I fail to see how OpenGL development will help almost any companies... making your video games that don't exist run better doesn't seem to help most companies.
If you fail to see, it may be that your vision is too narrow. Games are not the only applications to benefit from stable graphics drivers and a solid OpenGL implementation.
You do realize that a good fraction of the people on this website make a living trying to prove you wrong, don't you?
No, I don't acknowledge that considering the majority of people on this website advocate "open" computing, which means thats computers necessarily must have the ability to "change or fake" anything that can be computed (or stolen) in reasonable time. A good fraction of people on this website who work in security realize that under such a system, criminals will still be able to forge and/or steal these "digital" keys ("ID's") and continue their thievery with more options than before.
In fact, there are just as many setting to configure to use an iPad as there are to use a new Windows PC.
I don't have an iPad, but I find this statement in particular to be quite absurd. Having recently set up a new Windows 7 Lenovo laptop for my father, I can only assume you've forgotten how many things there are that need to be configured to get a Windows PC ready for daily use, the least of which include: Uninstall all the bloatware. Install anti-virus software. Set up a non-admin user account with password. Find and install all the required software, clicking through all the multi-page installers and UAC warnings (continues to be a big PITA since Windows still doesn't have a package manager). Switch the default browser to something secure, and configure said browser. Change the desktop background to something that isn't hideous. Set the screensaver to not activate after every 60 seconds of idle. Yes, I could go on.
Now, I've never set up an iPad (or used one for more than 3 consecutive minutes), but I'm fairly confident that it would take several hours less time than it took me to set up my old man's new computer. If you thought about it a little more, I'm sure you'd agree. So don't be silly.
The thing you're struggling with is your assumption that higher taxes automatically leads to more income for the government (and thus a reduced deficit); unfortunately, that's not a safe assumption in today's world. Higher taxes means more people searching out and taking advantage of loopholes in the insane tax laws. It's not unrealistic that lowering taxes and cutting meaningless spending (military expenditures are not usually considered meaningless, but many entitlement costs are) will lead to a deficit reduction. So no, it's not hypocritical; it's just a point of view.
It's always "the breakthrough free software has been waiting for"... free software has been growing over the years, but these sorts of things never seem to make the big global impact that the news reports they will. (Not saying this is a bad thing, though!)
The summary doesn't seem to suggest any impending "global" impact. The sentence you took that fragment from is clearly only talking about Russian free software programs. Nobody is suggesting that free software is inevitably going to take over the world over night, but with local victories such as this, the long-term viability of free software is definitely assured.
1) Fox News makes its viewers less informed. (What headline said, which is impossible.)
Clearly you've never watched Glenn Beck.
I have a couple of times. He spent the entire hour broadcasting video clips of what various people have said ("them, in their own words"), informing viewers to form their own opinions. Curious, after researching a handful of the clips shown myself, I found that they were actually provided in context as well. Beck obviously has a strict libertarian viewpoint (while being more conservative on some social issues) which I suspect many here to disagree with, but the show was certainly not misinforming.
Most liberals I talk to like to guffaw as if it has already been shown that Beck is wrong and yet continues to spread lies. In reality, they're really just telling the rest of us how close-minded they are, since they're not willing to consider anything coming from someone they've already decided they don't like. I'm not saying Beck is wrong or right; I know for a fact that he has taken some quotes out of context in a way that is misinforming, but I've seen the same from all commentators, left or right. The difference is, most people I know on the right don't take an arrogant "I know better" stance with respect to liberal commentators like Chris Matthews, choosing rather to keep an open mind. Yet both sides are the same in that they tend toward the networks which broadcast in accordance with their viewpoints and opinions. The only interesting thing I take from that is that liberals aren't as open-minded as they pretend to be.
Probably Slashdot stories about Amazon denying hosting to Wikileaks harmed more the company than the combined Anonymous attack. There is no firewall against social attacks.
Except most people probably agree with Amazon's decision. It probably helped them. Surely you have noticed that Slashdot is not very representative of what we might call the "general population," falling somewhere to the left of where most people are, at least in the United States, Amazon's largest market.
It's becoming ever so popular to complain about ICANN or otherwise feel that a decentralized internet is the solution to our problems. I'm not a prophet, but even I can see the future on this one. The ones who will benefit the most from a completely decentralized DNS and/or P2P system are the ones who control the biggest botnets within the network. The rest of us will be so inundated with garbage that the internet will essentially become completely useless.
That's not to say that ICANN and especially the RIAA et al. aren't problems, but I don't see this becoming a viable solution. So I'm a skeptic, for now.
And you completed the circle by calling the other side a kind of religious zealot. Maybe we can all do a bit better and leave out the characterizations, don't you think?
Err, the GP didn't make any generalization about the "other side" unless you presume the "other side" is inherently prone to ignoring the valid distinction between skeptics and deniers (the latter having an agenda of their own). The GP isn't saying anything about any side. He's just saying that skepticism (good, healthy) is not the same thing as denial (bad, unproductive), and he's clearly correct.
I'm sorry, but it really pisses me off to see someone's hard work being taken off the market because something similar was released in 1980. Take away the copyright protection, and let Namco compete with the OP to make the best clone of the 1980 game!
Far be it from me to poopoo someone else's "hard work," but a pac man clone? Really? Not just a remix, but an exact replica. His "hard work" would have been better spent on a game with some originality, then maybe he could exert some copyright enforcement of his own.
I guess I don't have too much of a problem with copyright law and games. Gameplay isn't copyrightable, but artwork and sound are. All he had to do was mix it up a bit.
If the government threatened to shut down your business because you were supporting Wikileaks, you would probably cave too. The real issue here, as always, is government pressure and the power of the state.
Except the government isn't threatening any company in the way you're describing. Companies are distancing themselves from Wikileaks for PR reasons, not because there is any possibility that they will get shut down (by the US government, anyway).
All this enhancement sounds great, but I wish they would concentrate on compatibility with web sites first. There are too many sites that don't work well with Chrome and I am tired of getting warnings from popular sites that warn me about running an unsupported browser.
Any examples you can come up with, because I have no idea what you're talking about. WebKit is extremely compatible (it's one of the most popular HTML engines out there), and I don't know of any incompatibilities with Chrome's Javascript VM either, so... I guess I'll just have to call BS.
But I suppose "criminal fleeing from armed police and failing to respond to a stop order gets shot" isn't in line with your bleeding heart.
I've never heard of this story before, but police shot a man who was otherwise posing no threat to anyone else, just because he was fleeing? That doesn't sound very nice to me. Those cops would be suspended immediately and facing prosecution if they were in America. But, like I said, I've never heard of the story. Hopefully this is not what happened.
Lets say your ISP assigns you 10.0.32.128. Now, kindly tell me how you plan to connect to your home PC from work.
I'm obviously assuming a local NAT that you can configure. If your ISP won't give you at least one "real" address, then you're obviously screwed. Under the assumption that most ISP's provide real addresses to their clients (which is, AFAIK, true), I believe I'm correct in saying that NAT has been a decent bridge.
(What is actually surprising is that the internet still hasn't widely adopted IP6, and ISPs are now turning to ludicrous measures - NAT - to keep avoiding what makes sense.)
Dare I ask... why, pray tell, do you consider NAT to be a "ludicrous" measure? It seems like a pretty sturdy bridge to me. IPv6's slow adoption isn't really surprising to me; it has required code modifications across the board on numerous levels. It has been more of an undertaking than most people realize. On the other hand, apart from a little NAT-trickery to allow hole-punching (which, admittedly, should be have been put in a standard), the large majority of legacy apps continue to work under NAT like they did before. Not so with IPv6, which has been a lot more work to implement. Fortunately, most of that work is behind us, and IPv6 will "soon" be commonplace.
Yes , I agree about the syntax. Instead of creating a nice consistent extension to the C language as Bjarn did with C++ (albeit with some kludges) , Obj-C really looks like someone tossed a completely different language into C because it was easier than making an effort to actually extend C nicely, and then didn't even bother to stir the resulting dogs dinner.
I laughed at this post, but then I realized you might not be trying to be funny. As a C++ programmer myself, I've never heard anyone referring to C++ in a serious way as a "nice consistent extension to the C language." C++ is an absolute monster. It's completely inconsistent in many ways and is riddled with so many "gotchas" that it takes years until you should be able to call yourself an expert. That's a long time in the context of learning a new way to describe what a computer should do.
I haven't programmed in Objective-C in years, but I do remember that it is far simpler to learn than C++. It adds comparatively little to the C language, as far as syntax goes; basically just the [] message-passing construct and the @ keywords. I think Objective-C "2.0" may have distinguished itself a little more, but I haven't looked into it.
Anyway, hopefully you're being funny. Otherwise, we have completely different opinions. Objective-C seems to have extended C in a way that is much nicer and cleaner than C++ IMO.
Yuri: what's the difference between microsoft and russia?
Sasha: One's a ruthless totalitarian empire bent on world domination, with millions of informers, riddled with organized crime.
The other's a computer company.
Reading the font is also made easier by virtue of it being a text many of us would recognize. Our minds would fill in the gaps, even if it wasn't completely legible. I suspect it would be harder to read a paragraph with font that small if the text was completely unfamiliar.
I wonder if nicing the kernel compilation would have had a similar effect....
Probably, but that's not really the point. A user should rarely (if at all) have to use nice on a desktop, because a desktop operating system is supposed to be able to keep input latency low, always. That is the reason BeOS had such incredible perceived speed, but some "modern" operating systems are still struggling with this feat. I mean, it's 2010 and we've had 25+ years to work this out. Cursor stuttering and choppy video should have been a completely solved problem by now.
undereducated old fogeys that are only there to help their personal interests
As opposed to young, educated politicians who just want to help the country? No. "Young" politicians are also there to help their personal interests, and many of them are better at it than the old fogies.
Or you can just install CentOS which is Red Hat minus the artwork and the word "Red Hat" like most of us. I find Linux generally stable/reliable enough that I don't need support (I can't even remember my last Linux server crash, it's been years and stuff "just works").
That's fine and dandy if it's just your own server hooked up to your cable, but when it matters, going without support isn't a realistic option no matter how good the software is.
That's a nice list of scripting languages you've got there. And don't get me wrong, scripting languages are nice. However, if speed is an issue, Lua's never going to cut it in the same way that Java does.
Actually, there is no intrinsic property of scripting languages that make them slower than Java. Obviously it mostly depends on the implementation of the virtual machine:
For example, take a look at this list. LuaJIT actually seems to be quite competitive with the fastest of the languages. So, no, I can't agree with you. If speed is an issue, your choices may be limited to those languages which have just-in-time compilation for your processor type, but it certainly doesn't mean that Lua et al. can never match the likes of Java.
Slashdot Mirror
I fail to see how OpenGL development will help almost any companies... making your video games that don't exist run better doesn't seem to help most companies.
If you fail to see, it may be that your vision is too narrow. Games are not the only applications to benefit from stable graphics drivers and a solid OpenGL implementation.
You do realize that a good fraction of the people on this website make a living trying to prove you wrong, don't you?
No, I don't acknowledge that considering the majority of people on this website advocate "open" computing, which means thats computers necessarily must have the ability to "change or fake" anything that can be computed (or stolen) in reasonable time. A good fraction of people on this website who work in security realize that under such a system, criminals will still be able to forge and/or steal these "digital" keys ("ID's") and continue their thievery with more options than before.
In fact, there are just as many setting to configure to use an iPad as there are to use a new Windows PC.
I don't have an iPad, but I find this statement in particular to be quite absurd. Having recently set up a new Windows 7 Lenovo laptop for my father, I can only assume you've forgotten how many things there are that need to be configured to get a Windows PC ready for daily use, the least of which include: Uninstall all the bloatware. Install anti-virus software. Set up a non-admin user account with password. Find and install all the required software, clicking through all the multi-page installers and UAC warnings (continues to be a big PITA since Windows still doesn't have a package manager). Switch the default browser to something secure, and configure said browser. Change the desktop background to something that isn't hideous. Set the screensaver to not activate after every 60 seconds of idle. Yes, I could go on.
Now, I've never set up an iPad (or used one for more than 3 consecutive minutes), but I'm fairly confident that it would take several hours less time than it took me to set up my old man's new computer. If you thought about it a little more, I'm sure you'd agree. So don't be silly.
The high cost is easy to explain -- they're going to fill it with Apple Macs rather than normal 1U servers. 10x cost -- after all, they _ARE_ Apple :)
Actually, Macs probably don't cost Apple very much at all...
The thing you're struggling with is your assumption that higher taxes automatically leads to more income for the government (and thus a reduced deficit); unfortunately, that's not a safe assumption in today's world. Higher taxes means more people searching out and taking advantage of loopholes in the insane tax laws. It's not unrealistic that lowering taxes and cutting meaningless spending (military expenditures are not usually considered meaningless, but many entitlement costs are) will lead to a deficit reduction. So no, it's not hypocritical; it's just a point of view.
It's always "the breakthrough free software has been waiting for"... free software has been growing over the years, but these sorts of things never seem to make the big global impact that the news reports they will. (Not saying this is a bad thing, though!)
The summary doesn't seem to suggest any impending "global" impact. The sentence you took that fragment from is clearly only talking about Russian free software programs. Nobody is suggesting that free software is inevitably going to take over the world over night, but with local victories such as this, the long-term viability of free software is definitely assured.
Who is saying it's a bad thing? I see some people who think it's good and many more who don't really care, but nobody is saying this is bad.
1) Fox News makes its viewers less informed. (What headline said, which is impossible.)
Clearly you've never watched Glenn Beck.
I have a couple of times. He spent the entire hour broadcasting video clips of what various people have said ("them, in their own words"), informing viewers to form their own opinions. Curious, after researching a handful of the clips shown myself, I found that they were actually provided in context as well. Beck obviously has a strict libertarian viewpoint (while being more conservative on some social issues) which I suspect many here to disagree with, but the show was certainly not misinforming.
Most liberals I talk to like to guffaw as if it has already been shown that Beck is wrong and yet continues to spread lies. In reality, they're really just telling the rest of us how close-minded they are, since they're not willing to consider anything coming from someone they've already decided they don't like. I'm not saying Beck is wrong or right; I know for a fact that he has taken some quotes out of context in a way that is misinforming, but I've seen the same from all commentators, left or right. The difference is, most people I know on the right don't take an arrogant "I know better" stance with respect to liberal commentators like Chris Matthews, choosing rather to keep an open mind. Yet both sides are the same in that they tend toward the networks which broadcast in accordance with their viewpoints and opinions. The only interesting thing I take from that is that liberals aren't as open-minded as they pretend to be.
Probably Slashdot stories about Amazon denying hosting to Wikileaks harmed more the company than the combined Anonymous attack. There is no firewall against social attacks.
Except most people probably agree with Amazon's decision. It probably helped them. Surely you have noticed that Slashdot is not very representative of what we might call the "general population," falling somewhere to the left of where most people are, at least in the United States, Amazon's largest market.
It's becoming ever so popular to complain about ICANN or otherwise feel that a decentralized internet is the solution to our problems. I'm not a prophet, but even I can see the future on this one. The ones who will benefit the most from a completely decentralized DNS and/or P2P system are the ones who control the biggest botnets within the network. The rest of us will be so inundated with garbage that the internet will essentially become completely useless.
That's not to say that ICANN and especially the RIAA et al. aren't problems, but I don't see this becoming a viable solution. So I'm a skeptic, for now.
And you completed the circle by calling the other side a kind of religious zealot. Maybe we can all do a bit better and leave out the characterizations, don't you think?
Err, the GP didn't make any generalization about the "other side" unless you presume the "other side" is inherently prone to ignoring the valid distinction between skeptics and deniers (the latter having an agenda of their own). The GP isn't saying anything about any side. He's just saying that skepticism (good, healthy) is not the same thing as denial (bad, unproductive), and he's clearly correct.
I'm sorry, but it really pisses me off to see someone's hard work being taken off the market because something similar was released in 1980. Take away the copyright protection, and let Namco compete with the OP to make the best clone of the 1980 game!
Far be it from me to poopoo someone else's "hard work," but a pac man clone? Really? Not just a remix, but an exact replica. His "hard work" would have been better spent on a game with some originality, then maybe he could exert some copyright enforcement of his own.
I guess I don't have too much of a problem with copyright law and games. Gameplay isn't copyrightable, but artwork and sound are. All he had to do was mix it up a bit.
It's called hope and change. Or something like that.
If the government threatened to shut down your business because you were supporting Wikileaks, you would probably cave too. The real issue here, as always, is government pressure and the power of the state.
Except the government isn't threatening any company in the way you're describing. Companies are distancing themselves from Wikileaks for PR reasons, not because there is any possibility that they will get shut down (by the US government, anyway).
All this enhancement sounds great, but I wish they would concentrate on compatibility with web sites first. There are too many sites that don't work well with Chrome and I am tired of getting warnings from popular sites that warn me about running an unsupported browser.
Any examples you can come up with, because I have no idea what you're talking about. WebKit is extremely compatible (it's one of the most popular HTML engines out there), and I don't know of any incompatibilities with Chrome's Javascript VM either, so... I guess I'll just have to call BS.
But I suppose "criminal fleeing from armed police and failing to respond to a stop order gets shot" isn't in line with your bleeding heart.
I've never heard of this story before, but police shot a man who was otherwise posing no threat to anyone else, just because he was fleeing? That doesn't sound very nice to me. Those cops would be suspended immediately and facing prosecution if they were in America. But, like I said, I've never heard of the story. Hopefully this is not what happened.
Lets say your ISP assigns you 10.0.32.128. Now, kindly tell me how you plan to connect to your home PC from work.
I'm obviously assuming a local NAT that you can configure. If your ISP won't give you at least one "real" address, then you're obviously screwed. Under the assumption that most ISP's provide real addresses to their clients (which is, AFAIK, true), I believe I'm correct in saying that NAT has been a decent bridge.
(What is actually surprising is that the internet still hasn't widely adopted IP6, and ISPs are now turning to ludicrous measures - NAT - to keep avoiding what makes sense.)
Dare I ask... why, pray tell, do you consider NAT to be a "ludicrous" measure? It seems like a pretty sturdy bridge to me. IPv6's slow adoption isn't really surprising to me; it has required code modifications across the board on numerous levels. It has been more of an undertaking than most people realize. On the other hand, apart from a little NAT-trickery to allow hole-punching (which, admittedly, should be have been put in a standard), the large majority of legacy apps continue to work under NAT like they did before. Not so with IPv6, which has been a lot more work to implement. Fortunately, most of that work is behind us, and IPv6 will "soon" be commonplace.
Yes , I agree about the syntax. Instead of creating a nice consistent extension to the C language as Bjarn did with C++ (albeit with some kludges) , Obj-C really looks like someone tossed a completely different language into C because it was easier than making an effort to actually extend C nicely, and then didn't even bother to stir the resulting dogs dinner.
I laughed at this post, but then I realized you might not be trying to be funny. As a C++ programmer myself, I've never heard anyone referring to C++ in a serious way as a "nice consistent extension to the C language." C++ is an absolute monster. It's completely inconsistent in many ways and is riddled with so many "gotchas" that it takes years until you should be able to call yourself an expert. That's a long time in the context of learning a new way to describe what a computer should do.
I haven't programmed in Objective-C in years, but I do remember that it is far simpler to learn than C++. It adds comparatively little to the C language, as far as syntax goes; basically just the [] message-passing construct and the @ keywords. I think Objective-C "2.0" may have distinguished itself a little more, but I haven't looked into it.
Anyway, hopefully you're being funny. Otherwise, we have completely different opinions. Objective-C seems to have extended C in a way that is much nicer and cleaner than C++ IMO.
Yuri: what's the difference between microsoft and russia? Sasha: One's a ruthless totalitarian empire bent on world domination, with millions of informers, riddled with organized crime. The other's a computer company.
Isn't that backwards?
Reading the font is also made easier by virtue of it being a text many of us would recognize. Our minds would fill in the gaps, even if it wasn't completely legible. I suspect it would be harder to read a paragraph with font that small if the text was completely unfamiliar.
I wonder if nicing the kernel compilation would have had a similar effect....
Probably, but that's not really the point. A user should rarely (if at all) have to use nice on a desktop, because a desktop operating system is supposed to be able to keep input latency low, always. That is the reason BeOS had such incredible perceived speed, but some "modern" operating systems are still struggling with this feat. I mean, it's 2010 and we've had 25+ years to work this out. Cursor stuttering and choppy video should have been a completely solved problem by now.
undereducated old fogeys that are only there to help their personal interests
As opposed to young, educated politicians who just want to help the country? No. "Young" politicians are also there to help their personal interests, and many of them are better at it than the old fogies.
Or you can just install CentOS which is Red Hat minus the artwork and the word "Red Hat" like most of us. I find Linux generally stable/reliable enough that I don't need support (I can't even remember my last Linux server crash, it's been years and stuff "just works").
That's fine and dandy if it's just your own server hooked up to your cable, but when it matters, going without support isn't a realistic option no matter how good the software is.
That's a nice list of scripting languages you've got there. And don't get me wrong, scripting languages are nice. However, if speed is an issue, Lua's never going to cut it in the same way that Java does.
Actually, there is no intrinsic property of scripting languages that make them slower than Java. Obviously it mostly depends on the implementation of the virtual machine:
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64/which-programming-languages-are-fastest.php
For example, take a look at this list. LuaJIT actually seems to be quite competitive with the fastest of the languages. So, no, I can't agree with you. If speed is an issue, your choices may be limited to those languages which have just-in-time compilation for your processor type, but it certainly doesn't mean that Lua et al. can never match the likes of Java.