On a related note, the Good counterpoint to J.T.'s Evil, Gamerdad, just recovered from a heart attack and quadruple heart bypass surgery. GamerDad is a videogame advocate in a family context, who gets into talk shows too. For you nasty people suggesting the heart attack is due to his lifestyle, he debunks that here.
You can help the forces of Good and send a penny his way to help with his medical fees there.
The network throughput can cause latencies in multimedia playback. (he shows the CPU going to ~40% "while copying a large file" O_O) So the multimedia scheduler (MMCSS) throttles network throughput. By default, this shouldn't be visible on 100Mbit connections. It *is* visible on gigabit connections, by throttling down 15% of max bandwidth.
I've never seen anybody use max Gigabit bandwidth, but I only observe casual-moderate usage.
HOWEVER, there's a bug that makes throttling much worse when there are multiple NICs (just present or in use isn't specified). I suppose this is common today, with people having both wired and wireless connections. He shows us a nice graph of network usage going from 20% to 6% upon starting a multimedia application, on a 1gb connection on a laptop with 3 NICs.
The hard-coded throttling values were shortsighted, established for slower single-cpu, 100Mbit systems.
People are all chiming in with examples of old PCs doing the same job without throttling. Without the scheduler bug, Vista should only show problems with heavy Gigabit throughputs. Anybody try that out? I'm especially curious as Russinovitch only got to 20% usage on a Gigabit connection. I don't mean any judgment either way.
This should be the lesson that companies learn from the IT industry (but won't): Too much lock-in locks the company in as well, making necessary changes and corrections impossible. You mean like Microsoft with Word, and keeping Wordperfect compatibility in OOXML?
Actually no, frostbite isn't an issue. In vacuum, there is no heat transfer through convection. The only way to lose heat is through thermal radiation.
Convection is what will freeze you when you fall in ice-cold water. Radiation is what will cool the beer you put in the reflective satellite dish at night.
In fact, human space modules (such as the ISS, but the ISS has to cope with atmospheric drag too, IIRC), have trouble dealing with excess heat, and have to use large surfaces to maximize radiation output
MS didn't reinvent Bittorrent. They built something better: Avalanche. It's more efficient and (I know this phrase is weird to use around MS, but...) more secure. Read the research papers (they touch on BT, its advantages and disadvantages). I imagine most of this stuff is on its way into standard BT, if it hasn't been worked in already. "Something better"? I haven't followed Avalanch, but for I suppose it must've much evolved since it first, much derided by Bram Cohen, announcement?
The W3C would become irrelevant quickly if they stopped tweaking the language. That's the essence of where the W3C went wrong: it's supposed to be a technical group existing solely to promote better standards.
If they promote standards just to justify their existence, then they've fallen for the Dark Side of Committees, and should just be brought out back and shot in the head.
In our first year of engineering school (in France. Call it college, for the USA), our math teacher only did multiple choice exams. I was always floored by how accurate the results of those exams were. Of course, all answers counted, and guesses were punished.
The rumor was that he had done his thesis on the subject of multiple choice exams. Sadly, he is retired now, and newer students no longer benefit from his type of quick and accurate exams.
Re:Freedom of GPL and BSD license compared
on
GPLv2 Vs. GPLv3
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· Score: 3, Informative
I still do not understand if I am forced to GPL my software for USING a GPLed library.
Yes, you are forced to, but only if the library is GPL, not LGPL. In that way, the GPL is admittedly a political license. Its purpose is to propagate this idea of freedom, and libraries are great vectors for that.
It happens that you'll hit the dilemma of choosing between a good quality proprietary library (you'll have to pay to use it), a good quality GPL library (you'll have to make your code GPL too, to use it), and a lesser quality BSD library (you can just use it). Yeah, I said lesser quality for the BSD, otherwise there's no dilemma, is there?:)
When somebody releases a library under the GPL (not the LGPL), it is to be used exclusively in GPL software. It is a tit-for-tat approach: you can use my GPL library if you subscribe to the GPL idea. If you don't agree, find another library.
Yup, it's mingling technical and political aspects, but you know what they say: if you don't do politics, politics do you;)
For LGPL libraries, no, you can keep your software under whichever license you want, as long as changes to the library itself are propagated GPL-style.
Freedom of GPL and BSD license compared
on
GPLv2 Vs. GPLv3
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Many people complain about GPL being less Free than the BSD license. They miss the point. GPL wants to ensure that all modification to the code remains free. BSD allows you to do anything to the code, including making it proprietary. Remember Windows' TCP/IP stack used to behave identically to BSD's, hinting to same underlying code. So if you realease code version n under the BSD license, sure, users of n can do whatever they god damn want. But it does not ensure anything for users n+1. GPL, on the other hand, ensures that users of n+1 enjoy exactly the same liberty. So, while BSD users have more immediate liberty, users of GPL have more long-term (in the sense of derived works) liberty. Ask HP-UX, AIX, Irix, and Solaris users if they enjoyed the same liberty the BSD gave to HP, IBM, Silicon Graphics, and Sun. Ask Linux users if they enjoy the same liberties as the kernel hackers have. So which license gives more liberty? Well, in the short-term, BSD. On the long term, GPL.
As a developer providing code, selecting the license depends on where you want it to go. Do you want it to spread as far and wide as possible, at the expense of the original code? Go BSD. Do you want the original code to enjoy improvements brought from other people, at the expense of how far it'll spread? GPL. As a developer using free code, sure, BSD is so much easier to use. You can use it at work on your proprietary product that feeds your kids! It's harder to make a business model around GPL code, though (yes, I know there are many examples out there, but they still remain the [loudly publicized] exception to the rule).
I really like the example of ODE (a game physics library). It is licensed under LGPL and BSD, but really, it seems most people use it as BSD. I know it's been used by Crytek (they contributed changes back), and I've heard it's been ported to the PS2, XBOX, and PS3. This is something that only the BSD license allowed, because the NDA of the devkits for those consoles implicitly prohibits the use of LGPL or GPL code in games, as the changes contributed back to the GPL/LGPL code will give hints of what's behind the NDA, and furthermore the developers cannot provide you with an object file that you can link with the GPL/LGPL code.
There are two sides of the coin, here: the contributors to the mainstream ODE library are happy to know their work is used in awesome places like those consoles. However, the mainstream code is none the wiser: those changes have never made it back to the main tree.
So what do you want? Your code to be improved upon by the community, or thrown into the wind, never to see those improvements come back, but knowing it went much farther than it ever could if you tied it down with the GPL?
It really is two different things, and saying that one is more restrictive than the other is missing the point.
I use Cygwin daily at work, as I cannot dual-boot to Linux. It is more than enough for my work, but for the general public, it's packaging system is sadly lacking in bells and whistles, and the available library is way short of your objective.
so, in essence, you keep with Suse because of "technical" aspects, while many others refuse it for matters of principle.
I'm not judging anything here, and think your priorities are perfectly valid (although I personally disagree).
I just wanted to point this out as a perfect example of a schism in the open-source community: those who walk down a path because it is technically best (say, the Torvalds camp), and those who avoid that path because it is philosophically tainted (say, the Stallman camp).
I find this interesting. I just hope it doesn't break the OSS community up.
[troll]What you want to play is Supreme Commander[/troll]
In fact, all your requests are implemented in Supreme Commander, so I suppose you already played it and that's where your requests come from.
Now I wasn't really meaning to troll. Starcraft and SupCom don't entirely overlap. As Better People have already stated before me, Starcraft is Tactical (ie, you'll spend a lot of time micromanaging and handling that specific skirmish if you want to win), whereas SupCom is Strategic (ie, think of the overall strategy, and don't bother handling your specific units in a skirmish). I happen to agree on this, mostly, and it makes me laugh softly when people claim Starcraft is "strategic".
I believe many of those pet peeves about the Starcraft UI are going to be addressed in SC2. This is because SC1 was built for machines with much tighter hardware resources (256 colors, for chrissakes!), and a lot of compromises had to be done to handle everything within those resources. Sure, Total Annihilation came out at the same period and didn't have those same limitations, but it required better hardware if you wanted to scale up.
Of course, I understand that some limitations are design decisions, like the max 12-unit groups (argh!) was there to limit manageable army size. While it might fulfill the primary goal for average players, the secondary effect will be that Pro players will be measured on how they can overcome those limitations. Whether that was a good design decision or not is debatable, depending on the playing level of the person you're talking with;p On this point, I fully expect Blizzard to think heavily about it, and the final decision to be carefully balanced. But for me, that Blizzard claims the game to be oriented towards competitive play is worrying, because it'll tip those design decisions away from what I, as a non-competitive player, would prefer.
LittleBigPlanet vs LittleBigAdventure?
on
LittleBigInterview
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I wonder if the name has anything to do with the old game Little Big Adventure (1994! I'm old!).
That was a great, cute, fun adventure game, and Activision had the bright idea of renaming it "Relentless" for the USA.
Inductive coupling is only the first step of the idea, because of a couple of important problems:
- you can't select who receives the power: your laptop will recharge, but your engagement ring will burn your finger off.
- most of the emitted power will dissipate into thin air.
Of course, this product improves on the idea by powering only the area closest to the device to recharge.
Dammit, I had this nice article explaining some promising research in the field, but I'm unable to find it again... The Wikipedia page on wireless energy transfer is a good start, as usual.
So if you lie about something that isn't anyone's business regarding the behavior of two consenting adults, then it's an impeachable offense. On the other hand, if you lie about matters of improper squandering of our nation's lives and treasure, you're just being persecuted for political gain?
Now I hate Bush as much as the next slashdotter, but I have to correct you: Bush hasn't lied under oath. Clinton admittedly did.
It's one thing to lie to our country in speeches and everything, it's another to do it in a court under oath. That's a thin distinction Clinton missed, and that Bush has been careful (or just lucky) about.
I personally find it utterly incredible that they even ask
That's exactly how social engineering works. Ask something incredible enough that people will think you've got a really good reason and have got the right authorizations to ask it in the first place!
It's exactly like walking out of the office purposefully with that very expensive projector. As long as it looks like you know what you're doing, people won't think twice.
Well, the least we can say is that they're not being half-assed in their accusations. They're tying everything up in a nice coherent package of victimization.
While I am seduced by the idea, I think it's risky to categorize people as extroverts and introverts and declare that introverts are doomed to suck at sales.
Following your logic, I completely qualify as introvert. I don't think that precludes me from going into sales (i'm a hard techie right now), and I am interested in broadening my experience.
Let's take an example of selling I had to do: myself. Writing my CV and cover letter was like scratching my nails on a blackboard, at first. I once spent a whole sleepless night on a cover letter, trying to find the right words that would both appeal to the target without making me vomit in disgust.
It got better, though, as I understood that this was what my correspondents expected, that they of course took it all with a grain of salt and wouldn't hold it against me. Adding a layer of varnish is important in dealing with people who don't have the same background and interests as you.
My point is: sure, you can be an introvert who is at first uncomfortable in an extrovert's position, but you're a human being, and you will learn and evolve.
Slashdot Mirror
Then how come a vegas roach trap is effective, even through it's based on coffee grounds?
Inquiring minds want to know!
Woops, missed that part. Sorry about that.
Your high ID gives a hint on the origin of your cluelessness, young one.
You have much to learn.
To summarise: when referring to MIT, "hacks" are pranks, often played on rival universities, usually Caltech or Harvard.
On a related note, the Good counterpoint to J.T.'s Evil, Gamerdad, just recovered from a heart attack and quadruple heart bypass surgery. GamerDad is a videogame advocate in a family context, who gets into talk shows too. For you nasty people suggesting the heart attack is due to his lifestyle, he debunks that here.
You can help the forces of Good and send a penny his way to help with his medical fees there.
Actually, in this context I think it is more appropriate to call them "Acts of god".
Summary notes in italic. Comments in normal text.
The network throughput can cause latencies in multimedia playback. (he shows the CPU going to ~40% "while copying a large file" O_O) So the multimedia scheduler (MMCSS) throttles network throughput. By default, this shouldn't be visible on 100Mbit connections. It *is* visible on gigabit connections, by throttling down 15% of max bandwidth.
I've never seen anybody use max Gigabit bandwidth, but I only observe casual-moderate usage.
HOWEVER, there's a bug that makes throttling much worse when there are multiple NICs (just present or in use isn't specified). I suppose this is common today, with people having both wired and wireless connections.
He shows us a nice graph of network usage going from 20% to 6% upon starting a multimedia application, on a 1gb connection on a laptop with 3 NICs.
The hard-coded throttling values were shortsighted, established for slower single-cpu, 100Mbit systems.
People are all chiming in with examples of old PCs doing the same job without throttling. Without the scheduler bug, Vista should only show problems with heavy Gigabit throughputs. Anybody try that out? I'm especially curious as Russinovitch only got to 20% usage on a Gigabit connection. I don't mean any judgment either way.
and how this compare to OpenID ? (See also OpenID Enabled for those interested in using it)
Actually no, frostbite isn't an issue. In vacuum, there is no heat transfer through convection. The only way to lose heat is through thermal radiation.
Convection is what will freeze you when you fall in ice-cold water.
Radiation is what will cool the beer you put in the reflective satellite dish at night.
In fact, human space modules (such as the ISS, but the ISS has to cope with atmospheric drag too, IIRC), have trouble dealing with excess heat, and have to use large surfaces to maximize radiation output
If they promote standards just to justify their existence, then they've fallen for the Dark Side of Committees, and should just be brought out back and shot in the head.
In our first year of engineering school (in France. Call it college, for the USA), our math teacher only did multiple choice exams. I was always floored by how accurate the results of those exams were. Of course, all answers counted, and guesses were punished.
The rumor was that he had done his thesis on the subject of multiple choice exams. Sadly, he is retired now, and newer students no longer benefit from his type of quick and accurate exams.
Hmm, your list could be a nice fit next to the Evil Overlord list.
Yes, you are forced to, but only if the library is GPL, not LGPL. In that way, the GPL is admittedly a political license. Its purpose is to propagate this idea of freedom, and libraries are great vectors for that.
It happens that you'll hit the dilemma of choosing between a good quality proprietary library (you'll have to pay to use it), a good quality GPL library (you'll have to make your code GPL too, to use it), and a lesser quality BSD library (you can just use it). Yeah, I said lesser quality for the BSD, otherwise there's no dilemma, is there?
When somebody releases a library under the GPL (not the LGPL), it is to be used exclusively in GPL software. It is a tit-for-tat approach: you can use my GPL library if you subscribe to the GPL idea. If you don't agree, find another library.
Yup, it's mingling technical and political aspects, but you know what they say: if you don't do politics, politics do you
For LGPL libraries, no, you can keep your software under whichever license you want, as long as changes to the library itself are propagated GPL-style.
Many people complain about GPL being less Free than the BSD license. They miss the point.
GPL wants to ensure that all modification to the code remains free. BSD allows you to do anything to the code, including making it proprietary. Remember Windows' TCP/IP stack used to behave identically to BSD's, hinting to same underlying code.
So if you realease code version n under the BSD license, sure, users of n can do whatever they god damn want. But it does not ensure anything for users n+1. GPL, on the other hand, ensures that users of n+1 enjoy exactly the same liberty. So, while BSD users have more immediate liberty, users of GPL have more long-term (in the sense of derived works) liberty.
Ask HP-UX, AIX, Irix, and Solaris users if they enjoyed the same liberty the BSD gave to HP, IBM, Silicon Graphics, and Sun. Ask Linux users if they enjoy the same liberties as the kernel hackers have.
So which license gives more liberty? Well, in the short-term, BSD. On the long term, GPL.
As a developer providing code, selecting the license depends on where you want it to go. Do you want it to spread as far and wide as possible, at the expense of the original code? Go BSD. Do you want the original code to enjoy improvements brought from other people, at the expense of how far it'll spread? GPL.
As a developer using free code, sure, BSD is so much easier to use. You can use it at work on your proprietary product that feeds your kids! It's harder to make a business model around GPL code, though (yes, I know there are many examples out there, but they still remain the [loudly publicized] exception to the rule).
I really like the example of ODE (a game physics library). It is licensed under LGPL and BSD, but really, it seems most people use it as BSD. I know it's been used by Crytek (they contributed changes back), and I've heard it's been ported to the PS2, XBOX, and PS3. This is something that only the BSD license allowed, because the NDA of the devkits for those consoles implicitly prohibits the use of LGPL or GPL code in games, as the changes contributed back to the GPL/LGPL code will give hints of what's behind the NDA, and furthermore the developers cannot provide you with an object file that you can link with the GPL/LGPL code.
There are two sides of the coin, here: the contributors to the mainstream ODE library are happy to know their work is used in awesome places like those consoles. However, the mainstream code is none the wiser: those changes have never made it back to the main tree.
So what do you want? Your code to be improved upon by the community, or thrown into the wind, never to see those improvements come back, but knowing it went much farther than it ever could if you tied it down with the GPL?
It really is two different things, and saying that one is more restrictive than the other is missing the point.
I use Cygwin daily at work, as I cannot dual-boot to Linux. It is more than enough for my work, but for the general public, it's packaging system is sadly lacking in bells and whistles, and the available library is way short of your objective.
Nevertheless, isn't it a good start?
so, in essence, you keep with Suse because of "technical" aspects, while many others refuse it for matters of principle.
I'm not judging anything here, and think your priorities are perfectly valid (although I personally disagree).
I just wanted to point this out as a perfect example of a schism in the open-source community: those who walk down a path because it is technically best (say, the Torvalds camp), and those who avoid that path because it is philosophically tainted (say, the Stallman camp).
I find this interesting. I just hope it doesn't break the OSS community up.
[troll]What you want to play is Supreme Commander[/troll]
;p On this point, I fully expect Blizzard to think heavily about it, and the final decision to be carefully balanced.
In fact, all your requests are implemented in Supreme Commander, so I suppose you already played it and that's where your requests come from.
Now I wasn't really meaning to troll. Starcraft and SupCom don't entirely overlap. As Better People have already stated before me, Starcraft is Tactical (ie, you'll spend a lot of time micromanaging and handling that specific skirmish if you want to win), whereas SupCom is Strategic (ie, think of the overall strategy, and don't bother handling your specific units in a skirmish). I happen to agree on this, mostly, and it makes me laugh softly when people claim Starcraft is "strategic".
I believe many of those pet peeves about the Starcraft UI are going to be addressed in SC2. This is because SC1 was built for machines with much tighter hardware resources (256 colors, for chrissakes!), and a lot of compromises had to be done to handle everything within those resources. Sure, Total Annihilation came out at the same period and didn't have those same limitations, but it required better hardware if you wanted to scale up.
Of course, I understand that some limitations are design decisions, like the max 12-unit groups (argh!) was there to limit manageable army size. While it might fulfill the primary goal for average players, the secondary effect will be that Pro players will be measured on how they can overcome those limitations. Whether that was a good design decision or not is debatable, depending on the playing level of the person you're talking with
But for me, that Blizzard claims the game to be oriented towards competitive play is worrying, because it'll tip those design decisions away from what I, as a non-competitive player, would prefer.
I wonder if the name has anything to do with the old game Little Big Adventure (1994! I'm old!).
That was a great, cute, fun adventure game, and Activision had the bright idea of renaming it "Relentless" for the USA.
Hm. Burn, burn, Activision!
Inductive coupling is only the first step of the idea, because of a couple of important problems:
- you can't select who receives the power: your laptop will recharge, but your engagement ring will burn your finger off.
- most of the emitted power will dissipate into thin air.
Of course, this product improves on the idea by powering only the area closest to the device to recharge.
Dammit, I had this nice article explaining some promising research in the field, but I'm unable to find it again...
The Wikipedia page on wireless energy transfer is a good start, as usual.
Now I hate Bush as much as the next slashdotter, but I have to correct you: Bush hasn't lied under oath. Clinton admittedly did.
It's one thing to lie to our country in speeches and everything, it's another to do it in a court under oath. That's a thin distinction Clinton missed, and that Bush has been careful (or just lucky) about.
That's exactly how social engineering works. Ask something incredible enough that people will think you've got a really good reason and have got the right authorizations to ask it in the first place!
It's exactly like walking out of the office purposefully with that very expensive projector. As long as it looks like you know what you're doing, people won't think twice.
Well, the least we can say is that they're not being half-assed in their accusations. They're tying everything up in a nice coherent package of victimization.
While I am seduced by the idea, I think it's risky to categorize people as extroverts and introverts and declare that introverts are doomed to suck at sales.
Following your logic, I completely qualify as introvert. I don't think that precludes me from going into sales (i'm a hard techie right now), and I am interested in broadening my experience.
Let's take an example of selling I had to do: myself. Writing my CV and cover letter was like scratching my nails on a blackboard, at first. I once spent a whole sleepless night on a cover letter, trying to find the right words that would both appeal to the target without making me vomit in disgust.
It got better, though, as I understood that this was what my correspondents expected, that they of course took it all with a grain of salt and wouldn't hold it against me. Adding a layer of varnish is important in dealing with people who don't have the same background and interests as you.
My point is: sure, you can be an introvert who is at first uncomfortable in an extrovert's position, but you're a human being, and you will learn and evolve.