Could you render the Final Fantasy movie in real time with five times as many enemies as Serious Sam throws at you with a completely deformable and interactive world?
Saying the Quake3 engine is fast enough is like saying the Doom engine is fast enough. The only reason it is "fast enough" is because it has made serious trade offs in terms of photorealism, number of objects in the scene, size of objects, horizon, etc.
Until the Quake 47 engine looks substantially like the view out my window it seems pretty obvious to me the ways in which game graphics can improve.
And who can blame them? Jabber is a horrible design. "Yeah, and then we'll store all the passwords in cleartext in one place." If I were AOL I would want to shut that down, too.
(I'm confused about how bork is the appropriate word in this context.)
This seems pretty juvenile to me. He is forging headers. First he forges a bunch of X-headers which were specifically created as a place for mailers to put proprietary information. Then he forges the Reply-By header, which is part of RFC 1327. (Shame on Microsoft for trying to bring overdue items to the attention of the user!)
His only valid complaint is that apparently Outlook has a bug regarding lines that begin with "begin". Wow, a mail client has a bug.
I'm reminded of mutt's tagline: All mail clients suck.
And any program that intends to use more RAM than is physically present should implement a virtual memory mechanism? Some features get implemented in the kernel because we don't want everyone to have to reinvent the wheel. Kernel support for checkpointing processes is one such thing.
The Windows TCP stack isn't derived from BSD. A very long time ago they licensed a TCP stack from a company that based their product on the BSD TCP stack. But that was close to a decade ago, the licensing agreement is over, Microsoft implemented their own stack from scratch, and the TCP stack in Windows has no code in common with the BSD TCP stack.
A decent amount of software you can get for linux nowadays comes with a ton of compile options. When I get a binary package from debian or redhat I have no say over which of those options were turned on. Maybe I don't want postfix to be able to support ldap and mysql and postgresql lookups? Well, tough, I don't have any choice in the matter and so I have to download and install those libraries to satisfy postfix's dependencies.
Sometimes (most often in the case of SSL) you'll see multiple versions of the same package to satisfy problems like this. This is a hack to solve the problem. Sure I can install lynx-ssl instead of lynx but what if I want lynx to use slang instead of ncurses?
This is more about control than optimization. While I'm not sure this level of control is necessary for everyone, control is one of the selling points of Open Source Software and something that most people like to have.
nowhere does he mention why he needed a 2.4 kernel in the first place
The article is generally short on details but that doesn't mean he didn't have a valid reason for wanting to use 2.4, a supposedly stable kernel.
Besides all of the new functionality -- reiserfs, drivers, etc -- 2.4 was supposed to have a lot of BETTER functionality. The VFS subsystem was supposed to much improved, the networking layer was completely rewritten to be much better, etc.
If someone told you that 2.4 was the stable kernel release fork and that 2.4 included lots of major rewrites that improved the efficiency and scalability of subsystems wouldn't you think it appropriate to try to use it?
Or do you purposely run the most inefficient OS you can find for your application?
I agree that he doesn't make a very good argument for his case, but just because the system was currently working doesn't mean it didn't need to be changed. Maybe it was working but overloaded and slow to respond and due to profiling of the problem he determined that an improved network and VFS subsystem would help remedy the situation.
The problem is that there isn't a decent multi-patch versioning system out there
Uh, yes there are. Perforce, aide-de-camp, bitkeeper, and others all do this just fine. I haven't used squeak much, but I think this is also how the built-in version control in their smalltalk image works as well. Every change management system that uses changesets works pretty much exactly this way.
CVS basically sucks, which is why some people are trying to replace it. It only gets used because it is popular and free, not because it is technically superior. The only thing it is better than is RCS/SCCS. Every other possible solution is no worse, and usually much better, than CVS.
this kind of bashing between the high priests of Linux is not good
Sure it is. How else are we going to find out where our disagreements are and work through them? Or, at the very least, learn not to make the same mistakes in future projects. The problem of the Linus bottleneck has been known for a long time. This "bashing" is not new, it's just current.
Having Linus Torvalds around helps insure that, for the average user, there is no splintering of development effort -- just use the Linus kernel. But it also severely hinders improvement because you are limited to what Linus likes or dislikes.
And despite what may be the common conception on/. Linus is not an all knowing genius. He makes mistakes. Perhaps this is one of those mistakes. The real question is whether the benefits of the stewardship he provides compensates for the hindrances his authoritarianism creates.
If you look at history this is exactly what has happened. Sixtus IV established the Spanish inquisition in 1478 the root out Judaizing, the Christian community was able to solidify behind this movement and by 1492 there were no Jews left in Spain. The establishment of the Portugese inquisition in 1534 had a similar outcome. When Paul III established the Roman inquisition in 1542 to stop the problem of Protestantism they were similarly successful.
The inquisitions of Europe were as successful as they were because they focused on penance, not punishment by isolation, which seems to be exactly what you advocate.
However, today the inquisition is hardly thought of as a good model, despite the fact that it meets all the criteria you seem to suggest: it wildly popular with the majority, the auto-da-fes were crowd pleasing events that focused on penance, the entire community felt they had a stake in rooting out heresy which threatened the continued well-being and existence of their world, and the punishment acted to bring the community together.
Surprisingly enough when the United States was founded, people like Madison and Mason considered these historical precedents and gave arguments for why unrestricted democracy was a bad thing. The tyrrany of the masses, as evidenced in the behavior of the masses.
I would be interested to hear how your community oriented anarchy would not allow something like the Spanish inquisition to be repeated.
If I cant pop up the game, and select "play online" and then be presented with a list of games running from a list server (Open source so it's not that company hogging it) and play then it wont work..
The success of MMORPGs would seem to indicate your points lacks any actual validity in the real world.
The model you present has several problems: characters stored locally making them vulnerable to hacking, portability of characters between servers make play balancing harder, and inability to have a persistent world.
The last is the real problem. There is no persistent world in Q3A and CS so using them as examples is completely irrelevant.
If Squarsoft screws up their Multiplayer with stupid "lock IN" devices then they will fail. and they will fail horribly.
Do you have a single example of a persistent role playing game world that doesn't use centralized servers?
George Mason is the who wrote Virginia's Declaration of Rights that influenced Jefferson. Mason is the one who was present at the drafting of Constitution and protested the lack of a bill of rights.
The anti-federalist Samuel Bryan was the first to publicly complain about the lack of a Bill of Rights, which marshalled public opinion in their favor and pressured the Federalists to promise their eventual adoption.
It was John Hancock's influence in Massachusetts and their recommendation of a Bill of Rights that forced the forced the Federalists to agree to their necessity.
In Virginia it was Patrick Henry and George Mason who advocated for the Bill of Rights most strongly, not Jefferson.
And finally it was Madison who wrote the 17 amendments, shepherded them through Congress, saw them winnowed to 12 in the Senate, and then saw 10 ratified by the States.
Jefferson played almost no role in all of these. He wrote a few letters and offered moral support. If Jefferson hadn't existed the same exact outcome would have been realized.
The agreement the court approved Monday bars the city from enforcing the portion of the law related to violent video games. The industry did not challenge the sexual-content provision.
Even though there is also no evidence that sexual-content has any ill affects on children. So I'm not quite sure where the video game industry's moral righteousness comes from. They seem willing to accept political based censorship, despite their claims to the contrary.
First off you're examples Monte Carlo simulations and differential equations aren't "engineering problems". They are math problems that are a component of an engineering problem. Engineers does things. It builds a bridge, drives a car, prints a document. The examples you give are parts of that solution. Every GUI needs to do things like interpolate colors and position, which are the same class of problems -- if orders of magnitude simpler -- as differential equations and Monte Carlo simulations. So it seems to me that you need to figure out what your real problem is and figure out what programming paradigms might help you out with that.
As others have pointed out OOP doesn't let you solve things that are otherwise unsolvable. It is a way of solving problems that may be better in some situations and worse in others. The examples you give of solving equations are all better suited to a functional language than a procedural one like Fortran, so rather than asking "why use OOP" you might want to first ask yourself "why am I using Fortran?" Obviously there are a number of factors that go into how we pick our solutions. Maybe OOP per se isn't a good fit for your problem but you need it to be multiplatform and have a huge amount of available code and standard libraries so you end up going with Java. Or whatever.
The kinds of problems you're talking about don't have a great mapping onto the traditional ways of describing OOP. However, OOP is really just a somewhat formalized kind of way of dealing with abstraction and data encapsulation. You can make a difference equation a class. Maybe it'll only have one method that immediately finds all the finite solutions. But once it is a particular datatype you can also do things like compare whether two user-entered difference equations are identical and just returned the cached solution. You can curry them. You can return partial solutions and then come back later and ask the object for more solutions.
Don't you already have discrete data types for these things? And don't you already have functions that operate on those discrete datatypes? Then you're already doing OOP. Sure you're not using inheritance and multimethods and things like that. But not every OO program does.
But last time I checked installing apache under debian requires installing libmysql first (explain that one to me). Installing postfix requires installing sasl, ldap, pcre, and mysql libs. Try installing any of the courier suit in a "waist slim" state. Debian wants to install telnetd and inetd out-of-the-box and I can't remove netkit-inetd because netbase depends on it. Samba requires CUPS even though I don't own a printer. CUPS in turn makes me install tiff libraries. I need to install db2 for man and perl but I need db3 for postfix. Vim and links require I have gpm installed even though there is no mouse on the computer.
All this is on a relatively bare bones server. Debian is nice but "waist slim" it is not.
And ANY language can have all of those attributes.
Of course any program in any language can have those attributes. But are you seriously arguing that all programming languages are equally maintainable or equally usable by teams? Are False or Intercal really just as easy to maintain as Perl or Python? Is csh just as easy to write a 500,000 line program in as C++?
Obviously anyone saying that you can't write a maintainable or large program in perl is overstating the case. What more reasonable people are saying is that perl makes it easy to hang yourself, probably too easy. We can all sit around and say only other programmers make mistakes and thus we don't need a bondage and discipline language but when you look at the state of the average code base that argument is hard to take seriously.
I've never used PayPal as a merchant but if you don't use PayPal to accept payments then you need to provide some kind of "secure" way of getting the credit card number of the person who wants to buy stuff, right? That means either sending payment through the mail, having a secure web site set up, or having someone sitting around waiting to answer a phone. Those aren't always viable options for small (the word here is SMALL) businesses. For instance, Kartboy is an extremely well known and respected vendor in the Subaru Impreza community. But he has a day job and only sells a few things. PayPal works great for him and I don't think he has anything under $20 for sale.
Didn't Edgar Cayce predict this decades ago? How come Nostradamus gets more press?
Re:Go ahead, remove all the doc
on
The LDP and Debian
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
No, the point is that since they aren't a company there is no reason for them to release before they are ready. Just push back the release to get the licensing issues sorted out. They are being hypocritical by releasing the product anyway.
.all this time, physicists have assumed that "dark matter" - the matter that provides a great deal of the gravitational force that holds the universe together - is "invisible" or "unobservable" or in some extreme cases "existing in a separate yet intertwined reality".
No they haven't. Let me quote from a Scientific American article on dark matter.
Astronomers and physicists offer a variety of explanations for this dark matter. On the one hand, it could merely be ordinary material, such as ultrafaint stars, large or small black holes, cold gas, or dust scattered around the universe--all of which emit or reflect too little radiation for our instruments to detect.
Hey, notice that part where they say a variety of explanations are offered?
(BTW, what do you mean by "invisible" other than it doesn't have light bouncing off of it?)
Slashdot Mirror
Could you render the Final Fantasy movie in real time with five times as many enemies as Serious Sam throws at you with a completely deformable and interactive world?
Saying the Quake3 engine is fast enough is like saying the Doom engine is fast enough. The only reason it is "fast enough" is because it has made serious trade offs in terms of photorealism, number of objects in the scene, size of objects, horizon, etc.
Until the Quake 47 engine looks substantially like the view out my window it seems pretty obvious to me the ways in which game graphics can improve.
It's hard to call it a gamble when you're just going down the same path that others, like Tribes, have blazed before you and shown to be successful.
And who can blame them? Jabber is a horrible design. "Yeah, and then we'll store all the passwords in cleartext in one place." If I were AOL I would want to shut that down, too.
(I'm confused about how bork is the appropriate word in this context.)
This seems pretty juvenile to me. He is forging headers. First he forges a bunch of X-headers which were specifically created as a place for mailers to put proprietary information. Then he forges the Reply-By header, which is part of RFC 1327. (Shame on Microsoft for trying to bring overdue items to the attention of the user!)
His only valid complaint is that apparently Outlook has a bug regarding lines that begin with "begin". Wow, a mail client has a bug.
I'm reminded of mutt's tagline: All mail clients suck.
Having a choice turned you off?
And any program that intends to use more RAM than is physically present should implement a virtual memory mechanism? Some features get implemented in the kernel because we don't want everyone to have to reinvent the wheel. Kernel support for checkpointing processes is one such thing.
The Windows TCP stack isn't derived from BSD. A very long time ago they licensed a TCP stack from a company that based their product on the BSD TCP stack. But that was close to a decade ago, the licensing agreement is over, Microsoft implemented their own stack from scratch, and the TCP stack in Windows has no code in common with the BSD TCP stack.
A decent amount of software you can get for linux nowadays comes with a ton of compile options. When I get a binary package from debian or redhat I have no say over which of those options were turned on. Maybe I don't want postfix to be able to support ldap and mysql and postgresql lookups? Well, tough, I don't have any choice in the matter and so I have to download and install those libraries to satisfy postfix's dependencies.
Sometimes (most often in the case of SSL) you'll see multiple versions of the same package to satisfy problems like this. This is a hack to solve the problem. Sure I can install lynx-ssl instead of lynx but what if I want lynx to use slang instead of ncurses?
This is more about control than optimization. While I'm not sure this level of control is necessary for everyone, control is one of the selling points of Open Source Software and something that most people like to have.
nowhere does he mention why he needed a 2.4 kernel in the first place
The article is generally short on details but that doesn't mean he didn't have a valid reason for wanting to use 2.4, a supposedly stable kernel.
Besides all of the new functionality -- reiserfs, drivers, etc -- 2.4 was supposed to have a lot of BETTER functionality. The VFS subsystem was supposed to much improved, the networking layer was completely rewritten to be much better, etc.
If someone told you that 2.4 was the stable kernel release fork and that 2.4 included lots of major rewrites that improved the efficiency and scalability of subsystems wouldn't you think it appropriate to try to use it?
Or do you purposely run the most inefficient OS you can find for your application?
I agree that he doesn't make a very good argument for his case, but just because the system was currently working doesn't mean it didn't need to be changed. Maybe it was working but overloaded and slow to respond and due to profiling of the problem he determined that an improved network and VFS subsystem would help remedy the situation.
The problem is that there isn't a decent multi-patch versioning system out there
Uh, yes there are. Perforce, aide-de-camp, bitkeeper, and others all do this just fine. I haven't used squeak much, but I think this is also how the built-in version control in their smalltalk image works as well. Every change management system that uses changesets works pretty much exactly this way.
CVS basically sucks, which is why some people are trying to replace it. It only gets used because it is popular and free, not because it is technically superior. The only thing it is better than is RCS/SCCS. Every other possible solution is no worse, and usually much better, than CVS.
When Linus is the source control system then personal issues become technical issues.
this kind of bashing between the high priests of Linux is not good
/. Linus is not an all knowing genius. He makes mistakes. Perhaps this is one of those mistakes. The real question is whether the benefits of the stewardship he provides compensates for the hindrances his authoritarianism creates.
Sure it is. How else are we going to find out where our disagreements are and work through them? Or, at the very least, learn not to make the same mistakes in future projects. The problem of the Linus bottleneck has been known for a long time. This "bashing" is not new, it's just current.
Having Linus Torvalds around helps insure that, for the average user, there is no splintering of development effort -- just use the Linus kernel. But it also severely hinders improvement because you are limited to what Linus likes or dislikes.
And despite what may be the common conception on
punishment should bring people together
If you look at history this is exactly what has happened. Sixtus IV established the Spanish inquisition in 1478 the root out Judaizing, the Christian community was able to solidify behind this movement and by 1492 there were no Jews left in Spain. The establishment of the Portugese inquisition in 1534 had a similar outcome. When Paul III established the Roman inquisition in 1542 to stop the problem of Protestantism they were similarly successful.
The inquisitions of Europe were as successful as they were because they focused on penance, not punishment by isolation, which seems to be exactly what you advocate.
However, today the inquisition is hardly thought of as a good model, despite the fact that it meets all the criteria you seem to suggest: it wildly popular with the majority, the auto-da-fes were crowd pleasing events that focused on penance, the entire community felt they had a stake in rooting out heresy which threatened the continued well-being and existence of their world, and the punishment acted to bring the community together.
Surprisingly enough when the United States was founded, people like Madison and Mason considered these historical precedents and gave arguments for why unrestricted democracy was a bad thing. The tyrrany of the masses, as evidenced in the behavior of the masses.
I would be interested to hear how your community oriented anarchy would not allow something like the Spanish inquisition to be repeated.
If I cant pop up the game, and select "play online" and then be presented with a list of games running from a list server (Open source so it's not that company hogging it) and play then it wont work..
The success of MMORPGs would seem to indicate your points lacks any actual validity in the real world.
The model you present has several problems: characters stored locally making them vulnerable to hacking, portability of characters between servers make play balancing harder, and inability to have a persistent world.
The last is the real problem. There is no persistent world in Q3A and CS so using them as examples is completely irrelevant.
If Squarsoft screws up their Multiplayer with stupid "lock IN" devices then they will fail. and they will fail horribly.
Do you have a single example of a persistent role playing game world that doesn't use centralized servers?
Because it is off-topic AND factually incorrect?
George Mason is the who wrote Virginia's Declaration of Rights that influenced Jefferson. Mason is the one who was present at the drafting of Constitution and protested the lack of a bill of rights.
The anti-federalist Samuel Bryan was the first to publicly complain about the lack of a Bill of Rights, which marshalled public opinion in their favor and pressured the Federalists to promise their eventual adoption.
It was John Hancock's influence in Massachusetts and their recommendation of a Bill of Rights that forced the forced the Federalists to agree to their necessity.
In Virginia it was Patrick Henry and George Mason who advocated for the Bill of Rights most strongly, not Jefferson.
And finally it was Madison who wrote the 17 amendments, shepherded them through Congress, saw them winnowed to 12 in the Senate, and then saw 10 ratified by the States.
Jefferson played almost no role in all of these. He wrote a few letters and offered moral support. If Jefferson hadn't existed the same exact outcome would have been realized.
The agreement the court approved Monday bars the city from enforcing the portion of the law related to violent video games. The industry did not challenge the sexual-content provision.
Even though there is also no evidence that sexual-content has any ill affects on children. So I'm not quite sure where the video game industry's moral righteousness comes from. They seem willing to accept political based censorship, despite their claims to the contrary.
First off you're examples Monte Carlo simulations and differential equations aren't "engineering problems". They are math problems that are a component of an engineering problem. Engineers does things. It builds a bridge, drives a car, prints a document. The examples you give are parts of that solution. Every GUI needs to do things like interpolate colors and position, which are the same class of problems -- if orders of magnitude simpler -- as differential equations and Monte Carlo simulations. So it seems to me that you need to figure out what your real problem is and figure out what programming paradigms might help you out with that.
As others have pointed out OOP doesn't let you solve things that are otherwise unsolvable. It is a way of solving problems that may be better in some situations and worse in others. The examples you give of solving equations are all better suited to a functional language than a procedural one like Fortran, so rather than asking "why use OOP" you might want to first ask yourself "why am I using Fortran?" Obviously there are a number of factors that go into how we pick our solutions. Maybe OOP per se isn't a good fit for your problem but you need it to be multiplatform and have a huge amount of available code and standard libraries so you end up going with Java. Or whatever.
The kinds of problems you're talking about don't have a great mapping onto the traditional ways of describing OOP. However, OOP is really just a somewhat formalized kind of way of dealing with abstraction and data encapsulation. You can make a difference equation a class. Maybe it'll only have one method that immediately finds all the finite solutions. But once it is a particular datatype you can also do things like compare whether two user-entered difference equations are identical and just returned the cached solution. You can curry them. You can return partial solutions and then come back later and ask the object for more solutions.
Don't you already have discrete data types for these things? And don't you already have functions that operate on those discrete datatypes? Then you're already doing OOP. Sure you're not using inheritance and multimethods and things like that. But not every OO program does.
By "write code this way" do you mean "in C"?
Or you could just not read the content if you aren't willing to pay the price they have set for it.
I use debian and generally like it.
But last time I checked installing apache under debian requires installing libmysql first (explain that one to me). Installing postfix requires installing sasl, ldap, pcre, and mysql libs. Try installing any of the courier suit in a "waist slim" state. Debian wants to install telnetd and inetd out-of-the-box and I can't remove netkit-inetd because netbase depends on it. Samba requires CUPS even though I don't own a printer. CUPS in turn makes me install tiff libraries. I need to install db2 for man and perl but I need db3 for postfix. Vim and links require I have gpm installed even though there is no mouse on the computer.
All this is on a relatively bare bones server. Debian is nice but "waist slim" it is not.
And ANY language can have all of those attributes.
Of course any program in any language can have those attributes. But are you seriously arguing that all programming languages are equally maintainable or equally usable by teams? Are False or Intercal really just as easy to maintain as Perl or Python? Is csh just as easy to write a 500,000 line program in as C++?
Obviously anyone saying that you can't write a maintainable or large program in perl is overstating the case. What more reasonable people are saying is that perl makes it easy to hang yourself, probably too easy. We can all sit around and say only other programmers make mistakes and thus we don't need a bondage and discipline language but when you look at the state of the average code base that argument is hard to take seriously.
I've never used PayPal as a merchant but if you don't use PayPal to accept payments then you need to provide some kind of "secure" way of getting the credit card number of the person who wants to buy stuff, right? That means either sending payment through the mail, having a secure web site set up, or having someone sitting around waiting to answer a phone. Those aren't always viable options for small (the word here is SMALL) businesses. For instance, Kartboy is an extremely well known and respected vendor in the Subaru Impreza community. But he has a day job and only sells a few things. PayPal works great for him and I don't think he has anything under $20 for sale.
Didn't Edgar Cayce predict this decades ago? How come Nostradamus gets more press?
No, the point is that since they aren't a company there is no reason for them to release before they are ready. Just push back the release to get the licensing issues sorted out. They are being hypocritical by releasing the product anyway.
No they haven't. Let me quote from a Scientific American article on dark matter.
Hey, notice that part where they say a variety of explanations are offered?
(BTW, what do you mean by "invisible" other than it doesn't have light bouncing off of it?)