I agree totally. However, I would like to remind people that the war on terror possibly prevented many more such incidents.
The "war on terror" might have, but the "war on Iraq" probably increased the chances of an attack many times over.
I suspect the vast majority of Muslims sympathised with the US and thought the Taliban had it coming to them after the WTC attacks. I also suspect that most of them changed their minds very rapidly when they saw the US invade Iraq on flimsy pretenses. If the US had stuck to Afghanistan, the chances are that terrorists would have marginalised to the point of non-existence.
The whole point of bluetooth is that you shouldn't have to attach your phone to a computer. If you need a cable (or infrared), it means the bluetooth has been crippled or is broken to begin with.
When bluetooth works, it's actually kind of neat. But it breaks so much that I am impressed when it works at all. I have four bluetooth devices - an Acer laptop, a Sony-Ericsson T610, a Motorola wireless headset and a iPaq 4150. Bluetooth for each of those devices (except the headset) is buried under 4 or 5 nested menus. The bluetooth software on the iPaq & Acer is also extremely fragile. I actually feel that I have been blessed when I manage to get them to talk to each other without problems.
More often than not, the devices can be right beside each other and they still don't work properly. Or a device crashes. Or if it does work I can detect (for example) my headset, but the PC / iPaq can't use it as a device even though it would be fantastic for Skype.
I don't know much about the organization behind the bluetooth 'standard' but my feeling is they should be cracking the whip. Halfassed and crippled implementations are killing it. The 'standard' could more accurately be called 'pot luck' and its doing the technology no favours at all.
Actually Postal 2 is just a piss poor FPS. I've played it and it just uses "sick" violence to sell itself despite having horrific load times, repetitive gameplay, badly designed levels and next to no redeeming qualities whatsoever. You're more likely to get sick from lurching through one boxy maze-like level to another in the game than you are from the content.
I got to about the fourth level which sees you fighting arabs in a church and I just couldn't take it any more. I would have chucked up if I played it any more.
As for the violence, a game can be ultra-violent and great. The GTA series is one example but violence does not a good game make. Humour, level design, plot, graphics and variety are needed too.
Even Rockstar can screw up. I thought Max Payne 2 was excreble. It was certainly attractive and well produced but the game play was mind numbingly repetitive.
Just about everything on that audio mods page that I was referring to and someone linked is a ripoff. Those knobs fit onto a "signature" volume control costing $6820 and a "signature" amp costing $9050. Clearly someone stupid enough to splash out that amount of money is going to fork over another $2000 for the knobs.
In some ways it is pitiful that that there are people that dumb in the world. In other ways I wish I'd found them first. The markup on those things is obscene.
Or better yet do a double blind test with some volunteers. Part of the problem as I understand it is that a lot of very expensive audio gear does absolutely fuck all for the quality of the sound. It's just that people expect it to improve the sound so they mistakenly perceive that it does. Some idiots even go so far as to pay $500 to replace the audio knobs on their equipment. That's $500 per knob. A blind test would eliminate that bias.
I expect they'll keep the FUD ticking over during the XBox 360 launch. But as the PS3 is getting more buzz than the 360 it's possible they're relying on the gaming community doing some of it for them.
The 360 does seem to be generating a large amount of 'meh' reaction in the press who see it underpowered by comparison with Sony's offering.
Neither seems perfect to me. But the PS3 seems to push the envelope a hell of a lot more than its counterpart.
If dogma is there to be subverted, why bother with it at all? Either the dogma is meaningless and should be tossed aside or it should be obeyed completely and not dodged. Evading what dogma says by jumping through some silly hoop just makes the religion and its adherants look stupid.
Even that first link does it saying G-d instead of God. It's plain ridiculous.
This isn't just a Jewish thing. All organised religion are as guilty of ignoring dogma and inconvenient bits of their teachings when it doesn't coincide with what reality.
The Mac OS X ports of OO required quite a bit of rewriting.
Of course they needed rewriting. Cocoa is a weird API by conventional measures so implementing a version of OO that uses Cocoa and Aqua is a non-trivial exercise. It has next to nothing to do with what CPU the source is compiled with. You might have to do a few end-endian checks here or there, but it's nothing that hasn't already been fixed in OO, for example for the Linux PPC port.
If the CPU changes to x86, supporting OS X will be just as hard as it is today. The APIs remain the same so none of the issues have gone away.
The reason Darwin with X has no problems supporting OO is because X11 is a supported widget set. So it makes next to no difference what CPU runs underneath.
Games, Games, Games.
I wouldn't get your hopes up. Wine currently requires X11 too. Until someone ports it to Cocoa the same issues exist as they do with OpenOffice.
Why on earth do you think OpenOffice 2.0 will work now? The underlying architecture is the least of your problems when porting a GUI app. The reason that OO doesn't work is because the existing version requires you build against X11 and writing a new native widget set is difficult.
As for the other benefits, they're not that big a deal. A 2Ghz Mac is more than capable of emulating an x86 at acceptable speeds for most reasons that you'd want to use a PC anyway.
That's hogwash. You have no idea how hard it is to cancel, or that when you do that they'll acknowledge it. There have been plenty of horror stories from AOL and porn sites where once they've got your card it becomes a nightmare of phone calls to have it removed.
Perhaps none of this happens for Linden which is still irrelevant. Forcing someone to hand over their credit card number for a small amount of play is a tactic deliberatly designed to snare people who forget, who are confused by the terms and conditions, or who can't get through to the site in time to cancel.
There are plenty of free ways to encourage subscriptions that are much better than this:
Free code good for 2 weeks play. Star Wars Galaxies did that.
Free 30 day play. Puzzle Pirates.
Free play except for expansion packs. Anarchy Online
Free play with refer a friend. EVE Online
Free play that limits you to building / crafting newbie stuff. A Tale in the Desert.
None of these require CC numbers and all of them allow you to sample the game without paying first. I also assume that all of them generate more good will than some crowd who expect your payment details before you even know what you're getting.
2 to 3 watts is still 2 to 3 watts. Perhaps it means nothing on its own but add up all those millions of TVs and other devices all over the state of California (for example) and it means the difference between brownouts and no brownouts. It means billions of dollars of savings for lower power consumption and lost production. It means less pollution and less demand for oil / coal.
As you say, a soft standby means you can turn on the TV from the remote. But if you're just walking into a room anyway, I don't believe it is some massive hardship to walk over and turn the thing on or off.
As for businesses that work over night, they can do what they do for other reasons - present their electricity bills and their worker's hours to the taxman and get a tax break or rebate if one is due.
By law remove the "soft" standby switches on appliances that have no earthly reason to spend most of their lives consuming power while doing nothing. E.g. TV sets, washing machines, DVD players.
In conjunction with that slap a heavy tax on offices for night time use of power to force them to force their employees to turn off all non-essential equipment like desktop computers, monitors, lights etc. when no one is there to use them.
That's all well and good but Linux does expire like this. Red Hat dumps support for their releases a lot sooner than MS does. I recall owning RH9 and it expired just 9 months after I bought it. See also any other commercial vendor.
Yes you still have the source if you want to support it yourself, but not many companies would be happy about doing that.
Now, concerning the "message" of Linux. Where is a version of Linux that you can pop into the drive of any NT / W2K box and it will set about reproducing your entire configuration (as much as is possible) in the new environment? I'm talking about something that would replicate your file shares, your printers, your web environment using the equivalent software on Linux. For extra points it would even boot off NTFS or at least repartition the drive so it didn't delete the data. This would be a killer application of Linux but it doesn't exist.
If MS can produce migration tools that "migrate" people from Netware or OS/2 or earlier versions of NT then I don't see why the same can't be done to them.
You're a fucking idiot. Perhaps your automobile, shoes, DVD player and calculator were all made by Reebok. I managed to pick and choose mine from different brands (and non-brands).
Linux distributions like Red Hat & SUSE (Novell) are quite capable of being configured with no command line intervention whatsoever. Perhaps that wasn't the case before but these days it's easy peasy. In particular, Red Hat / Fedora make it a no brainer to set up networking and other config options since they supply apps that offer a wizard-like interface to do just that.
You also have the option to drop to the command line if you wish.
Even if OS X does happen to be slightly simpler to configure, I hardly think that justifies locking yourself into a single software and hardware distributor, especially when the equivalent in x86 is considerably cheaper.
The new AIM client is based on a framework called Boxley. Now that I would like to see open sourced. As it was described way back, it is somewhat like XUL + Javascript without some of the horrific bits like RDF.
AOL is run by a bunch of geniuses. I've never seen a company that can invest millions in technologies such as browsers, music & video players, only to shitcan their (superior) solutions in favour of (inferior) ones developed by their main competitors.
I just look at WinAmp and shake my head. There's a programme that could have been iTMS before such a thing even existed. It could still be iTMS rival now, two years too late. And the integrated NSV means it could deliver TV and VOD too with a little work. So why the hell isn't it?
That appears to be more with how the garbage collector operates when the process is woken up. From the last comments in the bug it suggests it basically does a linear sweep of all JS / XPConnect objects which essentially means page faulting occurs randomly all over the address space. It also says that Java /.NET apps have similar issues.
That isn't a good thing but it doesn't have much to do with memory leakage. Rather it seems that the GC shouldn't happen at wakeup, or if it does it should be smarter about how it walks that list. Perhaps it means that info pertaining to GC should be maintained in a discrete area, separate from the objects, or that objects of a similar type should be allocated from their own heap.
No it doesn't affect other apps significantly. If an app leaks memory, that memory gets paged out because it is unused. It would be different if all those objects were in use causing page faults but they're not. It might say 100mb on the task list but the chances are that the amount of physical memory is significantly less than that. There would be some minimal system impact because paging implies disk activity and depending on the heap, not every leaky object is going to occupy exactly a full page on its own.
Then of course you would eventually hit a crunch time when the page file fills up, but an app creeping up from 20 to 100Mb isn't that likely to do it.
But does an slowly leaking app kill performance in any noticeable way? Nope. If Gecko or IE is slowing the system down, it's more likely because something on the page or pages you're browsing is causing it. Examples might be funky JS that runs lots of timers, loops, DOM intensive stuff, or shock / flash content.
Memory leaks don't cause sluggishness. Sluggishness is caused JS, flash players, chrome etc. all running on the same thread. Getting something like adblock is a good way to increase performance. These problems might not be so noticeable in IE since you can have multiple IE processes running at once.
But Gecko does use something similar internally to IE called XPCOM. It's possible that some of the similar techniques that could track down memory issues in IE be adapted to work in Gecko. For example you can count when objects are addrefed and released for example. That's usually the most likely cause of such problems an object not being released so it lives forever, or two objects holding a reference each other.
The problem is that tracking refcounting problems is horrifically complicated. Gecko has smart pointers, weak references and refcounting macros to debug problems, but at the end of the day good programming is the best defence.
In the case of IE, I have no idea what it's written in but the chances are the code contains a lot of crap. It might use ATL or similar in someplaces and nothing at all in others. For all I know they're using raw interface pointers in places and forgetting to release them. Or two objects refcount each other so neither goes away. It's certainly possible when dealing with the DOM to run into these kind of problems since you have lots of relationships between objects. I imagine that it's a nightmare trying to figure out what to do when some JS holds onto a DOM element when the document that contains it has been replaced by something else.
Since when has any mainstream website cared about Linux? The answer is they don't. If some flash movie doesn't play on Linux, they'll say "ho hum" and let the Linux users live with broken flash, or recommend users use the official flash player.
If we took the attitude that there should be only one implementation of anything, there would be no Samba, Firefox, Ghostscript, or Wine
Besides flash is not rocket science. If there is buggy content, it is easy enough to run it in the official and open source player side by side and figure out what's wrong.
Windows XP. CoLinux requires WinPCap to tap into ethernet connections, and things get a little complicated at that point depending on DHCP, bridged devices, and other factors. After a lot of reading the wiki, screwing around with various settings and reboots (of XP & Linux) I got it working, but it wasn't that easy.
Slashdot Mirror
The "war on terror" might have, but the "war on Iraq" probably increased the chances of an attack many times over.
I suspect the vast majority of Muslims sympathised with the US and thought the Taliban had it coming to them after the WTC attacks. I also suspect that most of them changed their minds very rapidly when they saw the US invade Iraq on flimsy pretenses. If the US had stuck to Afghanistan, the chances are that terrorists would have marginalised to the point of non-existence.
When bluetooth works, it's actually kind of neat. But it breaks so much that I am impressed when it works at all. I have four bluetooth devices - an Acer laptop, a Sony-Ericsson T610, a Motorola wireless headset and a iPaq 4150. Bluetooth for each of those devices (except the headset) is buried under 4 or 5 nested menus. The bluetooth software on the iPaq & Acer is also extremely fragile. I actually feel that I have been blessed when I manage to get them to talk to each other without problems.
More often than not, the devices can be right beside each other and they still don't work properly. Or a device crashes. Or if it does work I can detect (for example) my headset, but the PC / iPaq can't use it as a device even though it would be fantastic for Skype.
I don't know much about the organization behind the bluetooth 'standard' but my feeling is they should be cracking the whip. Halfassed and crippled implementations are killing it. The 'standard' could more accurately be called 'pot luck' and its doing the technology no favours at all.
I got to about the fourth level which sees you fighting arabs in a church and I just couldn't take it any more. I would have chucked up if I played it any more.
As for the violence, a game can be ultra-violent and great. The GTA series is one example but violence does not a good game make. Humour, level design, plot, graphics and variety are needed too.
Even Rockstar can screw up. I thought Max Payne 2 was excreble. It was certainly attractive and well produced but the game play was mind numbingly repetitive.
In some ways it is pitiful that that there are people that dumb in the world. In other ways I wish I'd found them first. The markup on those things is obscene.
Or better yet do a double blind test with some volunteers. Part of the problem as I understand it is that a lot of very expensive audio gear does absolutely fuck all for the quality of the sound. It's just that people expect it to improve the sound so they mistakenly perceive that it does. Some idiots even go so far as to pay $500 to replace the audio knobs on their equipment. That's $500 per knob. A blind test would eliminate that bias.
The 360 does seem to be generating a large amount of 'meh' reaction in the press who see it underpowered by comparison with Sony's offering.
Neither seems perfect to me. But the PS3 seems to push the envelope a hell of a lot more than its counterpart.
Get the nearly overwhelming desire to throw the original Mac out of the nearest window when it asked you to swap disks for the 100th time?
It's a bastardized and paraphrased line from the Spanish Inquisition sketch.
Even that first link does it saying G-d instead of God. It's plain ridiculous.
This isn't just a Jewish thing. All organised religion are as guilty of ignoring dogma and inconvenient bits of their teachings when it doesn't coincide with what reality.
Of course they needed rewriting. Cocoa is a weird API by conventional measures so implementing a version of OO that uses Cocoa and Aqua is a non-trivial exercise. It has next to nothing to do with what CPU the source is compiled with. You might have to do a few end-endian checks here or there, but it's nothing that hasn't already been fixed in OO, for example for the Linux PPC port.
If the CPU changes to x86, supporting OS X will be just as hard as it is today. The APIs remain the same so none of the issues have gone away.
The reason Darwin with X has no problems supporting OO is because X11 is a supported widget set. So it makes next to no difference what CPU runs underneath.
Games, Games, Games.
I wouldn't get your hopes up. Wine currently requires X11 too. Until someone ports it to Cocoa the same issues exist as they do with OpenOffice.
As for the other benefits, they're not that big a deal. A 2Ghz Mac is more than capable of emulating an x86 at acceptable speeds for most reasons that you'd want to use a PC anyway.
Perhaps none of this happens for Linden which is still irrelevant. Forcing someone to hand over their credit card number for a small amount of play is a tactic deliberatly designed to snare people who forget, who are confused by the terms and conditions, or who can't get through to the site in time to cancel.
There are plenty of free ways to encourage subscriptions that are much better than this:
None of these require CC numbers and all of them allow you to sample the game without paying first. I also assume that all of them generate more good will than some crowd who expect your payment details before you even know what you're getting.
As you say, a soft standby means you can turn on the TV from the remote. But if you're just walking into a room anyway, I don't believe it is some massive hardship to walk over and turn the thing on or off.
As for businesses that work over night, they can do what they do for other reasons - present their electricity bills and their worker's hours to the taxman and get a tax break or rebate if one is due.
In conjunction with that slap a heavy tax on offices for night time use of power to force them to force their employees to turn off all non-essential equipment like desktop computers, monitors, lights etc. when no one is there to use them.
Yes you still have the source if you want to support it yourself, but not many companies would be happy about doing that.
Now, concerning the "message" of Linux. Where is a version of Linux that you can pop into the drive of any NT / W2K box and it will set about reproducing your entire configuration (as much as is possible) in the new environment? I'm talking about something that would replicate your file shares, your printers, your web environment using the equivalent software on Linux. For extra points it would even boot off NTFS or at least repartition the drive so it didn't delete the data. This would be a killer application of Linux but it doesn't exist.
If MS can produce migration tools that "migrate" people from Netware or OS/2 or earlier versions of NT then I don't see why the same can't be done to them.
You're a fucking idiot. Perhaps your automobile, shoes, DVD player and calculator were all made by Reebok. I managed to pick and choose mine from different brands (and non-brands).
You also have the option to drop to the command line if you wish.
Even if OS X does happen to be slightly simpler to configure, I hardly think that justifies locking yourself into a single software and hardware distributor, especially when the equivalent in x86 is considerably cheaper.
The new AIM client is based on a framework called Boxley. Now that I would like to see open sourced. As it was described way back, it is somewhat like XUL + Javascript without some of the horrific bits like RDF.
More accurately Netscape did when it was still a largely autonomous company.
I just look at WinAmp and shake my head. There's a programme that could have been iTMS before such a thing even existed. It could still be iTMS rival now, two years too late. And the integrated NSV means it could deliver TV and VOD too with a little work. So why the hell isn't it?
Because AOL is run by a bunch of geniuses.
That isn't a good thing but it doesn't have much to do with memory leakage. Rather it seems that the GC shouldn't happen at wakeup, or if it does it should be smarter about how it walks that list. Perhaps it means that info pertaining to GC should be maintained in a discrete area, separate from the objects, or that objects of a similar type should be allocated from their own heap.
Then of course you would eventually hit a crunch time when the page file fills up, but an app creeping up from 20 to 100Mb isn't that likely to do it.
But does an slowly leaking app kill performance in any noticeable way? Nope. If Gecko or IE is slowing the system down, it's more likely because something on the page or pages you're browsing is causing it. Examples might be funky JS that runs lots of timers, loops, DOM intensive stuff, or shock / flash content.
But Gecko does use something similar internally to IE called XPCOM. It's possible that some of the similar techniques that could track down memory issues in IE be adapted to work in Gecko. For example you can count when objects are addrefed and released for example. That's usually the most likely cause of such problems an object not being released so it lives forever, or two objects holding a reference each other.
The problem is that tracking refcounting problems is horrifically complicated. Gecko has smart pointers, weak references and refcounting macros to debug problems, but at the end of the day good programming is the best defence.
In the case of IE, I have no idea what it's written in but the chances are the code contains a lot of crap. It might use ATL or similar in someplaces and nothing at all in others. For all I know they're using raw interface pointers in places and forgetting to release them. Or two objects refcount each other so neither goes away. It's certainly possible when dealing with the DOM to run into these kind of problems since you have lots of relationships between objects. I imagine that it's a nightmare trying to figure out what to do when some JS holds onto a DOM element when the document that contains it has been replaced by something else.
If we took the attitude that there should be only one implementation of anything, there would be no Samba, Firefox, Ghostscript, or Wine
Besides flash is not rocket science. If there is buggy content, it is easy enough to run it in the official and open source player side by side and figure out what's wrong.
Windows XP. CoLinux requires WinPCap to tap into ethernet connections, and things get a little complicated at that point depending on DHCP, bridged devices, and other factors. After a lot of reading the wiki, screwing around with various settings and reboots (of XP & Linux) I got it working, but it wasn't that easy.