However, I'll take the ease-of-use of OpenGL over D3D anyday. Carmack does too, among a few developers. I wonder why?;-)
Nobody really chooses OpenGL over D3D for 'ease-of-use' anymore. This might have been true during the days of DirectX 3. Ever since DX5 (and especially 6 & 7), D3D is as easy to use as OpenGL.
Of course, I'm not really advocating D3D use here. I'm a graphics programmer myself and choose OpenGL, but for portability reasons.
If the DX APIs were cross platform, I'd use them.
Its really nice to have integrated sound/3D and 2D framebuffer APIs...As is now, I tend to use SDL (which more or less mimics a lot of DirectX functionality, but has a cross-platform core and supports OpenGL)
Huh? Do you know anything about the history of computers? Do you realize how much effort it was, in the past, to generate 8K of usable machine code on a paper punch roll?
>and my point is: using Word to create a
>text-only output is a slippery slope. its all to
>easy to be tempted (by wysiwyg editors) to
>insert large fonts, pictures, etc. whereas,
>using emacs or vi will NOT even allow such >idiocy.
Anyone who breaks RFC 2223 by doing such things would have their RFC rejected.
I can think of plenty of reasons of using Word to create drafts -- great spell/grammar checker, thesaurus, etc.
Personally, Microsoft does win some points in my eyes for this. Again, if you took the time to at least scan through the RFC you'd see that it generally covers PROBLEMS in using Word for RFCs..It points out several of Word's weaknesses..It doesn't state that Word would be a good format to submit final RFCs in.
I was waiting for a post like this..Knew it was coming.
If you had read the RFC, you'd have seen that it was simply a template and some instructions to make writing RFC writing easier if you are using Micrsofot Word.
It's NOT a request that Word become the 'official' file format of RFCs. In fact, though it was written by MS employees, it most points out how Word can sometimes be problematic when dealing with text export, etc, and offers solutions to work around these issues.
Please read the links before you blindly comment on them.
While Open Source is without a doubt capable of better quality in theory (due to the "many eyes" argument) in practice it seems that most of the time when bugs are found in programs, they are reported to the original author(s) in simple bug-report-feedback formats...Which is to say, without a 'fix' included...And the original author(s) will then fix the bug themselves.
This is no different than the closed source model, except that the end user DOES have the option of fixing the bug him/herself, if they choose. But in my experience they tend to only do this when they absolutely need to (original author(s) don't respond, or are dead, or something).
Of course, there are nice people out there that will once in a while submit not only a bug report but the fix as well...But this is a hard thing to do, because finding the source of most bugs requires a pretty deep understanding of how the code is working, which can be very time consuming.
Well, the short version of all this is that while many eyes DO make all bugs shallow, those eyes have to have brains attached that are capable of understanding the code and also enough free time available (and the desire) to learn the internals of the buggy program.
'Other people's system disorientation' can be a problem under Windows, but its not as big a problem as it is with UNIX systems.
From personal experience, I don't like to do things on other people's Windows systems if I can avoid it -- invariably they won't have some software that I use often, or their keyboard feels weird (so, to some extent for me its a hardware issue as well). I don't know where to find things...C: drive? D: Drive?
But in my experience UNIX systems suffer from basically all these same problems, and a few more...
It is very rare indeed to find Windows users (maybe not as rare on Slashdot) who use alternate window manager/shells. Basically everyone seems to run explorer (by explorer, I mean explorer.exe, the default Window GUI manager...Not IE)...With UNIX systems, the diversity of WMs can be a blessing and a curse. If you're not familiar with the window manager, there's going to be a bit of learning before you can actually get anything done...And even if you ARE familiar with the window manager, most of them are so flexible that you can bet the person whose system it is has it configured quite a bit differently than you might have it set on your systems...
Also...different UNIX systems handle even the most basic input in different ways. So many times have I sat down to use someone's system (and thus their settings), hit the backspace key and up pops a visible DEL character in the terminal. Makes me want to smash the keyboard (please no flames about the 'right' keyboard layout...its all preference:) Easy enough thing to deal with, but its just one example...Using 'other people's systems' usually causes you to run into multiple such issues.
Vint Cerf's opinion, like Bob Metcalfe's opinion, means very little to me on a personal basis. Yes, I realize they 'invented' TCP/IP, ethernet, etc. I'm not discounting those achievements.
I just think its very important that we seperate the technical innovation that some of these folks have been part of with their political or idealogical views.
From Article: Cerf also said that it would be a bad idea to force the FBI to reveal Carnivore's source code, as many of the system's critics have requested
Bad? Bad how? Does anyone have any other links that might have direct quotes? I don't see how releasing the source code 'would be bad' if the system is as robust as they claim.
Why not release the source code of the system? I mean, if it is really well designed and the authentication is so robust, what do they have to fear from full disclosure?
From Article: Carnivore's detractors had suggested that hackers may be able to gain access into the system.
Actually, for me the issue is more about the FBI themselves abusing this system than some future threat of a hacker takeover of it...
Quote from article:
Many Iowa residents have been left behind by high-speed Internet providers simply because of where they live," said Pederson. "Without high-speed Internet access, we can't expect many of those communities to survive."
Its true! Its true!! Call in the Red Cross!! If these people don't get Internet access soon, they may all DIE!!!
As another person mentioned, they plan on releasing this code under the GPL (not LGPL) which will be violated when the program is run through the QuickTime interface that is a requirement of winning!
Also, by not forcing people to be MPEG4 compliant (according to the rules your code must be MPEG4, or something with 'better quality'), the resulting codec may not be open standards compliant, which in many ways nullifies its existence...Do we really want open platforms like Linux to still have their own different set of codecs? I guess having a 'different' codec beats having obsolete ones... but most web sites (etc) will use something more standard, regardless of quality. Unless the codec is SUPER COOL and ported to many platforms, in which case the author could likely make much more than $50k off of it by other means.
Lastly, I looked through the site and didn't find any information on how this will be judged. Image quality alone? Or code quality? Or time to code? Anyone?
The problem is that its not miniaturized. Have you seen pictures of the card? Its a huge hulking beast that requires its own power supply and has problems fitting in the AGP slots of many smaller-sized cases.
Honestly, 3dfx seems to be living in an alternate universe where people still care about them being the first affordable consumer 3D card company...They really need to bring something stunning to the market next cycle or NVidia's (and even ATI now) are going to stomp them so far into the ground...
You don't need to send a working copy of your atomic particle-smasher to the Patent Office to get a patent on it.
Actually, the patent office still has the right to request that you produce a working model before a patent is granted. They almost never do this... its usually reserved for ideas related to perpetual motion devices, which people try to patent a lot.
Until the late 1800s, all submissions needed to include a working model to even be considered.
Ethernet's goal is carrying electrons down a wire. That's it.
It is as secure or insecure as the high level protocols you are running on it. Perhaps you are confusing Ethernet with the Internet (in the form of TCP/IP)?
You hit the nail on the head with the last part. If the incentive is good enough, people will install all manner of questionable crap.
Also, don't count on too much information being released on the clients. Any company who is a client of one of these CPU-for-dollars service will want to believe their data is accurate and that the people running individual clients can't steal the majority of their precious intellectual property.
Most of the free 'for fame & glory' distributed projects wont even release source code because they are afraid it will cause people to send in garbage data results in an attempt to cheat to get to the top of the list. And putting in some sort of fancy security layer on top of the client to make sure data is valid would likely invalidate most of the gains of a distributed project, because you'd burn tons of cycles on the server trying to do re-validation...
The article raises lots of interesting points about the commercialism of distributed computing..But I think it somewhat glossed over the fact that there's likely to be many companies unwilling to allow the calculations to be done on 'Joe Public's' computer for security reasons. Even if the clients are theoretically secure, and no person gets enough information to understand what the data or results is, MANY (many, many) companies are so paranoid about their intellectual property that they'll never do this.
Also, it didn't really get much into the fact that not all problems are particularly well suited to distributed computing. In fact, I'd say the majority of all computation problems AREN'T easily suited for distributed computing. Either because you'd lose the computational benefits due to the overhead of transmitting really large blocks of data or the algorithm is too dependent upon being feed serial data.
Eh? The logical conclusion is that these asteroids have been coming "close" all this time. We just didn't know it because we weren't looking.
We have plenty of geological evidence that sometimes they hit. The results can be fairly local for small objects and extinction level in other cases (bye bye dinosaurs!)
The notion that a stamped letter mailed to yourself (or anyone else) is protection for/against patents or copyrights is an old urban legend. This gives you absolutely no protection or prior art claim.
This doesn't prove much of anything. Even if you can find 50,000 people who use Linux as a desktop OS, that's a pale, pale, pale shadow of the number who use Windows or even Mac for that matter.
Lets face the facts, Linux is NOT being used on the desktop by Joe Public. Major strides towards making Linux usable as a desktop OS are being made, and that's great -- but we've got a long way to go.
Even the people who are contributing most to Linux (Linus, the Gnome people, KDE people) will tell you that Linux as "Grandma-usable" desktop OS is 5 years or more away.
IE supports the correct behavior for hostname transmission in HTTP 1.1 with IE, why wouldn't it do it for ftp? Particularly when doing so is such an amazingly minor change, NOT doing so would be ammunition against them from the "net standards" purists AND they have nothing to lose from supporting it?
Please at least THINK before you bash Microsoft for something they might or might not do in the future.
Yeah, I'd really like to know more about the specific patent. If the person is in litigation, I'd assume the patent owner is the one who filed...And my guess in that case would be that its not IBM.
I'm not aware of IBM being particularly litigious with their myriad of patents. And if it were IBM, I think we might have heard more about this case, even if its a small one.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you read the last part of the comment? ONLY OUR UNDERSTANDING CHANGES. Physics hasn't changed. Our KNOWLEDGE OF PHYSICS has.
the human imagination and knowledge set.
By most accounts, physics hasn't changed over the past 100 years and won't over the next 100. Only our understanding changes.
Nobody really chooses OpenGL over D3D for 'ease-of-use' anymore. This might have been true during the days of DirectX 3. Ever since DX5 (and especially 6 & 7), D3D is as easy to use as OpenGL.
Of course, I'm not really advocating D3D use here. I'm a graphics programmer myself and choose OpenGL, but for portability reasons.
If the DX APIs were cross platform, I'd use them.
Its really nice to have integrated sound/3D and 2D framebuffer APIs...As is now, I tend to use SDL (which more or less mimics a lot of DirectX functionality, but has a cross-platform core and supports OpenGL)
A well known pre-registered account for the NYT site is "cypherpunks"/"cypherpunks" (account name & password are the same).
I guess not.
Yahoo released a method for exploting the rankings on Google. It is known as the "strategic alliance exploit"
I can think of plenty of reasons of using Word to create drafts -- great spell/grammar checker, thesaurus, etc.
Personally, Microsoft does win some points in my eyes for this. Again, if you took the time to at least scan through the RFC you'd see that it generally covers PROBLEMS in using Word for RFCs..It points out several of Word's weaknesses..It doesn't state that Word would be a good format to submit final RFCs in.
If you had read the RFC, you'd have seen that it was simply a template and some instructions to make writing RFC writing easier if you are using Micrsofot Word.
It's NOT a request that Word become the 'official' file format of RFCs. In fact, though it was written by MS employees, it most points out how Word can sometimes be problematic when dealing with text export, etc, and offers solutions to work around these issues.
Please read the links before you blindly comment on them.
This is no different than the closed source model, except that the end user DOES have the option of fixing the bug him/herself, if they choose. But in my experience they tend to only do this when they absolutely need to (original author(s) don't respond, or are dead, or something).
Of course, there are nice people out there that will once in a while submit not only a bug report but the fix as well...But this is a hard thing to do, because finding the source of most bugs requires a pretty deep understanding of how the code is working, which can be very time consuming.
Well, the short version of all this is that while many eyes DO make all bugs shallow, those eyes have to have brains attached that are capable of understanding the code and also enough free time available (and the desire) to learn the internals of the buggy program.
From personal experience, I don't like to do things on other people's Windows systems if I can avoid it -- invariably they won't have some software that I use often, or their keyboard feels weird (so, to some extent for me its a hardware issue as well). I don't know where to find things...C: drive? D: Drive?
But in my experience UNIX systems suffer from basically all these same problems, and a few more...
It is very rare indeed to find Windows users (maybe not as rare on Slashdot) who use alternate window manager/shells. Basically everyone seems to run explorer (by explorer, I mean explorer.exe, the default Window GUI manager...Not IE)...With UNIX systems, the diversity of WMs can be a blessing and a curse. If you're not familiar with the window manager, there's going to be a bit of learning before you can actually get anything done...And even if you ARE familiar with the window manager, most of them are so flexible that you can bet the person whose system it is has it configured quite a bit differently than you might have it set on your systems...
Also...different UNIX systems handle even the most basic input in different ways. So many times have I sat down to use someone's system (and thus their settings), hit the backspace key and up pops a visible DEL character in the terminal. Makes me want to smash the keyboard (please no flames about the 'right' keyboard layout...its all preference :) Easy enough thing to deal with, but its just one example...Using 'other people's systems' usually causes you to run into multiple such issues.
I just think its very important that we seperate the technical innovation that some of these folks have been part of with their political or idealogical views.
From Article: Cerf also said that it would be a bad idea to force the FBI to reveal Carnivore's source code, as many of the system's critics have requested
Bad? Bad how? Does anyone have any other links that might have direct quotes? I don't see how releasing the source code 'would be bad' if the system is as robust as they claim.
Why not release the source code of the system? I mean, if it is really well designed and the authentication is so robust, what do they have to fear from full disclosure?
From Article: Carnivore's detractors had suggested that hackers may be able to gain access into the system.
Actually, for me the issue is more about the FBI themselves abusing this system than some future threat of a hacker takeover of it...
Keep up the good work!
Its true! Its true!! Call in the Red Cross!! If these people don't get Internet access soon, they may all DIE!!!
As another person mentioned, they plan on releasing this code under the GPL (not LGPL) which will be violated when the program is run through the QuickTime interface that is a requirement of winning!
Also, by not forcing people to be MPEG4 compliant (according to the rules your code must be MPEG4, or something with 'better quality'), the resulting codec may not be open standards compliant, which in many ways nullifies its existence...Do we really want open platforms like Linux to still have their own different set of codecs? I guess having a 'different' codec beats having obsolete ones... but most web sites (etc) will use something more standard, regardless of quality. Unless the codec is SUPER COOL and ported to many platforms, in which case the author could likely make much more than $50k off of it by other means.
Lastly, I looked through the site and didn't find any information on how this will be judged. Image quality alone? Or code quality? Or time to code? Anyone?
Honestly, 3dfx seems to be living in an alternate universe where people still care about them being the first affordable consumer 3D card company...They really need to bring something stunning to the market next cycle or NVidia's (and even ATI now) are going to stomp them so far into the ground...
Actually, the patent office still has the right to request that you produce a working model before a patent is granted. They almost never do this... its usually reserved for ideas related to perpetual motion devices, which people try to patent a lot.
Until the late 1800s, all submissions needed to include a working model to even be considered.
Ethernet's goal is carrying electrons down a wire. That's it. It is as secure or insecure as the high level protocols you are running on it. Perhaps you are confusing Ethernet with the Internet (in the form of TCP/IP)?
Also, don't count on too much information being released on the clients. Any company who is a client of one of these CPU-for-dollars service will want to believe their data is accurate and that the people running individual clients can't steal the majority of their precious intellectual property.
Most of the free 'for fame & glory' distributed projects wont even release source code because they are afraid it will cause people to send in garbage data results in an attempt to cheat to get to the top of the list. And putting in some sort of fancy security layer on top of the client to make sure data is valid would likely invalidate most of the gains of a distributed project, because you'd burn tons of cycles on the server trying to do re-validation...
Also, it didn't really get much into the fact that not all problems are particularly well suited to distributed computing. In fact, I'd say the majority of all computation problems AREN'T easily suited for distributed computing. Either because you'd lose the computational benefits due to the overhead of transmitting really large blocks of data or the algorithm is too dependent upon being feed serial data.
We have plenty of geological evidence that sometimes they hit. The results can be fairly local for small objects and extinction level in other cases (bye bye dinosaurs!)
Please don't propagate this myth any further.
Lets face the facts, Linux is NOT being used on the desktop by Joe Public. Major strides towards making Linux usable as a desktop OS are being made, and that's great -- but we've got a long way to go.
Even the people who are contributing most to Linux (Linus, the Gnome people, KDE people) will tell you that Linux as "Grandma-usable" desktop OS is 5 years or more away.
Please at least THINK before you bash Microsoft for something they might or might not do in the future.
I thought the NSA was created in 1952.
I'm not aware of IBM being particularly litigious with their myriad of patents. And if it were IBM, I think we might have heard more about this case, even if its a small one.