It doesn't matter if emergency service is just for me or for everyone. The point is the phone belongs to me and I should have a right to block any use of the phone I don't want. If they wanted a phone they should have bought a cellphone themselves.
How many people run up, grab somebody elses cellphone, and call 911 (or 999 or whatever)? I'd be shocked if this happens more than a few times in a whole year. When it does happen I'd have to wonder for what reason they aren't using a phone of their own.
To me, saving a couple lifes a year isn't worth inconviencing everyone all the time. It's the same as the stupid airline security (since 9/11.. damn those numbers again) that is totally anal retentive now. On the off chance that somebody is going to take over a plane using a pair of tweezers they forbid you taking all sorts of common items on a plane, make boarding a plane much slower and annoying than it used to be, and raise costs of flying. All because somebody/could/ be hurt if they don't. It's the same with the phone thing. Being able to disable 911 or pick a vendor that doesn't support 911/could/ result in someone being hurt so they pass some stupid laws. We have some crazy idea that it's possible to bandaid over every part of life that could result in someone being hurt.. at the small price of personal freedoms. Obviously they never saw iRobot or if they did they failed to understand the message.;)
What makes people assume that a phone has to be a method of reaching emergency help? Any communications device could do the same thing. Not that 911 is a bad idea. I just don't buy the idea that you have a right to force it into products or on consumers that don't want it.
If the bridge you mentioned was my property then why would I be forced to change it just because unauthorized users might injure themselves on it? If it's their own bridge, or a bridge owned by the government, then fine it can be fixed up for the public good but if it's my bridge then it's mine to do with as I wanted. I've had bridges on my property before crossing little creeks on my land. Maybe now we're going to say I can't build out of logs and I need to build from steel in case an ambulance needs to cross my foot bridge in case of an emergency?
I'm very sorry that sometimes people are hurt or die but that is just a fact of life. We can't fix it by taking away freedoms. Small freedoms, like choosing my own phone provider, with or withour 911 service, are the things that are slowly eroded by do-good politics. Nobody wants to be the bad guy that says that things that are obviously good ideas or good intentions shouldn't be forced on people so those freedoms just quietly disappear. Let people choose to adopt these good ideas for themselves.
So let it be consumer demand then. If 99% of consumers want it then the company that supports it will have a lot more customers than the company that doesn't support it. Forcing it on people using the legal system is the wrong way to add features to products. What right do they have to tell me I can't use a product because it lacks a feature I don't want? It's not as if I'm saying other people have to use the same product. Besides, last time I looked Vonage had 911 support listed. Is there something missing for it to qualify for passing this stupid law?
A way to turn off 911 support would be good. Or at least the option to disable 911 when keyguard is enabled. I really don't care if I might need it someday because I'm unlikely to use it even if nearly dead. It just wouldn't occur to me in an emergency (it never has in past emergencies). So could I please not have products that dial 911 themselves at the drop of a hat. Every cellphone I've had recently has had that problem and one home phone I had a few years back (that was otherwise a very nice phone) would dial 911 if you pressed 9 and didn't proceed to press anything else within 15 seconds or so. REALLY pissed me off as I found out it did this the hard way and found out that you can't hang up a 911 call. I'm going to get fined for prank calling because of a poorly designed product? Really, if I can't dial 911 by myself then I'm probably to near death to bother with. Maybe they just figure that the average moron can't remember all three of those numbers so they need to simplify the process for them.:p
Shouldn't consumers be able to pick between products that support 911 and those that don't? I DON'T want 911 service and would be quite pissed to be told I can't pick a phone company because they don't offer 911 service.
I hate 911 service on my cell phone. Stupid things are designed so you can dial 911 even when keyguard is on. The only keys that work are 9 and 1.. figure out what number frequently gets dialed as my phone bangs around in my pocket. Duh. Bad idea altogether.
Might as well make it against the law to provide Internet service without providing a special button on the modem that will request emergency help. Or hey how about force cable providers to provide a help button on the remote control.
Forcing such a stupid feature just doesn't make sense. Let consumer demand decide this issue.
Did anyone ever respect them? I never did. Ever tried to get them to resolve the issue of a register forcibly stealing your domain? Hahaha good luck. User's of eNom know what I'm talking about.
Maybe there are stupid introverts and smart introverts then? The stupid ones spend all day worrying about stupid stuff while the smart ones are day dreaming and designing new code, writing novels, planning new projects, etc in their head.
I don't think it's fair to say that introverts never do anything though. They just don't spend a lot of time doing stupid crap like clubbing and watching football games in a pub full of pals. I enjoy things like hiking, travel, building, exploring, studying, etc. More intellectual doing of things I guess. Being with average extroverts feels like being put in charge of babysitting young children.
But do you spend a lot of time worrying about what people think of you and when you find out someone doesn't like you do you spend a lot of effort trying to win them over? Most introverts don't which is a large part of the reason that we suffer as social outcasts in highschool. We might care but we don't think about it that much and don't act on it that much.
It often seems the people that seem the most outgoing and/or wild are actually introverts. In forcing ourselves to seem outgoing it's often easier to overdo things. Also by being some sort of an actor we can hide inside our roles which gives us something to prompt us to act out.
I'm pretty quiet and dull most of the time but I enjoy torturing people with my own little role playing so I think it's probably similar but on a smaller scale. I go up to people in the grocery store and start making potatos talk to them and things like that. Doubly strange since most people assume, wrongly, that I'm shy because I'm an introvert. But being introverted I have time to see funny things to say and do that other people would probably miss so it allows me to act these things out or say the right lines at the right time to be funny. It's sort of like being a Jedi because you see things before other people have had time to think about them.;) Probably someone like Johnny would experience things that way too. I'd expect most comedians that are good at improv comedy are introverts.
You're assuming that the introverts are only solving one problem at a time. My experience is that most introverts juggle many thoughts at the same time. I'll watch tv, listen to music, read a couple books, surf the web, check my email, and work on 5 or 6 things all at once without problem. Less brain activity on a single problem means you can spend the rest on other problems or work on harder problems.
Less brain activity altogether means your dead, a rock, really stupid, or simply lacking in curiosity and ambition. As it I find it difficult to ever be bored or idle because I'm always thinking of new interesting things.
I expect other introverts are probably the same although I'm not opposed to a group decision that I'm special.;)
Supporting full CSS2, PNGs, DOM, and Javascript would be a good start for IE. I for one refuse to support IE until it supports at least these basics. IE has 80-90% market share so there is no excuse for them not supporting these modern features. Everyone else should be catching up instead of leading. Opera is rather shoddy but better than IE and maybe the new version is even better. Safari and Firefox have small bits missing and minor bugs but are/mostly/ supportive of all these standards (and many more).
If Microsoft can't get it's house in order then I suggest making an IE interface on top of the gecko and/or khtml engines. There is no reason to keep on a fight they've clearly lost and will see little profit from rejoining. The best way to keep their customers using IE is to make IE use the competitions technology.
I beg to differ. Introverts just don't care if everyone knows how smart they are. Most of them don't really realize how smart they are. Introverts tend to spend more time thinking about actual interesting things and not just what people think of them. Which is probably why they seem antisocial - they really don't give a flying fuck what everyone else thinks. It's not that they don't care. It's more that they really don't stop to think about it.
I think it's why a lot of people who are intelligent and whom we think of as extroverts will admit to being introverts that have learned to fake extroversion in order to do what they want. A lot of actors, musicians, business men, etc that seem very public faces were introverts as children and return to introversion when they aren't working. Sort of an interesting twist on the whole thing I think.
Ahhhhh I like stories like this that tell me I'm smarter than everbody else!
It seems we're still looking for intelligent life on Earth? Doh, we're supposed to check a signal for a threat before we know the signal exists? That's really bright. Almost as bright is that he thinks there are aliens intelligent enough to be a security risk to our mish-mash of computer technologies they've not had a chance to study (if they've had a chance then we have bigger problems) AND he thinks we can somehow stop them from attacking our network by plugging a copy of Norton somewhere in the system? Brilliant.
I for one won't be afraid until a strange multi-dimensional bird shows up in my mail box.
My biggest fetish is making lots of extensible small programs/libraries and building other programs out of them.. so I guess I like subclassing and embedding too. I was once accused of creating my own custom programming language for everything I programmed. I do that less now but do like to expose the internals in ways that let my programs be modifed in all sorts of interesting ways.
I wonder if they aren't considering inventing a new language, or modifying an existing language, that has constructs to make this kind of programming easier. Something that would let you create tasks that look like sepperate mini-programs running but can communicate easily using some common concept such as pipes. There is really no reason that programmers need to write everything in C and C++.
A Python-like language that had extra semantics for the multi-processor design and that compiled down to machine code would be good I think. Easier and less verbose than Java, C, or C++ with good OOP support. Why muck with the details when you can avoid doing so. It amusses me that most games and graphical programs just run in a while loop but that you still have to specify the while loop in the language. Couldn't the language just know little details such as that? It's not a big detail but over the course of a large program the little details add up and make the program harder to understand.
Or a OS that can do the same would work. Let it run the main program as programmers would normally expect and run the SPE programs as sepperate programs and again let them communicate in some known method such as pipes.
When I was a kid one of the first enviroments I learned to program in was MOO (MUD Object Oriented) which is a somewhat interesting enviroment to learn in as it consists of a text-based multi-user online enviroment that every user can add new programming to as the game runs. The entire system was object oriented and obviously objects could work together but you didn't need to worry about the details of what other objects were doing most of the time. THAT is an incredibly powerful concept I think and one that could be very suited to multi-core or multi-processor systems.:)
Individual indiosyncracies are nice. I hate being forced to use a given enviroment to work on something. I keep working on my ideal enviroment which is of course ideal only to me. Fancy tools with low overhead.;)
All consoles suffer from the problem of games only really exlpoiting the systems full power after a couple years of developer practice. Really, unless it's based entirely on an existing known system, you have to expect that.
Underestimating RAM needs is a common problem too. At least since BG's 640K is enough for anyone.
I imagine the multi-core design will improve AI code, weather simulation, physics simulation, etc. Anything that needs lots of small concurrent calculations.
It seems that the cell design, once utilized, should make for games that feel better even if they look the same. Maybe the difference won't show in a screenshot but you'll be able to tell it's there when you play the game.
I'm interested in the rumor that multiple Cell processors will be able to work together even over the PS3's built-in networking. That could open up some interesting possibilities. Bigger tasks could be broken up across multiple Cell's for more bang. Especially awesome if the same will be true of Cell's in blade servers and other real world apps. Not needing a third party solution to run a program across multiple machines would be really awesome.
I'll use an IDE when they invent one that is fast, flexible, and chrome free as a normal bash command prompt. I have hated every IDE I've tried due to slowness and their insistance on making an ugly bloated interface. I don't need the IDE to try to guess what I'm typing, to offer code debugging while I'm typing, to FTP my files for me, etc.
Basic project management, checking my code for errors (when I ask.. not constantly), good seach and replace (with regular expressions and across multiple files), and a built-in reference guides for everything I'm doing (language, protocols, etc) would be good enough. Possibly an interface builder if it works well and stays out of the way when not needed. Much more than that and you're just letting wasting your time playing with an interface replace actual coding time.
I don't bother making my websites look nice in IE anymore. Just make it usable and slap a 'better with Firefox' logo/link on. Sometimes I'll bother tweaking the site to fix minor bugs in Opera and Safari but not always. Luckily the bugs in those, especially in Safari, are few so even if I don't they tend to work well.
I like to use text shadowing too which STILL only works in Safari. I really wish Firefox would add that style element. It really does make text jump off the page in a way flat text doesn't.
I haven't really noticed FF leaking memory but I do wish it could use less memory for windows and tabs that haven't been used recently. Page their contents to disk or something instead of keeping them in RAM. A lot of the time I'll have 40+ tabs open and until I close them FF uses the expected crap load of memory.
At least an opensource PS would have came with directions on how to use your string when setting up your PS and a helpful community to answer question should you have difficulty using your string. Will we be seeing a 'String Included' logo on 360 boxes? I doubt it!
I guess Microsoft thought this out realy well. How to keep people from running Linux on the 360? Ahh.. make it so it overheats and shuts itself off. Linux geeks hate when their uptime is less than a year.
Seriously though, this kind of issue is why I won't think of buying a 360 until such a time as they are at discount price. I still haven't got around to buying an original XBOX and I feel no interest in a 360 either. I messed with one at the store and was really unimpressed. I'm waiting for the PS3 and Revolution.
It'd seem to me that a lot of the development trickery will be in getting a proper compiler and specialized libs out there that take advantage of this parallelism without requiring massive changes to how the average developer has to write their code.
Most of the bitching we've heard from developers so far hasn't been that the cell sucks but that their existing codebases don't take advantage of it's design and they don't want to make a rewrite that locks them into the platform.
As with every platform the really good stuff will come out a couple years after it's release. At least with the Cell they are pushing it to go mainstream instead of just for gaming consoles so we should expect to see development moving along much faster than with a plain console.
You're assuming that it'd be quicker to fix this mess than to start from scratch somewhere else. As an engineer I've rarely seen that to be the case. It is almost always faster and cheaper to create something from nothing than to fix an existing, seriously broken, system. There is no reason we can't create fully self-sustained mini-ecosystems for ourselves on the moon, Mars, Venus, or just floating around somewhere in space within a couple decades time if we decided to invest our time and scientific talent. I seriously doubt we could fix Earth during that same timeframe.
Tragedy or chance to make something better, it's usually the poor who are among the first to colonize. No doubt, with space colonization, it'd be the same. It's risky and uncomfortable so besides a few of the adventurous the wealthy would hang back and once again the poor would risk their necks and comfort for the chance at a better life somewhere else. Maintaining the status quo is what keeps the poor locked in poverty. New frontiers give them a way out.
TLDs should be important but they aren't. The majority of domains seem to be held by squaters and for a great number of domains they own the same domain under several TLD's which all point to the same site. (slashdot.net, slashdot.org, slashdot.com) which just sort of makes having the TLD pointless.
I'd rather have everyone own their own TLD than bother with TLD's which are mostly meaningless. Who cares if you can't tell if single word domains are inside or outside your LAN? Try naming a server com or org now and see what happens. Same difference really. Why not use a fully qualified domain name for all machines? Sub-domains are free anyway so it's no harder to call your machine buttkiss.mynet than it is to call it buttkiss. Your domain server should still recognize that buttkiss should resolve to buttkiss.mynet if there is no buttkiss TLD. It's just getting used to a change and not really an important structural change. How many users really expect it if their DNS resolves google to google.mynetwork.com anyway rather than to google.com? Just to take a guess I'd bet less than 1% of them would expect that behavior.
I do think there should be controls to fight squating of these TLD's. Maybe start with only allowing a company or individual to register only one TLD each and only if they have the trademark on that wording. TLDs to generic to be trademarked, or dictionary words, should be held in trust for public use as current TLDs are. sex or puppy shouldn't be held for normal TLD use. slashdot, microsoft, walmart, sears, and ibm would be fine for company's to control.
Or just create a.priv (privately owned) TLD and set the same rules for domains under it and make it the standard that domains that don't resolve will atempt to resolve under priv. So typing slashdot would end up going to slashdot.priv in the background. Most browsers make some half assed attempt to do that with.com anyway (or a search engine) so it'd be good to standardize the process.
Who cares if we fuck this planet up anyway? There are plenty of others. If we can modify those to our needs we won't need Earth and anyway would probably then have the technology to either clean Earth up or adapt the new Earth to our needs.
I'm all for the enviroment and personally detest automobiles (especially ineffecient ones) and am pro-public transit, renewable energy, cities designed for less commute, etc but I think the real tragedy is if we let the greenie wackos slow down our progress in the name of the enviroment (or for anything). Science and technology are mankinds only way out of the existing mess and that is where all our efforts should be spent. Cleaning up our mess, for now, is a waste of effort and probably even counter productive. If your house is on fire you figure out how to get out of the house before you try to put the fire out, start trying to figure out how the fire got started, and repair the damage.
So, better to invest in space colonization efforts and other advancement sciences rather than wasting time and money studying global warming and trying to fix it.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't matter if emergency service is just for me or for everyone. The point is the phone belongs to me and I should have a right to block any use of the phone I don't want. If they wanted a phone they should have bought a cellphone themselves.
/could/ be hurt if they don't. It's the same with the phone thing. Being able to disable 911 or pick a vendor that doesn't support 911 /could/ result in someone being hurt so they pass some stupid laws. We have some crazy idea that it's possible to bandaid over every part of life that could result in someone being hurt.. at the small price of personal freedoms. Obviously they never saw iRobot or if they did they failed to understand the message. ;)
How many people run up, grab somebody elses cellphone, and call 911 (or 999 or whatever)? I'd be shocked if this happens more than a few times in a whole year. When it does happen I'd have to wonder for what reason they aren't using a phone of their own.
To me, saving a couple lifes a year isn't worth inconviencing everyone all the time. It's the same as the stupid airline security (since 9/11.. damn those numbers again) that is totally anal retentive now. On the off chance that somebody is going to take over a plane using a pair of tweezers they forbid you taking all sorts of common items on a plane, make boarding a plane much slower and annoying than it used to be, and raise costs of flying. All because somebody
What makes people assume that a phone has to be a method of reaching emergency help? Any communications device could do the same thing. Not that 911 is a bad idea. I just don't buy the idea that you have a right to force it into products or on consumers that don't want it.
If the bridge you mentioned was my property then why would I be forced to change it just because unauthorized users might injure themselves on it? If it's their own bridge, or a bridge owned by the government, then fine it can be fixed up for the public good but if it's my bridge then it's mine to do with as I wanted. I've had bridges on my property before crossing little creeks on my land. Maybe now we're going to say I can't build out of logs and I need to build from steel in case an ambulance needs to cross my foot bridge in case of an emergency?
I'm very sorry that sometimes people are hurt or die but that is just a fact of life. We can't fix it by taking away freedoms. Small freedoms, like choosing my own phone provider, with or withour 911 service, are the things that are slowly eroded by do-good politics. Nobody wants to be the bad guy that says that things that are obviously good ideas or good intentions shouldn't be forced on people so those freedoms just quietly disappear. Let people choose to adopt these good ideas for themselves.
So let it be consumer demand then. If 99% of consumers want it then the company that supports it will have a lot more customers than the company that doesn't support it. Forcing it on people using the legal system is the wrong way to add features to products. What right do they have to tell me I can't use a product because it lacks a feature I don't want? It's not as if I'm saying other people have to use the same product. Besides, last time I looked Vonage had 911 support listed. Is there something missing for it to qualify for passing this stupid law?
:p
A way to turn off 911 support would be good. Or at least the option to disable 911 when keyguard is enabled. I really don't care if I might need it someday because I'm unlikely to use it even if nearly dead. It just wouldn't occur to me in an emergency (it never has in past emergencies). So could I please not have products that dial 911 themselves at the drop of a hat. Every cellphone I've had recently has had that problem and one home phone I had a few years back (that was otherwise a very nice phone) would dial 911 if you pressed 9 and didn't proceed to press anything else within 15 seconds or so. REALLY pissed me off as I found out it did this the hard way and found out that you can't hang up a 911 call. I'm going to get fined for prank calling because of a poorly designed product? Really, if I can't dial 911 by myself then I'm probably to near death to bother with. Maybe they just figure that the average moron can't remember all three of those numbers so they need to simplify the process for them.
Shouldn't consumers be able to pick between products that support 911 and those that don't? I DON'T want 911 service and would be quite pissed to be told I can't pick a phone company because they don't offer 911 service.
I hate 911 service on my cell phone. Stupid things are designed so you can dial 911 even when keyguard is on. The only keys that work are 9 and 1.. figure out what number frequently gets dialed as my phone bangs around in my pocket. Duh. Bad idea altogether.
Might as well make it against the law to provide Internet service without providing a special button on the modem that will request emergency help. Or hey how about force cable providers to provide a help button on the remote control.
Forcing such a stupid feature just doesn't make sense. Let consumer demand decide this issue.
Did anyone ever respect them? I never did. Ever tried to get them to resolve the issue of a register forcibly stealing your domain? Hahaha good luck. User's of eNom know what I'm talking about.
Maybe there are stupid introverts and smart introverts then? The stupid ones spend all day worrying about stupid stuff while the smart ones are day dreaming and designing new code, writing novels, planning new projects, etc in their head.
I don't think it's fair to say that introverts never do anything though. They just don't spend a lot of time doing stupid crap like clubbing and watching football games in a pub full of pals. I enjoy things like hiking, travel, building, exploring, studying, etc. More intellectual doing of things I guess. Being with average extroverts feels like being put in charge of babysitting young children.
f.u!
Can I register that?
But do you spend a lot of time worrying about what people think of you and when you find out someone doesn't like you do you spend a lot of effort trying to win them over? Most introverts don't which is a large part of the reason that we suffer as social outcasts in highschool. We might care but we don't think about it that much and don't act on it that much.
It often seems the people that seem the most outgoing and/or wild are actually introverts. In forcing ourselves to seem outgoing it's often easier to overdo things. Also by being some sort of an actor we can hide inside our roles which gives us something to prompt us to act out.
;) Probably someone like Johnny would experience things that way too. I'd expect most comedians that are good at improv comedy are introverts.
I'm pretty quiet and dull most of the time but I enjoy torturing people with my own little role playing so I think it's probably similar but on a smaller scale. I go up to people in the grocery store and start making potatos talk to them and things like that. Doubly strange since most people assume, wrongly, that I'm shy because I'm an introvert. But being introverted I have time to see funny things to say and do that other people would probably miss so it allows me to act these things out or say the right lines at the right time to be funny. It's sort of like being a Jedi because you see things before other people have had time to think about them.
You're assuming that the introverts are only solving one problem at a time. My experience is that most introverts juggle many thoughts at the same time. I'll watch tv, listen to music, read a couple books, surf the web, check my email, and work on 5 or 6 things all at once without problem. Less brain activity on a single problem means you can spend the rest on other problems or work on harder problems.
;)
Less brain activity altogether means your dead, a rock, really stupid, or simply lacking in curiosity and ambition. As it I find it difficult to ever be bored or idle because I'm always thinking of new interesting things.
I expect other introverts are probably the same although I'm not opposed to a group decision that I'm special.
Supporting full CSS2, PNGs, DOM, and Javascript would be a good start for IE. I for one refuse to support IE until it supports at least these basics. IE has 80-90% market share so there is no excuse for them not supporting these modern features. Everyone else should be catching up instead of leading. Opera is rather shoddy but better than IE and maybe the new version is even better. Safari and Firefox have small bits missing and minor bugs but are /mostly/ supportive of all these standards (and many more).
If Microsoft can't get it's house in order then I suggest making an IE interface on top of the gecko and/or khtml engines. There is no reason to keep on a fight they've clearly lost and will see little profit from rejoining. The best way to keep their customers using IE is to make IE use the competitions technology.
I beg to differ. Introverts just don't care if everyone knows how smart they are. Most of them don't really realize how smart they are. Introverts tend to spend more time thinking about actual interesting things and not just what people think of them. Which is probably why they seem antisocial - they really don't give a flying fuck what everyone else thinks. It's not that they don't care. It's more that they really don't stop to think about it.
I think it's why a lot of people who are intelligent and whom we think of as extroverts will admit to being introverts that have learned to fake extroversion in order to do what they want. A lot of actors, musicians, business men, etc that seem very public faces were introverts as children and return to introversion when they aren't working. Sort of an interesting twist on the whole thing I think.
Ahhhhh I like stories like this that tell me I'm smarter than everbody else!
It seems we're still looking for intelligent life on Earth? Doh, we're supposed to check a signal for a threat before we know the signal exists? That's really bright. Almost as bright is that he thinks there are aliens intelligent enough to be a security risk to our mish-mash of computer technologies they've not had a chance to study (if they've had a chance then we have bigger problems) AND he thinks we can somehow stop them from attacking our network by plugging a copy of Norton somewhere in the system? Brilliant.
I for one won't be afraid until a strange multi-dimensional bird shows up in my mail box.
My biggest fetish is making lots of extensible small programs/libraries and building other programs out of them.. so I guess I like subclassing and embedding too. I was once accused of creating my own custom programming language for everything I programmed. I do that less now but do like to expose the internals in ways that let my programs be modifed in all sorts of interesting ways.
Still, plenty of problems exist that can be attacked that don't need to send a lot of data back and forth quickly.
I wonder if they aren't considering inventing a new language, or modifying an existing language, that has constructs to make this kind of programming easier. Something that would let you create tasks that look like sepperate mini-programs running but can communicate easily using some common concept such as pipes. There is really no reason that programmers need to write everything in C and C++.
:)
A Python-like language that had extra semantics for the multi-processor design and that compiled down to machine code would be good I think. Easier and less verbose than Java, C, or C++ with good OOP support. Why muck with the details when you can avoid doing so. It amusses me that most games and graphical programs just run in a while loop but that you still have to specify the while loop in the language. Couldn't the language just know little details such as that? It's not a big detail but over the course of a large program the little details add up and make the program harder to understand.
Or a OS that can do the same would work. Let it run the main program as programmers would normally expect and run the SPE programs as sepperate programs and again let them communicate in some known method such as pipes.
When I was a kid one of the first enviroments I learned to program in was MOO (MUD Object Oriented) which is a somewhat interesting enviroment to learn in as it consists of a text-based multi-user online enviroment that every user can add new programming to as the game runs. The entire system was object oriented and obviously objects could work together but you didn't need to worry about the details of what other objects were doing most of the time. THAT is an incredibly powerful concept I think and one that could be very suited to multi-core or multi-processor systems.
Individual indiosyncracies are nice. I hate being forced to use a given enviroment to work on something. I keep working on my ideal enviroment which is of course ideal only to me. Fancy tools with low overhead. ;)
All consoles suffer from the problem of games only really exlpoiting the systems full power after a couple years of developer practice. Really, unless it's based entirely on an existing known system, you have to expect that.
Underestimating RAM needs is a common problem too. At least since BG's 640K is enough for anyone.
I imagine the multi-core design will improve AI code, weather simulation, physics simulation, etc. Anything that needs lots of small concurrent calculations.
It seems that the cell design, once utilized, should make for games that feel better even if they look the same. Maybe the difference won't show in a screenshot but you'll be able to tell it's there when you play the game.
I'm interested in the rumor that multiple Cell processors will be able to work together even over the PS3's built-in networking. That could open up some interesting possibilities. Bigger tasks could be broken up across multiple Cell's for more bang. Especially awesome if the same will be true of Cell's in blade servers and other real world apps. Not needing a third party solution to run a program across multiple machines would be really awesome.
Real geeks don't use IDEs! ;)
I'll use an IDE when they invent one that is fast, flexible, and chrome free as a normal bash command prompt. I have hated every IDE I've tried due to slowness and their insistance on making an ugly bloated interface. I don't need the IDE to try to guess what I'm typing, to offer code debugging while I'm typing, to FTP my files for me, etc.
Basic project management, checking my code for errors (when I ask.. not constantly), good seach and replace (with regular expressions and across multiple files), and a built-in reference guides for everything I'm doing (language, protocols, etc) would be good enough. Possibly an interface builder if it works well and stays out of the way when not needed. Much more than that and you're just letting wasting your time playing with an interface replace actual coding time.
I don't bother making my websites look nice in IE anymore. Just make it usable and slap a 'better with Firefox' logo/link on. Sometimes I'll bother tweaking the site to fix minor bugs in Opera and Safari but not always. Luckily the bugs in those, especially in Safari, are few so even if I don't they tend to work well.
I like to use text shadowing too which STILL only works in Safari. I really wish Firefox would add that style element. It really does make text jump off the page in a way flat text doesn't.
I haven't really noticed FF leaking memory but I do wish it could use less memory for windows and tabs that haven't been used recently. Page their contents to disk or something instead of keeping them in RAM. A lot of the time I'll have 40+ tabs open and until I close them FF uses the expected crap load of memory.
At least an opensource PS would have came with directions on how to use your string when setting up your PS and a helpful community to answer question should you have difficulty using your string. Will we be seeing a 'String Included' logo on 360 boxes? I doubt it!
I guess Microsoft thought this out realy well. How to keep people from running Linux on the 360? Ahh.. make it so it overheats and shuts itself off. Linux geeks hate when their uptime is less than a year.
Seriously though, this kind of issue is why I won't think of buying a 360 until such a time as they are at discount price. I still haven't got around to buying an original XBOX and I feel no interest in a 360 either. I messed with one at the store and was really unimpressed. I'm waiting for the PS3 and Revolution.
It'd seem to me that a lot of the development trickery will be in getting a proper compiler and specialized libs out there that take advantage of this parallelism without requiring massive changes to how the average developer has to write their code.
Most of the bitching we've heard from developers so far hasn't been that the cell sucks but that their existing codebases don't take advantage of it's design and they don't want to make a rewrite that locks them into the platform.
As with every platform the really good stuff will come out a couple years after it's release. At least with the Cell they are pushing it to go mainstream instead of just for gaming consoles so we should expect to see development moving along much faster than with a plain console.
You're assuming that it'd be quicker to fix this mess than to start from scratch somewhere else. As an engineer I've rarely seen that to be the case. It is almost always faster and cheaper to create something from nothing than to fix an existing, seriously broken, system. There is no reason we can't create fully self-sustained mini-ecosystems for ourselves on the moon, Mars, Venus, or just floating around somewhere in space within a couple decades time if we decided to invest our time and scientific talent. I seriously doubt we could fix Earth during that same timeframe.
Tragedy or chance to make something better, it's usually the poor who are among the first to colonize. No doubt, with space colonization, it'd be the same. It's risky and uncomfortable so besides a few of the adventurous the wealthy would hang back and once again the poor would risk their necks and comfort for the chance at a better life somewhere else. Maintaining the status quo is what keeps the poor locked in poverty. New frontiers give them a way out.
TLDs should be important but they aren't. The majority of domains seem to be held by squaters and for a great number of domains they own the same domain under several TLD's which all point to the same site. (slashdot.net, slashdot.org, slashdot.com) which just sort of makes having the TLD pointless.
.priv (privately owned) TLD and set the same rules for domains under it and make it the standard that domains that don't resolve will atempt to resolve under priv. So typing slashdot would end up going to slashdot.priv in the background. Most browsers make some half assed attempt to do that with .com anyway (or a search engine) so it'd be good to standardize the process.
I'd rather have everyone own their own TLD than bother with TLD's which are mostly meaningless. Who cares if you can't tell if single word domains are inside or outside your LAN? Try naming a server com or org now and see what happens. Same difference really. Why not use a fully qualified domain name for all machines? Sub-domains are free anyway so it's no harder to call your machine buttkiss.mynet than it is to call it buttkiss. Your domain server should still recognize that buttkiss should resolve to buttkiss.mynet if there is no buttkiss TLD. It's just getting used to a change and not really an important structural change. How many users really expect it if their DNS resolves google to google.mynetwork.com anyway rather than to google.com? Just to take a guess I'd bet less than 1% of them would expect that behavior.
I do think there should be controls to fight squating of these TLD's. Maybe start with only allowing a company or individual to register only one TLD each and only if they have the trademark on that wording. TLDs to generic to be trademarked, or dictionary words, should be held in trust for public use as current TLDs are. sex or puppy shouldn't be held for normal TLD use. slashdot, microsoft, walmart, sears, and ibm would be fine for company's to control.
Or just create a
Who cares if we fuck this planet up anyway? There are plenty of others. If we can modify those to our needs we won't need Earth and anyway would probably then have the technology to either clean Earth up or adapt the new Earth to our needs.
I'm all for the enviroment and personally detest automobiles (especially ineffecient ones) and am pro-public transit, renewable energy, cities designed for less commute, etc but I think the real tragedy is if we let the greenie wackos slow down our progress in the name of the enviroment (or for anything). Science and technology are mankinds only way out of the existing mess and that is where all our efforts should be spent. Cleaning up our mess, for now, is a waste of effort and probably even counter productive. If your house is on fire you figure out how to get out of the house before you try to put the fire out, start trying to figure out how the fire got started, and repair the damage.
So, better to invest in space colonization efforts and other advancement sciences rather than wasting time and money studying global warming and trying to fix it.