And we're also forgettting Europe, one of the fastest growing games markets.
Well, at least in Finland you can be pretty sure that Xbox is going to flop. In the US you see Xbox priced at $299 which makes it equally priced to PS2. In the forthcoming Europe release Xbox is going to be £299 that is 479 euros. Compare this to 300 euros including 22% tax for PS2 in Finland right now and it's a no brainer to get PS2. In the US, I would definately get Xbox because it clearly has better hardware and therefore I could expect longer usage time from it without extra investments.
The playstation 2 has
the huge back library of ps1 games
As a PC gamer still wondering if I should buy Xbox or PS2 I just want to say that I couldn't care less if PS2 could play Super Nintendo games too. It's not like I'm going to touch any of those old games. I have PC for intelligent games and I'm about to buy console for big screen gaming with friends. You really don't want to watch PSX games from 80 inch screen! Right now I'm looking forward to buy PS2 because it seems that Sony has more exclusive games whereas most Xbox games will be ported to PC soon enough. Plus MS's Europe tax for Xbox seems too high.
The tabbed interface is more flexible than what Opera has to offer.
I agree. I never considered tabbed browsing as an important feature before checking all boxes on Edit-Properties-Tabbed Browsing. Now reading slashdot is much faster because I simply middle-click everything that seems interesting and read them later when loading has finished.
Speaking of this "fix", the fix created a lot of controversy. Apparently some sites like ole slashdot set their pages to no-cache, most likely to force a page refresh so as to get another ad impression. [...]
According to RFC 2616, "Pragma: no-cache" and
"Cache-Control: no-cache" SHOULD NOT affect the back/forward buttons.
Unfortunately, this is commonly interpreted as "...MUST affect..." according to how broken browsers work. Note that if site contains sensitive information it should send both no-cache and no-store. However, according to the same RFC user agent MAY still allow back and forward without refetch. For sites like slashdot I'd suggest must-revalidate and Expires: last post + 1 minute so that unneeded refetches could be avoided.
At 72DPI, a block of 72 x 72 pixels will translate to 1 square inch on paper.
To be exact, at 72 dpi, a block of 72 x 72 pixels will translate to 5184 dots on 1 square inch on paper. Hence, Dots Per Inch. What you described is 72ppi.
Yeah, I know those are commonly incorrectly mixed.
One other thing worth mentioning: Kazaa wants you to use it so that it can make money off your processing cycles, memory, and network connection. That's right; Kazaa plans to introduce technology to allow businesses to use the Kazaa network to burden the load of distributing large quantities of data.
Well, I for one would be more than happy to give some bandwidth, cpu power and memory for exchange if I could legally download music and stuff. If, however, the plan is to count on dumb users not to read eula and spend those resources without payment this sounds ridiculous.
Unless your cd-rom drive looks like one in Playstation (1) they are pretty useless. It's fun to try to insert one of these into slot-in drive! Even some tray models eat these with great difficulties.
Each student (each MAC address, really) is allowed to transfer one gigabyte within a 12-hour period.
This sounds a little low limit to me. Yeah, it's a lot of data but this way a student cannot easily download ISO images of current Linux distribution (about 2 CDs) or something similar. I mean, I would easily go over limit every now and then, but I wouldn't go over limit like 4G/week. I have 10Mbps connection through local university so I have some experience about this...
What I really wanted to ask in this reply is how have you arranged this kind of setup? Does the router compute transferred bytes and decide according to that what transfer speed the user gets. How is speed decreased? Do you drop packets or wait in router or something weird?
How is that when MS says "It's cross-platform: it runs on Win98 AND Win2000" we all snicker, but when somebody says "It's cross-platform: it runs on all flavors of Unix" we don't even blink?
Perhaps it's that Win98 and Win2000 practically run the same software. It's win32/x86 only. Similar support would be latest versions of Redhat and SuSE only. Ever tried to compile something under pure Tru64 or Solaris? Those are pretty different beasts compared to basic linux box.
Or it might be that we're simply too 1337 to understand real world.
Similarly, the IE and Netscape show pages differently, even if the HTML follows the standard... Not that it makes life easier for programmers: at my previous company, all programmers and testers had 15 versions of Netscape installed. Not much fun.
Repeat after me: "HTML is document description language. It's not supposed to be used for formatting." You're supposed to markup part of the text as header and another part as paragraph. It's up to "user agent", commonly known as browser, how to render this to end user. CSS is another thing, but you didn't talk about it...
all programmers and testers had 15 versions of Netscape installed. Not much fun.
And to test Internet explorer they needed 15 computers because no Windows can have two different versions of IE installed simultaneously. Much less fun.
How hard would it be to write an MS Word virus that would change this preference when a document was opened?
There's only one problem: this kind of virus wouldn't spread effectively because I don't know about virus that works with RTF files. That doesn't say that such virus cannot exist though. Perhaps it should spread itself for a week and change the preference after that.
That is, it should be possible to read and edit the same document with different open-source tools [since there is no chance that we all use the same] without loosing neither text, nor formatting or meta information (like indexes, cross-references, review marks etc...).
Yeah, it's a nice target, but when most users can't understand the difference between style and font attribute, how is thing thing going to keep formatting while editing text?
I mean, there isn't like one or two people in the world that still increase font size and make it bolder to mark it as header. Usually these people don't even know the difference between line break and paragraph break. I have seen too many files that have extra paragraph breaks to fix an orphan line simply because author was too dumb to edit style the way s/he likes. Now when another author adds a line 10 pages before this "fix" causes really ugly results.
Now, given the restriction that author cannot describe the meaning of the document, how can any document format keep formatting when text is edited ? Making editor to keep sure about that like LyX is one way, but how we make these people to use it? It's not like they want to be told how dumb they are... Perhaps something that looks like current MS Word interface, but hidden logic that maps bolded and increased text to one of the four header levels. Two or more line breaks as one paragraph break and so on. If only there were an easy way to edit LyX document styles to one's needs...
This problem really only becomes significant when pipelines are made too long (such as in the P4). The pipelines are extended to make it possible to use a higher Mhz rating - though because of the extended pipeline and the problems caused by having to guess ahead so far the CPU doesn't actually function anywhere near as fast as the Mhz would indicate it should.
Actually, pipelines aren't made longer to get higher MHz rating only, but to increase throughput [in optimal case]. Current crop of CPUs do more per clock than older ones (well, not counting P4, usually). You can nowadays add more than two numbers in one clock cycle and possibly do additinal multiplication in the same time. Even P4 should be really fast if all you do is basic operations without loops. P4 has 3+GHz ALU unit for this! Unfortunately, we really don't need that much computing power but logic power partly because we have additional processors on our sound and graphics cards where the computing power really counts. If you really need to emulate DSP in software, then P4 is what you need, otherwise deep pipeline is going to hurt badly.
Perhaps it's just you didn't expect that much from computers a couple of years ago. I remember using 75MHz Pentium with sucky graphics adapter for not too many years ago and it felt plenty fast. I'd hate to have to use that kind of crap anymore - no matter what software I used. And that's because I know about better.
I agree - just make it sure that server is fast enough with the encryption. I really hate when it takes ages to sign in.
Strict XHTML 1.1 + CSS
A dream come true. With tags to help parsing for alternative frontends. The only problem I can see is the requirement for XHTML compatible formatting in posts: "Line 12: Parse error: missing closing tag for <p>."
Even though it requires 2 more instructions to do it, just because its not ocupying the same register as eax dosent mean its [MMX] an ugly hack although i would prefer that it be an extention to the gpr.(sic)
I surely would call MMX as an ugly hack. Not because one needs to use normal registers to access data but because MMX uses FPU registers. Hello? To use instructions designed for 64bit integer calculations, you need to disable FPU? And remember, this was because OSes couldn't support task switching without changes if there wouldn't have been a hack like this. MMX is useful for such a special cases that practically no compiler generates MMX code - it's always hand-tuned assembler.
In fact, most desktops are just glorified directories anyway that are always open and at the lowest level. So what's the point of difference, because I fail to see one.
This is exactly the point. And this is IMHO where all current desktops fail! How about making desktop to be a directory and nothing else? In fact desktop should be a browser window itself with "home desktop" and "parent desktop" buttons. This way you'd have many desktops and when you use them you'd be using the real directory structure.
The way I'd want it to be is that all the configuration files for user should be saved in "~/Settings" or something like that so that user's home directory (~) could be used as default desktop. As it's today, home cannot be used as default desktop because practically all apps want to save their config in you home. Sure hiding all dot-files does help, but that only gets us where microsoft is now - for example worms could hide themselves with rename and so on. If there would be directory for settings I wouldn't have any reason to hide any files from listing (. and.. are not files on this desktop!) Creating a new folder on your home desktop would be the same as 'cd ~; mkdir "new folder"' in your CLI. Deleting a file from desktop would be the same as deleting file from the directory your desktop currently presents.
The only question that remains is when should desktop be moved to child directory instead of opening a new browser window for that directory. I'd be happy with desktop moves always unless you press shift/control+1st/middle mouse button to open new window so that UI would be practically the same as opening a link in a new web browser window.
Even so, I don't consider making a menu that reads from bottom to top any great innovation over the top-to-bottom apple menu, that's always right there at the top of the screen on the mac, performing a similar function...
But according to what I've seen very few mac users actually use apple menu for nothing but configuration (like control panel in windows) and use some weird way, like some launcher or browsing to installation folder with finder, to start apps instead. At least MS got people to start apps from one place. Yeah, most apps still force their icon on the desktop and some people start those apps from there but even so.
Don't GPL it, that would be silly. If you guys made the darn thing with the intention of earning money, you should darn well get some money for it!
Well, if you intent to get some money with it GPLing shouldn't ruin the plan. If somebody wants to use this codec commercially they probably sell closed source program with it and cannot therefore use codec without purchasing different license. GPL doesn't restrict from releasing product under another product simultaneously. One could even claim that GPL version would be a full-featured demo to sell codec.
If the codec does something revolutional like not using DCT and interpolation between keyframes then not to GPL it may be a good idea because ideas aren't restricted by copyright. Without money you cannot patent it and that would be only yet another hated software patent anyway.
Whether or not the use of GPLed codec would be legal in Windows or MacOS is another question. Most programs in these platforms are closed and cannot therefore link with GPLed code. Strictly interpreted this means that you cannot use GPLed codec in say for example WMP. On the other hand WMP may be claimed to be part of OS and GPL allows linking with OS libraries...
write the entire file to the socket at once [...] the sendfile() call
(man sendfile, man 7 tcp) Hmmm.... TCP_CORK socket option seems interesting too. Unfortunately there also reads: "Other Unixes often implement sendfile with different semantics and prototypes. It should not be used in portable programs." and "TCP_CORK is new in 2.2". Does POSIX have any support for directing TCP/IP-stack about the content of data to optimize packet size and stuff or is there some another way to do this in portable way?
It appears to me that the transmitting side generates the symbols (parameters of the equations, I guess) and begins sending them to the receiving side as fast as it can....don't have to keep up this conversation: [long conversation removed]
It seems to me that article indeed speaks about network that has high latency but high bandwidth with some loss. How about simply compressing the data and using bigger packets to transmit it? If you can use big enough window while sending data you can push all the data to the network in the beginning. Conversation comes to A) Here it comes A) Done [64 packets, 125MB] B) Okay, listening B) Resend 2,7 and 25 A) Done [3 packets, 6MB] B) OK. Note that A starts sending before getting reply from B. In fact, with fast long-distance connection it could be that A gets to the end before B getting "Here it comes".
I think if we want to speed up file transfer we need an API to tell OS that we're going to send lots of data so make it big packets or the opposite. Currently we just open socket connection to destination and start write()ing. OS has no way to guess whether or not we're going to write 100 or 10e8 bytes. We need a way to tell OS that the data we're sending isn't worth a dime before it's all done so make it big packets to minimize bandwidth wasted to TCP control traffic.
You can opt to waste bandwidth to reduce perceived latency and that's what I think is done here. A sends file twice and in a case some packets were lost the sent copy would be used to fill in missing parts. A has sent missing packet before B had known it's missing it. Yeah, A wasted half the bandwidth for the redundant data that got correctly to the destination at the first time but we aren't interested in that. The key here is to use UDP so that lost packets are really lost instead of automatically resend. This kind of setup increases overall throughput only if latency is the only problem in your network. Perhaps this is needed in the future because increasing bandwidth is easy - not necessarily cheap - but the light crawling inside fiber is so damn slow!
...as much as in rights management. I mean "To protect the rights-managed data on the page file, the digital rights management operating system prohibits raw access to the page file, or erases the data from the page file before allowing such access." Does this sound like safe or what? I simply have to wonder who's going to code this when you consider all the security bugs seen in MS apps lately.
Now all we need is "You need to login.Net Passport Service before viewing this movie." Welcome to the Microsoft(R) Planet(TM)!
even a few dozen milliseconds of latency can hurt the abilities of the person playing the music
I really cannot imagine what kind of system would have a few dozen milliseconds of latency. It takes like 10ms to send IP packets over a couple of hundred miles via multiple routers. You really don't need that special hardware to send some sound 30 feet or so - digital or not.
If you consider that speed of sound is roughly 1 feet per millisecond placing your speakers in the wrong position matters probably more than the latency of any reasonable system.
Except that you cannot get 1st person view when you're walking and 1st person view is pretty much unusable when driving too... Makes it really hard to shoot enemies when the camera points 90 degrees to wrong direction!
Oh did I mention that this game [GTA3] is very non-PC and not recommended for people under 17?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, at least in Finland you can be pretty sure that Xbox is going to flop. In the US you see Xbox priced at $299 which makes it equally priced to PS2. In the forthcoming Europe release Xbox is going to be £299 that is 479 euros. Compare this to 300 euros including 22% tax for PS2 in Finland right now and it's a no brainer to get PS2. In the US, I would definately get Xbox because it clearly has better hardware and therefore I could expect longer usage time from it without extra investments.
As a PC gamer still wondering if I should buy Xbox or PS2 I just want to say that I couldn't care less if PS2 could play Super Nintendo games too. It's not like I'm going to touch any of those old games. I have PC for intelligent games and I'm about to buy console for big screen gaming with friends. You really don't want to watch PSX games from 80 inch screen! Right now I'm looking forward to buy PS2 because it seems that Sony has more exclusive games whereas most Xbox games will be ported to PC soon enough. Plus MS's Europe tax for Xbox seems too high.
I agree. I never considered tabbed browsing as an important feature before checking all boxes on Edit-Properties-Tabbed Browsing. Now reading slashdot is much faster because I simply middle-click everything that seems interesting and read them later when loading has finished.
From the bug 112564:
Unfortunately, this is commonly interpreted as "...MUST affect..." according to how broken browsers work. Note that if site contains sensitive information it should send both no-cache and no-store. However, according to the same RFC user agent MAY still allow back and forward without refetch. For sites like slashdot I'd suggest must-revalidate and Expires: last post + 1 minute so that unneeded refetches could be avoided.To be exact, at 72 dpi, a block of 72 x 72 pixels will translate to 5184 dots on 1 square inch on paper. Hence, Dots Per Inch. What you described is 72ppi.
Yeah, I know those are commonly incorrectly mixed.
Am I the only one trying to find Magrathea from those photos?
Well, I for one would be more than happy to give some bandwidth, cpu power and memory for exchange if I could legally download music and stuff. If, however, the plan is to count on dumb users not to read eula and spend those resources without payment this sounds ridiculous.
Unless your cd-rom drive looks like one in Playstation (1) they are pretty useless. It's fun to try to insert one of these into slot-in drive! Even some tray models eat these with great difficulties.
This sounds a little low limit to me. Yeah, it's a lot of data but this way a student cannot easily download ISO images of current Linux distribution (about 2 CDs) or something similar. I mean, I would easily go over limit every now and then, but I wouldn't go over limit like 4G/week. I have 10Mbps connection through local university so I have some experience about this...
What I really wanted to ask in this reply is how have you arranged this kind of setup? Does the router compute transferred bytes and decide according to that what transfer speed the user gets. How is speed decreased? Do you drop packets or wait in router or something weird?
Perhaps it's that Win98 and Win2000 practically run the same software. It's win32/x86 only. Similar support would be latest versions of Redhat and SuSE only. Ever tried to compile something under pure Tru64 or Solaris? Those are pretty different beasts compared to basic linux box.
Or it might be that we're simply too 1337 to understand real world.
Repeat after me: "HTML is document description language. It's not supposed to be used for formatting." You're supposed to markup part of the text as header and another part as paragraph. It's up to "user agent", commonly known as browser, how to render this to end user. CSS is another thing, but you didn't talk about it...
all programmers and testers had 15 versions of Netscape installed. Not much fun.
And to test Internet explorer they needed 15 computers because no Windows can have two different versions of IE installed simultaneously. Much less fun.
There's only one problem: this kind of virus wouldn't spread effectively because I don't know about virus that works with RTF files. That doesn't say that such virus cannot exist though. Perhaps it should spread itself for a week and change the preference after that.
Yeah, it's a nice target, but when most users can't understand the difference between style and font attribute, how is thing thing going to keep formatting while editing text?
I mean, there isn't like one or two people in the world that still increase font size and make it bolder to mark it as header. Usually these people don't even know the difference between line break and paragraph break. I have seen too many files that have extra paragraph breaks to fix an orphan line simply because author was too dumb to edit style the way s/he likes. Now when another author adds a line 10 pages before this "fix" causes really ugly results.
Now, given the restriction that author cannot describe the meaning of the document, how can any document format keep formatting when text is edited ? Making editor to keep sure about that like LyX is one way, but how we make these people to use it? It's not like they want to be told how dumb they are... Perhaps something that looks like current MS Word interface, but hidden logic that maps bolded and increased text to one of the four header levels. Two or more line breaks as one paragraph break and so on. If only there were an easy way to edit LyX document styles to one's needs...
Actually, pipelines aren't made longer to get higher MHz rating only, but to increase throughput [in optimal case]. Current crop of CPUs do more per clock than older ones (well, not counting P4, usually). You can nowadays add more than two numbers in one clock cycle and possibly do additinal multiplication in the same time. Even P4 should be really fast if all you do is basic operations without loops. P4 has 3+GHz ALU unit for this! Unfortunately, we really don't need that much computing power but logic power partly because we have additional processors on our sound and graphics cards where the computing power really counts. If you really need to emulate DSP in software, then P4 is what you need, otherwise deep pipeline is going to hurt badly.
Perhaps it's just you didn't expect that much from computers a couple of years ago. I remember using 75MHz Pentium with sucky graphics adapter for not too many years ago and it felt plenty fast. I'd hate to have to use that kind of crap anymore - no matter what software I used. And that's because I know about better.
I agree - just make it sure that server is fast enough with the encryption. I really hate when it takes ages to sign in.
Strict XHTML 1.1 + CSS
A dream come true. With tags to help parsing for alternative frontends. The only problem I can see is the requirement for XHTML compatible formatting in posts: "Line 12: Parse error: missing closing tag for <p>."
I surely would call MMX as an ugly hack. Not because one needs to use normal registers to access data but because MMX uses FPU registers. Hello? To use instructions designed for 64bit integer calculations, you need to disable FPU? And remember, this was because OSes couldn't support task switching without changes if there wouldn't have been a hack like this. MMX is useful for such a special cases that practically no compiler generates MMX code - it's always hand-tuned assembler.
Or it might finally result in making ALL "press enter to agree" EULAs to be void. Yeah... I'm dreaming.
This is exactly the point. And this is IMHO where all current desktops fail! How about making desktop to be a directory and nothing else? In fact desktop should be a browser window itself with "home desktop" and "parent desktop" buttons. This way you'd have many desktops and when you use them you'd be using the real directory structure.
The way I'd want it to be is that all the configuration files for user should be saved in "~/Settings" or something like that so that user's home directory (~) could be used as default desktop. As it's today, home cannot be used as default desktop because practically all apps want to save their config in you home. Sure hiding all dot-files does help, but that only gets us where microsoft is now - for example worms could hide themselves with rename and so on. If there would be directory for settings I wouldn't have any reason to hide any files from listing (. and .. are not files on this desktop!) Creating a new folder on your home desktop would be the same as 'cd ~; mkdir "new folder"' in your CLI. Deleting a file from desktop would be the same as deleting file from the directory your desktop currently presents.
The only question that remains is when should desktop be moved to child directory instead of opening a new browser window for that directory. I'd be happy with desktop moves always unless you press shift/control+1st/middle mouse button to open new window so that UI would be practically the same as opening a link in a new web browser window.
But according to what I've seen very few mac users actually use apple menu for nothing but configuration (like control panel in windows) and use some weird way, like some launcher or browsing to installation folder with finder, to start apps instead. At least MS got people to start apps from one place. Yeah, most apps still force their icon on the desktop and some people start those apps from there but even so.
Well, if you intent to get some money with it GPLing shouldn't ruin the plan. If somebody wants to use this codec commercially they probably sell closed source program with it and cannot therefore use codec without purchasing different license. GPL doesn't restrict from releasing product under another product simultaneously. One could even claim that GPL version would be a full-featured demo to sell codec.
If the codec does something revolutional like not using DCT and interpolation between keyframes then not to GPL it may be a good idea because ideas aren't restricted by copyright. Without money you cannot patent it and that would be only yet another hated software patent anyway.
Whether or not the use of GPLed codec would be legal in Windows or MacOS is another question. Most programs in these platforms are closed and cannot therefore link with GPLed code. Strictly interpreted this means that you cannot use GPLed codec in say for example WMP. On the other hand WMP may be claimed to be part of OS and GPL allows linking with OS libraries...
(man sendfile, man 7 tcp) Hmmm.... TCP_CORK socket option seems interesting too. Unfortunately there also reads: "Other Unixes often implement sendfile with different semantics and prototypes. It should not be used in portable programs." and "TCP_CORK is new in 2.2". Does POSIX have any support for directing TCP/IP-stack about the content of data to optimize packet size and stuff or is there some another way to do this in portable way?
It seems to me that article indeed speaks about network that has high latency but high bandwidth with some loss. How about simply compressing the data and using bigger packets to transmit it? If you can use big enough window while sending data you can push all the data to the network in the beginning. Conversation comes to A) Here it comes A) Done [64 packets, 125MB] B) Okay, listening B) Resend 2,7 and 25 A) Done [3 packets, 6MB] B) OK. Note that A starts sending before getting reply from B. In fact, with fast long-distance connection it could be that A gets to the end before B getting "Here it comes".
I think if we want to speed up file transfer we need an API to tell OS that we're going to send lots of data so make it big packets or the opposite. Currently we just open socket connection to destination and start write()ing. OS has no way to guess whether or not we're going to write 100 or 10e8 bytes. We need a way to tell OS that the data we're sending isn't worth a dime before it's all done so make it big packets to minimize bandwidth wasted to TCP control traffic.
You can opt to waste bandwidth to reduce perceived latency and that's what I think is done here. A sends file twice and in a case some packets were lost the sent copy would be used to fill in missing parts. A has sent missing packet before B had known it's missing it. Yeah, A wasted half the bandwidth for the redundant data that got correctly to the destination at the first time but we aren't interested in that. The key here is to use UDP so that lost packets are really lost instead of automatically resend. This kind of setup increases overall throughput only if latency is the only problem in your network. Perhaps this is needed in the future because increasing bandwidth is easy - not necessarily cheap - but the light crawling inside fiber is so damn slow!
Now all we need is "You need to login .Net Passport Service before viewing this movie." Welcome to the Microsoft(R) Planet(TM)!
I really cannot imagine what kind of system would have a few dozen milliseconds of latency. It takes like 10ms to send IP packets over a couple of hundred miles via multiple routers. You really don't need that special hardware to send some sound 30 feet or so - digital or not.
If you consider that speed of sound is roughly 1 feet per millisecond placing your speakers in the wrong position matters probably more than the latency of any reasonable system.
Except that you cannot get 1st person view when you're walking and 1st person view is pretty much unusable when driving too... Makes it really hard to shoot enemies when the camera points 90 degrees to wrong direction!
Oh did I mention that this game [GTA3] is very non-PC and not recommended for people under 17?
From the Grand Theft Auto web site:
So it's not PS2 only forever... Though I have to admit that the game is damn good. By the way, age limit is 18 in here, Finland.