An almost-perfect Wine/WineX 'emulation' of some parts of a game might just be a perfect way for companies to start selling Linux ports.
For some trivial things like menu interfaces, performance is not an issue. The real trouble lies usually in the fast heavy graphical stuff. As GL is becoming less of a barrier, an hybrid-port (regular stuff via WineX, CPU-intensive GL stuff recompiled for Linux) could be a good bet for game companies.
I can understand that spending 10,000USD or more for a Linux port might not be that bright right now for a game company, but if Wine/WineX can lower that cost, companies will have "nothing to lose".
And while that's not the perfect solution, don't expect companies to release stuff "free as in speech" for a couple of years anyway.
Resolution of this great life problem would bring to its knees my second greatest annoyance: when a soundapp crashes and doesn't free its lock on the sound module, you're stuck with no sound until you reboot and/or use black magic to bypass module logic and remove the module by hand, tainting your kernel and feeling bad about it.
You could easily run a jabber client, there are free (as in beer) versions and the main server is running inside your network, so no unfortunate export of precious information.
Do you realize the sheer number of major companies, one after the other, helping the community in some way or another?
Sun: SuSE distribution
Novell: Ximian
IBM: Kernel
Apple: KHTML
HP: XFree86
Are they all wanting the success of GNU/Linux or is it a case of against-Microsoft-anything-will-do?
These companies, which on certain fields compete against each other, are willing to go in the same direction, isn't it weird?...can't wait to add Microsoft/SCO to the list - or simply remove them from the other list:)
Trouble is, as long as the mainstream webpage building programs (Frontpage, Dreamweaver,...) don't catch up, web is going to be a horrid place for non-visual media.
Usually artists who design the visual part of a web page don't want to spawn Vim - they use these graphical tools which rarely comply even to HTML4/tagsoup. Table layouts are so commonplace even today and these documents make no sense structurally.
And a lot of artists prefer using Shockwave/Flash to build pages: they get more control. That way, you really make sure that accessibility is lost.
To comply with even WAI-A asks a lot from the web-builder, although when you think of it, it makes sense even for visual public (like: hyperlinks with the same title should point to the same URL).
But we're so used to the web: the place where structure/syntax is inimportant... and it's so easy!
Is it syntax style? No, it's pretty standard C-like-syntax-with-braces;
Is it speed? Nah, interpreted like most of them web languages;
What makes PHP great is an impressive set of embedded libraries, easy integration in an already existing plain HTML document and POST, GET, cookie, session management.
Look at this beast: *SQL*, FTP, zip, flash, XML, gettext, image manipulation, LDAP, UNIX process control... all rolled-into-one language. Wow. Perl is, in that respect, with the right CPAN modules, as nice as PHP, but dare I say... easily obfuscated?
PHP had (still has in 5.0?) enormous deficiencies and bugs in its OO model. Works great for quick pages, but as the article says, does not scale well.
So, why insist on keeping PHP for large-scale sites instead of plain java? to use PHP's libraries, HTML integration and web-oriented features, that's it. An artist can draw a page in his favorite application, export to HTML, the coder only has to fill the blanks.
The language in itself has no advantages. If java had all these libraries and "native" web access, why would we consider "merging" these two languages?
Think of it, two interpreted languages joining forces to drain down CPU and memory...
Who are asking whether this will be implemented in future versions of IE are asking the right question, since it dominates the browser market.
That the very reason why they won't do it.
Since they won the battle against Netscape, look at how much stuff Microsoft added to IE. Not much, hey?
Microsoft has nothing to gain (marketshare-wise, that's the way they think) in improving its browser. In a interview this spring was the announcement that IE6SP1 was the last standalone browser version. They don't care about the browser anymore. They won by bundling and will continue by bundling.
If they had even a slight respect for the web standards and its users, PNG would be fully supported now, XHTML wouldn't throw errors, tabbed browsing would be possible, pop-up blocking options would be there.
But no. Don't expect any improvement until Longworm. And even then...
Supposing the density of the calls is not very high, use a two-person/week scheme.
Person 1: Primary from midnight to noon, secondary from noon to midnight; Person 2: Primary from noon to midnight, secondary from midnight to moon;
Rotate each week (week 2: person 3-4,..., week 4: 7-1,..., week 7: 6-7). After 7 weeks, each person will have worked 2 weeks. Not so bad, only a 22% uptime is needed.
And for an odd N (in your case 7), you automatically shift morning/night in each iteration.
Seems easier that way too, you don't have to remember "are we thursday and it is really between 6am and 11h30am?".
hdup should do the job. Simple, does monthly/weekly/daily and compression + encryption if you wish.
Mount your NT filesystem via samba, specify your mounted directories to backup, put a crontab entry, that should be it.
I use it daily to store a backup file on a the same host as the filesystem backuped - then fetching it using rsync with another machine for archival purposes.
Won't keep NT permissions automatically, you should backup relevant permission files for Windows (anybody knows what they are?)
I try to be as strict as possible. For this reason, I send my webpages (written in pure XHTML1.1) with a proper content-type: text/xml (XHTML should NOT be sent as text/html)
Google will not correctly index pages sent as text/xml: it will simply write "File format: unrecognized", even with the proper !DOCTYPE, even with the html tag:( cloak your pages, everybody!
MSIE has this nasty problem with the XHTML1.1 doctype, gives an error. Documents should be sent as text/html too. I guess it won't be fixed in the standalone version which is now to be discarded by Microsoft.
The best way I've found to make browsers digest the HTML entities (we're not all using 7-bit clean languages!) is to never use entities, use plainly the numerical code.
Apart from that, Mozilla is a great platform for XHTML, and even MathML and SVG (if your build has that enabled). So the modular nature of XHTML is becoming more and more useful;) Great thing about Mozilla is its XML debugger: a "mismatched td in line 1226" is something you _need_.
You must be careful with javascript in Mozilla too... old tricks a la document.write won't work; you have to do it the 'right way': through the DOM. And SGML comments wrapping STYLE and SCRIPT sections must be enclosed in proper CDATA marks.
For those who complain that CSS is too complicated, it's just a matter of knowing, not understanding. The only thing you have to understand is that some elements are blocks, others are lines. All is declarative, there's not even a for loop or an if to confuse you:) After you know the names of the properties, it's really very easy.
To conclude, yes, XHTML is the right way, but you have to polish it, like you'd do in other real programming languages. It's not for Aunt Sally anymore!
"If source code is copied from protected Unix code," the SCO document adds, "there is no way for Linus Torvalds to identify that fact."
You'd want Linus to compare both codes and after that sue him for "inspiration"?
Look, Linux, you've seen all SCO code, now don't say you weren't influenced by it. As we said earlier, it is technologically impossible for anyone to produce great code without copying it from us.
They're shooting themselves in the foot, and remove their shoes beforehand!
* Time Out, Dave Brubeck, 1959 Although it seemed far out at the time, with all these songs in weird meters (5/4, 7/4) - when the jazz scene was all playing standard 4/4 bars - this album ironically became a best-seller.
* Giant Steps, John Coltrane, 1959 This guy expanded what we knew then about harmony. This album (especially the title track) will show the way to all structured atonal jazz.
* Bitches Brew, Miles Davis, 1969 The first fusion record, with some of the greatest jazz players ever: Wayne Shorter, Josef Zawinul, Dave Holland, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, John McLaughlin, Jack DeJohnette, Billy Cobham. Some would shout 'experimental', but on a few listens it grows on you. The best music to listen to when there's a storm outside.
* The Inner Mounting Flame, Mahavishnu Orchestra, 1972 I don't think there are other jazz fusion records that intense. If you're looking for tight musicianship, and like electric instruments, this is the way to go. Odd time signatures throughout.
Is it really easier to deploy a 3rd-party app than to secure an app/OS?
A virus scanner will block only certain signatures - how many virii use the same core but are recognized as different by scanners?
A simple vulnerability could result in tens if not hundreds different viruses, all exploiting the same hole.
Let's say scanners are updated and catch all the virus variations - the same vulnerability is _still_ present, just waiting for another iteration of the same core.
Just like letting your child at home with a list of people he's not allowed to let in, instead of just locking the door...
I think the move is only political Look, we're really trying to make it look like^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsecure.
OO is all about encapsulating and ugly hacks are made because of ugly designs. There is a tremendous advantage when using the OO features of PHP, for example you can create a class that encapsulates the database connection and all operations to it.
Let's say you want to use only one connexion handler in your database class (so that objects inheriting from it can use shared "insert" and "update" methods). What you'd do in a real OO language is to use a class attribute, shared by all your class instances. Now there's no such thing as class attributes in PHP, so you have to <don't_do_this_at_home>use global variables</don't_do_this_at_home>.
In some contexts, using a class method won't work. So instead of a clean class::method($param), you have to use: call_user_func(array("class", "method"), $param);
These two examples are ugly, but only because of the language limitations.
The fact that usually PHP is used to produce HTML is irrelevant: it's just an interface. As lots of in-house programs consist only in a front-end to a database, a web interface is often enough.
You can actually display alpha layered PNGs on Microsoft Internet Explorer, starting from version 5.5, using an ugly workaround using DirectX and a CSS3 directive.
Now, be prepared: it will work _only_ with tags, so no alpha for background images yet. Still, it's an improvement.
I still don't get why they didn't implement it properly in the first place, let's not talk about it, it's a 1996 recommendation and I'm already so mad and frustrated by their bogus workarounds covering their flaws (XML parser bugs, ignores the IGNORE directive in DTDs, anyone?)
You just have to point to a 1x1 spacer GIF in the.htc source.
Works pretty fine, is compatible with Opera/Mozilla/IE and _at last_ you can get rid of 1988-oriented GIFs.
Should you want to support IE 5.5, welcome to the future of the web of yesterday:)
Why should they always bypass logic?
on
Hijacking .NET
·
· Score: 2, Funny
So, a private member is not private.
All this fighting for Intellectual Property, for information privacy, DRM, to discover that actually, behind the scenes, in the Microsoft world,
a private member is not private
Look, ma, we'll sell this slow API, and on our side we'll use undocumented features, make private members public, get a performance boost and say afterwards we've got a better product and that it was all fair play.
Innovation, would say Ballmer.
Re:Why does my intuition says something else?
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 1
$10.24 would be a single bill
$10.23 would take 9 bills/coins in binary form, $10.23 would take 6 bills/coins in decimal form.
Why does my intuition says something else?
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 1
Using base 2, with 1 cent, 2 cents, 4 cents, 8 cents pieces,..., $1.28 bills,...
you actually can have any amount up to $10245.76 using a maximum of 20 pieces/bills.
On average you'd have 10 pieces/bills, which is not too bad.
To have 20 dollars bills and "round" amounts is irrelevant: taxes always cast the amount you have to pay into a float anyway.
Perl and/or PHP can be pretty powerful to access databases and lotsa libraries; PHP can be compiled as a Command Line Interface which gives the console user a plus.
Links is a text-based web browser - building a console interface can be very simple using HTML and Links - you don't have to play with ncurses' mess.
The problem with GUI speed is not so much caused by design - it's the darn mouse that slows down everything... instead of doing a simple Ctrl-S to save, it's all these 6 steps (or more!):
Maybe the trouble is a spider who fetches your page, looks at the links, and notices more than 80% of the href point to the same file. GET parameters are different, but maybe their regex don't check that.
Have you ever noticed that pattern in porn sites?
80%+ of the links go to http://domain.porn/register
Maybe it's just that.
Also, snippets like "Demo", "Contact", "!!! WANTED !!!", "gearing up", "is coming", "files and attach" (all from your site) can be potentially offensive!
Slashdot Mirror
An almost-perfect Wine/WineX 'emulation' of some parts of a game might just be a perfect way for companies to start selling Linux ports.
For some trivial things like menu interfaces, performance is not an issue. The real trouble lies usually in the fast heavy graphical stuff. As GL is becoming less of a barrier, an hybrid-port (regular stuff via WineX, CPU-intensive GL stuff recompiled for Linux) could be a good bet for game companies.
I can understand that spending 10,000USD or more for a Linux port might not be that bright right now for a game company, but if Wine/WineX can lower that cost, companies will have "nothing to lose".
And while that's not the perfect solution, don't expect companies to release stuff "free as in speech" for a couple of years anyway.
Though new drivers from begin to support it almost transparently, lack of a standard way (no, esd is not great) to make multiple applications share a sound card (realtime mixing from multiple sources).
Resolution of this great life problem would bring to its knees my second greatest annoyance: when a soundapp crashes and doesn't free its lock on the sound module, you're stuck with no sound until you reboot and/or use black magic to bypass module logic and remove the module by hand, tainting your kernel and feeling bad about it.
You could easily run a jabber client, there are free (as in beer) versions and the main server is running inside your network, so no unfortunate export of precious information.
Are they all wanting the success of GNU/Linux or is it a case of against-Microsoft-anything-will-do?
These companies, which on certain fields compete against each other, are willing to go in the same direction, isn't it weird?
Trouble is, as long as the mainstream webpage building programs (Frontpage, Dreamweaver, ...) don't catch up, web is going to be a horrid place for non-visual media.
Usually artists who design the visual part of a web page don't want to spawn Vim - they use these graphical tools which rarely comply even to HTML4/tagsoup. Table layouts are so commonplace even today and these documents make no sense structurally.
And a lot of artists prefer using Shockwave/Flash to build pages: they get more control. That way, you really make sure that accessibility is lost.
To comply with even WAI-A asks a lot from the web-builder, although when you think of it, it makes sense even for visual public (like: hyperlinks with the same title should point to the same URL).
But we're so used to the web: the place where structure/syntax is inimportant... and it's so easy!
What makes PHP great is an impressive set of embedded libraries, easy integration in an already existing plain HTML document and POST, GET, cookie, session management.
Look at this beast: *SQL*, FTP, zip, flash, XML, gettext, image manipulation, LDAP, UNIX process control... all rolled-into-one language. Wow. Perl is, in that respect, with the right CPAN modules, as nice as PHP, but dare I say... easily obfuscated?
PHP had (still has in 5.0?) enormous deficiencies and bugs in its OO model. Works great for quick pages, but as the article says, does not scale well.
So, why insist on keeping PHP for large-scale sites instead of plain java? to use PHP's libraries, HTML integration and web-oriented features, that's it. An artist can draw a page in his favorite application, export to HTML, the coder only has to fill the blanks.
The language in itself has no advantages. If java had all these libraries and "native" web access, why would we consider "merging" these two languages?
Think of it, two interpreted languages joining forces to drain down CPU and memory...
(just my two cents)
That the very reason why they won't do it.
Since they won the battle against Netscape, look at how much stuff Microsoft added to IE. Not much, hey?
Microsoft has nothing to gain (marketshare-wise, that's the way they think) in improving its browser. In a interview this spring was the announcement that IE6SP1 was the last standalone browser version. They don't care about the browser anymore. They won by bundling and will continue by bundling.
If they had even a slight respect for the web standards and its users, PNG would be fully supported now, XHTML wouldn't throw errors, tabbed browsing would be possible, pop-up blocking options would be there.
But no. Don't expect any improvement until Longworm. And even then...
Supposing the density of the calls is not very high, use a two-person/week scheme.
..., week 4: 7-1, ..., week 7: 6-7). After 7 weeks, each person will have worked 2 weeks. Not so bad, only a 22% uptime is needed.
Person 1: Primary from midnight to noon, secondary from noon to midnight;
Person 2: Primary from noon to midnight, secondary from midnight to moon;
Rotate each week (week 2: person 3-4,
And for an odd N (in your case 7), you automatically shift morning/night in each iteration.
Seems easier that way too, you don't have to remember "are we thursday and it is really between 6am and 11h30am?".
If they don't RTFM, how can they know what RTFM stands for?!
hdup should do the job. Simple, does monthly/weekly/daily and compression + encryption if you wish.
Mount your NT filesystem via samba, specify your mounted directories to backup, put a crontab entry, that should be it.
I use it daily to store a backup file on a the same host as the filesystem backuped - then fetching it using rsync with another machine for archival purposes.
Won't keep NT permissions automatically, you should backup relevant permission files for Windows (anybody knows what they are?)
I try to be as strict as possible. For this reason, I send my webpages (written in pure XHTML1.1) with a proper content-type: text/xml (XHTML should NOT be sent as text/html)
:( cloak your pages, everybody!
;) Great thing about Mozilla is its XML debugger: a "mismatched td in line 1226" is something you _need_.
:) After you know the names of the properties, it's really very easy.
Google will not correctly index pages sent as text/xml: it will simply write "File format: unrecognized", even with the proper !DOCTYPE, even with the html tag
MSIE has this nasty problem with the XHTML1.1 doctype, gives an error. Documents should be sent as text/html too. I guess it won't be fixed in the standalone version which is now to be discarded by Microsoft.
The best way I've found to make browsers digest the HTML entities (we're not all using 7-bit clean languages!) is to never use entities, use plainly the numerical code.
Apart from that, Mozilla is a great platform for XHTML, and even MathML and SVG (if your build has that enabled). So the modular nature of XHTML is becoming more and more useful
You must be careful with javascript in Mozilla too... old tricks a la document.write won't work; you have to do it the 'right way': through the DOM. And SGML comments wrapping STYLE and SCRIPT sections must be enclosed in proper CDATA marks.
For those who complain that CSS is too complicated, it's just a matter of knowing, not understanding. The only thing you have to understand is that some elements are blocks, others are lines. All is declarative, there's not even a for loop or an if to confuse you
To conclude, yes, XHTML is the right way, but you have to polish it, like you'd do in other real programming languages. It's not for Aunt Sally anymore!
Did they, too, stole code from SCO?
Nobody is able to do as well as us, so they must have stolen the code
Somebody had to build on the paranoia.
You'd want Linus to compare both codes and after that sue him for "inspiration"?
Look, Linux, you've seen all SCO code, now don't say you weren't influenced by it. As we said earlier, it is technologically impossible for anyone to produce great code without copying it from us.
They're shooting themselves in the foot, and remove their shoes beforehand!
Is the agreement on SP4 only touching the technology modified by this service pack?
If I agreed on SP3, can a further SP change my rights?
I mean, I already said yes to all that invasive stuff.
Seems like a PR-move for me.
Some standouts from the post-bop era:
* Time Out, Dave Brubeck, 1959
Although it seemed far out at the time, with all these songs in weird meters (5/4, 7/4) - when the jazz scene was all playing standard 4/4 bars - this album ironically became a best-seller.
* Giant Steps, John Coltrane, 1959
This guy expanded what we knew then about harmony. This album (especially the title track) will show the way to all structured atonal jazz.
* Bitches Brew, Miles Davis, 1969
The first fusion record, with some of the greatest jazz players ever: Wayne Shorter, Josef Zawinul, Dave Holland, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, John McLaughlin, Jack DeJohnette, Billy Cobham. Some would shout 'experimental', but on a few listens it grows on you. The best music to listen to when there's a storm outside.
* The Inner Mounting Flame, Mahavishnu Orchestra, 1972
I don't think there are other jazz fusion records that intense. If you're looking for tight musicianship, and like electric instruments, this is the way to go. Odd time signatures throughout.
Is it really easier to deploy a 3rd-party app than to secure an app/OS?
A virus scanner will block only certain signatures - how many virii use the same core but are recognized as different by scanners?
A simple vulnerability could result in tens if not hundreds different viruses, all exploiting the same hole.
Let's say scanners are updated and catch all the virus variations - the same vulnerability is _still_ present, just waiting for another iteration of the same core.
Just like letting your child at home with a list of people he's not allowed to let in, instead of just locking the door...
I think the move is only political Look, we're really trying to make it look like^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsecure.
Let's say you want to use only one connexion handler in your database class (so that objects inheriting from it can use shared "insert" and "update" methods). What you'd do in a real OO language is to use a class attribute, shared by all your class instances. Now there's no such thing as class attributes in PHP, so you have to <don't_do_this_at_home>use global variables</don't_do_this_at_home>.
In some contexts, using a class method won't work. So instead of a clean class::method($param), you have to use:
call_user_func(array("class", "method"), $param);
These two examples are ugly, but only because of the language limitations.
The fact that usually PHP is used to produce HTML is irrelevant: it's just an interface. As lots of in-house programs consist only in a front-end to a database, a web interface is often enough.
PHP5 promises great features, but PHP4 still lacks lots of OO concepts.
You can do OO-like stuff without the points above but at the expense of no encapsulation and ugly hacks.
Some elegant constructs are hard to achieve in PHP, a statement like this (in java) would have to be dereferenced one by one by hand:Somebody who has already done some OOP would be able to find workarounds but PHP would not be a good way for a newbie to learn OOP.
You can actually display alpha layered PNGs on Microsoft Internet Explorer, starting from version 5.5, using an ugly workaround using DirectX and a CSS3 directive.
.htc file coming from here:
.htc source.
:)
Now, be prepared: it will work _only_ with tags, so no alpha for background images yet. Still, it's an improvement.
I still don't get why they didn't implement it properly in the first place, let's not talk about it, it's a 1996 recommendation and I'm already so mad and frustrated by their bogus workarounds covering their flaws (XML parser bugs, ignores the IGNORE directive in DTDs, anyone?)
Anyway, the trick is to use a CSS on all images:
img { behaviour: url('/path/to/.htc'); }
using the
Thanks
You just have to point to a 1x1 spacer GIF in the
Works pretty fine, is compatible with Opera/Mozilla/IE and _at last_ you can get rid of 1988-oriented GIFs.
Should you want to support IE 5.5, welcome to the future of the web of yesterday
So, a private member is not private.
All this fighting for Intellectual Property, for information privacy, DRM, to discover that actually, behind the scenes, in the Microsoft world,
a private member is not private
Look, ma, we'll sell this slow API, and on our side we'll use undocumented features, make private members public, get a performance boost and say afterwards we've got a better product and that it was all fair play.
Innovation, would say Ballmer.
$10.24 would be a single bill
$10.23 would take 9 bills/coins in binary form,
$10.23 would take 6 bills/coins in decimal form.
Using base 2, with 1 cent, 2 cents, 4 cents, 8 cents pieces, ..., $1.28 bills, ...
you actually can have any amount up to $10245.76 using a maximum of 20 pieces/bills.
On average you'd have 10 pieces/bills, which is not too bad.
To have 20 dollars bills and "round" amounts is irrelevant: taxes always cast the amount you have to pay into a float anyway.
Links is a text-based web browser - building a console interface can be very simple using HTML and Links - you don't have to play with ncurses' mess.
The problem with GUI speed is not so much caused by design - it's the darn mouse that slows down everything... instead of doing a simple Ctrl-S to save, it's all these 6 steps (or more!):
Maybe the trouble is a spider who fetches your page, looks at the links, and notices more than 80% of the href point to the same file. GET parameters are different, but maybe their regex don't check that.
Have you ever noticed that pattern in porn sites?
80%+ of the links go to http://domain.porn/register
Maybe it's just that.
Also, snippets like "Demo", "Contact", "!!! WANTED !!!", "gearing up", "is coming", "files and attach" (all from your site) can be potentially offensive!
Very useful to look for a file or a set of files.
regex:/href=".*cowboyneal\.jpg"/i