It strikes me that there's basically four groups when dealing with these things:
(Listed in order of paranoia, a bit of description for each.)
1) The wide-eyed "Extended Warranty? How can I lose?" group.
Clearly, this is what the grandparent poster was talking about: Complete and total submission.
You get all the benefits of the Ignorance-is-bliss set, at first. As time goes by, it would certainly become harder not to notice that the only phone calls you get are from telemarketers, the only email you receive is spam, and there is so much noise that it won't even be worth looking for signal anymore (aka, the SETI@home project, har har, only joking). You'll have reached the prime consumer level, but that basically just means "easy mark" in the corporations eyes. It might be easier in the short term, but a society of total consumerism would be a mess. Probably best not to go in this far.
2) People that will occasionally go for an advertised bargain/discount club/etc., but do not think much of it.
I would say this is the average person out there right now. There isn't much reason not to join a grocery club with the better prices always listed. They'll usually avoid most telemarketers and throw away their junk mail.
3) People that will sign up for said clubs/memberships, but will minimize their exposure.
A large portion of the geek crowd lands here. Why not get the benefits of the grocery club, just under the name of J. Edgar Hoover? I signed up for a grocery club under a not-quite-real name, and they've not cancelled my card (as far as I know). They gave me two keyring tags and one card. I gave away the card and a keytag and have traded the remaining keytag a couple times now. Who knows what sort of information has been attached to that original pseudonym by now?
This is a more cautious group, giving out incomplete or outright fictitious information, but a bit more pragmatic than the others.
4) People that won't sign up for anything where they have to give any personal information.
These are the people that either have so little faith in the system that they won't get anywhere near it, or so against it on principle that they won't lessen themselves by it. I admire the idea, but unless something drastic changes, it's extremely difficult to opt-out entirely. It can be done, but you'd probably have to give up many conveniences, like credit cards or checks (they know where you shop), renting a residence (your rental and credit history is duly noted), insuring a car, health insurance (do you smoke? drink? have any prior ailments?), etc. The more extreme of this group lives in small shanties writing manifestos on their manual typewriters.
This isn't meant an an indictment against any of these groups. It's a matter of how much of your life you're willing to give up for others' profit. Until I feel that those controlling the information can be trusted to ethically posess such knowledge, I would advocate that most people should aim to be in one of the latter two groups (against the system by total disassociation, or against the system by misdirection).
This is the right idea, but a lot more complex than it needs to be. Considering that the correct file size is already known, you should be able to use dd to specify how many blocks actually get written. So the steps are 'make a backup with dd, specifying length', 'test the backup thouroughly with whatever created it or can validate it', 'once you're certain the original is no longer needed, get rid of it.'.
yeah, after rereading my comment a day later, I realize I did slip up in part of my explanation: If your first state is "E", the next character to input is "a", you would go to state "Ea", and with "t", go to "Eat", which is listed as an accepting state.
Our good friend (or foe, depending on what you're trying to prove) the pumping lemma does give us an idea that N 'A's followed by N 'B's is impossible in this context (or A^n followed by B^n isn't regular).
You've got the easy hack of "Take all possible tokens. Create an additional set of states for each where there's an arbitrary number of parentheses, brackets, etc. in front of them and the same number behind them" (which would be really big, unless you've got a really small list of tokens or cut off the number of parentheses, etc. to a really small number, or both.)
A^nB^n doesn't work. A^mB^n does work, provided you don't try to be too specific about what M or N are, just that they're some nonnegative number.
On another note, it's good news to me that I did get most of the meat of it right. Glad to hear I'm not getting the second-rate education I'd feared. =)
This is a pretty lousy explanation of how things work, although I do agree that regular expressions have limits and you should be familiar with what they are.
I might not get every single bit of the technical vocabulary right on this one, but do try to follow along anyhow (and please only refute the REALLY glaring errors).
Basically, with regular expressions, you get what Chomsky (famed linguist and political extremist...er, nut =) ) referred to as a type-3 grammar, or roughly something that can be solved with a deterministic finite-state automata (DFA. Ok, you might argue that you get an NFA (nondeterministic finite-state automata), but using the subset construction, it's so easily converted to a DFA, we'll just pretend we're working with a DFA.)
Basically, a DFA works like this: Think of a table. You start out at one row (the starting state) and based on the input you get, you move to another row/state. One or more of these states is specially marked as an accepting state, so if you run out of input characters on one of those states, the string is accepted and everyone is happy. If you run out of input on any state not marked as such, the string is rejected. (DFA's are often expressed as graphs as well, but from a programmatic perspective, it's really easy to just use a table, or for the pedantic, a list of nodes (containing the current state, and where to go on any possible input...a list of lists)).
Maybe we can go more simple than that: You're sitting on a nerdly board game. You draw a card that says "B. Go to the square labeled as 'R'", so you go to R and draw another card. You keep picking cards and following the directions on them until you get "$: The game is over. If you're on a square that is labeled with an underlined letter, you win. If the letter is not underlined, you lose."
So what does this mean? In terms of compiler/language theory, we can use a regex to recognize tokens (or individual words), but they aren't very powerful when it comes to syntax (Our lexer would be happy with "sentence This a is.", but by our grammar, it doesn't make a lot of sense. We, as people, could guess the meaning, but computers are still really bad at guessing anything (especially your weight). A parser would be necessary to figure out if things make any sense by the rules of the grammar, which would refuse "sentence This a is." but accept "This is a sentence.") If you're setting up the rules of our example nerdly board game, you could set up a number of states that could find any word in your language. (If the first state is "E" and the next state is "a" and the next state is "t", followed by "$" (commonly used for end of input, but in your language you might specify the end of the word being a space or some bit of punctuation instead), you'll have successfully parsed "Eat", which by your rules is considered to be a valid accepting state. In the same sense, if you pick "R" followed by "Z", you might move off to some error state you've specified, where no matter what input follows, you'll always loop back around to that same state, because you know for certain there's no word you want to accept that starts with "RZ".)
So to answer the question "can regexp validate XML?", the answer is yes, in the sense that it can be used to scan for valid XML components (words), and no, in that it can't tell well-formed XML from poorly-formed XML tags (sentences). A regex alone isn't quite powerful enough to understand that ">>>>XML" and "<XML>" aren't both perfectly acceptable.
Sort of.
Could you write enough rules that some really large set of regex could do it? Maybe, but it's a mathematical proof that's way out of my league, but I'll warn you now: you'll be writing so many cases for every possible permutation that you'll probably go batty trying. Part of what all this language theory got us was an understanding that some tools are good at one task, but lousy at others.
If you're interested in this further, the Dragon book (search for it on google, you'll find it as "dragon book" faster than its real title, which I've forgotten) is considered the canonical source for this sort of thing, although it can be horribly dry and hard to read. There are some other compiler theory books out there, and some aren't quite as dull (though arguably less informative. I wasn't able to prove my nerdliness by reading more than a handful of pages of the dragon book, though I found it to be a great reference for filling in the gaps of the other books (which were more prone to shameless hand-holding))
comp.compilers can be a good source as well, though sometimes a bit intimidating. Read through it, see if you can find references to the stuff you don't really understand, and just try to absorb what's there.
Sorry, but Peru is still a bit of a distance for a California voter, even if "the dead have risen, and they're voting Republican!"
Being in California does mean that you can show up on Disney's front door in Burbank (or at least the sidewalk in front ot the gate) with some friends and witty sayings on cardboard signs. Exercise that right to peaceful assembly while we've still got it.
A.) I don't care if it's talked about as much as making beowulf clusters out of everything, I didn't participate in that argument.
Ok.
I have no interest in Linux as a gaming platform so I don't know why you think it's a prerequisite for me to know what agruments have gone on about it.
So let me see if I've got your argument straight: You have no interest in Linux as a gaming platform, thus it will fail.
B.) A game that sells 10,000 - 40,000 copies is not a success. It's pathetic. I don't care how much money was funneled away into somebody's account, those #'s are scary to somebody saying "Let's start a Linux game company!".
Maybe this is true if you're somebody like EA, or Blizzard, or ID, or whatever. You never hear about people complaining about Ferrari not having the same sales volume as Volkswagen. 40,000 X $50 really isn't that bad if you're a company of around 10 employees, especially considering they didn't really have to do the hard parts: design, art, etc. And when they were selling games through their site, yes, they were getting $50 a copy, so a cut for the distributor isn't really an issue in that case. Pay off the title's original owner, and the rest can go back into the business. Sure, 40K units isn't a lot for the Windows game market, but how does that compare against the Mac games? Or other Linux games? Different market, different yardstick.
C.) Regardless of Loki's internal problems, they had 0 chance of becoming big if they established themselves as a port company. You could replace 'Loki' with any other company/management, the poblem is the exact same.
Really. So companies don't fail because the management is stealing all of the money, they fail because they didn't get the memo that porting companies have no chance of success. Do you think you could provide a few more examples of similar companies that have failed? Maybe you could also throw in some about all the other Linux-centric game companies that have failed, thus proving there's no way to pull off such an endeavor?
To summarize, no matter what happened to Loki, my comment still stands: Linux is not a market for the game industry to cater to. If you're going to argue with me, argue that since it was my point.
So where was that point again? You started off on the original post I replied to that Linux needs platform-specific titles, and then concluded with Linux users should just use Windows instead. Would Linux exclusive titles be a good thing? Sure, but they still stand about as much chance of success on their own as any other game thrown into the market (the vast majority of which aren't big-sellers).
I think there are a couple flaws in your basic premise. First, things like what Transgaming is trying to do makes porting relatively trivial. Second, the gaming industry is a big nasty place, and one company's failure (which easily could be attributed to more fundamental problems) is hardly enough to use as a precedent. Third, there's a vastly different culture associated with the different platforms: Linux and Unix tend to be used by engineers, scientists, programmers, other researchers, and generally anyone who wants a stable machine, but isn't afraid of the learning curve. The Macintosh is often used by designers, content creators, pretentious artists, etc. Windows has long been used for business/home desktops as a general purpose environment, and as a toy.
-transiit
The problem is that this means Loki will never really hit mass market.
Yes, but they will never hit mass market because they went out of business early this year.
The problem is that the game market is a novelty market. Lots of companies make games that will be interesting for about a month and then move on. If memory serves, Loki ported games that had already been out for a while.
Yes, Loki did port established titles. But a better question is whether their failure was caused by this, or the fact that Scott Draeker, the guy in charge, was funnelling money out of the company into his own account (as reported over at linuxandmain here.)
Thank you for rehashing the same argument that was beaten to death on here for months.
-transiit
You do understand that AIM and ICQ are both products of AOL, right?
I don't see how that matters, other than to drive home my point that they are two (almost) completely different things.
I think I'm still going to have to disagree with you on this point. ICQ was developed, as my memory serves, by a company called Mirabillis. AOL bought them, and for whatever reason, never merged ICQ in with their product, AIM. Some features have shown up that didn't used to be there, like multiple users in the same chat session, etc., but the only thing that's keeping them apart at this point is the whims of AOL. (although some could say they're dealing with the problem by making ICQ increasingly more crapulent, but I've not used it in years. Couldn't say.)
Oh, of course the technological side isn't impossible. But I was talking about the usability side, and so far all of the "universal instant messenger" services that connect with anything that they can find display the same sort of problems that you would find in a Swiss Army Knife, i.e. they do everything "okay" or "pretty well", but overall don't do the job as well as a service or tool that is tailored to one specific job.
If your argument is to hold true, the whole situation is self-defeating. Either the gateway services are to cater to the lowest common denominator, or they aren't going to work. If they don't work, they fail. If they don't support every stupid addition to every possible client/protocol, they fail.
I'd also like to point out that analogies still suck. I've had a swiss army knife for years. Works great. Does what I need it to. (mainly, it cuts stuff, has a screwdriver, and keeps me from having to open cans with my teeth).
This differs greatly from programs that deal with the differing standards and manage to lump them all into one program. Accepting differing standards and packaging them together allows you to keep most of the purity of each standard by keeping them mostly seperate from one another. Forcing the services themselves to conform to a standard, however, would force the groups behind AIM and ICQ to decide whether or not they, for instance, wanted messages for a user that is offline to be stored and then sent when the user logs on. They wouldn't be allowed to make seperate decisions about how they wanted their services to work, so there would be a lot less choice and competition among instant messaging users.
Wait a second....you're against standards because they mean less choice for the user? Are you on crack? The idea of having a standard is all about choice: it means that you aren't forced into using one tool just because it's the only one that supports feature X. Say we've got a standard, like "For every instant message, the format is a 32-byte 'From' field, a datestamp, and the rest is message until you reach a null terminator". Now as a user, this doesn't mean a whole lot, except that you know that any client that follows this standard will work with the rest of the instant messaging user community, at which point you start picking the client based on whether or not they think you should see ads on your contact list, or how well they manage those contacts, or if they're prone to crashing every ten minutes, or if the servers they talk to are prone to being unreachable every ten minutes, etc. All the other bells and whistles get embedded between the datestamp and the terminator. Want HTML formatting, include it. Think XML is the one true instant message format? use it. But just like email clients, you would do yourself a service by being less noisy, but HTML mail continues to annoy email users worldwide, and most of the people sending it are too clueless to get it, so it continues....
And that just doesn't serve any purpose, or at least much less of a purpose than creating a standard in upload and download speeds over cable and DSL lines that aren't federally regulated.
Whoa. Where the hell did that come from, and for that matter, what the hell does it have to do with anything? Where is it written that if we try to create an instant messaging standard, we'll never get a standard in cable/dsl rates? In fact, why should we have a standard in transfer rates on those media above what already exists? (What, you think they got this shit working out of sheer dumb luck? Everybody reinvents the wheel for every cable provider or dsl-providing-telco? There's plenty of standarization on that stuff.)
The problem in this market is a lack of competition. How are we supposed to show our disgust with artificial bandwidth caps if we don't have any other choice in the market?
Trying to force AIM and ICQ to conform to a standard is like trying to force ham radio companies and phone companies to conform to a standard.
You do understand that AIM and ICQ are both products of AOL, right?
I think it's become apparent through the efforts of Jabber, Trillian, etc. that the technological side of getting interoperability between the networks isn't impossible. The problem is companies such as AOL changing their protocol whenever they feel threatened.
-transiit
So here's my theory of what will happen if we hit a wall in processor performance:
1) Software developers will aim to better optimize the software. 2) Hardware developers will work at moving software-dependent things off on to hardware.
Some years back, I had a machine capable (at least to my untrained eyes) of full-screen, full-motion movies, under win 3.1. Of course, this was thanks to a $100 Sigma Designs VLB hardware MPEG decompressor, but ever since, I've wondered what all the excitement has been about in the last year or so with people talking about how great it is to have a CPU fast enough to handle movie playback. (one of these days, I'm going to put the old DX4-100 back together and see if I can get it to play dvd's through that card). But this seems to be a common trend. Stuff lives on hardware because it can be done fast. Stuff moves to software because it can be done cheap. Having major speed increases in the processor market has helped, but I think it'd be a hard sell to say that everything that's done in software currently couldn't be moved off into hardware. Find me 10 people that are convinced that hardware-accelerated 3d is soon to be eclipsed by software, and perhaps I'll consider that as an argument. Does this mean that everything needs to be moved off to hardware? Probably not, but I'd like to see some of it offloaded. Some could arguably be better off as hardware (I could be wrong, but I think a cheap usb camera duct-taped to a lava lamp would make a better random number generator than most of the algorithms out there.)
As for software optimization, here's where the annoying part comes in. How many self-taught people know the difference between O(n) and O(2^n)? It's not the sort of thing you can rely on your compiler to fix for you. Perhaps we'll be coming to an age where the difference between doing the time in formal education learning the foundation becomes apparent from those who bought a "Teach yourself C++ in 10 minutes" book.
I'm reminded of a Bloom County strip I read many years back where a film review was being written down at ye olde Bloom Picayune: "It did for cinema what Jonestown did for Kool-Aid".
Sometimes the reviewers are on to something, sometimes they just sound like elitist pricks. As I recall, Siskel & Ebert gave "The Usual Suspects" two thumbs down, which remains one of my favorite movies to date. I've plans to see this one, but I'm not sure I have the interest to go out of my way to see it opening night. I'm even busy enough with the approaching finals that I'd probably miss any lone-gunmen-are-dead reviews around these parts
Well, to increase the creation of the post-modern Tower of Babel that the internet is fostering, I'm going to start pronouncing everything with a silent 'K'. Thus, it's Mail, Word, Spread, Illustrator, Rapp and of course, DE.
They could've at least thought up something that rolls off the tongue smoothly....like CBDTPA
And for posterity, it was the "Kewl Desktop Enivronment" see here
(the only early reference I could find, though I'm sure if you searched through the google usenet archive you might find an early reference.)
Yeah, even from the start, they haven't given us a lot to respect.
How about taxing the politicians to fund the government?
So here's the problem in a nutshell: The people that are interested tend to get benefits from the programs. Thus the programs are funded by those who get the benefits. This sounds an awful lot like the private sector....which leads to why don't we just privatize all these programs to begin with?
Or, we could just leave it the way it is, where public sector research benefits everyone. Yes, NASA is generally pretty interested in space, but the output of the space missions has brought us all sorts of other side benefits. Satellite television. Bar codes. Smoke detectors. Invisible orthodontic braces. Edible toothpaste!
Tang!
Where the hell would we be without Tang?
whoa. digression
Anyhow, as long as the benefits of the programs, even edible toothpaste, are spread far and wide, then the general public can pay for them, not just those dreaming of having a pet dragon that will someday grok them in fullness.
no, the GPL would happily let you build a closed road off of an open one. Closed, non-free software can legitimately read files created by GPL-bound software. You can even use other things like named pipes (via something like mkfifo) or shell redirects to get data from one to the other.
What you're asking for is the ability to put up toll booths on public roadways, which really isn't about freedom, but the ability to profit off of others' work. The GPL is good for people that write software that want to give it away towards the greater good: It does a good job of enforcing the guarantee that the program will always be available to those that need it. The BSD license is good for making sure your name gets attached to the code. If you're really just concerned about the least amount of restriction being placed on the code you release, just put it in the public domain.
So I guess it comes down to what your intentions are: Some release their code because they want it to be available to people that can use it. Some release their code so they can build a reputation for whatever reason (looking for employment?). Some people gain benefits from Free software because they can use it to solve real problems. Some people bitch and moan about how they can't legally use other people's code for their crappy software to be sold at grossly inflated prices.
Alright, so you could hide data within the trailing unused space of a block, (IIRC, people like Tanenbaum refer to this as internal fragmentation), and the article says you could use a tool like bmap to handily stuff data in this space....but for those who aren't convinced this does much in the way of hiding anything, could a more practical use be put into place for the slack space? Perhaps write support into the filesystem that would start stuffing things in a relatively (user) transparent way...thus finally making a 10GB disk something much closer to holding 10GB (base-2 or 10 calculations of a GB aside)?
Or perhaps some sort of piggyback filesystem that uses the slack space but would be mounted as a separate partition?
I'd imagine this would introduce lots of external fragmentation on anything stored there, but as a separate filesystem, you could suffer those pains and move your "current, but not often accessed" files there, where you really don't care if you suffer a bit of a performance hit because it's still a whole lot better than reading it from backups.
it would mean switching to Microsoft first. I'm within a handful of classes from graduating with a CS degree, and I've not used a Microsoft product for program development since 2000. (I have used MS Word a couple times when I had to write a paper and there weren't other options available. I still feel dirty)
Of course, the rest of the department has gone overboard implementing whatever they view as "currently being used by the marketplace" (note the awful flash animations on the page. Also note that many pictures of students hard at work are not students, but paid models at somewhere definitely not at our school. I don't know why the hell they went down that road), and for now, Microsoft and the marketplace are linked in many people's minds. The real trauma is that they keep getting rid of pure CS classes and replacing them with gimpy CIS classes (which is another program). The classes on AI and parallel processing haven't been held for years.(rumor has it the parallel processing class ceased after the hypercube had a meltdown) Of the new classes we've been offered in recent semesters, only one is what I'd call actual computer science (Quantum Computing. We've also received classes on J2EE and web-enabled databases. Yuck.)
But I digress. My point was that using unix or unix-like systems, even within a great sea of Microsoft, is not only possible but arguably preferable. I've had to jump through a few additional hoops, such as porting code provided by the instructor to be os-independent, having to arrange showing my projects during office hours in lieu of turning in a binary, having to persuade instructors that I'm not on crack....
So I've had to learn more on my own. Big deal. I'm still quite a bit more happy using joe and gcc to write code rather than the point-and-drool nature of MSVC. It's also worth noting that I'm starting out ahead of my peers in my compiler class this semester (where the instructor is requiring our projects to run on a solaris box)
The Edward's Theatre at the Irvine Rectum^H^H^H^H^H^HSpectrum (rumored to be the largest grossing theatre in the US, even though Edward's is currently attempting to claw their way out of Chapter 11) has at least one digital projector. Saw Atlantis and Final Fantasy there....so I do know they exist.
The good: Clear picture.
The bad: I saw one animated movie and one all-cgi movie. Without seeing them on a traditional projector, how would I know the difference? There was still the dust problem (air or lens), although it did look to be a lot cleaner overall.
A few points worth noting: I saw part of the phantom menace on one of those wide-screen hdtv's. Picture was so clear that it made the film's effects look even less realistic. Anyone who's gone out to see Beauty & The Beast at any of the IMAX theatres may have noticed that thanks to it being increased to "Dear god, look at the size of that nutcracker!" size made it much more apparent that the people coloring the cells didn't get quite as close to the outlines as you might expect. Thus, technology increases typically work best when everything is aiming at the same target.
Additionally, I'm not a believer that FPS needs to be increased much more than it is. Yes, you could make conventional projectors churn out film faster, although you'd need to increase the size of the platters, adjust the timing of the reels, etc. You'd probably not have a lot of reason just to convert an existing projector, you'd want to get a new one...and if you're getting a new projector, you might as well get a digital one if you get the benefits of the [easier, more durable] distribution medium, clearer picture, etc. Besides, there comes a physiological limit to the amount of information the eye can process at once. 30fps is plenty for me, and I can't really distinguish a difference between 30 and 60. Same reason why I think 96khz cd's are ridiculous. I can't hear outside of a certain range, who cares if it can faithfully record it?
I think digital projection will catch on, not because of features the audience would notice, but because of things that will make distribution easier. People seem to go to the movies no matter how badly they're made, how uncomfortable the seats, how high the ticket prices...so getting stuff done for the sake of the audience doesn't really seem like a big motivating factor for the industry.
On Tuesday, Amazon is expected to report what it calls a "pro forma" operating income, which excludes certain noncash items. Much ado has been made about "pro forma" accounting, a term not recognized by the Financial Accounting Standards Board, a group overseeing accounting rules.
Or, analysts expect pro-forma accounting.
News.com:
Amazon reported net income of $5 million, or a penny a share, under generally accepted accounting principles, well ahead of analysts' expectations. Most analysts had predicted that the company would report a profit on a pro forma basis, which excludes a host of expenses and charges.
Or, the analysts were wrong, they used generally accepted accounting principles.
So the news here is that they not only made a profit, but did so by fudging the numbers no more than any normal accountant would.
Debian source packages....hm....and the advantage of this over a source tarball from the original author is what, exactly? You save yourself maybe five minutes of finding the most current version? The thrill of wondering what's changed from the official release by the package maintainer?
When you do a "make install", you're only doing so blindly if you don't bother to look at the makefile to begin with. So you've got a choice: Take a chance with a package manager or a blind "make install" OR just be dilligent to begin with.
Unfortunately, I haven't found a package manager worth its salt yet....rpm-based systems tend to be so picky about dependencies that you either have to go along with whatever it tells you (which is a much lower level of choice than what I expect) or you force installation (which often tends to push the rpm database even further into its little fantasy world.) Apt, from my experience, tends to do whatever the hell it feels like. Nothing like watching it install libc5, remove libc5 and then reinstall libc5 on successive runs of "apt-get upgrade". (Here in the fifth circle of hell, we've only got low-bandwidth connections and a lot of mud.) What finally drove me over the edge was that I decided the system I was working on didn't need an MTA, so I told it to get rid of exim. It did. And took at with it. So, thinking it was annoying, told it to go get at again. It did. And brought zmailer with it.
I tend to view package management as it's defined these days as a great tool for the lazy, cowards and the otherwise uninterested. When it really comes down to it, if I were to find myself responsible for a large number of debian-like boxen, I'd probably just set up a box to act as the primary package source and populate it myself. Call it paranoia, but one of the big things that got me excited by Free software was the amount of choice that comes with it. If you're experience is all about having a package manager do all the fun work, then by all means, go right ahead.
I'm going to have to disagree on the "lack of package management holds it back" argument.
Current package management systems in use (rpm, deb, etc.) rely heavily on the package maintainers. You're trusting them on several issues that seem kind of hairy in a large production environment.
1) The binary package does what it's supposed to (read: trojan free)
2) The software within was compiled to an architecture that you can handle (Nothing like finding -i386 meant to your package maintainer that 686 optimizations were included (not so good on some chips, like the AMD k6-2's))
3) Everything was built with reasonable options
4) The package plays nice and doesn't replace files from other packages on your system.
Personally, I'm more than happy compiling everything from source, especially now that a "./configure ; make ; make install" describes the build instructions on a huge number of available applications.
Want to roll it out on your large production system? Build the package on your test machine, use makepkg to build a slackware package, and then install it all over your network. Slack's concept of packages may be a bit simple (yes, they're basically gzipped tarballs with a manifest), but installpkg, removepkg and makepkg have been enough for me. (If you're using the makepkg angle, it's quite a bit easier removing things, especially if you're generally bad at keeping track where all the stuff is landing to begin with)
I won't bother with all my other anti-package arguments (dependencies, etc.)
As long as there are people that enjoy slackware, it will keep going. My question to the poster of the article (not that comment I'm replying to) is "When did commercial acceptance become the _only_ thing we care about?"
Speaking from firsthand knowledge of Cal State Fullerton, I can say that the unix variant and workalikes of all CS labs. The setup here is one beefy Sun box, a few NT servers lying about, two labs full of Macs (that I know of. The open lab is rather dated. The instructional lab is full of G3's which I believe are being replaced with G4's soon), and lab after lab of Dell pentium II systems running...win95. Only recently has work begun on setting up a full-fledged Unix lab stocked with a bunch of Ultrasparcs.
The problem: Most of the CSUF CS department (faculty and students alike) are really excited by two things: Windows and Java. It's all I ever hear out of them, and there's only a small (but dedicated) group of *nix lovers hanging about trying as best as we can to bring about changing this (I'm still looking for hard evidence on this one, but allegedly, back in the days before BSD was the hot ticket, there existed the Fullerton Unix extensions.)
For what it's worth, you can walk into the back of nearly any lab on campus and look out upon the screens at what people are actually using it for: The usual breakdown is that half the room is talking to the other half over the AIM. Throw in some generic browser usage and the occasional VC6 user, and there you have it. I'm firmly convinced that a suitable Linux (or *BSD (or even BeOS)) replacement could be made...most of the people I talk to tend to follow two lines of thought:
1) "But Windows is popular and Java is really easy to program! If I choose something else, won't I be limited to a really small number of jobs?"
2) "What do you mean that you only use joe and gcc to do all of your projects? How can you keep track of three files at once? What if you need the online help?"
[DISCLAIMER TYPE="RUMOR"]
From what I hear, the school turned down a _free_ site license for metrowerks Code Warrior a few years back. Our speculation is that it would've put any agreements with microsoft in jeopardy.
[/DISCLAIMER]
I'm doing the best we can to either fix some of these problems or scare away some of the "Point 'n Click" programmers, because I'm in CS for the love, not to listen to a bunch of whiners out for money.
-transiit
Re:A.I.: View at the Matinee price!
on
Review: A.I.
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· Score: 2
well, I must've dozed off during the line that explained what they were. Maybe it was one of those "you had to have read the short story first" moments. Either way, I interpreted them as aliens. Would machines care if another machine is happy? Would machines say things like "These robots must have been around when the living humans existed"?
I'll refer to them as the Jello Automatons then. They were still lousy and detracted from the quality of the film.
-transiit
A.I.: View at the Matinee price!
on
Review: A.I.
·
· Score: 2
It was not the worst film I've seen in a while. My first comment after viewing was "Wow, that was the best android-centric movie with Robin Williams that I've seen all year!".
The good:
Well, I did get to see Ministry in a Speilberg flick. Never expected that one in a million years (confirmed in the credits: Even if it wasn't 'officially' Ministry, it was Al Jorgensen and Paul Barker, which is darn near close enough. )
The character I found the most believable was the ueber Teddy Ruxpin. It was the only one with believable lines.
I really enjoyed the score. It didn't carry the film, no matter how hard Speilberg hoped.
The bad:
I found most of the dialogue to be downright lousy: So the mecha know that they've got some serious advantages over the orga. Note that they do absolutely nothing about it other than be able to hang around in an icecube until the really lousy cgi aliens show up. It surprised me to see that every single android shown had no qualities that put them above humanity. No speed advantage. No memory advantage. No strength, no brains, nada. (exceptions: 1) the aliens harvested all of david's memories out, so the retention was there, but david never used any of it 2) Gigalo Joe and spasm radio)
The ugly:
The aliens. Awful. Lousy. Everything about them was worthless.
Chris Rock as the comedian android. At least it only survived for a minute or so of the film.
Robin Williams as Dr. Know. Horrible.
I finally got to see the LoTR trailer, but the exciter bulb went out on the projector, so no audio. I still blame Speilberg for that one =)
The point was lost by people who give kneejerk responses without being troubled to read or think about the comments.
So, to summarize... Assertion 1: Linux is too big for embedded devices Response: There is nothing inherently bloated about the linux kernel that it can't be trimmed down to fit whereever it needs to Assertion 2: Well, QNX can fit a GUI and a Browser on a floppy! Linux can't do that, right? Response: The linux kernel is small enough that you could fit it on a floppy with enough space for your custom GUI and browser Assertion 3: You don't need to do that because QNX did this years ago Response: Yeah, no shit. See assertion 2. Assertion 4: Transiit is a retarded zealot. Response: Maybe. Not in this case tho...the point was that it CAN be done with linux, not that it HAS been done with linux. Somebody claimed linux was inherently incapable of doing a certain task. This has nothing to do with zealotry. This was a (misguided) attempt to clarify someone's mistaken assumption.
Leave the herd behind. Just because popular opinion loved linux last week or hate linux this week should have very little bearing on your own opinions. Think for yourselves. If you like W2k, use it. If you like QNX, use it. If you like BeOS, use it. Someone defending their own choice does not make for zealotry though.
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It strikes me that there's basically four groups when dealing with these things:
(Listed in order of paranoia, a bit of description for each.)
1) The wide-eyed "Extended Warranty? How can I lose?" group.
Clearly, this is what the grandparent poster was talking about: Complete and total submission.
You get all the benefits of the Ignorance-is-bliss set, at first. As time goes by, it would certainly become harder not to notice that the only phone calls you get are from telemarketers, the only email you receive is spam, and there is so much noise that it won't even be worth looking for signal anymore (aka, the SETI@home project, har har, only joking). You'll have reached the prime consumer level, but that basically just means "easy mark" in the corporations eyes. It might be easier in the short term, but a society of total consumerism would be a mess. Probably best not to go in this far.
2) People that will occasionally go for an advertised bargain/discount club/etc., but do not think much of it. I would say this is the average person out there right now. There isn't much reason not to join a grocery club with the better prices always listed. They'll usually avoid most telemarketers and throw away their junk mail.
3) People that will sign up for said clubs/memberships, but will minimize their exposure. A large portion of the geek crowd lands here. Why not get the benefits of the grocery club, just under the name of J. Edgar Hoover? I signed up for a grocery club under a not-quite-real name, and they've not cancelled my card (as far as I know). They gave me two keyring tags and one card. I gave away the card and a keytag and have traded the remaining keytag a couple times now. Who knows what sort of information has been attached to that original pseudonym by now?
This is a more cautious group, giving out incomplete or outright fictitious information, but a bit more pragmatic than the others.
4) People that won't sign up for anything where they have to give any personal information.
These are the people that either have so little faith in the system that they won't get anywhere near it, or so against it on principle that they won't lessen themselves by it. I admire the idea, but unless something drastic changes, it's extremely difficult to opt-out entirely. It can be done, but you'd probably have to give up many conveniences, like credit cards or checks (they know where you shop), renting a residence (your rental and credit history is duly noted), insuring a car, health insurance (do you smoke? drink? have any prior ailments?), etc. The more extreme of this group lives in small shanties writing manifestos on their manual typewriters.
This isn't meant an an indictment against any of these groups. It's a matter of how much of your life you're willing to give up for others' profit. Until I feel that those controlling the information can be trusted to ethically posess such knowledge, I would advocate that most people should aim to be in one of the latter two groups (against the system by total disassociation, or against the system by misdirection).
-transiit
no, not really. 1395 bytes? dd it off to a floppy drive, or another partition, or some other removeable media. Where's the risk?
-transiit
This is the right idea, but a lot more complex than it needs to be. Considering that the correct file size is already known, you should be able to use dd to specify how many blocks actually get written. So the steps are 'make a backup with dd, specifying length', 'test the backup thouroughly with whatever created it or can validate it', 'once you're certain the original is no longer needed, get rid of it.'.
problem solved?
-transiit
yeah, after rereading my comment a day later, I realize I did slip up in part of my explanation: If your first state is "E", the next character to input is "a", you would go to state "Ea", and with "t", go to "Eat", which is listed as an accepting state.
Our good friend (or foe, depending on what you're trying to prove) the pumping lemma does give us an idea that N 'A's followed by N 'B's is impossible in this context (or A^n followed by B^n isn't regular).
You've got the easy hack of "Take all possible tokens. Create an additional set of states for each where there's an arbitrary number of parentheses, brackets, etc. in front of them and the same number behind them" (which would be really big, unless you've got a really small list of tokens or cut off the number of parentheses, etc. to a really small number, or both.)
A^nB^n doesn't work. A^mB^n does work, provided you don't try to be too specific about what M or N are, just that they're some nonnegative number.
On another note, it's good news to me that I did get most of the meat of it right. Glad to hear I'm not getting the second-rate education I'd feared. =)
-transiit
This is a pretty lousy explanation of how things work, although I do agree that regular expressions have limits and you should be familiar with what they are.
I might not get every single bit of the technical vocabulary right on this one, but do try to follow along anyhow (and please only refute the REALLY glaring errors).
Basically, with regular expressions, you get what Chomsky (famed linguist and political extremist...er, nut =) ) referred to as a type-3 grammar, or roughly something that can be solved with a deterministic finite-state automata (DFA. Ok, you might argue that you get an NFA (nondeterministic finite-state automata), but using the subset construction, it's so easily converted to a DFA, we'll just pretend we're working with a DFA.)
Basically, a DFA works like this: Think of a table. You start out at one row (the starting state) and based on the input you get, you move to another row/state. One or more of these states is specially marked as an accepting state, so if you run out of input characters on one of those states, the string is accepted and everyone is happy. If you run out of input on any state not marked as such, the string is rejected. (DFA's are often expressed as graphs as well, but from a programmatic perspective, it's really easy to just use a table, or for the pedantic, a list of nodes (containing the current state, and where to go on any possible input...a list of lists)).
Maybe we can go more simple than that: You're sitting on a nerdly board game. You draw a card that says "B. Go to the square labeled as 'R'", so you go to R and draw another card. You keep picking cards and following the directions on them until you get "$: The game is over. If you're on a square that is labeled with an underlined letter, you win. If the letter is not underlined, you lose."
So what does this mean? In terms of compiler/language theory, we can use a regex to recognize tokens (or individual words), but they aren't very powerful when it comes to syntax (Our lexer would be happy with "sentence This a is.", but by our grammar, it doesn't make a lot of sense. We, as people, could guess the meaning, but computers are still really bad at guessing anything (especially your weight). A parser would be necessary to figure out if things make any sense by the rules of the grammar, which would refuse "sentence This a is." but accept "This is a sentence.") If you're setting up the rules of our example nerdly board game, you could set up a number of states that could find any word in your language. (If the first state is "E" and the next state is "a" and the next state is "t", followed by "$" (commonly used for end of input, but in your language you might specify the end of the word being a space or some bit of punctuation instead), you'll have successfully parsed "Eat", which by your rules is considered to be a valid accepting state. In the same sense, if you pick "R" followed by "Z", you might move off to some error state you've specified, where no matter what input follows, you'll always loop back around to that same state, because you know for certain there's no word you want to accept that starts with "RZ".)
So to answer the question "can regexp validate XML?", the answer is yes, in the sense that it can be used to scan for valid XML components (words), and no, in that it can't tell well-formed XML from poorly-formed XML tags (sentences). A regex alone isn't quite powerful enough to understand that ">>>>XML" and "<XML>" aren't both perfectly acceptable.
Sort of.
Could you write enough rules that some really large set of regex could do it? Maybe, but it's a mathematical proof that's way out of my league, but I'll warn you now: you'll be writing so many cases for every possible permutation that you'll probably go batty trying. Part of what all this language theory got us was an understanding that some tools are good at one task, but lousy at others.
If you're interested in this further, the Dragon book (search for it on google, you'll find it as "dragon book" faster than its real title, which I've forgotten) is considered the canonical source for this sort of thing, although it can be horribly dry and hard to read. There are some other compiler theory books out there, and some aren't quite as dull (though arguably less informative. I wasn't able to prove my nerdliness by reading more than a handful of pages of the dragon book, though I found it to be a great reference for filling in the gaps of the other books (which were more prone to shameless hand-holding))
comp.compilers can be a good source as well, though sometimes a bit intimidating. Read through it, see if you can find references to the stuff you don't really understand, and just try to absorb what's there.
-transiit
David Villanueva Nuñez, the Peruvian Congressman?
Sorry, but Peru is still a bit of a distance for a California voter, even if "the dead have risen, and they're voting Republican!"
Being in California does mean that you can show up on Disney's front door in Burbank (or at least the sidewalk in front ot the gate) with some friends and witty sayings on cardboard signs. Exercise that right to peaceful assembly while we've still got it.
-transiit
Maybe this is true if you're somebody like EA, or Blizzard, or ID, or whatever. You never hear about people complaining about Ferrari not having the same sales volume as Volkswagen. 40,000 X $50 really isn't that bad if you're a company of around 10 employees, especially considering they didn't really have to do the hard parts: design, art, etc. And when they were selling games through their site, yes, they were getting $50 a copy, so a cut for the distributor isn't really an issue in that case. Pay off the title's original owner, and the rest can go back into the business. Sure, 40K units isn't a lot for the Windows game market, but how does that compare against the Mac games? Or other Linux games? Different market, different yardstick. Really. So companies don't fail because the management is stealing all of the money, they fail because they didn't get the memo that porting companies have no chance of success. Do you think you could provide a few more examples of similar companies that have failed? Maybe you could also throw in some about all the other Linux-centric game companies that have failed, thus proving there's no way to pull off such an endeavor? So where was that point again? You started off on the original post I replied to that Linux needs platform-specific titles, and then concluded with Linux users should just use Windows instead. Would Linux exclusive titles be a good thing? Sure, but they still stand about as much chance of success on their own as any other game thrown into the market (the vast majority of which aren't big-sellers).
I think there are a couple flaws in your basic premise. First, things like what Transgaming is trying to do makes porting relatively trivial. Second, the gaming industry is a big nasty place, and one company's failure (which easily could be attributed to more fundamental problems) is hardly enough to use as a precedent. Third, there's a vastly different culture associated with the different platforms: Linux and Unix tend to be used by engineers, scientists, programmers, other researchers, and generally anyone who wants a stable machine, but isn't afraid of the learning curve. The Macintosh is often used by designers, content creators, pretentious artists, etc. Windows has long been used for business/home desktops as a general purpose environment, and as a toy.
-transiit
Yes, Loki did port established titles. But a better question is whether their failure was caused by this, or the fact that Scott Draeker, the guy in charge, was funnelling money out of the company into his own account (as reported over at linuxandmain here.)
Thank you for rehashing the same argument that was beaten to death on here for months.
-transiit
I think I'm still going to have to disagree with you on this point. ICQ was developed, as my memory serves, by a company called Mirabillis. AOL bought them, and for whatever reason, never merged ICQ in with their product, AIM. Some features have shown up that didn't used to be there, like multiple users in the same chat session, etc., but the only thing that's keeping them apart at this point is the whims of AOL. (although some could say they're dealing with the problem by making ICQ increasingly more crapulent, but I've not used it in years. Couldn't say.)
If your argument is to hold true, the whole situation is self-defeating. Either the gateway services are to cater to the lowest common denominator, or they aren't going to work. If they don't work, they fail. If they don't support every stupid addition to every possible client/protocol, they fail.
I'd also like to point out that analogies still suck. I've had a swiss army knife for years. Works great. Does what I need it to. (mainly, it cuts stuff, has a screwdriver, and keeps me from having to open cans with my teeth).
Wait a second....you're against standards because they mean less choice for the user? Are you on crack? The idea of having a standard is all about choice: it means that you aren't forced into using one tool just because it's the only one that supports feature X. Say we've got a standard, like "For every instant message, the format is a 32-byte 'From' field, a datestamp, and the rest is message until you reach a null terminator". Now as a user, this doesn't mean a whole lot, except that you know that any client that follows this standard will work with the rest of the instant messaging user community, at which point you start picking the client based on whether or not they think you should see ads on your contact list, or how well they manage those contacts, or if they're prone to crashing every ten minutes, or if the servers they talk to are prone to being unreachable every ten minutes, etc. All the other bells and whistles get embedded between the datestamp and the terminator. Want HTML formatting, include it. Think XML is the one true instant message format? use it. But just like email clients, you would do yourself a service by being less noisy, but HTML mail continues to annoy email users worldwide, and most of the people sending it are too clueless to get it, so it continues....
Whoa. Where the hell did that come from, and for that matter, what the hell does it have to do with anything? Where is it written that if we try to create an instant messaging standard, we'll never get a standard in cable/dsl rates? In fact, why should we have a standard in transfer rates on those media above what already exists? (What, you think they got this shit working out of sheer dumb luck? Everybody reinvents the wheel for every cable provider or dsl-providing-telco? There's plenty of standarization on that stuff.)
The problem in this market is a lack of competition. How are we supposed to show our disgust with artificial bandwidth caps if we don't have any other choice in the market?
-transiit
I think it's become apparent through the efforts of Jabber, Trillian, etc. that the technological side of getting interoperability between the networks isn't impossible. The problem is companies such as AOL changing their protocol whenever they feel threatened.
-transiit
So here's my theory of what will happen if we hit a wall in processor performance:
1) Software developers will aim to better optimize the software.
2) Hardware developers will work at moving software-dependent things off on to hardware.
Some years back, I had a machine capable (at least to my untrained eyes) of full-screen, full-motion movies, under win 3.1. Of course, this was thanks to a $100 Sigma Designs VLB hardware MPEG decompressor, but ever since, I've wondered what all the excitement has been about in the last year or so with people talking about how great it is to have a CPU fast enough to handle movie playback. (one of these days, I'm going to put the old DX4-100 back together and see if I can get it to play dvd's through that card). But this seems to be a common trend. Stuff lives on hardware because it can be done fast. Stuff moves to software because it can be done cheap. Having major speed increases in the processor market has helped, but I think it'd be a hard sell to say that everything that's done in software currently couldn't be moved off into hardware. Find me 10 people that are convinced that hardware-accelerated 3d is soon to be eclipsed by software, and perhaps I'll consider that as an argument.
Does this mean that everything needs to be moved off to hardware? Probably not, but I'd like to see some of it offloaded. Some could arguably be better off as hardware (I could be wrong, but I think a cheap usb camera duct-taped to a lava lamp would make a better random number generator than most of the algorithms out there.)
As for software optimization, here's where the annoying part comes in. How many self-taught people know the difference between O(n) and O(2^n)? It's not the sort of thing you can rely on your compiler to fix for you. Perhaps we'll be coming to an age where the difference between doing the time in formal education learning the foundation becomes apparent from those who bought a "Teach yourself C++ in 10 minutes" book.
I'm reminded of a Bloom County strip I read many years back where a film review was being written down at ye olde Bloom Picayune: "It did for cinema what Jonestown did for Kool-Aid".
Sometimes the reviewers are on to something, sometimes they just sound like elitist pricks. As I recall, Siskel & Ebert gave "The Usual Suspects" two thumbs down, which remains one of my favorite movies to date. I've plans to see this one, but I'm not sure I have the interest to go out of my way to see it opening night. I'm even busy enough with the approaching finals that I'd probably miss any lone-gunmen-are-dead reviews around these parts
-transiit
Well, to increase the creation of the post-modern Tower of Babel that the internet is fostering, I'm going to start pronouncing everything with a silent 'K'. Thus, it's Mail, Word, Spread, Illustrator, Rapp and of course, DE.
They could've at least thought up something that rolls off the tongue smoothly....like CBDTPA
And for posterity, it was the "Kewl Desktop Enivronment" see here (the only early reference I could find, though I'm sure if you searched through the google usenet archive you might find an early reference.)
Yeah, even from the start, they haven't given us a lot to respect.
-transiit
How about taxing the politicians to fund the government?
So here's the problem in a nutshell: The people that are interested tend to get benefits from the programs. Thus the programs are funded by those who get the benefits. This sounds an awful lot like the private sector....which leads to why don't we just privatize all these programs to begin with?
Or, we could just leave it the way it is, where public sector research benefits everyone. Yes, NASA is generally pretty interested in space, but the output of the space missions has brought us all sorts of other side benefits. Satellite television. Bar codes. Smoke detectors. Invisible orthodontic braces. Edible toothpaste!
Tang!
Where the hell would we be without Tang?
whoa. digression
Anyhow, as long as the benefits of the programs, even edible toothpaste, are spread far and wide, then the general public can pay for them, not just those dreaming of having a pet dragon that will someday grok them in fullness.
-transiit
no, the GPL would happily let you build a closed road off of an open one. Closed, non-free software can legitimately read files created by GPL-bound software. You can even use other things like named pipes (via something like mkfifo) or shell redirects to get data from one to the other.
What you're asking for is the ability to put up toll booths on public roadways, which really isn't about freedom, but the ability to profit off of others' work. The GPL is good for people that write software that want to give it away towards the greater good: It does a good job of enforcing the guarantee that the program will always be available to those that need it. The BSD license is good for making sure your name gets attached to the code. If you're really just concerned about the least amount of restriction being placed on the code you release, just put it in the public domain.
So I guess it comes down to what your intentions are: Some release their code because they want it to be available to people that can use it. Some release their code so they can build a reputation for whatever reason (looking for employment?). Some people gain benefits from Free software because they can use it to solve real problems. Some people bitch and moan about how they can't legally use other people's code for their crappy software to be sold at grossly inflated prices.
-transiit
Alright, so you could hide data within the trailing unused space of a block, (IIRC, people like Tanenbaum refer to this as internal fragmentation), and the article says you could use a tool like bmap to handily stuff data in this space....but for those who aren't convinced this does much in the way of hiding anything, could a more practical use be put into place for the slack space? Perhaps write support into the filesystem that would start stuffing things in a relatively (user) transparent way...thus finally making a 10GB disk something much closer to holding 10GB (base-2 or 10 calculations of a GB aside)?
Or perhaps some sort of piggyback filesystem that uses the slack space but would be mounted as a separate partition?
I'd imagine this would introduce lots of external fragmentation on anything stored there, but as a separate filesystem, you could suffer those pains and move your "current, but not often accessed" files there, where you really don't care if you suffer a bit of a performance hit because it's still a whole lot better than reading it from backups.
-transiit
it would mean switching to Microsoft first. I'm within a handful of classes from graduating with a CS degree, and I've not used a Microsoft product for program development since 2000. (I have used MS Word a couple times when I had to write a paper and there weren't other options available. I still feel dirty)
Of course, the rest of the department has gone overboard implementing whatever they view as "currently being used by the marketplace" (note the awful flash animations on the page. Also note that many pictures of students hard at work are not students, but paid models at somewhere definitely not at our school. I don't know why the hell they went down that road), and for now, Microsoft and the marketplace are linked in many people's minds. The real trauma is that they keep getting rid of pure CS classes and replacing them with gimpy CIS classes (which is another program). The classes on AI and parallel processing haven't been held for years.(rumor has it the parallel processing class ceased after the hypercube had a meltdown) Of the new classes we've been offered in recent semesters, only one is what I'd call actual computer science (Quantum Computing. We've also received classes on J2EE and web-enabled databases. Yuck.)
But I digress. My point was that using unix or unix-like systems, even within a great sea of Microsoft, is not only possible but arguably preferable. I've had to jump through a few additional hoops, such as porting code provided by the instructor to be os-independent, having to arrange showing my projects during office hours in lieu of turning in a binary, having to persuade instructors that I'm not on crack....
So I've had to learn more on my own. Big deal. I'm still quite a bit more happy using joe and gcc to write code rather than the point-and-drool nature of MSVC. It's also worth noting that I'm starting out ahead of my peers in my compiler class this semester (where the instructor is requiring our projects to run on a solaris box)
-transiit
The Edward's Theatre at the Irvine Rectum^H^H^H^H^H^HSpectrum (rumored to be the largest grossing theatre in the US, even though Edward's is currently attempting to claw their way out of Chapter 11) has at least one digital projector. Saw Atlantis and Final Fantasy there....so I do know they exist.
The good: Clear picture.
The bad: I saw one animated movie and one all-cgi movie. Without seeing them on a traditional projector, how would I know the difference? There was still the dust problem (air or lens), although it did look to be a lot cleaner overall.
A few points worth noting: I saw part of the phantom menace on one of those wide-screen hdtv's. Picture was so clear that it made the film's effects look even less realistic. Anyone who's gone out to see Beauty & The Beast at any of the IMAX theatres may have noticed that thanks to it being increased to "Dear god, look at the size of that nutcracker!" size made it much more apparent that the people coloring the cells didn't get quite as close to the outlines as you might expect. Thus, technology increases typically work best when everything is aiming at the same target.
Additionally, I'm not a believer that FPS needs to be increased much more than it is. Yes, you could make conventional projectors churn out film faster, although you'd need to increase the size of the platters, adjust the timing of the reels, etc. You'd probably not have a lot of reason just to convert an existing projector, you'd want to get a new one...and if you're getting a new projector, you might as well get a digital one if you get the benefits of the [easier, more durable] distribution medium, clearer picture, etc. Besides, there comes a physiological limit to the amount of information the eye can process at once. 30fps is plenty for me, and I can't really distinguish a difference between 30 and 60. Same reason why I think 96khz cd's are ridiculous. I can't hear outside of a certain range, who cares if it can faithfully record it?
I think digital projection will catch on, not because of features the audience would notice, but because of things that will make distribution easier. People seem to go to the movies no matter how badly they're made, how uncomfortable the seats, how high the ticket prices...so getting stuff done for the sake of the audience doesn't really seem like a big motivating factor for the industry.
-transiit
Seattle Times: Or, analysts expect pro-forma accounting.
News.com: Or, the analysts were wrong, they used generally accepted accounting principles.
So the news here is that they not only made a profit, but did so by fudging the numbers no more than any normal accountant would.
-transiit
Debian source packages....hm....and the advantage of this over a source tarball from the original author is what, exactly? You save yourself maybe five minutes of finding the most current version? The thrill of wondering what's changed from the official release by the package maintainer?
When you do a "make install", you're only doing so blindly if you don't bother to look at the makefile to begin with. So you've got a choice: Take a chance with a package manager or a blind "make install" OR just be dilligent to begin with.
Unfortunately, I haven't found a package manager worth its salt yet....rpm-based systems tend to be so picky about dependencies that you either have to go along with whatever it tells you (which is a much lower level of choice than what I expect) or you force installation (which often tends to push the rpm database even further into its little fantasy world.) Apt, from my experience, tends to do whatever the hell it feels like. Nothing like watching it install libc5, remove libc5 and then reinstall libc5 on successive runs of "apt-get upgrade". (Here in the fifth circle of hell, we've only got low-bandwidth connections and a lot of mud.) What finally drove me over the edge was that I decided the system I was working on didn't need an MTA, so I told it to get rid of exim. It did. And took at with it. So, thinking it was annoying, told it to go get at again. It did. And brought zmailer with it.
I tend to view package management as it's defined these days as a great tool for the lazy, cowards and the otherwise uninterested. When it really comes down to it, if I were to find myself responsible for a large number of debian-like boxen, I'd probably just set up a box to act as the primary package source and populate it myself. Call it paranoia, but one of the big things that got me excited by Free software was the amount of choice that comes with it. If you're experience is all about having a package manager do all the fun work, then by all means, go right ahead.
-transiit
I'm going to have to disagree on the "lack of package management holds it back" argument.
Current package management systems in use (rpm, deb, etc.) rely heavily on the package maintainers. You're trusting them on several issues that seem kind of hairy in a large production environment.
1) The binary package does what it's supposed to (read: trojan free)
2) The software within was compiled to an architecture that you can handle (Nothing like finding -i386 meant to your package maintainer that 686 optimizations were included (not so good on some chips, like the AMD k6-2's))
3) Everything was built with reasonable options
4) The package plays nice and doesn't replace files from other packages on your system.
Personally, I'm more than happy compiling everything from source, especially now that a "./configure ; make ; make install" describes the build instructions on a huge number of available applications.
Want to roll it out on your large production system? Build the package on your test machine, use makepkg to build a slackware package, and then install it all over your network. Slack's concept of packages may be a bit simple (yes, they're basically gzipped tarballs with a manifest), but installpkg, removepkg and makepkg have been enough for me. (If you're using the makepkg angle, it's quite a bit easier removing things, especially if you're generally bad at keeping track where all the stuff is landing to begin with)
I won't bother with all my other anti-package arguments (dependencies, etc.)
As long as there are people that enjoy slackware, it will keep going. My question to the poster of the article (not that comment I'm replying to) is "When did commercial acceptance become the _only_ thing we care about?"
-transiit
Speaking from firsthand knowledge of Cal State Fullerton, I can say that the unix variant and workalikes of all CS labs. The setup here is one beefy Sun box, a few NT servers lying about, two labs full of Macs (that I know of. The open lab is rather dated. The instructional lab is full of G3's which I believe are being replaced with G4's soon), and lab after lab of Dell pentium II systems running...win95. Only recently has work begun on setting up a full-fledged Unix lab stocked with a bunch of Ultrasparcs.
The problem: Most of the CSUF CS department (faculty and students alike) are really excited by two things: Windows and Java. It's all I ever hear out of them, and there's only a small (but dedicated) group of *nix lovers hanging about trying as best as we can to bring about changing this (I'm still looking for hard evidence on this one, but allegedly, back in the days before BSD was the hot ticket, there existed the Fullerton Unix extensions.)
For what it's worth, you can walk into the back of nearly any lab on campus and look out upon the screens at what people are actually using it for: The usual breakdown is that half the room is talking to the other half over the AIM. Throw in some generic browser usage and the occasional VC6 user, and there you have it. I'm firmly convinced that a suitable Linux (or *BSD (or even BeOS)) replacement could be made...most of the people I talk to tend to follow two lines of thought:
1) "But Windows is popular and Java is really easy to program! If I choose something else, won't I be limited to a really small number of jobs?"
2) "What do you mean that you only use joe and gcc to do all of your projects? How can you keep track of three files at once? What if you need the online help?"
[DISCLAIMER TYPE="RUMOR"]
From what I hear, the school turned down a _free_ site license for metrowerks Code Warrior a few years back. Our speculation is that it would've put any agreements with microsoft in jeopardy.
[/DISCLAIMER]
I'm doing the best we can to either fix some of these problems or scare away some of the "Point 'n Click" programmers, because I'm in CS for the love, not to listen to a bunch of whiners out for money.
-transiit
well, I must've dozed off during the line that explained what they were. Maybe it was one of those "you had to have read the short story first" moments. Either way, I interpreted them as aliens. Would machines care if another machine is happy? Would machines say things like "These robots must have been around when the living humans existed"?
I'll refer to them as the Jello Automatons then. They were still lousy and detracted from the quality of the film.
-transiit
It was not the worst film I've seen in a while. My first comment after viewing was "Wow, that was the best android-centric movie with Robin Williams that I've seen all year!".
The good:
Well, I did get to see Ministry in a Speilberg flick. Never expected that one in a million years (confirmed in the credits: Even if it wasn't 'officially' Ministry, it was Al Jorgensen and Paul Barker, which is darn near close enough. )
The character I found the most believable was the ueber Teddy Ruxpin. It was the only one with believable lines.
I really enjoyed the score. It didn't carry the film, no matter how hard Speilberg hoped.
The bad:
I found most of the dialogue to be downright lousy: So the mecha know that they've got some serious advantages over the orga. Note that they do absolutely nothing about it other than be able to hang around in an icecube until the really lousy cgi aliens show up. It surprised me to see that every single android shown had no qualities that put them above humanity. No speed advantage. No memory advantage. No strength, no brains, nada. (exceptions: 1) the aliens harvested all of david's memories out, so the retention was there, but david never used any of it 2) Gigalo Joe and spasm radio)
The ugly:
The aliens. Awful. Lousy. Everything about them was worthless.
Chris Rock as the comedian android. At least it only survived for a minute or so of the film.
Robin Williams as Dr. Know. Horrible.
I finally got to see the LoTR trailer, but the exciter bulb went out on the projector, so no audio. I still blame Speilberg for that one =)
-transiit
The point was lost by people who give kneejerk responses without being troubled to read or think about the comments.
So, to summarize...
Assertion 1: Linux is too big for embedded devices
Response: There is nothing inherently bloated about the linux kernel that it can't be trimmed down to fit whereever it needs to
Assertion 2: Well, QNX can fit a GUI and a Browser on a floppy! Linux can't do that, right?
Response: The linux kernel is small enough that you could fit it on a floppy with enough space for your custom GUI and browser
Assertion 3: You don't need to do that because QNX did this years ago
Response: Yeah, no shit. See assertion 2.
Assertion 4: Transiit is a retarded zealot.
Response: Maybe. Not in this case tho...the point was that it CAN be done with linux, not that it HAS been done with linux. Somebody claimed linux was inherently incapable of doing a certain task. This has nothing to do with zealotry. This was a (misguided) attempt to clarify someone's mistaken assumption.
Leave the herd behind. Just because popular opinion loved linux last week or hate linux this week should have very little bearing on your own opinions. Think for yourselves. If you like W2k, use it. If you like QNX, use it. If you like BeOS, use it. Someone defending their own choice does not make for zealotry though.