You sound like a lisp coder, talking about all the features the competition doesn't have, but you can't live without. I don't mean that in a bad way, but the similarity is very striking. I guess right now GIT is the Lisp of SCMs. I hope it can catch on better, though.
Re:Well, speaking from my own experience...
on
Linus on GIT and SCM
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· Score: 1
I've not used GIT much myself, but I did watch the video. Linus pointed out that the UI has only recently stopped sucking. Since it's been over a year, it is definitely time for another look.
That explains it. Legal documents are ugly! Just take a look at the stuff posted on groklaw. How the hell did it become standard practice to create a vertical line out of a column of aligned parentheses? Can't these people at least use the pipe character?
I don't know how things work down in New Orleans (particularly given that it is not a common law territory) but many of the homes, probably including the one in question, were condemned. That probably makes it much easier to void the previous titles.
Broadcast agreement. No parties to those contracts are improperly broadcasting. If I choose to receive those broadcasts from somewhere unexpected, so what? It isn't like consumers are re-broadcasting anything; Slingbox uses unicast TCP/IP connections.
What tasks weren't compared that should have been included? The benchmarks were all measuring the delays from extremely common, simple tasks. Booting, app launching, opening, typing, scrolling, and saving are the fundamental tasks for word processing. Overall, the ancient mac plus is more responsive for those tasks. That means that, if those tasks are all you need to do, the Mac plus is the better, more productive machine.
The comparison was carefully designed to not be about features: everything they tested is a universal feature that works basically the same across all platforms. There wouldn't have been any point in writing an article about how much more computers can do these days.
DVDs are how people get their movies. Anything that will play movies must either have a DVD drive, or offer some way of getting movies off the discs and onto the device. The Foleo lacks that. I really doubt that it lacks the CPU speed necessary for the decoding.
I expect the Foleo to be very good at what it does. What remains to be seen is if it is good enough that people will want the supplement for their smartphone, or the replacement for the large laptop. However, as a standalone device for people lacking a small laptop and a smartphone, it will still probably be good given the price.
There are plenty of cheap laptops on the market nowadays. Not too many at $500, but plenty at $700+. The problem is that those machines are often crap, and are seldom truly portable. The Foleo seems to be taking the approach of not pretending to be a desktop replacement, and instead focusing on being really mobile. So, while there are laptops that can match the Foleo in portability, they can't approach it in price.
After what the OLPC folks have accomplished, there should be no doubt that the price could be pushed way down. If Palm didn't need the cash badly, this would probably be much cheaper. As it stands, $500 is going to keep this out of students' hands.
Note specifically that I mentioned puberty. Faces do change shape significantly during puberty. This kind of technology will be used heavily in child abduction cases, where these issues really make a difference.
The Foleo will be bad at playing DVDs because it lacks a DVD drive and a hard drive. Modern ARM cores definitely have the performance to handle the decoding. In fact, the ARM architecture is very good at DSP tasks.
As for what it will be good at: It will be very good at everything that smartphones want to be good at, but can't because of the limitations of still being a handheld phone. So, it will be a very good PIM, it will work well with web-based stuff, and it will be great for carrying around and viewing digital documents. Also, it will allow the PDA makers to include far better time-wasting games than bejeweled. Expect a Freeciv port within a few months.
Lastly, you can't underestimate the effect that the instant-on will have. It's been a long time since powerful devices with fast boot times were on the mass market. People will find something productive to do with when they no longer have to wait for a laptop to boot.
If my name and itunes account info start showing up on music all over P2P sites, the evil RIAA may come knocking on my door. Why does that matter? The music is still DRM-free, so you have full fair-use capabilities. The personal info is only a privacy concern if you are giving away the music willy-nilly (also known as pirating). When you consider that the info is (or soon will be) trivially removable, this can't be used against consumers who are obeying the law. It will also be very difficult for this to be used against consumers who only pirate a few songs for friends.
This is not an Orwellian measure. It is a completely justified and reasonable attempt to make enforcement of copyright laws easier.
Keep in mind that 256MB of RAM is not going to be constraining this system. The OS has been tuned to run on PDA-class hardware, and the first-party apps will probably not have much of a memory footprint. Also, Opera has demonstrated the ability to run in low ram systems, so it should be okay, too.
If it turns out to be as moddable as it should be, this could be a great seller among geeks. $500 is cheap enough that, if it is sufficiently rugged, it could be hugely popular amongst high-schoolers. And frequent travelers might end up liking it, too. (The lack of mass storage and optical drives will probably hold it back some, though.)
How good are computers at recognizing a face after ten or twenty years? I doubt the algorithms can recognize, say, a teenager based on photos taken prior to puberty. Also, can they maintain accuracy even if somebody has a new scar or puts on dark sunglasses? How much of a face does it take to make a match?
You might want to check out Uru Live. Cyan seems to be on track for making a successful MMO with a good plot behind it. It's too soon to tell how it will work out in the long run, but it does seem that they are breaking new ground. It also isn't really an RPG, but Cyan is at least proving that online games can be driven by the story. That can have repercussions for any wannabe WoW killer.
Did you even bother to try it out? Camino's about:config page is almost identical to FF's page. Any options that are named the same in Camino as in FF will do the same thing. (Camino is just a different front end on Gecko, and about:config options are almost all Gecko options, not browser specific.)
Compiler written in what language? Assembly? No, because that's not portable and too low-level to implement a complex language anyways. Compilers are generally written in C or a C compatible language.
Sure, some things still need to be done in assembly, but they are always wrapped in a C api. And that is why C will not die until computer architectures change drastically. C is close enough to the hardware that you really know what is going on, and you can control it directly. Languages like Java, which eschew pointers and mandate that all code be in a class, can never replace C.
In fact, no language that isn't pretty much C can replace C. If it doesn't give you the control over pointers and memory allocation that you have with C, it won't work as a replacement. If it does have those thing, it is not going to replace C unless it is a backwards compatible extension like C++ or Obj-C.
D3D and OpenGL are supposed to be device-independent APIs. They are abstraction layers. It is inevitable that there will be different ways to accomplish pretty much the same task. Those semantically equivalent algorithms will not all translate to the hardware capabilities to the same extent. The game developers should not have to care too much about the relative strengths and weaknesses of the underlying hardware.
HALs are designed so that the developers can ignore the potentially vast differences in underlying hardware, and get on with writing code that works. If the hardware manufacturer can optimize the HAL so that it performs better under certain usage, they should. They know the most about the strengths and weaknesses of their hardware, and are the most able to make those optimizations.
You rarely need to download new drivers in order to play a new game. However, it is reasonable to expect new drivers to offer a performance benefit for new game engines. This is the price you pay for having games under $100 that can run on Nvidia and ATI chips.
Your question is still pretty pathetic. It is pointless to ask if games should be less exciting. But you do bring up a good point - there should be games that are approachable and do not require dedication to be fun. That can be done, but it should never be accomplished by making the games unexciting or boring.
Not everybody has the time to get into a game like Uru. Far more people have time to get lost in WoW. Most anybody can find the time to play Wii Sports on occasion (not that it isn't immersive, it's just approachable). All three games are good, and there is no reason to exclude the hard core gamers for the sake of casual players, or vice versa. There is a market for all three games, and no reasonably large publisher has to pick just one or two markets to cater to.
In my home state, the minimum length was 180 school days per year. That puts a 40-[school]day suspension at about 22% of the year. That figure is misleading, however, because missing 40 school days in a row pretty much condemns you to flunking everything and having to repeat the grade.
The real problem is the concept of "The Market." Games like Brain Age appeal to a different audience than RPGs. Economically, they are barely related. They aren't substitutes or complements. They just run on the same systems as different genre games. People don't go to a store looking for an FPS and walk out with Pong. Asking "should games be more boring?" is like asking "should everything on TV be more like soap operas?" Like with TV shows, the market for video games is too broad to really be treated as a single market. What TFA should have asked is "have the video game companies been paying enough attention to the arcade and puzzle game markets?"
If these people actually send letters to MS asking for a lawsuit or precise disclosure of the infringements, then MS has three choices: 1) actually must sue them 2) disclose what specific code infringes 3) lose the ability to enforce their patent rights against people who requested one of 1 or 2. 4) Profit!
Now, I know that patents normally don't act this way, but in this case they do. MS has been publicly stating that the software infringes. If somebody asks MS directly what specific code is infringing, and MS is not forthcoming, that will prevent them from winning a later suit against that person. Microsoft must make an effort to resolve the situation, or their later suits will be dismissed according to the doctrine of laches.
So if you are confident that your software doesn't infringe on any valid patents, go ahead and send MS a registered letter asking for the details of the infringement.
So, if the IBM Power6 chips implement the full POWER ISA (which has the PowerPC ISA as a strict subset), then doesn't that make Power6 chips PPCs (and then some)? Since the IBM Power6 chips can be used to run any software that is compiled for PowerPC, it isn't actually wrong to call them PPCs or PPC compatible. It isn't any more wrong than calling a square a parallelogram.
This is a troll. Universal binaries are not twice as hard to create as architecture-specific code. For almost all programs, there is no extra work needed beyond a checkbox. Apple even provides frameworks for vector code that will use SSEx on Intel and Altivec on PPC. I've yet to hear a good reason why an app couldn't be Universal. The closest I've heard is dealing with Wine based apps (ie. those using Cider). And since those aren't really Mac apps, it doesn't matter.
It could be a very good idea for Apple to release Power6 based XServes while keeping the workstations, desktops, and laptops on Intel. It wouldn't alienate any developers, because they barely have any extra work. The worst that could happen is that a few QA guys gripe.
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You sound like a lisp coder, talking about all the features the competition doesn't have, but you can't live without. I don't mean that in a bad way, but the similarity is very striking. I guess right now GIT is the Lisp of SCMs. I hope it can catch on better, though.
I've not used GIT much myself, but I did watch the video. Linus pointed out that the UI has only recently stopped sucking. Since it's been over a year, it is definitely time for another look.
I'm in law./quote>
That explains it. Legal documents are ugly! Just take a look at the stuff posted on groklaw. How the hell did it become standard practice to create a vertical line out of a column of aligned parentheses? Can't these people at least use the pipe character?
Does the water table really matter if the basement is meant to be filled with water?
I don't know how things work down in New Orleans (particularly given that it is not a common law territory) but many of the homes, probably including the one in question, were condemned. That probably makes it much easier to void the previous titles.
Broadcast agreement. No parties to those contracts are improperly broadcasting. If I choose to receive those broadcasts from somewhere unexpected, so what? It isn't like consumers are re-broadcasting anything; Slingbox uses unicast TCP/IP connections.
What tasks weren't compared that should have been included? The benchmarks were all measuring the delays from extremely common, simple tasks. Booting, app launching, opening, typing, scrolling, and saving are the fundamental tasks for word processing. Overall, the ancient mac plus is more responsive for those tasks. That means that, if those tasks are all you need to do, the Mac plus is the better, more productive machine.
The comparison was carefully designed to not be about features: everything they tested is a universal feature that works basically the same across all platforms. There wouldn't have been any point in writing an article about how much more computers can do these days.
DVDs are how people get their movies. Anything that will play movies must either have a DVD drive, or offer some way of getting movies off the discs and onto the device. The Foleo lacks that. I really doubt that it lacks the CPU speed necessary for the decoding.
I expect the Foleo to be very good at what it does. What remains to be seen is if it is good enough that people will want the supplement for their smartphone, or the replacement for the large laptop. However, as a standalone device for people lacking a small laptop and a smartphone, it will still probably be good given the price.
There are plenty of cheap laptops on the market nowadays. Not too many at $500, but plenty at $700+. The problem is that those machines are often crap, and are seldom truly portable. The Foleo seems to be taking the approach of not pretending to be a desktop replacement, and instead focusing on being really mobile. So, while there are laptops that can match the Foleo in portability, they can't approach it in price.
After what the OLPC folks have accomplished, there should be no doubt that the price could be pushed way down. If Palm didn't need the cash badly, this would probably be much cheaper. As it stands, $500 is going to keep this out of students' hands.
Note specifically that I mentioned puberty. Faces do change shape significantly during puberty. This kind of technology will be used heavily in child abduction cases, where these issues really make a difference.
The Foleo will be bad at playing DVDs because it lacks a DVD drive and a hard drive. Modern ARM cores definitely have the performance to handle the decoding. In fact, the ARM architecture is very good at DSP tasks.
As for what it will be good at: It will be very good at everything that smartphones want to be good at, but can't because of the limitations of still being a handheld phone. So, it will be a very good PIM, it will work well with web-based stuff, and it will be great for carrying around and viewing digital documents. Also, it will allow the PDA makers to include far better time-wasting games than bejeweled. Expect a Freeciv port within a few months.
Lastly, you can't underestimate the effect that the instant-on will have. It's been a long time since powerful devices with fast boot times were on the mass market. People will find something productive to do with when they no longer have to wait for a laptop to boot.
This is not an Orwellian measure. It is a completely justified and reasonable attempt to make enforcement of copyright laws easier.
Keep in mind that 256MB of RAM is not going to be constraining this system. The OS has been tuned to run on PDA-class hardware, and the first-party apps will probably not have much of a memory footprint. Also, Opera has demonstrated the ability to run in low ram systems, so it should be okay, too.
If it turns out to be as moddable as it should be, this could be a great seller among geeks. $500 is cheap enough that, if it is sufficiently rugged, it could be hugely popular amongst high-schoolers. And frequent travelers might end up liking it, too. (The lack of mass storage and optical drives will probably hold it back some, though.)
How good are computers at recognizing a face after ten or twenty years? I doubt the algorithms can recognize, say, a teenager based on photos taken prior to puberty. Also, can they maintain accuracy even if somebody has a new scar or puts on dark sunglasses? How much of a face does it take to make a match?
You might want to check out Uru Live. Cyan seems to be on track for making a successful MMO with a good plot behind it. It's too soon to tell how it will work out in the long run, but it does seem that they are breaking new ground. It also isn't really an RPG, but Cyan is at least proving that online games can be driven by the story. That can have repercussions for any wannabe WoW killer.
Did you even bother to try it out? Camino's about:config page is almost identical to FF's page. Any options that are named the same in Camino as in FF will do the same thing. (Camino is just a different front end on Gecko, and about:config options are almost all Gecko options, not browser specific.)
Compiler written in what language? Assembly? No, because that's not portable and too low-level to implement a complex language anyways. Compilers are generally written in C or a C compatible language.
Sure, some things still need to be done in assembly, but they are always wrapped in a C api. And that is why C will not die until computer architectures change drastically. C is close enough to the hardware that you really know what is going on, and you can control it directly. Languages like Java, which eschew pointers and mandate that all code be in a class, can never replace C.
In fact, no language that isn't pretty much C can replace C. If it doesn't give you the control over pointers and memory allocation that you have with C, it won't work as a replacement. If it does have those thing, it is not going to replace C unless it is a backwards compatible extension like C++ or Obj-C.
D3D and OpenGL are supposed to be device-independent APIs. They are abstraction layers. It is inevitable that there will be different ways to accomplish pretty much the same task. Those semantically equivalent algorithms will not all translate to the hardware capabilities to the same extent. The game developers should not have to care too much about the relative strengths and weaknesses of the underlying hardware.
HALs are designed so that the developers can ignore the potentially vast differences in underlying hardware, and get on with writing code that works. If the hardware manufacturer can optimize the HAL so that it performs better under certain usage, they should. They know the most about the strengths and weaknesses of their hardware, and are the most able to make those optimizations.
You rarely need to download new drivers in order to play a new game. However, it is reasonable to expect new drivers to offer a performance benefit for new game engines. This is the price you pay for having games under $100 that can run on Nvidia and ATI chips.
Your question is still pretty pathetic. It is pointless to ask if games should be less exciting. But you do bring up a good point - there should be games that are approachable and do not require dedication to be fun. That can be done, but it should never be accomplished by making the games unexciting or boring.
Not everybody has the time to get into a game like Uru. Far more people have time to get lost in WoW. Most anybody can find the time to play Wii Sports on occasion (not that it isn't immersive, it's just approachable). All three games are good, and there is no reason to exclude the hard core gamers for the sake of casual players, or vice versa. There is a market for all three games, and no reasonably large publisher has to pick just one or two markets to cater to.
In my home state, the minimum length was 180 school days per year. That puts a 40-[school]day suspension at about 22% of the year. That figure is misleading, however, because missing 40 school days in a row pretty much condemns you to flunking everything and having to repeat the grade.
The real problem is the concept of "The Market." Games like Brain Age appeal to a different audience than RPGs. Economically, they are barely related. They aren't substitutes or complements. They just run on the same systems as different genre games. People don't go to a store looking for an FPS and walk out with Pong. Asking "should games be more boring?" is like asking "should everything on TV be more like soap operas?" Like with TV shows, the market for video games is too broad to really be treated as a single market. What TFA should have asked is "have the video game companies been paying enough attention to the arcade and puzzle game markets?"
If these people actually send letters to MS asking for a lawsuit or precise disclosure of the infringements, then MS has three choices:
1) actually must sue them
2) disclose what specific code infringes
3) lose the ability to enforce their patent rights against people who requested one of 1 or 2.
4) Profit!
Now, I know that patents normally don't act this way, but in this case they do. MS has been publicly stating that the software infringes. If somebody asks MS directly what specific code is infringing, and MS is not forthcoming, that will prevent them from winning a later suit against that person. Microsoft must make an effort to resolve the situation, or their later suits will be dismissed according to the doctrine of laches.
So if you are confident that your software doesn't infringe on any valid patents, go ahead and send MS a registered letter asking for the details of the infringement.
So, if the IBM Power6 chips implement the full POWER ISA (which has the PowerPC ISA as a strict subset), then doesn't that make Power6 chips PPCs (and then some)? Since the IBM Power6 chips can be used to run any software that is compiled for PowerPC, it isn't actually wrong to call them PPCs or PPC compatible. It isn't any more wrong than calling a square a parallelogram.
This is a troll. Universal binaries are not twice as hard to create as architecture-specific code. For almost all programs, there is no extra work needed beyond a checkbox. Apple even provides frameworks for vector code that will use SSEx on Intel and Altivec on PPC. I've yet to hear a good reason why an app couldn't be Universal. The closest I've heard is dealing with Wine based apps (ie. those using Cider). And since those aren't really Mac apps, it doesn't matter.
It could be a very good idea for Apple to release Power6 based XServes while keeping the workstations, desktops, and laptops on Intel. It wouldn't alienate any developers, because they barely have any extra work. The worst that could happen is that a few QA guys gripe.