You can't win with either java or mono(c#).. Maybe its time ffor python/perl/php/ruby.....
Well, with IronPython mono is Python. Alternatively, you can always use Jython and have Python being Java. The real benefit here is this: There's no need for constant updates to the pyGTK and pyGNOME libraries every time GTK of GNOME changes if you're using IronPython, because IronPython automatically gets the latest GTK# stack through mono - your bindings are always automatically up to date.
Of course, you can always go with Parrot if you want the completely new and different open source implementation of the concept. Parrot will run both Perl and Python happily, not sure about PHP and Ruby, but I imagine someting is in the works, and while it is a lot less complete than the others, it promises to do a lot more, and potentially do it notably faster than either Java or Mono/.NET
Plenty of options, and they all make some sense. Time to let OpenSource Darwinian practices see who survives in the long run - there are more baskets for these eggs, so there's no reason to panic.
Why bother with Helix when there are other freely-availble, open-source alternatives (e.g., mplayer, xine) that appear equally capable of supporting a variety of player formats?
Have you actually tried HelixPlayer, or the RealPlayer for Linux? They are, in fact, very nice, with simple clean minimalist interfaces using GTK. No ugly skinning, no bizarre file selection dialogs (just plain GTK file selection dialogs), no relying on keyboard shortcuts.
I like Mplayer, and I use it a lot, but HelixPlayer really is very nice, and I'm using it more and more. Don't knock it until you've tried it. Real seems to have turned a corner here and gone open source. HelixPlayer is a great open source project, and the RealPlayer based on it is not the intrusive email collecting mess that one used to associate with Real.
I know many here hate Real, and it's understandable given their previous efforts, but they do seem to have changed, and I think they're worthy of a second chance here... now if only they'd free up their codec...
So how much of that MSN percentage is coming from all the Internet Explorer users who automatically end up searching MSN whenever they mistype a web address etc.? Surely that's pushing the numbers up a little.
ITFacts.biz just gave results, with nothing on methodology (did they just count hits or what?)
found that an easy way to get him heated up was to suggest that something you need to know is "unmeasurable." The man was offended by the very idea.
Better not let him near any pure mathematics then. Mathematciains have determined that there are, in fact non-measurable sets - that is, sets that you can't actually measure. Sure, they're also non-computable and highly pathological, but their existence can be proved.
That's a straw-man. First off trade is trade and jobs are jobs. Not the same in about a dozen ways. Out-sourcing the building of your widget is not the same as a company over-seas making it and selling it in the US to consumers at all.
If you hire someone to do something, you are giving them money, and in return they produce something for you (be it a nifty hardware widget, or a bunch of code). You are just buying the product of their labours. There is no difference between a software company paying someone overseas to write a new software module, and a hardware manufacturer paying someone overseas to produce the circuitry they're going to use in their printer. Buying goods, or buying services is the only difference here, and it is all trade. You can't separate "trade" and "jobs" it's all trade, it's just a matter of whether you are trading goods or services.
But when you're dealing with goods that are on the cutting edge, and where their production requires the most highly skilled in your work-force (not design, production), and you allow those goods (or work) to come from over-seas without a measure of protectionism, you hurt our country's economy substantially.
Well yes, you hurt the country's economy in the short term, but on a global scale you assist immensely in helping to better apportion resources for greatest productivity. If someone else can provide the same goods or services more cheaply and efficiently then why exactly are you trying to stop them from doing so? In practice you provide more of whatever it is you are making cheaper and more efficiently. In the long run that benefits everyone immensely more than the short term gains of trying to lock everything down.
Here's an off the wall example: Lamb is expensive in the US. It is pretty cheap in New Zealand and Australia. New Zealand and Australian lamb faces massive tarrifs in the US though, so that US sheep farmers can keep farming sheep in the US even though, compared to NZ and Aussie sheep farmers, they aren't very good at it (it costs them way more to produce). That protectionism helps the US economy - it keeps US sheep farmers in work, and Lamb prices high for consumers, so money keeps going round. It also makes lamb more expensive. Were you to drop the tariffs the market would be flooded with much cheaper NZ and Aussie lamb and most consumers would be much better off being able to now afford lamb. Of course, a few US sheep farmers wouldn't be able to support themselves in their sheep farming anymore... But all you were doing with that protectionism was taking money away from average US consumers (with artifically high lamb prices) and handing it to US sheep farmers. If you let the people who are efficient at sheep farming do the sheep farming and instead trade with them in terms of things you are better at both sides end up better off.
The only argument I've ever heard regarding this sort of thing that makes any sense is one of time scales - letting trade and capitlism balance things out (much akin to letting a natural ecosystem settle into its most efficient state) is that occasionally the time frame required for the economic system to adjust to changes is not a time frame that fits well with human timeframes. At best, however, that onyl suggests temporary measures to ease the transition rather than attempts to halt or alter the change.
Both Gandalf and the eagles are servants of Valar (middle earth gods effectively). They are there to try to influence events to come out right, but they are not there to get up and do all the hard work themselves - essentially the Valar want the races of middle earth to sort their problems out on their own, and send Gandalf as someone to help guide things in the right directions. Similarly, the eagles will step in occasionally, but for the most part they seek to remain uninvolved. End result: The eagles aren't going to carry anybody anywhere unless some serious meddling is required.
Why do the eagles carry Gandalf away from Saruman? Saruman, like Gandalf was sent by the Valar to help guide events along the right paths. He got corrupted. The Valar are happy enough to have the eagles step in to help clear up a mess that the Valar themselves essentially made - save Gandalf from Saruman.
Why do the eagles come and fight at the gates, and rescue Frodo? The people of middle earth had done all the work by that point - they'd made their stand against Sauron themselves as the Valar wanted - at that point it's acceptable to the Valar to send the eagles to make sure everything comes out nicely.
The other main reason this doesn't work is Sauron. He is actually rather powerful, and often neglected in such thinking. Sure, the nine represent air power on the fell beasts, but any frontal assault on Mordor has to face Sauron as well. Remember what happened to Frodo whenever he put on the ring, or Pippin when he looked in the Palantir - that's because they came to Sauron's notice. An eagle with a ring bearer on it's back heading straight for Mount Doom pretty quickly comes into Sauron's focus, and he can cause pretty nasty things to happen to eagles and any hobbits aboard should he deign it necessary. Sending a small band, and particularly a hobbit was all about stealth. Sauron wasn't expecting them to try and destryoy the ring, he was expecting them to use it (hence the scene missing from the movie where Aragorn looks into the Palantir and effectively announces to Sauron that he has the Ring, and he's coming to take Sauron out which deflects Sauron's interest in Frodo and hobbits).
However, almost every single teenager in the world is a raging ball of hormones, and seeing T&A on TV only makes them hornier.
In other words, lots of kids will replicate sexual behaviour they see in movies and on TV, but not many will replicate the violent behaviour they observe.
Which is interesting really. Teens will "replicate the sexual behaviour they see". Now just where do you think they'll see this sexual behaviour? In a more open society that didn't cringe at every minor sighting of breast and keep everything repressed (like, say, Europe) they might see sexual behaviour treated openly and honestly. In a prudish society that tries to hide everything away from the poor children they'll probably have to resort to porn to see much sexual behaviour.
Hmm, open honest representations, or porn... I wonder which is better to have them trying to replicate?
It's worth noting that despite their much more open attitudes toward sex Europe has a lower rate of teen pregnancy than the US.
Untrue. Checked execeptions and strong typing are two features that Java has over Python, for example, which aid maintainability.
Checked exceptions are up for debate, though personally I think they are nice. Strong typing on the other hand - Python actually has strong typing, it just doesn't have static typing.
A major maintainability point that python is hopefully getting soon is Design by Contract. I blieve there are some packages that let you add it in to Java of course, but it's not in the standard package.
It's quite easy to write larger programs in perl, all you have to do is start the program with a different mentality. Write modules, use perl's OO (which is in some ways a kludge, but in other ways remarkably flexible and versatile). People who claim you can't write large programs in perl are simply failing to use the features of perl available for doing those sorts of things - they're trying to expand the same sort of programming they used for their 500 line program into something that works for a 5000 line program. Really, this is akin to trying to write a large C program by just putting everything in main() and then complaining C is no good for large programs.
For reference, I much prefer python to perl - I find it cleaner and easier. When pushed I like to use python combined with C for any heavy lifting (farm out any intensive routines to some C code that returns python objects).
You do realize that, as far as designing reusable space faring vehicles goes, $20 million is practically nothing and qualifies as a "true 'backyard' effort" as far as the aerospace industry is concerned?
I agree that it would be nice to see the Da Vinci Project do well, but as it stands it's pretty much untested. It's worth noting that Scaled was doing test flights over a year ago. Da Vinci could work, but I have yet to be convinced. It will certainly be interesting to see how it pans out.
Don't write Scaled off just because they have some cash behind them - in aerospace terms they have hardly any cash behind them (it costs way more just to buy a 747 than they've spent on the entire design, construction and testing of their project so far).
Next week, before you can purchase DOOM 3, our goal is to publish the DOOM 3 [H]ardware Guide in order to give you an official resource to help you know what to expect out of your current hardware or to help make the right hardware buying decision should you be ready for an upgrade.
This week they're publishing the high end graphics card benchmarks. They are putting together the data for those other boxes, and they'll be publishing that as a more complete guide next week. If you can wait 7 days you'll have more just the benchmarks for a 1.5GHz Pentium 4 box with a GeForce 4 MX440 video card but presumably a range of machines with slightly higher specs than that as well so that you can get a much better idea of the sort of performance you can expect on your box, whatever that may be.
Really? That's not at all what I get from reading the article. The framerates reported are remarkably good even for the Nvidia 5950, and they claimed it was quite playable on a Geforce 3. Judging from all that I would guess you could probably manage something in the 800x600 to 1024x768 range, medium effects at 30-40fps on a Geforce 4, and possibly even better.
All this stuff about buying new cards is mostly a pissing competition. I have seen nothing in the reported hardware requirements, nor benchmarks that would imply you couldn't get a very satisfactory game of a Geforce 4.
Presuming that people here are linking to the right patent (and it looks like they are, the patent number matches that in the press release) it quite clearly gives the filing date as April 20, 2000. Does that mean they worked on it for 10 years, and got around to patenting it? Does that make a damn bit of difference with regard to prior art?
And then there are some wonderful bits of drivel in the summary, which pretty much screams "utter bullshit". Prime example is the following...storage medium for automatically effectuating communication sessions with a distribution service...
This is just a two bit company (that can barely write) serving up half assed press releases claiming they own everything. That does sound familiar...
When faced with these sorts of forced splits, it is always useful to consider Fisher's Deduction:
"The more issues a person tries crudely shoehorn down into an artificial liberal/conservative dichotomy, the more certain you can be that ther person is an American."
It's not 100%, but it is surprisingly accurate surprisingly often.
But if I had to go to a File->Open menu each time I press C-x f in emacs, I'd go mad. Total time to decide to open a file and then press the keys to do so is about a half second. (I just checked, with my brother timing me)
Commonly used keyboard shortcuts can become instinctive. I often manage to hit C-x C-s BEFORE I think "I ought to save". My fingers do the thinking at the end of an edit operation, and then my brain catches up shortly afterwards. You should see all the weird results that show up when I'm stuck using windows and Notepad and keep hitting C-x C-f and C-a etc.
Which brings up another point: Should "beginning of line" and "end of line" and "transpose characters" be accessible through the menu with no keyboard shortcuts? Isn't that pure madness?
The question is, how many infected computers do you need before your attack is detected? If it's something like Code Red, a few thousand will get noticed: they spew out too many requests. One a day? It's harder to say. Will someone notice when there are 100,000 attacks a day? 1,000,000? But how long will it take to *get* to 100,000 infected computers? How many attacks will fail? Odds are, most of them will fail: not every IP has an attackable computer...
The solution to that sort of problem is not to just pound wildly on everything out there. Set up your virus to create a P2P style communication network of nodes and actually have instances of the virus COORDINATE their attack.
I understand entirely. Luckily my insomnia comes in bouts that last at most a week every month or 3, so most of the time I am getting enough sleep.
But yes, people are INCREDIBLY lacking in understanding of insomnia. The most common reaction, as you say, is a bunch of suggestions of "have you tried...?", to which, for me, the answer is almost always "yes, I've tried it - it didn't help". People who haven't had serious insomnia tend to relate to it via times when they've struggled to sleep. The problem is, that's quite different to insomnia. That sort of failure to sleep CAN be cured by getting up earlier, or abstaining from caffeine, or exercising heavily. That sort of difficulty sleeping often is brought on by something you're doing (too much stress, too much caffeine, being to active in the evenings), and so people tend to think of insomnia as being your fault - something you're doing badly, and so they suggest "fixes" and fail to really understand.
Because my insomnia tend to come and go I've had plenty of time to notice differences between when I can sleep easily and when I can't, to find all those factors that make a difference to my ability to get to sleep. Guess what? There aren't any. every month or two I have a short patch (ranging from 2 or 3 days to a week) where I simply cannot fall asleep easily. There's nothing I do differently, or fail to do, when these bouts occur. They just happen, and I simply struggle to get to sleep for a while. None of the usual things (exercise, lack of caffiene, getting up early) fix it.
I really wish all those people who don't have insomnia would be a little more understanding. Wouldn't assume we were stupid and hadn't thought about not drinking any caffiene. Wouldn't assume it's the sort of light inability to sleep due to lack of tiredness that they get and tell us to wake up earlier, or exercise more. I really wish people were a little more understanding of the fact that this is a biological thing, like clinical depression, and it's just the way the body works sometimes.
I'm truly ashamed for people who think that hydrogen fuel cells will solve all of the world's fossil fuel problems. Sure, hydrogen fuel cells will make for extremely low exhaust cars, longer laptop battery life, etc, but they won't solve the fossil fuel crisis.
Very true, but they do provide an easier means of transition once better energy generation comes on line. It is a lot easier to just convert over/build new electricity generation plants and use that electricity to charge all the fuel cell powered gizmos (especially cars), than it is to stick with gas powered cars and then have to suddenly convert them to something else.
Basically by going to fuel cells you are setting up all the required infrastructure (no small feat) for an easy transition. You simply charge your fuel cell car at a suitable charging station - where and how that electricity is generated (via fossil fuels now, or something more efficient later) is irrelevant. Changing the infrastructure is a huge step towards moving away from fossil fuel dependence.
So no, fuel cells aren't a cure for the fossil fuel crisis, but I would suggest that they are an extremely useful means to take preliminary steps and smooth the eventual transition.
The Xine maintainers, who must all be insane, have a project that's been stable for years and it hasn't hit 1.0 yet.
It's worth noting that, technically, Emacs hasn't gone 1.0 yet either. The version is really 0.21 - it's just that they've been in the minor version numbers for so long now nobody refers to it that way anymore. Is Emacs incomplete? Lacking functionality perhaps? Apparently yes.
Then maybe there's anice market for you if you get in early. As you say, there are a number of commercial apps to clean up windows - if you think this is really going to happen then write a deroot-kit for linux that checks the logs, cleans up any issues and forces the user to reset their passwords etc.
We always hear about people who have switched their non-computer-savvy relatives to Linux, but that doesn't mean anything. It's the computer-savvy people you need to target. People who do nothing else but write e-mail, surf eBay, and keep family photos can use pretty much anything from OS X to Windows 95 to KDE.
Um, that was my point. The original post said complained that it was the unaware computer-phobic people that are being asked to switch (due to all the viruses, spyware and the like), but such people are incapable of using Linux. All I said was that that was quite possibly rubbish. You are here agreeing with me. I agree entirely that the computer savvy windows user is much less likely to change. So what? You say "It's the computer-savvy people you need to target", but I don't need to do anything. I switched my parents to linux because, quite frankly, it is easier for them to use. I have no aims for linux global domination, or the destruction of the windows empire - I just want to make my parents computing experience a little less painful.
Have your mom go buy a new printer and scanner and try to install it. Have them try to install an application themselves.
Actually they've done both already. I bought a nice boxed distribution for them complete with a little manual. They read that, and followed the instructions.
Perhaps they'd like to switch from dialup to DSL.
They're planning on doing that eventually actually. Then again, with the distribution they're using that is no harder to do than it is on windows (there's a nice setup wizard that you just step through).
Sure, there are still issues that they'll run into occasionally, but then they ran into plenty of issues on windows too. In general linux has been easier for them to use, not harder. Yes, that's largely because they aren't very computer savvy, and will struggle with basic administration tasks regardless of what they are using, but THAT'S THE POINT. For them it is easier, and that's all I'm worried about.
Actually I had my parents do the install. I just sat in the next room. Occasionally they'd ask me to come in and I would do so, and they'd say "What should I do here?", to which I'd reply "What does it look like you should do?". They'd then reply and I'd say "Well, why don't you do that...". No problems anywhere in there.
I admit, I had 1 major advantage: I wasn't getting them to install linux over top of their old system. Rather, I waited till they were due for a hardware upgrade and had them put linux on a fresh new system. No backing up, no resizing partitions.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't win with either java or mono(c#).. Maybe its time ffor python/perl/php/ruby.....
Well, with IronPython mono is Python. Alternatively, you can always use Jython and have Python being Java. The real benefit here is this: There's no need for constant updates to the pyGTK and pyGNOME libraries every time GTK of GNOME changes if you're using IronPython, because IronPython automatically gets the latest GTK# stack through mono - your bindings are always automatically up to date.
Of course, you can always go with Parrot if you want the completely new and different open source implementation of the concept. Parrot will run both Perl and Python happily, not sure about PHP and Ruby, but I imagine someting is in the works, and while it is a lot less complete than the others, it promises to do a lot more, and potentially do it notably faster than either Java or Mono/.NET
Plenty of options, and they all make some sense. Time to let OpenSource Darwinian practices see who survives in the long run - there are more baskets for these eggs, so there's no reason to panic.
Jedidiah
Why bother with Helix when there are other freely-availble, open-source alternatives (e.g., mplayer, xine) that appear equally capable of supporting a variety of player formats?
Have you actually tried HelixPlayer, or the RealPlayer for Linux? They are, in fact, very nice, with simple clean minimalist interfaces using GTK. No ugly skinning, no bizarre file selection dialogs (just plain GTK file selection dialogs), no relying on keyboard shortcuts.
I like Mplayer, and I use it a lot, but HelixPlayer really is very nice, and I'm using it more and more. Don't knock it until you've tried it. Real seems to have turned a corner here and gone open source. HelixPlayer is a great open source project, and the RealPlayer based on it is not the intrusive email collecting mess that one used to associate with Real.
I know many here hate Real, and it's understandable given their previous efforts, but they do seem to have changed, and I think they're worthy of a second chance here... now if only they'd free up their codec...
Jedidiah.
So how much of that MSN percentage is coming from all the Internet Explorer users who automatically end up searching MSN whenever they mistype a web address etc.? Surely that's pushing the numbers up a little.
ITFacts.biz just gave results, with nothing on methodology (did they just count hits or what?)
Jedidiah.
found that an easy way to get him heated up was to suggest that something you need to know is "unmeasurable." The man was offended by the very idea.
Better not let him near any pure mathematics then. Mathematciains have determined that there are, in fact non-measurable sets - that is, sets that you can't actually measure. Sure, they're also non-computable and highly pathological, but their existence can be proved.
Jedidiah.
That's a straw-man. First off trade is trade and jobs are jobs. Not the same in about a dozen ways. Out-sourcing the building of your widget is not the same as a company over-seas making it and selling it in the US to consumers at all.
If you hire someone to do something, you are giving them money, and in return they produce something for you (be it a nifty hardware widget, or a bunch of code). You are just buying the product of their labours. There is no difference between a software company paying someone overseas to write a new software module, and a hardware manufacturer paying someone overseas to produce the circuitry they're going to use in their printer. Buying goods, or buying services is the only difference here, and it is all trade. You can't separate "trade" and "jobs" it's all trade, it's just a matter of whether you are trading goods or services.
But when you're dealing with goods that are on the cutting edge, and where their production requires the most highly skilled in your work-force (not design, production), and you allow those goods (or work) to come from over-seas without a measure of protectionism, you hurt our country's economy substantially.
Well yes, you hurt the country's economy in the short term, but on a global scale you assist immensely in helping to better apportion resources for greatest productivity. If someone else can provide the same goods or services more cheaply and efficiently then why exactly are you trying to stop them from doing so? In practice you provide more of whatever it is you are making cheaper and more efficiently. In the long run that benefits everyone immensely more than the short term gains of trying to lock everything down.
Here's an off the wall example: Lamb is expensive in the US. It is pretty cheap in New Zealand and Australia. New Zealand and Australian lamb faces massive tarrifs in the US though, so that US sheep farmers can keep farming sheep in the US even though, compared to NZ and Aussie sheep farmers, they aren't very good at it (it costs them way more to produce). That protectionism helps the US economy - it keeps US sheep farmers in work, and Lamb prices high for consumers, so money keeps going round. It also makes lamb more expensive. Were you to drop the tariffs the market would be flooded with much cheaper NZ and Aussie lamb and most consumers would be much better off being able to now afford lamb. Of course, a few US sheep farmers wouldn't be able to support themselves in their sheep farming anymore... But all you were doing with that protectionism was taking money away from average US consumers (with artifically high lamb prices) and handing it to US sheep farmers. If you let the people who are efficient at sheep farming do the sheep farming and instead trade with them in terms of things you are better at both sides end up better off.
The only argument I've ever heard regarding this sort of thing that makes any sense is one of time scales - letting trade and capitlism balance things out (much akin to letting a natural ecosystem settle into its most efficient state) is that occasionally the time frame required for the economic system to adjust to changes is not a time frame that fits well with human timeframes. At best, however, that onyl suggests temporary measures to ease the transition rather than attempts to halt or alter the change.
Change happens. Life is unfair. Get used to it.
Jedidiah.
There are actually a couple of very good reasons.
Both Gandalf and the eagles are servants of Valar (middle earth gods effectively). They are there to try to influence events to come out right, but they are not there to get up and do all the hard work themselves - essentially the Valar want the races of middle earth to sort their problems out on their own, and send Gandalf as someone to help guide things in the right directions. Similarly, the eagles will step in occasionally, but for the most part they seek to remain uninvolved. End result: The eagles aren't going to carry anybody anywhere unless some serious meddling is required.
Why do the eagles carry Gandalf away from Saruman? Saruman, like Gandalf was sent by the Valar to help guide events along the right paths. He got corrupted. The Valar are happy enough to have the eagles step in to help clear up a mess that the Valar themselves essentially made - save Gandalf from Saruman.
Why do the eagles come and fight at the gates, and rescue Frodo? The people of middle earth had done all the work by that point - they'd made their stand against Sauron themselves as the Valar wanted - at that point it's acceptable to the Valar to send the eagles to make sure everything comes out nicely.
The other main reason this doesn't work is Sauron. He is actually rather powerful, and often neglected in such thinking. Sure, the nine represent air power on the fell beasts, but any frontal assault on Mordor has to face Sauron as well. Remember what happened to Frodo whenever he put on the ring, or Pippin when he looked in the Palantir - that's because they came to Sauron's notice. An eagle with a ring bearer on it's back heading straight for Mount Doom pretty quickly comes into Sauron's focus, and he can cause pretty nasty things to happen to eagles and any hobbits aboard should he deign it necessary. Sending a small band, and particularly a hobbit was all about stealth. Sauron wasn't expecting them to try and destryoy the ring, he was expecting them to use it (hence the scene missing from the movie where Aragorn looks into the Palantir and effectively announces to Sauron that he has the Ring, and he's coming to take Sauron out which deflects Sauron's interest in Frodo and hobbits).
HTH
Jedidiah
However, almost every single teenager in the world is a raging ball of hormones, and seeing T&A on TV only makes them hornier.
In other words, lots of kids will replicate sexual behaviour they see in movies and on TV, but not many will replicate the violent behaviour they observe.
Which is interesting really. Teens will "replicate the sexual behaviour they see". Now just where do you think they'll see this sexual behaviour? In a more open society that didn't cringe at every minor sighting of breast and keep everything repressed (like, say, Europe) they might see sexual behaviour treated openly and honestly. In a prudish society that tries to hide everything away from the poor children they'll probably have to resort to porn to see much sexual behaviour.
Hmm, open honest representations, or porn... I wonder which is better to have them trying to replicate?
It's worth noting that despite their much more open attitudes toward sex Europe has a lower rate of teen pregnancy than the US.
Jedidiah.
Untrue. Checked execeptions and strong typing are two features that Java has over Python, for example, which aid maintainability.
Checked exceptions are up for debate, though personally I think they are nice. Strong typing on the other hand - Python actually has strong typing, it just doesn't have static typing.
A major maintainability point that python is hopefully getting soon is Design by Contract. I blieve there are some packages that let you add it in to Java of course, but it's not in the standard package.
Jedidiah
It's quite easy to write larger programs in perl, all you have to do is start the program with a different mentality. Write modules, use perl's OO (which is in some ways a kludge, but in other ways remarkably flexible and versatile). People who claim you can't write large programs in perl are simply failing to use the features of perl available for doing those sorts of things - they're trying to expand the same sort of programming they used for their 500 line program into something that works for a 5000 line program. Really, this is akin to trying to write a large C program by just putting everything in main() and then complaining C is no good for large programs.
For reference, I much prefer python to perl - I find it cleaner and easier. When pushed I like to use python combined with C for any heavy lifting (farm out any intensive routines to some C code that returns python objects).
Jedidiah.
You do realize that, as far as designing reusable space faring vehicles goes, $20 million is practically nothing and qualifies as a "true 'backyard' effort" as far as the aerospace industry is concerned?
I agree that it would be nice to see the Da Vinci Project do well, but as it stands it's pretty much untested. It's worth noting that Scaled was doing test flights over a year ago. Da Vinci could work, but I have yet to be convinced. It will certainly be interesting to see how it pans out.
Don't write Scaled off just because they have some cash behind them - in aerospace terms they have hardly any cash behind them (it costs way more just to buy a 747 than they've spent on the entire design, construction and testing of their project so far).
Jedidiah.
As the article says:
Next week, before you can purchase DOOM 3, our goal is to publish the DOOM 3 [H]ardware Guide in order to give you an official resource to help you know what to expect out of your current hardware or to help make the right hardware buying decision should you be ready for an upgrade.
This week they're publishing the high end graphics card benchmarks. They are putting together the data for those other boxes, and they'll be publishing that as a more complete guide next week. If you can wait 7 days you'll have more just the benchmarks for a 1.5GHz Pentium 4 box with a GeForce 4 MX440 video card but presumably a range of machines with slightly higher specs than that as well so that you can get a much better idea of the sort of performance you can expect on your box, whatever that may be.
Have some patience.
Jedidiah.
Really? That's not at all what I get from reading the article. The framerates reported are remarkably good even for the Nvidia 5950, and they claimed it was quite playable on a Geforce 3. Judging from all that I would guess you could probably manage something in the 800x600 to 1024x768 range, medium effects at 30-40fps on a Geforce 4, and possibly even better.
All this stuff about buying new cards is mostly a pissing competition. I have seen nothing in the reported hardware requirements, nor benchmarks that would imply you couldn't get a very satisfactory game of a Geforce 4.
Jedidiah
Presuming that people here are linking to the right patent (and it looks like they are, the patent number matches that in the press release) it quite clearly gives the filing date as April 20, 2000. Does that mean they worked on it for 10 years, and got around to patenting it? Does that make a damn bit of difference with regard to prior art?
...storage medium for automatically effectuating communication sessions with a distribution service...
And then there are some wonderful bits of drivel in the summary, which pretty much screams "utter bullshit". Prime example is the following
This is just a two bit company (that can barely write) serving up half assed press releases claiming they own everything. That does sound familiar...
Jedidiah
When faced with these sorts of forced splits, it is always useful to consider Fisher's Deduction:
"The more issues a person tries crudely shoehorn down into an artificial liberal/conservative dichotomy, the more certain you can be that ther person is an American."
It's not 100%, but it is surprisingly accurate surprisingly often.
Jedidiah.
But if I had to go to a File->Open menu each time I press C-x f in emacs, I'd go mad. Total time to decide to open a file and then press the keys to do so is about a half second. (I just checked, with my brother timing me)
Commonly used keyboard shortcuts can become instinctive. I often manage to hit C-x C-s BEFORE I think "I ought to save". My fingers do the thinking at the end of an edit operation, and then my brain catches up shortly afterwards. You should see all the weird results that show up when I'm stuck using windows and Notepad and keep hitting C-x C-f and C-a etc.
Which brings up another point: Should "beginning of line" and "end of line" and "transpose characters" be accessible through the menu with no keyboard shortcuts? Isn't that pure madness?
Jedidiah.
The question is, how many infected computers do you need before your attack is detected? If it's something like Code Red, a few thousand will get noticed: they spew out too many requests. One a day? It's harder to say. Will someone notice when there are 100,000 attacks a day? 1,000,000? But how long will it take to *get* to 100,000 infected computers? How many attacks will fail? Odds are, most of them will fail: not every IP has an attackable computer...
The solution to that sort of problem is not to just pound wildly on everything out there. Set up your virus to create a P2P style communication network of nodes and actually have instances of the virus COORDINATE their attack.
Such a system could be quite nasty indeed.
Jedidiah.
I understand entirely. Luckily my insomnia comes in bouts that last at most a week every month or 3, so most of the time I am getting enough sleep.
But yes, people are INCREDIBLY lacking in understanding of insomnia. The most common reaction, as you say, is a bunch of suggestions of "have you tried...?", to which, for me, the answer is almost always "yes, I've tried it - it didn't help". People who haven't had serious insomnia tend to relate to it via times when they've struggled to sleep. The problem is, that's quite different to insomnia. That sort of failure to sleep CAN be cured by getting up earlier, or abstaining from caffeine, or exercising heavily. That sort of difficulty sleeping often is brought on by something you're doing (too much stress, too much caffeine, being to active in the evenings), and so people tend to think of insomnia as being your fault - something you're doing badly, and so they suggest "fixes" and fail to really understand.
Because my insomnia tend to come and go I've had plenty of time to notice differences between when I can sleep easily and when I can't, to find all those factors that make a difference to my ability to get to sleep. Guess what? There aren't any. every month or two I have a short patch (ranging from 2 or 3 days to a week) where I simply cannot fall asleep easily. There's nothing I do differently, or fail to do, when these bouts occur. They just happen, and I simply struggle to get to sleep for a while. None of the usual things (exercise, lack of caffiene, getting up early) fix it.
I really wish all those people who don't have insomnia would be a little more understanding. Wouldn't assume we were stupid and hadn't thought about not drinking any caffiene. Wouldn't assume it's the sort of light inability to sleep due to lack of tiredness that they get and tell us to wake up earlier, or exercise more. I really wish people were a little more understanding of the fact that this is a biological thing, like clinical depression, and it's just the way the body works sometimes.
Jedidiah.
I'm truly ashamed for people who think that hydrogen fuel cells will solve all of the world's fossil fuel problems. Sure, hydrogen fuel cells will make for extremely low exhaust cars, longer laptop battery life, etc, but they won't solve the fossil fuel crisis.
Very true, but they do provide an easier means of transition once better energy generation comes on line. It is a lot easier to just convert over/build new electricity generation plants and use that electricity to charge all the fuel cell powered gizmos (especially cars), than it is to stick with gas powered cars and then have to suddenly convert them to something else.
Basically by going to fuel cells you are setting up all the required infrastructure (no small feat) for an easy transition. You simply charge your fuel cell car at a suitable charging station - where and how that electricity is generated (via fossil fuels now, or something more efficient later) is irrelevant. Changing the infrastructure is a huge step towards moving away from fossil fuel dependence.
So no, fuel cells aren't a cure for the fossil fuel crisis, but I would suggest that they are an extremely useful means to take preliminary steps and smooth the eventual transition.
Jedidiah.
The Xine maintainers, who must all be insane,
have a project that's been stable for years and it hasn't hit 1.0 yet.
It's worth noting that, technically, Emacs hasn't gone 1.0 yet either. The version is really 0.21 - it's just that they've been in the minor version numbers for so long now nobody refers to it that way anymore. Is Emacs incomplete? Lacking functionality perhaps? Apparently yes.
Jedidiah.
TS Eliot - UK dude, wrote my favourite poem (the Wasteland)
Eliot is actually American. He moved to England and lived there while doing most of his writing though.
I'd also recommend checking out Charles Bukowski - particularly his later works.
Jedidiah.
You can't install new packages with up2date, it just updates the current ones.
Really? I wonder how I managed to install new packages with up2date then. Must have been some odd bug or something that let me do it by accident.
Jedidiah.
Then maybe there's anice market for you if you get in early. As you say, there are a number of commercial apps to clean up windows - if you think this is really going to happen then write a deroot-kit for linux that checks the logs, cleans up any issues and forces the user to reset their passwords etc.
Jedidiah.
We always hear about people who have switched their non-computer-savvy relatives to Linux, but that doesn't mean anything. It's the computer-savvy people you need to target. People who do nothing else but write e-mail, surf eBay, and keep family photos can use pretty much anything from OS X to Windows 95 to KDE.
Um, that was my point. The original post said complained that it was the unaware computer-phobic people that are being asked to switch (due to all the viruses, spyware and the like), but such people are incapable of using Linux. All I said was that that was quite possibly rubbish. You are here agreeing with me. I agree entirely that the computer savvy windows user is much less likely to change. So what? You say "It's the computer-savvy people you need to target", but I don't need to do anything. I switched my parents to linux because, quite frankly, it is easier for them to use. I have no aims for linux global domination, or the destruction of the windows empire - I just want to make my parents computing experience a little less painful.
Have your mom go buy a new printer and scanner and try to install it. Have them try to install an application themselves.
Actually they've done both already. I bought a nice boxed distribution for them complete with a little manual. They read that, and followed the instructions.
Perhaps they'd like to switch from dialup to DSL.
They're planning on doing that eventually actually. Then again, with the distribution they're using that is no harder to do than it is on windows (there's a nice setup wizard that you just step through).
Sure, there are still issues that they'll run into occasionally, but then they ran into plenty of issues on windows too. In general linux has been easier for them to use, not harder. Yes, that's largely because they aren't very computer savvy, and will struggle with basic administration tasks regardless of what they are using, but THAT'S THE POINT. For them it is easier, and that's all I'm worried about.
Jedidiah.
Actually I had my parents do the install. I just sat in the next room. Occasionally they'd ask me to come in and I would do so, and they'd say "What should I do here?", to which I'd reply "What does it look like you should do?". They'd then reply and I'd say "Well, why don't you do that...". No problems anywhere in there.
I admit, I had 1 major advantage: I wasn't getting them to install linux over top of their old system. Rather, I waited till they were due for a hardware upgrade and had them put linux on a fresh new system. No backing up, no resizing partitions.
Jedidiah.
print DVDs flawlessly with my Epson printer
Perhaps you're asking a bit much there. Unless of course you mean "print CD/DVD labels flawlessly with my Epson printer".
Jedidiah.