Roboticization of warfare can only be a good thing.
Because only people from poor countries get hurt?
he problem with anti-war nuts is that they fail to consider the costs of the alternatives.
Ah yes, the price of peace. In particular the hideous economic consequences of free trade.
Back in the day, nobody thought much if a B-52 dropping 500 bombs on a military target happened to wipe out an adjacent village.
True, and certainly arguable that laser guided bombs have at least reduced the civilian casualty rate if not eliminated it entirely. However, the argument falls flat on two fronts:
1, In countries with conscription is there really a difference between a civilian and an enemy solider? 2, The development of more accurate weapons has led to a wider acceptance of war, and hence more of it.
Still, not wiping out an adjacent village has to be a good thing.
I'm not a real DBA, but know one - and he messes around with Sybase, of which there is now a free version. Probably only free as in beer, but hey.
Me, myself, bollocks to it all - standardise on postgres and be happy. It's gradually becoming less of a bitch to administer and has never had any problems on the stability front.
Drive itself across a desert for ten hours then, like, get pizza or something? I think not. What they want is something that will drive itself for ten hours then go fucking BANG! and take out a whole shitload of unsuspecting Iraqi's.
We're just, like, interested to see if it can be done. Here, have a million bucks. Sure, fuck you.
still have money to spend on my 5 (yes, FIVE) children
Screw the money, what about the time? I have 1 (yes, ONE) child - a toddler who's 17 months. At this stage my partner and I are _still_ constantly amazed that the species manages to perpetuate at all. Let alone five.
Either this is the biggest troll ever, or you're deeply in the shit. Assuming it's the latter, for now, I shall toss my orb and see where it lands:
*HIRE A REALLY GOOD SYSADMIN*
You're horrendously out of your depth and there are shedloads of really good sysadmins around who need jobs. Take someone on for three months to look at the problem properly. Advice 2:
*DON'T BUY AN ITANIUM MACHINE*
There is simply no point, particularly if you don't really know what you're going to use it for.
All Joel's comments are geared towards small forums that are attempting to grow. Wouldn't work here - I don't know about anyone else, but I dont want to have to page through 50k of "BSD is dying" before I get to something relevant.
Slighty offtopic, but if there are any OS X coders reading this can I get an opinion on whether or not Carbon is the inferior sibling of Cocoa, or are they both as good as each other really.
FSAA, BTW, is tremendously difficult for video-cards to do (because they're actually rendering at 2x or greater resolutions
While this was true until recently, there has been some significant progress in this area. The Parhelia for instance (bad example, I know, but stick with me) only anti-aliases the edge pixels of triangles that aren't joined to other triangles - spectacularly reducing the quantity of work needed to at least get the beneficial effects of AA if not true AA itself. There's also been some work on using non uniform sample grids, I believe this is how the GF4's AA.
Go look at some benchmarks, the more modern cards still sweat with AA, but not nearly to the hernia inducing loads that my GF3 would be put under should I ever run AA on it... And this, to me, is what the latest generation of video cards are all about - much the same in terms of framerate, but a better visual quality.
I'm still disappointed to see a lack of comparisons between SDRAM and DDR. I have an XP1800 on KT133a and really don't want to have to change the motherboard, RAM etc. If I drop a faster video card on it (currently running a o/ced GF3 ti200), will it go to waste? If I drop a faster CPU on it, will it starve for bandwidth?
Really I guess it boils down to what Doom3 needs to go properly, and whether or not I give a shit about PC gaming once it finally comes out. The price/performance of my PS2 looks pretty good right now.
But look at your FLOPS per dollar. Chances are the PC will be at least an order of magnitude lower.
Problem is that not all flops are born the same. The highly iterative algorithms that the scientific and engineering communities need to run start to sprout actually relevant errors when calculated using "only" 32 bits.
I would love to see the x86 architecture, and all of the legacy crop dropped like a hot potato. I'm not confident that it will happen in this decade, but it sure would be nice if it was.
Of course it's happening, what do you think Itanium is? What about ARM? It's not like ARM processors are rare either. Of course we'll never see it dropped on a "pee cee" circa 1984, but the newer processors are doing a great job of pretending the cruft isn't there.
I could reply this to a dozen posts I've just read, but I chose this one. Don't know why.
This is one hell of a good time to start a Debian support firm. Arseloads of server contracts at $800/box/year knocking around, pissed off IT managers, hell of a good time.
Don't go low level unless you really want to. If you want to get a game out either use the torque engine that appears to work and is a whole hundred US. Or for a basic FPS use the Quake engine for nowt.
Gee, thanks man. The net is toast, so I'll go download 100Mb.
The correct thing to do is get on the phone to the best paid MS employee you can find and whine your F*CKING arse off. Continually. Until they plead you to go away. Then do it some more.
This is fine, I guess, if you're going to run a processor as slow (!) as this. Point being that a hyperthreaded system will place greater demands on the ram bandwidth.
With a slow processor they may be using 80% of the available bandwidth instead of 60% with HT switched off. Upping to processor speed to... say 3GHz, where HT is enabled in vanilla P4's... and we can expect to see the memory bandwidth being toasted continuously. Under these conditions I doubt we would see a speedup at all, and quite possibly the reduced cache efficiency would reduce it.
Executive Summary: Can we do this again with a non-Xeon P4 3GHz?
The cost to have throw away apps signed (not to mention the time delay involved) will utterly destroy them.
Oh, do get a grip. You think monkey boy is going to jump around shouting "developers developers developers" then do a thing like that? MS know they need to keep the small development shops onside, and they're not about to crap on them. (Famous last words)
I expect what we'll see is some arrangement where apps that run within the.net run time environment either don't need signing or have a light SSL'esque certificate attached. Code that runs natively, or more to the point can get to low level hardware will need approving by redmond though. So, a stock control application written in VB will have no problems, though a home cooked CD burner - or DRM cracker will have difficulty running.
Sure it does, why do people make sure they get good quality IDE cables (esp. for UDMA), why do we need good quality network cables and connections?
I think you'll find that for one pretty well anything will work for 100base-T. Gig is different, but you'll get away with murder at 100Mbit. And secondly that SPDIF is a far lower data rate than either. You could send the signals over a coat hanger and still have no appreciable loss.
Basically, no. There was something on here a couple'o'months back about... ahhh... some text editor or something, can't remember. Anyway, the point is that the author had sold 'n' thousand copies for the mac, ported it to Linux and sold something like four copies.
So, quality shareware for Linux? F*ck that.
Commercial, expensive server software may have a market. Particularly if it enables interoperability with Windows (-1 Unfashionable).
Mac OSX? Now that's a different question. Here we have a target market that we *know* pays for things, otherwise they wouldn't have macs. The big danger is that whatever you write will be released at macworld as iWhatever three days before you release it and the market will be dead. Witness OmniWeb and Safari -> owned. Imagine making photo editing software for the mac now. Or an MP3 player. Or some presentation software. Or an email client. Or calendaring. You get my drift?
Slashdot Mirror
About four years too late, but hey.
Dave
Real DBA. See, told you.
:)
Dave
Roboticization of warfare can only be a good thing.
Because only people from poor countries get hurt?
he problem with anti-war nuts is that they fail to consider the costs of the alternatives.
Ah yes, the price of peace. In particular the hideous economic consequences of free trade.
Back in the day, nobody thought much if a B-52 dropping 500 bombs on a military target happened to wipe out an adjacent village.
True, and certainly arguable that laser guided bombs have at least reduced the civilian casualty rate if not eliminated it entirely. However, the argument falls flat on two fronts:
1, In countries with conscription is there really a difference between a civilian and an enemy solider?
2, The development of more accurate weapons has led to a wider acceptance of war, and hence more of it.
Still, not wiping out an adjacent village has to be a good thing.
Dave
I'm not a real DBA, but know one - and he messes around with Sybase, of which there is now a free version. Probably only free as in beer, but hey.
Me, myself, bollocks to it all - standardise on postgres and be happy. It's gradually becoming less of a bitch to administer and has never had any problems on the stability front.
Dave
Drive itself across a desert for ten hours then, like, get pizza or something? I think not. What they want is something that will drive itself for ten hours then go fucking BANG! and take out a whole shitload of unsuspecting Iraqi's.
We're just, like, interested to see if it can be done. Here, have a million bucks. Sure, fuck you.
Dave
still have money to spend on my 5 (yes, FIVE) children
:)
Screw the money, what about the time? I have 1 (yes, ONE) child - a toddler who's 17 months. At this stage my partner and I are _still_ constantly amazed that the species manages to perpetuate at all. Let alone five.
Jeez
Dave
Either this is the biggest troll ever, or you're deeply in the shit. Assuming it's the latter, for now, I shall toss my orb and see where it lands:
*HIRE A REALLY GOOD SYSADMIN*
You're horrendously out of your depth and there are shedloads of really good sysadmins around who need jobs. Take someone on for three months to look at the problem properly. Advice 2:
*DON'T BUY AN ITANIUM MACHINE*
There is simply no point, particularly if you don't really know what you're going to use it for.
Cheers,
Dave
All Joel's comments are geared towards small forums that are attempting to grow. Wouldn't work here - I don't know about anyone else, but I dont want to have to page through 50k of "BSD is dying" before I get to something relevant.
Dave
I use exim. I have used exim, qmail and sendmail and I like exim by far the most. It is:
* Shit easy to configure.
* When something does go to custard I can understand the logs.
* Stable, appears to be secure, yaddah yaddah yaddah.
Not convinced by the "plug in replacement" nature of it, I also don't know what your sendmail config does so can't comment.
It's worth a go. Debian's worth a go too.
Dave
Slighty offtopic, but if there are any OS X coders reading this can I get an opinion on whether or not Carbon is the inferior sibling of Cocoa, or are they both as good as each other really.
Cheers,
Dave
I am. I thought they'd at least wait until they had some market share before pissing everyone off.
Dave
FSAA, BTW, is tremendously difficult for video-cards to do (because they're actually rendering at 2x or greater resolutions
While this was true until recently, there has been some significant progress in this area. The Parhelia for instance (bad example, I know, but stick with me) only anti-aliases the edge pixels of triangles that aren't joined to other triangles - spectacularly reducing the quantity of work needed to at least get the beneficial effects of AA if not true AA itself. There's also been some work on using non uniform sample grids, I believe this is how the GF4's AA.
Go look at some benchmarks, the more modern cards still sweat with AA, but not nearly to the hernia inducing loads that my GF3 would be put under should I ever run AA on it... And this, to me, is what the latest generation of video cards are all about - much the same in terms of framerate, but a better visual quality.
Dave
I'm still disappointed to see a lack of comparisons between SDRAM and DDR. I have an XP1800 on KT133a and really don't want to have to change the motherboard, RAM etc. If I drop a faster video card on it (currently running a o/ced GF3 ti200), will it go to waste? If I drop a faster CPU on it, will it starve for bandwidth?
Really I guess it boils down to what Doom3 needs to go properly, and whether or not I give a shit about PC gaming once it finally comes out. The price/performance of my PS2 looks pretty good right now.
Dave
But look at your FLOPS per dollar. Chances are the PC will be at least an order of magnitude lower.
Problem is that not all flops are born the same. The highly iterative algorithms that the scientific and engineering communities need to run start to sprout actually relevant errors when calculated using "only" 32 bits.
I would love to see the x86 architecture, and all of the legacy crop dropped like a hot potato. I'm not confident that it will happen in this decade, but it sure would be nice if it was.
Of course it's happening, what do you think Itanium is? What about ARM? It's not like ARM processors are rare either. Of course we'll never see it dropped on a "pee cee" circa 1984, but the newer processors are doing a great job of pretending the cruft isn't there.
Dave
I could reply this to a dozen posts I've just read, but I chose this one. Don't know why.
This is one hell of a good time to start a Debian support firm. Arseloads of server contracts at $800/box/year knocking around, pissed off IT managers, hell of a good time.
Dave
Don't go low level unless you really want to. If you want to get a game out either use the torque engine that appears to work and is a whole hundred US. Or for a basic FPS use the Quake engine for nowt.
:)
Dave
Gee, thanks man. The net is toast, so I'll go download 100Mb.
The correct thing to do is get on the phone to the best paid MS employee you can find and whine your F*CKING arse off. Continually. Until they plead you to go away. Then do it some more.
Dave
This is fine, I guess, if you're going to run a processor as slow (!) as this. Point being that a hyperthreaded system will place greater demands on the ram bandwidth.
... say 3GHz, where HT is enabled in vanilla P4's ... and we can expect to see the memory bandwidth being toasted continuously. Under these conditions I doubt we would see a speedup at all, and quite possibly the reduced cache efficiency would reduce it.
With a slow processor they may be using 80% of the available bandwidth instead of 60% with HT switched off. Upping to processor speed to
Executive Summary: Can we do this again with a non-Xeon P4 3GHz?
Dave
The cost to have throw away apps signed (not to mention the time delay involved) will utterly destroy them.
.net run time environment either don't need signing or have a light SSL'esque certificate attached. Code that runs natively, or more to the point can get to low level hardware will need approving by redmond though. So, a stock control application written in VB will have no problems, though a home cooked CD burner - or DRM cracker will have difficulty running.
Oh, do get a grip. You think monkey boy is going to jump around shouting "developers developers developers" then do a thing like that? MS know they need to keep the small development shops onside, and they're not about to crap on them. (Famous last words)
I expect what we'll see is some arrangement where apps that run within the
Dave
Maybe you should try twisting it. If it only craps out occasionally, the marginal improvement due to twisting the pairs might be enough to do the job.
Dave
Sure it does, why do people make sure they get good quality IDE cables (esp. for UDMA), why do we need good quality network cables and connections?
I think you'll find that for one pretty well anything will work for 100base-T. Gig is different, but you'll get away with murder at 100Mbit. And secondly that SPDIF is a far lower data rate than either. You could send the signals over a coat hanger and still have no appreciable loss.
Dave
Basically, no. There was something on here a couple'o'months back about ... ahhh ... some text editor or something, can't remember. Anyway, the point is that the author had sold 'n' thousand copies for the mac, ported it to Linux and sold something like four copies.
:)
So, quality shareware for Linux? F*ck that.
Commercial, expensive server software may have a market. Particularly if it enables interoperability with Windows (-1 Unfashionable).
Mac OSX? Now that's a different question. Here we have a target market that we *know* pays for things, otherwise they wouldn't have macs. The big danger is that whatever you write will be released at macworld as iWhatever three days before you release it and the market will be dead. Witness OmniWeb and Safari -> owned. Imagine making photo editing software for the mac now. Or an MP3 player. Or some presentation software. Or an email client. Or calendaring. You get my drift?
Shareware for Linux? Do get a grip
Dave
Finally got it.
Monsieur market-spiel turns out to have won a "contest" for early adopters.
Dave
Twice in one day I post then find I'm talking out of my arse. Possibly:
t ml
http://www.bookofseg.com/diaries/Img_2033_JPG.h
So he paid for it, *and* won a contest. How weird.
Dave
Ummm, bullshit.
"the segway ht unit is about $5,000, for my household having one this year will have paid itself off by delivery.
so we ordered one..."
http://www.bookofseg.com/diaries/index.html
Dave