As for the compiler itself, yes, it's not the best of the bunch, but that doesn't mean it's any bad either (quite the opposite!). Intels' compiler, for example, still beats it for performance (at least the last few times i tried it), but i could live happily with GCC alone.
I've spent quite a bit of time hacking on gcc, and I'd say my biggest complaint is that a lot of the gcc code really sucks. It's chock full of gigantic impossible-to-understand chunks of code -- few comments, huge numbers of global variables, an "enumerate every case I could think of with 25 page if-statements" coding style, vast numbers of unwritten assumptions about the way your processor works. That it works at all, never mind as well as it does, is a testament to the dedication of gcc hackers.
I think a lot of this is historic, and the newer parts of the compiler are much better (and so the overall code quality is slowly improving as old code gets replaced), but gcc can still be a real pain to work on. If you're trying to port to an architecture that differs in some way from "typical" architectures, be prepared for misery.
Now AMD doesn't even make chipsets and their mobile offering is still quite the joke in the face of the Pentium M.
From what I've heard, the new AMD mobile chip ("Turon" I think) has pretty much caught up with the Pentium M, and is far better than the old AMD mobile junk.
The Pentium M has a much bigger L2 cache, but the Turon has AMD's typically better memory interface, amd64 mode, etc.; the reviews I saw seemed to basically call it a wash (i.e., the results can go either way depending on which benchmark you use). In any case, AMD's clearly back in the mobile game.
I expect that we won't see the slim silver/white wedge that their PR department has been coming out with. It will probably be made out of cheap plastic with handles and other superfluous design elements that aim more for the young gamer market
I hate to interfere with your attempt to work out your self-esteem issues, but for the record, they almost certainly will release something like the elegant designs they've shown at E3.
The previous "toylike" design focus was apparently largely due to Yamauchi's influence. Now that Iwata is truly in charge, Nintendo has shown many signs of being a much more flexible company and responding to the market rather than Yamauchi's personal image of what Nintendo should be (note the dramatic change in style from the original GBA to the GBA SP).
Most Linux users who brag about having some "massive" uptime (usually under 1000 days) obviously have never used VMS, for instance.
Er, sure, but I suspect a major reason for those long VMS uptimes is that VMS's heyday was 20 years ago -- the bugs got worked out and the system reached maturity a long time ago -- and that the sort of people who still run VMS are pretty conservative by nature. I used VMS a lot in the 80s when it was more common, and yes it crashed and had downtimes for system upgrades just like any other OS.
What people are saying is that a "open" format is not useful unless it can be used -- by all developers, not just those MS deems fit.
Microsoft has a history of putting forward "standards" which use calculated language to exclude many interested parties from actually using them, but using said standards to defuse criticism that they aren't open enough -- essentially pretending to open up access to all, but not doing so in reality.
People have every reason to be skeptical about an offer like this from MS.
or perhaps because they were never serious about it to begin with and were merely attempting to fearmonger people into not cancelling in the first place.
Sony: What nefarious deed shall I execute today, oh my master?
Satan: Today's task shall be.... fear mongering!
Sony: Your will shall be done, oh most evil one. (bows repeatedly, exits)
2 or 3 commercial breaks lasting 2-4 minutes, depending on the movie rating
"Commercial breaks" are one of the most execrable things about watching a movie on television; why the !@#$ are you emulating that?
During a series originally intended for TV, it doesn't matter so much, because they're structured around the need for commercials, and for films, before and after are fine -- but not during the movie.
You can dress comfortably and fashionably at the same time. A pair of Old Navy khakis, a pair of rockport walking shoes, and a decent button down shirt is not a difficult ensemble to throw together and it looks more stylish than jeans and a t-shirt.
It makes you look like a fratboy. More "businesslike"? Yeah. More "safe"? Yes. More stylish? No.
A typical businessman knows well how to fit in and look like all the other businessmen, and this helps him succeed in business -- but he knows bugger-all about style (indeed, a primary reason for business attire, including the "dockers" type, is that it allows one to look respectable without making any effort or having any taste). Naturally some think they do (hang out near any Manhattan financial firm to see quite a few nausea-inducing examples), but in the vast majority of cases it's mere conceit, consisting mainly of higher-priced fratboy-wear: more expensive, but every bit as safe and banal as the usual sort.
As far as Digg.com taking over goes, I'm in total aggrement with the Grandparent. You don't get any sort of intellectual discussion there like you do here (of course, using the comment threshold to its full advantage;) ), but I don't think that's the point of Digg.com.
Er, but what exactly is the point of Digg? If you want tons of random and pointless comments on the same stories every other site is reporting, there are approximately 535,239,887 web-forums out there to keep you happy.
Slashdot, on the other hand, is (in my experience) rather unique, in that it offers generally high-quality discussion from a very wide range of viewpoints (i.e., without being a closed community). Sure the editors are often kinda lame, but the system works quite well on average; even the dumbest stories duped for the 5th time often end up generating interesting conversations.
I know a lot of people here hate the word, but that makes Digg sound an awful lot like a blog...
Yup; from what I've seen, Digg reads pretty much like a typical web-forum/blogg/whatever; stories can be rated so that people know what's most popular (most web forums just show the most recently posted story first, which actually does tend to keep them in "popularity order", but less explicitly).
The comments I read were mostly the completely random pointless crap you tend to get on most web forums. They allow you to "rate" comments too (I guess like kuro5hin's "anybody can moderate" system), but there's little evidence that anybody actually takes advantage of this, and as you might expect, the few ratings that do get done don't seem to have much meaning (i.e., high-rated comments typically don't seem to be very good ones). As others have mentioned. there's also no apparent threading of comments, which makes it hard to follow them as a series of conversations, and reinforces the "random" nature of the result.
Another problem with digg is one shared by most "slashdot-like" sites (included many that use slashcode): most stories have very few comments, which means that few achieve the "critical mass" necessary to get a really good discussion going.
Finally, the digg user-community seems far more average than Slashdot's -- despite all the trolls, Slashdot has an unusually high degree of smart and knowledgeable users, and the moderation system tends to make their comments visible (and hide those of the trolls). Fundamentally it's the boring users (posting banal pointless comments) that make most web-forums so awful, and Digg has this problem in spades. Slashdot's elaborate mechanisms may seem unfair to some, but they do a pretty good job of keeping conversations focused and interesting, which is exactly what Digg comments aren't.
The end result is that Digg is actually quite lame; I don't know why people are getting so excited about it. It you want more anarchy (but more crap) than Slashdot, Kuro5hin appears to offer roughly the same functionality implemented more competently, with a somewhat more clueful user community.
What on earth more do you want from Rare? They make great games that are no more tedious than any other game maker.
Er, I think the argument is that their games are more tedious than any other game maker.
I agree with this; maybe it was different 15 years ago, but they seem to have been going downhill recently. Rare still apparently has very good programmers, but the "creative aspects" of their recent games suck: the gameplay is typically more tedium than joy, the character designs lack any sort of charisma, etc; there's just no spark.
I've played Kameo on the 360 (briefly), and from what I could tell, it continues this trend.
It's been about a thousand years, so I think they've let bygones be bygones. It'll be at least 1 or 2 generations mroe before they give up this grudge.
Well, before the population gives up the grudge. Actually it's already happening -- all the young Koreans I know admire Japan, and say that anti-Japanese feeling is an "old people thing" (a lot of those in Korea it seems:-).
What's a bit more scary is that authoritarian governments like (the P.R. of) China and North Korea will keep it alive artificially as long as they can, because it's a useful tool to distract attention from the government's failings.
[Of course democraticly elected governments are hardly very pure either -- the Japanese government could help a lot by pandering a bit less to the right-wing loonie fringe -- but they simply don't have the control authoritarian governments do.]
Is it just me, or are most of the scores pretty arbitary? The entire article is pretty contentless,
Yup.
1up.com seems to be pretty awful in general though, so I suppose it's par for the course; the real question is why do they get referred to so often on Slashdot?
Oh, BTW, just FYI, since you seemed to miss the point of my last post: your original post was an example of type #3 irony in the list posted (further illustrated by my 2nd paragraph).
So I ask on what basis you make the statement "Ironically, you appear not to know much about irony..."
Well, I'm not sure that it's a very good example, but a self-proclaimed "irony nazi", making a post complaining about the meaning of irony, is expected to at least get this one thing right -- but you didn't. And the fact that it's ironic makes it more ironic...:-)
A friend once explained to me that the dramatic use of irony tends to make the point that "man cannot outwit the gods", and demonstrates this by strongly emphasizing the (as your quote puts it) incongruence between the outcome implied by a character's conceit and the actual outcome, making the point of failure be exactly that which was claimed as the least likely possibility -- e.g., someone crusading against immorality being brought down by a sex scandal.
really... how exactly do you replace a running libc?
Typical distros that support pervasive no-reboot updating (like Debian) don't exactly replace a "running" libc (or any other library), they simply update the on-disk copy. So any programs run after that will get the new libc, but any programs that were started before the update will of course be using the old libc.
Usually this works very well; I suppose for a mega serious security update you might want to restart all your daemons too or something.
It's "Manga" ever since the English language adopted the term to mean that particular style of comics.
Even by this rather dodgy definition (wtf do you call comics from Japan then???), the two strips mentioned in the article hardly seem to qualify -- other than a few details of the way eyes are drawn, they look/feel much more like traditional american comics than real manga.
[And in the grand tradition of most newspaper comics, they also appear to suck.]
We've already lived the long-term, and it hasn't happened that much. Anything that leads to increasingly open hardware specifications is going to involve a change, since we've been at a steady-state for a while now with the current approach.
This is not true. Linux has been around for a long time, but only recently has it started to truly take fire. In particular in the last few years it's started to supplant traditional embedded operating systems; in the future, the increasing sophistication of its end-user support will lead further adoption on the desk top and in other more mainstream systems.
It's these latter two categories which will force it to be noticed by hardware manufacturer -- they can easily ignore a few nerds, but it's much harder to ignore giant mega-corporations and zillions of consumers.
To be honest, I was very cynical until I saw the first batch of games. They are impressive; and gameplay-wise, not just graphically.
Which ones? The Xbox 360 games I've tried/seen have all been extremely blah, very unimpressive. I'm particularly dissapointed in Kameo, which had been rumored to be something special, but in fact seems to be kinda lame (with slightly prettier graphics than the last gen).
As far as I can tell, the 360 looks slated to continue the recent tradition of launching with a bunch of very weak games.
Granted, I've just played around on the demo units, not done an in-depth analysis, but it makes the point that there's no glaringly obvious difference between the next gen and this one.
What it comes down to is this: The main linux kernel hackers know all the pros and cons of having a "stable binary driver interface" -- and have explicitly rejected it. They've decided that, for them, the cons outweight the pros, and they value flexibility (of development), performance, and the promotion of open interfaces, over making closed-source driver writers happy.
You can argue all you want, but it's very unlikely you're saying something the kernel developers haven't already heard -- and rejected.
Personally I think they're right too: the high-handed approach may be more painful for some people right now, in the short-term, but in the long-term, it's going to lead to more open hardware. Hardware manufacturers won't get any less paranoid, clueless, and butt-headed of course, but even the worst of them will eventually notice the writing on the wall (or at least the steam roller they're about to get flattened by).
as far as I can tell the only piece of software that could be worth the now-ludicrous $60 they're trying to extort from people for "NEXT-GEN!!!" games, is Kameo.
I played Kameo for a while in the Tokyo (Aoyama/Omotesando) "xbox 360 cafe", and what I saw was pretty dull. Very, very, "Rare": technically and visually impressive, but with annoyingly generic and uninvolving characters and gameplay. If you've played Starfox Adventures on the gamecube, Kameo feels sort of like that, except the characters in Kameo are more bland.
Re:We can all breathe a bit easier
on
Chinese Eco-Cities
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
Chinese factories may see this as a means to up their bargaining power in deals with environmental authorities. Something along the lines of "...why should we [ stop dirty smelting practises / pay increased pollution taxes / etc ] when our employees are living in an urban green zone?".
Then the environmental police will shoot them. One of the perks of being an authoritarian state. "It's good to be the king!"
(unless of course they're up-to-date on their bribes, in which case the environmental police will shoot the environmentalists that brought up the issue)
Slashdot Mirror
As for the compiler itself, yes, it's not the best of the bunch, but that doesn't mean it's any bad either (quite the opposite!). Intels' compiler, for example, still beats it for performance (at least the last few times i tried it), but i could live happily with GCC alone.
I've spent quite a bit of time hacking on gcc, and I'd say my biggest complaint is that a lot of the gcc code really sucks. It's chock full of gigantic impossible-to-understand chunks of code -- few comments, huge numbers of global variables, an "enumerate every case I could think of with 25 page if-statements" coding style, vast numbers of unwritten assumptions about the way your processor works. That it works at all, never mind as well as it does, is a testament to the dedication of gcc hackers.
I think a lot of this is historic, and the newer parts of the compiler are much better (and so the overall code quality is slowly improving as old code gets replaced), but gcc can still be a real pain to work on. If you're trying to port to an architecture that differs in some way from "typical" architectures, be prepared for misery.
Now AMD doesn't even make chipsets and their mobile offering is still quite the joke in the face of the Pentium M.
From what I've heard, the new AMD mobile chip ("Turon" I think) has pretty much caught up with the Pentium M, and is far better than the old AMD mobile junk.
The Pentium M has a much bigger L2 cache, but the Turon has AMD's typically better memory interface, amd64 mode, etc.; the reviews I saw seemed to basically call it a wash (i.e., the results can go either way depending on which benchmark you use). In any case, AMD's clearly back in the mobile game.
I expect that we won't see the slim silver/white wedge that their PR department has been coming out with. It will probably be made out of cheap plastic with handles and other superfluous design elements that aim more for the young gamer market
I hate to interfere with your attempt to work out your self-esteem issues, but for the record, they almost certainly will release something like the elegant designs they've shown at E3.
The previous "toylike" design focus was apparently largely due to Yamauchi's influence. Now that Iwata is truly in charge, Nintendo has shown many signs of being a much more flexible company and responding to the market rather than Yamauchi's personal image of what Nintendo should be (note the dramatic change in style from the original GBA to the GBA SP).
Most Linux users who brag about having some "massive" uptime (usually under 1000 days) obviously have never used VMS, for instance.
Er, sure, but I suspect a major reason for those long VMS uptimes is that VMS's heyday was 20 years ago -- the bugs got worked out and the system reached maturity a long time ago -- and that the sort of people who still run VMS are pretty conservative by nature. I used VMS a lot in the 80s when it was more common, and yes it crashed and had downtimes for system upgrades just like any other OS.
What people are saying is that a "open" format is not useful unless it can be used -- by all developers, not just those MS deems fit.
Microsoft has a history of putting forward "standards" which use calculated language to exclude many interested parties from actually using them, but using said standards to defuse criticism that they aren't open enough -- essentially pretending to open up access to all, but not doing so in reality.
People have every reason to be skeptical about an offer like this from MS.
or perhaps because they were never serious about it to begin with and were merely attempting to fearmonger people into not cancelling in the first place.
.... fear mongering!
Sony: What nefarious deed shall I execute today, oh my master?
Satan: Today's task shall be
Sony: Your will shall be done, oh most evil one. (bows repeatedly, exits)
2 or 3 commercial breaks lasting 2-4 minutes, depending on the movie rating
"Commercial breaks" are one of the most execrable things about watching a movie on television; why the !@#$ are you emulating that?
During a series originally intended for TV, it doesn't matter so much, because they're structured around the need for commercials, and for films, before and after are fine -- but not during the movie.
You can dress comfortably and fashionably at the same time. A pair of Old Navy khakis, a pair of rockport walking shoes, and a decent button down shirt is not a difficult ensemble to throw together and it looks more stylish than jeans and a t-shirt.
It makes you look like a fratboy. More "businesslike"? Yeah. More "safe"? Yes. More stylish? No.
A typical businessman knows well how to fit in and look like all the other businessmen, and this helps him succeed in business -- but he knows bugger-all about style (indeed, a primary reason for business attire, including the "dockers" type, is that it allows one to look respectable without making any effort or having any taste). Naturally some think they do (hang out near any Manhattan financial firm to see quite a few nausea-inducing examples), but in the vast majority of cases it's mere conceit, consisting mainly of higher-priced fratboy-wear: more expensive, but every bit as safe and banal as the usual sort.
As far as Digg.com taking over goes, I'm in total aggrement with the Grandparent. You don't get any sort of intellectual discussion there like you do here (of course, using the comment threshold to its full advantage ;) ), but I don't think that's the point of Digg.com.
Er, but what exactly is the point of Digg? If you want tons of random and pointless comments on the same stories every other site is reporting, there are approximately 535,239,887 web-forums out there to keep you happy.
Slashdot, on the other hand, is (in my experience) rather unique, in that it offers generally high-quality discussion from a very wide range of viewpoints (i.e., without being a closed community). Sure the editors are often kinda lame, but the system works quite well on average; even the dumbest stories duped for the 5th time often end up generating interesting conversations.
I know a lot of people here hate the word, but that makes Digg sound an awful lot like a blog...
Yup; from what I've seen, Digg reads pretty much like a typical web-forum/blogg/whatever; stories can be rated so that people know what's most popular (most web forums just show the most recently posted story first, which actually does tend to keep them in "popularity order", but less explicitly).
The comments I read were mostly the completely random pointless crap you tend to get on most web forums. They allow you to "rate" comments too (I guess like kuro5hin's "anybody can moderate" system), but there's little evidence that anybody actually takes advantage of this, and as you might expect, the few ratings that do get done don't seem to have much meaning (i.e., high-rated comments typically don't seem to be very good ones). As others have mentioned. there's also no apparent threading of comments, which makes it hard to follow them as a series of conversations, and reinforces the "random" nature of the result.
Another problem with digg is one shared by most "slashdot-like" sites (included many that use slashcode): most stories have very few comments, which means that few achieve the "critical mass" necessary to get a really good discussion going.
Finally, the digg user-community seems far more average than Slashdot's -- despite all the trolls, Slashdot has an unusually high degree of smart and knowledgeable users, and the moderation system tends to make their comments visible (and hide those of the trolls). Fundamentally it's the boring users (posting banal pointless comments) that make most web-forums so awful, and Digg has this problem in spades. Slashdot's elaborate mechanisms may seem unfair to some, but they do a pretty good job of keeping conversations focused and interesting, which is exactly what Digg comments aren't.
The end result is that Digg is actually quite lame; I don't know why people are getting so excited about it. It you want more anarchy (but more crap) than Slashdot, Kuro5hin appears to offer roughly the same functionality implemented more competently, with a somewhat more clueful user community.
What on earth more do you want from Rare? They make great games that are no more tedious than any other game maker.
Er, I think the argument is that their games are more tedious than any other game maker.
I agree with this; maybe it was different 15 years ago, but they seem to have been going downhill recently. Rare still apparently has very good programmers, but the "creative aspects" of their recent games suck: the gameplay is typically more tedium than joy, the character designs lack any sort of charisma, etc; there's just no spark.
I've played Kameo on the 360 (briefly), and from what I could tell, it continues this trend.
"... no sei da!" ?
It's been about a thousand years, so I think they've let bygones be bygones. It'll be at least 1 or 2 generations mroe before they give up this grudge.
:-).
Well, before the population gives up the grudge. Actually it's already happening -- all the young Koreans I know admire Japan, and say that anti-Japanese feeling is an "old people thing" (a lot of those in Korea it seems
What's a bit more scary is that authoritarian governments like (the P.R. of) China and North Korea will keep it alive artificially as long as they can, because it's a useful tool to distract attention from the government's failings.
[Of course democraticly elected governments are hardly very pure either -- the Japanese government could help a lot by pandering a bit less to the right-wing loonie fringe -- but they simply don't have the control authoritarian governments do.]
Is it just me, or are most of the scores pretty arbitary? The entire article is pretty contentless,
Yup.
1up.com seems to be pretty awful in general though, so I suppose it's par for the course; the real question is why do they get referred to so often on Slashdot?
Oh, BTW, just FYI, since you seemed to miss the point of my last post: your original post was an example of type #3 irony in the list posted (further illustrated by my 2nd paragraph).
I could go back and do the same analysis of why the original post was not ironic either
Er, given that your first "analysis" failed, why risk it?
So I ask on what basis you make the statement "Ironically, you appear not to know much about irony..."
:-)
Well, I'm not sure that it's a very good example, but a self-proclaimed "irony nazi", making a post complaining about the meaning of irony, is expected to at least get this one thing right -- but you didn't. And the fact that it's ironic makes it more ironic...
A friend once explained to me that the dramatic use of irony tends to make the point that "man cannot outwit the gods", and demonstrates this by strongly emphasizing the (as your quote puts it) incongruence between the outcome implied by a character's conceit and the actual outcome, making the point of failure be exactly that which was claimed as the least likely possibility -- e.g., someone crusading against immorality being brought down by a sex scandal.
This post has been a service by your local Irony Nazi.
Ironically, you appear not to know much about irony...
[There are several commonly used meanings; the one you objected to is if anything the "classic" definition of irony.]
really... how exactly do you replace a running libc?
Typical distros that support pervasive no-reboot updating (like Debian) don't exactly replace a "running" libc (or any other library), they simply update the on-disk copy. So any programs run after that will get the new libc, but any programs that were started before the update will of course be using the old libc.
Usually this works very well; I suppose for a mega serious security update you might want to restart all your daemons too or something.
It's "Manga" ever since the English language adopted the term to mean that particular style of comics.
Even by this rather dodgy definition (wtf do you call comics from Japan then???), the two strips mentioned in the article hardly seem to qualify -- other than a few details of the way eyes are drawn, they look/feel much more like traditional american comics than real manga.
[And in the grand tradition of most newspaper comics, they also appear to suck.]
We've already lived the long-term, and it hasn't happened that much. Anything that leads to increasingly open hardware specifications is going to involve a change, since we've been at a steady-state for a while now with the current approach.
This is not true. Linux has been around for a long time, but only recently has it started to truly take fire. In particular in the last few years it's started to supplant traditional embedded operating systems; in the future, the increasing sophistication of its end-user support will lead further adoption on the desk top and in other more mainstream systems.
It's these latter two categories which will force it to be noticed by hardware manufacturer -- they can easily ignore a few nerds, but it's much harder to ignore giant mega-corporations and zillions of consumers.
To be honest, I was very cynical until I saw the first batch of games. They are impressive; and gameplay-wise, not just graphically.
Which ones? The Xbox 360 games I've tried/seen have all been extremely blah, very unimpressive. I'm particularly dissapointed in Kameo, which had been rumored to be something special, but in fact seems to be kinda lame (with slightly prettier graphics than the last gen).
As far as I can tell, the 360 looks slated to continue the recent tradition of launching with a bunch of very weak games.
Granted, I've just played around on the demo units, not done an in-depth analysis, but it makes the point that there's no glaringly obvious difference between the next gen and this one.
What it comes down to is this: The main linux kernel hackers know all the pros and cons of having a "stable binary driver interface" -- and have explicitly rejected it. They've decided that, for them, the cons outweight the pros, and they value flexibility (of development), performance, and the promotion of open interfaces, over making closed-source driver writers happy.
You can argue all you want, but it's very unlikely you're saying something the kernel developers haven't already heard -- and rejected.
Personally I think they're right too: the high-handed approach may be more painful for some people right now, in the short-term, but in the long-term, it's going to lead to more open hardware. Hardware manufacturers won't get any less paranoid, clueless, and butt-headed of course, but even the worst of them will eventually notice the writing on the wall (or at least the steam roller they're about to get flattened by).
as far as I can tell the only piece of software that could be worth the now-ludicrous $60 they're trying to extort from people for "NEXT-GEN!!!" games, is Kameo.
I played Kameo for a while in the Tokyo (Aoyama/Omotesando) "xbox 360 cafe", and what I saw was pretty dull. Very, very, "Rare": technically and visually impressive, but with annoyingly generic and uninvolving characters and gameplay. If you've played Starfox Adventures on the gamecube, Kameo feels sort of like that, except the characters in Kameo are more bland.
Chinese factories may see this as a means to up their bargaining power in deals with environmental authorities. Something along the lines of "...why should we [ stop dirty smelting practises / pay increased pollution taxes / etc ] when our employees are living in an urban green zone?".
Then the environmental police will shoot them. One of the perks of being an authoritarian state. "It's good to be the king!"
(unless of course they're up-to-date on their bribes, in which case the environmental police will shoot the environmentalists that brought up the issue)