I do agree that Sony and MS could lose games to the Wii, Metal Gear Solid and FF13 aren't in that category. The demos and movies we've seen released simply exceed the Wii's graphical capability. Heck, the FF13 stuff exceeds most high-quality PC renders, and I bet the XBox 360 would be hard pressed to output that kind of graphical quality in realtime.
We've known for awhile that the PS3 has the best hardware from a raw output standpoint (the real problem being that, like the PS2, it's extremely hard to use effectively). There is a great hunger out there for video games that really look great on our modern home theater systems, and Sony and Microsoft are both in competition for capturing this market. This segment is much like Apple's segment of the PC market, it's people who are more inclined to spend money on the product anyways. It's a very profitable sector.
The Wii is not even remotely aimed at that component, and that cleanly shuts it out from some big-name franchises. I am not saying the Wii will fail, but I am saying that it is not a great target for ports (unique control schemes) and doesn't get the nice 2-fer factor of also being a good media player.
Either the packages are up-to-date enough on DarwinPorts, or they are just too slow for my development cycle. It's interesting to note that the stuff I've got installed outside of management on my OS X box is pretty much the same stuff I have on my linux box.
Maybe I have a bad taste in my mouth from Debian's package system going insane and being unable to install most packages because I installed one misconfigured package and it destroyed my version database.:\
The problem is their killers exclusives are both (FFIII & MGS4) 3rd party, and can become multi-platform. We have seen this already with GTA4 and Assassin's Creed. If Sony keeps losing exclusives they are at an increasing disadvantage with the PS3. Not only do they need strong 3rd party support they need exclusives, and they need to be better than the competitions.
I think people underestimate the market's ravenous desire for high-definition gaming. The Wii's biggest weakness is that it simply cannot field the same picture quality as competing machines. Its greatest strength (controllers), on the other hand, is something that other people can ape and work with and approach. You can make motion-sensitive (or other novel approach) controllers for the Xbox 360 and PS3, but you can't simply plug in something to the Wii and make it more than an incremental improvement on the Gamecube.
Graphics are not everything, but great games like Gears of War show that they can turn a great game into a blockbuster.
Blu-Ray has larger raw storage capacity per layer than DVD, or HD-DVD. To say it's technically superior however, is debatable.
It's a superior media in terms of storage capacity and has the managed copy feature. This translates directly to picture quality and the availability of extras, which sell DVDs. It's not a small amount of space either. I'd prefer to see it win over HD-DVD, which I view as more of an attempt by the content companies to cheap out on the next gen just to fill in the "high definition" square.
The fact that my PS3 _is_ a blu-ray player is huge to me. I can play both formats, but I much prefer the output of my PS3 playing a blu-ray.
It's slow mostly because it takes a noticeable time to start processes, and this bothers me, as it's something I do a lot. Also, the GUI takes up so much memory that there is less of it left to get work done with. Once this gets up to the point where it starts swapping a lot, obviously productivity is out of the window.
You say 'iBook'. Which I assumes means you've got a much older laptop there. I completely agree, the G3 iBooks were real dogs. But you shouldn't extend that to the modern system. When I pull up something lightweight like a command line utility or an X11 app (running over Apple's X11 layer) the response is about as fast as any of my linux boxes.
Otherwise, about the only thing my linux install does faster is boot.
It's a hassle, because, although a lot of open source software technically works on it, not all of it is readily available. At least at the time I still used it (the situation may have improved since), there were fink, darwinports, and pkgsrc, each supporting some packages but not everything I wanted (pkgsrc worked best for me, but didn't provide binaries for OS X). Having to use different package managers and having to compile things from source are terrible time wasters. The software that Apple ships is either different from what I'm used to from other *nix systems, or it's the same software, but often an older version, which caused further problems.
This is better than it used to be, but certainly Fink and DarwinPorts leave a lot to be desired. But as time has gone on, the free and open source mac software world has grown significantly. Most of the irreplacable linux-oriented apps are in a package manager, and there are great FOSS alternatives for many common mac tasks.
There are also some closed products that are so good that they beg for that fact to be excused. For example, the now extremely popular TextMate editor is something so incredibly good that if it and emacs had a fight, I'm not sure who'd win. And certainly TextMate is easier to get started with, Emacs has a very stiff learning curve and lacks the awesome video podcast showing tips and tricks.
Also keeping the software up to date is a nightmare when some of it is integrated with Apple's updater (which keeps pushing "updates" for software I don't have or want), some of it is integrated with some open-source package manager (fink and friends), some of it comes with custom updaters, and some of it doesn't have any update mechanism at all.
You know, thinking about this, I realized that a lot of my linux stuff has to be outside the package structure too. If you're developing, you often get nightlies and betas well before any kind of package can be submitted and piped through. Personally I call this a wash. Most Linux distros update core components, provide a marginally complete but not terribly up-to-date package directory, and that's what OS X does.
The final straw was that Tiger broke the ext2 driver, meaning the end of sharing files between OS X and Linux. Yes, Linux supports HFS+, but the interaction between the Linux HFS+ driver and Apple's fsck has given me...bad results in the past, so I'm not going there again.
Of course, none of this means that OS X doesn't look gorgeous and isn't a great OS if you just want to use the great software that Apple ships with it, and maybe a handful of third-party apps. However, for a command-line junkie like me, GNU/Linux beats OS X hands down.
I find myself far more productive in OS X than in Linux, and I have used both for years and understand them both quite well. I think the real reason is that OS X has Quicksilver, whereas there is no good competition for that in the linux space.
People need to keep in mind the Wii costs less than half of the PS3's hefty price tag. Of course more people are going to buy Wiis right now, it's cheaper. Not to say that the Wii's awesomeness isn't playing a big role, but keep in mind that Nintendo's biggest problem is finding 3rd party developers who make worthwhile games. The gamecube was a great system, but they had very few must-have games that were not from Nintendo. No matter how good the Wii is, good third party dev support is what wins console wars.
Before we all doom the PS3, let's wait until some of the big-name PS3 games come out later this year. Sony already knew they were going to take a loss at the outset of the PS3 market, so I think they're taking the long view. In Japan, when Final Fantasy XIII comes out, there is going to be a rabid fanbase that will purchase the console for that game alone. Others may hold off, but given the other big properties that will shortly follow, how can anyone avoid the PS3's gravity?
Also factor in the other part of the market... Blu-rays absolutely rock on a HDTV. LG is coming out with a dual-mode player, which means that given the choice, the consumer can be easily swayed towards Blu-ray simply by flooding (true) advertisements about the media's technical superiority. If Blu-ray pulls ahead, then the PS3 becomes much more attractive.
1. Enumerate all the subclasses of a given class, or classes that implement a particular interface, including those supplied in plug-ins, at runtime.
** You can, through reflection
2. Call methods by name.
** You can, through reflection
3. Query whether a delegate object implements a given method, allowing for informal protocols.
** You can, through reflection
Too bad C#'s reflection API is so tedious to use compared to the very simple and elegant ObJC selector primitive or the NSInvocation class. And #3 is disingenuous, informal protocols don't exist in C#.
4. Handle the case where an object tries to call a method on my object that doesn't exist, to allow the simple creation of generic proxy objects.
** That can never happen in C#
This is why C# fails yet again, just like Java. Dynamic dispatch is hugely powerful and useful. It completely eliminates the need for several complex GoF patterns and opens up very simple and elegant delegation patterns, which AppKit and FoundationKit (apple's APIs) use with such amazing effects.
5. Add methods to a class, even if it's part of the standard library and I don't have the source code (I can even do this at runtime, although it's messier, and I haven't ever needed to).
** What's wrong with inheritance?
Firstly, inheritance doesn't let you extend existing classes, only create new ones. For example, if I want to add a method to the String object to compute its Levenshtein distance with another string. In order for me to do this in C#, I need to create my new SmarterString based off previous strings. With ObjC categories, I could make it so all strings have my improved string distance, even for other system primitives.
Also, inheritance requires you understand every detail of the existing class. Often times we extend classes for only small feature improvements, inheritance is very much overboard for this.
6. Separate the allocation and initialisation of an object into separate methods, to allow different allocation policies to be implemented (e.g. pools for commonly re-cycled objects) transparently to users of the class.
** Not needed in.NET by design. You can't allocate anything on your own.
He's talking about hooking into these procedures. It's useful for implementing custom serialization strategies, or when you want to take memory allocation into your own hands for special high-performance situations.
Consider a hypothetical programmer, who tackles the above challenge. Let's say that they solve the problem in 60 lines vs. 6 (a 10x speed increase), but that there is only a 2x speed increase, then it may seem like you spent a very long time writing 6 lines. In reality though, you were just solving the complexity of the problem, which isn't something a language can really alleviate.
People who make this argument usually don't know Haskell, Ocaml, or other alternatives very well. Yes, when you're new to a language it's going to go slower. If you'd clocked as many hours in Ocaml as you had in Java, you'd be pretty fast with that language too.
Unfortunately I have to develop software in the real world. This (for the most part anyway) completely rules out every language you suggested. It sounds like you lack experience programming in the real world.
At Lockheed Martin working on the RSAII project (which has to do with giving the US's two major space ranges updated and modernized software and hardware for launching rockets), a large percentage of our development was done in Python, Ruby, and C++. We also did a lot of prototyping in Scheme, and several DrScheme-based tools became popular.
I have since worked at two startups that were Ruby on Rails projects.
That was a lot of wasted text. You have still failed to address the point: You can speculate that environmentalists and concerned climatologists stand to gain by fudging their research to spread FUD about global warming. On the other hand, Big Oil has already been observed doing this. Badly.
Maybe my thinly veiled references to Al Gore's crock "An Inconvient Truth" wasn't obvious enough. Enormous profit, and now contracts with school districts where children are compelled to watch that tripe and have taxes pay for that. Make a cheap movie full of lies, out of context (and outright edited) quotes and panic, and then get the government to pay you to spread that hysteria to children. That's a pretty good business model, if you ask me.
In my state, California, the Sierra Club and other environmentalist groups are receiving millions of dollars a year for "Clean Air And Water", but any attempt to audit how this money is spent has met with utter failure. It's considered "un-auditable" and critics loudly decry this. But green interests are strong in this state, so we cheerfully throw our limited tax dollars into a completely opaque hole.
Of course--and I hate to say this for the third or fourth time in this thread--the way you phrase your response marks you as a shill for Big Oil: "I think Global Warming may be true, but let's not get hasty here, gentlemen!" This kind of language is repeated all the time by industry plants in just about every variety of/. thread you will find: "I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy, but..." "Personally I don't smoke, but..."
I have no stock in any fuel or energy company. My sole interest here is with the American economy. You make it sound like our only option is the Kyoto treaty. Nothing could be further from the truth. Let's be hasty, let's get the fuck into alternative fuels the minute they are viable. Let's make sure to cut our emissions. Heck, let's even reward businesses that can show their CO2 emissions falling every year with tax cuts. If you incentivize it, then people will cheerfully do it. I will support every reasonable effort to improve the environment of the world.
But I will not fly off half-cocked. We did that once with recycling, and we're now cheerfully hurting the environment while we recycle paper and smugly tell the world how green we are. We're cheerfully destroying preferred animal habitats while preserving poor and sparse habitats, crowing about how we're saving the world. Fuck that. Fuck that stupid bullshit, and I will do everything in my power to stop reactionaries like you from ruin ing our country globally just so that you can sleep at night knowing you did something.
These are all conditional/future statements; the fact of Environmentalists gaining anything from convincing people that global climate change is a reality is a purely theoretical one. Whereas we have observations of Big Oil actually making money by tilting their research. This, to me (and anyone else who actually know anything about how science is done) is a rather important distinction.
It is not theoretical at all. Let's look at the US, where this battle is still being fought. The Environmentalists are Lobbyists. Why do lobbyists do anything?
They want the government to legislate in a way that they approve of. This legislation grows the size of the government, which increases the scope of the government, which increases the potential power of lobbyists in the US. This increased power means more people will donate to their organizations to effect change, perceiving correctly that these institutions are getting better at meeting their desires (which are motivated by an indescribable quantity of different motivations).
In this regard, the environmentalist movement in Washington D.C. is no different from Big Oil, Big Tobacco, or any other institution that can organize such large sums of money. Further, we have green movement demagogues telling us they have lied and distorted the facts to push their agenda. When Big Tobacco finally admitted this, they were forced to pay for a campaign to close them down. But when green groups do it, we just say they're thinking of the greater good.
On the international scene, one need only look at the Kyoto Treaty to see there are numerous biases and agendas in it. If it were truly concerned with reducing emissions, it would not exclude China, who's output of various pollutants is skyrocketing. In comparison, heavy burdens are put on the United States, who's emissions increases have been decreasing yearly, despite a healthy population and industrial increase every year. There are many possible explanations for this, but none of them have environmental reasons.
Personally, I think that we can prove Global Warming, and we know that increased CO2 emissions accelerate the effect. That's enough to say we need to cut emissions and work on alternative fuels. But that isn't enough to castrate ourselves in the world market (which hurts everyone) in a frantic, guilt ridden attempt to comply with people who are clearly using this crisis to their own advantage. The US is more than capable of self-regulating at least as well as any other nation in the world, and unlike many others we will do so without a world organization forcing us to (we already are in many states).
Yes, but not all buffer overflows can lead to code exploits.
Nearly every stack-based buffer overflow which allows arbitrary string entry, even if that precludes nulls, can be used to execute code.
This particular expolit relies on the buffer overflow exactly hitting a specific memory address, that does not appear to always be where they were thinking it was - rendering the attack as is useless (as noted it does not work on my maacbook).
Emphasis above is mine, and demonstrates how little you get here. Every stack-based buffer overflow has to thread the needle at least twice. Having never implemented a buffer overflow yourself, you must not know that every stack-based buffer overflow has to overwrite the return address of the function to jump execution the nop sled. The instruction pointer isn't going to magically move to the stack on its own (unless you're overflowing an overly fancy language interpreter/compiler, or maybe an oldschool bit blitter). It's is a fine art, involving a lot of factors.
If you are doing a ret-to-libc it is usually much easier, but of course your choices are more limited. Then again, if we start getting NX bit set on our stack pages, ret-to-libc will be required.
You can be forgiven for not understanding the full implications of a buffer overflow from the sensationalistic approach the media has taken, where every buffer overflow is a gauranteed entry into the darkest heart of your system. Next time don't be so afraid of what you don't know or udnerstand.
Wow. I cut you to the bone, huh? Here's a free tip. Next time your face flushes and your pudgy fingers begin to ponderously tap out a venomous reply, do check for typos. Insults on my "udnerstanding" and my susceptibility to these dire "gaurantee[s]" are much more meaningful when you don't type like a chimp. Doubly so, since I presume you are on a mac and therefore have spellcheck in every text field. Sheesh.
Many people say this is a buffer overflow, including Darwin Developers, Apple engineers, and other developers like myself. For someone who doesn't even understand the basic mechanisms and requirements for an exploit to work, what makes you think you're going to get away with this kind of astroturfing crap?
Until we see confirmation that people get anything but this crash, there is no exploit demonstrated, just a way to crash Quicktime.
There is a buffer overflow. This exploit is a classic example of one which is proof of concept and needs tuning to work on specific situations.
Please do not further muddy the waters when you don't understand core concepts. If you don't understand what that crashlog is saying, your opinion is non-technical.
If Bush is so proud of never reading the newspapers, why do we assume the enemy does? Why do we assume anything we do "emboldens" the enemy any more than the fact that we're not a Muslim nation and thus must be blown off the face of the earth? You can spout any excuses you want from "we support Jews occupying Muslim holy lands" to "our culture is immoral", yet the fact remains that the extremists want to destroy everything that isn't Islam. Take a look at the holes where giant Buddha statues once stood in Afghanistan, or the treatment of Christians in Egypt and other middle eastern countries, and see the future of a world under Islamic rule.
Good point.But calling Saddam "secular" is... an interesting interpretation. For someone who is secular, he certainly carried out foaming-at-the-mouth-religious-fanatic style genocides quite well.
I guess we could withdraw to Darfur and perform the moral equivalent of masturbation rather than try to stay in Iraq.
The capabilities are not the problem. The problem is using those capabilities outside the law.
Except that the argument that it was outside the law was debatable. Hence intervention required. Why is it legal for the FCC to charge fees without the House's intervention? Can we challenge that next?
What color is the sky on the planet you live on? By "great things", do you mean make modest improvements to the toilet he drove the economy into? Have you checked out what he did to the national debt?
Blue. Same as yours.
The consumer economy is at a ridiculously good point right now. The real problem with our national debt is that wicked monstrosity called Social Security. Once that is forced to close and a graceful exit (read: not very graceful, as I will probably be paying with no hope of benefits, I guess that's the price I pay for being born in a era of buck-passing politicans).
What Bush did that I like is that he eloquently demonstrated that lowering taxes can lead to an increase in national revenue. This is key, from my standpoint. I'm not a fan of the way our tax structure is set up, because it penalizes success and directly rewards abuse.
If they had some semblance of respect for the office, they'd demand that the President execute the laws faithfully as the Constitution demands, and not use his "signing statements" to override or twist the laws to his own ends.
Since when do we get upset when a branch of our government tries to acquire more power? There are three branches constantly doing this, every single day. Anyone who says the courts aren't trying to expand their ability to create law is off in la-la land.
This is what branches of government do. They did it when Clinton was in power too. Please don't pretend it's a trait unique to this president. The Executive branch always gains power during times of military conflict. It's designed and intended to step to the forefront during such situations.
This is why we have congress and the courts, to block unchecked expansion of power.
Thats what they said the first time they killed the Total Information Awareness program.
I don't like it either, but where the fuck were we during the Clinton years when this shit all got started? This isn't exactly new, Gore and Clinton have laid the groundwork for this before Bush ever got into office. The Wiretapping capabilities, and email scanning capabilities... neither are the inventions of this president. Now, that doesn't mean the Bush administration gets a free pass. Some of the stuff that's been enacted since 9/11 is ridiculous.
However, it's unfair to blame everything on Bush, Cheney, or a made-up specter of Darth Rove. Our Senators voted for this shit, and they can undo it. Why aren't we demanding that they undo the mess they caused by not reading the fucking bills they signed. Why aren't we screaming at the Supreme Court to strike the whole thing down? Seriously? All people do is blindly say "Impeach Bush" when the only reason the Executive Branch has these powers is because Congress openly gave it to them?
You HAVE to recognize that Bush has been the number one polarizer in modern USA, he's inches from the all-time record, saved by the fact that at least he hasn't managed to cause any states to withdraw from the Union.
No. He is the focus of a polarization. Let me put on my anti-big-media hat and say that the complete and total mindfuck that several big media institutions have executed as a way to push their corporate politics is mostly at fault. Bush's administration has failed at their #2 job, which is telling the American people what the hell is going on, but this has been compounded and greatly muddied by a fleet of talking heads that spit venom. The only positive point of this president is that he's done great things for the economy, and while I appreciate that, I know from history that there are presidents who can do that and actually do a decent job of foreign politics and PR.
Err, it wasn't the gp that began the "die-hard *political category*" statements. Trying to suggest polarization after someone defending the opposing standpoint broached it is unfair and disingenuous.
Oh, and Bush is somewhat of a pariah in his own party. May Republicans are much more conservative on many issues (e.g., immigration controls and reforms). The reason that the Republicans don't turn on him publicly is that they have some semblance of respect for the office of the presidency. Something many of his opponents lack. To claim that he and his "die-hard republicans" are in charge is very incorrect from the standpoint of party politics.
I know that conservatism is very unpopular on slashdot, but let me throw a bone out here to people puzzling over why conservatives are not seeking impeachment. We believe that America is at war, and a very scary kind of war. I am at least as frustrated with our current administration as you are, and I cannot wait to vote in a new president. However, it would be an extreme sign of weakness to oust Bush prematurely.
For people who say that Bush is getting away with all kinds of civil-rights violations, please consider that we know about so many of them! The news media is joining the executive-branch checks-and-balances. The Administration is effectively neutered. Fortunately, they've effected their economic changes (which are positive) before that, so now we're locked into a relatively steady state for the time being.
When the next Presidental Election comes along, let's demand someone who can produce results we want. The last two elections have been "lesser of two morons" elections.
Err, lots of people have had Wii defects. Heck, someone here responded to you already.
And that's fine, new hardware has bugs. The Wii should be a bit more reliable, there is less new hardware in it. It is mostly a revised and clocked-up gamecube.
Look... when you're at a store-even if you're at a Sony Playstation Store-and a clerk tells you some technical detail that sounds absurd? Ignore it.
This is a story about a dumb retail clerk spouting off garbage to sound smart. If I had a nickel for every time this happened to me, I'd be wearing an italian-designed suit made of Euros anddriving a SUV made from US dollars.
The PS3 has some manufacturing defects. Holy crap, shock, and fear. New hardware has defects. This has happened before, it has happened again. If you're concerned about the PS3's future stability, look to updated and replaced Xbox 360s, which are now quite stable.
One thing I have noticed though. Lots of people tell me their PS3 "locks up a lot". But examining the physical location of their unit, it's in an entertainment center with no airflow. Both the PS3 manual and the Xbox 360 manual clearly said you needed some space around the machines and to make sure there is airflow. The machine heats up, it breaks. Same as any other computer. Once they move it out, they generally experience fewer problems. I'm 3/3 on this. Not that it's an excuse or something you can generally extrapolate from, but it's something to consider.
Microsoft does not seem to reply very quickly to critical vulnerabilities - not that this is an excuse, but it does go to show that a few days' wait isn't enough to make something 'not a serious desktop' (even when 99% of vulnerabilities are for that particular platform)
Seriously. Microsoft is not anyone's role model, or even a watermark for acceptability. Across the board, MS's practices are pretty much the canonical example of what not to do. Their monthly patch strategy has turned into a nightmare, with exploits gaming that system. Critical vulnerabilities that should be patched within 48 hours of disclosure lie dormant for weeks at a time.
I know that people say, "Well, we're as good as Microsoft" as a justification for their performance. But Microsoft's methods are not acceptable! To judge anyone by them is to indulge in a fantasy and further deepen the mire that many businesses find themselves ensnared in, unable to escape their dependence on MS products.
...and this from the same group that brings you Microsoft is Competetive, Not Monopolistic, and 101 other assorted reasons why monopolies are great.
Yeah, I really trust them to dispassionately and rationally decide whether a scientific theory is real.
Spoken like a true slashdot-ite. Microsoft engaged in anti-competitive practices, but their entire success cannot be attributed to this. MS, up until very recently, has accurately analyzed that what big businesses and people really want is a feeling of accountability from their otherwise mysterious and confusing computers. Even if that accountability is clearly denied in a complex and a hard-to-read EULA, people will buy again and again.
I think geeks at large are still smarting from this, it impacts our faith in humanity. You can't really blame the NCPA for pointing out the factual evidence of Microsoft's success. A casual glance around nearly any modern workplace could do exactly the same. Heck, you really can't get angry about them pointing out why monopolies exist, it's usually a history of success followed by a sudden switch from competitive to anti-competitive tactics.
You can't discount their climate evidence report solely on the grounds that you don't like their economics.
The problem with the BBC's investigation is that the debate really isn't over climate change. Any idiot can look at the data and say, "Yes, it is warmer now." The question of why, and if humans have anything to do with it, is the hotly debated question. There is a lot of evidence to suggest that we are warming because of a variety of related factors, and the debate is over the impact human industry has on this process.
I can't help but feel that this kind of wording makes things much more confusing. Anthroprogenic global warming is not a catchy term, and people tend to turn the debate into "Is the globe warming or not?" That is not the issue. The issue is, "Is the globe warming because of anything we've done? And if so, can/should we attempt to counteract it?"
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I do agree that Sony and MS could lose games to the Wii, Metal Gear Solid and FF13 aren't in that category. The demos and movies we've seen released simply exceed the Wii's graphical capability. Heck, the FF13 stuff exceeds most high-quality PC renders, and I bet the XBox 360 would be hard pressed to output that kind of graphical quality in realtime.
We've known for awhile that the PS3 has the best hardware from a raw output standpoint (the real problem being that, like the PS2, it's extremely hard to use effectively). There is a great hunger out there for video games that really look great on our modern home theater systems, and Sony and Microsoft are both in competition for capturing this market. This segment is much like Apple's segment of the PC market, it's people who are more inclined to spend money on the product anyways. It's a very profitable sector.
The Wii is not even remotely aimed at that component, and that cleanly shuts it out from some big-name franchises. I am not saying the Wii will fail, but I am saying that it is not a great target for ports (unique control schemes) and doesn't get the nice 2-fer factor of also being a good media player.
Either the packages are up-to-date enough on DarwinPorts, or they are just too slow for my development cycle. It's interesting to note that the stuff I've got installed outside of management on my OS X box is pretty much the same stuff I have on my linux box.
Maybe I have a bad taste in my mouth from Debian's package system going insane and being unable to install most packages because I installed one misconfigured package and it destroyed my version database.
I think people underestimate the market's ravenous desire for high-definition gaming. The Wii's biggest weakness is that it simply cannot field the same picture quality as competing machines. Its greatest strength (controllers), on the other hand, is something that other people can ape and work with and approach. You can make motion-sensitive (or other novel approach) controllers for the Xbox 360 and PS3, but you can't simply plug in something to the Wii and make it more than an incremental improvement on the Gamecube.
Graphics are not everything, but great games like Gears of War show that they can turn a great game into a blockbuster.
It's a superior media in terms of storage capacity and has the managed copy feature. This translates directly to picture quality and the availability of extras, which sell DVDs. It's not a small amount of space either. I'd prefer to see it win over HD-DVD, which I view as more of an attempt by the content companies to cheap out on the next gen just to fill in the "high definition" square.
The fact that my PS3 _is_ a blu-ray player is huge to me. I can play both formats, but I much prefer the output of my PS3 playing a blu-ray.
Not that I've seen? LG has just announced they're going to sell one this year.
You say 'iBook'. Which I assumes means you've got a much older laptop there. I completely agree, the G3 iBooks were real dogs. But you shouldn't extend that to the modern system. When I pull up something lightweight like a command line utility or an X11 app (running over Apple's X11 layer) the response is about as fast as any of my linux boxes.
Otherwise, about the only thing my linux install does faster is boot.
This is better than it used to be, but certainly Fink and DarwinPorts leave a lot to be desired. But as time has gone on, the free and open source mac software world has grown significantly. Most of the irreplacable linux-oriented apps are in a package manager, and there are great FOSS alternatives for many common mac tasks.
There are also some closed products that are so good that they beg for that fact to be excused. For example, the now extremely popular TextMate editor is something so incredibly good that if it and emacs had a fight, I'm not sure who'd win. And certainly TextMate is easier to get started with, Emacs has a very stiff learning curve and lacks the awesome video podcast showing tips and tricks.
You know, thinking about this, I realized that a lot of my linux stuff has to be outside the package structure too. If you're developing, you often get nightlies and betas well before any kind of package can be submitted and piped through. Personally I call this a wash. Most Linux distros update core components, provide a marginally complete but not terribly up-to-date package directory, and that's what OS X does.
Your information is outdated.
I find myself far more productive in OS X than in Linux, and I have used both for years and understand them both quite well. I think the real reason is that OS X has Quicksilver, whereas there is no good competition for that in the linux space.
People need to keep in mind the Wii costs less than half of the PS3's hefty price tag. Of course more people are going to buy Wiis right now, it's cheaper. Not to say that the Wii's awesomeness isn't playing a big role, but keep in mind that Nintendo's biggest problem is finding 3rd party developers who make worthwhile games. The gamecube was a great system, but they had very few must-have games that were not from Nintendo. No matter how good the Wii is, good third party dev support is what wins console wars.
Before we all doom the PS3, let's wait until some of the big-name PS3 games come out later this year. Sony already knew they were going to take a loss at the outset of the PS3 market, so I think they're taking the long view. In Japan, when Final Fantasy XIII comes out, there is going to be a rabid fanbase that will purchase the console for that game alone. Others may hold off, but given the other big properties that will shortly follow, how can anyone avoid the PS3's gravity?
Also factor in the other part of the market... Blu-rays absolutely rock on a HDTV. LG is coming out with a dual-mode player, which means that given the choice, the consumer can be easily swayed towards Blu-ray simply by flooding (true) advertisements about the media's technical superiority. If Blu-ray pulls ahead, then the PS3 becomes much more attractive.
Too bad C#'s reflection API is so tedious to use compared to the very simple and elegant ObJC selector primitive or the NSInvocation class. And #3 is disingenuous, informal protocols don't exist in C#.
This is why C# fails yet again, just like Java. Dynamic dispatch is hugely powerful and useful. It completely eliminates the need for several complex GoF patterns and opens up very simple and elegant delegation patterns, which AppKit and FoundationKit (apple's APIs) use with such amazing effects.
Firstly, inheritance doesn't let you extend existing classes, only create new ones. For example, if I want to add a method to the String object to compute its Levenshtein distance with another string. In order for me to do this in C#, I need to create my new SmarterString based off previous strings. With ObjC categories, I could make it so all strings have my improved string distance, even for other system primitives.
Also, inheritance requires you understand every detail of the existing class. Often times we extend classes for only small feature improvements, inheritance is very much overboard for this.
He's talking about hooking into these procedures. It's useful for implementing custom serialization strategies, or when you want to take memory allocation into your own hands for special high-performance situations.
Consider a hypothetical programmer, who tackles the above challenge. Let's say that they solve the problem in 60 lines vs. 6 (a 10x speed increase), but that there is only a 2x speed increase, then it may seem like you spent a very long time writing 6 lines. In reality though, you were just solving the complexity of the problem, which isn't something a language can really alleviate.
People who make this argument usually don't know Haskell, Ocaml, or other alternatives very well. Yes, when you're new to a language it's going to go slower. If you'd clocked as many hours in Ocaml as you had in Java, you'd be pretty fast with that language too.
At Lockheed Martin working on the RSAII project (which has to do with giving the US's two major space ranges updated and modernized software and hardware for launching rockets), a large percentage of our development was done in Python, Ruby, and C++. We also did a lot of prototyping in Scheme, and several DrScheme-based tools became popular.
I have since worked at two startups that were Ruby on Rails projects.
This notion of "real world" is so bogus.
Maybe my thinly veiled references to Al Gore's crock "An Inconvient Truth" wasn't obvious enough. Enormous profit, and now contracts with school districts where children are compelled to watch that tripe and have taxes pay for that. Make a cheap movie full of lies, out of context (and outright edited) quotes and panic, and then get the government to pay you to spread that hysteria to children. That's a pretty good business model, if you ask me.
In my state, California, the Sierra Club and other environmentalist groups are receiving millions of dollars a year for "Clean Air And Water", but any attempt to audit how this money is spent has met with utter failure. It's considered "un-auditable" and critics loudly decry this. But green interests are strong in this state, so we cheerfully throw our limited tax dollars into a completely opaque hole.
I have no stock in any fuel or energy company. My sole interest here is with the American economy. You make it sound like our only option is the Kyoto treaty. Nothing could be further from the truth. Let's be hasty, let's get the fuck into alternative fuels the minute they are viable. Let's make sure to cut our emissions. Heck, let's even reward businesses that can show their CO2 emissions falling every year with tax cuts. If you incentivize it, then people will cheerfully do it. I will support every reasonable effort to improve the environment of the world.
But I will not fly off half-cocked. We did that once with recycling, and we're now cheerfully hurting the environment while we recycle paper and smugly tell the world how green we are. We're cheerfully destroying preferred animal habitats while preserving poor and sparse habitats, crowing about how we're saving the world. Fuck that. Fuck that stupid bullshit, and I will do everything in my power to stop reactionaries like you from ruin ing our country globally just so that you can sleep at night knowing you did something.
It is not theoretical at all. Let's look at the US, where this battle is still being fought. The Environmentalists are Lobbyists. Why do lobbyists do anything?
They want the government to legislate in a way that they approve of. This legislation grows the size of the government, which increases the scope of the government, which increases the potential power of lobbyists in the US. This increased power means more people will donate to their organizations to effect change, perceiving correctly that these institutions are getting better at meeting their desires (which are motivated by an indescribable quantity of different motivations).
In this regard, the environmentalist movement in Washington D.C. is no different from Big Oil, Big Tobacco, or any other institution that can organize such large sums of money. Further, we have green movement demagogues telling us they have lied and distorted the facts to push their agenda. When Big Tobacco finally admitted this, they were forced to pay for a campaign to close them down. But when green groups do it, we just say they're thinking of the greater good.
On the international scene, one need only look at the Kyoto Treaty to see there are numerous biases and agendas in it. If it were truly concerned with reducing emissions, it would not exclude China, who's output of various pollutants is skyrocketing. In comparison, heavy burdens are put on the United States, who's emissions increases have been decreasing yearly, despite a healthy population and industrial increase every year. There are many possible explanations for this, but none of them have environmental reasons.
Personally, I think that we can prove Global Warming, and we know that increased CO2 emissions accelerate the effect. That's enough to say we need to cut emissions and work on alternative fuels. But that isn't enough to castrate ourselves in the world market (which hurts everyone) in a frantic, guilt ridden attempt to comply with people who are clearly using this crisis to their own advantage. The US is more than capable of self-regulating at least as well as any other nation in the world, and unlike many others we will do so without a world organization forcing us to (we already are in many states).
Nearly every stack-based buffer overflow which allows arbitrary string entry, even if that precludes nulls, can be used to execute code.
Emphasis above is mine, and demonstrates how little you get here. Every stack-based buffer overflow has to thread the needle at least twice. Having never implemented a buffer overflow yourself, you must not know that every stack-based buffer overflow has to overwrite the return address of the function to jump execution the nop sled. The instruction pointer isn't going to magically move to the stack on its own (unless you're overflowing an overly fancy language interpreter/compiler, or maybe an oldschool bit blitter). It's is a fine art, involving a lot of factors.
If you are doing a ret-to-libc it is usually much easier, but of course your choices are more limited. Then again, if we start getting NX bit set on our stack pages, ret-to-libc will be required.
Wow. I cut you to the bone, huh? Here's a free tip. Next time your face flushes and your pudgy fingers begin to ponderously tap out a venomous reply, do check for typos. Insults on my "udnerstanding" and my susceptibility to these dire "gaurantee[s]" are much more meaningful when you don't type like a chimp. Doubly so, since I presume you are on a mac and therefore have spellcheck in every text field. Sheesh.
Many people say this is a buffer overflow, including Darwin Developers, Apple engineers, and other developers like myself. For someone who doesn't even understand the basic mechanisms and requirements for an exploit to work, what makes you think you're going to get away with this kind of astroturfing crap?
The assumed known address is wrong, but it does crash quicktime on my machine.
/Applications/QuickTime Player.app/Contents/MacOS/QuickTime Player
...
:)
Snips from my crash log:
OS Version: 10.4.8 (Build 8N1051)
Report Version: 4
Command: QuickTime Player
Path:
Parent: WindowServer [57]
Version: 7.1.3 (7.1.3)
Build Version: 65
Project Name: QuickTime
Source Version: 4650000
PID: 9548
Thread: Unknown
Exception: EXC_BAD_INSTRUCTION (0x0002)
Code[0]: 0x00000001
Code[1]: 0x00000000
Unknown thread crashed with X86 Thread State (32-bit):
eax: 0xffffffff ebx: 0x41414141 ecx: 0x900012f8 edx: 0xffffffff
edi: 0x41414141 esi: 0x41414141 ebp: 0xdeadbabe esp: 0xbfffd628 (hello deadbabe!)
ss: 0x0000001f efl: 0x00010286 eip: 0x918bef3a cs: 0x00000017
ds: 0x0000001f es: 0x0000001f fs: 0x00000000 gs: 0x00000037
Not so good.
Good point.But calling Saddam "secular" is... an interesting interpretation. For someone who is secular, he certainly carried out foaming-at-the-mouth-religious-fanatic style genocides quite well.
I guess we could withdraw to Darfur and perform the moral equivalent of masturbation rather than try to stay in Iraq.
Except that the argument that it was outside the law was debatable. Hence intervention required. Why is it legal for the FCC to charge fees without the House's intervention? Can we challenge that next?
Blue. Same as yours.
The consumer economy is at a ridiculously good point right now. The real problem with our national debt is that wicked monstrosity called Social Security. Once that is forced to close and a graceful exit (read: not very graceful, as I will probably be paying with no hope of benefits, I guess that's the price I pay for being born in a era of buck-passing politicans).
What Bush did that I like is that he eloquently demonstrated that lowering taxes can lead to an increase in national revenue. This is key, from my standpoint. I'm not a fan of the way our tax structure is set up, because it penalizes success and directly rewards abuse.
Since when do we get upset when a branch of our government tries to acquire more power? There are three branches constantly doing this, every single day. Anyone who says the courts aren't trying to expand their ability to create law is off in la-la land.
This is what branches of government do. They did it when Clinton was in power too. Please don't pretend it's a trait unique to this president. The Executive branch always gains power during times of military conflict. It's designed and intended to step to the forefront during such situations.
This is why we have congress and the courts, to block unchecked expansion of power.
I don't like it either, but where the fuck were we during the Clinton years when this shit all got started? This isn't exactly new, Gore and Clinton have laid the groundwork for this before Bush ever got into office. The Wiretapping capabilities, and email scanning capabilities... neither are the inventions of this president. Now, that doesn't mean the Bush administration gets a free pass. Some of the stuff that's been enacted since 9/11 is ridiculous.
However, it's unfair to blame everything on Bush, Cheney, or a made-up specter of Darth Rove. Our Senators voted for this shit, and they can undo it. Why aren't we demanding that they undo the mess they caused by not reading the fucking bills they signed. Why aren't we screaming at the Supreme Court to strike the whole thing down? Seriously? All people do is blindly say "Impeach Bush" when the only reason the Executive Branch has these powers is because Congress openly gave it to them?
No. He is the focus of a polarization. Let me put on my anti-big-media hat and say that the complete and total mindfuck that several big media institutions have executed as a way to push their corporate politics is mostly at fault. Bush's administration has failed at their #2 job, which is telling the American people what the hell is going on, but this has been compounded and greatly muddied by a fleet of talking heads that spit venom. The only positive point of this president is that he's done great things for the economy, and while I appreciate that, I know from history that there are presidents who can do that and actually do a decent job of foreign politics and PR.
Pre-9/11. Get over it.
The stakes then was embarrassing a mediocre president. The stakes now include emboldening an intelligent and suicidal enemy.
Err, it wasn't the gp that began the "die-hard *political category*" statements. Trying to suggest polarization after someone defending the opposing standpoint broached it is unfair and disingenuous.
Oh, and Bush is somewhat of a pariah in his own party. May Republicans are much more conservative on many issues (e.g., immigration controls and reforms). The reason that the Republicans don't turn on him publicly is that they have some semblance of respect for the office of the presidency. Something many of his opponents lack. To claim that he and his "die-hard republicans" are in charge is very incorrect from the standpoint of party politics.
I know that conservatism is very unpopular on slashdot, but let me throw a bone out here to people puzzling over why conservatives are not seeking impeachment. We believe that America is at war, and a very scary kind of war. I am at least as frustrated with our current administration as you are, and I cannot wait to vote in a new president. However, it would be an extreme sign of weakness to oust Bush prematurely.
For people who say that Bush is getting away with all kinds of civil-rights violations, please consider that we know about so many of them! The news media is joining the executive-branch checks-and-balances. The Administration is effectively neutered. Fortunately, they've effected their economic changes (which are positive) before that, so now we're locked into a relatively steady state for the time being.
When the next Presidental Election comes along, let's demand someone who can produce results we want. The last two elections have been "lesser of two morons" elections.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense(tm).
/. signature!
I think that's my new
Err, lots of people have had Wii defects. Heck, someone here responded to you already.
And that's fine, new hardware has bugs. The Wii should be a bit more reliable, there is less new hardware in it. It is mostly a revised and clocked-up gamecube.
Look... when you're at a store-even if you're at a Sony Playstation Store-and a clerk tells you some technical detail that sounds absurd? Ignore it.
This is a story about a dumb retail clerk spouting off garbage to sound smart. If I had a nickel for every time this happened to me, I'd be wearing an italian-designed suit made of Euros anddriving a SUV made from US dollars.
The PS3 has some manufacturing defects. Holy crap, shock, and fear. New hardware has defects. This has happened before, it has happened again. If you're concerned about the PS3's future stability, look to updated and replaced Xbox 360s, which are now quite stable.
One thing I have noticed though. Lots of people tell me their PS3 "locks up a lot". But examining the physical location of their unit, it's in an entertainment center with no airflow. Both the PS3 manual and the Xbox 360 manual clearly said you needed some space around the machines and to make sure there is airflow. The machine heats up, it breaks. Same as any other computer. Once they move it out, they generally experience fewer problems. I'm 3/3 on this. Not that it's an excuse or something you can generally extrapolate from, but it's something to consider.
Seriously. Microsoft is not anyone's role model, or even a watermark for acceptability. Across the board, MS's practices are pretty much the canonical example of what not to do. Their monthly patch strategy has turned into a nightmare, with exploits gaming that system. Critical vulnerabilities that should be patched within 48 hours of disclosure lie dormant for weeks at a time.
I know that people say, "Well, we're as good as Microsoft" as a justification for their performance. But Microsoft's methods are not acceptable! To judge anyone by them is to indulge in a fantasy and further deepen the mire that many businesses find themselves ensnared in, unable to escape their dependence on MS products.
Spoken like a true slashdot-ite. Microsoft engaged in anti-competitive practices, but their entire success cannot be attributed to this. MS, up until very recently, has accurately analyzed that what big businesses and people really want is a feeling of accountability from their otherwise mysterious and confusing computers. Even if that accountability is clearly denied in a complex and a hard-to-read EULA, people will buy again and again.
I think geeks at large are still smarting from this, it impacts our faith in humanity. You can't really blame the NCPA for pointing out the factual evidence of Microsoft's success. A casual glance around nearly any modern workplace could do exactly the same. Heck, you really can't get angry about them pointing out why monopolies exist, it's usually a history of success followed by a sudden switch from competitive to anti-competitive tactics.
You can't discount their climate evidence report solely on the grounds that you don't like their economics.
The problem with the BBC's investigation is that the debate really isn't over climate change. Any idiot can look at the data and say, "Yes, it is warmer now." The question of why, and if humans have anything to do with it, is the hotly debated question. There is a lot of evidence to suggest that we are warming because of a variety of related factors, and the debate is over the impact human industry has on this process.
I can't help but feel that this kind of wording makes things much more confusing. Anthroprogenic global warming is not a catchy term, and people tend to turn the debate into "Is the globe warming or not?" That is not the issue. The issue is, "Is the globe warming because of anything we've done? And if so, can/should we attempt to counteract it?"