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Actually, the Thoroughbred core versions of the XP processors are *much* cooler than the Palomino. I have two 1700+ chips, one with each core, in identical (tiny) aluminum cases. The Palomino runs far hotter than the Tbred. Oddly, much hotter than seems to be accounted for by the 64 vs 49 watt power consumption they are respectively rated. The Palomino, btw, has now been upgraded with faster (and louder!) fans but the box still runs much hotter.

Bottom line, a Tbred is only useful for heating a small room. For a whole house, specify 'Palomino core'.

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My biggest problem with Red Hat 8 was the GNOME terminal. It scrolls verrryyy Slooooollly. I play starship traders in telnet mode and it was like playing through a 4800 bps modem on a 128/512 DSL connection. I switched the shell icon to run the KDE Konsole and now have the best of both worlds -- fast, low-cpu telnet and no-effort anti-aliased fonts. Woohoo!

Red Hat 8 is a hint at desktop Linux's future.

Yes, exactly... except for the part about other engineering disciplines. ;)

The trouble with that phrase is that 'software engineering' isn't properly one of them... or is it?

Even if higher-level abstractions were perfectly bug-free and non-leaky, there is another tradeoff that would forever preserve the niche of lower-level development tools. The granularity of the abstraction is an inherent tradeoff not just in machine time/efficiency, but in programmer learning curve as well.

Maybe Red Storm would be a computer for the Chinese government. After all, they already got Red Flag going.

No, RMS, Linux is not GNU/Linux

"One guy, Linus Torvalds, used GCC to make his operating system (yes, Linux is an OS -- more on this later). He named it 'Linux' with a little help from his friends. Why doesn't he call it GNU/Linux? Because he wrote it, with more help from his friends, not you. You named your stuff, I named my stuff -- including the software I wrote using GCC -- and Linus named his stuff. The proper name is Linux because Linus Torvalds says so. Linus has spoken. Accept his authority. To do otherwise is to become a nag. You don't want to be known as a nag, do you?"

LINUX use is growing 30% / year!

"Linux use is growing 30 per cent year-on-year and while it hasn't been targeted as much, Linux is going to be targeted. Any application - open source or otherwise - will have weaknesses," he added.

...AND SLASHDOT published astronomy shit on frontpage... not these NEWS!

No, RMS, Linux is not GNU/Linux

"One guy, Linus Torvalds, used GCC to make his operating system (yes, Linux is an OS -- more on this later). He named it 'Linux' with a little help from his friends. Why doesn't he call it GNU/Linux? Because he wrote it, with more help from his friends, not you. You named your stuff, I named my stuff -- including the software I wrote using GCC -- and Linus named his stuff. The proper name is Linux because Linus Torvalds says so. Linus has spoken. Accept his authority. To do otherwise is to become a nag. You don't want to be known as a nag, do you?"

LINUX use is growing 30% / year!

"Linux use is growing 30 per cent year-on-year and while it hasn't been targeted as much, Linux is going to be targeted. Any application - open source or otherwise - will have weaknesses," he added.

...AND SLASHDOT published astronomy shit on frontpage... not these NEWS!

Maybe, but since I first started using the internet a few years back the bandwidth available to me at home has gone from 14Kb/s to 512Kb/s and I can't believe it's going to stop there. Ok I can't stream at 512Kb/s but 128Kb/s is quite achievable for hours at a stretch. Add to this emerging technologies such as Wavelet Modulation and I think there is some cause for hope.

"People are understandably reluctant to add real engineering discipline to software development..."

I found this 'alternative reason to why software sucks...' to be true with 3D Animation as well.

As a hobby, I assist people entering into the world of 3D art. My goal is to teach them professional methods to achieve their goals. What I've found interesting, though, is that a lot of them are reluctant to actually design what it is they are building or animating.

With new recruits, I can almost never get them to actually sit down with some paper and design the robot they want to build, for example. What they try to do is just sit down and build it. I'll hear stuff like "Oh I can't draw...", or "It's faster if I just sit down and build it. I know what I want it to look like."

The results? Well, the models they invent are ... well.. ameteurish. But when they make a model that they have lots of reference of, like the starship Enterprise for example, then they look top notch. Even presented with such a startling comparison, they still refuse to do the design work. Why? Because it adds overhead to their project.

I really think what happens is that they have in inaccurate impression of what being a 3D artist really entails. This is similar to what Ray said in his post about why software sucks. The sad thing is that until they start taking approaches like designing your model, they'll always look like a 3D newb.

Is there a solution? Well, I have an idea as to how to help both the 3D Artists and the Programmers out there: Make it clear that there is more to their job than just poking keys. I had no idea what all a Software Engineer (I used to call them Programmers...) did until I got a job at a software company. I had the impression in my mind that all they did was write code. The thought of them doing things like 'designing the UI' was alien to me.

Heck, before I got a job doing 3D, I thought all I had to do was build a model as fast as I possibly could. I expected they'd give me 3 days to do what would normally take me a week. I had no idea that they'd actually give me time to design and understand my model before building it. I spent over a year trying to be faster in LW, only to find that faster isn't what they wanted.

In short, I think it's very important to alter the perception out there about what a job really entails. If somebody aspiring to be a programmer knows that they need to pay attention to design and UI, then they'll be far more observant about those aspects during their education. If I had known how much learning to draw would help me with my 3D work, I would have done a lot more drawing exercises in high school.

You've hit on the central concept of Starship Traders. Relative to these modern games, however, it's hopelessly simple. It relies entirely on the other players to make it interesting. While there is a fledgling graphical interface, the vast majority of players still use the more refined text interfaces, either browser or telnet.

Starship Traders is normally thought of as a web mode game, but it has its history in Czarwars, a BBS door game. It still supports telnet on port 23 for the 'Continuum of Chaos' persistent-universe game at StarshipTraders.com.

Especially considering that, say, Python already has MP libraries. A research paper from UO, another fellow who's trod this path before, several MUD/MOO/MP libraries and games, Merchant Empire, Twisted, Eve, and so on.

Using Python would allow this fellow to achieve his goal of learning a new language, fast. He can then properly focus on the important things: program structure and gameplay.

like this

After all, how do you tell a 'good' virus from a bad one? It might be harder than you realize, if you're a virus scanner, for example. There is an article here that deals with some of the other issues that 'good' viruses raise.

heheh! Not only is it a fine remote administration feature, but it's also pretty slick the way machines upgraded in this way advertise their new status to everyone with a webserver on port 80.

The criticisms of this review are valid but could benefit from a different perspective. I started writing a networked, 3D game client in the spring, my first such attempt. If I had discovered this book a month earlier, it would probably have saved me a week or more. It did save me some time. I could find no other single source that covered what I wanted to do.

A short overview and a brief technical introduction to virtually every technology I have used so far is in this book. When you are struggling with your first 3d game client, this book offers valuable perspective that can save you from wasting a lot of time just trying to figure out what to use. If you are attempting, as I was, to write your first 3d, networked game client, consider this: is a week (or two or three) of your time worth 50 bux? (I think that's what I paid) If so, take a look at the book.

If you are an experienced programmer in most of the technologies covered in this book and already have a good perspective on each of them and what they are useful for, don't buy it.

If you fall in between the extremes above and think that the book isn't for you, wait for something else or dig up the info for yourself -- as I mostly did. ;) But, in the absence of much competition, this book may have some value if you want to write code -- and save a little time -- right now.

(The client I'm working on is not yet released in source form but will be when I get it cleaned up a bit. It is here and is used to play the web game Starshiptraders which has historically been playable only with a browser or telnet.)

At least a copy of sites are using this GPL'd copying policy in an attempt to make the web a bit less hospitable to Smart Tags. The idea is to disallow reproduction privileges for purposes of modifying document content by adding links. Some background is here.

At least a copy of sites are using this GPL'd copying policy in an attempt to make the web a bit less hospitable to Smart Tags. The idea is to disallow reproduction privileges for purposes of modifying document content by adding links. Some background is here.

MajikSlinger,

Excellent post... If you have no objection, I'll post it at Librenix.com tomorrow (Sunday) where it will likely get somewhat lower visibility than a (Score: -1, Redundant) 200th post here. :P