So let me get this straight. Microsoft wants to make Xforms the standard. Everyone else wants something else to be the standard. But does it really matter which standard we choose as long as its an open one? And aren't all W3C standards open? So what's the problem? I say choose the better standard regardless of other factors.
In Oregon Trail The Dalles was the place where you got to control the raft going down the river. Everybody always chose that option. You were just dumb if you took the Barlow Toll Road. Looks like Google didn't crash into any rocks.
Why do people keep bringing this up? It's a logical fallacy. I understand that it seems to make sense that if more people use linux, as much as they use windows, it will be a bigger target and easier to hit.
However, this is simply not the case. Windows is a very homogenous system. Every win2k box is a win2k box. The only differences are slight differences in configuration.
Linux is heterogenous. I mean even if you take a distribution like fedora core 3. Every FC3 box has the same kernel. And if they are up to date they all have the same versions of stuff like glibc. A linux box is a collection of many small pieces of software. Windows is one giant blob of software. So maybe you find a hole in a particular version of openssh. Lots of linux boxes have openssh of varying versions. So you might be able to hit a bunch of them. But it is very difficult to target linux the way you target windows because the number of systems that are similar enough is very small, even if the whole world used it.
You would literally have to find a hole that is present in all 2.4 an 2.6 kernels regardless of patches applied in order to get enough of the linux boxen. And some people still use 2.2. 2.0?
Games like WoW are not designed to be artistic masterpieces of gaming wonder. They are designed with one thing in mind. Get you hooked, forever, so they can keep collecting your monthly fee.
Look at the game mechanic. It's a chat room with fancy graphics, you IRC people know how addictive IRC is already. Next, the game has no difficulty factor. You just click on things, they die, and numbers go up. Quick, easy, repeatable gratification. Combine it with humour and the ability to customize digital thingies, mostly the acquisition of equipment. The model is one which rewards not skill or intelligence, but rewards people playing for longer periods of time. Whoever plays more gets more. To get ahead you've got to keep playing.
I've been saying this for a long long time. Just read my blog or slashdot journal and you'll see it there. But, um, you guys keep playing and keep playing. You know it's true, so um, why? My prediction is that after we get rid of cigarettes and all the other illegal substances and things MMOs will be next on the list. Don't you have anything better to do with your life other than click on pictures of monsters and increment numbers in a database far away?
Let's say this. I drive to delaware and buy some fancy electronics. I pay no sales tax because the store is in Delaware. See, its not really me who pays the sales tax. It's the store that pays the sales tax. The store just charges me extra so they have the money to pay that tax, and so they can account for it.
Now, even though I live in a state with a lot of sales tax, they don't charge me if I buy stuff from a store in Delaware. So lets say we have an online store in a state with 6% sales tax. That store should have to pay the 6% sales tax whether its sales are online or offline. If they want to charge online customers that 6% they are free to do so. So an online store in delaware wouldn't have to do anything.
You could even take it a step further. See, me driving to delaware and buying something is completely an issue for the state of Delaware. But driving those goods over state borders could be interpreted as a federal issue because its interstate commerce. Me buying goods online from any store that resides in a different state or country is absolutely a federal issue. There is no federal sales tax. Therefore, we don't have to pay anything. Unless you buy something online from a store in the same state as which you reside. In that case the place you bought stuff from should pay the state the appropriate tax and charge that to you if they so desire. In fact, there are many setups like this already. For example if you buy legos online or via catalog from the state of CT you have to pay tax. But if you buy them from anywhere else, it's tax free.
This is a simple problem. Think about it, whatever google wants to do or plans in the future, Wikipedia is obviously against any sort of evil like this. All they have to do is make sufficient backups of the pedia and be careful not so sign anything away in the fine print of any contracts. Then if google turns evil wikipedia can sue, or just bring the pedia back up on some other hosting. Wikipedia wont die unless wikipedia turns evil.
Definitely. As a rule if something is crazy and far out like this don't believe it unless either snopes, randi or a humongous pile of scientists also agree. Randi is usually a very very good thermometer for detecting the temperature of bullshit.
Well, you could genetically engineer the trees to be pretty much any color you would like. And then even for them to change into any other color in the fall.
The real trick would be to make is to that the leaves DO fall off, or at least go away. Maybe they stay on the tree but get so brittle that they turn to dust and float away. Like disintegrating. Or maybe that grass that stops growing at 2" can have a gene that makes it eat the leaves.
Even crazier. Have the leaves disintegrate into a pile of dirt, fertilizer and grass seeds for a type of grass that only grows 2".
Their proposal of leaves don't fall off is definitely defying logic. But if you get creative there are other possibilities.
Yes, it is annoying when drivers or dev kits are built for very specific distros. For this I have found a semi-decent solution. Setup a computer with usermode linux or vmware, etc. For each thing you need a specific distro for, install that distro on this box. So for your case, you would make a standard print server with the distro the driver wants. Then all your other computers can use it as a normal perfectly working print server. Hooray.
This is a problem if you only have one computer since you probably don't want to run usermode linux on it.
If the most popular OSes out there are taking care of HW at the high level, why haven't BIOS makers taken advantage of this to reduce their workload?
Because if you buy a motherboard and the BIOS on it makes it so that the computer will only work with Windows XP, server 2k3 and linux kernel 2.4+ people will be pissed. Some people might still want to run DOS, OS/2, Windows 95/98, kernel 2.2, or some other old busted operating system. It's there for that reason. With a linux bios your computer can pretty much only run Linux. Which is fine if that's all you want to run.
Oh, and BIOS makers don't have more workload. They've pretty much mastered making that part of the BIOS. They just have to slightly modify their BIOSes for each motherboard that comes out and update them to deal with the newest chips.
Gentoo is by far the best distro for gaming. I've used just about every major distro there is. Gentoo is the only one where I could reliably make games work. I've got nvidia drivers, alsa, the doom3 demo, emulators. Heck, I've got Mechwarrior 2 running in DOSbox on this thing. It didn't work when I tried it on fedora.
hi everyone, sorry my site has been down for the past day or so. i goofed and put some stuff up on my blog that's not supposed to be there. nothing serious and they didn't ask me to take anything down (even the stuff where i'm critical about the company). i'm learning that google is understandably careful about disclosing sensitive information, even vague financial-related things. the quickest way for me to fix the situation at the time was to take it all down. now i'm back up. just so you know, google was pretty cool about all this. thanks for and sorry for the frenzy of speculation.
Apparently this wasn't an issue of someone talking about their life at google, or their day-to-day tirals and tribulations on the job. This was someone releasing sensitive NDA information onto the net. While I don't like NDAs as much as the next guy its a pretty obvious breach of contract and an OK reason for firing. For everyone getting ready to start hating the last giant non-evil corp left, you're going to have to wait a few more weeks.
Have you ever used a completely unpatched windows xp? its fast and stable as hell. It's just full of a zillion security holes. Worse than swiss cheese. If you take it and add all the patches all the way up to the very latest hotfixes, you will notice its slow as hell. That's sans-spyware and additional software. The same thing goes for Office.
Take OSX. Why do people need the dual G5s? Well, its for that fancy gui and shite. If you take that away those boxes are fast as hell. They eat up their cycles with pretty pictures.
And look at Linux, the favorite of slashdot. If you run a "crummy" distro like fedora or lindows or something then your user experience is pretty average. If you use something l33ter like gentoo or debian your user experience will be phenomenal. But whatever performance you've gained by setting up a "real" system you lost all that time when you set the thing up, in the case of gentoo. Or in the case of debian you lost that time learning how to set the thing up.
I tried the new ubuntu linux and this is a very nice distro. It's just as good as a perfect clean debian system, but you don't have to waste time setting it up. The only problem is that all packages that I saw are built for 386. So you're not going to get the most out of your cpu.
If you want your cycles back then run linux without X or run netbsd or something. No matter what you choose, you're going to lose time somewhere. My suggestion is to spend the time to build gentoo, then image a bunch of machines. You get your time back and your cycles, as long as you have multiple machines of similar hardware.
Ok, sure, so the openoffice and the abiword don't open the MS file formats perfectly.
But I can interoprate, GNU screen, netcat, mplayer, grep and the apple// screensaver, xosd, and aalib quake to do crazy shite in *nix. In windows the programs don't talk to each other. In *nix things that were never meant to go together can talk quite nicely through the pipes and stdin/stdout. In windows your lucky if you can get your instant messenger to talk to notepad.
Some of those thingies running embedded Linux might do the trick. Just attach it to the car's computer via USB or serial cable. It has its own LCD controller and can run embedded X windows even. Then writing the software is relatively simple.
Take some currency, put it in an envelope and mail it. I mean, those Nigerian scammers have some way of getting money out of your bank account. I'm sure it must be easy if you try do it legitimately.
Like most studies this one only provides one possible interpretation of the data collected. Another possible interpretation of this information is that students think the media is evil and manipulative, like we do. And they are naieve enough to think that the government interfering with this will make the media better. When I was in high school whenever I saw a problem my answer was always "the government should step in and do X". Only later did I realize how stupid this was. I know many others who had similar thought patterns.
I also greatly desire a laptop without a touchpad. I hate the damn things, they're basically useless to me. The nub is better, but not perfect either. If you're going to have a built-in pointing device it should be like back in the day when there was a trackball in the laptop. Or on one really old 486 laptop I remember it had a trackball that snapped onto the side of it. Or even better, do like the sony U101 has the gamepad style grips. Tablet pcs of course have a stylus. Basically if you aren't going to have a useful pointing device, don't have one at all and I'll plug something in every time.
Since you are doing this in high school, and want it cross platform, it obviously doesn't have to be a high performance 3D super game of awesome. So make it in java.
The design pattern for most simple java games is model view controller. You create an object oriented game model with map, player, item classes etc. Then you create a view, or the gui that looks at this game model and translates the data into graphics or text on the screen. Then the controller portion interprets player input and modifies the game model accordingly.
This is a very good pattern to follow for games, especially for research projects. This is because the game itself usually isn't the research, but some underlying CS principle or algorithm. And this makes very simple cross platform games to which you can attach or embed your real research very easily.
You can also follow this same approach with python, or ruby or even C++. Python might even be a better choice since it might beat java in performance and is used quite often in the game industry.
I actually think it might prove beneficial. It would corrall all the stupid users into Google's ranch. Google is good cowboys and can take car of all the cattle in the world.
The rest of us can roam the wild west as we please without having to worry about the sherriff. I think it will be good times, unless you're a cattle. But even then, better than going to the MS slaughterhouse.
As more people use RSS more people use RSS aggregators. Right now for example I can subscribe to gizmodo and engadget. But lets say I only want certain types of new from them, and not duplicate news. The way of the future is an aggregator which combines all your RSS feeds into a single news feed customized for you. This filter will also remove ads. It will probably be easier to remove ads from RSS than it is to filter spam e-mail due to the nature of the beast. And thus, putting ads in RSS is stupid. And if someone trys to put ads in there and keeps fiddling to get them through the filters, I'll unsubscribe from them. There's more than one blog of type X out there. There will always be at least one that's ad-free.
16 people with DSes sit around a revolution in one city and play on a team against 16 people sitting around a revolution with DSes in another city. a 16vs16 person game where everyone has two screens and a controller. Also the revolution hooks up to a tv to provide the "big screen" for the whole team to see.
And that's taking it to the extreme. If you just keep it simple with something like internet enabled smash brothers with a new innovative control scheme you've already struck gold.
Nintendo is making the video game hardware that is truly revolutionary by innovating the game interface. They started by inventing the first real gamepad (the plus) and now the're taking it a step further. The only problem is that they do not make software that takes full advantage of the potential of the platform. And the quantity of software that takes advantage is not enough. I think it is because they are very protective of their dev kits, unlike Sony and MS who are very open in this area.
Slashdot Mirror
So let me get this straight. Microsoft wants to make Xforms the standard. Everyone else wants something else to be the standard. But does it really matter which standard we choose as long as its an open one? And aren't all W3C standards open? So what's the problem? I say choose the better standard regardless of other factors.
Or is there something I'm missing here?
In Oregon Trail The Dalles was the place where you got to control the raft going down the river. Everybody always chose that option. You were just dumb if you took the Barlow Toll Road. Looks like Google didn't crash into any rocks.
Why do people keep bringing this up? It's a logical fallacy. I understand that it seems to make sense that if more people use linux, as much as they use windows, it will be a bigger target and easier to hit.
However, this is simply not the case. Windows is a very homogenous system. Every win2k box is a win2k box. The only differences are slight differences in configuration.
Linux is heterogenous. I mean even if you take a distribution like fedora core 3. Every FC3 box has the same kernel. And if they are up to date they all have the same versions of stuff like glibc. A linux box is a collection of many small pieces of software. Windows is one giant blob of software. So maybe you find a hole in a particular version of openssh. Lots of linux boxes have openssh of varying versions. So you might be able to hit a bunch of them. But it is very difficult to target linux the way you target windows because the number of systems that are similar enough is very small, even if the whole world used it.
You would literally have to find a hole that is present in all 2.4 an 2.6 kernels regardless of patches applied in order to get enough of the linux boxen. And some people still use 2.2. 2.0?
Games like WoW are not designed to be artistic masterpieces of gaming wonder. They are designed with one thing in mind. Get you hooked, forever, so they can keep collecting your monthly fee.
Look at the game mechanic. It's a chat room with fancy graphics, you IRC people know how addictive IRC is already. Next, the game has no difficulty factor. You just click on things, they die, and numbers go up. Quick, easy, repeatable gratification. Combine it with humour and the ability to customize digital thingies, mostly the acquisition of equipment. The model is one which rewards not skill or intelligence, but rewards people playing for longer periods of time. Whoever plays more gets more. To get ahead you've got to keep playing.
I've been saying this for a long long time. Just read my blog or slashdot journal and you'll see it there. But, um, you guys keep playing and keep playing. You know it's true, so um, why? My prediction is that after we get rid of cigarettes and all the other illegal substances and things MMOs will be next on the list. Don't you have anything better to do with your life other than click on pictures of monsters and increment numbers in a database far away?
Let's say this. I drive to delaware and buy some fancy electronics. I pay no sales tax because the store is in Delaware. See, its not really me who pays the sales tax. It's the store that pays the sales tax. The store just charges me extra so they have the money to pay that tax, and so they can account for it.
Now, even though I live in a state with a lot of sales tax, they don't charge me if I buy stuff from a store in Delaware. So lets say we have an online store in a state with 6% sales tax. That store should have to pay the 6% sales tax whether its sales are online or offline. If they want to charge online customers that 6% they are free to do so. So an online store in delaware wouldn't have to do anything.
You could even take it a step further. See, me driving to delaware and buying something is completely an issue for the state of Delaware. But driving those goods over state borders could be interpreted as a federal issue because its interstate commerce. Me buying goods online from any store that resides in a different state or country is absolutely a federal issue. There is no federal sales tax. Therefore, we don't have to pay anything. Unless you buy something online from a store in the same state as which you reside. In that case the place you bought stuff from should pay the state the appropriate tax and charge that to you if they so desire. In fact, there are many setups like this already. For example if you buy legos online or via catalog from the state of CT you have to pay tax. But if you buy them from anywhere else, it's tax free.
And that, is how it should/does work.
This is a simple problem. Think about it, whatever google wants to do or plans in the future, Wikipedia is obviously against any sort of evil like this. All they have to do is make sufficient backups of the pedia and be careful not so sign anything away in the fine print of any contracts. Then if google turns evil wikipedia can sue, or just bring the pedia back up on some other hosting. Wikipedia wont die unless wikipedia turns evil.
not AT&aT
Their armor is too strong for blasters. Use your harpoons and tow cables!
Definitely. As a rule if something is crazy and far out like this don't believe it unless either snopes, randi or a humongous pile of scientists also agree. Randi is usually a very very good thermometer for detecting the temperature of bullshit.
Well, you could genetically engineer the trees to be pretty much any color you would like. And then even for them to change into any other color in the fall.
The real trick would be to make is to that the leaves DO fall off, or at least go away. Maybe they stay on the tree but get so brittle that they turn to dust and float away. Like disintegrating. Or maybe that grass that stops growing at 2" can have a gene that makes it eat the leaves.
Even crazier. Have the leaves disintegrate into a pile of dirt, fertilizer and grass seeds for a type of grass that only grows 2".
Their proposal of leaves don't fall off is definitely defying logic. But if you get creative there are other possibilities.
Yes, it is annoying when drivers or dev kits are built for very specific distros. For this I have found a semi-decent solution. Setup a computer with usermode linux or vmware, etc. For each thing you need a specific distro for, install that distro on this box. So for your case, you would make a standard print server with the distro the driver wants. Then all your other computers can use it as a normal perfectly working print server. Hooray.
This is a problem if you only have one computer since you probably don't want to run usermode linux on it.
If the most popular OSes out there are taking care of HW at the high level, why haven't BIOS makers taken advantage of this to reduce their workload?
Because if you buy a motherboard and the BIOS on it makes it so that the computer will only work with Windows XP, server 2k3 and linux kernel 2.4+ people will be pissed. Some people might still want to run DOS, OS/2, Windows 95/98, kernel 2.2, or some other old busted operating system. It's there for that reason. With a linux bios your computer can pretty much only run Linux. Which is fine if that's all you want to run.
Oh, and BIOS makers don't have more workload. They've pretty much mastered making that part of the BIOS. They just have to slightly modify their BIOSes for each motherboard that comes out and update them to deal with the newest chips.
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If you look at the official developer list there seem to have been about 100+ developers ever. But so many people who aren't developers work on it.
grep -ri fuck /usr/src/linux
I just wouldn't be open source without inappropriate comments.
Gentoo is by far the best distro for gaming. I've used just about every major distro there is. Gentoo is the only one where I could reliably make games work. I've got nvidia drivers, alsa, the doom3 demo, emulators. Heck, I've got Mechwarrior 2 running in DOSbox on this thing. It didn't work when I tried it on fedora.
Apparently this wasn't an issue of someone talking about their life at google, or their day-to-day tirals and tribulations on the job. This was someone releasing sensitive NDA information onto the net. While I don't like NDAs as much as the next guy its a pretty obvious breach of contract and an OK reason for firing. For everyone getting ready to start hating the last giant non-evil corp left, you're going to have to wait a few more weeks.
Have you ever used a completely unpatched windows xp? its fast and stable as hell. It's just full of a zillion security holes. Worse than swiss cheese. If you take it and add all the patches all the way up to the very latest hotfixes, you will notice its slow as hell. That's sans-spyware and additional software. The same thing goes for Office.
Take OSX. Why do people need the dual G5s? Well, its for that fancy gui and shite. If you take that away those boxes are fast as hell. They eat up their cycles with pretty pictures.
And look at Linux, the favorite of slashdot. If you run a "crummy" distro like fedora or lindows or something then your user experience is pretty average. If you use something l33ter like gentoo or debian your user experience will be phenomenal. But whatever performance you've gained by setting up a "real" system you lost all that time when you set the thing up, in the case of gentoo. Or in the case of debian you lost that time learning how to set the thing up.
I tried the new ubuntu linux and this is a very nice distro. It's just as good as a perfect clean debian system, but you don't have to waste time setting it up. The only problem is that all packages that I saw are built for 386. So you're not going to get the most out of your cpu.
If you want your cycles back then run linux without X or run netbsd or something. No matter what you choose, you're going to lose time somewhere. My suggestion is to spend the time to build gentoo, then image a bunch of machines. You get your time back and your cycles, as long as you have multiple machines of similar hardware.
Ok, sure, so the openoffice and the abiword don't open the MS file formats perfectly.
But I can interoprate, GNU screen, netcat, mplayer, grep and the apple// screensaver, xosd, and aalib quake to do crazy shite in *nix. In windows the programs don't talk to each other. In *nix things that were never meant to go together can talk quite nicely through the pipes and stdin/stdout. In windows your lucky if you can get your instant messenger to talk to notepad.
http://www.arcom.com/pc104-xscale-viper.htm
Some of those thingies running embedded Linux might do the trick. Just attach it to the car's computer via USB or serial cable. It has its own LCD controller and can run embedded X windows even. Then writing the software is relatively simple.
Take some currency, put it in an envelope and mail it. I mean, those Nigerian scammers have some way of getting money out of your bank account. I'm sure it must be easy if you try do it legitimately.
Like most studies this one only provides one possible interpretation of the data collected. Another possible interpretation of this information is that students think the media is evil and manipulative, like we do. And they are naieve enough to think that the government interfering with this will make the media better. When I was in high school whenever I saw a problem my answer was always "the government should step in and do X". Only later did I realize how stupid this was. I know many others who had similar thought patterns.
I also greatly desire a laptop without a touchpad. I hate the damn things, they're basically useless to me. The nub is better, but not perfect either. If you're going to have a built-in pointing device it should be like back in the day when there was a trackball in the laptop. Or on one really old 486 laptop I remember it had a trackball that snapped onto the side of it. Or even better, do like the sony U101 has the gamepad style grips. Tablet pcs of course have a stylus. Basically if you aren't going to have a useful pointing device, don't have one at all and I'll plug something in every time.
Since you are doing this in high school, and want it cross platform, it obviously doesn't have to be a high performance 3D super game of awesome. So make it in java.
The design pattern for most simple java games is model view controller. You create an object oriented game model with map, player, item classes etc. Then you create a view, or the gui that looks at this game model and translates the data into graphics or text on the screen. Then the controller portion interprets player input and modifies the game model accordingly.
This is a very good pattern to follow for games, especially for research projects. This is because the game itself usually isn't the research, but some underlying CS principle or algorithm. And this makes very simple cross platform games to which you can attach or embed your real research very easily.
You can also follow this same approach with python, or ruby or even C++. Python might even be a better choice since it might beat java in performance and is used quite often in the game industry.
I actually think it might prove beneficial. It would corrall all the stupid users into Google's ranch. Google is good cowboys and can take car of all the cattle in the world.
The rest of us can roam the wild west as we please without having to worry about the sherriff. I think it will be good times, unless you're a cattle. But even then, better than going to the MS slaughterhouse.
As more people use RSS more people use RSS aggregators. Right now for example I can subscribe to gizmodo and engadget. But lets say I only want certain types of new from them, and not duplicate news. The way of the future is an aggregator which combines all your RSS feeds into a single news feed customized for you. This filter will also remove ads. It will probably be easier to remove ads from RSS than it is to filter spam e-mail due to the nature of the beast. And thus, putting ads in RSS is stupid. And if someone trys to put ads in there and keeps fiddling to get them through the filters, I'll unsubscribe from them. There's more than one blog of type X out there. There will always be at least one that's ad-free.
I've said it before, but I'll say it again. Here's what my imagination "predicts" about the revolution.
Revolution = wireless DS hub + broadband ethernet.
16 people with DSes sit around a revolution in one city and play on a team against 16 people sitting around a revolution with DSes in another city. a 16vs16 person game where everyone has two screens and a controller. Also the revolution hooks up to a tv to provide the "big screen" for the whole team to see.
And that's taking it to the extreme. If you just keep it simple with something like internet enabled smash brothers with a new innovative control scheme you've already struck gold.
Nintendo is making the video game hardware that is truly revolutionary by innovating the game interface. They started by inventing the first real gamepad (the plus) and now the're taking it a step further. The only problem is that they do not make software that takes full advantage of the potential of the platform. And the quantity of software that takes advantage is not enough. I think it is because they are very protective of their dev kits, unlike Sony and MS who are very open in this area.