That's upsetting. The biggest problem with handheld devices is that whenever a new product line comes along, the manufacturer starts almost from square one again to write the operating system. (Fortunately this is less-so the case with PDAs).
Lots of wasted effort goes into rewriting the same functionality over and over again, and ISVs have to deal with hell to write portable applications. What's that? Java? BREW? Please, that garbage isn't going to encourage innovation on handhelds.
You'll only start seeing real innovation when developers have raw unfettered access to the entire phone, and that's just not feasible until 90% of the phones are running the same platform.
Right now all of the manufacturers and providers are getting hardons for how much proprietary pay-by-use junk they can cram into their phones, and in the meanwhile the people with ideas can't see them realized.
These suckers are starting to come with internet access and GPS, coupled with a portable device which can retain state you have bundled some amazing potential, but it's all being retarded by the entire industry's inability to cooperate.
It troubles me that Microsoft of all people is the one that sees this and is trying its damndest to make Windows CE the unified handheld platform, so much so that they're even opening the code to some degree.
I suppose if Windows CE becomes the ubiquitous standard, it paves the way for Linux (or whatever) to be an easy drop in replacement, but it's easier to capture unclaimed marketshare than to fight Microsoft for it...
Advice to vendors: Adopt a standard now -- Linux may be a good one. Don't wait for Microsoft to get its act together, because by the time they come onto your radar it'll be too late.
Most Americans grow up glued to the TV, and have become suprisingly anti-social in the process. TV has done a job of distorting one's perception of what acceptable social intercourse is.
As such, if they speak to someone who doesn't immediately agree with them, they believe they are being insulted. Especially if you're using a heavy european accent (which Americans have been conditioned to see as a condescending, obnoxious tone -- just look at all of the French jokes). If you're a subordinate, they think you are challenging their authority.
Try not to work with idiots. Working in a large city helps since they typically encourage more social interaction between its inhabitants.;)
When a new game comes out, warez of it is usually available everywhere. You download it, play it, and as time goes on, if you haven't played it in forever, you wipe it out. It didn't cost anything after all.
But if you bought the game 5 years ago, you probably don't want to throw it out even if you have stopped playing it. Descent 2, for example, is still sitting on my shelf. And what luck, icculus has a Descent 2 Linux port!
OF COURSE you can warez duke3d today, but typically games are harder to find after their prime. Retro gaming (oh my god it is retro already isn't it?) warez has smaller distribution channels, I daresay.
icculus guys rule
on
Duke3d in Linux
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Having two computers on-hand rules too. Now if I could just find the game files...
Interesting case for buying games instead of warez'ing them. In 5 years when the game source is GPL'd, the box with all of the game data will be sitting on your shelf.
``Those that would sacrifice their freedom for safety will find they inherit neither.''
The 2nd Amendment guarantees us security. The government needn't do anything else. When they do seek additional measures in the name of security, question their motives. These are usually the groundwork for more sinister plans.
If you think the U.S. government is not susceptible to committing atrocities, you've had your eyes closed. Ask any American Indian if they trust the government. Or any Japanese-American who spent years of his life in an internment camp. Or an African-American who unwittingly found himself enrolled in a state-sponsored syphillis program. How about the people whose lives were ruined because they were denounced as COMMUNISTS?
We're no different today. We simply changed some keywords. COMMUNISTS now means either DEMOCRATS or TERRORISTS. Instead of the USSR it's the Middle East. Instead of the SS driving jews into ghettos, it's the IDF driving Palestinians into ghettos. Beat Vietnam protestors -> Beat Iraqi war protestors. S&L? Now Enron, WorldCom, etc. Joseph McCarthy? John Ashcroft! The same scandals, the same atrocities, the same lies, the same tyrants, just new names and a new days.
Less than 1% of 1% of the CIA's documents have been declassified, and just those few alone have shown thousands of cases of US sponsored terrorism, assassinations, support of military dicatorships, sending weapons and supplies to genocidal maniacs, destabilization campaigns, drug smuggling, ad naseum. And these people are still in our government today.
Trusting in the sanity of the United States Government is not an option. Their actions must be closely monitored and recorded. There are to be no secrets, their access limited and their power tightly curtailed. We have a responsibility to do this not only for ourselves, but for the entire world.
The reason we believe in Freedom and Privacy is because we think there's hope in changing our government for the better, peacefully. Once we lose sight of this, the only option left is to exercise the 2nd Amendment.
That would require an amazing amount of government surveillance to ensure that we were all seeking the same purpose. Fortunately, the US was founded on individualist principles which make it next to impossible to completely fulfill your "Slavery is Freedom" vision. However, if you're going to really do the job right, you're going to need the right weaponry, such as laser rifles, to point at the people that would rather pursue their own dreams instead of yours.
OK since a lot of you aren't getting the reference...
"One vision one purpose!" is the creedo of the fictional Brotherhood of Nod, a secret society that sprang up to challenge the Westernization of the world, featured in the smash hit video game, Command & Conquer.
They (Nod) set out to create a new world order by leveraging a disruptive new resource; Tiberium. On the other hand, the Western world feared Tiberium, demonized it, and groups that utilized it, including Nod.
The Western world considered Nod a threat to its security, and formed the Global Defense Initiative to destroy them.
It was just a far out story when I first encountered it, but events of late have illustrated many parallels between this fictional world and our own reality. It's quite funny really.
If war accomplished nothing, slavery might still exist in the Confederate States of America
FYI, while war "officially" marked the end slavery, it was actually obviated by capitalism.
Like it or not we are Human and that means that as a species we like to kill each other and take each others resources by force, etc, etc. If you have a problem with that talk to the evolution gods. Untill you do though, we will continue spending money to make sure we are not the next Carthage, Phonecia, Ottoman Empire, etc.
When you build up the ability to destroy an enemy that doesn't exist, you tend to create one.
When was the last time a suicide bomber blew up a bus in Canada? Or a fundamentalist radical shot up a market in Sweden? I don't see people crashing planes into skyscrapers in Norway. And hey, looks like no one has regularly blown up crowded marketplaces in Finland either.
IT MUST BE THEIR SUPER EFFICIENT ADVANCED STRONG MILITARY KEEPING THEM SAFE!
The other day I found myself at CompUSA paying $40 for Red Hat. Why on earth would I pay money for that when I can get an ISO and burn it for free?
In my case, it was because I was at a datacenter and needed to reinstall the system (the vendor forgot to install it). I could've either taken a trip back home (30 minutes), downloaded and burned a CD (an hour), and taken a trip back (30 minutes), or I could drop by CompUSA and pay for a copy (20 minutes). Savings to my client by paying for software? 1.75 billable hours.
If there's any hope in selling data as a retail product, it'll be in models that completely ignore the actual data on it.
There's my case (needed it quickly), but there are many others.
Some people just want to rummage through piles of stuff, find a gem, claim a prize. That whole Hunter/Scavenger instinct is still with us, you know.
Shopping at a record store is a social activity for many people -- something that's harder to do with a real person by a computer.
There have been many times that we browsed Blockbuster Video (yes, they suck, but that's a different story) in search of a movie and ended up there an entire hour because we became so engrossed in searching (and ended up with 3 or 4 movies by the end of it). A web site can offer the content, but seldom can it recreate that experience.
The content cartel should capitalize on this, because their current business model's days are numbered.
Nah! That shit's boring! Lets focus our resources on developing more efficient ways of killing people!
Someone really needs to start an extra-American hyper technology-driven society with some priorities besides war-war-war. Brotherhood. Unity. Peace. Peace through power! One vision one purpose!
1. Almost all LCD manufacturers also manufacture CRTs. Dropping prices on LCDs would be cannibalizing their CRT market, which no one wants to do yet.
2. Until LCDs started hitting the shelves, CRTs would cost a fortune. Contrary to the rest of the computer industry, CRT prices were very inelastic. Then LCDs hit the scene and CRT prices started dropping. You can buy a 21" CRT now for far less than they cost 3 years ago, yet 5 years before that I don't remember their prices moving much at all.
3. LCDs cost now what CRTs of similar screen dimensions did about 3-4 years ago.
See any interesting relationships? Until either a newer sexier technology comes out, or until people become truly sick of CRTs, expect LCD prices to stay pretty much the same.;)
I hope there's a shakeout in the industry some day. Having investigated developing applications for these devices, I've always been disappointed in that either you need to sign up for some really expensive licenses, use Java (J2ME) which doesn't offer anywhere near the phone's true potential, or you have to deal with a new platform for each phone you come across, even across a single manufacturer's line.
What a freakish coincidence. We bought a pair of Zip Zaps last night and raced them for 6 hours. But this video definitely tops anything we did.
And is it just me, or did those guys have a little too much faith in the RC system and the guy driving it? I've spazzed out enough just while controlling little RC cars (oops, left IS oriented this way, duh). I can't imagine standing 15 feet away from a full-size RC controlled car.
A lot of what he gripes about is infeasible
to write in a higher level language (which he does note). In those cases, the problem is better addressed with mandatory access controls.
In the descriptions below, where HLL appears, I would mean something like Ruby, Python, maybe Perl.
Kernel: If you're trying to be a UNIX system, C is only practical
OpenSSL: The bulk of this is performance critical (C/C++)
MySQL: Much of MySQL is performance critical (ie C/C++), although there's no damned reason why MySQL needs to run as root outside of a chroot jail. I'm not even sure why people start it as root, it even binds to a non-privileged port. I think the first line of main() should be a call to getuid() and complain if it returns 0.
lpr: Someone write one in HLL for pete's sake. All it does is process files with helper tools and cram them to a printer device. Some of the helper tools could no doubt be rewritten as well.
mutt: Great case for HLL here.
glibc: Obviously this is in C's domain
file: One based on perl and regular expressions would be pretty useful, methinks.
ircii: HLL
Evolution: gack why is this beast written in C/C++? It probably would've taken 1/4 the time if it were written in HLL, not to mention 1/8th the code.
Samba: I imagine one written in HLL would perform just as well. *shrug*
Other examples...
wu-*: Anything that comes from Washington University should be burned. They are beyond hope.
proftpd: I don't get why this is written in C. HLL can provide a totally usable, high performance ftp server.
ssh: Most of the crypto, etc. is handled by OpenSSL. Why does this need to be in C? It doesn't.
crond? HLL
named? HLL
sendmail? HLL
ad naseum/infinitum
Of course, there are reasons against rewriting any of these beasts in a HLL. As C code, they're usually pretty self-contained. Written in a HLL, they would depend on a HLL interpreter, and for decent performance, may depend on other libraries which the default system install certainly won't have.
I remember awhile back Tom Christiansen started a "reimplement UNIX in perl" project, but haven't seen anything since. It may not have even been TC. *shrug*
She would come down with these incapacitating migraines almost biweekly. They were awful, she'd be bedridden for almost the entire day, except for hourly trips to the bathroom to dryheave.
She adjusted a few factors in her life and now they're practically gone.
Firstly, she switched birth control pills. Supposedly this is a common side effect of Ortho-Tri-Cyclen. This cut them down to about once a month, with a little less intensity.
(Yes, she did have these ailments before she started birth control, they were just more erratic, as were her periods. Birth control made them both regular.)
Second, she started drinking organic milk. This didn't affect her periodic migraines, but it did stop the headaches she'd come down with a few hours after drinking milk.
Thirdly, she started drinking more water, and cut out coffee, soda, etc. This seemed to eliminate them altogether. Now during her cycle she has a light headache at best (which is supposed to be normal). Now if only we could get rid of the bitchiness.
Another point is Apples. She'd almost always go straight into a migraine/dryheave-a-thon after eating an Apple. But she's not allergic to Apples themselves. It turns out that a lot of fruit is sprayed with a preservative. *shrug*
There are two conclusions that you can make.
One is that there are dangerous chemicals in everything we eat and touch that makes us sick. The other is that people are crazy and can make their bodies do some amazing shit for attention. either way, problem solved I guess.
And I'm one of those people who thinks ADD and ADHD are bullshit, or at the very least way too overprescribed. That is, I guess I'm a skeptic. But I can't argue with results (I'm pretty sure my wife's not crazy).
I myself cut out regular coffee, soda, juice intake and replaced it with (filtered) tap water. After the caffeine withdrawal (which was about a week of agony), I've felt better than ever (I even wake up early with energy, imagine that). Oddly enough, my blood pressure has also dropped from high to normal (not "fantastic", but no longer at "we're going to prescribe procardia").
Maybe I could even do a bit of exercise and lose some weight. But back on topic...
I hope Smalltalk will not be the only language you can use to write programs. I think it's cool, but there's no reason I shouldn't be able to use other programming languages I know.
It's interesting to note that Windows, having always been a GUI environment, has always tried to boost interactive applications automatically. Linux, on the other hand, has traditionally been used on servers, and it requires manual adjustment for interactive applications (using the "nice" command, for instance). This patch could make GUI applications on Linux just as responsive as Windows without sacrificing its role on the server. Of course, that remains to be seen.
Since many userland issues penetrate the NT kernel, it is able to say things like "Give priority boost to the process that has the currently focused window". It's really freaking ugly, but it allows Windows to "cheat" to good effect.
By design, the Linux kernel does not have this information, nor should it (since it has more than one rendering system, window manager, etc.) The scheduler improvement patches (I think) attempt to determine what process is interactive by its behavior, and distributes priority points accordingly.
Note to others, this does not mean batch process throughput will be sacrificed. Both of these areas can be improved without harming the other. The patches address latency. It takes minimal CPU time to move a mouse pointer, but the devil is in recognizing that this is an interactive process so it's more important to make it happen ahead of the 5 seconds worth of busy batch process work it has to do.
Oh I get it, Tao is all about putting two contradictory phrases in the same sentance. Cool, I thought it was deeper than that, but this is way easier to understand.
Humans find beauty in simplicity, but are fascinated by complexity. Tao'ist rambling seems to stress those points.
This is untrue. Portability and performance are not mutually exclusive.
Performance is more greatly affected by software design, not implementation hacks. Well designed software is also portable software.
You most certainly can have multiple processor specific optimizations. Just as you can have backend renderers for more than one kind of video card, or more than one kind of sound card. This stuff can even be decided at runtime.
Game development, like most commercial software development, is about getting the damned thing to work and out the door as quickly as possible, and preferably as affordably as possible. Everything else is secondary, including security, maintainability, and portability.
Most of the tedium of programming applications is loading and storing state. The thought of doing this automatically is very appealing.
But at the same time, it's not that big a deal. Most of the time you can boil data retrieval and data update operations down to a few base primitives that serve to both abstract away the underlying store as well as providing some syntactic convenience. From there the support code to deal with the impedence mismatch is quite minimal.
Hooray for slashdot-effect hairsplitting and arguing to death niggling details!
In case it wasn't clear enough, the point was that they're a company who sees its marketshare fading, they think they deserve something for being first, and they are using whatever is at their disposal to do it.
The courts are backing up their patent claims after all. They'd be fools not to take advantage of it.
And quite frankly every innovation we made to our online calendar showed up 3 months later in someone elses calendar. In fact we even found instances where people had literally cut and pasted our code, comments and all!
This kind of thing can ruin your week, it's really upsetting when it happens to me, and I imagine some people get outright hitting-the-bottle depressed when it happens to them.
It's even worse when the lawyers tell you that there's almost nothing you can do about it, and it can ruin your whole year if your copycat sues you after THEY have the gall to patent what they stole from you--and why wouldn't they? If they had no moral qualms about ripping you off in the first place, do you really think they'd shy away from patenting your own creation and using it against you?
It does not suprise me that people in this position get patents not only for defense, but to bludgeon the scumbags who rip them off.
Are the patents stupid? Of course they are. But they're granted! And ridiculously enough, enforced! Why wouldn't they apply for them?
No one bought anything over the internet. E-commerce didn't quite exist.
Here comes some upstart that asks people to risk them the cash to make this new business model happen. They do something that most people would call innovative. A new business model is formed, the face of commerce completely changed. Today everyone sells over the internet.
If you're this upstart who was there since day one doing what no one else did, taking the risks back then which aren't really risks today (relatively speaking), you'd be pretty mad. Especially when your big stupid competitor finally wakes up and realizes the internet exists and copies your site almost exactly, from look to semantics, and starts eating away at your bottom line.
All of your hard work, creative energy, raising capital, the meetings, market analysis, research, etc. you put forth to make your crackpot idea a reality is now being blithely ripped off by your inferior. Through simple cloning your inferior is now your equal.
If you've been in that position before, you know how infuriating it is. So what are your options? Sadly, very few.
Amazon is getting patents because it seems like the only way to fight off their idiot copycat competitors. I think software patents are detestable, but I understand Amazon's reasoning.
It's kind of a mixed bag. It sucks that Amazon does it, but it's not going to stop me from supporting them. Why? I'll put myself in their position.
The position is one where my shareholders are screaming at me to protect their investment which they entrusted in me. A position where my customers are leaving to buy from my copycat because they can't tell the difference anymore no matter what we do. Where my employees who helped me build such a great service are worried that they might not have a job in 6 months. The choice is clear, I'd do the same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
That's upsetting. The biggest problem with handheld devices is that whenever a new product line comes along, the manufacturer starts almost from square one again to write the operating system. (Fortunately this is less-so the case with PDAs).
Lots of wasted effort goes into rewriting the same functionality over and over again, and ISVs have to deal with hell to write portable applications. What's that? Java? BREW? Please, that garbage isn't going to encourage innovation on handhelds.
You'll only start seeing real innovation when developers have raw unfettered access to the entire phone, and that's just not feasible until 90% of the phones are running the same platform. Right now all of the manufacturers and providers are getting hardons for how much proprietary pay-by-use junk they can cram into their phones, and in the meanwhile the people with ideas can't see them realized.
These suckers are starting to come with internet access and GPS, coupled with a portable device which can retain state you have bundled some amazing potential, but it's all being retarded by the entire industry's inability to cooperate.
It troubles me that Microsoft of all people is the one that sees this and is trying its damndest to make Windows CE the unified handheld platform, so much so that they're even opening the code to some degree.
I suppose if Windows CE becomes the ubiquitous standard, it paves the way for Linux (or whatever) to be an easy drop in replacement, but it's easier to capture unclaimed marketshare than to fight Microsoft for it...
Advice to vendors: Adopt a standard now -- Linux may be a good one. Don't wait for Microsoft to get its act together, because by the time they come onto your radar it'll be too late.
Most Americans grow up glued to the TV, and have become suprisingly anti-social in the process. TV has done a job of distorting one's perception of what acceptable social intercourse is.
As such, if they speak to someone who doesn't immediately agree with them, they believe they are being insulted. Especially if you're using a heavy european accent (which Americans have been conditioned to see as a condescending, obnoxious tone -- just look at all of the French jokes). If you're a subordinate, they think you are challenging their authority.
Try not to work with idiots. Working in a large city helps since they typically encourage more social interaction between its inhabitants. ;)
No...
When a new game comes out, warez of it is usually available everywhere. You download it, play it, and as time goes on, if you haven't played it in forever, you wipe it out. It didn't cost anything after all.
But if you bought the game 5 years ago, you probably don't want to throw it out even if you have stopped playing it. Descent 2, for example, is still sitting on my shelf. And what luck, icculus has a Descent 2 Linux port!
OF COURSE you can warez duke3d today, but typically games are harder to find after their prime. Retro gaming (oh my god it is retro already isn't it?) warez has smaller distribution channels, I daresay.
Having two computers on-hand rules too. Now if I could just find the game files...
Interesting case for buying games instead of warez'ing them. In 5 years when the game source is GPL'd, the box with all of the game data will be sitting on your shelf.
``Those that would sacrifice their freedom for safety will find they inherit neither.''
The 2nd Amendment guarantees us security. The government needn't do anything else. When they do seek additional measures in the name of security, question their motives. These are usually the groundwork for more sinister plans.
If you think the U.S. government is not susceptible to committing atrocities, you've had your eyes closed. Ask any American Indian if they trust the government. Or any Japanese-American who spent years of his life in an internment camp. Or an African-American who unwittingly found himself enrolled in a state-sponsored syphillis program. How about the people whose lives were ruined because they were denounced as COMMUNISTS?
We're no different today. We simply changed some keywords. COMMUNISTS now means either DEMOCRATS or TERRORISTS. Instead of the USSR it's the Middle East. Instead of the SS driving jews into ghettos, it's the IDF driving Palestinians into ghettos. Beat Vietnam protestors -> Beat Iraqi war protestors. S&L? Now Enron, WorldCom, etc. Joseph McCarthy? John Ashcroft! The same scandals, the same atrocities, the same lies, the same tyrants, just new names and a new days.
Less than 1% of 1% of the CIA's documents have been declassified, and just those few alone have shown thousands of cases of US sponsored terrorism, assassinations, support of military dicatorships, sending weapons and supplies to genocidal maniacs, destabilization campaigns, drug smuggling, ad naseum. And these people are still in our government today.
Trusting in the sanity of the United States Government is not an option. Their actions must be closely monitored and recorded. There are to be no secrets, their access limited and their power tightly curtailed. We have a responsibility to do this not only for ourselves, but for the entire world.
The reason we believe in Freedom and Privacy is because we think there's hope in changing our government for the better, peacefully. Once we lose sight of this, the only option left is to exercise the 2nd Amendment.
That would require an amazing amount of government surveillance to ensure that we were all seeking the same purpose. Fortunately, the US was founded on individualist principles which make it next to impossible to completely fulfill your "Slavery is Freedom" vision. However, if you're going to really do the job right, you're going to need the right weaponry, such as laser rifles, to point at the people that would rather pursue their own dreams instead of yours.
OK since a lot of you aren't getting the reference...
"One vision one purpose!" is the creedo of the fictional Brotherhood of Nod, a secret society that sprang up to challenge the Westernization of the world, featured in the smash hit video game, Command & Conquer.
They (Nod) set out to create a new world order by leveraging a disruptive new resource; Tiberium. On the other hand, the Western world feared Tiberium, demonized it, and groups that utilized it, including Nod.
The Western world considered Nod a threat to its security, and formed the Global Defense Initiative to destroy them.
It was just a far out story when I first encountered it, but events of late have illustrated many parallels between this fictional world and our own reality. It's quite funny really.
If war accomplished nothing, slavery might still exist in the Confederate States of America
FYI, while war "officially" marked the end slavery, it was actually obviated by capitalism.
Like it or not we are Human and that means that as a species we like to kill each other and take each others resources by force, etc, etc. If you have a problem with that talk to the evolution gods. Untill you do though, we will continue spending money to make sure we are not the next Carthage, Phonecia, Ottoman Empire, etc.
When you build up the ability to destroy an enemy that doesn't exist, you tend to create one.
When was the last time a suicide bomber blew up a bus in Canada? Or a fundamentalist radical shot up a market in Sweden? I don't see people crashing planes into skyscrapers in Norway. And hey, looks like no one has regularly blown up crowded marketplaces in Finland either.
IT MUST BE THEIR SUPER EFFICIENT ADVANCED STRONG MILITARY KEEPING THEM SAFE!
The other day I found myself at CompUSA paying $40 for Red Hat. Why on earth would I pay money for that when I can get an ISO and burn it for free?
In my case, it was because I was at a datacenter and needed to reinstall the system (the vendor forgot to install it). I could've either taken a trip back home (30 minutes), downloaded and burned a CD (an hour), and taken a trip back (30 minutes), or I could drop by CompUSA and pay for a copy (20 minutes). Savings to my client by paying for software? 1.75 billable hours.
If there's any hope in selling data as a retail product, it'll be in models that completely ignore the actual data on it.
There's my case (needed it quickly), but there are many others.
Some people just want to rummage through piles of stuff, find a gem, claim a prize. That whole Hunter/Scavenger instinct is still with us, you know.
Shopping at a record store is a social activity for many people -- something that's harder to do with a real person by a computer.
There have been many times that we browsed Blockbuster Video (yes, they suck, but that's a different story) in search of a movie and ended up there an entire hour because we became so engrossed in searching (and ended up with 3 or 4 movies by the end of it). A web site can offer the content, but seldom can it recreate that experience.
The content cartel should capitalize on this, because their current business model's days are numbered.
Nah! That shit's boring! Lets focus our resources on developing more efficient ways of killing people!
Someone really needs to start an extra-American hyper technology-driven society with some priorities besides war-war-war. Brotherhood. Unity. Peace. Peace through power! One vision one purpose!
1. Almost all LCD manufacturers also manufacture CRTs. Dropping prices on LCDs would be cannibalizing their CRT market, which no one wants to do yet.
2. Until LCDs started hitting the shelves, CRTs would cost a fortune. Contrary to the rest of the computer industry, CRT prices were very inelastic. Then LCDs hit the scene and CRT prices started dropping. You can buy a 21" CRT now for far less than they cost 3 years ago, yet 5 years before that I don't remember their prices moving much at all.
3. LCDs cost now what CRTs of similar screen dimensions did about 3-4 years ago.
See any interesting relationships? Until either a newer sexier technology comes out, or until people become truly sick of CRTs, expect LCD prices to stay pretty much the same. ;)
I hope there's a shakeout in the industry some day. Having investigated developing applications for these devices, I've always been disappointed in that either you need to sign up for some really expensive licenses, use Java (J2ME) which doesn't offer anywhere near the phone's true potential, or you have to deal with a new platform for each phone you come across, even across a single manufacturer's line.
One day this will stop sucking. Until then...
What a freakish coincidence. We bought a pair of Zip Zaps last night and raced them for 6 hours. But this video definitely tops anything we did.
And is it just me, or did those guys have a little too much faith in the RC system and the guy driving it? I've spazzed out enough just while controlling little RC cars (oops, left IS oriented this way, duh). I can't imagine standing 15 feet away from a full-size RC controlled car.
A lot of what he gripes about is infeasible to write in a higher level language (which he does note). In those cases, the problem is better addressed with mandatory access controls.
In the descriptions below, where HLL appears, I would mean something like Ruby, Python, maybe Perl.
Kernel: If you're trying to be a UNIX system, C is only practical
OpenSSL: The bulk of this is performance critical (C/C++)
MySQL: Much of MySQL is performance critical (ie C/C++), although there's no damned reason why MySQL needs to run as root outside of a chroot jail. I'm not even sure why people start it as root, it even binds to a non-privileged port. I think the first line of main() should be a call to getuid() and complain if it returns 0.
lpr: Someone write one in HLL for pete's sake. All it does is process files with helper tools and cram them to a printer device. Some of the helper tools could no doubt be rewritten as well.
mutt: Great case for HLL here.
glibc: Obviously this is in C's domain
file: One based on perl and regular expressions would be pretty useful, methinks.
ircii: HLL
Evolution: gack why is this beast written in C/C++? It probably would've taken 1/4 the time if it were written in HLL, not to mention 1/8th the code.
Samba: I imagine one written in HLL would perform just as well. *shrug*
Other examples...
wu-*: Anything that comes from Washington University should be burned. They are beyond hope.
proftpd: I don't get why this is written in C. HLL can provide a totally usable, high performance ftp server.
ssh: Most of the crypto, etc. is handled by OpenSSL. Why does this need to be in C? It doesn't.
crond? HLL
named? HLL
sendmail? HLL
ad naseum/infinitum
Of course, there are reasons against rewriting any of these beasts in a HLL. As C code, they're usually pretty self-contained. Written in a HLL, they would depend on a HLL interpreter, and for decent performance, may depend on other libraries which the default system install certainly won't have.
I remember awhile back Tom Christiansen started a "reimplement UNIX in perl" project, but haven't seen anything since. It may not have even been TC. *shrug*
...then so do SUV owners.
To use my wife as an example...
She would come down with these incapacitating migraines almost biweekly. They were awful, she'd be bedridden for almost the entire day, except for hourly trips to the bathroom to dryheave.
She adjusted a few factors in her life and now they're practically gone.
Firstly, she switched birth control pills. Supposedly this is a common side effect of Ortho-Tri-Cyclen. This cut them down to about once a month, with a little less intensity.
(Yes, she did have these ailments before she started birth control, they were just more erratic, as were her periods. Birth control made them both regular.)
Second, she started drinking organic milk. This didn't affect her periodic migraines, but it did stop the headaches she'd come down with a few hours after drinking milk.
Thirdly, she started drinking more water, and cut out coffee, soda, etc. This seemed to eliminate them altogether. Now during her cycle she has a light headache at best (which is supposed to be normal). Now if only we could get rid of the bitchiness.
Another point is Apples. She'd almost always go straight into a migraine/dryheave-a-thon after eating an Apple. But she's not allergic to Apples themselves. It turns out that a lot of fruit is sprayed with a preservative. *shrug*
There are two conclusions that you can make.
One is that there are dangerous chemicals in everything we eat and touch that makes us sick. The other is that people are crazy and can make their bodies do some amazing shit for attention. either way, problem solved I guess.
And I'm one of those people who thinks ADD and ADHD are bullshit, or at the very least way too overprescribed. That is, I guess I'm a skeptic. But I can't argue with results (I'm pretty sure my wife's not crazy).
I myself cut out regular coffee, soda, juice intake and replaced it with (filtered) tap water. After the caffeine withdrawal (which was about a week of agony), I've felt better than ever (I even wake up early with energy, imagine that). Oddly enough, my blood pressure has also dropped from high to normal (not "fantastic", but no longer at "we're going to prescribe procardia").
Maybe I could even do a bit of exercise and lose some weight. But back on topic...
Humans are such interesting little machines.
What is "Environmental Illness"? I've never heard it before in my life.
What does "toxic home" mean in this context? I've never thought of lampshades as dangerous. I'm left guessing here.
Obviously I can look these all up (and I will). But any other reporting source would've explained these concepts in some detail.
I hope Smalltalk will not be the only language you can use to write programs. I think it's cool, but there's no reason I shouldn't be able to use other programming languages I know.
It's interesting to note that Windows, having always been a GUI environment, has always tried to boost interactive applications automatically. Linux, on the other hand, has traditionally been used on servers, and it requires manual adjustment for interactive applications (using the "nice" command, for instance). This patch could make GUI applications on Linux just as responsive as Windows without sacrificing its role on the server. Of course, that remains to be seen.
Since many userland issues penetrate the NT kernel, it is able to say things like "Give priority boost to the process that has the currently focused window". It's really freaking ugly, but it allows Windows to "cheat" to good effect.
By design, the Linux kernel does not have this information, nor should it (since it has more than one rendering system, window manager, etc.) The scheduler improvement patches (I think) attempt to determine what process is interactive by its behavior, and distributes priority points accordingly.
Note to others, this does not mean batch process throughput will be sacrificed. Both of these areas can be improved without harming the other. The patches address latency. It takes minimal CPU time to move a mouse pointer, but the devil is in recognizing that this is an interactive process so it's more important to make it happen ahead of the 5 seconds worth of busy batch process work it has to do.
Oh I get it, Tao is all about putting two contradictory phrases in the same sentance. Cool, I thought it was deeper than that, but this is way easier to understand.
Humans find beauty in simplicity, but are fascinated by complexity. Tao'ist rambling seems to stress those points.
This is untrue. Portability and performance are not mutually exclusive.
Performance is more greatly affected by software design, not implementation hacks. Well designed software is also portable software.
You most certainly can have multiple processor specific optimizations. Just as you can have backend renderers for more than one kind of video card, or more than one kind of sound card. This stuff can even be decided at runtime.
Game development, like most commercial software development, is about getting the damned thing to work and out the door as quickly as possible, and preferably as affordably as possible. Everything else is secondary, including security, maintainability, and portability.
Most of the tedium of programming applications is loading and storing state. The thought of doing this automatically is very appealing.
But at the same time, it's not that big a deal. Most of the time you can boil data retrieval and data update operations down to a few base primitives that serve to both abstract away the underlying store as well as providing some syntactic convenience. From there the support code to deal with the impedence mismatch is quite minimal.
Maybe some day.
If I wanted to run a crappy, proprietary UNIX on overpriced hardware I'd be using Solaris.
If I wanted to run a crappy, proprietary UNIX with a candy coated desktop on overpriced hardware I'd use MacOS X.
It's all about your needs, man. You've got to determine what's important to you.
Hooray for slashdot-effect hairsplitting and arguing to death niggling details!
In case it wasn't clear enough, the point was that they're a company who sees its marketshare fading, they think they deserve something for being first, and they are using whatever is at their disposal to do it.
The courts are backing up their patent claims after all. They'd be fools not to take advantage of it.
And quite frankly every innovation we made to our online calendar showed up 3 months later in someone elses calendar. In fact we even found instances where people had literally cut and pasted our code, comments and all!
This kind of thing can ruin your week, it's really upsetting when it happens to me, and I imagine some people get outright hitting-the-bottle depressed when it happens to them.
It's even worse when the lawyers tell you that there's almost nothing you can do about it, and it can ruin your whole year if your copycat sues you after THEY have the gall to patent what they stole from you--and why wouldn't they? If they had no moral qualms about ripping you off in the first place, do you really think they'd shy away from patenting your own creation and using it against you?
It does not suprise me that people in this position get patents not only for defense, but to bludgeon the scumbags who rip them off.
Are the patents stupid? Of course they are. But they're granted! And ridiculously enough, enforced! Why wouldn't they apply for them?
Rewind 8 or 9 years.
No one bought anything over the internet. E-commerce didn't quite exist.
Here comes some upstart that asks people to risk them the cash to make this new business model happen. They do something that most people would call innovative. A new business model is formed, the face of commerce completely changed. Today everyone sells over the internet.
If you're this upstart who was there since day one doing what no one else did, taking the risks back then which aren't really risks today (relatively speaking), you'd be pretty mad. Especially when your big stupid competitor finally wakes up and realizes the internet exists and copies your site almost exactly, from look to semantics, and starts eating away at your bottom line.
All of your hard work, creative energy, raising capital, the meetings, market analysis, research, etc. you put forth to make your crackpot idea a reality is now being blithely ripped off by your inferior. Through simple cloning your inferior is now your equal.
If you've been in that position before, you know how infuriating it is. So what are your options? Sadly, very few.
Amazon is getting patents because it seems like the only way to fight off their idiot copycat competitors. I think software patents are detestable, but I understand Amazon's reasoning.
It's kind of a mixed bag. It sucks that Amazon does it, but it's not going to stop me from supporting them. Why? I'll put myself in their position.
The position is one where my shareholders are screaming at me to protect their investment which they entrusted in me. A position where my customers are leaving to buy from my copycat because they can't tell the difference anymore no matter what we do. Where my employees who helped me build such a great service are worried that they might not have a job in 6 months. The choice is clear, I'd do the same thing.