On Tuesday 03 December 2002 12:35 pm, you wrote: > On Tue, Dec 03, 2002 at 10:14:45AM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote: > | > | Why? I don't understand this reluctance to just admit that the _user_ may > | be right. > > I note your use of the word "may." Sometimes the user can happily > express a simple preference, but often such a choice has consequences > that the user can't foresee, and won't like. > > For example, a user might say to himself "I'll choose 32bpp textures so > that I can get higher-quality rendering." What he doesn't know is that > 32bpp textures are so much larger that his game no longer has enough > texture space available on his system. The game has to fall back to > lower-resolution textures or eliminate other quality-oriented features > like multitextured lightmapping. In the end, the user's ability to > express a low-level preference didn't achieve what he wanted. > > Things get a *lot* worse when resources are explicitly shared rather > than virtualized. > > | In short, the only sane remaining thing to do is to have environment > | variables. ... > > There's a minor debate here about the control mechanism for expressing > preferences -- GUI tool, config file, environment variables. But the > main question is where the control mechanism resides. > > You've mentioned that libraries can't know how to resolve questions of > user preference. That's true. But neither users nor libraries can know > how to understand the tradeoffs associated with a particular preference. > The environment is just too complicated and variable for that. > > There is only one system component that has enough information to > "understand" high-level preferences expressed by the user, and the > low-level tradeoffs that have to be made to implement those preferences. > That's the application program.
I have to butt in here and disagree. Who are the majority of Linux users still to date? Fairly knowledgeable types. These are the same types that care a lot about tweaking performance, and I would wager that Linux + gamers == hardcore gamers like myself and one of my good friends. We don't just accept what it does out of the box. We find every available knob to turn, know our hardware limits inside and out, and tweak, test, &infinitum until we are satisfied that we have achieved the best possible performance/quality tradeoff that we like. We are very aware of the tradeoffs such as available texture memory, load times, swapping, render times. I would think we are very representative of the average Linux gamer. I guarantee you that the only thing truly knowledgeable enough to make such tradeoffs is the user at the keyboard, not the programmer writing the application somewhere else on different hardware with different tastes. Nick ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Visual Studio.NET comprehensive development tool, built to increase your productivity. Try a free online hosted session at: http://ads.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/redirect.pl?micr0003en _______________________________________________ Dri-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
