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Comment Re:Hmmm... (Score 1) 75

by Zadok_Allan (#28027205) Attached to: Hardware-Accelerated Graphics On SGI O2 Under NetBSD

An X driver with lots of rough edges and lots of hoops to jump through?

You may want to read the article again, it said nothing like that. There are no hoops to jump through for the user and you invented the 'lots' of rough edges. The hoops mentioned in the article are about the driver having to keep the Xserver from trying to scribble into video memory.

Comment Re:Octane / Onyx (Score 2, Informative) 75

by Zadok_Allan (#27988771) Attached to: Hardware-Accelerated Graphics On SGI O2 Under NetBSD

I seem to remember IRIX having an xrender library available, possibly from sgifreeware or nekochan, or does it just do software rendering? IRIX used to make a very fast X terminal, but modern apps always seemed very sluggish on it and perhaps that's why..

That's the client library, as far as I know there is no Xrender extension for Xsgi so all anti-aliased text is rendered client-side, by software, which burns lots of CPU cycles. On slow CPUs like the R5k that really, really hurts.

About Onyx and Octane - there's linux code available to make IMPACT-based boards do tricks but nothing for vPro, let alone Reality Engine or Infinite Reality. IIRC all these graphics options understand OpenGL opcodes more or less directly so once someone finds out how to feed them commands the rest should be easy.
( btw. the O2's rendering engine is nothing like that, you program it like most other graphics chips, by hammering data into registers or feeding register write commands into a ring buffer )

Comment Re:What a waste of time (Score 0, Flamebait) 75

by Zadok_Allan (#27981587) Attached to: Hardware-Accelerated Graphics On SGI O2 Under NetBSD

People like you kept me from getting involved with Linux.
A few points for you to consider:
- you want to tell me what to do for fun in my Copious Spare Time? Get lost.
- please learn to read - what makes you think this has anything to do with Linux at all?
- Linux needs help? Well, go help them instead of wasting time here.
GUI

Submission + - X on SGI O2 (opera.com)

Submitted by
Zadok_Allan
Zadok_Allan writes: "It's a bit late but since many readers will remember the SGI O2 fondly this might interest a few. The gist of the story is — NetBSD now supports hardware accelerated graphics on the O2 both in X and in the kernel. We didn't get any help from SGI, the documention available doesn't go beyond a general description and a little theory of operation which is why it took so long to figure it out. The X driver is still has a few rough edges ( all the acceleration frameworks pretty much expect a mappable linear framebuffer, if you don't have one — like on most SGI hardware — you'll have to jump thorugh a lot of hoops and make sure there's no falling back to cfb and friends ) but it supports XRENDER well enough to run KDE 3.5. Yes, it's usable on a 200MHz R5k O2. Not quite as snappy as a any modern hardware but nowhere near as sluggish as you'd expect and since Xsgi doesn't support any kind of XRENDER support, let alone hardware acceleration, pretty much anything using anti-aliased fonts gets a huge performance boost out of this compared to IRIX."
Medicine

First Proven Diagnostic Test For Alzheimer's 66

Posted by kdawson from the peace-of-mind-or-otherwise dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A test that can confirm or rule out Alzheimer's disease at an early stage has been shown effective by US pathologists. 'With this test, we can reliably detect and track the progression of Alzheimer's disease,' said lead researcher Leslie Shaw with the University of Pennsylvania's Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative in Philadelphia. ... The new test is detailed in the journal Annals of Neurology. It measures the cerebral-spinal fluid concentration of two biochemicals associated with the disease — amyloid beta42 peptide and tau protein."
Education

University Tries "One iPhone Per Student" 281

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the enrollment-and-dropout-numbers-to-spike dept.
alphadogg writes to tell us that one freshman class has a little more than usual to be excited about. When students at Abilene Christian University showed up for their first days of class they were greeted with the choice of either a new iPhone 3g or an iPod Touch plus a package of custom web apps to use on them. "The hardware is part of the Texas university's pilot mobile learning project, which has been gestating for over a year. About 650 first-year students chose the iPhone, and about 300 the iPod Touch, which is a very similar device but without the 3G radio (both devices incorporate an 802.11g Wi-Fi adapter). ACU pays for the hardware, student (or their parents) select and pay for their monthly AT&T service plan."

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