Well, it is, and that's what I'm saying. XML is slow. Don't get me wrong, I use XML all the time - just not to generate animated vector graphics. Binary will always win on the performance front, and intensive graphics applications still need all the performance that it can get.
Here's one good reason why you'd want to implement Flash instead of SVG: SVG is Slooow.
Don't get me wrong, I'm very excited about the possibilities for quick and _relatively static_ XML based graphic generation. But for an extremely slow animation SVG hogs my CPU @100% on an Athlon 1.2Ghz.
I'm not saying that a basic understanding of abstractions below you is not required, however, one does not need to be an expert... tunnel vision goes both ways you know. Not understanding how to build and design applications in an efficient manner is a common problem with younger CS grads. Some stay in that rut, the more creative ones break out of it and have the best of all worlds. Personally, I've done work for companies that are extremely small, and in the Fortune 100. I've never needed to worry about the hardware, memory management, or machine code (although as a geek I know of such things purely through my own efforts). It's not a tunnel, it's a broad, but different set of disciplines in which computer science is only a fraction. Really, in many worlds, C/C++ is dead, and I get bored when dealing with it's messy string classes. Quite frankly, I have a lot more fun hacking ASM.
Microsoft has GREAT exclusive titles. You just have to not be blind to them. I've never even heard of Phantasy Star or Animal Crossing... why? Because I have an XBox, not a GameCube.
Don't get me wrong, Nintendo has got a good thing going for them (aside from really cheap controllers IMHO). I plan on getting a GC once the price goes down because of Zelda and Metroid Prime particularly. Most other games on the GC have great counterparts on the XBox though.
I had a Softawre Development Manager who worked for the Joint Strike Fighter program at Boeing who had the same philosophy. We never got projects done in a reasonable time, everything was done using dated technology that couldn't do what we needed it to do without a lot of developer effort, and half of our budget went to technical writers so that we could have huge libraries of documentation that would be outdated before it was even printed. Military grade software development simply doesn't work in most businesses. Eventually he got fired and replaced by someone who allowed us to get the job done, and to this day the system has never double billed a customer, or had any other significant breaks in production.
Spoken like a true elitist. I've worked with many CS grad's who could write code that could run circles around mine when it comes to memory management and sorting strings efficiently. But when it comes to clean OO and application design in a Java or C# environment, they Just Don't Get It(tm). Many are caught with all of the cool optimizations they can do because they understand so much about things that just don't matter in these higher level environments. To be fair, I've worked with CS grad's who are overal excellent developers, but the point is that a "real expert" need not know how to hack Assembler for your next J2EE project.
hmm.. maybe I should go back to school and get some real skills
School does not give you skills (or at least not primarily), it teaches you how to think and how to learn. School can not make you an expert, it can only give you the tools that you need to become an expert.
The real world is using Java and C# over lower level languages. Assembly hacking is great, and so is C/C++/Objective C, but you can't expect a programmer to be a master of each layer of abstraction. The knowledge of points is useless for many programmers, and will be for the rest of their careers. A programmer!=Computer Scientist and visa versa. I know a CS guy who's quite brilliant (could probably contribute a lot to Google's search algorithms and distributed data indexing algorithms) but would do horribly developing the next J2EE app for our Fortune 100.
I will agree that Java shouldn't be the _primary_ teaching language at a university, but many CS grad's go on to become professional programmers, and need to be taught how to think at the proper layer of abstraction.
Well, I had a PS2, and now I have an XBox. The games currently available and the games coming up for this Christmas season are great. Any new console needs a good 12-18months to develop a game library. I knew that XBox's potential outdid PS2's last year, and now I'm seeing that happen. The same goes for the GC. The PS2 is getting less and less attention and game developers are getting more excited about the potentials that the GC and XBox offer. This doesn't mean that buying the PS2 was a bad console choice - some games like FF will never be on the other two. It just depends on what's important to you.
Is the X-Box just grossly mismanaged
Not at all - it's doing very well all things considering. XBox Live is a BLAST (I've been Beta testing it), the current game library is great, and the games coming out this month and next look incredible. I'm not saying that the XBox is the _BEST_ console, I'm just saying that it was done right, and I like it a lot.
It's amazing to me that MS is able to get away with the same thing without its competitors screaming more loudly at the US government.
It's probably because MS's competitors understand the Sherman act better then you do. Microsoft has the money to easily sell the XBox at $99, and games at $29 for hit titles. However, this is underselling in a market. MS is competing at market price (note how Sony is the one who started the price war by lowering to $199) and is actually _MORE_ expensive then the other two consoles in some markets. Taking a loss is considered an investment decision where your product can lead towards future revenue. There really is no correlation between the console business and the oil business.
Like Sony is not a megacorporation that can't keep up with MS. Also, a $177million loss is not rediculous considering the poor economy and the nature of the console business (difficult market penetration for the "new kid ont he block"). Sony took huge losses on the PS1, and that was during a better economy and a less heated console war.
to hear that they're losing money with game sales seems odd to me.
Well, that's because they aren't losing money on game sales. The problem is that the game sales isn't enough to recoup the loss that the console itself generates. Also, none of this is strange because this was predicted by MS before it launched it's console. Of course, there's strong hopes that Christmas game and accessory sales will help get the XBox division out of the red.
Even if we narrow the scope to x86 desktop apps, it seems that based on preliminary benchmarks (with Hyperthreading enabled) AMD's AthlonXP 2800+ still reigns (albeit, by a very small margin) as the fastest chip available.
Dictionary.com's definitions can be vague, since they pull from a large number of sources. Number 1 is the correct definition (as usual for that site). A religion does not necessarily have an authoritarian leader, nor does it have followers living in an unconventional manner.
This is why a cult is defined as "A religion", and then some additional qualifiers. This of course concludes that not all religions are cults. Religion is also a very loose term - the Open Source Movement can be classified as a religion, and maybe even a Cult if you consider RMS a charasmatic leader:-).
Your sig makes no logical sense, nor is it correct in any sense either. I suggest you read up on what a cult is, and educate yourself so that when you debate someone in the future you don't sound ignorant about your topic.
A case which does not substantiate that the flaw had anything to do with the nature of "closed source" software - maybe Borland just had a poor code review process, or maybe it didn't happen at all and it was a rumour.
WarGames was one of the most accurate theatrical portrayals of hacking ever.
I'm not sure whethor to mod this +5 Funny or -1 Clueless. I really hope you were joking.
Where's the guarantee that your car is designed to last 250,000 miles? Sure, you can open the hood, but you (nor any individual) can determine the quality of the design simply by opening the hood. You look at a Company's track record. When Honda has proven itself by building cars that last long with minimal maintenance, that's how you know. This is the same with Airplane's, or any other engineered product. It's ludicrious to assume that the blueprints for a 747 need to be "open" so that we can ensure that there's no bugs in the GPS computer (for example).
Now all that hard work is paying off!
on
Film Gimp
·
· Score: 2, Flamebait
All that hard work that you've spent coding for FREE on the Gimp project is finally paying off! Now, the same companies that bring us great technologies like CSS and great laws like the DMCA are now PROFITING OFF OF YOUR BACKS!
Okay, maybe my attitude is wrong about the whole thing, but could someone please help me figure out why?
Microsoft had their source available to some cracker for three months back in 2000.
Just because _parts_ of the Windows Source was leaked thanks to help from an Employee doesn't mean that that "cracker" could modify the code and check it in.
If your closed source software has backdoors or trojans...well.... Well, that's why you have peer review, software test engineers (that test for security, not just breaking bugs). The reality is I don't have time to find these trojans, so I expect a company to do it internally. True, with Open Source there are "more eyes" looking at the code, but there's no guaruntee of the competance of those eyes.
This is utterly bizarre - only MSFT can get away with cancelling a major release and not undergoing a hailstorm of criticism in the trade press.
It's only bizarre if you lack objectivity. A 2004 release of Longhorn Server is a bad thing, and MS realized that a late 2005 or early 2006 release would be much better. Windows.NET Server (to suceed Win2K Server) will probably be out early 2003. If MS did release Longhorn in 2004, you'd be posting yet another MS bashing +5 "insightful" rant about how MS is ripping us off by coming out with a new OS every year.
Slashdot Mirror
Six years ago Palm pilot's reigned. MS has gained momentum with CE, thanks to Palm's lack of ability to innovate beyond the Palm 3.
Watch it - your post reeks of business savvy "lingo" and factual basis. You should know that this is not the place for such things.
This is like saying XML is slow.
Well, it is, and that's what I'm saying. XML is slow. Don't get me wrong, I use XML all the time - just not to generate animated vector graphics. Binary will always win on the performance front, and intensive graphics applications still need all the performance that it can get.
Here's one good reason why you'd want to implement Flash instead of SVG: SVG is Slooow.
Don't get me wrong, I'm very excited about the possibilities for quick and _relatively static_ XML based graphic generation. But for an extremely slow animation SVG hogs my CPU @100% on an Athlon 1.2Ghz.
I'm not saying that a basic understanding of abstractions below you is not required, however, one does not need to be an expert... tunnel vision goes both ways you know. Not understanding how to build and design applications in an efficient manner is a common problem with younger CS grads. Some stay in that rut, the more creative ones break out of it and have the best of all worlds. Personally, I've done work for companies that are extremely small, and in the Fortune 100. I've never needed to worry about the hardware, memory management, or machine code (although as a geek I know of such things purely through my own efforts). It's not a tunnel, it's a broad, but different set of disciplines in which computer science is only a fraction. Really, in many worlds, C/C++ is dead, and I get bored when dealing with it's messy string classes. Quite frankly, I have a lot more fun hacking ASM.
Please go take a business class (or two). Monopolies are A) not illegal and B) not necessarily obtained by unfair means.
The courts have NEVER ruled that Microsoft obtained it's monopoly unfairly. They just _sustained_ it for a short while unfairly.
Microsoft has GREAT exclusive titles. You just have to not be blind to them. I've never even heard of Phantasy Star or Animal Crossing... why? Because I have an XBox, not a GameCube.
Don't get me wrong, Nintendo has got a good thing going for them (aside from really cheap controllers IMHO). I plan on getting a GC once the price goes down because of Zelda and Metroid Prime particularly. Most other games on the GC have great counterparts on the XBox though.
Well, you've got 3 of 50. It's a start... I guess. I'd rather use OS X where most of those games are NATIVE.
I had a Softawre Development Manager who worked for the Joint Strike Fighter program at Boeing who had the same philosophy. We never got projects done in a reasonable time, everything was done using dated technology that couldn't do what we needed it to do without a lot of developer effort, and half of our budget went to technical writers so that we could have huge libraries of documentation that would be outdated before it was even printed. Military grade software development simply doesn't work in most businesses. Eventually he got fired and replaced by someone who allowed us to get the job done, and to this day the system has never double billed a customer, or had any other significant breaks in production.
Spoken like a true elitist. I've worked with many CS grad's who could write code that could run circles around mine when it comes to memory management and sorting strings efficiently. But when it comes to clean OO and application design in a Java or C# environment, they Just Don't Get It(tm). Many are caught with all of the cool optimizations they can do because they understand so much about things that just don't matter in these higher level environments. To be fair, I've worked with CS grad's who are overal excellent developers, but the point is that a "real expert" need not know how to hack Assembler for your next J2EE project.
hmm.. maybe I should go back to school and get some real skills
School does not give you skills (or at least not primarily), it teaches you how to think and how to learn. School can not make you an expert, it can only give you the tools that you need to become an expert.
That's great, but what about the real world?
The real world is using Java and C# over lower level languages. Assembly hacking is great, and so is C/C++/Objective C, but you can't expect a programmer to be a master of each layer of abstraction. The knowledge of points is useless for many programmers, and will be for the rest of their careers. A programmer!=Computer Scientist and visa versa. I know a CS guy who's quite brilliant (could probably contribute a lot to Google's search algorithms and distributed data indexing algorithms) but would do horribly developing the next J2EE app for our Fortune 100.
I will agree that Java shouldn't be the _primary_ teaching language at a university, but many CS grad's go on to become professional programmers, and need to be taught how to think at the proper layer of abstraction.
Well, I had a PS2, and now I have an XBox. The games currently available and the games coming up for this Christmas season are great. Any new console needs a good 12-18months to develop a game library. I knew that XBox's potential outdid PS2's last year, and now I'm seeing that happen. The same goes for the GC. The PS2 is getting less and less attention and game developers are getting more excited about the potentials that the GC and XBox offer. This doesn't mean that buying the PS2 was a bad console choice - some games like FF will never be on the other two. It just depends on what's important to you.
Is the X-Box just grossly mismanaged
Not at all - it's doing very well all things considering. XBox Live is a BLAST (I've been Beta testing it), the current game library is great, and the games coming out this month and next look incredible. I'm not saying that the XBox is the _BEST_ console, I'm just saying that it was done right, and I like it a lot.
It's amazing to me that MS is able to get away with the same thing without its competitors screaming more loudly at the US government.
It's probably because MS's competitors understand the Sherman act better then you do. Microsoft has the money to easily sell the XBox at $99, and games at $29 for hit titles. However, this is underselling in a market. MS is competing at market price (note how Sony is the one who started the price war by lowering to $199) and is actually _MORE_ expensive then the other two consoles in some markets. Taking a loss is considered an investment decision where your product can lead towards future revenue. There really is no correlation between the console business and the oil business.
Like Sony is not a megacorporation that can't keep up with MS. Also, a $177million loss is not rediculous considering the poor economy and the nature of the console business (difficult market penetration for the "new kid ont he block"). Sony took huge losses on the PS1, and that was during a better economy and a less heated console war.
to hear that they're losing money with game sales seems odd to me.
Well, that's because they aren't losing money on game sales. The problem is that the game sales isn't enough to recoup the loss that the console itself generates. Also, none of this is strange because this was predicted by MS before it launched it's console. Of course, there's strong hopes that Christmas game and accessory sales will help get the XBox division out of the red.
Even if we narrow the scope to x86 desktop apps, it seems that based on preliminary benchmarks (with Hyperthreading enabled) AMD's AthlonXP 2800+ still reigns (albeit, by a very small margin) as the fastest chip available.
Dictionary.com's definitions can be vague, since they pull from a large number of sources. Number 1 is the correct definition (as usual for that site). A religion does not necessarily have an authoritarian leader, nor does it have followers living in an unconventional manner.
:-).
This is why a cult is defined as "A religion", and then some additional qualifiers. This of course concludes that not all religions are cults. Religion is also a very loose term - the Open Source Movement can be classified as a religion, and maybe even a Cult if you consider RMS a charasmatic leader
Your sig makes no logical sense, nor is it correct in any sense either. I suggest you read up on what a cult is, and educate yourself so that when you debate someone in the future you don't sound ignorant about your topic.
and followed by a real-life case.
A case which does not substantiate that the flaw had anything to do with the nature of "closed source" software - maybe Borland just had a poor code review process, or maybe it didn't happen at all and it was a rumour.
WarGames was one of the most accurate theatrical portrayals of hacking ever.
I'm not sure whethor to mod this +5 Funny or -1 Clueless. I really hope you were joking.
Remember WarGames?
Yes, I own that _MOVIE_ (case in point).
Where's the guarantee that your car is designed to last 250,000 miles? Sure, you can open the hood, but you (nor any individual) can determine the quality of the design simply by opening the hood. You look at a Company's track record. When Honda has proven itself by building cars that last long with minimal maintenance, that's how you know. This is the same with Airplane's, or any other engineered product. It's ludicrious to assume that the blueprints for a 747 need to be "open" so that we can ensure that there's no bugs in the GPS computer (for example).
All that hard work that you've spent coding for FREE on the Gimp project is finally paying off! Now, the same companies that bring us great technologies like CSS and great laws like the DMCA are now PROFITING OFF OF YOUR BACKS!
Okay, maybe my attitude is wrong about the whole thing, but could someone please help me figure out why?
Microsoft had their source available to some cracker for three months back in 2000.
Just because _parts_ of the Windows Source was leaked thanks to help from an Employee doesn't mean that that "cracker" could modify the code and check it in.
If your closed source software has backdoors or trojans...well....
Well, that's why you have peer review, software test engineers (that test for security, not just breaking bugs). The reality is I don't have time to find these trojans, so I expect a company to do it internally. True, with Open Source there are "more eyes" looking at the code, but there's no guaruntee of the competance of those eyes.
This is utterly bizarre - only MSFT can get away with cancelling a major release and not undergoing a hailstorm of criticism in the trade press.
.NET Server (to suceed Win2K Server) will probably be out early 2003. If MS did release Longhorn in 2004, you'd be posting yet another MS bashing +5 "insightful" rant about how MS is ripping us off by coming out with a new OS every year.
It's only bizarre if you lack objectivity. A 2004 release of Longhorn Server is a bad thing, and MS realized that a late 2005 or early 2006 release would be much better. Windows