What he intuited, it would seem, is Kolmogorov scaling. Other artists, gifted artists, tried to render turbulence, but their renderings did not exhibit Kolmogorov scaling. So, that's pretty interesting -- his paintings manifest a deep theoretical result, that other paintings which try to capture the same phenomenon, do not. It's reasonable to suggest he intuited something pretty deep that others did not.
Unless you're running on special hardware (like a VIA chipset, for example), it's incredibly unlikely that compiling your own binaries will get you any particular performance advantage.
There is a very good reason for compiling your own, though: you can control all kinds of things via./configure (typically). It's pretty handy to have control over this stuff, and it DOES get to be a bit wasteful if every binary you have installed has every possible option linked in.
N00bs obviously find the compilation process a little daunting, but it's a good exercise in figuring out how things work and fit together:./configure --help | less
The other comments about screen are spot-on: virtualizing a terminal is really powerful, and makes it easy to do command-line stuff from any terminal you want. Pretty soon you lose that uncomfortable feeling that your life would really such should you run in to an unexpected HUP.
One thing I like to use screen for is a "better nohup". You can start a named screen session (screen -S), start a server in it, then detach and leave it running. At any point it's then trivial to reattach to it (by name again), ^C and restart if necessary, look at stdout, etc. Plus you can scroll back through the output.
Personally I find screen particularly effective when used in conjunction with ratpoison, which is a similar concept in window managers. You get one dimension via screen, and a second dimension via ratpoison.
Well...we wanted to make use of 3d hardware, but what we were doing with the z-buffer just didn't work very well on a huge number of accelerator cards. We ended up focusing on making it playable in software (using DirectX's software renderer for the characters, by the way, and a bunch of different customer blitters for alpha-blended z-pixels).
There was one final horrific stretch to make the scrolling work...I was working at home, I had to come in to the office for a meeting, and rushed out, claiming the graphics engine was in pieces all over my apartment, and I had to get back before I forgot how to put it all back together. After I checked that stuff in, Don Hopkins said something like, "boy you really unstuck the scrolling, thanks!"
Sorry you think it "failed." Most people would like to fail that way.:)
It was definitely hard to port it to Mac...we didn't wrap the DX stuff well at all. I still feel bad about that.
I lead the graphics effort on The Sims, and for us, there was a lot of luck involved. Most people don't think of The Sims as terribly cutting edge graphics-wise, but at the time we were trying to do something that a lot of people told us wouldn't work (software 3d rendering into a rich z-buffered background). I put a huge amount of effort in to making the game playable on a 200MHz MMX PC, which it barely was. In the end I think we got lucky...by the time it shipped, that was a definite sweet spot in the market. And it did manage to sell a fair number of copies, though probably not for that reason.:)
Rumor has it The Sims has driven up the price of RAM. We didn't spend nearly enough time optimizing how it would use RAM with hundreds or thousands of new objects added to the game, and from what I hear hardcore players are happy enough without high-spec CPUs, but they all like a gig or more of RAM.
I used a great headhunter in the Bay Area in 1995. I was in Southern California, trying to make a move to the Bay Area, and I was running out of money. This guy paid for hotels and rental cars out of his own pocket, and got in me in with a few different head hunters. I ended up getting a *great* job, not through him, and he was nothing but supportive and honest the whole way through. No hard feelings at the end. I kind of assumed all head hunters were like that. Sadly, despite the fact that they can take $30K from placing a good candidate in a good position without much work, the one's I've dealt with since largely act like I work for them. My favorite is when they insist I copy and paste my text resume into Word and mail it back to them. Sigh.
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You need Visio 2007 to reverse-engineer an Oracle 10g database. That's reason enough for me!
What he intuited, it would seem, is Kolmogorov scaling. Other artists, gifted artists, tried to render turbulence, but their renderings did not exhibit Kolmogorov scaling. So, that's pretty interesting -- his paintings manifest a deep theoretical result, that other paintings which try to capture the same phenomenon, do not. It's reasonable to suggest he intuited something pretty deep that others did not.
ctags + cscope + vim is REALLY the way to go (IMO).
1
Here's a great introduction: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=5
I've tried a lot of solutions; if you're inclined to go the Vim Way, then tags is great, cscope + tags is even greater.
There was an imode virus in Japan in 2000, that caused phones to dial emergency services:
. html
http://specials.ft.com/telecoms/sep00/FT3R3BJ29DC
Unless you're running on special hardware (like a VIA chipset, for example), it's incredibly unlikely that compiling your own binaries will get you any particular performance advantage.
./configure (typically). It's pretty handy to have control over this stuff, and it DOES get to be a bit wasteful if every binary you have installed has every possible option linked in.
./configure --help | less
There is a very good reason for compiling your own, though: you can control all kinds of things via
N00bs obviously find the compilation process a little daunting, but it's a good exercise in figuring out how things work and fit together:
The other comments about screen are spot-on: virtualizing a terminal is really powerful, and makes it easy to do command-line stuff from any terminal you want. Pretty soon you lose that uncomfortable feeling that your life would really such should you run in to an unexpected HUP.
One thing I like to use screen for is a "better nohup". You can start a named screen session (screen -S), start a server in it, then detach and leave it running. At any point it's then trivial to reattach to it (by name again), ^C and restart if necessary, look at stdout, etc. Plus you can scroll back through the output.
Personally I find screen particularly effective when used in conjunction with ratpoison, which is a similar concept in window managers. You get one dimension via screen, and a second dimension via ratpoison.
Well...we wanted to make use of 3d hardware, but what we were doing with the z-buffer just didn't work very well on a huge number of accelerator cards. We ended up focusing on making it playable in software (using DirectX's software renderer for the characters, by the way, and a bunch of different customer blitters for alpha-blended z-pixels).
:)
There was one final horrific stretch to make the scrolling work...I was working at home, I had to come in to the office for a meeting, and rushed out, claiming the graphics engine was in pieces all over my apartment, and I had to get back before I forgot how to put it all back together. After I checked that stuff in, Don Hopkins said something like, "boy you really unstuck the scrolling, thanks!"
Sorry you think it "failed." Most people would like to fail that way.
It was definitely hard to port it to Mac...we didn't wrap the DX stuff well at all. I still feel bad about that.
Well, think what you like, but that was me. Sorry about the typo, I "led" it, I don't presently have anything to do with it.
The RAM prices thing was a joke.
I lead the graphics effort on The Sims, and for us, there was a lot of luck involved. Most people don't think of The Sims as terribly cutting edge graphics-wise, but at the time we were trying to do something that a lot of people told us wouldn't work (software 3d rendering into a rich z-buffered background). I put a huge amount of effort in to making the game playable on a 200MHz MMX PC, which it barely was. In the end I think we got lucky...by the time it shipped, that was a definite sweet spot in the market. And it did manage to sell a fair number of copies, though probably not for that reason. :)
Rumor has it The Sims has driven up the price of RAM. We didn't spend nearly enough time optimizing how it would use RAM with hundreds or thousands of new objects added to the game, and from what I hear hardcore players are happy enough without high-spec CPUs, but they all like a gig or more of RAM.
I used a great headhunter in the Bay Area in 1995. I was in Southern California, trying to make a move to the Bay Area, and I was running out of money. This guy paid for hotels and rental cars out of his own pocket, and got in me in with a few different head hunters. I ended up getting a *great* job, not through him, and he was nothing but supportive and honest the whole way through. No hard feelings at the end. I kind of assumed all head hunters were like that. Sadly, despite the fact that they can take $30K from placing a good candidate in a good position without much work, the one's I've dealt with since largely act like I work for them. My favorite is when they insist I copy and paste my text resume into Word and mail it back to them. Sigh.
Check this story out from new.com.com.
Jumping to the conclusion that their intent is to block 3rd party clients is just wrong, according to this.
It sounds reasonable to occasionally force an upgrade, particularly in the interest of protecting privacy.