The major difference between apple and microsoft to me is that apple actually uses accepted standards where they can and don't invent their own and push them down your throath. Interoperability with other systems is a lot better than with any MS product.
That said, these sections to me smell like smth for a closed beta program which were blindly copied from somewhere, the lawyers didn't see any problems and the ppl who would know what this meant never got to see this, or weren't interested in it (I wouldn't be in their place). I never believe Apple would actually sue someone over this, they would hurt developers for their platforms, which is exactly one of the cornerstones of the success of the iPhone and their platform in general. Do you really believe they would suddenly refuse all opensource code to ever run on their iPhone? That would be a huge mistake from their side, and I'm pretty sure they're well aware of this. They count a lot on 'free' (as in non-paying - whatever kind) software for their phone if you look at their policy for $0 software on the apps store.
Apple knows very well that developers and applications are key to their success and acceptance, just look at what Microsoft did. Yes they also used a lot of questionable tactics, but they also took good care of their developer programs. Only thing Apple does differently is that it tries to keep their developers in check and on the same line. Microsoft let them do whatever they liked, and always kept backwards compatability. This resulted in a huge mess in windows, where they have some functions 2 or 3 times there, once a 'correct'-one, and the others with bugs which are exploited by some 3rd party or own software. This is a problem of 'closed source' software, and shouting that this is evil won't help a thing. Closed source software will always exist next to opensource, if you want it or not. Therefor, Apple tries to enforce much stricter rules to their developers, and apply an 'adapt or vanish' policy, which for the end-user is a good thing. If only they would apply this on their own software too (think Final Cut Pro). Sometimes - like here - they go a bit over the top, and get reactions like this.
I can't say that what you're saying is very 'informative', sorry. While linux indeed uses free memory to cache files, browsers do not cache 'files' in memory, they cache fully preprocessed DOM-trees and pre-rendered parts of webpages. Disabling in-memory caching only hurts performance there, forcing the browser to reprocess and revalidate all your pages. The only reason your browser uses the disk is because it's faster than your network connection and saves speed between browser-sessions or when visiting a page which has been cleaned up from your browser's own memory cache. Disk I/O - even with loads of OS-level caching will always be slower than letting the application just keep stuff in memory.
Most of your browser's in-memory cache is pre-processed data, including the last X entries accessible with your back-button - and that for each tab - are cached. This means images, DOM-tree, CSS-styles and sometimes even pre-rendered parts of the page.
I really hope you don't believe the disk io is the limit here. Parsing, validating and rendering takes up a good part of the responsiveness - even on modern PC's with fast quad-core cpu's. It's not only the CPU's that are advancing in speed, also webstandards require more & more processing power.
Also with todays machines with 1GB+ RAM - I don't really see the problem of memory useage. I have 4GB at home - and the moment my linux uses even only 25% of that for disk caching, it will have very old stuff in that disk-cache of which a lot would probably never be used again. I'd rather have my browser use 2Gb and feel extremely snappy, than have it use less memory just to preserve memory.
The 'non-free ' is one of the things which makes the majority of linux users non-gamers I think. A lot of them still think in black & white. Open = good, closed = bad, which is just plain stupid in my opinion.
You have 2 parts in the 'free' problem, the first is the accelerated drivers, the other is the game itself. Don't even dream of an open accelerated OpenGL driver which outperforms nVidia's propriatry version. ATI/AMD released the specs/source of the drivers for their cards - but do you honestly believe that's gonna 'improve' anything for 'a gamer' - or even performance-wise?
nVidia drivers started to improve the moment they were making money with their Quadro line on Linux workstations. They have steadily improved (for the user) and I have absolutely no problem with them at this moment. They work brilliantly and run games just fine. Even 'worse' (from your point of view) - I would recommend anyone an nVidia card to run Linux - and yes - with the 'propriatry closed' drivers.
Other part is the game, I heard some fanatic say 'they should open the sourcecode of ' - and then I really wonder what planet he is living on, they simply have no clue what they're talking about. I'm member of the warsow devteam (currently inactive though due to lack of time), and while it's an opensource game, the development process is not open (read: we only release sourcecode for each release) - for some very good reasons. Our development isn't even commercial, we don't have to take into account that we use licensed technology/libraries/... over which we don't have control since we're limited to GPL things. I'm not even touching the anti-cheat stuff here, which can - sadly - only work through obscurity and binary-only dynamic libs. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against warsow being 'opensource', but it does make the development process a lot harder. Sure, the community sometimes submits patches - but that's rare. The ones submitting multiple patches usually become a devteam-member anyway.
In the end it's plain simple, a typical gamer (95%+) wants an icon on his desktop which he clicks and the game launches. No fuzz, no 'oh no is my driver up-to-date', and certainly no 'warning your driver is not driver opensource/free/...'. They simply do not care, and why would they? I don't care anymore either. It's just pointless, if nVidia produces bad drivers, it hurts their business. They can develop and test drivers for hardware that's still in development and can only be simulated on huge clusters. I buy the lastest nVidia card and I can pretty much run any game I like. Right now, no waiting for 6 years for a decently optimized accelerated OpenGL driver - which simply doesn't exist in the Opensource world, Mesa is NOT optimized at all.
So that leaves maybe 5% of gamers which could actually care about something more than an icon on a desktop - and then we're not even talking about 'choice of OS' - since most of them got Vista or XP preinstalled anyway, why not use it. That leaves a very minor niche-market for the linux audience. Of the ones actually running linux (like myself), a lot of them end up with 2 pc's, one for gaming, one for 'linux stuff' (or dual boot - which I hate).
So why are so few gamers using linux? Convenience.
So you are absolutely sure not a single patent applies to OGG? I personally highly doubt this, and as long as this format isn't a viable target for patent-lawsuits you will never know. If it would be widely adopted, you can be absolutely sure of it that some patent-lawsuits will pop up. 1 firm committed to 'free' patent use, but there will be a whole lot more who don't when it would go mainstream (smth I don't believe in).
I personally don't like OGG, and that's one of the reasons. It is advocated as being free just because some people claim it is, and a lot of people believe this, but I don't buy that, sorry. I live in a real world where real money speaks. Yes I love the opensource movement and concept in general, I am actively contributing to some opensource projects too, but a lot of the/. readers here really have a limited view on the world. In an ideal world, yes - something like OGG/Theora would be a real nice sollution in theory, but in the real world out-there? Forget it.
Also when ignoring patents and 'propriatry' things, OGG is not superior to AAC, and Ogg Theora is not superior to H264 at all. From a commercial point of view - which is, whether you like it or not, very important - choosing OGG Theora over H264 is pointless. It has no market penetration what-so-ever, and there is not a single sign of this changing in the (near) future. H264 on the other hand is there, there are devices out-there with hardware support.
Also last time I heard, Theora wasn't exactly resource-friendly, which is one of the main points of H264, it scales up to resolutions higher than full HDTV nicely, while being able to deliver - with exactly the same codec - streaming video material for a cellphone in high-quality using low-bandwidth.
The hack wasn't by a university from the Netherlands, but one from Belgium (University of Leuven) together with researchers from Israel.
According to the local news here the hack would require you to be in the environment of the key for about 1 hour, after which it would require approximately 1 day of calculation to break the code.
No papers have been released yet - they would release them somewhere in April 2008.
I don't really get it. Is this article written by someone claiming to be part of an elite group or what? It sure sounds like it wants to claim that WoW is superior, unique or more special than anything you've ever seen. My personal opinion about WoW set aside (I think the game is repetitive & boring), I really wonder if ppl who claim this have anything to compare this to?
The article seems to assumes that no other games with dense communities exist. WoW had a lot of predecessors and still has a lot of competition in Azia. What do you think those games are? Exactly the same. Look at Guild-wars - same thing. Even games like Quake, UT, Battlefield, CS,... have a very close community. Clans/Guilds (same thing) are formed, new friendships are made,... The difference maybe is that this is not all in-game, but it's all related, part of the bigger picture of the game. The difference is that in MMORPG's these social structures are part of the planned game, while in other games it is up to the players themselfs to organise this.
So enlighten me - what's so special about a game with a tight community? Soccer/baseball/basketball are games too - they have communities aka 'fan-clubs'. It's not because they don't involve pc's that they're not an escape from reality/daily boring life...
1) RTFM - there is a nice readme provided with the official nvidia drivers which explains every module option it supports. This includes monitor selection, multi-head,... That took me 2 minutes to find out when I had that problem.
2) Update your drivers. They indeed used to do that, but now it works just fine.
Opensource is nice - very nice, I couldn't live without, it's my job, my hobby,... When I ask myself the question - what if suddenly propriatry drivers are forbidden in linux or any GPL'd soft? I'm very sorry - but that is limiting me - the user - in functionality. That's robbing ME from my freedom, and I don't like that, and I don't see who's rights it would be violating when I choose to use a propriatry driver in linux.
There is no way that you can convince ATI or nVidia to open their source - and I wouldn't see the point, they release new drivers like every few months - what are they gonna do? Fork them? And resync every 6 months when a next-gen chip comes out? Those projects will lag behind, and in the end fail. Both nVidia and ATI listened to the linux user base that asked for drivers - and they are becoming better and better. Ok - the developers asked for the specs, but do you really think a full opengl implementation would be written with these performance figures by an opensource project especially for 1 chipset? Look at MesaGL, and how long it took to be "stable". Sure it can be patched and accellerated by hardware, but it won't come close to the fps that the "closed source" drivers deliver, and that's what users ask for. True - opensource is all about the developers wanting to develop something, but me as a developer - I want to write something that will be used by people and that they're happy about it, so I can feel some pride. Not "develop to develop" and write something "opensource" which sucks, or even of less quality than a closed-source competitor. You may even write software with a genius design behind it, if it's slower than a non-free competitor - the users will decide, it's all about the user in the end. Software without users will die.
Both nVidia and ATI listened to their bigger customer base - the users who will probably never even open a.c file in their entire life to look at the code, not the developers. Releasing their drivers for other platforms was probably a good thing for them to do regarding maintainability and flexibility when using the same codebase, they could be convinced that this was in their best interest or at least benefit them. Releasing specs is a whole other thing, it's not like that's a 5 page manual they should release, and graphics cards are becoming more and more complicated.
For me as a user - I want to be free to use propriatry drivers -is it that hard? I thought open-source was all about choice. What's next - you're not allowed to run closed-source apps anymore with a GPL'd kernel? I personally don't see the difference. Closed-source linux apps are usually linked to glibc - no? Oh no - they use kernel-features too!!!
FSF lately seems to be thinking like the moslim extremists in a way that "my way is the only good-one, and everybody should comply". I honestly think that the FSF is hurting the opensource-movement more than it's helping it when saying such stupid things. Wake up - open your eyes ffs - you're not alone in the world. A bit of idealism can be nice, but a bit of realism doesn't hurt either.
The opensource movement should be gratefull that Linus is so openminded and the fact that he lives in this world, and not some idealistic utopia.
Sorry - but this is pure bullshit imho. I think it's really UgLy that YoU Can WritE aNytHing caSe inSenSitiVe, or do you like this last part of the sentence?
If you have a function thisDoesSomeStuff() and you see it being used like Thisdoessomestuff() thisdoessomeStuff() thisdoesDomeStuff() all over the place, that's pritty ugly imho. And to be honest - I never had problems with case sensitivity in my whole carreer - even in the beginning. I think it's a good thing that you should mind what you're typing - this doesn't give the impression that the computer is smart and will try it's best to understand you. As a programmer you should very well be aware that the thing you're trying to tell has to be explained as if it is a complete moron you're talking to.
Another point - the shifted delimiters. First of all - you always use both hands if you code a lot, so I don't really see the problem. I did write some code in VB - and that's exactly the thing that I absolutely HATE - no clear delimiters. In any decent editor - you can jump to the matching bracket with a simple key-combo. In VB - this is not possible in a simple manner.
I personally think you should keep beginning programmers on a very short leech, make them very aware of what happens if they do something stupid. The most important thing about being a programmer is absolutely not the language, but the thinking. VB does too much thinking for them. Yes it's "easy" - but programming is not supposed to be "easy" - bugs are also made "easily", and doing stupid things that work are even "easier".
I personally would start with C or Java or C#, in the beginning preferably C actually and let them implement things which actually does something seriously wrong (buffer overflow etc) and explain what this is. Afterwards, once they understand the basics like functions, loops, variables, arrays - switch to Java or C#. The difference isn't that big - so it won't have any problems. You simply explain that here, boundry-checking is done for you. Then you can start with sorting and other basic algorithms/concepts like recursion. Next step is oop. I can't understand how programmers can be trained without basic concepts of the OS and memory-model. I have seen more than 1 example of a programmer using smth "standard" in VB, i.e. hidden listboxes to store large amounts of data.
I've encountered too much developers (not only VB, but sadly enough but still majority) who simply have no idea what something does if they use it. If you would ask them to write smth simular themselves they would simply stare at you like you just asked them to prove that einstein's relativity theory was wrong. They just stop thinking beyond their comfortable "everything is magic" world...
Ok - title makes it sound like a troll - or whatever. Fact is, these people have to make a living. Other fact is - a lot of people made a living of their work without giving ANYTHING back.
As you can see on their CVS servers, there are barely any external contributions. Isn't that the whole point of GPL? Everybody profits from everybodies changes. That didn't happen, so YOU may be using Nessus 2.x without giving anything back. It's not a bad thing, but these people do this for their living. All the bitching about the moral of the whole GPL stuff, why isn't there any bitching about ripping off Nessus? It's the same thing for me as Cherry OS - which ripped off the wine project. The only difference was, the nessus rip-offs provided the source code, written by Tenable and were open about it. What's the difference? They openly say "I'm a parasite, and I admit it", and it's ok by the GPL, so no problem. I would not have a problem with it when those people contributed to the nessus project, and I'm a absolutely confident that it would still be GPL'd if this would have been the case - but it isn't. Sorry - if you make money out of a project like that, the least you could do is contribute in some way to it.
I think there's a huge difference between company-driven OSS programs, and "hobby" projects in this regard. If I would be the CEO or responsible for a company, and I suddenly see the profit go down because your biggest competitors are guys simply copying all your hard work, without giving anything back and having no development costs at all, I wouldn't hesitate for a second what to do. Do something that gives me the advantage back - and they did. Even legally, I would have to, simply to protect the rights of the share-holders, because that's the world we live in, not some kind of GPL fairy-tale.
Now it is forked, which is an old version which is 1 a 2 years behind the current Nessus release. If nobody contributed in the first project, do they really believe that anybody will contribute to the "GPL" fork? Maybe in the beginning, but when all the buzz is over, forget it. The project will be burried in a few years. Most companies like plug-and-play security-scanners, but paying someone to help writing one? Don't forget, Nessus isn't targettet at the hobbyist's network at home, but at large enterprise-size networks. This means, companies, not people who use and profit from it - either way. Why do you think there aren't any other large GPL'd network intrusion/monitoring systems? Because the geek with his 20 computer-network doesn't need a tool like Nessus, but companies do. GPL is about freedom for the people for me, companies are there to make money, and if they use a tool to ensure they can make money, I think it would be perfectly normal to charge them for it in some way. GPL doesn't provide anything like this, too bad, but I perfectly understand the decision they made, no hard feelings. If I'd be in their shoes, I'd do the same thing.
I also bet most of the ones bitching about it not being GPL anymore never contributed to any GPL project in some way. Stop critisizing, and start contributing to the GPL-fork, but no, prolly no-one will do it anyway, spending time posting bullshit on/. is soo much more important... *sigh* It's not your right to have access to someone's work, it's a privilege. If it's abused, too bad, but don't bitch about it when the rules change due to that...
Compare it to someone who makes doors for friends, they just need to pay the materials, he does the work for free cause he likes it. Then he sees that a lot of people he knows want doors. He still makes them for free, but charges something to install them. Suddenly other people go fetch doors he makes for free, and start charging for installing them also, but no-one offers to help him making the doors. Doesn't that sound plain wrong to you? To me it does... If he then starts charging for a new kind of doors which are more silent, but the old-ones would still be for free, would you bitch about it? Peo
>> Disclaimer: I am the chief architect of Globule, the experimental content-distribution network used to host www.minix3.org/.'ing is a great way to test your network isn't it?:D
now what? Would there be any way to fake it? Until that's not possible - I have mixed feelings about this - we could be worse off with these findings. As long as this system is out-there we can check who printed smth ourselfs if we really want to... Isn't that a more serious privacy issue? Ok - shouldn't have been there in the first place but as long as there's no way to stop this...
Re:specifications are good for real world stuff
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Linus Says No to 'Specs'
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I think there's a lot of confusion over the word "specs". That can mean a few things for software:
1) What the program should and shouldn't do. These can be "demands" from the customer. Should be non-technical, not too detailed - but should be clear. If the customer has specific I/O demands, this should refer to other documents for this, don't mix these things.
2) Internal software analisys. Should describe the internal main blocks, in most software companies I've worked, this is done on a blackboard with all important dev's there brainstorming about a project. If it gets really complicated someone might be victimized of putting that on paper:) It shouldn't be too complicated, but the purpose of these kind of "specs" are often mis-interpreted by "pure analysists", what in some cases ends up in a way to detailed almost pseudocode alike book. This is BAD, by theory leaves no room for interpretation, but in practice it does. The person who wrote this could have written the code instead - and would have found all contradictions, errors, and would have been faced with all practical problems his "point of view" suffers from. Sadly enough - these kind of specs (in general) usually end up way too detailed. Programmers always have their "speciality" if they are left with some freedom. Let them do their own thinking give them an "IO spec" for their part - and let them do their job. At least that's what I do, I don't want code-monkeys in my team - I want individual coders who actually understand what the hell is going on. Too bad they're becoming harder and harder to find. I blame Visual Basic *grin*
3) An I/O or interface spec. What goes in and what goes out, described in what form, as short as possible, with flexibility so someone can easily add a proposal/extention to it. These are not easy to make, but luckily I work in a competitive team that understands software writing:) Basicly these are nothing more than a written down version of good and clear agreements. If reality changes - these should be changed, never the other way around, but which happens way too much.
These are 3 completely separate things. All 3 need to be done more or less for major projects, some can be left out. Mixing these should be avoided as much as possible. The first 2 I consider to be "software specs", the last-one is something completely different and I see a lot of people here confusing these. HTTP, TCP/IP, HTML, XML, XHTML, RSS and even POSIX aren't software specs, these are standardized I/O / interface specs. Such specs are in general a good thing, they describe how something should be used, so multiple programs can "communicate" with each other using the same interface.
As far as I've seen, writing software to specs is an utopia. The worst specs usually are specs written to an existing program. It's fine as "documentation" and shouldn't be used for anything else, certainly not for writing a new version. Writing detailed specs after a project is finished (well - as far as that's possible) usually has little point. Writing documentation on the other hand has a point, but this is widely regarded as a boring unimportant job (and I can't blame anybody who does:P)
Anyway - what I suspect that Linus means is a mixture of these 3 - a mess which mixes everything in a way to detailed form. Most specs that are written are plain wrong, bad, and mix too many things. Most of the software specs are written by people who think they know everything. Nobody does.. except me offcourse:p
I have a P910i, and Opera is supplied on CD. It's a rather big application (2/3mb if I recall well) after being installed. For a symbian phone, that's big, so I can understand they choose not to by default. They can't strip out the "default" symbian browser cause that's rather integrated and heavily used in the UIQ interface. Opera will however be the default browser on UIQ 3.0 platforms where it will replace the symbian browser.
Same here, but it's not really the poor translation that's bothering me (well every translation in Dutch sounds silly to me) - it's the fact that I'm used to English terms in such programs. I HATE it that it chooses such things for me without even a standard point&click way to change it. I happen to run an English windows here at work, configured to be the region "Dutch (Belgium)" cause I need a euro sign and decent date/time notations, but I DON'T want programs to be in Dutch, but here it automaticly detects this and automaticly assumes I want to see Dutch.
Well, deleted the dutch language locals, and now it works fine in english...
Why wouldn't Donny Darko be a good movie? It has an excellent story, very good acting, nice screenplay, what do you want more? This movie has gotten a cult movie status over the few years that it's around for a reason...
You clearly didn't even take the time to actually READ the list. Brasil, 8 1/2, The 400 Blows and Citizen Kane are in the list...
Personally I think this top100 list stinks. Ok, it contains excellent movies, but I mean - wtf? Put the ultra-crappy "The fly" in there?? A lot of movies are simply missing. If Blade Runner is there (which is a very good movie) - where's Alien? I also didn't see any recent french movie in-there (no - I'm not french myself:) ). Le fabuleux destin d'Amelie Poulain is Jean-Pierre Jeunet's undisputable masterpiece, and certainly belongs in my list. Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samourai is missing, I think it's a lot better than his Yojimbo (which is also good, but not as good as...). Also there is no anime - which surprises me. I'm not a real anime fan, on the contrary, I don't like most anime, but there are some magnificent anime movies, like Sen to chihiro no kamikakushi (english title: "Spirited away") or Akira.
Barry Lyndon is in the list, and that movie disappointed me, I don't like it, Kubrick made much better movies than that (Full Metal Jacket, A Clockwork Orange, Dr. Strangelove).
Movies I think are missing: - Lost Highway (David Lynch) - Pi (Darren Aronofsky) - Requiem for a Dream (Aranofsky again:)) - Reservoir Dogs (Tarantino) - La Vita è bella (Roberto Benigni) - Full metal jacket (Stanley Kubrick) - Sen to chihiro no kamikakushi/Spirited away (Hayao Miyazaki) - Alien (Ridley Scott) - American Beauty (Sam Mendes) - Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola) - Das Boot (Wolfgang Petersen) - Das experiment (Oliver Hirschbiegel) - Fight Club (David Fincher) - Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (Guy Ritchie) - Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly) - Festen (Thomas Vinterberg) - Dogville (Lars von Trier) - Léon/The Professional (Luc Besson) - Trainspotting (Danny Boyle) - The great dictator (Charlie Chaplin) - La Meglio gioventù (Marco Tullio Giordana) -...
These are mostly recent movies, because I think they lookt a bit too much at the past. Yes, there have been made great movies back-then, but nowadays a lot more movies are produced, resulting in a lot of crappy stuff, but also more good things. I don't say the older movies are bad, but a lot of good movies have been produced in the last 15-20 years...
Some things in the list (positively) surprised me though, like Miller's Crossing - which is an excellent movie. I would have put it in the list, but wouldn't have expected it there:) But well - taste is taste, the world will never agree on the top 100 movies
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The major difference between apple and microsoft to me is that apple actually uses accepted standards where they can and don't invent their own and push them down your throath. Interoperability with other systems is a lot better than with any MS product.
That said, these sections to me smell like smth for a closed beta program which were blindly copied from somewhere, the lawyers didn't see any problems and the ppl who would know what this meant never got to see this, or weren't interested in it (I wouldn't be in their place). I never believe Apple would actually sue someone over this, they would hurt developers for their platforms, which is exactly one of the cornerstones of the success of the iPhone and their platform in general. Do you really believe they would suddenly refuse all opensource code to ever run on their iPhone? That would be a huge mistake from their side, and I'm pretty sure they're well aware of this. They count a lot on 'free' (as in non-paying - whatever kind) software for their phone if you look at their policy for $0 software on the apps store.
Apple knows very well that developers and applications are key to their success and acceptance, just look at what Microsoft did. Yes they also used a lot of questionable tactics, but they also took good care of their developer programs. Only thing Apple does differently is that it tries to keep their developers in check and on the same line. Microsoft let them do whatever they liked, and always kept backwards compatability. This resulted in a huge mess in windows, where they have some functions 2 or 3 times there, once a 'correct'-one, and the others with bugs which are exploited by some 3rd party or own software. This is a problem of 'closed source' software, and shouting that this is evil won't help a thing. Closed source software will always exist next to opensource, if you want it or not. Therefor, Apple tries to enforce much stricter rules to their developers, and apply an 'adapt or vanish' policy, which for the end-user is a good thing. If only they would apply this on their own software too (think Final Cut Pro). Sometimes - like here - they go a bit over the top, and get reactions like this.
Exactly what I was thinking, works brilliantly on both my Windows and Linux boxes, and uses all cores.
I can't say that what you're saying is very 'informative', sorry. While linux indeed uses free memory to cache files, browsers do not cache 'files' in memory, they cache fully preprocessed DOM-trees and pre-rendered parts of webpages. Disabling in-memory caching only hurts performance there, forcing the browser to reprocess and revalidate all your pages. The only reason your browser uses the disk is because it's faster than your network connection and saves speed between browser-sessions or when visiting a page which has been cleaned up from your browser's own memory cache. Disk I/O - even with loads of OS-level caching will always be slower than letting the application just keep stuff in memory.
Most of your browser's in-memory cache is pre-processed data, including the last X entries accessible with your back-button - and that for each tab - are cached. This means images, DOM-tree, CSS-styles and sometimes even pre-rendered parts of the page.
I really hope you don't believe the disk io is the limit here. Parsing, validating and rendering takes up a good part of the responsiveness - even on modern PC's with fast quad-core cpu's. It's not only the CPU's that are advancing in speed, also webstandards require more & more processing power.
Also with todays machines with 1GB+ RAM - I don't really see the problem of memory useage. I have 4GB at home - and the moment my linux uses even only 25% of that for disk caching, it will have very old stuff in that disk-cache of which a lot would probably never be used again. I'd rather have my browser use 2Gb and feel extremely snappy, than have it use less memory just to preserve memory.
The 'non-free ' is one of the things which makes the majority of linux users non-gamers I think. A lot of them still think in black & white. Open = good, closed = bad, which is just plain stupid in my opinion.
You have 2 parts in the 'free' problem, the first is the accelerated drivers, the other is the game itself. Don't even dream of an open accelerated OpenGL driver which outperforms nVidia's propriatry version. ATI/AMD released the specs/source of the drivers for their cards - but do you honestly believe that's gonna 'improve' anything for 'a gamer' - or even performance-wise?
nVidia drivers started to improve the moment they were making money with their Quadro line on Linux workstations. They have steadily improved (for the user) and I have absolutely no problem with them at this moment. They work brilliantly and run games just fine. Even 'worse' (from your point of view) - I would recommend anyone an nVidia card to run Linux - and yes - with the 'propriatry closed' drivers.
Other part is the game, I heard some fanatic say 'they should open the sourcecode of ' - and then I really wonder what planet he is living on, they simply have no clue what they're talking about. I'm member of the warsow devteam (currently inactive though due to lack of time), and while it's an opensource game, the development process is not open (read: we only release sourcecode for each release) - for some very good reasons. Our development isn't even commercial, we don't have to take into account that we use licensed technology/libraries/... over which we don't have control since we're limited to GPL things. I'm not even touching the anti-cheat stuff here, which can - sadly - only work through obscurity and binary-only dynamic libs. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against warsow being 'opensource', but it does make the development process a lot harder. Sure, the community sometimes submits patches - but that's rare. The ones submitting multiple patches usually become a devteam-member anyway.
In the end it's plain simple, a typical gamer (95%+) wants an icon on his desktop which he clicks and the game launches. No fuzz, no 'oh no is my driver up-to-date', and certainly no 'warning your driver is not driver opensource/free/...'. They simply do not care, and why would they? I don't care anymore either. It's just pointless, if nVidia produces bad drivers, it hurts their business. They can develop and test drivers for hardware that's still in development and can only be simulated on huge clusters. I buy the lastest nVidia card and I can pretty much run any game I like. Right now, no waiting for 6 years for a decently optimized accelerated OpenGL driver - which simply doesn't exist in the Opensource world, Mesa is NOT optimized at all.
So that leaves maybe 5% of gamers which could actually care about something more than an icon on a desktop - and then we're not even talking about 'choice of OS' - since most of them got Vista or XP preinstalled anyway, why not use it. That leaves a very minor niche-market for the linux audience. Of the ones actually running linux (like myself), a lot of them end up with 2 pc's, one for gaming, one for 'linux stuff' (or dual boot - which I hate).
So why are so few gamers using linux? Convenience.
Was thinking exactly the same, use Heise's tool too - and it works brilliantly :)
So you are absolutely sure not a single patent applies to OGG? I personally highly doubt this, and as long as this format isn't a viable target for patent-lawsuits you will never know. If it would be widely adopted, you can be absolutely sure of it that some patent-lawsuits will pop up. 1 firm committed to 'free' patent use, but there will be a whole lot more who don't when it would go mainstream (smth I don't believe in).
/. readers here really have a limited view on the world. In an ideal world, yes - something like OGG/Theora would be a real nice sollution in theory, but in the real world out-there? Forget it.
I personally don't like OGG, and that's one of the reasons. It is advocated as being free just because some people claim it is, and a lot of people believe this, but I don't buy that, sorry. I live in a real world where real money speaks. Yes I love the opensource movement and concept in general, I am actively contributing to some opensource projects too, but a lot of the
Also when ignoring patents and 'propriatry' things, OGG is not superior to AAC, and Ogg Theora is not superior to H264 at all. From a commercial point of view - which is, whether you like it or not, very important - choosing OGG Theora over H264 is pointless. It has no market penetration what-so-ever, and there is not a single sign of this changing in the (near) future. H264 on the other hand is there, there are devices out-there with hardware support.
Also last time I heard, Theora wasn't exactly resource-friendly, which is one of the main points of H264, it scales up to resolutions higher than full HDTV nicely, while being able to deliver - with exactly the same codec - streaming video material for a cellphone in high-quality using low-bandwidth.
The hack wasn't by a university from the Netherlands, but one from Belgium (University of Leuven) together with researchers from Israel.
According to the local news here the hack would require you to be in the environment of the key for about 1 hour, after which it would require approximately 1 day of calculation to break the code.
No papers have been released yet - they would release them somewhere in April 2008.
You have clearly never played Duke Nukem 3D :)
I don't really get it. Is this article written by someone claiming to be part of an elite group or what? It sure sounds like it wants to claim that WoW is superior, unique or more special than anything you've ever seen. My personal opinion about WoW set aside (I think the game is repetitive & boring), I really wonder if ppl who claim this have anything to compare this to?
... have a very close community. Clans/Guilds (same thing) are formed, new friendships are made, ... The difference maybe is that this is not all in-game, but it's all related, part of the bigger picture of the game. The difference is that in MMORPG's these social structures are part of the planned game, while in other games it is up to the players themselfs to organise this.
The article seems to assumes that no other games with dense communities exist. WoW had a lot of predecessors and still has a lot of competition in Azia. What do you think those games are? Exactly the same. Look at Guild-wars - same thing. Even games like Quake, UT, Battlefield, CS,
So enlighten me - what's so special about a game with a tight community? Soccer/baseball/basketball are games too - they have communities aka 'fan-clubs'. It's not because they don't involve pc's that they're not an escape from reality/daily boring life...
Doom suddenly became a lot less fun :(
1) RTFM - there is a nice readme provided with the official nvidia drivers which explains every module option it supports. This includes monitor selection, multi-head, ... That took me 2 minutes to find out when I had that problem.
2) Update your drivers. They indeed used to do that, but now it works just fine.
Opensource is nice - very nice, I couldn't live without, it's my job, my hobby, ... When I ask myself the question - what if suddenly propriatry drivers are forbidden in linux or any GPL'd soft? I'm very sorry - but that is limiting me - the user - in functionality. That's robbing ME from my freedom, and I don't like that, and I don't see who's rights it would be violating when I choose to use a propriatry driver in linux.
.c file in their entire life to look at the code, not the developers. Releasing their drivers for other platforms was probably a good thing for them to do regarding maintainability and flexibility when using the same codebase, they could be convinced that this was in their best interest or at least benefit them. Releasing specs is a whole other thing, it's not like that's a 5 page manual they should release, and graphics cards are becoming more and more complicated.
There is no way that you can convince ATI or nVidia to open their source - and I wouldn't see the point, they release new drivers like every few months - what are they gonna do? Fork them? And resync every 6 months when a next-gen chip comes out? Those projects will lag behind, and in the end fail. Both nVidia and ATI listened to the linux user base that asked for drivers - and they are becoming better and better. Ok - the developers asked for the specs, but do you really think a full opengl implementation would be written with these performance figures by an opensource project especially for 1 chipset? Look at MesaGL, and how long it took to be "stable". Sure it can be patched and accellerated by hardware, but it won't come close to the fps that the "closed source" drivers deliver, and that's what users ask for.
True - opensource is all about the developers wanting to develop something, but me as a developer - I want to write something that will be used by people and that they're happy about it, so I can feel some pride. Not "develop to develop" and write something "opensource" which sucks, or even of less quality than a closed-source competitor. You may even write software with a genius design behind it, if it's slower than a non-free competitor - the users will decide, it's all about the user in the end. Software without users will die.
Both nVidia and ATI listened to their bigger customer base - the users who will probably never even open a
For me as a user - I want to be free to use propriatry drivers -is it that hard? I thought open-source was all about choice. What's next - you're not allowed to run closed-source apps anymore with a GPL'd kernel? I personally don't see the difference. Closed-source linux apps are usually linked to glibc - no? Oh no - they use kernel-features too!!!
FSF lately seems to be thinking like the moslim extremists in a way that "my way is the only good-one, and everybody should comply". I honestly think that the FSF is hurting the opensource-movement more than it's helping it when saying such stupid things. Wake up - open your eyes ffs - you're not alone in the world. A bit of idealism can be nice, but a bit of realism doesn't hurt either.
The opensource movement should be gratefull that Linus is so openminded and the fact that he lives in this world, and not some idealistic utopia.
Sorry - but this is pure bullshit imho. I think it's really UgLy that YoU Can WritE aNytHing caSe inSenSitiVe, or do you like this last part of the sentence?
If you have a function thisDoesSomeStuff() and you see it being used like Thisdoessomestuff() thisdoessomeStuff() thisdoesDomeStuff() all over the place, that's pritty ugly imho. And to be honest - I never had problems with case sensitivity in my whole carreer - even in the beginning. I think it's a good thing that you should mind what you're typing - this doesn't give the impression that the computer is smart and will try it's best to understand you. As a programmer you should very well be aware that the thing you're trying to tell has to be explained as if it is a complete moron you're talking to.
Another point - the shifted delimiters. First of all - you always use both hands if you code a lot, so I don't really see the problem. I did write some code in VB - and that's exactly the thing that I absolutely HATE - no clear delimiters. In any decent editor - you can jump to the matching bracket with a simple key-combo. In VB - this is not possible in a simple manner.
I personally think you should keep beginning programmers on a very short leech, make them very aware of what happens if they do something stupid. The most important thing about being a programmer is absolutely not the language, but the thinking. VB does too much thinking for them. Yes it's "easy" - but programming is not supposed to be "easy" - bugs are also made "easily", and doing stupid things that work are even "easier".
I personally would start with C or Java or C#, in the beginning preferably C actually and let them implement things which actually does something seriously wrong (buffer overflow etc) and explain what this is. Afterwards, once they understand the basics like functions, loops, variables, arrays - switch to Java or C#. The difference isn't that big - so it won't have any problems. You simply explain that here, boundry-checking is done for you. Then you can start with sorting and other basic algorithms/concepts like recursion. Next step is oop. I can't understand how programmers can be trained without basic concepts of the OS and memory-model. I have seen more than 1 example of a programmer using smth "standard" in VB, i.e. hidden listboxes to store large amounts of data.
I've encountered too much developers (not only VB, but sadly enough but still majority) who simply have no idea what something does if they use it. If you would ask them to write smth simular themselves they would simply stare at you like you just asked them to prove that einstein's relativity theory was wrong. They just stop thinking beyond their comfortable "everything is magic" world...
Oh come on, Blair is the BOB (bend-over-bitch) of Bush, I'm in deeper shit, I'm from Belgium... :D
Ok - title makes it sound like a troll - or whatever. Fact is, these people have to make a living. Other fact is - a lot of people made a living of their work without giving ANYTHING back.
/. is soo much more important... *sigh* It's not your right to have access to someone's work, it's a privilege. If it's abused, too bad, but don't bitch about it when the rules change due to that...
As you can see on their CVS servers, there are barely any external contributions. Isn't that the whole point of GPL? Everybody profits from everybodies changes. That didn't happen, so YOU may be using Nessus 2.x without giving anything back. It's not a bad thing, but these people do this for their living. All the bitching about the moral of the whole GPL stuff, why isn't there any bitching about ripping off Nessus? It's the same thing for me as Cherry OS - which ripped off the wine project. The only difference was, the nessus rip-offs provided the source code, written by Tenable and were open about it. What's the difference? They openly say "I'm a parasite, and I admit it", and it's ok by the GPL, so no problem. I would not have a problem with it when those people contributed to the nessus project, and I'm a absolutely confident that it would still be GPL'd if this would have been the case - but it isn't. Sorry - if you make money out of a project like that, the least you could do is contribute in some way to it.
I think there's a huge difference between company-driven OSS programs, and "hobby" projects in this regard. If I would be the CEO or responsible for a company, and I suddenly see the profit go down because your biggest competitors are guys simply copying all your hard work, without giving anything back and having no development costs at all, I wouldn't hesitate for a second what to do. Do something that gives me the advantage back - and they did. Even legally, I would have to, simply to protect the rights of the share-holders, because that's the world we live in, not some kind of GPL fairy-tale.
Now it is forked, which is an old version which is 1 a 2 years behind the current Nessus release. If nobody contributed in the first project, do they really believe that anybody will contribute to the "GPL" fork? Maybe in the beginning, but when all the buzz is over, forget it. The project will be burried in a few years. Most companies like plug-and-play security-scanners, but paying someone to help writing one? Don't forget, Nessus isn't targettet at the hobbyist's network at home, but at large enterprise-size networks. This means, companies, not people who use and profit from it - either way. Why do you think there aren't any other large GPL'd network intrusion/monitoring systems? Because the geek with his 20 computer-network doesn't need a tool like Nessus, but companies do. GPL is about freedom for the people for me, companies are there to make money, and if they use a tool to ensure they can make money, I think it would be perfectly normal to charge them for it in some way. GPL doesn't provide anything like this, too bad, but I perfectly understand the decision they made, no hard feelings. If I'd be in their shoes, I'd do the same thing.
I also bet most of the ones bitching about it not being GPL anymore never contributed to any GPL project in some way. Stop critisizing, and start contributing to the GPL-fork, but no, prolly no-one will do it anyway, spending time posting bullshit on
Compare it to someone who makes doors for friends, they just need to pay the materials, he does the work for free cause he likes it. Then he sees that a lot of people he knows want doors. He still makes them for free, but charges something to install them. Suddenly other people go fetch doors he makes for free, and start charging for installing them also, but no-one offers to help him making the doors. Doesn't that sound plain wrong to you? To me it does... If he then starts charging for a new kind of doors which are more silent, but the old-ones would still be for free, would you bitch about it?
Peo
That's why God created VIM
>> Disclaimer: I am the chief architect of Globule, the experimental content-distribution network used to host www.minix3.org /.'ing is a great way to test your network isn't it? :D
now what? Would there be any way to fake it? Until that's not possible - I have mixed feelings about this - we could be worse off with these findings. As long as this system is out-there we can check who printed smth ourselfs if we really want to... Isn't that a more serious privacy issue? Ok - shouldn't have been there in the first place but as long as there's no way to stop this...
I think there's a lot of confusion over the word "specs". That can mean a few things for software:
:) It shouldn't be too complicated, but the purpose of these kind of "specs" are often mis-interpreted by "pure analysists", what in some cases ends up in a way to detailed almost pseudocode alike book. This is BAD, by theory leaves no room for interpretation, but in practice it does. The person who wrote this could have written the code instead - and would have found all contradictions, errors, and would have been faced with all practical problems his "point of view" suffers from.
:) Basicly these are nothing more than a written down version of good and clear agreements. If reality changes - these should be changed, never the other way around, but which happens way too much.
:P)
:p
1) What the program should and shouldn't do. These can be "demands" from the customer. Should be non-technical, not too detailed - but should be clear. If the customer has specific I/O demands, this should refer to other documents for this, don't mix these things.
2) Internal software analisys. Should describe the internal main blocks, in most software companies I've worked, this is done on a blackboard with all important dev's there brainstorming about a project. If it gets really complicated someone might be victimized of putting that on paper
Sadly enough - these kind of specs (in general) usually end up way too detailed. Programmers always have their "speciality" if they are left with some freedom. Let them do their own thinking give them an "IO spec" for their part - and let them do their job. At least that's what I do, I don't want code-monkeys in my team - I want individual coders who actually understand what the hell is going on. Too bad they're becoming harder and harder to find. I blame Visual Basic *grin*
3) An I/O or interface spec. What goes in and what goes out, described in what form, as short as possible, with flexibility so someone can easily add a proposal/extention to it. These are not easy to make, but luckily I work in a competitive team that understands software writing
These are 3 completely separate things. All 3 need to be done more or less for major projects, some can be left out. Mixing these should be avoided as much as possible. The first 2 I consider to be "software specs", the last-one is something completely different and I see a lot of people here confusing these. HTTP, TCP/IP, HTML, XML, XHTML, RSS and even POSIX aren't software specs, these are standardized I/O / interface specs. Such specs are in general a good thing, they describe how something should be used, so multiple programs can "communicate" with each other using the same interface.
As far as I've seen, writing software to specs is an utopia. The worst specs usually are specs written to an existing program. It's fine as "documentation" and shouldn't be used for anything else, certainly not for writing a new version. Writing detailed specs after a project is finished (well - as far as that's possible) usually has little point. Writing documentation on the other hand has a point, but this is widely regarded as a boring unimportant job (and I can't blame anybody who does
Anyway - what I suspect that Linus means is a mixture of these 3 - a mess which mixes everything in a way to detailed form. Most specs that are written are plain wrong, bad, and mix too many things. Most of the software specs are written by people who think they know everything. Nobody does.. except me offcourse
I have a P910i, and Opera is supplied on CD. It's a rather big application (2/3mb if I recall well) after being installed. For a symbian phone, that's big, so I can understand they choose not to by default.
They can't strip out the "default" symbian browser cause that's rather integrated and heavily used in the UIQ interface. Opera will however be the default browser on UIQ 3.0 platforms where it will replace the symbian browser.
That works fine for quite a while now without any dirty hacks :)
what about Encyclopedia Dramatica? :)
Same here, but it's not really the poor translation that's bothering me (well every translation in Dutch sounds silly to me) - it's the fact that I'm used to English terms in such programs.
I HATE it that it chooses such things for me without even a standard point&click way to change it. I happen to run an English windows here at work, configured to be the region "Dutch (Belgium)" cause I need a euro sign and decent date/time notations, but I DON'T want programs to be in Dutch, but here it automaticly detects this and automaticly assumes I want to see Dutch.
Well, deleted the dutch language locals, and now it works fine in english...
Why wouldn't Donny Darko be a good movie? It has an excellent story, very good acting, nice screenplay, what do you want more? This movie has gotten a cult movie status over the few years that it's around for a reason...
You clearly didn't even take the time to actually READ the list. Brasil, 8 1/2, The 400 Blows and Citizen Kane are in the list...
:) ). Le fabuleux destin d'Amelie Poulain is Jean-Pierre Jeunet's undisputable masterpiece, and certainly belongs in my list. Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samourai is missing, I think it's a lot better than his Yojimbo (which is also good, but not as good as...). Also there is no anime - which surprises me. I'm not a real anime fan, on the contrary, I don't like most anime, but there are some magnificent anime movies, like Sen to chihiro no kamikakushi (english title: "Spirited away") or Akira.
:)) ...
:) But well - taste is taste, the world will never agree on the top 100 movies
Personally I think this top100 list stinks. Ok, it contains excellent movies, but I mean - wtf? Put the ultra-crappy "The fly" in there?? A lot of movies are simply missing. If Blade Runner is there (which is a very good movie) - where's Alien? I also didn't see any recent french movie in-there (no - I'm not french myself
Barry Lyndon is in the list, and that movie disappointed me, I don't like it, Kubrick made much better movies than that (Full Metal Jacket, A Clockwork Orange, Dr. Strangelove).
Movies I think are missing:
- Lost Highway (David Lynch)
- Pi (Darren Aronofsky)
- Requiem for a Dream (Aranofsky again
- Reservoir Dogs (Tarantino)
- La Vita è bella (Roberto Benigni)
- Full metal jacket (Stanley Kubrick)
- Sen to chihiro no kamikakushi/Spirited away (Hayao Miyazaki)
- Alien (Ridley Scott)
- American Beauty (Sam Mendes)
- Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola)
- Das Boot (Wolfgang Petersen)
- Das experiment (Oliver Hirschbiegel)
- Fight Club (David Fincher)
- Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (Guy Ritchie)
- Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly)
- Festen (Thomas Vinterberg)
- Dogville (Lars von Trier)
- Léon/The Professional (Luc Besson)
- Trainspotting (Danny Boyle)
- The great dictator (Charlie Chaplin)
- La Meglio gioventù (Marco Tullio Giordana)
-
These are mostly recent movies, because I think they lookt a bit too much at the past. Yes, there have been made great movies back-then, but nowadays a lot more movies are produced, resulting in a lot of crappy stuff, but also more good things. I don't say the older movies are bad, but a lot of good movies have been produced in the last 15-20 years...
Some things in the list (positively) surprised me though, like Miller's Crossing - which is an excellent movie. I would have put it in the list, but wouldn't have expected it there