They do it when they don't realise 5% of the room (or whatever it is) are, in fact, gay or bisexual, because most non-straights are very quiet about it, because it isn't universally accepted as ok, so they end up insulting people unintentionally.
You know, it's funny, the very same people which cannot make it past a word being used in a context other than the offensive one they consistently find are the people which use words like asshole, moron, cretin, and other words which descend from far more offensive roots.
Perhaps etymology in small doses would cure people of their insistance that using slang is offensive. I can call you a bastard, and nobody thinks I'm challenging your parents' marriage license.
The secret to that 95% of straight and gay people getting on with life without being torn apart by South Park is that we realize that almost nobody actually gives a half a damn. You shouldn't either. Stop being fifteen.
The technology to make Star Trek:TOS and even ST:TNG a reality has existed for years (except for maybe antigravity).
Oh, well, sure. I mean, I've got that nacelle buried under old tires out back; if someone would just lend me a few magnetic bottles full of antimatter that I could pipe through a second-phase crystal into matter to create the warp field, I'd zap down to the CostCo and bring them back their supply plus some spares for their trouble. Besides, I need some new force coils for the field generators for the quarantine array; Timmy's got the Rigellian Fever, and we can't afford any of those fancy hyposprays. So we put him in suspended animation, because there's a little magnetic field near his hypothalamus, and we're waiting to see if it's a parasite or a dimensional traveller or a nanite supervirus, or maybe if the damn scanner's just on the fritz again.
Wouldn't want to do it in the roundabout; the shields aren't strong enough to stand up to those disrupters the hoodlums have down in the East End. Why, they'd transport on board and force me to synthesize food and electronics for them until my dilithium matrix was depleted! And without one of those, how am I supposed to detect the heavy neutrino emissions to avoid cloaked ships, or time travellers, or Jehovah's Space Witnesses?
Yep, everything's ready except the antigravity. That elusive centripedal force. When will we catch you, centripedal? When?
I almost went as far as to play the asshole and point out how often we see people in the shower, until I realized that even I don't want to be the guy that corrects cast members.
And to think that I chuckled to myself and thought "nobody would confuse a research list with a dictionary" when I read this plain as day on the front page:
This list is not meant to be a comprehensive glossary of SF terminology: it is only a list of those terms that the OED has a particular need to have researched. Certain terms have been excluded from this list because we know beyond doubt that we have the earliest possible example, the circumstances of the coinage being known. These include dalek, robot, and grok. There is no need to point out the absence of these words. We also maintain a separate list for terms we are considering entering; from time to time we move items from this list to one of the main lists.
In other words, without the Star-Trek script that illustrates the use of the term "cloaking device"
And we all know that that'll never happen, because after being written by Roddenbaricon Antaeus and passed around the hands of royalty, they ended up in a church where the vellum was scraped and resued folded to make palimpsests, and then lost in a Mosque in northern Iran for 800 years, poached by a dishonest German archaeologists, sold on the black market, and ended up found in somebody's grandfather's book collection in northern Champagne, and that there's totally no way that you could buy them at Waldenbooks for $30, no way at all, don't be ridiculous.
look at how much "science" of today would have been dismissed as "fiction" 100 years ago.
Hardly any.
Bwahaha. Dark matter / dark energy. A fundamental limit on speed. Branes. Particles carrying force. Quantuum Mechanics as a whole provides literally dozens of examples; quantuum branching as a basis for single-state computation is an/existing//tool/ which would have been dismissed as (ahem) poppycock back as recently as when we were figuring out nuclear weapons.
Sedna and Nemesis. Cloning and genetic manipulation, either for warfare or medicine. Holographic displays (which were used in video games as early as 1988.) Bug nerves on circuits. Food supplements for smarter children. Waste generating electricity. Yarn spun from microtubular chains of carbon, so strong that it can lift things into space despite its own enormous weight.
Life under the frozen crust of europa, probes drilling for clue, fears of contamination of alien biospheres with terrestrial organisms. Using greenhouse gasses to terraform mars. Finding the mutations in the genome that seperated us from the apes. Watching the natural geysers super-erupt and destroy whole states. Transparent versions of traditionally opaque building materials and their impacts on design.
Theories on extraplanetary events causing domestic tragedies. Flexible monitors on low power consumption used as wallpaper. Cryogenic reanimation. Commercial exploitation of space. Mechanical neuroelectrical signal correction.
Oh, and need I point out that the robots which we were all smugly pointing out wouldn't be real household tools for another century in the 90s, which seemed so tired and ridiculous a concept in the 80s largely due to its overuse on cartoons in the 70s are currently being made by Sony, Hitachi, Honda and Toyota, and they're starting to do things like reliably respond to voice commands, to carry things, and other good old-people support tasks?
Those are almost all either classic Sci-Fi plots or things that would have been dismissed as ridiculous before their discovery (especially the speed limit at C.) And that's just slashdot science this week. Is it science you don't know well, or science fiction?
Sorry. It can address 256 megabits. 256 megabits is 32 megabytes. The AGB can address ROMs in the range 0x08000000..0x9AFFFFFF, which is mirrored with potentially different rom timings at 0xa0..bf and c0..df . The 1GB flash carts that companies like visoly and UFO sell are for storing multiple images on a single cart, whose sole use is therefore obviously piracy; that's why they need to be reflashed after stopping working every so often, because certain write patterns cause write triggers in the carts, and because the header software (which contains hardware bank switching and reboot code to facilitate game swapping) occasionally needs to be reloaded as a result.
Nintendo has indeed gotten quite a bit of use out of that old pin layout, inasfaras using it for realtime clocks in games like harvest moon, physical alignment detection like kirby's pinball, coprocessors like a variety of games; that said, there are no AGB games on the market which bank switch to extend their address range. Nintendo restricts the rom size of games, and generally places their own limit at double that. Remember that the larger ROM is, the more expensive it is to produce; and that because the screen is small, bitmaps are also small. Generally, well-written program code isn't huge. The gameboy limit of 32meg is rarely a challenge; getting things into RAM is usually the far more significant issue (another ingenious use of the pinout of N's.)
Well, sure. But to put things in perspective, there's never been a cart for any home system which could approach CD capacities, let alone DVD capacities, for under $20 in production costs alone (that watermark being set with the extreme example of SD cards, which enjoy an unreasonably large manufacturing base, for the NGage.)
You have to *scrimp* to put things into a cart-based game. The Gameboy Advance caps at 32 megabytes. I remember games bigger than that being distributed on floppys (unnatural selection, for example, wouldn't fit on the AGB, and it's from like 92 or so.)
Yes, the CD games are the same price as cart games. Yes, the manufacturer makes a few extra bucks due to the manufacturing margin difference. And if the size of the two media was equivalent, that'd be a sensible comparison. Instead, the media that they're profiting from is *bare* *minimum* 20 times larger than a cart, and you're not paying any extra.
The main advantage of a CD is its storage capacity but all we've gotten out of that are boring cut scenes
The file listing the vector animation points for Kazuya alone in Tekken Tag is over 2/3 the maximum size of a Gameboy Advance cart, and includes no graphics. You sure about that?
I recommend you pick up Oddworld 2: Abe's Exodus. Now there's a game that doesn't waste the space. Holy crap is that game long.
Well, sure, except that the PS2 Linux kit includes the PS2 hard drive.
I think the difference is that modding an x-box to be developed on is way cheaper than modding a PS2 to be developed on. Also, it's easier to develop for the XBox by a fair sight; it can be developed for with modern tools, and there are easily-found leaked SDKs that integrate closely with strong IDEs, whereas Sony's libraries are under control, they expect you to develop in GCC, and the hardware in the PS2 is famous for scaring some established PS1 developers.
Wouldn't that be great? Then, we'd all be running NeXTstep caliber machines...:)
You seem to be implying that everyone should just make an exception for Windows because its Windows
No, not at all. The parent poster assumed that the problem could not be an app because the OS should protect from things like that. I was merely pointing out the more realistic situation wherein we all know Windows isn't stable enough to prevent things like that.
but to me that just sounds like an apology for MS's incompetence
Who's apologizing? Don't jump to conclusions. I was simply reminding the parent that MS' stability could not be taken for granted as he was attempting to do. If anything, it's out of hand damning MS.
Window's instability IS NOT NORMAL for an operating system!
Hm. This depends a little on whether you want "normal" to mean "typical" or "ideal." It's certainly not ideal, and in many cases not even acceptable, but typical? Most OSes crash, until the recent batch of unices, BSD and Plan 9 aside as they're too old to call recent. I'd go as far as to say that no, Lixun, QNX, GBSD, etc are the abnormal ones, because they're doing something other OSes are failing to achieve.
How I got modded offtopic I'll never know. Moderators don't have a clue, it seems.
How you can call flash passive is beyond me, when one of its most popular uses is as a lightweight platform for game development. As far as being purely image driven, I'll grant you that people tend to break out flash when what they want is image content. That said, that's certainly not the only use, or PHP wouldn't have an on-the-fly flash generation module (in fact, it has two.)
Why you challenge the format's openness is also sort of a mystery to me. Macromedia opened the format to the general public years ago.
As far as why they didn't go with Dreamweaver, Flash is a more popular product. It's a safer testing ground. If things don't go as expected, their losses aren't that big. I wouldn't be at all surprised, should the flash port go well, to see the rest of the tool suite follow suit.
The space western is an old genre; most of our early variety television adaptations of science fiction were fond of it (the outer limits, the twilight zone, star trek and so on.) It was appropriate: westerns were still common, and it was a new frontier, exactly the topic of the westerns: exploring dangerous land, bumping into things you don't understand, trading and having sex with them if you could and shooting them if you couldn't.
And whereas it's sick in reality, god, it's fun on TV, especially if some of the bastards are green.
Bwahaha. You ever used MS' XSL support? How about their JVM? What about their notion of SQL? Their C++ was so bad that they had to buy a compiler from EDG and an STL from (dinkum, maybe? i forget.)
What Microsoft is doing is polarizing everyone to expect Microsoft's implementation to be the norm, so that they can deploy a shitty SVG, then an alternative which is of usable quality, so that they continue to dominate the web and that web standards don't propose a threat to their software lines, especially Office (which is now under dire threat.)
BTW, a number of OSes, notably NeXT (mourn!) used Display Postscript successfully.
Wrong. The Meyerweb article is a way to show how to use CSS to approximate complex shapes with rectangles and corners.
Can't see the difference? Try rendering the golden spiral, which is relatively straightforward in SVG and Flash (especially under Ming.)
Meyer's tricks are great for getting seemingly impossible things under current support, but with proper support for what should be simple things, people like Meyer can start aiming at wholly new levels of obscenely weird web page design.
I presume you mean rendered into a binary form as opposed to the source being stored in a binary format instead of XML? How can you not? It can be scaled to any resolution
You seem to have confused the difference between markup and binary with the difference between bitmap and vector. You can have vector in markup (svg) or in binary (flash); you can have bitmap in binary (most image formats), or markup (any of those cutesy no-img image-as-table generators).
What the parent poster was considering was the size increase in markup versus binary, the penalty in space we pay for it to be human readable. I'm with the parent; if SVG doesn't have an alternate binary format, its bandwidth costs will kill it dead.
A 700 page spec that reuses W3C specs still beats Flash, a complex binary format that nobody supports.
Are you on crack? *Everybody* supports flash, and it was already the defacto before they open sourced their format in 2000. Also, that format is quite elegant; it's not complex if you understand 2D vector graphics well. (This would be like calling Mathematica elegant; it's a fairly minimal implementation for the amount of math it does.)
Yes, and the same functionality is present in Flash (when it isn't, as in MathML, it's a deficiency).
"Huhuh, it's all there, and when it's not it's a failure." Um. MathML doesn't need to be in Flash. Flash's text tools already encompass placement well enough to handle math. It would be useless cruft, especially given that some of those no programs which support flash are actually designed to turn MathML into flash.
Now, when you try to do your own implementation of Flash, you have to start from scratch, trying to implement Macromedia's counterpart to ECMA Script, SMIL, etc. How is that better?
Who said it was better? The parent poster was just noting the difficulties involved in making a compliant SVG renderer. In the meantime, there is no Flash counterpart to SMIL, and it's a damn silly thing to call ActionScript a counterpart to ECMAScript.
This is like, in response to observations to the difficulties of deploying a hydrogen car fleet, saying "Well yes, but in order to support a gasoline system you need twice the infrastructure in tanks and pumps." Whereas that may be true, the important part is that that's already done; you're comparing an incomplete investment to a complete investment and suggesting that the incomplete investment is cheaper.
Besides, Flash with all of its bits and pieces (except the mp3 player, admittedly) is simpler than SVG-sans-dependencies alone; the argument just doesn't doesn't hold water. Perhaps you should go read the flash spec. It's actually quite a bit of fun to script in Flash; even though it's binary, things like Ming, which has native PHP library access, are simply put a joy to use.
When you roll in Flash's elegant resource sharing model, the flexibility of ActionScript, and the high performance of the primary distribution Flash renderer, you begin to realize that Flash isn't so stunningly successful because it did things wrongly. Please remember that flash and shockwave used to have *lots* of competition, and they weren't the first ones on the block.
modern vector graphics format based on XML, something that the world really does need
Agreed and disagreed. I agree with you, that an XML-based vector graphics language would be a powerful tool. However, for something like vector graphics, which is element intense, it is my strongly held belief that XML is far too verbose to offer efficient distribution of large files. If SVG attains a native compressor/decompressor pair, if compression in HTTP starts taking on alternate algorithms for alternate tasks, or if we see a binary compiled form of SVG, *then* *and* *only* *then* do I see it as a competitor to Flash, which can make complex UI interactions with high graphic precision in a handful of K.
I'll be much much more convinced when you see a converter from one to the other, or bidirectional. I wouldn't at all be surprised to see SVG end up as an intermediary language between data and representation.
You know, this is a shallow and incindiary read of what he said.
I too have a userland app that takes down what is otherwise a perfectly stable OS. I run Win2k AS at work, and IE takes it down on a fairly regular basis, whereas Mozilla (I don't use firefox) doesn't have any real problems. The machine has a hot-swap drive; under various other OSes, it's perfectly stable, even using IE.
There is some *very* subtle interaction going on between drivers. When I regress certain drivers - and it's not just one! - to their generic counterparts, then the problem goes away. Only IE and programs which embed IE ever have a problem (on a home box this would be an issue, because IE's pretty much everywhere; thankfully I rarely run things other than compilers on this machine.) I've had the issue for about six months now; I estimate I about half-understand it. If it were a bigger problem or if I had more free time, I'd probably finish hunting it down, but frankly, I save often enough that what it really is is an excuse for me to get up and stretch my legs once a week.
Now, you can come charging in with all the bright-eyed wonder, insisting that a userland app should never be able to take down an OS. In an RTOS or a mission critical OS, I'd be inclined to agree with you, but the phrase "windows or not" indicates that you know at one level just how silly what you're saying is. I mean, I have video games that kill many of my machines frequently. The fact of the matter is that Windows is too fragile (god, the plural-agreement center of my brain is flipping out) to make userland-app-can't-be-the-problem claims.
Now, I'm not suggesting it's firefox. Quite to the contrary: this sort of thing almost never happens under Firefox AFAIK, so it's certainly a rare situation. That said, you're flying off of the handle without so much as actually wondering what the real problem is. Very old Mozilla builds hose my XP machines. There's absolutely no reason to discount this as a user problem out of hand. In fact, I view that sort of dismissive attitude as both dangerous and damaging: dangerous because real bugs with a very limited source base which are being responsibly reported (well, to a degree - obviously not here, but I imagine this behavior of yours reaches into bugzilla, too) are not only being ignored but those user which have such machines are being driven away; damaging because you seriously sully the view of Mozilla as a dependable base for communications and applications, and if Mozilla is going to progress, that's where it needs to make headway.
In short, your tantrums are hurting us all, not just someone whom you've chosen to look down your nose at as a noob. I know it's sort of silly for me to stand on SlashDot asking for good behavior, but I'm going to do it anyway. Until you have a reason to suggest that it really isn't Mozilla beyond some wishy-washy observations about an ideal OS' stability, which we all know perfectly well XP is not a good candidate for, I request that you kindly sit down, shut up, and stop hurting the Mozilla project.
Now. I don't think the IT Manager is going to be so clueless as to call a warm boot a black screen; it doesn't make contextual sense besides, as a warm boot isn't a black screen for more than a half second in typical circumstances, and most people know the word reboot more readily than they know the fairly rare phrase "black screen." I think - and I could be wrong, he was admittedly quite vague - that the problem he's having, whatever its source, is actually killing the video signal. This implies problems in the video subsystem (likely a driver issue) or a video card which has entered an impossible state (certainly a driver issue.) Alternatives are a total catastrophic windows death, which are rare, but which do exist, or something weird which I'm not likely to think of without seeing the problem first hand.
Maybe give the people which see repeating behaviors a half of a quarter of a piece of a sliver of credit, huh? The accusations you make don't make much sense.
Oh, and by the way, if it were RAM or the CPU, firefox wouldn't be the only one setting it off, asshat.
Slashdot Mirror
They do it when they don't realise 5% of the room (or whatever it is) are, in fact, gay or bisexual, because most non-straights are very quiet about it, because it isn't universally accepted as ok, so they end up insulting people unintentionally.
You know, it's funny, the very same people which cannot make it past a word being used in a context other than the offensive one they consistently find are the people which use words like asshole, moron, cretin, and other words which descend from far more offensive roots.
Perhaps etymology in small doses would cure people of their insistance that using slang is offensive. I can call you a bastard, and nobody thinks I'm challenging your parents' marriage license.
The secret to that 95% of straight and gay people getting on with life without being torn apart by South Park is that we realize that almost nobody actually gives a half a damn. You shouldn't either. Stop being fifteen.
Do you realize that "faggot" used to refer to a bundle of sticks
This is a common misperception. A faggot is a bouquet garnis - it's a bundle of woody herbs, like cinnamon, thyme, and so on, not sticks.
The technology to make Star Trek:TOS and even ST:TNG a reality has existed for years (except for maybe antigravity).
Oh, well, sure. I mean, I've got that nacelle buried under old tires out back; if someone would just lend me a few magnetic bottles full of antimatter that I could pipe through a second-phase crystal into matter to create the warp field, I'd zap down to the CostCo and bring them back their supply plus some spares for their trouble. Besides, I need some new force coils for the field generators for the quarantine array; Timmy's got the Rigellian Fever, and we can't afford any of those fancy hyposprays. So we put him in suspended animation, because there's a little magnetic field near his hypothalamus, and we're waiting to see if it's a parasite or a dimensional traveller or a nanite supervirus, or maybe if the damn scanner's just on the fritz again.
Wouldn't want to do it in the roundabout; the shields aren't strong enough to stand up to those disrupters the hoodlums have down in the East End. Why, they'd transport on board and force me to synthesize food and electronics for them until my dilithium matrix was depleted! And without one of those, how am I supposed to detect the heavy neutrino emissions to avoid cloaked ships, or time travellers, or Jehovah's Space Witnesses?
Yep, everything's ready except the antigravity. That elusive centripedal force. When will we catch you, centripedal? When?
I almost went as far as to play the asshole and point out how often we see people in the shower, until I realized that even I don't want to be the guy that corrects cast members.
And to think that I chuckled to myself and thought "nobody would confuse a research list with a dictionary" when I read this plain as day on the front page:
This list is not meant to be a comprehensive glossary of SF terminology: it is only a list of those terms that the OED has a particular need to have researched. Certain terms have been excluded from this list because we know beyond doubt that we have the earliest possible example, the circumstances of the coinage being known. These include dalek, robot, and grok. There is no need to point out the absence of these words. We also maintain a separate list for terms we are considering entering; from time to time we move items from this list to one of the main lists.
If you want to be particular, morphos isn't a word at all, it's a suffix, and its most common conjugation is -morph, as in Polymorph.
In other words, without the Star-Trek script that illustrates the use of the term "cloaking device"
And we all know that that'll never happen, because after being written by Roddenbaricon Antaeus and passed around the hands of royalty, they ended up in a church where the vellum was scraped and resued folded to make palimpsests, and then lost in a Mosque in northern Iran for 800 years, poached by a dishonest German archaeologists, sold on the black market, and ended up found in somebody's grandfather's book collection in northern Champagne, and that there's totally no way that you could buy them at Waldenbooks for $30, no way at all, don't be ridiculous.
look at how much "science" of today would have been dismissed as "fiction" 100 years ago.
/existing/ /tool/ which would have been dismissed as (ahem) poppycock back as recently as when we were figuring out nuclear weapons.
Hardly any.
Bwahaha. Dark matter / dark energy. A fundamental limit on speed. Branes. Particles carrying force. Quantuum Mechanics as a whole provides literally dozens of examples; quantuum branching as a basis for single-state computation is an
Sedna and Nemesis. Cloning and genetic manipulation, either for warfare or medicine. Holographic displays (which were used in video games as early as 1988.) Bug nerves on circuits. Food supplements for smarter children. Waste generating electricity. Yarn spun from microtubular chains of carbon, so strong that it can lift things into space despite its own enormous weight.
Life under the frozen crust of europa, probes drilling for clue, fears of contamination of alien biospheres with terrestrial organisms. Using greenhouse gasses to terraform mars. Finding the mutations in the genome that seperated us from the apes. Watching the natural geysers super-erupt and destroy whole states. Transparent versions of traditionally opaque building materials and their impacts on design.
Theories on extraplanetary events causing domestic tragedies. Flexible monitors on low power consumption used as wallpaper. Cryogenic reanimation. Commercial exploitation of space. Mechanical neuroelectrical signal correction.
Oh, and need I point out that the robots which we were all smugly pointing out wouldn't be real household tools for another century in the 90s, which seemed so tired and ridiculous a concept in the 80s largely due to its overuse on cartoons in the 70s are currently being made by Sony, Hitachi, Honda and Toyota, and they're starting to do things like reliably respond to voice commands, to carry things, and other good old-people support tasks?
Those are almost all either classic Sci-Fi plots or things that would have been dismissed as ridiculous before their discovery (especially the speed limit at C.) And that's just slashdot science this week. Is it science you don't know well, or science fiction?
Eight archaeologists just rolled over in their graves.
Sorry. It can address 256 megabits. 256 megabits is 32 megabytes. The AGB can address ROMs in the range 0x08000000..0x9AFFFFFF, which is mirrored with potentially different rom timings at 0xa0..bf and c0..df . The 1GB flash carts that companies like visoly and UFO sell are for storing multiple images on a single cart, whose sole use is therefore obviously piracy; that's why they need to be reflashed after stopping working every so often, because certain write patterns cause write triggers in the carts, and because the header software (which contains hardware bank switching and reboot code to facilitate game swapping) occasionally needs to be reloaded as a result.
;)
Nintendo has indeed gotten quite a bit of use out of that old pin layout, inasfaras using it for realtime clocks in games like harvest moon, physical alignment detection like kirby's pinball, coprocessors like a variety of games; that said, there are no AGB games on the market which bank switch to extend their address range. Nintendo restricts the rom size of games, and generally places their own limit at double that. Remember that the larger ROM is, the more expensive it is to produce; and that because the screen is small, bitmaps are also small. Generally, well-written program code isn't huge. The gameboy limit of 32meg is rarely a challenge; getting things into RAM is usually the far more significant issue (another ingenious use of the pinout of N's.)
Nice try; thanks for playing.
This makes the hasty presumption that there are good XBox 1 titles that you want to keep around.
... prince of persia... um...
Prince of Persia, and
Well, sure. But to put things in perspective, there's never been a cart for any home system which could approach CD capacities, let alone DVD capacities, for under $20 in production costs alone (that watermark being set with the extreme example of SD cards, which enjoy an unreasonably large manufacturing base, for the NGage.)
You have to *scrimp* to put things into a cart-based game. The Gameboy Advance caps at 32 megabytes. I remember games bigger than that being distributed on floppys (unnatural selection, for example, wouldn't fit on the AGB, and it's from like 92 or so.)
Yes, the CD games are the same price as cart games. Yes, the manufacturer makes a few extra bucks due to the manufacturing margin difference. And if the size of the two media was equivalent, that'd be a sensible comparison. Instead, the media that they're profiting from is *bare* *minimum* 20 times larger than a cart, and you're not paying any extra.
The glass is half full.
The main advantage of a CD is its storage capacity but all we've gotten out of that are boring cut scenes
The file listing the vector animation points for Kazuya alone in Tekken Tag is over 2/3 the maximum size of a Gameboy Advance cart, and includes no graphics. You sure about that?
I recommend you pick up Oddworld 2: Abe's Exodus. Now there's a game that doesn't waste the space. Holy crap is that game long.
Well, sure, except that the PS2 Linux kit includes the PS2 hard drive.
I think the difference is that modding an x-box to be developed on is way cheaper than modding a PS2 to be developed on. Also, it's easier to develop for the XBox by a fair sight; it can be developed for with modern tools, and there are easily-found leaked SDKs that integrate closely with strong IDEs, whereas Sony's libraries are under control, they expect you to develop in GCC, and the hardware in the PS2 is famous for scaring some established PS1 developers.
Well, it *shouldn't*!
:)
Wouldn't that be great? Then, we'd all be running NeXTstep caliber machines...
You seem to be implying that everyone should just make an exception for Windows because its Windows
No, not at all. The parent poster assumed that the problem could not be an app because the OS should protect from things like that. I was merely pointing out the more realistic situation wherein we all know Windows isn't stable enough to prevent things like that.
but to me that just sounds like an apology for MS's incompetence
Who's apologizing? Don't jump to conclusions. I was simply reminding the parent that MS' stability could not be taken for granted as he was attempting to do. If anything, it's out of hand damning MS.
Window's instability IS NOT NORMAL for an operating system!
Hm. This depends a little on whether you want "normal" to mean "typical" or "ideal." It's certainly not ideal, and in many cases not even acceptable, but typical? Most OSes crash, until the recent batch of unices, BSD and Plan 9 aside as they're too old to call recent. I'd go as far as to say that no, Lixun, QNX, GBSD, etc are the abnormal ones, because they're doing something other OSes are failing to achieve.
How I got modded offtopic I'll never know. Moderators don't have a clue, it seems.
How you can call flash passive is beyond me, when one of its most popular uses is as a lightweight platform for game development. As far as being purely image driven, I'll grant you that people tend to break out flash when what they want is image content. That said, that's certainly not the only use, or PHP wouldn't have an on-the-fly flash generation module (in fact, it has two.)
Why you challenge the format's openness is also sort of a mystery to me. Macromedia opened the format to the general public years ago.
As far as why they didn't go with Dreamweaver, Flash is a more popular product. It's a safer testing ground. If things don't go as expected, their losses aren't that big. I wouldn't be at all surprised, should the flash port go well, to see the rest of the tool suite follow suit.
The show fuses sci-fi space conventions with Wild West-era characters and environments.
See also less well known things.
The space western is an old genre; most of our early variety television adaptations of science fiction were fond of it (the outer limits, the twilight zone, star trek and so on.) It was appropriate: westerns were still common, and it was a new frontier, exactly the topic of the westerns: exploring dangerous land, bumping into things you don't understand, trading and having sex with them if you could and shooting them if you couldn't.
And whereas it's sick in reality, god, it's fun on TV, especially if some of the bastards are green.
Amusingly, Pico has been dead for years. That's why we now have GNU Nano.
Yeah, you still think Thundercats was a great show up and until you actually go back and try to watch it.
Here. You'll be done with it in two hours.
Bwahaha. You ever used MS' XSL support? How about their JVM? What about their notion of SQL? Their C++ was so bad that they had to buy a compiler from EDG and an STL from (dinkum, maybe? i forget.)
What Microsoft is doing is polarizing everyone to expect Microsoft's implementation to be the norm, so that they can deploy a shitty SVG, then an alternative which is of usable quality, so that they continue to dominate the web and that web standards don't propose a threat to their software lines, especially Office (which is now under dire threat.)
BTW, a number of OSes, notably NeXT (mourn!) used Display Postscript successfully.
Wrong. The Meyerweb article is a way to show how to use CSS to approximate complex shapes with rectangles and corners.
Can't see the difference? Try rendering the golden spiral, which is relatively straightforward in SVG and Flash (especially under Ming.)
Meyer's tricks are great for getting seemingly impossible things under current support, but with proper support for what should be simple things, people like Meyer can start aiming at wholly new levels of obscenely weird web page design.
I presume you mean rendered into a binary form as opposed to the source being stored in a binary format instead of XML? How can you not? It can be scaled to any resolution
You seem to have confused the difference between markup and binary with the difference between bitmap and vector. You can have vector in markup (svg) or in binary (flash); you can have bitmap in binary (most image formats), or markup (any of those cutesy no-img image-as-table generators).
What the parent poster was considering was the size increase in markup versus binary, the penalty in space we pay for it to be human readable. I'm with the parent; if SVG doesn't have an alternate binary format, its bandwidth costs will kill it dead.
A 700 page spec that reuses W3C specs still beats Flash, a complex binary format that nobody supports.
Are you on crack? *Everybody* supports flash, and it was already the defacto before they open sourced their format in 2000. Also, that format is quite elegant; it's not complex if you understand 2D vector graphics well. (This would be like calling Mathematica elegant; it's a fairly minimal implementation for the amount of math it does.)
Yes, and the same functionality is present in Flash (when it isn't, as in MathML, it's a deficiency).
"Huhuh, it's all there, and when it's not it's a failure." Um. MathML doesn't need to be in Flash. Flash's text tools already encompass placement well enough to handle math. It would be useless cruft, especially given that some of those no programs which support flash are actually designed to turn MathML into flash.
Now, when you try to do your own implementation of Flash, you have to start from scratch, trying to implement Macromedia's counterpart to ECMA Script, SMIL, etc. How is that better?
Who said it was better? The parent poster was just noting the difficulties involved in making a compliant SVG renderer. In the meantime, there is no Flash counterpart to SMIL, and it's a damn silly thing to call ActionScript a counterpart to ECMAScript.
This is like, in response to observations to the difficulties of deploying a hydrogen car fleet, saying "Well yes, but in order to support a gasoline system you need twice the infrastructure in tanks and pumps." Whereas that may be true, the important part is that that's already done; you're comparing an incomplete investment to a complete investment and suggesting that the incomplete investment is cheaper.
Besides, Flash with all of its bits and pieces (except the mp3 player, admittedly) is simpler than SVG-sans-dependencies alone; the argument just doesn't doesn't hold water. Perhaps you should go read the flash spec. It's actually quite a bit of fun to script in Flash; even though it's binary, things like Ming, which has native PHP library access, are simply put a joy to use.
When you roll in Flash's elegant resource sharing model, the flexibility of ActionScript, and the high performance of the primary distribution Flash renderer, you begin to realize that Flash isn't so stunningly successful because it did things wrongly. Please remember that flash and shockwave used to have *lots* of competition, and they weren't the first ones on the block.
modern vector graphics format based on XML, something that the world really does need
Agreed and disagreed. I agree with you, that an XML-based vector graphics language would be a powerful tool. However, for something like vector graphics, which is element intense, it is my strongly held belief that XML is far too verbose to offer efficient distribution of large files. If SVG attains a native compressor/decompressor pair, if compression in HTTP starts taking on alternate algorithms for alternate tasks, or if we see a binary compiled form of SVG, *then* *and* *only* *then* do I see it as a competitor to Flash, which can make complex UI interactions with high graphic precision in a handful of K.
I'll be much much more convinced when you see a converter from one to the other, or bidirectional. I wouldn't at all be surprised to see SVG end up as an intermediary language between data and representation.
But the future has surprised us all before...
You know, this is a shallow and incindiary read of what he said.
I too have a userland app that takes down what is otherwise a perfectly stable OS. I run Win2k AS at work, and IE takes it down on a fairly regular basis, whereas Mozilla (I don't use firefox) doesn't have any real problems. The machine has a hot-swap drive; under various other OSes, it's perfectly stable, even using IE.
There is some *very* subtle interaction going on between drivers. When I regress certain drivers - and it's not just one! - to their generic counterparts, then the problem goes away. Only IE and programs which embed IE ever have a problem (on a home box this would be an issue, because IE's pretty much everywhere; thankfully I rarely run things other than compilers on this machine.) I've had the issue for about six months now; I estimate I about half-understand it. If it were a bigger problem or if I had more free time, I'd probably finish hunting it down, but frankly, I save often enough that what it really is is an excuse for me to get up and stretch my legs once a week.
Now, you can come charging in with all the bright-eyed wonder, insisting that a userland app should never be able to take down an OS. In an RTOS or a mission critical OS, I'd be inclined to agree with you, but the phrase "windows or not" indicates that you know at one level just how silly what you're saying is. I mean, I have video games that kill many of my machines frequently. The fact of the matter is that Windows is too fragile (god, the plural-agreement center of my brain is flipping out) to make userland-app-can't-be-the-problem claims.
Now, I'm not suggesting it's firefox. Quite to the contrary: this sort of thing almost never happens under Firefox AFAIK, so it's certainly a rare situation. That said, you're flying off of the handle without so much as actually wondering what the real problem is. Very old Mozilla builds hose my XP machines. There's absolutely no reason to discount this as a user problem out of hand. In fact, I view that sort of dismissive attitude as both dangerous and damaging: dangerous because real bugs with a very limited source base which are being responsibly reported (well, to a degree - obviously not here, but I imagine this behavior of yours reaches into bugzilla, too) are not only being ignored but those user which have such machines are being driven away; damaging because you seriously sully the view of Mozilla as a dependable base for communications and applications, and if Mozilla is going to progress, that's where it needs to make headway.
In short, your tantrums are hurting us all, not just someone whom you've chosen to look down your nose at as a noob. I know it's sort of silly for me to stand on SlashDot asking for good behavior, but I'm going to do it anyway. Until you have a reason to suggest that it really isn't Mozilla beyond some wishy-washy observations about an ideal OS' stability, which we all know perfectly well XP is not a good candidate for, I request that you kindly sit down, shut up, and stop hurting the Mozilla project.
Now. I don't think the IT Manager is going to be so clueless as to call a warm boot a black screen; it doesn't make contextual sense besides, as a warm boot isn't a black screen for more than a half second in typical circumstances, and most people know the word reboot more readily than they know the fairly rare phrase "black screen." I think - and I could be wrong, he was admittedly quite vague - that the problem he's having, whatever its source, is actually killing the video signal. This implies problems in the video subsystem (likely a driver issue) or a video card which has entered an impossible state (certainly a driver issue.) Alternatives are a total catastrophic windows death, which are rare, but which do exist, or something weird which I'm not likely to think of without seeing the problem first hand.
Maybe give the people which see repeating behaviors a half of a quarter of a piece of a sliver of credit, huh? The accusations you make don't make much sense.
Oh, and by the way, if it were RAM or the CPU, firefox wouldn't be the only one setting it off, asshat.
Makes you wonder if anyone besides you and I realize that that's not totally random, or would recognize "You killed my cabbage! Negotiations are off!"