That is complete nonesense. If you want to advocate compatibility between linux and solaris/bsd/sco, you should be advocating *source* compatibility, not binary compatibility.
Those platforms are just trying to get a cheap ride on the the linux wave by supporting linux binaries. The only reason they have linux-compatibility-modes is because they cant be bothered to port the software to their own platforms. They have the fucking source, tell them to port it and submit the changes to the maintainter. Or if you have the source (i.e. you maintain a closed source app), *you* fix the source to be compatible.
Look, linux is a moving target, and the linux distros try valiantly to keep up. If other platforms want to continue to be binary compatible with that target, they are going to have to track it and keep up with it.
I do a lot of porting among the various *nix platforms and nt, and with the exception of dealing with nt, it is *not* that hard. It just takes some time and effort.
So, in short, stop your pansy-ass whining and get a fucking clue.
Considering all the hoopla I see around here about "bad journalism" and "inflamatory posts" on/., I'm suprised noone has yet thanked emmett for actually calling up Be and asking about this article.
Anyway, I'll be the first; rock on, emmett. Thanks for checking up on the story before posting it. I'm quite sure it eliminated the copious amounts of whining that would have otherwise resulted:)
Looks interesting (altho I'm still doubtful about jamming PDA's and cellphones together), but I'm a Candian working in Houston, Texas, and all your developement positions seem to be in London. Probably not an easy option for a job change;)
Yes, that is how it is typically done in games. It's fast, it's simple, and nobody really cares about accurate collision resolution for good game-play. I just wanted to point out that simulating Newtonian physics doesn't necessarily imply a trivial set of rules.
In fact, even in two dimensions it's quite non-trivial if done with a signicant amount of accuracy.
While the article doesnt really go into much depth on how detailed their modelling scheme is, I suspect you are right. If all they are talking about is Newtonian motion for flying around, that's not too difficult.
However, if they are including three dimensional collisions with friction and correct collision detection, it's a whole 'nother kettle of fish. I worked on writing such simulations for a couple years at a university, so I know at least a bit about it.
Frictional collisions in three dimensions are actually a bit tricky to get correct. More difficult is correct and efficient collision detection; you need to know as precisely as possible where the two bodies collide so that you can calculate accurate surface normals to compute accurate frictional forces. The hip thing in collision detection at the time was to use three dimensional voronoi diagrams to minimize collision checks. Calculating voronoi diagrams is a non-trivial excersize, but at least they can be precomputed.
Dunno what the hip thing is these days in collision detection. The work I did was about 3 years ago.
Of course, this sort of accuracy probably isnt necessary for a game, so they probably aren't really worried about this stuff.
Anyway, as in most areas of computer science, the answer is "it depends":)
I'm glad to hear that... our company has quite high standards too, but that is really only because they are smart enough to employ exceptionally good developers and testers. The process itself sucks rock, but we do ok because of the folks involved in the process. I'm a developer for these guys (turn on your javascript:P) who do you work for?
If it were that simple, I'd agree. However, software maintainance costs a significant amount of cash. The only real advantage, as far as I can tell, in being lax with requirements/design/coding is being first to market. Unfortunately you wind up paying for it in maintenance and bug fixes later. If you got it right the first time, you might be a bit behind the competitors, but you'd look good in the eyes of perspective clients because your software didnt suck. And you wouldnt have to pay your coders to fix things. You could pay them to add interesting and useful features.
So, yes, in the end, it's all about cash. I'm just convinced that in the general case cash is being spent improperly.
This isn't exactly a huge suprise to me. I had a TA in university that had previously worked on the shuttle code, and showed us the design documents and the coding procedures for some of the shuttle control code. The attention to detail was almost unreal. Even the requirements doc was triple-intense, not to mention the coding procedures themselves. The shuttle folks are coding-for-keeps, and well they should; peoples lives are *directly* on the line.
Too bad the industry-at-large refuses to be as thorough as NASA.
If you'd bother to actually read the original post, you'll find that it was co-authered by Jamie and Emmett.
It used to be that people couldnt be bothered to read the linked articles before posting. Are they now not even reading the post on the front page? Holy root.
I'd almost forgotten about "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead". Brilliant film (never seen it preformed on the stage). My first year english prof pointed this one out to me while we were studying "Hamlet". It's not only funny as hell, it also gives alot of insight into the roll of R and G in "Hamlet".
As a bit of an asside, later that year there was a very warped production of "Hamlet" at the school theatre. Instead of the main characters being royalty, they were the heads of a mafia familly. Same dialogue, but with an Italian accent, all dressed in 40's attire, and wielded guns instead of swords. And to top it off, scenes from "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" were integrated into the play. Wierd, but definitely interesting.
I got one of these cameras a few months back, and I agree. It's very nice. However, the next in the series has been announced (980?) for release in a month or two. From what I can tell, it's solved a few of the complaints most people have about the 950. Nameley, they've done some sorta upgrad to the battery and flashcard ports so they arent as easily broken. It's been a while since I read the reviews on it, but there were a couple other nice fixes, IIRC.
Also, the newer model has all the features of the 950, but adds MPEG capture! Dunno if it's actually any good, but it might be an interesting capabability to have around.
One feature you didnt mention, is that along with BestShot, there is a continuous shot mode that will just keep snapping shots and storing them until you let go of the shutter button or you run out of memory.
My only gripes with the camera are as follows: no way to attach the lense cover to the camera when your remove it (I've already lost mine... I suspect one of the cats decided to play with it) and the LCD isnt bright enough if you are outdoors (even on cloudy days). Mind you, there are very few digital cameras that handle that very well.
One other thing I feel compelled to point out. This is a camera made for taking "real" pictures, not snapshots. Sure, you can set it up for taking snapshots, but if you havent done so before hand, subjects have a tendancy to get a bit annoyed while you fiddle with the settings. While discussing this with a friend of mine, we came to the conclusion that if you are mostly just going to take snapshots to publish on the web or email to your friends, this camera is overkill. So, we decided, the optimal solution is to have two cameras: something like the coolpix for "serious" photos where you need high image quality, and a point-and-click camera for snapping pix at the company BBQ, birthday parties at the local pub, etc. It's not that you *can't* do both with the coolpix, it's just a bit inconvenient. And even the "cheap" cameras are a few hundred bux, so it's not in everones budget.
The coolpix is also also much bulkier than the less expensive point-and-click models which makes it a bit of a drag to carry around while you are playing pool with your local IRC friends.
BTW, gphoto (linux app - dunno if it's ported to other OSes) supports the coolpix line, altho it's a bit (ahem) buggy.
We had considered tracking down people, but my inital test run of trying to track down people went so terribly, we gave up. You'd be amazed how many people change e-mail addresses in a year.
In case something like this ever comes up again, you might want to consider adding a new feature to slashdot. Instead of tracking people down by email, why not track them down using their user id? Write a "sysop message" facility; if you send a message to them, the next time they login to/. the message shows up at the top of the first page.
I read the article on the Planetary Society site, and it's not clear to me why this is a good idea. Sure, you might get a stronger signal from a narrowband laser pulse, but the sender would have to be pointing it directly at us for us to get the signal. Why would the sender decide to point it in our direction? Seems pretty improbable.
Then again, if you have read more on the subject, and it isn't actually as bogus as it sounds, maybe you can enlighten us:)
It's not quite as dumb as it sounds. I recently saw a History Channel show on the Russian space program. Apparently they were occasionally using Mir for filming TV comercials (you know, the kind where there's little balls of milk floating through the air, etc). So, when they talk about advertising deals, I don't think they are talking about slapping giant bumper stickers on Mir.
Not all Vinyl-obsessed geeks are DJ's. In my younger years, i bought used records by the truckload, and I've still got about 700 of the suckers. I've just recently bought a technics SL-1200MK2 (great bloody turntable!) and I havent listened to a CD since:)
There's something about spinning wax that playing CD's and mp3's cant match. It's a tactile experience that brings back memories of the good 'ol days, especially when coupled with vinyl that I played when I was 14. Then again, I guess maybe I'm a bit older than the average slashdoter:)
A couple of folks have alluded to this, but I'll reiterate in an attempt to make it clear; real time systems imply bounded response times. That does not directly imply a *faster* response time (altho the goal is to reduce the gauranteed bound on response times).
Hence, the phrase "real-time mathematical computations" is almost an oxymoron... if the computation by nature is unbounded, you wont get realtime performance out of any processor.
Basically, I'm attempting to point out that "real time" and "fast" are not synonymous.
Check out a program called "pinfo". It converts man and info pages to html on the fly and pipes them through lynx. Rather a spiffy way to read man pages; It's what I use for reading man pages most of the time. BTW, you can force it to ignore info files by using the -m switch. However, the method makes reading info documents much less painful, so you might find yourself starting to like info docs after all:)
Bigger and better (well, mostly bigger) versions of the images can be found here and here
I always love pictures from Hubble; they are always stunningly beautiful. However, they tend to look almost *too* good, as if some graphics artist had a bit to much free time while fiddling about with The GIMP... I sometimes think the Hubble folks are trying to pull a fast one on us with these pictures:)
Disclaimer: this is not a bashing of admintools.. please bare with me:)
I've been kicking around unix systems for some years now, and I've developed a love/hate relationship with admin tools (both GUI and text-based). I tend to lean towards the hate category and edit config files by hand as much as possible.
"Why", you ask? Because if I don't figure out how to do it by hand, when things go south, you either wind up learning to do it by hand, or you often are out of luck. It seems to me that it is better to know all the nasty bits up front, rather than wait for Bad Things to happen later and have to figure things out then (often under pressure from time constraints).
Now, this is not an admintool-bashing argument; I'd love to see the end-all-be-all suite of admin tools. However, what I would *most* like to see in an admin tool is more feedback. Specifically, if I'm going to be using linuxconf (for example), when I hit the apply button, I want it to *tell* me what it's doing, and preferably log all the changes it's making. That way, I have a clue where to look if linuxconf isn't doing the Right Thing. That would go along way towards helping newcomers to linux: they'd have a central place to go for configuration *and* learn what was going on behind the scenes for those times when it really matters.
As a second example, consider the debate about the ease of installing windows vs installing linux. Windows installation is usually described as easier, right? In many ways, I'd say this is true (altho it's the delta is narrowing all the time). However, you've probably had those times when installing windows didn't go so well. And when it goes badly, what happens? You are in a world of hurt. Why is that? Because it doesn't tell you what it's trying to do behind the seens; you can't fix things because you can't even figure out what is supposed to be fixed (at least not without an enormous amount of effort or prior knowledge of windows).
So, in summary, I think anyone developing configuration tools should really consider keeping the tool's users informed about what is going on under the hood, rather than hiding the operations completely. That would help both the user, and the tool's maintainer.
When I heard about this from a friend last week, I looked for a webpage. I didn't find the one listed in the above article but I did find a page (also on nasa.gov) that listed all lunar eclipses for 2000. However, all the times listed on that page were listed as UT. What does UT stand for, Universal Time? And is it somehow different than GMT? The GMT times listed in the above article are the same as the UT times listed on the page I read previously.
I suspect you've never used one of those cartridge loaded fountain pens. I have, and so the way I interpretted the article is that the fuel cell (the expensive bit) is not replaced, but rather a small plastic tube full of methanol (the inexpensive bit) which powers the fuel cell is replaced.
Slashdot Mirror
That is complete nonesense. If you want to advocate compatibility between linux and solaris/bsd/sco, you should be advocating *source* compatibility, not binary compatibility.
Those platforms are just trying to get a cheap ride on the the linux wave by supporting linux binaries. The only reason they have linux-compatibility-modes is because they cant be bothered to port the software to their own platforms. They have the fucking source, tell them to port it and submit the changes to the maintainter. Or if you have the source (i.e. you maintain a closed source app), *you* fix the source to be compatible.
Look, linux is a moving target, and the linux distros try valiantly to keep up. If other platforms want to continue to be binary compatible with that target, they are going to have to track it and keep up with it.
I do a lot of porting among the various *nix platforms and nt, and with the exception of dealing with nt, it is *not* that hard. It just takes some time and effort.
So, in short, stop your pansy-ass whining and get a fucking clue.
Considering all the hoopla I see around here about "bad journalism" and "inflamatory posts" on /., I'm suprised noone has yet thanked emmett for actually calling up Be and asking about this article.
:)
Anyway, I'll be the first; rock on, emmett. Thanks for checking up on the story before posting it. I'm quite sure it eliminated the copious amounts of whining that would have otherwise resulted
Looks interesting (altho I'm still doubtful about jamming PDA's and cellphones together), but I'm a Candian working in Houston, Texas, and all your developement positions seem to be in London. Probably not an easy option for a job change ;)
Yes, that is how it is typically done in games. It's fast, it's simple, and nobody really cares about accurate collision resolution for good game-play. I just wanted to point out that simulating Newtonian physics doesn't necessarily imply a trivial set of rules.
In fact, even in two dimensions it's quite non-trivial if done with a signicant amount of accuracy.
While the article doesnt really go into much depth on how detailed their modelling scheme is, I suspect you are right. If all they are talking about is Newtonian motion for flying around, that's not too difficult.
:)
However, if they are including three dimensional collisions with friction and correct collision detection, it's a whole 'nother kettle of fish. I worked on writing such simulations for a couple years at a university, so I know at least a bit about it.
Frictional collisions in three dimensions are actually a bit tricky to get correct. More difficult is correct and efficient collision detection; you need to know as precisely as possible where the two bodies collide so that you can calculate accurate surface normals to compute accurate frictional forces. The hip thing in collision detection at the time was to use three dimensional voronoi diagrams to minimize collision checks. Calculating voronoi diagrams is a non-trivial excersize, but at least they can be precomputed.
Dunno what the hip thing is these days in collision detection. The work I did was about 3 years ago.
Of course, this sort of accuracy probably isnt necessary for a game, so they probably aren't really worried about this stuff.
Anyway, as in most areas of computer science, the answer is "it depends"
I'm glad to hear that ... our company has quite high standards too, but that is really only because they are smart enough to employ exceptionally good developers and testers. The process itself sucks rock, but we do ok because of the folks involved in the process. I'm a developer for these guys (turn on your javascript :P) who do you work for?
If it were that simple, I'd agree. However, software maintainance costs a significant amount of cash. The only real advantage, as far as I can tell, in being lax with requirements/design/coding is being first to market. Unfortunately you wind up paying for it in maintenance and bug fixes later. If you got it right the first time, you might be a bit behind the competitors, but you'd look good in the eyes of perspective clients because your software didnt suck. And you wouldnt have to pay your coders to fix things. You could pay them to add interesting and useful features.
So, yes, in the end, it's all about cash. I'm just convinced that in the general case cash is being spent improperly.
This isn't exactly a huge suprise to me. I had a TA in university that had previously worked on the shuttle code, and showed us the design documents and the coding procedures for some of the shuttle control code. The attention to detail was almost unreal. Even the requirements doc was triple-intense, not to mention the coding procedures themselves. The shuttle folks are coding-for-keeps, and well they should; peoples lives are *directly* on the line.
Too bad the industry-at-large refuses to be as thorough as NASA.
If you'd bother to actually read the original post, you'll find that it was co-authered by Jamie and Emmett.
It used to be that people couldnt be bothered to read the linked articles before posting. Are they now not even reading the post on the front page? Holy root.
I'd almost forgotten about "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead". Brilliant film (never seen it preformed on the stage). My first year english prof pointed this one out to me while we were studying "Hamlet". It's not only funny as hell, it also gives alot of insight into the roll of R and G in "Hamlet".
As a bit of an asside, later that year there was a very warped production of "Hamlet" at the school theatre. Instead of the main characters being royalty, they were the heads of a mafia familly. Same dialogue, but with an Italian accent, all dressed in 40's attire, and wielded guns instead of swords. And to top it off, scenes from "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" were integrated into the play. Wierd, but definitely interesting.
I got one of these cameras a few months back, and I agree. It's very nice. However, the next in the series has been announced (980?) for release in a month or two. From what I can tell, it's solved a few of the complaints most people have about the 950. Nameley, they've done some sorta upgrad to the battery and flashcard ports so they arent as easily broken. It's been a while since I read the reviews on it, but there were a couple other nice fixes, IIRC.
... I suspect one of the cats decided to play with it) and the LCD isnt bright enough if you are outdoors (even on cloudy days). Mind you, there are very few digital cameras that handle that very well.
Also, the newer model has all the features of the 950, but adds MPEG capture! Dunno if it's actually any good, but it might be an interesting capabability to have around.
One feature you didnt mention, is that along with BestShot, there is a continuous shot mode that will just keep snapping shots and storing them until you let go of the shutter button or you run out of memory.
My only gripes with the camera are as follows: no way to attach the lense cover to the camera when your remove it (I've already lost mine
One other thing I feel compelled to point out. This is a camera made for taking "real" pictures, not snapshots. Sure, you can set it up for taking snapshots, but if you havent done so before hand, subjects have a tendancy to get a bit annoyed while you fiddle with the settings. While discussing this with a friend of mine, we came to the conclusion that if you are mostly just going to take snapshots to publish on the web or email to your friends, this camera is overkill. So, we decided, the optimal solution is to have two cameras: something like the coolpix for "serious" photos where you need high image quality, and a point-and-click camera for snapping pix at the company BBQ, birthday parties at the local pub, etc. It's not that you *can't* do both with the coolpix, it's just a bit inconvenient. And even the "cheap" cameras are a few hundred bux, so it's not in everones budget.
The coolpix is also also much bulkier than the less expensive point-and-click models which makes it a bit of a drag to carry around while you are playing pool with your local IRC friends.
BTW, gphoto (linux app - dunno if it's ported to other OSes) supports the coolpix line, altho it's a bit (ahem) buggy.
I submitted this story in the goddam Creataceous period! And slashdot is just posting it now? I'm *sooooo* pissed off.
We had considered tracking down people, but my inital test run of trying to track down people went so terribly, we gave up. You'd be amazed how many people change e-mail addresses in a year.
/. the message shows up at the top of the first page.
;)
In case something like this ever comes up again, you might want to consider adding a new feature to slashdot. Instead of tracking people down by email, why not track them down using their user id? Write a "sysop message" facility; if you send a message to them, the next time they login to
I'd offer to help by I hate perl
All I have to say on this matter is that I'm glad I'm on cable modem :)
I read the article on the Planetary Society site, and it's not clear to me why this is a good idea. Sure, you might get a stronger signal from a narrowband laser pulse, but the sender would have to be pointing it directly at us for us to get the signal. Why would the sender decide to point it in our direction? Seems pretty improbable.
:)
Then again, if you have read more on the subject, and it isn't actually as bogus as it sounds, maybe you can enlighten us
It's not quite as dumb as it sounds. I recently saw a History Channel show on the Russian space program. Apparently they were occasionally using Mir for filming TV comercials (you know, the kind where there's little balls of milk floating through the air, etc). So, when they talk about advertising deals, I don't think they are talking about slapping giant bumper stickers on Mir.
Not all Vinyl-obsessed geeks are DJ's. In my younger years, i bought used records by the truckload, and I've still got about 700 of the suckers. I've just recently bought a technics SL-1200MK2 (great bloody turntable!) and I havent listened to a CD since :)
:)
There's something about spinning wax that playing CD's and mp3's cant match. It's a tactile experience that brings back memories of the good 'ol days, especially when coupled with vinyl that I played when I was 14. Then again, I guess maybe I'm a bit older than the average slashdoter
A couple of folks have alluded to this, but I'll reiterate in an attempt to make it clear; real time systems imply bounded response times. That does not directly imply a *faster* response time (altho the goal is to reduce the gauranteed bound on response times).
... if the computation by nature is unbounded, you wont get realtime performance out of any processor.
Hence, the phrase "real-time mathematical computations" is almost an oxymoron
Basically, I'm attempting to point out that "real time" and "fast" are not synonymous.
Check out a program called "pinfo". It converts man and info pages to html on the fly and pipes them through lynx. Rather a spiffy way to read man pages; It's what I use for reading man pages most of the time. BTW, you can force it to ignore info files by using the -m switch. However, the method makes reading info documents much less painful, so you might find yourself starting to like info docs after all :)
You can find pinfo on freshmeat (of course).
Well, this isnt't exactly the sort of artificial pussy I was hoping for ...
Since www.ioccc.org seems to be unreachable at the moment (at least for me), you can amuse yourself by looking at previous winning entries
:)
Have fun
Bigger and better (well, mostly bigger) versions of the images can be found here and here
... I sometimes think the Hubble folks are trying to pull a fast one on us with these pictures :)
I always love pictures from Hubble; they are always stunningly beautiful. However, they tend to look almost *too* good, as if some graphics artist had a bit to much free time while fiddling about with The GIMP
Disclaimer: this is not a bashing of admintools .. please bare with me :)
I've been kicking around unix systems for some years now, and I've developed a love/hate relationship with admin tools (both GUI and text-based). I tend to lean towards the hate category and edit config files by hand as much as possible.
"Why", you ask? Because if I don't figure out how to do it by hand, when things go south, you either wind up learning to do it by hand, or you often are out of luck. It seems to me that it is better to know all the nasty bits up front, rather than wait for Bad Things to happen later and have to figure things out then (often under pressure from time constraints).
Now, this is not an admintool-bashing argument; I'd love to see the end-all-be-all suite of admin tools. However, what I would *most* like to see in an admin tool is more feedback. Specifically, if I'm going to be using linuxconf (for example), when I hit the apply button, I want it to *tell* me what it's doing, and preferably log all the changes it's making. That way, I have a clue where to look if linuxconf isn't doing the Right Thing. That would go along way towards helping newcomers to linux: they'd have a central place to go for configuration *and* learn what was going on behind the scenes for those times when it really matters.
As a second example, consider the debate about the ease of installing windows vs installing linux. Windows installation is usually described as easier, right? In many ways, I'd say this is true (altho it's the delta is narrowing all the time). However, you've probably had those times when installing windows didn't go so well. And when it goes badly, what happens? You are in a world of hurt. Why is that? Because it doesn't tell you what it's trying to do behind the seens; you can't fix things because you can't even figure out what is supposed to be fixed (at least not without an enormous amount of effort or prior knowledge of windows).
So, in summary, I think anyone developing configuration tools should really consider keeping the tool's users informed about what is going on under the hood, rather than hiding the operations completely. That would help both the user, and the tool's maintainer.
When I heard about this from a friend last week, I looked for a webpage. I didn't find the one listed in the above article but I did find a page (also on nasa.gov) that listed all lunar eclipses for 2000. However, all the times listed on that page were listed as UT. What does UT stand for, Universal Time? And is it somehow different than GMT? The GMT times listed in the above article are the same as the UT times listed on the page I read previously.
I suspect you've never used one of those cartridge loaded fountain pens. I have, and so the way I interpretted the article is that the fuel cell (the expensive bit) is not replaced, but rather a small plastic tube full of methanol (the inexpensive bit) which powers the fuel cell is replaced.