Related, I don't think the line between administrator and developer should be considered as it usually is today. They should blur a good deal, especially in the open-sourcy world. The "right" stuff is kinda the same in both fields, it's really more a question of specialization. But I expect a good admin to be able to write decent software (and keep those skills somewhat honed during day to day administration by making sources fixes, writing little tools, etc...), and I expect a decent developer to be able to admin stuff (they need to be, in order to have the right insight into what the admins need their software to be like).
AOL has launched getnetscape.com advertising 9.95 internet access with virus/spam protection, etc.. They're advertising it as just "Netscape" and keeping the name AOL out of it as much as they can. They ran TV ads for it during the election coverage Tusaday night. The ads and the website both try to play on the Netscape name's very grassroots feel. They're kinda playing an Earthlink-like image in all of it. Don't believe it, it's just AOL in disguise.
Exactly. Even with lan-play (which pretty much eliminates the network-lag problem) and a fast machine, I find playing at a vsync'd framerate of any less than 45 to be intolerable for the purposes of deathmatch-type gaming, and I prefer to be over 60 to feel comfortable. Otherwise there's this detectable choppiness where your brain wants more information about the visuals flying by as your spin and move, and it's just not there. I've never tried FPS-style gaming on an LCD, but if the advertised pixel response is just barely good enough to swap the pixels at 60Hz, it sounds borderline for that kind of gaming.
To re-interpret without permission from the immortal Hartman of Full Metal Jacket:
Holy dog shit. Slashdot? Only trolls and posers come from Slashdot, Private CowboyNeal. And you don't look much like a troll to me so that kinda narrows it down. Do you use Windows?
Therefore 16ms response time ~= 60 frames/second is the maximum framerate you can expect to acheive without seeing the effects of the LCD lag. That's too close for comfort in my book, especially since that 16ms number might've be kinda whacked (like, taken at a very warm temperature or some crap).
If they advertised 8ms max, and the manufacturer was reputable, I would consider it.
The place I hate this the most is medical research news articles. I don't neccesarily fault the medical researchers, as the newsmen are often the ones putting the wrong spin on it. You see headlines like "Study shows that people who prefer the color purple are more likely to get cancer" and such.
Inevitably high-performance clusters require software designed to run on high-performance clusters. It is better not to think of such a cluster as a single system, but rather as a network of individual machines with a tight network connection. Some of the clustering add-ons for linux approach and even achieve certain aspects of a "Single system image" type of configuration, but it's never completely like a single system.
Back in 1997 or so I tried to get as close as I could to a true Single System Image by building off of the beowulf patchsets combined with patches for Distributed SysV IPC/SHM and a globally-shared root filesystem using CNFS (cluster-nfs, so that a few essential configfiles can have unique copies per cluster node). It was very daunting work to get those patches integrated together, and the end result was that without some kind of network-interconnect that was as high-speed and low-latency as a processor's FSB, there was always going to be a big performance hit doing things this way. Of course if an application happens to be perfect for simple HPC clusters (all cpu intensive, very little I/O, and the work is easily divisible without tons of IPC between the workers), then it runs fantastically on such a Single System Image cluster, but then again it would have run fantastically on a simple cluster that doesn't look like a Single System too. So what the Single System concept bought me really was a nice abstraction layer that made everything easy to deploy, configure and manage. But it came at a severe initial cost of human labour. It's not worth the trouble.
I think thaqt page is funny shit. If you can't laugh at your own kind, you don't really have the right to laugh at anyone. I like to think that I use Gentoo because I know what I'm doing and Gentoo gives me a bit more control over exactly how my box is built, while still giving me enough package management to not have to go through the pains of real DIY from plain sources. But at the same time, I've often joked with freinds about how ridiculuous it is that I often end up spending 6 hours compiling software that I could've downloaded in binary form in 5 minutes, and the net result is like 17 seconds of saved CPU time over the course of the next month or two, at which point I'll be re-compiling that package again anyways.
Don't forget that hardware raid is a single point of failure. The best solution for the absolute best redundancy and performance is software raid set up to be fault tolerant of controller failures. For example, put two seperate scsi cards in the box, and software mirror your data between them, and then stripe on top of that for added performance if you have the drives. When using striping and mirroring together, always mirror at the lowest level, then stripe on top of that.
What the C/C++ world really needs is a "C+" of sorts that bridges the gap. C+ would be plain old C99, with the following C++ features added:
structs can also be called "classes" structs can have member functions, including constructors and destructors. struct data and function members can be either private or public.
The above just saves a whole lot of typing and macros and other crap that people do when they write OO-style C-code, without adding the more complex C++ features that people argue about.
Beyond the ones above, you could also *possibly* add the following, maybe, I'd really have to think about it more than I am for just a/. comment:
Simple inheritance Operator overloading Simplistic templates (this one is a real low probability maybe...).
Do it all in a way that doesn't break the rules of C99, and is syntactically compatible with C++ where they overlap features, and you'd have a fine language I would love to use.
BTW - the v60x isn't Sun-designed. It's a generic platform that's designed and manufactured by Intel for rebranding (Combo M/B, Chassis, PS, Fans, etc..), and Sun sticks their peice of pastic on the front of it. If you dig around on Intel's site you can find the part numbers - at one point I even had to buy a special intel part number PCI riser card for a v60x to use a 5v PCI card in it, as Sun doesn't carry/rebrand some of those obscure parts. I would assume the v65x is the sme kind of story, but I haven't seen one in person.
Specifically, Sony is banking on their successes with EQ1 to bring them EQ2 customers. For all of it's flaws (believe me, I ranted and railed about EQ1 plenty), it was still one of the best-designed and successful MMORPGs to date. They still have a healthy population that trounces most other games even after all these years and expansions and competitors.
What most people don't realize, and what Sony hopes they don't realize until it's too late (e.g. already bought EQ2 retail box, and signed up for a few months, and maybe even got hooked on the shitty game) - is that the guys who built EQ1 are not building EQ2. Your SWG references are pefect, because in terms of development/release/gameplay talent, EQ2 has more in common with SWG than EQ1.
Designing a really good MMORPG is a very hard thing, and there's a very small pool of talent who can really do it right. They (Verant, Sony) has the right guys doing the right stuff when EQ1 was built. The EQ2 team is not the same guys.
Incidentally, some of those magically talented guys that brought EQ1 into this world are currently working on a new games at http://www.sigilgames.com
Their new game is promising, if nothing else because of the guys behind it, but it's considerably behind the schedule of games like WoW and EQ2.
Question: Where are the WMD, and why do 75% of Bush supporters thing we found WMD or Iraq had them? Where is the PROOF?
As a Bush supporter, I honestly could care less whether we happened to find any WMD upon invading. Intelligence is what it is, it's ok to go in for WMD and then find none, it's called an intelligence mistake. What made Iraq a viable and believable target in terms of WMD that people on your side of the fence seem to be ignoring is that we *did* have proof that he had WMD in the past. We gave it him (as in, the US government handed Saddam chemical and biological agents), and he used them against Iran in the Iran-Iraq war (documented, and that's the war he gave them to him for), and against his own Kurds (not as well documented, but widely believed to be true). He *did* have WMD at one point in time, and then the Gulf War I happened, the sanctions and inspections dragged on for roughly a decade, jack shit came out of the process, and then we went back in. In the absence of intelligence that said otherwise, it would hav ebeen fair to assume in GWB's position that WMD existed - and especially with flaws intelligence coming in confirming that, how can you blame him?
I love slashdot logic. If you disagree with someone strongly, they must be trolling. I won't bother responding to the various comments below, although for the most part they contain serious logical fallacies and don't constitute a real rebuttal at all.
Wouldn't a bicycle do the same thing, only better? Plus it gives an image of someone who's in shape and frugal, as opposed to someone who can't pedal for themselves and likes to blow money on toys and look "hip".
Linux doesn't need a VB-like environment. It will only encourage bad things. There is no getting around the essential complexities of designing and writing software. Tools that make things "easier" can be used by those who udnerstand the complexities to make their job easier. But time has proven that the easier the tool becomes to use, the larger percentage of its userbase tends to be dumbasses who can't code their way out of a paper bag without said tool. This leads to bad projects and code by people who had no business getting into this sort of thing. You can avoid and discourage this whole situation to some degree by not designing tools that tend to empower idiots to do bad things.
The peice is heavily biased, and if you can't see that, you're not living in this reality. It goes to lengths to be fair and scientific in gathering the facts about the beliefs of the Bush and Kerry backers, but then just "assumes" with no evidence shown that the worldview of the Kerry side is correct, and the worldview of the Bush side is incorrect. If it were that simple, it wouldn't be such a big deal. There are a lot of very intelligent people both here and abroad, who have a firm understanding of and a lot of experience with geopolitical issues, who believe that Bush is holding a more "correct" worldview than Kerry is.
It's stealing if I intended my ideas to become public property for the good of everyone, and someone else decides to capitalize on that effort without benefitting the community in the same way I did with the original work. Take the example of the known BSD network stack code in MS products. The BSD guys put their open-source license on that stack because they wanted to benefit a community. They surely didn't wish to give microsoft a leg up in their decidedly anti-community practices. Yet by using their BSD license instead of a more restrictive GPL license, they allowed that to happen.
And I never said there was anything wrong with making money.
The article is too light on details to tell wtf they are talking about, but it sounds to me like what they're saying is that the software operates on a virtual display device which gets automatically scaled down by blending virtual pixels into a smaller number of real pixels. If so, it's not rocket science, and it doesn't really do jack for image quality compared to just telling the software the display was the correct size to begin with.
Slashdot Mirror
Related, I don't think the line between administrator and developer should be considered as it usually is today. They should blur a good deal, especially in the open-sourcy world. The "right" stuff is kinda the same in both fields, it's really more a question of specialization. But I expect a good admin to be able to write decent software (and keep those skills somewhat honed during day to day administration by making sources fixes, writing little tools, etc...), and I expect a decent developer to be able to admin stuff (they need to be, in order to have the right insight into what the admins need their software to be like).
AOL has launched getnetscape.com advertising 9.95 internet access with virus/spam protection, etc.. They're advertising it as just "Netscape" and keeping the name AOL out of it as much as they can. They ran TV ads for it during the election coverage Tusaday night. The ads and the website both try to play on the Netscape name's very grassroots feel. They're kinda playing an Earthlink-like image in all of it. Don't believe it, it's just AOL in disguise.
rm -rf / is more like deltree
format C: is mkfs
You mean the left side? His politics are as misguided as his computer science. Smart guy, wrong direction.
Exactly. Even with lan-play (which pretty much eliminates the network-lag problem) and a fast machine, I find playing at a vsync'd framerate of any less than 45 to be intolerable for the purposes of deathmatch-type gaming, and I prefer to be over 60 to feel comfortable. Otherwise there's this detectable choppiness where your brain wants more information about the visuals flying by as your spin and move, and it's just not there. I've never tried FPS-style gaming on an LCD, but if the advertised pixel response is just barely good enough to swap the pixels at 60Hz, it sounds borderline for that kind of gaming.
WTF are you smoking?
To re-interpret without permission from the immortal Hartman of Full Metal Jacket:
Holy dog shit. Slashdot? Only trolls and posers come from Slashdot, Private CowboyNeal. And you don't look much like a troll to me so that kinda narrows it down. Do you use Windows?
1000/60 = 16.66666
Therefore 16ms response time ~= 60 frames/second is the maximum framerate you can expect to acheive without seeing the effects of the LCD lag. That's too close for comfort in my book, especially since that 16ms number might've be kinda whacked (like, taken at a very warm temperature or some crap).
If they advertised 8ms max, and the manufacturer was reputable, I would consider it.
The place I hate this the most is medical research news articles. I don't neccesarily fault the medical researchers, as the newsmen are often the ones putting the wrong spin on it. You see headlines like "Study shows that people who prefer the color purple are more likely to get cancer" and such.
Inevitably high-performance clusters require software designed to run on high-performance clusters. It is better not to think of such a cluster as a single system, but rather as a network of individual machines with a tight network connection. Some of the clustering add-ons for linux approach and even achieve certain aspects of a "Single system image" type of configuration, but it's never completely like a single system.
Back in 1997 or so I tried to get as close as I could to a true Single System Image by building off of the beowulf patchsets combined with patches for Distributed SysV IPC/SHM and a globally-shared root filesystem using CNFS (cluster-nfs, so that a few essential configfiles can have unique copies per cluster node). It was very daunting work to get those patches integrated together, and the end result was that without some kind of network-interconnect that was as high-speed and low-latency as a processor's FSB, there was always going to be a big performance hit doing things this way. Of course if an application happens to be perfect for simple HPC clusters (all cpu intensive, very little I/O, and the work is easily divisible without tons of IPC between the workers), then it runs fantastically on such a Single System Image cluster, but then again it would have run fantastically on a simple cluster that doesn't look like a Single System too. So what the Single System concept bought me really was a nice abstraction layer that made everything easy to deploy, configure and manage. But it came at a severe initial cost of human labour. It's not worth the trouble.
I think thaqt page is funny shit. If you can't laugh at your own kind, you don't really have the right to laugh at anyone. I like to think that I use Gentoo because I know what I'm doing and Gentoo gives me a bit more control over exactly how my box is built, while still giving me enough package management to not have to go through the pains of real DIY from plain sources. But at the same time, I've often joked with freinds about how ridiculuous it is that I often end up spending 6 hours compiling software that I could've downloaded in binary form in 5 minutes, and the net result is like 17 seconds of saved CPU time over the course of the next month or two, at which point I'll be re-compiling that package again anyways.
Don't forget that hardware raid is a single point of failure. The best solution for the absolute best redundancy and performance is software raid set up to be fault tolerant of controller failures. For example, put two seperate scsi cards in the box, and software mirror your data between them, and then stripe on top of that for added performance if you have the drives. When using striping and mirroring together, always mirror at the lowest level, then stripe on top of that.
The basic idea is:
C == controller
D == disk
R == virtual raid disk
C1 --> D1,D2,D3
C2 --> D4,D5,D6
R1 = mirror(D1,D4)
R2 = mirror(D2,D5)
R3 = mirror(D3,D6)
R4 = stripe(R1,R2,R3)
Wow. We need a "+1 sensible discussion without diverging into unneccesary flaming" moderation for comments like these.
What the C/C++ world really needs is a "C+" of sorts that bridges the gap. C+ would be plain old C99, with the following C++ features added:
structs can also be called "classes"
structs can have member functions, including constructors and destructors.
struct data and function members can be either private or public.
The above just saves a whole lot of typing and macros and other crap that people do when they write OO-style C-code, without adding the more complex C++ features that people argue about.
Beyond the ones above, you could also *possibly* add the following, maybe, I'd really have to think about it more than I am for just a
Simple inheritance
Operator overloading
Simplistic templates (this one is a real low probability maybe...).
Do it all in a way that doesn't break the rules of C99, and is syntactically compatible with C++ where they overlap features, and you'd have a fine language I would love to use.
BTW - the v60x isn't Sun-designed. It's a generic platform that's designed and manufactured by Intel for rebranding (Combo M/B, Chassis, PS, Fans, etc..), and Sun sticks their peice of pastic on the front of it. If you dig around on Intel's site you can find the part numbers - at one point I even had to buy a special intel part number PCI riser card for a v60x to use a 5v PCI card in it, as Sun doesn't carry/rebrand some of those obscure parts. I would assume the v65x is the sme kind of story, but I haven't seen one in person.
I used to have a copy of Sun's 386i UNIX software, which wasn't called SunOS or Solaris, and it came on a bunch of floppies
Specifically, Sony is banking on their successes with EQ1 to bring them EQ2 customers. For all of it's flaws (believe me, I ranted and railed about EQ1 plenty), it was still one of the best-designed and successful MMORPGs to date. They still have a healthy population that trounces most other games even after all these years and expansions and competitors.
What most people don't realize, and what Sony hopes they don't realize until it's too late (e.g. already bought EQ2 retail box, and signed up for a few months, and maybe even got hooked on the shitty game) - is that the guys who built EQ1 are not building EQ2. Your SWG references are pefect, because in terms of development/release/gameplay talent, EQ2 has more in common with SWG than EQ1.
Designing a really good MMORPG is a very hard thing, and there's a very small pool of talent who can really do it right. They (Verant, Sony) has the right guys doing the right stuff when EQ1 was built. The EQ2 team is not the same guys.
Incidentally, some of those magically talented guys that brought EQ1 into this world are currently working on a new games at http://www.sigilgames.com
Their new game is promising, if nothing else because of the guys behind it, but it's considerably behind the schedule of games like WoW and EQ2.
Question: Where are the WMD, and why do 75% of Bush supporters thing we found WMD or Iraq had them? Where is the PROOF?
As a Bush supporter, I honestly could care less whether we happened to find any WMD upon invading. Intelligence is what it is, it's ok to go in for WMD and then find none, it's called an intelligence mistake. What made Iraq a viable and believable target in terms of WMD that people on your side of the fence seem to be ignoring is that we *did* have proof that he had WMD in the past. We gave it him (as in, the US government handed Saddam chemical and biological agents), and he used them against Iran in the Iran-Iraq war (documented, and that's the war he gave them to him for), and against his own Kurds (not as well documented, but widely believed to be true). He *did* have WMD at one point in time, and then the Gulf War I happened, the sanctions and inspections dragged on for roughly a decade, jack shit came out of the process, and then we went back in. In the absence of intelligence that said otherwise, it would hav ebeen fair to assume in GWB's position that WMD existed - and especially with flaws intelligence coming in confirming that, how can you blame him?
I love slashdot logic. If you disagree with someone strongly, they must be trolling. I won't bother responding to the various comments below, although for the most part they contain serious logical fallacies and don't constitute a real rebuttal at all.
Wouldn't a bicycle do the same thing, only better? Plus it gives an image of someone who's in shape and frugal, as opposed to someone who can't pedal for themselves and likes to blow money on toys and look "hip".
Linux doesn't need a VB-like environment. It will only encourage bad things. There is no getting around the essential complexities of designing and writing software. Tools that make things "easier" can be used by those who udnerstand the complexities to make their job easier. But time has proven that the easier the tool becomes to use, the larger percentage of its userbase tends to be dumbasses who can't code their way out of a paper bag without said tool. This leads to bad projects and code by people who had no business getting into this sort of thing. You can avoid and discourage this whole situation to some degree by not designing tools that tend to empower idiots to do bad things.
The peice is heavily biased, and if you can't see that, you're not living in this reality. It goes to lengths to be fair and scientific in gathering the facts about the beliefs of the Bush and Kerry backers, but then just "assumes" with no evidence shown that the worldview of the Kerry side is correct, and the worldview of the Bush side is incorrect. If it were that simple, it wouldn't be such a big deal. There are a lot of very intelligent people both here and abroad, who have a firm understanding of and a lot of experience with geopolitical issues, who believe that Bush is holding a more "correct" worldview than Kerry is.
It wouldn't be very hard at all to write a trojan that waits on the host machine and compromises your "Secure" data once the qemu vm boots up.
It's stealing if I intended my ideas to become public property for the good of everyone, and someone else decides to capitalize on that effort without benefitting the community in the same way I did with the original work. Take the example of the known BSD network stack code in MS products. The BSD guys put their open-source license on that stack because they wanted to benefit a community. They surely didn't wish to give microsoft a leg up in their decidedly anti-community practices. Yet by using their BSD license instead of a more restrictive GPL license, they allowed that to happen.
And I never said there was anything wrong with making money.
The article is too light on details to tell wtf they are talking about, but it sounds to me like what they're saying is that the software operates on a virtual display device which gets automatically scaled down by blending virtual pixels into a smaller number of real pixels. If so, it's not rocket science, and it doesn't really do jack for image quality compared to just telling the software the display was the correct size to begin with.
Back in the old days of consoles the NTSC/PAL thing mattered, but it doesn't anymore. It's incredibly easy to solve in a Playstation2.