14 MB is pretty small for something that essentially emulates a totally different platform.
Actually, it *wraps* a different platform. It doesn't emulate squat.
I don't think you have grounds to complain when the Windows OS needs about 50 times that much space by itself.
Heh. That's funny. Running Windows XP, with a lot of apps running, I'm getting a total commit-charge of 165Mb. That would be *ten* times the size of the Java VM. And all that does is wrap Windows calls.
you wouldn't happen to plan on releasing the winsock stuff, would you? sounds neat
Probably not. I don't like releasing libraries which aren't up to spec; and I'm not entirely happy with this one. (In fact, for most applications, it's probably better to just hang off of Winsock directly yourself, and just make sure you're using Overlapped IO for everything (as it's much better documented and much more... deterministic than the other mechanisms)).
I'd be happy to write up the hows and whys though.
Then there's the Mr. Gibson [grc.com] and his "everything in assembly" philosphy -- also under 100k. Those are the only kinds of things that deserve to be called "tiny."
Hmmm.. I wrote an SMTP mailer app in C++ using VC++ recently.
It comes in at 20k, most of which is load-time linkage information. It zips down nicely to 5kb too. (I wrote a custom socket lib stuff to sit on top of Winsock for asynchronous *everything* with timeouts and cancels from other threads being serviced correctly too...)
Why is assembly supposedly so great for writing this kind of stuff then?
I mean, I'm no slouch when it comes to getting down to the bare metal (I grew up on assembly language; programmed it for 10 or so years before I even touched C or Java)... but with today's compilers, unless you're doing some hefty optimization, it's just a chest-beating machismo exercize.
No doubt, though, if Mr. Gibson wrote the same app as mine, he'd have it down to -12kb.
In the days of huge software programs it always amazes me to see what can be done in such small packages (each 4k jar file includes the source code too).
I take it you're not counting the 14Mb runtime that you need to make that Jar file work?
Simon
Re:Rampant Problems, non-exclusive games, DOA3
on
Crashing Xbox Kiosks
·
· Score: 2
Also, to clear something up, DOA3 does not look as good as Tecmo would want everyone to believe. Tecmo has a bad habit of releasing ultra high-res screens captured from developer kits (we're talking near 2000x pixel resolutions). They released beautiful but fake screenshots of DOA2: Hardcore on PS2 with tons of antialiasing. Then when you actually play DOA2 you'll find it's a jagged, shimmering mess. Sad to see that people are falling for the same trick again with DOA3.
Hmmmm... no, I don't think they're doing the same trick again. I just saw an XBox in Toys R Us (working fine, thankyouverymuch), and the graphics looked FABULOUS. Antialiased to the hilt, smooooooth surfaces. Downright Yummy.
Oddworld didn't look too bad, but I'm not a fan. And Project Gotham Racing looked *great*, but every now and then there was some polygon popping going on which was slightly annoying. The reflections look *fabulous*. Windows on the car... rainy streets... yum.
Amped looks brilliant too.
Looks like a kickass system. Gamecube doesn't look too bad either (they had a demo video tape running in the store), but Luigi's mansion appeared to have serious mipmapping problems (or lack thereof), and the characters appeared to have low-poly counts. The other games - Wave Race for example - looked better though.
If the only value of your music is how much cash your can remove from other peoples pockets in exchange for it, well it must really sound like shit, real music is priceless, music created with the intent of generating profit is only as valueable as the media it's printed on
Music comes from the heart.
It's what you do with it afterwards that is up to you.
YOU can CHOOSE to give it away, or sell it. The Beatles, for example, chose to sell it. Bach chose to accept positions from incumbent royalty so that he could produce more. Either way, what's behind the music has nothing to do with whether you sell it or not.
This is what divides the artist from the filthy grabass. It's also what divides the scientist from the filthy grabass - where would science be if discoveries could be copyrighted? I'm producing research (with any luck), I publish it, and I won't make a cent from anyone who uses it.
And I suppose you have tenure?
Who pays for you to do that research?
If you're at a University or other school, then it's the students (in terms of fees), corporate sponsorship of research, donations from alumni and wealthy benefactors, and the government.
You're being paid to do research and give it away for free. That's why you have a position in which you *can* do the research you're doing.
I suppose in your corporate fantasy world music and musicians did not exist prior to the creation of copyright law.
No, but they were paid by the presiding royalty of the country they were in. (This is why paychecks from music companies are called 'royalties').
Would you prefer we went back to the feudal system?
By the way, for example, Bach expected payment for his work:
"Your honor will have the goodness to excuse an old and faithful servant for taking the liberty of disturbing you with the present letter. It must be nearly four years since Your Honor favored me with a kind answer to the letter I sent you; I remember that at that time you graciously asked me to give you some news of what had happened to me, and I humbly take this opportunity of providing you with the same. You know the course of my life from my youth up until the change in my fortunes that took me to Cothen as Capellmeister. There I had a gracious Prince, who both loved and knew music, and in his service I intended to spend the rest of my life. It must happen, however, that the said Serenissimus should marry a Princess of Berenburg, and that then the impression should arise that the musical interests of the said Prince had become somewhat lukewarm, especially as the new Princess seemed to be unmusical; and it pleased God that I should be called hither to be Director Musices and Cantor at the Thomas-Schule. Though at first, indeed, it did not seem at all proper to me to change my position of Capellmeister for that of Cantor. Wherefore, then, I postponed my decision for a quarter of a year; but this post was described to me in such favorable terms that finally (particularly since my sons seemed inclined to [university] studies) I cast my lot, in the name of the Lord, and made the journey to Leipzig, took my examination, and then made the change of position. Here, by God's will, I am still in service. But since (1) I find that the post is by no means so lucrative as it had been described to me; (2) I have failed to obtain many of the fees pertaining to the office; (3) the place is very expensive; and (4) the authorities are odd and little interested in music, so that I must live amid almost continual vexation, envy, and persecution; accordingly I shall be forced, with God's help, to seek my fortune elsewhere. Should Your Honor know or find a suitable post in our city for an old and faithful servant, I beg you most humbly to put in a most gracious word of recommendation for me--I shall not fail to do my best to give satisfaction and justify your most gracious intercession in my behalf. My present post amounts to about 700 thaler, and when there are rather more funerals than usual, the fees rise in proportion; but when a healthy wind blows, they fall accordingly, as for example last year, when I lost fees that would ordinarily come in from funerals to an amount of more than 100 thaler. In Thuringia I could get along better on 400 thaler than here with twice that many, because of the excessively high cost of living."
Personally, I'd welcome the exposure. Then more people would come to my concerts, I'd sell more tickets, be able to book bigger venues. Yeah, that would really suck.
Do you actually do this for a living? Or are you just begging the question?
And you assume all artists are greedy capitalists who use musical art to fatten their pockets with cash. Not all are artists are greedy tools of large corporations like the ones you hear on the radio
I'd like to see you make the same statement to your landlord. When you're three months late on the rent, you can say "But I'm an artist! And not all artists are greedy capitalists!", and everything will be okay...
... and then you'll arrive in the real world, and realize that whatever you're smoking -- or whatever some people are feeding you -- is some utopian Star Trek bullshit that will never make it in the real world.
As long as humans are mortal, you'll have these problems. Because things take *time* to make, and that time is part of your life you can never get back. Most people want to be compensated for that.
No downloading music isn't stealing. At most downloading might be a copyright violation, assuming the artist that created the music decided to trade their rights for a fistful of dollars. Anyways, no downloading music is not stealing.
Funny... both are illegal. And yes, it's stealing. Same root: you took something that you didn't have the right to take.
Simon
Re:Since when did MS ever set any standards?
on
Microsoft's Future
·
· Score: 1
Spectecjr is one of the oldest MS trolls around. He and Zico must be live-in lovers.
Actually, I'm not an "MS troll". I'm just against people posting patently ignorant bullshit.
One hundard people is $6,000,000 dollars. At $500 a copy of Windows 2000 and one million copy sold, that is 50 billion gross. Do I fail to see why they couldn't hire a team of 100 people to audit their code? Oh yeah, they wanted to keep the profits up!! Silly me.
The amusing part of your argument is that you don't seem to realize that Microsoft *DID* have Windows 2000 code-audited by external, independent auditors for security holes.
Simon
Re:Since when did MS ever set any standards?
on
Microsoft's Future
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Everything Microsoft ever did since the very beginning was steal ideas from other people and companies and market them as their own. Ask Tim Paterson, Gary Kildall, Apple, Stac Electronics, or Spyglass. They very nearly got away with this with Java, but Sun was watchful, and now, what they're doing with C# and.NET is basically a reinvention of what Java already is. It makes me wonder if the bigwigs inside Microsoft ever had an original thought in their own heads
An interesting comment.
1. Stac Electronics was a patent infringement suit. I thought every good slashdotter was anti patent-abuse? Or are you the odd man out?
MS infringed their patent on compressing data as it is written to the disk/decompressing it as it's read from the disk. Sounds really original and innovative that does.
The same guy is now running this outfit:
X-Sides. Check out their new product:
Scary, huh?
If that doesn't make you sit back and think "OH MY GOD... PERMANENT BANNER ADS!", and then shriek in horror, I don't know what will. This is not the kind of person who shies away from a filing trivial patents.
2. Apple -- see Xerox.
As for the others, I'll let someone else answer them.
I have, and it isn't anywhere near compliant with CSS2 (CSS1 is fine - but how old is that!?!). Mozilla absolutely walks all over IE6 in standards compliance. Compare this page [w3.org] in both IE and Mozilla to see what I mean.
That isn't a particularly compelling argument without seeing it in the reference renderer (athena).
Just for the record, two questions for ya. How am I shooting my mouth off? This I am truly curious to know. Also, how did you manage to fill in the blank I left with Navigator? I referred to Mozilla distinctly outside the "certain other browser" motif.
Who said anything about Mozilla? I said Navigator. As in Netscape.
Mozilla ain't perfect either.
And you're shooting your mouth off, because you claim that IE isn't compliant (IE 6; ignore the older versions... you don't expect Mosaic 1.0 to be HTML4.0 compliant do you?) without providing evidence.
While Billg is the single largest owner, he actually owns 12 % now (actually, I think that I saw 10% but can't swear to that). He has been busy divesting himself of Microsoft stock, in particular, during the last 3 years.
Does he know something that you don't know?????
Yes: 1. Money doesn't grow on trees.
2. Charity requires cash donations.
3. You run out of money quickly when all of your assets are stock options; you need to cash them in to have... well... CASH...
And he's been doing this for years - much longer than the last 3 years. You've just been noticing it more because you're on a crack-fueled conspiracy binge.
Opera and Mozilla are both doing everything in their power to try to adhere to the standards set down by the W3C, and bully for them. I can name one other browser, however, that could really care less about the standards, and doesn't hesitate to render bad code as if nothing is whack. (hint:... do you even need a hint?)
Wouldn't be Netscape Navigator, would it?
Just for the record... before shooting your mouth off, check out the latest version of IE6.
i meen the whole buffer overflow thing codered exploited, that is something that you can't just have happen accedently..that had to be codded into it.
No, actually, it's a direct side effect of the C standard libraries. Things like strcpy, strcat, sprintf... all of these are buffer overflows waiting to happen.
For example, there's a buffer overflow (probably unintentional... unless you're a conspiracy theorist like yourself) just waiting for someone to exploit it in the Mozilla image handling code. Just imagine; a linux virus that spreads by someone sending a carefully crafted image file to your system. Everything would look fine on the surface; but that image file contains compressed code that expands in such a way that it causes a buffer overflow.
... or are you saying that the Mozilla coders intended it to be a security hole?
All I know of W2K reparse points are the few descriptions I've read of them, so I don't have a total understanding.
Anyway, my understanding is that reparse points are made for virtual files (or symlinks and the like), and that it would be very difficult (or impossible?) to make full virtual filesystems like you do with translators. e.g. could I do e:\ftp_sites\www.foo.com\pub\pr0n\britney_spears.j pg using reparse points?
I'm hoping the answer is "yes", but all descriptions I've read of reparse points make it sound like symlink+code.
The answer is yes; the problem is that you have to write a filter driver to do this, which is rather annoying (I've not played on the kernel side of things for about 6 years).
I don't think the RIAA is too worried about it. As to date, My dad still hasn't been able to successfully burn a single cd from his machine that's running XP. The RIAA doesn't worry about software that doesn't work.
I'm surprised. I do that all the time on my XP box with zero problems to date.
The concept of a translator is the "Everything is a file" taken a step further. If you imbed a program in an inode, it can then deal with filesystem calls to that inode as it sees fit.
Slashdot Mirror
14 MB is pretty small for something that essentially emulates a totally different platform.
Actually, it *wraps* a different platform. It doesn't emulate squat.
I don't think you have grounds to complain when the Windows OS needs about 50 times that much space by itself.
Heh. That's funny. Running Windows XP, with a lot of apps running, I'm getting a total commit-charge of 165Mb. That would be *ten* times the size of the Java VM. And all that does is wrap Windows calls.
Simon
you wouldn't happen to plan on releasing the winsock stuff, would you? sounds neat
Probably not. I don't like releasing libraries which aren't up to spec; and I'm not entirely happy with this one. (In fact, for most applications, it's probably better to just hang off of Winsock directly yourself, and just make sure you're using Overlapped IO for everything (as it's much better documented and much more... deterministic than the other mechanisms)).
I'd be happy to write up the hows and whys though.
Simon
Then there's the Mr. Gibson [grc.com] and his "everything in assembly" philosphy -- also under 100k. Those are the only kinds of things that deserve to be called "tiny."
Hmmm.. I wrote an SMTP mailer app in C++ using VC++ recently.
It comes in at 20k, most of which is load-time linkage information. It zips down nicely to 5kb too. (I wrote a custom socket lib stuff to sit on top of Winsock for asynchronous *everything* with timeouts and cancels from other threads being serviced correctly too...)
Why is assembly supposedly so great for writing this kind of stuff then?
I mean, I'm no slouch when it comes to getting down to the bare metal (I grew up on assembly language; programmed it for 10 or so years before I even touched C or Java)... but with today's compilers, unless you're doing some hefty optimization, it's just a chest-beating machismo exercize.
No doubt, though, if Mr. Gibson wrote the same app as mine, he'd have it down to -12kb.
Simon
In the days of huge software programs it always amazes me to see what can be done in such small packages (each 4k jar file includes the source code too).
I take it you're not counting the 14Mb runtime that you need to make that Jar file work?
Simon
Also, to clear something up, DOA3 does not look as good as Tecmo would want everyone to believe. Tecmo has a bad habit of releasing ultra high-res screens captured from developer kits (we're talking near 2000x pixel resolutions). They released beautiful but fake screenshots of DOA2: Hardcore on PS2 with tons of antialiasing. Then when you actually play DOA2 you'll find it's a jagged, shimmering mess. Sad to see that people are falling for the same trick again with DOA3.
Hmmmm... no, I don't think they're doing the same trick again. I just saw an XBox in Toys R Us (working fine, thankyouverymuch), and the graphics looked FABULOUS. Antialiased to the hilt, smooooooth surfaces. Downright Yummy.
Oddworld didn't look too bad, but I'm not a fan. And Project Gotham Racing looked *great*, but every now and then there was some polygon popping going on which was slightly annoying. The reflections look *fabulous*. Windows on the car... rainy streets... yum.
Amped looks brilliant too.
Looks like a kickass system. Gamecube doesn't look too bad either (they had a demo video tape running in the store), but Luigi's mansion appeared to have serious mipmapping problems (or lack thereof), and the characters appeared to have low-poly counts. The other games - Wave Race for example - looked better though.
It's going to be an interesting ride...
Simon
If the only value of your music is how much cash your can remove from other peoples pockets in exchange for it, well it must really sound like shit, real music is priceless, music created with the intent of generating profit is only as valueable as the media it's printed on
Music comes from the heart.
It's what you do with it afterwards that is up to you.
YOU can CHOOSE to give it away, or sell it. The Beatles, for example, chose to sell it. Bach chose to accept positions from incumbent royalty so that he could produce more. Either way, what's behind the music has nothing to do with whether you sell it or not.
Simon
This is what divides the artist from the filthy grabass. It's also what divides the scientist from the filthy grabass - where would science be if discoveries could be copyrighted? I'm producing research (with any luck), I publish it, and I won't make a cent from anyone who uses it.
And I suppose you have tenure?
Who pays for you to do that research?
If you're at a University or other school, then it's the students (in terms of fees), corporate sponsorship of research, donations from alumni and wealthy benefactors, and the government.
You're being paid to do research and give it away for free. That's why you have a position in which you *can* do the research you're doing.
Simon
No, but they were paid by the presiding royalty of the country they were in. (This is why paychecks from music companies are called 'royalties').
Would you prefer we went back to the feudal system?
By the way, for example, Bach expected payment for his work:
Personally, I'd welcome the exposure. Then more people would come to my concerts, I'd sell more tickets, be able to book bigger venues. Yeah, that would really suck.
Do you actually do this for a living? Or are you just begging the question?
And you assume all artists are greedy capitalists who use musical art to fatten their pockets with cash. Not all are artists are greedy tools of large corporations like the ones you hear on the radio
I'd like to see you make the same statement to your landlord. When you're three months late on the rent, you can say "But I'm an artist! And not all artists are greedy capitalists!", and everything will be okay...
... and then you'll arrive in the real world, and realize that whatever you're smoking -- or whatever some people are feeding you -- is some utopian Star Trek bullshit that will never make it in the real world.
As long as humans are mortal, you'll have these problems. Because things take *time* to make, and that time is part of your life you can never get back. Most people want to be compensated for that.
Simon
How come if you "steal" my music, I still have it then?
Well, good luck to you if you want to get anything in return for it. Because you won't.
I've just reduced the value of your music to zero, because I can spread it far and wide.
If you were planning on making a living making and selling your own music, you're now SOL.
Would you call that stealing from you? I would.
Simon
No downloading music isn't stealing. At most downloading might be a copyright violation, assuming the artist that created the music decided to trade their rights for a fistful of dollars. Anyways, no downloading music is not stealing.
Funny... both are illegal. And yes, it's stealing. Same root: you took something that you didn't have the right to take.
Simon
Spectecjr is one of the oldest MS trolls around. He and Zico must be live-in lovers.
Actually, I'm not an "MS troll". I'm just against people posting patently ignorant bullshit.
Someone has to play devil's advocate.
Simon
One hundard people is $6,000,000 dollars. At $500 a copy of Windows 2000 and one million copy sold, that is 50 billion gross. Do I fail to see why they couldn't hire a team of 100 people to audit their code? Oh yeah, they wanted to keep the profits up!! Silly me.
The amusing part of your argument is that you don't seem to realize that Microsoft *DID* have Windows 2000 code-audited by external, independent auditors for security holes.
Simon
Everything Microsoft ever did since the very beginning was steal ideas from other people and companies and market them as their own. Ask Tim Paterson, Gary Kildall, Apple, Stac Electronics, or Spyglass. They very nearly got away with this with Java, but Sun was watchful, and now, what they're doing with C# and .NET is basically a reinvention of what Java already is. It makes me wonder if the bigwigs inside Microsoft ever had an original thought in their own heads
An interesting comment.
1. Stac Electronics was a patent infringement suit. I thought every good slashdotter was anti patent-abuse? Or are you the odd man out?
MS infringed their patent on compressing data as it is written to the disk/decompressing it as it's read from the disk. Sounds really original and innovative that does.
The same guy is now running this outfit:
X-Sides. Check out their new product:
Scary, huh?
If that doesn't make you sit back and think "OH MY GOD... PERMANENT BANNER ADS!", and then shriek in horror, I don't know what will. This is not the kind of person who shies away from a filing trivial patents.
2. Apple -- see Xerox.
As for the others, I'll let someone else answer them.
Simon
I have, and it isn't anywhere near compliant with CSS2 (CSS1 is fine - but how old is that!?!). Mozilla absolutely walks all over IE6 in standards compliance. Compare this page [w3.org] in both IE and Mozilla to see what I mean.
That isn't a particularly compelling argument without seeing it in the reference renderer (athena).
But yes, I agree with the rest of what you say.
Simon
Just for the record, two questions for ya. How am I shooting my mouth off? This I am truly curious to know. Also, how did you manage to fill in the blank I left with Navigator? I referred to Mozilla distinctly outside the "certain other browser" motif.
Who said anything about Mozilla? I said Navigator. As in Netscape.
Mozilla ain't perfect either.
And you're shooting your mouth off, because you claim that IE isn't compliant (IE 6; ignore the older versions... you don't expect Mosaic 1.0 to be HTML4.0 compliant do you?) without providing evidence.
Simon
While Billg is the single largest owner, he actually owns 12 % now (actually, I think that I saw 10% but can't swear to that). He has been busy divesting himself of Microsoft stock, in particular, during the last 3 years.
Does he know something that you don't know?????
Yes: 1. Money doesn't grow on trees.
2. Charity requires cash donations.
3. You run out of money quickly when all of your assets are stock options; you need to cash them in to have... well... CASH...
And he's been doing this for years - much longer than the last 3 years. You've just been noticing it more because you're on a crack-fueled conspiracy binge.
Simon
Opera and Mozilla are both doing everything in their power to try to adhere to the standards set down by the W3C, and bully for them. I can name one other browser, however, that could really care less about the standards, and doesn't hesitate to render bad code as if nothing is whack. (hint: ... do you even need a hint?)
Wouldn't be Netscape Navigator, would it?
Just for the record... before shooting your mouth off, check out the latest version of IE6.
Simon
i meen the whole buffer overflow thing codered exploited, that is something that you can't just have happen accedently..that had to be codded into it.
No, actually, it's a direct side effect of the C standard libraries. Things like strcpy, strcat, sprintf... all of these are buffer overflows waiting to happen.
For example, there's a buffer overflow (probably unintentional... unless you're a conspiracy theorist like yourself) just waiting for someone to exploit it in the Mozilla image handling code. Just imagine; a linux virus that spreads by someone sending a carefully crafted image file to your system. Everything would look fine on the surface; but that image file contains compressed code that expands in such a way that it causes a buffer overflow.
... or are you saying that the Mozilla coders intended it to be a security hole?
Simon
All I know of W2K reparse points are the few descriptions I've read of them, so I don't have a total understanding.
j pg using reparse points?
Anyway, my understanding is that reparse points are made for virtual files (or symlinks and the like), and that it would be very difficult (or impossible?) to make full virtual filesystems like you do with translators. e.g. could I do e:\ftp_sites\www.foo.com\pub\pr0n\britney_spears.
I'm hoping the answer is "yes", but all descriptions I've read of reparse points make it sound like symlink+code.
The answer is yes; the problem is that you have to write a filter driver to do this, which is rather annoying (I've not played on the kernel side of things for about 6 years).
Here's some details though:
Quick guide to reparse points
Simon
I don't think the RIAA is too worried about it. As to date, My dad still hasn't been able to successfully burn a single cd from his machine that's running XP. The RIAA doesn't worry about software that doesn't work.
I'm surprised. I do that all the time on my XP box with zero problems to date.
Simon
3) Translators
The concept of a translator is the "Everything is a file" taken a step further. If you imbed a program in an inode, it can then deal with filesystem calls to that inode as it sees fit.
Sounds like Win2000 reparse points...
Simon
Tell me this, Simon: how are you able to edit these VC++ projects by hand while your boyfriend's cock is in your mouth?
My hands are free, you schmuck.
Simon
Their project files have checksums that preclude you editing them by hand (the IDE bitches).
I've never seen it bitch, and I do this frequently.
As for your other question... who cares?
Simon