This is like checking in code for someone else without reading it. Version-control software won't do a damn thing if the people using it are dumbasses. Same thing with Congress.
And there's just about no process or procedure you can require that will magically make dumbasses not do dumb things. Smart teams review code, no matter what software they use. If members of Congress are sloppy and other members don't check on them, we'll get more responsiveness voting for less sloppy candidates than in trying to make them jump through more procedural hoops.
Teh Internets Have Spoken
on
Define - /etc?
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· Score: 2, Funny
Google "extended tool chest" returns "about 13 results." If that's the meaning, it's a very well-kept secret meaning.
Even with comparable hardware, consoles have some pretty important performance advantages over PCs. PCs are general-purpose systems, designed to run a whole range of applications, usually simultaneously. Game consoles run one kind of program -- games! -- and only need run one at a time.
So? Consoles are tuned for game performance in a way that PCs aren't: you can buy a great graphics card for your PC, but the motherboard wasn't designed with the sole purpose of being a raging triangle-slinging red-hot graphics mama. Your game is going to have far better cache performance on a console than it will on your desktop machine, where it has to contend with the OS and whatever else you're running for those cache lines.
And most importantly, the console has a reliable, very regular refresh rate. You know *exactly* how many cycles you'll get for each frame and you can wring every last bit of computation from them. On a PC, you never know precisely how much computation you'll get in -- there are too many unknowns, too many places where you need to contend for resources, or where a random delay might cost you a millisecond or two. This means less reliable frame rate, and a whole lot of overhead in terms of programmer effort in order to carefully monitor your run rate and compensate accordingly.
It's an apples-and-oranges comparision to look at specs on game consoles and desktop PCs. If you look under the hood of any gaming box, it's always slightly scandalous what "slow" hardware they're getting away with. But the consoles are always designed so that good programmers can exploit that hardware to the absolute max, something which is much tougher on a PC, which has to waste some of its raw power on general-purpose flexibility.
It's like racial balances in neighborhoods. Integrated neighborhoods can roll along for years just fine, but if the balance tips too far one way or the other, people in the minority (in the neighborhood, that is) feel uncomfortable and move out, which tips the balance even further.
It's the same deal with the balance in computers -- the field has been so male-dominated for so long that it's automatically an unpleasant choice for many women because they're so outnumbered.
The kind of development tools you use are almoost entirely platform-independent. I've developed under Windows using a CVS repository (with command-line client) for version-control, with command-line makefiles, and using vi and emacs for editing. It's perfectly possible to use the MS IDE and compiler, while telling Source Unsafe and the "project" part of the IDE to go fuck off. Especially with some of the very nice third-party editing environments out there (or a well-customized emacs), the experience developing under Windows can approximate that of developing under Unix, if not perfectly, than at least reasonably well.
MFC? A nightmare on some levels, sure. But if you use the brain-dead Visual Studio wizards to create your MFC project, you deserve the lossage you get. If you actually do that stuff manually, well, you still have to live with MFC, but that takes a lot of the horrible hair off of the development process. Of course, the better way is just to throw MFC away entirely -- nobody holds a gun to your head and forces you to use MFC just because Windows is your development platform. That's a choice made during the design process, and there are plenty of alternatives.
The Linux development "environment" isn't one single thing, either. There are all sorts of tools and options -- if you don't like some piece of software, you're hardly stuck using it. With the degree of customization available, you can have as Windows-y or as un-Windows-y an experience as you want.
Most of the posts here are about Linux and Windows as development targets, not development platforms. These are separate issues.
First, there's this endless back-and-forth escalation between the distribution technology (Napster) and the control technology (Media Enforcer). As soon as someone figures out how the other side's tech "really" works, they can code up countermeasures.
And second, this whole struggle is kind of inevitable because the Media Enforcer-style tech is (in some slightly iffy sense) indistinguishable from the search technology that lets people find tracks to download in the first place. Technology has unanticipated uses.
As one of those MS employees bothered by my employer's tactics in this whole ugly mess, I just wanted to throw in my two bits on why MS does dumb, heavy-handed stuff like this. It's not (most of the time) our managers who do nasty things like send out cease-and-desist letters or require massive EULAs. It's the lawyers, with their paranoid attitudes about the various kinds of trouble, real and phantom, they see us getting into if this-that-or-the-other loophole isn't closed and sealed up tight. The DOJ trial doesn't help matters: the lawyers can say "look what happened when you didn't listen to us last time!" and as a result, people are reluctant to stand up to the advice from Legal when that advice is along the lines of "you'll be at risk unless you treat this material as proprietary."
As for Kerberos, I don't know the details, but I'd guess it's very unlikely that Gates and Ballmer sat in a room cackling somewhere and decided to make a non-interoperable version. MS is too big and -- gasp -- has too many autonomous units doing their own thing for that image of complete totalitarian control to have all that much truth to it.
Personally, I work for a pretty damn ethical group. Where there are standards or standards drafts, we adhere to them. It's only where there aren't standards already coming along in the pipeline that we go our own way.
Ebay auction to set up transaction == virtual-world interaction
Sony's action against Ebay == real-world action
That is, Sony is taking real-world action to prevent virtual-world interactions which lead to real-world exchanges of the "rights" to virtual-world objects modeled on real-world ones. Kind of beautiful, actually. And a very interesting study of the interaction and coexistence of real and cyber spaces.
Since computer scientists, like birds and cavemen, only count up to three (whoops, I mean "many"), this means that quantum computing has really definitively entered the realm of "many." Pulling this off is pretty huge, not just because it brings practical quanutm computers that much closer. It's also a pretty impressive achievement in experimental physics and engineering to get that kind of precise control over individual quantum systems.
Linux is about choice. Any Linux advocate who says Delphi is not welcome in the Linux space is a hypocrite
That's not true. Some people who advocate Linux do so because it is free software, and would only advocate free software, and consider non-free software to be coercive and immoral. Danny Thorpe clearly disagrees with this view (as do most Linux users, probably) but that doesn't mean that its proponents are hypocrites.
Such people, though, would qualify as "free sofware advocates," not "Linux advocates."
It's an absurd decision in the context of copyright law, but not in the context of contract law.
The real trouble is that the DMCA sets down rules concerning intellectual property -- a field in which the threshold of "theft" is low because ideas and words can be so easy to appropriate -- but is drafted with the mindset of physical property law -- in which people are allowed to set very particular conditions ("no reverse engineering!" "home use only!") on the sale of an item.
So, yes, the violation of intellectual property traditions is pretty blatant, but there is plenty of precedent in other branches of law for what just happened. The real place that this fight should be taking place is in the legislatures and at the law-making courts (not the law-interpreting ones that have to go according to established precedent), where we need to make the case that yes, we feel very strongly that intellectual property traditions are the ones that should be used in the new media world, not the contract law traditions that are bound up with physical objects and literal interpretations.
Slashdot Mirror
This is like checking in code for someone else without reading it. Version-control software won't do a damn thing if the people using it are dumbasses. Same thing with Congress.
And there's just about no process or procedure you can require that will magically make dumbasses not do dumb things. Smart teams review code, no matter what software they use. If members of Congress are sloppy and other members don't check on them, we'll get more responsiveness voting for less sloppy candidates than in trying to make them jump through more procedural hoops.
Google "extended tool chest" returns "about 13 results." If that's the meaning, it's a very well-kept secret meaning.
So? Consoles are tuned for game performance in a way that PCs aren't: you can buy a great graphics card for your PC, but the motherboard wasn't designed with the sole purpose of being a raging triangle-slinging red-hot graphics mama. Your game is going to have far better cache performance on a console than it will on your desktop machine, where it has to contend with the OS and whatever else you're running for those cache lines.
And most importantly, the console has a reliable, very regular refresh rate. You know *exactly* how many cycles you'll get for each frame and you can wring every last bit of computation from them. On a PC, you never know precisely how much computation you'll get in -- there are too many unknowns, too many places where you need to contend for resources, or where a random delay might cost you a millisecond or two. This means less reliable frame rate, and a whole lot of overhead in terms of programmer effort in order to carefully monitor your run rate and compensate accordingly.
It's an apples-and-oranges comparision to look at specs on game consoles and desktop PCs. If you look under the hood of any gaming box, it's always slightly scandalous what "slow" hardware they're getting away with. But the consoles are always designed so that good programmers can exploit that hardware to the absolute max, something which is much tougher on a PC, which has to waste some of its raw power on general-purpose flexibility.
It's the same deal with the balance in computers -- the field has been so male-dominated for so long that it's automatically an unpleasant choice for many women because they're so outnumbered.
MFC? A nightmare on some levels, sure. But if you use the brain-dead Visual Studio wizards to create your MFC project, you deserve the lossage you get. If you actually do that stuff manually, well, you still have to live with MFC, but that takes a lot of the horrible hair off of the development process. Of course, the better way is just to throw MFC away entirely -- nobody holds a gun to your head and forces you to use MFC just because Windows is your development platform. That's a choice made during the design process, and there are plenty of alternatives.
The Linux development "environment" isn't one single thing, either. There are all sorts of tools and options -- if you don't like some piece of software, you're hardly stuck using it. With the degree of customization available, you can have as Windows-y or as un-Windows-y an experience as you want.
Most of the posts here are about Linux and Windows as development targets, not development platforms. These are separate issues.
First, there's this endless back-and-forth escalation between the distribution technology (Napster) and the control technology (Media Enforcer). As soon as someone figures out how the other side's tech "really" works, they can code up countermeasures.
And second, this whole struggle is kind of inevitable because the Media Enforcer-style tech is (in some slightly iffy sense) indistinguishable from the search technology that lets people find tracks to download in the first place. Technology has unanticipated uses.
> current MS consumers.
So? Haven't they already demonstrated -- by using MS products -- that they deserve to be hurt?
As for Kerberos, I don't know the details, but I'd guess it's very unlikely that Gates and Ballmer sat in a room cackling somewhere and decided to make a non-interoperable version. MS is too big and -- gasp -- has too many autonomous units doing their own thing for that image of complete totalitarian control to have all that much truth to it.
Personally, I work for a pretty damn ethical group. Where there are standards or standards drafts, we adhere to them. It's only where there aren't standards already coming along in the pipeline that we go our own way.
EverQuest cloak == virtual-world item
money paid for EverQuest cloak == real-world item
Ebay auction to set up transaction == virtual-world interaction
Sony's action against Ebay == real-world action
That is, Sony is taking real-world action to prevent virtual-world interactions which lead to real-world exchanges of the "rights" to virtual-world objects modeled on real-world ones. Kind of beautiful, actually. And a very interesting study of the interaction and coexistence of real and cyber spaces.
Since computer scientists, like birds and cavemen, only count up to three (whoops, I mean "many"), this means that quantum computing has really definitively entered the realm of "many." Pulling this off is pretty huge, not just because it brings practical quanutm computers that much closer. It's also a pretty impressive achievement in experimental physics and engineering to get that kind of precise control over individual quantum systems.
The real trouble is that the DMCA sets down rules concerning intellectual property -- a field in which the threshold of "theft" is low because ideas and words can be so easy to appropriate -- but is drafted with the mindset of physical property law -- in which people are allowed to set very particular conditions ("no reverse engineering!" "home use only!") on the sale of an item.
So, yes, the violation of intellectual property traditions is pretty blatant, but there is plenty of precedent in other branches of law for what just happened.
The real place that this fight should be taking place is in the legislatures and at the law-making courts (not the law-interpreting ones that have to go according to established precedent), where we need to make the case that yes, we feel very strongly that intellectual property traditions are the ones that should be used in the new media world, not the contract law traditions that are bound up with physical objects and literal interpretations.