Performance. On Windows, Direct3D apps are faster. Not by much, but enough to be used. Also, the renderer itself is only a small part of the port. The main thing is optimization - fine-tuning it to run quickly and efficiently.
Valve is another company that could do it. Importantly, they're currently porting all their major games to the Mac, which is a very good halfway point for porting to Linux. More importantly, they've been releasing Linux ports of their dedicated server software - no renderer or client software, meaning you can't actually play it, but that means a good chunk of the code is already there. Most importantly, though, Valve is pretty much in control of digital distribution, which is the ONLY way commercial games are going to come to Linux (many shops don't even stock Windows games anymore, let alone Linux) - and their current push onto the Mac is causing other companies to port there as well.
Looking through my current Steam gamelist, I see 20-odd games that already have Linux ports, and another 30 or so that could be ported with less effort than normal. Now, not all of them are guaranteed to get a port - but even if half of them do, that's enough for 35 games on launch day, probably more (I used my "purchased games" list instead of the full "all games on Steam" list). That's enough for a pretty good launch, which would probably push other developers to either release ports, or hire someone to port it.
Sure there is. Who's always the first adopters for open-source anti-corporatist programs? Nerds like us. Firefox started as the nerd's browser. Linux started as the nerd's OS - and it still is, on the desktop. So, for now, think of it as "Facebook for Slashdotters".
Almost anything will serve as a weapon in a pinch.
Including, of course, nothing. It's not terribly difficult to kill someone with your bare hands - some muscular strength is needed to do so quickly, but a few months of training in any real martial art will be enough. With proper training and a bit of luck, an unarmed person can even defeat an armed soldier - there's a whole series of techniques in Krav Maga for disarming someone of various weapons.
And, naturally, the TSA will soon only allow wheelchair-bound passengers aboard. At least until someone develops telekinesis.
IIRC, Fusion is aimed more at smartphones, tablets and maybe netbooks/nettops. A Core 2 Duo / nVidia 320M should still be significantly more powerful. They were once planning a desktop-grade processor, but that seems to have been cancelled.
Well, I tried to avoid this argument, but since you started it, I may as well respond.
Was the invasion of Iraq necessary to protect America? No. Iraq wouldn't have been a threat for at least a few decades, and if you invade any country that could be a threat in a century, you'd be invading the world.
Was the invasion of Iraq a net good for the world? I believe so. Here's the thing about military dictatorships - they don't get brought down from the inside. Saddam was a cruel tyrant - his war crimes just against his own citizens were worthy of the death penalty. Count the atrocities and blatant violations of Geneva during the Iran-Iraq war, and you realize that this guy was not someone who should be in power. As bad as the war in Iraq is, the people of Iraq a really better off than they were during Saddam's reign. By that standard, yes, the war was justified. It was long overdue - we should have kept going after he launched a war of aggression against Kuwait.
How about this then:
"Solid rocket boosters are only suitable for applications where turning the engine off early is never needed". That covers ejection seats, air-to-ground missiles, deorbit thrusters, and firecrackers.
It's cliche, but it's true: war is hell. Always is, always will be. It's an evil, but often a necessary one. I won't bother arguing whether the current wars were necessary, since that itself is an argument far more complicated than/. posts can accommodate. There will always be civilian deaths, there will always be violations of the laws of war, and yes, there will always be atrocities. The thing is context. Compare Iraq to even the First World War, and you'll find far, far fewer atrocities, even if you account for the much smaller scale of the war. There's no mass looting, no city-wide rapes, no bodies impaled on posts as a warning to others. In comparison to other wars, this is a tame and controlled one.
Don't get me wrong: any soldier deliberately killing innocents, or even thieving, ought to be shot. But that's a problem with particular individuals, not the military as a whole. There may be problems with them keeping it quiet, or not punishing enough for it, but "conspiracy to conceal after the fact" is a far, far cry from the Holocaust.
My point was that Assange and his organization is losing it's independent status. So far, all their major leaks have been strongly anti-US. That hurts their credibility big-time, enough to cast suspicion over all their documents. Because it makes them look like they have a specific agenda beyond "letting information be free".
It's not like there's a lack of things worth exposing. China has enough corruption and abuse of government to last Wikileaks for years; I suspect Russia has the same. Even if you want to keep it in the Anglosphere, just look at the UK's surveillance programs. Hell, you don't even need to target governments - corporations might be an even juicier target. After all, everybody knows that soldiers aren't always nice (to put it mildly), but expose the RIAA's protection racket scheme, or exactly what Google tracks about you, or how biased the media is towards non-eventful stories. Do that, and Wikileaks starts looking more like an actual leaks site, and less like a specifically anti-American, anti-war propaganda site.
Com on, there's got to be more data than stuff related to the US. Do something on the PRC, or Russia, or the UK, or almost anything. You've proved your point - the US is far from perfect. Now can you point your crosshairs at some other country for a change?
We could try changing the acronyms. I propose "I'm Not A Trained Lawyer" (and variants for other professions). INATL looks more like an abbreviation for "International" than anything dirty.
There actually is a method for using 32-bit addresses in programs, but letting the OS address 52-bit space. It's called PAE, and it's been around since the Pentium Pro. It's almost always enabled on Linux and Mac OS X, but isn't available for non-server versions of Windows. So it's been tried, but isn't well-known or used.
Currently, 64-bit processors only use a 48-bit address space, precisely for some of the reasons you listed. The architecture is designed to scale up to full 64-bit addresses, but the processors internally use 48-bit addresses, to save on cache, bus width, etc.
While most programs don't use more than 4gb of memory, there is one rather significant market segment that does: gaming. Most games released over the past few years can benefit greatly from using significant amounts of RAM. 4gb of RAM is actually considered the minimum needed for modern gaming - many gamers will use 8gb or even 16gb of RAM. That's just one market segment that would use 64-bit. Photo processing is another one - for some time, Hollywood was using Linux and the GIMP for editing, because it was the only way to work with films that used nearly a gigabyte per frame. 3d rendering/modeling/CAD is yet another. While Joe User might not really need 64-bit addressing, there's enough users that DO need it that every OS needs to support it, and it's just less of a headache to use 64-bit throughout than to have some set up as 32-bit, and others as 64-bit.
They can't inform him of his charges if he hasn't actually been charged for anything. I'm not a lawyer, and my legal knowledge is US, not Swedish, but if they're still investigating the matter, they can't charge you with anything. I'm also going to ask for an independent (read: not aligned with either side) source for "multiple violations of Swedish and international law. Just because I think, had there actually been a clear violation, Assange would be suing Sweden for everything it owns.
"Nobody is above the law" is the principle Wikileaks seems to be standing for. Assange should not be exempt from the laws either. By all means, if there is sufficient evidence to warrant some questions, question him.
I personally have no opinion as to whether these charges are true or not - there just isn't enough data to support any conclusion. It could be an attempt to discredit the organization, or it could be true. So, then, go get the data, and examine the evidence, and see if there's even enough to warrant a trial.
It angered people mostly because it spread so effectively that it clogged the Internet. If you coded one properly, such that it spread slowly and didn't try to reinfect machines, I think it would be viewed in a much more positive light.
Glock, Remington, Colt, Beretta, H&K, and S&W have all been doing quite well of late. Remember - in any war, the real winners are the ones making the weapons.
But you're missing the point. It's not being consistent about it. I fully understand that there's thousands of alloys for both steel and aluminum, but the problem is that if WolframAlpha can parse one of them, it should be able to parse the other.
Ideally, it would ask "what alloy are you asking about", but just giving an "average" result while having a little "this information is for alloy 113811742, click for more options" box in the corner, would be fine.
His point was that balloons have been considered and proposed by many people far more educated in that particular branch of science than any of us, so we should defer to their opinion that it is fully possible.
Except it's inconsistent about things. Type in "tensile strength of steel", it gives you a table of mechanical properties for steel. Type in "tensile strength of aluminum", and it ignores the "tensile strength" and just gives you chemical info on Aluminum. Tried a few variations in syntax, and tried spelling it the British way, no luck. It's a useful tool, but the parser seems inconsistent, probably the worst thing a program can be.
Wouldn't something less fuel-hungry give a longer usable life, and thus be a better return on investment? Solar-powered propellers, or just a helium balloon, might make more sense, as every gram of fuel takes away from the payload.
Slashdot Mirror
Performance. On Windows, Direct3D apps are faster. Not by much, but enough to be used. Also, the renderer itself is only a small part of the port. The main thing is optimization - fine-tuning it to run quickly and efficiently.
Valve is another company that could do it. Importantly, they're currently porting all their major games to the Mac, which is a very good halfway point for porting to Linux. More importantly, they've been releasing Linux ports of their dedicated server software - no renderer or client software, meaning you can't actually play it, but that means a good chunk of the code is already there. Most importantly, though, Valve is pretty much in control of digital distribution, which is the ONLY way commercial games are going to come to Linux (many shops don't even stock Windows games anymore, let alone Linux) - and their current push onto the Mac is causing other companies to port there as well.
Looking through my current Steam gamelist, I see 20-odd games that already have Linux ports, and another 30 or so that could be ported with less effort than normal. Now, not all of them are guaranteed to get a port - but even if half of them do, that's enough for 35 games on launch day, probably more (I used my "purchased games" list instead of the full "all games on Steam" list). That's enough for a pretty good launch, which would probably push other developers to either release ports, or hire someone to port it.
Sure there is. Who's always the first adopters for open-source anti-corporatist programs? Nerds like us. Firefox started as the nerd's browser. Linux started as the nerd's OS - and it still is, on the desktop. So, for now, think of it as "Facebook for Slashdotters".
Almost anything will serve as a weapon in a pinch.
Including, of course, nothing. It's not terribly difficult to kill someone with your bare hands - some muscular strength is needed to do so quickly, but a few months of training in any real martial art will be enough. With proper training and a bit of luck, an unarmed person can even defeat an armed soldier - there's a whole series of techniques in Krav Maga for disarming someone of various weapons.
And, naturally, the TSA will soon only allow wheelchair-bound passengers aboard. At least until someone develops telekinesis.
IIRC, Fusion is aimed more at smartphones, tablets and maybe netbooks/nettops. A Core 2 Duo / nVidia 320M should still be significantly more powerful. They were once planning a desktop-grade processor, but that seems to have been cancelled.
Well, I tried to avoid this argument, but since you started it, I may as well respond.
Was the invasion of Iraq necessary to protect America? No. Iraq wouldn't have been a threat for at least a few decades, and if you invade any country that could be a threat in a century, you'd be invading the world.
Was the invasion of Iraq a net good for the world? I believe so. Here's the thing about military dictatorships - they don't get brought down from the inside. Saddam was a cruel tyrant - his war crimes just against his own citizens were worthy of the death penalty. Count the atrocities and blatant violations of Geneva during the Iran-Iraq war, and you realize that this guy was not someone who should be in power. As bad as the war in Iraq is, the people of Iraq a really better off than they were during Saddam's reign. By that standard, yes, the war was justified. It was long overdue - we should have kept going after he launched a war of aggression against Kuwait.
Was the war necessary? No. Was it just? Yes.
How about this then: "Solid rocket boosters are only suitable for applications where turning the engine off early is never needed". That covers ejection seats, air-to-ground missiles, deorbit thrusters, and firecrackers.
It's cliche, but it's true: war is hell. Always is, always will be. It's an evil, but often a necessary one. I won't bother arguing whether the current wars were necessary, since that itself is an argument far more complicated than /. posts can accommodate. There will always be civilian deaths, there will always be violations of the laws of war, and yes, there will always be atrocities. The thing is context. Compare Iraq to even the First World War, and you'll find far, far fewer atrocities, even if you account for the much smaller scale of the war. There's no mass looting, no city-wide rapes, no bodies impaled on posts as a warning to others. In comparison to other wars, this is a tame and controlled one.
Don't get me wrong: any soldier deliberately killing innocents, or even thieving, ought to be shot. But that's a problem with particular individuals, not the military as a whole. There may be problems with them keeping it quiet, or not punishing enough for it, but "conspiracy to conceal after the fact" is a far, far cry from the Holocaust.
My point was that Assange and his organization is losing it's independent status. So far, all their major leaks have been strongly anti-US. That hurts their credibility big-time, enough to cast suspicion over all their documents. Because it makes them look like they have a specific agenda beyond "letting information be free".
It's not like there's a lack of things worth exposing. China has enough corruption and abuse of government to last Wikileaks for years; I suspect Russia has the same. Even if you want to keep it in the Anglosphere, just look at the UK's surveillance programs. Hell, you don't even need to target governments - corporations might be an even juicier target. After all, everybody knows that soldiers aren't always nice (to put it mildly), but expose the RIAA's protection racket scheme, or exactly what Google tracks about you, or how biased the media is towards non-eventful stories. Do that, and Wikileaks starts looking more like an actual leaks site, and less like a specifically anti-American, anti-war propaganda site.
Com on, there's got to be more data than stuff related to the US. Do something on the PRC, or Russia, or the UK, or almost anything. You've proved your point - the US is far from perfect. Now can you point your crosshairs at some other country for a change?
We could try changing the acronyms. I propose "I'm Not A Trained Lawyer" (and variants for other professions). INATL looks more like an abbreviation for "International" than anything dirty.
Apple managed to make the switch from PowerPC to Intel almost seamlessly, thanks to a well-written emulator. Microsoft might be able to do the same.
Who actually reads Slashdot for the articles?
The same criticisms can be applied to Windows. Definitely not a Russian OS, and it's definitely starting to slip.
They can't inform him of his charges if he hasn't actually been charged for anything. I'm not a lawyer, and my legal knowledge is US, not Swedish, but if they're still investigating the matter, they can't charge you with anything. I'm also going to ask for an independent (read: not aligned with either side) source for "multiple violations of Swedish and international law. Just because I think, had there actually been a clear violation, Assange would be suing Sweden for everything it owns.
"Nobody is above the law" is the principle Wikileaks seems to be standing for. Assange should not be exempt from the laws either. By all means, if there is sufficient evidence to warrant some questions, question him.
I personally have no opinion as to whether these charges are true or not - there just isn't enough data to support any conclusion. It could be an attempt to discredit the organization, or it could be true. So, then, go get the data, and examine the evidence, and see if there's even enough to warrant a trial.
It angered people mostly because it spread so effectively that it clogged the Internet. If you coded one properly, such that it spread slowly and didn't try to reinfect machines, I think it would be viewed in a much more positive light.
Actually, you might be on to something. Anybody know if all the TSA passenger regs apply to pilots of small aircraft?
Glock, Remington, Colt, Beretta, H&K, and S&W have all been doing quite well of late. Remember - in any war, the real winners are the ones making the weapons.
Law enforcement isn't. Supplying and training law enforcement is.
I think "able to brute-force thousands of passwords in an hour" qualifies as a weakness in SHA-1.
But you're missing the point. It's not being consistent about it. I fully understand that there's thousands of alloys for both steel and aluminum, but the problem is that if WolframAlpha can parse one of them, it should be able to parse the other.
Ideally, it would ask "what alloy are you asking about", but just giving an "average" result while having a little "this information is for alloy 113811742, click for more options" box in the corner, would be fine.
His point was that balloons have been considered and proposed by many people far more educated in that particular branch of science than any of us, so we should defer to their opinion that it is fully possible.
Except it's inconsistent about things. Type in "tensile strength of steel", it gives you a table of mechanical properties for steel. Type in "tensile strength of aluminum", and it ignores the "tensile strength" and just gives you chemical info on Aluminum. Tried a few variations in syntax, and tried spelling it the British way, no luck. It's a useful tool, but the parser seems inconsistent, probably the worst thing a program can be.
Wouldn't something less fuel-hungry give a longer usable life, and thus be a better return on investment? Solar-powered propellers, or just a helium balloon, might make more sense, as every gram of fuel takes away from the payload.