Seth Nickel wrote about some of the 3D-accelerated desktop work that is going on at Red Hat in his blog. He referst to one of the effects as ‘wobbly windows’. There are some videos on his site that will help to get the point across. I compiled all of the necessary packages and was playing around with the wobbly window effect on my desktop. It is freaking awesome. The windows are too wobbly for normal every day use, but that can be scaled down so that the windows just kind of give a little bit when you move them. It’s also neat to have real transparent windows on a linux desktop. I’m going to try and get all of this stuff to work on my laptop so I can show it off at work tomorrow.
I’m going to see Henry Rollins speak at the Zipper Theater tomorrow. He’s going to be there for two weeks and there are plenty of tickets left if you want to try and catch him while he’s in the area. I stronly recommend it.
I’m not sure exactly what happened to me yesterday, but I fell asleep at 7:30pm and woke up at 7:45am. Yeah – I slept for about 12 hours straight. I’m not sure why. I was just going to lay down for a nap at 7:30 and didn’t really wake up until later than I normally get up. It was very weird.
Wow… Wobbly Windows. That was cool when stardock pimped that 2 years ago with WindowFX + WindowBlinds. Course, I didn’t have to complie shit, Hell I didn’t even have to pay for it. I but I see as far as eye candy goes, the Linux desktop is getting there. I always though that Gnome was way sexier than any XP desktop could be. I think that it’s awesome that the Linux desktop with have 3D acceleration in place before schLonghorn even gets out the door.
Course… OSX has been around how long now?
Oh yeah, I got an iBook. PearPC too slow and CherryOS too stolen. Been having fun with the packages from Fink. The allure of the mac is 99% applications, 1% hardware. The hardware is a joke, but it’s enough to make everything you run on it look pretty. A friend at work got all high an mighty that I’m switching. I told him to fuck off, if anything I’m platform bi. I’m all for the PC, but occasionally I get drunk, get in to the wrong bed and let the mac suck me off ^_^.
For a scenario, we did a comparison. The challenge: to go from DVD to ISO MPEG 4. It takes my home machine (AMD64 3200, 1GB Ram) 1 hours, 45 minutes at high quality. It took his Dual G5 (2×1.6GHx, 2GB Ram) 6 hours to do the same clip. Apparently XCode & AltiVec optimizations sound great on paper, but it didn’t work out so well. But I have to say… The windows too look pretty and bright on under OS X and expose makes me cream my pants.
You know, I almost let all of these cracks about Stardock doing this first and about how I had to compile stuff just slide right by. But, I just can’t. I don’t _have_ to compile anything. I just have the option of compiling stuff when it isn’t even released yet. I had to check the wobbly windows stuff out of CVS because it is just that new. Hell, I could submit a patch to it and get it included in the real version before people who don’t compile anything even see the end result. The one compelling reason I have to compile something is to get my hands on code that is less than a day old. :o)
I’m pretty psyched that this stuff will be out before Longhorn. This stuff is slated for release in Fedora Core 5 which will come out by the end of this year. Apple _has_ been doing this stuff for years of course, but that’s the way things tend to go with Apple. They do something years before everyone else and it only really takes off when MS does it. It’s a shame really.
I wouldn’t feel bad about using a Mac OSX machine. Hell, I would use a Mac OSX machine before I ever use a Windows machine again. So, tell your work buddy that he’s just a mac-a-phobe. :o)