...and because of that, I think I will have to applaud their actions.
Kids get things drilled into their heads, like how many planets there are. Instead they should be taught in a way that's a little less discreet such that they come to an earlier realization that the universe isn't black and white, any more than life is.
A friend of mine (who grew up and went to school in Japan) thought that there was only one moon, "The Moon." Again, I think this is reflective of a strict regimine of memorizing facts rather than exploring the wonders that our universe has to offer.
When are the distribution makers going to learn? wu-ftpd is riddled with bugs and security holes. Why does something like this come standard with the world's most popular Linux distribution?
(Ideally it would come with proftpd, but with it disabled out-of-the-box...)
I'm not really that concerned with convincing anyone, in truth. If there are good tools available and you choose to make your own work harder by ignoring them, it's no sweat off my back.:)
However, here's a quick example where OO excels. I was in the game industry for many years. Virtually all games involve a bunch of "things" moving around on the screen, anything from spaceships and laser beams to puzzle pieces falling from the sky.
For years I struggled trying to reconcile the fact that all of these "things" are very similar in many fundamental ways. They all move around and bump into other things. They all need to be saved to disk and loaded again at savegame time. They may need to blow up or otherwise be destroyed when certain game events happen. And of course, they need to display themselves on the screen somehow. Yet they are all very different - the logic that controls, say, an homing missle is quite different from the logic that controls the player character, for example.
During this time I wrote hacks involving void points, casting, functions with huge "switch" statements at the top to try to figure out what something was, and other roundabout ways to handle all the similar functionality of these things in one place, yet still allow for all the special code that goes with each type of thing.
OO solved all of that nastiness for me. It pretty much works the same in the end, but it's much easier to code, and *vastly* more maintainable. I can now make a base class entity, and derive all my specific types of things from them. I have virtual functions for Move(), Collide(), AI(), Update(), Draw(), which have defaults, but I fill them in with special code for each type of thing, and I never have to duplicate my basic motion/collision/whatever code, nor are there any messy hacks to be able to put all these types of things into one giant list of entities, but still have each thing "know" what it is and how to behave.
It's more complicated than this, but that's the gist of it. Every game company I've worked at has used this scheme almost exactly (although the terminology may differ) because it works so well.
Yes. I would also argue that I can build - and in fact, have built - a system equivilent to what Dell, Compaq, Penguin Computing, or VA Linux sells you for 1/2, or less, the cost. Cobalt machines are no different, although the markup is higher because they (potentially) offer more than a machine from one of these othercompanies.
In fact, I recently helped a friend purchase a Cobalt Qube 3. He has no knowledge of, or really any interest in, Linux or any other kind of server operating system. But the Qube does what he wants out of the box. It's small, attractive, and has a wonderful web-based administration GUI. The fact that I could have built him the system for half the price is irrelevant - he would not have wanted that system, so it wasn't worth *any* amount of savings, because he wouldn't have used it.
I will say that I wish the markup wasn't quite so extreme. I've long wanted to buy my workstations and servers from someplace like VA or Penguin Computing, but it's just not worth the price markup. (Plus they rarely offer the exact components I want, namely the latest AMD CPus.)
I fought it for many years, and finally gave in. Now I wonder how I ever got by without it.
There are applications - small ones - for which OOP is not appropriate. Code which generates web pages, for example, is generately best written in a procedural language. The vast majority of applications, however, are easier to extend and maintain (although not necessarily write, at least until you've been doing it for quite a while) if written with OO.
And of course, you don't need an OO language to use OO. The Linux kernel is very OO, and it's written in C.
FWIW, the examples given in this article are terrible. Not only are they not very relevant, but they are badly written. If someone I was working with wrote OO code like that, I'd seriously question their ability as a programmer.
It seems to me that you've got two potential audiences here: Linux users that use Apple hardware, and Apple users that use the Linux OS.
I would be an example of someone who is a longtime Linux user that is just looking for some interesting non-x86 hardware to run it on (Alphas are pretty pointless for the desktop, as I discovered a few years back). My girlfriend, on the other hand, is an Apple user who is just tired of an unstable operating system.
Either way, we are both looking forward to Mac OS X. If Apple can create a stable, powerful operating system running on fast, reasonably priced hardware that is also easy to use - well that's something that has never before been achieved in the world of desktop computing.
My favorite of all time is Arctic. A close second is AnotherMUD, which lacks the quality and consistency of Arctic but makes up for it in pure fun.
And, of course, I must take this opportunity to pitch my own creation: Blood Dusk. It's offline for major upgrades right now, but check out the pages to get a feel for it...
Excellent advice. The most important thing, though, is just "ordinary" security - get a well-administered hosting service, or if you admin your own box, use all the good security practices you read about on slashdot, Security Focus, and so forth.
I would also recommend a payment gateway that makes security a top priority. Obviously the merchants weren't at fault in the creditcards.com case; they could have all the security they wanted, and the database would still have been stolen from their payment processor.
If I may be so bold, I can recommend a payment processor who makes security a top priority...
Rather than starting a new project (which, in most cases, is just going to duplicate other effort), find a small to medium size project with relatively uncomplicated functionality. For example: an ICQ client, a news reader, or a configuration editor. Use it for a while and see what it needs in terms of making it more useful and more pleasant to use. Then try to add that.
Perhaps the simplest thing is bugfixes. Bang on an app with a 1.0 version for a while until you get something funny to happen. Duplicate it. Now do it from a debugger and start hacking.
This kind of work is both easy to get into, and probably the most useful thing you can do for the open source community as a whole. We've got lots of very nice apps which need "just" a few more tweaks and improvements to be really slick. But of course, that last 5% is often the hardest part...
I hate to harp, but Konquerer would have blown away all the browsers in this test had they bothered to include it. Galleon and other Mozilla-based browsers wouldn't have been bad either. If load time and memory footprint is what you're interested in, Netscape and Mozilla are definitely NOT the right browser for you.
Color calibration annoys the hell out of me, and I'll tell you why. Artists (and I've worked with many of them due to my years in the game industry) all think that it's their job to make sure their art looks the same on everyone's monitor. They think that if someone has their brightness turned down or otherwise has different color settings than wherever they originally created the art, that it looks "wrong."
Here's my complaint: the reason that you *can* change your monitor settings is that everyone has different eyes! My eye doctor always notes that my eyes are unusually sensative to light. When it comes to adjusting my monitor, I always want my brightness way down and the contrast at maxmimum. People always comment that they think things look "ugly" on my monitor because they are dark and high contrast; but I think that the settings that most people keep their monitors at are ugly because the colors look washed out and all the blacks look like dark grey to me.
There are a few places where color calibration is most certainly relevant (such as when your final medium is not a monitor, but a piece of paper, or something else), but most of the time you should just get it the way that you want it to look on your monitor and not worry too much about it being exactly identical on other monitors. (I do usually try viewing my web images with the brightness on my monitor turned up just to make sure that the blacks aren't too grey, but that's about it.)
Here's a question: anyone know how to turn off the use of gamma on a PNG? I love png's (smaller and more color depths than gifs) but IE and Mozilla both use the gamma setting and it ends up looking totally different from Netscape or a non-gamma'd GIF, even on the same monitor. My only solution so far has been to save the image as a PNG, quit the gimp, edit.gimp/gimprc to set gamma-correct equal to 0.4, restart gimp, load the PNG, and then save it out again. This results in the image looking pretty close to its original colors (that is, how it would look if I had just saved it as a GIF), but it's not exact. This issue is especially important when you're trying to make your image colors match that of the HTML-coded colors on your document.
Don't count out VMWare just yet. They have an amazing product that does a lot more than just run a guest OS - it provides complete network integration, cool suspend/resume functionality, and other nifty tricks. They are one of the few proprietary software packages that I think is actually worth the money they ask.
Still, I'm glad to see a free replacement coming into maturity. I am in programmer-awe of anyone that can achieve what these guys have done.
...there are no black leggo-people! Hence no Morpheus.
Of course, there are no white leggo-people either. They're all yellow, which we might take for Asian, except that...let's face it, Asians aren't really yellow.
So I guess that means that leggo people are actually humanoid aliens. I guess that explains all their advanced space travel technology.
That's the DUMBEST bunch of TLDs I've ever heard. Cripes, they had a chance to make some truly cool/interesting new domains that would make people actually want to get non-dot-com names, thereby helping those businesses as well as reducing load on the top level serers.
Instead, they cluttered the namespace with a bunch of lame crap. Who put them in charge, again?
That may be true, and that'll pretty much keep me (and probably most folks here) from using the new version(s) of Netscape. But guess what? It's open source! There's an anti-cruft version, and it's called Mozilla. There's even an anti-anti-cruft version, called Galleon.
If Netscape makes money off the mass market through their banner ads, and that money goes towards funding a great open source project like Mozilla, then what are you complaining about? It looks like everyone gets what they want.
We were using Informix at my workplace for a while; in less than a month the thing completely "melted down" and dropped all of our data. The suits were in a panic.
We switched over the Postgres in one swift maneuver, and it's been running great ever since. Speed was never in question; we just needed a database which wouldn't drop all its data one night while no one was looking.:)
Besides which, the ultra-cool pg_dump command makes backups a no-brainer.
Kudos to the Postgres team. And my company won't be dump enough to try to use proprietary software again in the future, that's for sure...
I think maybe someone has finally realized why people prefer Napster and MP3's to going out and purchasing CDs: it's not money, it's convenience. It's much easier to hop online, search for something, and download it, than it is to go hunt down the physical goods at your local store.
I'm not sure that this is easier, at least not yet. But perhaps it's a step in the right direction.
Alright, you (and my girlfriend, who advanced similar arguments) won me over. I wanted to vote for Browne anyways, but my anger at Bush's attitude led me to want to doing something that I thought would be more effective.
To quote from Kang & Kodoss:
"Silly human! You have a two party system! You HAVE to vote for one of us!"
Okay, convince me. I know that Democrats are for more government (which I'm against) and Republicans general go for less (which I'm for), but at least in the case of the war on drugs Bush seems to place it as a very high priority. Gore hasn't seemed to mention it at all (I can't find anything about it on his website) but Bush seems to be making it a major part of his platform (see this).
XAnim is cool, but it's not the only game in town anymore. Check out Xtheater for AVIs and ASFs, or MpegTV for mpegs.
Unfortunately, neither of these will play the stuff that I really want to see, like the Lord of the Rings Trailer or the D&D movie trailer. I'm forced to fall back to VMWare for that. Damn Quicktime...
As usual, the candidates' stand on most of these issues is pretty irrelevant. The president is a member of the executive branch; they don't make the laws, they enforce them. Thus, the presidental stand on how to deal with existing enforcement - stuff like the military, the war on drugs, and foreign policy - is a lot more important than what they support in terms of new laws. (Obviously there is some relevancy, because they do get the chance to veto bills.)
I normally vote Libertarian, but the closeness of this election has me a little nervous. I'm going to be (gag, choke) voting for Gore, just because I'm afraid that Bush might win and push our government's spending on military supremacy and the war on drugs back into the 80's.
Now what's I'm really looking forward to voting on is Prop 36. If you're a Californian, check it out.
Slashdot Mirror
For what it's worth, it installs without a hitch on a RH7.0 system, and I haven't had a single problem with it.
.0 release in the 2.x series.
In fact, it fixed a few small annoying bugs that I had with 2.2.18, and introduced no new ones, as near as I can tell.
This is definitely the most stable
...and because of that, I think I will have to applaud their actions.
Kids get things drilled into their heads, like how many planets there are. Instead they should be taught in a way that's a little less discreet such that they come to an earlier realization that the universe isn't black and white, any more than life is.
A friend of mine (who grew up and went to school in Japan) thought that there was only one moon, "The Moon." Again, I think this is reflective of a strict regimine of memorizing facts rather than exploring the wonders that our universe has to offer.
When are the distribution makers going to learn? wu-ftpd is riddled with bugs and security holes. Why does something like this come standard with the world's most popular Linux distribution?
(Ideally it would come with proftpd, but with it disabled out-of-the-box...)
I'm not really that concerned with convincing anyone, in truth. If there are good tools available and you choose to make your own work harder by ignoring them, it's no sweat off my back. :)
However, here's a quick example where OO excels. I was in the game industry for many years. Virtually all games involve a bunch of "things" moving around on the screen, anything from spaceships and laser beams to puzzle pieces falling from the sky.
For years I struggled trying to reconcile the fact that all of these "things" are very similar in many fundamental ways. They all move around and bump into other things. They all need to be saved to disk and loaded again at savegame time. They may need to blow up or otherwise be destroyed when certain game events happen. And of course, they need to display themselves on the screen somehow. Yet they are all very different - the logic that controls, say, an homing missle is quite different from the logic that controls the player character, for example.
During this time I wrote hacks involving void points, casting, functions with huge "switch" statements at the top to try to figure out what something was, and other roundabout ways to handle all the similar functionality of these things in one place, yet still allow for all the special code that goes with each type of thing.
OO solved all of that nastiness for me. It pretty much works the same in the end, but it's much easier to code, and *vastly* more maintainable. I can now make a base class entity, and derive all my specific types of things from them. I have virtual functions for Move(), Collide(), AI(), Update(), Draw(), which have defaults, but I fill them in with special code for each type of thing, and I never have to duplicate my basic motion/collision/whatever code, nor are there any messy hacks to be able to put all these types of things into one giant list of entities, but still have each thing "know" what it is and how to behave.
It's more complicated than this, but that's the gist of it. Every game company I've worked at has used this scheme almost exactly (although the terminology may differ) because it works so well.
Yes. I would also argue that I can build - and in fact, have built - a system equivilent to what Dell, Compaq, Penguin Computing, or VA Linux sells you for 1/2, or less, the cost. Cobalt machines are no different, although the markup is higher because they (potentially) offer more than a machine from one of these othercompanies.
In fact, I recently helped a friend purchase a Cobalt Qube 3. He has no knowledge of, or really any interest in, Linux or any other kind of server operating system. But the Qube does what he wants out of the box. It's small, attractive, and has a wonderful web-based administration GUI. The fact that I could have built him the system for half the price is irrelevant - he would not have wanted that system, so it wasn't worth *any* amount of savings, because he wouldn't have used it.
I will say that I wish the markup wasn't quite so extreme. I've long wanted to buy my workstations and servers from someplace like VA or Penguin Computing, but it's just not worth the price markup. (Plus they rarely offer the exact components I want, namely the latest AMD CPus.)
I fought it for many years, and finally gave in. Now I wonder how I ever got by without it.
There are applications - small ones - for which OOP is not appropriate. Code which generates web pages, for example, is generately best written in a procedural language. The vast majority of applications, however, are easier to extend and maintain (although not necessarily write, at least until you've been doing it for quite a while) if written with OO.
And of course, you don't need an OO language to use OO. The Linux kernel is very OO, and it's written in C.
FWIW, the examples given in this article are terrible. Not only are they not very relevant, but they are badly written. If someone I was working with wrote OO code like that, I'd seriously question their ability as a programmer.
It seems to me that you've got two potential audiences here: Linux users that use Apple hardware, and Apple users that use the Linux OS.
I would be an example of someone who is a longtime Linux user that is just looking for some interesting non-x86 hardware to run it on (Alphas are pretty pointless for the desktop, as I discovered a few years back). My girlfriend, on the other hand, is an Apple user who is just tired of an unstable operating system.
Either way, we are both looking forward to Mac OS X. If Apple can create a stable, powerful operating system running on fast, reasonably priced hardware that is also easy to use - well that's something that has never before been achieved in the world of desktop computing.
I've been salivating for months anticipating the anticipation for 2.6. Let the wait begin!
:)
My favorite of all time is Arctic. A close second is AnotherMUD, which lacks the quality and consistency of Arctic but makes up for it in pure fun.
And, of course, I must take this opportunity to pitch my own creation: Blood Dusk. It's offline for major upgrades right now, but check out the pages to get a feel for it...
I don't think I ever claimed that slashdot actually used the practices mentioned on their site :)
Excellent advice. The most important thing, though, is just "ordinary" security - get a well-administered hosting service, or if you admin your own box, use all the good security practices you read about on slashdot, Security Focus, and so forth.
I would also recommend a payment gateway that makes security a top priority. Obviously the merchants weren't at fault in the creditcards.com case; they could have all the security they wanted, and the database would still have been stolen from their payment processor.
If I may be so bold, I can recommend a payment processor who makes security a top priority...
System Requirements
Microsoft Windows OS
Microsoft Internet Explorer version 5.0 or greater
Your operating system does not appear to meet these requirements.
Your system infomation was reported as:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/2.0; X11); Supports MD5-Digest; Supports gzip encoding
Install the Google Toolbar
Because your system does not appear to meet the system requirements for the Google Toolbar, installation has been cancelled.
Rather than starting a new project (which, in most cases, is just going to duplicate other effort), find a small to medium size project with relatively uncomplicated functionality. For example: an ICQ client, a news reader, or a configuration editor. Use it for a while and see what it needs in terms of making it more useful and more pleasant to use. Then try to add that.
Perhaps the simplest thing is bugfixes. Bang on an app with a 1.0 version for a while until you get something funny to happen. Duplicate it. Now do it from a debugger and start hacking.
This kind of work is both easy to get into, and probably the most useful thing you can do for the open source community as a whole. We've got lots of very nice apps which need "just" a few more tweaks and improvements to be really slick. But of course, that last 5% is often the hardest part...
I hate to harp, but Konquerer would have blown away all the browsers in this test had they bothered to include it. Galleon and other Mozilla-based browsers wouldn't have been bad either. If load time and memory footprint is what you're interested in, Netscape and Mozilla are definitely NOT the right browser for you.
Color calibration annoys the hell out of me, and I'll tell you why. Artists (and I've worked with many of them due to my years in the game industry) all think that it's their job to make sure their art looks the same on everyone's monitor. They think that if someone has their brightness turned down or otherwise has different color settings than wherever they originally created the art, that it looks "wrong."
.gimp/gimprc to set gamma-correct equal to 0.4, restart gimp, load the PNG, and then save it out again. This results in the image looking pretty close to its original colors (that is, how it would look if I had just saved it as a GIF), but it's not exact. This issue is especially important when you're trying to make your image colors match that of the HTML-coded colors on your document.
Here's my complaint: the reason that you *can* change your monitor settings is that everyone has different eyes! My eye doctor always notes that my eyes are unusually sensative to light. When it comes to adjusting my monitor, I always want my brightness way down and the contrast at maxmimum. People always comment that they think things look "ugly" on my monitor because they are dark and high contrast; but I think that the settings that most people keep their monitors at are ugly because the colors look washed out and all the blacks look like dark grey to me.
There are a few places where color calibration is most certainly relevant (such as when your final medium is not a monitor, but a piece of paper, or something else), but most of the time you should just get it the way that you want it to look on your monitor and not worry too much about it being exactly identical on other monitors. (I do usually try viewing my web images with the brightness on my monitor turned up just to make sure that the blacks aren't too grey, but that's about it.)
Here's a question: anyone know how to turn off the use of gamma on a PNG? I love png's (smaller and more color depths than gifs) but IE and Mozilla both use the gamma setting and it ends up looking totally different from Netscape or a non-gamma'd GIF, even on the same monitor. My only solution so far has been to save the image as a PNG, quit the gimp, edit
Don't count out VMWare just yet. They have an amazing product that does a lot more than just run a guest OS - it provides complete network integration, cool suspend/resume functionality, and other nifty tricks. They are one of the few proprietary software packages that I think is actually worth the money they ask.
Still, I'm glad to see a free replacement coming into maturity. I am in programmer-awe of anyone that can achieve what these guys have done.
...there are no black leggo-people! Hence no Morpheus.
Of course, there are no white leggo-people either. They're all yellow, which we might take for Asian, except that...let's face it, Asians aren't really yellow.
So I guess that means that leggo people are actually humanoid aliens. I guess that explains all their advanced space travel technology.
That's the DUMBEST bunch of TLDs I've ever heard. Cripes, they had a chance to make some truly cool/interesting new domains that would make people actually want to get non-dot-com names, thereby helping those businesses as well as reducing load on the top level serers.
Instead, they cluttered the namespace with a bunch of lame crap. Who put them in charge, again?
That may be true, and that'll pretty much keep me (and probably most folks here) from using the new version(s) of Netscape. But guess what? It's open source! There's an anti-cruft version, and it's called Mozilla. There's even an anti-anti-cruft version, called Galleon.
If Netscape makes money off the mass market through their banner ads, and that money goes towards funding a great open source project like Mozilla, then what are you complaining about? It looks like everyone gets what they want.
We were using Informix at my workplace for a while; in less than a month the thing completely "melted down" and dropped all of our data. The suits were in a panic.
:)
We switched over the Postgres in one swift maneuver, and it's been running great ever since. Speed was never in question; we just needed a database which wouldn't drop all its data one night while no one was looking.
Besides which, the ultra-cool pg_dump command makes backups a no-brainer.
Kudos to the Postgres team. And my company won't be dump enough to try to use proprietary software again in the future, that's for sure...
I think maybe someone has finally realized why people prefer Napster and MP3's to going out and purchasing CDs: it's not money, it's convenience. It's much easier to hop online, search for something, and download it, than it is to go hunt down the physical goods at your local store.
I'm not sure that this is easier, at least not yet. But perhaps it's a step in the right direction.
Alright, you (and my girlfriend, who advanced similar arguments) won me over. I wanted to vote for Browne anyways, but my anger at Bush's attitude led me to want to doing something that I thought would be more effective.
To quote from Kang & Kodoss:
"Silly human! You have a two party system! You HAVE to vote for one of us!"
Okay, convince me. I know that Democrats are for more government (which I'm against) and Republicans general go for less (which I'm for), but at least in the case of the war on drugs Bush seems to place it as a very high priority. Gore hasn't seemed to mention it at all (I can't find anything about it on his website) but Bush seems to be making it a major part of his platform (see this).
Unfortunately, neither of these will play the stuff that I really want to see, like the Lord of the Rings Trailer or the D&D movie trailer. I'm forced to fall back to VMWare for that. Damn Quicktime...
I normally vote Libertarian, but the closeness of this election has me a little nervous. I'm going to be (gag, choke) voting for Gore, just because I'm afraid that Bush might win and push our government's spending on military supremacy and the war on drugs back into the 80's.
Now what's I'm really looking forward to voting on is Prop 36. If you're a Californian, check it out.