Totally. Sun's trying hard to sow the seeds of fud over fragmentation of Linux in a lame-ass attempt to convince everyone that we're better off with them holding on to Java rather than releasing it to an international standards body. I like Java but I ain't buying Sun's BS.
No way!!! If we vote for Nader than all those famous Hollywood movie stars will have wasted their time and money campaigning long and hard for Vice-president Gore. If Americans vote their conscience and vote for Nader, then all of the hard work that Rob Reiner has contributed and all that cash will have been for nought.
Meathead deserves better than that!
Besides, we need Gore around to allow China into the WTO. Let him finish the work that he began as Bill Clinton's sidekick. We need strong, hardworking democrats in office to achieve the plan our corporate caretakers have in store for us.
A vote for Gore is a vote for yet another 4 years of Corporate goodwill. A vote for Gore is a vote for normal trade relations with one of the world's most egregious abusers of human rights, but at least Bush isn't in office, right?
There's an easy fix for this, just add www.aol.com to your/etc/hosts file as 127.0.0.1. then you'll get your own local home page instead of their crap...
This is no big deal. We do it in the movie production business all the time. It's a hell of a lot easier to have either a scripted sequence playing or a full screen video image playing than it is to have an actor learn how to use a computer with such authority that it looks authentic. Even then, for some of the things you want to show, modern computers just aren't fast enough.
This is especially true if you're doing a tracking shot and want something to happen just as the computer screen is coming into view. Most movies and tv shows were you see computer action, there's some guy sitting down beneath the sound stage firing off the video animations when the director cues him.
Usually, though, when you see a computer, you can't tell which OS it's using, because it's easier to have the machine run FakeOS than to get a real company's PR department to OK their product being shown used to kill a bunch of people or break into a bank vault. Since Linux (or other Free Unixes) have generous licenses, this isn't an issue, I'd think.
Re:Maybe this is what sunk the Kursk
on
Microsoft Cracked
·
· Score: 2
I've always considered the majority of Slashdot readers to be brats, but this goes to show that whatever Microsoft may do to fight the open-source movement, they'll probably win.
1) How do you know that the majority of Slashdot READERS are brats if they are in fact reading and not posting? If you'd said the majority of/. posters were brats.. then I'd tend to agree with you.
Why? Because for the most part, it's people like you who make up and support that movement, people lacking any amount of maturity and decency, and for movements to succeed, they must at least be honorable in the face of their enemy.
2) How do you know that people like the tastless, lame poster make up and support the open source movement?
I think you're basing your opinions of a fairly large and diverse group of people on the actions of a few morons, who may or may not in fact be in support of Open source. I don't recall anything in that first offensive post that said anything about open-source software. I do recall some insensitive (and, quite frankly, LAME) humor about Microsoft's stability impaired operating system being responsible for the Kursk tragedy.
You make these vast over-generalizations and your own prejudices shine through, overshadowing the original message: the original poster is a jerk.
Please consider the targets of your message before you go off flaming good, undeserving people.
This is a bullshit answer. What if I don't want to spend the time and resources to host my own email (or fix my car). I might have better things to do with my time.
This is a Bullshit retort. If you had gone to Cardot, news for gearheads and asked how to have your car hopped up, you should expect to get answers telling you how to do it yourself.
Coming to Slashdot NEWS FOR NERDS he should expect at least this much technical advice as to how to do it himself. This isn't an AOL chatroom, for chrissakes.
Here's an appropriate answer to the original question, using the non-bullshit answering criteria you proposed: Go to Yahoo and type Secure E-mail with SSH POP and Shell Access. Click on the first link that pops up. Voila! Problem solved.
If you ever take a computer architecture class, you'll learn that simply doubling the processor speed doesn't give you a machine that can execute code twice as fast. There are many other factors involved in determining a computers computational speed.
I'm not exactly sure what they are using to base their "50% faster" expectation on though. Anybody know what kind of benchmarks exist for PalmOS? Global Searches?
So even if you maxed out the Dragonball VZ's DRAM controller with 64M, you'd still need some way of controlling fragmentation etc, because you don't have a hardware MMU to shuffle pages around.
With Palm OS 3.0, there is only one storage heap (per memory card - current devices only have one card) and so having large code resources isn't a problem. Any given code resource still can't be more than 64k, but fragmentation problems aren't an issue as they were in previous versions of the OS.
-From PalmOS.com
If you're willing to take the performance hit, you could *manually* add 32-bit offsets to an address register (and give up the offset addressing mode). But pretty soon this starts looking just like the near/far pointer tar pit from the bad old 8086 days.
The Motorola 68328 processor's 32-bit registers and 32 internal address lines support a 32-bit execution model as well, although the external data bus is only 16 bits wide. This design reduces cost without impacting the software model. The processor's bus controller automatically breaks down 32-bit reads and writes into multiple 16-bit reads and writes externally.
-From PalmOS.com
So, what should Linux people be doing? Sitting back and waiting for Palm to be the source of All Good Things?
So what should Palm developers be doing, wasting their time porting bloated Unix tools to a decidedly (and purposefully) limited platform, for the sheer intellectual rigor of the excercise, or devloping for a fully functional OS that's well suited for the tasks it's asked to perform?
Gimme a break. Linux is useful, no doubt. But I don't think it's going to be all things to all people, as some would posture. There are better tools more suited for certain tasks.
If the Linux developers are having a tough time figuring out what to do , a much more useful pursuit would be developing a better way of syncing a Palm device to Linux. Right now there is no standard conduit API for Linux. For people who own PalmOS devices, that'd be a lot more useful than PERL for Palm.
Go with an operating system built for this instead - Epoc.
There are no palm-sized machines that run EPOC. The clamshell sucks. If the EPOC partners came out with a machine that was like the ones everybody has been buying, they'd probably catch on a lot bigger in the US.
The PalmOS 3.5 Memory architecture allows at least 128K for its dynamic memory heap, which is huge in the Palm world (Palm apps are tiny). PalmOS 3.5 also has a dynamic memory heap that changes as the amount of memory on the machine goes up. As far as hardware limitations, DragonBall is a 32-bit processor, so it has an addressable memory space of 4G. I don't see much of a limitation here.
The newer versions of PalmOS are also moving closer to processor agnosticism with a HAL, which will sever its dependence on the DragonBall Series (MIPS, anyone? How about an IPaq, then? Mayhaps even Crusoe...).
Unlike Microsoft, Palm is changing and eliminating its OSes primary weaknesses rather than saddling its developers/users/customers with archaic requirements, just like a company in a competitive market should.
I've strongly considered this myself, but it has one major drawback: For the most part, all of the realtime preview rendering I want will have the same renderer as the in-game renderer these days.
Post long-winded, self-righteous comments slamming the Slashdot process, as though it were a subscription news service with some quality guarantee (rather than what it really is and has always purported to be: a DISCUSSION group with topics of interest appealing to Nerds) in a lame, sarcastic attempt at pseudo-intellectual humor.
and,
Post terse, smart-ass, acidic comments poking fun at other peoples ego-inflated posts.
No doubt! Hopefully you'll be able to run programs straight off of that memory stick (like the new TRG's) otherwise, I'm a lot more tempted to upgrade that m100 to 8 megs...
Emacs has anything that an IDE does, and so does vi. And as complicated as CVS or Make seems to a beginner, they're worthy tools that offer far more flexibility than a GUI'ed IDE.
Now wait. I never said anything about teaching GUI'd IDEs. Not a damn thing. People assume that when I say IDE, I mean Visual Studio. That's not what I said and that's not what I meant. You have all made an ass out of yourselves and me (to a lesser extent) as the old adage goes.
Yes, it's called reading the documentation, something Windows users have grown unaccustomed to.
When a student signs up for a C++ programming class, they aren't there to learn the ins and outs of a Unix environment. That would be the exact same burden as requiring them to use a particular IDE, and I assume that the instructor believes it will take less time to teach the students how to use and IDE.
Windows may be easier to learn, but Linux/Unix is far less painful to use.
Again, I don't think Unix is difficult to use, but it can be assumed that the students already know how to use Windows, because of it's marketplace dominance. It's annoying, but it's true.
Um...hate to burst your bubble, but there are jobs out there for people who (gasp) don't program using Windows.
Who said anything about windows?
If there was an effective IDE for Solaris and AIX, you bet your ass that the fairly large company you work for would require you to use it, because it WOULD enhance your productivity. Time is money, and IDEs save time.
The real purpose is to teach you something about how a computer works -- from both a formal math point of view and a practical point of view. Hence, the reason that most people have to take a courses on computation theory, language theory, compilers, operating systems, etc.
True, but would you rather have to take a specific class to learn how IDEs work, or would you rather learn as a beneficial side effect of a low level course? Personally, I'd rather not have to take a separate course to learn.
Btw, java code on Windows == Java code on Linux == Java code on Solaris ==
In theory this is true. In practice there are many quirks in the various virtual machines that make this a tad more problematic than Sun's marketing people will have you believe.
I prefer java, but I wish to hell they'd open the standard up.
1) Is this another way for MS to gain student mindshare?
MS already has mindshare, that's why their software is bundled with textbooks.
2) Why were they forced to buy a product for a single use in a class?
Since you're asking this, I assume you've never been to college (not trying to insult you). At the University professors routinely require an exorbitant number of texts and materials. So many in fact that there must be some sort of grift involved.
On several occasions, I was required to buy some rinky-dink 100 page manuscript that was written (or edited) by the instructor themself, for an insanely high amount of money ($40+ for a cheesy velobound stack of photocopies). This is part of the cost of your education.
3) Are universities being co-opted to provide MS based programming tools instead of other alternatives? Eg.Linux/Gcc/as/Qt/Gnome?
Some of the classes I took had over a hundred people in them. Would you want to be the person who the students would call everytime they couldn't find a file on their Linux machine? Would you want to be the person who they'd call when Enlightenment crashes? The fact is, as much as I like Linux, it's a difficult operating system. The mind-numbing usability hasn't been programmed into it yet.
This whole issue is really a non-issue, though. Anyone who can learn the skills needed to design and implement a program in Visual Basic can learn to apply those same design principles to C++ or Java or anything. The classes we are talking about aren't classes to teach student how to use a programming environment, they're basic skill classes. Once the ideas are learned, the students will have to take grammars classes to learn other languages (which is much easier to do once you have full command of one).
BTW I took CS 161/162/163 (Intro to programming, data structures and algorithms) at Portland State University, and we did it all with cc. The instructor insisted that our programs compiled without error in cc, and warned us of the differences between cc and gcc.
It sounds like you're not locked into actually using it for anything but a quick run-through at the end to make sure it compiles right.
I know of no commercial developers who use g++ to develop on. It's just not practical. Like it or not, IDEs increase productivity, and that's why we use them. If these students are going to be professional programmers, they're going to be using IDEs their entire career. Why the hell shouldn't they be learning from the get go how they function?
Any CS program that doesn't teach a student how to use and IDE is being negligent in their curriculum.
Man, that Bioware engine sucks much ass. I love their games, but they go to get their engine up to snuff. Somethings gotta be done about stupid NPCs and monsters. It's not fun when you can exploit problems with the engine to make the game easier to win.
We could just spray a couple cans of instant tire sealant into the space station instead. If one of these space debris happens to hit it, it'll seal up like a Goodyear Eagle! That stuff was developed by NASA anyways, wasn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
Totally. Sun's trying hard to sow the seeds of fud over fragmentation of Linux in a lame-ass attempt to convince everyone that we're better off with them holding on to Java rather than releasing it to an international standards body. I like Java but I ain't buying Sun's BS.
No way!!! If we vote for Nader than all those famous Hollywood movie stars will have wasted their time and money campaigning long and hard for Vice-president Gore. If Americans vote their conscience and vote for Nader, then all of the hard work that Rob Reiner has contributed and all that cash will have been for nought.
Meathead deserves better than that!
Besides, we need Gore around to allow China into the WTO. Let him finish the work that he began as Bill Clinton's sidekick. We need strong, hardworking democrats in office to achieve the plan our corporate caretakers have in store for us.
A vote for Gore is a vote for yet another 4 years of Corporate goodwill. A vote for Gore is a vote for normal trade relations with one of the world's most egregious abusers of human rights, but at least Bush isn't in office, right?
Well, you go tmy little joke, congrats!
There's an easy fix for this, just add www.aol.com to your /etc/hosts file as 127.0.0.1. then you'll get your own local home page instead of their crap...
Nyuk Nyuk.
This is no big deal. We do it in the movie production business all the time. It's a hell of a lot easier to have either a scripted sequence playing or a full screen video image playing than it is to have an actor learn how to use a computer with such authority that it looks authentic. Even then, for some of the things you want to show, modern computers just aren't fast enough.
This is especially true if you're doing a tracking shot and want something to happen just as the computer screen is coming into view. Most movies and tv shows were you see computer action, there's some guy sitting down beneath the sound stage firing off the video animations when the director cues him.
Usually, though, when you see a computer, you can't tell which OS it's using, because it's easier to have the machine run FakeOS than to get a real company's PR department to OK their product being shown used to kill a bunch of people or break into a bank vault. Since Linux (or other Free Unixes) have generous licenses, this isn't an issue, I'd think.
I've always considered the majority of Slashdot readers to be brats, but this goes to show that whatever Microsoft may do to fight the open-source movement, they'll probably win.
/. posters were brats.. then I'd tend to agree with you.
1) How do you know that the majority of Slashdot READERS are brats if they are in fact reading and not posting? If you'd said the majority of
Why? Because for the most part, it's people like you who make up and support that movement, people lacking any amount of maturity and decency, and for movements to succeed, they must at least be honorable in the face of their enemy.
2) How do you know that people like the tastless, lame poster make up and support the open source movement?
I think you're basing your opinions of a fairly large and diverse group of people on the actions of a few morons, who may or may not in fact be in support of Open source. I don't recall anything in that first offensive post that said anything about open-source software. I do recall some insensitive (and, quite frankly, LAME) humor about Microsoft's stability impaired operating system being responsible for the Kursk tragedy.
You make these vast over-generalizations and your own prejudices shine through, overshadowing the original message: the original poster is a jerk.
Please consider the targets of your message before you go off flaming good, undeserving people.
This is a bullshit answer. What if I don't want to spend the time and resources to host my own email (or fix my car). I might have better things to do with my time.
This is a Bullshit retort. If you had gone to Cardot, news for gearheads and asked how to have your car hopped up, you should expect to get answers telling you how to do it yourself.
Coming to Slashdot NEWS FOR NERDS he should expect at least this much technical advice as to how to do it himself. This isn't an AOL chatroom, for chrissakes.
Here's an appropriate answer to the original question, using the non-bullshit answering criteria you proposed: Go to Yahoo and type Secure E-mail with SSH POP and Shell Access. Click on the first link that pops up. Voila! Problem solved.
If you ever take a computer architecture class, you'll learn that simply doubling the processor speed doesn't give you a machine that can execute code twice as fast. There are many other factors involved in determining a computers computational speed.
I'm not exactly sure what they are using to base their "50% faster" expectation on though. Anybody know what kind of benchmarks exist for PalmOS? Global Searches?
Personally, I'd be a lot more interested in working on this if the Palm devices spoke some standard, open protocol for synchronization.
Check this out. When it's finalized, it ought to provide a reasonable standard for synchronization.
So me saying "Linux people" was a mistatement. I hope you get what I meant.
No problem. Got it.
-From PalmOS.com
If you're willing to take the performance hit, you could *manually* add 32-bit offsets to an address register (and give up the offset addressing mode). But pretty soon this starts looking just like the near/far pointer tar pit from the bad old 8086 days.
-From PalmOS.com
So, what should Linux people be doing? Sitting back and waiting for Palm to be the source of All Good Things?
So what should Palm developers be doing, wasting their time porting bloated Unix tools to a decidedly (and purposefully) limited platform, for the sheer intellectual rigor of the excercise, or devloping for a fully functional OS that's well suited for the tasks it's asked to perform?
Gimme a break. Linux is useful, no doubt. But I don't think it's going to be all things to all people, as some would posture. There are better tools more suited for certain tasks.
If the Linux developers are having a tough time figuring out what to do , a much more useful pursuit would be developing a better way of syncing a Palm device to Linux. Right now there is no standard conduit API for Linux. For people who own PalmOS devices, that'd be a lot more useful than PERL for Palm.
Go with an operating system built for this instead - Epoc.
There are no palm-sized machines that run EPOC. The clamshell sucks. If the EPOC partners came out with a machine that was like the ones everybody has been buying, they'd probably catch on a lot bigger in the US.
The PalmOS 3.5 Memory architecture allows at least 128K for its dynamic memory heap, which is huge in the Palm world (Palm apps are tiny). PalmOS 3.5 also has a dynamic memory heap that changes as the amount of memory on the machine goes up. As far as hardware limitations, DragonBall is a 32-bit processor, so it has an addressable memory space of 4G. I don't see much of a limitation here.
The newer versions of PalmOS are also moving closer to processor agnosticism with a HAL, which will sever its dependence on the DragonBall Series (MIPS, anyone? How about an IPaq, then? Mayhaps even Crusoe...).
Unlike Microsoft, Palm is changing and eliminating its OSes primary weaknesses rather than saddling its developers/users/customers with archaic requirements, just like a company in a competitive market should.
No uCLinux for the Handsprings, they don't have programmable ROM.
I've strongly considered this myself, but it has one major drawback: For the most part, all of the realtime preview rendering I want will have the same renderer as the in-game renderer these days.
JavaGL could do it. The tools exist in Java.
You forgot:
and,
This new Sony montrousity is just downright ugly!
No doubt! Hopefully you'll be able to run programs straight off of that memory stick (like the new TRG's) otherwise, I'm a lot more tempted to upgrade that m100 to 8 megs...
Emacs has anything that an IDE does, and so does vi. And as complicated as CVS or Make seems to a beginner, they're worthy tools that offer far more flexibility than a GUI'ed IDE.
Now wait. I never said anything about teaching GUI'd IDEs. Not a damn thing. People assume that when I say IDE, I mean Visual Studio. That's not what I said and that's not what I meant. You have all made an ass out of yourselves and me (to a lesser extent) as the old adage goes.
Yes, it's called reading the documentation, something Windows users have grown unaccustomed to.
When a student signs up for a C++ programming class, they aren't there to learn the ins and outs of a Unix environment. That would be the exact same burden as requiring them to use a particular IDE, and I assume that the instructor believes it will take less time to teach the students how to use and IDE.
Windows may be easier to learn, but Linux/Unix is far less painful to use.
Again, I don't think Unix is difficult to use, but it can be assumed that the students already know how to use Windows, because of it's marketplace dominance. It's annoying, but it's true.
Um...hate to burst your bubble, but there are jobs out there for people who (gasp) don't program using Windows.
Who said anything about windows?
If there was an effective IDE for Solaris and AIX, you bet your ass that the fairly large company you work for would require you to use it, because it WOULD enhance your productivity. Time is money, and IDEs save time.
The real purpose is to teach you something about how a computer works -- from both a formal math point of view and a practical point of view. Hence, the reason that most people have to take a courses on computation theory, language theory, compilers, operating systems, etc.
True, but would you rather have to take a specific class to learn how IDEs work, or would you rather learn as a beneficial side effect of a low level course? Personally, I'd rather not have to take a separate course to learn.
Btw, java code on Windows == Java code on Linux == Java code on Solaris ==
In theory this is true. In practice there are many quirks in the various virtual machines that make this a tad more problematic than Sun's marketing people will have you believe.
I prefer java, but I wish to hell they'd open the standard up.
1) Is this another way for MS to gain student mindshare?
MS already has mindshare, that's why their software is bundled with textbooks.
2) Why were they forced to buy a product for a single use in a class?
Since you're asking this, I assume you've never been to college (not trying to insult you). At the University professors routinely require an exorbitant number of texts and materials. So many in fact that there must be some sort of grift involved.
On several occasions, I was required to buy some rinky-dink 100 page manuscript that was written (or edited) by the instructor themself, for an insanely high amount of money ($40+ for a cheesy velobound stack of photocopies). This is part of the cost of your education.
3) Are universities being co-opted to provide MS based programming tools instead of other alternatives? Eg.Linux/Gcc/as/Qt/Gnome?
Some of the classes I took had over a hundred people in them. Would you want to be the person who the students would call everytime they couldn't find a file on their Linux machine? Would you want to be the person who they'd call when Enlightenment crashes? The fact is, as much as I like Linux, it's a difficult operating system. The mind-numbing usability hasn't been programmed into it yet.
This whole issue is really a non-issue, though. Anyone who can learn the skills needed to design and implement a program in Visual Basic can learn to apply those same design principles to C++ or Java or anything. The classes we are talking about aren't classes to teach student how to use a programming environment, they're basic skill classes. Once the ideas are learned, the students will have to take grammars classes to learn other languages (which is much easier to do once you have full command of one).
BTW I took CS 161/162/163 (Intro to programming, data structures and algorithms) at Portland State University, and we did it all with cc. The instructor insisted that our programs compiled without error in cc, and warned us of the differences between cc and gcc.
It sounds like you're not locked into actually using it for anything but a quick run-through at the end to make sure it compiles right.
I know of no commercial developers who use g++ to develop on. It's just not practical. Like it or not, IDEs increase productivity, and that's why we use them. If these students are going to be professional programmers, they're going to be using IDEs their entire career. Why the hell shouldn't they be learning from the get go how they function?
Any CS program that doesn't teach a student how to use and IDE is being negligent in their curriculum.
Man, that Bioware engine sucks much ass. I love their games, but they go to get their engine up to snuff. Somethings gotta be done about stupid NPCs and monsters. It's not fun when you can exploit problems with the engine to make the game easier to win.
We could just spray a couple cans of instant tire sealant into the space station instead. If one of these space debris happens to hit it, it'll seal up like a Goodyear Eagle! That stuff was developed by NASA anyways, wasn't it?