At least the programmers are passionate about what they think is right, which means they are probably going to end up with a GREAT solution. Better than a world where the programmers just accept whatever comes their way even if it's a bad solution to the problem.
But other than that, I really hope they calm down the flamewars. Having a passionate discussion about something and harrassing or insulting someone else (often on something totally not related to the subject) will ruin relationships and break apart a good development team. If it's bad enough to drive someone to resign, it's pretty bad.
I'd be incredibly careful that my name is in no way associated with my DNA. The last thing I want is these folks turning around and selling it to who knows who so that they can eventually parse my DNA and know whole loads of stuff about me. If you were prone to bladder infections, and didn't even know it (I'm not btw, afaik), would you want some company knowing that you were and spamming you with bladder-infection medicine (or whatever) just before you're scheduled to start getting them. Or perhaps they could sell it to insurance companies. Anyway, read the license carefully.
My friend has one of these, we hooked it up and played I think Duke Nukem. It's really loud and shakes your body so much you can't speak clearly. A very cool thing, but definatly no porn value, at least not if you wear in in the conventional manner;)
I was always under the impression that when they went to the lawyers these would be the first to die:
Napster
Gnutella
Aimster
AudioGalaxy
(other stuff)
Of course that's mainly based on volume of mp3s traded. Stil it's interesting that everyone has always been talking about how gnutella can avoid punishment because it has no central servers, and it seems that's working! I guess going after individual Gnutella software companies would take more time/megabyte of "pirated" music than aimster(which I assume only has one real producer and therefore more volume per producer).
I don't see exactly what choice google has on that issue. Google is a crawler, and if it hasn't come across your website you can submit it to the crawler to get crawled in the future. Google doesn't single out sites which they choose not to list (afaik), these sites are probably just not linked to from many places, which means it takes forever for them to show up.
While it does suck that google doesn't let me search everything, there is an ungodly amount of information and basically no feasable way to organize it without high powerd clusters of computers.
It'd be great to have a push for a linux/unix port of this game NOW, instead of 6 months after it's been released. When it comes it'd be very very cool to have windows and linux on the same disc, so people don't have to buy a separate version.
There were also indications that the hardware is not entirely stable yet - a crash during Nightcaster revealed a familiar looking PC boot screen, and a Microsoft representative explained that the memory configuration on the floor models was different than that of the final version.
I don't quite get how a memory configuration is a hardware error, unless they were using shoddy ram, but why would you use bad ram in a public display of your product? I don't recall windows crashing because of insufficient ram either, and am I really to believe that they only stocked the machine with 64-128 megs or so of ram for their public display? Ram is cheap, and for one of the richest companies on earth i'm sure they can afford to make their testing models as good as the soon to be released models.
Well it probably would look like crap when you photographed it. Just like 3d images look like crap when you don't have goggles on. You definatly wouldn't be able to see the 3d aspect of it though. Just a thought.
Concidering the loads of cash microsoft has on hand, I think they care more about flooding & holding the market than about making a profit. They can afford to spend whatever they want on marketing and r&d and they could probably also give the things away for free (assuming masses didn't take free ones and only those who will buy them now took one for free).
I'd suspect no one is going to want to rent the old system's games in a few months anyway. So it really doesn't matter. You're gonna get a lot more rents for (awesome super cool new game) than super mario brothers or whatever. Do people really still rent SNES games?
Ever heard of vaccines? People make vaccines, even though it's only required one time(or around once a decade). That's not treating the symptoms, or the cure, it's cutting it off before it even happens, which saves you lots and lots of money. Be thankful.
Mozilla is getting really nice. I know it's come slow, but it's here, and think about where it was a year ago. The advancement is stunning. I've only been using it everyday for like 5 months now but gaah it's awesome.
The ability to get free tabs makes playing music much easier, which in turn creates more musicians, and makes the recording industry MORE MONEY. If they shut down the tab websites, they'll get back the INCREDIBLY small amount of money from people who'd rather hear a local band perform an artist's song than the artist themself.
Do I have any less desire to see Clapton in concert because I heard FuzzBucket perform "Tears in Heaven"? Absolutley not.
Yeah, but (hopefully) the ideal langauge of tommorow will run as native machine code, or at least be capable of it. You could structure programs so that sometimes they could require types, and other times not. Requiring types would be nice for really big and structured code.
Anyways there are ways of doing it, and it would be nice to have both a "medium level" language which is easier to write than C++ (cleaner, well thought out, proper OO) than another mutant of C/C++.
And C is implemented in itself. "How'd they do that?" you ask. They wrote a bootstrap compiler in some other language that can create binaries (like assembler), and then they used that bootstrap compiler to compile a compiler written in the native language (being C in this example).
I think they should stop and concider when it's time to move on. My grandmother coded in C for Bell Labs (ok I'm 15, but still). While C/C++ are still great languages, in the future (ie: when these things finally get around to being fully supported in most compilers) processors will be about 8 times faster (expecting moores law at 1.5 years and 4-5 years until these are supported).
There are many great scripting languages with much more concise structuring than C and C++, and even things like variable-types could possibly be eliminated (perhaps build a virtual machine into the kernel that will handle the programs). Anyways they should think before wasting the time to add onto the language, get it standardized, get it implemented, and getting everyone to learn it.
If you tell people we WILL have this technology by this date, than we just might develop it by then. 33 years ago, and for most of the 80's, people thought ANY DAY we'd break through and develop Artificial Intelligence.
Also, and this sort of screws up my earlier observation, I don't think clarke wanted to put a date on his movie, but kubrick forced him to.
Well I think it's a good system, the only things that worry me are that they might bundle some extra "goodies" with the vchip tvs. Like all that DMCA stuff that would prevent me from taping copyrighted shows (maybe a nice little ability for the tv to do that god awfully annoying fade from light to black thing that some DVDs do during "copyrighted" shows).
I also wonder if they would offer to let parents just screen out one show or so, or maybe allow a few shows. I know my parents (back when I was 5 or so) had selective ideas of what I should watch. They'd much rather say "no, you can't watch MTV" (I was five) than "no, you can't watch shows on the discovery channel that use the word 'sex'".
Aqua is a very good UI. Have you used it? Apple is making strides once again, of course there are problems, for example animation is annoying when you're trying to run effects on 600 meg audio files and it's slow.
I have been using osX intensely since the Public Beta, and I have used OSX PB, OSX build 4K17, and Build 4k78 (the final version). It has steadily improved. Apple has produced an operating system of the future, and it can do things with graphics that would amaze you. Under normal conditions the Aqua interface is incredibly fast and responsive, and quick to navigate.
I also don't know what you're talking about with people saying the osX cds were fake.. I think some people were surprised that apple left the build id (4K78) in the "about this computer" Window. Some people thought apple mistakenly shipped two versions, but that is far from shipping a "fake" osX.
While I admit that this is rather interesting evidence, and I'm no fan of M$, when the apple powermac g4 cube was first rumored at, at least one website offered evidence that it was faked in photoshop (note that they have since removed their photoshop analyzation of the images of the cube). If apple users (notably image experts) can't really figure out if an image is faked, how can we expect others to?
Well it really depends on the platform, on x86 the first 1024 bytes (or whatever) of a given disk is booted first IIRC. It's probably much different for the playstation 2 though.
It'd be really cool to make cds that you can slap into a ps2 and boot Linux, then automatically boot up a game. You could then distribute tuxracer(and other open source and highly portable games) as ps2 games.
I don't think that redhat will ever give an automated-updating package manager their full support. It's a pain to get all of the little dependencies for RPM(this depends on that, which depends on those 8 packages, two of which require a new version of pacakge q), which helps them sell cds.
This is not at troll, but honestly, redhat has to sell cds, and I belive they have held back support for automatically updating package managers because they would rather have their users go out and buy redhat cds.
Now Eazel and I belive helixcode are gearing up to offer subscription(money)-based automatic system updaters, and I remember hearing something similar from redhat at one point. But I doubt they will ever support one for free. It's a sad fact that often technology advances are held back because a company needs to make money.
An interesting thing to try would be to make it so you could do bug-fixing upgrades (1.0 to 1.1) but not feature upgrades (1.0 to 2.0). And in order for that upgrade you would have to be running the new version of Redhat. "6.0 lets you upgrade from 1.0 to 1.1, but to get the added functionality of 2.0 you need to buy version 7!".
Slashdot Mirror
At least the programmers are passionate about what they think is right, which means they are probably going to end up with a GREAT solution. Better than a world where the programmers just accept whatever comes their way even if it's a bad solution to the problem.
But other than that, I really hope they calm down the flamewars. Having a passionate discussion about something and harrassing or insulting someone else (often on something totally not related to the subject) will ruin relationships and break apart a good development team. If it's bad enough to drive someone to resign, it's pretty bad.
I'd be incredibly careful that my name is in no way associated with my DNA. The last thing I want is these folks turning around and selling it to who knows who so that they can eventually parse my DNA and know whole loads of stuff about me. If you were prone to bladder infections, and didn't even know it (I'm not btw, afaik), would you want some company knowing that you were and spamming you with bladder-infection medicine (or whatever) just before you're scheduled to start getting them. Or perhaps they could sell it to insurance companies. Anyway, read the license carefully.
My friend has one of these, we hooked it up and played I think Duke Nukem. It's really loud and shakes your body so much you can't speak clearly. A very cool thing, but definatly no porn value, at least not if you wear in in the conventional manner ;)
Couldn't you forget playing quake in antarctica since it's a 9.6k link? I think the bandwith is more of a concern there than ping time.
Of course that's mainly based on volume of mp3s traded. Stil it's interesting that everyone has always been talking about how gnutella can avoid punishment because it has no central servers, and it seems that's working! I guess going after individual Gnutella software companies would take more time/megabyte of "pirated" music than aimster(which I assume only has one real producer and therefore more volume per producer).
I don't see exactly what choice google has on that issue. Google is a crawler, and if it hasn't come across your website you can submit it to the crawler to get crawled in the future. Google doesn't single out sites which they choose not to list (afaik), these sites are probably just not linked to from many places, which means it takes forever for them to show up.
While it does suck that google doesn't let me search everything, there is an ungodly amount of information and basically no feasable way to organize it without high powerd clusters of computers.
It'd be great to have a push for a linux/unix port of this game NOW, instead of 6 months after it's been released. When it comes it'd be very very cool to have windows and linux on the same disc, so people don't have to buy a separate version.
There were also indications that the hardware is not entirely stable yet - a crash during Nightcaster revealed a familiar looking PC boot screen, and a Microsoft representative explained that the memory configuration on the floor models was different than that of the final version.
I don't quite get how a memory configuration is a hardware error, unless they were using shoddy ram, but why would you use bad ram in a public display of your product? I don't recall windows crashing because of insufficient ram either, and am I really to believe that they only stocked the machine with 64-128 megs or so of ram for their public display? Ram is cheap, and for one of the richest companies on earth i'm sure they can afford to make their testing models as good as the soon to be released models.
Well it probably would look like crap when you photographed it. Just like 3d images look like crap when you don't have goggles on. You definatly wouldn't be able to see the 3d aspect of it though. Just a thought.
Concidering the loads of cash microsoft has on hand, I think they care more about flooding & holding the market than about making a profit. They can afford to spend whatever they want on marketing and r&d and they could probably also give the things away for free (assuming masses didn't take free ones and only those who will buy them now took one for free).
I'd suspect no one is going to want to rent the old system's games in a few months anyway. So it really doesn't matter. You're gonna get a lot more rents for (awesome super cool new game) than super mario brothers or whatever. Do people really still rent SNES games?
Ever heard of vaccines? People make vaccines, even though it's only required one time(or around once a decade). That's not treating the symptoms, or the cure, it's cutting it off before it even happens, which saves you lots and lots of money. Be thankful.
Mozilla is getting really nice. I know it's come slow, but it's here, and think about where it was a year ago. The advancement is stunning. I've only been using it everyday for like 5 months now but gaah it's awesome.
The ability to get free tabs makes playing music much easier, which in turn creates more musicians, and makes the recording industry MORE MONEY. If they shut down the tab websites, they'll get back the INCREDIBLY small amount of money from people who'd rather hear a local band perform an artist's song than the artist themself.
Do I have any less desire to see Clapton in concert because I heard FuzzBucket perform "Tears in Heaven"? Absolutley not.
Yeah, but (hopefully) the ideal langauge of tommorow will run as native machine code, or at least be capable of it. You could structure programs so that sometimes they could require types, and other times not. Requiring types would be nice for really big and structured code.
Anyways there are ways of doing it, and it would be nice to have both a "medium level" language which is easier to write than C++ (cleaner, well thought out, proper OO) than another mutant of C/C++.
And C is implemented in itself. "How'd they do that?" you ask. They wrote a bootstrap compiler in some other language that can create binaries (like assembler), and then they used that bootstrap compiler to compile a compiler written in the native language (being C in this example).
Connect the dots
I think they should stop and concider when it's time to move on. My grandmother coded in C for Bell Labs (ok I'm 15, but still). While C/C++ are still great languages, in the future (ie: when these things finally get around to being fully supported in most compilers) processors will be about 8 times faster (expecting moores law at 1.5 years and 4-5 years until these are supported).
There are many great scripting languages with much more concise structuring than C and C++, and even things like variable-types could possibly be eliminated (perhaps build a virtual machine into the kernel that will handle the programs). Anyways they should think before wasting the time to add onto the language, get it standardized, get it implemented, and getting everyone to learn it.
If you tell people we WILL have this technology by this date, than we just might develop it by then. 33 years ago, and for most of the 80's, people thought ANY DAY we'd break through and develop Artificial Intelligence.
Also, and this sort of screws up my earlier observation, I don't think clarke wanted to put a date on his movie, but kubrick forced him to.
Well I think it's a good system, the only things that worry me are that they might bundle some extra "goodies" with the vchip tvs. Like all that DMCA stuff that would prevent me from taping copyrighted shows (maybe a nice little ability for the tv to do that god awfully annoying fade from light to black thing that some DVDs do during "copyrighted" shows).
I also wonder if they would offer to let parents just screen out one show or so, or maybe allow a few shows. I know my parents (back when I was 5 or so) had selective ideas of what I should watch. They'd much rather say "no, you can't watch MTV" (I was five) than "no, you can't watch shows on the discovery channel that use the word 'sex'".
Aqua is a very good UI. Have you used it? Apple is making strides once again, of course there are problems, for example animation is annoying when you're trying to run effects on 600 meg audio files and it's slow.
I have been using osX intensely since the Public Beta, and I have used OSX PB, OSX build 4K17, and Build 4k78 (the final version). It has steadily improved. Apple has produced an operating system of the future, and it can do things with graphics that would amaze you. Under normal conditions the Aqua interface is incredibly fast and responsive, and quick to navigate.
I also don't know what you're talking about with people saying the osX cds were fake.. I think some people were surprised that apple left the build id (4K78) in the "about this computer" Window. Some people thought apple mistakenly shipped two versions, but that is far from shipping a "fake" osX.
While I admit that this is rather interesting evidence, and I'm no fan of M$, when the apple powermac g4 cube was first rumored at, at least one website offered evidence that it was faked in photoshop (note that they have since removed their photoshop analyzation of the images of the cube). If apple users (notably image experts) can't really figure out if an image is faked, how can we expect others to?
OK, I couldn't really recall. Anyways it's most definatly not going to be the same thing on a playstation 2.
Well it really depends on the platform, on x86 the first 1024 bytes (or whatever) of a given disk is booted first IIRC. It's probably much different for the playstation 2 though.
It'd be really cool to make cds that you can slap into a ps2 and boot Linux, then automatically boot up a game. You could then distribute tuxracer(and other open source and highly portable games) as ps2 games.
Warning, I am a debian user.
I don't think that redhat will ever give an automated-updating package manager their full support. It's a pain to get all of the little dependencies for RPM(this depends on that, which depends on those 8 packages, two of which require a new version of pacakge q), which helps them sell cds.
This is not at troll, but honestly, redhat has to sell cds, and I belive they have held back support for automatically updating package managers because they would rather have their users go out and buy redhat cds.
Now Eazel and I belive helixcode are gearing up to offer subscription(money)-based automatic system updaters, and I remember hearing something similar from redhat at one point. But I doubt they will ever support one for free. It's a sad fact that often technology advances are held back because a company needs to make money.
An interesting thing to try would be to make it so you could do bug-fixing upgrades (1.0 to 1.1) but not feature upgrades (1.0 to 2.0). And in order for that upgrade you would have to be running the new version of Redhat. "6.0 lets you upgrade from 1.0 to 1.1, but to get the added functionality of 2.0 you need to buy version 7!".