chatroom slang became such in an effort to be able to convey ideas through typing at the rate of talking
Not strictly true. It's just a convenient way
of typing faster than you could otherwise do.
It doesn't necessarily have to be at full talking
speed (which is *very* hard to achieve without a
stenography machine). Most people grow out of it
as their typing speed increases. Sadly, there's
an increasing segment of the population that
never make it that far (and that think it's
"k3wl", something I never really understood).
XFS uses extents rather than blocks, meaning that contiguous data is treated as one logical unit rather than a sequence of separate blocks. This is said to improve performance for sequential access.
Yes, extents will increase sequential read
performance slightly, but it's GRIO that give's
*guaranteed* performance, which is the desirable
feature for streaming. Oh, and extent based
filesystems still use blocks the same as any
other filesystem. The block allocation policy is
the only difference.
And a word on hungarian notation. It makes me want to puke. Your variables should be named well enough that it shouldn't need extra letters to tell you the type.
More to the point, the compiler will tell you
when you've got the type wrong anyway. Hungarian
notation is completely unnecessary, and (IMHO,
of course) those who claim it makes for easier
reading need their heads examined. It serves no
purpose, and for that reason alone, shouldn't
be used...
I can only think of two recent original games that really made a splash - the Sims and Pikmin
The Sims is original how? It's just an enhanced
version of LCP,
with a better graphics engine, and better AI due
to the increased CPU horsepower. The game concept
itself is far from original.
"You've generated 140,000 charges, thats more than your normal volume."
Hmm... Would you expect a store to want to deliberately shut down its systems because it is getting too much business?
Yes, I would, because that's almost guaranteed to
be fraudulent use, and it's a pain in the ass for
the store to have to clear up the resulting mess.
But apart from that, I wouldn't expect the *store*
to do it anyway. I'd expect the card processor
(First Data or similar) to do it. I work for a UK
based credit
card, and we *do* have systems in place to
check for abnormal usage (although I don't know
if they'd have helped in this case -- they
certainly pick up unusual patterns per card, but
this was only one transaction per card). I'd hope
that FDE
have similar checking, but I don't know for sure.
I'd assumed it was
routine, but found out it wasn't when my
girlfriend's card was cloned. Sure, her bank
eventually refunded the fraudulent transactions,
but made no attempt to stop them in the first
place. From speaking to our fraud people, it
seems it's up to the individual issuer whether
or not they do it.
Yes, but what is even nicer is that Galeon is Mozilla without all the bloat.
And taking things to their logical conclusion,
Skipstone
is Galeon without all the bloat. I used to have
really high hopes for Galeon, but their dependencies
on bleeding edge versions of countless Gnome
libraries make it nearly impossible to install on
anything that isn't running Ximian.
I'd rather have an MP3/OGG player than a minidisc player.
So would I, but there just aren't any practical
options at the moment, which is why I'm still
using Minidisc. My digital music is all
in Ogg format, so an MP3 player isn't really an
option (given that I don't want to have to reencode it all). There are currently no portable
Ogg players. Also,
with Minidisc, I can carry 10 disc around with me,
to get lots of hours of music when I'm on the move.
With MP3/ogg, the cost of compact flash, smartmedia,
memory stick or whatever generally makes that
prohibitively expensive. The only alternative is
to get a player with a hard drive built in, which
is more expensive and loses you many of the
benefits of portable digital players (no moving
parts, light weight, etc.). In a few years time,
I expect to have a portable digital player. But
for now, I'll stick with Minidisc.
No more Betamax? I guess I'll need to buy a new doorstop then.
Doorstop? My Betamax machine is still in full
working order. I figure I'll hang onto it for a
few more years yet, and then make a killing by
selling it as spare parts to those in need, now
that Sony have discontinued them. After several
failed attempts at amassing obscene amounts of
wealth, this time my plan's foolproof. It has to
work, right?
more and more config files are being written in XML. If it had no business there, I seriously doubt so many people would be switching to it.
Do you honestly believe that? People switch to
things because of momentum, and the desire to
follow the herd. Technical merit comes a long way down the list.
XML is in no way supposed to be easy to read.
Remarkable... in one simple sentence, you've
managed to completely explain why XML shouldn't
be let anywhere near a config file.
It was never meant to be, it was never designed to be. If you find editing a XML file that difficult, get an XML GUI.
There are a few problems with that. Firstly,
none of my machines have either a graphics
card or even X libraries. They're servers, hence
they don't need, and don't have, graphics.
You could arguably have a curses based front
end, I suppose. But step back for a second and
think about what you're suggesting. You're
claiming that every application should be shipped
with a separate config front end, rather than
just designing a sensible, easily readable
config file format in the first place? Sorry,
that doesn't sound like a win to me. Perhaps
you can explain the benefits of XML
for config files. Not why they're no worse than
other formats, but what advantages they give you
that are sufficiently compelling to use XML?
Because I genuinely don't get it...
Re: 30-45 second outage: Have you played with the tomcat manager app to reload / deploy / undeploy applications without restarting tomcat?
Nope, not yet. We have a number of business critical
deliveries to make in the next couple of months,
so we're sticking with Tomcat 3 for now. Once
those are out of the way, Tomcat 4 is one of the
many things on the todo list (primarily driven
by the potential to workaroung the slow startup
times)
Hmmm. I don't like Ant. That's in no small part
due to my belief that XML has no business being
anywhere near a config file. You only have to
look at Jabber to prove that. Or in fact, much
of tomcat -- server.xml makes me feel sick every
time I have to look at it.
In fact Ant's very existence
is a reaction to the problems Sun caused with
Java when they decided to break the traditional
source file
to object file relationship that had existed for
years. If they hadn't done that, and if javac
worked like a traditional compiler, then make wouldn't
have had such a hard time with Java in the first
place, and Ant wouldn't have existed.
I am sure you can find a way to make Ant alter the config files then produce individual WAR files for each server.
Yes. I could do that with any number of means,
and I'm sure Ant is one of them. However, it
breaks one of the fundamental principles of
software management -- the build you deploy
on your production systems should come from the same
distribution that you deployed on your test
systems. Otherwise your tests are meaningless.
You can exhaustively test a build all you want,
but unless you're deploying the same
build on production, what's the point?
Just dropping a new.war file in the deploy directory
We can't use war files easily, because each
build needs to be configured for the system
on which it's being deployed. So we just deploy
a pre-extracted tar file, with a configure script
that substitutes in the appropriate values in
various config files for
the server in question.
One thing execs don't like about "free" is, whose fault is it when it breaks? They need somebody to yell at
That's fine, so long as they're aware that yelling
is all they can expect to be able to do. Read the
fine print in your support contract. You'll see
that there's no guarantee to fix anything, and
no liability if they don't fix it.
more fitting for the big screen than the London Times
The name of the newspaper is just "The Times",
not the "London Times". It's the oldest English
language newspaper in the world, and other papers
added a regional prefix to differentiate themselves
from the original Times (e.g., the NY Times, and
local papers like the Barnet Borough Times). It's
also no longer purely based in London. When I
worked there a few years ago, there were three
main offices, one in Wapping (London), one in
Liverpool and one in Scotland. Each had their
own set of journalists and editorial staff, and
printing was done at all three sites, plus several
others dotted around the country.
Like the subject says. It seems to
work OK for us. Startup times are annoyingly slow.
If we need to deploy a new context, then restarting
tomcat brings with it a 30-45 second outage. But
other than that, it's fine. Performance testing
showed that increasing the number of threads the
connectors can handle, and increasing the memory
size (we use -Xmx500M) helps enormously.
Seriously, who gives a damn about where the DVD gets watched as long as they bought it. The manufacurers still get cash.
The manufacturers give a damn, because they get
more cash if they can time the releases with
suitable promotional visits from the film's stars,
etc. If the DVD is released into a global market,
they can't stagger releases to allow them to
concentrate on one market at a time. After all,
there's only one Tom Cruise, and he can't be
publicising his latest film in the USA, Europe
and the Far East all at the same time.
I personally don't think that maximizing an
already huge amount of profit is sufficient reason
for them to stomp all over my rights as a consumer,
but that's their reasoning behind it.
I believe it's aimed squarely at Codeweaver's Crossover programs, making them less usable by removing the possibility of downloading fonts.
Yes, I agree completely. It was obvious for some
time that they were specifically trying to exclude
Unix and MacOS users from using these fonts. That's
why they released them as self extracting Windows
executables (and unlike most, they're not just a
zip file with an executable header). The license
specifically says that redistribution is allowed
if, and only if, they're in the original,
unmodified archive. What they'd overlooked was the
ability for other systems to extract the archives
via Windows emulation, and now that's become a
reality, they're doing what they can to stop it.
I don't believe they're particularly worried
about the spread of these fonts in themselves.
However, as an enabling mechanism that allows
Crossover Office to potentially take Windows
revenue away from them, then yes, they're
worried. As they should be -- I've been using
Crossover Office at work, and it certainly has
the potential to be the key piece in the jigsaw
that make Linux a viable corporate desktop
alternative. That is something that
will have Redmond very worried indeed...
is XTerm so large? I've been hearing about this for a while, as it is usally cited as a reason for using rxvt.
Yes, it's really large. It uses 2.3MB of RAM on
my machine, of which, 1.8 or so is shared with
other processes. The
sad fact is, though, that so is rxvt these days
(and indeed, all current terminal emulators).
xterm includes a tektronics emulator, amongst other
things, which 99% of users will never need (in fact,
I'm the only person I know that has ever had a
genuine need for it). As a reaction to xterm's
size, one of my lecturers at University wrote
xvt, a minimal terminal emulator, without the
bloat. Over time, that evolved into rxvt, which
is growing more and more features, and is no
longer as small as it once was. It's still
smaller than xterm, but that's not hard. For
comparison, opening up a new term uses up the
following amount of RAM per new window:
496: xterm
296: rxvt
856: gnome-terminal
140: gnome-terminal --use-factory
1068: konsole
160: konsole (first new tab)
36: konsole (subsequent new tabs)
It should be noted that both konsole and gnome-terminal have massive startup costs,
with konsole starting up 4 kdeinit processes,
and gnome-terminal starting up gnome-pty-helper.
In the US/Canada and Japan, you had the original Nintendo Entertainment System. In most parts of Europe and South America, the Sega Master System. Both came out around 1985 (exact date depended on where you lived), and pretty much dominated the gaming scene in their respective areas.
Nope. Although the Master system was around, it
certainly didn't dominate. In fact, it barely
made a dent. It wasn't until the Megadrive that
consoles in the UK achieved widespread use.
In the shop in which I worked, we had racks of Spectrum,
C64, Amiga and ST games, and a handful of Master
System games because there was just no demand
for them.
The article is also full of other technical inaccuracies, it's almost as if the people who wrote it knew nothing of the game industry.
Indeed. The most obvious one (to me, at least)
was the claim that gaming in the late 80s was
dominated by consoles. At least in the UK,
consoles barely scratched the surface of the
market back then, which was utterly dominated
by personal computers. The C64, Amiga, Atari ST
ruled the market, and even the Spectrum was still
going strong. Apart from the Atari 2600, consoles
barely existed until the Sega Megadrive 2 came along
in 1989, and didn't really hit the big time until
around 1992.
Both Amiga and C64 had hardware scrolling, and just by incrementing a single register the screen could be scrolled in single pixel imcrements both horizontally and vertically. The point was that Carmack found a way to achieve the same effect on hardware that was not intended to do that.
Yes, by using double buffering, a well known
technique by that point (I'd been using it for
many years by then, for example, starting somewhere around
1985 or so). Although the C64 and Amiga supported
hardware scrolling, that wasn't always appropriate
to the task in hand, and double buffering was
used extensively on both systems before 1990.
have you any statistics that shows that the latest versions of XP and IE are already more popular than older versions?
Browser stats show our website gets more hits
from IE6 than any other browser. But that's mostly
on older OSes. Very few people seem to be using
XP yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, but I'm disappointed they've removed Assault. That was always the best game type in UT.
Not strictly true. It's just a convenient way of typing faster than you could otherwise do. It doesn't necessarily have to be at full talking speed (which is *very* hard to achieve without a stenography machine). Most people grow out of it as their typing speed increases. Sadly, there's an increasing segment of the population that never make it that far (and that think it's "k3wl", something I never really understood).
Yes, extents will increase sequential read performance slightly, but it's GRIO that give's *guaranteed* performance, which is the desirable feature for streaming. Oh, and extent based filesystems still use blocks the same as any other filesystem. The block allocation policy is the only difference.
* tweaked for streaming large files to/from disk -- probably best at sequential reads/writes.
Is this true? I thought the reason XFS did so well for streaming video on IRIX was GRIO, and that hasn't been ported to Linux... at least, not yet.
More to the point, the compiler will tell you when you've got the type wrong anyway. Hungarian notation is completely unnecessary, and (IMHO, of course) those who claim it makes for easier reading need their heads examined. It serves no purpose, and for that reason alone, shouldn't be used...
The Sims is original how? It's just an enhanced version of LCP, with a better graphics engine, and better AI due to the increased CPU horsepower. The game concept itself is far from original.
Hmm... Would you expect a store to want to deliberately shut down its systems because it is getting too much business?
Yes, I would, because that's almost guaranteed to be fraudulent use, and it's a pain in the ass for the store to have to clear up the resulting mess. But apart from that, I wouldn't expect the *store* to do it anyway. I'd expect the card processor (First Data or similar) to do it. I work for a UK based credit card, and we *do* have systems in place to check for abnormal usage (although I don't know if they'd have helped in this case -- they certainly pick up unusual patterns per card, but this was only one transaction per card). I'd hope that FDE have similar checking, but I don't know for sure. I'd assumed it was routine, but found out it wasn't when my girlfriend's card was cloned. Sure, her bank eventually refunded the fraudulent transactions, but made no attempt to stop them in the first place. From speaking to our fraud people, it seems it's up to the individual issuer whether or not they do it.
The mistake Americans seem most prone to making is using "insure" when they mean "ensure". Why is this so prevalent?
And taking things to their logical conclusion, Skipstone is Galeon without all the bloat. I used to have really high hopes for Galeon, but their dependencies on bleeding edge versions of countless Gnome libraries make it nearly impossible to install on anything that isn't running Ximian.
So would I, but there just aren't any practical options at the moment, which is why I'm still using Minidisc. My digital music is all in Ogg format, so an MP3 player isn't really an option (given that I don't want to have to reencode it all). There are currently no portable Ogg players. Also, with Minidisc, I can carry 10 disc around with me, to get lots of hours of music when I'm on the move. With MP3/ogg, the cost of compact flash, smartmedia, memory stick or whatever generally makes that prohibitively expensive. The only alternative is to get a player with a hard drive built in, which is more expensive and loses you many of the benefits of portable digital players (no moving parts, light weight, etc.). In a few years time, I expect to have a portable digital player. But for now, I'll stick with Minidisc.
Doorstop? My Betamax machine is still in full working order. I figure I'll hang onto it for a few more years yet, and then make a killing by selling it as spare parts to those in need, now that Sony have discontinued them. After several failed attempts at amassing obscene amounts of wealth, this time my plan's foolproof. It has to work, right?
Do you honestly believe that? People switch to things because of momentum, and the desire to follow the herd. Technical merit comes a long way down the list.
XML is in no way supposed to be easy to read.
Remarkable... in one simple sentence, you've managed to completely explain why XML shouldn't be let anywhere near a config file.
It was never meant to be, it was never designed to be. If you find editing a XML file that difficult, get an XML GUI.
There are a few problems with that. Firstly, none of my machines have either a graphics card or even X libraries. They're servers, hence they don't need, and don't have, graphics. You could arguably have a curses based front end, I suppose. But step back for a second and think about what you're suggesting. You're claiming that every application should be shipped with a separate config front end, rather than just designing a sensible, easily readable config file format in the first place? Sorry, that doesn't sound like a win to me. Perhaps you can explain the benefits of XML for config files. Not why they're no worse than other formats, but what advantages they give you that are sufficiently compelling to use XML? Because I genuinely don't get it...
Nope, not yet. We have a number of business critical deliveries to make in the next couple of months, so we're sticking with Tomcat 3 for now. Once those are out of the way, Tomcat 4 is one of the many things on the todo list (primarily driven by the potential to workaroung the slow startup times)
Hmmm. I don't like Ant. That's in no small part due to my belief that XML has no business being anywhere near a config file. You only have to look at Jabber to prove that. Or in fact, much of tomcat -- server.xml makes me feel sick every time I have to look at it. In fact Ant's very existence is a reaction to the problems Sun caused with Java when they decided to break the traditional source file to object file relationship that had existed for years. If they hadn't done that, and if javac worked like a traditional compiler, then make wouldn't have had such a hard time with Java in the first place, and Ant wouldn't have existed.
I am sure you can find a way to make Ant alter the config files then produce individual WAR files for each server.
Yes. I could do that with any number of means, and I'm sure Ant is one of them. However, it breaks one of the fundamental principles of software management -- the build you deploy on your production systems should come from the same distribution that you deployed on your test systems. Otherwise your tests are meaningless. You can exhaustively test a build all you want, but unless you're deploying the same build on production, what's the point?
We can't use war files easily, because each build needs to be configured for the system on which it's being deployed. So we just deploy a pre-extracted tar file, with a configure script that substitutes in the appropriate values in various config files for the server in question.
That's fine, so long as they're aware that yelling is all they can expect to be able to do. Read the fine print in your support contract. You'll see that there's no guarantee to fix anything, and no liability if they don't fix it.
The name of the newspaper is just "The Times", not the "London Times". It's the oldest English language newspaper in the world, and other papers added a regional prefix to differentiate themselves from the original Times (e.g., the NY Times, and local papers like the Barnet Borough Times). It's also no longer purely based in London. When I worked there a few years ago, there were three main offices, one in Wapping (London), one in Liverpool and one in Scotland. Each had their own set of journalists and editorial staff, and printing was done at all three sites, plus several others dotted around the country.
Like the subject says. It seems to work OK for us. Startup times are annoyingly slow. If we need to deploy a new context, then restarting tomcat brings with it a 30-45 second outage. But other than that, it's fine. Performance testing showed that increasing the number of threads the connectors can handle, and increasing the memory size (we use -Xmx500M) helps enormously.
The manufacturers give a damn, because they get more cash if they can time the releases with suitable promotional visits from the film's stars, etc. If the DVD is released into a global market, they can't stagger releases to allow them to concentrate on one market at a time. After all, there's only one Tom Cruise, and he can't be publicising his latest film in the USA, Europe and the Far East all at the same time. I personally don't think that maximizing an already huge amount of profit is sufficient reason for them to stomp all over my rights as a consumer, but that's their reasoning behind it.
Yes, I agree completely. It was obvious for some time that they were specifically trying to exclude Unix and MacOS users from using these fonts. That's why they released them as self extracting Windows executables (and unlike most, they're not just a zip file with an executable header). The license specifically says that redistribution is allowed if, and only if, they're in the original, unmodified archive. What they'd overlooked was the ability for other systems to extract the archives via Windows emulation, and now that's become a reality, they're doing what they can to stop it. I don't believe they're particularly worried about the spread of these fonts in themselves. However, as an enabling mechanism that allows Crossover Office to potentially take Windows revenue away from them, then yes, they're worried. As they should be -- I've been using Crossover Office at work, and it certainly has the potential to be the key piece in the jigsaw that make Linux a viable corporate desktop alternative. That is something that will have Redmond very worried indeed...
Yes, it's really large. It uses 2.3MB of RAM on my machine, of which, 1.8 or so is shared with other processes. The sad fact is, though, that so is rxvt these days (and indeed, all current terminal emulators). xterm includes a tektronics emulator, amongst other things, which 99% of users will never need (in fact, I'm the only person I know that has ever had a genuine need for it). As a reaction to xterm's size, one of my lecturers at University wrote xvt, a minimal terminal emulator, without the bloat. Over time, that evolved into rxvt, which is growing more and more features, and is no longer as small as it once was. It's still smaller than xterm, but that's not hard. For comparison, opening up a new term uses up the following amount of RAM per new window:
It should be noted that both konsole and gnome-terminal have massive startup costs, with konsole starting up 4 kdeinit processes, and gnome-terminal starting up gnome-pty-helper.
Nope. Although the Master system was around, it certainly didn't dominate. In fact, it barely made a dent. It wasn't until the Megadrive that consoles in the UK achieved widespread use. In the shop in which I worked, we had racks of Spectrum, C64, Amiga and ST games, and a handful of Master System games because there was just no demand for them.
Indeed. The most obvious one (to me, at least) was the claim that gaming in the late 80s was dominated by consoles. At least in the UK, consoles barely scratched the surface of the market back then, which was utterly dominated by personal computers. The C64, Amiga, Atari ST ruled the market, and even the Spectrum was still going strong. Apart from the Atari 2600, consoles barely existed until the Sega Megadrive 2 came along in 1989, and didn't really hit the big time until around 1992.
Yes, by using double buffering, a well known technique by that point (I'd been using it for many years by then, for example, starting somewhere around 1985 or so). Although the C64 and Amiga supported hardware scrolling, that wasn't always appropriate to the task in hand, and double buffering was used extensively on both systems before 1990.
Browser stats show our website gets more hits from IE6 than any other browser. But that's mostly on older OSes. Very few people seem to be using XP yet.