The problem with PHP is that it's very easy. One of the supposed advantages of Lamp is that it is also rather easy to set up and work with. I've seen more projects than I would care to, where the programmers couldn't code their way out of a paper bag but managed to accumulate a surprisingly functional mass of PHP spaghetti code. Perl is a good option only if the coders are disciplined, and having good structure is critical for a good Perl project. I don't have any experience with Python, but due to the nature of python language structure, you'll never be able to embed it the way you could with PHP (templates are necessary here as well).
One of the problems with PHP is the fact that when the bar of entry is so low, you get a lot more low bar people actually coding it. It's become the next generation of VB garbage. The language is only half of the security problem (a half we could better do without, but still).
Personally what annoys me more is that this is giving me no benchmark against how ruby in general is performing. Maybe something is twice as fast, but twice as fast as what? Slow as hell? My understanding is that ruby has always lagged a bit in the performance sector, although maybe that has improved over the last 2 years. I'd be more interested to see additional benchmarks against equivalent programs in Perl5 which is sort of the interpreter execution standard, or maybe something in C.
I agree. From what I've seen it comes down to the fact that Americans now live in fear of offending anyone. And it doesn't even seem to matter how harmless something is, people just avoid it at all costs. What I've seen is many preach acceptance, but actually expect avoidance. Just ignore the fact that a guy is black. When I say "that black guy" it's probably because he was the only black guy there, yet some find this offensive. When I say "that white guy" (inferring everyone else in the area was black), then suddenly that's okay. There was a time when America actually was becoming more accepting - where people recognized each other's differences and were okay with them, but somewhere in all the lawsuits and political correctness that became severely warped.
I have similar feelings. Not so much that I want it to be a geek OS, but I want Linux to cater to ME, not some other bloke's grandmother. You know it's like people are running this rat race to become a MS clone at the end of the tunnel. Like all of the trial and work of the people who work on free software eventually culminates in a pile of junk the geeks that made it don't even want to use.
I couldn't care less if Linux becomes a consumer grade OS, as long as it always improves things for me.
I had problems with acrobat 8 on vista as well. The machine kept saying that my tempdir was invalid. It I checked my paths and even manually set the environment variables to C:\temp, and checked my profile temp and %windir%/temp - still no luck. It seemed like it was looking for some f'ed up DOS path or something. I never got it to work on that install. Eventually I reformatted (again) and it worked okay. It's possible one of the additional updates that came along when I was trying to work through this problem for 2 days fixed it, but aside from that I'm pretty baffled.
When people say "There are no problems, everything is just fine", they are only speaking from their one little corner of a billion possible problems/configurations. I was expecting slight changes like 98->XP or 2k-2003, but there is certainly a lot of changes under the hood that is breaking all sorts of stuff.
Is it really an open standard if they are the only ones that developed it? It reminds me of a quote which I will paraphrase:
The short answer is yes. Development is irrelevant. In fact there have been more than a few instances where communal development ends up win a total train-wreck with standards as people can argue endlessly over things which are often not even relevant. In contrast, a well integrated team with a definite focus can often come up with a much better product.
If you didn't work on the standard directly yourself then from your perspective it's probably the same if it was developed by a certain party, or multiple groups. That's not to be confused with a standard that is garbage, or a patent minefield, or other problems that can happen - anyone can develop those.
This is after Christmas is the big slump in pretty much every industry due to holiday spending hangover - computers are certainly no exception to this. If MS wanted better Vista sales, they should have gotten the OS out before the gift PCs were purchased at years end. I think more than anything this is probably proof that people just use what comes with their computer (whatever it may be), and very few would actually bother to change the OS - Microsoft or otherwise.
Hardcore gamers tend to fit into much of what you posted. Playstation/Xbox fanboys are often what is thought of as the typical hardcore gamer, as well as people who spend far to much on PCs/video cards. They usually demand supreme graphics. Casual gamers are the people who tend not to spend much time at games, and/or are not rabidly attached to them.
Then that leaves people like me. I like to refer to myself as a "traditional gamer" - someone who loves games of all sorts. I'll play just about any sort of video game, but I also like many other sorts of games such as board games, darts, pool, and a fervent love of pinball. I doubt anyone will refer to you as a hardcore gamer no matter how much nethack you play.
If your algorithm is showing weaknesses, then throwing more bits at the problem is best reserved as a temporary solution. At the worst this competition will just give us an alternative hash algorithm, and that is probably reason enough to have it.
I think once thermo-nuclear power comes into its prime, we'll have to do that anyway. Not necessarily from a CO2 standpoint, but just from raw pollution of other stuff. There are just too many people and not enough vegetation to work long term. At some point we're going to have to actively work to clean the environment, instead of dumping shit everywhere and expecting nature to diffuse it after a while.
There is one slight difference though. Games are pretty limited to what you can do in them. When you've done all there is to do with a game, then what? Personally I can replay games just to play them, but most people I know can't. When I was a kid I always found new ways to play with toys - typically in ways that were never intended by coupling them with other toys. If you always have new games to play, that isn't much of a problem, but for me I got games and toys and what you got is what you got for a few months. You had to entertain yourself after that, and toys could better cope with the boredness factor.
And in later years there are other strange uses for toys. I'll never forget the 4th of july when GI Joe met bottle rockets. =)
Not just applications, but hardware for that matter. I just found out that my HP5400 scanner won't work with Vista. HP says too bad, "consider buying a new product (from us)". It's sort of interesting that people criticize Linux for it's driver support as they're mostly written by someone other than the vendor, but windows depends on those vendors for drivers which means you're often SOL after a certain period of time.
I'm a YAML convert myself. I used to use XML::Simple quite often for configuration files but generally wasn't to happy with the readability of what it generated. YAML by contrast was pretty easy to read and write your configs by hand if you wanted (a pain with XML). However XML isn't going anywhere soon. In some industries XML is just now starting to grab attention for interoperability and I've had to deal with XML stuff that was just handed to me more and more. In that sense XML::Simple has made my life much easier.
I don't know, considering Vista only came out recently, I wouldn't be surprised to find early adapters who are fascinated by new shiny things going out in droves to buy Vista. I also wouldn't be surprised if Vista cost more to develop than OSX over its entire life so far. For that matter it almost seems like Vista has dropped more major features than OSX added over its life.
To some extent the Wii should at least start to balance that out a bit. The more simplistic controlling scheme that involves body movement should be easier for many of the disabled who have problems with traditional controllers. I started thinking that in the same lines when I was watching a four year old trying to play various PS2 games. His hands were too small (but he did pretty well considering), and the combinations of buttons to push were just too complex for most of the games I had.
This is one thing I really like about FreeBSD, and that's the fact that they aren't afraid of versions. You have a development branch, and a production branch. Changes are typically moderate until a major revision 5.x to 6.x. It's also nice that you typically have stability within a version, and often a backwards compatibility layer. For instance nVidia drivers work in FreeBSD 5x, but all that's needed for 6x is to compile an option in the kernel (there by default).
Many such as myself are getting tired of having a buggy kernel as we can remember the stability of the 2.4 days. Linus needs to get over his fear of versions and step up to the plate. If I were Linus I'd throw away the old even-odd stable versioning and increase the version by.1 every year on a schedule.
One of the articles says that hardware acceleration is no longer available in Vista, but doesn't say why (aside from the fact that MS didn't include it in their sound layer rewrite). Is this mainly a DRM thing?
Might be a bit ironic if these sound cards target MS operating systems only to have Linux (and Mac?) being the only ones that support the hardware acceleration.
I suppose that sort of depends on the scale and location of these things. If people live near (but not in) a city that's usually a suburb in the U.S. That means that people take cars to work which produce CO2 and.. water. Even if we go to hydrogen cars we're producing water as a byproduct.
Personally I would think it would be better for the environment if we better utilized/recycled water from the surface/ocean. Mainly because this means humans are required to remove the contamination that we most likely put there.
Using vista business right now as a test, I can say I'm not planning on migrating much of anything away from Win2k. XP didn't see much of an improvement as far as I could tell. So Vista seemed like a possible upgrade point (been 7 years after all). But having used the Vista Beta I figured service pack one would be a necessity. Now that I'm using Vista business I'm honestly not planning on upgrading at all. Win2k has til 2010, so I'll planning on fence sitting until MS releases whatever comes after Vista, or I am forced into disaster with Vista.
Hopefully Office 2007 uptake wont force my hand before then.
As far as completely new things go, the User Access Control is a pain in the butt, and I disabled it within 5 minutes.
I am severely tempted to do that myself, but having done the same thing in XP I'm now forcing myself to use the defaults - because when you sit down at a foreign pc that's most likely what you're going to have to deal with. After a week of trying to adjust things (and get Vista to work with Samba roaming profiles) I'm not sure it's even worth the effort.
Having started using vista, I'm thinking I'll be waiting until the next release of windows. I'm sure MS can fix much of this stuff, but the entire OS just feels like a train-wreck. Some like to equate this as the next evolutionary step in windows, but I'm thinking this feels a lot more like windows 95. I'll wait for the next "windows 98"
So you won't get a Wii because you don't like Mario? Honestly I'll play anything that's fun no matter who the characters are, or if I play through a million sequels. That's basically the entire FPS genre right there. If Nintendo were relying on Mario, it was during past generations, and they lost the fight with simple titles driving the platform at N64. If the Wii isn't creative, then I'd be hard pressed to name another company that actually was.
Sony has already made a half assed attempt to do this with their new stock controller, but all reports point to it as a tacked on mess versus the Wii Remote and Nunchuck.
I'm not sure but it doesn't seem too bad from what I've heard from people that used it. For instance you can pitch and yaw a plane in a fairly intuitive manor. Is it a stellar innovation? no, but hardly a mess.
Of course you'll never hold such a controller like a sword like the wii-mote, so it has very limited applications by its nature. Honestly I'd rather have rumble back - which I didn't like much in the first place.
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Not sure why you would be in any hurry to upgrade if you're just worried about your mainboard. AM3 processors will work in AM2 sockets.
The problem with PHP is that it's very easy. One of the supposed advantages of Lamp is that it is also rather easy to set up and work with. I've seen more projects than I would care to, where the programmers couldn't code their way out of a paper bag but managed to accumulate a surprisingly functional mass of PHP spaghetti code. Perl is a good option only if the coders are disciplined, and having good structure is critical for a good Perl project. I don't have any experience with Python, but due to the nature of python language structure, you'll never be able to embed it the way you could with PHP (templates are necessary here as well).
One of the problems with PHP is the fact that when the bar of entry is so low, you get a lot more low bar people actually coding it. It's become the next generation of VB garbage. The language is only half of the security problem (a half we could better do without, but still).
Personally what annoys me more is that this is giving me no benchmark against how ruby in general is performing. Maybe something is twice as fast, but twice as fast as what? Slow as hell? My understanding is that ruby has always lagged a bit in the performance sector, although maybe that has improved over the last 2 years. I'd be more interested to see additional benchmarks against equivalent programs in Perl5 which is sort of the interpreter execution standard, or maybe something in C.
I agree. From what I've seen it comes down to the fact that Americans now live in fear of offending anyone. And it doesn't even seem to matter how harmless something is, people just avoid it at all costs. What I've seen is many preach acceptance, but actually expect avoidance. Just ignore the fact that a guy is black. When I say "that black guy" it's probably because he was the only black guy there, yet some find this offensive. When I say "that white guy" (inferring everyone else in the area was black), then suddenly that's okay. There was a time when America actually was becoming more accepting - where people recognized each other's differences and were okay with them, but somewhere in all the lawsuits and political correctness that became severely warped.
I have similar feelings. Not so much that I want it to be a geek OS, but I want Linux to cater to ME, not some other bloke's grandmother. You know it's like people are running this rat race to become a MS clone at the end of the tunnel. Like all of the trial and work of the people who work on free software eventually culminates in a pile of junk the geeks that made it don't even want to use.
I couldn't care less if Linux becomes a consumer grade OS, as long as it always improves things for me.
I had problems with acrobat 8 on vista as well. The machine kept saying that my tempdir was invalid. It I checked my paths and even manually set the environment variables to C:\temp, and checked my profile temp and %windir%/temp - still no luck. It seemed like it was looking for some f'ed up DOS path or something. I never got it to work on that install. Eventually I reformatted (again) and it worked okay. It's possible one of the additional updates that came along when I was trying to work through this problem for 2 days fixed it, but aside from that I'm pretty baffled.
When people say "There are no problems, everything is just fine", they are only speaking from their one little corner of a billion possible problems/configurations. I was expecting slight changes like 98->XP or 2k-2003, but there is certainly a lot of changes under the hood that is breaking all sorts of stuff.
Is it really an open standard if they are the only ones that developed it? It reminds me of a quote which I will paraphrase:
The short answer is yes. Development is irrelevant. In fact there have been more than a few instances where communal development ends up win a total train-wreck with standards as people can argue endlessly over things which are often not even relevant. In contrast, a well integrated team with a definite focus can often come up with a much better product.
If you didn't work on the standard directly yourself then from your perspective it's probably the same if it was developed by a certain party, or multiple groups. That's not to be confused with a standard that is garbage, or a patent minefield, or other problems that can happen - anyone can develop those.
This is after Christmas is the big slump in pretty much every industry due to holiday spending hangover - computers are certainly no exception to this. If MS wanted better Vista sales, they should have gotten the OS out before the gift PCs were purchased at years end. I think more than anything this is probably proof that people just use what comes with their computer (whatever it may be), and very few would actually bother to change the OS - Microsoft or otherwise.
Hardcore gamers tend to fit into much of what you posted. Playstation/Xbox fanboys are often what is thought of as the typical hardcore gamer, as well as people who spend far to much on PCs/video cards. They usually demand supreme graphics. Casual gamers are the people who tend not to spend much time at games, and/or are not rabidly attached to them.
Then that leaves people like me. I like to refer to myself as a "traditional gamer" - someone who loves games of all sorts. I'll play just about any sort of video game, but I also like many other sorts of games such as board games, darts, pool, and a fervent love of pinball. I doubt anyone will refer to you as a hardcore gamer no matter how much nethack you play.
If your algorithm is showing weaknesses, then throwing more bits at the problem is best reserved as a temporary solution. At the worst this competition will just give us an alternative hash algorithm, and that is probably reason enough to have it.
I think once thermo-nuclear power comes into its prime, we'll have to do that anyway. Not necessarily from a CO2 standpoint, but just from raw pollution of other stuff. There are just too many people and not enough vegetation to work long term. At some point we're going to have to actively work to clean the environment, instead of dumping shit everywhere and expecting nature to diffuse it after a while.
There is one slight difference though. Games are pretty limited to what you can do in them. When you've done all there is to do with a game, then what? Personally I can replay games just to play them, but most people I know can't. When I was a kid I always found new ways to play with toys - typically in ways that were never intended by coupling them with other toys. If you always have new games to play, that isn't much of a problem, but for me I got games and toys and what you got is what you got for a few months. You had to entertain yourself after that, and toys could better cope with the boredness factor.
And in later years there are other strange uses for toys. I'll never forget the 4th of july when GI Joe met bottle rockets. =)
Not just applications, but hardware for that matter. I just found out that my HP5400 scanner won't work with Vista. HP says too bad, "consider buying a new product (from us)". It's sort of interesting that people criticize Linux for it's driver support as they're mostly written by someone other than the vendor, but windows depends on those vendors for drivers which means you're often SOL after a certain period of time.
In the land of lawsuits that isn't going to fly very far.
I'm a YAML convert myself. I used to use XML::Simple quite often for configuration files but generally wasn't to happy with the readability of what it generated. YAML by contrast was pretty easy to read and write your configs by hand if you wanted (a pain with XML). However XML isn't going anywhere soon. In some industries XML is just now starting to grab attention for interoperability and I've had to deal with XML stuff that was just handed to me more and more. In that sense XML::Simple has made my life much easier.
I don't know, considering Vista only came out recently, I wouldn't be surprised to find early adapters who are fascinated by new shiny things going out in droves to buy Vista. I also wouldn't be surprised if Vista cost more to develop than OSX over its entire life so far. For that matter it almost seems like Vista has dropped more major features than OSX added over its life.
To some extent the Wii should at least start to balance that out a bit. The more simplistic controlling scheme that involves body movement should be easier for many of the disabled who have problems with traditional controllers. I started thinking that in the same lines when I was watching a four year old trying to play various PS2 games. His hands were too small (but he did pretty well considering), and the combinations of buttons to push were just too complex for most of the games I had.
This is one thing I really like about FreeBSD, and that's the fact that they aren't afraid of versions. You have a development branch, and a production branch. Changes are typically moderate until a major revision 5.x to 6.x. It's also nice that you typically have stability within a version, and often a backwards compatibility layer. For instance nVidia drivers work in FreeBSD 5x, but all that's needed for 6x is to compile an option in the kernel (there by default).
.1 every year on a schedule.
Many such as myself are getting tired of having a buggy kernel as we can remember the stability of the 2.4 days. Linus needs to get over his fear of versions and step up to the plate. If I were Linus I'd throw away the old even-odd stable versioning and increase the version by
One of the articles says that hardware acceleration is no longer available in Vista, but doesn't say why (aside from the fact that MS didn't include it in their sound layer rewrite). Is this mainly a DRM thing?
Might be a bit ironic if these sound cards target MS operating systems only to have Linux (and Mac?) being the only ones that support the hardware acceleration.
I suppose that sort of depends on the scale and location of these things. If people live near (but not in) a city that's usually a suburb in the U.S. That means that people take cars to work which produce CO2 and.. water. Even if we go to hydrogen cars we're producing water as a byproduct.
Personally I would think it would be better for the environment if we better utilized/recycled water from the surface/ocean. Mainly because this means humans are required to remove the contamination that we most likely put there.
Using vista business right now as a test, I can say I'm not planning on migrating much of anything away from Win2k. XP didn't see much of an improvement as far as I could tell. So Vista seemed like a possible upgrade point (been 7 years after all). But having used the Vista Beta I figured service pack one would be a necessity. Now that I'm using Vista business I'm honestly not planning on upgrading at all. Win2k has til 2010, so I'll planning on fence sitting until MS releases whatever comes after Vista, or I am forced into disaster with Vista.
Hopefully Office 2007 uptake wont force my hand before then.
As far as completely new things go, the User Access Control is a pain in the butt, and I disabled it within 5 minutes.
I am severely tempted to do that myself, but having done the same thing in XP I'm now forcing myself to use the defaults - because when you sit down at a foreign pc that's most likely what you're going to have to deal with. After a week of trying to adjust things (and get Vista to work with Samba roaming profiles) I'm not sure it's even worth the effort.
Having started using vista, I'm thinking I'll be waiting until the next release of windows. I'm sure MS can fix much of this stuff, but the entire OS just feels like a train-wreck. Some like to equate this as the next evolutionary step in windows, but I'm thinking this feels a lot more like windows 95. I'll wait for the next "windows 98"
So you won't get a Wii because you don't like Mario? Honestly I'll play anything that's fun no matter who the characters are, or if I play through a million sequels. That's basically the entire FPS genre right there. If Nintendo were relying on Mario, it was during past generations, and they lost the fight with simple titles driving the platform at N64. If the Wii isn't creative, then I'd be hard pressed to name another company that actually was.
Sony has already made a half assed attempt to do this with their new stock controller, but all reports point to it as a tacked on mess versus the Wii Remote and Nunchuck.
I'm not sure but it doesn't seem too bad from what I've heard from people that used it. For instance you can pitch and yaw a plane in a fairly intuitive manor. Is it a stellar innovation? no, but hardly a mess.
Of course you'll never hold such a controller like a sword like the wii-mote, so it has very limited applications by its nature. Honestly I'd rather have rumble back - which I didn't like much in the first place.