In short?
If you want to use Bitkeeper for the development of something to replace it, you have to purchase a commercial license. Otherwise, you can use the "gratis" license.
This isn't an accurate statement, or at best it's misleading. Say you want to work on two projects -- one a version control program, the other the Linux kernel. For the version control stuff, you use your own software (or CVS or anything not BK), and for Linux you use BK (which apparently you don't have to do, but it integrates best). Nope, can't do it. Because you work on a competing project, you can't use BK for free for anything. I think this is the biggest problem.
Apparently you're allowed to buy your own license, but most people don't have $5,000 to shell out (I've seen the price list) for a single copy.
Unfortunately, this as been in the EULA for at least 6 months. Not sure where I read it, but it's in the mailing list archive.
Also, as was mentioned earlier, if you're using the free version, BitKeeper forces you to upgrade as newer beta versions come out.
On a personal note, Man, this really sucks. BitKeeper is cool, but man, I don't want to deal with it not being free, much less major restrictions on who can use it within the limitations put upon the free version. I'd be happy to see Linus come back and say "no" to bitkeeper and push it back into obscurity forever..
Special Offer: Are you targeting the right keywords? How do you know if people are searching on your keywords? Use WordTracker, and you'll get inside information on what people are really searching for. With this top secret information, you can optimize your site the right way the first time and see immediate results!
This was the ad at the bottom of the page.. Ironic, no? Maybe even a little hypocritical? Sigh..
The AFL, unlike MIT and BSD, does not require that the copyright be maintained in derivative works, but only in distributions of the Original Work.
Seems like the taking out of the copyright notice is in itself making a derivative work, which means you can distribute something exactly like the original minus the copyright notice. Hrmm..
Wrong. Monopolies are fine and dandy. Perfectly legal. The goal of every public business is to become a monopoly.
whoa.. I don't think I said monopolies were illegal. I surely didn't mean to. If they were, and you were the first to start doing something, you'd have to artificially start competition in order to not be a monopoly.
I did, however, state that immoral business practices tend to lead to monopolies. You can be "better" at business if you don't let bothersome things like ethics and morals get in your way. If you do, someone else won't, and you'll be eaten alive.
However once you are a monopoly, you have to play by a different set of rules, or the government will step in like they are with Microsoft.
While this is true, it's sort of an interesting part of our government system.. by the time you get big enough for these laws to apply to you, you're at a point where you control a lot of the people who are supposed to be curtailing your activities. I don't know how much money MS has spent buying people so MS won't get split up or whatever, but I'm sure it's immense. Not that the law is bad, but it's really tough to enforce.
This may not be the time or place for this, but I believe there should be VERY harsh laws for bribery in politics -- from lengthy prison terms to the death penalty depending on the severity of the infraction. If I take money from chemical company X and then vote to make their chemical legal, even though I know it's going to seep into the water and give people cancer, I deserve to die. People should get into politics because they want to help others, not themselves. But now I'm going a bit off topic. Sorry.
Re:UNIX companies don't understand PC hardware..
on
Sun To Sell Linux PCs
·
· Score: 2
So what's your point ? These boxes ought to be cheaper than Wondows PC's because the OS and Office suite on them is free.
What I'm saying is that you have to move HUGE quantities of computers to make money while charging prices that are consistent with other PC vendors. The margins there just so small that it's incredibly hard to break into the market.
Are you claiming that Sun can't offer support and warranties ?
I'm claiming that the support for PC hardware is normally vastly different than the support for big iron. People want 3 year warranties thrown in with their computer purchase. SUN is used to charging thousands of dollars a year for support. Also, big iron support tends to be on-site with 24 hour (or better) parts availability. This costs bundles and doesn't translate well to PC support.
Anyways, all I was really trying to say is that SUN is trying to get into a very tight market that is just coming back into line from a super-saturated point it was at around 1999-2000. SUN has no experience in this market and it will be very difficult for them to succeed.
The editorial mentioned-- wasn't worth mentioning
on
Sun To Sell Linux PCs
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The editorial mentioned at the end of the slashdot article is painfully bad. The person writing it obviously has very little idea what he is writing about.. Let me give some examples..
First, Sun will forego the PC OEM deals for StarOffice 6 because Sun Microsystems' main revenue stream comes from their own PC sales.
This is in reference to SUN not getting together with companies like Dell and Gateway to put StarOffice on their machines. The first thing that got me, though, was that it says that SUN's main income is from their PC sales. Last time I checked, SUN doesn't make PCs. And, while they may start in the near future, they certainly don't have any revenue from it now.
After years of protestation and lawsuits against Microsoft giving away IE for free, is Sun hypocritically hoping to create an illegal monopoly of their own by giving StarOffice 6 to students for free?
Again, just because you do something that mirrors what Microsoft does, does not make you Microsoft. Giving away software does not make you a monopoly. Immoral business practices do. Besides, as the author tries to mention, SUN makes its money on hardware (not PC sales), similar to Apple. All they're trying to do is show people there's an alternative to the Wintel platform. They're trying to show people that you don't have to have a box running windows to be productive. That you can have a Linux box (that they'd love to sell you in a few quarters) and run StarOffice on it and be doing just fine. As far as I can tell, there's nothing wrong with that. Another thing people need to remember is that there's a big difference between a non-monopoly business practices. If a non-monopoly says "If you don't put our software on all your machines, you can't put it on any, it doesn't matter, because the OEM has choices. When a monopoly does it, it is illegal, because the OEM has no real choice (go out of business?).
If the schools had actually purchased the software rather than acquired it for free, the deal adds up to a $5.7 billion (yes, billion with a "b") missed opportunity. That's $5.7 billion USD in sales that Sun will never see because they gave it away at a time when they don't need to be giving away $5.7 billion.
Oh come on, buddy. This is complete nonsense. While the numbers work out, it's meaningless. Software doesn't have intrinsic value. That's not like saying "I'm going to give away 100 cars." It's the same thing about trying to figure out the value of "pirated" software. You can't say you lost 40 millions dollars, because one million people "pirated" your $40 software. It just doesn't work like that. These schools wouldn't have paid $5.7 billion for this software, so SUN didn't give away $5.7 billion.
Anyways, the editorial just goes on and on like this.. it's truly painful to read.
UNIX companies don't understand PC hardware..
on
Sun To Sell Linux PCs
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
While I wish SUN all the best luck in selling these low-cost Linux PCs, I don't have great faith in their ability to succeed in this low-margin market. These companies don't have a true understanding for how little money is involved with selling PC hardware.
I worked for SGI a few years ago (as an intern), just as they were introducing their PC strategy. They were coming out with (relatively) low-cost NT workstations with a proprietary graphics system (kicked ass at the time..), but were immediately stuck in a catch-22. They had high prices because they couldn't sell enough, and couldn't sell enough because of their high prices. SGI also tried selling server-ish PC boxes (with redundant power supplies, and multiple processors and stuff), but that lasted about a year as well, before it went away (at least I can't find it on their web page anymore)
When people buy PC hardware, they expect to pay PC hardware prices. And they want support. And warranties.. There's just no money there...especially not the kind of money these companies are used to seeing.
If they're getting in to this to make money, then they're in trouble. If SUN is getting in to this to fight against MS, then great, but I don't think SUN has enough money to fight MS.
Re:hope mono gets it right...
on
KDE Adopting Mono
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
KDE is also going to suffer from a similar rash of programmers like windows VB programmers who thing that dragging and dropping an application together makes them every bit as valuable as someone who can lovingly craft inline assembler into their C routines for speed and keep an eye on memory utilization.
Personally, I don't care how a program is written. And I know very few people are going to complain about having more apps for Linux. Many applications have absolutely no need to be written in highly optimized C. This can cause more errors, and more time spent trying to optimize for an extra 20% boost and leaves less time for adding new features. Personally, I'll take the one that takes 20% longer to run with 80% more features..
The dot.bomb shakeup was good for scaring those VB types out of the industry for a bit, but MS is still trying to sway focus over to "productivity" over stability or longevity.
If you had been paying attention, the "dot.bomb shakeup", as you call it, had very little to do with technology and far more to do with business models. It didn't matter what programming language you used to set up your online dog-food website, it wasn't going to make it. These companies were doomed from the start, and did not go out of business because they hired VB programmers instead of K&R C programmers.
Mildly interesting tangent, we had a sales guy from this group show up at our second Slashdot Meetup in Raleigh, NC. He showed up and pretended to be interested in Slashdot and geek stuff, but really was trying to recruit people to show up or present or whatever. I was never quite sure what he wanted, but he really came across as a sales guy.
He made sure everyone used the right buzzwords.. it's not a conference, it's not a trade show.. I don't remember what he called it, but I wasn't impressed. He had to explain what the heck a Lulu was (all I could remember was the little girl from my mom's old comic books). One of the guys I was with had a beef with RedHat, as well, as he had lost a tad of money, and the guy who was starting Lulu Tech Circus was still making tons off it.
Anyways, the guy was giving out cards and stuff, but he didn't really impress anyone, I don't think. We were far more impressed with the fact that the bar we happened upon had a wireless network and two people had randomly brought laptops..
Just to illustrate the point you made about it taking 200 MB to send the images back --
1600x1200x32bit = 7,680,000 bytes / image
24fps means 184,320,000 bytes / second back down the AGP bus -- and that's if you only want 24 fps. That's a lot of bytes moving around, especially when you have to be sending data back up to render future frames.
Maybe you could do some sort of hardware compression, but as other people have mentioned, video cards are already large enough, make too much heat, use too much power, and are expensive enough that I don't want to be adding additional complexity and cost to them for what a few people want to do. If there are people who want this, they should pay for the R&D and production costs of these specialized chips.
The BMW logo on the computer reminded me of this story about the BMW chair. Combine the two -- have a roaming leather seat out of a BMW and hook up the computer and touch screen flat panel monitor to it. Maybe make the system wireless..
The problem with other virtual machines written for other languages is that they are optimized for static binding, strict type-checking languages, which Perl, Python, and Ruby are not. That's where parrot comes in. Someone else mentioned that in Parrot, a regular expression is a single assembly instruction in Parrot. Java doesn't even have regular expressions built into the language.
Some users of the mosquito-repelling program have reported headaches after long periods spent in front of a computer emitting the bug-repelling high-pitched whine.
Some users have reported headaches after long periods spent in front of a computer.
College education costs are on the rise, and I think the actual college education is degrading just as fast...
All the links seem to be down, and the code doesn't appear to be in CPAN -- at least not in the right place. If anyone can find a working link, please post it as a reply to this. Thank you.
I think this would be really handy for home theater setups. Most of the places I've lived just aren't set up right to have proper surround sound. The rear speakers just don't really have any place to go, and even if they did, the wires would be really obnoxious. Often times the front left and right speakers can't be pushed out far enough to really give the proper seperation, either.
But, by using this technology, all you'd have to do is point these high-freq speakers at the spots from which you want the sound to come and *poof* you've got a virtual-speaker there.
They're saying that there are issues with reproducing bass signals, but that's where your subwoofer comes in. Now, that is often the uglies part of the system.. big and bulky, but if you could find somewhere for that to go, then that should make up for the lack of bass from the high-freq speakers. Sort of like those Bose systems with the little satelite speakers and the sub. Together, the system sounds really good.. but unplug the sub? It's not a pretty sound..
The real winner will be the engineer that develops a practical system to counter-act such a device. A small device such as a watch that can detect the signal and then send a destructive wave to cancel the signal would be good.
ahh, but that's not possible. It works with normal sound waves because they go out pretty much evenly in all directions. But this sound works more like a laser. You can't tell that there's a laser somewhere unless it hits you. So this watch wouldn't be able to produce anti-sound unless the the sound beam was hitting it. And if the sound is hitting the watch, it's not hitting your ears, so who cares.
And, btw, Purify (never used it under Linux so maybe it is different there) can also work on executables (and DLLs/SOs, etc) without a relinking.
You wanna know why you've never used Purify under Linux? Cuz it's not available. AFAIK, no Rational tools are available for Linux. When I was looking for Linux tools at my previous job, the only memory checker available for Linux was insure++. I also found that there were no commercial profilers available for Linux. gprof just doesn't cut the mustard, especially in multithreaded apps, and Rational's Quantify wasn't available for Linux. When I called Rational to ask if they planned on supporting Linux, they said "Maybe sometime in the future", but when I continued questioning them, they said they had no immediate plans to start working on Linux versions of any of their software.
So, while Valgrind may not be as complete as Purify (I don't know if it is or not), it's a helluva lot cheaper than insure++ (~$4K license -- well worth it if it's not your money), and better than any other Free software I've seen.
The Raleigh meetup turned out pretty well. We had 19 people RSVP, and had about 20-21 people show up -- the extras were due to spouses/gf's/small people. It was a bit tight trying to get a table for 20 at Chilis at 7pm, right in the middle of their dinner rush, but they did a great job getting us in there.
We had quite a group of people. Most people were computer geeks, but we had an agriculture geek, a lawyer (yes, we let him stay), a politician (who stayed just long enough to give us his vote-for-me speach), a teacher.. We got seated ~7:20 and the last of us left a bit after 9:30, so it was a good get together (my vocabulary is still stuck in the mid 90's BBS days), and the time really flew by.
I brought a digital camera, but I can't find the stupid usb interface cable, so there's no pictures available right now:(
ADV: If you're in the Raleigh area, join us for the next one.
His request was flatly refused because, according to an emailed reply from an N2H2 representative, "I am sure that you have enough intelligence to know that [the list] is proprietary information and will not be shared. I am also sure that life will some day bring you greater things to do with your time."
That's what the blocking software company sent to this guy when he requested the full blocking list.. I bet that guy's wishing he had been a bit more professional when he wrote that e-mail...
I mean.. of how much use is a 30 year old probe? I think I'd probably want to send out cheaper probes more frequently than still be getting data from an old one. I know it takes a while to get stuff out that far and all, but doesn't newer mean better?
have you seen the screenshots? They're *gorgeous*. The level of immersion in Doom3 will be crazy -- it's all about believing that you're really there. The lighting is really where Doom3 excels. It's able to do things we've never seen before. I have a feeling it'll be the first game to scare me since playing doom in the dark at 2am.
The gameplay will probably be very similar to everything else we've seen, but as I stated in my original comment, the graphics are unlike anything we've seen before in real-time, consumer-grade graphics.
With how far gaming has gone in the last 12 years, isn't it amazing that id software is still on top?
Commander Keen came out in 1980. id software is still on top with their Quake3 engine, and is poised to re-define real-time consumer-grade graphics with Doom3.
After all this time, the only company to do anything to challenge id's throne has been Epic Megagames, but the best they've done is beat id to the punch with their unreal2 engine that is just an evolutionary step from Quake3, while Doom3's graphics appear to be revolutionary.
Not everyone has a GeForce 3+ yet and Halo relies strongly on programmable pixel shaders.
While I can't argue as to whether or not Halo relies strongly on programmable pixel shaders, I can say that the graphics weren't that impressive. The Quake3 engine has comperable graphics (imho), and has run on boards 3 generations older than a GF3. I was playing it on my TNT 2 Ultra. Also, always remember that consoles can have a lot of pretty graphics because they only rasterize to 640x480.
Another thing is that PCs have far more CPU power than any console. I believe that an XBox is ~700MHz Celeron. Since a good portion of the appeal of Halo is in the physics (surely not the level design..), this should translate well to the PC and maybe even be better? And when it does come out, I bet it doesn't require a board with pixel shaders.
10. No easy way to configure X - especially change resolution on the fly.
I'm not running X right now, but I do believe, you just hit ctrl-alt-[+-] (maybe only on the number pad?) to switch between available resolutions on the fly...
Slashdot Mirror
In short?
If you want to use Bitkeeper for the development of something to replace it, you have to purchase a commercial license. Otherwise, you can use the "gratis" license.
This isn't an accurate statement, or at best it's misleading. Say you want to work on two projects -- one a version control program, the other the Linux kernel. For the version control stuff, you use your own software (or CVS or anything not BK), and for Linux you use BK (which apparently you don't have to do, but it integrates best). Nope, can't do it. Because you work on a competing project, you can't use BK for free for anything. I think this is the biggest problem.
Apparently you're allowed to buy your own license, but most people don't have $5,000 to shell out (I've seen the price list) for a single copy.
Unfortunately, this as been in the EULA for at least 6 months. Not sure where I read it, but it's in the mailing list archive.
Also, as was mentioned earlier, if you're using the free version, BitKeeper forces you to upgrade as newer beta versions come out.
On a personal note,
Man, this really sucks. BitKeeper is cool, but man, I don't want to deal with it not being free, much less major restrictions on who can use it within the limitations put upon the free version. I'd be happy to see Linus come back and say "no" to bitkeeper and push it back into obscurity forever..
Special Offer: Are you targeting the right keywords?
How do you know if people are searching on your keywords? Use WordTracker, and you'll get inside information on what people are really searching for. With this top secret information, you can optimize your site the right way the first time and see immediate results!
This was the ad at the bottom of the page.. Ironic, no? Maybe even a little hypocritical? Sigh..
The AFL, unlike MIT and BSD, does not require that the copyright
be maintained in derivative works, but only in distributions of
the Original Work.
Seems like the taking out of the copyright notice is in itself making a derivative work, which means you can distribute something exactly like the original minus the copyright notice. Hrmm..
Anyone?
Wrong. Monopolies are fine and dandy. Perfectly legal. The goal of every public business is to become a monopoly.
whoa.. I don't think I said monopolies were illegal. I surely didn't mean to. If they were, and you were the first to start doing something, you'd have to artificially start competition in order to not be a monopoly.
I did, however, state that immoral business practices tend to lead to monopolies. You can be "better" at business if you don't let bothersome things like ethics and morals get in your way. If you do, someone else won't, and you'll be eaten alive.
However once you are a monopoly, you have to play by a different set of rules, or the government will step in like they are with Microsoft.
While this is true, it's sort of an interesting part of our government system.. by the time you get big enough for these laws to apply to you, you're at a point where you control a lot of the people who are supposed to be curtailing your activities. I don't know how much money MS has spent buying people so MS won't get split up or whatever, but I'm sure it's immense. Not that the law is bad, but it's really tough to enforce.
This may not be the time or place for this, but I believe there should be VERY harsh laws for bribery in politics -- from lengthy prison terms to the death penalty depending on the severity of the infraction. If I take money from chemical company X and then vote to make their chemical legal, even though I know it's going to seep into the water and give people cancer, I deserve to die. People should get into politics because they want to help others, not themselves. But now I'm going a bit off topic. Sorry.
So what's your point ? These boxes ought to be cheaper than Wondows PC's because the OS and Office suite on them is free.
What I'm saying is that you have to move HUGE quantities of computers to make money while charging prices that are consistent with other PC vendors. The margins there just so small that it's incredibly hard to break into the market.
Are you claiming that Sun can't offer support and warranties ?
I'm claiming that the support for PC hardware is normally vastly different than the support for big iron. People want 3 year warranties thrown in with their computer purchase. SUN is used to charging thousands of dollars a year for support. Also, big iron support tends to be on-site with 24 hour (or better) parts availability. This costs bundles and doesn't translate well to PC support.
Anyways, all I was really trying to say is that SUN is trying to get into a very tight market that is just coming back into line from a super-saturated point it was at around 1999-2000. SUN has no experience in this market and it will be very difficult for them to succeed.
The editorial mentioned at the end of the slashdot article is painfully bad. The person writing it obviously has very little idea what he is writing about.. Let me give some examples..
First, Sun will forego the PC OEM deals for StarOffice 6 because Sun Microsystems' main revenue stream comes from their own PC sales.
This is in reference to SUN not getting together with companies like Dell and Gateway to put StarOffice on their machines. The first thing that got me, though, was that it says that SUN's main income is from their PC sales. Last time I checked, SUN doesn't make PCs. And, while they may start in the near future, they certainly don't have any revenue from it now.
After years of protestation and lawsuits against Microsoft giving away IE for free, is Sun hypocritically hoping to create an illegal monopoly of their own by giving StarOffice 6 to students for free?
Again, just because you do something that mirrors what Microsoft does, does not make you Microsoft. Giving away software does not make you a monopoly. Immoral business practices do. Besides, as the author tries to mention, SUN makes its money on hardware (not PC sales), similar to Apple. All they're trying to do is show people there's an alternative to the Wintel platform. They're trying to show people that you don't have to have a box running windows to be productive. That you can have a Linux box (that they'd love to sell you in a few quarters) and run StarOffice on it and be doing just fine. As far as I can tell, there's nothing wrong with that. Another thing people need to remember is that there's a big difference between a non-monopoly business practices. If a non-monopoly says "If you don't put our software on all your machines, you can't put it on any, it doesn't matter, because the OEM has choices. When a monopoly does it, it is illegal, because the OEM has no real choice (go out of business?).
If the schools had actually purchased the software rather than acquired it for free, the deal adds up to a $5.7 billion (yes, billion with a "b") missed opportunity. That's $5.7 billion USD in sales that Sun will never see because they gave it away at a time when they don't need to be giving away $5.7 billion.
Oh come on, buddy. This is complete nonsense. While the numbers work out, it's meaningless. Software doesn't have intrinsic value. That's not like saying "I'm going to give away 100 cars." It's the same thing about trying to figure out the value of "pirated" software. You can't say you lost 40 millions dollars, because one million people "pirated" your $40 software. It just doesn't work like that. These schools wouldn't have paid $5.7 billion for this software, so SUN didn't give away $5.7 billion.
Anyways, the editorial just goes on and on like this.. it's truly painful to read.
While I wish SUN all the best luck in selling these low-cost Linux PCs, I don't have great faith in their ability to succeed in this low-margin market. These companies don't have a true understanding for how little money is involved with selling PC hardware.
I worked for SGI a few years ago (as an intern), just as they were introducing their PC strategy. They were coming out with (relatively) low-cost NT workstations with a proprietary graphics system (kicked ass at the time..), but were immediately stuck in a catch-22. They had high prices because they couldn't sell enough, and couldn't sell enough because of their high prices. SGI also tried selling server-ish PC boxes (with redundant power supplies, and multiple processors and stuff), but that lasted about a year as well, before it went away (at least I can't find it on their web page anymore)
When people buy PC hardware, they expect to pay PC hardware prices. And they want support. And warranties.. There's just no money there...especially not the kind of money these companies are used to seeing.
If they're getting in to this to make money, then they're in trouble. If SUN is getting in to this to fight against MS, then great, but I don't think SUN has enough money to fight MS.
KDE is also going to suffer from a similar rash of programmers like windows VB programmers who thing that dragging and dropping an application together makes them every bit as valuable as someone who can lovingly craft inline assembler into their C routines for speed and keep an eye on memory utilization.
Personally, I don't care how a program is written. And I know very few people are going to complain about having more apps for Linux. Many applications have absolutely no need to be written in highly optimized C. This can cause more errors, and more time spent trying to optimize for an extra 20% boost and leaves less time for adding new features. Personally, I'll take the one that takes 20% longer to run with 80% more features..
The dot.bomb shakeup was good for scaring those VB types out of the industry for a bit, but MS is still trying to sway focus over to "productivity" over stability or longevity.
If you had been paying attention, the "dot.bomb shakeup", as you call it, had very little to do with technology and far more to do with business models. It didn't matter what programming language you used to set up your online dog-food website, it wasn't going to make it. These companies were doomed from the start, and did not go out of business because they hired VB programmers instead of K&R C programmers.
Mildly interesting tangent, we had a sales guy from this group show up at our second Slashdot Meetup in Raleigh, NC. He showed up and pretended to be interested in Slashdot and geek stuff, but really was trying to recruit people to show up or present or whatever. I was never quite sure what he wanted, but he really came across as a sales guy.
He made sure everyone used the right buzzwords.. it's not a conference, it's not a trade show.. I don't remember what he called it, but I wasn't impressed. He had to explain what the heck a Lulu was (all I could remember was the little girl from my mom's old comic books). One of the guys I was with had a beef with RedHat, as well, as he had lost a tad of money, and the guy who was starting Lulu Tech Circus was still making tons off it.
Anyways, the guy was giving out cards and stuff, but he didn't really impress anyone, I don't think. We were far more impressed with the fact that the bar we happened upon had a wireless network and two people had randomly brought laptops..
Just to illustrate the point you made about it taking 200 MB to send the images back --
1600x1200x32bit = 7,680,000 bytes / image
24fps means 184,320,000 bytes / second back down the AGP bus -- and that's if you only want 24 fps. That's a lot of bytes moving around, especially when you have to be sending data back up to render future frames.
Maybe you could do some sort of hardware compression, but as other people have mentioned, video cards are already large enough, make too much heat, use too much power, and are expensive enough that I don't want to be adding additional complexity and cost to them for what a few people want to do. If there are people who want this, they should pay for the R&D and production costs of these specialized chips.
The BMW logo on the computer reminded me of this story about the BMW chair. Combine the two -- have a roaming leather seat out of a BMW and hook up the computer and touch screen flat panel monitor to it. Maybe make the system wireless..
The problem with other virtual machines written for other languages is that they are optimized for static binding, strict type-checking languages, which Perl, Python, and Ruby are not. That's where parrot comes in. Someone else mentioned that in Parrot, a regular expression is a single assembly instruction in Parrot. Java doesn't even have regular expressions built into the language.
Some users of the mosquito-repelling program have reported headaches after long periods spent in front of a computer emitting the bug-repelling high-pitched whine.
Some users have reported headaches after long periods spent in front of a computer.
College education costs are on the rise, and I think the actual college education is degrading just as fast...
All the links seem to be down, and the code doesn't appear to be in CPAN -- at least not in the right place. If anyone can find a working link, please post it as a reply to this. Thank you.
I think this would be really handy for home theater setups. Most of the places I've lived just aren't set up right to have proper surround sound. The rear speakers just don't really have any place to go, and even if they did, the wires would be really obnoxious. Often times the front left and right speakers can't be pushed out far enough to really give the proper seperation, either.
But, by using this technology, all you'd have to do is point these high-freq speakers at the spots from which you want the sound to come and *poof* you've got a virtual-speaker there.
They're saying that there are issues with reproducing bass signals, but that's where your subwoofer comes in. Now, that is often the uglies part of the system.. big and bulky, but if you could find somewhere for that to go, then that should make up for the lack of bass from the high-freq speakers. Sort of like those Bose systems with the little satelite speakers and the sub. Together, the system sounds really good.. but unplug the sub? It's not a pretty sound..
The real winner will be the engineer that develops a practical system to counter-act such a device. A small device such as a watch that can detect the signal and then send a destructive wave to cancel the signal would be good.
ahh, but that's not possible. It works with normal sound waves because they go out pretty much evenly in all directions. But this sound works more like a laser. You can't tell that there's a laser somewhere unless it hits you. So this watch wouldn't be able to produce anti-sound unless the the sound beam was hitting it. And if the sound is hitting the watch, it's not hitting your ears, so who cares.
And, btw, Purify (never used it under Linux so maybe it is different there) can also work on executables (and DLLs/SOs, etc) without a relinking.
You wanna know why you've never used Purify under Linux? Cuz it's not available. AFAIK, no Rational tools are available for Linux. When I was looking for Linux tools at my previous job, the only memory checker available for Linux was insure++. I also found that there were no commercial profilers available for Linux. gprof just doesn't cut the mustard, especially in multithreaded apps, and Rational's Quantify wasn't available for Linux. When I called Rational to ask if they planned on supporting Linux, they said "Maybe sometime in the future", but when I continued questioning them, they said they had no immediate plans to start working on Linux versions of any of their software.
So, while Valgrind may not be as complete as Purify (I don't know if it is or not), it's a helluva lot cheaper than insure++ (~$4K license -- well worth it if it's not your money), and better than any other Free software I've seen.
The Raleigh meetup turned out pretty well. We had 19 people RSVP, and had about 20-21 people show up -- the extras were due to spouses/gf's/small people. It was a bit tight trying to get a table for 20 at Chilis at 7pm, right in the middle of their dinner rush, but they did a great job getting us in there.
:(
We had quite a group of people. Most people were computer geeks, but we had an agriculture geek, a lawyer (yes, we let him stay), a politician (who stayed just long enough to give us his vote-for-me speach), a teacher.. We got seated ~7:20 and the last of us left a bit after 9:30, so it was a good get together (my vocabulary is still stuck in the mid 90's BBS days), and the time really flew by.
I brought a digital camera, but I can't find the stupid usb interface cable, so there's no pictures available right now
ADV: If you're in the Raleigh area, join us for the next one.
Everyone, check out slashdot.meetup.com!!!
His request was flatly refused because, according to an emailed reply from an N2H2 representative, "I am sure that you have enough intelligence to know that [the list] is proprietary information and will not be shared. I am also sure that life will some day bring you greater things to do with your time."
That's what the blocking software company sent to this guy when he requested the full blocking list.. I bet that guy's wishing he had been a bit more professional when he wrote that e-mail...
I mean.. of how much use is a 30 year old probe? I think I'd probably want to send out cheaper probes more frequently than still be getting data from an old one. I know it takes a while to get stuff out that far and all, but doesn't newer mean better?
have you seen the screenshots? They're *gorgeous*. The level of immersion in Doom3 will be crazy -- it's all about believing that you're really there. The lighting is really where Doom3 excels. It's able to do things we've never seen before. I have a feeling it'll be the first game to scare me since playing doom in the dark at 2am.
The gameplay will probably be very similar to everything else we've seen, but as I stated in my original comment, the graphics are unlike anything we've seen before in real-time, consumer-grade graphics.
With how far gaming has gone in the last 12 years, isn't it amazing that id software is still on top?
Commander Keen came out in 1980. id software is still on top with their Quake3 engine, and is poised to re-define real-time consumer-grade graphics with Doom3.
After all this time, the only company to do anything to challenge id's throne has been Epic Megagames, but the best they've done is beat id to the punch with their unreal2 engine that is just an evolutionary step from Quake3, while Doom3's graphics appear to be revolutionary.
Not everyone has a GeForce 3+ yet and Halo relies strongly on programmable pixel shaders.
While I can't argue as to whether or not Halo relies strongly on programmable pixel shaders, I can say that the graphics weren't that impressive. The Quake3 engine has comperable graphics (imho), and has run on boards 3 generations older than a GF3. I was playing it on my TNT 2 Ultra. Also, always remember that consoles can have a lot of pretty graphics because they only rasterize to 640x480.
Another thing is that PCs have far more CPU power than any console. I believe that an XBox is ~700MHz Celeron. Since a good portion of the appeal of Halo is in the physics (surely not the level design..), this should translate well to the PC and maybe even be better? And when it does come out, I bet it doesn't require a board with pixel shaders.
10. No easy way to configure X - especially change resolution on the fly.
I'm not running X right now, but I do believe, you just hit ctrl-alt-[+-] (maybe only on the number pad?) to switch between available resolutions on the fly...