It's naive, I know. But wouldn't it be nice to have a medium which was:
world-wide
cross-cultural
accessible to everyone
wasn't yet another avenue for targetted marketting.
Bring back the text-based (not ASCII!) Internet. Let's embrace Unicode, open standards and technologies designed by intelligent people thinking hard and collaborating to produce a substrate for a world-wide society for this the new millenium. GIFs can't be translated. Streaming animations won't animate the text-only terminal. Proprietry protocols are a great way to lock in monopolies of information, which leads to the advertising drivel that constitutes most TV and radio. Sometimes graphics are the best tool for the presentation of information. They're not the best way to display text content.
I hope I'm preaching to the converted, but all too often I see posts from people advocating the use of MSIE-targetted web pages (for example), or claiming that they shouldn't have to accomodate those people who 'can't afford' a real computer. It's much more important than that.
Never before has there been a chance to connect so great a proportion of the world's population together. Let's do it right - and keep it open and accessible. Let's educate people to use the 'net, not dumb down the 'net to the moronic standards that dominate our other media.
If you're a University library, you'll need to get the big name journals where a lot of important research is being published. They simply can't afford not to, without abandoning their academic function. Researchers can't afford not to have their papers published in the big name journals - if they don't, there is less chance people will read it, and less chance readers will trust the peer-review process.
Publishers then rub their hands in glee. Article authors don't get royalties - instead, in many fields, they themselves pay to have an item published. With electronic distribution, the publishers certainly aren't spending much money. Bits are cheap, and practically free to reproduce. So why do the prices of jounals increase by over 10% per year?
There are some initiatives to provide online journals from within the academic community itself. As the financial pressure increases, these will of course gain recognition and increase in number. The rise of pre-print servers is another nail in the publishers' coffins. This seems like a last clutch at maintaining their obscene margins for a few more years. In the meantime, it is of course libraries and the academics who use them that suffer.
Microsoft need only make a small change - a single character - and simultaneously sidestep the trademark problem while building on brand recognition.
Everyone knows a game console should be uncomplicated and straightforward. It should be simple. It should be intuitive. It should be something your mother can use.
Oh, stay away from the Ultra 5. When Sun went IDE, things went down hill very quickly. Disk to disk copy taking 100% processor utilization?! Not good. Sun's low end offerings have become increasingly dodgy in recent years, at least relative to the PC market. Low quality screens, subpar performance.
Higher-end Sun hardware is very nice, and it's what they're good at. Unless you really need an all-Sun environment, just skip their bottom end machines entirely.
ah! I had no idea the handling was done on the motherboard side. In those applications where some device pretends to be a floppy, are the devices limited then to the slow data rate we see with floppies? Or can they transfer at a faster rate (even if it's not in the same league as USB1, say)?
Most will agree that the floppy ought to be dead. Slow transfer rates, fragile medium, low capacity. This latest invention seems to address the last, only.
Yet there is a 3.5" format medium that stores 1.3GB, is about as fast as a Hard disk from 1995, and survives casual drops and stray magnetic fields. It's magneto-optical.
The only downside to MO, is its price. The latest and greatest 3.5" format drives will cost around US$400. But it really deserves to be the small, portable data storage medium of choice. That no one has even mentioned it yet (while bringing up DVD-R, CD-R, etc.) demonstrates how little marketting the devices have had outside of Japan. Perhaps if PC manufacturers would start offering it as an option (like Zip was for a while), it would take off, prices would come down, and it could gain the ubiqiuity that will be necessary for a floppy replacement.
IIRC, ever since the hatchet job done on Nausicaa was made known to Studio Ghibli, they have refused to license their productions without a guarantee that there would be no re-editing of the material.
For much more concrete information, it would be worth having a browse at the comprehensive Miyazaki Hayao fan website.
Strom Riders... wasn't that hot I thought. Great disappointment after the great wu xia films of the 80s and early 90s. It really did look like the director was substituting computer graphics effects for good, tight choreography.
I'm eagerly looking forward to Crouching Tiger though:)
No IT-Manager with a half a brain would frown upon buying new machines every year (or even every few months) for budget reasons, while losing thousands of $ because the programmers aren't working at top-efficiency on computers which don't support the best development tools.
Therein lies the rub. A disturbingly large number of IT-managers have less than half a brain. Besides, time wasted is not time paid for if it's unpaid overtime.
(Two years since working for that company, and still bitter! On a possibly unrelated note, check out fatbabies for game industry goss.
'Bundles' seem to be a formalized example of a common Unix system administration practice. My Unix admin experience is pretty much limited to the University environment, but in these situations at least, typically any 3rd party software is manhandled into its own directory, labelled with version numbers, and then made a part of the system with the absolute minimum number of symlinks (this is of course much easier if one has the source! many commercial packages don't play nice and want to extend their hooks into every nook and cranny.)
One immediate advantage is that packages can be exported over the network or easily rsynced between machines, allowing for much more straight-forward software updates and distribution. Appropriate use of configure's exec-prefix, localstatedir and such makes this sort of configuration a breeze for packages which use configure:)
Everytime I wish to update a piece of software on my home machine(s) that was installed off the distribution as an RPM, it is installed in such a manner and the old RPM removed. RPM database corruption does happen, and it really sucks. My home system is now in mid-migration to Linux From Scratch, which should allow the avoidance of RPM problems entirely.
Using the right tool for the job is of course
good sense. However one might also wish to
avoid the Windows operating system and other
Microsoft software for ethical reasons. Just as
some people are motivated to buy other goods
with the greater environment in mind (recycled paper, etc.)
some do not wish to support a company which has
acted so dishonestly and caused such damage in
the field of computing.
That's fine if you're fill-rate limited, but if instead you're bus-limited, it's a waste. I can't speak for the PS2, but on the PC platform, saturating PCI or AGP with geometry data can be an issue on a fast machine at high frame rates. Not sending back-facing polygons can help dramatically.
It's a shame that DirectPlay simply Did Not Work until version 6.1a. To clarify this statement: all the bits of DirectPlay that weren't essentially wrappers over a socket-like interface, were too buggy to use. I believe 6.1a finally did mostly work.
The problem is that a good half of DirectPlay is abstracting over something that doesn't need to be abstracted over. It's not like each network card needs to be addressed in its own particular way from the application point of view. This is already handled by the operating system.
As an API, it's also very poorly designed, almost completetely lacking in orthoganality or layer distinction, and having some particularly odd choices of abstraction.
Of course, the most important failing of DirectPlay is that it is platform specific; there is no reason for a closed networking protocol - if you're talking to another machine it shouldn't matter what operating system it is running. DirectPlay essentially forces all participants to be Windows 9x/NT machines. For massively multiplayer games in particular, it's very possible that you don't want your servers running on NT. Further, it means one can't release a game for multiple platforms and have them talk to each other, or the same server.
I'd still recommend that a game developer avoid DirectPlay entirely, and roll their own protocol instead.
I had to decide between making this page look good for the vast majority of viewers, or making it be readable by the miniscule minority of you stuck in the 70s. Those of you in the retro contingent lost. Sorry.
jwz may be able to code - but that doesn't mean that he necessarily has any other redeeming features. His website ('[USEMAP]') and newspostings all seem to indicate a rarely matched level of arrogance and self-importance. If only he had less of a clue, it would be very easy to dismiss him totally.
The only problem with sending multiple packets is the tradeoff in bandwidth - the fifty odd bytes of header means that sending 100-byte packets instead of 400-byte packets uses bandwidth only 75% as efficiently.
The extra header information also adds delay in and of itself, so there does come a point of diminishing returns.
Over PPP, over a high quality link, TCP will be faster and have less latency than UDP, due to the wonders of header compression. The address and header information in a TCP packet that's part of an already established connection gets compressed down to a measly 6 bytes (this can be done because the PPP peers share state.)
Compression schemes could be used to provide similar header compression for UDP as it is used for games and such, and of course one could talk different but better suited to gaming protocols over IP (e.g. connection-based unreliable, unordered datagrams; connection-based reliable ordered datagrams.) The problem is of course that it's not so easy to go and rewrite the IP stacks of all these machines, or fiddle with their PPP code. This is where something like PowerPlay - with the backing of large companies - will be useful.
Hmm, there might actually be some way to do strange things with MS Winsock ver.2 to extend it to support other protocols dynamically - need to check the docs.
I may have my dates mixed up, but the Acorn RISC OS has been around for a long time - version 1 was the operating system released with the first Acorn Archimedes in 1987. Does this predate MIPS RISC/os?
It's commonly understood that the so called 'fifth' Star Trek movie was a clever hoax; and so successful in fact that the official movie releases skipped 'V' entirely in order to avoid confusion.
To clarify: There _is_ no Start Trek: V 'Final Frontier'. It was just a dream. A bad dream. Probably brought on by too much pizza. Really.
Is something still a trade secret if it has been reverse engineered? I thought this was the trade off between patenting and keeping something a trade secret. Surely they can't have it both ways?
Slashdot Mirror
It's naive, I know. But wouldn't it be nice to have a medium which was:
Bring back the text-based (not ASCII!) Internet. Let's embrace Unicode, open standards and technologies designed by intelligent people thinking hard and collaborating to produce a substrate for a world-wide society for this the new millenium. GIFs can't be translated. Streaming animations won't animate the text-only terminal. Proprietry protocols are a great way to lock in monopolies of information, which leads to the advertising drivel that constitutes most TV and radio. Sometimes graphics are the best tool for the presentation of information. They're not the best way to display text content.
I hope I'm preaching to the converted, but all too often I see posts from people advocating the use of MSIE-targetted web pages (for example), or claiming that they shouldn't have to accomodate those people who 'can't afford' a real computer. It's much more important than that.
Never before has there been a chance to connect so great a proportion of the world's population together. Let's do it right - and keep it open and accessible. Let's educate people to use the 'net, not dumb down the 'net to the moronic standards that dominate our other media.
We don't need a stupid society.
If you're a University library, you'll need to get the big name journals where a lot of important research is being published. They simply can't afford not to, without abandoning their academic function. Researchers can't afford not to have their papers published in the big name journals - if they don't, there is less chance people will read it, and less chance readers will trust the peer-review process.
Publishers then rub their hands in glee. Article authors don't get royalties - instead, in many fields, they themselves pay to have an item published. With electronic distribution, the publishers certainly aren't spending much money. Bits are cheap, and practically free to reproduce. So why do the prices of jounals increase by over 10% per year?
There are some initiatives to provide online journals from within the academic community itself. As the financial pressure increases, these will of course gain recognition and increase in number. The rise of pre-print servers is another nail in the publishers' coffins. This seems like a last clutch at maintaining their obscene margins for a few more years. In the meantime, it is of course libraries and the academics who use them that suffer.
Microsoft need only make a small change - a single character - and simultaneously sidestep the trademark problem while building on brand recognition.
Everyone knows a game console should be uncomplicated and straightforward. It should be simple. It should be intuitive. It should be something your mother can use.
It should be called ... X-BOB.
Oh, stay away from the Ultra 5. When Sun went IDE, things went down hill very quickly. Disk to disk copy taking 100% processor utilization?! Not good. Sun's low end offerings have become increasingly dodgy in recent years, at least relative to the PC market. Low quality screens, subpar performance.
Higher-end Sun hardware is very nice, and it's what they're good at. Unless you really need an all-Sun environment, just skip their bottom end machines entirely.
ah! I had no idea the handling was done on the motherboard side. In those applications where some device pretends to be a floppy, are the devices limited then to the slow data rate we see with floppies? Or can they transfer at a faster rate (even if it's not in the same league as USB1, say)?
Most will agree that the floppy ought to be dead. Slow transfer rates, fragile medium, low capacity. This latest invention seems to address the last, only.
Yet there is a 3.5" format medium that stores 1.3GB, is about as fast as a Hard disk from 1995, and survives casual drops and stray magnetic fields. It's magneto-optical.
The only downside to MO, is its price. The latest and greatest 3.5" format drives will cost around US$400. But it really deserves to be the small, portable data storage medium of choice. That no one has even mentioned it yet (while bringing up DVD-R, CD-R, etc.) demonstrates how little marketting the devices have had outside of Japan. Perhaps if PC manufacturers would start offering it as an option (like Zip was for a while), it would take off, prices would come down, and it could gain the ubiqiuity that will be necessary for a floppy replacement.
They're also shiny and will enhance your nest.
Ask Slashdot: Is KtB a moron or a troll? Does it matter?
IIRC, ever since the hatchet job done on Nausicaa was made known to Studio Ghibli, they have refused to license their productions without a guarantee that there would be no re-editing of the material.
For much more concrete information, it would be worth having a browse at the comprehensive Miyazaki Hayao fan website.
Strom Riders ... wasn't that hot I thought. Great disappointment after the great wu xia films of the 80s and early 90s. It really did look like the director was substituting computer graphics effects for good, tight choreography.
I'm eagerly looking forward to Crouching Tiger though :)
Quoting:
Therein lies the rub. A disturbingly large number of IT-managers have less than half a brain. Besides, time wasted is not time paid for if it's unpaid overtime.(Two years since working for that company, and still bitter! On a possibly unrelated note, check out fatbabies for game industry goss.
'Bundles' seem to be a formalized example of a common Unix system administration practice. My Unix admin experience is pretty much limited to the University environment, but in these situations at least, typically any 3rd party software is manhandled into its own directory, labelled with version numbers, and then made a part of the system with the absolute minimum number of symlinks (this is of course much easier if one has the source! many commercial packages don't play nice and want to extend their hooks into every nook and cranny.)
One immediate advantage is that packages can be exported over the network or easily rsynced between machines, allowing for much more straight-forward software updates and distribution. Appropriate use of configure's exec-prefix, localstatedir and such makes this sort of configuration a breeze for packages which use configure :)
Everytime I wish to update a piece of software on my home machine(s) that was installed off the distribution as an RPM, it is installed in such a manner and the old RPM removed. RPM database corruption does happen, and it really sucks. My home system is now in mid-migration to Linux From Scratch, which should allow the avoidance of RPM problems entirely.
Using the right tool for the job is of course good sense. However one might also wish to avoid the Windows operating system and other Microsoft software for ethical reasons. Just as some people are motivated to buy other goods with the greater environment in mind (recycled paper, etc.) some do not wish to support a company which has acted so dishonestly and caused such damage in the field of computing.
That's fine if you're fill-rate limited, but if instead you're bus-limited, it's a waste. I can't speak for the PS2, but on the PC platform, saturating PCI or AGP with geometry data can be an issue on a fast machine at high frame rates. Not sending back-facing polygons can help dramatically.
You can mock us now! But we will have the last laugh when with the aid of our robotic lamprey servents, we take over the world!
It's a shame that DirectPlay simply Did Not Work until version 6.1a. To clarify this statement: all the bits of DirectPlay that weren't essentially wrappers over a socket-like interface, were too buggy to use. I believe 6.1a finally did mostly work.
The problem is that a good half of DirectPlay is abstracting over something that doesn't need to be abstracted over. It's not like each network card needs to be addressed in its own particular way from the application point of view. This is already handled by the operating system.
As an API, it's also very poorly designed, almost completetely lacking in orthoganality or layer distinction, and having some particularly odd choices of abstraction.
Of course, the most important failing of DirectPlay is that it is platform specific; there is no reason for a closed networking protocol - if you're talking to another machine it shouldn't matter what operating system it is running. DirectPlay essentially forces all participants to be Windows 9x/NT machines. For massively multiplayer games in particular, it's very possible that you don't want your servers running on NT. Further, it means one can't release a game for multiple platforms and have them talk to each other, or the same server.
I'd still recommend that a game developer avoid DirectPlay entirely, and roll their own protocol instead.
Of course, that's still a heck of a lot of arrogance.
jwz writes:
Does anyone else find this incredibly insulting?
jwz may be able to code - but that doesn't mean that he necessarily has any other redeeming features. His website ('[USEMAP]') and newspostings all seem to indicate a rarely matched level of arrogance and self-importance. If only he had less of a clue, it would be very easy to dismiss him totally.
I still haven't forgiven him for netscape.
I think you misspelled Norwegian.
Ideally the EFF would step in here and somehow (appealing to right of reply?) get a reasoned counter-argument in print in the same publication.
The only problem with sending multiple packets is the tradeoff in bandwidth - the fifty odd bytes of header means that sending 100-byte packets instead of 400-byte packets uses bandwidth only 75% as efficiently.
The extra header information also adds delay in and of itself, so there does come a point of diminishing returns.
Over PPP, over a high quality link, TCP will be faster and have less latency than UDP, due to the wonders of header compression. The address and header information in a TCP packet that's part of an already established connection gets compressed down to a measly 6 bytes (this can be done because the PPP peers share state.)
Compression schemes could be used to provide similar header compression for UDP as it is used for games and such, and of course one could talk different but better suited to gaming protocols over IP (e.g. connection-based unreliable, unordered datagrams; connection-based reliable ordered datagrams.) The problem is of course that it's not so easy to go and rewrite the IP stacks of all these machines, or fiddle with their PPP code. This is where something like PowerPlay - with the backing of large companies - will be useful.
Hmm, there might actually be some way to do strange things with MS Winsock ver.2 to extend it to support other protocols dynamically - need to check the docs.
I may have my dates mixed up, but the Acorn RISC OS has been around for a long time - version 1 was the operating system released with the first Acorn Archimedes in 1987. Does this predate MIPS RISC/os?
It's commonly understood that the so called 'fifth' Star Trek movie was a clever hoax; and so successful in fact that the official movie releases skipped 'V' entirely in order to avoid confusion.
To clarify: There _is_ no Start Trek: V 'Final Frontier'. It was just a dream. A bad dream. Probably brought on by too much pizza. Really.
Is something still a trade secret if it has been reverse engineered? I thought this was the trade off between patenting and keeping something a trade secret. Surely they can't have it both ways?