You must admit, though, that there USED TO BE an incredible hype-machine surrounding this project, and now there is not.
I live in CA, and I was planning on buzzing on down to Palmdale for the test, I believe it was supposed to be last summer? or was it the summer before? Anyway, when is the test going to be, do y'all have *any* idea?
Hopefully, in the future, after CPU technology has stagnated for a century or two, perhaps software technology will have to fill in the gaps.
We'll all be back to programming everything directly in assembler, writing to bare metal, and economizing every last cycle of bandwidth and bit of cache. Programming will be painful, and software will be elegant. GUIs will be a federal offense.
Ultimately, maybe they can use a scanning-tunnelling microscope to physically etch-out a mask of a thin layer of some metal, like gold or something, since you can move one atom at a time with one of those things, you could theoretically just program it straight off of your CAD design layout of the chip itself, and drive the microscope like a CNC.
Intel will keep announcing newer and faster chips. However, when you try to buy one, they'll be "unavailable". But the announcements will keep up with Moore's law.
This is using a new high-tech process of press-release generation code-named "vapor". Motorola is said to be licensing this new technology from Intel to assist in ramping clock speeds for their PowerPC chips.
I've been an angry bastard ever since that evening in 1993 when I realized it was 9:30pm, and I had been tweaking this poor bastard's config.sys file over the phone with him since 2pm, trying to help him get his system up and running. I remembered the *last* time I came home that late for similar reasons, and my wife was pissed because she had tried to suprise me with the kids at grandma's, and a candlelight dinner at home.
Since config.sys has been replaced with the registry, things haven't gotten much better (except since my stock options came through, my wife now appreciates the time I put in to make us so rich). Messing with a registry or config.sys can turn *anyone* into an angry bastard.
I believe the rumor that the ONLY profane language Mother Theresa ever uttered in her entire sainted life was the first and last day she tried to run a Windows system.
best yet is that when you save an html file with a space in the name (which Front Page lets any clueless moron do), most web browsers will barf on the space.
The other question I have regarding UFS vs. HFS+ on OS X, is, if you upgrade a currently formatted HFS+ partition, can you change it to UFS, or are you stuck with HFS+ (unless you reformat)?
And if you DO stay with HFS+, can it support traditional Unix file permissions, or are you screwed, and if you DON'T have Unix file permissions, how do you secure your fs from intruders?
There are times in Mac OS where I hit that 32 character limitation, it's kind of a pain in the ass, on rare occasions where a more descriptive filename is desired.
However, the implementation of 255, on Windows, is, as you say, screwed-up.
First of all, that is correct, the entire path limitation is 255, actually a few characters less, because that includes separators (\) and drive letter, and colon. DOS command lines are limited to a max lenght of 255 anyway, so specifying longer paths gets to be a pain in the keister, you have to DIR/X to derive the 8.3 synonym of the name, and use that. But the hilarious thing is, using the 8.3 version of the filename, you can use DOS commands to generate paths MUCH deeper than 255 characters in length. I believe the real limit of the file system is 65,535 characters, but the funny thing is, when you exceed the 255 character length, your data is there, but Explorer can't go into that directory. Few DOS utilities can even go into longer paths. But the WORST thing is, you can have data in these deep paths, and MOST backup software can't see it. These QA guys test the backup app, and don't pay attention to the deeper paths, because EXPLORER can't see them, they assume, wrongly, that that is the limit of the OS, when it's not true, it's the limit of the GUI-based file-system browser. So if the backup app's programmer makes a mistake, uses the wrong api, or specs the app out for no longer than 255 character paths, and if nobody with half a brain QA's it, you can cause serious data-loss for your customer.
How do I know this? I've worked for tech support for several backup software companies. And I've had to lobby and fight with developers, project managers and QA people over and over to get them to recognize this problem. Fortunately, the product I work on now DOES cover your ass on WIndows. Some folks think it's *silly* to have to support paths that the file-system browser doesn't support - but the real issue is, if a customer has data there, and if we're a backup program, we need to protect ALL of the customer's data.
If you admin any Windows systems, I STRONGLY suggest you test this out ASAP.
Anyone remember the URL to that cool site that had the animations of computer simulations of various relations to black holes? orbit around a black hole, falling into the event horizon, watching a star or planet falling into the event horizon, etc.
Mr. Coward, obviously you're befuddled by too much Solitaire - how can you say that W2K DC performs better than Sun, when performance is a hardware issue, and when you compare SPARC to x86, it's an apples and oranges game?
What performs better? ten intel boxes to one sparc box? $50000 worth of intel equipment for $50000 worth of Sun equipment (which presumably includes OS and service, which the intel box would not, because the OS is licensed free from MS - to MS).
How does it compare price/performance when you include what a REAL customer pays for Win2K Data Center - which is exhorbitant considering it's almost identical to Win2k professional, code-wise, with a few registry bits flipped?
Reliability is also a relative term, because in the Windows world, you have less uptime, but you CALL that reliability because the downtime is planned for, not unexpected downtime. But can you hot-swap CPU's and motherboards in your Intel boxes? How many more Win2k boxes are required simply to maintain the CaptiveDirectory services?
How many MAN-HOURS were invested in this project, start to finish? (including the prior attempts at migration that FAILED). Do you REALLY expect a customer to undertake such a foolish venture, and eat those costs? How do you explain the increase in customer complaints? Is this Microsoft's grand vision of the future? The promise of "New Technology"? Will HotMail be better off at the end of this migration, or will your marketing people finally get to brag, and forget about the big black-eye they got when they picked a fight with big-bad Unix. That makes it worth it, eh? But it's all about serving your customers, isn't it?
Personally, I've never been happy with ANY of the casting choices for Batman. Keaton was okay, but let's face it, physically, not there. Classic Batman was always drawn very large and menacing. I can't even imagine who *would* be a good Batman. none of the "big" guys can be dark and booding enough (Shwartz- in "End of Days" did not, in my opinion, sufficiently pull-off dark and brooding - too much "Jolly Austrian" in him, see ya at Oktoberfest, Arnold).
Anyone else have any ideas? As long as we're fantasizing.
I imagine that since Pi was as much a psycho-spiritual thriller, and visually stunning in b/w, wonderful composition, that this Batman movie will be very visual, and psychological. I can dream.
All I know is, I was a Compuserve subscriber until recently, and back at the time AOL bought CIS, Compuserve was JUST starting to get good, and switch over to a more internet-centric service, then AOL took over, and it went to hell. I stayed on because I got it free thru work. But connect speeds went down, local numbers evaporated, of course the content also disappeared because people left CIS in droves, so nobody showed in the chatrooms anymore, nobody posted files anymore. Then, for some reason, the time it took to dial into a server multiplied tenfold, so if you wanted to get on the internet, it was an affair that took upwards of 5 minutes or longer if you had to do any retries. Spontaneous disconnects, etc. I thought it was the phone lines, I thought it was my modem.
Then work cancelled my CIS account - and I signed up for Earthlink. I now connect first-time, every time, in about 10-20 seconds, and I don't get randomly disconnected, (which, on CIS took about 10 minutes, first the connection would slow way down, sometimes pick up again, then slow down, then stop, with occasional bursts, then nothing until the dreaded timeout, and disconnect).
Of course, I shun cable, and DSL is not yet available where I live, so I'm still 56k-ing my way, but Earthlink made it sooooo much more tolerable.
Well, maybe you don't know this but the original purpose of "the great depression" was to get property out of the hands of land-owners, and into the hands of the banks. Worked very well. I think a depression will have the opposite effect you're hoping for.
I too was disappointed when I first saw BattleBots, because it was really just fancy, expensive remote-control toys. Hell, the guys here at work do the same thing with their RC trucks in the parking lot at lunch.
The fact is, though, that a fully-autonomous robot deathmatch would not be entertaining to the masses. I dont think the technology is there yet for robots to take in the intelligence, and sensor data, that would lead to an exiting match, with novel tactics, or reasonable reaction times. Sometimes, these machine-controlled robots have crashes, or their program goes into the weeds, or a sensor fails, and the thing will just sit there, or wander off aimlessly, or spaz-out. Perhaps in a few years, computer-controlled combatants will outpace human-controlled (it will probably be cool to see human controlled vs. machine controlled competition for a while, but eventually, the technology will get to the point where a human wont stand a chance, as in chess).
Until then, we have the initial thrill of battle bots, and I'm sure if the ratings slip, they'll start having the builders do things to the designs of their bots like, pyrotechnics, fluids that can leak, ablative armor. They can just escalate that stuff one gimmick at a time to keep the audience interested. But one day, there will be a contestant that is not radio controlled. That will be the day that most of us here on/. will find this show truly entertaining. Then, it won't just be the physical engineering that we'll find interesting, it will be the programming, and the processing hardware and sensor equipment, and strategies employed to defeat the programming, and sensor equipment of the opponent.
On the Skywalker Ranch where the Storm Trooper Posse says:
Well, a user ought to do that himself. that way he's well aware that those files he stored in/tmp are gonna disappear on their own sooner or later, and that/tmp is not a good place to store things long-term.
On my NT box, I run a nightly script that DELTREE's \TEMP, and recreates it. DELTREE seems to give me more leeway against files that are left opened by (errant) processes.
On the Skywalker Ranch where the Storm Trooper Posse says:
I'm not saying I want free CDs. I buy CDs. I pay for CDs. If I could find any tune free, online, in MP3 format, I would still (and do still) buy CDs. They offer a value that is above and beyond having a simple compressed digital copy of inferior quality. It's like saying that having public drinking fountains threatens the revenue of the bottled water industry.
On the Skywalker Ranch where the Storm Trooper Posse says:
Slashdot Mirror
You must admit, though, that there USED TO BE an incredible hype-machine surrounding this project, and now there is not.
I live in CA, and I was planning on buzzing on down to Palmdale for the test, I believe it was supposed to be last summer? or was it the summer before? Anyway, when is the test going to be, do y'all have *any* idea?
Not if I can get a bootleg MPEG and post it on Slashdot!
ST3 was Search for Spock.
More like: Ep2: The Wrath of Han
(ST2: Wrath of Khan)
Hopefully, in the future, after CPU technology has stagnated for a century or two, perhaps software technology will have to fill in the gaps.
We'll all be back to programming everything directly in assembler, writing to bare metal, and economizing every last cycle of bandwidth and bit of cache. Programming will be painful, and software will be elegant. GUIs will be a federal offense.
Ultimately, maybe they can use a scanning-tunnelling microscope to physically etch-out a mask of a thin layer of some metal, like gold or something, since you can move one atom at a time with one of those things, you could theoretically just program it straight off of your CAD design layout of the chip itself, and drive the microscope like a CNC.
wow! sengan? BOredAtWork? All we need is Meeept! and we've got a frickin /. old-timer's reunion going here.
Hell, with a 4-digit user #, even I'm an old-timer these days!
Intel will keep announcing newer and faster chips. However, when you try to buy one, they'll be "unavailable". But the announcements will keep up with Moore's law.
This is using a new high-tech process of press-release generation code-named "vapor". Motorola is said to be licensing this new technology from Intel to assist in ramping clock speeds for their PowerPC chips.
I've been an angry bastard ever since that evening in 1993 when I realized it was 9:30pm, and I had been tweaking this poor bastard's config.sys file over the phone with him since 2pm, trying to help him get his system up and running. I remembered the *last* time I came home that late for similar reasons, and my wife was pissed because she had tried to suprise me with the kids at grandma's, and a candlelight dinner at home.
Since config.sys has been replaced with the registry, things haven't gotten much better (except since my stock options came through, my wife now appreciates the time I put in to make us so rich). Messing with a registry or config.sys can turn *anyone* into an angry bastard.
I believe the rumor that the ONLY profane language Mother Theresa ever uttered in her entire sainted life was the first and last day she tried to run a Windows system.
best yet is that when you save an html file with a space in the name (which Front Page lets any clueless moron do), most web browsers will barf on the space.
disk space is cheap.
The other question I have regarding UFS vs. HFS+ on OS X, is, if you upgrade a currently formatted HFS+ partition, can you change it to UFS, or are you stuck with HFS+ (unless you reformat)?
And if you DO stay with HFS+, can it support traditional Unix file permissions, or are you screwed, and if you DON'T have Unix file permissions, how do you secure your fs from intruders?
There are times in Mac OS where I hit that 32 character limitation, it's kind of a pain in the ass, on rare occasions where a more descriptive filename is desired.
/X to derive the 8.3 synonym of the name, and use that. But the hilarious thing is, using the 8.3 version of the filename, you can use DOS commands to generate paths MUCH deeper than 255 characters in length. I believe the real limit of the file system is 65,535 characters, but the funny thing is, when you exceed the 255 character length, your data is there, but Explorer can't go into that directory. Few DOS utilities can even go into longer paths. But the WORST thing is, you can have data in these deep paths, and MOST backup software can't see it. These QA guys test the backup app, and don't pay attention to the deeper paths, because EXPLORER can't see them, they assume, wrongly, that that is the limit of the OS, when it's not true, it's the limit of the GUI-based file-system browser. So if the backup app's programmer makes a mistake, uses the wrong api, or specs the app out for no longer than 255 character paths, and if nobody with half a brain QA's it, you can cause serious data-loss for your customer.
However, the implementation of 255, on Windows, is, as you say, screwed-up.
First of all, that is correct, the entire path limitation is 255, actually a few characters less, because that includes separators (\) and drive letter, and colon. DOS command lines are limited to a max lenght of 255 anyway, so specifying longer paths gets to be a pain in the keister, you have to DIR
How do I know this? I've worked for tech support for several backup software companies. And I've had to lobby and fight with developers, project managers and QA people over and over to get them to recognize this problem. Fortunately, the product I work on now DOES cover your ass on WIndows. Some folks think it's *silly* to have to support paths that the file-system browser doesn't support - but the real issue is, if a customer has data there, and if we're a backup program, we need to protect ALL of the customer's data.
If you admin any Windows systems, I STRONGLY suggest you test this out ASAP.
Anyone remember the URL to that cool site that had the animations of computer simulations of various relations to black holes? orbit around a black hole, falling into the event horizon, watching a star or planet falling into the event horizon, etc.
Mr. Coward, obviously you're befuddled by too much Solitaire - how can you say that W2K DC performs better than Sun, when performance is a hardware issue, and when you compare SPARC to x86, it's an apples and oranges game?
What performs better? ten intel boxes to one sparc box? $50000 worth of intel equipment for $50000 worth of Sun equipment (which presumably includes OS and service, which the intel box would not, because the OS is licensed free from MS - to MS).
How does it compare price/performance when you include what a REAL customer pays for Win2K Data Center - which is exhorbitant considering it's almost identical to Win2k professional, code-wise, with a few registry bits flipped?
Reliability is also a relative term, because in the Windows world, you have less uptime, but you CALL that reliability because the downtime is planned for, not unexpected downtime. But can you hot-swap CPU's and motherboards in your Intel boxes? How many more Win2k boxes are required simply to maintain the CaptiveDirectory services?
How many MAN-HOURS were invested in this project, start to finish? (including the prior attempts at migration that FAILED). Do you REALLY expect a customer to undertake such a foolish venture, and eat those costs? How do you explain the increase in customer complaints? Is this Microsoft's grand vision of the future? The promise of "New Technology"? Will HotMail be better off at the end of this migration, or will your marketing people finally get to brag, and forget about the big black-eye they got when they picked a fight with big-bad Unix. That makes it worth it, eh? But it's all about serving your customers, isn't it?
Matt,
Well, you just tell them to fuck off.
And keep writing the best damn game that ever was.
-moi
Lots of things have died after general release, full market penetration, and wide-scale adoption. It's the nature of the computer industry.
Basically, as Microsoft has taught me, for any product or OS platform to survive long-term, it has to suck.
Personally, I've never been happy with ANY of the casting choices for Batman. Keaton was okay, but let's face it, physically, not there. Classic Batman was always drawn very large and menacing. I can't even imagine who *would* be a good Batman. none of the "big" guys can be dark and booding enough (Shwartz- in "End of Days" did not, in my opinion, sufficiently pull-off dark and brooding - too much "Jolly Austrian" in him, see ya at Oktoberfest, Arnold).
Anyone else have any ideas? As long as we're fantasizing.
I imagine that since Pi was as much a psycho-spiritual thriller, and visually stunning in b/w, wonderful composition, that this Batman movie will be very visual, and psychological. I can dream.
No way, Danny Elfman all the way!
All I know is, I was a Compuserve subscriber until recently, and back at the time AOL bought CIS, Compuserve was JUST starting to get good, and switch over to a more internet-centric service, then AOL took over, and it went to hell. I stayed on because I got it free thru work. But connect speeds went down, local numbers evaporated, of course the content also disappeared because people left CIS in droves, so nobody showed in the chatrooms anymore, nobody posted files anymore. Then, for some reason, the time it took to dial into a server multiplied tenfold, so if you wanted to get on the internet, it was an affair that took upwards of 5 minutes or longer if you had to do any retries. Spontaneous disconnects, etc. I thought it was the phone lines, I thought it was my modem.
Then work cancelled my CIS account - and I signed up for Earthlink. I now connect first-time, every time, in about 10-20 seconds, and I don't get randomly disconnected, (which, on CIS took about 10 minutes, first the connection would slow way down, sometimes pick up again, then slow down, then stop, with occasional bursts, then nothing until the dreaded timeout, and disconnect).
Of course, I shun cable, and DSL is not yet available where I live, so I'm still 56k-ing my way, but Earthlink made it sooooo much more tolerable.
Well, maybe you don't know this but the original purpose of "the great depression" was to get property out of the hands of land-owners, and into the hands of the banks. Worked very well. I think a depression will have the opposite effect you're hoping for.
there will be many greased palms in the EC.
The train is a-comin', and nuthin's gonna stop it. Dig your bomb shelters now.
I too was disappointed when I first saw BattleBots, because it was really just fancy, expensive remote-control toys. Hell, the guys here at work do the same thing with their RC trucks in the parking lot at lunch.
/. will find this show truly entertaining. Then, it won't just be the physical engineering that we'll find interesting, it will be the programming, and the processing hardware and sensor equipment, and strategies employed to defeat the programming, and sensor equipment of the opponent.
The fact is, though, that a fully-autonomous robot deathmatch would not be entertaining to the masses. I dont think the technology is there yet for robots to take in the intelligence, and sensor data, that would lead to an exiting match, with novel tactics, or reasonable reaction times. Sometimes, these machine-controlled robots have crashes, or their program goes into the weeds, or a sensor fails, and the thing will just sit there, or wander off aimlessly, or spaz-out. Perhaps in a few years, computer-controlled combatants will outpace human-controlled (it will probably be cool to see human controlled vs. machine controlled competition for a while, but eventually, the technology will get to the point where a human wont stand a chance, as in chess).
Until then, we have the initial thrill of battle bots, and I'm sure if the ratings slip, they'll start having the builders do things to the designs of their bots like, pyrotechnics, fluids that can leak, ablative armor. They can just escalate that stuff one gimmick at a time to keep the audience interested. But one day, there will be a contestant that is not radio controlled. That will be the day that most of us here on
On the Skywalker Ranch where the Storm Trooper Posse says:
So, basically, people who don't have an innate sense of right and wrong, are afraid to trust everyone else to behave as if they did.
On the Skywalker Ranch where the Storm Trooper Posse says:
Well, a user ought to do that himself. that way he's well aware that those files he stored in /tmp are gonna disappear on their own sooner or later, and that /tmp is not a good place to store things long-term.
On my NT box, I run a nightly script that DELTREE's \TEMP, and recreates it. DELTREE seems to give me more leeway against files that are left opened by (errant) processes.
On the Skywalker Ranch where the Storm Trooper Posse says:
so what's wrong with just wanting free music?
I'm not saying I want free CDs. I buy CDs. I pay for CDs. If I could find any tune free, online, in MP3 format, I would still (and do still) buy CDs. They offer a value that is above and beyond having a simple compressed digital copy of inferior quality. It's like saying that having public drinking fountains threatens the revenue of the bottled water industry.
On the Skywalker Ranch where the Storm Trooper Posse says: