That reminds me of the oft-quoted fact that Marlyn Monroe's brain was larger than einstein.
Of course, it can be disproved by the fact that mice's brains are smaller than dolphins, and everyone knows that mice are the most intelligent creatures. --
Anyone who sends correspondence to Blizzard should be sure to mention how many of their previous (Windows) games they've bought...
The problem with this is that this confirms you are existing customer, presumably with a dual-boot machine (or VMWare). If the company where to do a Linux port, then they'd be losing money on you, since because you would have bought the game anyway, the money spent on the port would have been wasted.
If you do send a mail like this, be sure to state very firmly you do not intend buying any more of their games, until they support Linux, then they might listen. --
I think it's worthwhile to let vendors know I bought their product because they support Linux.
Vendor can mean any vendor. Although it is fairly cut and dry in the case of buying a Linux version of a game, what about hardware (I recently bought a new video card, and went for the Matrox G400, specifically because of Matrox being open with their specs, and giving money towards the development of X drivers for their cards (the fact that it's a great card helped too, of course - I wouldn't buy crap just because the company supported the free software movement;)), or what about choosing one windoze product over another because of the company being Linux-friendly?
Also, it helps to remind the company that supporting Linux gains a lot of kudos from the community;) --
I can't believe they used the onion as an example -- I think it should be mandatory, so that children learn what good satire is.
Seriously though, you'll always get these people who seem to believe that children can be corrupted by simply seeing certain words or images, when the oppressive stigmatism of sexual things that these people preach causes far more long-lasting psychological damage than reading the word 'fuck' on a web page.
Mass censorship is never the answer, children shouldn't be "surfing the web" (man, I hate that expression) on their own, and adults should be able to show some discretion when using public machines with internet access. --
Dunno about USA, but broadband wireless communication is almost here in the UK, can't remember the exact data rates, although you can get 2Mb/s through current wireless technology (I doubt public access will be a great as that though, anyone have more info?). One of this years 'next bit things' is supposed to be the wireless LAN, think - no more ethernet cables cluttering everything up.
Personally, I think that PCs and PDAs should be used together -- since, lets face it, you'll never see a 21" monitor on a PDA;) I predict that centralised 'virtual' drives will become more and more common, to allow data sharing without having to constantly synch machines.
As for power, most applications for PDAs won't require that much power, although I'm sure game developers will be able to proove me wrong:) --
The odd thing is, that even though they print the flames, they don't seem to have any valid responses for them -- almost like they're trying to stir up as much fuss (read publicity) as possible. Perhaps if we ignore them, they'll go away.
The way the CTO talks about their product being 'proprietry' as if it's a USP (unique selling point), scares me -- the thing is, if it's any good, it'll alienate traditional Linux users, but may actually do well commercially, making the current distro wars look like a walk in the park, kinda like all those rumours about 'MicroSoft Linux'.
Oh well, that's assuming they do actually have something of any interest, wouldn't surprise me if their major product anouncement was on April 1st. --
Actually, contributors to the kernel don't hand over copyright, Linus himself said that this was so the kernel would remain free (libre), since even he couldn't relicense it closed source.
Also, the modules thing isn't an exception to the GPL, it's Linus' interpretation of a grey area in the GPL, since kernel modules don't actually _use_ GPL code, simply link. --
The people have spoken and they all said: [Penguin sound]
I saw somewhere the sound penguins make described as 'awk' (IIRC, it was a Terry Pratchett book - The Lost Continent - when someone (the librarian?) was turned into one), and remember thinking how appropriate... although most penguins use perl instead of awk;) Of course, the real sound is 'ribbit' (don't ask)
Seriously, though, I really hope that industry people realise that open standards are far better than closed ones, and no matter how much copy protection you try and put on things, it'll be the people, not the pirates and warez kiddies, that lose out in the long run. --
Thank you for that, I'm sick of this attitude that money is a means in itself, and anything that won't make money is a waste of time.
The point behind the GPL is to let people freely share software with others, not a new business plan (although there is no conflict of interest with companies which genuinely further free software making money from support.)
But anyone expressing these views on/. is put down as a "communist" as if there are only two political ways - pure capitalism, and communism.
Perhaps if more people had the same ideals of community and sharing (join with us and share the software, so to speak;) there'd be a lot less problems in the world.
p.s. remember that advertisers are the maggots feeding on the corpse of capitalism (Karl Marx - never as funny as his brother, Groucho)
The obvious wrong answer, because it assumes "program code" as a constant.
My entire point was about the difference between the Java program code and the asm code. I was assuming that both used the same algorithms, so were comparable in everything except language used (which is a very big difference), and said that the compiler would have to optimise the Java one to be faster than the asm one by the same or greater than the overhead. My fault though, I should have been specific in that point and differentiated between the two. Anyway, I shouldn't be posting this late into the thread, but I hate when people misunderstand what I mean (despite my being more fluent in C than English - can't stand it, no pointer arithmetic;) --
Dunno about Emacs (hideous program that it is;), but vim has the:make command, which will call make, then you can cycle through any errors with the:c set of commands. As for knowing what file to compile, you need to set up dependancies in the Makefile so that make will know only to recompile one file. What's 'ae' btw? --
can anyone actually give me a good reason why Java + JIT should be slower than Good Programmer + Assembler?
I was simply giving the obvious answer that:
JAVA version = program code + VM + JIT Asm version = program code
I'd say this is a good reason why it should be slower, since the average speed increase has to be greater than the overhead (can a compiler really produce code that is that much faster than well-optimised asm?), also I'd like to actually see figures for the best case vs worst case for an average userland program running on this, since in any decent sized program, there's going to be a lot of code to keep track of. --
The obvious answer would be that the JIT/VM code takes up clock cycles to convert/schedule/optimise the code, so there's always a significant overhead (JIT removes unnecessary (sp?) conversion, but there's still some overhead). --
Hmmmm... a Beowulf cluster of vacuum cleaners running on Crusoe chips, calculating the optimum cleaning path round your house, and showing the results dynamically in XML on the web. I'll buy that;) --
And of course, the ultimate 'rock stars' - Id Software (complete with Ferraris;-) Hell, I saw an advert in a magazine recently for John Romero's company's (Ion Storm IIRC) new game, which featured his name in far bigger letters than the publisher (ok, maybe that's probably more Rock Star ego (Id/ego - geddit?) than rock star fame.) --
Slashdot Mirror
also minimilist is
thanks
reply good
--
I'm wondering why Solaris and Linux were singled out in this, hmmm ... aren't they NT's closed rivals on web servers? ... me smells a rat
(of course, I don't have statistics, *BSD might be closer than one of them)
--
before anyone says anything, that should read "larger than Einstein's brain" ;-P
need ... more ... sleep
--
Of course, it can be disproved by the fact that mice's brains are smaller than dolphins, and everyone knows that mice are the most intelligent creatures.
--
Which, alas, proved to be a hoax :(
Was the nano-guitar built for mini-elvis?
--
The problem with this is that this confirms you are existing customer, presumably with a dual-boot machine (or VMWare). If the company where to do a Linux port, then they'd be losing money on you, since because you would have bought the game anyway, the money spent on the port would have been wasted.
If you do send a mail like this, be sure to state very firmly you do not intend buying any more of their games, until they support Linux, then they might listen.
--
the statement in the article was:
Vendor can mean any vendor. Although it is fairly cut and dry in the case of buying a Linux version of a game, what about hardware (I recently bought a new video card, and went for the Matrox G400, specifically because of Matrox being open with their specs, and giving money towards the development of X drivers for their cards (the fact that it's a great card helped too, of course - I wouldn't buy crap just because the company supported the free software movement;)), or what about choosing one windoze product over another because of the company being Linux-friendly?
Also, it helps to remind the company that supporting Linux gains a lot of kudos from the community ;)
--
I can't believe they used the onion as an example -- I think it should be mandatory, so that children learn what good satire is.
Seriously though, you'll always get these people who seem to believe that children can be corrupted by simply seeing certain words or images, when the oppressive stigmatism of sexual things that these people preach causes far more long-lasting psychological damage than reading the word 'fuck' on a web page.
Mass censorship is never the answer, children shouldn't be "surfing the web" (man, I hate that expression) on their own, and adults should be able to show some discretion when using public machines with internet access.
--
Dunno about USA, but broadband wireless communication is almost here in the UK, can't remember the exact data rates, although you can get 2Mb/s through current wireless technology (I doubt public access will be a great as that though, anyone have more info?). One of this years 'next bit things' is supposed to be the wireless LAN, think - no more ethernet cables cluttering everything up.
Personally, I think that PCs and PDAs should be used together -- since, lets face it, you'll never see a 21" monitor on a PDA ;) I predict that centralised 'virtual' drives will become more and more common, to allow data sharing without having to constantly synch machines.
As for power, most applications for PDAs won't require that much power, although I'm sure game developers will be able to proove me wrong :)
--
The odd thing is, that even though they print the flames, they don't seem to have any valid responses for them -- almost like they're trying to stir up as much fuss (read publicity) as possible. Perhaps if we ignore them, they'll go away.
The way the CTO talks about their product being 'proprietry' as if it's a USP (unique selling point), scares me -- the thing is, if it's any good, it'll alienate traditional Linux users, but may actually do well commercially, making the current distro wars look like a walk in the park, kinda like all those rumours about 'MicroSoft Linux'.
Oh well, that's assuming they do actually have something of any interest, wouldn't surprise me if their major product anouncement was on April 1st.
--
Actually, contributors to the kernel don't hand over copyright, Linus himself said that this was so the kernel would remain free (libre), since even he couldn't relicense it closed source.
Also, the modules thing isn't an exception to the GPL, it's Linus' interpretation of a grey area in the GPL, since kernel modules don't actually _use_ GPL code, simply link.
--
COBOL is just too verbose a language to obfuscate in the way you can obfuscate C.
;)
That was kinda the point. most of the programmers that I know who use both languages would prefer to debug 20 year old COBOL than 8 year old C.
But I bet all of them (the sane ones anyway) would rather write something new with C. COBOL is a hideous language, on a par with Visual Basic
--
I can't wait to read the entries in the obfuscated COBOL code contest ...
--
It was the last odd day for a long time, not the first.
--
The people have spoken and they all said: [Penguin sound]
... although most penguins use perl instead of awk ;) Of course, the real sound is 'ribbit' (don't ask)
I saw somewhere the sound penguins make described as 'awk' (IIRC, it was a Terry Pratchett book - The Lost Continent - when someone (the librarian?) was turned into one), and remember thinking how appropriate
Seriously, though, I really hope that industry people realise that open standards are far better than closed ones, and no matter how much copy protection you try and put on things, it'll be the people, not the pirates and warez kiddies, that lose out in the long run.
--
Have you not read the 'Armed Nuclear warfare' HOWTO? it's in the 'Total World Domination' directory at MetaLab.
--
Thank you for that, I'm sick of this attitude that money is a means in itself, and anything that won't make money is a waste of time.
The point behind the GPL is to let people freely share software with others, not a new business plan (although there is no conflict of interest with companies which genuinely further free software making money from support.)
But anyone expressing these views on /. is put down as a "communist" as if there are only two political ways - pure capitalism, and communism.
Perhaps if more people had the same ideals of community and sharing (join with us and share the software, so to speak;) there'd be a lot less problems in the world.
p.s. remember that advertisers are the maggots feeding on the corpse of capitalism (Karl Marx - never as funny as his brother, Groucho)
--
The obvious wrong answer, because it assumes "program code" as a constant.
My entire point was about the difference between the Java program code and the asm code.
I was assuming that both used the same algorithms, so were comparable in everything except language used (which is a very big difference), and said that the compiler would have to optimise the Java one to be faster than the asm one by the same or greater than the overhead.
My fault though, I should have been specific in that point and differentiated between the two. Anyway, I shouldn't be posting this late into the thread, but I hate when people misunderstand what I mean (despite my being more fluent in C than English - can't stand it, no pointer arithmetic;)
--
Dunno about Emacs (hideous program that it is;), but vim has the :make command, which will call make, then you can cycle through any errors with the :c set of commands. As for knowing what file to compile, you need to set up dependancies in the Makefile so that make will know only to recompile one file. What's 'ae' btw?
--
JAVA version = program code + VM + JIT
Asm version = program code
I'd say this is a good reason why it should be slower, since the average speed increase has to be greater than the overhead (can a compiler really produce code that is that much faster than well-optimised asm?), also I'd like to actually see figures for the best case vs worst case for an average userland program running on this, since in any decent sized program, there's going to be a lot of code to keep track of.
--
The obvious answer would be that the JIT/VM code takes up clock cycles to convert/schedule/optimise the code, so there's always a significant overhead (JIT removes unnecessary (sp?) conversion, but there's still some overhead).
--
What are the "intrinsic restrictions" of OpenGL? I seem to have missed something.
--
Hmmmm... a Beowulf cluster of vacuum cleaners running on Crusoe chips, calculating the optimum cleaning path round your house, and showing the results dynamically in XML on the web. I'll buy that ;)
--
From the article, I'd say he was seeking to do a positive writeup iff LinuxOne gave him anything to write positively about ... which didn't happen.
--
And of course, the ultimate 'rock stars' - Id Software (complete with Ferraris;-)
Hell, I saw an advert in a magazine recently for John Romero's company's (Ion Storm IIRC) new game, which featured his name in far bigger letters than the publisher (ok, maybe that's probably more Rock Star ego (Id/ego - geddit?) than rock star fame.)
--