"server" is not a quantity. This phrase doesn't make any sense at alll; VB applications don't require a server to run, they'll run on any Windows operating system.
Faster? Maybe against Java running on windows, under IIS.
Well, yes. You can't run VB applications anywhere other than Windows, so it doesn't matter how Java performs on other platforms, if VB is faster than Java for Windows. Besides, VB applications don't run "under IIS"; are you thinking of ASP?
Faster to code? Could be. Point and Drool is hard to beat...for time.
You say that like it's a bad thing. If a certain language is easier to use and you can develop more quickly in it, how is that a bad quality?
While I agree it'd be a nice option for it to say that it doesn't work on 486 processors, it should be pretty obvious if you look at the filename -- the "i586" means it only works on 586 (aka Pentium) or better processors. I'm not aware if there are currently any builds of the 9.2 RC for 486s, unfortunately.
From what I understand, O2 is considered to be the best all-around optimization; O3 generates code that is faster, but the file sizes tend to be larger.
If you want it to be even more optimized, you can use the mcpu or march options for your processor; mcpu generates code optimized for a specific processor that will still run on others, while march generates code that will probably only run on the specified processor (or better). For example: -O3 -march=pentium4
For a list of supported CPU types, see the GCC man page.
Actually, the only anime pirates I know who use the "butchered" excuse are ones who don't know a drop of Japanese (or if they do, just a smattering of common words) that automatically assume something must be butchered. In fact, most of the anime pirates I know will willingly buy illegal Hong Kong DVDs of series or movies that have already been given good US releases, just because they don't want to pay for it.
Now, I've been taking classes in Japanese for two years, and while I'm still far from proficient, I can say that most anime translations are very good. The only places where material is regularly edited is when it's shown on TV, or when it's for a "kids'" series, such as Pokemon or Digimon; in general, whenever a company edits something that is commercially released in stores, fans make a huge outcry. The anime industry in America is still small enough that you can't make enough money to survive without support from the dedicated fanbase, so companies generally try to appeal to the fans.
In fact, in my experience commercial companies generally do a much better job than fansubbers. Groups like AnimeJunkies frequently make both the Japanese and English grammar geek sides within me cringe in pain.
Now, the excuse about good series not being translated is more valid; however, most series worthy of note do get translated. Generally, those that don't are of a genre that doesn't sell in America (dating sim, magical girl, etc.), or they're really crap but so focused towards a single genre that fans of that genre like it anyway.
(note that the above observations are based on what I've seen as president of the Texas Tech University anime club for the last two years)
On the contrary -- since animation typically features sharper contrasts between objects and sharp changes in colors, you have to encode it at a higher bitrate in order for the artifacts to be less noticable than in live action video. With live action stuff, you typically have many, many different similar shades near each other, complete with natural shadows and blurring from imperfect focus, so artifacts blend in better.
Or they could be people who haven't used computers before. I promise, they exist. Leave Slashdot and interact with people for a while -- I work at a small company with around 100 employees, and I'd guess as many as a fourth of them had virtually no computer experience before working here.
By the way, I have an OS X PowerBook that I love, and I like the Windows XP interface quite a bit. Not as much as OS X, but I'd say it's the best Windows yet, and a bit better than the Linux desktops I've used.
Purchases from the iTunes Music Store are available only in the United States and are not available in any other location. You agree not to use or attempt to use the service from outside of the available territory. Apple may use technologies to verify such compliance.
All this is saying is that you may not use the iTunes service outside the US. This is likely not of their own choice, but because of agreements with the record labels that restrict them to distribution in the US.
Furthermore, it says nothing like, "Apple's 'technologies' delete the bought-and-paid-for files with no refund and no replacement when & if you leave the U.S." You're welcome to listen to your music anywhere you please. Read in the proper context, "Apple may use technologies to verify such compliance," obviously means that if Apple detects you using the iTunes service from outside the US, they'll stop you. Is that so harsh?
You do realize that, depending on which OS we're talking about, it's still two to three times larger than Opera, right? And most of that size is because of Unicode support -- older versions that didn't support Unicode were small enough to fit on a floppy. I have a hard time considering any browser larger than five megs or so to be "small"...
How does BitTorrent make you any more safe than any other filesharing system? In fact, I think it would be trivial for someone working with law enforcement to go through search sites like the one you just listed with a client such as this one and grab the IPs of everybody downloading the file.
Well, except that XP can't handle having the motherboard changed out from under it
Yes, it can. I work in a corporate environment, and I've had to change out motherboards in a number of computers running XP before, so I know it's possible.
The thing you usually have to watch out for is IDE controller drivers; if the new motherboard has a different controller than the old one (and it almost certainly will), XP will bluescreen on startup, because it tries to load IDE drivers as part of the system boot-up process. It's possible to prevent this, though; before you switch motherboards, go into the Device Manager and change your IDE controller driver to the generic Microsoft one. It should work on any controller, so you should then be able to swap out the motherboard with a new one, then install the controller drivers for its specific chipset.
If you somehow bork that up (as I managed to do when recently upgrading my own computer), it's possible to use an XP install CD to boot into the recovery console and manually disable any boot-time IDE drivers, which forces XP to load the standard ones.
As a sidenote, I've been using the corporate edition of XP since the first public betas, and I've never had to do any product activation.
What's really strange here is that I was unable to reproduce the problem on my own; I tried making a page that closed comments just like that page did, but it displayed properly in Opera. At first that made me think that the problem might be somewhere else, so I made a copy of the site's page and changed the close-comment tag to -->. Oddly, it worked. The problem may be a combination of a few different things, then.. Anyway, I've e-mailed the site maintainer about it, and I'll keep looking into it.
Actually, Opera is rendering the site properly. If you look at the source, you'll notice that in some Javascript at the top of the page, they don't properly close one of their HTML comments. Just like it should, Opera doesn't display anything else on the page, as it's all commented out.
Opera can do 2, although you have to zoom the rest of the page with the image. It can also do 3, by double-clicking on the target word; you can also look up the word in an encyclopedia or translator. It could be argued that it can also do 5, as it's also probably the smallest of all the feature-rich browsers.
First, I noticed the title image only has 15 colors, so I changed it to a 4-bit PNG. Then, after running it through pngcrush, it came out as 2,773 bytes. Sure, that only comes out as a 700 byte difference, but after you get a bit of traffic (and you know Slashdot does), that adds up to a lot. Not to mention that that's only a single image -- every Slashdot page has at least that, the Slashdot table widgets, and the section icons.
Actually, I discovered this early today -- a convenient little javascript hack that makes alpha transparency work in IE. Yep, it's really cool. Oddly enough, the spacer image included in it (you'll see if you check it out) is a GIF; it's easy enough to change to a PNG, though, and it works just as well.
Actually, if one believes my Japanese teacher (a native Osakan), Japan used to have a form of cursive writing, but it's all but dead. Standard block writing is practically just as fast, and with a decent Japanese input system, it's still possible to type kana and convert them to kanji in far less time than it would take to write out a series of 20-stroke kanji.
Sure, there'll always be a niche for calligraphy, but the average person doesn't need to know how to write it -- it's the same issue here. Who really needs cursive handwriting?
Actually, did you know that you can run fvwm on your OS X box? Check out http://fink.sourceforge.net. I switch between it, KDE, and blackbox depending on my mood.;-)
I'm curious about one of the ratings on your site. I browsed over it, and in general I agree with most of your ratings, but one that really boggles me is the 9 you gave Melanie Rawn's "Dragon Prince." Could you tell me what you thought of it? It felt to me like an unimaginative romance novel that passed itself off as fantasy, with completely predictable characters. It's one of the few books that bored me too much to finish, in fact; I only made it about 3/4 of the way through.
I suppose it's possible I missed a really incredible ending, but could you say what you thought?
Actually, there was a pirate version of Phantasy Star Online version 2 that loaded and ran faster than the official version; the folks who ripped it optimized the arrangement of the data on the disc so that the laser didn't have to move as much. It was really rather sad, especially since to most people it was useless -- you still had to have a valid serial key to play online.
Enjoy! If you don't like those particular skins, they have a lot of other ones, many of which look quite nice. Also, although the button layout and such is different from older versions, it's pretty easy to rearrange them as you like. I don't understand what you mean by "dumbed down the configuration interface," though -- it seems pretty much the same to me..
Duh! What do you think "unstable" means? It doesn't necessarly means it takes a while to crash.
You seem to be under the assumption that a bug in a program invariably causes it to crash. It is quite possible for a program to have bugs that do not cause it to crash, and thus the program is still stable -- just buggy.
and retitle shows like RUROUNI KENSHIN with stupid names like Samurai X because it supposedly sounds cool.
This was done for legal reasons. Media Blasters holds the American copyright on the title "Rurouni Kenshin"; however, ADV translated the OAV, so they had to change the name. Whether it's a good choice or not is a matter of opinion, but you should at least get your facts straight.
Slashdot Mirror
VB needs too much server
"server" is not a quantity. This phrase doesn't make any sense at alll; VB applications don't require a server to run, they'll run on any Windows operating system.
Faster? Maybe against Java running on windows, under IIS.
Well, yes. You can't run VB applications anywhere other than Windows, so it doesn't matter how Java performs on other platforms, if VB is faster than Java for Windows. Besides, VB applications don't run "under IIS"; are you thinking of ASP?
Faster to code? Could be. Point and Drool is hard to beat...for time.
You say that like it's a bad thing. If a certain language is easier to use and you can develop more quickly in it, how is that a bad quality?
While I agree it'd be a nice option for it to say that it doesn't work on 486 processors, it should be pretty obvious if you look at the filename -- the "i586" means it only works on 586 (aka Pentium) or better processors. I'm not aware if there are currently any builds of the 9.2 RC for 486s, unfortunately.
From what I understand, O2 is considered to be the best all-around optimization; O3 generates code that is faster, but the file sizes tend to be larger.
If you want it to be even more optimized, you can use the mcpu or march options for your processor; mcpu generates code optimized for a specific processor that will still run on others, while march generates code that will probably only run on the specified processor (or better). For example:
-O3 -march=pentium4
For a list of supported CPU types, see the GCC man page.
Actually, sodas are only $1.00 at Texas Tech. Yeah, that's somethin' to brag about!
More on-topic, I didn't see Texas Tech anywhere on any of their lists, but I love it there anyway. Oh well!
("mass naked child events" ring a bell to any AnimeJunkies fans?)
;-)
I would just like to comment that that is the exact scene I was thinking of when I made my below post.
Actually, the only anime pirates I know who use the "butchered" excuse are ones who don't know a drop of Japanese (or if they do, just a smattering of common words) that automatically assume something must be butchered. In fact, most of the anime pirates I know will willingly buy illegal Hong Kong DVDs of series or movies that have already been given good US releases, just because they don't want to pay for it.
Now, I've been taking classes in Japanese for two years, and while I'm still far from proficient, I can say that most anime translations are very good. The only places where material is regularly edited is when it's shown on TV, or when it's for a "kids'" series, such as Pokemon or Digimon; in general, whenever a company edits something that is commercially released in stores, fans make a huge outcry. The anime industry in America is still small enough that you can't make enough money to survive without support from the dedicated fanbase, so companies generally try to appeal to the fans.
In fact, in my experience commercial companies generally do a much better job than fansubbers. Groups like AnimeJunkies frequently make both the Japanese and English grammar geek sides within me cringe in pain.
Now, the excuse about good series not being translated is more valid; however, most series worthy of note do get translated. Generally, those that don't are of a genre that doesn't sell in America (dating sim, magical girl, etc.), or they're really crap but so focused towards a single genre that fans of that genre like it anyway.
(note that the above observations are based on what I've seen as president of the Texas Tech University anime club for the last two years)
On the contrary -- since animation typically features sharper contrasts between objects and sharp changes in colors, you have to encode it at a higher bitrate in order for the artifacts to be less noticable than in live action video. With live action stuff, you typically have many, many different similar shades near each other, complete with natural shadows and blurring from imperfect focus, so artifacts blend in better.
Or they could be people who haven't used computers before. I promise, they exist. Leave Slashdot and interact with people for a while -- I work at a small company with around 100 employees, and I'd guess as many as a fourth of them had virtually no computer experience before working here.
By the way, I have an OS X PowerBook that I love, and I like the Windows XP interface quite a bit. Not as much as OS X, but I'd say it's the best Windows yet, and a bit better than the Linux desktops I've used.
All this is saying is that you may not use the iTunes service outside the US. This is likely not of their own choice, but because of agreements with the record labels that restrict them to distribution in the US.
Furthermore, it says nothing like, "Apple's 'technologies' delete the bought-and-paid-for files with no refund and no replacement when & if you leave the U.S." You're welcome to listen to your music anywhere you please. Read in the proper context, "Apple may use technologies to verify such compliance," obviously means that if Apple detects you using the iTunes service from outside the US, they'll stop you. Is that so harsh?
Firebird is small,
You do realize that, depending on which OS we're talking about, it's still two to three times larger than Opera, right? And most of that size is because of Unicode support -- older versions that didn't support Unicode were small enough to fit on a floppy. I have a hard time considering any browser larger than five megs or so to be "small"...
How does BitTorrent make you any more safe than any other filesharing system? In fact, I think it would be trivial for someone working with law enforcement to go through search sites like the one you just listed with a client such as this one and grab the IPs of everybody downloading the file.
Well, except that XP can't handle having the motherboard changed out from under it
Yes, it can. I work in a corporate environment, and I've had to change out motherboards in a number of computers running XP before, so I know it's possible.
The thing you usually have to watch out for is IDE controller drivers; if the new motherboard has a different controller than the old one (and it almost certainly will), XP will bluescreen on startup, because it tries to load IDE drivers as part of the system boot-up process. It's possible to prevent this, though; before you switch motherboards, go into the Device Manager and change your IDE controller driver to the generic Microsoft one. It should work on any controller, so you should then be able to swap out the motherboard with a new one, then install the controller drivers for its specific chipset.
If you somehow bork that up (as I managed to do when recently upgrading my own computer), it's possible to use an XP install CD to boot into the recovery console and manually disable any boot-time IDE drivers, which forces XP to load the standard ones.
As a sidenote, I've been using the corporate edition of XP since the first public betas, and I've never had to do any product activation.
Hmm.. Well, the HTML 4.01 spec talks about comments at http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/intro/sgmltut.html#h- 3.2.4, and it seems to indicate that the closing tag should be -->.
What's really strange here is that I was unable to reproduce the problem on my own; I tried making a page that closed comments just like that page did, but it displayed properly in Opera. At first that made me think that the problem might be somewhere else, so I made a copy of the site's page and changed the close-comment tag to -->. Oddly, it worked. The problem may be a combination of a few different things, then.. Anyway, I've e-mailed the site maintainer about it, and I'll keep looking into it.
Actually, Opera is rendering the site properly. If you look at the source, you'll notice that in some Javascript at the top of the page, they don't properly close one of their HTML comments. Just like it should, Opera doesn't display anything else on the page, as it's all commented out.
Opera can do 2, although you have to zoom the rest of the page with the image. It can also do 3, by double-clicking on the target word; you can also look up the word in an encyclopedia or translator. It could be argued that it can also do 5, as it's also probably the smallest of all the feature-rich browsers.
First, I noticed the title image only has 15 colors, so I changed it to a 4-bit PNG. Then, after running it through pngcrush, it came out as 2,773 bytes. Sure, that only comes out as a 700 byte difference, but after you get a bit of traffic (and you know Slashdot does), that adds up to a lot. Not to mention that that's only a single image -- every Slashdot page has at least that, the Slashdot table widgets, and the section icons.
Actually, I discovered this early today -- a convenient little javascript hack that makes alpha transparency work in IE. Yep, it's really cool. Oddly enough, the spacer image included in it (you'll see if you check it out) is a GIF; it's easy enough to change to a PNG, though, and it works just as well.
Actually, if one believes my Japanese teacher (a native Osakan), Japan used to have a form of cursive writing, but it's all but dead. Standard block writing is practically just as fast, and with a decent Japanese input system, it's still possible to type kana and convert them to kanji in far less time than it would take to write out a series of 20-stroke kanji.
Sure, there'll always be a niche for calligraphy, but the average person doesn't need to know how to write it -- it's the same issue here. Who really needs cursive handwriting?
Actually, did you know that you can run fvwm on your OS X box? Check out http://fink.sourceforge.net. I switch between it, KDE, and blackbox depending on my mood. ;-)
I'm curious about one of the ratings on your site. I browsed over it, and in general I agree with most of your ratings, but one that really boggles me is the 9 you gave Melanie Rawn's "Dragon Prince." Could you tell me what you thought of it? It felt to me like an unimaginative romance novel that passed itself off as fantasy, with completely predictable characters. It's one of the few books that bored me too much to finish, in fact; I only made it about 3/4 of the way through.
I suppose it's possible I missed a really incredible ending, but could you say what you thought?
Actually, there was a pirate version of Phantasy Star Online version 2 that loaded and ran faster than the official version; the folks who ripped it optimized the arrangement of the data on the disc so that the laser didn't have to move as much. It was really rather sad, especially since to most people it was useless -- you still had to have a valid serial key to play online.
The unit of "volt" can also be expressed as m^2kgs^-3A^-1.
http://my.opera.com/customize/skins/index.pl?cat=O pera%20style&author=0&perscreen=10&skip=0&search=& show=new
Enjoy! If you don't like those particular skins, they have a lot of other ones, many of which look quite nice. Also, although the button layout and such is different from older versions, it's pretty easy to rearrange them as you like. I don't understand what you mean by "dumbed down the configuration interface," though -- it seems pretty much the same to me..
Duh! What do you think "unstable" means? It doesn't necessarly means it takes a while to crash.
You seem to be under the assumption that a bug in a program invariably causes it to crash. It is quite possible for a program to have bugs that do not cause it to crash, and thus the program is still stable -- just buggy.
and retitle shows like RUROUNI KENSHIN with stupid names like Samurai X because it supposedly sounds cool.
This was done for legal reasons. Media Blasters holds the American copyright on the title "Rurouni Kenshin"; however, ADV translated the OAV, so they had to change the name. Whether it's a good choice or not is a matter of opinion, but you should at least get your facts straight.