You weren't really "addicted" to painkillers if you were taking them to really cope with chronic pain, which it sounds to me like you did. You were taking them to get rid of the pain, thats not really an "addiction"; if you kept taking them even when you had no pain then that would be an addiction. Was that the case? Just checking, it wasn't all that clear from the post.
To saturate the market, ms had bundled IE with everything from ITmagazine cd's, to computers, to even peripherals.
Sheesh, I remember that time. It was almost impossible to get any CD that didn't have Internet Explorer bundled into it. Everyone I know was up to their flippin ears in spare IE CDs. I'm surprised they didn't give IE CDs away in cereal boxes too.
"It hasn't really improved, while Internet Explorer has made leaps and bounds, coming from behind, overtaking, and leaving the Netscape crowd in the dust"
I hate to point out the gaping flaw in your reasoning here, but of course Netscape got left in the dust - that is exactly what happens when a competitor cuts off your distribution channels - you can no longer afford to improve the product - helloooo, thats exactly what Microsoft did to Netscape, that is actually called "killing them off". How do you improve your product when you've been cut out of the market?
How short our memories are. IE3 and IE 4, the "competition" for NN4 at the time, were also crap products, incredibly unstable and buggy. Now a couple of years later everyone seems to have forgotten that, and now everyone compares the Netscape of 2 to 3 years ago to the Internet Explorer of today. Hardly a fair comparison.
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Re:Does anyone bother reading the articles any mor
on
Magnet Patent Suits
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· Score: 2
Yeah, we have nukes pointed at China, but you missed everything else in that post to get your little snippet in
That wasn't my purpose. I bundled the other stuff under the general comment about human rights. I know China is lacking in human rights. I'm not disputing that at all. I just completely disagree with the way that America is handling China, it is incredibly dangerous and quite frankly, fscking stupid. Yes, the Chinese government is "in the wrong". Yes, they lie, and keep their people in the dark with propaganda. The way I see it is, during the next 100 years, it is almost a certainty that China will undergo some sort of "freedom revolution", this seems to be the overall trend in todays society. So the only question is, will it be a bloody revolution, or a "peaceful" revolution? Do thousands (maybe millions) of people need to die to bring it about? I don't think so, freedom can be attained without largescale bloodshed (e.g. South Africa). So the US wants to see freedom of Chinese people. How do they go about it? They provoke. They have huge 'China is evil and the USA is great(*)' media (propaganda) campaigns. They portray the Chinese as evil (**). Americans seem to think that doing this will pressure the Chinese government into improving policy. Ha, right! It will only serve to provoke, and escalate tensions. Is that the right way to export the principles of freedom and democracy? You attack someone (not physically I mean), they go on the defensive, and you will not convince them of anything after that. All the US is doing is convincing the Chinese government more and more that their own animosity towards the USA is justified. There is a reason that the US is so hated in many countries (e.g. Iraq) - the US comes across as being really arrogant, pushy and self-righteous. This makes it very easy for totalitarian rulers to push anti-US propaganda. Do you really believe that the right way to change China is for the US to go to war with China? This is what may well happen if current trends are extrapolated. Is it worth it for thousands of Americans and Chinese to die? I don't see it as a necessary solution. You're not going to convince the Chinese what freedom truly is by going about it the way you are currently.
All things considered, the US has a pretty lousy human rights record (McCarthy era, slavery, racism, womens rights etc). The system itself though does seem to correct itself over time, which makes it a worthwhile system. But Americans must remember just how far from perfect their system is when they make noise about the problems in other countries. From the perspective of somebody living outside the US, you people come across as believing yourselves to be so much better and more righteous than everyone else (I'm not saying it is that way, but that is the impression you give, and that counts for a lot). Myself, I think the US would have a more positive influence on other countries if they adopted a more humble approach. Because everyone else is sick of hearing the same crap over and over about "how great this country of ours truly is" and about "the principles on which this great country of ours was founded" and how the US "stands up to protect and defend" others, "defenders of the free world", blah blah blah. Self-appointed "big brother" (not in the orwell sense).
(*) See CNN reports when US pilots returned home, its not even subtle. Its flat out "USA is such a great wonderful country" propaganda.
(**) Russians no longer seem to be the evil guys in US television and movies. Grep all 80's TV scripts for "russia" and replace with "china". Chinese are now portrayed as being maniacally bent on ruling the world by force, a show I saw just a couple of days ago portrayed the Chinese government as wantonly trying to completely nuke entire USA. Pretty lame, yes, but that sort of thing brainwashes on a large scale.
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Re:Does anyone bother reading the articles any mor
on
Magnet Patent Suits
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· Score: 2
And America doesn't have nuclear bombs pointed at Chinese cities? But "thats different, Americans are the good guys"..
I'm not saying China doesn't have a lacking in the human rights department, but quite frankly, the anti-China sentiment seen in the US media (and on/.) has gone way past objective levels - people don't seem to be thinking clearly about it, they're posting the most ridiculous statements.
Do you really, really believe that the average American's opinion on China has not been clouded by a slew of media propag^H^H^H^H^H^H, uh, "information" about China?
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Re:Does anyone bother reading the articles any mor
on
Magnet Patent Suits
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· Score: 3
And incidentally, in 1995 the whole shebang was acquired by a Chinese holding company. Yes, a Chinese company suddenly has the potential to drastically affect a large portion of the American computer-manufacturing market. Does anyone think *that* might have interesting repurcussions worth discussing?
Gosh, you mean this might be an ATTACK on the GOOD GUYS from the EVIL CHINESE!?!? Uhm, lets see now... the list of defendants includes Sony, Philips, Toshiba and Samsumg, none of which are American companies. It is truly amazing (and sad) how Americans simply cannot seem to see the anti-China propaganda for what it is.
I played in a local Quake3 competition last year. Each player could submit their q3config.cfg file, and these files were made available on the network. The computers were supplied, but you were allowed to bring your own keyboard and your own mouse. I also brought some utils in (e.g. ps2rate) on a floppy. They had 32 computers, and you were assigned to a specific computer only shortly before playing.
Overall, it worked well. People installed custom mouse drivers etc for their boomslangs.. didn't seem to cause any problems.
Having all the computers the same also ensures that someone doesn't have an advantage over someone else simply because they have the latest GeForce, 1GHz CPU, 512MB RAM etc.
There were no problems with file copying simply because players could not spend any additional time sitting around at the PCs. It was a standalone LAN, no additional PCs could be plugged in. Also the games were one after each other the whole time - so by and large, people were very focussed only on the games. Of course, this was a competition, not really a "LAN party".
File transfer tends to suck the bandwidth dry at LAN parties. Most people I know still use hubs at LAN parties, sometimes even 10 MB. Copying files at the same time as 3 seperate concurrent Q3 DM games on the same LAN tends to kill the LAN.
Even getting a cheap 8 port switch and organizing your hubs through the switch can help a lot though.
I very much like the idea of copying files at LANs, and I admit I do it myself, although I do try not to copy too much. If the networks were a lot more efficient (e.g. lots more switches instead of hubs) it would be great.
As others have pointed out here, google isn't the only usenet archive around. Is one to go to every single one individually and ask them all? Should you have to keep track of every time a new usenet archive service appears? If a company buys an existing usenet archive, can they be trusted to continue to honour the "deleted" messages? What about usenet archives which don't allow you to do request that your posts be deleted?
I don't see a way around it, quite frankly.. the proverbial cats out of the bag.. if you have some nasty stuff from your past that you want gone, its too late.
Not really, this lame patent specifically includes that the system cull visible avatars to a maximum number. This is an incredibly lame thing to try patent, but to my knowledge none of the ID line of games does this. Doom and Quake (versions 1 to 3) will always display *all* avatars that are in a clients view.
Nonetheless, there is a LOT of prior art. Diablo II, for example, sounds to me like it fits the bill fairly well (although not strictly "3D" in the usual computer-graphics sense of the word). Games aside, a lot of existing military simulations use precisely the techniques described, and *are* "3D" (in the computer-graphics sense of the word). They are even based on open standards such as DIS/HLA. DIS has been around for years.
"We will also review other 3D sites who may be using our technology to ensure we are fully compensated"
They've just been awarded the patent, and are now planning to go after a 'plurality' of existing 3D sites that are supposedly already using "their" technology. In other words, he admits there are a number of other sites that have already been using such technologies for a while --- given that these other sites all developed their technology without literally stealing it from his company, isn't he basically admitting that their is prior art? "We just got this patent and now we're going to go after a bunch of people who actually independently developed these same techniques"
There must be huge amount of prior art on this one (and yes, I have read the patent, and the techniques described in this patent are precisely my line of work). The techniques described are not only in existing games like Diablo2 (not sure about Quake3 as Quake3 doesn't attempt to cull visible avatars to a maximum amount as the patent describes - Quake3 will render all of them if all of them are in view), but have been in common use (precisely as described) in military simulations, including support in open standards like DIS/HLA. I believe the lithtech engine also does what the patent describes.
When configured properly, they cut compile times quite dramatically (funnily enough, when misconfigured (e.g. if the "use precompiled headers through" edit box is empty instead of containing a filename), they slow down compile times dramatically). I experimented with this stuff very recently actually, managed to get a "rebuild all" down from 6 minutes to 3 minutes 45 seconds, for a project of just over 100000 lines of code, in 7 or 8 projects.
"I switched from GNU C++ to Visual C++ in 1996 (change of jobs) and found that VC++ 5.0 was lot closer to the standard"
Thats odd, as I remember it the C++ standard wasn't finalised until around 1998. Can you really blame major compiler vendors for not having up-to-the-minute support on a moving target?
I do remember VC 5 had a number of problems with STL in particular, and we still have problems with the compiler in VC 6, even with the latest SP (random errors regarding DEBUG_NEW in MFC apps that disappear when you try compile again, as well as internal compiler errors).. but overall our experiences have been pretty good with it.
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South Africa and nuclear, not quite
on
Fission in a Box
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· Score: 2
"The situation is SA appears to me to be precisely the situation that lead to the first generation of Nuclear Power being a failure. It will be a political statement signalling the rise of a regional superpower"
I don't think the developments on PBMR in South Africa are politically motivated but economically motivated (Eskom is a large now privatised company).
South Africa has also already had a successful nuclear power plant for decades now (Koeberg, in the Cape), so I can't understand that we have much of a statement to make. Very few people also seem to remember that South Africa also had a nuclear program and successfully built and detonated a nuclear bomb (way back in the 70's already IIRC; the nuclear program was eventually dismantled). So I highly doubt that this is an attempt to make any sort of political statement, I don't think South Africa has anything much "to prove" in terms of nuclear technologies (unlike for example countries like India which are experimenting now with nuclear weapons, their political situation is entirely different).
Our president might not be the sharpest around at science (his degree is economics) so quite frankly I (and most everyone else) wishes he would refrain from attempting to make strong scientific statements, its embarrassing. But the President has absolutely nothing to do with the PBMR program, and believe it or not we do have some very good scientists and engineers here.
I think you should consider doing a little more research into the political and social climate and history of South Africa before making your conclusions, as it seems to me that by and large you've just mentally mapped the US political situation onto South Africa, assumed it is more or less the same, and made your deductions from that.
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Possibly not a troll [OffTopic]
on
Fission in a Box
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· Score: 2
I suspect it may have been an attempt at humour, rather than a troll. If it was a troll though, I say he gets some points for spelling "Johannesburg" correctly (research):)
The software we (http://www.5dt.com/) used to distribute with our Data Glove product had a demo that mapped gestures to actions way back in 1995 already. Some of our applications use it too, not unlike the way it appears in B&W. Our current glove driver has some simple gesture recognition built into it. Granted, this is "real" hand gestures, not gestures using the mouse, so it probably isn't quite the same thing.
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Stupid question about netbios naming resolution
on
Samba 2.2.0 Released
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· Score: 2
This might be a stupid (inexperienced question), but am I the only one who thinks it would be very useful to have Linux's hostname resolving scheme support Netbios name resolution? e.g. to be able to specify for example in/etc/host.conf something like "order hosts, netbios, bind" or something like that. So that typing (for example) "ping foo" would allow for a Netbios-named PC on the LAN called "foo"'s IP to be found, if it isn't in/etc/hosts, for example. We have a WinNT DHCP server on the LAN, and a Linux server that does some other stuff, and entirely Windows clients, so the Windows clients all get "random" IP addresses on startup. It's a pain to keep/etc/hosts up to date under this scheme, and its also a pain to use IP reservations for every client.
Apart from this probably esoteric setup, I'm sure there are many other possible useful applications for this to be supported (e.g. to recreate something like Windows Network Neighbourhood - how does the new KDE do this?). Seems to me "Linux as a workstation" could benefit seriously from this. You don't really want to be going around explaining the "smbclient" command parameters to every employee - in Windows this stuff "just works, point and click", at least from a user perspective.
Is something like this planned? Is it something that would perhaps be easier to support with the planned LibSMB?
Is this already possible and I just don't know how (or haven't tried recently)? Admittedly its been at least 6 months to a year since I last looked at this stuff. Sorry if it's a stupid question.
Strange, I was talking about Win9X. I didn't say a thing about Linux. You then posted a long rant about Linux. Where did Linux come into it? I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you mistakenly replied to the incorrect post.
Despite my personal feelings about your obviously abrasive personality, I do happen to agree with some of your very valid points, e.g. the "50 half-assed graphical user environments", and various other usability and, uh, 'complexity' issues that Linux developers should probably address. Seriously, I can find my way around Linux no problem simply because I've been playing around with it for over 5 years now, but I feel sorry for anybody who wants to try learn it from scratch.
Visual C++ on Win2K is my development environment "of choice" (i.e. the one I enjoy working in the most). Win98 has severe stability issues (see my abovementioned points regarding protected mode and Win16Mutex), and Linux doesn't have Visual C++ (or anything that even comes close, not even kdevelop). Win2K (with Visual C++) has, for my purposes, the strong points of both. It seems you just made a whole bunch of incorrect assumptions about me when you replied to my post.
The main factor preventing headsets from becoming mainstream is probably that those tiny screen cost a LOT. So do the lenses required to get a decent Field of View (which also make the things fairly heavy). The trackers (to track movement of the head) are also very expensive. The weight of the helmets usually make it quite tiring for people to wear the stuff for more than a couple of hours also.
The argument that they make people "throw up" used to have more validity, but not so much now. What makes people seasick is usually the latency, i.e. the delay between moving your head and seeing the results. To eliminate this, you need two things, fast frame rate (at least 30, preferably 60), and a low-latency tracker. Fast frame rates have only become possible recently with mainstream 3d cards like the GeForce series, so this has become less of a problem. But trackers are still a problem - even the relatively cheaper ones (e.g. in the $1000 range) still have relatively high latency.
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"If that's the only thing in your life that raises your ire then life can't be that damn bad"
When your job requires that you spend a minimum of 8 hours a day for years on end constantly using some crappy software, then it sure as hell is "that bad". If I only did some e-mail and web browsing every day and maybe a bit of word processing now and again, I'm sure I wouldn't be nearly as bothered by how crap MS sofware is. But when you have to do full-time software development on Windows 98 it can make literally turn what *could* be a relatively fun job into a miserable hell. If you don't know what protected mode is or what the Win16Mutex is, then don't even bother trying to argue back, because you obviously don't know enough to make an informed argument about it.
BTW, you appear to imply that people may not complain about something unless it is at least as bad as a tumor or being blind/deaf/dumb. This is probably the most ridiculous viewpoint I've heard in a long time. As ridiculous as the argument made on some/. threads some time ago that you may only complain about bad teachers if you yourself are a good teacher.
According to this article, the web is a declining industry
Thats not the impression I got. The impression I got was more like "the IT industry is fairly volatile at the moment". "Declining"? No.. didn't read that into it at all.
No, its because his post is, technically, complete and utter BS. I haven't read a/. post so technically inaccurate in a long time. So either he is incredibly clueless, or he is a troll. Hard to tell though.
But if you already are using a full fledge desktop on your computer, running another on a remote computer seems redundant
Not entirely. VNC lets you run multiple desktops from the same machine. In fact in my case, I have a linux box set up with no local display at all (no monitor) which is actually running VNC desktops for three users. They're not very heavily used, so they perform well. They're also running from a slow old Pentium with only 64 MB ram and a 10 Mb lan card, so all in all they run pretty well.
Slashdot Mirror
He/she's been trolling around slashdot for a while, check out his/her posting history.
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"I also had a bad pain killer addiction"
You weren't really "addicted" to painkillers if you were taking them to really cope with chronic pain, which it sounds to me like you did. You were taking them to get rid of the pain, thats not really an "addiction"; if you kept taking them even when you had no pain then that would be an addiction. Was that the case? Just checking, it wasn't all that clear from the post.
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To saturate the market, ms had bundled IE with everything from ITmagazine cd's, to computers, to even peripherals.
Sheesh, I remember that time. It was almost impossible to get any CD that didn't have Internet Explorer bundled into it. Everyone I know was up to their flippin ears in spare IE CDs. I'm surprised they didn't give IE CDs away in cereal boxes too.
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"It hasn't really improved, while Internet Explorer has made leaps and bounds, coming from behind, overtaking, and leaving the Netscape crowd in the dust"
I hate to point out the gaping flaw in your reasoning here, but of course Netscape got left in the dust - that is exactly what happens when a competitor cuts off your distribution channels - you can no longer afford to improve the product - helloooo, thats exactly what Microsoft did to Netscape, that is actually called "killing them off". How do you improve your product when you've been cut out of the market?
How short our memories are. IE3 and IE 4, the "competition" for NN4 at the time, were also crap products, incredibly unstable and buggy. Now a couple of years later everyone seems to have forgotten that, and now everyone compares the Netscape of 2 to 3 years ago to the Internet Explorer of today. Hardly a fair comparison.
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Yeah, we have nukes pointed at China, but you missed everything else in that post to get your little snippet in
That wasn't my purpose. I bundled the other stuff under the general comment about human rights. I know China is lacking in human rights. I'm not disputing that at all. I just completely disagree with the way that America is handling China, it is incredibly dangerous and quite frankly, fscking stupid. Yes, the Chinese government is "in the wrong". Yes, they lie, and keep their people in the dark with propaganda. The way I see it is, during the next 100 years, it is almost a certainty that China will undergo some sort of "freedom revolution", this seems to be the overall trend in todays society. So the only question is, will it be a bloody revolution, or a "peaceful" revolution? Do thousands (maybe millions) of people need to die to bring it about? I don't think so, freedom can be attained without largescale bloodshed (e.g. South Africa). So the US wants to see freedom of Chinese people. How do they go about it? They provoke. They have huge 'China is evil and the USA is great(*)' media (propaganda) campaigns. They portray the Chinese as evil (**). Americans seem to think that doing this will pressure the Chinese government into improving policy. Ha, right! It will only serve to provoke, and escalate tensions. Is that the right way to export the principles of freedom and democracy? You attack someone (not physically I mean), they go on the defensive, and you will not convince them of anything after that. All the US is doing is convincing the Chinese government more and more that their own animosity towards the USA is justified. There is a reason that the US is so hated in many countries (e.g. Iraq) - the US comes across as being really arrogant, pushy and self-righteous. This makes it very easy for totalitarian rulers to push anti-US propaganda. Do you really believe that the right way to change China is for the US to go to war with China? This is what may well happen if current trends are extrapolated. Is it worth it for thousands of Americans and Chinese to die? I don't see it as a necessary solution. You're not going to convince the Chinese what freedom truly is by going about it the way you are currently.
All things considered, the US has a pretty lousy human rights record (McCarthy era, slavery, racism, womens rights etc). The system itself though does seem to correct itself over time, which makes it a worthwhile system. But Americans must remember just how far from perfect their system is when they make noise about the problems in other countries. From the perspective of somebody living outside the US, you people come across as believing yourselves to be so much better and more righteous than everyone else (I'm not saying it is that way, but that is the impression you give, and that counts for a lot). Myself, I think the US would have a more positive influence on other countries if they adopted a more humble approach. Because everyone else is sick of hearing the same crap over and over about "how great this country of ours truly is" and about "the principles on which this great country of ours was founded" and how the US "stands up to protect and defend" others, "defenders of the free world", blah blah blah. Self-appointed "big brother" (not in the orwell sense).
(*) See CNN reports when US pilots returned home, its not even subtle. Its flat out "USA is such a great wonderful country" propaganda.
(**) Russians no longer seem to be the evil guys in US television and movies. Grep all 80's TV scripts for "russia" and replace with "china". Chinese are now portrayed as being maniacally bent on ruling the world by force, a show I saw just a couple of days ago portrayed the Chinese government as wantonly trying to completely nuke entire USA. Pretty lame, yes, but that sort of thing brainwashes on a large scale.
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And America doesn't have nuclear bombs pointed at Chinese cities? But "thats different, Americans are the good guys" ..
I'm not saying China doesn't have a lacking in the human rights department, but quite frankly, the anti-China sentiment seen in the US media (and on /.) has gone way past objective levels - people don't seem to be thinking clearly about it, they're posting the most ridiculous statements.
Do you really, really believe that the average American's opinion on China has not been clouded by a slew of media propag^H^H^H^H^H^H, uh, "information" about China?
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And incidentally, in 1995 the whole shebang was acquired by a Chinese holding company. Yes, a Chinese company suddenly has the potential to drastically affect a large portion of the American computer-manufacturing market. Does anyone think *that* might have interesting repurcussions worth discussing?
Gosh, you mean this might be an ATTACK on the GOOD GUYS from the EVIL CHINESE!?!? Uhm, lets see now ... the list of defendants includes Sony, Philips, Toshiba and Samsumg, none of which are American companies. It is truly amazing (and sad) how Americans simply cannot seem to see the anti-China propaganda for what it is.
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I played in a local Quake3 competition last year. Each player could submit their q3config.cfg file, and these files were made available on the network. The computers were supplied, but you were allowed to bring your own keyboard and your own mouse. I also brought some utils in (e.g. ps2rate) on a floppy. They had 32 computers, and you were assigned to a specific computer only shortly before playing.
Overall, it worked well. People installed custom mouse drivers etc for their boomslangs .. didn't seem to cause any problems.
Having all the computers the same also ensures that someone doesn't have an advantage over someone else simply because they have the latest GeForce, 1GHz CPU, 512MB RAM etc.
There were no problems with file copying simply because players could not spend any additional time sitting around at the PCs. It was a standalone LAN, no additional PCs could be plugged in. Also the games were one after each other the whole time - so by and large, people were very focussed only on the games. Of course, this was a competition, not really a "LAN party".
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File transfer tends to suck the bandwidth dry at LAN parties. Most people I know still use hubs at LAN parties, sometimes even 10 MB. Copying files at the same time as 3 seperate concurrent Q3 DM games on the same LAN tends to kill the LAN.
Even getting a cheap 8 port switch and organizing your hubs through the switch can help a lot though.
I very much like the idea of copying files at LANs, and I admit I do it myself, although I do try not to copy too much. If the networks were a lot more efficient (e.g. lots more switches instead of hubs) it would be great.
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As others have pointed out here, google isn't the only usenet archive around. Is one to go to every single one individually and ask them all? Should you have to keep track of every time a new usenet archive service appears? If a company buys an existing usenet archive, can they be trusted to continue to honour the "deleted" messages? What about usenet archives which don't allow you to do request that your posts be deleted?
I don't see a way around it, quite frankly .. the proverbial cats out of the bag .. if you have some nasty stuff from your past that you want gone, its too late.
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I didn't notice the filing date was so long ago. That makes it a little trickier.
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Didn't doom use this same architecture
Not really, this lame patent specifically includes that the system cull visible avatars to a maximum number. This is an incredibly lame thing to try patent, but to my knowledge none of the ID line of games does this. Doom and Quake (versions 1 to 3) will always display *all* avatars that are in a clients view.
Nonetheless, there is a LOT of prior art. Diablo II, for example, sounds to me like it fits the bill fairly well (although not strictly "3D" in the usual computer-graphics sense of the word). Games aside, a lot of existing military simulations use precisely the techniques described, and *are* "3D" (in the computer-graphics sense of the word). They are even based on open standards such as DIS/HLA. DIS has been around for years.
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"We will also review other 3D sites who may be using our technology to ensure we are fully compensated"
They've just been awarded the patent, and are now planning to go after a 'plurality' of existing 3D sites that are supposedly already using "their" technology. In other words, he admits there are a number of other sites that have already been using such technologies for a while --- given that these other sites all developed their technology without literally stealing it from his company, isn't he basically admitting that their is prior art? "We just got this patent and now we're going to go after a bunch of people who actually independently developed these same techniques"
There must be huge amount of prior art on this one (and yes, I have read the patent, and the techniques described in this patent are precisely my line of work). The techniques described are not only in existing games like Diablo2 (not sure about Quake3 as Quake3 doesn't attempt to cull visible avatars to a maximum amount as the patent describes - Quake3 will render all of them if all of them are in view), but have been in common use (precisely as described) in military simulations, including support in open standards like DIS/HLA. I believe the lithtech engine also does what the patent describes.
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Yes I do actually.
When configured properly, they cut compile times quite dramatically (funnily enough, when misconfigured (e.g. if the "use precompiled headers through" edit box is empty instead of containing a filename), they slow down compile times dramatically). I experimented with this stuff very recently actually, managed to get a "rebuild all" down from 6 minutes to 3 minutes 45 seconds, for a project of just over 100000 lines of code, in 7 or 8 projects.
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"I switched from GNU C++ to Visual C++ in 1996 (change of jobs) and found that VC++ 5.0 was lot closer to the standard"
Thats odd, as I remember it the C++ standard wasn't finalised until around 1998. Can you really blame major compiler vendors for not having up-to-the-minute support on a moving target?
I do remember VC 5 had a number of problems with STL in particular, and we still have problems with the compiler in VC 6, even with the latest SP (random errors regarding DEBUG_NEW in MFC apps that disappear when you try compile again, as well as internal compiler errors) .. but overall our experiences have been pretty good with it.
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"The situation is SA appears to me to be precisely the situation that lead to the first generation of Nuclear Power being a failure. It will be a political statement signalling the rise of a regional superpower"
I don't think the developments on PBMR in South Africa are politically motivated but economically motivated (Eskom is a large now privatised company).
South Africa has also already had a successful nuclear power plant for decades now (Koeberg, in the Cape), so I can't understand that we have much of a statement to make. Very few people also seem to remember that South Africa also had a nuclear program and successfully built and detonated a nuclear bomb (way back in the 70's already IIRC; the nuclear program was eventually dismantled). So I highly doubt that this is an attempt to make any sort of political statement, I don't think South Africa has anything much "to prove" in terms of nuclear technologies (unlike for example countries like India which are experimenting now with nuclear weapons, their political situation is entirely different).
Our president might not be the sharpest around at science (his degree is economics) so quite frankly I (and most everyone else) wishes he would refrain from attempting to make strong scientific statements, its embarrassing. But the President has absolutely nothing to do with the PBMR program, and believe it or not we do have some very good scientists and engineers here.
I think you should consider doing a little more research into the political and social climate and history of South Africa before making your conclusions, as it seems to me that by and large you've just mentally mapped the US political situation onto South Africa, assumed it is more or less the same, and made your deductions from that.
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I suspect it may have been an attempt at humour, rather than a troll. If it was a troll though, I say he gets some points for spelling "Johannesburg" correctly (research) :)
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The software we (http://www.5dt.com/) used to distribute with our Data Glove product had a demo that mapped gestures to actions way back in 1995 already. Some of our applications use it too, not unlike the way it appears in B&W. Our current glove driver has some simple gesture recognition built into it. Granted, this is "real" hand gestures, not gestures using the mouse, so it probably isn't quite the same thing.
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This might be a stupid (inexperienced question), but am I the only one who thinks it would be very useful to have Linux's hostname resolving scheme support Netbios name resolution? e.g. to be able to specify for example in /etc/host.conf something like "order hosts, netbios, bind" or something like that. So that typing (for example) "ping foo" would allow for a Netbios-named PC on the LAN called "foo"'s IP to be found, if it isn't in /etc/hosts, for example. We have a WinNT DHCP server on the LAN, and a Linux server that does some other stuff, and entirely Windows clients, so the Windows clients all get "random" IP addresses on startup. It's a pain to keep /etc/hosts up to date under this scheme, and its also a pain to use IP reservations for every client.
Apart from this probably esoteric setup, I'm sure there are many other possible useful applications for this to be supported (e.g. to recreate something like Windows Network Neighbourhood - how does the new KDE do this?). Seems to me "Linux as a workstation" could benefit seriously from this. You don't really want to be going around explaining the "smbclient" command parameters to every employee - in Windows this stuff "just works, point and click", at least from a user perspective.
Is something like this planned? Is it something that would perhaps be easier to support with the planned LibSMB?
Is this already possible and I just don't know how (or haven't tried recently)? Admittedly its been at least 6 months to a year since I last looked at this stuff. Sorry if it's a stupid question.
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Strange, I was talking about Win9X. I didn't say a thing about Linux. You then posted a long rant about Linux. Where did Linux come into it? I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you mistakenly replied to the incorrect post.
Despite my personal feelings about your obviously abrasive personality, I do happen to agree with some of your very valid points, e.g. the "50 half-assed graphical user environments", and various other usability and, uh, 'complexity' issues that Linux developers should probably address. Seriously, I can find my way around Linux no problem simply because I've been playing around with it for over 5 years now, but I feel sorry for anybody who wants to try learn it from scratch.
Visual C++ on Win2K is my development environment "of choice" (i.e. the one I enjoy working in the most). Win98 has severe stability issues (see my abovementioned points regarding protected mode and Win16Mutex), and Linux doesn't have Visual C++ (or anything that even comes close, not even kdevelop). Win2K (with Visual C++) has, for my purposes, the strong points of both. It seems you just made a whole bunch of incorrect assumptions about me when you replied to my post.
The main factor preventing headsets from becoming mainstream is probably that those tiny screen cost a LOT. So do the lenses required to get a decent Field of View (which also make the things fairly heavy). The trackers (to track movement of the head) are also very expensive. The weight of the helmets usually make it quite tiring for people to wear the stuff for more than a couple of hours also.
The argument that they make people "throw up" used to have more validity, but not so much now. What makes people seasick is usually the latency, i.e. the delay between moving your head and seeing the results. To eliminate this, you need two things, fast frame rate (at least 30, preferably 60), and a low-latency tracker. Fast frame rates have only become possible recently with mainstream 3d cards like the GeForce series, so this has become less of a problem. But trackers are still a problem - even the relatively cheaper ones (e.g. in the $1000 range) still have relatively high latency. -
"If that's the only thing in your life that raises your ire then life can't be that damn bad"
When your job requires that you spend a minimum of 8 hours a day for years on end constantly using some crappy software, then it sure as hell is "that bad". If I only did some e-mail and web browsing every day and maybe a bit of word processing now and again, I'm sure I wouldn't be nearly as bothered by how crap MS sofware is. But when you have to do full-time software development on Windows 98 it can make literally turn what *could* be a relatively fun job into a miserable hell. If you don't know what protected mode is or what the Win16Mutex is, then don't even bother trying to argue back, because you obviously don't know enough to make an informed argument about it.
BTW, you appear to imply that people may not complain about something unless it is at least as bad as a tumor or being blind/deaf/dumb. This is probably the most ridiculous viewpoint I've heard in a long time. As ridiculous as the argument made on some /. threads some time ago that you may only complain about bad teachers if you yourself are a good teacher.
According to this article, the web is a declining industry
Thats not the impression I got. The impression I got was more like "the IT industry is fairly volatile at the moment". "Declining"? No .. didn't read that into it at all.
No, its because his post is, technically, complete and utter BS. I haven't read a /. post so technically inaccurate in a long time. So either he is incredibly clueless, or he is a troll. Hard to tell though.
But if you already are using a full fledge desktop on your computer, running another on a remote computer seems redundant
Not entirely. VNC lets you run multiple desktops from the same machine. In fact in my case, I have a linux box set up with no local display at all (no monitor) which is actually running VNC desktops for three users. They're not very heavily used, so they perform well. They're also running from a slow old Pentium with only 64 MB ram and a 10 Mb lan card, so all in all they run pretty well.