What was this fool trying to prove? He allowed direct SSH access to the machine! Of course someone is going to hack it! Once you're inside the system, it becomes incredibly easy to find configuration mistakes, and exploit holes in priviledged programs. Remember, this system runs much of the same software as Linux and FreeBSD. Much of that software hasn't been properly audited and locked down. Why? Because this is a desktop machine.
Mac OS X security primarily stems from not doing anything stupid by default. Which means that there are no remote services enabled, the system tries to be intelligent about handling executable files (like most Unixes), and super-user functionality is handled by Sudo. But that's not a bullet-proof vest. There's nothing in the system that makes it automagically secure against all attacks. So if you want security, don't turn on those remote services, and don't give out SSH accounts!
It would take a major breakthrough in fuel technology and/or hypersonic flight to make it from 100,000 ft. to 300 miles, even starting at mach 3.
What makes you say that? We've had the technology for this sort of thing for quite a long time. The reason why the Space Shuttle sucks so much is:
It carries the largest payload of any rocket currently flying, despite design recommendations to the contrary.
Its budget was cut up into smaller yearly parcels, thus resulting in changes to the craft that would fit development within the yearly budgets.
The craft is designed to be both a heavy cargo hauler and human transport for no other reason than because we can. This increased the vehicle's complexity by an order of magnitude.
The Space Shuttle pioneered and/or was used to perfect many of the technologies built into its design. By now there should be a Shuttle-II system that uses that knowledge in a newer, safer, and more compact vehicle. Unfortunately, a lot of money was spent on more pie-in-the-sky endevors like compact SSTOs utiliziing bleeding-edge rocket technology.
That being said, the Space Shuttle is a marvel of engineering. The engineers were merely given a task that didn't make sense (combine cargo and human lifting), and the space vehicle industry has suffered from a lack of follow-up.
A craft the size of this hypothetical spaceplane would need a huge amount of fuel for that
All rockets do. The entire point of the Rocket Equation is to figure out the percentage of mass that will need to be expended using a given propulsion method. That's why the shuttle weighs 2 kilotonnes on the pad just to get 135ish tonnes into orbit. Or in percentages, about 6.75% of the Shuttle's mass makes it to orbit. The rest is either burned or discarded.
"We" never made that claim about Soviet reactors. Cherbobyl didn't "blow sky high" anyways. It simply burned.
Actually, it did blow "sky high". The boiler overpressurized and exploded. That's why old-style pressurized-boiler systems aren't liked. They have a tendency to explode suddenly. Those same boilers were responsible for quite a few industrial accidents in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The nuclear fuel, however, never exploded. It was merely scattered by the boiler explosion. Had the Chernobyl reactor bunker been properly designed to withstand such an explosion, the mess could have been completely contained. Instead it spread across several miles of nearby area and found its way into the water table. Some of it was carried by winds, but this really wasn't anything different than the hundreds of nuclear bomb tests that had been done in decades past.
One way or another, Chernobyl was a stupid, stupid design. The reactor had insufficient safeguards, the personnel were not fully trained, they performed a fail-safe test by actively overriding the fail-safes themselves (!?), and the fail-safe test was done with no qualified overseerers present. Put it all together, and it spells a recipe for disaster.
I'm guessing that it's not so much that it can't work that way, as it is that it would kill performance.
Today's operating systems try to do exactly what this drive is doing by pumping all reads and writes through the paging system. The problem is that the OS can't take a full performance boost from this or data will be lost in a crash or power loss. You may remember that EXT2FS could easily lose all the data you'd recently written if it wasn't unmounted properly. (It ticked me off when I tried to move RedHat 5.2 packages to a special partition, then found out that they had all disappeared on reboot because I hadn't explicitly unmounted the disk. *grumble*)
Since this technology has little to no chance of losing data in a power failure, the OS can be modified to write the blocks immediately. This could easily result in a performance increase of 2 to 3 times what you normally see today. The improvements in writing meta-data alone could easily provide this increase.
Except fast food won't be exported, they'll just set up a McDonald's in India
Which will have to pay franchising fees to McDonald's America, and also purchase raw product from McDonald's Indian Distribution centers which are owned by McDonald's America.
all those fancy plasma TVs aren't made in America
But are paid for and sold by American companies.
so the American working man won't benefit, but the big American companies will..
That depends on how you define the American "working man". "Working man" used to mean factory workers and service personnel. As time goes on, it has been changing to mean corporate workers (many of who can get $$$ bonuses for opening business in new areas) and entrepenuers. As long as the change isn't too sudden (thus leaving a massive number of specialized workers jobless), such change is far from a bad thing. In fact, it generally means more wealth and independence for all.
I think you're missing the point. India already had plenty of curry spice. That makes it more likely that they'll export it rather than import it. However, India does not have tons of greasy fast food and 30" Plasma TVs. America does. Ergo, America can export these products to India.
Now see, once every Indian "needs" McDonald's food and Plasma Televisions, they'll start demanding higher salaries to pay for these luxuries. Once they start demanding higher salaries, the outsourcing market will begin to become less profitable. India would then need to compete on product quality rather than price of production. Thus, outsourcing as we know it today would disappear.
Indeed. The message seems clear enough to me: "Don't f**k with Steve Jobs."
The music industry tried to get greedy by forcing Jobs' to raise prices on music. He pushed back and told them it would kill iTunes. The music companies banded together and tried to force his hand. Now, suddenly, the justice department is interested in allegations of price fixing. Coincidence? I think not.
Don't worry, I thought the same thing. My first reaction was, "I wasn't aware that Game Development had been outsourced to India in the first place!"
I think we need to make the terms "Indie Developers" and "Indie Studios" the standard to prevent confusion with terms like "The East Indies." Then again, with the current state of common geographical knowledge in the US today, perhaps it doesn't matter.:-P
The best products represent a collaboration between programmers, designers, artists, usability experts, documentors, and experts in the target market. Open Source needs a lot more than programmers to acheive that.
i.e. Open Source needs talented people of all walks. Period.
Edison wanted to pump DC across longdistance lines, which would have consumed much more than the 10-20% losses in Tesla's AC.
Actually, Edison wanted to create a distributed power generation grid to avoid the issue altogether. Otherwise, I'm completely with you. Which is why the headline is just plain silly. There's no argument between Tesla and Edison here. DC works well in devices. AC works well for transmission. It just so happens that a server room can be treated as one big device.:-)
Oh, well, nothing sensationalist about that headline. (*rolls eyes*)
DC advocates say that plugging servers into AC power is inefficient, and switching to DC cuts down on waste heat and component failure.
In this case they're right. With that much hardware that close together, it's easier to treat the entire room as a single device. As the article suggests, this cuts down on waste heat produced by inefficiencies in AC->DC conversion. In fact, it significantly cuts down on the amount of equipment needed in the entire room. The concept can be taken as far as to cutting down to a single power supply per rack.
The amusing part about this is that the resulting racks might look a lot like Big Iron servers with pluggable motherboards.:-)
Didn't I see this in a movie once? (Or twice? Or ten different times?) I'm pretty sure I already know what's going to happen:
One of the sharks will be smarter than the rest. It will figure out how to escape its captivity, then lead the rest of the sharks in an attack on tasty human morsels. One by one the humans and sharks will destroy each other. At the end of the movie, the hero/heroine will defeat the Big Bad shark with something lame like a live wire. The sharky explodes in gibblets and everyone lives happily ever after.
Check your email. (The tiresias one.) I just sent you something that should settle things quite well. There are still a few holes, but I'm not looking to pursue it any further.
Before the Colombia disaster, it was half a billion per launch.
Prior to Columbia, Shuttle flights ran between $100-$250 million per. After Columbia, they ballooned to $500 million per flight. The differences in cost are not because NASA is spending more money. The cost differences are because the Shuttle requires an army of technicians, flight controllers, and engineers who get paid whether the Shuttle flies or not. When the Shuttle flies less, the cost per flight goes up. When the Shuttle flies more, the costs plummet.
If you can't click on "DOM Level 2 Core" and then click on "ECMAScript Bindings", you've got problems.
As for those "Recommendations", that part just happens to tell you what's here already and what's still in the works. But go ahead and write five versions of your code. (IE, Mozilla, Opera, Konqueror, Safari) Less competition is a good thing for me.:-)
About 25% of your response is again arguing with things I didn't say. e.g.
Why did I say that BSP's were used for rotation? Well, I didn't. I was referring to depth sorting.
I never said that MS Flight Simulator was *more* impressive, only on par. My point being that non-texturemapped 3D code had been around for over a decade. A10 was just another flight simulator and was nothing special in that respect.
The fact that 16 colors was less that 256 was the point that I was trying to make.
Another 50% is still utterly wrong. For example,
You're still thinking that approximations of anti-aliasing is the same thing as anti-aliasing. The end result is similar, but not the same thing.
Magic Carpet was no more 3D than Doom was. It used a special case of Ray Casting commonly referred to as a Voxel Engine. (Which is actually a misnomer. There's no Voxels in such Terrain Engines.) The Magic Carpet Engine was probably the most advanced Terrain Engine ever produced.
The PCjr used an 8086, and was the least powerful machine in IBM's lineup.
The 80286 was released by Intel in 1982, but the IBM PC-AT didn't come out until 1984.
Games didn't fake Phong shading, Demos did.
Taken from the Wolf3D Source code:
#define MaxX 320 #define MaxY 200
"Many computer games have used [Mode 13h] such as DOOM and DOOM2, the original C&C the DOS version of C&C-RedAlert. It's also Quake's standard resolution, and QuakeII's non 3d excelerated standard resolution."[ref]
"full directional, unlimited scrolling like this should be possible in 320x200, I did it back in 1994 with Jazz Jackrabbit 1"[ ref] -Arjan Brussee
The impressive demos you saw from the Demo Scene used a lot of tricks that relied on the fact that the scene would always be the same. They were never turned into games because their technology made it impossible.
For the remaining 25%, assume the usual pleasantries apply. I'd love to argue all these points out with you further, but I'm afraid this thread has made me far too weary. Keep up the good work on rocketry, but please don't write any non-OpenGL/DirectX engines until you get this stuff clear in your head.:-)
Well there's a bad idea. If you want your code to be cross platform, always go to the source for your information. Otherwise you're guaranteed to get burned. It's bad enough that Internet Exploder refuses to support DOM Events. Throwing stuff that may be Mozilla specific into the fray is a sure-fire way to make it that much worse.
Having a female hero was also something new for the time, sure they overdid it quite a bit and turned her into a boob-monster, but still having a strong female lead isn't the worst thing you can do.
What's interesting is that the massive bosom was supposedly a complete accident. According to the Wikipedia article, character designer Toby Gard was, "fudging around with the model when he accidentally blew up Lara's bosom to 150% of what he intended it to be." While he was correcting his mistake, the other designers noticed and asked him to keep it as part of the character.
I dare you - come up with a list of viruses, that can infect a standard (or updated) installation of Debian Gnu/Linux.
The same could officially be said of Windows. Microsoft usually has a patch out by the time a virus hits the 'net. So officially Windows is "virus free". (Yeah, right.)
Unfortunately, if you don't want a virus, you need to go to the Mac. The closest thing it has ever had is a social engineering worm. Linux, on the other hand, has fallen into the same trap as Microsoft on severaloccasions. Granted, Linux doesn't have many viruses, but it's also not a very big target. The Mac is a far larger target, and they're still waiting.
Do you ever wonder where all the spam in your Inbox is coming from, or how+why DDoS attacks are possible?
I know, and you know. Joe Average has no clue. It's just the magical Internet to him. Especially since adding Virus Software doesn't stop the spam.
I really can't take that statement seriously, sorry.
You obviously have never actually listened to the public. They really believe that Bill Gates is the smartest man alive. Some choice quotes:
"Bill [Gates] is just smarter than everyone else. There are probably more smart people per square foot right here than anywhere else in the world, but Bill is just smarter."
"I think Bill Gates is wonderful. I am poor as dirt, but there's no reason bleaming one man for everyone's woes. Of course, he is stinky rich, but hey, he earned it. "
"William Henry Gates III is the richest man on the planet, and maybe the smartest."
"It's like walking the Vatican with the pope." (Brokaw on Gates)
My 286 ran games with graphics better than 320x200.
So did my XT. With only 16 colors. The 256 colors was why everyone put up with such a low resolution.
It's a choice between 320x200 with no paging and 360x480 with paging. Huge, huge difference.
Not for learning. If you're learning how to write a video game the difference is: understandable and completely incomprehensible.
Have you ever tried teaching Java to someone who's never coded before? The whole class and main method confuse the hell out of them. All they want to do is complete a "Hello World" program. Yet you're already throwing meaningless concepts at them. Same thing with Mode X. It was completely irrelevant to teaching game programming of the time, and was only going to confuse the issue. The rest of the stuff was better learned elsewhere. For example, order the VESA specification, or pick up a book on the subject.
Mode X was dominant in the top-of-the-line PC games between 1992 and 1996 or so.
Ok, this is where we may get into a difference of opinion over what "Mode X" was. The Mode X features like fast scrolling and page flipping were fully available to the 320x200 mode. Many games claimed they were using Mode X because of this. In reality, many continued to use 320x200 because it provided a flat memory space inside 64K. That was a big deal in those days, as you just didn't have much memory for double buffering. If you could page-flip it instead, you could save yourself a complete secondary buffer. Thus there weren't many games that used Mode X resolutions. I know about Quake and Flashback. Doom, Wolf3D, and Commander Keen all used 320x200.
That's what LaMothe does throughout the book - "There's some other stuff you can do, but I'm not going to tell you how" (and often not even mentioning that there are much better options out there).
Because it was, again, irrelevent. He used up 800 pages just to get the reader up to speed. Stopping to cover every little optimization in existence would have been pointless. (And would make the book far more dated than it is in its current form.)
Actually, I have to wonder whether or not *you* know what antialiasing is. Seriously. Antialiasing does NOT only apply to 3d graphics; it applies to everything from lines via bresenham's algorithm to Wu antialiasing of sprites up to (yes, finally) 3d.
Umm, yeah. I'm well aware of what anti-aliasing is. I know the algorithm by heart. I also know that it's incredibly slow.
Ever see a sprite scale down and remain recognisable? That's antialiasing.
No, that's smooth scaling. (Usually accomplished through sub-sampling and interpolation.) Antialiasing is when you take another pass at the image and smooth out solid edges and remove artifacts.
And, yes, it was available on the Genesis (I can probably dig up an article for you)
You're on the hook and the clock is ticking. I need evidence to back up such a wild claim.
and done in the later Keen series games for special effects (I can probably find where in the book Abrash mentions that).
Go ahead and look that up as well. You'll find that you're confusing anti-aliasing with interpolation during scaling. The latter merely blurs the image due to a lack of information (and can even *cause* aliasing!), while the former intentionally adds image information in key areas to smooth seams between areas of high contrast.
Depends on which algorithm to which you refer; line drawing was the original. He later described, using the exact same method (tracking remainders), algorithms for circles (also 1991) and filled solids (not sure when, but I think that was '92). It's all a progression on the same basic concept - use the remainder to determine how to weight the border colors.
1) Draw a line. 2) Draw a line that bends. 3) Draw sever
This is getting quite funny. HOW do you resolve these two statements?
Quite easily, in fact. I'm not saying that "Linux Sucks!", I'm saying that "Linux is not positioned as a leader in the Desktop market." The fact that Linux has 0.5% of the market share would seem to support that statement. If you want that 0.5% to grow then something needs to change. I have my ideas on how that might happen. Whether you agree with them or not is your business. I'm not forcing you to accept them.
How do you claim to have run Gentoo, Fedora, and Suse and say that they offer NOTHING over Windows?
Quite simple. To the average user Linux offers nothing over Windows. You and I may care that Unix machines have SSH support, can run multiple desktops, are downloadable for free, and have a Virtual Memory Manager that doesn't suck (just to name a few). However, all that is abstract to the average user. They mean nothing, nothing, and more nothing. All a user sees is "I can't install Microsoft Office", "I don't understand how to resolve a package conflict" (or even what it is), and "My obscure hardware XYZ doesn't work."
Whatever solutions may exist to resolve these issues are useless in a user's mind. They just want to boot back into Windows (which came packaged and preconfigured with their PC for "free") and load up Half Life 2. They have a hard time remembering any "good" experiences with Linux because the experience was altogether unimpressive. The Desktop was just like Windows, except that it had lots more confusing whizz-a-ma-bobs. Why would they want to switch?
Unlike your post (which only seems to offer pointless argument), I've offered a partial solution. You claim I "hate Linux" because I'm trying to make it better? That's quite a stretch.
You hate Linux, you're a Microsoft shill, and you're not only a liar, but an artless one at that. Well, I don't see anywhere productive for this discussion to go from here. Tell your billy-boss I said "Nice try".
These are the realities of the situation, and you and you alone come along and assert (a) that Linux is nothing but scrolling text,
No, I didn't. If you read what I said, I stated that some distros often show text screens to the user. An example I can pull off the top of my head is JDS 2. It boots completely without a GUI screen. (Which actually kind of pissed me off. SuSE was the first distro I'd ever seen the graphical boot screen on, and JDS1 had included it. Why it was disabled in JDS2 boggled my mind.) The last time I tried Fedora, I also noticed a non-graphical boot screen. (Though that may have changed in the internim.) Gentoo surprisingly has one of the better looking boot environments, but thats offset by the fact that users have to build their own system. (Not that I think end users should be using any such thing.) Surprisingly, Ubuntu shows text screens on boot and shutdown (as can be seen here), as well as a text mode installer. (Though at least it's text mode graphics.) The remaining list of distros are full of hits and misses.
(b) imply that this and this alone is worthy evidence why Linux is crap and Windows is gold-plated.
No, I never implied such a thing. I implied that Linux offers nothing to users over Windows, and that users often feel that Linux takes away. I understand that you're used to hearing from the "Linux sucks!" crowd, but I'm not one of them. I'm trying to provide realistic assements of why Linux is having difficulties in making inroads.
Does writing a Visual Basic App require a knowledge of the following technologies?
SuperVGA Modes Assembler Language Mouse Interfacing Graphics Drawing Text Rendering
I'm guessing the answer is, "no". It's perfectly possible to provide a simpler interface to future programmers than the technology you list. It's just that no one has yet abstracted away from that level. (Well, at least not publicly, anyway.) Eventually the JavaScript level will be superceded by something else, and sanity will return to Web App programming.
Slashdot Mirror
What was this fool trying to prove? He allowed direct SSH access to the machine! Of course someone is going to hack it! Once you're inside the system, it becomes incredibly easy to find configuration mistakes, and exploit holes in priviledged programs. Remember, this system runs much of the same software as Linux and FreeBSD. Much of that software hasn't been properly audited and locked down. Why? Because this is a desktop machine.
Mac OS X security primarily stems from not doing anything stupid by default. Which means that there are no remote services enabled, the system tries to be intelligent about handling executable files (like most Unixes), and super-user functionality is handled by Sudo. But that's not a bullet-proof vest. There's nothing in the system that makes it automagically secure against all attacks. So if you want security, don't turn on those remote services, and don't give out SSH accounts!
What makes you say that? We've had the technology for this sort of thing for quite a long time. The reason why the Space Shuttle sucks so much is:
That being said, the Space Shuttle is a marvel of engineering. The engineers were merely given a task that didn't make sense (combine cargo and human lifting), and the space vehicle industry has suffered from a lack of follow-up.
A craft the size of this hypothetical spaceplane would need a huge amount of fuel for that
All rockets do. The entire point of the Rocket Equation is to figure out the percentage of mass that will need to be expended using a given propulsion method. That's why the shuttle weighs 2 kilotonnes on the pad just to get 135ish tonnes into orbit. Or in percentages, about 6.75% of the Shuttle's mass makes it to orbit. The rest is either burned or discarded.
"We" never made that claim about Soviet reactors. Cherbobyl didn't "blow sky high" anyways. It simply burned.
Actually, it did blow "sky high". The boiler overpressurized and exploded. That's why old-style pressurized-boiler systems aren't liked. They have a tendency to explode suddenly. Those same boilers were responsible for quite a few industrial accidents in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The nuclear fuel, however, never exploded. It was merely scattered by the boiler explosion. Had the Chernobyl reactor bunker been properly designed to withstand such an explosion, the mess could have been completely contained. Instead it spread across several miles of nearby area and found its way into the water table. Some of it was carried by winds, but this really wasn't anything different than the hundreds of nuclear bomb tests that had been done in decades past.
One way or another, Chernobyl was a stupid, stupid design. The reactor had insufficient safeguards, the personnel were not fully trained, they performed a fail-safe test by actively overriding the fail-safes themselves (!?), and the fail-safe test was done with no qualified overseerers present. Put it all together, and it spells a recipe for disaster.
The Altoses were in the same class as PDP-11 mini-computers.
:-)
No, I do not mean Altos.
I'm guessing that it's not so much that it can't work that way, as it is that it would kill performance.
Today's operating systems try to do exactly what this drive is doing by pumping all reads and writes through the paging system. The problem is that the OS can't take a full performance boost from this or data will be lost in a crash or power loss. You may remember that EXT2FS could easily lose all the data you'd recently written if it wasn't unmounted properly. (It ticked me off when I tried to move RedHat 5.2 packages to a special partition, then found out that they had all disappeared on reboot because I hadn't explicitly unmounted the disk. *grumble*)
Since this technology has little to no chance of losing data in a power failure, the OS can be modified to write the blocks immediately. This could easily result in a performance increase of 2 to 3 times what you normally see today. The improvements in writing meta-data alone could easily provide this increase.
The only people who come out ahead in your scenario are the textile factory owners.
Then if I were you, I'd be investing heavily in textile factories.
Sometimes you get farther by working with the flow rather than against it.
Except fast food won't be exported, they'll just set up a McDonald's in India
Which will have to pay franchising fees to McDonald's America, and also purchase raw product from McDonald's Indian Distribution centers which are owned by McDonald's America.
all those fancy plasma TVs aren't made in America
But are paid for and sold by American companies.
so the American working man won't benefit, but the big American companies will..
That depends on how you define the American "working man". "Working man" used to mean factory workers and service personnel. As time goes on, it has been changing to mean corporate workers (many of who can get $$$ bonuses for opening business in new areas) and entrepenuers. As long as the change isn't too sudden (thus leaving a massive number of specialized workers jobless), such change is far from a bad thing. In fact, it generally means more wealth and independence for all.
I think you're missing the point. India already had plenty of curry spice. That makes it more likely that they'll export it rather than import it. However, India does not have tons of greasy fast food and 30" Plasma TVs. America does. Ergo, America can export these products to India.
Now see, once every Indian "needs" McDonald's food and Plasma Televisions, they'll start demanding higher salaries to pay for these luxuries. Once they start demanding higher salaries, the outsourcing market will begin to become less profitable. India would then need to compete on product quality rather than price of production. Thus, outsourcing as we know it today would disappear.
Indeed. The message seems clear enough to me: "Don't f**k with Steve Jobs."
The music industry tried to get greedy by forcing Jobs' to raise prices on music. He pushed back and told them it would kill iTunes. The music companies banded together and tried to force his hand. Now, suddenly, the justice department is interested in allegations of price fixing. Coincidence? I think not.
Don't worry, I thought the same thing. My first reaction was, "I wasn't aware that Game Development had been outsourced to India in the first place!"
:-P
I think we need to make the terms "Indie Developers" and "Indie Studios" the standard to prevent confusion with terms like "The East Indies." Then again, with the current state of common geographical knowledge in the US today, perhaps it doesn't matter.
Open Source needs programmers. Period.
The best products represent a collaboration between programmers, designers, artists, usability experts, documentors, and experts in the target market. Open Source needs a lot more than programmers to acheive that.
i.e. Open Source needs talented people of all walks. Period.
Edison wanted to pump DC across longdistance lines, which would have consumed much more than the 10-20% losses in Tesla's AC.
:-)
Actually, Edison wanted to create a distributed power generation grid to avoid the issue altogether. Otherwise, I'm completely with you. Which is why the headline is just plain silly. There's no argument between Tesla and Edison here. DC works well in devices. AC works well for transmission. It just so happens that a server room can be treated as one big device.
Was Thomas Edison Right about DC Power?
:-)
Oh, well, nothing sensationalist about that headline. (*rolls eyes*)
DC advocates say that plugging servers into AC power is inefficient, and switching to DC cuts down on waste heat and component failure.
In this case they're right. With that much hardware that close together, it's easier to treat the entire room as a single device. As the article suggests, this cuts down on waste heat produced by inefficiencies in AC->DC conversion. In fact, it significantly cuts down on the amount of equipment needed in the entire room. The concept can be taken as far as to cutting down to a single power supply per rack.
The amusing part about this is that the resulting racks might look a lot like Big Iron servers with pluggable motherboards.
Didn't I see this in a movie once? (Or twice? Or ten different times?) I'm pretty sure I already know what's going to happen:
One of the sharks will be smarter than the rest. It will figure out how to escape its captivity, then lead the rest of the sharks in an attack on tasty human morsels. One by one the humans and sharks will destroy each other. At the end of the movie, the hero/heroine will defeat the Big Bad shark with something lame like a live wire. The sharky explodes in gibblets and everyone lives happily ever after.
Or do they.... ? (Bum, bum, BUUUUUUM)
Check your email. (The tiresias one.) I just sent you something that should settle things quite well. There are still a few holes, but I'm not looking to pursue it any further.
-AKAImBatman
Before the Colombia disaster, it was half a billion per launch.
Prior to Columbia, Shuttle flights ran between $100-$250 million per. After Columbia, they ballooned to $500 million per flight. The differences in cost are not because NASA is spending more money. The cost differences are because the Shuttle requires an army of technicians, flight controllers, and engineers who get paid whether the Shuttle flies or not. When the Shuttle flies less, the cost per flight goes up. When the Shuttle flies more, the costs plummet.
If you can't click on "DOM Level 2 Core" and then click on "ECMAScript Bindings", you've got problems.
:-)
As for those "Recommendations", that part just happens to tell you what's here already and what's still in the works. But go ahead and write five versions of your code. (IE, Mozilla, Opera, Konqueror, Safari) Less competition is a good thing for me.
Another 50% is still utterly wrong. For example,
For the remaining 25%, assume the usual pleasantries apply. I'd love to argue all these points out with you further, but I'm afraid this thread has made me far too weary. Keep up the good work on rocketry, but please don't write any non-OpenGL/DirectX engines until you get this stuff clear in your head.
Well there's a bad idea. If you want your code to be cross platform, always go to the source for your information. Otherwise you're guaranteed to get burned. It's bad enough that Internet Exploder refuses to support DOM Events. Throwing stuff that may be Mozilla specific into the fray is a sure-fire way to make it that much worse.
Having a female hero was also something new for the time, sure they overdid it quite a bit and turned her into a boob-monster, but still having a strong female lead isn't the worst thing you can do.
:-)
What's interesting is that the massive bosom was supposedly a complete accident. According to the Wikipedia article, character designer Toby Gard was, "fudging around with the model when he accidentally blew up Lara's bosom to 150% of what he intended it to be." While he was correcting his mistake, the other designers noticed and asked him to keep it as part of the character.
You just can't make this stuff up.
I dare you - come up with a list of viruses, that can infect a standard (or updated) installation of Debian Gnu/Linux.
The same could officially be said of Windows. Microsoft usually has a patch out by the time a virus hits the 'net. So officially Windows is "virus free". (Yeah, right.)
Unfortunately, if you don't want a virus, you need to go to the Mac. The closest thing it has ever had is a social engineering worm. Linux, on the other hand, has fallen into the same trap as Microsoft on several occasions. Granted, Linux doesn't have many viruses, but it's also not a very big target. The Mac is a far larger target, and they're still waiting.
Do you ever wonder where all the spam in your Inbox is coming from, or how+why DDoS attacks are possible?
I know, and you know. Joe Average has no clue. It's just the magical Internet to him. Especially since adding Virus Software doesn't stop the spam.
I really can't take that statement seriously, sorry.
You obviously have never actually listened to the public. They really believe that Bill Gates is the smartest man alive. Some choice quotes:
"Bill [Gates] is just smarter than everyone else. There are probably more smart people per square foot right here than anywhere else in the world, but Bill is just smarter."
"I think Bill Gates is wonderful. I am poor as dirt, but there's no reason bleaming one man for everyone's woes. Of course, he is stinky rich, but hey, he earned it. "
"William Henry Gates III is the richest man on the planet, and maybe the smartest."
"It's like walking the Vatican with the pope." (Brokaw on Gates)
My 286 ran games with graphics better than 320x200.
So did my XT. With only 16 colors. The 256 colors was why everyone put up with such a low resolution.
It's a choice between 320x200 with no paging and 360x480 with paging. Huge, huge difference.
Not for learning. If you're learning how to write a video game the difference is: understandable and completely incomprehensible.
Have you ever tried teaching Java to someone who's never coded before? The whole class and main method confuse the hell out of them. All they want to do is complete a "Hello World" program. Yet you're already throwing meaningless concepts at them. Same thing with Mode X. It was completely irrelevant to teaching game programming of the time, and was only going to confuse the issue. The rest of the stuff was better learned elsewhere. For example, order the VESA specification, or pick up a book on the subject.
Mode X was dominant in the top-of-the-line PC games between 1992 and 1996 or so.
Ok, this is where we may get into a difference of opinion over what "Mode X" was. The Mode X features like fast scrolling and page flipping were fully available to the 320x200 mode. Many games claimed they were using Mode X because of this. In reality, many continued to use 320x200 because it provided a flat memory space inside 64K. That was a big deal in those days, as you just didn't have much memory for double buffering. If you could page-flip it instead, you could save yourself a complete secondary buffer. Thus there weren't many games that used Mode X resolutions. I know about Quake and Flashback. Doom, Wolf3D, and Commander Keen all used 320x200.
That's what LaMothe does throughout the book - "There's some other stuff you can do, but I'm not going to tell you how" (and often not even mentioning that there are much better options out there).
Because it was, again, irrelevent. He used up 800 pages just to get the reader up to speed. Stopping to cover every little optimization in existence would have been pointless. (And would make the book far more dated than it is in its current form.)
Actually, I have to wonder whether or not *you* know what antialiasing is. Seriously. Antialiasing does NOT only apply to 3d graphics; it applies to everything from lines via bresenham's algorithm to Wu antialiasing of sprites up to (yes, finally) 3d.
Umm, yeah. I'm well aware of what anti-aliasing is. I know the algorithm by heart. I also know that it's incredibly slow.
Ever see a sprite scale down and remain recognisable? That's antialiasing.
No, that's smooth scaling. (Usually accomplished through sub-sampling and interpolation.) Antialiasing is when you take another pass at the image and smooth out solid edges and remove artifacts.
And, yes, it was available on the Genesis (I can probably dig up an article for you)
You're on the hook and the clock is ticking. I need evidence to back up such a wild claim.
and done in the later Keen series games for special effects (I can probably find where in the book Abrash mentions that).
Go ahead and look that up as well. You'll find that you're confusing anti-aliasing with interpolation during scaling. The latter merely blurs the image due to a lack of information (and can even *cause* aliasing!), while the former intentionally adds image information in key areas to smooth seams between areas of high contrast.
Here's a nice introduction for you on both methods.
Depends on which algorithm to which you refer; line drawing was the original. He later described, using the exact same method (tracking remainders), algorithms for circles (also 1991) and filled solids (not sure when, but I think that was '92). It's all a progression on the same basic concept - use the remainder to determine how to weight the border colors.
1) Draw a line. 2) Draw a line that bends. 3) Draw sever
This is getting quite funny. HOW do you resolve these two statements?
Quite easily, in fact. I'm not saying that "Linux Sucks!", I'm saying that "Linux is not positioned as a leader in the Desktop market." The fact that Linux has 0.5% of the market share would seem to support that statement. If you want that 0.5% to grow then something needs to change. I have my ideas on how that might happen. Whether you agree with them or not is your business. I'm not forcing you to accept them.
How do you claim to have run Gentoo, Fedora, and Suse and say that they offer NOTHING over Windows?
Quite simple. To the average user Linux offers nothing over Windows. You and I may care that Unix machines have SSH support, can run multiple desktops, are downloadable for free, and have a Virtual Memory Manager that doesn't suck (just to name a few). However, all that is abstract to the average user. They mean nothing, nothing, and more nothing. All a user sees is "I can't install Microsoft Office", "I don't understand how to resolve a package conflict" (or even what it is), and "My obscure hardware XYZ doesn't work."
Whatever solutions may exist to resolve these issues are useless in a user's mind. They just want to boot back into Windows (which came packaged and preconfigured with their PC for "free") and load up Half Life 2. They have a hard time remembering any "good" experiences with Linux because the experience was altogether unimpressive. The Desktop was just like Windows, except that it had lots more confusing whizz-a-ma-bobs. Why would they want to switch?
Unlike your post (which only seems to offer pointless argument), I've offered a partial solution. You claim I "hate Linux" because I'm trying to make it better? That's quite a stretch.
You hate Linux, you're a Microsoft shill, and you're not only a liar, but an artless one at that. Well, I don't see anywhere productive for this discussion to go from here. Tell your billy-boss I said "Nice try".
Here's my honest answer for you: Grow up.
These are the realities of the situation, and you and you alone come along and assert (a) that Linux is nothing but scrolling text,
No, I didn't. If you read what I said, I stated that some distros often show text screens to the user. An example I can pull off the top of my head is JDS 2. It boots completely without a GUI screen. (Which actually kind of pissed me off. SuSE was the first distro I'd ever seen the graphical boot screen on, and JDS1 had included it. Why it was disabled in JDS2 boggled my mind.) The last time I tried Fedora, I also noticed a non-graphical boot screen. (Though that may have changed in the internim.) Gentoo surprisingly has one of the better looking boot environments, but thats offset by the fact that users have to build their own system. (Not that I think end users should be using any such thing.) Surprisingly, Ubuntu shows text screens on boot and shutdown (as can be seen here), as well as a text mode installer. (Though at least it's text mode graphics.) The remaining list of distros are full of hits and misses.
(b) imply that this and this alone is worthy evidence why Linux is crap and Windows is gold-plated.
No, I never implied such a thing. I implied that Linux offers nothing to users over Windows, and that users often feel that Linux takes away. I understand that you're used to hearing from the "Linux sucks!" crowd, but I'm not one of them. I'm trying to provide realistic assements of why Linux is having difficulties in making inroads.
I'll even say I'm sorry for coming off rude.
Apology accepted.
Does writing a Visual Basic App require a knowledge of the following technologies?
SuperVGA Modes
Assembler Language
Mouse Interfacing
Graphics Drawing
Text Rendering
I'm guessing the answer is, "no". It's perfectly possible to provide a simpler interface to future programmers than the technology you list. It's just that no one has yet abstracted away from that level. (Well, at least not publicly, anyway.) Eventually the JavaScript level will be superceded by something else, and sanity will return to Web App programming.