I must say that I have heard people complain about AC3 (DD) for sure, especially DD-EX. I am one of them myself. Especially if you get low bitrate TV surround sound (just as I can't stand low bitrate picture. What use is "digital tv" when the quality is so shitty? DVD quality or better is the only acceptable way to have it.)
For some information about DTS: http://www.dtsonline.com/home/info.shtml
They write some interesting stuff there, I recommend the read. I like DTS, and it is the best out there right now.
These blocks can be implemented on Linux, and China has access to both free software and coders of their own. Would that be better?
So don't go blame these american companies for the acts of the Chinese goverment. It is one thing to sell a nuclear sub with nuclear arms to a country, then there is no question what it should be used for. But selling general purpuse products should not be stopped, and the companies selling them should not be punished.
I wish that the censorship would go away, but it won't until the Chinese goverment starts to realise that they are part of the world, and that the Chinese people are realising it before them. So if Amnesty wants to improve the situation, go to China and help.
Simple as that. I code for Linux (servers) every day at work, so I have a pretty good knowledge of the Linux platform, and it's horrible as far as I am concerned. Very primitive.
Simple as that. If free software had been better (and properly supported and quality assured) I would use it myself. And MacOS X would be WAY to expensive for me to get (the useless hardware is WAY to expensive).
Yes, a very good point. Why didn't Microsoft make everything perfect when they designed Windows? Why don't everyone only make perfect software?
Get a grip. I think that it is a very good thing that Microsoft now wants to take more responsibility for the product they sell. Just as a car manufacturer should call in cars if they find a problem with them. Of course there are problems when developing software on the scale that Microsoft does, just look at any project that large and involving that many people and you will see that it is hard.
And yes, windows doesn't have the best design, and no they won't change it because for the majority of their users that would be a bad thing, old software would stop working etc. This is not a free OS given away that you don't have to take any responsibilites with and that you can gladly fuck up things for anyone as much as you want.
Be on M$ back when they do something stupid, but not when they do something nice. Be consistent please.
If you have to write a comment, it is not obvious. Hence only write comments when it is not obvious what is going on.
And, do please try to make it obvious as to what is going on. I can't stand code where the comments is a MUCH bulkier version OF THE CODE. I can read code, I do it every day. I can't read minds.
If you want to write well documented code, document what a class does and what a method/function does. That helps a lot more. Then I won't have to read your code unless there is something wrong at that very point. And then I only need to know what is not obvious from the code.
For Windows OpenGL 2.0 will certainly have less impact by now. DirectX 9 is far from bad and will most certainly be used by a large number of developers. But the story for Linux surely is very different.
I certainl will just dream about the next part, but here goes...
I would like to see a standard OpenGL 2.0 implementation for Linux, with implementations for all new cards, that is not tied to X (whether or not it should be somehow connected to the kernel, well, is a decision for the implementors). I want it to be stable, fast, and state of the art.
This would:
1. Give me as a developer one API that I know will always be there, and I won't have to care about what card might be in the computer. 2. Give game developers the same as in 1 3. Make it feasable to port X to OpenGL 2.0 to improve the horrible performace 4. Write a new windowing system based on OpenGL 2.0 and put KDE/QT on top of it to make the Linux desktop experience more up to par with MacOS X for example (i.e. not make a copy of MacOS X, but start using more of your hardware for a smoother ride). (If you prefer gnome, the same goes for it;))
Don't use make at all. It is horrible and will eat up a LOT of time (and produce a bunch of errors and problems that you have to take care of along the way, and all your 7 developers won't know how to do the correct changes (because one of the others did it to begin with).
I would recommend using a make replacement. You have a few examples in this thread, but I would like to throw in my personal favorite (because I use it myself of course;)).
http://www.perforce.com/jam/jam.html
It takes a little time to get into, but as soon as you have converted everything, it will be a breeze. It is WAY faster than make (does the whole dependancy on the fly), cleans up with lightning speed, and you won't need different files for different platforms. This is one of the most solid pieces of software that has ever graced a system that I have worked on. It is made by someone at perforce (one hell of a versioning system, blows sourceUnsafe et al out of the wall, and I wouldn't wanna touch CVS after using P4).
A general note on GCC. If I understand it correctly, you have C++ code as well, and for at least four platforms. I am sure that not all your customers can upgrade to gcc 3.2 just like that. It would be very nice to have (for example on MIPS/Solaris) but first me very sure that your customers can run the software properly. I am sure that many here on Slashdot hasn't been developing software with the same kind of customers as you have, so they might be a bit too optimistical sometimes;)
QT, as suggested, is a good idea, and you would hopefully be able to hide away as much as possible of the differences of the platforms. Just make sure that QT works (and is supported actively) on all platforms with all compilers.
Start writing much simpler code. I know how frustrating it can be to do something simple, and have the system crap on you and then spend WAY too much time on this trifle problem while your competitor has pressed F5 and debugged it a long time ago.
So what to do? Try to write the code as uncomplicated as possible. If needed, send your developers on some extra education. And make sure that you have what you need for finding bugs and squashing them. Get a better IDE/debugger, throw in asserts and other goodies, write down all the differences between compilers that you find, etc.
(and yes, if you can use it, QT have already taken care of a bunch of the differences between platforms. Grab the evaluation version (or free linux version) and put one of your developers to port one of your components to QT)
PDF is owned by Adobe, right? Why is there not a free format out there? I am not happy about M$ trying to own the formats (I am all for them making software that uses them though, that is good), but the same goes for Apple, Adobe, IBM, your momma. This is not confined to Microsoft, it is simply that it has a much larger impact when they move around.
We have gotten ogg, png, etc that is free (and not used enough, throw out all your GIF right now, ok...) and at least as good as the competition (actually better, but the point is very valid). Why not a free set of formats for documents and such?
(side note: MacOS X uses pdf for displaying graphics, isn't it time for a free GUI with the same kind of power? Down with X;))
Then your display could be your framebuffer. Which means you could get really cool effects when doing 3D without dubbel buffering;) Especially if you disable the z-buffer;)
One would think that it was about time that iNTEL started to see where all these patents are going, and how it affects large corporations (which I see as a large bunch of people getting paid so they can live their lives). The computer industry is not being helped by patents right now, and that was their purpuse after all. The be fair to the inventor that is.
Either you are bitching at M$ because they are not releasing enough bug fixes, then because they do release them (think of the service packs as just the next version, free software constantly get new versions...). Make up your mind, this is silly. Dumb comments doesn't make you neither l33t, nor cool, nor taken seriously.
I know a very fine way of loosing the very silence when you stop. Install a proper stereo in the car;) You will be playing louder than the engine at all points, thus not having to bother about hearing the engine or not;))
First I thought that it was a really original hack, with making the poor C64 actually run at 1+GHz. That would have been awsome (no idea how you would do that though, but then again, I guess shrinking that old system into one single 0.15 micron chip would be easy today. And not only that, incredibly awsome;)
Or they forced you to watch some moronic "inför morgondagens xxx" crap. I.e. (for you non-Swedish speaking ppl) a 5-10 min short commercial for the big show the next evening. And lo and behold, then they could show commercials before and after that crap.
I don't know about you guys, but I am quite sure I can't be the only one who has loved getting TV series first on VCD (no commercials! Watching when I want to!) and then on DVD (I rather watch when I want to, and I don't want the TV series in the crappy broadcasted quality. Digital my ass. Only if you can real video DVD quality...). Many of you probably don't get them on DVD later though. But still. There is a market for commerical free, "watch when _I_ want to", TV series. And if it is easy enough to use, we might just not care about trying to get it from FTP sites anymore.
...but the multiuser part of Windows sucks worse than NFS in Linux. The separation of users settings works as long as it is Microsoft's software, but many 3rd party software sucks ass big time (for instance ICQ).
Multi-user works a hell of a lot better in different unixes, even though it is very basic and cumbersom (I can't spell today) at times.
Not only is it horrible, but it is also about as slow as anything ever has been.
I suggest going with a native interface, and if you don't want to do ObjC do C++ and separate the logic and the display. Don't try too hard to get something portable, that will work against you. Concentrate on making a good piece of software and code clean and easy to understand C++. It will be much easier to port it if you have a good design.
Slashdot Mirror
I must say that I have heard people complain about AC3 (DD) for sure, especially DD-EX. I am one of them myself. Especially if you get low bitrate TV surround sound (just as I can't stand low bitrate picture. What use is "digital tv" when the quality is so shitty? DVD quality or better is the only acceptable way to have it.)
For some information about DTS:
http://www.dtsonline.com/home/info.shtml
They write some interesting stuff there, I recommend the read. I like DTS, and it is the best out there right now.
Or the europeans, or the Saudi, or whomever. I am sure that someone else than Russia could be interested after all.
These blocks can be implemented on Linux, and China has access to both free software and coders of their own. Would that be better?
So don't go blame these american companies for the acts of the Chinese goverment. It is one thing to sell a nuclear sub with nuclear arms to a country, then there is no question what it should be used for. But selling general purpuse products should not be stopped, and the companies selling them should not be punished.
I wish that the censorship would go away, but it won't until the Chinese goverment starts to realise that they are part of the world, and that the Chinese people are realising it before them. So if Amnesty wants to improve the situation, go to China and help.
Or it would be a good idea to not forget that the slashcode removes my faked HTML so the point of my whole argument died away ;)
so |money currency="yen"| 5000 |/money| (| represents ) would a whole lot more sense.
They should have switched to a better server ;))
Why not an open replacement to PS/PDF as well? Or would Adobe be fearful of open standards as well?
How about open quicktime (sörensen to be precise), WMA, MPEG, etc as well?
Don't go blind with M$ hating, they are not the only culprits in this after all.
5000 Yen. Spiffy and nice, but I am not good at currency conversion. This is just a dream, but I would love to see this:
5000
And then let the browser do the job. Either let it be, translate it to my choice, or give me both the original and in my choice in paranthesis.
Would be pretty simple, really, as long as you can grab a conversion table from somewhere.
Simple as that. I code for Linux (servers) every day at work, so I have a pretty good knowledge of the Linux platform, and it's horrible as far as I am concerned. Very primitive.
Simple as that. If free software had been better (and properly supported and quality assured) I would use it myself. And MacOS X would be WAY to expensive for me to get (the useless hardware is WAY to expensive).
I really did want a .sex or .pr0n TLD. Would make for some really spiffy email addys;)
http://www.slashdot.kids.us ^_^
Yes, a very good point. Why didn't Microsoft make everything perfect when they designed Windows? Why don't everyone only make perfect software?
Get a grip. I think that it is a very good thing that Microsoft now wants to take more responsibility for the product they sell. Just as a car manufacturer should call in cars if they find a problem with them. Of course there are problems when developing software on the scale that Microsoft does, just look at any project that large and involving that many people and you will see that it is hard.
And yes, windows doesn't have the best design, and no they won't change it because for the majority of their users that would be a bad thing, old software would stop working etc. This is not a free OS given away that you don't have to take any responsibilites with and that you can gladly fuck up things for anyone as much as you want.
Be on M$ back when they do something stupid, but not when they do something nice. Be consistent please.
If you have to write a comment, it is not obvious. Hence only write comments when it is not obvious what is going on.
And, do please try to make it obvious as to what is going on. I can't stand code where the comments is a MUCH bulkier version OF THE CODE. I can read code, I do it every day. I can't read minds.
If you want to write well documented code, document what a class does and what a method/function does. That helps a lot more. Then I won't have to read your code unless there is something wrong at that very point. And then I only need to know what is not obvious from the code.
For Windows OpenGL 2.0 will certainly have less impact by now. DirectX 9 is far from bad and will most certainly be used by a large number of developers. But the story for Linux surely is very different.
;))
I certainl will just dream about the next part, but here goes...
I would like to see a standard OpenGL 2.0 implementation for Linux, with implementations for all new cards, that is not tied to X (whether or not it should be somehow connected to the kernel, well, is a decision for the implementors). I want it to be stable, fast, and state of the art.
This would:
1. Give me as a developer one API that I know will always be there, and I won't have to care about what card might be in the computer.
2. Give game developers the same as in 1
3. Make it feasable to port X to OpenGL 2.0 to improve the horrible performace
4. Write a new windowing system based on OpenGL 2.0 and put KDE/QT on top of it to make the Linux desktop experience more up to par with MacOS X for example (i.e. not make a copy of MacOS X, but start using more of your hardware for a smoother ride). (If you prefer gnome, the same goes for it
Don't use make at all. It is horrible and will eat up a LOT of time (and produce a bunch of errors and problems that you have to take care of along the way, and all your 7 developers won't know how to do the correct changes (because one of the others did it to begin with).
I would recommend using a make replacement. You have a few examples in this thread, but I would like to throw in my personal favorite (because I use it myself of course;)).
http://www.perforce.com/jam/jam.html
It takes a little time to get into, but as soon as you have converted everything, it will be a breeze. It is WAY faster than make (does the whole dependancy on the fly), cleans up with lightning speed, and you won't need different files for different platforms. This is one of the most solid pieces of software that has ever graced a system that I have worked on. It is made by someone at perforce (one hell of a versioning system, blows sourceUnsafe et al out of the wall, and I wouldn't wanna touch CVS after using P4).
A general note on GCC. If I understand it correctly, you have C++ code as well, and for at least four platforms. I am sure that not all your customers can upgrade to gcc 3.2 just like that. It would be very nice to have (for example on MIPS/Solaris) but first me very sure that your customers can run the software properly. I am sure that many here on Slashdot hasn't been developing software with the same kind of customers as you have, so they might be a bit too optimistical sometimes;)
QT, as suggested, is a good idea, and you would hopefully be able to hide away as much as possible of the differences of the platforms. Just make sure that QT works (and is supported actively) on all platforms with all compilers.
Start writing much simpler code. I know how frustrating it can be to do something simple, and have the system crap on you and then spend WAY too much time on this trifle problem while your competitor has pressed F5 and debugged it a long time ago.
So what to do? Try to write the code as uncomplicated as possible. If needed, send your developers on some extra education. And make sure that you have what you need for finding bugs and squashing them. Get a better IDE/debugger, throw in asserts and other goodies, write down all the differences between compilers that you find, etc.
(and yes, if you can use it, QT have already taken care of a bunch of the differences between platforms. Grab the evaluation version (or free linux version) and put one of your developers to port one of your components to QT)
PDF is owned by Adobe, right? Why is there not a free format out there? I am not happy about M$ trying to own the formats (I am all for them making software that uses them though, that is good), but the same goes for Apple, Adobe, IBM, your momma. This is not confined to Microsoft, it is simply that it has a much larger impact when they move around.
We have gotten ogg, png, etc that is free (and not used enough, throw out all your GIF right now, ok...) and at least as good as the competition (actually better, but the point is very valid). Why not a free set of formats for documents and such?
(side note: MacOS X uses pdf for displaying graphics, isn't it time for a free GUI with the same kind of power? Down with X;))
oooh, hidden source software. Wouldn't this mean that you could get a lot more information about the code? ;))
Then your display could be your framebuffer. Which means you could get really cool effects when doing 3D without dubbel buffering;) Especially if you disable the z-buffer ;)
ok, totally useless, really, but fun;)
One would think that it was about time that iNTEL started to see where all these patents are going, and how it affects large corporations (which I see as a large bunch of people getting paid so they can live their lives). The computer industry is not being helped by patents right now, and that was their purpuse after all. The be fair to the inventor that is.
Too bad they couldn't stay at 2.4.0 ...
Either you are bitching at M$ because they are not releasing enough bug fixes, then because they do release them (think of the service packs as just the next version, free software constantly get new versions...). Make up your mind, this is silly. Dumb comments doesn't make you neither l33t, nor cool, nor taken seriously.
I know a very fine way of loosing the very silence when you stop. Install a proper stereo in the car ;) You will be playing louder than the engine at all points, thus not having to bother about hearing the engine or not ;))
I really should do the switch to jabber real soon. I really should. AIM/ICQ will just continue to get worse...
First I thought that it was a really original hack, with making the poor C64 actually run at 1+GHz. That would have been awsome (no idea how you would do that though, but then again, I guess shrinking that old system into one single 0.15 micron chip would be easy today. And not only that, incredibly awsome ;)
Or they forced you to watch some moronic "inför morgondagens xxx" crap. I.e. (for you non-Swedish speaking ppl) a 5-10 min short commercial for the big show the next evening. And lo and behold, then they could show commercials before and after that crap.
I don't know about you guys, but I am quite sure I can't be the only one who has loved getting TV series first on VCD (no commercials! Watching when I want to!) and then on DVD (I rather watch when I want to, and I don't want the TV series in the crappy broadcasted quality. Digital my ass. Only if you can real video DVD quality...). Many of you probably don't get them on DVD later though. But still. There is a market for commerical free, "watch when _I_ want to", TV series. And if it is easy enough to use, we might just not care about trying to get it from FTP sites anymore.
...but the multiuser part of Windows sucks worse than NFS in Linux. The separation of users settings works as long as it is Microsoft's software, but many 3rd party software sucks ass big time (for instance ICQ).
Multi-user works a hell of a lot better in different unixes, even though it is very basic and cumbersom (I can't spell today) at times.
Not only is it horrible, but it is also about as slow as anything ever has been.
I suggest going with a native interface, and if you don't want to do ObjC do C++ and separate the logic and the display. Don't try too hard to get something portable, that will work against you. Concentrate on making a good piece of software and code clean and easy to understand C++. It will be much easier to port it if you have a good design.