heck, once the code's publically available, i hope someone does the decent thing: rewriting all the directx (windows specific) stuff so that it uses opengl instead.
there's no reason at all why this app shouldn't be cross platform: i can't imagine they're using directx for anything much more than the 3d visualisation... and c# is (fairly) cross platform now... (hmmm.. i wonder if there are opengl bindings for c#/mono?)
afterall -- apart from the immense disk space requirements and the need for a fat internet connection -- pcs having a 1ghz cpu, 256mb ram, geforce2 (or better) spec are fairly commonplace nowadays.
it sounds like an awesome piece of software, and it would be great if it were available for linux/bsd/osx as well as windows.
I live in the UK, and a good sensible measure that I've taken to recently is to line not only my hat with tin foil, but my shoes, socks, trousers, shirt and jacket too. As far as I can tell, it seems to stop the cameras from looking at me.
Ok.. UK Data Protection Act states that fixed cameras are ok, but if they can zoom or move, then you must comply with the act. To comply with the act you must have a nominated data-protection manager in your company (responsible for cycling tapes, answering public enquiries, etc), you must not place cameras where you shouldn't (toilets/etc), you must display the necessary signs (you are not (meant to be) allowed to record anyone without their knowledge) with contact details as to who is responsible for the cameras and who the 'data-protection manager' is, and if you operate cameras of a non-fixed kind any member of the public is entitled to make an enquiry, and providing they give reasonable information (time, location, description of appearance, what you were doing, who else was present, etc), and pay a handling fee of no more than £15(?) then you must either invite that person in to the company to inspect the footage, or (and?), make it available on standard playable video cassette -- and they have to block out the distinguishing features (black strips, mosaic fuzziness, etc) of anyone else who was present in the footage, but not immediately involved with the person in question.
I might've missed something, but I think that pretty much covers it. You can get advice and template letters for making such enquiries from a variety of places on the net, including (i think) from the UK government's DPA website.
It's all fairly serious stuff, lots of businesses (particularly night-clubs and restaurants) don't fully comply with the act (no visible signs in recording areas), and I'd be certain that they'd be unable to produce the required video footage if it were requested.
It sucks really.
Shit -- must dash, some of my tinfoil is more than 24hrs old, and needs replacing.......
Whether it is shareware or not is not an issue: if they abide by the licenses of any included code, then they are ok.
E.g. if they use material covered by the GPL, then they must make sources available, etc, etc, yada yada yada.
From what I understand reading here (can't get to the site: dead already), the source code is available for download or you can buy the binary.
Of course, it might not be as clear cut as above, they might not solely be using GPLed code, or they might not be releasing all of the required source, or whatever.
Your points are, of course, totally valid and correct, but they seem to neglect the fact that the shareware app itself could also be GPLed and available as source (but I've not gone to the trouble of finding this out myself).
I can't read the article at the moment (their MySQL has overloaded)...
...but Mark Pesce was the original inventor of VRML -- which, although it seems to've pretty much died-a-death in the dot-com bust, I think we'll eventually go full circle and re-discover/re-invent it once we've all got SVG viewers built-in to our browsers.
maybe you could base it on GetFree??? -- unfortunately it appears to be no longer maintained (shame, i quite liked the concept!), but the source is released as public domain.
Re:Maps are not copyrighted
on
Open Maps?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Maps likely have different copyrights depending on the map in question and what coutry's copyright laws are applicable to the map-bearer.
Here in England we have "Ordnance Survey" maps which are very high quality -- and are all covered by Crown Copyright (the government/queen's copyright -- I dunno how it's any different to any other copyright though).
Also, if you take a map to a copy shop here in the UK -- let's say, because you need to give your dad (who lives some way away) directions how to find your street -- many of them will tell you that they will not copy it for you (bah, just like when someone in your band needs another copy of some sheet music).
I have a feeling that the "Times' Atlas of the World" is also likely to a copyrighted work..!
My points are still valid, even if my psuedo-code is not 100% correct -- but you miss my point: any of the large webmail providers (Yahoo, Hotmail, etc) will still be able to search all the email in any users mailboxes, almost as easily you can log-in on their respective homepages. It would be a fallacy to think otherwise. Of course, these services already do -- just like Gmail -- have one huge store for all their users' mail, even if it is distributed, as you mention.
It is my belief, gained through knowledge of mail servers -- and too many years real-world experience writing high-end web-services/front-ends of one kind or another -- that SQL is the most scalable solution for the back-end of a web-based email system with this quantity of users, the idea of using any kind of file based mailstore is unpractical for web-based email for a number of technical reasons.
Furthermore, if I remember correctly, in the past I have read articles about the big webmail provider's back-end systems being SQL based (sorry, I can't remember which company the article was about -- I think I've read about more than one..(?)).
Your analogy about searching everyone's email is moot: we are not really talking about searching everyone's email spool, rather, people are arguing over whether Google's webmail -- Gmail -- is any less private than any of the other big webmail solutions (Yahoo, Hotmail) that are already out there -- and it's not. It's no better, and no worse -- but they are being more upfront about things (i.e. explicit about their business/technical processes) in their privacy policy than some of the other providers care to be, which has brought this matter into the eyes of the general user (who probably do not realise that when they click 'Delete' on Hotmail, a copy of their message may indeed still reside on another of Hotmail's systems in an archived backup, unaccessible to the all but the sysadmins -- and the respective law enforcement agents/agencies, if they have the right paperwork).
With Gmail, everyone's mail is indexed in one easy to use place, so searching mail becomes like web browsing via a search engine. It's just so much easier there's no comparison.
In this statement (and possibly inferred in some other statements) you make it sound like Gmail/Google will index everyone's mail-server's mailstores like it indexes webpages -- it won't. Gmail only indexes the mail of Gmail users.
They can't practically do a full search across everyone's email for a particular keyword. To do so, the providers need to offer this kind of service, which they haven't been built to do (data persistence, indexing etc.).
Just because other email service providers are not specifically optimising their email service for search, doesn't mean they can't simply issue something similar to:
SELECT * FROM T_EMAIL WHERE MESSAGE_BODY LIKE '%terrorism%'
... it might take a little longer to execute than having a separate table to hold the keywords:
SELECT * FROM T_EMAIL E, T_KEYWORDS K WHERE K.KEYWORD = 'terrorism' AND K.MSG_ID = T.MSG_ID
... but it is just a database afterall, and they are meant to be searchable (and are indeed very often indexed -- but indexing in such a way is all about performance, it doesn't make it impossible).
Furthermore, I've got a feeling that other email providers might keep backups of emails in storage for a short while -- just like Google: they can't guarantee immediate deletion of your message from an archived backup -- but maybe they simply are not being as up-front and implicit about this fact in their terms and conditions? (e.g. I don't see how Hotmail/Yahoo could not have backups, so do they still have copies of your old messages? You will probably never know...)
Sorry, but I don't think it's impracticle: I agree with the grand-parent post: nothing is is currently stopping the government from snooping on your email from other mail providers -- just because Google are the 'search kings' doesn't mean nobody else can search a database of email messages (thinking otherwise is nearly ludicrous).
An encyclopedia -- whether a dvd of compressed data or a twenty volume set of real books -- isn't something that you need to update every year: most of the information doesn't change frequently enough to warrant this.
It's more a case of such libraries of information decaying from bit rot over a longer period of time.
A guy I knew about 15 years ago told me that his grandfather was very good friends with JRR Tolkien.
Apparently Tolkien and some other friends used to come to his Granpa's for Sunday lunch and in the afternoon they would then sit, smoke pipes and speak to one another in a "strange language that wasn't spoken any more".
No more details than that I'm afraid.. interesting all the same.
I worked with a guy from a similar part of the world - he told me that 8 is a lucky number amongst Chinese people: it is good to have it in your phone number or car registration plate number.
Whereas the number 4 is considered unlucky as it has a similar sound to the word for 'death' -- hence Chinese people will never have the number four in their car license plate or phone number (if they have any choice in the matter).
(Apparently Chinese people also prefer cars that look like they have a happy face on the front - bumper/fender and headlights - but now I'm getting off topic)
I guess in China, no one wants 44444444 as their phone number?
Daniel Etherington, the author of that article, was an old school friend of mine. We used to play C64 video games together back in the good old days. I've not been in contact with him for years, but I still read quite a few of his articles on BBCi.
But, getting back to the point of my post: this particular article is a follow up to his last piece, entitled 'Are video games breeding killers?'
I'm using kernel 2.6.x and gentoo 1.4, and I'm fairly new to linux. All my h/w (nvidia, sblive, adaptec-compat scsi, usb mouse + mp3 player) works very well.
It wasn't as smooth an upgrade as I'd've liked, but, like I said, I'm fairly new to all this.
When I first upgraded, I did get a lot of errors/warnings on boot, but I have since fixed them all.
Ensuring you have the latest versions of hotplug and module-init-tools will help your migration to 2.6, as there are changes to h/w detection and module loading.
Take care when doing make oldconfig from an earlier gentoo kernel - gentoo kernels have had various performance patched in them for some time, but -- if I recall -- these settings didn't all magically migrate across, as the gentoo kernel build flags and the official kernel build flags have differing names for these features between 2.4 and 2.6. Just remember to check all your options with make menuconfig or similar. Some other build flags have changed names too, including stuff for usb devices and (IIRC) framebuffers -- this will probably only catch you out if you're migrating settings from an older kernel.
After building and installing my 2.6 kernel, I also installed the latest nvidia package from nvidia's website, and alsa-lib and alsa-utils (both 1.0.2, from portage)
Also, there are changes to how some system stats/info is handled/reported - ensure you have an up-to-date version of procps, or top might give some cranky info... some tools that monitor memory levels (gkrellm, various gdesklets) will stop working because the output of/proc/meminfo has changed (the first few summary lines have been removed) -- fixes for this don't seem to exist yet.
Other than the meminfo issue, kernel 2.6 hasn't broken anything (that I've noticed) on my gentoo system, and it appears to work very well.
(Oh, kernel 2.6 did cause one of my drives to give warnings about unexpected DMAs every few mins, but that totally fixed itself once I stopped overclocking the CPU. The drive was running slower with a mis-firing DMA, but other than the warnings, no problems occured (YMMV). Something in 2.6 must be more timing sensitive or less tolerant of overcranked h/w speeds. NBD: my system is a few years old, the extra ~20% speed increase cannot is insignificant when compared to speeds of a modern CPU - it seemed a lot at the time!)
the dreamcast wasn't too bad at the time, but sega's saturn also suffered the similar fate of crashing out of the market before the other players did.
it wasn't technically superior, although it had a fair amount of power to compete with the other consoles at the time - but inside it was technically all wrong for the time....
what caused the programmers headaches with the saturn was the fact that it's 3d engine/hw all worked in quads (and not tris).
this meant that you had to develop a radically different 3d engine to all the other platforms at the time (ie: pc, psx - and if you didn't mind *seriously* limited texture memory, the n64 (..but at least it rendered tris)).
not only that, but the engine would have to undergo different optimisation to a tri-poly engine (aside from any other platform specific differences like texure memory management, etc)..and, as if that wasn't enough, you also have to write another set of model conversion tools that work with quads... and, if you want performance, you have to get your graphic artist to design models that make use of a lot of quads too - truly horrendous with the tools of the day (3dstudio/etc)
also, the compiler's backed produced some awful code. not only was the a lot of stuff that was truly sub-optimal, but plenty of it was actually redundant (you should see what a mess it made of compiling our cross platform fixed-n-float maths library - and don't even think about using most of the nice oo features in c++, coz it just made the code lots worst)
an interesting challenge, but plenty of developers soon decided it was the 'black sheep' of the consoles, requiring too much of its own kind of voodoo to be a commercially viable platform to develop for at the time -- the project manager's soon realised that the saturn was proving to be the awkward one of the bunch, and then during the next project, it was left in the corner with all the other junk hardware, allowing everyone to concentrate on working together more easily.
i don't know what developers thought of the dreamcast, but it certainly wasn't adopted as quickly as the psx2 was - maybe this was simply a hangover from the saturn legacy? maybe the compiler was still not as good as those on the other platforms (that alone can make coding into a nightmare issue or two)
whatever happens to the current xbox, i think it likely that the next xbox will simply be another pc-alike-in-a-box [yawn for the gamers, but eventually good for us hacker-geeks]
microsoft know they are on to a winner if they stick with what (games+/etc) developers already know.
[technical aside] of course, if you've got quads, you can always make a triangle by putting two verts at the same coordinate - which is fine if you've not got a fancy texture on the quad (coz otherwise the non-perspective correct texture mapping would skew it to bits) and you don't mind incurring the cost of using quads for tris (extra maths on a redundant vert) - a lot of games used minimal textures and shading to compensate for all the triangularly-skewed-quads.
sure, publicity can lead to extra sales, but why would a hong-kong based company selling cds to the uk at the same price as everyone else do any better than the high-street stores, or other (uk-based) online retailers?
seems to be exactly what the bpi wants to do -- level the ground, not (gasp) by allowing a uk store to reduce its prices and compete fairly, but by telling cd-wow to up their prices.
after all: it's a it's totally plainly obvious price fixing racket, isn't it?..and it's been going on for years.
Slashdot Mirror
In the UK we still have NoChex, which is a very similar kind of thing...
It's probably not so funny when a flooded pipe does cause meaningful damage to your business -- as shown by the recent dDOS on Worlpay (and the knock-on effect to businesses using their systems).
I suppose it all depends on your definition of meaningful..
heck, once the code's publically available, i hope someone does the decent thing: rewriting all the directx (windows specific) stuff so that it uses opengl instead.
there's no reason at all why this app shouldn't be cross platform: i can't imagine they're using directx for anything much more than the 3d visualisation... and c# is (fairly) cross platform now... (hmmm.. i wonder if there are opengl bindings for c#/mono?)
afterall -- apart from the immense disk space requirements and the need for a fat internet connection -- pcs having a 1ghz cpu, 256mb ram, geforce2 (or better) spec are fairly commonplace nowadays.
it sounds like an awesome piece of software, and it would be great if it were available for linux/bsd/osx as well as windows.
Yes, it's just a basic charge to cover admin -- but I think the max is now as much as £10 or £15
(On my UK keyboard GBP symbol is simply shift-3, slashdot must do the rest..)
I live in the UK, and a good sensible measure that I've taken to recently is to line not only my hat with tin foil, but my shoes, socks, trousers, shirt and jacket too. As far as I can tell, it seems to stop the cameras from looking at me.
Ok.. UK Data Protection Act states that fixed cameras are ok, but if they can zoom or move, then you must comply with the act. To comply with the act you must have a nominated data-protection manager in your company (responsible for cycling tapes, answering public enquiries, etc), you must not place cameras where you shouldn't (toilets/etc), you must display the necessary signs (you are not (meant to be) allowed to record anyone without their knowledge) with contact details as to who is responsible for the cameras and who the 'data-protection manager' is, and if you operate cameras of a non-fixed kind any member of the public is entitled to make an enquiry, and providing they give reasonable information (time, location, description of appearance, what you were doing, who else was present, etc), and pay a handling fee of no more than £15(?) then you must either invite that person in to the company to inspect the footage, or (and?), make it available on standard playable video cassette -- and they have to block out the distinguishing features (black strips, mosaic fuzziness, etc) of anyone else who was present in the footage, but not immediately involved with the person in question.
I might've missed something, but I think that pretty much covers it. You can get advice and template letters for making such enquiries from a variety of places on the net, including (i think) from the UK government's DPA website.
It's all fairly serious stuff, lots of businesses (particularly night-clubs and restaurants) don't fully comply with the act (no visible signs in recording areas), and I'd be certain that they'd be unable to produce the required video footage if it were requested.
It sucks really.
Shit -- must dash, some of my tinfoil is more than 24hrs old, and needs replacing.......
Whether it is shareware or not is not an issue: if they abide by the licenses of any included code, then they are ok.
E.g. if they use material covered by the GPL, then they must make sources available, etc, etc, yada yada yada.
From what I understand reading here (can't get to the site: dead already), the source code is available for download or you can buy the binary.
Of course, it might not be as clear cut as above, they might not solely be using GPLed code, or they might not be releasing all of the required source, or whatever.
Your points are, of course, totally valid and correct, but they seem to neglect the fact that the shareware app itself could also be GPLed and available as source (but I've not gone to the trouble of finding this out myself).
I can't read the article at the moment (their MySQL has overloaded)...
"Unemployment is a benefit of any technologically advanced society." (?Robert Anton Wilson)
The sooner we realise that, and stop treating it as a problem, the better.
maybe you could base it on GetFree??? -- unfortunately it appears to be no longer maintained (shame, i quite liked the concept!), but the source is released as public domain.
Maps likely have different copyrights depending on the map in question and what coutry's copyright laws are applicable to the map-bearer.
Here in England we have "Ordnance Survey" maps which are very high quality -- and are all covered by Crown Copyright (the government/queen's copyright -- I dunno how it's any different to any other copyright though).
Also, if you take a map to a copy shop here in the UK -- let's say, because you need to give your dad (who lives some way away) directions how to find your street -- many of them will tell you that they will not copy it for you (bah, just like when someone in your band needs another copy of some sheet music).
I have a feeling that the "Times' Atlas of the World" is also likely to a copyrighted work..!
...indeed -- let alone a translucent window that fades with time, as described in the patent application.
Sounds like quite a nice idea.
My points are still valid, even if my psuedo-code is not 100% correct -- but you miss my point: any of the large webmail providers (Yahoo, Hotmail, etc) will still be able to search all the email in any users mailboxes, almost as easily you can log-in on their respective homepages. It would be a fallacy to think otherwise. Of course, these services already do -- just like Gmail -- have one huge store for all their users' mail, even if it is distributed, as you mention.
It is my belief, gained through knowledge of mail servers -- and too many years real-world experience writing high-end web-services/front-ends of one kind or another -- that SQL is the most scalable solution for the back-end of a web-based email system with this quantity of users, the idea of using any kind of file based mailstore is unpractical for web-based email for a number of technical reasons.
Furthermore, if I remember correctly, in the past I have read articles about the big webmail provider's back-end systems being SQL based (sorry, I can't remember which company the article was about -- I think I've read about more than one..(?)).
Your analogy about searching everyone's email is moot: we are not really talking about searching everyone's email spool, rather, people are arguing over whether Google's webmail -- Gmail -- is any less private than any of the other big webmail solutions (Yahoo, Hotmail) that are already out there -- and it's not. It's no better, and no worse -- but they are being more upfront about things (i.e. explicit about their business/technical processes) in their privacy policy than some of the other providers care to be, which has brought this matter into the eyes of the general user (who probably do not realise that when they click 'Delete' on Hotmail, a copy of their message may indeed still reside on another of Hotmail's systems in an archived backup, unaccessible to the all but the sysadmins -- and the respective law enforcement agents/agencies, if they have the right paperwork).
In this statement (and possibly inferred in some other statements) you make it sound like Gmail/Google will index everyone's mail-server's mailstores like it indexes webpages -- it won't. Gmail only indexes the mail of Gmail users.
Just because other email service providers are not specifically optimising their email service for search, doesn't mean they can't simply issue something similar to:
SELECT * FROM T_EMAIL WHERE MESSAGE_BODY LIKE '%terrorism%'
... it might take a little longer to execute than having a separate table to hold the keywords:
SELECT * FROM T_EMAIL E, T_KEYWORDS K WHERE K.KEYWORD = 'terrorism' AND K.MSG_ID = T.MSG_ID
... but it is just a database afterall, and they are meant to be searchable (and are indeed very often indexed -- but indexing in such a way is all about performance, it doesn't make it impossible).
Furthermore, I've got a feeling that other email providers might keep backups of emails in storage for a short while -- just like Google: they can't guarantee immediate deletion of your message from an archived backup -- but maybe they simply are not being as up-front and implicit about this fact in their terms and conditions? (e.g. I don't see how Hotmail/Yahoo could not have backups, so do they still have copies of your old messages? You will probably never know...)
Sorry, but I don't think it's impracticle: I agree with the grand-parent post: nothing is is currently stopping the government from snooping on your email from other mail providers -- just because Google are the 'search kings' doesn't mean nobody else can search a database of email messages (thinking otherwise is nearly ludicrous).
There's nothing wrong with having hundreds of forks
there is no fork...
ah, no.. i remember: it was a spoon
heh
An encyclopedia -- whether a dvd of compressed data or a twenty volume set of real books -- isn't something that you need to update every year: most of the information doesn't change frequently enough to warrant this.
It's more a case of such libraries of information decaying from bit rot over a longer period of time.
A guy I knew about 15 years ago told me that his grandfather was very good friends with JRR Tolkien.
Apparently Tolkien and some other friends used to come to his Granpa's for Sunday lunch and in the afternoon they would then sit, smoke pipes and speak to one another in a "strange language that wasn't spoken any more".
No more details than that I'm afraid.. interesting all the same.
I worked with a guy from a similar part of the world - he told me that 8 is a lucky number amongst Chinese people: it is good to have it in your phone number or car registration plate number.
Whereas the number 4 is considered unlucky as it has a similar sound to the word for 'death' -- hence Chinese people will never have the number four in their car license plate or phone number (if they have any choice in the matter).
(Apparently Chinese people also prefer cars that look like they have a happy face on the front - bumper/fender and headlights - but now I'm getting off topic)
I guess in China, no one wants 44444444 as their phone number?
Daniel Etherington, the author of that article, was an old school friend of mine. We used to play C64 video games together back in the good old days. I've not been in contact with him for years, but I still read quite a few of his articles on BBCi.
But, getting back to the point of my post: this particular article is a follow up to his last piece, entitled 'Are video games breeding killers?'
I'm using kernel 2.6.x and gentoo 1.4, and I'm fairly new to linux. All my h/w (nvidia, sblive, adaptec-compat scsi, usb mouse + mp3 player) works very well.
/proc/meminfo has changed (the first few summary lines have been removed) -- fixes for this don't seem to exist yet.
It wasn't as smooth an upgrade as I'd've liked, but, like I said, I'm fairly new to all this.
When I first upgraded, I did get a lot of errors/warnings on boot, but I have since fixed them all.
Ensuring you have the latest versions of hotplug and module-init-tools will help your migration to 2.6, as there are changes to h/w detection and module loading.
Take care when doing make oldconfig from an earlier gentoo kernel - gentoo kernels have had various performance patched in them for some time, but -- if I recall -- these settings didn't all magically migrate across, as the gentoo kernel build flags and the official kernel build flags have differing names for these features between 2.4 and 2.6. Just remember to check all your options with make menuconfig or similar. Some other build flags have changed names too, including stuff for usb devices and (IIRC) framebuffers -- this will probably only catch you out if you're migrating settings from an older kernel.
After building and installing my 2.6 kernel, I also installed the latest nvidia package from nvidia's website, and alsa-lib and alsa-utils (both 1.0.2, from portage)
Also, there are changes to how some system stats/info is handled/reported - ensure you have an up-to-date version of procps, or top might give some cranky info... some tools that monitor memory levels (gkrellm, various gdesklets) will stop working because the output of
Other than the meminfo issue, kernel 2.6 hasn't broken anything (that I've noticed) on my gentoo system, and it appears to work very well.
(Oh, kernel 2.6 did cause one of my drives to give warnings about unexpected DMAs every few mins, but that totally fixed itself once I stopped overclocking the CPU. The drive was running slower with a mis-firing DMA, but other than the warnings, no problems occured (YMMV). Something in 2.6 must be more timing sensitive or less tolerant of overcranked h/w speeds. NBD: my system is a few years old, the extra ~20% speed increase cannot is insignificant when compared to speeds of a modern CPU - it seemed a lot at the time!)
the dreamcast wasn't too bad at the time, but sega's saturn also suffered the similar fate of crashing out of the market before the other players did.
..and, as if that wasn't enough, you also have to write another set of model conversion tools that work with quads... and, if you want performance, you have to get your graphic artist to design models that make use of a lot of quads too - truly horrendous with the tools of the day (3dstudio/etc)
it wasn't technically superior, although it had a fair amount of power to compete with the other consoles at the time - but inside it was technically all wrong for the time....
what caused the programmers headaches with the saturn was the fact that it's 3d engine/hw all worked in quads (and not tris).
this meant that you had to develop a radically different 3d engine to all the other platforms at the time (ie: pc, psx - and if you didn't mind *seriously* limited texture memory, the n64 (..but at least it rendered tris)).
not only that, but the engine would have to undergo different optimisation to a tri-poly engine (aside from any other platform specific differences like texure memory management, etc)
also, the compiler's backed produced some awful code. not only was the a lot of stuff that was truly sub-optimal, but plenty of it was actually redundant (you should see what a mess it made of compiling our cross platform fixed-n-float maths library - and don't even think about using most of the nice oo features in c++, coz it just made the code lots worst)
an interesting challenge, but plenty of developers soon decided it was the 'black sheep' of the consoles, requiring too much of its own kind of voodoo to be a commercially viable platform to develop for at the time -- the project manager's soon realised that the saturn was proving to be the awkward one of the bunch, and then during the next project, it was left in the corner with all the other junk hardware, allowing everyone to concentrate on working together more easily.
i don't know what developers thought of the dreamcast, but it certainly wasn't adopted as quickly as the psx2 was - maybe this was simply a hangover from the saturn legacy? maybe the compiler was still not as good as those on the other platforms (that alone can make coding into a nightmare issue or two)
whatever happens to the current xbox, i think it likely that the next xbox will simply be another pc-alike-in-a-box [yawn for the gamers, but eventually good for us hacker-geeks]
microsoft know they are on to a winner if they stick with what (games+/etc) developers already know.
[technical aside]
of course, if you've got quads, you can always make a triangle by putting two verts at the same coordinate - which is fine if you've not got a fancy texture on the quad (coz otherwise the non-perspective correct texture mapping would skew it to bits) and you don't mind incurring the cost of using quads for tris (extra maths on a redundant vert) - a lot of games used minimal textures and shading to compensate for all the triangularly-skewed-quads.
['scuse the ramble]
i'd just like to point out that this article is:
...not that i fully understand - but i might end up reading this trilogy should my spam get too much worse.
"from the spam-filtering-ideas dept."
Thanks for the info!
(You learn something new everyday)
Don't you want all your clocks to be in sync?
Beyond SSH, it's one of the first network services I setup on any kind of system.
Hmm.. maybe it's just me.
(...or maybe Macs already do NTP anyway?)
sure, publicity can lead to extra sales, but why would a hong-kong based company selling cds to the uk at the same price as everyone else do any better than the high-street stores, or other (uk-based) online retailers?
..and it's been going on for years.
seems to be exactly what the bpi wants to do -- level the ground, not (gasp) by allowing a uk store to reduce its prices and compete fairly, but by telling cd-wow to up their prices.
after all: it's a it's totally plainly obvious price fixing racket, isn't it?