The only reason for these absurd space requirements is the tendency for game developpers to believe that including hours of cutscenes will make up for loosy gameplay and total lack of scenario.
Given that many games really fun to play take only a few megabytes, I cannot believe that any reasonnable game would require more than a DVD until some years.
Give up with a seg fault? Wouldn't it be better to give up with an error?
Off course ! Failing immediately does not implies crashing immediately, and an error message may help a bit.
My point is that on many systems, such carefully coded error messages will be replaced by a seg. fault nevertheless. So being extra-carefull, while nice, is often overkill.
While checking the results of malloc and realloc is good practice, given than some OSes (like Linux, but it is configurable) almost never return NULL even if they cannot guarante memory will be available (a result of using memory overcommit), it probably won't catch any error and will not prevent a seg. fault. Moreover, in most cases, if you do not get the memory you need, unless you have coded an alternative to perform the task (very rare), you might as well give up immediately.
I suppose the same kind of defect management specified for DVD+RW and the like (i.e. in UDF v1.5 for example) could be used on those flash memory based drives to reduce the wear, unless the drive already does it by itself.
I am using Fedora Core Three and wasn't able to find a word processor without serious bugs in it. I finally had to do some source code hacking to get a word processor that I could use.
You might want to try LaTeX (or LyX if you want a nice interface).
Almost bug-free, very low memory footprint, extremely fast, very high quality output, plays nice with versioning systems like CVS, works on all OSes: an almost endless list of qualities. It may have its problems, but its a damn fine solution to most word processing needs.
Besides those who are forced to use Word by their employers, I've always wondered why some people are using Word (or its clones): these word processors are even not easier to use ! (and most people who claim the contrary haven't tried LaTeX or LyX)
Maybe because from the price of the mac mini, your x86 hardware will be a bigger, less pretty and probably noiser ? "Better" is quite relative: It all depends on your priorities.
We could debate the interest of using Debian over Mac OS X, but if your really need Debian on a small computer, why not the mac mini ?
Monopoly, definition: Exclusive control by one group of the means of producing or selling a commodity or service
I fail to see where is Microsoft monopoly here. No one is forced to use their products and in fact, many people don't (for example, I don't). There even exists perfectly good alternatives for pretty much every product they sell.
I'm becoming really tired with this "monopoly" argument. Why deny the fact that many people just buy their product because they like these better?
You're right: Each version of the kernel doesn't requires applications to be compiled specifically for it.
Yet, where I work, the applications have to be specifically recompiled for each of the three versions of the Linux distribution currently in use.
While it may be mainly the in-house distribution designers fault, it is a real mess, and a major reason for many of the engineers staying away from Linux.
Most software used on the Atari ST to increase the disk space simply increased the number of sector per track from 9 (720kb) to 10 (800kb) or even 11 (and sometimes marginally increased the number of tracks). It worked very well. Most warez was distributed on such disks. Even some commerical games (try "maupiti island" for example : you can download disks images from http://www.lankhor.net/ if you want to check by yourself).
Why is Moz so much faster under Windows than under Linux ? Looking at the graphs, the gap is even not decreasing. What hardware is used in this tests ?
As for BSD you clearly are clueless, as they use aging versions of gcc
FreeBSD use the latest gcc.
It wont encourage you unless you know how poor Microsoft or Sun's compilers are
For most of our C++ work (I'm talking of big codes used in the electricity utilities business), Microsoft (on Windows) and Sun compilers (on Solaris/Sparc) are infinitely better than gcc : Better supports of the C++ standards, much better performance.
I don't say gcc is not good : it's an amazing piece of software, and invaluable for the open source developpement. But if you really want to bite, at least bite correctly.
Part of the betanews article is misleading : DjVu does not compress 'faster' than PDF/GIF/JPG but more efficiently, which enable faster transmission of compressed documents.
Note to the editor : please read the article more carefully next time. Thanks.
You should have a look at iCab, a nice, small and very popular browser for MacOS.
iCab is a 1Mb download, is extremely standard compliant, and can run with less that 5 Mb of ram. ... and you can use it on a Mac LC (68020 at 16Mhz, with 10 Mb ram) which is considerably slower than a 486/50.
You might be interested to learn that IE runs on Solaris, HP-UX and Alpha : See IE On Unix.
So far IE 5 runs on five platforms (six if you add Win 3.1/NT 3.5.1).
If you look at the list of companies that will match the donations to the EFF made by their employees, you will find Sony Pictures Entertainment, Walt Disney and Twentieth Century Fox for example (all members of the MPAA. See About the MPAA).
With big corporations like these behind us, finding funds to help win the DeCSS should be easy...
Apple claims the new OS will be partially preemptive
Mac OS X uses fully preemptive multitasking. It's core is Unix BSD.
Linux can nicely support fairly sophisticated functions, including firewalling, IP masquerading, and, overall, the creation of network environments that will indeed be very complex.
MacOS and Windows 9x simply don't support this.
Mac OS Open Transport is one of the most advanced networking stack, and support almost everything you can do on Linux. It's based upon Mentat Portable Streams (used on Novell NetWare, Hewlett-Packard HP-UX, IBM AIX, Compaq Tru64 UNIX...)
All too often, on Windows or MacOS, if a program crashes, this can readily pull down the rest of the system around it, as programs often are tightly integrated into the GUI which is tightly integrated into the OS kernel.
Most apps do not crash linux too bad, but at least on the Linux boxes I used, X windows had a tendency to crash and take the whole system with it...
Linux Advocacy is nice. Impartiality would be nicer. At least it would help differentiate Linux from Apple/Microsoft, whose advocacy is often far for beeing objective...
Note for the author : how long did it take you to set up a PPP connection with the Debian ppp-config utility ? not more than 3 minutes ? or about 5 minutes ? At least be coherent.
Slashdot Mirror
The only reason for these absurd space requirements is the tendency for game developpers to believe that including hours of cutscenes will make up for loosy gameplay and total lack of scenario.
Given that many games really fun to play take only a few megabytes, I cannot believe that any reasonnable game would require more than a DVD until some years.
Give up with a seg fault? Wouldn't it be better to give up with an error?
Off course ! Failing immediately does not implies crashing immediately, and an error message may help a bit.
My point is that on many systems, such carefully coded error messages will be replaced by a seg. fault nevertheless. So being extra-carefull, while nice, is often overkill.
While checking the results of malloc and realloc is good practice, given than some OSes (like Linux, but it is configurable) almost never return NULL even if they cannot guarante memory will be available (a result of using memory overcommit), it probably won't catch any error and will not prevent a seg. fault.
Moreover, in most cases, if you do not get the memory you need, unless you have coded an alternative to perform the task (very rare), you might as well give up immediately.
I suppose the same kind of defect management specified for DVD+RW and the like (i.e. in UDF v1.5 for example) could be used on those flash memory based drives to reduce the wear, unless the drive already does it by itself.
I am using Fedora Core Three and wasn't able to find a word processor without serious bugs in it. I finally had to do some source code hacking to get a word processor that I could use.
You might want to try LaTeX (or LyX if you want a nice interface).
Almost bug-free, very low memory footprint, extremely fast, very high quality output, plays nice with versioning systems like CVS, works on all OSes: an almost endless list of qualities. It may have its problems, but its a damn fine solution to most word processing needs.
Besides those who are forced to use Word by their employers, I've always wondered why some people are using Word (or its clones): these word processors are even not easier to use ! (and most people who claim the contrary haven't tried LaTeX or LyX)
Maybe because from the price of the mac mini, your x86 hardware will be a bigger, less pretty and probably noiser ? "Better" is quite relative: It all depends on your priorities.
We could debate the interest of using Debian over Mac OS X, but if your really need Debian on a small computer, why not the mac mini ?
Monopoly, definition: Exclusive control by one group of the means of producing or selling a commodity or service
I fail to see where is Microsoft monopoly here. No one is forced to use their products and in fact, many people don't (for example, I don't). There even exists perfectly good alternatives for pretty much every product they sell.
I'm becoming really tired with this "monopoly" argument. Why deny the fact that many people just buy their product because they like these better?
You are being paid to perform your job and not to devote all your time and energy to your employer.
If you can do your job while performing your hobby, it's hardly stealing: on the contrary, it's a fine suggestion.
libtorrent is released under the BSD-license.
See: http://libtorrent.sourceforge.net/manual.html
If GPL'ed, it probably would not have been used in eXeem (it's probably quite difficult to make a spyware ridden application from a GPL'ed app...).
You're right: Each version of the kernel doesn't requires applications to be compiled specifically for it.
Yet, where I work, the applications have to be specifically recompiled for each of the three versions of the Linux distribution currently in use.
While it may be mainly the in-house distribution designers fault, it is a real mess, and a major reason for many of the engineers staying away from Linux.
Most software used on the Atari ST to increase the disk space simply increased the number of sector per track from 9 (720kb) to 10 (800kb) or even 11 (and sometimes marginally increased the number of tracks).
It worked very well. Most warez was distributed on such disks. Even some commerical games (try "maupiti island" for example : you can download disks images from http://www.lankhor.net/ if you want to check by yourself).
On the other hand, Optima actually *had* nice storage sofware products (on the Mac for those I remember).
Why is Moz so much faster under Windows than under Linux ? Looking at the graphs, the gap is even not decreasing. What hardware is used in this tests ?
> With Mac OS, you have a 100% probability of guessing the correct number (unless you are a fucking idiot. ;-)
Strangely enough, nmap return this when run against my mac.
It does not look so easy to spoof.
TCP Sequence Prediction:
Class=random positive increments
Difficulty=60740 (Worthy challenge)
Sequence numbers: 1C4ABBC3 1C4CAFD8 1C4F99ED 1C518A02 1C55E217 1C57EE2C
Remote operating system guess: HP-UX B.11.00
As for BSD you clearly are clueless, as they use aging versions of gcc
FreeBSD use the latest gcc.
It wont encourage you unless you know how poor Microsoft or Sun's compilers are
For most of our C++ work (I'm talking of big codes used in the electricity utilities business), Microsoft (on Windows) and Sun compilers (on Solaris/Sparc) are infinitely better than gcc : Better supports of the C++ standards, much better performance.
I don't say gcc is not good : it's an amazing piece of software, and invaluable for the open source developpement. But if you really want to bite, at least bite correctly.
Part of the betanews article is misleading : DjVu does not compress 'faster' than PDF/GIF/JPG but more efficiently, which enable faster transmission of compressed documents.
Note to the editor : please read the article more carefully next time. Thanks.
It's an old technology developed at AT&T a few years ago. See : What is DjVu.
YMMV but it seems to work quite well.
You should have a look at iCab, a nice, small and very popular browser for MacOS.
... and you can use it on a Mac LC (68020 at 16Mhz, with 10 Mb ram) which is considerably slower than a 486/50.
iCab is a 1Mb download, is extremely standard compliant, and can run with less that 5 Mb of ram.
See it at iCab Home Page.
You might be interested to learn that IE runs on Solaris, HP-UX and Alpha : See IE On Unix.
So far IE 5 runs on five platforms (six if you add Win 3.1/NT 3.5.1).
If you look at the list of companies that will match the donations to the EFF made by their employees, you will find Sony Pictures Entertainment, Walt Disney and Twentieth Century Fox for example (all members of the MPAA. See About the MPAA).
With big corporations like these behind us, finding funds to help win the DeCSS should be easy...
Mac OS X uses fully preemptive multitasking. It's core is Unix BSD.
MacOS and Windows 9x simply don't support this.
Mac OS Open Transport is one of the most advanced networking stack, and support almost everything you can do on Linux. It's based upon Mentat Portable Streams (used on Novell NetWare, Hewlett-Packard HP-UX, IBM AIX, Compaq Tru64 UNIX...)
Most apps do not crash linux too bad, but at least on the Linux boxes I used, X windows had a tendency to crash and take the whole system with it...
Linux Advocacy is nice. Impartiality would be nicer. At least it would help differentiate Linux from Apple/Microsoft, whose advocacy is often far for beeing objective...
Note for the author : how long did it take you to set up a PPP connection with the Debian ppp-config utility ? not more than 3 minutes ? or about 5 minutes ? At least be coherent.