Basically, the designers erroneously believed that the characters for "big" (dai) and "sword" (katana), when slapped together, are pronounced "Daikatana." That's lunacy: this combination would be pronounced "Ogatana," (with an elongated "o.")
I looked the kanji up. The reading edict gives is "taitou", meaning just a longsword. The name "Daikatana" comes from an RPG session the id guys had one time: Romero's character had a sword called "Daikatana" equipped. It is pretty silly and asinine, but it stuck.
... And by "easiest to use" do you mean "most closely resembling Microsoft Windows, and/or the Macintosh"? It seems that is the sole criterion nowadays for judging ease of use on Linux.
WindowMaker is easy enough, and I have quick access to all my favorite applications. By eschewing the feature-encrusted "desktop environments" I free up a heck of a lot of RAM and CPU cycles I can use for extra Mozilla windows, editor sessions, or for playing FlightGear.:)
The problem is, Direct3D has the game market about sewn up. Except for those holdouts over at id, the PC game industry has pretty much standardized on Direct3d version X.Y (whatever it is this week). We may have bought OpenGL some time but in a few years I see Fahrenheit repeating itself where OpenGL is subsumed entirely as a "legacy" layer on top of Direct3D, especially as the game market pulls more clout in the overall 3D scene.
I don't know about Australia but here in the US "Information Technology" means something a little different. It means you can push the buttons on a computer but not necessarily know how it works. That's the connotation, anyway. Most of the non-CS IT programs I've heard of have something to do with Management Information Systems (MIS), or as I like to call it, "majoring in Word and Excel".
Then again PC hobbyists tend to be cut from different cloth than Mac enthusiasts, who believe that the only good ideas in computing came from Steve Jobs...
The resources of the OSS community are limited, and too few to waste. Gnome and KDE would set a terrific example if they would get together, rationally and unemotionally select the most desirable features from each, and include them in the one frontrunning Linux desktop. It should be aimed squarely at Windows and at demonstrating that Linux is in fact ready for the desktop.
There is a problem with this. Bill Gates has the power to say "THIS is the way we will make the Windows XP interface. If you do it any other way, you are FIRED." No such power structure exists in the free software world. If you try to force one desktop on people someone is going to spin off and make their own desktop. It is not really a question of KDE vs. GNOME but KDE vs. GNOME vs. UDE vs. GNUstep vs. whatever else is out there. KDE and GNOME are the two big players right now but there are many desktops for Linux. That is not about to change. If you consider that a "weakness" of open source, keep using Windows.
In H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, this is precisely what happened. Mankind's evolutionary tree split into the friendly, social, but profoundly stupid Eloi and the brutish, mechanically inclined Morlocks. Oh, and the Morlocks ate Eloi for breakfast.
All quicktimes made within the last few years use the proprietary Sorenson codec. It's patented. The only software that can legally play it comes from Apple.
I think their software was just less incompatible than their competitors'. Remember "DOS isn't done till Lotus won't run"? Remember DR DOS and Windows 3.1? Microsoft's stranglehold on the PC platform is instrumental to its success.
I think this is true. The problem isn't with Microsoft as an entity but rather with the Microsoft model of software production: ship it first, fix bugs later.
Joel: Because it's almost never true. It's not like code rusts if it's not used. The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they've been fixed. There's nothing wrong with it.
SMS: Well, why do programmers constantly go charging into management's offices claiming the existing code base is junk and has to be replaced?
Joel: My theory is that this happens because it's harder to read code than to write it. A programmer will whine about a function that he thinks is messy. It's supposed to be a simple function to display a window or something, but for some reason it takes up two pages and has all these ugly little hairs and stuff on it and nobody knows why. OK. I'll tell you why. Those are bug fixes. One of them fixes that bug that Jill had when she tried to install the thing on a computer that didn't have Internet Explorer. Another one fixes a bug that occurs in low memory conditions. Another one fixes some bug that occurred when the file is on a floppy disk and the user yanks out the diskette in the middle. That LoadLibrary call is sure ugly but it makes the code work on old versions of Windows 95. When you throw that function away and start from scratch, you are throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected bug fixes. Years of programming work.
Code may not rust when it isn't used but it sure grows barnacles. And sometimes you need to clean 'em off. Not just for performance but also for maintainability. For a function like this I'd consider at least copying and pasting all the nasty bits into separate functions or something, just to make it easier to maintain. Especially if checks like this occur over and over again elsewhere in the code.
And... there are computers that don't have Internet Explorer?
SMS: Hmmm. Let's take a look at your theory and compare it to some real world software meltdowns. For instance, what happened at Netscape?
Joel: Way back in April 2000, I wrote on my web site that Netscape made the "single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make" by deciding to rewrite their code from scratch. Lou Montulli, one of the 5 programming superstars who did the original version of Navigator, E-mailed me to say, "I agree completely, it's one of the major reasons I resigned from Netscape." This one decision cost Netscape four years and they're not really done yet. That's three years they spent with their prize aircraft carrier in 200,000 pieces in dry-dock. They couldn't add new features, couldn't respond to the competitive threads from IE, and had to sit on their hands while Microsoft completely ate their lunch.
Of course he fails to realize that while Netscape failed as a company, Mozilla is a great open source success. My observations seem to indicate that it's gaining momentum and attracting users, with a feature set that rivals and in some cases surpasses Internet Explorer. Better standards compatibility to boot, not that it matters.
Netscape's business model had collapsed long before Mozilla was rewritten. Financially speaking, it's not that big of a deal now that Netscape's abandoned husk has been absorbed into the AOL behemoth. It was more of an "OK, we're flat on our backs anyway, why the hell not?" type of thing. Netscape 4.x was buggy and ran like a three-legged dog. Something had to be done.
I think software projects fail because people spend a lot of time grafting features onto a code base that can't really support it, and then opt for re-engineering only when it's too late and they can't be saved. Microsoft can afford to do this quite simply because they own the substrate upon which most commercial software depends, so they will come out in the black anyway. Without that kind of monopoly, you'd better get it right early on. With that in mind, about ICQ being in perpetual beta... maybe they were simply being honest?:)
I have rewritten portions of code on projects I've worked on when I felt that the special-casing, spaghetti code, etc. was getting out of control. I kinda had to strike out on my own, make like Sinatra and do it my way. Once I had it put together I submitted it as kind of a patch to my boss, who tested it and incorporated it into the next release. The result was far fewer calls along the line of "Jeff, the ActiveX control is missing" or "The form produces an error message" or whatever.
A programmer with good design skills can do this quickly, keeping the good parts of the code and taking out the messy ones (or at least moving them into a more manageable position). He is right on one thing, a 100% rewrite is seldom if ever necessary. Even messy code has good bits that can be reused, or refactored into a library or something.
The way I see it, other companies can't compete with Microsoft by playing Microsoft's game, since Microsoft sets the rules and owns the playing field.
If the video codec really is all it's cracked up to be, then it looks like WE HAEV A WINNAR. I doubt that MPEG-4 can hold up for very long against something which achieves similar results in a tiny fraction of the memory and CPU power without serious push from a monopoly or oligopoly.
AFAIK the codec is patented, so even if someone RE's it, it's illegal to use without a license. The reason why there are no good open source video players is because there's big money in keeping all the codecs closed.
The orange Cingular splat I keep seeing reminds me of this one Pink Panther cartoon which featured an annoying asterisk that kept turning green. When the panther tried to teach the asterisk a lesson, he was greeted by its brother, a big, MEAN green asterisk who kicked the shit out of him!
Re:Why can't anyone see the implications of this?
on
This is IT?
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· Score: 2
Neither of them can compare to "Wild Wacky Action Bike", the bike that's hard to ride!
At the end of the day, these things are all fiction. I can't really see people getting more excited about a CGI model than a furry puppet. It's also _much_ harder to use the CGI model. An interview with the virtual star would require weeks of computer work and post processing just to fit the CGI model into the normal studio shot of the interview. Not exactly spontaneous and realistic.
Unless they're appearing on Space Ghost Coast to Coast. At which point they simply appear on that TV screen...:)
in other words no office suite will ever be good enough because it is not word.
That's it, in a nutshell. The world has standardized on Microsoft Word for the exchange of enriched textual information. In a business environment, "I can't read this" is often invalid. You MUST be able to read and write.doc files in order to communicate.
Until business realizes the value in open standard formats like PDF or hell, even ASCII text, Microsoft Word will be king on the desktop.
Re: Sick of political bickering in software...
on
Freedom or Power Redux
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· Score: 3, Insightful
RMS acts like a rabid maniac sometimes but when you stop to think about it his point makes a lot more sense from a freedom standpoint.
Many people claim that true freedom is the right to impose whatever restrictions you want on something that belongs to you, a part of property law, and since software is intellectual property this naturally applies to software too. Unfortunately this does not hold water.
If I own a piece of land then I am well within my rights to restrict your access to it. If I sell you a piece of land my right to restrict your use of it goes away. Why is this not so with software? Furthermore, if I buy a Honda, why should I expect the Honda corporation to restrict my rights to open the hood of the car, fix the engine if it breaks, etc.?
What RMS is doing is challenging our notion of "intellectual property". Intellectual property rights are not natural rights. Congress was given the power to grant limited monopolies to creators and inventors, to encourage them to develop the arts and sciences in this country. What is happening, particularly in the proprietary software field, is exactly the opposite. Companies are using these rights to stifle innovation and competition in the field, to ensure that customers must purchase whatever software they sell no matter how bloated/buggy/outdated it may be (*cough*Windows*cough*). This has the potential effect of creating a sort of "software illuminati". Much as the guilds of the past kept information about their trade secret, both to remain in business and as a form of protection from a Church that banned the acquisition of certain types of scientific knowledge, the proprietary software companies of today keep their source code, which is nothing but information about their craft, secret. The Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution both came about during periods of relative intellectual freedom, when anyone could acquire the scientific knowledge necessary to invent and develop new technologies, art, etc.
Free software promises to do the same thing in the software world. RMS realizes this, and so does Bill Gates which is why he's so afraid of it.
RMS has not called for a law banning any form of proprietary software (that I can tell), and we all know that he has very strong opinions on what kinds of policy should be implemented in his version of a free society. I can't speak for him but it looks like he's taking the correct approach in a free society, putting his money where his mouth is. He believes that free software is so damn good from a freedom standpoint that it will eventually win out over proprietary software in the end, and that makes the GNU project a sort of social experiment to determine if this is the case. So far the outcome seems hopeful despite the landscape being littered with the decaying husks of open source dot-coms: Linux, Mozilla, Apache, etc. usage is still growing.
This is why I use free software: because proprietary software is a car with the hood welded shut.
If you think the United States Republican Party represents (small-r) republicanism, you haven't been paying attention to the news, or American politics in general. And don't get me started on how the definitions of "liberal" and "conservative" were swapped sometime in the early part of the twentieth century.
It reminds me of that time on "The Jetsons" where Jane punched up a Rocket Ranger dream or somesuch for Elroy. Elroy had a special bed with programmable dreams in it.:)
The patent only applies to triple alpha channels, i.e., where the alpha channel is itself an RGB value, and the source and destination images are blended channel by channel according to the RGB values in the triple alpha channel.
It seems like an obvious extension of alpha blending (which was around for a while and is referenced in the patent) but that didn't stop Apple. HURR! WE R SMRT!
Slashdot Mirror
Ohhh, if only you knew the things I have seen... with your eyes.
(Sorry, it just had to be said.)
I looked the kanji up. The reading edict gives is "taitou", meaning just a longsword. The name "Daikatana" comes from an RPG session the id guys had one time: Romero's character had a sword called "Daikatana" equipped. It is pretty silly and asinine, but it stuck.
Someone please mod the parent up "Funny". That has got to be the most poignantly humorous interpretation of the Pac-Man quote I've yet heard.
... And by "easiest to use" do you mean "most closely resembling Microsoft Windows, and/or the Macintosh"? It seems that is the sole criterion nowadays for judging ease of use on Linux.
:)
WindowMaker is easy enough, and I have quick access to all my favorite applications. By eschewing the feature-encrusted "desktop environments" I free up a heck of a lot of RAM and CPU cycles I can use for extra Mozilla windows, editor sessions, or for playing FlightGear.
The problem is, Direct3D has the game market about sewn up. Except for those holdouts over at id, the PC game industry has pretty much standardized on Direct3d version X.Y (whatever it is this week). We may have bought OpenGL some time but in a few years I see Fahrenheit repeating itself where OpenGL is subsumed entirely as a "legacy" layer on top of Direct3D, especially as the game market pulls more clout in the overall 3D scene.
I don't know about Australia but here in the US "Information Technology" means something a little different. It means you can push the buttons on a computer but not necessarily know how it works. That's the connotation, anyway. Most of the non-CS IT programs I've heard of have something to do with Management Information Systems (MIS), or as I like to call it, "majoring in Word and Excel".
Then again PC hobbyists tend to be cut from different cloth than Mac enthusiasts, who believe that the only good ideas in computing came from Steve Jobs...
There is a problem with this. Bill Gates has the power to say "THIS is the way we will make the Windows XP interface. If you do it any other way, you are FIRED." No such power structure exists in the free software world. If you try to force one desktop on people someone is going to spin off and make their own desktop. It is not really a question of KDE vs. GNOME but KDE vs. GNOME vs. UDE vs. GNUstep vs. whatever else is out there. KDE and GNOME are the two big players right now but there are many desktops for Linux. That is not about to change. If you consider that a "weakness" of open source, keep using Windows.
In H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, this is precisely what happened. Mankind's evolutionary tree split into the friendly, social, but profoundly stupid Eloi and the brutish, mechanically inclined Morlocks. Oh, and the Morlocks ate Eloi for breakfast.
All quicktimes made within the last few years use the proprietary Sorenson codec. It's patented. The only software that can legally play it comes from Apple.
I think their software was just less incompatible than their competitors'. Remember "DOS isn't done till Lotus won't run"? Remember DR DOS and Windows 3.1? Microsoft's stranglehold on the PC platform is instrumental to its success.
Code may not rust when it isn't used but it sure grows barnacles. And sometimes you need to clean 'em off. Not just for performance but also for maintainability. For a function like this I'd consider at least copying and pasting all the nasty bits into separate functions or something, just to make it easier to maintain. Especially if checks like this occur over and over again elsewhere in the code.
And... there are computers that don't have Internet Explorer?
Of course he fails to realize that while Netscape failed as a company, Mozilla is a great open source success. My observations seem to indicate that it's gaining momentum and attracting users, with a feature set that rivals and in some cases surpasses Internet Explorer. Better standards compatibility to boot, not that it matters.
Netscape's business model had collapsed long before Mozilla was rewritten. Financially speaking, it's not that big of a deal now that Netscape's abandoned husk has been absorbed into the AOL behemoth. It was more of an "OK, we're flat on our backs anyway, why the hell not?" type of thing. Netscape 4.x was buggy and ran like a three-legged dog. Something had to be done.
I think software projects fail because people spend a lot of time grafting features onto a code base that can't really support it, and then opt for re-engineering only when it's too late and they can't be saved. Microsoft can afford to do this quite simply because they own the substrate upon which most commercial software depends, so they will come out in the black anyway. Without that kind of monopoly, you'd better get it right early on. With that in mind, about ICQ being in perpetual beta... maybe they were simply being honest?
I have rewritten portions of code on projects I've worked on when I felt that the special-casing, spaghetti code, etc. was getting out of control. I kinda had to strike out on my own, make like Sinatra and do it my way. Once I had it put together I submitted it as kind of a patch to my boss, who tested it and incorporated it into the next release. The result was far fewer calls along the line of "Jeff, the ActiveX control is missing" or "The form produces an error message" or whatever.
A programmer with good design skills can do this quickly, keeping the good parts of the code and taking out the messy ones (or at least moving them into a more manageable position). He is right on one thing, a 100% rewrite is seldom if ever necessary. Even messy code has good bits that can be reused, or refactored into a library or something.
The way I see it, other companies can't compete with Microsoft by playing Microsoft's game, since Microsoft sets the rules and owns the playing field.
If the video codec really is all it's cracked up to be, then it looks like WE HAEV A WINNAR. I doubt that MPEG-4 can hold up for very long against something which achieves similar results in a tiny fraction of the memory and CPU power without serious push from a monopoly or oligopoly.
AFAIK the codec is patented, so even if someone RE's it, it's illegal to use without a license. The reason why there are no good open source video players is because there's big money in keeping all the codecs closed.
The orange Cingular splat I keep seeing reminds me of this one Pink Panther cartoon which featured an annoying asterisk that kept turning green. When the panther tried to teach the asterisk a lesson, he was greeted by its brother, a big, MEAN green asterisk who kicked the shit out of him!
Neither of them can compare to "Wild Wacky Action Bike", the bike that's hard to ride!
That's a troll. It looks like Waita Uziga's deadly joy could become the new goatse.cx.
Unless they're appearing on Space Ghost Coast to Coast. At which point they simply appear on that TV screen...
That's it, in a nutshell. The world has standardized on Microsoft Word for the exchange of enriched textual information. In a business environment, "I can't read this" is often invalid. You MUST be able to read and write
Until business realizes the value in open standard formats like PDF or hell, even ASCII text, Microsoft Word will be king on the desktop.
RMS acts like a rabid maniac sometimes but when you stop to think about it his point makes a lot more sense from a freedom standpoint.
Many people claim that true freedom is the right to impose whatever restrictions you want on something that belongs to you, a part of property law, and since software is intellectual property this naturally applies to software too. Unfortunately this does not hold water.
If I own a piece of land then I am well within my rights to restrict your access to it. If I sell you a piece of land my right to restrict your use of it goes away. Why is this not so with software? Furthermore, if I buy a Honda, why should I expect the Honda corporation to restrict my rights to open the hood of the car, fix the engine if it breaks, etc.?
What RMS is doing is challenging our notion of "intellectual property". Intellectual property rights are not natural rights. Congress was given the power to grant limited monopolies to creators and inventors, to encourage them to develop the arts and sciences in this country. What is happening, particularly in the proprietary software field, is exactly the opposite. Companies are using these rights to stifle innovation and competition in the field, to ensure that customers must purchase whatever software they sell no matter how bloated/buggy/outdated it may be (*cough*Windows*cough*). This has the potential effect of creating a sort of "software illuminati". Much as the guilds of the past kept information about their trade secret, both to remain in business and as a form of protection from a Church that banned the acquisition of certain types of scientific knowledge, the proprietary software companies of today keep their source code, which is nothing but information about their craft, secret. The Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution both came about during periods of relative intellectual freedom, when anyone could acquire the scientific knowledge necessary to invent and develop new technologies, art, etc.
Free software promises to do the same thing in the software world. RMS realizes this, and so does Bill Gates which is why he's so afraid of it.
RMS has not called for a law banning any form of proprietary software (that I can tell), and we all know that he has very strong opinions on what kinds of policy should be implemented in his version of a free society. I can't speak for him but it looks like he's taking the correct approach in a free society, putting his money where his mouth is. He believes that free software is so damn good from a freedom standpoint that it will eventually win out over proprietary software in the end, and that makes the GNU project a sort of social experiment to determine if this is the case. So far the outcome seems hopeful despite the landscape being littered with the decaying husks of open source dot-coms: Linux, Mozilla, Apache, etc. usage is still growing.
This is why I use free software: because proprietary software is a car with the hood welded shut.
If you think the United States Republican Party represents (small-r) republicanism, you haven't been paying attention to the news, or American politics in general. And don't get me started on how the definitions of "liberal" and "conservative" were swapped sometime in the early part of the twentieth century.
It reminds me of that time on "The Jetsons" where Jane punched up a Rocket Ranger dream or somesuch for Elroy. Elroy had a special bed with programmable dreams in it. :)
The future is here, folks.
hehe, yeah, their digital Bruce Lee is really the solid-color sprite from the Speccy Bruce Lee game...
I think it's Finnish, actually. (Linus's metasyntactic variables?) :)
The patent only applies to triple alpha channels, i.e., where the alpha channel is itself an RGB value, and the source and destination images are blended channel by channel according to the RGB values in the triple alpha channel.
It seems like an obvious extension of alpha blending (which was around for a while and is referenced in the patent) but that didn't stop Apple. HURR! WE R SMRT!