First, I don't understand why a company would pay so much for chili. Given the current price of ground beef in our market economy, and...
Oh. Sorry. Am I the only person who thinks that "Chilli!Soft" is a really dumb name? They should be happy about being bought by a reputable company. (read: with a marketable name...)
I guess I just lose it when they start talking about that "integrating Chili!Soft Active Server Pages technology". I'd never buy Microsoft chili on the web; I'm sure it'd taste like ASP!:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Jon, your ideas are your own, and believe me, no one is going to steal them from you.:)
Yeah, all of us hackers are evil pirates. My web browser "steals" copyrighted images every day and makes copies of them. Those.au files I used to listen to were just as enjoyable as the radio. When I first thought up that bubblesort algorithm, I didn't know someone else had done it first.
...but the difference is, now that there is money involved, corporations are entering the picture and getting lawsuit-happy, and generally trashing the world that we built in the first place, and exploiting its features.
I'd much rather live in a world where record companies did not exist, banner ads were illegal, phone and computer companies could not own media or patent simple ideas, musicians were supported by the goodwill of their fans, without anyone to take their excess money, and slashdot discussions were intelligent.
But I think that's enough fantasy for one day... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Ars Technica always has interesting technical stuff. Heck, it's "News for Nerds" by definition. Kudos to slashdot for linking to it, especially since they post some of the better Slashdot links on Ars.:)
They wrote an excellent article on the Crusoe, (I just wrote a short paper on it for class, myself, although I used the white paper for reference...) and were looking forward to this architecture. It's nice to hear more details.
Wow, these results are really impressive! I wish someone would implement an x86 interpreter on x86 that actually ran faster. I wonder if the limited number of registers would really get in the way of a control program, though. Transmeta, where are you?;) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
What are you talking about? Linux is not socialist or fascist, but rather embodies the ideal of the perfect communism, where everyone contributes what they can, and hopefully gets what they need. But since the barrier to entry is so much lower, information is essentially free to all, and distribution problems go to nil!
...And do you really think the moderators will fall for something so simplistic?
[...]
Damn, I wish I had thought of this one first!:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Yeah, it's been *available*, but not for actual use in any projects, which would be the point, IMO.
Wow, I have this source, and I can compile it non-stop for 25 days and read it, but I can't *use* any of it. It's like showing a beginning writer "Paradise Lost", and saying "study it all you want for the next month, but don't write it later, ha ha ha!".
(okay, maybe not Paradise Lost, I mean it still crashes on Win 3.1, doesn't know what the "Grey Enter" key is, and doesn't like some of the niftier VGA modes. But still...) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Okay, okay, I'll find a *different* protected mode app to use for my examples. DOSEmu already runs a bunch of stuff, though. I just wish it did sound better... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Now that the Bochs source is available, could this be used to make a library that virtualizes more of those pesky x86 instructions?
I'd be really happy if DOSEmu and Wine finally had full protected mode support. DOSEmu has great Linux FS support, and low memory usage, and can run Win 3.1 minus the protected mode stuff. If it had that, I don't think anything would stop it from running modern Windows, or more importantly DOOM!
Why wouldn't there be problems with massive memory leaks on Windows 2000? NT4 had that problem too. Windows works fine until either (a) you want to get real work done, or (b) it decides to crash anyhow. I'm just glad I deserted around Windows 3.1, for my personal machine.
I thought the telnet server for W2K was a pretty sweet add-on, although if I had a W2K box I guess I'd want to be running SSH instead... But to really feel at home I'd have to install BASH and the other UNIX tools. And then... well, what's the point, eh? I'd rather run Linux, have all the good stuff run natively, and run xdos over SSH if I ever need to...:)
It isn't hard for something to be a "tremendous improvement" over NT and 9x. I really doubt W2K is that, in all areas. It has higher system requirements and worse hardware compatibility. But that's the future for you, eh?
The companies roll out what they think the customers want, especially if Microsoft gives them a discount. And I don't know about Compaq or GE, but DELL really *IS* an Intel / Microsoft stooge. They try to sell computers with RAMBUS memory, for crying out loud!
There are many ways to define success. If Bill Gates cared about his customers even a tenth as much as he cares about his money, or the success of his company, I'd reward him for it. As it is, though, I fart in his general direction.
I used DOS since 3.2, and I still have a copy of DOS 2.0. I used Windows 3.1, and even though I didn't like it, I knew it well, got it to work, and found out what everything did. That all changed in Win '95, and it pissed me off. I couldn't figure out how a company could make their product less stable, more bloated, more annoying, less useful, and hide more helpful stuff from the user. Before, it was "edit WINBLAH.INI to make the problem go away". Now, it's "reboot the computer and pray".
So why do I use Linux? Because I don't trust "faith healing" as a valid system recovery method. It's *my* computer, and I'd like to know what its doing and why. I think my Operating System owes me that much. So Microsoft lost a power user. Ha ha ha ha ha.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, according to my post, your pay scale should be somewhere between $40,000 and priceless, which it is.
But since you know what the big red button is, *and* know enough not to touch it, you deserve a raise!
My numbers weren't supposed to be *too* accurate, just the sentiment behind them. See, it was supposed to be funny. I need to mark those posts with "HUMOR" again...
And I couldn't get to the Dr. Dobbs article. But their primary source had a lot of cool info, and said a lot of the things we're saying here: just because there are a lot of IT professionals out there, that doesn't mean they know how to do what *you* want them to, and they aren't all necessarily qualified.
Oh, and sorry about the NT, man. I hope you like your job. I know NT Administrators that don't do much more than reboot the server when the printer queues stop working. Scary stuff... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
A Temp Worker: $25,000. An MSCE NT Professional: $40,000. A Professional UNIX Admin: $60,000. An Admin who actually knows what that big red button does: Priceless.
Yep, there's a shortage. That's why I'm not worried about a job. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
My social security number is just a number. So is this post. So is a computerized representation of my genetic code. According to your interpretation, no electronic media is copyrightable provided it is represented as a number (which it is, a long binary one). Or at least the *number* isn't copyrightable....
Jeez, this stuff makes my head hurt. I liked it back when I thought I was buying an actual program, and not just a license to use it. Oh, and I'd never copy it, I just hit upon the right (unpatentable) combination of bits to produce a disk that's surprisingly similar!;) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
There are *so* many holes in the DVD players, formats, etc., etc. that it won't be a problem for anyone to get around these "features" the MPAA wants.
And just how legal is this "region-coding" crap, anyhow? I remember they tried the same thing with consoles and audio and failed. (anyone ever played Golden Axe 3 in America? Anyone set the 'copyright bit' on your mp3's?)
A business isn't going to sell a product that have added features that make consumers not buy it. Well, unless they have a monopoly or something. Otherwise, a competing standard without these features will win out. The MPAA will find this out, hopefully the hard way.
.com for DOS sites. .org for machine code. .txt for sites with content / Unix sites. .exe for Windows sites. .hqx for Mac sites. .cpp /.pas /.bas /.asm / etc. for source code. .tar for archives (picture / ftp / whatever) .gif /.jpg /.mpg for porn sites.
Under my proposal, 'slashdot.org' would be 'slashdot.txt', 'zdnet.com' would be 'zdnet.exe', and 'goatse.cx' would be 'goatse.jpg'.
This would have several advantages over the current system:
- Platform dependence. Never be told you can't get the plug-ins, just browse the right sites!
- Easy blocking of sites. Just mass-block all sites with any fluff in them! Better register all your info in the.txt domain, for the kiddies!
- Nifty three-letter name extensions. Now if only we could get rid of that darn "www." thing, and limit the other part to 8 letters. This would also cut down on domain squatting, as it limits the number of valid domains.
- Reinvent the existing system. This happened when the web was invented in 1993, and look at the economy now! It's in our best interest to completely reinvent the existing system every 8 years or so to drive interest in technology.
- Get rid of newbies. Ever since Windows stopped displaying file extensions and instead has little pictures, like the Mac, newbies don't understand them. Now that they will be unable to navigate the web, content will be back on the rise, as well as sales of "Domain Names for Dummies". I'm confident that IDG will back my proposal.
Oh, and we'll need a '.idg' for IDG books. (I wanted '.dum', but you know how those corporate sponsors are...) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
(especially since I couldn't get Wine to install FF7... blah. It isn't fair, I can play the other six under Linux!:)
Rumor has it that Starcraft is playable under Wine. If I had a copy, I'd try it out, but that's more than you're going to get from Blizzard anytime soon. Does WarCraft run under DOSEmu? (StarCon2 does, yeah!:)
Loki rulez. Except that I've been playing too much HOMM3 lately, instead of, say, sleeping.:| Oh well, it's something to do, especially since Masters of Magic will probably never have a decent sequel... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
That's how the first good checkers AIs worked: the algorithm got to be smarter than the human programmer. Of course, Go is a *much* more complicated game than Checkers. But now that Chess is basically solved, maybe people will concentrate on Go, and we'll see some new approaches. AI could definitely use some new motivation. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Point taken. I wouldn't want to see a format implemented like that. AVIs and RealPlayer files do the same thing, and it annoys the crap out of me.
The first thing to do is to make sure that all of the codecs used are implemented directly in the program / library, preferably open source so they can't be taken out later.
The interesting (and different, I think) part I was mentioning would be the ability to change which "codec" is being used at whatever point in the file. VBR encoding for mp3's works sort of like this: it detects properties about the sound (don't need as much detail / less frequencies) and adjusts its compression accordingly. Of course, that's lossy. I guess PNGs can already do this too, and they're lossless, but I'd like to see more of this for general data compression, not just images.
The advantage would be having one compressed file format that's good enough for many varieties of data, and we can go back to plain data files compressed with generic compressors. (like ps.gz instead of pdf files, or xcf.bz2 instead of.psd files, but with one great compressor. I don't think we'll ever settle on a standard data file format, even though it's probably not impossible to do...)
Hey, if you're paranoid, just store your thesis as "thesis.roff.zoo", and you should be fine!;) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
That "go" question was really cool. I wish I played it well enough to attempt to write a great computer player, as this is a classic hard problem in AI, with a $2,000,000 reward, IIRC...
Of course, his "compression" is generally expressed in terms of "rules", and even some tips from image compression might help here. (recognize similar configurations, whether they be rotated, translated, etc., and adjust your strategy accordingly)
bzip2 is a really great program, generally offering better compression than gzip at least for large bodies of text. What I'd really like to see is a meta-compression format that has some heuristic to identify the type of file, and use the appropriate (optimal) algorithm. I know most modern compression programs do something like this already, (like RAR and its multimedia compression) but it's still neat. The few bits to identify the compression methods can be well worth it...
Also, hopefully those compression patches will eventually make it into Linux; it'd be great to see something like that working at the VFS level.
If it used something like LZO, there'd be up to gzip levels of compression with practically no performance hit on even a modest system. Maybe even speed improvements would be possible, due to having to read less data from the disk...
Under those situations, I'd advocate comressing swap (and even memory!) where it would help (not recently used data), and maybe merging more of that into the filesystem too... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I haven't played the game, but the N64 controller always struck me as being somewhat elaborate. If you can't do it with a directional controller and four buttons, (six buttons max) it's probably pretty complicated... Give me a standard, NES-style controller any day. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I tried it out when they started the program, it was really cool! Of course it only really matters if you're a developer or an OS nut or something, but still...
Bottom line: if you've got an app that you want to compile and run, cross platform, get an account!
Oh yeah, and to all the Trolls: they've got a Beowulf cluster, too!;) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
:) Yep, I knew all the keyboard commands by heart. Of course, this was 6.0 and later. (5.5 wasn't as cool, but I still knew the commands--the key bindings were awkward, but standard at the time, ^K^B, ^K^K, ^K^V, etc., etc.)
Not only is it unintuitive, it's darn slow! Who wants to be moving that thing around? Regardless, they supported that just fine, too, and the mouse worked well with it, if it was used. But all the keyboard commands were helpfully in the menus, and the help system was great. (much better than the standard Emacs-like Info browser, IMO...)
Yeah, most Open Source projects are far more customizable than their Windows counterparts, (because you can change it, silly!) and there's usually an (undocumented) substitute for unavailable keys. (or you can bind a key to it--I'm tempted to bind my "Windows" keys someday, but I don't need anything extra, really.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I think if Linux came with a "Getting Started" guide that just *touched on* the wealth of tools that are available, it'd be much easier. In Windows, it doesn't come with much. Your average Linux distro comes with a WHOLE LOT of tools, and users need to realize that.
The interface design is fine. It's just as good/bad as anything else. The last known good interface I saw was the text IDE for "Turbo Pascal 7", which is why I like RHIDE. The last "innovative" one I saw was WinAmp, (and everyone has already copied that) but that doesn't necessarily mean it's easier to use.
Widgets on Linux, Windows, whatever haven't changed much for a while. (but I'd kill to be able to resize more windows in Windows, they can't design the control panel worth a damn!) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Slashdot Mirror
What, your qubix kernel doesn't want to run in supervisor mode either?
Does that count as an observer?
Damn you Heisenberg, and your Uncertainty Principle!
Oh well. I think it already runs QNX...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
First, I don't understand why a company would pay so much for chili. Given the current price of ground beef in our market economy, and...
:)
Oh. Sorry. Am I the only person who thinks that "Chilli!Soft" is a really dumb name? They should be happy about being bought by a reputable company. (read: with a marketable name...)
I guess I just lose it when they start talking about that "integrating Chili!Soft Active Server Pages technology". I'd never buy Microsoft chili on the web; I'm sure it'd taste like ASP!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Jon, your ideas are your own, and believe me, no one is going to steal them from you. :)
.au files I used to listen to were just as enjoyable as the radio. When I first thought up that bubblesort algorithm, I didn't know someone else had done it first.
Yeah, all of us hackers are evil pirates. My web browser "steals" copyrighted images every day and makes copies of them. Those
...but the difference is, now that there is money involved, corporations are entering the picture and getting lawsuit-happy, and generally trashing the world that we built in the first place, and exploiting its features.
I'd much rather live in a world where record companies did not exist, banner ads were illegal, phone and computer companies could not own media or patent simple ideas, musicians were supported by the goodwill of their fans, without anyone to take their excess money, and slashdot discussions were intelligent.
But I think that's enough fantasy for one day...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Ars Technica always has interesting technical stuff. Heck, it's "News for Nerds" by definition. Kudos to slashdot for linking to it, especially since they post some of the better Slashdot links on Ars. :)
;)
They wrote an excellent article on the Crusoe, (I just wrote a short paper on it for class, myself, although I used the white paper for reference...) and were looking forward to this architecture. It's nice to hear more details.
Wow, these results are really impressive! I wish someone would implement an x86 interpreter on x86 that actually ran faster. I wonder if the limited number of registers would really get in the way of a control program, though. Transmeta, where are you?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
What are you talking about? Linux is not socialist or fascist, but rather embodies the ideal of the perfect communism, where everyone contributes what they can, and hopefully gets what they need. But since the barrier to entry is so much lower, information is essentially free to all, and distribution problems go to nil!
:)
...And do you really think the moderators will fall for something so simplistic?
[...]
Damn, I wish I had thought of this one first!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Yeah, it's been *available*, but not for actual use in any projects, which would be the point, IMO.
Wow, I have this source, and I can compile it non-stop for 25 days and read it, but I can't *use* any of it. It's like showing a beginning writer "Paradise Lost", and saying "study it all you want for the next month, but don't write it later, ha ha ha!".
(okay, maybe not Paradise Lost, I mean it still crashes on Win 3.1, doesn't know what the "Grey Enter" key is, and doesn't like some of the niftier VGA modes. But still...)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Okay, okay, I'll find a *different* protected mode app to use for my examples. DOSEmu already runs a bunch of stuff, though. I just wish it did sound better...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Now that the Bochs source is available, could this be used to make a library that virtualizes more of those pesky x86 instructions?
I'd be really happy if DOSEmu and Wine finally had full protected mode support. DOSEmu has great Linux FS support, and low memory usage, and can run Win 3.1 minus the protected mode stuff. If it had that, I don't think anything would stop it from running modern Windows, or more importantly DOOM!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Why wouldn't there be problems with massive memory leaks on Windows 2000? NT4 had that problem too. Windows works fine until either (a) you want to get real work done, or (b) it decides to crash anyhow. I'm just glad I deserted around Windows 3.1, for my personal machine.
:)
:)
I thought the telnet server for W2K was a pretty sweet add-on, although if I had a W2K box I guess I'd want to be running SSH instead... But to really feel at home I'd have to install BASH and the other UNIX tools. And then... well, what's the point, eh? I'd rather run Linux, have all the good stuff run natively, and run xdos over SSH if I ever need to...
It isn't hard for something to be a "tremendous improvement" over NT and 9x. I really doubt W2K is that, in all areas. It has higher system requirements and worse hardware compatibility. But that's the future for you, eh?
The companies roll out what they think the customers want, especially if Microsoft gives them a discount. And I don't know about Compaq or GE, but DELL really *IS* an Intel / Microsoft stooge. They try to sell computers with RAMBUS memory, for crying out loud!
There are many ways to define success. If Bill Gates cared about his customers even a tenth as much as he cares about his money, or the success of his company, I'd reward him for it. As it is, though, I fart in his general direction.
I used DOS since 3.2, and I still have a copy of DOS 2.0. I used Windows 3.1, and even though I didn't like it, I knew it well, got it to work, and found out what everything did. That all changed in Win '95, and it pissed me off. I couldn't figure out how a company could make their product less stable, more bloated, more annoying, less useful, and hide more helpful stuff from the user. Before, it was "edit WINBLAH.INI to make the problem go away". Now, it's "reboot the computer and pray".
So why do I use Linux? Because I don't trust "faith healing" as a valid system recovery method. It's *my* computer, and I'd like to know what its doing and why. I think my Operating System owes me that much. So Microsoft lost a power user. Ha ha ha ha ha.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, according to my post, your pay scale should be somewhere between $40,000 and priceless, which it is.
But since you know what the big red button is, *and* know enough not to touch it, you deserve a raise!
My numbers weren't supposed to be *too* accurate, just the sentiment behind them. See, it was supposed to be funny. I need to mark those posts with "HUMOR" again...
And I couldn't get to the Dr. Dobbs article. But their primary source had a lot of cool info, and said a lot of the things we're saying here: just because there are a lot of IT professionals out there, that doesn't mean they know how to do what *you* want them to, and they aren't all necessarily qualified.
Oh, and sorry about the NT, man. I hope you like your job. I know NT Administrators that don't do much more than reboot the server when the printer queues stop working. Scary stuff...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
A Temp Worker: $25,000.
An MSCE NT Professional: $40,000.
A Professional UNIX Admin: $60,000.
An Admin who actually knows what that big red button does: Priceless.
Yep, there's a shortage. That's why I'm not worried about a job.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Because that is a slippery slope.
;)
My social security number is just a number. So is this post. So is a computerized representation of my genetic code. According to your interpretation, no electronic media is copyrightable provided it is represented as a number (which it is, a long binary one). Or at least the *number* isn't copyrightable....
Jeez, this stuff makes my head hurt. I liked it back when I thought I was buying an actual program, and not just a license to use it. Oh, and I'd never copy it, I just hit upon the right (unpatentable) combination of bits to produce a disk that's surprisingly similar!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
There are *so* many holes in the DVD players, formats, etc., etc. that it won't be a problem for anyone to get around these "features" the MPAA wants.
And just how legal is this "region-coding" crap, anyhow? I remember they tried the same thing with consoles and audio and failed. (anyone ever played Golden Axe 3 in America? Anyone set the 'copyright bit' on your mp3's?)
A business isn't going to sell a product that have added features that make consumers not buy it. Well, unless they have a monopoly or something. Otherwise, a competing standard without these features will win out. The MPAA will find this out, hopefully the hard way.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I agree, but be careful with those TLAs.
.pas / .bas / .asm / etc. for source code. .jpg / .mpg for porn sites.
.txt domain, for the kiddies!
I suggest:
.com for DOS sites.
.org for machine code.
.txt for sites with content / Unix sites.
.exe for Windows sites.
.hqx for Mac sites.
.cpp /
.tar for archives (picture / ftp / whatever)
.gif /
Under my proposal, 'slashdot.org' would be 'slashdot.txt', 'zdnet.com' would be 'zdnet.exe', and 'goatse.cx' would be 'goatse.jpg'.
This would have several advantages over the current system:
- Platform dependence. Never be told you can't get the plug-ins, just browse the right sites!
- Easy blocking of sites. Just mass-block all sites with any fluff in them! Better register all your info in the
- Nifty three-letter name extensions. Now if only we could get rid of that darn "www." thing, and limit the other part to 8 letters. This would also cut down on domain squatting, as it limits the number of valid domains.
- Reinvent the existing system. This happened when the web was invented in 1993, and look at the economy now! It's in our best interest to completely reinvent the existing system every 8 years or so to drive interest in technology.
- Get rid of newbies. Ever since Windows stopped displaying file extensions and instead has little pictures, like the Mac, newbies don't understand them. Now that they will be unable to navigate the web, content will be back on the rise, as well as sales of "Domain Names for Dummies". I'm confident that IDG will back my proposal.
Oh, and we'll need a '.idg' for IDG books. (I wanted '.dum', but you know how those corporate sponsors are...)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
D00D, that is excellent, I completely agree.
:)
:)
:|
(especially since I couldn't get Wine to install FF7... blah. It isn't fair, I can play the other six under Linux!
Rumor has it that Starcraft is playable under Wine. If I had a copy, I'd try it out, but that's more than you're going to get from Blizzard anytime soon. Does WarCraft run under DOSEmu? (StarCon2 does, yeah!
Loki rulez. Except that I've been playing too much HOMM3 lately, instead of, say, sleeping.
Oh well, it's something to do, especially since Masters of Magic will probably never have a decent sequel...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
That's how the first good checkers AIs worked: the algorithm got to be smarter than the human programmer. Of course, Go is a *much* more complicated game than Checkers. But now that Chess is basically solved, maybe people will concentrate on Go, and we'll see some new approaches. AI could definitely use some new motivation.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Point taken. I wouldn't want to see a format implemented like that. AVIs and RealPlayer files do the same thing, and it annoys the crap out of me.
.psd files, but with one great compressor. I don't think we'll ever settle on a standard data file format, even though it's probably not impossible to do...)
;)
The first thing to do is to make sure that all of the codecs used are implemented directly in the program / library, preferably open source so they can't be taken out later.
The interesting (and different, I think) part I was mentioning would be the ability to change which "codec" is being used at whatever point in the file. VBR encoding for mp3's works sort of like this: it detects properties about the sound (don't need as much detail / less frequencies) and adjusts its compression accordingly. Of course, that's lossy. I guess PNGs can already do this too, and they're lossless, but I'd like to see more of this for general data compression, not just images.
The advantage would be having one compressed file format that's good enough for many varieties of data, and we can go back to plain data files compressed with generic compressors. (like ps.gz instead of pdf files, or xcf.bz2 instead of
Hey, if you're paranoid, just store your thesis as "thesis.roff.zoo", and you should be fine!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
That "go" question was really cool. I wish I played it well enough to attempt to write a great computer player, as this is a classic hard problem in AI, with a $2,000,000 reward, IIRC...
Of course, his "compression" is generally expressed in terms of "rules", and even some tips from image compression might help here. (recognize similar configurations, whether they be rotated, translated, etc., and adjust your strategy accordingly)
bzip2 is a really great program, generally offering better compression than gzip at least for large bodies of text. What I'd really like to see is a meta-compression format that has some heuristic to identify the type of file, and use the appropriate (optimal) algorithm. I know most modern compression programs do something like this already, (like RAR and its multimedia compression) but it's still neat. The few bits to identify the compression methods can be well worth it...
Also, hopefully those compression patches will eventually make it into Linux; it'd be great to see something like that working at the VFS level.
If it used something like LZO, there'd be up to gzip levels of compression with practically no performance hit on even a modest system. Maybe even speed improvements would be possible, due to having to read less data from the disk...
Under those situations, I'd advocate comressing swap (and even memory!) where it would help (not recently used data), and maybe merging more of that into the filesystem too...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Beta release. For developers only.
:)
Not even a writeup on it yet, so don't slashdot the site any earlier than you have to!
It is great to see some Perl development, though.
We're one step closer to version 6.6.6!
Anyone know when they're rewriting it all in C++?
(or are those two statements related?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Thanks for the info!
I haven't played the game, but the N64 controller always struck me as being somewhat elaborate. If you can't do it with a directional controller and four buttons, (six buttons max) it's probably pretty complicated... Give me a standard, NES-style controller any day.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Playing the Atari 7800 (Food Fight!) for hours at a time made my hands hurt. Solution? Stop playing every once in a while.
Playing Zelda on the Nintendo for hours at a time made my eyes hurt. But after a while, I beat it, and I didn't have to play it as much.
Maybe the controllers aren't designed for really prolonged usage, but our bodies aren't either. Some people just don't know when to quit.
Read a book, guys. Go outside. But don't sue the people who make your games just because you're lazy!
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I think it lasts at least a month, I haven't messed with it lately, so I'm sure my account is long gone...
Doesn't it say on the site?
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I tried it out when they started the program, it was really cool! Of course it only really matters if you're a developer or an OS nut or something, but still...
;)
Bottom line: if you've got an app that you want to compile and run, cross platform, get an account!
Oh yeah, and to all the Trolls: they've got a Beowulf cluster, too!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
:) Yep, I knew all the keyboard commands by heart. Of course, this was 6.0 and later. (5.5 wasn't as cool, but I still knew the commands--the key bindings were awkward, but standard at the time, ^K^B, ^K^K, ^K^V, etc., etc.)
:)
Not only is it unintuitive, it's darn slow! Who wants to be moving that thing around? Regardless, they supported that just fine, too, and the mouse worked well with it, if it was used. But all the keyboard commands were helpfully in the menus, and the help system was great. (much better than the standard Emacs-like Info browser, IMO...)
Yeah, most Open Source projects are far more customizable than their Windows counterparts, (because you can change it, silly!) and there's usually an (undocumented) substitute for unavailable keys. (or you can bind a key to it--I'm tempted to bind my "Windows" keys someday, but I don't need anything extra, really.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I'll be happy when the first thing someone says about Linux *isn't* about
* Learning vi
* Learning Emacs
* "...arcane commmand line..."
* "...text files..."
My reply to this is as follows:
* GNOME Apps
* KDE Apps
* LinuxConf
* RTFM!!!!
I think if Linux came with a "Getting Started" guide that just *touched on* the wealth of tools that are available, it'd be much easier. In Windows, it doesn't come with much. Your average Linux distro comes with a WHOLE LOT of tools, and users need to realize that.
The interface design is fine. It's just as good/bad as anything else. The last known good interface I saw was the text IDE for "Turbo Pascal 7", which is why I like RHIDE. The last "innovative" one I saw was WinAmp, (and everyone has already copied that) but that doesn't necessarily mean it's easier to use.
Widgets on Linux, Windows, whatever haven't changed much for a while. (but I'd kill to be able to resize more windows in Windows, they can't design the control panel worth a damn!)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.