We use GNUstep for Oolite (and it's possibly the only accelerated OpenGL game to use GNUstep). Oolite was originally written only for OS X, and was ported to Linux using GNUstep (and later Windows also using GNUstep).
The GNUstep Foundation is sufficiently similar to Cocoa's Foundation as to make no odds. I think the Foundation makes a very decent Objective-C class library, too (with the added bonus that if you use it for your ObjC programs, they will almost certainly compile without changes on OS X with Cocoa). I don't think we've found any divergences worth worrying about in the Foundation. However, AppKit is another matter - where as GNUstep Base (which provides the Foundation) is very mature, the AppKit still has a way to go. Although we got the game working with AppKit with only minor changes from OS X, we decided that moving to SDL was a far better choice in the long run.
Actually, they don't work perfectly. The nvidia ones break suspend/resume, don't work with SElinux if execution on the stack/heap (which is vital to neuter buffer overflow attacks) is disabled, and the latest version of the nvidia drivers cause 'hall of mirrors' effects on games like Enemy Territory.
In the single user, single tasking non-networked PC world of the 1980s, the idea of the user always being the administrator was fine and not harmless. However, you can't take this model into the networked multi-user world and expect it to work. If Microsoft expects its software to work in the networked world, they must drop their single user single tasking philosophy.
I always thought it was odd how Google would have summers of code. I thought it'd make much more sense to have a "Winter of Code" instead - do it when the weather is bad for most of the population, rather than when the weather is good. I suppose if you live in the southern hemisphere it'll be a winter of code though.
The other thing from your screen shot that is notable is that the transparency is just far too transparent. The other effects (the sort of reflective bit on the Start Menu bar at the bottom) are just far too shiny and reduces the readability of the information. It seems like the "well we can do shiny things, transparency and bling therefore we should do a LOT of transparency, shininess and bling because we can and to show off how shiny and blingy we can make it" without considering the usability aspects or WHY you want to do these things for usability (for example, a subtle 3d shadow effect under the window makes it a lot easier to tell the stacking order of your windows at a glance - but an in-your-face version of the same just makes things look ugly. Similarly for transparency - slight transparency makes a great visual cue, but the "lets see how much transparent window area we can slap on it" appraoch they have taken makes it more difficult to read and makes it look crude and unrefined and "bling").
I think the ultimate irony is that all those Gulf Coast refineries will end up under water (I used to live in League City, Texas - between Baytown (filled with refineries) and Texas City (filled with refineries), both of which lie only a few metres above mean sea level, and less so over the high tide mark) - and that Jeb Bush's state, Florida, will be heavily flooded if it all comes to pass as expected. The global warming deniers states (Dubya and Jeb) will both be economically destroyed by the very global warming they deny...
I'm guessing you are alluding to an increase in solar output. CO2 induced global warming and changes in solar output are not mutually exclusive - they are additive. Therefore, the argument we should do nothing because solar output may be increasing is invalid.
You're making the classic layman's mistake and confusing meteorology with climatology.
The people who are forecasting the weather 12 hours away or 5 days away or 10 days away are meteorologists. The people who are looking at trends affecting the next 250 years are climatologists. They both deal with weather but the two aren't that comparable.
A good analogy might be this. Take a large pan of water, uncovered, and set it on a gas stove at low heat. The meteorologist is the guy who tells you that a convection will appear *here* and *here*, and in 3 seconds, a bubble will appear *here*. His predictions will get increasingly inaccurate as time goes on - indeed, he'll probably have a lot of difficulty predicting where convections appear in 10 seconds time.
The climatologist on the other hand is the guy who says if you put a lid on the pan, the water will heat quicker, and the convective currents will be more pronounced and the bubbles will be more numerous. He doesn't try to say where they will appear, he just says there will be a general trend that more will appear since you're now keeping more energy in the system. Similarly, the climatologist will tell you the pan will boil in N minutes if you turn the heat up to setting M, but boil in N-2 minutes if you set the heat on M+1, or N-3 if you cover the pan and leave the setting at M, since he has a good grasp at what trapping energy in the system or adding extra energy to the system will have.
Just as surely that a pan of water will boil faster with the lid on, more energy will be kept in the Earth's atmosphere if you increase the concentration of CO2. These things simply aren't disputed, and the fact that meteorologists aren't accurate past five days does not make it not so, any more than the inability to predict where convections will occur in ten seconds time in a pan of water somehow invalidates the prediction that putting the lid on the pan will allow the water to boil more quickly. Meterology != climatology, even though the two are related.
We have good evidence going back into geological timescales that when there are higher concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere, there are also higher temperatures. It's simple cause-and-effect - if you do something that keeps more energy in the global system, it will warm up, just as 1 + 1 = 2. The continual confusion between what a climatologist does and what a meterologist does is either simple misunderstanding, or burying heads in the sand.
The probability of you being in the same bit of sky as the laser is infinitessimally small. Besides, if the laser is likely to be used in earnest, we are likely having a nuclear war and your skydiving operation will be grounded for national security reasons anyway.
The Wifi problem is a general issue with the Linux kernel as a whole rather than a specific issue with Ubuntu. The state of wireless in Linux is pretty bad. This is largely due to the manufacturers - they won't even release specs let alone release a driver for Linux - so you have to be very picky about which wifi dongle you use.
I'm sorry, this is a bit of a pet peeve - but if you could care less, this means you care a lot and could reduce the amount you care. I think you really mean you couldn't care less.
With a guitar (or other fretted instrument) it's actually much simpler - you tune the lowest fret, go up to the fret that will make it sound the same note as the next string up (which will depend on which tuning you are using), and then tune the next string so its pitch matches the string you just tuned and are holding on a fret. If you listen carefully you can listen for the beat frequency when you get close, and make small adjustments until the beat frequency goes away. Then repeat with the next string and so on until all strings are tuned.
If you're just playing solo and have no reference, just tune the guitar to itself using the lowest string as the reference.
Well, first let me agree with you on the music reading thing then disagree:-)
Being able to read music notation is very useful - but (depending on what your goals are) I think too many people are taught to be human player pianos (s/piano/instrument-of-your-choice/). If your goal is to be able to make music, I think learning theory (i.e. what makes music sound like it sounds) is much more important than being able to sight read. I can only speak for the piano - but I found the emphasis on sight reading and scales to the exclusion of everything else the way it's taught now (and the way they attempted, but failed, to teach me at school) is extremely boring and unpleasant and puts people off. I was being taught to be a human player piano, not being taught how to make music. I gave up and didn't touch a piano again until I went to university.
I am once again learning to read notation well, but only to the extent required to be able to use technique books, which are a necessary evil (actually, I quite like going through the old Hanon book, but not for hours on end!) I'm not at all interested in sheet music. If I want to play someone else's music, I'd rather just listen to it carefully then make my own interpretation - that's what I find to be fun. Of course that's just me and I'm sure there are many people out there who get great satisfaction from sight reading music perfectly.
I have a (fairly dreadful) old piano which simply isn't worth spending money on, so I got my own tuning kit (tuning lever, mutes, fork etc). I also got a book with it. The most interesting thing about the book is the discussion of all the tempers used in the past and how we ended up with the current 'equal tempered' tuning.
It's actually very hard (I suppose for a piano tuner who does it every day, it's instinctive) to tune a piano by ear - the beats are quite subtle. Since I'm never going to tune it frequently enough to be able to do it like a real piano tuner, I got a strobe tuner for my PowerBook which makes it trivially easy to tune it properly (or at least, as well as my old wreck of a piano can be tuned). The strobe tuner has about 40 different tempers you can use. But it takes too long as it is for me to try an experiment! I still need to figure out the correct 'stretch' for the upper end of the keyboard (which keeps going out of tune very quickly anyway, so it may be a lost cause).
If you want to learn to read music off a staff, you have to get to the stage where it's like reading words on a page - you don't want to have to look at a note and think 'FACE', erm, therefore that's a C. You want to just see the note and immediately play the note without having to think what it is - just like you're reading this text without having to think about it.
There are some good 'flash card' trainers to help learn to read music like you can read letters on a page. http://www.musictheory.net/ is a good start and it's free (but requires Flash).
X is not huge. The core of X hasn't really got much larger in years - and it used to run very happily on a 486 with 16MB of RAM. I'm sure with a little effort it would be possible to make a usable system on a 486 with the 2.6 kernel and the current X.org and an older or lightweight window manager (like olwvm or fvwm). Don't confuse X with the (large) toolkits that get run on top of it.
I'm making the assumption you've never been bullied for years on end at school.
I was. I know what the parent poster felt like. I have never desired to hurt someone or take pleasure in being unpleasant - on the contrary, I'd rather be friends. But when people are tormenting you day in and day out eventually it gets to the point you can't take any more. I used to fantasize about shooting my bullies in the neck with one of the Lee Enfield 303s the school kept in the armory and paralysing them for life. Later on, when I was still being tormented at age 17, I used to fantasize about seeing my bullies bounce off the front of the car I was driving.
Like the original poster, I can look back on it and shake my head now. But at the time I was being driven insane by the constant physical and mental torment being inflicted on me, and had a very serious thirst for vengeance. Fortunately, the rational part of my mind could always stop me from carrying out these actions - even when the thought crossed my mind when I was in CCF, carrying a 303 with a full magazine.
People don't witter on about how terribly hard cruising is like they do about parallel parking. I'm not saying an auto parking tool is useless, I'm saying that those who really need it probably shouldn't be on the roads in the first place if they can't do something as elementary as parallel park.
Slashdot Mirror
We use GNUstep for Oolite (and it's possibly the only accelerated OpenGL game to use GNUstep). Oolite was originally written only for OS X, and was ported to Linux using GNUstep (and later Windows also using GNUstep).
The GNUstep Foundation is sufficiently similar to Cocoa's Foundation as to make no odds. I think the Foundation makes a very decent Objective-C class library, too (with the added bonus that if you use it for your ObjC programs, they will almost certainly compile without changes on OS X with Cocoa). I don't think we've found any divergences worth worrying about in the Foundation. However, AppKit is another matter - where as GNUstep Base (which provides the Foundation) is very mature, the AppKit still has a way to go. Although we got the game working with AppKit with only minor changes from OS X, we decided that moving to SDL was a far better choice in the long run.
Actually, they don't work perfectly. The nvidia ones break suspend/resume, don't work with SElinux if execution on the stack/heap (which is vital to neuter buffer overflow attacks) is disabled, and the latest version of the nvidia drivers cause 'hall of mirrors' effects on games like Enemy Territory.
Well, Ubuntu is free and Windows costs money (and is made by a multibillion dollar company) so Windows better damn well be perfect.
In the single user, single tasking non-networked PC world of the 1980s, the idea of the user always being the administrator was fine and not harmless. However, you can't take this model into the networked multi-user world and expect it to work. If Microsoft expects its software to work in the networked world, they must drop their single user single tasking philosophy.
China has not been communist for years - why people call them communist I don't know; China is a straightforward dictatorship.
I always thought it was odd how Google would have summers of code. I thought it'd make much more sense to have a "Winter of Code" instead - do it when the weather is bad for most of the population, rather than when the weather is good. I suppose if you live in the southern hemisphere it'll be a winter of code though.
The other thing from your screen shot that is notable is that the transparency is just far too transparent. The other effects (the sort of reflective bit on the Start Menu bar at the bottom) are just far too shiny and reduces the readability of the information. It seems like the "well we can do shiny things, transparency and bling therefore we should do a LOT of transparency, shininess and bling because we can and to show off how shiny and blingy we can make it" without considering the usability aspects or WHY you want to do these things for usability (for example, a subtle 3d shadow effect under the window makes it a lot easier to tell the stacking order of your windows at a glance - but an in-your-face version of the same just makes things look ugly. Similarly for transparency - slight transparency makes a great visual cue, but the "lets see how much transparent window area we can slap on it" appraoch they have taken makes it more difficult to read and makes it look crude and unrefined and "bling").
Oh, it's called Luna in XP? I always thought it was called Teletubbies.
I think the ultimate irony is that all those Gulf Coast refineries will end up under water (I used to live in League City, Texas - between Baytown (filled with refineries) and Texas City (filled with refineries), both of which lie only a few metres above mean sea level, and less so over the high tide mark) - and that Jeb Bush's state, Florida, will be heavily flooded if it all comes to pass as expected. The global warming deniers states (Dubya and Jeb) will both be economically destroyed by the very global warming they deny...
I'm guessing you are alluding to an increase in solar output. CO2 induced global warming and changes in solar output are not mutually exclusive - they are additive. Therefore, the argument we should do nothing because solar output may be increasing is invalid.
You're making the classic layman's mistake and confusing meteorology with climatology.
The people who are forecasting the weather 12 hours away or 5 days away or 10 days away are meteorologists. The people who are looking at trends affecting the next 250 years are climatologists. They both deal with weather but the two aren't that comparable.
A good analogy might be this. Take a large pan of water, uncovered, and set it on a gas stove at low heat. The meteorologist is the guy who tells you that a convection will appear *here* and *here*, and in 3 seconds, a bubble will appear *here*. His predictions will get increasingly inaccurate as time goes on - indeed, he'll probably have a lot of difficulty predicting where convections appear in 10 seconds time.
The climatologist on the other hand is the guy who says if you put a lid on the pan, the water will heat quicker, and the convective currents will be more pronounced and the bubbles will be more numerous. He doesn't try to say where they will appear, he just says there will be a general trend that more will appear since you're now keeping more energy in the system. Similarly, the climatologist will tell you the pan will boil in N minutes if you turn the heat up to setting M, but boil in N-2 minutes if you set the heat on M+1, or N-3 if you cover the pan and leave the setting at M, since he has a good grasp at what trapping energy in the system or adding extra energy to the system will have.
Just as surely that a pan of water will boil faster with the lid on, more energy will be kept in the Earth's atmosphere if you increase the concentration of CO2. These things simply aren't disputed, and the fact that meteorologists aren't accurate past five days does not make it not so, any more than the inability to predict where convections will occur in ten seconds time in a pan of water somehow invalidates the prediction that putting the lid on the pan will allow the water to boil more quickly. Meterology != climatology, even though the two are related.
We have good evidence going back into geological timescales that when there are higher concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere, there are also higher temperatures. It's simple cause-and-effect - if you do something that keeps more energy in the global system, it will warm up, just as 1 + 1 = 2. The continual confusion between what a climatologist does and what a meterologist does is either simple misunderstanding, or burying heads in the sand.
I'm pretty sure iPhoto keeps the originals - I certainly see them go by when I do my rsync offsite backup of my photos.
A better name would be Rupert.
The probability of you being in the same bit of sky as the laser is infinitessimally small. Besides, if the laser is likely to be used in earnest, we are likely having a nuclear war and your skydiving operation will be grounded for national security reasons anyway.
The Wifi problem is a general issue with the Linux kernel as a whole rather than a specific issue with Ubuntu. The state of wireless in Linux is pretty bad. This is largely due to the manufacturers - they won't even release specs let alone release a driver for Linux - so you have to be very picky about which wifi dongle you use.
Yes, but he who lives by the silly lawsuit dies by the silly lawsuit - e.g. the Apple records -vs- Apple Computer lawsuit.
I'm sorry, this is a bit of a pet peeve - but if you could care less, this means you care a lot and could reduce the amount you care. I think you really mean you couldn't care less.
I meant tune the lowest string. Damn not hitting Preview!
With a guitar (or other fretted instrument) it's actually much simpler - you tune the lowest fret, go up to the fret that will make it sound the same note as the next string up (which will depend on which tuning you are using), and then tune the next string so its pitch matches the string you just tuned and are holding on a fret. If you listen carefully you can listen for the beat frequency when you get close, and make small adjustments until the beat frequency goes away. Then repeat with the next string and so on until all strings are tuned.
If you're just playing solo and have no reference, just tune the guitar to itself using the lowest string as the reference.
Well, first let me agree with you on the music reading thing then disagree :-)
Being able to read music notation is very useful - but (depending on what your goals are) I think too many people are taught to be human player pianos (s/piano/instrument-of-your-choice/). If your goal is to be able to make music, I think learning theory (i.e. what makes music sound like it sounds) is much more important than being able to sight read. I can only speak for the piano - but I found the emphasis on sight reading and scales to the exclusion of everything else the way it's taught now (and the way they attempted, but failed, to teach me at school) is extremely boring and unpleasant and puts people off. I was being taught to be a human player piano, not being taught how to make music. I gave up and didn't touch a piano again until I went to university.
I am once again learning to read notation well, but only to the extent required to be able to use technique books, which are a necessary evil (actually, I quite like going through the old Hanon book, but not for hours on end!) I'm not at all interested in sheet music. If I want to play someone else's music, I'd rather just listen to it carefully then make my own interpretation - that's what I find to be fun. Of course that's just me and I'm sure there are many people out there who get great satisfaction from sight reading music perfectly.
I have a (fairly dreadful) old piano which simply isn't worth spending money on, so I got my own tuning kit (tuning lever, mutes, fork etc). I also got a book with it. The most interesting thing about the book is the discussion of all the tempers used in the past and how we ended up with the current 'equal tempered' tuning.
It's actually very hard (I suppose for a piano tuner who does it every day, it's instinctive) to tune a piano by ear - the beats are quite subtle. Since I'm never going to tune it frequently enough to be able to do it like a real piano tuner, I got a strobe tuner for my PowerBook which makes it trivially easy to tune it properly (or at least, as well as my old wreck of a piano can be tuned). The strobe tuner has about 40 different tempers you can use. But it takes too long as it is for me to try an experiment! I still need to figure out the correct 'stretch' for the upper end of the keyboard (which keeps going out of tune very quickly anyway, so it may be a lost cause).
If you want to learn to read music off a staff, you have to get to the stage where it's like reading words on a page - you don't want to have to look at a note and think 'FACE', erm, therefore that's a C. You want to just see the note and immediately play the note without having to think what it is - just like you're reading this text without having to think about it.
There are some good 'flash card' trainers to help learn to read music like you can read letters on a page. http://www.musictheory.net/ is a good start and it's free (but requires Flash).
X is not huge. The core of X hasn't really got much larger in years - and it used to run very happily on a 486 with 16MB of RAM. I'm sure with a little effort it would be possible to make a usable system on a 486 with the 2.6 kernel and the current X.org and an older or lightweight window manager (like olwvm or fvwm). Don't confuse X with the (large) toolkits that get run on top of it.
I'm making the assumption you've never been bullied for years on end at school.
I was. I know what the parent poster felt like. I have never desired to hurt someone or take pleasure in being unpleasant - on the contrary, I'd rather be friends. But when people are tormenting you day in and day out eventually it gets to the point you can't take any more. I used to fantasize about shooting my bullies in the neck with one of the Lee Enfield 303s the school kept in the armory and paralysing them for life. Later on, when I was still being tormented at age 17, I used to fantasize about seeing my bullies bounce off the front of the car I was driving.
Like the original poster, I can look back on it and shake my head now. But at the time I was being driven insane by the constant physical and mental torment being inflicted on me, and had a very serious thirst for vengeance. Fortunately, the rational part of my mind could always stop me from carrying out these actions - even when the thought crossed my mind when I was in CCF, carrying a 303 with a full magazine.
People don't witter on about how terribly hard cruising is like they do about parallel parking. I'm not saying an auto parking tool is useless, I'm saying that those who really need it probably shouldn't be on the roads in the first place if they can't do something as elementary as parallel park.