Because he's the public front of the Free Software movement. He's the one who does the talking. I don't doubt his intellect, but his job also involves interacting with normal people.
Good God - you know, I'd always heard that he was scruffy, but I'd never taken the time to find out how much so. Holy cow, he looks as worse than the local Comic Book Guy. How does he expect anyone to take him seriously in person? I mean, if he's really attached to having a beard and long hair, he could have a well-trimmed beard and kept long hair instead of looking like he's never showered. I know sikhs (who're prohibited from ever trimming their beards or hair) with facial hair that looks less natty than that.
No, SoHo is the heavyweight (modern) version. The Deluxe version is the lightweight desktop with all of the serving tools and packages that you'd want on your legacy box. That's the problem - 5.1 is desktop only, 5.1 SOHO is heavyweight, and 5.1 Deluxe is desktop with access a decent set of packages.
Hm. I get a "Script Prompt" window over a tiny IE window, with the name of your site in a textbox. A few seconds later (or when I touch it) it snaps and then I get the windows "close-details" app crash window.
So it disturbs the browser, but it doesn't hack it for me.
Computer is custom and very old - can't find original specs. Found the ID of the mobo, but mobo comes in multiple, indistinguishable versions with different chipsets. Sound chip is hidden behind the PSU so I can't see it.
How long does it take to make a transaction with icann? (26*3-6)*time = how long it will take for this situation to resolve after they release the 1 char domains.
So when do they do the opposite? Make a "general" TLD? Just require that the "general" domains be 4 or more chars. Then send any request involving a TLD with more than 3 chars to the new "general" TLD's domains. Ditch the whole "com/net/org" argument by just letting them name their domain whatever, as long as it's over 3 characters.
Good point. I've got a Gigabyte mobo on an old Duron box that I'm installing Win2k onto for a friend, an getting the onboard sound chipset to work is a huge nuisance. First I thought it had some silly via thing (the mobo docs list two alternate chipsets) and it worked fine - but the computer would freeze up occaisionally. It took me a long time to realise that it was the soundcard causing it. Then, on further research, I realised it had a Creative Labs chip in there. Now, when I run the Creative installer it doesn't do anything - click the exe, hourglass appears.... and nothing happens, hourglass disappears. The only ini file gets ignored by the "add hardware" wizard.
Sound chipsets + win = PITA unless you've got the original driver disks handy.
Having seen how OSX measures up to most *nix desktops, I think I'll be using the built-in PVR software. The only reason I'd use MythTV would be to dodge the Apple DRM.
As an aside, I hope Apple goes with their plan to use a larger HDD. I mean, the unit is much, much smaller than it needs to be - I doubt anyone would complain if their PVR was even as big as a DVD player - and the Mini is obscenely tiny. The payoff in disk space (or price) would be well worth the increase in size.
The computing industry (except for Netscape Navigator) got along fine before garbage collection. Yes, it's a nuisance to do without - but you can implement it yourself if you like. Do any of Id's games have memory leaks to speak of? Besides are other architectures besides the reference-counted-shared-pointer using a lazy sweep-cleanup garbage collector for safe pointers. For example, a "parent/child-only" with weak references creates a resolvable tree that makes for easy cleanup, and weak references can be used for non-parent-child pointers. None of the ambiguity of the garbage collector there.
As for array counting - yes, any data you get from user files should go through a safe array - but what about inner loops? Should my merge-sort algorithm use safe arrays for it's internal copies?
The point is that they _are_ training wheels. Good, solid code can be made without them. Yes, for apps where speed isn't essential, you may as well leave them on - but the problem is that the platform _forces_ you to use them. At least in.NET you can work with Managed C++ or unsafe C# and get nitty-gritty with the pointers and structs if you like. Java has no such facilities that I know of.
JIT is a great feature, but it's speed advantages are overshadowed by the speed barriers in Java, preventing it's use as a high-performance speed-oriented language. I expect that.NET will fare better in that regard.
Oh, I know - but a solid FPS game would be simple with something as simple a PS2-style second shoulder button. The rest is all there - move wand for aim, trigger/shoulder to shoot, thumb button + wand movement, for peripheral actions like switch weapons, reload, whatever. But no jump, or any other actions besides the basics because of the single trigger. Similar problems occur with Super Smash Bros.
So as a result, I'm expecting that every developer besides Nintendo will simply expect you to have the stick in nunchuck configuration, which to me defeats the whole purpose.
My worry with this sort of layout in a home usage is power consumption. I mean, how much wattage are we talking about per box? These days, it might be better to go with a slightly beefier box and have it wear a few more hats.
Good call. People always push DSL as the "legacy box" linux distro - but that's not the best approach. First, DSL is focussed on small _size_ more than anything else. A new HDD is the easiest upgrade to do on a legacy box - at the vary least you can get it up to the 8Gig limit. Meanwhile, ease-of-use and functionality go out the window.
Vector Linux is supposed to be the best for this, but it's a retail product - their free versions are full-featured modern distros a la Ubuntu, not lightweights. There's Buffalo, which is a free rerelease of Vector, but it is a small project.
One recommendation I heard for saving an old box was to go with 'Drake. I know it sounds odd, but remember that Mandrake comes with lightweight WMs. Theoretically if you rip out enough extraneous stuff and boot X into Ice, you might go far that way.
Remember: your competition is Win98 + Office2k. Win98 might've been unstable and outright dangerous, but it was lightyears ahead of DSL for ease-of-use and functionality.
Of course, if you're one of those command line cowboys, then my comments are pointless, but so is this whole article - you don't need DSL or anything else, you can just hack your Gentoo in to fit the box.
While in general JIT does bring a lot to the table, Java drags it back down with a lot of things - the garbage collector, the over-specified floating-point accuracy, array-bounds-checking, and any number of overheads that come from Java's security/stability-before-speed design.
But then, my knowledge of Java is dated. Has there been new ground broken in the environment to let coders rip off the training wheels?
Agreed. I love my DS. The DS is the first console that can really naturally play PC-style titles - the stylus is the ideal replacement for the mouse, so it opens the world to PC shooters and strat games. The Metroid Hunters demo is everything an FPS should be, without having to compromise the gameplay with slow movement and autoaim hacks like TV-console games do.
The Rev will be my next console. While MS and Sony put out just another iteration of the same thing, Nintendo's branching out in a new direction with a proven ability to succeed in that direction.
My only complaint is that the second stick will be practically _necessary_ for conventional gameplay - the wand on it's own is just a little too simple for most console-genre games.
Us Canucks are lucky that way - nicely spread out for us. Either way, my family does roast for Christmas. A nice marinated eye-of-round stuffed with bacon and spices.
Actually, it was beyond a cheat code - it was a hack. There was no way to expose the disabled content in the game without pushing bits around manually. Afaik, you had to hexedit a savegame or gamestate or something to expose it. People then uploaded the hacked savegame file that you could DL to try it.
The problem is that there is no real analogy for it in the real world. Most other forms of media can't include unviewable content in any expressible form. Imagine if a VHS tape had a porn movie outside of the margins of the screen - you'd have to practically break your VCR to view it. Or a book had 2 pages glued together with dirty pictures on them - but the only way to expose it was with chemical solvents that you'd have to go to a specialty store to buy.
Opening line: No, Jenny, I can tell you the game is _not_ over. In fact, the game.... is just starting.
Closing line, after capturing the bad guys: Where you're going... the only scoring... will be on you.
And so on. God I hate Caruso. Plus, Miami seems to be the offician vessel for the most tastelessly political and sensationalist stories. Vegas is 100x better. Grissom is god.
The PS1 version was great, and generally didn't fare too well. I'd love to see it rereleased with higher-resolution, more fluid graphics - it had the telltale PS1 chunkiness. The problem I ran into though was that it was just really, frustratingly hard to play without serious abuse of the "continue" command. Plus, it had the stupid old arcade tradition of "power that you lose the first time you get hurt" like in original Strider, which basically means that losing a single bar of health leaves you screwed and vulnerable.
Still, the action within the game was awesome fun.
Yep. alt-F4 is your friend... except that it often closes the browser window. Plus, flash ads often eat gestures, so mozgest down-right doesn't work either. There is no silver bullet when it comes to those things (besides closing the tab).
What confuses me is the flash-driven or script-driven popups that sneak past the Firefox built-in filter... why do they do that? I mean, at some point there has to be a call into FireFox to spawn a new window. Why can't it just eat that call no matter what? Personally, I've always felt that the ideal solution would've been a hybrid of normal pop-ups and the blocker bar - use a sidebar that pops up with a shrunken view of the popup. Dump all the popups that are children of a given window into it's sidebar, and mute them. That way it's trivial to see if the popup is relevant. Click to spawn in a new tab and unmute. Then there's no worries about "good" pop-ups vs. "bad" pop-ups - just dump everything that wasn't manually opened in a new window by the user into the sidebar. If the parent window closes, close all the windows remaining in the sidebar to prevent clutter from building up (tree-based garbage collection pwns).
Google sells non-popup ads, and provides users with a blocker for popup ads. Personally, I can understand the valid, intelligent reasons for doing both - both giving consumers what they want.... but put together, it looks pretty damn evil.
The problem is that we're in the wake of GTA:San Andreas, and so every 2-bit knockoff company is making games about black kids shooting up their urban city.
When he means "black man with shotgun" he doesn't mean Malcolm from UT. He means "gang banging thug".
Now, personally, I'd extend that rule to apply to any game where the box art shows a protagonist wearing street-gang glothing with a shaved head wielding firearms, not just black ones... but by and large, right not the trend for street gangery is to have a black protagonist similar to San Andreas.
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Because he's the public front of the Free Software movement. He's the one who does the talking. I don't doubt his intellect, but his job also involves interacting with normal people.
Good God - you know, I'd always heard that he was scruffy, but I'd never taken the time to find out how much so. Holy cow, he looks as worse than the local Comic Book Guy. How does he expect anyone to take him seriously in person? I mean, if he's really attached to having a beard and long hair, he could have a well-trimmed beard and kept long hair instead of looking like he's never showered. I know sikhs (who're prohibited from ever trimming their beards or hair) with facial hair that looks less natty than that.
No, SoHo is the heavyweight (modern) version. The Deluxe version is the lightweight desktop with all of the serving tools and packages that you'd want on your legacy box. That's the problem - 5.1 is desktop only, 5.1 SOHO is heavyweight, and 5.1 Deluxe is desktop with access a decent set of packages.
You guys seriously think there are any .com domain names under 6 chars that are unclaimed? How cute. /used to have Pxtl.org a long time ago.
Hm. I get a "Script Prompt" window over a tiny IE window, with the name of your site in a textbox. A few seconds later (or when I touch it) it snaps and then I get the windows "close-details" app crash window.
So it disturbs the browser, but it doesn't hack it for me.
Computer is custom and very old - can't find original specs. Found the ID of the mobo, but mobo comes in multiple, indistinguishable versions with different chipsets. Sound chip is hidden behind the PSU so I can't see it.
And screw you.
How long does it take to make a transaction with icann? (26*3-6)*time = how long it will take for this situation to resolve after they release the 1 char domains.
So when do they do the opposite? Make a "general" TLD? Just require that the "general" domains be 4 or more chars. Then send any request involving a TLD with more than 3 chars to the new "general" TLD's domains. Ditch the whole "com/net/org" argument by just letting them name their domain whatever, as long as it's over 3 characters.
Good point. I've got a Gigabyte mobo on an old Duron box that I'm installing Win2k onto for a friend, an getting the onboard sound chipset to work is a huge nuisance. First I thought it had some silly via thing (the mobo docs list two alternate chipsets) and it worked fine - but the computer would freeze up occaisionally. It took me a long time to realise that it was the soundcard causing it. Then, on further research, I realised it had a Creative Labs chip in there. Now, when I run the Creative installer it doesn't do anything - click the exe, hourglass appears.... and nothing happens, hourglass disappears. The only ini file gets ignored by the "add hardware" wizard.
Sound chipsets + win = PITA unless you've got the original driver disks handy.
Having seen how OSX measures up to most *nix desktops, I think I'll be using the built-in PVR software. The only reason I'd use MythTV would be to dodge the Apple DRM.
As an aside, I hope Apple goes with their plan to use a larger HDD. I mean, the unit is much, much smaller than it needs to be - I doubt anyone would complain if their PVR was even as big as a DVD player - and the Mini is obscenely tiny. The payoff in disk space (or price) would be well worth the increase in size.
Idunno, but I am so pissed at my parents right now. I feel like going and calling my dad this instant... oh wait, that sounds like work.
nm.
The computing industry (except for Netscape Navigator) got along fine before garbage collection. Yes, it's a nuisance to do without - but you can implement it yourself if you like. Do any of Id's games have memory leaks to speak of? Besides are other architectures besides the reference-counted-shared-pointer using a lazy sweep-cleanup garbage collector for safe pointers. For example, a "parent/child-only" with weak references creates a resolvable tree that makes for easy cleanup, and weak references can be used for non-parent-child pointers. None of the ambiguity of the garbage collector there.
.NET you can work with Managed C++ or unsafe C# and get nitty-gritty with the pointers and structs if you like. Java has no such facilities that I know of.
.NET will fare better in that regard.
As for array counting - yes, any data you get from user files should go through a safe array - but what about inner loops? Should my merge-sort algorithm use safe arrays for it's internal copies?
The point is that they _are_ training wheels. Good, solid code can be made without them. Yes, for apps where speed isn't essential, you may as well leave them on - but the problem is that the platform _forces_ you to use them. At least in
JIT is a great feature, but it's speed advantages are overshadowed by the speed barriers in Java, preventing it's use as a high-performance speed-oriented language. I expect that
Oh, I know - but a solid FPS game would be simple with something as simple a PS2-style second shoulder button. The rest is all there - move wand for aim, trigger/shoulder to shoot, thumb button + wand movement, for peripheral actions like switch weapons, reload, whatever. But no jump, or any other actions besides the basics because of the single trigger. Similar problems occur with Super Smash Bros.
So as a result, I'm expecting that every developer besides Nintendo will simply expect you to have the stick in nunchuck configuration, which to me defeats the whole purpose.
My worry with this sort of layout in a home usage is power consumption. I mean, how much wattage are we talking about per box? These days, it might be better to go with a slightly beefier box and have it wear a few more hats.
Nope. But win98, office97, and IE will work just fine. /MS trollin'
Good call. People always push DSL as the "legacy box" linux distro - but that's not the best approach. First, DSL is focussed on small _size_ more than anything else. A new HDD is the easiest upgrade to do on a legacy box - at the vary least you can get it up to the 8Gig limit. Meanwhile, ease-of-use and functionality go out the window.
Vector Linux is supposed to be the best for this, but it's a retail product - their free versions are full-featured modern distros a la Ubuntu, not lightweights. There's Buffalo, which is a free rerelease of Vector, but it is a small project.
One recommendation I heard for saving an old box was to go with 'Drake. I know it sounds odd, but remember that Mandrake comes with lightweight WMs. Theoretically if you rip out enough extraneous stuff and boot X into Ice, you might go far that way.
Remember: your competition is Win98 + Office2k. Win98 might've been unstable and outright dangerous, but it was lightyears ahead of DSL for ease-of-use and functionality.
Of course, if you're one of those command line cowboys, then my comments are pointless, but so is this whole article - you don't need DSL or anything else, you can just hack your Gentoo in to fit the box.
While in general JIT does bring a lot to the table, Java drags it back down with a lot of things - the garbage collector, the over-specified floating-point accuracy, array-bounds-checking, and any number of overheads that come from Java's security/stability-before-speed design.
But then, my knowledge of Java is dated. Has there been new ground broken in the environment to let coders rip off the training wheels?
Agreed. I love my DS. The DS is the first console that can really naturally play PC-style titles - the stylus is the ideal replacement for the mouse, so it opens the world to PC shooters and strat games. The Metroid Hunters demo is everything an FPS should be, without having to compromise the gameplay with slow movement and autoaim hacks like TV-console games do.
The Rev will be my next console. While MS and Sony put out just another iteration of the same thing, Nintendo's branching out in a new direction with a proven ability to succeed in that direction.
My only complaint is that the second stick will be practically _necessary_ for conventional gameplay - the wand on it's own is just a little too simple for most console-genre games.
I'm looking forward to it.
Us Canucks are lucky that way - nicely spread out for us. Either way, my family does roast for Christmas. A nice marinated eye-of-round stuffed with bacon and spices.
Actually, it was beyond a cheat code - it was a hack. There was no way to expose the disabled content in the game without pushing bits around manually. Afaik, you had to hexedit a savegame or gamestate or something to expose it. People then uploaded the hacked savegame file that you could DL to try it.
The problem is that there is no real analogy for it in the real world. Most other forms of media can't include unviewable content in any expressible form. Imagine if a VHS tape had a porn movie outside of the margins of the screen - you'd have to practically break your VCR to view it. Or a book had 2 pages glued together with dirty pictures on them - but the only way to expose it was with chemical solvents that you'd have to go to a specialty store to buy.
Remember when web browsers were just for viewing HTML pages, and not as a platform agnostic instant-rollout applications platform?
Yeah, me neither.
I can imagine it now:
Opening line:
No, Jenny, I can tell you the game is _not_ over. In fact, the game.... is just starting.
Closing line, after capturing the bad guys:
Where you're going... the only scoring... will be on you.
And so on. God I hate Caruso. Plus, Miami seems to be the offician vessel for the most tastelessly political and sensationalist stories. Vegas is 100x better. Grissom is god.
The PS1 version was great, and generally didn't fare too well. I'd love to see it rereleased with higher-resolution, more fluid graphics - it had the telltale PS1 chunkiness. The problem I ran into though was that it was just really, frustratingly hard to play without serious abuse of the "continue" command. Plus, it had the stupid old arcade tradition of "power that you lose the first time you get hurt" like in original Strider, which basically means that losing a single bar of health leaves you screwed and vulnerable.
Still, the action within the game was awesome fun.
Yep. alt-F4 is your friend... except that it often closes the browser window. Plus, flash ads often eat gestures, so mozgest down-right doesn't work either. There is no silver bullet when it comes to those things (besides closing the tab).
What confuses me is the flash-driven or script-driven popups that sneak past the Firefox built-in filter... why do they do that? I mean, at some point there has to be a call into FireFox to spawn a new window. Why can't it just eat that call no matter what? Personally, I've always felt that the ideal solution would've been a hybrid of normal pop-ups and the blocker bar - use a sidebar that pops up with a shrunken view of the popup. Dump all the popups that are children of a given window into it's sidebar, and mute them. That way it's trivial to see if the popup is relevant. Click to spawn in a new tab and unmute. Then there's no worries about "good" pop-ups vs. "bad" pop-ups - just dump everything that wasn't manually opened in a new window by the user into the sidebar. If the parent window closes, close all the windows remaining in the sidebar to prevent clutter from building up (tree-based garbage collection pwns).
Hmm.... that does make me wonder.
Google sells non-popup ads, and provides users with a blocker for popup ads. Personally, I can understand the valid, intelligent reasons for doing both - both giving consumers what they want.... but put together, it looks pretty damn evil.
The problem is that we're in the wake of GTA:San Andreas, and so every 2-bit knockoff company is making games about black kids shooting up their urban city.
When he means "black man with shotgun" he doesn't mean Malcolm from UT. He means "gang banging thug".
Now, personally, I'd extend that rule to apply to any game where the box art shows a protagonist wearing street-gang glothing with a shaved head wielding firearms, not just black ones... but by and large, right not the trend for street gangery is to have a black protagonist similar to San Andreas.