Well, when MicroSoft announced that they're about to enter the console business they also noted that they won't make a profit on the first generation and that they knew it and that this was okay since their goal was to get into the peoples' living rooms. And I think for Sony, it's really important for them to push Blueray with the PS3, if that ship sinks like Betamax it'll really hurt.
First off, I have to question Chris Heckers developer quality, since he's one of the I need more power because I can't get my stuff run fast enough people. Quite often the issue is that the resources at hand aren't used optimal, either because the tools at hand lack the quality or the developers lack the quality. For example, I'm really impressed with Final Fantasy XII: the developers managed to squeeze quite nice graphics out of the total of just 36MB RAM they have at hand, especially the level of detail implementation is really good. Overall, the PlayStation 2 is a very good example at how developers had to learn to use the resources they have available: the first generation PS2 titles looked awful compared to the games that hit the market in the last few months. And I also remember playing around with graphics programming on my 80386. I never managed to have it do smooth animations, let alone smooth scrolling. Yet others proved that the hardware was not the problem (e.g. Doom), so the problem wasn't that the machine wasn't fast enough, the problem was that I didn't understand to use the resources adequately.
Also, the guy completely ignores Nintendo's situation: unlike MicroSoft and Sony, they don't have money to burn. They have to make a profit off their consoles from day one since that's all they do. They don't have other businesses with which they can make money (apart from licensing, of course). So they can't subsidize their consoles like MicroSoft and Sony do (they sell their consoles for less than their production costs).
This and other issues led Nintendo to conclude that they can't compete with this generation of consoles from MicroSoft and Sony. So if you can't play in the same market as the other guys you have to find another market, and that's just what Nintendo did, and successfully so. They managed to attract people to the Wii who wouldn't play console games otherwise. I know two couples who never had a console but found the Wii to be fun and bought it. They are both in their mid-/end-twenties and only now entered console gaming through the Wii and simply don't care about the PS3 or XBox360 since they don't appeal to them. Chris Hecker simply doesn't recognize that Nintendo is targeting a completely different audience than both MicroSoft and Sony.
You better buy yourself a copy of Donald Knuth's The Art Of Computer Programming, part 3 (sorting and searching). Quicksort may be OK in some cases, but most of the time there's a better algorithm. Also the best case of quicksort is O(n log(n)), not O(1).
Well, we had that wall back in the old days as well. I particularly remember Super Mario Bros. 3: I had no problems reaching World 8, and even had lots of extras. But the levels in that world are so much more difficult than the previous ones that I didn't stand a chance... after playing three times to World 8 I only managed to cross about half of the worlds. That was it for me then. No fun any more. I like challenging games and beaten quite a lot of games now, but when the difficulty suddenly rises by an insanely amount it frustrates me and makes me abandon the game after a few tries.
But I agree with you that most games nowadays are way easier then former games... or maybe we just got better ?;-)
I was asking myself that very same question for several years now...
Assembler-wise, I know ARMv5, Motorola 68k and Intel x86. Compared to the former two, x86 is not just plain ugly, it's just primitive and dumb. For example, since there are no real all-purpose registers (every register is eventually required by some instruction to be used in a special way), you always have to use the stack or memory. Using the stack is now quite efficient and cached by the CPU, AFAIK, I don't think it's a match to having a few all-purpose registers.
And the legacy of the 8086 (which was a hack to get to market quickly with a 16-bit processor) and then the 80386 are still with us, and I'm pretty sure todays processors could be faster and/or more efficient if things would have been designed better back then. Even Intel seems to think it's a bad design and AFAIK tried to replace it several times (iAPX 432, maybe i960, Itanium), but they failed horribly because those CPUs were too slow or too late (market penetration of the x86 was too huge then).
Oh well, there's a saying: "Programming is like sex: one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life". Same is true for hardware, it seems. That's why we still have this 1980'ish BIOS and boot process and other stuff that were mistakes from day one.
The reason why they're still here is that back then, the solution wasn't so horrible and only meant to stay for a few years, not decades. If people at Intel and IBM would have known that their stuff would stick with us for this long, they would have done a lot of things differently, I'm sure. But to everyones surprise the 8086 and IBM PC were big successes, and once you've got a certain market penetration you can survive even when there are better alternatives... history has shown this several times already:-/
It's called "disconnected IMAP" and is like cached IMAP: KMail pulls the stuff on your box so you can view it even when you have no network connection, like with POP3. But since this is IMAP and everything is on the server, you can do that with several clients. I've got my own IMAP server and use KMail's disconnected IMAP at home and at work. It works just fine...
The company I work for wouldn't exist without OSS, at least we wouldn't do what we do now. We're doing VoIP products, and without Linux, the GNU tools, OpenSER and Asterisk we wouldn't be able to build those products since we don't have the resources to write stuff like that ourselves. We've patched almost everything to smaller or larger degrees so that the software fits our needs, and I've sent patches that are interesting to a wider audience back to the appropriate projects. We would never have been able to do the stuff we do with closed source software as we then wouldn't have been able to adapt them to our needs.
And yes, I've also written patches/worked on OSS projects in my spare time. I'm an OSS developer for several years now and also learned a great deal how to code (and how NOT to code) from several open source projects. On a related side note: if you'd like to see how to manage a project (OSS or not) and how to write high quality software, I really recommend looking at SubVersion.
I have mixed feelings about this trend. On one hand, it's nice to be able to be part of a community steering your favourite distribution, that is be able to help improve it/influence where it goes.
On the other hand I don't think that it always works as good as it sounds at first. I'm a long time Linux user, and I personally think that SuSE 10.0, the first community influenced version, was laking in quality. For the very first time I got an error message box during installation (that wasn't caused by a defect medium), and I didn't understand what the error message box was about or what it wanted to tell me. It really burned into my head that I got it: I've never seen something like this in earlier SuSE releases. I remotely remember having had other issues as well. In short: I personally found the first community influenced SuSE distribution to be below normal SuSE quality.
Maybe 10.1 will be better, I will of course have a look. But it left me thinking whether it really was the right move for SuSE. Community driven distribution can work, but I don't think it's the correct way for all distributions.
It's like Wikipedia vs. Enclycopaedia Britannica: they work differently, and both models of making an encyclopaedia have their up- and down-sides. Same for making a distribution: I don't think there's an "one-size-fits-all" solution that makes everyone happy.
I know I'll get modded down and will lose karma when I post this but I can't resist. I hope this doesn't sound too much like a flame against America and Americans, because I don't intend to do so, but I thought about this a few times and this is my view on this:
I think the biggest issue US americans have is that they are "locked in": they only know their mother tongue and normally aren't tought any second language (to my knowledge, please correct me if I'm wrong) and I think most americans never leave their country.
For example, if you're making vacations in Europe you travel from one european country to another most of the time, and that normally means crossing a language baorder (there are only few exceptions like traveling between Germany, Austria and Switzerland). In the US, you simple cross a state border but never a language border (let's leave the dialects out;-). Europeans (except for the British, of course) are forced to learn english besides their mother tongue to make their way through the business world or the technical world. AFAIK a lot of Asian people have to learn mandarin chinese for the very same reason in their region, and in the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany)people had to learn russian to do business, like in most east European countries today.
So people outside of the US (and probably China) have regular contact with other countries, cultures and languages in one form or another while I think US Americans normally don't despite the fact that America is made up only of immigrants. They probably tend to have a more centralistic view because of this (note: I know this doesn't apply to all Americans)... this could be the reason why the USA regularly step on the feet of other countries and make themselves unpopular all over the world: they aren't used to the fact that the USA is not the center of the world.
Know your music
on
Learning to DJ?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I'm a hobby DJ myself and do a monthly (former weekly) event for about four years now together with a friend of mine who has about seven or eight years of DJ experience, and this is my opinion on this topic (I'll first rant about DJ'ing itself and then about the software/hardware we use):
I think the most important thing for DJ'ing is to know your music. You must know the bands and names of your songs and vice versa you must know how your songs sound like when you hear their names. And you must learn how to combine them. The bigger your reportoire the better. Be prepared to buy a lot of CDs over time... my collection is currently about 400 CDs right now and that's not very much, IMHO: other DJs I know have more, some have MUCH more. Most DJs I know could have bought a car with the money they've spent into CDs. (Yes, there are P2P nets, bla bla, but I like to hold something in my hand; and I also know some DJs which still only use vinyl)
We do a gothic event and that means to know a lot of different music genres, from medieval to gothic rock to 80's pop and wave to industrial. In short: all kind of different rock and electronic genres from the 80's to now. DJ'ing for those events is probably different from DJ'ing a techno or hip hop event, but you haven't said which music you're into so I just assume my opinion could be useful for you;-)
Our concept is to do blocks of one genre and try to slide into another genre and only sometimes do "breaks" where we change e.g. from noise into "heavenly voices" from one song to another. That means if I play a song from some band I have to come up with songs of other bands that fit in the same genre and are good follow-ups to former song. Other DJs have other concepts, for example another good DJ I know normally only plays songs one or two songs of the same genre and then breaks into a completely different genre. Those concepts depend on a few things, e.g. how many guests you have, how many people fit on the dance floor at one time and also your target audience, just to name a few.
Whatever your concept is doesn't matter though, what matters is that you can come up with songs that fit your concept and that people like, and that means you really have to know your song reportoire. And to do that you don't need any fancy software for that. I personally normally work with CDs, I need the inspiration from seeing the CD backs in my DJ cases. A simple list of songs is not very inspiring for me... other DJs think otherwise, like my co-DJ.
But my co-DJ used AtomixMP3 and now the successor (AFAIK) Virtual DJ. Both are very easy to use and affordable. While I rarely use the computer for DJ'ing myself I think they're very good. They also have automatic beat mixing and stuff which may be more important to DJs for electronic music (for non-electronic stuff beat mixing and effect are quite useless, IMHO...).
We also have a console for Virtual DJ which includes a sound card and generally makes the software usable like DJ CD players. It's very nice, IIRC we paid 200 Euro for the console including the software but it's much cheaper now, I think 100 Euro or something. Together with an USB 2.0 harddisk and a notebook you're set.
Ah, and some other important advises: Have fun ! Don't let others stress you. Especially don't listen to song requests from annoying guests, you'll see that the dance floor will be empty when you play that damn song and the annoying guest is nowhere to be seen. And remember that a DJ creates trends, if you only play the songs on the current top 100 you'll probably bore your guests...
Haven't you heard that there will be a Sam & Max game after all? Best of all, it isn't being made by Lucasarts, but it is being made by the people who were on Lucasarts' "Freelance Police" project.
Ah yes, I forgot... still, I think it's a shame to dump an almost finished game (I mean the one developed by LucasArts), especially in this case: back in the days, LucasArts was famous for doing the best adventures. If I didn't miss a thing all they're doing nowadays is producing Star Wars game after Star Wars game... how original. (Yes, I know it makes them a lot of money, but I think it's a bit risky to rely on just one franchise, especially since they proved that can do excellent different games as well)
Monkey Island II is the game I play the most. I normally play through at least one Monkey Island game every year, I just love the humor (I like the first two parts the most but enjoy III and IV as well).
Maniac Mansion II: Day of the Tentacle is also one of those games I replay quite often. Like Monkey Island, the humor is just great.
Too bad Sam and Max II was cancelled and that the gaming industry doesn't produce good adventures (especially humorous adventures) any more... at least I haven't heard of any.
The EU asked Microsoft to release documentation of their protocols. What MS offers is to license their source to people already using MS products.
But that's not what the EU asked for or what the EU wants.
Even worse, if MS licensed their source to a competitor and that competitor produces a product using some of the protocols used in Windows, MS could sue them for copyright violation.
But it's a clever idea of MS nonetheless, IMHO. Luckily the EU didn't fall for it.
There exists DOS 3.31 which has all the smallness of DOS 3.3 with the benefit of FAT32 support. I used it for a while, along with QEMM for memory management.
I'm pretty sure you're mixing something up:-) FAT32 got introduced in Win95B. You probably mean FAT16 with large cluster support.
I so agree with you ! I have to code an Asterisk application, and for more than two month I'm trying to work my way through the Asterisk code to understand how Asterisk works internally.
The design is not bad per se, but I find the code is very bad and frustrating in many ways:
Too few comments. The function/code section does something very complicated ? Don't expect any explanation on how and why. Granted, the header files are documented, and some of those documentations/comments are good, but the real code lacks comments all over the place.
Almost no documentation. For example, in the doc/ dir is a document called channel.txt. With a few words it explains what a channel is and who creates them. No word on how you use them (in an application), how they interact with the PBX, how to do something usefull with them. Many (important) details are totally undocumented (or impossible to find).
If your code contains single C files that are bigger than 100kB you know somethings wrong. And Asterisk has several of them. The biggest one is the SIP channel. A complete SIP implementation in just one file: 440kB.
Not only are the C files big, they are unsorted as well. You can encounter type definitions (structs, enums) in the middle of a C file, squeezed between two functions with no easy to spot marking comments or something. And you can encounter functions where you wonder how those particular functions relate to the others in the current C file and why they haven't made it into their own C files.
The code just leaves an unclean impression. It is not really bad, but nonetheless it just feels dirty ! It's hard to work your way through it.
Don't get me wrong, I think Asterisk is an incredible piece of software and it works quite reliable. But I think the whole code should refactored, cleaned up and documented. E.g. almost every channel driver should get its own directory and be splitted into several files. Likewise all other big files that exceed say 100kB should be splitted (I counted 13...).
By contrast, Asterisk is often used together with SER/OpenSER. Now look at that code and see the difference ! It's not the most beautiful code I've seen and it could use a bit more documentation as well, but the code is splitted into nice, consumable pieces and is documented all over the place. It's easy to work your way through it and work with it.
Each character represents a different digit (the dots are just to preserve the formatting). No two characters represent the same digit. Happy solving:-)
VIM (or EMACS if that's your favourite, let's not start a religious war)
make (or ant or something like that, I personally like make)
a version control system (I prefer SubVersion, but everything that is not VSS will do)
a good shell (bash, or if you like it better zsh)
some selfwritten scripts to ease up some tasks
I know this may sound very "low-tech" to people who are used to IDE's but at least I can guarantee that my environment will always behave like I want (something I can't say about the Visual Studio.NET I'm forced to use in one project) and that I can use this setup for all programming languages that I've ever worked with (yes, even C#). I'm a believer in "adapt your tools to your needs, don't adapt to your tools".
Oh, BTW, I came from the IDE word (Topspeed Modula/2, Turbo BASIC, Turbo/Borland Pascal) and while I think they do make your life easier in some areas of your work I today also think they hide too much stuff from you and don't allow to work around problems (like VS.NET is not able to compile dependant projects into the same directory: you can't work around that, you have to alter/reorganize your projects; that hit us in a stage of a project when we really had no time at hand for unnecessary stuff like that).
We use SubVersion at our company for well over two years now, and since then I've been subscribed to the SubVersion user and developer mailing lists.
I find the SubVersion project a very interesting project. What really makes this project shine is the development quality. By this I mean:
The way new features are discussed and designed before they get implemented. Let's face it, more often then not in Open Source projects someone just tries to implement a feature without a concrete design (I'm guilty of this, too;-). The SubVersion maintainers on the other hand normally don't start coding anything before a solid design has been specified.
The way code quality is enforced. Patched are actually reviewed and discussed and have to fullfill a certain standard before they get accepted, something few projects really do.
The main coders are really bright people who seem to have many years of experience. They normally know very well what they are talking about;-)
Friendly people. You don't see flamewars on the lists, the SubVersion people are helpful and patient.
No hostility against other projects. The SubVersion maintainers are the first to say something like "Well, if you want to work like this or need feature foo then SubVersion might not be the correct solution for you, try OtherVersionControlSystem instead.".
I've seen a few OpenSource projects by now, even was co-leader of a very small, now long abandoned project and thus am really impressed by the way development is done in the SubVersion project.
I really, really wish that I'll have the opportunity to work on a commercial project that comes halfway to the code quality of the SubVersion project. I'm a professional programmer for just about four years now but have already worked on some big industrial projects (industrial robots, lasers). Still I have yet to see a commercial development project where not some really dumb programmers can constantly screw the project, check code in that doesn't compile, doesn't follow the coding style or is simply of low quality. I see code that almost no OpenSource project would accept on a daily basis. And this code is produced by people that are highly paid and sometimes have years of experience (but still should visit a "Coding 101" course !).
Very often I think, "Now if this were an OpenSource project that code would have been rejected and the programmer would have been forced to correct it and do better next time." Unfortunately this will stay a dream, and thus I fear I'll never see a commercial project with code quality that rivals that of SubVersion.
Re:Some folks still contest the "landing"
on
Google Moon Debuts
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· Score: 1
*yawn* The same old "I-didn't-pay-attention-at-school" physics questions related to the moon.
Now, let's look at these...
1: The moon's surface dust which was now blown away when the craft was landing.
Uhm, yes, there was dust (of course !), and it was blown away (of course !). I don't know what you want to say with this one. I guess you propably mean the one were people say dust was raised, why is there none on the space crafts feet. Simply because there is no atmosphere, which is why the dust gets blow aways from the craft in a nice flat parable and can't swirl around like it can on earth where we have a gas atmosphere.
2: Both sides of the American flag were bright! This is impossible since we all know that in an environment lit on one side, the other most have a shadow.
Haven't seen this one. But what about light reflecting on the space craft ?
3: The orientation of the astronaut's shadow suggested a different light source other than the sun!
Haven't seen this one either... see number 2.
4: The American flag was shown to be being blown by some wind...yet we know that the moon has NO wind!
Since there is no atmosphere there is almost no damping (I'm no native english speaker, I hope it's the correct term). If you rattle on the flag it looks like blowing in the wind, and this effect last a lot longer than it does here one earth.
5: There were no stars in the moon's sky! Where did they go? Americans must have forgotten this one. Where do you stand on this?
You should go take some photography lessons. As noted a few times already, there is no atmosphere on moon. The sun's light isn't dimmed and the dust reflects the light as well (remember snow blindness). It's so bright on moon that the astronauts' helmets were propably the most expensive sunglasses (they used a gold coated visor, IIRC). In fact it's so bright on moon that the light reflected from the dust can illuminate earth on the night side considerably. So, if you take a picture on moon and adjust the camera to the brightness so that you can actually see features on the moon then the surrounding stars are just waaaaaaay too dim. Go to the dark side of the moon to see some stars.
The "Revolution" is so advanced that... it needs a computer to have access to a Wi-Fi network
I think misunderstood that: the Revolution has built-in WiFi and Nintendo is selling a WiFi router so PCs can access that WiFi net... they use their own WiFi network. This means if you buy a Revolution and have a DS, the DS can connect to the Revolution immediately without the need of buying a connector.
AFAIK they have their own WiFi net because of the special requirements a gaming device has.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, when MicroSoft announced that they're about to enter the console business they also noted that they won't make a profit on the first generation and that they knew it and that this was okay since their goal was to get into the peoples' living rooms. And I think for Sony, it's really important for them to push Blueray with the PS3, if that ship sinks like Betamax it'll really hurt.
A few links:
First off, I have to question Chris Heckers developer quality, since he's one of the I need more power because I can't get my stuff run fast enough people. Quite often the issue is that the resources at hand aren't used optimal, either because the tools at hand lack the quality or the developers lack the quality. For example, I'm really impressed with Final Fantasy XII: the developers managed to squeeze quite nice graphics out of the total of just 36MB RAM they have at hand, especially the level of detail implementation is really good. Overall, the PlayStation 2 is a very good example at how developers had to learn to use the resources they have available: the first generation PS2 titles looked awful compared to the games that hit the market in the last few months. And I also remember playing around with graphics programming on my 80386. I never managed to have it do smooth animations, let alone smooth scrolling. Yet others proved that the hardware was not the problem (e.g. Doom), so the problem wasn't that the machine wasn't fast enough, the problem was that I didn't understand to use the resources adequately.
Also, the guy completely ignores Nintendo's situation: unlike MicroSoft and Sony, they don't have money to burn. They have to make a profit off their consoles from day one since that's all they do. They don't have other businesses with which they can make money (apart from licensing, of course). So they can't subsidize their consoles like MicroSoft and Sony do (they sell their consoles for less than their production costs).
This and other issues led Nintendo to conclude that they can't compete with this generation of consoles from MicroSoft and Sony. So if you can't play in the same market as the other guys you have to find another market, and that's just what Nintendo did, and successfully so. They managed to attract people to the Wii who wouldn't play console games otherwise. I know two couples who never had a console but found the Wii to be fun and bought it. They are both in their mid-/end-twenties and only now entered console gaming through the Wii and simply don't care about the PS3 or XBox360 since they don't appeal to them. Chris Hecker simply doesn't recognize that Nintendo is targeting a completely different audience than both MicroSoft and Sony.
You better buy yourself a copy of Donald Knuth's The Art Of Computer Programming, part 3 (sorting and searching). Quicksort may be OK in some cases, but most of the time there's a better algorithm. Also the best case of quicksort is O(n log(n)), not O(1).
Well, we had that wall back in the old days as well. I particularly remember Super Mario Bros. 3: I had no problems reaching World 8, and even had lots of extras. But the levels in that world are so much more difficult than the previous ones that I didn't stand a chance... after playing three times to World 8 I only managed to cross about half of the worlds. That was it for me then. No fun any more. I like challenging games and beaten quite a lot of games now, but when the difficulty suddenly rises by an insanely amount it frustrates me and makes me abandon the game after a few tries.
;-)
But I agree with you that most games nowadays are way easier then former games... or maybe we just got better ?
I was asking myself that very same question for several years now...
:-/
Assembler-wise, I know ARMv5, Motorola 68k and Intel x86. Compared to the former two, x86 is not just plain ugly, it's just primitive and dumb. For example, since there are no real all-purpose registers (every register is eventually required by some instruction to be used in a special way), you always have to use the stack or memory. Using the stack is now quite efficient and cached by the CPU, AFAIK, I don't think it's a match to having a few all-purpose registers.
And the legacy of the 8086 (which was a hack to get to market quickly with a 16-bit processor) and then the 80386 are still with us, and I'm pretty sure todays processors could be faster and/or more efficient if things would have been designed better back then. Even Intel seems to think it's a bad design and AFAIK tried to replace it several times (iAPX 432, maybe i960, Itanium), but they failed horribly because those CPUs were too slow or too late (market penetration of the x86 was too huge then).
Oh well, there's a saying: "Programming is like sex: one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life". Same is true for hardware, it seems. That's why we still have this 1980'ish BIOS and boot process and other stuff that were mistakes from day one.
The reason why they're still here is that back then, the solution wasn't so horrible and only meant to stay for a few years, not decades. If people at Intel and IBM would have known that their stuff would stick with us for this long, they would have done a lot of things differently, I'm sure. But to everyones surprise the 8086 and IBM PC were big successes, and once you've got a certain market penetration you can survive even when there are better alternatives... history has shown this several times already
It's called "disconnected IMAP" and is like cached IMAP: KMail pulls the stuff on your box so you can view it even when you have no network connection, like with POP3. But since this is IMAP and everything is on the server, you can do that with several clients. I've got my own IMAP server and use KMail's disconnected IMAP at home and at work. It works just fine...
The first was Schwäbisch Hall (sorry, the english Wikipedia article doesn't mention the Linux migration). They decided to migrate back in 2002.
It's a small city (about 36.000 people) but an important one as it's the home of a big german building society.
It has another advantage: it's compiled into the kernel, so you only need to load one image (good for embedded systems).
It has a huge disadvantage: it's compiled into the kernel, so you can't easily change it (bad for desktop systems).
The company I work for wouldn't exist without OSS, at least we wouldn't do what we do now. We're doing VoIP products, and without Linux, the GNU tools, OpenSER and Asterisk we wouldn't be able to build those products since we don't have the resources to write stuff like that ourselves. We've patched almost everything to smaller or larger degrees so that the software fits our needs, and I've sent patches that are interesting to a wider audience back to the appropriate projects. We would never have been able to do the stuff we do with closed source software as we then wouldn't have been able to adapt them to our needs.
And yes, I've also written patches/worked on OSS projects in my spare time. I'm an OSS developer for several years now and also learned a great deal how to code (and how NOT to code) from several open source projects. On a related side note: if you'd like to see how to manage a project (OSS or not) and how to write high quality software, I really recommend looking at SubVersion.
I have mixed feelings about this trend. On one hand, it's nice to be able to be part of a community steering your favourite distribution, that is be able to help improve it/influence where it goes.
On the other hand I don't think that it always works as good as it sounds at first. I'm a long time Linux user, and I personally think that SuSE 10.0, the first community influenced version, was laking in quality. For the very first time I got an error message box during installation (that wasn't caused by a defect medium), and I didn't understand what the error message box was about or what it wanted to tell me. It really burned into my head that I got it: I've never seen something like this in earlier SuSE releases. I remotely remember having had other issues as well. In short: I personally found the first community influenced SuSE distribution to be below normal SuSE quality.
Maybe 10.1 will be better, I will of course have a look. But it left me thinking whether it really was the right move for SuSE. Community driven distribution can work, but I don't think it's the correct way for all distributions.
It's like Wikipedia vs. Enclycopaedia Britannica: they work differently, and both models of making an encyclopaedia have their up- and down-sides. Same for making a distribution: I don't think there's an "one-size-fits-all" solution that makes everyone happy.
I know I'll get modded down and will lose karma when I post this but I can't resist. I hope this doesn't sound too much like a flame against America and Americans, because I don't intend to do so, but I thought about this a few times and this is my view on this:
;-). Europeans (except for the British, of course) are forced to learn english besides their mother tongue to make their way through the business world or the technical world. AFAIK a lot of Asian people have to learn mandarin chinese for the very same reason in their region, and in the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany)people had to learn russian to do business, like in most east European countries today.
I think the biggest issue US americans have is that they are "locked in": they only know their mother tongue and normally aren't tought any second language (to my knowledge, please correct me if I'm wrong) and I think most americans never leave their country.
For example, if you're making vacations in Europe you travel from one european country to another most of the time, and that normally means crossing a language baorder (there are only few exceptions like traveling between Germany, Austria and Switzerland). In the US, you simple cross a state border but never a language border (let's leave the dialects out
So people outside of the US (and probably China) have regular contact with other countries, cultures and languages in one form or another while I think US Americans normally don't despite the fact that America is made up only of immigrants. They probably tend to have a more centralistic view because of this (note: I know this doesn't apply to all Americans)... this could be the reason why the USA regularly step on the feet of other countries and make themselves unpopular all over the world: they aren't used to the fact that the USA is not the center of the world.
I'm a hobby DJ myself and do a monthly (former weekly) event for about four years now together with a friend of mine who has about seven or eight years of DJ experience, and this is my opinion on this topic (I'll first rant about DJ'ing itself and then about the software/hardware we use):
I think the most important thing for DJ'ing is to know your music. You must know the bands and names of your songs and vice versa you must know how your songs sound like when you hear their names. And you must learn how to combine them. The bigger your reportoire the better. Be prepared to buy a lot of CDs over time... my collection is currently about 400 CDs right now and that's not very much, IMHO: other DJs I know have more, some have MUCH more. Most DJs I know could have bought a car with the money they've spent into CDs. (Yes, there are P2P nets, bla bla, but I like to hold something in my hand; and I also know some DJs which still only use vinyl)
We do a gothic event and that means to know a lot of different music genres, from medieval to gothic rock to 80's pop and wave to industrial. In short: all kind of different rock and electronic genres from the 80's to now. DJ'ing for those events is probably different from DJ'ing a techno or hip hop event, but you haven't said which music you're into so I just assume my opinion could be useful for you ;-)
Our concept is to do blocks of one genre and try to slide into another genre and only sometimes do "breaks" where we change e.g. from noise into "heavenly voices" from one song to another. That means if I play a song from some band I have to come up with songs of other bands that fit in the same genre and are good follow-ups to former song. Other DJs have other concepts, for example another good DJ I know normally only plays songs one or two songs of the same genre and then breaks into a completely different genre. Those concepts depend on a few things, e.g. how many guests you have, how many people fit on the dance floor at one time and also your target audience, just to name a few.
Whatever your concept is doesn't matter though, what matters is that you can come up with songs that fit your concept and that people like, and that means you really have to know your song reportoire. And to do that you don't need any fancy software for that. I personally normally work with CDs, I need the inspiration from seeing the CD backs in my DJ cases. A simple list of songs is not very inspiring for me... other DJs think otherwise, like my co-DJ.
But my co-DJ used AtomixMP3 and now the successor (AFAIK) Virtual DJ. Both are very easy to use and affordable. While I rarely use the computer for DJ'ing myself I think they're very good. They also have automatic beat mixing and stuff which may be more important to DJs for electronic music (for non-electronic stuff beat mixing and effect are quite useless, IMHO...).
We also have a console for Virtual DJ which includes a sound card and generally makes the software usable like DJ CD players. It's very nice, IIRC we paid 200 Euro for the console including the software but it's much cheaper now, I think 100 Euro or something. Together with an USB 2.0 harddisk and a notebook you're set.
Ah, and some other important advises: Have fun ! Don't let others stress you. Especially don't listen to song requests from annoying guests, you'll see that the dance floor will be empty when you play that damn song and the annoying guest is nowhere to be seen. And remember that a DJ creates trends, if you only play the songs on the current top 100 you'll probably bore your guests...
Haven't you heard that there will be a Sam & Max game after all? Best of all, it isn't being made by Lucasarts, but it is being made by the people who were on Lucasarts' "Freelance Police" project.
Ah yes, I forgot... still, I think it's a shame to dump an almost finished game (I mean the one developed by LucasArts), especially in this case: back in the days, LucasArts was famous for doing the best adventures. If I didn't miss a thing all they're doing nowadays is producing Star Wars game after Star Wars game... how original. (Yes, I know it makes them a lot of money, but I think it's a bit risky to rely on just one franchise, especially since they proved that can do excellent different games as well)
Monkey Island II is the game I play the most. I normally play through at least one Monkey Island game every year, I just love the humor (I like the first two parts the most but enjoy III and IV as well).
Maniac Mansion II: Day of the Tentacle is also one of those games I replay quite often. Like Monkey Island, the humor is just great.
Too bad Sam and Max II was cancelled and that the gaming industry doesn't produce good adventures (especially humorous adventures) any more... at least I haven't heard of any.
The EU asked Microsoft to release documentation of their protocols. What MS offers is to license their source to people already using MS products.
But that's not what the EU asked for or what the EU wants.
Even worse, if MS licensed their source to a competitor and that competitor produces a product using some of the protocols used in Windows, MS could sue them for copyright violation.
But it's a clever idea of MS nonetheless, IMHO. Luckily the EU didn't fall for it.
There exists DOS 3.31 which has all the smallness of DOS 3.3 with the benefit of FAT32 support. I used it for a while, along with QEMM for memory management.
I'm pretty sure you're mixing something up :-) FAT32 got introduced in Win95B. You probably mean FAT16 with large cluster support.
I so agree with you ! I have to code an Asterisk application, and for more than two month I'm trying to work my way through the Asterisk code to understand how Asterisk works internally.
The design is not bad per se, but I find the code is very bad and frustrating in many ways:
Don't get me wrong, I think Asterisk is an incredible piece of software and it works quite reliable. But I think the whole code should refactored, cleaned up and documented. E.g. almost every channel driver should get its own directory and be splitted into several files. Likewise all other big files that exceed say 100kB should be splitted (I counted 13...).
By contrast, Asterisk is often used together with SER/OpenSER. Now look at that code and see the difference ! It's not the most beautiful code I've seen and it could use a bit more documentation as well, but the code is splitted into nice, consumable pieces and is documented all over the place. It's easy to work your way through it and work with it.
You probably mean "One cuts, the other takes the first piece" ?
Here's a small one:
Each character represents a different digit (the dots are just to preserve the formatting). No two characters represent the same digit. Happy solving :-)
I know this may sound very "low-tech" to people who are used to IDE's but at least I can guarantee that my environment will always behave like I want (something I can't say about the Visual Studio .NET I'm forced to use in one project) and that I can use this setup for all programming languages that I've ever worked with (yes, even C#). I'm a believer in "adapt your tools to your needs, don't adapt to your tools".
Oh, BTW, I came from the IDE word (Topspeed Modula/2, Turbo BASIC, Turbo/Borland Pascal) and while I think they do make your life easier in some areas of your work I today also think they hide too much stuff from you and don't allow to work around problems (like VS.NET is not able to compile dependant projects into the same directory: you can't work around that, you have to alter/reorganize your projects; that hit us in a stage of a project when we really had no time at hand for unnecessary stuff like that).
We use SubVersion at our company for well over two years now, and since then I've been subscribed to the SubVersion user and developer mailing lists.
I find the SubVersion project a very interesting project. What really makes this project shine is the development quality. By this I mean:
I've seen a few OpenSource projects by now, even was co-leader of a very small, now long abandoned project and thus am really impressed by the way development is done in the SubVersion project.
I really, really wish that I'll have the opportunity to work on a commercial project that comes halfway to the code quality of the SubVersion project. I'm a professional programmer for just about four years now but have already worked on some big industrial projects (industrial robots, lasers). Still I have yet to see a commercial development project where not some really dumb programmers can constantly screw the project, check code in that doesn't compile, doesn't follow the coding style or is simply of low quality. I see code that almost no OpenSource project would accept on a daily basis. And this code is produced by people that are highly paid and sometimes have years of experience (but still should visit a "Coding 101" course !).
Very often I think, "Now if this were an OpenSource project that code would have been rejected and the programmer would have been forced to correct it and do better next time." Unfortunately this will stay a dream, and thus I fear I'll never see a commercial project with code quality that rivals that of SubVersion.
*yawn* The same old "I-didn't-pay-attention-at-school" physics questions related to the moon.
Now, let's look at these...
1: The moon's surface dust which was now blown away when the craft was landing.
Uhm, yes, there was dust (of course !), and it was blown away (of course !). I don't know what you want to say with this one. I guess you propably mean the one were people say dust was raised, why is there none on the space crafts feet. Simply because there is no atmosphere, which is why the dust gets blow aways from the craft in a nice flat parable and can't swirl around like it can on earth where we have a gas atmosphere.
2: Both sides of the American flag were bright! This is impossible since we all know that in an environment lit on one side, the other most have a shadow.
Haven't seen this one. But what about light reflecting on the space craft ?
3: The orientation of the astronaut's shadow suggested a different light source other than the sun!
Haven't seen this one either... see number 2.
4: The American flag was shown to be being blown by some wind...yet we know that the moon has NO wind!
Since there is no atmosphere there is almost no damping (I'm no native english speaker, I hope it's the correct term). If you rattle on the flag it looks like blowing in the wind, and this effect last a lot longer than it does here one earth.
5: There were no stars in the moon's sky! Where did they go? Americans must have forgotten this one. Where do you stand on this?
You should go take some photography lessons. As noted a few times already, there is no atmosphere on moon. The sun's light isn't dimmed and the dust reflects the light as well (remember snow blindness). It's so bright on moon that the astronauts' helmets were propably the most expensive sunglasses (they used a gold coated visor, IIRC). In fact it's so bright on moon that the light reflected from the dust can illuminate earth on the night side considerably. So, if you take a picture on moon and adjust the camera to the brightness so that you can actually see features on the moon then the surrounding stars are just waaaaaaay too dim. Go to the dark side of the moon to see some stars.
Now if she also has exposure to BASIC her mind will be crippled for the rest of her life...
I really hope somebody donates this kid a Mac or Linux box...
The "Revolution" is so advanced that... it needs a computer to have access to a Wi-Fi network
I think misunderstood that: the Revolution has built-in WiFi and Nintendo is selling a WiFi router so PCs can access that WiFi net... they use their own WiFi network. This means if you buy a Revolution and have a DS, the DS can connect to the Revolution immediately without the need of buying a connector.
AFAIK they have their own WiFi net because of the special requirements a gaming device has.
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