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If what you say is true (which I have no reason to doubt), that means that ATI would have been doing the same thing.. You just can't trus benchmarks.

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In soviet russia, all your us are belong to base!
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I noticed that the lawsuit Gator was facing was launched June, 2002. Does anybody know whatever happened to it?

Did they settle? Was it dismissed? What of it!

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In soviet russia, all your us are belong to us!
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Yup

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In soviet russia, all your us are belong to base!
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oooh this makes me very angry!

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In soviet russia, all your us are belong to base!
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Anybody notice how "Honey pots" backwards is "Stop yenoh!". A quick google of the word reveals it to have to do with food, so "honey pots" is code for "Stop food!". This madness must be ended!

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In soviet russia, all your us are belong to base!
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• It takes a month to sign off the site's Terms & Conditions because every time any one of your organisation's lawyers changes a full stop, all the other ones need to sign it off.
  
• You realise that your site's visual design isn't working, but it will take a month to wrap a new design around the same words.
  
• Your web design agency insists on all content being signed off two months before it goes live... and then transcribes it incorrectly.
  In a parting gesture, the Web publisher you fired replaced photos of board members with sheep.
  
• You can't update one section of the site because another section has a major overhaul underway. You can either publish the entire site, with both complete and incomplete updates, or hold until both are completed.
  
• You have to work through the night to publish the company's results at market opening time because you don't have a secure area to develop them in advance.
  
• You send email promotions about 'upgrading' to Windows2000 to registered Mac users.
  
• You're employing an army of skilled web publishers just to update the system requirements of your software.
  

Heh... More interesting than the Olympics.. And don't forget the.. hmm.. can't think of anything else :(

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In soviet russia, all your us are belong to base!
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While technically true, saying "64-bit can process 2x faster than 32-bit" is misleading.

64-bit means that each instruction can be 64 bits long, allowing for the native computation of larger numbers. Concurrently, it can process 2 32-bit instructions, but they would have to be instructions such that neither relies on the result of the other.

To sum up: 64-bit is not equal to 2x32-bit, but is much better than 32-bit.

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In soviet russia, all your us are belong to base!
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GPL Legal Battle Coming?
posted by Dan Gillmor 12:06 AM

The free software movement has surmounted all kinds of obstacles in its short history, moving from a political statement to a prominent position inside the world's largest companies.

A battle may -- repeat, may -- be shaping up over whether the GNU General Public License, or GPL, can be enforced. If it gets to court, this could be a pivotal case.

The GPL is the legal core of the movement. It's basically a copyright agreement. It gives users of GPL-licensed software the right to see the source code, or programming instructions, of the software and to make modifications. But there's a string attached: If you create software that is derived from software previously licensed under the GPL, you must release what you've written under the same license.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF), which monitors the scene and enforces the GPL, says a Mountain View company has been violating the GPL for more than a year. The foundation calls the violations serious and is threatening a lawsuit.

The specifics of the FSF's beef with OpenTV have to do with the company's policies in sending source code to licensees of OpenTV software tools created under the GPL. According to the foundation, OpenTV has either refused to provide the code, or has attached improper conditions on providing it, to several programmers who have every right to it.

OpenTV's intellectual property lawyer, Scott Doyle, says there's been missed communications on both sides but that the company has no intention of violating any legal agreements. He says the company plans to post the code in question online.

But if the FSF is right that OpenTV is violating the GPL, and if this behavior is found to be legal by the courts, the entire free-software and open-source movements could be derailed. Agreeing to share the improvements you make in the GPL-licensed software you've used is an essential part of the larger ecosystem.

Some people I respect say the GPL is a bad idea, period. They say it's too restrictive of programmers' rights, in the sense of forcing them to open what they've done to the world. Fine: If you don't like the GPL, don't create software from code that used it in the first place. Then put different licensing terms on what you've done.

But legal agreements are supposed to matter in our system. Just because the GPL turns the idea of intellectual property somewhat around doesn't make it less valid.

--- From here ---

Tom Brown
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In soviet russia, all your us are belong to base!
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But it was given a rating of 9! That must mean its practically perfect!

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In Soviet Russia, all your us are belong to base!
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package benchmarks;

public class FinalTest {

public static int INC;
public static final void method1() { INC++; }
public static void method2() { INC++; }
public final static int TEST = 1000000000;
public static void main(String[] args) {
long start;
INC = 0;
start = System.currentTimeMillis();
System.out.println("Running method1()");
for(int i=0; i<TEST; i++) method1();
System.out.println("TIME: "+(System.currentTimeMillis()-start));

INC = 0;
start = System.currentTimeMillis();
System.out.println("Running method2()");
for(int i=0; i<TEST; i++) method2();
System.out.println("TIME: "+(System.currentTimeMillis()-start));

INC = 0;
start = System.currentTimeMillis();
System.out.println("Running method2()");
for(int i=0; i<TEST; i++) method2();
System.out.println("TIME: "+(System.currentTimeMillis()-start));

INC = 0;
start = System.currentTimeMillis();
System.out.println("Running method1()");
for(int i=0; i<TEST; i++) method1();
System.out.println("TIME: "+(System.currentTimeMillis()-start));

INC = 0;
start = System.currentTimeMillis();
System.out.println("Running method1()");
for(int i=0; i<TEST; i++) method1();
System.out.println("TIME: "+(System.currentTimeMillis()-start));

INC = 0;
start = System.currentTimeMillis();
System.out.println("Running method2()");
for(int i=0; i<TEST; i++) method2();
System.out.println("TIME: "+(System.currentTimeMillis()-start));

}
}

Basically, the original story was just a load of crap!

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In Soviet Russia, all your us are belong to base!

And I assume that since you don't want to pay any taxes, you don't want to use any of the services our government provides..

You won't be able to use most roads, so you'll have to walk but if you get mugged, the police can't help you. You can't get food from the supermarket, because of all the subsidies the government provides food producers...

Basically, you want something for nothing.

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In Soviet Russia, all your us are belong to base!

It's a never ending battle between the republican types (who hate government involvement) and the democratic types who want more centralized/governmental control.

While I think that there is such thing as "too much taxes", I don't think we're there yet. The only problem with this system (IMHO) is that when each state has their own laws, it will become very difficult for small businesses to conform and collect the proper taxes for each state.

If the states want money from online sales, propose a federal tax, whose money would be split between states proportional to the ecomerce that is done in each state.

While the system wouldn't be perfect, it would be a huge step up from 50 separate laws!

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In Soviet Russia, all your us are belong to base!

Great! Another positive review!

I want to know more about its general feel! I want to know more about what I might not like! I want to know more than "There are parts that need to be polished, but ignore my last sentance"!

/RANT

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In Soviet Russia, all your us are belong to base!

Adds new meaning to Garbage In, Garbage Out

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In Soviet Russia, all your us are belong to base!

I agree that some laws should be made to take into account motivation (*cough* DMCA) rather than just the action, but there must be limits.

While very utopian, there are two problems with only passing laws based on motivation that come to mind.

Its very difficult to determine true motivation, and even if the person's motivation is good, that person could be walking all over the rights of another.

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In Soviet Russia, all your us are belong to base!

You've got it backwards (like the soviet russia joke..). In the matrix, they only know what fried chicken tastes like, thus everything tastes like fried chicken.

The article attempts to explain how the matrix can know the taste of fried chicken, but not the taste of anything else.

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In the matrix, soviet russia jokes about you!

To take the cynical view, anything can be explained in a made-up universe. Just look at all the "scientific" explanation for events in Star Wars (midiclroians, anyone?).

That said, its a very impressive article!

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Too many acronyms!

My head hurts!

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I posted this awhile ago, but it seems to fit here too..

LAN = Local Area Network
WAN = Wide Area Network
MAN = Metropoliton Area Network
WOMAN = Wide Open Metropolitan Area Network

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In Soviet Russia, all your us are belong to base!

if your job can be done capably by someone who has virtually no contact with management, halfway around the world, then you're not doing a good job. If you are a good, educated programmer, you have nothing to worry about.

Maybe if I had broadband, I would be revived from stasis much faster, on Terran Legacy. Damn, I sware that is the same Zealot waiting for me to look around outside the base, or the same pervert Overlord spying on me, or that damn Level 3 hydralisk waiting to deliver another 850+ damage POWER HIT.

Damn you 128K broadband!

This won't make any difference. We already know the musicians don't see much (if any) of the money collected, we know the RIAA inflates their reported losses, now we know how similar these file trading systems are to windows.

So what?

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In soviet Russia, all your us are belong to base!

How does this help the Iraqi people? All this does is give the rest of the world more domain space, while not giving Iraq the full value of their "property".

Why couldn't it be an Iraqi company that sells the domains? This would allow the country to keep all of the proceeds, instead of only getting some of the value.

I'm not against the UK, the US, France or anybody, but I think this might be one area where this company is being opportunistic.

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In soviet Russia, all your us are belong to base!

You expect something like "Everything is OK" from slashdot?

Maybe you haven't been here very long...

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With non-bytecode langauges, the compiler can optimize to the environment. It can re-order code based on the fastest execution time for the platform the code is compiled for.

Java (and other bytecode languages) were desinged to run well not just on a single platform, but on a variety of platforms. So as a trade-off, you lose environment-specific optimizations at compile time.

JIT JRE/compilers can work to prevent this. They can further optimize the bytecodes at execution time because they are platform specific.

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In soviet Russia, all your us are belong to base!

LAN = Local Area Network
WAN = Wide Area Network
MAN = Metropoliton Area Network
WOMAN = Wide Open Metropolitan Area Network, which is what most of those 802.11 networks will be...

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You're dissing perl for being quick and dirty, but just because you can use a shortcut, doesn't mean you have to. I can code with perl and have it come out looking as clean as Pascal (or even *gulp* Java).

Things can be done in other "structured" languages that would be as unreadable as the most obfuscated perl code. Being able to read your code 9 months from now is more a function of programmer discipline than the language used.

This game was written in perl, when I was learning, 5 years ago, and because I used good design and comments, I can still read and update the code.

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You're dissing perl for being quick and dirty, but just because you can use a shortcut, doesn't mean you have to. I can code with perl and have it come out looking as clean as Pascal (or even *gulp* Java).

Things can be done in other "structured" languages that would be as unreadable as the most obfuscated perl code. Being able to read your code 9 months from now is more a function of programmer discipline than the language used.

This game was written in perl, when I was learning, 5 years ago, and because I used good design and comments, I can still read and update the code.

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After reading the article, I can say I feel mislead. I clicked expecting to find something about how the government has just built some giant gravity-defying rooms, but instead I find that the goal of the military is to make our soldiers fight without even knowing their fighting.

IMHO, they got the wrong things out of Enders Game. There is value in soldiers not knowing the reality of fighting... But that makes any Big Brother scenario all the more scary.

It reminds me a little of the movie Toys (Plot Outline: An eccentric toymaker finds his family business horribly misused by his militaristic uncle who is bequeathed control of the company). Where a has-been general trains some youngsters to play video games, while in fact they're controlling RC weapons of war.

Scary, isn't it!

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Click here (Not like goats.ex... or whatever that other site is)

This is why retail products should get an "Evil-bit"... Or some sort of barcode that can be scanned to say "I'm an evil product!"

I don't think its too soon for games on demand.. Look at all the people who play on sites like pop-cap games, yahoo games and msn zone. There are many games that are available on demand, and as thus are played on demand.

I think the factor that will truly bring this idea success will be when you don't have to download to play the game. You visit the URL, and the game plays... Maybe that would require the game to install on demand... or maybe it already exists with languages like java and flash, where all you need to download are some datafiles (And a small amount of game code).

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In soviet russia, all your us are belong to base!

You can find a good ROT13 decoder here:

This link

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In soviet russia, all your us are belong to base!

Asking Slashdot for an unbiased news source is like asking Howard Stern to be homosexual. It just ain't gonna happen.

On the other hand, here you can find many different biasses. Anti-microsoft, pro-linux, pro-bsd, etc.. Eventually they all counteract.

The trick is to realize that each comment is biased, and to compare it to all the other comments to get the real truth.

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Now that I looked at the right place, the USD value of 11m GBP is $17,406,247.58.

His negotiated salary is probably about $17.5m when it was signed.

Now it REALLY sucks to be him if his back goes out.

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With exchange rates as they are, 11 million pounds is $12,372,061.64. That is quite the odd sum to pay an actor, so with rounding he's probably making a cool 12.5 million.

If his back trouble continues, sucks to be him!

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Antibiotic soap is really not the problem most people think it is. Its antibiotic properties work on completely different principles than the antibiotics your doctor gives you.

If everybody uses these topical antibiotics, they will become less effective and eventually completely non-effective, but it will not affect the potency of your doctors penicillin.

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Thank you for showing me the option (which I have now turned off). I had looked in the options, and never seen it before.

I am not a blind microsoft-hater. I dislike some things they do, but I still use many of their products, and do not diss them "just because they are microsoft".

If you read my post, you'll see that its not just a microsoft bash. Its an appeal for features to have an "on/off" switch, and my appeal is being made to any software producer, not just MS.

*Steps off soapbox*

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I believe they didn't do anything big until LOTR. Nobody in the mainstream had heard of Pixar until Toy Story came out, and Lucasarts became famous for SW and THX sound.

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New to this version are features like image auto sizing...

IAAIGD (Indie game developer)...

The analogy to the current entertainment industry is very accurate. This is a capitalist society, and as such the successful businesses are shaped a certain way. If they don't make money, they don't succeed. The innovation comes from the indies, but as we all know, the first person with any given technology usually fails.

Developing a good game is hard work. It takes time, talent in programming (physics, graphics, etc) and talent in the graphical arts. It is difficult to code fulltime every day for whatever company you work for, and go home and put in another 4-8 hours on your game. Code burnout happens quickly, and can last a long time.

That said, I think that if the musicians can manage some sort of revolution, computer games will not be too far behind. (How many developers do you know that don't read slashdot!).

Support the gamer revolution!
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If some company is stupid enough to make an international telemarketing call, have at it. That business model will soon drive them bankrupt.

One of the reasons that we currently get telemarketing calls is the pricing structure of local and toll calls is low enough to support that model.

I have not seen an unbiased answer to this question that has convinced me one way or the other. I use both on my site, all my new projects are PHP because its quicker, but mod_perl can be extremely powerful with the persistance of its threads.

To sum up, I don't believe an unbiased comparison is possible, and both PHP and Perl are fairly equal as web-scripting solutions right now.

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I have not seen an unbiased answer to this question that has convinced me one way or the other. I use both on my site, all my new projects are PHP because its quicker, but mod_perl can be extremely powerful with the persistance of its threads.

To sum up, I don't believe an unbiased comparison is possible, and both PHP and Perl are fairly equal as web-scripting solutions right now.

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PHP Wrox!

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"The only drawback that concerns me is how each item and price can be connected to an individual."

Should this come to pass on a widespread basis, it could be counteracted by some sort of open pricing network, similar to P2P.

Somehow the system knows what prices I can get for an item, and what prices anybody else logged in can get, and routes the purchase through that person...

Similar to pricewatch, but more community based rather than retailer based... .. Anyway, its just an idea! ..

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This battle has been fought before, if not in the courts than in the marketplace.

Without saying anything about the quality of certain brands, what really allowed the PC to become the dominant computer over Macintosh was the fact that PC parts were commodities. This allowed the prices of PC parts to remain low, increasing demand.

If Lexmark continues to block other manufacturers from creating Lexmark compatible cartriges, another printer manufacturer will realize the benefits of increased market share, and allow their printers to use cheaper ink.

Just ask any economist!

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"And as an added bonus, the game actually runs on Linux right out of the box"

Now I won't have to research the "Multiple OS" and "Open Source Movement" technology branches. Right on!

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