a bunch of sports games that are better on the Wii thanks to the Wii Motion Plus.
I'm still not sure the motion plus is a good move. They should have put more effort into it.
Resort is fun, but the motion plus add-on is relatively easy to confuse. Wave a bit around, and your sword / table tennis bat can already be slightly off (or point in a completely different direction).
Grand slam tennis also supports the motion plus, but it is even worse than Resort (does work well without motion plus though).
I hope they can iron out the bugs, because at the moment I wouldn't want to bet the future of the Wii on it.
but for most OSS out there you're relying on community forums and wikis like everyone else.
Or the developers themselves which, if they take their software seriously, is the best kind of help you can get.
I've had to use various commercially supported server-side products in the past, most of the time "support" entails being read from a script by some guy in a callcenter what you've already tried, after which you're out of luck. There were a couple of products that did have proper support, but you never know what you're going to get.
With open source you either have large projects where forums and wikis are useful enough, or small projects where you can communicate directly with the developers. Being able to talk to the guys who wrote the damn code is always the fastest and most efficient route (after which some beer-money goes their way).
By releasing the trojan's source code, Skype can fix their software.
I don't think this will help Skype a lot, at best they could attempt to stop this particular trojan.
We're talking about a trojan that has complete access to the local machine. At some point in the software Skype has to decrypt the audio transmission and send the data via the OS's audio API, and that is where this trojan will intercept the data. Skype now knows how the trojan intercepts the data, and at best they could frustrate it in a new version (which would work until the trojan is updated).
The big question is if Skype is still secure without having to gain access to the local machine (ie. can law enforcement decrypt Skype traffic).
Some day the SEC will pull their head out of their ass and put a mandatory ownership period on all stock purchases of 48 hours or something. Addicted day traders might stop gambling away their retirement and it might put an end to these fast traders.
Perhaps. But don't forget that those day traders are making the market makers a lot of money. Each trade they make, the intermediary gets a cut. If you curb fast trading, you will seriously hurt quite a few companies that make most of their cash thanks to these fast traders. I don't think the SEC would want that to happen.
Also, the question is if fast traders are really as malignant as you claim them to be. They do have different objectives than long-term investors (like we both probably are), but as long as they play by the rules and don't put out rumors and false info I personally don't have a problem with them.
If the SEC did put a mandatory ownership for a number of days it would seriously harm the market, while probably creating a large unregulated options market. Not going to happen as long as the US is waving the banner of capitalism.
In the US there are industries where most employees have 12 weeks vacation every year. There are even industries where the norm is 40 weeks of vacation a year.
Please enlighten me: which magical industry only requires 12 weeks of work every year? I must be in the wrong line of business.
I like Debian's commitment to free software, but if you don't deliver a product people will look elsewhere.
They did and do deliver a product: a rock-solid stable Linux distribution.
Some people care more about a stable environment (for servers or workstations) than the latest bells and whistles. That, together with the necessary security fixes, makes Debian the best distribution for me hands-down. And if you run Ubuntu or any derivative, you're still running Debian under the hood. Even if you don't need a rock-solid distribution, they allow other groups to give you those bells and whistles you want.
Rather than whine about those 3 years (hell, if you really needed an upgrade you could have tried out testing), be grateful that there are so many people out there that put this distribution together in their spare time and by doing so make your distribution possible.
Zimbra being open source and having quite a large community, it will survive regardless.
On a related note: Funambol works nicely with Zimbra, giving the ability to sync with Outlook and mobile phones without requiring the Zimbra Network (non-free) edition.
All of which are free and/or beta, giving Google the nice out "Hey, it's beta/free? WTF do you want?"
Not with Google Apps. Google will happily take your money ($50/user/year) for Gmail/Docs et al and you can hold them to their SLA. It isn't a great one, but it's good enough for quite a few businesses and organizations. No 'Beta' label for the last few years. I offer Apps to clients wanting Exchange-like functionality, together with 'real' alternatives (Zimbra).
I'm skeptical about Google, just like you. Hell, I run my own mail servers and avoid using Google search. However with them handling Android the way they do (and doing so, pushing out Linux to to millions of phones) leads me to believe they can open up markets for Linux and FLOSS in general to gain significant ground.
GAs are potentially extremely powerful (obviously - human biology is evidence of that) but they need to be iterated an astronomical number of times to divine anything useful
Not really, as it mostly depends on what kind of fitness landscape you're evolving your GA on together with the complexity of each entity in your GA.
On fairly complicated fitness landscapes, near-optimal solutions can be found in 50-100 generations. If however you are evolving monkeys into humans, you might need a few thousand generations more.
As Ted Dziuba put it, Google's very good at selling ads. Supporting actual customers? Not so much.
As much as I enjoy Ted's monday rant on El Reg, he's a few years behind the times with such a statement.
Gmail, Docs, Chrome? Actual users, and with Apps they turn into actual customers. Even though I don't use Google's stuff myself, they seem to be doing quite well. When they fsck up it is mentioned on slashdot, so they aren't fooling around too often (it's still news).
Perhaps they'll go the OEM route like they did with Android, in that case supporting customers wouldn't be their main concern.
Either way, it will be sweet seeing a large player push Linux back into the netbook market. It was horrifying to see such a linux-friendly market get swamped by MS in a matter of months, to the extent that now it's nearly impossible to get one with Linux pre-installed...
I'm in the EU and didn't know that. Does that mean I can just toddle off to French Guiana on a whim like I can to France? (travel costs permitting, of course, much like an american in new york visiting florida).
Good question, one I also was interested in and had to look up:
Some projects don't even use that nomenclature; Gentoo just uses the date of release
Maybe that's because version numbers really don't mean much when it comes to distributions. Fedora 10, Ubuntu 9.04 or Debian 3.0 are merely ways to distinguish different versions of a distribution. Because distro's are so complicated and contain so much software (even small ones) you can't be sure that 3.0 will even have the same stuff as 2.0, while with single applications you can be quite sure that you'll get a decent improvement in features and reliability (if not performance).
Of course you're correct than in the open source world the difference between 0.9 and 1.0 doesn't have to be world-changing.
In the end, it's either a matter of how the developer sees his project or how many releases marketing wants to push out of the door this year.
They should focus more on background and analysis for the factoids you've already read online.
The problem is that newspapers now have to choose who to focus on: People who get their daily news online, and people who don't.
As more and more people get their news-fix continuously throughout the day (hitting F5 on nu.nl has become an important part of Dutch work culture already) there will be less people that need cleaned-up press releases and there will be more that expect in-depth analysis on topics they saw online yesterday. But currently newspapers do have to cater to both groups.
Until e-readers become viable and open enough, in-depth analysis remains territory of newspapers. But in the end, they will go the way of the dodo.
Having to pay for even one ssh client is pretty absurd in the first place. Only in the apple ecosystem would anyone contemplate paying for an ssh client.
Mods on crack? I can't see why the above post would be worthy of a troll mod. Between openssh and putty, I have free and Free ssh clients on every platform I use, including blackberry and symbian.
If you disagree, don't mod Troll. Simply reply. The moderation system isn't for determining right from wrong, it's for filtering out the crap. If the parent is wrong, point to a ssh client for the iphone that is free.
If on a single core machine you are using threads and it makes perfect sense for your scenario, then you are not "doing parallelism", you are just doing multithreading.
There are different types of parallelism, and you and the blog article you link to define parallelism as strictly speeding up processes using multiple processors.
This is a false dichotomy. Parallelism at a process level allows a single program to run multiple bits of code in parallel of each other (instead of sequentially). Parallelism at the OS level allows processes to (seemingly) run at the same time, in parallel. Parallelism at the CPU-level or network/cluster-level allows you to speed up a task that would take longer sequentially. I fail to see why you'd want to restrict parallelism to only these last levels.
Threads, processes and clusters are (in my book) all means to achieve parallelism (simply doing stuff in parallel at a certain level), regardless of goal or the number of cores you're running on. But I guess it's all down to semantics.
There's certainly an element of artistry to it - a small block of recursion that accomplishes something horribly complex is just... beautiful.
This reminds me of a fairly large OSS project where they were recursively doing SQL queries after certain actions to clean up. This worked, however they didn't take into account scalability.
The project I was using this for was about a factor 10 larger than usual and it became terribly slow. The database was being pummeled recursively with SQL queries and the whole thing came to a screeching halt.
The solution was simple: a single optimized SQL query that did exactly the same as that wonderfully complex recursive database-killing monstrosity. Yes, it's in the main branch now.
I'm all for artistry, but you have to know the limitations of your tools. Recursion is lovely but not if it hampers the project. Sometimes, in software engineering, beauty is knowing when not to use a beautiful tool.
Of course you can. Rule #1: Follow the intent, not the letter, And then make the intent as clear as humanly possible.
I don't know if making laws that vague would solve anything, instead it would probably make things much more worse. All those lawyers would have a field day in arguing that the intent of a law is something different to what the rest of us think, or use the intent of one law to negate a completely different law.
Things aren't perfect as they are, but the legal system isn't this complex merely due to the lawyers. All these laws have to be as clear as possible, in intent and letter, which is the task the legislative branch has when coming up with a law.
The problem is that each year many laws are added to the system (because the legislative branch has to keep up the act) but there is very little incentive to actually remove laws to simplify the system. The more laws there are in the system, the harder it will be for a layman to understand even a portion of these laws and the more ammunition lawyers have in the courtroom.
Or to continue the analogy, what if you had 100 non-deprecated RFC's that define a simple protocol like SMTP? You would get a whole branch of IT workers through whom you would have to dictate your emails, because the whole system is so complex.
why should someone enjoy a nice clean apartment with with heating, running water, TV, Internet, food, clothing, healthcare..., all for free paid by the rest of society's hard work ?
Because we human beings should look out for each other?
Now your example is extreme, if you put electronics ahead of your basic necessities you don't deserve help. If you own a home or have some savings, you don't deserve help. If you have a partner that still has a solid income, you don't deserve help. However if you are out of a job and the rest of your society can temporarily help you get on your feet and working again, I don't see anything wrong with that.
It is true that the socialistic tendencies in the EUSSR are slowly eroding and I think this is a change for the good. Welfare should exist to get you working as soon as possible in whatever way and abuse of such systems should be harshly dealt with. Society should do its best to give everyone a fighting chance.
And if I have to pay more taxes to be ensured I won't have to dig in dumpsters for food, so be it.
Constantly having to use second rate programs because the the GPL is so restrictive and viral that no software vendor wants to deal with it. As much as people spout 'open source' it isn't. It places as hard or harder restrictions on its use as any proprietary software, they are just different restrictions. But it definitely is not open.
Now you're clearly trolling/FUDing. There are plenty of proprietary apps for Linux, either as drivers (Nvidia) or as userland software (mostly for servers), and if you are merely using FLOSS there are hardly any restrictions at all. When was the last time you saw a EULA when you installed a FLOSS application?
The reason companies don't target desktop Linux is because it's only a tiny fraction of the market. The GPL has nothing to do with it. It's business, plain and simple.
Re:99% of the answers are going to be Eclipse
on
What Free IDE Do You Use?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The person using GVIM or EMACS has 10,000 lines BECAUSE of GVIM, or EMACS... Flipping files in an IDE is trivial... In an editor like GVIM, or EMACS it is not a trivial. Ok not that hard, but I wonder if tedious as compared to an IDE.
Bollocks: Ctrl-x b. For us emacs-users, it's second-nature.
The reason why so many people still prefer vim or emacs is that we can do everything efficiently using the keyboard only. Coding, switching files, compiling, debugging, everything. And we can do that on our own computer, or on one on the other side of the world with merely ssh and the command-line editor of choice.
You might think that something as simple as switching between files isn't trivial in vim/emacs, but that only shows that you haven't learned either. You can point and click all you want, but programming isn't done with a mouse.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm still not sure the motion plus is a good move. They should have put more effort into it.
Resort is fun, but the motion plus add-on is relatively easy to confuse. Wave a bit around, and your sword / table tennis bat can already be slightly off (or point in a completely different direction).
Grand slam tennis also supports the motion plus, but it is even worse than Resort (does work well without motion plus though).
I hope they can iron out the bugs, because at the moment I wouldn't want to bet the future of the Wii on it.
Or the developers themselves which, if they take their software seriously, is the best kind of help you can get.
I've had to use various commercially supported server-side products in the past, most of the time "support" entails being read from a script by some guy in a callcenter what you've already tried, after which you're out of luck. There were a couple of products that did have proper support, but you never know what you're going to get.
With open source you either have large projects where forums and wikis are useful enough, or small projects where you can communicate directly with the developers. Being able to talk to the guys who wrote the damn code is always the fastest and most efficient route (after which some beer-money goes their way).
I don't think this will help Skype a lot, at best they could attempt to stop this particular trojan.
We're talking about a trojan that has complete access to the local machine. At some point in the software Skype has to decrypt the audio transmission and send the data via the OS's audio API, and that is where this trojan will intercept the data. Skype now knows how the trojan intercepts the data, and at best they could frustrate it in a new version (which would work until the trojan is updated).
The big question is if Skype is still secure without having to gain access to the local machine (ie. can law enforcement decrypt Skype traffic).
Perhaps. But don't forget that those day traders are making the market makers a lot of money. Each trade they make, the intermediary gets a cut. If you curb fast trading, you will seriously hurt quite a few companies that make most of their cash thanks to these fast traders. I don't think the SEC would want that to happen.
Also, the question is if fast traders are really as malignant as you claim them to be. They do have different objectives than long-term investors (like we both probably are), but as long as they play by the rules and don't put out rumors and false info I personally don't have a problem with them.
If the SEC did put a mandatory ownership for a number of days it would seriously harm the market, while probably creating a large unregulated options market. Not going to happen as long as the US is waving the banner of capitalism.
This whole Direct3D vs OpenGL discussion is completely unfounded and slightly off-topic. The issue at hand is if a Linux port would be worthwhile.
FTFA (after being asked if OpenGL 3 will be used in the Rage engine):
Please enlighten me: which magical industry only requires 12 weeks of work every year? I must be in the wrong line of business.
Somehow I think I know the answer: politics.
They did and do deliver a product: a rock-solid stable Linux distribution.
Some people care more about a stable environment (for servers or workstations) than the latest bells and whistles. That, together with the necessary security fixes, makes Debian the best distribution for me hands-down. And if you run Ubuntu or any derivative, you're still running Debian under the hood. Even if you don't need a rock-solid distribution, they allow other groups to give you those bells and whistles you want.
Rather than whine about those 3 years (hell, if you really needed an upgrade you could have tried out testing), be grateful that there are so many people out there that put this distribution together in their spare time and by doing so make your distribution possible.
Zimbra being open source and having quite a large community, it will survive regardless.
On a related note: Funambol works nicely with Zimbra, giving the ability to sync with Outlook and mobile phones without requiring the Zimbra Network (non-free) edition.
There, fixed that for you.
Not with Google Apps. Google will happily take your money ($50/user/year) for Gmail/Docs et al and you can hold them to their SLA. It isn't a great one, but it's good enough for quite a few businesses and organizations. No 'Beta' label for the last few years. I offer Apps to clients wanting Exchange-like functionality, together with 'real' alternatives (Zimbra).
I'm skeptical about Google, just like you. Hell, I run my own mail servers and avoid using Google search. However with them handling Android the way they do (and doing so, pushing out Linux to to millions of phones) leads me to believe they can open up markets for Linux and FLOSS in general to gain significant ground.
Not really, as it mostly depends on what kind of fitness landscape you're evolving your GA on together with the complexity of each entity in your GA.
On fairly complicated fitness landscapes, near-optimal solutions can be found in 50-100 generations. If however you are evolving monkeys into humans, you might need a few thousand generations more.
Large? Yes. Astronomical? Not even close.
As much as I enjoy Ted's monday rant on El Reg, he's a few years behind the times with such a statement.
Gmail, Docs, Chrome? Actual users, and with Apps they turn into actual customers. Even though I don't use Google's stuff myself, they seem to be doing quite well. When they fsck up it is mentioned on slashdot, so they aren't fooling around too often (it's still news).
Perhaps they'll go the OEM route like they did with Android, in that case supporting customers wouldn't be their main concern.
Either way, it will be sweet seeing a large player push Linux back into the netbook market. It was horrifying to see such a linux-friendly market get swamped by MS in a matter of months, to the extent that now it's nearly impossible to get one with Linux pre-installed...
He's a manager, said so himself. 'nuth said.
African or European?
Good question, one I also was interested in and had to look up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Area
Oversea territories are exempted from the Schengen treaty for a number of countries. This includes French Guiana.
Maybe that's because version numbers really don't mean much when it comes to distributions. Fedora 10, Ubuntu 9.04 or Debian 3.0 are merely ways to distinguish different versions of a distribution. Because distro's are so complicated and contain so much software (even small ones) you can't be sure that 3.0 will even have the same stuff as 2.0, while with single applications you can be quite sure that you'll get a decent improvement in features and reliability (if not performance).
Of course you're correct than in the open source world the difference between 0.9 and 1.0 doesn't have to be world-changing.
In the end, it's either a matter of how the developer sees his project or how many releases marketing wants to push out of the door this year.
The problem is that newspapers now have to choose who to focus on: People who get their daily news online, and people who don't.
As more and more people get their news-fix continuously throughout the day (hitting F5 on nu.nl has become an important part of Dutch work culture already) there will be less people that need cleaned-up press releases and there will be more that expect in-depth analysis on topics they saw online yesterday. But currently newspapers do have to cater to both groups.
Until e-readers become viable and open enough, in-depth analysis remains territory of newspapers. But in the end, they will go the way of the dodo.
Mods on crack? I can't see why the above post would be worthy of a troll mod. Between openssh and putty, I have free and Free ssh clients on every platform I use, including blackberry and symbian.
If you disagree, don't mod Troll. Simply reply. The moderation system isn't for determining right from wrong, it's for filtering out the crap. If the parent is wrong, point to a ssh client for the iphone that is free.
From article you link to:
There are different types of parallelism, and you and the blog article you link to define parallelism as strictly speeding up processes using multiple processors.
This is a false dichotomy. Parallelism at a process level allows a single program to run multiple bits of code in parallel of each other (instead of sequentially). Parallelism at the OS level allows processes to (seemingly) run at the same time, in parallel. Parallelism at the CPU-level or network/cluster-level allows you to speed up a task that would take longer sequentially. I fail to see why you'd want to restrict parallelism to only these last levels.
Threads, processes and clusters are (in my book) all means to achieve parallelism (simply doing stuff in parallel at a certain level), regardless of goal or the number of cores you're running on. But I guess it's all down to semantics.
They'll integrate Emacs next.
This reminds me of a fairly large OSS project where they were recursively doing SQL queries after certain actions to clean up. This worked, however they didn't take into account scalability.
The project I was using this for was about a factor 10 larger than usual and it became terribly slow. The database was being pummeled recursively with SQL queries and the whole thing came to a screeching halt.
The solution was simple: a single optimized SQL query that did exactly the same as that wonderfully complex recursive database-killing monstrosity. Yes, it's in the main branch now.
I'm all for artistry, but you have to know the limitations of your tools. Recursion is lovely but not if it hampers the project. Sometimes, in software engineering, beauty is knowing when not to use a beautiful tool.
I don't know if making laws that vague would solve anything, instead it would probably make things much more worse. All those lawyers would have a field day in arguing that the intent of a law is something different to what the rest of us think, or use the intent of one law to negate a completely different law.
Things aren't perfect as they are, but the legal system isn't this complex merely due to the lawyers. All these laws have to be as clear as possible, in intent and letter, which is the task the legislative branch has when coming up with a law.
The problem is that each year many laws are added to the system (because the legislative branch has to keep up the act) but there is very little incentive to actually remove laws to simplify the system. The more laws there are in the system, the harder it will be for a layman to understand even a portion of these laws and the more ammunition lawyers have in the courtroom.
Or to continue the analogy, what if you had 100 non-deprecated RFC's that define a simple protocol like SMTP? You would get a whole branch of IT workers through whom you would have to dictate your emails, because the whole system is so complex.
Because we human beings should look out for each other?
Now your example is extreme, if you put electronics ahead of your basic necessities you don't deserve help. If you own a home or have some savings, you don't deserve help. If you have a partner that still has a solid income, you don't deserve help. However if you are out of a job and the rest of your society can temporarily help you get on your feet and working again, I don't see anything wrong with that.
It is true that the socialistic tendencies in the EUSSR are slowly eroding and I think this is a change for the good. Welfare should exist to get you working as soon as possible in whatever way and abuse of such systems should be harshly dealt with. Society should do its best to give everyone a fighting chance.
And if I have to pay more taxes to be ensured I won't have to dig in dumpsters for food, so be it.
Now you're clearly trolling/FUDing. There are plenty of proprietary apps for Linux, either as drivers (Nvidia) or as userland software (mostly for servers), and if you are merely using FLOSS there are hardly any restrictions at all. When was the last time you saw a EULA when you installed a FLOSS application?
The reason companies don't target desktop Linux is because it's only a tiny fraction of the market. The GPL has nothing to do with it. It's business, plain and simple.
Bollocks: Ctrl-x b. For us emacs-users, it's second-nature.
The reason why so many people still prefer vim or emacs is that we can do everything efficiently using the keyboard only. Coding, switching files, compiling, debugging, everything. And we can do that on our own computer, or on one on the other side of the world with merely ssh and the command-line editor of choice.
You might think that something as simple as switching between files isn't trivial in vim/emacs, but that only shows that you haven't learned either. You can point and click all you want, but programming isn't done with a mouse.