It's cringeworthy because its a great game, but once you decide you'd like to fix the slowdowns in the game, you realize it's an unholy mess of perl bindings to C libraries and well... perl "at its finest". I've yet to find anyone with the combined talents of perl and game / graphics programming, let alone the motivation to fix it. Thankfully, frozen-bubble 2 uses less SDL and more openGL.
In particular, it seems a shame to pigeonhole Perl. Using Perl and readily available libraries, one can develop console programs, GUI programs, daemons, or web apps. With Tk, SDL, OpenGL, WxWidgets, curses, GTK, Win32::GUI, or Prima, few languages have as many options for interface libraries last I checked. Just because Perl is very useful for web development doesn't mean it's not useful in other areas.
You have to admit, it's pretty cringe-worthy when you discover Frozen Bubble was written in Perl.
Ironically, if you choose to log in, you can change how karma and other affects scores, and still check the box to "post anonymously". Apparently someone posted they use +4 Flamebait. So there is some benefit to registering, since it's difficult to personalize the site and remain "anonymous".
You must not have worked very hard looking for it. The default Ubuntu graphical shell is Nautilus. They've had scripting options for some time, and I figured SVN is popular enough elsewhere SOMEONE must have written such a thing. And lo and behold, via google:
It seems that TortoiseSVN has problems with Vista. I haven't tried the svn nautilus integration yet, but there's no bugs filed against it. If you run into any, please do file a report. Personally, I choose to use editors that have SVN / CVS support built in. But I suppose some web developers may prefer a seperate client or something.
In my own experience, Windows has been about as bad as Linux with hardware. Vista's nvidia are only slightly better than Linux's with regard to suspend: instead of locking up during suspend to RAM, it fails to initialize the video on restart. Equally unusable, really. Feisty's due to make some changes with nvidia that should help alleviate restricted drivers like the nvidia closed source binary. I think it's important to stress that Linux is first and foremost an open system. If it also serves as a usable system for people who don't care, and continues to be that way, I'm willing to attribute that to the openness of the system, and so much the better. But as much as open source considerations get in the way of the user experience, they are a second class citizen in my sight. Linux makes a fantastic hacker's system.
For example, FUSE is a great idea that has several great examples with few / no comparable in Windows. Daemontools in Windows lets you present a file as if it were a cd in a drive. FUSEISO does the same thing for windows, though the GUI aspect is not quite finished. FUSE presents this mount globally, without the need for applications to know about it. And it doesn't require significant user privileges. But the greatest part about FUSE is that it's the core to several components, like gmailfs, and sshfs, ftpfs, you name it. NTFS support was written this way with good success. There's fuse modules to present Doom WAD files as a directory. There's one to access your blog. In contrast, whatever technology daemon tools is using remains cloistered.
So yea, there's a learning curve, but I'm not gonna start advocating compatiblity with Windows programs to solve it. Downloading crap from random internet sites is the modus operandi of Windows software distribution, and it's crazy insecure. Ubuntu takes the steps proprietary software can't, packaging and distributing tested and signed versions of software, without including spyware (unless you count popcon;) ). I hope I've helped your problem some. And God, don't bother with vista without good reason.
While it's probably more socially graceful to email Marcus directly, in this case I don't think it would have been productive. Marcus was aware of the GPL'd code, and had informed Theo of it. They both knew what was going on and decided it wasn't important. I haven't had the opportunity to deal with Theo directly (knock on wood!), but I've never seen Theo interact nicely with Linux or other GPL communities, and it seems like every one ends with some innuendo blackmail over OpenSSH. But perhaps I'm just drawn to controversy when I read the news. Theo's a guy who should know better. Of course, I don't think there's any way Buesch could have known that Theo was already aware of the problem.
Kudos? They aren't risking anything by selling now. In fact it's the exact opposite! It's clear that they could stand to sell Wiis as they come off the line. Delaying the sales potentially results in fewer sales total. This isn't about annoying shareholders as much as misleading shareholders into thinking that the Wii demand is steady. And they may be damaging their long term prospects. The 3 months after Christmas are vital in demonstrating to consumers and developers where the market was headed, in addition to potentially lost sales. The more units in homes up front, the less incentive to go multiplatform, which leads to more unit sales, and a virtuous cycle.
Alternatively, this is about ramping sales of Super Paper Mario, which comes out shortly after April 1st. When you examine how many people bought the last Paper Mario game, re-imagining the franchise probably needs help. Now when you bring Wii and Zelda to the counter, the sales clerk can pre-sell you Paper Mario, and two weeks from now, suggestively sell you on it. Of course, this help comes at the expense of developers who've already released software, and customers who've paid higher prices because supply was intentionally stockpiled. This explanation at least makes sense to shareholders though.
There IS a reason it should -- Ubuntu's done a good job of keeping the base working set small and the start up fast. However, that doesn't stop people from buying a system with gigs of RAM. Running firefox in your GNOME Ubuntu setup probably costs 200MB of what could be 2GB. In contrast, hibernate has to restore the entire state of RAM. It doesn't matter if you had 200MB or a 3 GB of applications, it's all gotta come back in before you start running the kernel. It's quite easy to imagine that pulling in 1 tenth the data off disk and doing some calculations in the meanwhile is faster than hibernate.
I have no idea where they found that version of bootchart, but there's a.deb that will generate those.pngs and save them in/var/log/. It's a good start at diagnosing how to make things go faster, but once the low hanging fruit (like 4 second system pauses) are gone it's not as informative. You'll have to start examining why a process is IO bound or CPU bound, and whether it makes sense. I think Dave Jones had a journal article about stupid things user programs do like stat the same file 400 times, once per video driver, etc. That analysis is primarily done via strace.
Their example is pretty crappy -- I recommend gathering a few charts from your own install. It should generate more detailed pictures, and the cutoffs for being represented or not is tweakable (with no cutoffs you get a lot of shell scripts that execute for microseconds). One interesting aspect of newer bootcharts is that they attempt to analyze the difference between disk utilization and throughput. I don't know if the analysis is just wrong but it seems that the throughput only rarely makes it that fast.
Both Debian and Ubuntu base their release candidates on a snapshot of Debian unstable, but one of the two has a history of timely releases. I don't think Debian is any more open than Ubuntu, so it's not like Debian's openness is 100 percent the cause.
The good news is that you can disable it. It' suggested to turn it off for weaker video cards, since it does potentially require a hell of a lot of calculations.
I don't get how this got rated insightful. The margins on computers aren't thin only because of costs. They're thin because of competition. Gateway, HP, compaq et all, they're all competitors to Dell. And all of them are equally capable of making the cost saving switch as Dell. So even if Dell did reduce the price, competitors will easily step in and force Dell to reduce margins.
If they charged for it, there'd be a political price to pay. People would ask why they're charging for something OO.o offers for free. There would be calls to ask Dell to donate to OO.o. People would complain about internet updates costing OO.o. They'd have to pay careful attention to this or risk bad PR, primarily.
I'm not sure thats exactly true. Google's P/E is only 3 times IBM's, and earnings growth is ridiculus with Google (barring accounting irregularities). Just going by PEG, Google seems more undervalued.
It's not about customer value -- anyone asking for OpenOffice already knows about it and can easily install it. Dell's strategy is to make the cheapest PC's around to bring in customers, then make it as easy as possible to spend more than that. They are not the Wal-Mart of computing. A 30 day Office trial pays Dell. Even so, they want you to buy Office -- they get more money that way. OO.o has no such financial arrangement, and it would be tricky for Dell to attempt to charge customers for it.
It's not impractical, it's been done several times before, and even easier with internet advertising and internet sales websites! Dell started in Michael's garage, Alien computers did the same thing. Both started small and GREW. It's the only way Linux supported machines can work, I believe. Dell and its competitors are simply too large and focused to risk the resources and sweetheart deals they currently have to make a serious offering. There's so much inertia and management behind their way of making and selling computers that they can't seriously change.
Big companies like Dell have grown and become huge by coming up with a model, then taking that model and perfecting it. They're no longer able to adapt to demands like Linux support. They've squeezed so much efficiency out of selling computers by putting crapware on it that Linux will cost more than their Windows alternatives. If Dell does support Linux, it will largely work like Windows workstation division works already. It will come pre-installed, and a seperate software update system will be implemented for Dell's add on tools, if any update is provided. If we're very unlucky, Dell will eventually bundle Yahoo! toolbars, etc with firefox for a sum of money.
Instead, a small vendor (kind of already exist, but generally resell other people's hardware) can recognize that a particular market is underserved / not served at all. They recognize that people want backlight laptop keyboards, or high response panels, or whatever, and go to customize. They aren't concerned competitors -- there aren't any significant ones yet. They can recognize that distros like Ubuntu are popular and community maintained. They'll run custom public software repos. The CEO and hopefully sales staff will use the stuff they're selling. And they'll figure out how to make a living selling and supporting Linux. Then Dell will buy them out, unless Canonical makes a bigger offer.
I partly wonder if Dell has some big plans ahead and is astroturfing now for the press attention. I said above they can't really figure things out, but they do have linux experience and linux kernel engineers. They've gone to bat with linux at least once before. Maybe Michael Dell left his company to spend some time thinking. He said in an interview with NYTimes that "It feels like 1984 and I am starting over again". Most of the time changing a company is paramount to moving a mountain. The average CEO tenure is 3 years, and the bulk of their compensation is in incentive pay (stock options). Moreover, the CEO's training and experience is not in founding new companies but in managing and making medium companies larger. Micheal though, has seen a lot and knows the business quite well.
I'm pretty sure the GNU way is to switch out entire kernels every two to three years. Try writing ANY kind of driver in that environment!
But seriously, if you like Linux, that's great. But I feel Linux's greatest strengths all originate at the same place: open source. It lets everyone see and possibly fix a bug in the source code. It also lets anyone see and add a new crazy feature to the source code -- be it FUSE, or new I/O schedulers, or real time event handling. Open source encourages the reuse of code: 802.11 drivers all look awfully similar, so Intel's donated framework is handy (their binary daemon is less so handy). Forcing a fixed ABI is time kernel hackers could be spending fixing bugs, improving xen, or writing their own pet features.
One thing you're bound to get with closed source drivers is a ton ported windows drivers. And closed source stupidity, like MPEG codecs in the kernel, breaks suspend, 32bit only, architecture dependent, etc. Let's face it, if every piece hardware you used already had drivers in kernel, you shouldn't care whether you have a driver disc to lose or not. Moreover, that disc driver is going to get outdated rapidly. You might as well just take advantage of your distro's update capabilities, which unlike Windows Update, nearly universally covers video drivers. No need to play musical CDs and insist to the autorun.exe that you really don't need Adobe Acroread eight times.
Homework is not a requirement for learning - practice is. With 6 hours a day of school, minus 1.5 - 2 hours a day for... fine arts, etc.
Of course the string instruments teacher also thinks you should be practicing, as does the soccer coach. Fortunately when I was in elementary, they hadn't yet invented practice homework (my younger brother did not escape such a fate), and middle school homework load wasn't too bad. Of course this meant in high school I was often in a pseudo panic mode where I'd be working on the next period's class in the one immediately preceeding it. My favorite math teachers were the ones that put the homework up before class started (I'm willing to assume they left it up from last period and forgot to erase it rather than some cunning plan on their part). If you do the math, that's about 5 hours of homework for 5 hours of classes (it's very difficult to do homework while holding a violin). Somehow I don't feel that I ever really missed anything by not paying attention to the teacher's lectures that I didn't pick up from actually doing the work. I'm guessing the answer to your question, then, is not "someone standing in front of a projector writing things down and reading them to me."
If you're honestly feeling pressure from parents about how much homework their child isn't being given, you should only need to point to the student's performance. In many other countries, tutors are not uncommon. It seems like a stigma to hire a tutor in America. Like some admission that either the child is inferior or the teacher is inadequate.
Slashdot Mirror
So what happens when customer number four arrives? Does he suddenly become the miserly "rent's due" consumer, or does he walk away with a 360 instead?
It's cringeworthy because its a great game, but once you decide you'd like to fix the slowdowns in the game, you realize it's an unholy mess of perl bindings to C libraries and well... perl "at its finest". I've yet to find anyone with the combined talents of perl and game / graphics programming, let alone the motivation to fix it. Thankfully, frozen-bubble 2 uses less SDL and more openGL.
Well, he did give a talk about the power of the marginal at Railsconf. So he at least knows its popular with those not writing desktop apps.
You have to admit, it's pretty cringe-worthy when you discover Frozen Bubble was written in Perl.
Ironically, if you choose to log in, you can change how karma and other affects scores, and still check the box to "post anonymously". Apparently someone posted they use +4 Flamebait. So there is some benefit to registering, since it's difficult to personalize the site and remain "anonymous".
You must not have worked very hard looking for it. The default Ubuntu graphical shell is Nautilus. They've had scripting options for some time, and I figured SVN is popular enough elsewhere SOMEONE must have written such a thing. And lo and behold, via google:
s .pl?searchon=names&version=all&exact=1&keywords=na utilus-script-collection-svn
;) ). I hope I've helped your problem some. And God, don't bother with vista without good reason.
http://marius.scurtescu.com/node/85
Indeed, the same package shows up in Ubuntu repos from Dapper onward (as the first link describes):
http://packages.ubuntu.com/cgi-bin/search_package
It seems that TortoiseSVN has problems with Vista. I haven't tried the svn nautilus integration yet, but there's no bugs filed against it. If you run into any, please do file a report. Personally, I choose to use editors that have SVN / CVS support built in. But I suppose some web developers may prefer a seperate client or something.
In my own experience, Windows has been about as bad as Linux with hardware. Vista's nvidia are only slightly better than Linux's with regard to suspend: instead of locking up during suspend to RAM, it fails to initialize the video on restart. Equally unusable, really. Feisty's due to make some changes with nvidia that should help alleviate restricted drivers like the nvidia closed source binary. I think it's important to stress that Linux is first and foremost an open system. If it also serves as a usable system for people who don't care, and continues to be that way, I'm willing to attribute that to the openness of the system, and so much the better. But as much as open source considerations get in the way of the user experience, they are a second class citizen in my sight. Linux makes a fantastic hacker's system.
For example, FUSE is a great idea that has several great examples with few / no comparable in Windows. Daemontools in Windows lets you present a file as if it were a cd in a drive. FUSEISO does the same thing for windows, though the GUI aspect is not quite finished. FUSE presents this mount globally, without the need for applications to know about it. And it doesn't require significant user privileges. But the greatest part about FUSE is that it's the core to several components, like gmailfs, and sshfs, ftpfs, you name it. NTFS support was written this way with good success. There's fuse modules to present Doom WAD files as a directory. There's one to access your blog. In contrast, whatever technology daemon tools is using remains cloistered.
So yea, there's a learning curve, but I'm not gonna start advocating compatiblity with Windows programs to solve it. Downloading crap from random internet sites is the modus operandi of Windows software distribution, and it's crazy insecure. Ubuntu takes the steps proprietary software can't, packaging and distributing tested and signed versions of software, without including spyware (unless you count popcon
Which sounds great until you realize the website is lying. Or at least misleading.
/ ssh/LICENCE?rev=1.19&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-ma rkup is the only description of openSSH's license that counts, and it's one long enough to confuse me whether it's GPL is allowable or not. That said, I can't find anything relevant on debian-legal about it, so the GP may be mistaken.
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.bin
While it's probably more socially graceful to email Marcus directly, in this case I don't think it would have been productive. Marcus was aware of the GPL'd code, and had informed Theo of it. They both knew what was going on and decided it wasn't important. I haven't had the opportunity to deal with Theo directly (knock on wood!), but I've never seen Theo interact nicely with Linux or other GPL communities, and it seems like every one ends with some innuendo blackmail over OpenSSH. But perhaps I'm just drawn to controversy when I read the news. Theo's a guy who should know better. Of course, I don't think there's any way Buesch could have known that Theo was already aware of the problem.
"Games are becoming, in a lot of respects, entertainment," Silver said.
Will Captain Obvious save the day from the evil Duh League? Find out next time, on IB Times!
Kudos? They aren't risking anything by selling now. In fact it's the exact opposite! It's clear that they could stand to sell Wiis as they come off the line. Delaying the sales potentially results in fewer sales total. This isn't about annoying shareholders as much as misleading shareholders into thinking that the Wii demand is steady. And they may be damaging their long term prospects. The 3 months after Christmas are vital in demonstrating to consumers and developers where the market was headed, in addition to potentially lost sales. The more units in homes up front, the less incentive to go multiplatform, which leads to more unit sales, and a virtuous cycle.
Alternatively, this is about ramping sales of Super Paper Mario, which comes out shortly after April 1st. When you examine how many people bought the last Paper Mario game, re-imagining the franchise probably needs help. Now when you bring Wii and Zelda to the counter, the sales clerk can pre-sell you Paper Mario, and two weeks from now, suggestively sell you on it. Of course, this help comes at the expense of developers who've already released software, and customers who've paid higher prices because supply was intentionally stockpiled. This explanation at least makes sense to shareholders though.
People put like 5 dollar requests on mturk.com to translate podcasts, should you really need it.
There IS a reason it should -- Ubuntu's done a good job of keeping the base working set small and the start up fast. However, that doesn't stop people from buying a system with gigs of RAM. Running firefox in your GNOME Ubuntu setup probably costs 200MB of what could be 2GB. In contrast, hibernate has to restore the entire state of RAM. It doesn't matter if you had 200MB or a 3 GB of applications, it's all gotta come back in before you start running the kernel. It's quite easy to imagine that pulling in 1 tenth the data off disk and doing some calculations in the meanwhile is faster than hibernate.
I have no idea where they found that version of bootchart, but there's a .deb that will generate those .pngs and save them in /var/log/. It's a good start at diagnosing how to make things go faster, but once the low hanging fruit (like 4 second system pauses) are gone it's not as informative. You'll have to start examining why a process is IO bound or CPU bound, and whether it makes sense. I think Dave Jones had a journal article about stupid things user programs do like stat the same file 400 times, once per video driver, etc. That analysis is primarily done via strace.
Their example is pretty crappy -- I recommend gathering a few charts from your own install. It should generate more detailed pictures, and the cutoffs for being represented or not is tweakable (with no cutoffs you get a lot of shell scripts that execute for microseconds). One interesting aspect of newer bootcharts is that they attempt to analyze the difference between disk utilization and throughput. I don't know if the analysis is just wrong but it seems that the throughput only rarely makes it that fast.
If Gates is such a great coder, he should release the source to prove it!
Good luck finding the laptop friendly bus on your own though ;)
"Except I live in France, and I can tell you that, honestly, no one who lives in France actually works 35 hours per week."
Would that be more or less than 35?
Both Debian and Ubuntu base their release candidates on a snapshot of Debian unstable, but one of the two has a history of timely releases. I don't think Debian is any more open than Ubuntu, so it's not like Debian's openness is 100 percent the cause.
The good news is that you can disable it. It' suggested to turn it off for weaker video cards, since it does potentially require a hell of a lot of calculations.
I don't get how this got rated insightful. The margins on computers aren't thin only because of costs. They're thin because of competition. Gateway, HP, compaq et all, they're all competitors to Dell. And all of them are equally capable of making the cost saving switch as Dell. So even if Dell did reduce the price, competitors will easily step in and force Dell to reduce margins.
If they charged for it, there'd be a political price to pay. People would ask why they're charging for something OO.o offers for free. There would be calls to ask Dell to donate to OO.o. People would complain about internet updates costing OO.o. They'd have to pay careful attention to this or risk bad PR, primarily.
I'm not sure thats exactly true. Google's P/E is only 3 times IBM's, and earnings growth is ridiculus with Google (barring accounting irregularities). Just going by PEG, Google seems more undervalued.
It's not about customer value -- anyone asking for OpenOffice already knows about it and can easily install it. Dell's strategy is to make the cheapest PC's around to bring in customers, then make it as easy as possible to spend more than that. They are not the Wal-Mart of computing. A 30 day Office trial pays Dell. Even so, they want you to buy Office -- they get more money that way. OO.o has no such financial arrangement, and it would be tricky for Dell to attempt to charge customers for it.
It's not impractical, it's been done several times before, and even easier with internet advertising and internet sales websites! Dell started in Michael's garage, Alien computers did the same thing. Both started small and GREW. It's the only way Linux supported machines can work, I believe. Dell and its competitors are simply too large and focused to risk the resources and sweetheart deals they currently have to make a serious offering. There's so much inertia and management behind their way of making and selling computers that they can't seriously change.
Big companies like Dell have grown and become huge by coming up with a model, then taking that model and perfecting it. They're no longer able to adapt to demands like Linux support. They've squeezed so much efficiency out of selling computers by putting crapware on it that Linux will cost more than their Windows alternatives. If Dell does support Linux, it will largely work like Windows workstation division works already. It will come pre-installed, and a seperate software update system will be implemented for Dell's add on tools, if any update is provided. If we're very unlucky, Dell will eventually bundle Yahoo! toolbars, etc with firefox for a sum of money.
Instead, a small vendor (kind of already exist, but generally resell other people's hardware) can recognize that a particular market is underserved / not served at all. They recognize that people want backlight laptop keyboards, or high response panels, or whatever, and go to customize. They aren't concerned competitors -- there aren't any significant ones yet. They can recognize that distros like Ubuntu are popular and community maintained. They'll run custom public software repos. The CEO and hopefully sales staff will use the stuff they're selling. And they'll figure out how to make a living selling and supporting Linux. Then Dell will buy them out, unless Canonical makes a bigger offer.
I partly wonder if Dell has some big plans ahead and is astroturfing now for the press attention. I said above they can't really figure things out, but they do have linux experience and linux kernel engineers. They've gone to bat with linux at least once before. Maybe Michael Dell left his company to spend some time thinking. He said in an interview with NYTimes that "It feels like 1984 and I am starting over again". Most of the time changing a company is paramount to moving a mountain. The average CEO tenure is 3 years, and the bulk of their compensation is in incentive pay (stock options). Moreover, the CEO's training and experience is not in founding new companies but in managing and making medium companies larger. Micheal though, has seen a lot and knows the business quite well.
I'm pretty sure the GNU way is to switch out entire kernels every two to three years. Try writing ANY kind of driver in that environment!
But seriously, if you like Linux, that's great. But I feel Linux's greatest strengths all originate at the same place: open source. It lets everyone see and possibly fix a bug in the source code. It also lets anyone see and add a new crazy feature to the source code -- be it FUSE, or new I/O schedulers, or real time event handling. Open source encourages the reuse of code: 802.11 drivers all look awfully similar, so Intel's donated framework is handy (their binary daemon is less so handy). Forcing a fixed ABI is time kernel hackers could be spending fixing bugs, improving xen, or writing their own pet features.
One thing you're bound to get with closed source drivers is a ton ported windows drivers. And closed source stupidity, like MPEG codecs in the kernel, breaks suspend, 32bit only, architecture dependent, etc. Let's face it, if every piece hardware you used already had drivers in kernel, you shouldn't care whether you have a driver disc to lose or not. Moreover, that disc driver is going to get outdated rapidly. You might as well just take advantage of your distro's update capabilities, which unlike Windows Update, nearly universally covers video drivers. No need to play musical CDs and insist to the autorun.exe that you really don't need Adobe Acroread eight times.
Of course the string instruments teacher also thinks you should be practicing, as does the soccer coach. Fortunately when I was in elementary, they hadn't yet invented practice homework (my younger brother did not escape such a fate), and middle school homework load wasn't too bad. Of course this meant in high school I was often in a pseudo panic mode where I'd be working on the next period's class in the one immediately preceeding it. My favorite math teachers were the ones that put the homework up before class started (I'm willing to assume they left it up from last period and forgot to erase it rather than some cunning plan on their part). If you do the math, that's about 5 hours of homework for 5 hours of classes (it's very difficult to do homework while holding a violin). Somehow I don't feel that I ever really missed anything by not paying attention to the teacher's lectures that I didn't pick up from actually doing the work. I'm guessing the answer to your question, then, is not "someone standing in front of a projector writing things down and reading them to me."
If you're honestly feeling pressure from parents about how much homework their child isn't being given, you should only need to point to the student's performance. In many other countries, tutors are not uncommon. It seems like a stigma to hire a tutor in America. Like some admission that either the child is inferior or the teacher is inadequate.