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BorlandC++ 3.1 supports templates, STL and exceptions. In either case you don't need them if you make a small project (10k lines) or even larger one. Compile times are fast and given the compatibility (with proper programming) with Unix, you can do a quick hacks on Win32 machines.

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BorlandC++ 3.1 supports templates, STL,

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TC2.0 won't fit 360k but you can use it on a computer with just one 360k disk drive by using few disks. IDE is smart enough to ask you to insert the disk with lib's to compile stuff. I used this approach back in 1991/92. Even today I use BorlandC++ 3.1 for DOS.

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Cyrix rep there 6x86s cost about $80/unit to manufacture.

One of the reason why Cyrix failed is that they were fabless. That's it they had to make their stuff on IBMs fabs. Obviously they had to pay IBM for that service and given that they didn't have much choice 6x86 cost them $80, while it possibly cost $5 to IBM (speculation).

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they're just out to gain market share. Intel isn't about making quality products, they're a marketing company.

Intel has more than 90% of the market. They simply don't need to "gain" it to be accused of being a monopoly (ok, they are monopoly now, but with 100% market share no legal guy prove it's not), their strategy is to RETAIN the market share.

Now, concerning your accusation that they are "marketing company", they actually do marketing bit well, something I can't say for AMD (do they actually hire marketing guys at all?). Thing is that in R&D lots of time and money goes to develop actual operations and profiling to find out which one should be optmized more. Cloning it (something AMD does well) is much easier, obviously that what pisses off Intel mostly, they spend damn a lot of effots to fine grane, say MMX, and then some guy comes later and copy their stuff. I don't accuse AMD of copying, it's ok for them to compete, but saying that AMD is everything and Intel must die is dumb. I would think that current situation where Intel has the main share and thereby has money to invest into deep R&D is good, while AMD later clones whole reserach thus limiting Intel's ability to capitalize and exploit their research. It's good for consumers, good for me and you.

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Everyone is rightfully screaming about non-realistic nature of these benchmarks. I am sure my idea is by no means new, but right now I see no big disadvantages why it should not be used as a true benchmark: given that all sight *log* all attempts, why not take these big logs from some highly used sites and then *replay* the log on actual servers. This would simulate what actually has happened in real life for say month or two.

The only trouble I see so far is that the benchmark site should *not* have fully used it's bandswidth during the period, because in this case we won't add up those users who failed to fetch a webpage. Although given simple math we can see that GNU/Linux+Apache can saturate any line with static pages, we could get some real world results using this approach. Comments are welcome.

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to record everything you see and feel. Wouldn't you like to feel again your first date (unless it was not blown up completely!)

However, I think it's not possible to record all that stuff though non-brain integrated device. We need somehow to listen to our brain-waves, something not possible with even bulkier devices these days. Playback is of course through either some sort of virtual reality directly to our brain. In current implementation (as an external device) it will work only and only if there will be more such devices around, so they will be able to communicate with each other (nice thing to trace people!), and who is gonna pay to put all this bugs on the streets?

I think it's really cool, but I am afraid I will be too old by the time we have such toys on sale to record anything!



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500,000 simultanious connections as extreme as 150,000. I am not sure they actually tested it against the latter number. In fact, given that fact that they claimed to have 35Gb a day of work-units (and 350kb per unit send), we have
35,000,000/350 = 100,000 users per day. So, given the fact that they expected at least 150,000 they would max out rather soon. Bad planning.

Now, pardon my mood, but I am completely pissed off the fact, they released extremely slow Win client, while according to their own statistics Pentium/Windows platform leads by at least 5-8 times. Excuse me, but if they had a bit of brains they would optimise first WINDOWS client, no matter how they hate it. Could they at least provide an simple option NOT to draw pretty pictures, making it v1.01 in the next day? It is shame that Berkeley has got associated with such a poor programming. You might hate windows, but you should not be a fool and ignore thousands of people who dedicated their Win boxes, we feel like being treated as 3rd class users!

Nevermind that stupid URL at their site, why on Earth they needed SSL in it? seti.berkeley.edu could do fine.

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BG said that the only man he hated (as of sometime before 1993) was Philipp Kann (spell is wrong), founder of Borland. While Philipp departed long time ago to head still unknown Starfish, Bill must have had few nice feeling buying out his old rival. Although he didn't buy 51% (yet), it still significant. What is 100mln for him anyway? I bet MS paid with it's stock (not cash).

It is funny to see a bit of history back, Borland died anyway long time ago. It's Inprise *yucks* now.

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Real-time strategy games are way too special for me as I have sunken years of my time (nevermind study!) programming RTS, making clones (full re-code with gfx ripped off of course) of Dune2 and C&C series in 1994-97. You can have all source (buggy not finished as I quit games programming once and forever) at my site.

Point here is that DirectX for RTS is irrelevant. In fact most RTS use only fraction of it to just initialize screen and gain direct assess to video memory. There is NO need in it at all. My old DOS based code could be easily ported to it. I think the author uses DX as a buzz-word only. Besides, in my experience no generalized drivers are fast enough (unless hardware accelerated as 3D are)

Dune32 shots/source

Although in my view book is worthless (for me) I wish I had it back in 1994, when I had to do all these things on my own!

However, as a humble person who was interviewed there and talked to some guys, I would caution those wannabes who think to make big $$$ in the Games industry. Those wonderful games such as DungeonKeeper, MagicCarpet et al, are not making much money! Problem is that it takes lots of time and enegry to produce a game, while sales are not high (piracy)! Cash-cows for such companies are sports-games, boring to program, but people buy them. So, if you think to make your life as a games progammer -- think twice. I personally changed my mind and going for an MBA. Although games programming (w/o books, when YOU do design things) is a good teacher.

Projects I have been into are outdated now, some of the source was lots (stable one :( ) and all I have now is open for any crazy guy to lurk in. Don't think it's on much value though (except fast ASM). Peace, don't flame me too much, I am just a very tired games programmer who gave up his love.



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Real-time strategy games are way too special for me as I have sunken years of my time (nevermind study!) programming RTS, making clones (full re-code with gfx ripped off of course) of Dune2 and C&C series in 1994-97. You can have all source (buggy not finished as I quit games programming once and forever) at my site.

Point here is that DirectX for RTS is irrelevant. In fact most RTS use only fraction of it to just initialize screen and gain direct assess to video memory. There is NO need in it at all. My old DOS based code could be easily ported to it. I think the author uses DX as a buzz-word only. Besides, in my experience no generalized drivers are fast enough (unless hardware accelerated as 3D are)

Dune32 shots/source

Although in my view book is worthless (for me) I wish I had it back in 1994, when I had to do all these things on my own!

However, as a humble person who was interviewed there and talked to some guys, I would caution those wannabes who think to make big $$$ in the Games industry. Those wonderful games such as DungeonKeeper, MagicCarpet et al, are not making much money! Problem is that it takes lots of time and enegry to produce a game, while sales are not high (piracy)! Cash-cows for such companies are sports-games, boring to program, but people buy them. So, if you think to make your life as a games progammer -- think twice. I personally changed my mind and going for an MBA. Although games programming (w/o books, when YOU do design things) is a good teacher.

Projects I have been into are outdated now, some of the source was lots (stable one :( ) and all I have now is open for any crazy guy to lurk in. Don't think it's on much value though (except fast ASM). Peace, don't flame me too much, I am just a very tired games programmer who gave up his love.



AtW,
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Real-time strategy games are way too special for me as I have sunken years of my time (nevermind study!) programming RTS, making clones (full re-code with gfx ripped off of course) of Dune2 and C&C series in 1994-97. You can have all source (buggy not finished as I quit games programming once and forever) at my site.

Point here is that DirectX for RTS is irrelevant. In fact most RTS use only fraction of it to just initialize screen and gain direct assess to video memory. There is NO need in it at all. My old DOS based code could be easily ported to it. I think the author uses DX as a buzz-word only. Besides, in my experience no generalized drivers are fast enough (unless hardware accelerated as 3D are)

Dune32 shots/source

Although in my view book is worthless (for me) I wish I had it back in 1994, when I had to do all these things on my own!

However, as a humble person who was interviewed there and talked to some guys, I would caution those wannabes who think to make big $$$ in the Games industry. Those wonderful games such as DungeonKeeper, MagicCarpet et al, are not making much money! Problem is that it takes lots of time and enegry to produce a game, while sales are not high (piracy)! Cash-cows for such companies are sports-games, boring to program, but people buy them. So, if you think to make your life as a games progammer -- think twice. I personally changed my mind and going for an MBA. Although games programming (w/o books, when YOU do design things) is a good teacher.

Projects I have been into are outdated now, some of the source was lots (stable one :( ) and all I have now is open for any crazy guy to lurk in. Don't think it's on much value though (except fast ASM). Peace, don't flame me too much, I am just a very tired games programmer who gave up his love.



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A significant amount of the development effort will be released as Open Source code under the Artistic License, Perl's Open Source license.

This makes me wonder of to whom it will be significant: Microsoft or OSS community? For the latter I think 100% open source is the only significant amount, otherwise someone will yet again have control over features dooming portability. This reminds me cool language called Java.

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All we need is a simple principle:

You can't sell software without warranty period.

Those who code for free won't be affected (their projects will die automaticly if of poor quality), those who make money unfairly by exploiting powers of monopoly or just sell plainly crap product will rightfully suffer.

The situation where all products and services have warranty (which ensures quality) except software is not acceptable. Legally it should not be allowed to sell DISCLAIMED software (again unless it's free). Have you seen a car without warranty? And software is responsible for safe flights and running nuclear plants.

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Problem is that while it's possible to provide high-bandswidth for home countries, how would it help with misery trans-atlantic link? What if your super-duper VideoPhone works for US/Canada and you can't call your friend in the UK?

However, we need cheap high speeds anyway and this is a viable option. Problem is that telco's don't really want this happen as it would ruin their business where they charge people for (previously) limited resource (bandswidth). They should face that in 21st century (which is right behind the corner) bandswidth will be right and not priviledge. The only major difference between humans and other's repsesentative of the Mother Nature is ability to COMMUNICATE EFFECTIVELY.



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Can anyone give any good reason, why for example in the UK, films show up 2 months later????
There is no technical reason for that, I see no marketing reasons as well (only that people get extra anxious and book trans-atlantic tour -- airlines conspiracy?).

Granted lack of the film, people will be more tempted to use MPGs floating all over the net. Effectively, they are pushed to pirate.

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Same login, different machines BUT different block units too. You can't process same unit in "parallel" on X machines.

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This doesn't cover the case, where a lamer could fake that he didn't find anything (thus no double check untill after long time) and thus get credit for processing lots of work units. Given that some people have few minutes per work unit (bug?) one may think a lot about "security". If they had their source open, I would at least be able to fix their stupid bugs (like turning off all visual stuff) and maybe even optimization. My guts tell me that, their asm (C?) routines are somewhat far from being optimized for Intel x86.



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I remember my first program was on a calculator with 105 bytes of memory and numeric only display (row of 12 numbers plus mantissa). This thing flashes back to 1988, it was a top-of-the-art URSS
make model MK-61. It didn't have any storage device, once you turned it off, you will have to type your program again. Programming was in machine codes only.

Even on that calculator we had kewl games. They had to stretch your imagination, and interprete something like 124.5 as your current attitude on the Moon. Those who never tried won't understand.

I wish I had such a baby like HP-49 or even my current TI-83. Do I use now kewl TI-83? No. If I had it back to 1988 I would made really cool visual games, but not now. I have laptop, desctop, a computer in every place I go. Many have Pilots and other devices. Besides I have calculator in watches. Who is gonna pay $100 for calculator if you could get 486 or even 586 (not Pentium) for that price? The whole new computer would cost you less then $500 these days, what's the point to have super-duper programming RAM and other stuff like OS in a calculator? These days, those advanced calculators are creatures of the past, almost extinct. New hand-held devices will beat the rest of crap out of that market. You will be paying money for something you probably won't use at all. These devices probably cost more to HP to develop than they give 'em back. In practice this means, that losses for this product are offset by others (more popular), like over=priced HP WinCE devices.

p.s. I wish I had such a baby in school.

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This is exactly what would be required for
"Burger King to offer Internet Access".
If this thing will be able to withstand few months of this environment at all. All I wonder is if they tested the thing not with passive water, but actively corrosive stuff like Coke.

Actually, I would like to have this notebook (if it was not THAT expensive) to play some jokes, like spilling my coffee in refectory so people would be horrified.


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The idea is dumb for this type of business. Burger King, McDonalds et al are supposed to be fast food. How many times did you use the Net for only 10-15 minutes? Now exclude checks for an E-mail.
What if people would love this feature so much that they will keep surfing more then 15 mins? How they are gonna to enforce the limits? Fast food places are making their money on FAST rotation of people -- got your food, eat it and go away. This is not cafe where you can sit, drink coffee and enjoy your Quake session. It is not gonna work for the fast food chains.



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Compile source and make a binary comparison. Granted, they used standard Java distribution or alternatively you may ask them to tell which compiled did they use. This is not the problem. Problem is that THEY have all your keys, they may log all your plaintext Emails (you are gonna mail some of your friends in plaintext, right?)

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I think so. Perhaps I should not have used word -- block size -- this is more from RC5 competition. I meant: DATA UNIT. It's too big. I am running the client for 4 hours now and it's only 10% done of the DATA UNIT. IT is my understanding that until the WHOLE unit is done, it is NOT flushed to server. Consider this:

1. It will take 40 hours on PII-266 to complete it.
2. I am running the client on my University computers. Guess what? They are shared. I can reliably run a client only overnight (so no sucker will switch off the machine during day time).

Since it will take 4 nights to complete the whole block I have to MANUALLY go from one machine to another to backup partially done units. If I won't back it up, they might be deleted on a user disk by yet another sucker in the University.

While I had RC5 client I could get 100 blocks to do them overnight and flush 'em. Now, I can't do so, manually backup stuff from 20-30 machines sucks!

So, by saying block size I meant UNIT SIZE, this has nothing with actual resolution, just make data less (not resolution), so people on a decent machine can do a unit overnight and flush it.

Otherwise, project is bound to lose some people like me -- who are not admins but can run processes overnight. I hope now I am clear.

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> it's not showing up in the system tray either.

I am in the same position -- NT 4.0, no Admin assess. However, there is a trick I used with distributed.net client, to hide it from tray. Easy hack -- got my fav. resource editor and made tray icon -- TRANSPARENT! Now, when I run this thing first (before other tray icons), you can't see it!
However, this won't work with SETI client -- when it runs full=mode you can't really do anything! This is because of priorities (I guess they will fix it).

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I reckong it will take 3% of block done on PII-266. Considering that this client seems doesn't flush stuff till it's 100% done, machine should run 30 hours w/o break-off. It also seems, that in case if some luser turns off computer (I am running client on the Uni comps) I will have to relogin and start all over.

Am I the only one who thinkgs blocks should be way less in size/time? I would say few hours per block, or 7-8 hours (nightly run).

Also, it seems the client doesn't support MMX, or does it?

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That would be soooo nice in sense of security, to have a unique IP allocated to your house. A thing most maniacs and serial killers who are able enough to use traceroute would love for sure.


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These indecent prices for a stupid DNS name by internic.net and others (national domains are often even more expensive), could have been (somehow) justified if they were charging for an actual IP allocation. In this case they could have collected some real money and fund IPv6 initiative, which IMO could have made it more realistic in our the timeframe allocated to our lifes. Actually they are making money on IP allocations (selling them to ISPs), but they want to charge for domains too.

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Personally I opted not to ignore anyone via these checkboxes in UserPrefs. In my view there is no need of it for a mature person who can ignore an article or a post, which deemed to be stupid or (at least) arrogant without going to flame. If you strong and have force with you then you can do that. Rare author posts crap all the time and thus by blindly ignoring all possible posts from this author and some (probably) profound replies one loses that bit of new knowledge.

Consequently, this feature is in effect test of one's maturity.

I am glad fewer people use it on /. From the other hand maybe most of us are just lazy? I am, and that's why I get used to programming, how about you???



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It will make even more sense (if any exists at all): the bigger your code the more functions supposedly it will do.

Delphi/VB5/other lame languages are exempt for obvious reason unless you used dynamicly linked library (not to bload your exe). Your DLLs are ok.



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A decision against AOL could set a precedent for the online industry that might force companies to rethink the way they use volunteers, Rubin said, adding, "If the industry in fact was kept operating because of volunteer workers, it may have to reconfigure."

This directly concerns companies like Geocities who USE their members in exchange for services (free webpages), in fact their whole business model depends on them. Since we have same fact of doing something in exchange of some service or goods this constitutes work. I think Dept of Immigration would fully back this statement.

Of course these volunteers won't get any money -- since they agreed to work for free or at best get minimal pay level (though it will be impossible to find out how much everyone worked, of course for some strange(!) reason AOL didn't keep accounts).
AOL in turn will lost money, not much, their business is still ISP, they will return their money. But those risky enough to buy Inet stocks -- be ware! One precendent like this may render all your shares to worthless pieces of paper. Ooops, you won't even have nicely printed paper -- they in electronic form nowadays. What a scam.




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Absolutely agree with you. But did YOU try out that Gecko source? I downloaded it few times, first being in Apr, 1998. It was SUCH A MESS. It is now. I don't mind catching bugs, but in MY software. NGLayout (as it was initially called) is a fairly complicated product, full of bugs. Only the one who designed it have really good chance to debug it. We simply need some solid ground to start with, not horde of bugs!

Indeed, programming for me is a hobby only and I hardly believe most of open source coders do it full-time for free (those who not students), we have to live somehow, right? So, I could and would code FEATURES (which IMO many would like to do), but not bugs. I simply have no time for that.
If Linus rolled out his big stuff full of bugs he would get same responce. He made it right, giving out at least something VERY limited but stable, so people could start their own features and not get drawn in bugs.

IMO, Netscape made a fatal mistake: being desperate in the begging of 1998 they made half-move: releasing useless pile of code, even after year of development, having full time qualified developers from Netscape (!) they didn't make it! At best they will finish it by the end of this year (I hope, NN4 is no fun for me).

I believe this was one of the main reasons why so little developers so far.

Second biggest is that focus has changed: browser was is over. No matter who's won (IE in my opinion though), now it's no longer a hype. It's all about Linux vs Windows. All glory goes now to those who work on Linux, since most OSS guys don't get paid, the amount of glory received is way too important (that was rightfully noted by JWZ in his resignation).

In all, untill I see finished and shipping product (not beta-like-Communicator-4.0) I won't spend a minute coding it. And others seems had similiar thoughts.


p.s. My English is far from being perfect but I am working on it.

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Consider that Moscow budget used to be relatively ok because of:
1. 90% of all banks were in Moscow and paid taxes there -- now most of them bankrupt and do not pay a penny.
2. Gazprom (gaz monopoly) accounted form 25-30% of the whole Moscow budget, now probably even higher since it earns hard currency which soared from 6.3 rubles/$ to 26 rubles/$ for just half-a-year. Gazprom is only formally registered in Moscow, all real activities are done in West Siberia, which means people do all stuff there but taxes (according to current legislation) are being paid in Moscow! New proposed law will require all companies pay taxes at the place of real business, not formal registration -- bummer, will be -40-50% of Moscow budget, unless you will find some gaz dwells on it's territory.
3. Lukoil (biggest oil company), is struggling with low oil prices, sometimes below actual costs.
They also only legally registered in Moscow and pay taxes there yet until above condition will be met.
4. Devaluation of the ruble created big troubles for anyone who borrowed hard currency from foreign investors. Should I say that Moscow was #1 in these investments? This year Moscow will have to repay a lot of money, which account to at least half a budget unless restructured!

And now you saying Moscow is ok? Are you actually living in Moscow and reading any information source except computer-oriented????

No offence, but Moscow is by no means far from being ok.


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are fantasy until they actually get alife. For the last 10 years vast majority of these promises were not completed at all.

Chip design requires 100% funding, because you can't release a chip, which is 99.99% bug free, no one in his mind will buy it. Actually no one from serious buyers (mission critical stuff) will buy it until v2.xx or something.

Also bear in mind that current estimates on how much money is required to complete research (I don't believe they have finished it and only need fab's, that won't be a problem) tend to increase A LOT in this industry. So, they guys from Elbrus2000 project will have to beg for money again and again.

I seriously doubt they will get them (although I wish they will).

People from the US and other developed countries won't probably understand how it can be that top official promises to fund something, makes budget and it NEVER happens, even this official never get sacked. This is Russia's reality.

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Since this post contained direct insult I could not resist answering it.

0. I guess there are more bragging fools than me, in particular those who prefer to critique hiding under AC status, my work is not the best in the world but to certain point it was as good as some commercial samples. Until I see _anything_ from you I would

1. I have had a job, I do have a job and will have job. I could have a job in recognized computer company but I felt that I can do more than that. As you could mention I have other qualifications beyond programming.

2. TOEFL. My score is not as high as it will be this summer. True that I do have way too much spell and grammar errors, primarily because I have little time devoted to my site. This is fair point to notice and I do not ask for an excuse here. And I am working on it.

3. I take your advice, mister AC and working on my English, that work includes posts on this site where I have pleasure to talk with people like you. Don't get me wrong, I am actually grateful to you as you make some fair comments.

4. About Harvard/Stanford/Wharton. Pity you don't have Email, I would notify you when I get in. This will be sooner than you think.

5. As for mov ecx,0

6. If you pretend to know Russian learn how to spell.




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Go to my site, download my dune32 source code, have a look at my assembler code (it's in C++ file) designeg for Watcom.

The reason this lib is not in Asm is most likely because you wanted to make it portable, besides in game 10% of code runs 90% of time, and I DO know optimization rules, that's why I was not suggesting insane idea to write it all in asm. Only few functions must be in Asm.

About instructions I do complain: this was OBVIOUS optimization, and if you could not do that, than you probably can't do other, inside loops.
Pipelines are easy to figure out as long as you don't be lazy to look at timings for mainstream processors, I would optimize for Pentium+.

;)

You don't need to ruin my world, it's already ruined. And yes I am amateur, as you could see from my page my main profession is business, BUSINESS, programming is my hobby, see the difference? Interesting, did you look at MY asm, while I have looked at yours? I think you didn't.

Look, I am not saying you bad programmer, you probably even better than me, this is not my point.


To the AC below me: I've had job interview I did HAVE work offers, since my study will end in June this year I postponed my final decisions ;P

Now, if you want to see some real guy who kicked some major ID ass look here:

http://www.ii.uib.no/~alexey/

Look for PolyEngine, he is my old friend from high school.

The main reason he and me quit games programming is because we are way out of colledges now and need to make some money for life, dammit! If you still studying than you won't understand that at all.

He is now doing Java browsers: http://www.icesoft.no

Peace, and good luck, don't be mad at me ;)

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He is computer professional, since we have the Net there is no big deal where you actually are. Mitnick can do to some other 3rd world country, where he will definatly get permisson to work, he will have computers and the Net BUT he will work for some major corporations in the US. They will for example make a contract with his newly established company in Zimbabve or something like that. He has lots of ways to work around it, but I guess he will not be allowed to leave country while on parole AT ALL. He will have to visit his parole officer once a week or so.

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Well, probably I am way too strict to a 0.00x release (if we can call it release) but anyway, being a former game developer for PC I have noted the following.

How many of YOU here (yes personally you reading my words) have actually downloaded stuff and LOOKED AT THE SOURCE?? Personally I was most interested in their ASM routines, as a game programmer I had some hard times back in 1993 beating out of a CPU extra tick or two in every routine.

So, if you look at their file asm_rle.nasm (the first I have spotted), you can see something like that:

move ecx,0

You know, those who familiar with assembler not in theory but in practice, those who programmed games, demos etc WILL NEVER EVER USE THIS CODE!

For Christ sake, in games SPEED is the most important thing (memory comes second), it ought to be: xor ecx,ecx It's faster.

Same thing all over other assembler routies, they are WAY not optimized!!! Such a thing like movsb in a supposedly 32bit code is _the_ shame!

I ask myself, how it could happen that the guys did such an obvious mistake? The answer is simple: in their demos they can't check the real usefullness of their SDK, these simple demos could run fine even under EGAVGA.BGI (those who knew Borland would get what I mean) or even old WinG!

The guys should have made real demo, which stresses the hell out of their "SDK" to show it's useful for anything. Those who will try to develop real fun game (not stupid demo no one is gonna place more than 5 mins) will face big problems.

This actually brings to second point, did you ask yourself why there were so many SDKs and no one was successful? Even DirectX is mostly used in modern games only to obtain a valid pointer at video memory, all the other stuff is done by internals of the game itself.

These days such SDKs are only useful for educational type games, forget about serious game development if you can't make up your own engine, and this engine should be fast (unless you do Solitaire).

Honestly I wish guys who make this SDK good luck, but really all they get from it is good experience for themself, rather than some killer SDK.

Portability issue is not that important, with proper programming it's easy to port ANYTHING provided you didn't use external libs (without source code), to port all my games I only need to port Asm, which is easy too if target platform is x86.

You can check my games code and sources (including asm) at my website.






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I was just thinking, first of all these equity investments might not be money at all, those familiar with NYSE know that many investments are in fact EQUITY swaps, like AOL "purchased" Netscape, they merely swapped one bunch of worthless paper marked NSCP to another of AOL.

So, Dell probably traded some of it shares too.
The thing which worries me is that in any case there is no need to throw money only into RedHat as most vendors do, kernel is not done exclusively by RedHat you know. No one seems wants to invest in SuSE, Caldera etc, isn't that strange???

I am probably is a pro-conspiracy suspect guy, but I think these moves have far more meaning than just money NOW, we are talking here about attempts of various big companies to take control over leading Linux distributor. Maybe Dell has only 4-5%, but look, all other alien shareholders, which include mammoths like IBM, Intel got stakes too!!!



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By making a hash where seeds are one or more CPUIDs of your cool PIII+ one will avoid these problems.

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This is not a bug. Linux started from zero, slowly adding up and polishing modules of the project. If Linus team had a mess like mozilla they released in April, 98 they wouldn't make much too. I wanted to contribute to the mozilla, but hell, I want to program features, I am not going to work 10 hours a day to look for someone else's bugs. They have made a big mistake releasing that mess. But they didn't have choice did they?

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Unless you look for some stupid AOLer, you will get at best coordinates of my proxy server. There are miriads of those, allowing external access. And not all of them use CGI variable to show originating IP.

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Because they (rioters) expected that MS will make some sort of statement like: "MSWindows is an excellent OS, far superior and user-friendly than Linux", and since it will be the Folls day, no one would believe MS.

That's just my hypothesis.

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You are very wrong, claiming after being brainwashed by propaganda as making YOUR choice?
The whole point is that in the modern world it's extremely easy to use zomby techniques on people, as a result you will do something THEY need, and consider it as YOUR desicons, that what the GNU fellow was trying to tell you and other dudez who thins they do their own desicions.

In the modern world, your only true desicion is whether to make a pi-pi.

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I know that's off-topic, but just to show-off:

X=Y;
X^2=XY;
X^2-Y^2=XY-Y^2;
(X+Y)(X-Y)=Y(X-Y);
X+Y=Y; /* Since X=Y, X-Y=0, you can't divide by zero (X-Y) */
2Y=Y;
2=1


It's a fool's day anyway.

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T1 does exist. In fact most companies choose optic-fiber lines, since they not much more expensive than copper wires.

BUT, hardware is not expensive, BANDSWIDTH is damn expansive, and it's common that a company with fiber-optic capable of 1-2Mbit, uses only 64kb, because it costs almost as much as T1 in the US.

That majorly sucks.

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I know that, most of the honourable gentlemen and ladies at /. find the idea that Linus leaves highly paid job in the US to the research center in Moscow, where highest salary is probably no more than $500 a month. A month! And they don't get paid for months.

Most importantly, there they've got no money to develop their great ideas. If Linux was to work there, he would find that actually he can't do much, as no money means: no equipment, no newest data, no partners, no shit.

For me, as a Russian, is very sad to see this stupid joke. The people at the Babayan's lab have some of the greatest designs, but they have no chance to implement them, because of lack of funding. As a person who known Russia not from newspaper, I can say they are not going to get anything from Government in nearest 3-5 years. Their only hope is foreign investments, but companies like Intel doesn't really want to develop something superior than their own designs.
Even if they are to buy the company, it will be just to make sure the designs will never leave the door.

The joke originally comes from Russian newspaper, and I tell you, that in Russia fools day (1 April) is generally the day, when most sad and sick jokes are done.

The last guys who will laugh today are the E2K processor team (maybe Linus won't laugh at that too, he is ethical guy enough not to laugh at someone's major problems, at least I hope so and want to believe).

:(

p.s. Article was not translated properly, in particular OS is said to be "native", but not "dependable" as in suggested variant.

p.p.s. Spell and grammar sucks, I know and I am working on it.

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If you are using FAT16 (Win95), then the file itself takes maybe 16k or 32kb (minimal cluster size), depending on your partition.

While I fully agree that MSWord, MSExcel et ale writes lots of crap (including chunks of your RAM with your passwords), it still has no sense to argue about filesize.

Though, I often get puzzled HOW coders at MS could program, that simple inserted GIF or JPG of 30k, bloats document to 400k or something. They do store it as BMP and probably 3-4 times (to make it faster loading????)

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I remember the day when I started programming games, back in 1993. The problem always was lack of quality code around. From my own experience I became very skeptical of suitability of any "game kits" making development easier, more portable etc.

I faced the truth that time: any universal approach, suhch as drivers, cross-platform code etc, is doomed to be too general, and as the result too slow for specific purposes. Why Quake2-3 doesn't use DirectX for anything but direct screen access???

As a game developer you will try to die, but to make your game DIFFERENT, now, tell me, how different you are doing to make game using same routines? Best of the best always had to create their own engines (DOOM,Quake,Unreal etc),
what's the use of any other cross-platform staff?

For me as a game developer only real need is for some very basic, raw operations, such as direct access to screen. Engine itself can be done very portable, so, the only good thing in portable GameSDK is that it provides access to raw things, and that's it! Nothing more is required.

Hence, while I think the guys who are doing this project deserves a cheer or two, their creation will be useful for "educational purposes only", to learn new stuff, but not to create something commercial. It's very IMHO.

You can see my games at my site (with source code).

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I think the only way to stop evil at it's root is to held any software company accountable for it's work. Let's say, when you buy a car, if you die in a crash due to faulty equipment, than car company will have to pay.

How many of us ever read a software license? One of the main points in it NOT whether sourse is open or not, the main point is that NO GUARANTEES GIVEN! Simply, the makes of product disclaims everything. We pay hefty sums to the MS and alike for products without any quality guarantee.

I think DOJ and legislators in particular should make it illegal to sell software without guarantees. So, we will have situation where makes of poor software will not be able to exploit monopolistic status, they will have to pay $$$ for each and every bug, crash etc.

One may object: the software fundamentally is so complicated, that one can't guarantee anything. Well, I would only point out to few well known examples of solid software such as Linux, where proof-of-consept has been demosntrated, and if some software company can't back it's own work than get the hell out of this business.

This approach is perfectly inline with the principles of freedom and entrepreneurship.

Comments are welcome.


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The other day I was asking for a reference for a school X from one of my tutors. We had good relations, I was good student, so I was sure I won't have any problems with that. Imagine, when she said:
"You know, recently in the UK we have had this situation. One guy asked his tutor for a reference, applied a university and didn't make it. And you know what? He sued HIS TUTOR for reference! The bottom line is that he didn't only sue, he won something about $100k."

Now that's insane! I can understand sueing your school when you fail subject (understand, but not support, as since if you can't do your CS class then get the fsck out of school), but can't understand guy who does that. Except he was pissed of his tutor.

Gee, few weeks ago I applied Harvard and Stanford and I bet I won't get accepted there (this time).
Now, I forgot who gave me these references....





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