Why "solve" this "problem"? Having buildings produce units automatically is a FEATURE. Try ctrl-click to build in TA Kingdoms, for example.
Rather than "cracking down", I think improvement of the UI should be encouraged. It's supposed to be a strategy game, not a clicking-speed game, right?
I used to play multiplayer Quake classic a lot . . . eight hours a day one summer. I made some binary patches to the Linux client, both to enable cheats in multiplayer and fix some minor bugs (players that weren't visible in the score list, messages with carriage returns in them, bogus shirt colors in team games, etc).
I played with the cheats for a while, and discovered some interesting things. The good players could sometimes tell that I was cheating (I never denied it if someone guessed). The cheats often made the game less interesting, because there was less suspense (I only played with rendering hacks). And most interesting... even after I stopped using them, I was a better player from my experiences with them, because I had a better grasp of how other players acted; which routes they took on particular maps, how they evaded me when they thought I couldn't see them, stuff like that.
The stuff I was using was clumsy enough that when I finally found really good opponents (Clanring DM people), it kept me from improving. So I stopped using them, even the lighting hacks, which I think a *lot* of other players were achieving by editing the maps. And eventually I was good enough on my own that people called me a cheater anyway--a high compliment, IMO.
The article has some good advice for game developers; but I think that some forms of cheating, especially in FPS games, cannot be prevented. Determined hackers can always write their own client, or wrap the rendering layer nowadays. The best you can do is carefully filter the information sent to network clients, so that they don't get info about objects that should be hidden. And I can chime in to say that it's always unfair anyway--because of differing lag.
And for RTS games, I think a design goal should be that a human player can learn to be better than a computer. Definitely true for Starcraft, but I would like an option to write my own AI, and an arena where it can compete with other AIs... an RTS Core Wars:)
Example distributions that meet this specification
Caldera OpenLinux 2.4
Conectiva Linux 5.1
Linux-Mandrake 7.0
Red Hat Linux 6.2
SuSE Linux 6.4
TurboLinux 6.0
To be released: Debian GNU/Linux 2.2
To be released: Corel Linux OS Second Edition
I don't think that's "making the game hard"... unless you are a Slackware or Debian user, in which case your file system is misorganized or your libraries are two versions behind where they should be, respectively:) (Not trying to start a distro flamewar, just offering some possible reasons those distros are not listed here. Redhat IMO is kinda bleeding-edge with the libs, and I hate them all for using SysVile init.)
I'm seeing a lot of comments that find this proposed standard threatening. I think you should look for evil elsewhere... try MIME or X11 if you want to gripe about imperfect standards that everyone has to deal with. This one just looks like common sense.
From the phrase "binary-compatibility" I figured there wouldn't be much meat to this... and reading the beta, it seems to mostly be about which library versions to link against, and maybe which shell to expect. All quite harmless; nothing prevents you from having other versions of libc or bash lying around. And the idea of having a convenient checklist instead of actually testing your program on different distributions is nice, although I dunno if I would trust it myself.
I think the file system layout standards (standards efforts, last I checked) are more interesting, and (slightly) more likely to actually cause someone a problem... assuming that ttys can all be found directly inside/dev is more likely to *need* to change than anything addressed here. This effort seems aimed at making it less likely that novice users will have to play games with ldconfig to get some random package to run.
I have a linux box somewhere that still has libc4 programs running on it... only problem I've noticed in five years was due to a kernel change, and it was just poor coding in the app that kept it from handling some unexpected return values from sendto() gracefully. So from my point of view, things are fine anyway, and this will just provide guidelines for those that like official guidelines. The spec itself lists a bunch of popular distributions that meet it already, so it's not as if this was designed in secret and is now being forced on people... it's no more aggressive than documenting library calls in a man page, and offering developers some guarantee that said behavior is stable.
Sure it can find the files... but I bet it can't run a program or shell fragment on each one and check the return status, or just give me a plain text list of them. All it can do is display different stuff in a window (with OLE support, ooh).
You can't have one click for "arbitrary" criteria... there are only so many pixels on the screen. If for some perverse reason I want to sort by weekday last accessed, or distance from midnight, that's one line of awk or perl; you cannot support everything like that in a GUI without introducing some way of compositing operations, at which point you just have a different way of exposing what is really a programming language.
As for quick and painless previews... I admit that CLIs are useless for viewing some data... thats why I run file on it and then spawn an xv or mozilla or staroffice session. If I'm really anal then I write a thumbnail generator that groks lots of different kinds of files--the same thing you would have to do for Micros~1 Windows, assuming you don't just use explorer.exe.
CLI is not for getting "closer to the hardware", it's for "getting closer" to inherently stream-oriented tasks. The OSS movement is about writing software that you need, not for someone else who has never seen a computer before; you have to pay most people to do that. If Micros~1 could get away with not paying their employees, don't you think they would find a way? (Stock options... *snicker*)
And as for arcane config files... there is nothing I hate more than some setting buried in the registry that is not documented and not exposed in an obvious place by the GUI. I would rather deal with text config files and man pages than endless dialog boxes that don't give me access to what I need.
Which brings me to my next point... people like GUIs because they are lazy. Learning Unix does not require a "mathematical mind", but a willingness to read documentation that most users don't have--until they need to get real work done and get sick of kludging it with the sugary but nutritionless GUI tools they are used to.
"Local memory" is not "psychobabble". You are the elitist here to assume that because I use a phrase you aren't familiar with, it must not mean anything useful. Drop "memory locale taxon" into Google and do some reading. In my experience, women do not as often have a "geometric" view of the world as men do; they have a "graph" view. They know which things are close to each other, and what routes are shortest, but they can't always draw you a geometrically correct map. (Neither can many men; just saying I notice this more with women.) Anyway, the GUI vs CLI difference is much more about visual vs verbal learning. Until you are actually programming, there is nothing mathematical about either.
I'm not discouraging the creation of anything. Write whatever you want. But don't preach to me out of your ass about the virtues of GUIs. I want you to try renaming every file on a disk to the same name in lowercase with all your GUI tools. (Yes, I've needed to do this before.) With CLI tools, I can do
That example was rather sysadmin flavored, I admit. But at least a couple times a week I want to grep a bunch of my own files for something, and there is no commonly available way to do that in Windows. I would end up writing a program to do it, or installing the Cygwin tools, or something... whereas on any Unix box in the world, I type some combination of find, grep, and maybe xargs, and I'm done.
I'm not disputing that GUIs are more appropriate than CLIs for many tasks, and are easier to learn for many users. But a lot of the original posters points were just drivel, and I know from experience that it is much harder to develop a GUI for a complicated task than a CLI for the same task. I've seen a lot of complex GUIs in CAD software, for example, and they are certainly not models of ease of use or efficiency.
Even assuming the statements you offer as "facts" are all true, look at the history of science and engineering. Mathematics is what made most of the technological progress (or just change, if you prefer) in the last 200 years possible, and will only become more necessary in the future. Anything that encourages more people to become comfortable with reasoning mathematically is good, IMO.
Whether that has anything to do with most command-line interfaces is another question. Being a Bourne shell wizard is not quite the same as being a Knight of the Lambda Calculus.
Oh, and it's nice that you can sort files ascending by date in your favorite GUI... one more option letter to ls. But suppose you need to find all files in/var owned by Bob, larger than 300k, and modified in the last week. And rename them to lowercase or compress them or selectively change the permissions on them. And email Bob a summary of those actions, or make a cron job to repeat them weekly. And you have to do all this over a slow serial connection.
Designing a GUI for that is probably a complete waste of time; thats why people use CLIs for some things--the right tool for the right job. And if you compare *the existing tools*, it is very clear that CLIs win for power and expressiveness on many tasks; Windows NT doesn't even have a recursive relative chmod, probably because some putz figured that "power users" would be really good at clicking over and over. Drawing a picture is a GUI task; manipulating a large set of multifaceted objects in a scriptable fashion is a CLI task (unless you like banging your head against a wall).
So if you want to talk about "the vast majority of users", fine. But don't give me nonsense about women being more spatially oriented than men (they use landmarks more often and cardinal directions less often; thats locale memory in action, not spatial modeling), and don't tell me that GUIs are absolutely better for manipulating data that is not inherently pictorial. Show me a sysadmin that never uses a CLI and I'll show you a sysadmin that can't get the job done.
I have a nice set of headphones... only about $40, but very good sound... on which I can hear defects in most 128kbps MP3s--warbling, occasional dropped background notes, cymbals sound washed out, etc. On a bad day I hear bugs in Winamp's decoder.
However, if I encode with a stable version of LAME at about 192kpbs, and I use either CDParanoia on my Toshiba or anything on my Plextor for ripping, 95% of tracks sound exactly the same (I have "accidentally" done a blind test before... thought I was playing the CD from the sound quality, and then switched consoles later and found it was mpg123 running).
The fuss is because MP3s are a good enough copy for most people, and very very easy to get with tools like Napster. Consumers have had CDRs for years, and while I'm sure the recording industry was not pleased about that, it was too inconvenient for most people to matter. (Some of that inconvenience is arguable *because* of the recording industry, but I think jitter on audio tracks falls under the "stupidity before malice" heading.)
There should be no performance variation between two Thunderbirds marked for different clock speeds but running at the same speed. If you had separate L2 cache (rather than on-die), you might see a performance difference because you might get faster SRAM with the faster (rated) processor; but even in that case, it would be because the overclocked SRAM was clocked differently by the BIOS, because it would fail otherwise; doesn't have terribly much to do with the processor.
Anyway, who cares if it's overclocked, as long as it's stable? Only Intel or AMD, not the consumer. Artificial pricing is a lousy excuse for deliberately mangling hardware to run slower than it should.
"Democratic elections" does not mean we should ignore what they do when they aren't campaigning. And constitutional governments exist because some ideas about public policy should not have legal or military force behind them, no matter how many idiot citizens think they are a good idea when you poll them!
Actually, I would want to "let my kids seen pornographic filth on TV". Some state and local governments in the US have passed weird restrictions on when adult programming can be aired ("cabled" actually) or how it has to be scrambled to "protect children", and a lot of them have been struck down by the Supreme Court(s), because they were found to infringe on the rights of adults to view such material.
So what if the ACLU stands up for my right to filth just because a lot of their money comes from adult video stores... they stand up for my Constitutional rights in general, and I thank them for it. Anyway, there are a lot worse things that happen to children than seeing some bad acting by naked people... and if the government wants to "help the children" (I'm thinking particularly of state and local governments in the US), perhaps they should devote their energies to at least refocusing the public schools from babysitting to learning.
I'm really tired of fundamentalist zealots telling me what it's OK for me to do based on their ideas about raising their children. I don't care for the implied comparison, and I don't need the government to play father for me.
The Internet should at least be "free" to the extent that speech between people in public and in private is, and communities that can't handle that should feel "free" to collapse into black holes of superdense self-righteousness from which no rational thought escapes--and sever your phone lines while you're at it!
BTW, while we are on the subject of "fuzzy-headed thinking", try to understand the distinction between "free speech" and "free beer". Taxing certain kinds of speech impinges on both forms of "freedom".
And if I am just responding to a troll responding to a troll... well, sometimes the tripe people post is so ridiculous and narrow-minded I cannot bear to leave it unanswered.
does not make it a duck. It's just a "review" at this point, and hopefully someone will explain to this board the difference between analog broadcasting over public frequencies and packet-based unicast on private leased lines. Regulating one is management of a finite shared resource; regulating the other doesn't serve the public interest and is mostly unenforceable.
The only analogous situation I can imagine would be if the Australian government subsidized a national IP network which supported multicast, and people were transmitting ("broadcasting") things on that. This study sounds like a case of either the government seeking a new source of revenue, or traditional media lobbying for a "level playing field" to help them compete.
Even if they do come to some ridiculous conclusions and make them law, that shouldn't have any effect on streams coming from outside Australia, any more than they could make someone in Malaysia get an Australian license for their late-night shortwave broadcasts.
Eventually I expect IP-over-radio services for portable computers (or other network-aware devices) will be available in many areas, and it will be interesting to see how that pans out in terms of regulation, especially if any bandwidth currently used for analog transmissions is reclaimed for packet radio.
Parody is also protected, but you can sell the result. I think the producers of Saturday Night Live are payed by NBC... "Non-commercial use" is almost totally irrelevant; individuals who have redistributed copyrighted software without any profit to themselves have still lost in court.
The entire argument for the limited monopoly of copyrights and patents is predicated on encouraging creative behavior by increasing the potential for financial return. It's a societal belief that you must pay people to create. (Not a universal belief, of course, but very common at least in the US.) The only sense in which it would be contrary to "the promotion of science and the useful arts" for the Hatch family to distribute amongst themselves copies of a copyrighted work is that it would decrease revenue for the publisher.
Whether a single act is commercially significant is not necessarily tied to whether it would be considered infringement. You could make the argument that if every family were permitted to share copies of music purchased by one member, that would be a significant loss of revenue in some cases. You could also argue that this is already occurring. I'm not aware of legal precedent on that particular issue, but if there is none, I think it could go either way in a court. (But IANAL, so you shouldn't listen to me anyway:)
That is for purposes of study or education, which has been categorically protected in court and law. There are limits on that, too; the teacher could not get away with handing out complete copies of the entire text.
The "Hatch family" argument rings bogus to me. Why not use the same argument to claim that a corporation only has to buy one license/copy of a piece of software to let all their employees use it on the job? I'm not trying to endorse commercial software licenses, just saying that analogous situations are treated in a clear fashion; if two people use the software at the same time, the publisher typically must be payed twice. Are you claiming that music is different, or that a family is different, and thus it is legal to buy one copy of Quake and install it on both my computer and my wife's computer and deathmatch with her? (Ignoring for the sake of argument how difficult it is to find anyone that would be my wife or appreciates classic Quake, nevermind both at once:)
You could argue that it would be different if Hatch made a copy for his wife with the mutual intent that she evaluate it. I'm not sure of the exact legal status of that maneuver, but a lot of warez sites do try to hide behind it.
The behavior of the RIAA is probably not making them a lot of friends in Congress--but I think they are having trouble getting people with a less-than-complete grasp of the technology to understand how bad this is for the recording industry. I suspect many legislators do not fully understand what it means to have an environment where any individual can make perfect copies of something for almost zero cost. Hatch and Leahy seem to think that this will be like any previous advance in publishing technology--first the industry fights change and consumers push for it, and eventually it becomes a profitable system for the publishers.
But a lot of smart lawyers and historians have looked at the current situation, and I have yet to hear a proposal that can guarantee artists are compensated. My intuition is that you have to reduce the cost of purchasing music by at least a factor of 10 before retail becomes competitive with the convenience of tools like Napster.
Maybe in ten years I will remember what I thought about these problems and see myself as naive. Maybe the solutions will be obvious in hindsight. But no one seems to have a clear vision of the future from here--Napster still doesn't know how they are going to generate any revenue! (Well, no one except those who claim the concept of intellectual property is defunct.)
Fair use does not include the right to give other people copies of something in a way that competes with the market for the original. That is what copyright protects--the right to publish. (Whether this protection is a reasonable idea, or still enforceable, is a separate question.)
However, duplicating or ripping a CD is perfectly legal. Translating a work, or making archival copies, has never been a violation of copyright. What is disturbing about the entire "battle over digital music" is that most of the solutions proposed by recording industry aim to restrict those rights, as well as to inhibit republishing.
Why would you have to replace your case? Almost everything in the PC world is ATX now, and the only real case problems I have had in years involved deliberately nonstandard cases from large OEMs. PC housing still can't compare to the elegance of Sun cases, but sometimes you do get what you pay for....
As for keeping your motherboard... well, the K7 and P2/3 have very different CPU/chipset interfaces (and Intel was trying for different memory interfaces, too, but they realized they can't force that down our throats). You could have PCI, IDE, or SCSI backplanes in your system... rackmounts often do.
If you look at PC history, you will notice that even if you could keep your old motherboard when upgrading processors, you usually wouldn't want to, because they improve too. (Intel has yet to surpass the BX chipset, but I suppose eventually they will get their asses in gear on that. Is the 840 a reasonable successor?)
Change is just inherent to computer hardware. The real uses for passive backplanes are rackmount and hotswap, not saving a few bucks on printed circuit boards.
Uhh... this has little to do with AMD. They don't even make the chipset on these boards; VIA does. ABIT "saves the day", just as they do for Intel-processor-based systems, by putting lots of fiddly timing options on the motherboard/in the BIOS setup.
AMD does not multipler-lock their processors in the same way Intel does, though. Intel claims this is to deal with remarking, not to discourage overclocking, and I believe them. "All of the overclockers" is actually a fairly small community, and while they may be important as early adopters, they probably don't have much influence on revenue in the long run--except to vendors of cooling hardware:)
I find moria descendants, especially nethack, to be very creative and addictive games, with a lot of replay value. Nethack has more depth in item interactions than any MUD, hack-n-slash or RPG I've ever played. Too bad it's not multiplayer....
I've worked on a few non-commercial game projects... the problem is always finding artists.
what is that page? an http-to-gnutella portal? half the links dont do anything useful, so its mostly indecipherable to me.
i think the real fun is in a somewhat different direction... build a distributed database like napster or gnutella, but with all the scaling issues fixed, automatic mirroring and indexing... and then start replacing http as a transport for content that doesnt change (not just static, but also never needs to be updated). replace everything from the latest kernel tarball to the gifs that make up the window dressing with queries that go to a local mirror, and maybe automatically version and mirror the rest... would certainly help avoid the "slashdot effect".
...but now im offtopic and in my own unimplemented pipe-dream.
I don't see how the industry could possibly create something competitive... most people are cheap. They will put up with a lot of inconvenience to save a few dollars. And Napster is very little inconvenience, compared to previous alternatives to coughing up retail for a CD.
Napster will be improved upon. Either they will spend some of their VC money on something other than legal fees, or something better will appear and replace it. I don't see what the existing industry has to offer that fans couldn't offer to each other with a little work--better quality files, a good indexing system, info from liner notes? And if artists got involved in the new distribution systems, that doesn't really leave any place for the RIAA members.
The Internet has profound implications for the notion of "intellectual property". Many laws are not at all enforceable anymore, and most people cannot convince themselves that there is any harm in freely copying information meant for mass consumption in the first place. The recording industry will of course fight the changes, but ultimately they cannot stop the tide.
typing speed and accuracy are not particularly relevant. the programs typically arent very long (200 lines is about the most ive seen, and mine are often <50) and the compiler warns you about almost all typos. its much more important to identify the correct algorithm for a problem, and to see the nasty special cases that arent spelled out in the problem spec.
and i was offered a job at the contest, actually... ibm was implicitly the only recruiter, but an old friend of our team came to cheer us (and his hometown team, gatech) on, and offered all of us jobs. he says what his company does is rapid prototyping and on-site tweaking to said prototypes, and that it is not unlike contest coding.
efficiency is important in contest code, although maintainability is frequently neglected. and you say "some test inputs" as if to imply that the programs are not well tested... try it some time, the judge data is usually very good, if not literally exhaustive. (and occasionally doesnt meet the problem spec, GRRR)
Slashdot Mirror
Why "solve" this "problem"? Having buildings produce units automatically is a FEATURE. Try ctrl-click to build in TA Kingdoms, for example.
Rather than "cracking down", I think improvement of the UI should be encouraged. It's supposed to be a strategy game, not a clicking-speed game, right?
I used to play multiplayer Quake classic a lot . . . eight hours a day one summer. I made some binary patches to the Linux client, both to enable cheats in multiplayer and fix some minor bugs (players that weren't visible in the score list, messages with carriage returns in them, bogus shirt colors in team games, etc).
I played with the cheats for a while, and discovered some interesting things. The good players could sometimes tell that I was cheating (I never denied it if someone guessed). The cheats often made the game less interesting, because there was less suspense (I only played with rendering hacks). And most interesting... even after I stopped using them, I was a better player from my experiences with them, because I had a better grasp of how other players acted; which routes they took on particular maps, how they evaded me when they thought I couldn't see them, stuff like that.
The stuff I was using was clumsy enough that when I finally found really good opponents (Clanring DM people), it kept me from improving. So I stopped using them, even the lighting hacks, which I think a *lot* of other players were achieving by editing the maps. And eventually I was good enough on my own that people called me a cheater anyway--a high compliment, IMO.
The article has some good advice for game developers; but I think that some forms of cheating, especially in FPS games, cannot be prevented. Determined hackers can always write their own client, or wrap the rendering layer nowadays. The best you can do is carefully filter the information sent to network clients, so that they don't get info about objects that should be hidden. And I can chime in to say that it's always unfair anyway--because of differing lag.
And for RTS games, I think a design goal should be that a human player can learn to be better than a computer. Definitely true for Starcraft, but I would like an option to write my own AI, and an arena where it can compete with other AIs... an RTS Core Wars :)
They lived on the spilt gore from Castle Wolfenstein.
Read the link from the story, why don't you:
I don't think that's "making the game hard"... unless you are a Slackware or Debian user, in which case your file system is misorganized or your libraries are two versions behind where they should be, respectively :) (Not trying to start a distro flamewar, just offering some possible reasons those distros are not listed here. Redhat IMO is kinda bleeding-edge with the libs, and I hate them all for using SysVile init.)
Heh... the FHS is linked to from it. Doesn't look "proposed" anymore, I should check more often :)
I'm seeing a lot of comments that find this proposed standard threatening. I think you should look for evil elsewhere... try MIME or X11 if you want to gripe about imperfect standards that everyone has to deal with. This one just looks like common sense.
From the phrase "binary-compatibility" I figured there wouldn't be much meat to this... and reading the beta, it seems to mostly be about which library versions to link against, and maybe which shell to expect. All quite harmless; nothing prevents you from having other versions of libc or bash lying around. And the idea of having a convenient checklist instead of actually testing your program on different distributions is nice, although I dunno if I would trust it myself.
I think the file system layout standards (standards efforts, last I checked) are more interesting, and (slightly) more likely to actually cause someone a problem... assuming that ttys can all be found directly inside /dev is more likely to *need* to change than anything addressed here. This effort seems aimed at making it less likely that novice users will have to play games with ldconfig to get some random package to run.
I have a linux box somewhere that still has libc4 programs running on it... only problem I've noticed in five years was due to a kernel change, and it was just poor coding in the app that kept it from handling some unexpected return values from sendto() gracefully. So from my point of view, things are fine anyway, and this will just provide guidelines for those that like official guidelines. The spec itself lists a bunch of popular distributions that meet it already, so it's not as if this was designed in secret and is now being forced on people... it's no more aggressive than documenting library calls in a man page, and offering developers some guarantee that said behavior is stable.
Sure it can find the files... but I bet it can't run a program or shell fragment on each one and check the return status, or just give me a plain text list of them. All it can do is display different stuff in a window (with OLE support, ooh).
You can't have one click for "arbitrary" criteria... there are only so many pixels on the screen. If for some perverse reason I want to sort by weekday last accessed, or distance from midnight, that's one line of awk or perl; you cannot support everything like that in a GUI without introducing some way of compositing operations, at which point you just have a different way of exposing what is really a programming language.
As for quick and painless previews... I admit that CLIs are useless for viewing some data... thats why I run file on it and then spawn an xv or mozilla or staroffice session. If I'm really anal then I write a thumbnail generator that groks lots of different kinds of files--the same thing you would have to do for Micros~1 Windows, assuming you don't just use explorer.exe.
CLI is not for getting "closer to the hardware", it's for "getting closer" to inherently stream-oriented tasks. The OSS movement is about writing software that you need, not for someone else who has never seen a computer before; you have to pay most people to do that. If Micros~1 could get away with not paying their employees, don't you think they would find a way? (Stock options... *snicker*)
And as for arcane config files... there is nothing I hate more than some setting buried in the registry that is not documented and not exposed in an obvious place by the GUI. I would rather deal with text config files and man pages than endless dialog boxes that don't give me access to what I need.
Which brings me to my next point... people like GUIs because they are lazy. Learning Unix does not require a "mathematical mind", but a willingness to read documentation that most users don't have--until they need to get real work done and get sick of kludging it with the sugary but nutritionless GUI tools they are used to.
"Local memory" is not "psychobabble". You are the elitist here to assume that because I use a phrase you aren't familiar with, it must not mean anything useful. Drop "memory locale taxon" into Google and do some reading. In my experience, women do not as often have a "geometric" view of the world as men do; they have a "graph" view. They know which things are close to each other, and what routes are shortest, but they can't always draw you a geometrically correct map. (Neither can many men; just saying I notice this more with women.) Anyway, the GUI vs CLI difference is much more about visual vs verbal learning. Until you are actually programming, there is nothing mathematical about either.
I'm not discouraging the creation of anything. Write whatever you want. But don't preach to me out of your ass about the virtues of GUIs. I want you to try renaming every file on a disk to the same name in lowercase with all your GUI tools. (Yes, I've needed to do this before.) With CLI tools, I can do
find ~ -print0 | perl -0ne 'rename($_,lc($_))'
Arcane, maybe. Better than any existing GUI, yes.
That example was rather sysadmin flavored, I admit. But at least a couple times a week I want to grep a bunch of my own files for something, and there is no commonly available way to do that in Windows. I would end up writing a program to do it, or installing the Cygwin tools, or something... whereas on any Unix box in the world, I type some combination of find, grep, and maybe xargs, and I'm done.
I'm not disputing that GUIs are more appropriate than CLIs for many tasks, and are easier to learn for many users. But a lot of the original posters points were just drivel, and I know from experience that it is much harder to develop a GUI for a complicated task than a CLI for the same task. I've seen a lot of complex GUIs in CAD software, for example, and they are certainly not models of ease of use or efficiency.
Even assuming the statements you offer as "facts" are all true, look at the history of science and engineering. Mathematics is what made most of the technological progress (or just change, if you prefer) in the last 200 years possible, and will only become more necessary in the future. Anything that encourages more people to become comfortable with reasoning mathematically is good, IMO.
Whether that has anything to do with most command-line interfaces is another question. Being a Bourne shell wizard is not quite the same as being a Knight of the Lambda Calculus.
Oh, and it's nice that you can sort files ascending by date in your favorite GUI... one more option letter to ls. But suppose you need to find all files in /var owned by Bob, larger than 300k, and modified in the last week. And rename them to lowercase or compress them or selectively change the permissions on them. And email Bob a summary of those actions, or make a cron job to repeat them weekly. And you have to do all this over a slow serial connection.
Designing a GUI for that is probably a complete waste of time; thats why people use CLIs for some things--the right tool for the right job. And if you compare *the existing tools*, it is very clear that CLIs win for power and expressiveness on many tasks; Windows NT doesn't even have a recursive relative chmod, probably because some putz figured that "power users" would be really good at clicking over and over. Drawing a picture is a GUI task; manipulating a large set of multifaceted objects in a scriptable fashion is a CLI task (unless you like banging your head against a wall).
So if you want to talk about "the vast majority of users", fine. But don't give me nonsense about women being more spatially oriented than men (they use landmarks more often and cardinal directions less often; thats locale memory in action, not spatial modeling), and don't tell me that GUIs are absolutely better for manipulating data that is not inherently pictorial. Show me a sysadmin that never uses a CLI and I'll show you a sysadmin that can't get the job done.
I have a nice set of headphones... only about $40, but very good sound... on which I can hear defects in most 128kbps MP3s--warbling, occasional dropped background notes, cymbals sound washed out, etc. On a bad day I hear bugs in Winamp's decoder.
However, if I encode with a stable version of LAME at about 192kpbs, and I use either CDParanoia on my Toshiba or anything on my Plextor for ripping, 95% of tracks sound exactly the same (I have "accidentally" done a blind test before... thought I was playing the CD from the sound quality, and then switched consoles later and found it was mpg123 running).
The fuss is because MP3s are a good enough copy for most people, and very very easy to get with tools like Napster. Consumers have had CDRs for years, and while I'm sure the recording industry was not pleased about that, it was too inconvenient for most people to matter. (Some of that inconvenience is arguable *because* of the recording industry, but I think jitter on audio tracks falls under the "stupidity before malice" heading.)
There should be no performance variation between two Thunderbirds marked for different clock speeds but running at the same speed. If you had separate L2 cache (rather than on-die), you might see a performance difference because you might get faster SRAM with the faster (rated) processor; but even in that case, it would be because the overclocked SRAM was clocked differently by the BIOS, because it would fail otherwise; doesn't have terribly much to do with the processor.
Anyway, who cares if it's overclocked, as long as it's stable? Only Intel or AMD, not the consumer. Artificial pricing is a lousy excuse for deliberately mangling hardware to run slower than it should.
"Democratic elections" does not mean we should ignore what they do when they aren't campaigning. And constitutional governments exist because some ideas about public policy should not have legal or military force behind them, no matter how many idiot citizens think they are a good idea when you poll them!
Actually, I would want to "let my kids seen pornographic filth on TV". Some state and local governments in the US have passed weird restrictions on when adult programming can be aired ("cabled" actually) or how it has to be scrambled to "protect children", and a lot of them have been struck down by the Supreme Court(s), because they were found to infringe on the rights of adults to view such material.
So what if the ACLU stands up for my right to filth just because a lot of their money comes from adult video stores... they stand up for my Constitutional rights in general, and I thank them for it. Anyway, there are a lot worse things that happen to children than seeing some bad acting by naked people... and if the government wants to "help the children" (I'm thinking particularly of state and local governments in the US), perhaps they should devote their energies to at least refocusing the public schools from babysitting to learning.
I'm really tired of fundamentalist zealots telling me what it's OK for me to do based on their ideas about raising their children. I don't care for the implied comparison, and I don't need the government to play father for me.
The Internet should at least be "free" to the extent that speech between people in public and in private is, and communities that can't handle that should feel "free" to collapse into black holes of superdense self-righteousness from which no rational thought escapes--and sever your phone lines while you're at it!
BTW, while we are on the subject of "fuzzy-headed thinking", try to understand the distinction between "free speech" and "free beer". Taxing certain kinds of speech impinges on both forms of "freedom".
And if I am just responding to a troll responding to a troll... well, sometimes the tripe people post is so ridiculous and narrow-minded I cannot bear to leave it unanswered.
does not make it a duck. It's just a "review" at this point, and hopefully someone will explain to this board the difference between analog broadcasting over public frequencies and packet-based unicast on private leased lines. Regulating one is management of a finite shared resource; regulating the other doesn't serve the public interest and is mostly unenforceable.
The only analogous situation I can imagine would be if the Australian government subsidized a national IP network which supported multicast, and people were transmitting ("broadcasting") things on that. This study sounds like a case of either the government seeking a new source of revenue, or traditional media lobbying for a "level playing field" to help them compete.
Even if they do come to some ridiculous conclusions and make them law, that shouldn't have any effect on streams coming from outside Australia, any more than they could make someone in Malaysia get an Australian license for their late-night shortwave broadcasts.
Eventually I expect IP-over-radio services for portable computers (or other network-aware devices) will be available in many areas, and it will be interesting to see how that pans out in terms of regulation, especially if any bandwidth currently used for analog transmissions is reclaimed for packet radio.
Parody is also protected, but you can sell the result. I think the producers of Saturday Night Live are payed by NBC... "Non-commercial use" is almost totally irrelevant; individuals who have redistributed copyrighted software without any profit to themselves have still lost in court.
The entire argument for the limited monopoly of copyrights and patents is predicated on encouraging creative behavior by increasing the potential for financial return. It's a societal belief that you must pay people to create. (Not a universal belief, of course, but very common at least in the US.) The only sense in which it would be contrary to "the promotion of science and the useful arts" for the Hatch family to distribute amongst themselves copies of a copyrighted work is that it would decrease revenue for the publisher.
Whether a single act is commercially significant is not necessarily tied to whether it would be considered infringement. You could make the argument that if every family were permitted to share copies of music purchased by one member, that would be a significant loss of revenue in some cases. You could also argue that this is already occurring. I'm not aware of legal precedent on that particular issue, but if there is none, I think it could go either way in a court. (But IANAL, so you shouldn't listen to me anyway :)
That is for purposes of study or education, which has been categorically protected in court and law. There are limits on that, too; the teacher could not get away with handing out complete copies of the entire text.
The "Hatch family" argument rings bogus to me. Why not use the same argument to claim that a corporation only has to buy one license/copy of a piece of software to let all their employees use it on the job? I'm not trying to endorse commercial software licenses, just saying that analogous situations are treated in a clear fashion; if two people use the software at the same time, the publisher typically must be payed twice. Are you claiming that music is different, or that a family is different, and thus it is legal to buy one copy of Quake and install it on both my computer and my wife's computer and deathmatch with her? (Ignoring for the sake of argument how difficult it is to find anyone that would be my wife or appreciates classic Quake, nevermind both at once :)
You could argue that it would be different if Hatch made a copy for his wife with the mutual intent that she evaluate it. I'm not sure of the exact legal status of that maneuver, but a lot of warez sites do try to hide behind it.
The behavior of the RIAA is probably not making them a lot of friends in Congress--but I think they are having trouble getting people with a less-than-complete grasp of the technology to understand how bad this is for the recording industry. I suspect many legislators do not fully understand what it means to have an environment where any individual can make perfect copies of something for almost zero cost. Hatch and Leahy seem to think that this will be like any previous advance in publishing technology--first the industry fights change and consumers push for it, and eventually it becomes a profitable system for the publishers.
But a lot of smart lawyers and historians have looked at the current situation, and I have yet to hear a proposal that can guarantee artists are compensated. My intuition is that you have to reduce the cost of purchasing music by at least a factor of 10 before retail becomes competitive with the convenience of tools like Napster.
Maybe in ten years I will remember what I thought about these problems and see myself as naive. Maybe the solutions will be obvious in hindsight. But no one seems to have a clear vision of the future from here--Napster still doesn't know how they are going to generate any revenue! (Well, no one except those who claim the concept of intellectual property is defunct.)
".dot" is pretty silly, but I recently saw this email address:
<dot@dotat.at>
Fair use does not include the right to give other people copies of something in a way that competes with the market for the original. That is what copyright protects--the right to publish. (Whether this protection is a reasonable idea, or still enforceable, is a separate question.)
However, duplicating or ripping a CD is perfectly legal. Translating a work, or making archival copies, has never been a violation of copyright. What is disturbing about the entire "battle over digital music" is that most of the solutions proposed by recording industry aim to restrict those rights, as well as to inhibit republishing.
I've played Quake on an IBM PS/2 "Valuepoint", with a 486-25 processor. You get about 1 fps *groan*
I was about 60ms from the server, and most of the other players were on modems, and it was a CTF game... so I could actually compete :)
Why would you have to replace your case? Almost everything in the PC world is ATX now, and the only real case problems I have had in years involved deliberately nonstandard cases from large OEMs. PC housing still can't compare to the elegance of Sun cases, but sometimes you do get what you pay for....
As for keeping your motherboard... well, the K7 and P2/3 have very different CPU/chipset interfaces (and Intel was trying for different memory interfaces, too, but they realized they can't force that down our throats). You could have PCI, IDE, or SCSI backplanes in your system... rackmounts often do.
If you look at PC history, you will notice that even if you could keep your old motherboard when upgrading processors, you usually wouldn't want to, because they improve too. (Intel has yet to surpass the BX chipset, but I suppose eventually they will get their asses in gear on that. Is the 840 a reasonable successor?)
Change is just inherent to computer hardware. The real uses for passive backplanes are rackmount and hotswap, not saving a few bucks on printed circuit boards.
Uhh... this has little to do with AMD. They don't even make the chipset on these boards; VIA does. ABIT "saves the day", just as they do for Intel-processor-based systems, by putting lots of fiddly timing options on the motherboard/in the BIOS setup.
AMD does not multipler-lock their processors in the same way Intel does, though. Intel claims this is to deal with remarking, not to discourage overclocking, and I believe them. "All of the overclockers" is actually a fairly small community, and while they may be important as early adopters, they probably don't have much influence on revenue in the long run--except to vendors of cooling hardware :)
I find moria descendants, especially nethack, to be very creative and addictive games, with a lot of replay value. Nethack has more depth in item interactions than any MUD, hack-n-slash or RPG I've ever played. Too bad it's not multiplayer....
I've worked on a few non-commercial game projects... the problem is always finding artists.
what is that page? an http-to-gnutella portal? half the links dont do anything useful, so its mostly indecipherable to me.
i think the real fun is in a somewhat different direction... build a distributed database like napster or gnutella, but with all the scaling issues fixed, automatic mirroring and indexing... and then start replacing http as a transport for content that doesnt change (not just static, but also never needs to be updated). replace everything from the latest kernel tarball to the gifs that make up the window dressing with queries that go to a local mirror, and maybe automatically version and mirror the rest... would certainly help avoid the "slashdot effect".
...but now im offtopic and in my own unimplemented pipe-dream.
I don't see how the industry could possibly create something competitive... most people are cheap. They will put up with a lot of inconvenience to save a few dollars. And Napster is very little inconvenience, compared to previous alternatives to coughing up retail for a CD.
Napster will be improved upon. Either they will spend some of their VC money on something other than legal fees, or something better will appear and replace it. I don't see what the existing industry has to offer that fans couldn't offer to each other with a little work--better quality files, a good indexing system, info from liner notes? And if artists got involved in the new distribution systems, that doesn't really leave any place for the RIAA members.
The Internet has profound implications for the notion of "intellectual property". Many laws are not at all enforceable anymore, and most people cannot convince themselves that there is any harm in freely copying information meant for mass consumption in the first place. The recording industry will of course fight the changes, but ultimately they cannot stop the tide.
typing speed and accuracy are not particularly relevant. the programs typically arent very long (200 lines is about the most ive seen, and mine are often <50) and the compiler warns you about almost all typos. its much more important to identify the correct algorithm for a problem, and to see the nasty special cases that arent spelled out in the problem spec.
and i was offered a job at the contest, actually... ibm was implicitly the only recruiter, but an old friend of our team came to cheer us (and his hometown team, gatech) on, and offered all of us jobs. he says what his company does is rapid prototyping and on-site tweaking to said prototypes, and that it is not unlike contest coding.
efficiency is important in contest code, although maintainability is frequently neglected. and you say "some test inputs" as if to imply that the programs are not well tested... try it some time, the judge data is usually very good, if not literally exhaustive. (and occasionally doesnt meet the problem spec, GRRR)
(i am on the ucf team fwiw)