Hmm, YMMV I guess, but I love google docs, especially the most recent versions, which seem to have really improved over the originals (I guess they integrated a bunch of stuff from google wave?).
They're really nice for typical light everyday editing use and exchanging documents, where bloated messes like MS word or openoffice are just overkill (and inconvenient).
The realtime collaborative editing is also a killer feature for my use -- I regularly edit documents together with friends halfway around the world (while we discuss the changes over the phone).
The google docs drawing program is also really nice these days, and is really the first "collaborative web drawing editor" I've tried that is actually good enough to use on a regular basis (there are tons of them out there, but except for the one in google docs, they all seem to suck).
The three commonly-used character sets used in Japanese (Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji) are hardly a _good_ example of how to do written communication. They actually only *need* one of them (Hiragana or Katakana). The argument that in written communication, you can use the others for various things neatly sidesteps the fact that in spoken Japanese, there is no such distinction.
Written and spoken language are not exactly the same though -- written language tends to be more formal and more complex. Kanji actually help comprehension/speed a great deal when reading (they both literally disambiguate, and make good use of the human visual system's pattern-recognition ability).
There have been numerous attempts to try and eliminate them, both under pressure from the American occupying forces after WWII, and due to linguistic fashion later on, but in the end, they've always failed, essentially under the weight of common sense: you don't make wholesale changes to such a fundamental part of your culture without an awful lot of justification!
In current times, the trend may actually be in the other direction, as computers have made kanji usage easier for many people (even if at the same time they've had negative effects on many people's ability to write them by hand)...
Formal proof is very important - if taught well, it teaches people to think in different way.
Exactly!
Proofs can be hard and annoying in class (and seem "pointless"), but the ability to approach problems, break them down, and establish a chain of reasoning to justify (and understand!) a conclusion is absolutely valuable in everyday life.
That's why this article seems like such bullshit -- while most people may not use many of the details of higher-level math in many cases, I think that the methodology and approaches to problem solving that I picked up in college math classes have been endlessly useful, and I am a better person for them.
I'd say the real thing I'm amazed at is just how long google has remained the go-to search engine. Results have been juuust passable for about five or six years now, when once they were very good.
On the contrary, I find the quality of google's search results to be absolutely excellent, and indeed, far better now than they were 5 years ago. At least like 80% of the time, the first or second search result is Exactly What I Wanted.
So, as I find them excellent, but every google story on slashdot has one or two people whining that "google is now the sux0rs!1!", I can only come to the conclusion that either (1) these people are lying, or (2) the quality of google search results is dependent on what you search for, and how you do it (and perhaps where from -- country, etc).
Being a nice guy, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and guess (2) is the case. It makes some sense, certainly -- my searches tend to be on technical subjects and other things that are unlikely to be heavily targeted by spammers and the like, but for people that only ever search for things like "bo0bies" or "n00d britney" well.... good luck, I guess.
I dunno what you've been smoking, but an increase anti-apple opinion on Slashdot is absolutely consistent with the generally individualist, "pro freedom" bent the people here have always had. People here generally gave apple some credit in the past for at least being a technically excellent and otherwise inoffensive alternative to MS domination, but its recent moves are scary for anybody that cares about an open computing culture. [We all knew Jobs was an insane control-freak but previously that had only really manifested in the area of product and GUI design, where control-freakiness at least generally has a positive effect for the end-user.]
I think you're mistaken about the level of anti-apple rhetoric here -- there are certainly people lambasting apple's recent actions, but there's also a ready supply of apple apologists to defend them -- and you don't need to invent "astroturfing" stories to explain the former.
Instead, just look squarely at Steve Job's attempts to move computing culture in a direction most of us really would rather it not move in.
... then they would wrestle, with the minivan careening crazily all over the road as they roll around and dangled off the back... pulling themselves up just in time as the pickup truck repeatedly bumped the back of the van, and then having a fistfight on the roof of the minivan, which would then plunge off a giant cliff in slow motion, with the (driver or passenger, whoever's the good guy) grabbing onto a tree on the edge of the cliff and saving himself with one hand while he snatched the unconscious pickup-truck driver to safety with other (as the pickup truck too plunged into the void). Then the pickup-truck driver would wake up and ask woozily what on earth he was doing dangling off this cliff and the hero would answer "just hanging around" (with an austrian accent).
Who wants to wear some clunky glasses while they watch a movie?
To be fair, the last time I saw a 3D movie in a theater, the glasses were like sunglasses, and they actually weren't clunky at all.
But aren't the glasses for "3d" televisions somewhat different?
The glasses used in theaters are relatively cheap "passive" material, but the glasses used with 3d-tv are "active" (LCD shutters or whatever), and much more expensive to produce -- especially in large sizes...
I'm certainly not saying TV watching is good or people are bad for not watching it, and indeed I'd say not watching much TV is a generally a good thing.
ed is a fine editor (the fact that it's "old and out of normal use" don't change that), if barebones.
It's notable because it:
Makes it somewhat cumbersome to do lots of little micro-edits or twiddling. If you're going to change something, it's often easier to replace the text, typing the replacement in again.
Doesn't keep the document all up in your face -- the past is the past, you want to see it, it's there, but there's no active display of the document cooing "edit me... edit me... just a little"
The process of writing using a medium where it's really easy to tweak the text is very different than when one can't. I've noticed many cases where I've simply tweaked a text to death -- there end up being fewer "small mistakes", but the cohesiveness and large scale structure suffer. Moreover, the urge to tweak can be a real time sink.
If I had a will of iron, maybe I could just force myself not to tweak... but I don't have a will of iron; despite my best intentions, I often succumb to temptation (to my later chagrin). And most people don't. So I can easily understand how a professional writer, for whom these points are even more important, may want to use some light artificial restrictions on his working environment in order to focus on what's really important to him.
So I don't think it's really fair to assume "there's something else going on here behind the scenes". Maybe this guy just wants to get on with his craft and cut out the crap that he's found to interfere with it. It's probably the same reasons many authors write on paper, despite the inconveniences (sure some of them may do it because they have a fountain-pen fetish, but I don't think it's reasonable to assume that must be the reason).
[As an aside -- I've noticed that many people (not saying you do, just the general vibe of the thread, and similar threads) often seem almost personally offended by others explicitly choosing to not use some popular modern technology... and while such choices may sometimes have silly reasons ("I don't watch TV, haha I'm so intellectual!"), I think the responses are often just as banal or even scary...]
I don't know. The OLPC project is basically founded on dreams and whimsy, but has become very real very quickly.
... and hype. Don't forget hype.
Negroponte may be an idiot, but he's pretty good at getting out there and spewing whatever it takes to get people listening to him, whether or not it actually makes much sense.
They seem to be much more savvy now than when they started.
But they're also probably much less important than when they started. The OLPC project had its time in the spotlight, but that seems to have passed...
At intermediate stations, the Shinkansen typically stops less than a minute (maybe even like 30s), so you can see it's not that hard to get the total time lost due to a stop under 5 minutes.
Really? What about old people? People in wheelchairs, etc.? Do they have catapults that toss these unfortunate slow folk into and out of the train at these stops? Surely you jest.
I didn't time a stop:) -- but they're very short.
The reason it works seems simple enough though: the trains are exactly on time, stop at a precise location, and people line up beforehand at the appropriate location on the platform for their car. Wheelchair users are assisted by station staff (I don't know if that's actually necessary or not, but every one I've seen has been).
This isn't particularly annoying or difficult because you know the train will be there exactly when and where it's supposed to be, so there's no unnecessary waiting.
Travellers believe that the high-speed train between Shanghai and Hangzhou make take longer than the two-hour drive on road if the train stops at all the nine stations along the route, seven of which are newly built in suburban districts of Shanghai and some cities of Zhejiang.
What bullshit. The current high speed trains stop maybe once or twice between Shanghai and Hangzhou - why would this one stop more than that? It'd blow the average speed, and anyway, there are already slower regional trains. Trying to claim it's a two drive to Hangzhou is again exageration... especially trying to get in to Hangzhou with its absolutely abysmal traffic problems.
You're right that no sane train operator would have all trains stop at all stations, but it's also pretty likely that even all-stops trains will be faster than driving. Modern HSR tends to be very light and have very good acceleration, so with good operating practices, a single stop need not add more than about 5 minutes of delay including deacceleration/acceleration time.[1] This HSR goes at 350km/h, so the total time taken by the train, including 9 intermediate stops could easily be 80 minutes or less -- far less than the 2 hours or more (if there's no traffic!) that a car at 100-110km/h would take. With express trains making fewer stops, of course, the train wins by an even huger margin.
[1] E.g., the Japanese N700 shinkansen has acceleration of 2.6km/h/s. At that rate of acceleration, accelerating to 350km/h only takes a little over 2 min. Since the average speed of the train during that period isn't zero, but rather about half the final speed, then the actual amount of time lost is only 1 min; double that to include deacceleration for total of 2 min. At intermediate stations, the Shinkansen typically stops less than a minute (maybe even like 30s), so you can see it's not that hard to get the total time lost due to a stop under 5 minutes.
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Re:Autotools do not need a book
on
Autotools
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I agree -- autoconf is independent, and does a great job handling system configuration stuff without involving automake -- but I think you're being a bit unfair to automake.
For projects that "fit" automake, it's actually a wonderful tool, as it allows a highly concise description of the package contents and dependencies, with almost zero fat and overhead, and does pretty much all the typical boilerplate stuff (convenience targets, separate build-directory support, installation, automatic dependency generation, consistency checking, etc) automatically without the user ever having to see the ugly internals. However automake also imposes a degree of structure on a project (not surprisingly, roughly following that of many GNU packages), and is not so flexible if you want something different. For packages that don't follow this structure, or which make particularly complex demands on the build system, automake may not fit very well, and may end up just getting in the way. [It's not entirely inflexible though -- it does try to provide for customization to some degree, and remember, it's essentially a wrapper around makefiles, and will pass through traditional makefile rules largely unscathed.]
I'd highly recommend trying automake first though, just to see if it works for you, because when it does work, it's really nice.
From what I've been able to figure out, most people who say they hate the autotools aren't realllly griping about the actual functionality, but rather expressing their distaste at the really grody implementation. It's very true that the implementation details of autotools (a bizarre mixture of m4, bourne-shell, perl, make, etc, all of which are even more ugly that necessary in order to remain portable) is not for the squeamish. However a user of autotools doesn't have to care about the implementation details for the most part -- and from a user's point of view it actually works quite well, and has some very nice features.
Not just that, the app store rules are ambiguously and capriciously enforced. For example, Lua for game scripting has been approved though it violates the rules. There's no way of telling what will and will not be approved.
Note that the "rules" have apparently since been changed so that things like Lua scripting are officially OK -- the new rule is something like "scripting languages are allowed, as long as no scripts are downloaded from the net."
That's a good change, of course, as the "old rule" was insane, but while it shows that Apple does occasionally listen to reason, it also emphasizes how capricious they can be, and that should make iphone/ipad/etc devs nervous.
[Not that any of my starry-eyed, just-discarded-all-their-belongings-and-replaced-them-with-an-ipad, "this trivial iphone app will make me riiiiichhchchchchchh!!!1!" friends will even notice of course...]
If anything, the vast budgets of U.S. game makers are what's killing creativity and innovation in game design -- it's way too expensive for them to take much risk these days, and pretty much everything coming out of the U.S. these days is the same old tired formulas with better anti-aliasing and more accurate physics...
If Japan's economy is ailing, then that might kill off some developers (which is bad), but on the other hand, it might also mean that the focus shifts to lower-priced and lower-budget games. Even if such small-budget games tend to often be formulaic as well, the simple fact that they're much faster to develop and involve much less risk means there's actually a lot more room for experimentation. If you actually look at the selection of games available in Japan, I'd say this is true: despite a few "whales" like FFXIII, there's a vast range of quirky and interesting games for the DS, wii, etc. -- and these are what actually get the most shelf space, and seem to account for the majority of traffic in the store (well, judging by "where people are standing looking at games," anyway), even if the big monitor at the front of the store (paid for by Sony of course) is showing off the latest whale-of-the-month.
"Last I checked, CPU upgrades don't necessitate RAM and motherboard changes."
You didn't check hard enough, then. Suddenly upgrading the CPU from one core to 3 or 4 removes the bottleneck from the CPU and puts it elsewhere - likely the RAM (we're not including harddrives for the sake of the argument,) or it's entirely possible the motherboard can only handle 2 of those 3 or 4 cores.
All kinds of things can go wrong.
On the other hand, it's certainly not necessary that "things go wrong", and there are cases where a new CPU works out -- it may very well be that the system pre-new-CPU actually had excess memory bandwidth, or your application happens to be very cache friendly, or the new CPU's bigger cache is enough to handle it.
Er, sure, but this benchmark bears almost no resemblance to typical browser usage, and the correlation with performance on any other web app/page is likely to be pretty near zero.
I'm not sure how they get off calling this a "real world benchmark", as it seems to bear almost no resemblance to what people normally use web browsers for: "The benchmark works by simply dragging a part of the diagram around the page for five seconds." WTF?
It certainly doesn't seem to be any more useful than the other browser benchmark being touted these days, and arguably it's much less useful, because it measures a single very narrow aspect of browser operation, one which has little connection with typical browser usage.
Moreover, the slashdot summary seems to go to great lengths to emphasize how "badly" FF4 did on this (useless, remember) benchmark, and to pump up IE9: "The results were surprising. IE9 held its own pretty well (with a few caveats), and the latest Firefox 4 beta came in dead last" -- but if you actually look at the results that emphasis is misplaced: almost all the browsers were quite close to each other, with a few outliers, but in no cases was FF4 an outlier, and indeed was pretty much identical to IE9 (on this test).
The only clear result I can see is: When doing a certain very specific type of javascript rendering, most modern browsers have pretty much identical performance, though chrome's particularly fast, and IE8 particularly slow.
Of course, that isn't very interesting to anybody except LucidChart users, of course, nor very likely to generate any controversy...
I don't think that deserved the "flamebait" mod...
I have a ps3 but not an xbox, and I'd certainly be interested to try out the halo games -- but not interested enough to buy an xbox. I don't think I'm the only person in this situation.
Yeah, MS would probably never allow it, but it's not an unreasonable thing to wish for...
If you're going to worry specifically about JS performance (which is an assumption; the IE team is still saying that this focus is a mistake and to some extent they're right),
There's another somewhat more sinister interpretation of that of course -- the increasing emphasis on javascript, especially with html5, is a direction that Microsoft really wishes things wouldn't go, because it represents a move towards platform-independence, and away from windows-only apps and technologies.
If people must run stuff in their browser, I'm sure MS would far prefer they did it using something like silverlight, over which MS at least maintains some control...
I wonder how much of this colour preference is a result of exception and prior experience? Did people in the 1890s complain about those new-fangled light bulbs with their weird colour compared to good old fashioned gas lamps?
No doubt that is a possibility -- but on the other hand, it's also quite possible there is some inherent quality being reflected in such preferences, and they won't change with time. It's impossible to know until enough time has passed.:(
There is some evidence for the latter position, in that "regular" fluorescent lamps have been widely used for ages (especially in commercial settings), with a variety of phosphor formulations, and people still widely preferred incandescent lamps for home use (especially for "living areas", as opposed to "utility areas", which suggests that it's related to the quality of the light rather than the price or whatever).
Touchscreen keyboards are worthless for those who know how to type properly.
Protip: that's not the target market.
What is the target market though? I'd wager that people that don't really type much would be much happier with something like an ipad, with its "occasional" onscreen keyboard, and would hate the clunky almost useless lower portion of this thing. People that do type a lot, on the other hand, are not going to accept this abortion of a keyboard-replacement.
This thing looks like the random output of a "what do we do to compete in the rapidly shifting laptop/netbook/pad marketplace?" brainstorming session. Brainstorming is all well and good, but this thing doesn't look like it should have made it past the "hahaha right" stage; I'll be amazed if it actually makes it to the "being in stores" stage....
Hm, of course it was by choice -- from what I can tell (based on the occasional talk about phones), "ordinary people" (i.e., not Balmer and other "public faces") at MS are pretty much as infatuated with the iphone as the rest of the country is... it's the cool thing to have, even there.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, YMMV I guess, but I love google docs, especially the most recent versions, which seem to have really improved over the originals (I guess they integrated a bunch of stuff from google wave?).
They're really nice for typical light everyday editing use and exchanging documents, where bloated messes like MS word or openoffice are just overkill (and inconvenient).
The realtime collaborative editing is also a killer feature for my use -- I regularly edit documents together with friends halfway around the world (while we discuss the changes over the phone).
The google docs drawing program is also really nice these days, and is really the first "collaborative web drawing editor" I've tried that is actually good enough to use on a regular basis (there are tons of them out there, but except for the one in google docs, they all seem to suck).
The three commonly-used character sets used in Japanese (Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji) are hardly a _good_ example of how to do written communication. They actually only *need* one of them (Hiragana or Katakana). The argument that in written communication, you can use the others for various things neatly sidesteps the fact that in spoken Japanese, there is no such distinction.
Written and spoken language are not exactly the same though -- written language tends to be more formal and more complex. Kanji actually help comprehension/speed a great deal when reading (they both literally disambiguate, and make good use of the human visual system's pattern-recognition ability).
There have been numerous attempts to try and eliminate them, both under pressure from the American occupying forces after WWII, and due to linguistic fashion later on, but in the end, they've always failed, essentially under the weight of common sense: you don't make wholesale changes to such a fundamental part of your culture without an awful lot of justification!
In current times, the trend may actually be in the other direction, as computers have made kanji usage easier for many people (even if at the same time they've had negative effects on many people's ability to write them by hand)...
Formal proof is very important - if taught well, it teaches people to think in different way.
Exactly!
Proofs can be hard and annoying in class (and seem "pointless"), but the ability to approach problems, break them down, and establish a chain of reasoning to justify (and understand!) a conclusion is absolutely valuable in everyday life.
That's why this article seems like such bullshit -- while most people may not use many of the details of higher-level math in many cases, I think that the methodology and approaches to problem solving that I picked up in college math classes have been endlessly useful, and I am a better person for them.
I'd say the real thing I'm amazed at is just how long google has remained the go-to search engine. Results have been juuust passable for about five or six years now, when once they were very good.
On the contrary, I find the quality of google's search results to be absolutely excellent, and indeed, far better now than they were 5 years ago. At least like 80% of the time, the first or second search result is Exactly What I Wanted.
So, as I find them excellent, but every google story on slashdot has one or two people whining that "google is now the sux0rs!1!", I can only come to the conclusion that either (1) these people are lying, or (2) the quality of google search results is dependent on what you search for, and how you do it (and perhaps where from -- country, etc).
Being a nice guy, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and guess (2) is the case. It makes some sense, certainly -- my searches tend to be on technical subjects and other things that are unlikely to be heavily targeted by spammers and the like, but for people that only ever search for things like "bo0bies" or "n00d britney" well.... good luck, I guess.
I dunno what you've been smoking, but an increase anti-apple opinion on Slashdot is absolutely consistent with the generally individualist, "pro freedom" bent the people here have always had. People here generally gave apple some credit in the past for at least being a technically excellent and otherwise inoffensive alternative to MS domination, but its recent moves are scary for anybody that cares about an open computing culture. [We all knew Jobs was an insane control-freak but previously that had only really manifested in the area of product and GUI design, where control-freakiness at least generally has a positive effect for the end-user.]
I think you're mistaken about the level of anti-apple rhetoric here -- there are certainly people lambasting apple's recent actions, but there's also a ready supply of apple apologists to defend them -- and you don't need to invent "astroturfing" stories to explain the former.
Instead, just look squarely at Steve Job's attempts to move computing culture in a direction most of us really would rather it not move in.
... then they would wrestle, with the minivan careening crazily all over the road as they roll around and dangled off the back... pulling themselves up just in time as the pickup truck repeatedly bumped the back of the van, and then having a fistfight on the roof of the minivan, which would then plunge off a giant cliff in slow motion, with the (driver or passenger, whoever's the good guy) grabbing onto a tree on the edge of the cliff and saving himself with one hand while he snatched the unconscious pickup-truck driver to safety with other (as the pickup truck too plunged into the void). Then the pickup-truck driver would wake up and ask woozily what on earth he was doing dangling off this cliff and the hero would answer "just hanging around" (with an austrian accent).
I'd watch it...
Who wants to wear some clunky glasses while they watch a movie?
To be fair, the last time I saw a 3D movie in a theater, the glasses were like sunglasses, and they actually weren't clunky at all.
But aren't the glasses for "3d" televisions somewhat different?
The glasses used in theaters are relatively cheap "passive" material, but the glasses used with 3d-tv are "active" (LCD shutters or whatever), and much more expensive to produce -- especially in large sizes...
It was just an example :)
I'm certainly not saying TV watching is good or people are bad for not watching it, and indeed I'd say not watching much TV is a generally a good thing.
Hmm, you say "never pioneering in any sense" like it's some sort of damning fault...
Maybe it's just sheer luck that ed has vastly exceeded qed in popularity, but still, ed's a fine editor.
qed may also be (have been?) a fine editor of course...
ed is a fine editor (the fact that it's "old and out of normal use" don't change that), if barebones.
It's notable because it:
The process of writing using a medium where it's really easy to tweak the text is very different than when one can't. I've noticed many cases where I've simply tweaked a text to death -- there end up being fewer "small mistakes", but the cohesiveness and large scale structure suffer. Moreover, the urge to tweak can be a real time sink.
If I had a will of iron, maybe I could just force myself not to tweak ... but I don't have a will of iron; despite my best intentions, I often succumb to temptation (to my later chagrin). And most people don't. So I can easily understand how a professional writer, for whom these points are even more important, may want to use some light artificial restrictions on his working environment in order to focus on what's really important to him.
So I don't think it's really fair to assume "there's something else going on here behind the scenes". Maybe this guy just wants to get on with his craft and cut out the crap that he's found to interfere with it. It's probably the same reasons many authors write on paper, despite the inconveniences (sure some of them may do it because they have a fountain-pen fetish, but I don't think it's reasonable to assume that must be the reason).
[As an aside -- I've noticed that many people (not saying you do, just the general vibe of the thread, and similar threads) often seem almost personally offended by others explicitly choosing to not use some popular modern technology... and while such choices may sometimes have silly reasons ("I don't watch TV, haha I'm so intellectual!"), I think the responses are often just as banal or even scary...]
I don't know. The OLPC project is basically founded on dreams and whimsy, but has become very real very quickly.
... and hype. Don't forget hype.
Negroponte may be an idiot, but he's pretty good at getting out there and spewing whatever it takes to get people listening to him, whether or not it actually makes much sense.
They seem to be much more savvy now than when they started.
But they're also probably much less important than when they started. The OLPC project had its time in the spotlight, but that seems to have passed...
Really? What about old people? People in wheelchairs, etc.? Do they have catapults that toss these unfortunate slow folk into and out of the train at these stops? Surely you jest.
I didn't time a stop :) -- but they're very short.
The reason it works seems simple enough though: the trains are exactly on time, stop at a precise location, and people line up beforehand at the appropriate location on the platform for their car. Wheelchair users are assisted by station staff (I don't know if that's actually necessary or not, but every one I've seen has been).
This isn't particularly annoying or difficult because you know the train will be there exactly when and where it's supposed to be, so there's no unnecessary waiting.
The article's full of errors:
...
What bullshit. The current high speed trains stop maybe once or twice between Shanghai and Hangzhou - why would this one stop more than that? It'd blow the average speed, and anyway, there are already slower regional trains. Trying to claim it's a two drive to Hangzhou is again exageration... especially trying to get in to Hangzhou with its absolutely abysmal traffic problems.
You're right that no sane train operator would have all trains stop at all stations, but it's also pretty likely that even all-stops trains will be faster than driving. Modern HSR tends to be very light and have very good acceleration, so with good operating practices, a single stop need not add more than about 5 minutes of delay including deacceleration/acceleration time.[1] This HSR goes at 350km/h, so the total time taken by the train, including 9 intermediate stops could easily be 80 minutes or less -- far less than the 2 hours or more (if there's no traffic!) that a car at 100-110km/h would take. With express trains making fewer stops, of course, the train wins by an even huger margin.
[1] E.g., the Japanese N700 shinkansen has acceleration of 2.6km/h/s. At that rate of acceleration, accelerating to 350km/h only takes a little over 2 min. Since the average speed of the train during that period isn't zero, but rather about half the final speed, then the actual amount of time lost is only 1 min; double that to include deacceleration for total of 2 min. At intermediate stations, the Shinkansen typically stops less than a minute (maybe even like 30s), so you can see it's not that hard to get the total time lost due to a stop under 5 minutes.
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I agree -- autoconf is independent, and does a great job handling system configuration stuff without involving automake -- but I think you're being a bit unfair to automake.
For projects that "fit" automake, it's actually a wonderful tool, as it allows a highly concise description of the package contents and dependencies, with almost zero fat and overhead, and does pretty much all the typical boilerplate stuff (convenience targets, separate build-directory support, installation, automatic dependency generation, consistency checking, etc) automatically without the user ever having to see the ugly internals. However automake also imposes a degree of structure on a project (not surprisingly, roughly following that of many GNU packages), and is not so flexible if you want something different. For packages that don't follow this structure, or which make particularly complex demands on the build system, automake may not fit very well, and may end up just getting in the way. [It's not entirely inflexible though -- it does try to provide for customization to some degree, and remember, it's essentially a wrapper around makefiles, and will pass through traditional makefile rules largely unscathed.]
I'd highly recommend trying automake first though, just to see if it works for you, because when it does work, it's really nice.
From what I've been able to figure out, most people who say they hate the autotools aren't realllly griping about the actual functionality, but rather expressing their distaste at the really grody implementation. It's very true that the implementation details of autotools (a bizarre mixture of m4, bourne-shell, perl, make, etc, all of which are even more ugly that necessary in order to remain portable) is not for the squeamish. However a user of autotools doesn't have to care about the implementation details for the most part -- and from a user's point of view it actually works quite well, and has some very nice features.
Not just that, the app store rules are ambiguously and capriciously enforced. For example, Lua for game scripting has been approved though it violates the rules. There's no way of telling what will and will not be approved.
Note that the "rules" have apparently since been changed so that things like Lua scripting are officially OK -- the new rule is something like "scripting languages are allowed, as long as no scripts are downloaded from the net."
That's a good change, of course, as the "old rule" was insane, but while it shows that Apple does occasionally listen to reason, it also emphasizes how capricious they can be, and that should make iphone/ipad/etc devs nervous.
[Not that any of my starry-eyed, just-discarded-all-their-belongings-and-replaced-them-with-an-ipad, "this trivial iphone app will make me riiiiichhchchchchchh!!!1!" friends will even notice of course...]
Seriously.
If anything, the vast budgets of U.S. game makers are what's killing creativity and innovation in game design -- it's way too expensive for them to take much risk these days, and pretty much everything coming out of the U.S. these days is the same old tired formulas with better anti-aliasing and more accurate physics...
If Japan's economy is ailing, then that might kill off some developers (which is bad), but on the other hand, it might also mean that the focus shifts to lower-priced and lower-budget games. Even if such small-budget games tend to often be formulaic as well, the simple fact that they're much faster to develop and involve much less risk means there's actually a lot more room for experimentation. If you actually look at the selection of games available in Japan, I'd say this is true: despite a few "whales" like FFXIII, there's a vast range of quirky and interesting games for the DS, wii, etc. -- and these are what actually get the most shelf space, and seem to account for the majority of traffic in the store (well, judging by "where people are standing looking at games," anyway), even if the big monitor at the front of the store (paid for by Sony of course) is showing off the latest whale-of-the-month.
"Last I checked, CPU upgrades don't necessitate RAM and motherboard changes."
You didn't check hard enough, then. Suddenly upgrading the CPU from one core to 3 or 4 removes the bottleneck from the CPU and puts it elsewhere - likely the RAM (we're not including harddrives for the sake of the argument,) or it's entirely possible the motherboard can only handle 2 of those 3 or 4 cores.
All kinds of things can go wrong.
On the other hand, it's certainly not necessary that "things go wrong", and there are cases where a new CPU works out -- it may very well be that the system pre-new-CPU actually had excess memory bandwidth, or your application happens to be very cache friendly, or the new CPU's bigger cache is enough to handle it.
Er, sure, but this benchmark bears almost no resemblance to typical browser usage, and the correlation with performance on any other web app/page is likely to be pretty near zero.
Thus: useless
I'm not sure how they get off calling this a "real world benchmark", as it seems to bear almost no resemblance to what people normally use web browsers for: "The benchmark works by simply dragging a part of the diagram around the page for five seconds." WTF?
It certainly doesn't seem to be any more useful than the other browser benchmark being touted these days, and arguably it's much less useful, because it measures a single very narrow aspect of browser operation, one which has little connection with typical browser usage.
Moreover, the slashdot summary seems to go to great lengths to emphasize how "badly" FF4 did on this (useless, remember) benchmark, and to pump up IE9: "The results were surprising. IE9 held its own pretty well (with a few caveats), and the latest Firefox 4 beta came in dead last" -- but if you actually look at the results that emphasis is misplaced: almost all the browsers were quite close to each other, with a few outliers, but in no cases was FF4 an outlier, and indeed was pretty much identical to IE9 (on this test).
The only clear result I can see is: When doing a certain very specific type of javascript rendering, most modern browsers have pretty much identical performance, though chrome's particularly fast, and IE8 particularly slow.
Of course, that isn't very interesting to anybody except LucidChart users, of course, nor very likely to generate any controversy...
When is this arriving for the ps3?
I don't think that deserved the "flamebait" mod...
I have a ps3 but not an xbox, and I'd certainly be interested to try out the halo games -- but not interested enough to buy an xbox. I don't think I'm the only person in this situation.
Yeah, MS would probably never allow it, but it's not an unreasonable thing to wish for...
If you're going to worry specifically about JS performance (which is an assumption; the IE team is still saying that this focus is a mistake and to some extent they're right),
There's another somewhat more sinister interpretation of that of course -- the increasing emphasis on javascript, especially with html5, is a direction that Microsoft really wishes things wouldn't go, because it represents a move towards platform-independence, and away from windows-only apps and technologies.
If people must run stuff in their browser, I'm sure MS would far prefer they did it using something like silverlight, over which MS at least maintains some control...
I wonder how much of this colour preference is a result of exception and prior experience? Did people in the 1890s complain about those new-fangled light bulbs with their weird colour compared to good old fashioned gas lamps?
No doubt that is a possibility -- but on the other hand, it's also quite possible there is some inherent quality being reflected in such preferences, and they won't change with time. It's impossible to know until enough time has passed. :(
There is some evidence for the latter position, in that "regular" fluorescent lamps have been widely used for ages (especially in commercial settings), with a variety of phosphor formulations, and people still widely preferred incandescent lamps for home use (especially for "living areas", as opposed to "utility areas", which suggests that it's related to the quality of the light rather than the price or whatever).
Protip: that's not the target market.
What is the target market though? I'd wager that people that don't really type much would be much happier with something like an ipad, with its "occasional" onscreen keyboard, and would hate the clunky almost useless lower portion of this thing. People that do type a lot, on the other hand, are not going to accept this abortion of a keyboard-replacement.
This thing looks like the random output of a "what do we do to compete in the rapidly shifting laptop/netbook/pad marketplace?" brainstorming session. Brainstorming is all well and good, but this thing doesn't look like it should have made it past the "hahaha right" stage; I'll be amazed if it actually makes it to the "being in stores" stage....
Hm, of course it was by choice -- from what I can tell (based on the occasional talk about phones), "ordinary people" (i.e., not Balmer and other "public faces") at MS are pretty much as infatuated with the iphone as the rest of the country is... it's the cool thing to have, even there.