15 Oct
2011
15 Oct
'11
6:54 p.m.
On 11 October 2011 04:30, David Griffith <dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu> wrote:
On Mon, 10 Oct 2011, Toby Thain wrote:
Well, Display Postscript evolved into Quartz, which I've read
described as essentially being "Display PDF". It's DPS with a lot of
simplification and uses an open standard that anybody can create code
to read and write without royalties to Adobe.
So DPS is not exactly dead or gone - its successor lives on and is the
basis of a widely-used, much-admired and loved GUI.
OTOH, NeWS sounded fascinating and I've love to see a modern, FOSS
reimplementation of it. I think that perhaps it might not be a very
good fit for the modern display pipeline though - of a very fast
multi-gigaHertz multicore CPU connected closely to a cluster of
high-performance very-parallel MIMD GPU cores.
Right now, usually, they're on a PCIe card, but AMD is showing the way
- its Llano and Bulldozer "Fusion" APUs integrate the GPU onto the
same die as the CPU cores. This is the way all CPUs *will* go; it's
just that the current Intel offerings have crappy GPUs.
--
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I'm not talking about gzip. I'm talking
about compression *in general*
which means designing your vocabulary and operations to suit the domain in
question. X11 cannot do this, it's at least one level removed from this
flexibility - but systems like NeWS *can* too (at least to my recollection),
and they made X11 look crummy at the time.
That reminds me of something... ?Would it be practical to bring back
something like NeWS and Display Postscript? ?Could it even be done?