You signed a contract before starting in the job, right? Just check what it says. Where I live, the usual announcement time before leaving is one month. The company gets one month advance warning that you're leaving and you get the pay for that month. Bigger companies usually don't take any risks and once you announce that you're leaving, you're told that your presence is no longer required but you'll get paid for the last month anyway. Smaller companies expect you to stay for the last month working.
A well written contract also clearly defines what happens if you or the employer try to deviate from the contract. Sometimes it could be possible to leave the old job immediately and pay the penalty defined in the contract and still have good recommendations from your old employer. It's possible because the old employer gets compensated for your early leave.
Like m50d wrote in another message, the case isn't that clear. It's true that GPL is based on a copyright but the copyright law defines derivative works. For example, a translation of a work is defined to be a derivative and still under the same copyright, so you cannot escape GPL by re-writing the code in another language. For example, you cannot just re-write a Perl algorithm in C# and be done legally. You can use the same algorithm (though it might be covered by a patent you or anybody else has never heard of) but you cannot copy. Where's the difference between the "same algorithm" and "copy" if writing the thing with different words might be counted as a translation? It depends on whom you ask...
This model works fine if there is only one customer for the product of your hard work. If you have 100 potential customers for a GPL'd product, you give the right to your first customer to get the source, compile it, and give it to the other 99.
And that's exactly the beauty of the GPL. It's designed so that an author gets pay for his work but he cannot blackmail more and more later on. Just make sure that the initial price you request is high enough so that you don't need to complain later. If the software you're writing is a big and complex one, then you may need 100 customers to pay the initial price - the price would be too much for a single customer. In that case every one of your customers pay for 1/100th of the price you require. Or just one pays 100% and shares the rest with others. You get the same pay.
In real word situations you usually get requested for more features once the initial version has been paid for. It's up to you to request more payment for additional work or discontinue to work with the software if your customers don't want to pay. But unlike with the proprietary software, you customers aren't forced to pay whatever payment you request for. You might be able to request a pretty good payment because anyone else trying to create derivative works would have to first understood your existing work - and that would require more work and so cost more when done by anyone else.
GPL is about being fair - if you want more than your share for your work, you select some another license.
The only people I know of who actually pay for TV are the British.
The other people with that problem are the Finnish. In Finland, we have this thing called "televisioilmoitus" ("TV-license") which is practically a yearly tax supported by law and the money goes directly to our lovely national broadcast company YLE. And one has to pay for that license for owning a device capable to sync with publicly available TV-broadcasts. It doesn't matter if one actually views content produced or distributed by YLE or not. In addition to this, commercial TV-companies have to pay yearly royalties to YLE by law for broadcasting TV-signals.
And still, with all this monetary support by law, the YLE cannot compete with commercial channels; all viewers combined from all YLE's channels are roughly equal to the viewers of a single commercial publicly available channel. Talk about wasted money...
If anybody is using Firefox for Fedora Core 3, I made this RPM that incorporates this patch.
Did you also fix the regressions/related bugs caused by that path? See for example, bugzilla.mozilla.org bugs #246382 and #246999? Also try test case 1 or test case 2.
And I still have never experienced the bug you're all talking about.
The bug shows up more often if you set
nglayout.initialpain.delay in about:config to some small number like 10 or 20. That number sets the number of milliseconds of delay before FF starts to display anything after the server starts sending the content. The problem is, the smaller the number is, the more FF needs to reflow the content and then this reflow bug appears. (Reflowing means re-rendering the page because of more content has been added to page - initial rendering may have been done from partial document...) Decreasing this value makes FF feel a much faster on fast computers, but be warned that repeated reflowing eats pretty much CPU power. And there's this slahdot.org rendering bug, of course.
It and many other reflow bugs have been fixed in FF 1.1. Try nighly builds to confirm.
Loss of 800 jobs is immediate, obvious and can lose them votes.
Just make sure that public understands that the choice to lose those jobs is done by Microsoft. I assume that the company was doing pretty fine until Microsoft bought it and if Microsoft is now threatening to fire those people, it's their choice.
We have had a couple of similar situations in Finland where large companies asked for lower taxes or "they would be forced to fire people". Okay, they got the lower taxes and now they are firing people to increase profits. As a result, I don't trust local for-profit entities a little bit.
Unsurprisingly, the patent text has been obfuscated beyond all understanding, but if it has something to do with controlling an object or the camera from viewspace or screenspace, I'd guess Virtual Trackball by SGI would count as prior art. It has been open source since 1993.
Anyway, software patents have two big problems. The first one is that about 20 years is way too long time for a patent in information technology field. Another big problem is that software patents have to be obfuscated. Otherwise the patent would cover just one implementation. As a result, nobody can even explain what a patent really does or what it covers because a thorough explanation could also be an implementation of said patent. Especially, one cannot explain the patent with any machine readable language. Or it that's allowed, no open source developer never needs to mind about software patents. Because then we're just distributing the description of the patent and patents do not cover use of patent for personal use -- like using the description to build/compile the software, for example.
However... IANAL, obviously, and I do live in a country that doesn't yet have software patents, so what do I know?
Patent Law -- a system desigened by lawyers, for the lawyers.
urpmi gaim works fine with Mandrake 10. Just like pretty much any piece of software you'd want. Try urpmf --summary frozen-bubble for example. For MS platform, I prefer Miranda as it's the lightest IM software I've found. It does just one thing and it does that well. Though, it's pretty much like Firefox -- you probably want to install some extensions/plugins first.
tags and branches are just copies, and copies are very cheap space-wise in SVN. It's really quite clean.
okay. But now I have numerical revision "names" and I'd want to give more meaningful names for commits/revisions, how do I do that? There's difference between knowing that difference from r123 to r124 is bug fix to bug number 42 and having r124 an alias called bug42fix. That way I could more easily merge that fix to another branch. But I guess it all comes down to svn not really supporting changesets. Perhaps I don't undestand how svn works?
I ported our inhouse CVS repository to subversion (svn) mainly because svn supports renaming and moving of files and especially directories. Later I've found that I'd rather take system based on 'changesets', but luckily svn can emulate those suprisingly well with it's -rN:M syntax.
For example, if I want to import changes between revisions 123 and 124 from trunk to current branch, I can just use svn merge url://path/to/repo/trunk -r123:124 and all changes in the trunk between those revisions will be merged in the current branch. Note that a revision is always the result of a commit and might include changes to a bunch of files and directories. And if something has been renamed in that commit, that change will be included too! If it later comes out (possibly after 10 more commits to the very same files) that such a merge was mistake, I can remove that merge just as easily with svn merge url://path/to/repo/trunk -r124:123. Note that I just reversed the repository numbers, so svn applies changes in reverse.
There're some things I don't like, though:
CVS was faster in many simple cases like, for example, cvs commit. I've been told that SVN has much faster branching and other stuff that I never learned how to do with CVS. Branching is fast, I have to admit that.
svn has no tags or branches (or it has both but those are "only" full copies of the "branch source" directories). I'd also want to give revisions symbolic names (this is how I understand "tagging") so that I could refer to special revisions by name instead of some random number.
svn stores all data in a database. Fortunately 1.1 seems to fix this. If you have really many developers accessing the repository a database might be the best choice but for smaller projects it was a bit too complex system. Now svn can support both systems and you can start with fsfs-backend and later upgrade to real database if you really need it.
If I don't remember to run svn update every now and then, I end up with "mixed working copy" which isn't always a good thing because "mixed working copy" has some serious limitations in the current implentation. You might end up needing to run svn update even when you don't want to do that.
Just give the cvs2svn a try and play with svn with some real world sources. And keep the CVS repository running until you're comfortable with svn. Then use cvs2svn to do the conversion.
The simple solution is for parents to become parents again. We (I have 3), collectively, need to quit blaming other people for our shortcomings as parents and own up to the fact that kids turn out pretty much how we raise them (and who we let them hang out with). We, not laws, should be the filters that sort out what our kids watch and do.
You're absolutely right. My point was that if one thinks that making more laws is going to help with violence even a bit then banning guns would make more sense than banning violent tv shows or computer games. Neither of those laws could replace good parenting. A real "bugfix" would be to disallow everybody from breeding by default. Only, if you can demonstrate (how?) that you would be a good parent, you get a license to have children.
We already require license to own a gun or to drive a car. Still, anybody is allowed to have a child!
...the first game that comes to my mind is GTA: San Andreas? Not that it changes anything as all the other GTA games were 'not suitable for persons under 18 years', here in Finland. (Not to mention that USA doesn't yet make laws here...)
I understand the idea behind this new "law" but I still think that this is wrong way to fix the problem. If USA really wants to make life safer for 'law enforcement officers', how about stricter gun laws, instead? I think I have forgot something... oh yeah, not having lots of guns would be unconstitutional. I guess you should ban computer games and movies instead.
Just to be pedantic, it is possible to make predictions about the present and the past.[...]
[...] I predict that the mass extinction that killed most of the dinosaurs was caused by a meteorite impact and that the diameter of the impact basin would be X [...]
That's a still prediction of events to come in the future (that is, speaker is guessing that in the future, a proof is found that supports his thoughts). Note that you can replace word 'predict' with word 'guess' in every situation and the meaning of the sentence doesn't change. A predicting is just a fancy speak for guessing. "I guess that there are an infinite number of primes". Admittably, using word 'predict' hints that the speaker has some knowledge about the subject.
You can [run Windows with real restricted user accounts].
Yadda yadda yadda... of course you can create a restricted account and play some Minesweeper or Windows Calculator in it. But then run some third-party games or apps and see what breaks. There's just too much software that can't handle restricted access.
So, you're saying that instead of requesting those third party software developers/manufacturers to fix their broken products, you opt to run your box wide open (that is, everything under Administrator account). It's your choice and if you get burned, don't come back to manufacturers of software that does work under restricted access.
I'm running my W2K system with restricted access. For those third party apps that are broken and I cannot live without, I run those with Superior SU so that only those pieces of software are run with administrative access. Admittedly, not perfect, but much better than running web browser/word processor/whatever with administrative rights. Currently my list of programs that I use and that need administrator access are:
DScaler (because it loads hardware drivers on the fly),
Nero (newer versions probably could handle cd-rom burning from user space?),
Palm Desktop (this piece of software is just broken but I haven't looked for anything else. I hope that it isn't broken enough to randomly delete files or run other programs).
Under linux, there's absolute no reason to always run root. You can usually configure even hardware access via different groups so that you only need to add your user account to group that has access to hardware device you absolutely need.
If the "security" is high enough in other theaters too, I never have to download another crappy quality movie rip again. In the future, all the pirated movies will be copies of prematurely leaked DVDs. MPAA and friends should better identify their real friends and foes, pretty much like/. does:D
... I must admit that I'd prefer Xbox2 not having backwards compatibility. Think Xbox -- Microsoft just brought it to the market and it already has pretty nice share of it. Did Xbox have backwards compatibility with anything? Of course not because it was the first console MS ever did. I'm pretty confident that Xbox2 can easily outperform it without backwards compatibility. In fact, I'd consider that as a plus because I don't need to pay for extra few million transistors and a couple of other hardware parts just for the emulation part. And if Xbox2 really doesn't have harddrive, it would be really hard part to emulate!
I've PS2 also and I've played exactly zero PS1 games with it. When I change to another console, I'll sell my PS2 and all the games I own for that so that I don't have to fork that much / any more money for the next console and a few games. I don't know about you guys but as long as games cost way over 50 bucks it really doesn't matter if the box costs 150 or 250 bucks -- it's only a bit more than one game!
Pick any web developer and ask them whether they have more problems making websites work with IE or making them work with Mozilla.
Any web developer won't do. To get results like that, the web developer you ask about it, should have some clue. Most of the "web developers" and especially "web designers" I've met use software from Macromedia/Microsoft/Adobe and don't have a clue how web pages are supposed to work. They just author the web pages just like they would author a fixed sized paper. They consider the fact that MSIE doesn't allow changing the size of the fonts that use "px" size to be a feature, not a bug.
Remember that somebody being a "professional" doesn't mean that he knows how to do the thing, it just means that he does something related to the thing for living...
If we assume GNU tools like the test did, one could implement "find and compile.c files into.o when the.o is old or absent" as find -name "*.c" | sed 's/.c$/.o/;' | xargs echo all: | make -f-
(this is because GNU make is smart enough to figure out how to make.o files out of.c files) and if you know find well enough (unlike I) you'd only need find. The only thing that is "sh" in this piece of code are the pipes.
Perhaps the "sh" implementation could assume that there's a perl implementation with shebang in a file called "x" in the same directory and make every "sh script" as 'x "$@"'? That would be really effective scripting language!:-)
[Raytracing] also forces lighting on the rendering. After all, we're tracing rays of light, here.
Umm.. no. In practice, no raytracer traces rays from the light source because very few of those rays would ever hit the camera. Instead, all raytracers do it backwards: backtrace the ray that would come from the top left pixel orientation towards the camera lens. When the ray hits an object (say, a wall), compute backtraces from that location. If you don't need realistic lightning, hitting a wall could always return preset amount of light (mixed with the object texture, of course) from that wall and no scattering of the ray.
The problem with full hardware raytracers is that the hardware should be able to hold whole scene or there'll be problems with some ray directions. GPU and the board on which it recides would limit the complexity of the scene, unlike with OpenGL which may render as complex scenes as the whole system can store (part of the scene can be streamed from the hard drive...)
I think the future will be a mix of both systems. Raytracer for curved, reflective surfaces. Multipass raster engine for everything else.
After looking through the video clip, it seems clear to me that the most important improvement in current games is better shadows. How many reflective surfaces there're in your environment? I'd say the glass is only one I'd miss reflections from and if that makes the difference between 2fps and 200fps, the lets forget the real reflections and use environment cube mapping instead.
That's true. CMOS is also used in Canon EOS-1Ds, Canon EOS-1D which are the digital SLRs for pro users.
They're cheap to make, but even a good CMOS has significantly poorer sensitivity than a good CCD; hence you tend to get more noise.
I must get some of the stuff you're smoking! First, compare test shots between Canon EOS-300D ("Digital Rebel") and Nikon D70. Also check the noise test results. I'm not saying that Nikon D70 is a bad camera, the other way around. It's just that Canon CMOS cameras have from the start had less noise than most CCD cameras. CMOS technology has better battery life but usually slower burst shooting. I think that D70 has a bit better lens than the one that's bundled with 300D. One can get better lenses for a SLR, of course, but it needs to be taken into the consideration while you're comparing the features and price.
I still think that a second hand Powershoot G3 or G4 would be a better choice for a beginner. It's much cheaper and even G3 is far from a bad camera. By the time you've learned to shoot great pictures, the price of the entry level (or a bit higher) SLRs have dropped much more than the value of your second hand camera. Spend the money on a larger CF card and possibly to a good flash system instead (Note that investing on flash has vendor-lock effect as TTL systems usually require that the camera body and the flash system are from the same manufacturer).
The patch is six weeks old. At what point does it cease to be Microsoft's problem and become the PC owner's?
It started to be Microsoft's problem when they decided that all those ports should be open by default. I think it ceases to be Microsoft's problem when they release a fix that disables those ports by default, as it seems clear that they are not going to make those services secure. I'm still trying to figure out how to close port 135 in Windows XP, but my Windows 2000 has zero open ports listening (netstat -a). Port 135 can be closed in Windows 2000 by running dcomcnfg.exe and removing check from "Enable Distributed COM on this computer" -- I mean, how many computers really need DCOM support? Why this isn't off by default? Anyhow, other ports can be closed by disabling unneeded services that are started by default.
I'm still running my original W2K system without firewall with zero viruses this far; if I don't have any ports listening, the firewall wouldn't block anything anyway and if I made holes for the applications I want to run, the viruses could come through those holes so firewall wouldn't help in that case either.
As for the application security, I don't use MSIE or Outlook...
Get a pair of rather nice, open-back, full ear headphones. [...] because they aren't sealed you can still hear the phone, people talking directly to you, etc. [...] You need to ensure that the headphones are really comfortable [...] since you'll [...] be wearing them for hours on end.
If you want comfortable, you can't go wrong with Sony MDR-F1. Sure, some open headphones sound better but MDR-F1 is probably the most comfortable pair of cans available anywhere. Forget Sennheiser's if you wear glasses. Be warned though, that MDF-F1's are a quite demanding headphones - for the best quality you'll need a separate headphones amplifier, though one can get acceptable sound quality even from the sound card plug. The drive units are 50 mm diameter which is probably more than your average office desktop speakers have...
Vaios are some of the best-supported mobile systems available for Linux. Even the funky dials, switches and displays are supported by the sonypi project [...] It just makes sense for Sony to use hardware that won't cause headache for its users.
Eh? The sonypi project clearly says on their front page:
Please note that this driver was created by reverse engineering the Windows driver and the ACPI BIOS, because Sony doesn't agree to release any programming specs for its laptops. If someone convinces them to do so, drop me a note.
Is that the level of support or "making sense" something that only Sony can provide? This stuff just works in Linux, thanks to sonypi driver developers, and no thanks to Sony.
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You signed a contract before starting in the job, right? Just check what it says. Where I live, the usual announcement time before leaving is one month. The company gets one month advance warning that you're leaving and you get the pay for that month. Bigger companies usually don't take any risks and once you announce that you're leaving, you're told that your presence is no longer required but you'll get paid for the last month anyway. Smaller companies expect you to stay for the last month working.
A well written contract also clearly defines what happens if you or the employer try to deviate from the contract. Sometimes it could be possible to leave the old job immediately and pay the penalty defined in the contract and still have good recommendations from your old employer. It's possible because the old employer gets compensated for your early leave.
Like m50d wrote in another message, the case isn't that clear. It's true that GPL is based on a copyright but the copyright law defines derivative works. For example, a translation of a work is defined to be a derivative and still under the same copyright, so you cannot escape GPL by re-writing the code in another language. For example, you cannot just re-write a Perl algorithm in C# and be done legally. You can use the same algorithm (though it might be covered by a patent you or anybody else has never heard of) but you cannot copy. Where's the difference between the "same algorithm" and "copy" if writing the thing with different words might be counted as a translation? It depends on whom you ask...
And that's exactly the beauty of the GPL. It's designed so that an author gets pay for his work but he cannot blackmail more and more later on. Just make sure that the initial price you request is high enough so that you don't need to complain later. If the software you're writing is a big and complex one, then you may need 100 customers to pay the initial price - the price would be too much for a single customer. In that case every one of your customers pay for 1/100th of the price you require. Or just one pays 100% and shares the rest with others. You get the same pay.
In real word situations you usually get requested for more features once the initial version has been paid for. It's up to you to request more payment for additional work or discontinue to work with the software if your customers don't want to pay. But unlike with the proprietary software, you customers aren't forced to pay whatever payment you request for. You might be able to request a pretty good payment because anyone else trying to create derivative works would have to first understood your existing work - and that would require more work and so cost more when done by anyone else.
GPL is about being fair - if you want more than your share for your work, you select some another license.
The other people with that problem are the Finnish. In Finland, we have this thing called "televisioilmoitus" ("TV-license") which is practically a yearly tax supported by law and the money goes directly to our lovely national broadcast company YLE. And one has to pay for that license for owning a device capable to sync with publicly available TV-broadcasts. It doesn't matter if one actually views content produced or distributed by YLE or not. In addition to this, commercial TV-companies have to pay yearly royalties to YLE by law for broadcasting TV-signals.
And still, with all this monetary support by law, the YLE cannot compete with commercial channels; all viewers combined from all YLE's channels are roughly equal to the viewers of a single commercial publicly available channel. Talk about wasted money...
Did you also fix the regressions/related bugs caused by that path? See for example, bugzilla.mozilla.org bugs #246382 and #246999? Also try test case 1 or test case 2.
The bug shows up more often if you set nglayout.initialpain.delay in about:config to some small number like 10 or 20. That number sets the number of milliseconds of delay before FF starts to display anything after the server starts sending the content. The problem is, the smaller the number is, the more FF needs to reflow the content and then this reflow bug appears. (Reflowing means re-rendering the page because of more content has been added to page - initial rendering may have been done from partial document...) Decreasing this value makes FF feel a much faster on fast computers, but be warned that repeated reflowing eats pretty much CPU power. And there's this slahdot.org rendering bug, of course.
It and many other reflow bugs have been fixed in FF 1.1. Try nighly builds to confirm.
Just make sure that public understands that the choice to lose those jobs is done by Microsoft. I assume that the company was doing pretty fine until Microsoft bought it and if Microsoft is now threatening to fire those people, it's their choice.
We have had a couple of similar situations in Finland where large companies asked for lower taxes or "they would be forced to fire people". Okay, they got the lower taxes and now they are firing people to increase profits. As a result, I don't trust local for-profit entities a little bit.
Anyway, software patents have two big problems. The first one is that about 20 years is way too long time for a patent in information technology field. Another big problem is that software patents have to be obfuscated. Otherwise the patent would cover just one implementation. As a result, nobody can even explain what a patent really does or what it covers because a thorough explanation could also be an implementation of said patent. Especially, one cannot explain the patent with any machine readable language. Or it that's allowed, no open source developer never needs to mind about software patents. Because then we're just distributing the description of the patent and patents do not cover use of patent for personal use -- like using the description to build/compile the software, for example.
However... IANAL, obviously, and I do live in a country that doesn't yet have software patents, so what do I know?
Patent Law -- a system desigened by lawyers, for the lawyers.
urpmi gaim works fine with Mandrake 10. Just like pretty much any piece of software you'd want. Try urpmf --summary frozen-bubble for example. For MS platform, I prefer Miranda as it's the lightest IM software I've found. It does just one thing and it does that well. Though, it's pretty much like Firefox -- you probably want to install some extensions/plugins first.
For example, if I want to import changes between revisions 123 and 124 from trunk to current branch, I can just use svn merge url://path/to/repo/trunk -r123:124 and all changes in the trunk between those revisions will be merged in the current branch. Note that a revision is always the result of a commit and might include changes to a bunch of files and directories. And if something has been renamed in that commit, that change will be included too! If it later comes out (possibly after 10 more commits to the very same files) that such a merge was mistake, I can remove that merge just as easily with svn merge url://path/to/repo/trunk -r124:123. Note that I just reversed the repository numbers, so svn applies changes in reverse.
There're some things I don't like, though:
Just give the cvs2svn a try and play with svn with some real world sources. And keep the CVS repository running until you're comfortable with svn. Then use cvs2svn to do the conversion.
You're absolutely right. My point was that if one thinks that making more laws is going to help with violence even a bit then banning guns would make more sense than banning violent tv shows or computer games. Neither of those laws could replace good parenting. A real "bugfix" would be to disallow everybody from breeding by default. Only, if you can demonstrate (how?) that you would be a good parent, you get a license to have children.
We already require license to own a gun or to drive a car. Still, anybody is allowed to have a child!
I understand the idea behind this new "law" but I still think that this is wrong way to fix the problem. If USA really wants to make life safer for 'law enforcement officers', how about stricter gun laws, instead? I think I have forgot something... oh yeah, not having lots of guns would be unconstitutional. I guess you should ban computer games and movies instead.
That's a still prediction of events to come in the future (that is, speaker is guessing that in the future, a proof is found that supports his thoughts). Note that you can replace word 'predict' with word 'guess' in every situation and the meaning of the sentence doesn't change. A predicting is just a fancy speak for guessing. "I guess that there are an infinite number of primes". Admittably, using word 'predict' hints that the speaker has some knowledge about the subject.
I'm running my W2K system with restricted access. For those third party apps that are broken and I cannot live without, I run those with Superior SU so that only those pieces of software are run with administrative access. Admittedly, not perfect, but much better than running web browser/word processor/whatever with administrative rights. Currently my list of programs that I use and that need administrator access are:
Under linux, there's absolute no reason to always run root. You can usually configure even hardware access via different groups so that you only need to add your user account to group that has access to hardware device you absolutely need.
If the "security" is high enough in other theaters too, I never have to download another crappy quality movie rip again. In the future, all the pirated movies will be copies of prematurely leaked DVDs. MPAA and friends should better identify their real friends and foes, pretty much like /. does :D
I've PS2 also and I've played exactly zero PS1 games with it. When I change to another console, I'll sell my PS2 and all the games I own for that so that I don't have to fork that much / any more money for the next console and a few games. I don't know about you guys but as long as games cost way over 50 bucks it really doesn't matter if the box costs 150 or 250 bucks -- it's only a bit more than one game!
Any web developer won't do. To get results like that, the web developer you ask about it, should have some clue. Most of the "web developers" and especially "web designers" I've met use software from Macromedia/Microsoft/Adobe and don't have a clue how web pages are supposed to work. They just author the web pages just like they would author a fixed sized paper. They consider the fact that MSIE doesn't allow changing the size of the fonts that use "px" size to be a feature, not a bug.
Remember that somebody being a "professional" doesn't mean that he knows how to do the thing, it just means that he does something related to the thing for living...
find -name "*.c" | sed 's/.c$/.o/;' | xargs echo all: | make -f-
(this is because GNU make is smart enough to figure out how to make
Perhaps the "sh" implementation could assume that there's a perl implementation with shebang in a file called "x" in the same directory and make every "sh script" as 'x "$@"'? That would be really effective scripting language! :-)
Umm.. no. In practice, no raytracer traces rays from the light source because very few of those rays would ever hit the camera. Instead, all raytracers do it backwards: backtrace the ray that would come from the top left pixel orientation towards the camera lens. When the ray hits an object (say, a wall), compute backtraces from that location. If you don't need realistic lightning, hitting a wall could always return preset amount of light (mixed with the object texture, of course) from that wall and no scattering of the ray.
The problem with full hardware raytracers is that the hardware should be able to hold whole scene or there'll be problems with some ray directions. GPU and the board on which it recides would limit the complexity of the scene, unlike with OpenGL which may render as complex scenes as the whole system can store (part of the scene can be streamed from the hard drive...)
I think the future will be a mix of both systems. Raytracer for curved, reflective surfaces. Multipass raster engine for everything else.
After looking through the video clip, it seems clear to me that the most important improvement in current games is better shadows. How many reflective surfaces there're in your environment? I'd say the glass is only one I'd miss reflections from and if that makes the difference between 2fps and 200fps, the lets forget the real reflections and use environment cube mapping instead.
That's true. CMOS is also used in Canon EOS-1Ds, Canon EOS-1D which are the digital SLRs for pro users.
I must get some of the stuff you're smoking! First, compare test shots between Canon EOS-300D ("Digital Rebel") and Nikon D70. Also check the noise test results. I'm not saying that Nikon D70 is a bad camera, the other way around. It's just that Canon CMOS cameras have from the start had less noise than most CCD cameras. CMOS technology has better battery life but usually slower burst shooting. I think that D70 has a bit better lens than the one that's bundled with 300D. One can get better lenses for a SLR, of course, but it needs to be taken into the consideration while you're comparing the features and price.
I still think that a second hand Powershoot G3 or G4 would be a better choice for a beginner. It's much cheaper and even G3 is far from a bad camera. By the time you've learned to shoot great pictures, the price of the entry level (or a bit higher) SLRs have dropped much more than the value of your second hand camera. Spend the money on a larger CF card and possibly to a good flash system instead (Note that investing on flash has vendor-lock effect as TTL systems usually require that the camera body and the flash system are from the same manufacturer).
It started to be Microsoft's problem when they decided that all those ports should be open by default. I think it ceases to be Microsoft's problem when they release a fix that disables those ports by default, as it seems clear that they are not going to make those services secure. I'm still trying to figure out how to close port 135 in Windows XP, but my Windows 2000 has zero open ports listening (netstat -a). Port 135 can be closed in Windows 2000 by running dcomcnfg.exe and removing check from "Enable Distributed COM on this computer" -- I mean, how many computers really need DCOM support? Why this isn't off by default? Anyhow, other ports can be closed by disabling unneeded services that are started by default.
I'm still running my original W2K system without firewall with zero viruses this far; if I don't have any ports listening, the firewall wouldn't block anything anyway and if I made holes for the applications I want to run, the viruses could come through those holes so firewall wouldn't help in that case either.
As for the application security, I don't use MSIE or Outlook...
Are they going to sue doubleclick.com now?
If you want comfortable, you can't go wrong with Sony MDR-F1. Sure, some open headphones sound better but MDR-F1 is probably the most comfortable pair of cans available anywhere. Forget Sennheiser's if you wear glasses. Be warned though, that MDF-F1's are a quite demanding headphones - for the best quality you'll need a separate headphones amplifier, though one can get acceptable sound quality even from the sound card plug. The drive units are 50 mm diameter which is probably more than your average office desktop speakers have...
Eh? The sonypi project clearly says on their front page:
Is that the level of support or "making sense" something that only Sony can provide? This stuff just works in Linux, thanks to sonypi driver developers, and no thanks to Sony.