Sorry, maybe I'm missing something here but how does increased floating point performance equate to significantly better web serving? (either of static content or dynamic) I'm very skeptical but I'm also curious to see if there is an aspect to this I've previously missed. The increased memory addressability otoh makes perfect sense, apache sure can be a hungry beast when you lard those chillen' (yeah, I'm from the southern US;) ) up with mod_perl et al...
Re:Yep... he's a gamer.
on
SIGGRAPH 2001
·
· Score: 1
:-) like the other poster said, it's stream of conciousness. but basically he's saying that the person who wrote the linked article was attending siggraph and viewing it through a gamer's eyes, not the eyes of someone who uses graphics for "real" (i.e. scientific/engineering/datavis)
uses. the video card discussion is a way of illustrating how the consumer and professional 3d markets are close... but still quite divergent ("for a gamer, it's all about fill rate, for a scientist it's all about polygons" and the differing need for texture perf).
(how many times, if you were a technical student, have you ever calculated a negative mass or something and realized it was a simple sign error somewhere in the middle of a pages-long computation?)
yet another developer seduced by shiny tech, forgetting the cardinal rule of the web[0]:
Content is King, load time is Queen, and tech is Fart, the messanger boy.
Want to indulge your urge to play with the tech backing your website, fine, have fun and more power too you for having the courage to follow your curiousity. But if your goal is giving your users information and maybe fostering some sort of community, stable proven and maybe even boring tech is the way to go. Look at slashdot. None of the tech is really exciting, and at least with the first version of slashcode, it was somewhat shoddily implemented at that[1]. Still, not many sites can claim almost half a million active user accounts, at least sites without 'yahoo.com' or 'msn.com' in their fqdn.
[0] not to sound holier-than-thou, I'v been way guilty of this too
[1]the perl is just nasty in the codebase I've seen. rotten nasty.
Where did I say that I viewed paying taxes as my only contribution to society? It's one important facet of that, certainly, becuase public works cost money, but I try to give back in other ways whenever I can, for example by giving to charities whose causes I beleive in such as the Southern Poverty Law Center who fight racial intolerance. (I would volunteer but working 70+ hour weeks prevents me from reasonably commiting to an organization.) I pay attention to current events, try to develop informed opinions about issues, and vote in every election I'm eligible for. Simple educated participation doesn't take much time and benefits society as a whole, no matter what political leanings people happen to have, I'm happy when people vote. Sorry if this reply is a little disjointed but I'm coming off an 11 hour day at work on five hrs of sleep. %^)
All societies have done things that were injustices against members of their populace at one time or another. Of course the US has a checkerd history in this regard. But like I said to another poster, rent and watch "In The Name Of The Father" sometime.
Or read "The Power of One". The British have an even worse record than we do, and we usually consider them the nice-cute-little-people-with-the-funny-accents-acr oss-the-pond.
Don't kid yourself, the US government breaks the law *routinely*, to further illegal purposes.
That's a pretty strong statement. I'm sure that in the vast depth and breadth of things the US gov has done over time, yes, in later examination, some of those things would be wrong. But it's not like FBI agents are out there shooting up smack before the drive to work and shooting a few minorities on the way just for kicks.
depends on your income, as even the most cursory glance at a tax booklet would tell you
You may now return to your US-A-OK idyll.
Riiight. And any defense lawyer worth their salt would shot that prosecution tactic full of holes.
Is our legal system infalliable? hell no. But it's a damn sight better than most others out there. Watch "In The Name Of The Father" sometime.
WRT intelligence agencies and the military, yes, well, I wish all that money were being spent on something I consider more worthwhile like education or something. however, the essence of democracy is compromise, not "fuck off! out of my yard! I don't need anyone (but could you pleez not turn off my water?)!" which seems to be the core of most "I'm a libertarian goddamnit!" coder philosophy.
Further, your allegations that the majority of the NSA's budget or their mission focus is devoted to domestic surveillance are pretty much just that. Worth about precisely jack over squat until you can dig up some proof.
And while you're doing that consider that if you were in a place like the UK or France or (heaven forbid) the PRC, you wouldn't have something like the Freedom of Information Act on your side.
happy, docile smile.
I am proud to be a citizen, and I am proud when I can contribute to the society that I live in. Like a true sports fan who can honestly analyse his favorite team, a true patriot does not blindly give his loyalty to his country. It is our duty to look for problems in our society and fix them.
Eternal vigilence and a desire to see your society be the best it can be, well, I don't think that in any way equates to docile.
I mean, dude, were you smoking crack during your entire educational career? If anything, his interventionist policies and the nature of the structures he put in place would label him as more of a socialist. A "king"? Hardly. Just extremely popular, enough to win four consecutive elections. Last I checked, kings aren't elected.
50% of your income? That's a suspiciously round number. Round numbers are usually that way because they came out of someone's ass.
Typical libertarian/conservative bleating about the bad old government peeking into their lives and siphoning money from their pockets. Wake up and smell the representative democracy! The US government is astonishingly open and non-intrusive compared even to other Western democracies (c.f. surveillance in the UK, police powers in the UK such as not having the right to remain silent, encryption laws in France, etc.). WRT taxes, would you like to personally pay for your own mirror of the public goods and services you use, if it would mean paying no taxes? Have fun affording an army/navy/air force to protect you, or police and firemen and EMTs to save you, or several teachers for your kids, or a set of roads for you to drive on, or regulatory people to check the quality of the water you drink, the food you eat, or the meds you take. You get a lot for what you pay, if you'd bother to enumerate it rather than whinge about the cost. I'm proud to pay my taxes, because it means I am contributing to the welfare of my fellow citizens as well as my own via supporting society as a whole.
Now, of course our society is far from perfect, and we have PLENTY of really, really fucking retarded laws. But I blame the corps for that, and all the other special interests that have warped our democratic processes with ca$h. The only way to fix these imbalances is to get involved with the system, or as was said (by whom I forget, politico from the early 20th iirc) "The only cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy."
Yeah, I know this is only tangently related to the main topic, but I couldn't bear to see tripe like that get modded up without a response. Mod me down, mod me up, I care not because a) it's only karma, and b) I've got way more than enough karma to not worry about it;-)
yeah, from what I read it was intended to be a third party accelerator for ppc systems, like in the 500+ MHz range at a time when most ppc chips were in the 200 MHz area. (somewhere in the 95-97 time frame as I dimly recall) Apple decided to purge the heretics around this time (c.f. Be and PowerComputing), and denied third parties access to things like firmware specs... when I was curious two years ago I googled up a number of articles about the whole thing.
... for a while in the late '99-early '00 region as a PFY sysadmin. If they say they can do something, I'd lay good money on them doing it. The level of expertise and knowledge displayed by their staff was stunning. More specifically, I do recall some of the engineers talking excitedly about this stuff at the time and mentioning breaking the 2GHz barrier (keep in mind this was in late '99), so this is hardly a publicity stunt as it's been in the works for quite a while if it's the same thing I was hearing about then...
They were the Austin branch of a company called Exponential Tech. Doing a google on that should bring you up to speed on the Apple connection. I wouldn't really consider them a startup as they've been around for several years and have designed a number of very popular things (e.g. DSPs for other
chip manufacturers).
They were a great bunch to work for, especially for being kind to a rather wet-behind-the-ears sysadmin like I was. The only downside to working there was the gawd-awful commute I had to do from far NE Austin to far SW Austin. (If you're an EE type who'd like to live in Austin, they'd IMHO be a great place to work for)
heh, well I think most of the people in my circle of friends were firmly in the "Tim Burton Smoked A Fat Bag of Crack That Day" school of thought...:-)
If anything, the mere suggestion that it is further proves the man's thesis. If there is one big "problem" with open source these days, it's the unreasoned fanaticism of its proponents. We have met the enemy, and it isn't Microsoft. It is us.
Yes, many times the Open Source community has produced things better than commercial endeavors. Apache and IIS is a great example. So are vim and/or emacs vs. pretty much any closed source editor. etc. etc. Perl kicks the ass out of VisualBasic every day of the week and three times on Sunday. In terms of security and ease of administration, any of the free unixen beat win32 server platforms hands down IMHO. But there are times when, well, face it guys, someone with a clue works for a company and makes something good that is closed source. ASP pages, for example, have a nice object model (just use jscript to avoid that vbscript suckage;-) ). Anyone who things linux/*bsd is a good OpenGL development platform has never used Irix. etc. etc.
In the end, information technology is only useful in the extent that it makes people's lives easier or more entertaining in some way[1]. Whether the machine code came though gcc or msvc++, the end user does not care one whit. We are carpenters and stonemasons, only our raw materials are bits instead of wood or stone. So just pick the right tools for the job at hand, and leave the fanaticism at the door!
[1] Or to stick it to The Man. But that's besides the current point.
(I fully expect to get modded down for saying this stuff, but fuck it, I have 50 karma so I care not a fig for the slings and arrow of outrageous moderation.)
this reminds me of the possibly urban legend tale of aviators coming home from WW2 in the US and so associating vibration and loud noise with excitement that they couldn't "function" in quiet, intimate situations. so therapists advised putting a vacuum cleaner under the bed and the problem eventually cleared up. if it's true perhaps it is another datum for how strongly sound affects the human psyche. --
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
eh? so? clients don't matter squatola, as long as the data store and serving mechanisms are running on something secure. I do believe he said "anything important"... Or do you expect the average newbie employee or random client off the street to waltz into the bank and be perfectly adept using OS/2, Linux, *BSD, or whatever the hell the bank uses "for real"? (yes, many banks rely on IBM software like OS/2 for internal clients, DB2 on AIX for datastore, etc.; if one bank is retarded, this does not disprove the original posters thesis)
What's being asked is that the computer makers thoroughly test and understand the workings of the JRE being packaged.
The JRE is about as stone simple as you can get in terms of installation[1]. They don't need to understand jack squat about how the JVM works as long as the person making the disk image can click through a few dialog boxes to install it. Analogy: do you understand how a glow plug works? Can you drive a car with a diesel engine?
Besides, don't you think Sun or IBM would jump all over themselves providing technical info to OEMs willing to try this with their JREs?
Regarding Microsoft support of OEM installations (either of MS products or otherwise): hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha hahahaha.
thanks, I haven't laughed that way in a long time.
[1]Well, unless you're using Mozilla. But I don't see OEMs shipping a beta product as the main browser anytime soon.
Yep. And the differences become larger on the server side. (SQL Server is way more expensive than NT Server, as is Exchange, as is...). True, you have to buy license packs for the OS to add on users, but that's just them designing a razor where you have to replace two blades at once.;-)
using SDL for input, as a graphics substrate for 2D games and for OpenGL-based 3D games, etc. Throw in some coverage of OpenAL as well as generally applicable topics such as AI, Maths, and the like.
Garnish with touches of the 'other side' of game development (plot, characterization, artwork)
so the code monkeys understand what the writers and artists are talking about.
Result: a book teaching folks how to make games that run on Linux. And windows.
And any other platform SDL, OpenGL, and
OpenAL work on. If it can be pointed out to the development community that these tools are viable and easy to use, further that they get portability almost for free using them thus expanding their market for low marginal cost, more games might come out that Linux, MacOS, BeOS, *BSD, etc. could play.
Plus SDL is just cool.:-)
Only question in my mind is would O'Reilly publish a book like this; if so what animal would it be? (would a woodcut of Pac-Man work?)
Side note: gv works just as well as Acrobat to view PDF files from netscape as a helper app (and PS too, of course). Just add "gv %s" in as the application to handle the file types for PostScript and PDF(edit->preferences->helperapps or something like that). Personally I like gv's navigational structure better anyway.
(Well,/path/to/gv if it isn't in your path, naturally.)
Very rarely I will run across a document that gv just doesn't like but that Acrobat displays fine. This happens maybe once a month, if I'm looking at a fair amount of pdf's.
I think the software dependencies for gv are ghostscript and whatever dependencies it has but I'm not sure. apt-get or rpmfind.net or your ports tree are your friends in that regard.
Yeah, it's fast and supports transactions. BUT, at least in the last stable release, there were still some nasty catches. One I do recall was that the database could have no more than 1023 tables of the gemini type.
So if you do use it, make damn sure you read the docs on it and use it wisely given its limitations. IMHO, all of the new table types designed to give MySQL ACID-level database behavior have flaws, so you'd be better off using something with more mature suport if you need this (like PostgreSQL or a commercial rdbms).
Homeric nod, plot, and other 3am hallucinations
on
Lord of Light
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· Score: 2
(The first chapter is chronologically the second-last, which is a little confusing at first.)
This same structure is found in Homer's Odysee.
IIRC from freshman literature in high school (a disturbing number of years ago), the term for this was in media res or "in the middle" (someting like that anyway).
Rather effective for a heroic work as you see the penultimate part of the plot and the character's struggles to reach that point, with the final segment providing the climactic resolution / bad-guy-smiting. This yields a sense of inevitability to the character's actions, as they are drawn to their fate in the future. This "charmed life" atmosphere is of course fitting for a heroic character/story arc. So the use here could be a deliberate nod to Homer.
OTOH, this device is used everywhere in literature (and things derived from literature such as TV shows and movies, eg. how many times has a Star Trek episode gone like this: two minutes of stuff from the 'end' of that show's plot, intro/credits, back to the beginning...). Consider that this meme has had a few millenia to propogate through the writing culture and it's no wonder that this device is so frequently employed. So maybe RZ wasn't thinking in particular about Homer at the time.
stepwise.com for osx related things (& osx server and openstep and...). See the softrak section for osx databases (mysql an Pg both). nb: the osx server and osx sections are different; and I don't use either so ?? on the cross compatibility front.
Killer Kangaroos and the Dangers of Code Reuse
on
Military Grade Gaming
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· Score: 2
This spring during this OOD class I was taking at UT-Austin, the teacher gave an example of code resuse taken a bit too far (it lead into better ways to do what the programmers were trying to do). You will I hope pardon that I can't give any attribution or backup material for this, she didn't give any and I didn't think at the time to ask her...
Apparently, the Australian army wanted to make a flight sim to train helicopter pilots/gunnery officers on, complete with all the things you'd expect like infantry, ground vehicles, various and sundry air units, and non-combatants like civilians and atmosphere critters like kangaroos.
This is in the early 90s from what I recall her saying.
So the programmers naturally spend most of their time working on the "active" interaction objects, i.e. the ones the pilots/gunners will most likely be shooting at: infantry and vehicles.
(friend and foe, for IFF tests) It came time to do the atmosphere things and they decided to be efficient and reuse many of the behavioral subroutines from the enemy infantry for the ground critters (like herds of kangaroos instead of platoons of infantry; enemy becuase kangaroos wouldn't most likely stand and wave at a helicopter like Australian troops would).
This worked very well, mostly. The kangaroos would scatter and try to run away from the helicopter as soon as they heard it, hiding behind trees, hills, and in valleys, etc.
Unfortunately, the code reused also modeled the "pop out from behind cover and fire shoulder-launched AA missiles at helicopter" behavior, a fact no one noticed until the first air crew was lost due to the KLA (Kangaroo Liberation Army, as the bug manifestation apparently became known as).
Well, they do ship PostgreSQL, which is at least an ORDBMS. (And it's really cool!</advocacy>). Plus even the latest versions of Pg typically are a zero sweat install (rpms from the Pg site).
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, maybe I'm missing something here but how does increased floating point performance equate to significantly better web serving? (either of static content or dynamic) I'm very skeptical but I'm also curious to see if there is an aspect to this I've previously missed. The increased memory addressability otoh makes perfect sense, apache sure can be a hungry beast when you lard those chillen' (yeah, I'm from the southern US ;) ) up with mod_perl et al...
:-) like the other poster said, it's stream of conciousness. but basically he's saying that the person who wrote the linked article was attending siggraph and viewing it through a gamer's eyes, not the eyes of someone who uses graphics for "real" (i.e. scientific/engineering/datavis) ... but still quite divergent ("for a gamer, it's all about fill rate, for a scientist it's all about polygons" and the differing need for texture perf).
uses. the video card discussion is a way of illustrating how the consumer and professional 3d markets are close
sign change error? ;-)
(how many times, if you were a technical student, have you ever calculated a negative mass or something and realized it was a simple sign error somewhere in the middle of a pages-long computation?)
yet another developer seduced by shiny tech, forgetting the cardinal rule of the web[0]:
Content is King, load time is Queen, and tech is Fart, the messanger boy.
Want to indulge your urge to play with the tech backing your website, fine, have fun and more power too you for having the courage to follow your curiousity. But if your goal is giving your users information and maybe fostering some sort of community, stable proven and maybe even boring tech is the way to go. Look at slashdot. None of the tech is really exciting, and at least with the first version of slashcode, it was somewhat shoddily implemented at that[1]. Still, not many sites can claim almost half a million active user accounts, at least sites without 'yahoo.com' or 'msn.com' in their fqdn.
[0] not to sound holier-than-thou, I'v been way guilty of this too
[1]the perl is just nasty in the codebase I've seen. rotten nasty.
Where did I say that I viewed paying taxes as my only contribution to society? It's one important facet of that, certainly, becuase public works cost money, but I try to give back in other ways whenever I can, for example by giving to charities whose causes I beleive in such as the Southern Poverty Law Center who fight racial intolerance. (I would volunteer but working 70+ hour weeks prevents me from reasonably commiting to an organization.) I pay attention to current events, try to develop informed opinions about issues, and vote in every election I'm eligible for. Simple educated participation doesn't take much time and benefits society as a whole, no matter what political leanings people happen to have, I'm happy when people vote. Sorry if this reply is a little disjointed but I'm coming off an 11 hour day at work on five hrs of sleep. %^)
Or read "The Power of One". The British have an even worse record than we do, and we usually consider them the nice-cute-little-people-with-the-funny-accents-ac
That's a pretty strong statement. I'm sure that in the vast depth and breadth of things the US gov has done over time, yes, in later examination, some of those things would be wrong. But it's not like FBI agents are out there shooting up smack before the drive to work and shooting a few minorities on the way just for kicks.
depends on your income, as even the most cursory glance at a tax booklet would tell you
Riiight. And any defense lawyer worth their salt would shot that prosecution tactic full of holes.
Is our legal system infalliable? hell no. But it's a damn sight better than most others out there. Watch "In The Name Of The Father" sometime.
WRT intelligence agencies and the military, yes, well, I wish all that money were being spent on something I consider more worthwhile like education or something. however, the essence of democracy is compromise, not "fuck off! out of my yard! I don't need anyone (but could you pleez not turn off my water?)!" which seems to be the core of most "I'm a libertarian goddamnit!" coder philosophy.
Further, your allegations that the majority of the NSA's budget or their mission focus is devoted to domestic surveillance are pretty much just that. Worth about precisely jack over squat until you can dig up some proof.
And while you're doing that consider that if you were in a place like the UK or France or (heaven forbid) the PRC, you wouldn't have something like the Freedom of Information Act on your side.
I am proud to be a citizen, and I am proud when I can contribute to the society that I live in. Like a true sports fan who can honestly analyse his favorite team, a true patriot does not blindly give his loyalty to his country. It is our duty to look for problems in our society and fix them.
Eternal vigilence and a desire to see your society be the best it can be, well, I don't think that in any way equates to docile.
I mean, dude, were you smoking crack during your entire educational career? If anything, his interventionist policies and the nature of the structures he put in place would label him as more of a socialist. A "king"? Hardly. Just extremely popular, enough to win four consecutive elections. Last I checked, kings aren't elected.
;-)
50% of your income? That's a suspiciously round number. Round numbers are usually that way because they came out of someone's ass.
Typical libertarian/conservative bleating about the bad old government peeking into their lives and siphoning money from their pockets. Wake up and smell the representative democracy! The US government is astonishingly open and non-intrusive compared even to other Western democracies (c.f. surveillance in the UK, police powers in the UK such as not having the right to remain silent, encryption laws in France, etc.). WRT taxes, would you like to personally pay for your own mirror of the public goods and services you use, if it would mean paying no taxes? Have fun affording an army/navy/air force to protect you, or police and firemen and EMTs to save you, or several teachers for your kids, or a set of roads for you to drive on, or regulatory people to check the quality of the water you drink, the food you eat, or the meds you take. You get a lot for what you pay, if you'd bother to enumerate it rather than whinge about the cost. I'm proud to pay my taxes, because it means I am contributing to the welfare of my fellow citizens as well as my own via supporting society as a whole.
Now, of course our society is far from perfect, and we have PLENTY of really, really fucking retarded laws. But I blame the corps for that, and all the other special interests that have warped our democratic processes with ca$h. The only way to fix these imbalances is to get involved with the system, or as was said (by whom I forget, politico from the early 20th iirc) "The only cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy."
Yeah, I know this is only tangently related to the main topic, but I couldn't bear to see tripe like that get modded up without a response. Mod me down, mod me up, I care not because a) it's only karma, and b) I've got way more than enough karma to not worry about it
yeah, from what I read it was intended to be a third party accelerator for ppc systems, like in the 500+ MHz range at a time when most ppc chips were in the 200 MHz area. (somewhere in the 95-97 time frame as I dimly recall) Apple decided to purge the heretics around this time (c.f. Be and PowerComputing), and denied third parties access to things like firmware specs... when I was curious two years ago I googled up a number of articles about the whole thing.
... for a while in the late '99-early '00 region as a PFY sysadmin. If they say they can do something, I'd lay good money on them doing it. The level of expertise and knowledge displayed by their staff was stunning. More specifically, I do recall some of the engineers talking excitedly about this stuff at the time and mentioning breaking the 2GHz barrier (keep in mind this was in late '99), so this is hardly a publicity stunt as it's been in the works for quite a while if it's the same thing I was hearing about then...
They were the Austin branch of a company called Exponential Tech. Doing a google on that should bring you up to speed on the Apple connection. I wouldn't really consider them a startup as they've been around for several years and have designed a number of very popular things (e.g. DSPs for other chip manufacturers).
They were a great bunch to work for, especially for being kind to a rather wet-behind-the-ears sysadmin like I was. The only downside to working there was the gawd-awful commute I had to do from far NE Austin to far SW Austin. (If you're an EE type who'd like to live in Austin, they'd IMHO be a great place to work for)
heh, well I think most of the people in my circle of friends were firmly in the "Tim Burton Smoked A Fat Bag of Crack That Day" school of thought... :-)
It just happens to be BSD/OS. :-) (But at least by virtue of Apache and PHP they are benefiting from free software.)
Yeah, I had pretty much the same thing happen once for a programming position:
Company Owner: (first question after the small talk) "So what languages do you know?"
Me: "Well, in approximate order of how much I like them, there is perl , and"
CO: (big smile) "Cool, we really need a perl guy. How much do you want?"
That startup ended up dying out from under me several months later, but it was a fun ride on the whole.
If anything, the mere suggestion that it is further proves the man's thesis. If there is one big "problem" with open source these days, it's the unreasoned fanaticism of its proponents. We have met the enemy, and it isn't Microsoft. It is us.
Yes, many times the Open Source community has produced things better than commercial endeavors. Apache and IIS is a great example. So are vim and/or emacs vs. pretty much any closed source editor. etc. etc. Perl kicks the ass out of VisualBasic every day of the week and three times on Sunday. In terms of security and ease of administration, any of the free unixen beat win32 server platforms hands down IMHO. But there are times when, well, face it guys, someone with a clue works for a company and makes something good that is closed source. ASP pages, for example, have a nice object model (just use jscript to avoid that vbscript suckage ;-) ). Anyone who things linux/*bsd is a good OpenGL development platform has never used Irix. etc. etc.
In the end, information technology is only useful in the extent that it makes people's lives easier or more entertaining in some way[1]. Whether the machine code came though gcc or msvc++, the end user does not care one whit. We are carpenters and stonemasons, only our raw materials are bits instead of wood or stone. So just pick the right tools for the job at hand, and leave the fanaticism at the door!
[1] Or to stick it to The Man. But that's besides the current point.
(I fully expect to get modded down for saying this stuff, but fuck it, I have 50 karma so I care not a fig for the slings and arrow of outrageous moderation.)
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
this reminds me of the possibly urban legend tale of aviators coming home from WW2 in the US and so associating vibration and loud noise with excitement that they couldn't "function" in quiet, intimate situations. so therapists advised putting a vacuum cleaner under the bed and the problem eventually cleared up. if it's true perhaps it is another datum for how strongly sound affects the human psyche.
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
eh? so? clients don't matter squatola, as long as the data store and serving mechanisms are running on something secure. I do believe he said "anything important"... Or do you expect the average newbie employee or random client off the street to waltz into the bank and be perfectly adept using OS/2, Linux, *BSD, or whatever the hell the bank uses "for real"? (yes, many banks rely on IBM software like OS/2 for internal clients, DB2 on AIX for datastore, etc.; if one bank is retarded, this does not disprove the original posters thesis)
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
The JRE is about as stone simple as you can get in terms of installation[1]. They don't need to understand jack squat about how the JVM works as long as the person making the disk image can click through a few dialog boxes to install it. Analogy: do you understand how a glow plug works? Can you drive a car with a diesel engine?
Besides, don't you think Sun or IBM would jump all over themselves providing technical info to OEMs willing to try this with their JREs?
Regarding Microsoft support of OEM installations (either of MS products or otherwise): hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha hahahaha.
thanks, I haven't laughed that way in a long time.
[1]Well, unless you're using Mozilla. But I don't see OEMs shipping a beta product as the main browser anytime soon.
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
Yep. And the differences become larger on the server side. (SQL Server is way more expensive than NT Server, as is Exchange, as is ...). True, you have to buy license packs for the OS to add on users, but that's just them designing a razor where you have to replace two blades at once. ;-)
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
using SDL for input, as a graphics substrate for 2D games and for OpenGL-based 3D games, etc. Throw in some coverage of OpenAL as well as generally applicable topics such as AI, Maths, and the like. Garnish with touches of the 'other side' of game development (plot, characterization, artwork) so the code monkeys understand what the writers and artists are talking about.
Result: a book teaching folks how to make games that run on Linux. And windows. And any other platform SDL, OpenGL, and OpenAL work on. If it can be pointed out to the development community that these tools are viable and easy to use, further that they get portability almost for free using them thus expanding their market for low marginal cost, more games might come out that Linux, MacOS, BeOS, *BSD, etc. could play.
Plus SDL is just cool. :-)
Only question in my mind is would O'Reilly publish a book like this; if so what animal would it be? (would a woodcut of Pac-Man work?)
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News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
Side note: gv works just as well as Acrobat to view PDF files from netscape as a helper app (and PS too, of course). Just add "gv %s" in as the application to handle the file types for PostScript and PDF(edit->preferences->helperapps or something like that). Personally I like gv's navigational structure better anyway.
(Well, /path/to/gv if it isn't in your path, naturally.)
Very rarely I will run across a document that gv just doesn't like but that Acrobat displays fine. This happens maybe once a month, if I'm looking at a fair amount of pdf's.
I think the software dependencies for gv are ghostscript and whatever dependencies it has but I'm not sure. apt-get or rpmfind.net or your ports tree are your friends in that regard.
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Yeah, it's fast and supports transactions. BUT, at least in the last stable release, there were still some nasty catches. One I do recall was that the database could have no more than 1023 tables of the gemini type.
So if you do use it, make damn sure you read the docs on it and use it wisely given its limitations. IMHO, all of the new table types designed to give MySQL ACID-level database behavior have flaws, so you'd be better off using something with more mature suport if you need this (like PostgreSQL or a commercial rdbms).
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This same structure is found in Homer's Odysee. IIRC from freshman literature in high school (a disturbing number of years ago), the term for this was in media res or "in the middle" (someting like that anyway).
Rather effective for a heroic work as you see the penultimate part of the plot and the character's struggles to reach that point, with the final segment providing the climactic resolution / bad-guy-smiting. This yields a sense of inevitability to the character's actions, as they are drawn to their fate in the future. This "charmed life" atmosphere is of course fitting for a heroic character/story arc. So the use here could be a deliberate nod to Homer.
OTOH, this device is used everywhere in literature (and things derived from literature such as TV shows and movies, eg. how many times has a Star Trek episode gone like this: two minutes of stuff from the 'end' of that show's plot, intro/credits, back to the beginning...). Consider that this meme has had a few millenia to propogate through the writing culture and it's no wonder that this device is so frequently employed. So maybe RZ wasn't thinking in particular about Homer at the time.
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stepwise.com for osx related things (& osx server and openstep and ...). See the softrak section for osx databases (mysql an Pg both). nb: the osx server and osx sections are different; and I don't use either so ?? on the cross compatibility front.
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This spring during this OOD class I was taking at UT-Austin, the teacher gave an example of code resuse taken a bit too far (it lead into better ways to do what the programmers were trying to do). You will I hope pardon that I can't give any attribution or backup material for this, she didn't give any and I didn't think at the time to ask her...
Apparently, the Australian army wanted to make a flight sim to train helicopter pilots/gunnery officers on, complete with all the things you'd expect like infantry, ground vehicles, various and sundry air units, and non-combatants like civilians and atmosphere critters like kangaroos. This is in the early 90s from what I recall her saying.
So the programmers naturally spend most of their time working on the "active" interaction objects, i.e. the ones the pilots/gunners will most likely be shooting at: infantry and vehicles. (friend and foe, for IFF tests) It came time to do the atmosphere things and they decided to be efficient and reuse many of the behavioral subroutines from the enemy infantry for the ground critters (like herds of kangaroos instead of platoons of infantry; enemy becuase kangaroos wouldn't most likely stand and wave at a helicopter like Australian troops would).
This worked very well, mostly. The kangaroos would scatter and try to run away from the helicopter as soon as they heard it, hiding behind trees, hills, and in valleys, etc.
Unfortunately, the code reused also modeled the "pop out from behind cover and fire shoulder-launched AA missiles at helicopter" behavior, a fact no one noticed until the first air crew was lost due to the KLA (Kangaroo Liberation Army, as the bug manifestation apparently became known as).
Oops.
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Well, they do ship PostgreSQL, which is at least an ORDBMS. (And it's really cool!</advocacy>). Plus even the latest versions of Pg typically are a zero sweat install (rpms from the Pg site).
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