Terrible events in my life, listed in descending order of their personal importance, abridged:
1. Death of my father. 2. Hit by taxicab in Philadelphia. 3. Dumped by first girlfriend in junior high school. 4. Held up at gunpoint. . . . 57. Bicycle stolen. . . . 1,294. Embarrassing facial blemish on night of big date. . . . 7,837,129. Recipient of pathetically obvious "so how many books have you published, huh?" flame on slashdot by the author of "Lady Slings the Booze" or, as likely, a fanboy using his name.
I am one of the people quoted in that article. Mr. Stoehr never actually contacted me, and the quote is entirely fabricated. Calibrate your trust in the rest of the article accordingly.
For my money, Amnesia Moon is by far the weakest of Lethem's books. Some nice ideas, but way too obviously a short story dragged out into novel length.
"Gun, with Occasional Music" is where you should start.
Spider Robinson, the living definition of the hack SF author who survives purely by pandering to his arrested-adolescent fanbase and recycling the same appallingly trite scenario into an endless stream of identical "novels," is complaining about the state of modern SF writing?
Oh! The! Irony!
If speculative fiction needs to be saved from anything, it's the Spider Robinsons, Mercedes Lackeys and Piers Anthonys of the world. If they're complaining, that's probably a good sign -- hopefully that people are starting to spend their money on books by authors with actual talent rather than the 2,387th entry in the Callahan's Cross-Time Dragonquest for Telepathic Cats series.
Take a look at the dates on the Marble Madness 2 part of the guy's site, then read the text: he's had the MM2 prototype and boards for well over two years now, and he hasn't shown any interest in dumping the ROMs or letting anyone else do it.
I guess he figures he'll be in much less demand as a guest of honor at CAExtreme if people can actually play the game themselves.
The exploits are endless. You'd have to cripple the entire operating system while the document is open.
Not just the OS, but the hardware as well. By a stunning coincidence, the list of features you've just enumerated, plus the hardware platform features necessary to implement them, are pretty much point exactly what "Trusted Computing" is designed to destroy.
I thought AltiVec was just one of Apple's trademarked buzzwords.
Sigh. Sure, Apple created a trademark to describe absolutely nothing! What brilliant marketing on their part!
No.
AltiVec isn't Apple's trademark at all. AltiVec is Motorola's trademark for the VMX (Vector Multimedia eXtension) extension to the PowerPC instruction set, which is the PPC world's version of Intel's SSE and SSE2 instructions.
Apple's trademark for the VMX instructions is "Velocity Engine".
No matter what name you use for it, the name refers to something very real: a large section of the CPU die that is dedicated to processing vector math.
Very often, that "native" compiler either doesn't exist (because even the vendor is using gcc), or is prohibitively expensive for a startup company.
It's best to approach GCC like Java: use it to prove the correctness of your app, then profile profile profile and insert inlined assembly into your bottleneck points. Remember your Brooks: 90% of all optimization is premature.
Eh, I wouldn't say that GCC is "worthless", it's just that its worth lies in an area that has nothing to do with high-performance computing. Or even mid-performance computing.:)
GCC's primary virtue is that it exists. For practically every computing platform on the planet, there's a famliar, stable toolchain that produces repeatable results. You can't optimize a program that doesn't exist in the first place, and GCC is the tool that's allowed many if not most of the programs we use on a daily basis to exist. There's value in that.
I wonder how the AltiVec support in XLC for OSX compares to that in GCC?
This is actually really important. One of the big reasons that the Intel C compiler spanks every other available x86 compiler is that its SSE/SIMD support is, in the words of one of my assembly-programmer friends, "awe-inspiring." Like, unrolling entire program loops and replacing them with single SIMD instructions.
As far as I know, pretty much all of the AltiVec/VMX support in GCC was contributed by Apple and Motorola, and prior to the ppc970, IBM has never produced a PPC CPU with AltiVec instructions, so prior versions of XLC have never had to support it. So I'll be really curious to hear how it stacks up against GCC's Altivec.
The goal of GNOME is to have a completely integrated desktop. You can't do that with Mozilla or Firebird: it has its own custom widget set, its own UI specification, its own customization method, its own RPC implementation...on and on and on.
Plus, Firebird is slow. SLOW SLOW SLOW. People are so impressed with the fact that it's 2-3 times faster than Mozilla that they've basically forgotten that 3X as fast as Mozilla is still SLOWER THAN DOGSHIT BURIED MILES UNDERNEATH THE ANTARCTIC ICE SHELF.
Dude, have you tried to use Galeon recently? The "stable" 1.2 series has gotten less stable with each succeeding release, and the gnome-2 version of galeon is still missing features that were present two years ago in the gnome-1 version.
The Galeon team have NO ONE to blame but themselves for Epiphany's selection as the default GNOME browser.
It's sad, because when it first came out, Galeon was not just hands-down the best browser for Linux, but for any operating system. Now it's mostly just an embarrassment, and a painful lesson of what can happen to an OSS project when nobody has their hand on the rudder.
Okay, I appear to be having a political argument with someone who thinks that publishing a weblog of cut-and-paste-copied newsclippings with "zingy" one-line comments appended to the bottom makes him the second coming of Sacco and Venzetti, so I am pretty much by definition wasting my breath here...
the ACLU doesn't take lesser known cases
Oh really?
The New York State branch of the ACLU alone currently has over sixty open cases being worked. Since they're such headline-obsessed publicity whores who only work the well-known cases, obviously you should be able to name...I'll be generous here...at least 15 of them without looking at their website?
Newsflash, jackass: legal advocacy and aid organizations can't take every case that comes in front of them. That doesn't make them "publicity whores", that just makes them "aware of reality."
When you can point to youreighty-year history of defending civil liberties, then, maybe, you can get away with calling the ACLU "whores" in a public forum. But since you can't, you're just another stone moron with an ill-designed weblog calling his betters names on slashdot.
That's every part of safari that matters, right there, for your FSF-approved open source development pleasure. No, the shiny front-end isn't included, but that's not going to bother too many coders considering that you can write your own frontend in as little as one line of code, or if you're feeling particularly clever, zero lines of code. (Note: while the examples given are in ProjectBuilder on MacOS X, there's no intrinsic reason why you couldn't do the same trick with GnuSTEP on Linux, and a GTK+ wrapper would only be slightly more work.)
And WebCore isn't the only "unique" OSX software that they've released the source to. Need a streaming media server? A fully functional ZeroConf implementation? A crypto-key management framework? All there for the taking.
No, Apple isn't going to release the source for iPhoto or Final Cut so you can play with them for free. Cry me a freakin' river. Then get a job.
And while I'm here: the casual, contracted form of "would have" is "would've", not "would of". Please spread the word.
In theory, the idea is not to enrich the individual plaintiffs, but to make the aggregate penalty high enough to get the company's notice.
In practice, it's rarely so simple, since for a company Microsoft's size, $202 Million (which sounds like "a lot" of money to any sane person) can not only be easily written off in any year's books, but probably doesn't even amount to the aggregate interest they earned on the licensing of the products in question.
Re:Reiser4? Competition?
on
Reiser4 Benchmarks
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Reiser's competition is, in order: SGI XFS and IBM JFS. Oh, and I guess VxFS.
Well, yes and no. At the low end, any non-famous band cutting their own CDs is something of a novelty exercise and are not likely to make any actual money off the matter.
But: the way that bands actually get famous is for people -- lots of people, in places other than just the band's home city -- to hear their music. MP3 distribution can only get you so far; ideally you really want college radio DJs playing your stuff, and telling their listeners where to get it. For that, you need CDs. Pressing and distributing your own CDs is an incredible waste of time and money; cdbaby very cleverly automates the process and makes it quite affordable.
And: while basically nobody buys novelty-press books (unless the author is a multimillionaire self-promoting blowhard), lots of people buy indy-band music. Enough to make a living on? Probably not. Enough to buy the occasional new instrument? Hell yes.
Trust me, if you're anywhere in the indy music scene, you've heard of CDbaby. They are pretty much exactly what they claim to be: the ideal distribution medium for indy bands.
Wow, one whole Adaptec card that works on both PC and Mac.
You made a categorical statement. A single counterexample is all that is needed to disprove such a thing, and I granted that you may have been correct about boot support.
As for the AGP cards, there is not a SINGLE manufacturer I can find that produces a card that will work in both Mac and PC.
You are correct that no manufacturer officially supports it or admits to it. However, it is nonetheless true that on a PowerMac G4 running G4 firmware 4.1.8, it is possible to drop a standard PC GF2MX card into the slot and have it boot. (Usually only in a few low resolutions though -- to get full support for the card's features, you do in fact need to flash it with the Mac-specific BIOS. Results also appear to vary wildly depending on how far the manufacturer strayed from the nVidia's reference design.) I have personally done this.
I have yet to see an official explanation from Apple, nVidia or any of nVidia's resellers as to why this is so: either the G4 firmware has some stub code to specifically to handle the case of a reference gf2mx card in the AGP slot, or nVidia figured out some cute way to handle platform detection in firmware. (Certainly the former seems more likely.)
Slashdot Mirror
Terrible events in my life, listed in descending order of their personal importance, abridged:
1. Death of my father.
2. Hit by taxicab in Philadelphia.
3. Dumped by first girlfriend in junior high school.
4. Held up at gunpoint.
.
.
.
57. Bicycle stolen.
.
.
.
1,294. Embarrassing facial blemish on night of big date.
.
.
.
7,837,129. Recipient of pathetically obvious "so how many books have you published, huh?" flame on slashdot by the author of "Lady Slings the Booze" or, as likely, a fanboy using his name.
I am one of the people quoted in that article. Mr. Stoehr never actually contacted me, and the quote is entirely fabricated. Calibrate your trust in the rest of the article accordingly.
For my money, Amnesia Moon is by far the weakest of Lethem's books. Some nice ideas, but way too obviously a short story dragged out into novel length.
"Gun, with Occasional Music" is where you should start.
Spider Robinson, the living definition of the hack SF author who survives purely by pandering to his arrested-adolescent fanbase and recycling the same appallingly trite scenario into an endless stream of identical "novels," is complaining about the state of modern SF writing?
Oh! The! Irony!
If speculative fiction needs to be saved from anything, it's the Spider Robinsons, Mercedes Lackeys and Piers Anthonys of the world. If they're complaining, that's probably a good sign -- hopefully that people are starting to spend their money on books by authors with actual talent rather than the 2,387th entry in the Callahan's Cross-Time Dragonquest for Telepathic Cats series.
Take a look at the dates on the Marble Madness 2 part of the guy's site, then read the text: he's had the MM2 prototype and boards for well over two years now, and he hasn't shown any interest in dumping the ROMs or letting anyone else do it.
I guess he figures he'll be in much less demand as a guest of honor at CAExtreme if people can actually play the game themselves.
The exploits are endless. You'd have to cripple the entire operating system while the document is open.
Not just the OS, but the hardware as well. By a stunning coincidence, the list of features you've just enumerated, plus the hardware platform features necessary to implement them, are pretty much point exactly what "Trusted Computing" is designed to destroy.
Enjoy your future!
No.
AltiVec isn't Apple's trademark at all. AltiVec is Motorola's trademark for the VMX (Vector Multimedia eXtension) extension to the PowerPC instruction set, which is the PPC world's version of Intel's SSE and SSE2 instructions.
Apple's trademark for the VMX instructions is "Velocity Engine".
No matter what name you use for it, the name refers to something very real: a large section of the CPU die that is dedicated to processing vector math.
Very often, that "native" compiler either doesn't exist (because even the vendor is using gcc), or is prohibitively expensive for a startup company.
It's best to approach GCC like Java: use it to prove the correctness of your app, then profile profile profile and insert inlined assembly into your bottleneck points. Remember your Brooks: 90% of all optimization is premature.
Eh, I wouldn't say that GCC is "worthless", it's just that its worth lies in an area that has nothing to do with high-performance computing. Or even mid-performance computing. :)
GCC's primary virtue is that it exists. For practically every computing platform on the planet, there's a famliar, stable toolchain that produces repeatable results. You can't optimize a program that doesn't exist in the first place, and GCC is the tool that's allowed many if not most of the programs we use on a daily basis to exist. There's value in that.
I wonder how the AltiVec support in XLC for OSX compares to that in GCC?
This is actually really important. One of the big reasons that the Intel C compiler spanks every other available x86 compiler is that its SSE/SIMD support is, in the words of one of my assembly-programmer friends, "awe-inspiring." Like, unrolling entire program loops and replacing them with single SIMD instructions.
As far as I know, pretty much all of the AltiVec/VMX support in GCC was contributed by Apple and Motorola, and prior to the ppc970, IBM has never produced a PPC CPU with AltiVec instructions, so prior versions of XLC have never had to support it. So I'll be really curious to hear how it stacks up against GCC's Altivec.
The goal of GNOME is to have a completely integrated desktop. You can't do that with Mozilla or Firebird: it has its own custom widget set, its own UI specification, its own customization method, its own RPC implementation...on and on and on.
Plus, Firebird is slow. SLOW SLOW SLOW. People are so impressed with the fact that it's 2-3 times faster than Mozilla that they've basically forgotten that 3X as fast as Mozilla is still SLOWER THAN DOGSHIT BURIED MILES UNDERNEATH THE ANTARCTIC ICE SHELF.
Not that I'm bitter or anything.
Dude, have you tried to use Galeon recently? The "stable" 1.2 series has gotten less stable with each succeeding release, and the gnome-2 version of galeon is still missing features that were present two years ago in the gnome-1 version.
The Galeon team have NO ONE to blame but themselves for Epiphany's selection as the default GNOME browser.
It's sad, because when it first came out, Galeon was not just hands-down the best browser for Linux, but for any operating system. Now it's mostly just an embarrassment, and a painful lesson of what can happen to an OSS project when nobody has their hand on the rudder.
I liked this troll better when it was called "BSD is Dying!"
So far as I know, Scott does not claim much or any script input into Blade Runner.
otherwise it autonets (UPnP-styley)
Ugh, any chance of ZeroConf support in a future version?
...um, what exactly are these "star" things you mention?
Okay, I appear to be having a political argument with someone who thinks that publishing a weblog of cut-and-paste-copied newsclippings with "zingy" one-line comments appended to the bottom makes him the second coming of Sacco and Venzetti, so I am pretty much by definition wasting my breath here...
the ACLU doesn't take lesser known cases
Oh really?
The New York State branch of the ACLU alone currently has over sixty open cases being worked. Since they're such headline-obsessed publicity whores who only work the well-known cases, obviously you should be able to name...I'll be generous here...at least 15 of them without looking at their website?
Newsflash, jackass: legal advocacy and aid organizations can't take every case that comes in front of them. That doesn't make them "publicity whores", that just makes them "aware of reality."
When you can point to your eighty-year history of defending civil liberties, then, maybe, you can get away with calling the ACLU "whores" in a public forum. But since you can't, you're just another stone moron with an ill-designed weblog calling his betters names on slashdot.
Idiot.
When they decided to use KHTML for Safari, I thought they would at least release the source code for Safari and not just the changes to KHTML..
o re /
Would it have killed you to spend 0.12 seconds on google before opening your mouth?
http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/webc
That's every part of safari that matters, right there, for your FSF-approved open source development pleasure. No, the shiny front-end isn't included, but that's not going to bother too many coders considering that you can write your own frontend in as little as one line of code, or if you're feeling particularly clever, zero lines of code. (Note: while the examples given are in ProjectBuilder on MacOS X, there's no intrinsic reason why you couldn't do the same trick with GnuSTEP on Linux, and a GTK+ wrapper would only be slightly more work.)
And WebCore isn't the only "unique" OSX software that they've released the source to. Need a streaming media server? A fully functional ZeroConf implementation? A crypto-key management framework? All there for the taking.
No, Apple isn't going to release the source for iPhoto or Final Cut so you can play with them for free. Cry me a freakin' river. Then get a job.
And while I'm here: the casual, contracted form of "would have" is "would've", not "would of". Please spread the word.
In theory, the idea is not to enrich the individual plaintiffs, but to make the aggregate penalty high enough to get the company's notice.
In practice, it's rarely so simple, since for a company Microsoft's size, $202 Million (which sounds like "a lot" of money to any sane person) can not only be easily written off in any year's books, but probably doesn't even amount to the aggregate interest they earned on the licensing of the products in question.
Reiser's competition is, in order: SGI XFS and IBM JFS. Oh, and I guess VxFS.
Considering that CDBaby only started this service today, I'm guessing that the answer is "not many."
Well, yes and no. At the low end, any non-famous band cutting their own CDs is something of a novelty exercise and are not likely to make any actual money off the matter.
But: the way that bands actually get famous is for people -- lots of people, in places other than just the band's home city -- to hear their music. MP3 distribution can only get you so far; ideally you really want college radio DJs playing your stuff, and telling their listeners where to get it. For that, you need CDs. Pressing and distributing your own CDs is an incredible waste of time and money; cdbaby very cleverly automates the process and makes it quite affordable.
And: while basically nobody buys novelty-press books (unless the author is a multimillionaire self-promoting blowhard), lots of people buy indy-band music. Enough to make a living on? Probably not. Enough to buy the occasional new instrument? Hell yes.
Trust me, if you're anywhere in the indy music scene, you've heard of CDbaby. They are pretty much exactly what they claim to be: the ideal distribution medium for indy bands.
Wow, one whole Adaptec card that works on both PC and Mac.
You made a categorical statement. A single counterexample is all that is needed to disprove such a thing, and I granted that you may have been correct about boot support.
As for the AGP cards, there is not a SINGLE manufacturer I can find that produces a card that will work in both Mac and PC.
You are correct that no manufacturer officially supports it or admits to it. However, it is nonetheless true that on a PowerMac G4 running G4 firmware 4.1.8, it is possible to drop a standard PC GF2MX card into the slot and have it boot. (Usually only in a few low resolutions though -- to get full support for the card's features, you do in fact need to flash it with the Mac-specific BIOS. Results also appear to vary wildly depending on how far the manufacturer strayed from the nVidia's reference design.) I have personally done this.
I have yet to see an official explanation from Apple, nVidia or any of nVidia's resellers as to why this is so: either the G4 firmware has some stub code to specifically to handle the case of a reference gf2mx card in the AGP slot, or nVidia figured out some cute way to handle platform detection in firmware. (Certainly the former seems more likely.)