Probably because (having a Sony PC myself) they tend to include support contracts for bundled things as well. I imagine they could get a bulk rate commercial support contract for StarOffice while such a beast is (at least as a guess on my part without checking around) likely harder to find for OpenOffice.:)
This is actually what I do at work. It's allowed me, periodically, to laugh when people at work get bitten by Outlook virii and I'm reading my work-email over PINE.
Of course, there's the downside that I don't get to use the meeting-scheduling interfaces, but still.:)
Re:Actually...
on
Science Askew
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· Score: 2, Informative
What is your experience, is geek taste in female beauty different than "normal" guy's taste? (It better be, because we will never get a chance to touch such a girl anyhow.)
Hey, some geeks/are/ girls! And while I consider myself merely 'average,' some geek girls are fairly pretty, or even beautiful by "normal" standards.;)
See, I held the same opinion before I started on an XP project.:)
But it ended up actually working out very well. Sometimes I was bored when I wasn't the one 'driving' actively, but I found something, in the long run: the only time I felt defensive about someone sitting right there watching me code was if I wanted to hurry through something to get home, or get to lunch, or whatever. The times I'd be writing 'well, I'll hack it now and clean it up later' code, which I would be ashamed to show someone.
The rest of the time, when I was sitting down to implement something or work on a design for an API, I found that I/valued/ having the other person there.
I lost track of the number of times that someone might point out 'you've repeated that one sub-block of code with only a few variations across the past four tasks, let's refactor to make that a function itself' or could watch me program and point out a corner case I had not considered in what I was writing, or that I could do the same for them.
So, while I was pretty opposed to the idea of pair programming before using XP on a project, I got won over. I don't think it's some miracle cure that will fix everything, but I do now think for the right pairing situations it/does/ make for a very definite improvement in code quality.
I would say this is the product of an unbalanced co-worker, not of pair programming!
While I found someone who I paired with regularly to be rather attractive, I have not stalked him and definitely wish his girlfriend very well of him.;)
(Then again, maybe it's only because I do not meet the criteria given in the posts. While I am told I am attractive, I am only 5'5" as opposed to 5'8"...le sigh.)
Also, Kent Beck has always been very up-front that 'Extreme' in 'Extreme Programming' is because you take a number of common-sense best practices and 'turn them to 11', making them extreme.
it's good to have your code tested whenever possible -> write tests for/every/ task you do
cleanly readable code is good -> all functions and variables must have self-explanatory names
more eyes to examine a problem usually leads to less bugs and better design (i.e. the Open Source ideology) -> pair programming
etc. And yes, XP is hyped more than maybe it needs to be, but there's also never been any secret made of the fact that it's just a bunch of common sense and best-practice guidelines turned to an 'extreme' eleven.;)
Well, as a former XP developer -- see my post slightly earlier in the thread -- I both agree and disagree, Ducky.
Sometimes, you don't get to pick who works with you on an XP team. Our team worked really well when the whole team was part of the interview process and hiring decision...but when that power was taken from us, we saw more problems.
I agree wholeheartedly that when done right and supported fully, XP can produce some of the cleanest, best code I've seen and be one of the most rewarding environments to work in. But sometimes when it's not done right, it's not the fault of the engineers on the team in question, etc.
I joined a company a year and a half ago, becoming part of an Extreme Programming development team. And I was pretty skeptical at first.
I mean, here I am, coming into a compiler-and-assembler design team and I'm being told that we have to/share/ computers? That we have/weekly/ design meetings? And all sorts of other strange and unfamiliar things.
But to my surprise, it worked. We each had our own 'personal space' computer for e-mail and everything else, and when we were working we went into our lab as a group. We'd look at the board of current 'stories' (overall larger tasks) and pick a 'task card' from the story. (Literally, taking an index card off the corkboard and clipping it into a little holder by our computer.) And then you sat down at a computer with two monitors, two keyboards and two mice and you pair programmed. If there were an odd number of people, you had to have someone else go over your code with you before you checked it in. All code had to have tests written for it/before/ the code was written, and the code couldn't be checked in until the tests -- and all existing tests -- passed.
And to my surprise, it worked. With two people looking at code, the little mistakes were harder to make. Design problems were more easily tackled. Because we all shifted around and changed partners a lot, we all learned all the areas of the code and had a better understanding of the system as a whole. The way tasks and suchnot were partitioned out worked very well. Meetings didn't interrupt the flow of things, because almost all meetings/had/ to be held standing up. (I.e., everyone starts to get tired, and when people start sitting down a meeting had to end.) We took a fifteen minute break every two hours to keep from getting into fugue states, and because of that productivity we were never working overtime (thus keeping us from burning out). It was one of the most rewarding development experiences I've ever had.
BUT...this also became a story in how Extreme Programming can/fail/. We lost support within the rest of the company for the XP process, and that hurt a lot; XP relies on getting weekly or bi-weekly feedback from your 'customers' (i.e. the target for your project), as well as having them set what the more important tasks for the next two weeks were. Suddenly, we were having to plan out things six months in advance and operate in a vaccuum, which really hampered the Extreme Programming method. In addition, our team was expanded...and we learned the difficult way that while XP works really well for an 8-person team or so, it does/not/ mesh well with larger teams.
So, I actually would probably agree with the book's assessment; XP is well-suited for certain situations (small team, active customer feedback and support, quick dev cycles), but will fail miserably (and I do mean miserably, as in ruining the morale of the team) if you do not have the full support infrastructure.
Admittedly, some of XP's practices -- tests written before code, meetings held standing up to keep them from dragging on indefinitely -- work pretty well even outside XP. But the system as a whole works well only within a specific target range.
Actually, I work at a microchip company who have developed a chip which can be reconfigured to be different specific hardware applications suitable for embedding (see: myriad whitepapers on 'adaptive computing', or chips that can rebuild themselves into new chips specified in software, allowing software to upgrade hardware).
One of the already-completed and working demos of an application reconfiguring the chip to be an appropriate piece of embedded hardware is an Ogg Vorbis decoder (I/think/ the apps folks based it on Tremor, not the floating-point version of Ogg Vorbis, but I work on the compiler/assembler/simulation tools, not the apps); it's been demo'd one or two places, and a couple companies are interested. Especially since the same chip also has a demo doing MP3 decoding, meaning you could use one of these and handle both in an embedded device.:)
Downside, I can't say anything more specific (i.e., release date for a finalized mass-produced chip or any info on the Ogg Vorbis demo other than that it exists or who the companies interested in that particular application are) because of NDAs. Yay, NDAs!;P
But suffice it to say, there/is/ a chip out there that does this, in real-world demonstrations.
...at least, until PanIP figures out how to apply their patents to PayPal and shuts them down, thus invalidating the 'PayPal Donate Now' image on the YouMayBeNext.com webpage.;)
I think the poster might have gotten Brian Herbert (son of Frank Herbert, original author of Dune) and Kevin J. Anderson mixed up.
Far as I know, Kevin J. Anderson is not related to the late Poul Anderson at all; the only 'son' relationship in SF writers I can think of for Poul Anderson is Greg Bear, who is his son-in-law. (Hence why Greg Bear is the one who eulogized Poul Anderson in a number of SF publications when he passed away last year; they were apparently very close.)
Here's a better question: why is it always the son named 'Brian' of a famous person who carries on their father's work?
The Muppets? Now handled by Jim Henson's son, Brian Henson. Lord of the Rings? Now handled by J.R.R. Tolkien's son, Brian Tolkien. Dune? Now handled by Frank Herbert's son, Brian Herbert.
IT'S A BRIAN CONSPIRACY! AAAAAA! THE BRIANS ARE TAKING OVER!
(Long day at work, low blood sugar, strange mental state.)
The graphics are not primarily a function of the CPU; most graphics cards -- especially the Nvidia stuff, which I believe the X-Box uses -- have their own processors on board to handle various operations.
This is why, for example, a 1.2Ghz machine with a current-generation Nvidia card will 'generate more detailed graphics' than a 2.8Ghz machine with, say, a Voodoo2. The CPU controls how fast you can calculate transformations (and any other operations) in the 3d 'world' you're displaying.
For general-purpose apps, 64-bit is slower. However, for anything involving intense floating-point math, 64-bit tends to be a lot better. Something to remember is that a lot of PC 3D graphics engines use integer math internally wherever possible rather than floating-point, which means you don't see the speed hit of floating-point math functions under a 32-bit architecture.:)
IM interoperability would seem important in order for the wireless world to have interoperability.
Or to put it another way...imagine if instead of proprietary SMS protocols and proprietary IM protocols, you could make a standard IM protocol. And then you'd have an IM client on your desktop machine and an IM client on your cellular phone and so on, and no need to have people remember your pager address/and/ your AIM address/and/ your ICQ address/and/ your Y! address, etc.
In other words, in order to have a single contact method that moves everywhere with you as the wireless computing people seem to want, you need to have a single method of messaging that everything uses in order to make sure you really only/do/ need that single contact method.;)
At least, that's how I read the bit about wireless.
Slashdot, I believe, also has multiple servers and load balancing...something that not all servers do have. And a much faster link. And unfortunately, a lot of the article-servers are done that way for ease-of-management reasons. Have a single interface thing that generates your sidebar menus and all your 'current top stories' links and whatnot, and then just pull the article from the database. Also allows quick keyword searching through SQL.
Doesn't mean they couldn't cache those things ahead of time, but most sites don't think of that.
Luke Codehacker with a page on his home server about his nifty new software that ends up linked from Slashdot...ouch! Even if he isn't pulling from a database, watch the poor guy's DSL get obliterated!
That said, there are solutions to fix the Slashdotting problem. My own server hosts a site which was linked to from Slashdot about a month ago, and we saw the corresponding traffic spike. But it didn't kill the site or the link. Why?
I use all sorts of bandwidth-shaping tools and rules at both the kernel and Apache levels. Normally, the site in question is bandwidth-limited to 128kbit/sec of the overall link. When a whole huge spike of hits from the same referrer domain came in, the rules adjusted; it freed up another 128kbit/sec of the link for that site, and only put people from that referrer into that pool. As a result, normal site access wasn't impeded.
Now, if everything on the site was generated on-the-fly from a database, I probably would've had a lot more problems.:)
For the most part, yes, they do. (And actually, you might be surprised; Sierra's one of those who actually tends to be a lot nicer on the developers they have beholden to them...many want to just get you in debt enough to eat you alive and make you an internal development team.)
That's the problem...and publishers make sure it's the developer who feels the piracy losses; after all, it works out in their favor either way. If the game's a big success, the publisher makes lots of money. If the game gets pirated, it gives them an excuse to cut into the developer's revenue ('sorry, piracy losses') and end up with the developer still in debt, beholden to them.
Lest anyone think game piracy is a victimless crime...
The console publishers are actually harsher, but console developers weather things better because while you have to spend a lot on console dev hardware, you DON'T have to spend hundreds of hours (and thus paid-QA-person hours) on testing the game on as many different types of PC hardware as you can. It's easy to say 'don't let it out the door with bugs', but a lot harder to actually do; I defy anyone here to come up with a way to write software using advanced Direct3D functionality and/ensure/ it works flawlessly on every single 3D card out there. Then add in ensuring that it uses various 3D sound technologies (publishers often toss these 'you have to support this thing our partner sells' requirements at you as it is), and maybe several fancy new joystick-type devices. Now ensure that/every/ possible configuration of input device, sound device and video card work WITHOUT BUGS...while not making it take multiple/years/ to do that testing.
If you can do that, most dev houses would love to talk to you.;)
Unfortunately, that's somewhat less realistic in the games industry.
Speaking as someone who was at a game company who/did/ tell our publisher to take a long walk off a short pier (and considering our publisher was Microsoft, let me just tell you how incredibly satisfying that was!)... and then rapidly discovered most of the game stores wouldn't sell without a publisher's distribution clout. Publishers pushed us off shelves, refusing to allow stores to give us shelf-space. Online sales didn't work all that well. We made enough sales to scrape through, but just barely...and we were regarded as incredibly successful by other dev houses who'd looked at that route.
We certainly didn't have enough money in revenue to fund making another game. (And lest you say 'too much is spent on game development anyway', I'll point out that the low-budget games are usually panned by gamers who don't feel it's 'worth paying money for' if it doesn't support the latest hardware. And in order to/afford/ the latest hardware to develop on, you need money to get that hardware.)
As a result, we finally went crawling back to the publishing world and found a new publisher to fund our development, and went on.
It's great, from an idealistic standpoint; without a publisher, you could take the time to fix as many bugs as possible (though some will always crop up because you cannot test every possible configuration of PCs), you could make sure you had all the features in without a publisher breathing down your neck to get a release out...
But the reality is that the independent music market is unfortunately considerably lower bar to entry for self-publishing than the video game development world. Speaking at someone who already took that ride...:(
As a former game programmer myself, I can tell you that absolutely NOTHING is more disheartening than getting near the end of a game cycle, looking forward to getting the game out, and then finding on a newsgroup people already talking about the pirated copies they've downloaded.
Especially when this happens after the second year running that a publisher nukes your revenue stream on a game, claiming 'sorry, piracy losses...we're sure you'll recoup with the next game, now that you're in debt to us and have to stay with us.'
There are other reasons people don't use PDAs sometimes; my problem with Palms has been that traditionally...they're big. I had a Handspring Visor Deluxe when they first came out, and while I loved the PDA overall, it was just bulky. When I didn't have my purse with me, I couldn't really fit both the Visor and my cellular phone into my jacket easily. After a while, though the Visor was useful, I stopped using it and just carried the cellular phone. Eventually sold the Visor to a friend. Now I've got one of the Kyocera Palm PDA-phones, carry it everywhere, and I find I use the PDA a lot more.
As for PocketPCs...personally, I prefer Palm for the functionality, but I do know some serious PDA folks who use PocketPCs, to be fair. Our IT manager here has an iPaq because he can stick an 802.11b wireless card into it and load it with network administration software, and administer things from anywhere in the office. A former co-worker used his iPaq as a portable MP3 player and document reader nearly constantly.
Don't underestimate PocketPC. 3Dfx did that with Nvidia and ATI, believing they had the better platform and no one would ever top them, and they sat on their laurels for too long and turned to add serious innovations far too late; the little pretenders had taken the crown. (Hint hint, Palm: time to release start getting PalmOS 5 onto devices. The screenshots look nice!):)
Hey, everyone has a naming scheme for their domain. I have a server named 'foobar', a linux workstation named 'glitch', a WindowsXP digital production studio named 'buzzword', a laptop named 'widget'...what else would I name a cellular phone/PDA with wireless Internet access?:)
Actually, I'm a 6035 user, and I want the 7135. Not for the color or anything else, though I admit the MP3 ringers would be amusing...but Packet, my 6035, is just too darn BIG. I miss my little StarTAC; I got the 6035 because my StarTAC met an untimely accident involving a cement parking lot and a heavy vehicle and was rather unsavable...the 6035 was inexpensive for me because it I was eligible for upgrade, and I liked the idea of being able to hotsync my phone list.
However, I do remember now why I stopped carrying around my Visor in the first place; the Palm's form-factor is just too big to fit easily in a jacket pocket or something, and I don't want to always carry my purse. If the 7135 folds up and fits in the pocket of my windbreaker, then I'll definitely be picking it up.
Other than the size issue, the 6035 is a wonderful phone; I love the ease of use of Eudora to check e-mail and SMS is much saner. It also has, amazingly, the best speakerphone of any cellular phone I've ever seen; when home, I leave the 6035 in the hotsync cradle by my computer (to keep AvantGo fairly up-to-date) and if someone calls I can just use it in speakerphone mode. Also very handy when left on hold.;)
If the 6035 (and Verizon) just supported GPRS, it'd be perfect. I would love to be able to have an instant messenger open without having to be dialed into Verizon's #777 PPP service...
3Dfx started out with amazing innovations, and also really trying to work hard with the video game companies. Speaking as a former video game programmer here, I can attest to this part; back in about '98, they were the company who really made it easy to work with their cards. Direct3D was a pain to work with and most of the other cards had lousy drivers...but 3Dfx was really working hard with us to make sure we could support them well.
Then by about 2000, 3Dfx was sitting on their laurels. They weren't really making efforts to push any significant new technologies on game companies, or trying to make the companies support those. Direct3D was much more usable as a technology, and other cards were out there...plus, Nvidia and a few other companies were doing what 3Dfx used to, and really working with the game companies.
I think basically the most telling factor was that on all the personal machines at the game development house I was at, you started to see the Voodoo cards being dumped in favor of high-end Matrox or Nvidia cards. (Admittedly, the fact that Matrox and Nvidia were giving us bunches of reference cards specifically to try and get us sold on 'em didn't hurt.)
Nvidia and Matrox kept pushing the envelope...but 3Dfx was too used to having a huge market lead. It was like the tortoise and the hare...3Dfx raced ahead of the pack with amazing innovations early on, and then sat down to rest, secure in the knowledge that they had a lead. And slept through the rest of the race.:(
http://www.cdjapan.co.jp/ has a number of DVDs; you just have to wait a while because, well, they send them to you from Japan.
A surprising number of Japanese-mastered DVDs are beginning to have English subtitle tracks on them, but it's not a majority yet and they ARE still all Region 2.
Studio Ghibli (Miyazaki's studio) has been doing the English subtitles; I think Buena Vista Japan is actually one of the big ones in terms of doing the multilingual subtitling on the Region 2 discs. The subtitle translation quality could be better, but it's still quite acceptable.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably because (having a Sony PC myself) they tend to include support contracts for bundled things as well. I imagine they could get a bulk rate commercial support contract for StarOffice while such a beast is (at least as a guess on my part without checking around) likely harder to find for OpenOffice. :)
This is actually what I do at work. It's allowed me, periodically, to laugh when people at work get bitten by Outlook virii and I'm reading my work-email over PINE.
:)
Of course, there's the downside that I don't get to use the meeting-scheduling interfaces, but still.
- What is your experience, is geek taste in female beauty different than "normal" guy's taste? (It better be, because we will never get a chance to touch such a girl anyhow.)
Hey, some geeksSee, I held the same opinion before I started on an XP project. :)
/valued/ having the other person there.
/does/ make for a very definite improvement in code quality.
:)
But it ended up actually working out very well. Sometimes I was bored when I wasn't the one 'driving' actively, but I found something, in the long run: the only time I felt defensive about someone sitting right there watching me code was if I wanted to hurry through something to get home, or get to lunch, or whatever. The times I'd be writing 'well, I'll hack it now and clean it up later' code, which I would be ashamed to show someone.
The rest of the time, when I was sitting down to implement something or work on a design for an API, I found that I
I lost track of the number of times that someone might point out 'you've repeated that one sub-block of code with only a few variations across the past four tasks, let's refactor to make that a function itself' or could watch me program and point out a corner case I had not considered in what I was writing, or that I could do the same for them.
So, while I was pretty opposed to the idea of pair programming before using XP on a project, I got won over. I don't think it's some miracle cure that will fix everything, but I do now think for the right pairing situations it
To each their own.
I would say this is the product of an unbalanced co-worker, not of pair programming!
;)
While I found someone who I paired with regularly to be rather attractive, I have not stalked him and definitely wish his girlfriend very well of him.
(Then again, maybe it's only because I do not meet the criteria given in the posts. While I am told I am attractive, I am only 5'5" as opposed to 5'8"...le sigh.)
Also, Kent Beck has always been very up-front that 'Extreme' in 'Extreme Programming' is because you take a number of common-sense best practices and 'turn them to 11', making them extreme.
/every/ task you do
;)
it's good to have your code tested whenever possible -> write tests for
cleanly readable code is good -> all functions and variables must have self-explanatory names
more eyes to examine a problem usually leads to less bugs and better design (i.e. the Open Source ideology) -> pair programming
etc. And yes, XP is hyped more than maybe it needs to be, but there's also never been any secret made of the fact that it's just a bunch of common sense and best-practice guidelines turned to an 'extreme' eleven.
Well, as a former XP developer -- see my post slightly earlier in the thread -- I both agree and disagree, Ducky.
Sometimes, you don't get to pick who works with you on an XP team. Our team worked really well when the whole team was part of the interview process and hiring decision...but when that power was taken from us, we saw more problems.
I agree wholeheartedly that when done right and supported fully, XP can produce some of the cleanest, best code I've seen and be one of the most rewarding environments to work in. But sometimes when it's not done right, it's not the fault of the engineers on the team in question, etc.
I joined a company a year and a half ago, becoming part of an Extreme Programming development team. And I was pretty skeptical at first.
/share/ computers? That we have /weekly/ design meetings? And all sorts of other strange and unfamiliar things.
/before/ the code was written, and the code couldn't be checked in until the tests -- and all existing tests -- passed.
/had/ to be held standing up. (I.e., everyone starts to get tired, and when people start sitting down a meeting had to end.) We took a fifteen minute break every two hours to keep from getting into fugue states, and because of that productivity we were never working overtime (thus keeping us from burning out). It was one of the most rewarding development experiences I've ever had.
/fail/. We lost support within the rest of the company for the XP process, and that hurt a lot; XP relies on getting weekly or bi-weekly feedback from your 'customers' (i.e. the target for your project), as well as having them set what the more important tasks for the next two weeks were. Suddenly, we were having to plan out things six months in advance and operate in a vaccuum, which really hampered the Extreme Programming method. In addition, our team was expanded...and we learned the difficult way that while XP works really well for an 8-person team or so, it does /not/ mesh well with larger teams.
I mean, here I am, coming into a compiler-and-assembler design team and I'm being told that we have to
But to my surprise, it worked. We each had our own 'personal space' computer for e-mail and everything else, and when we were working we went into our lab as a group. We'd look at the board of current 'stories' (overall larger tasks) and pick a 'task card' from the story. (Literally, taking an index card off the corkboard and clipping it into a little holder by our computer.) And then you sat down at a computer with two monitors, two keyboards and two mice and you pair programmed. If there were an odd number of people, you had to have someone else go over your code with you before you checked it in. All code had to have tests written for it
And to my surprise, it worked. With two people looking at code, the little mistakes were harder to make. Design problems were more easily tackled. Because we all shifted around and changed partners a lot, we all learned all the areas of the code and had a better understanding of the system as a whole. The way tasks and suchnot were partitioned out worked very well. Meetings didn't interrupt the flow of things, because almost all meetings
BUT...this also became a story in how Extreme Programming can
So, I actually would probably agree with the book's assessment; XP is well-suited for certain situations (small team, active customer feedback and support, quick dev cycles), but will fail miserably (and I do mean miserably, as in ruining the morale of the team) if you do not have the full support infrastructure.
Admittedly, some of XP's practices -- tests written before code, meetings held standing up to keep them from dragging on indefinitely -- work pretty well even outside XP. But the system as a whole works well only within a specific target range.
Actually, I work at a microchip company who have developed a chip which can be reconfigured to be different specific hardware applications suitable for embedding (see: myriad whitepapers on 'adaptive computing', or chips that can rebuild themselves into new chips specified in software, allowing software to upgrade hardware).
/think/ the apps folks based it on Tremor, not the floating-point version of Ogg Vorbis, but I work on the compiler/assembler/simulation tools, not the apps); it's been demo'd one or two places, and a couple companies are interested. Especially since the same chip also has a demo doing MP3 decoding, meaning you could use one of these and handle both in an embedded device. :)
;P
/is/ a chip out there that does this, in real-world demonstrations.
One of the already-completed and working demos of an application reconfiguring the chip to be an appropriate piece of embedded hardware is an Ogg Vorbis decoder (I
Downside, I can't say anything more specific (i.e., release date for a finalized mass-produced chip or any info on the Ogg Vorbis demo other than that it exists or who the companies interested in that particular application are) because of NDAs. Yay, NDAs!
But suffice it to say, there
...at least, until PanIP figures out how to apply their patents to PayPal and shuts them down, thus invalidating the 'PayPal Donate Now' image on the YouMayBeNext.com webpage. ;)
Whups...you're right! My bad for posting without much sleep.
I think the poster might have gotten Brian Herbert (son of Frank Herbert, original author of Dune) and Kevin J. Anderson mixed up.
Far as I know, Kevin J. Anderson is not related to the late Poul Anderson at all; the only 'son' relationship in SF writers I can think of for Poul Anderson is Greg Bear, who is his son-in-law. (Hence why Greg Bear is the one who eulogized Poul Anderson in a number of SF publications when he passed away last year; they were apparently very close.)
Here's a better question: why is it always the son named 'Brian' of a famous person who carries on their father's work?
The Muppets? Now handled by Jim Henson's son, Brian Henson. Lord of the Rings? Now handled by J.R.R. Tolkien's son, Brian Tolkien. Dune? Now handled by Frank Herbert's son, Brian Herbert.
IT'S A BRIAN CONSPIRACY! AAAAAA! THE BRIANS ARE TAKING OVER!
(Long day at work, low blood sugar, strange mental state.)
The graphics are not primarily a function of the CPU; most graphics cards -- especially the Nvidia stuff, which I believe the X-Box uses -- have their own processors on board to handle various operations.
:)
This is why, for example, a 1.2Ghz machine with a current-generation Nvidia card will 'generate more detailed graphics' than a 2.8Ghz machine with, say, a Voodoo2. The CPU controls how fast you can calculate transformations (and any other operations) in the 3d 'world' you're displaying.
For general-purpose apps, 64-bit is slower. However, for anything involving intense floating-point math, 64-bit tends to be a lot better. Something to remember is that a lot of PC 3D graphics engines use integer math internally wherever possible rather than floating-point, which means you don't see the speed hit of floating-point math functions under a 32-bit architecture.
IM interoperability would seem important in order for the wireless world to have interoperability.
/and/ your AIM address /and/ your ICQ address /and/ your Y! address, etc.
/do/ need that single contact method. ;)
Or to put it another way...imagine if instead of proprietary SMS protocols and proprietary IM protocols, you could make a standard IM protocol. And then you'd have an IM client on your desktop machine and an IM client on your cellular phone and so on, and no need to have people remember your pager address
In other words, in order to have a single contact method that moves everywhere with you as the wireless computing people seem to want, you need to have a single method of messaging that everything uses in order to make sure you really only
At least, that's how I read the bit about wireless.
Slashdot, I believe, also has multiple servers and load balancing...something that not all servers do have. And a much faster link. And unfortunately, a lot of the article-servers are done that way for ease-of-management reasons. Have a single interface thing that generates your sidebar menus and all your 'current top stories' links and whatnot, and then just pull the article from the database. Also allows quick keyword searching through SQL.
:)
Doesn't mean they couldn't cache those things ahead of time, but most sites don't think of that.
Luke Codehacker with a page on his home server about his nifty new software that ends up linked from Slashdot...ouch! Even if he isn't pulling from a database, watch the poor guy's DSL get obliterated!
That said, there are solutions to fix the Slashdotting problem. My own server hosts a site which was linked to from Slashdot about a month ago, and we saw the corresponding traffic spike. But it didn't kill the site or the link. Why?
I use all sorts of bandwidth-shaping tools and rules at both the kernel and Apache levels. Normally, the site in question is bandwidth-limited to 128kbit/sec of the overall link. When a whole huge spike of hits from the same referrer domain came in, the rules adjusted; it freed up another 128kbit/sec of the link for that site, and only put people from that referrer into that pool. As a result, normal site access wasn't impeded.
Now, if everything on the site was generated on-the-fly from a database, I probably would've had a lot more problems.
For the most part, yes, they do. (And actually, you might be surprised; Sierra's one of those who actually tends to be a lot nicer on the developers they have beholden to them...many want to just get you in debt enough to eat you alive and make you an internal development team.)
/ensure/ it works flawlessly on every single 3D card out there. Then add in ensuring that it uses various 3D sound technologies (publishers often toss these 'you have to support this thing our partner sells' requirements at you as it is), and maybe several fancy new joystick-type devices. Now ensure that /every/ possible configuration of input device, sound device and video card work WITHOUT BUGS...while not making it take multiple /years/ to do that testing.
;)
That's the problem...and publishers make sure it's the developer who feels the piracy losses; after all, it works out in their favor either way. If the game's a big success, the publisher makes lots of money. If the game gets pirated, it gives them an excuse to cut into the developer's revenue ('sorry, piracy losses') and end up with the developer still in debt, beholden to them.
Lest anyone think game piracy is a victimless crime...
The console publishers are actually harsher, but console developers weather things better because while you have to spend a lot on console dev hardware, you DON'T have to spend hundreds of hours (and thus paid-QA-person hours) on testing the game on as many different types of PC hardware as you can. It's easy to say 'don't let it out the door with bugs', but a lot harder to actually do; I defy anyone here to come up with a way to write software using advanced Direct3D functionality and
If you can do that, most dev houses would love to talk to you.
Unfortunately, that's somewhat less realistic in the games industry.
/did/ tell our publisher to take a long walk off a short pier (and considering our publisher was Microsoft, let me just tell you how incredibly satisfying that was!)... and then rapidly discovered most of the game stores wouldn't sell without a publisher's distribution clout. Publishers pushed us off shelves, refusing to allow stores to give us shelf-space. Online sales didn't work all that well. We made enough sales to scrape through, but just barely...and we were regarded as incredibly successful by other dev houses who'd looked at that route.
/afford/ the latest hardware to develop on, you need money to get that hardware.)
:(
Speaking as someone who was at a game company who
We certainly didn't have enough money in revenue to fund making another game. (And lest you say 'too much is spent on game development anyway', I'll point out that the low-budget games are usually panned by gamers who don't feel it's 'worth paying money for' if it doesn't support the latest hardware. And in order to
As a result, we finally went crawling back to the publishing world and found a new publisher to fund our development, and went on.
It's great, from an idealistic standpoint; without a publisher, you could take the time to fix as many bugs as possible (though some will always crop up because you cannot test every possible configuration of PCs), you could make sure you had all the features in without a publisher breathing down your neck to get a release out...
But the reality is that the independent music market is unfortunately considerably lower bar to entry for self-publishing than the video game development world. Speaking at someone who already took that ride...
As a former game programmer myself, I can tell you that absolutely NOTHING is more disheartening than getting near the end of a game cycle, looking forward to getting the game out, and then finding on a newsgroup people already talking about the pirated copies they've downloaded.
Especially when this happens after the second year running that a publisher nukes your revenue stream on a game, claiming 'sorry, piracy losses...we're sure you'll recoup with the next game, now that you're in debt to us and have to stay with us.'
There are other reasons people don't use PDAs sometimes; my problem with Palms has been that traditionally...they're big. I had a Handspring Visor Deluxe when they first came out, and while I loved the PDA overall, it was just bulky. When I didn't have my purse with me, I couldn't really fit both the Visor and my cellular phone into my jacket easily. After a while, though the Visor was useful, I stopped using it and just carried the cellular phone. Eventually sold the Visor to a friend. Now I've got one of the Kyocera Palm PDA-phones, carry it everywhere, and I find I use the PDA a lot more.
:)
As for PocketPCs...personally, I prefer Palm for the functionality, but I do know some serious PDA folks who use PocketPCs, to be fair. Our IT manager here has an iPaq because he can stick an 802.11b wireless card into it and load it with network administration software, and administer things from anywhere in the office. A former co-worker used his iPaq as a portable MP3 player and document reader nearly constantly.
Don't underestimate PocketPC. 3Dfx did that with Nvidia and ATI, believing they had the better platform and no one would ever top them, and they sat on their laurels for too long and turned to add serious innovations far too late; the little pretenders had taken the crown. (Hint hint, Palm: time to release start getting PalmOS 5 onto devices. The screenshots look nice!)
Hey, everyone has a naming scheme for their domain. I have a server named 'foobar', a linux workstation named 'glitch', a WindowsXP digital production studio named 'buzzword', a laptop named 'widget'...what else would I name a cellular phone/PDA with wireless Internet access? :)
Actually, I'm a 6035 user, and I want the 7135. Not for the color or anything else, though I admit the MP3 ringers would be amusing...but Packet, my 6035, is just too darn BIG. I miss my little StarTAC; I got the 6035 because my StarTAC met an untimely accident involving a cement parking lot and a heavy vehicle and was rather unsavable...the 6035 was inexpensive for me because it I was eligible for upgrade, and I liked the idea of being able to hotsync my phone list.
;)
However, I do remember now why I stopped carrying around my Visor in the first place; the Palm's form-factor is just too big to fit easily in a jacket pocket or something, and I don't want to always carry my purse. If the 7135 folds up and fits in the pocket of my windbreaker, then I'll definitely be picking it up.
Other than the size issue, the 6035 is a wonderful phone; I love the ease of use of Eudora to check e-mail and SMS is much saner. It also has, amazingly, the best speakerphone of any cellular phone I've ever seen; when home, I leave the 6035 in the hotsync cradle by my computer (to keep AvantGo fairly up-to-date) and if someone calls I can just use it in speakerphone mode. Also very handy when left on hold.
If the 6035 (and Verizon) just supported GPRS, it'd be perfect. I would love to be able to have an instant messenger open without having to be dialed into Verizon's #777 PPP service...
There were other problems, too.
:(
3Dfx started out with amazing innovations, and also really trying to work hard with the video game companies. Speaking as a former video game programmer here, I can attest to this part; back in about '98, they were the company who really made it easy to work with their cards. Direct3D was a pain to work with and most of the other cards had lousy drivers...but 3Dfx was really working hard with us to make sure we could support them well.
Then by about 2000, 3Dfx was sitting on their laurels. They weren't really making efforts to push any significant new technologies on game companies, or trying to make the companies support those. Direct3D was much more usable as a technology, and other cards were out there...plus, Nvidia and a few other companies were doing what 3Dfx used to, and really working with the game companies.
I think basically the most telling factor was that on all the personal machines at the game development house I was at, you started to see the Voodoo cards being dumped in favor of high-end Matrox or Nvidia cards. (Admittedly, the fact that Matrox and Nvidia were giving us bunches of reference cards specifically to try and get us sold on 'em didn't hurt.)
Nvidia and Matrox kept pushing the envelope...but 3Dfx was too used to having a huge market lead. It was like the tortoise and the hare...3Dfx raced ahead of the pack with amazing innovations early on, and then sat down to rest, secure in the knowledge that they had a lead. And slept through the rest of the race.
"Holy GPL, Stallman! The Penguin isn't acknowledging our work as the basis for his Operating System!"
"Quick, Rlogin! To the GNU/Cave, we have work to do!"
(...the things that run through one's mind when one is sleep deprived...)
http://www.cdjapan.co.jp/ has a number of DVDs; you just have to wait a while because, well, they send them to you from Japan.
:)
A surprising number of Japanese-mastered DVDs are beginning to have English subtitle tracks on them, but it's not a majority yet and they ARE still all Region 2.
Studio Ghibli (Miyazaki's studio) has been doing the English subtitles; I think Buena Vista Japan is actually one of the big ones in terms of doing the multilingual subtitling on the Region 2 discs. The subtitle translation quality could be better, but it's still quite acceptable.
Hopefully that helps!
Yay, bandwidth shaping and traffic-management rulesets! ;)