I remember how during the gulf war the patriot system was being lauded on news sites as being fantastically accurate, taking out most missiles before they landed, etc.
Only turned out later that it wasn't so accurate.
I'll give it a couple of years before I conclude whether the accuracy reported in the new system is just propaganda or not.
It is a very good point to be made, and an article by Joel On Software from back in 2004 made it well (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html) - Microsoft keeps a lot of it's market share by remaining backwards compatible.
One of the reasons vista was a disaster was due to the amount of old software that it broke. However, most of this software was third party, closed source with no upgrade route.
On linux, most (all?) of the software that users use comes packaged with the distro of their choice, and so has a some guarantee that at some point it will be upgraded to run on the new version.
Indeed, my bigger lament is that you can forget about gnome or kde breaking compatibility because it doesn't matter; fundamental changes to a linux system come into play and break compatibility much earlier. New versions of gcc and glibc cause much more immediate headaches if you are trying to support a linux application over multiple distributions.
Thin client, no need to install software, access anywhere (who doesn't work from more than one location these days?.
And doesn't need any setup on the user's part making it very easy to use.
If there is anything I need to write these days, I write it in google docs because the hasstle of managing files between many computers, some of which I have only used for an hour or so and never use again, some of which don't have word or open office but do have a web browser... it's a no-brainer really.
Surely with more people sitting at home, unemployed, with nothing to do other than look for a job, and desperate to make their cv stand out more than everyone else in there situation, the amount of speculative work produced may in fact rise?
Speeding up is never a good idea, if the situation is dangerous, chucking more energy into a possible crash will just make it worse.
Secondly, you should be leaving enough space in front of you to brake safely, and if that space becomes compromised you should rebuild that space quickly. There is no excuse for going into the back of someone, it means that you wasn't driving safely, and insurance claims agree on this 99% of the time.
Thirdly, top speed is not the same as acceleration. Acceleration can be handy to get out of a tight situation like pulling out of a junction or onto a roundabout, but going more than 80 mph is not a tight situation.
It could be useful for setting up individual search profiles. For instance, I search for computer stuff all the time, so if I search for "wine" chances are I'm looking for the wine, the windows emulator, rather than the wikipedia article on the difference between red and white wines.
Or another case for me, is I quite often search for hardware reviews before I buy, and prefer reviews of independant sites rather than reviews attached to shops. If I kept promoting independant reviews to the top of my search until google cottoned on and made all my searches looking for reviews work like that... that would be a very positive way of customising individual searches.
Of course, you can look at this as another way to target advertising through google to use more as well.
The wii remote only has three accelerometers, which is not enough to give 6DOF (degrees of freedom) of detectable movement - for example, you cannot detect the difference between panning the remote left and right, or crabbing it left and right (to use camera terms).
If this motion add on, as people suggest has more accelerometers, it will be to give full 6 degrees of freedom, which will, yes make boxing games, or sword games much better to play, but probably won't affect shoot-em-ups at all (which from playing resident evil 4, and house of the dead 2/3 works absolutely fine for me anyway)
Gnome was also a child of politics, if not bureaucracy, it grew out of the politics that initially surrounded the KDE project, when Qt was licensed in a way that was deemed to not be "Free Software". Gnomewas one of several ways in which the GNU foundation attempted to rectify the problem (the other was an attempt to write a GPL'd library compatable with the Qt api so that KDE did not need to depend on it. When Qt went GPL, the issue went away and the project became redundant and died)
I've never understood people who consider mcdonalds food to be bad food that's bad for you but swear by the bland, arterry clogging mush that comes out of the average greasy spoon, at near enough the same price.
Let debian, mandriva, redhat, suse, ubunto, gentoo and all the other distros decide for themselves whether they want to ban binary modules, and then watch people walk with their feet when they find that their favourate distro that used to play doom3 doesn't anymore.
Banning binary modules will only reduce what people can do on linux and therefore drive people away, which is not what you want.
To be fair, tom bombadil adds nothing to the main lord of the rings plot; even the bbc radio version that comes on 13/14 cds (I think it's about 20 hours long) still misses out bombadil.
The story is eroneous, the call charges are incurred to the jahjah account, neither phone get's charged, so unless you can get access to your friends jahjah account (on par with getting their email password and using it to spam their friend's inboxes) it's not going to cost them anything.
In fact, all that the story is talking about is a rather weird way of calling your friends. If you want to jump through so many hoops in order to say hi to people, you probably deserve to be lonely, just call them ffs!!!
This is like skypes skype in/skype out services - you don't need to be at a computer to use it, and can call people who are not at a computer.
I'm not sure if skype offer similar functionality on those grounds. or if skype requires that one or both parties are connected to a computer.
Anyway, I've tried the jahjah service and it works well.
You are correct, rates are comparable.
Re:Speaking as a software engineer
on
OpenGL Distilled
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Direct X is not cross platform, so is not an option for us, but Direct X is very heavy in areas that openGL is very light (in openGL, the limitation on drawing geometries is much less than the Draw index Primitives (DIP's) in directX, although state changes are heavy.
Overall, the openGL interface is much simpler to optimize than directX. That is from my experience of both (althoguh I admit my experience of optimizing direct X is much less than that of openGL), in both cases batching is incredibly important, in openGl what is going on is very transparent.
But coming from the simplicity of openGL, it has to be said the over-complicated COM interface of Direct X is hideous...
No point really, it's five year old technology. While it's great for people coming into the gaming industry, there won't be anything in the quake 3 code that the competitors haven't already discovered for themselves, and also with the advance of the technology of gpu's, a lot of the neat tricks in quake 3 will probably be either unnecessary on the latest graphics cards, or will be completely supplanted by some other technology.
However, given source releases of other games (remember descent), they may clean out some expletives from various comments:-)
Nicing a process does not allow the system to run normally, if your process takes up lots of memory (and compiling does), you still get the hit of disk swapping whenever the nice'd process starts and stops running. Unless you have a machine with several gig of memory (which is possible)
Gentoo falls down on the upgrading process since compiling the upgrades will greatly affect the performance of the box (compiling is very heavy on resources, dontcha know!), which is not something you want in an always-on situation such as you describe. Much better to go with a pre-compiled solution so that the server is only running at a reduced performance for a couple of minutes at most.
In the unix fashion, applications are dedicated to what they need to do.
deb/rpm (is it called deb? Long time since I used debian) are package installers, and do not handle dependency checking.
On top of that sits urpmi (Mandrake), apt(debian) and I believe redhat have their own. These apps handle dependencies, but are still command line based.
On top of that sit a number of gui's that will call the underlying apt/urpmi to install packages with dependencies, these gui's have nicely sorted lists of applications under headings such as "games", "office" and "internet". Mandrake has this (check out therpm installer in the control panel), debian has this (dselect has been around for ages, there are other improved interfaces now). Hell, lindow's has it's one-click web interface thingy.
So why do people continue to say that apt/urpmi are crap because you have to remember the command options and/or the names of the apps you want to install??? If apt/urpmi are lower level than you want to go, USE ONE OF THE GUI'S, THAT'S WHAT THEY ARE THERE FOR!!!!
Cg is identical to HLSL, the shader language in DirectX9.
While I agree with you about DirectX in general, I find HLSL/Cg to be an absolute joy to program for, so credit where credit's due - I don't see why we need a seperate, different and incompatable shader language when the one we already have been kicking around for the past couple of years is so well thought out.
Without wanting to start a flame war (heh, believe that you believe anything;-)), with KDE you get a choice of 6 different styles of URL autocompletion (the default makes sense for non-power users), and it works consistantly among all url selection boxes in all apps (with history and undo functionality included for free;-))
Netscape also fucked around with browser implementation standards - it wasn't until Mozilla that standards compliance started being taken seriously.
Four years ago when I started uni, I really tried to like Netscape, but the name Nutscrape was appropriate - Netscape 4 was incredibly buggy and crash-prone. That is one of the reasons that Mozilla was a complete rewrite with a new core, don't forget:-)
Re:The only feature which is better in Windows...
on
Review: KDE 3.2
·
· Score: 1
Whenever I have to start using Windows again after using KDE I can answer this question - Windows needs to be more ergonomic. Operations always seem to require at least twice as many mouse clicks/keyboard clicks to achieve in windows as opposed to KDE.
Some examples - you have to click on a window to activate it in Windows. It's lack of multiple desktops means that you have to micro-manage the layout of your windows. There isn't even a magnetic border option to make this micro management easier.
No copy with select with mouse/middle mouse button. Instead you have to do select with mouse, Ctrl-C, click destination, Ctrl-V. (twice as many operations).
Scrollbars in windows are still broken - you can't "relax" with the mouse while using them, if you stray x number of pixels away from the scroll bar, it snaps back to the original position, forcing you to concentrate on operating the scrollbar rather than looking at what you are scrollng.
Internet explorer is feature incomplete - no tabbed browsing, but even worse, no popup blocking. closing popups is the number one productivity killer for my web experience on windows.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember how during the gulf war the patriot system was being lauded on news sites as being fantastically accurate, taking out most missiles before they landed, etc.
Only turned out later that it wasn't so accurate.
I'll give it a couple of years before I conclude whether the accuracy reported in the new system is just propaganda or not.
It is a very good point to be made, and an article by Joel On Software from back in 2004 made it well (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html) - Microsoft keeps a lot of it's market share by remaining backwards compatible.
One of the reasons vista was a disaster was due to the amount of old software that it broke. However, most of this software was third party, closed source with no upgrade route.
On linux, most (all?) of the software that users use comes packaged with the distro of their choice, and so has a some guarantee that at some point it will be upgraded to run on the new version.
Indeed, my bigger lament is that you can forget about gnome or kde breaking compatibility because it doesn't matter; fundamental changes to a linux system come into play and break compatibility much earlier. New versions of gcc and glibc cause much more immediate headaches if you are trying to support a linux application over multiple distributions.
Thin client, no need to install software, access anywhere (who doesn't work from more than one location these days?.
And doesn't need any setup on the user's part making it very easy to use.
If there is anything I need to write these days, I write it in google docs because the hasstle of managing files between many computers, some of which I have only used for an hour or so and never use again, some of which don't have word or open office but do have a web browser... it's a no-brainer really.
Surely with more people sitting at home, unemployed, with nothing to do other than look for a job, and desperate to make their cv stand out more than everyone else in there situation, the amount of speculative work produced may in fact rise?
Speeding up is never a good idea, if the situation is dangerous, chucking more energy into a possible crash will just make it worse.
Secondly, you should be leaving enough space in front of you to brake safely, and if that space becomes compromised you should rebuild that space quickly. There is no excuse for going into the back of someone, it means that you wasn't driving safely, and insurance claims agree on this 99% of the time.
Thirdly, top speed is not the same as acceleration. Acceleration can be handy to get out of a tight situation like pulling out of a junction or onto a roundabout, but going more than 80 mph is not a tight situation.
It could be useful for setting up individual search profiles. For instance, I search for computer stuff all the time, so if I search for "wine" chances are I'm looking for the wine, the windows emulator, rather than the wikipedia article on the difference between red and white wines.
Or another case for me, is I quite often search for hardware reviews before I buy, and prefer reviews of independant sites rather than reviews attached to shops. If I kept promoting independant reviews to the top of my search until google cottoned on and made all my searches looking for reviews work like that... that would be a very positive way of customising individual searches.
Of course, you can look at this as another way to target advertising through google to use more as well.
But in general, I would be in favour of this.
The wii remote only has three accelerometers, which is not enough to give 6DOF (degrees of freedom) of detectable movement - for example, you cannot detect the difference between panning the remote left and right, or crabbing it left and right (to use camera terms).
If this motion add on, as people suggest has more accelerometers, it will be to give full 6 degrees of freedom, which will, yes make boxing games, or sword games much better to play, but probably won't affect shoot-em-ups at all (which from playing resident evil 4, and house of the dead 2/3 works absolutely fine for me anyway)
You'd rather go over the rather long windows XP install process instead?
Gnome was also a child of politics, if not bureaucracy, it grew out of the politics that initially surrounded the KDE project, when Qt was licensed in a way that was deemed to not be "Free Software". Gnomewas one of several ways in which the GNU foundation attempted to rectify the problem (the other was an attempt to write a GPL'd library compatable with the Qt api so that KDE did not need to depend on it. When Qt went GPL, the issue went away and the project became redundant and died)
I've never understood people who consider mcdonalds food to be bad food that's bad for you but swear by the bland, arterry clogging mush that comes out of the average greasy spoon, at near enough the same price.
Let debian, mandriva, redhat, suse, ubunto, gentoo and all the other distros decide for themselves whether they want to ban binary modules, and then watch people walk with their feet when they find that their favourate distro that used to play doom3 doesn't anymore.
Banning binary modules will only reduce what people can do on linux and therefore drive people away, which is not what you want.
To be fair, tom bombadil adds nothing to the main lord of the rings plot; even the bbc radio version that comes on 13/14 cds (I think it's about 20 hours long) still misses out bombadil.
The story is eroneous, the call charges are incurred to the jahjah account, neither phone get's charged, so unless you can get access to your friends jahjah account (on par with getting their email password and using it to spam their friend's inboxes) it's not going to cost them anything.
In fact, all that the story is talking about is a rather weird way of calling your friends. If you want to jump through so many hoops in order to say hi to people, you probably deserve to be lonely, just call them ffs!!!
This is like skypes skype in/skype out services - you don't need to be at a computer to use it, and can call people who are not at a computer.
I'm not sure if skype offer similar functionality on those grounds. or if skype requires that one or both parties are connected to a computer.
Anyway, I've tried the jahjah service and it works well.
You are correct, rates are comparable.
Direct X is not cross platform, so is not an option for us, but Direct X is very heavy in areas that openGL is very light (in openGL, the limitation on drawing geometries is much less than the Draw index Primitives (DIP's) in directX, although state changes are heavy.
Overall, the openGL interface is much simpler to optimize than directX. That is from my experience of both (althoguh I admit my experience of optimizing direct X is much less than that of openGL), in both cases batching is incredibly important, in openGl what is going on is very transparent.
But coming from the simplicity of openGL, it has to be said the over-complicated COM interface of Direct X is hideous...
No point really, it's five year old technology. While it's great for people coming into the gaming industry, there won't be anything in the quake 3 code that the competitors haven't already discovered for themselves, and also with the advance of the technology of gpu's, a lot of the neat tricks in quake 3 will probably be either unnecessary on the latest graphics cards, or will be completely supplanted by some other technology.
:-)
However, given source releases of other games (remember descent), they may clean out some expletives from various comments
Nicing a process does not allow the system to run normally, if your process takes up lots of memory (and compiling does), you still get the hit of disk swapping whenever the nice'd process starts and stops running. Unless you have a machine with several gig of memory (which is possible)
Gentoo falls down on the upgrading process since compiling the upgrades will greatly affect the performance of the box (compiling is very heavy on resources, dontcha know!), which is not something you want in an always-on situation such as you describe. Much better to go with a pre-compiled solution so that the server is only running at a reduced performance for a couple of minutes at most.
In the unix fashion, applications are dedicated to what they need to do.
deb/rpm (is it called deb? Long time since I used debian) are package installers, and do not handle dependency checking.
On top of that sits urpmi (Mandrake), apt(debian) and I believe redhat have their own. These apps handle dependencies, but are still command line based.
On top of that sit a number of gui's that will call the underlying apt/urpmi to install packages with dependencies, these gui's have nicely sorted lists of applications under headings such as "games", "office" and "internet". Mandrake has this (check out therpm installer in the control panel), debian has this (dselect has been around for ages, there are other improved interfaces now). Hell, lindow's has it's one-click web interface thingy.
So why do people continue to say that apt/urpmi are crap because you have to remember the command options and/or the names of the apps you want to install??? If apt/urpmi are lower level than you want to go, USE ONE OF THE GUI'S, THAT'S WHAT THEY ARE THERE FOR!!!!
Umm... so why do you have dependency hell on mandrake?
urpmi <application_name>
sorts it all out for you.
Cg is identical to HLSL, the shader language in DirectX9.
While I agree with you about DirectX in general, I find HLSL/Cg to be an absolute joy to program for, so credit where credit's due - I don't see why we need a seperate, different and incompatable shader language when the one we already have been kicking around for the past couple of years is so well thought out.
Without wanting to start a flame war (heh, believe that you believe anything ;-)), with KDE you get a choice of 6 different styles of URL autocompletion (the default makes sense for non-power users), and it works consistantly among all url selection boxes in all apps (with history and undo functionality included for free ;-))
Netscape also fucked around with browser implementation standards - it wasn't until Mozilla that standards compliance started being taken seriously.
:-)
Four years ago when I started uni, I really tried to like Netscape, but the name Nutscrape was appropriate - Netscape 4 was incredibly buggy and crash-prone. That is one of the reasons that Mozilla was a complete rewrite with a new core, don't forget
Whenever I have to start using Windows again after using KDE I can answer this question - Windows needs to be more ergonomic. Operations always seem to require at least twice as many mouse clicks/keyboard clicks to achieve in windows as opposed to KDE.
Some examples - you have to click on a window to activate it in Windows. It's lack of multiple desktops means that you have to micro-manage the layout of your windows. There isn't even a magnetic border option to make this micro management easier.
No copy with select with mouse/middle mouse button. Instead you have to do select with mouse, Ctrl-C, click destination, Ctrl-V. (twice as many operations).
Scrollbars in windows are still broken - you can't "relax" with the mouse while using them, if you stray x number of pixels away from the scroll bar, it snaps back to the original position, forcing you to concentrate on operating the scrollbar rather than looking at what you are scrollng.
Internet explorer is feature incomplete - no tabbed browsing, but even worse, no popup blocking. closing popups is the number one productivity killer for my web experience on windows.
That's just a few of the things I can think of...
Indeed, up to 50% of people could be below the average starting salary for programmers.
But then, it wouldn't be much of an "average" if that wasn't true, would it?