Another example similar to the 'Smashing Pumpkins' one is the 'More than words' song by Extreme, the rest of the album is -nothing- like that song...
In general, it's not news that a band releases an album with a couple of hit tracks and the rest is filler (come on, 45s had a 'B' side for a reason!) it's just that nowadays most bands/singers sound the same (heck, they even -look- the same) so people are becoming a bit disillusioned with the whole prepackaged music market.
In the days of yore bands/groups were definitely more original & diverse, songs on the same album could be extremely different from each other, now labels are way too obsessed about formula IMHO.
Personally most (and I mean 95%) of the CDs I bought the past few years have been classical/jazz/'classic pop/rock', the rest is definitely non-mainstream stuff (people should check out 'Little Lights' by Kate Rusby, awesome voice & a great folk-type album).
The only contemporary (sort of) 'mainstream' (sort of) artist I buy albums as soon as they get out is Sting, I've never -ever- heard a 'filler' track on any of his solo album or really any formulaic ones, he's definitely by far my favorite 'pop' artist of all time...
Definitely, I don't care if -any- ATI card has a 2%-5%-10% performance advantage, having absolutely great drivers from NVidia (for Linux & windows) far outweighs any small performance gains the ATI card might supposedly have.
If the situation is like this (where the cards are pretty much neck & neck) the balance swings even farther towards buying NVidia. The only NVidia card I'd have never ever considered buying would have been the dustbuster...
Given that I'm running an (ancient) dual p3-450 bought 3 years ago, I guess this Fall it might be time to upgrade:)
you're honestly telling me that you believe that every cent made off fuel taxes goes to road upgrades and repairs? I think the one that lives in a candycane place is not me...
yeah, but the thing I don't understand is how can they formulate a tax law in such generic terms that automagically anything you run your car on becomes 'fuel' and has to be taxed.
What is going to stop the UK government from, for example, adding another tax to electricity if it's used to recharge a car's batteries? and what about fuel cells?
Amen regarding the dynamic pages (i.e. pages created as a result of a POST etc.) I have to keep an old NS4.7 around to be able to debug those, which is really stupid.
Whomever originally thought that 'view-source' should fetch the source from the webserver instead of just displaying what's already in the browser's memory should be made to debug dynamic sites for a few years while only having access to this moronic view-source functionality.
Why am I pessimistic? because as soon as a technology that promises to get away from petroleum dependency arises, petroleum producing states will cut prices significantly until said technology is deemed 'impractical'. Once this happens they'll raise prices once again.
I mean, how much does oil cost per barrel to Saudi Arabia to produce? a few bucks? less? how much are they selling it for? 30+ bucks and counting? They could flood the world oil market with oil at $5/barrel (which would translate in gas at around 40c/gallon) and still rack in profits...
Personally I don't believe that until oil runs out we'll ever wean ourselves from it: and given how big the reserves of oil producing states are, I don't believe it will run out for another several decades unfortunately...
and what about man pages for -many- GNU utilities that just say 'this man page is incomplete, out of date and/or wrong, see the info files for the documentation'. Even when I was running debian I still had to resort to info files for several GNU applications IIRC.
While I appreciate a good info help file (esp. for bigger programs like Emacs) I prefer man pages. BTW cperl-perldoc in Emacs is great!
I mean, the Geforce 5 6000^H^H^H^H^H^H5800 while having A LOT of drawbacks (noise, takes up two slots, probably lots of heat) doesn't seem to have very much going for it over the ATI's offerings. The only thing right now is driver quality, but as far as I am hearing ATI is getting better at this lately...
Note, I'm not an ATI fanboy (actually I'm running a GeForce1 right now) but I'm really appalled at what 3dfx^H^H^H^HNVidia was thinking when they created this card...
if they have finally fixed the subwoofer amplifier? In the old 'premium' model the sub had a tendency to blow up very quickly if the speakers were used at mid+ volumes on bass-heavy songs.
There's a msg board where some people were on their 3rd or even 4th set of speakers, which is really ridiculous...
it doesn't have to do that, really: since you start from an empty screen you just need to know what's the next piece that's coming down: in fact, as you can notice in the screenshots, the 'white squares' the system uses to recognize the shapes are in the location where the new piece appears.
Having a 'generic' solution that could be activated 'mid-game' would surely be much more complicated.
It'd also be interesting to know if there's anything done (maybe at a lower priority) to check that the situation on the 'slave' machine is the same in terms of pieces down (I'm thinking of, say, a keystroke not registering).
Also this 'visual' tetris should be, IMHO, handicapped the same way a player is in terms of knowing exactly where a piece will drop: it does happen to everybody sooner or later to press the 'drop' key and immediately go *&%&)!)$@! because the piece was really one column left/right of where you thought it was (obviously whether it's left or right depends from which side would be the worst possible case scenario, Murphy's law applies to tetris as usual).
for the very simple reason that I strongly doubt that anybody that has a root certificate which ships in IE/Netscape will sign your CA's key. If this is not done users will see the dreaded 'signer unknown' popup box which is pretty much a deal breaker if you are interested in setting up an eCommerce site (why would you need SSL otherwise?).
the most complex games, on the highest resolutions, get WAY too many frames
you're kidding me, right? Get UT2003 in 1600x1200 with everything maxed out and even on a 9700pro you won't see more than 30 or so fps on certain maps (alone, just looking around, in heavy firefights I'd suspect it'll drop to the teens: I don't have a system like that but I'm basing this on vidcaps I saw when UT came out).
Human eye is unable to perceive extra frames beyond a certain number
bs, it also really depends on what you're doing. If you're in a driving game going straight ahead and you get 30fps, you *might* not notice the difference between your 30 and 90fps. In a shooter or other game where the screen moves around quite a bit, I'm sorry but I can see the difference between 30fps and 70fps quite easily...
The moment somebody creates a card that is able to mantain refresh-rate-synced-updates (say 85fps) in any available game at any resolution regardless of what is going on, it's the moment a new game will be announced that will take a card 4x as powerful to do the same.
It really never ends... of course if all you'd like to do is play counterstrike you can get by quite well like myself with a really old p3-450 + geforce1.
given that this thing is a *balloon* which means that its flight path is very unpredictable, I really doubt he asked for permission or that it would have been given.
I mean, would you want a ballon to fly up to 80,000ft close to a major airport intersecting probably most flight corridors in its vicinity? While I applaud the ingenuity in doing this project, I do believe the author should have gone in the proverbial 'middle of nowhere' to launch it.
I mean, it *is* possible that this balloon could have ended in an airliner's jet engine with possibly bad consequences... if the author hasn't requested permission I suspect he might end up being 'contacted' by his local flight authority and possibly even fined (unsure about what's the situation in the US for this type of stuff)
I'm way, way, way faster entering text with one of the various freeware Qwerty screen-based keyboards (VirtualKB is great) and am toying with moving directly to one of those silkscreen thingies you can put on the graffiti area to type Qwerty there.
Graffiti is definitely not all it's cracked up to be (at least for me) while I can write the graffitis fast enough, I find it extremely disconcerting to write characters on top of each other: it goes against many years of learned behaviour (handwriting) and for this reason I don't think it'll ever feel natural. I also read somewhere an article that was talking about exactly this phenomenon.
IMHO there is no reason for graffiti/graffiti-like stuff to exist: for pdas use a Qwertyish keyboard (on screen or hardware) for tablet PCs just use standard handwriting recognition software.
One of the last tests ran was to run TWO applications at the same time (PS in fg and RAW converter in bg and vice-versa IIRC) and even in THAT case (that should have been much better for the SMP box) the intel-based computer was faster.
Also PS *does* take advantage of SMP, especially on macs: the point of the article was to buy the absolute fastest Mac available and pitch it against an intel P4, if they wanted to they could have used a dual AMD and probably crushed the Mac machine in the ground even more (like the article suggests at the end)
it's my turn to ask you to read my post;) obviously I'm not gonna fire up gdb to debug code I wrote an hour ago or for trivial stuff that's covered by printfs...
On occasion, though, it does happen that functionality that you add breaks the product in interesting ways, due to long-existing bugs that just weren't triggered before: it's in these cases that having a debugger is invaluable.
I can't really relate to 'programmers who learn to do without a debugger are better programmers', because when I learned how to code (in pascal/assembly on a very niche Z80-based computer in the early 80s) the only debugger was really printf, and having an infinite loop meant resetting the computer: the above poster, though, was saying that people program better when writing on paper or using a 'no-frills' editor like notepad vs an ide like VC/Emacs, and I still strongly disagree with that...
doing test-driven development = finding bugs via unit testing, the poster I was replying to advocated that if code was written on paper (rock + chisel, ed, whatever) bugs aren't going to be created thus making debugging unnecessary.
Test-driven development = debugging your own code if you see that you broke something, and to do that you do need debugging tools...
the best way to build a skyscraper is not to use CAD programs at all, but a slide rule and pen'n'paper, which force you to think about what you're doing instead of making mistakes and 'correcting them later'.
come on! You can't tell me that to be a Real Programmer one has to forgo color syntax highlighting, automatic indentation, automatic code formatting, automatic brace insertion, etags, man-on-symbol-at-point, folding, autodoc of functions, gcc -Wall -Weverything-but-the-kitchen-sink etc. etc. etc.
Personally I believe that being able to isolate myself to having to indent manually the next line and similar stuff makes me a better programmer, as I'm able to think about structure & what I want the function to be doing vs why the %##*%^ editor doesn't do what I want.
I'd also like to see you 'not put the bugs in in the first place' if you're adding a complex piece of functionality to a 2,000,000 lines program: I can write perfect 'hello world' code on a napkin, but considering doing it for real work is ludicrous.
Debugging is also an art, and I don't think I've ever found a bug I wasn't able to trace via judicious use of the tools currently available on the market right now, which are (from less to most esoteric):
- compile with as many warnings on as you can - reading the docs/code comments (some bugs are really features;) - the mighty printf/cout/cerr - find/grep - vanilla breakpoints in your debugger of choice - tcpdump/openssl s_client/telnet/other packet monitoring stuff - purify/ad-hoc malloc library - hardware watchpoints in gdb (saved me a few times) - sleeping on it/going for a walk (let your subconscious do its thing)
Only thing I'd like that current debuggers on unix don't have is what you can do in windows by inserting a certain line in your code that when is reached it automagically halts and pops up the debugger: when debugging multithreaded/multiprocess stuff that has bugs only when not running singleprocess/singlethread it's invaluable: anybody knows how to do that in unix?
Slashdot Mirror
Another example similar to the 'Smashing Pumpkins' one is the 'More than words' song by Extreme, the rest of the album is -nothing- like that song...
In general, it's not news that a band releases an album with a couple of hit tracks and the rest is filler (come on, 45s had a 'B' side for a reason!) it's just that nowadays most bands/singers sound the same (heck, they even -look- the same) so people are becoming a bit disillusioned with the whole prepackaged music market.
In the days of yore bands/groups were definitely more original & diverse, songs on the same album could be extremely different from each other, now labels are way too obsessed about formula IMHO.
Personally most (and I mean 95%) of the CDs I bought the past few years have been classical/jazz/'classic pop/rock', the rest is definitely non-mainstream stuff (people should check out 'Little Lights' by Kate Rusby, awesome voice & a great folk-type album).
The only contemporary (sort of) 'mainstream' (sort of) artist I buy albums as soon as they get out is Sting, I've never -ever- heard a 'filler' track on any of his solo album or really any formulaic ones, he's definitely by far my favorite 'pop' artist of all time...
Definitely, I don't care if -any- ATI card has a 2%-5%-10% performance advantage, having absolutely great drivers from NVidia (for Linux & windows) far outweighs any small performance gains the ATI card might supposedly have.
:)
If the situation is like this (where the cards are pretty much neck & neck) the balance swings even farther towards buying NVidia. The only NVidia card I'd have never ever considered buying would have been the dustbuster...
Given that I'm running an (ancient) dual p3-450 bought 3 years ago, I guess this Fall it might be time to upgrade
it's kind of funny, but the site works fine and the mirror is currently slashdotted :)
you're honestly telling me that you believe that every cent made off fuel taxes goes to road upgrades and repairs? I think the one that lives in a candycane place is not me...
yeah, but the thing I don't understand is how can they formulate a tax law in such generic terms that automagically anything you run your car on becomes 'fuel' and has to be taxed.
What is going to stop the UK government from, for example, adding another tax to electricity if it's used to recharge a car's batteries? and what about fuel cells?
If I lived in the UK I'd be kind of pissed...
but also with the new high definition screens (320x320 or higher) so people who have a IIIc (like myself) are SOL.
Amen regarding the dynamic pages (i.e. pages created as a result of a POST etc.) I have to keep an old NS4.7 around to be able to debug those, which is really stupid.
Whomever originally thought that 'view-source' should fetch the source from the webserver instead of just displaying what's already in the browser's memory should be made to debug dynamic sites for a few years while only having access to this moronic view-source functionality.
I think they would park the lexus in the garage in that case, or if the garage is not going to be covered they can always keep it in the living room :)
Why am I pessimistic? because as soon as a technology that promises to get away from petroleum dependency arises, petroleum producing states will cut prices significantly until said technology is deemed 'impractical'. Once this happens they'll raise prices once again.
I mean, how much does oil cost per barrel to Saudi Arabia to produce? a few bucks? less? how much are they selling it for? 30+ bucks and counting? They could flood the world oil market with oil at $5/barrel (which would translate in gas at around 40c/gallon) and still rack in profits...
Personally I don't believe that until oil runs out we'll ever wean ourselves from it: and given how big the reserves of oil producing states are, I don't believe it will run out for another several decades unfortunately...
just my 2c
and what about man pages for -many- GNU utilities that just say 'this man page is incomplete, out of date and/or wrong, see the info files for the documentation'. Even when I was running debian I still had to resort to info files for several GNU applications IIRC.
While I appreciate a good info help file (esp. for bigger programs like Emacs) I prefer man pages. BTW cperl-perldoc in Emacs is great!
I mean, the Geforce 5 6000^H^H^H^H^H^H5800 while having A LOT of drawbacks (noise, takes up two slots, probably lots of heat) doesn't seem to have very much going for it over the ATI's offerings. The only thing right now is driver quality, but as far as I am hearing ATI is getting better at this lately...
Note, I'm not an ATI fanboy (actually I'm running a GeForce1 right now) but I'm really appalled at what 3dfx^H^H^H^HNVidia was thinking when they created this card...
if they have finally fixed the subwoofer amplifier? In the old 'premium' model the sub had a tendency to blow up very quickly if the speakers were used at mid+ volumes on bass-heavy songs.
There's a msg board where some people were on their 3rd or even 4th set of speakers, which is really ridiculous...
it doesn't have to do that, really: since you start from an empty screen you just need to know what's the next piece that's coming down: in fact, as you can notice in the screenshots, the 'white squares' the system uses to recognize the shapes are in the location where the new piece appears.
Having a 'generic' solution that could be activated 'mid-game' would surely be much more complicated.
It'd also be interesting to know if there's anything done (maybe at a lower priority) to check that the situation on the 'slave' machine is the same in terms of pieces down (I'm thinking of, say, a keystroke not registering).
Also this 'visual' tetris should be, IMHO, handicapped the same way a player is in terms of knowing exactly where a piece will drop: it does happen to everybody sooner or later to press the 'drop' key and immediately go *&%&)!)$@! because the piece was really one column left/right of where you thought it was (obviously whether it's left or right depends from which side would be the worst possible case scenario, Murphy's law applies to tetris as usual).
for the very simple reason that I strongly doubt that anybody that has a root certificate which ships in IE/Netscape will sign your CA's key. If this is not done users will see the dreaded 'signer unknown' popup box which is pretty much a deal breaker if you are interested in setting up an eCommerce site (why would you need SSL otherwise?).
the most complex games, on the highest resolutions, get WAY too many frames
you're kidding me, right? Get UT2003 in 1600x1200 with everything maxed out and even on a 9700pro you won't see more than 30 or so fps on certain maps (alone, just looking around, in heavy firefights I'd suspect it'll drop to the teens: I don't have a system like that but I'm basing this on vidcaps I saw when UT came out).
Human eye is unable to perceive extra frames beyond a certain number
bs, it also really depends on what you're doing. If you're in a driving game going straight ahead and you get 30fps, you *might* not notice the difference between your 30 and 90fps. In a shooter or other game where the screen moves around quite a bit, I'm sorry but I can see the difference between 30fps and 70fps quite easily...
The moment somebody creates a card that is able to mantain refresh-rate-synced-updates (say 85fps) in any available game at any resolution regardless of what is going on, it's the moment a new game will be announced that will take a card 4x as powerful to do the same.
It really never ends... of course if all you'd like to do is play counterstrike you can get by quite well like myself with a really old p3-450 + geforce1.
at 20 grand US for an 18 month program in systems administration it better be good...
my bad! I read only selected parts of the article and completely missed that...
given that this thing is a *balloon* which means that its flight path is very unpredictable, I really doubt he asked for permission or that it would have been given.
I mean, would you want a ballon to fly up to 80,000ft close to a major airport intersecting probably most flight corridors in its vicinity? While I applaud the ingenuity in doing this project, I do believe the author should have gone in the proverbial 'middle of nowhere' to launch it.
I mean, it *is* possible that this balloon could have ended in an airliner's jet engine with possibly bad consequences... if the author hasn't requested permission I suspect he might end up being 'contacted' by his local flight authority and possibly even fined (unsure about what's the situation in the US for this type of stuff)
I'm way, way, way faster entering text with one of the various freeware Qwerty screen-based keyboards (VirtualKB is great) and am toying with moving directly to one of those silkscreen thingies you can put on the graffiti area to type Qwerty there.
Graffiti is definitely not all it's cracked up to be (at least for me) while I can write the graffitis fast enough, I find it extremely disconcerting to write characters on top of each other: it goes against many years of learned behaviour (handwriting) and for this reason I don't think it'll ever feel natural. I also read somewhere an article that was talking about exactly this phenomenon.
IMHO there is no reason for graffiti/graffiti-like stuff to exist: for pdas use a Qwertyish keyboard (on screen or hardware) for tablet PCs just use standard handwriting recognition software.
did you even read the article?
One of the last tests ran was to run TWO applications at the same time (PS in fg and RAW converter in bg and vice-versa IIRC) and even in THAT case (that should have been much better for the SMP box) the intel-based computer was faster.
Also PS *does* take advantage of SMP, especially on macs: the point of the article was to buy the absolute fastest Mac available and pitch it against an intel P4, if they wanted to they could have used a dual AMD and probably crushed the Mac machine in the ground even more (like the article suggests at the end)
exactly what I needed! thanks!!!
it's my turn to ask you to read my post ;) obviously I'm not gonna fire up gdb to debug code I wrote an hour ago or for trivial stuff that's covered by printfs...
On occasion, though, it does happen that functionality that you add breaks the product in interesting ways, due to long-existing bugs that just weren't triggered before: it's in these cases that having a debugger is invaluable.
I can't really relate to 'programmers who learn to do without a debugger are better programmers', because when I learned how to code (in pascal/assembly on a very niche Z80-based computer in the early 80s) the only debugger was really printf, and having an infinite loop meant resetting the computer: the above poster, though, was saying that people program better when writing on paper or using a 'no-frills' editor like notepad vs an ide like VC/Emacs, and I still strongly disagree with that...
doing test-driven development = finding bugs via unit testing, the poster I was replying to advocated that if code was written on paper (rock + chisel, ed, whatever) bugs aren't going to be created thus making debugging unnecessary.
Test-driven development = debugging your own code if you see that you broke something, and to do that you do need debugging tools...
the best way to build a skyscraper is not to use CAD programs at all, but a slide rule and pen'n'paper, which force you to think about what you're doing instead of making mistakes and 'correcting them later'.
;)
come on! You can't tell me that to be a Real Programmer one has to forgo color syntax highlighting, automatic indentation, automatic code formatting, automatic brace insertion, etags, man-on-symbol-at-point, folding, autodoc of functions, gcc -Wall -Weverything-but-the-kitchen-sink etc. etc. etc.
Personally I believe that being able to isolate myself to having to indent manually the next line and similar stuff makes me a better programmer, as I'm able to think about structure & what I want the function to be doing vs why the %##*%^ editor doesn't do what I want.
I'd also like to see you 'not put the bugs in in the first place' if you're adding a complex piece of functionality to a 2,000,000 lines program: I can write perfect 'hello world' code on a napkin, but considering doing it for real work is ludicrous.
Debugging is also an art, and I don't think I've ever found a bug I wasn't able to trace via judicious use of the tools currently available on the market right now, which are (from less to most esoteric):
- compile with as many warnings on as you can
- reading the docs/code comments (some bugs are really features
- the mighty printf/cout/cerr
- find/grep
- vanilla breakpoints in your debugger of choice
- tcpdump/openssl s_client/telnet/other packet monitoring stuff
- purify/ad-hoc malloc library
- hardware watchpoints in gdb (saved me a few times)
- sleeping on it/going for a walk (let your subconscious do its thing)
Only thing I'd like that current debuggers on unix don't have is what you can do in windows by inserting a certain line in your code that when is reached it automagically halts and pops up the debugger: when debugging multithreaded/multiprocess stuff that has bugs only when not running singleprocess/singlethread it's invaluable: anybody knows how to do that in unix?
for an excellent (as usual) review of a camera based on this sensor check dpreview
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/sigmasd9/