Used CD stores aren't stealing money from artists OR the RIAA OR the labels.
Used CD stores are a way for us, as consumers, to recoup our losses when we make a poor purchasing decision. If there was a way to 'rent' music (like movie rentals are now), or otherwise try it out first, we wouldn't have anywhere near the volume of used CD inventory that we do.
But, lack of rental abilities, pay-per-download, and poor variety on the airwaves means that often you have to buy-to-try. If you don't like the CD, you can resell it to anyone you like - including a used CD store - at any price they will offer.
I'm all about free (as in liberty) software -- and drivers are already free-as-in-beer. But aren't we missing something here? Why does it matter if you can't get a GPL driver for a closed proprietary piece of hardware?
I think if you're going to be an ass about the GPL-only software, you should be an ass about the hardware too. Hell, the BIOS on your motherboard probably isn't GPL, but you use it. The driver for your GeForce isn't too different, except it runs in the OS instead of below it.
Get off your high horse and put your money where your mouth is. Buy hardware that has GPL drivers, or live with what you have. So many other posters had it right - it's NOT wise for ATI and NVidia to put out GPL versions of their drivers, they obviously have a lot of trade secrets in there - have you seen the performance and features that they get between driver versions?
The best solution I've seen to this is to put a shim over the binary module. You recompile an interface layer to suit YOUR kernel. The interfaces aren't changing too often, and nobody that can put on the new kernel right away is looking for high-performance graphics and/or rock-solid stability.
"Dr McDonald said in teaching open-source platforms to students it is important not to "just ram open-source issues down their throats. It's important to explain why there is a difference in philosophy, why it's reasonable to not to totally tread the path of one particular vendor, one particular monopoly."
I wonder WHICH monopoly he refers to?
I think it's important to teach skills and not languages. The platform shouldn't really matter. But what I read there is "we're gonna teach non-proprietary solutions". I don't think the OS matters for the undergrads.
I learned programming on Solaris and later Linux, and honestly there's no real difference between them for 95% of what you do in school, since you are NOT administering the box, and the interesting tools are opensource, portable, and provided by the school - you just have to USE them. This probably holds true for BSD as well.
I do believe that we shouldn't be teaching kids to develop in MSVC++ and MFC. I think that's god-awful - we should learn to use makefiles and know the dependencies in our code, and not waste time on things that aren't portable to our jobs, on a yet-to-be-determined platform.
You're spot-on. A real desktop OS needs a fully-accelerated GUI. I love X11 for some things, but it is NOT the best solution for a desktop. This is why I prefer to use Win32 or OSX for my headed machines and Xservers for the few linux tasks that I have.
It's still ridiculously difficult to make a linux desktop environment like KDE or Gnome look as pretty as Aqua or Windows out of the box. You have to fiddle with fonts, it's much slower, doesn't take advantage of hardware acceleration for 2D as well, all the apps look different and use their own widgets. "It Just Works" is pretty much the reason that people haven't widely adopted linux as their desktop of choice. Some corporations have, but thats a business decision based on support and/or licensing cost, not on personal preference.
It's flamebait because he knows it's not/.'s fault that his company filters it. Slashdot never promised to be safe enough for my company's filter or yours or anyone elses. And unless you're paying them for the service (which you probably aren't) then you don't have any right to say what they should or shouldn't put on the sight. Even if you DO pay for slashdot, it doesn't give you the right, just a little voice with which you can ask nicely.
First off, AC's usually don't deserve a response, but this one is just off in left field.
Spirited Away is a _children's story_. You could let your 6-year-old watch this. So quit throwing around the 'japanese porno' catch-all description of anime. Yes, they do exist, but it's a relatively small segment of the market (in the US AND in Japan).
That's when Paul Allen decides he really wants a monorail and waves even more under their nose. I mean, cmon, wouldn't you want to have a monorail go right by your office?
(Paul Allen is a microsoft exec who owns a part of Seahawks Stadium, a big office complex across the street where I work, Experience Music Project in Seattle Center, and Allen Island out by the San Juans. In other words, a lot of big public landmarks)
You had to be pretty clueless to rent such a pair of movies. First, they had to be marked as rated R/ adults only. Second, adult anime is a pretty small genre compared to the whole of anime, just like the porno industry here is pretty small compared to hollywood.
Many animes do have sexual themes in them, even if they are not explicitly about sex. But they're usually well done and suggestive, just like sexual references are in everyday life.
Sounds like you just hit the wrong two rentals. Frankly, I doubt that you picked two adult-only rentals on accident; I think you knew what you were getting into (hardcore animated sex), but didn't realize how sick it would be.
Especially in laptops, aesthetics matter a lot. There's basically nothing in the market that matches the powerbook G4 in terms of display size/resolution (not to mention aspect ratio), size, weight, thickness, at any price point. I really like having a 15" screen at 5 lbs and 1 inch thick.
I also like that things 'just work'. I hook up a second monitor, and it automatically spans the desktop, remembers my resolution and color depth based on the monitors's PnP ID, and the wallpaper I assigned it last, and that I prefer my Dock on the monitor instead of built-in display.
Lastly, while I know we're not all keen on OSX here, I do think that OSX got the install process right. You drop a bundle into/Applications and all personal settings get put under ~/Library. This beats most windows installers by a long shot. Tons of Win32 apps use the registry or.ini' files in non-multi-user friendly ways.
The only place I feel like I got cheated on my powerbook is that the CPU (667) isn't as fast as the competition by ANY means. But it doesn't really matter when I'm not running a PSX emulator.
All of that said, I probably couldn't do with a Mac as my main computer. The lack of software choices is a big problem.
I totally agree. There's no reason that a game needs to be in 3d. Tons of good game genre's were based around 2d. Side-scrolling shooters and platformers, top-down adventure/RPG games were extremely fun. 3D games inevitably run into control and camera issues that 2d/top down games don't have.
If the 3d perspective doesn't add anything to the game, then don't use it.
As a side note, maybe the GBA is selling games left and right because there's no other handheld on the market, and certainly none that have the horsepower to emulate such games. It's not just because they are 2d, it's mainly because they're portable.
If the studios would lengthen the time between releasing a movie to theatres and releasing it to DVD, then they could get more people into the theatre. Unfortunately, you need to train people to expect a 1+ year (or 2 year?) delay for your blockbusters before this is effective, as you want them to go see it while it is still in theatres.
It seems that these days they want to milk the movie in the theatre and rush it to DVD - if they weren't so anxious to release the DVDs and beat out the other studios, then maybe we'd go see them in theatres while they're fresh. But for now, I'll just wait the 4 months until it's on DVD.
Owning a PowerbookG4 and thinkpad 600, I'll say flat-out that my Thinkpad is a more solid build. I'd wager thats sill true of the Thinkpad T-series - a friend has one and it seems rock-solid.
I've stood on the thing (by accident, of course) and done zero dmg to it. I'm fairly certain it could be dropped and turn out just fine. It's sturdy, only moderately heavy - around 6 lbs - and just generally feels like a tank. It just feels more solid - the lcd mount to the rest of the case never wiggles or wobbles, whereas my powerbooks screen bounces around if I shift my legs.
Maybe I think of it as tough because it's 4 years old and generally worthless now, but it's been thrown around the house a lot, and hasn't come up with any structure problems. And quiet too, but I guess thats to be expected from a P2-233. It's a shame it was just too underpowered for my uses.
I like a mouse and keyboard for FPS as well, but Halo with the X-box controller is a pretty good second. It takes all of a day to get used to it. My only complaint would be that it doesn't have trigger and shoulder buttons - I'd like to have both sticks usable at all times and more than just two buttons available to pull/push.
You can't really knock it until you try it. Split-screen, two people, is really fun. You can see each others views and play co-op through the campaign missions.
But hard drives don't work like this. The heads move to a radius, and the platters spin together. So you could only read/write simultaneously if the blocks you wanted to access were at the same angular positions. You might see a small performance boost if you treated the r/w head as master and let the other head read whenever it's sector's came up. But it'd have NOTHING over a mirrored raid solution. In fact, it would be worse with respect to reliability. More likelihood of a head crash, no redundance.
With proper branching in your source repository, you can isolate different areas of change, and thus keep build breakages limited to subsets of developers.
With regards to isolating who broke a build, that would require a clean build for each and every checkin, which just isn't practical in terms of hardware resources. A more practical solution is to grab tip, build, if fail -> indicate all checkins since last green build. This gives you a bigger culprit set, but it's MUCH cheaper in terms of hardware.
I think you're way off-base on the Code Review comment. At my job, code reviews take roughly 3-5% of the time I spend writing code, and very often find problems (in having my own code reviewed, or reviewing someone elses code).
And even if no bugs are found, it helps to have another pair of eyes go over code for readability. It may make sense to you, but it may not to someone else. When you leave and that code needs fixing, NOBODY will understand it because they don't have preconceived notions about how it operates.
The BEST thing you can do to improve quality of code, and of your developers, is to code review before every checkin. Find someone who is more/as intelligent as you, and have them scour your code while sitting next to you. At worst, they'll understand the code. At best, you'll find a bug before it goes out there, or you'll learn something new about the language/library you're using that you didn't know before.
If you read the whole book (Mythical Man Month), you'll find that he qualifies that by pointing out that some projects parallelize better than others. You can write the scheduling, GUI, and scsi drivers all pretty much separately, with non really affecting the other. That list can be expanded for sure.
To be truly accurate, we'd have to correlate the increase in developers with the increase in unrelated new features - they're not throwing more developers at existing problems, they're throwing new developers at new problems, which is perfectly fine.
Now, if a particular coupled set of features are late, throwing more manpower at them isn't necessarily a good idea.
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Used CD stores aren't stealing money from artists OR the RIAA OR the labels.
Used CD stores are a way for us, as consumers, to recoup our losses when we make a poor purchasing decision. If there was a way to 'rent' music (like movie rentals are now), or otherwise try it out first, we wouldn't have anywhere near the volume of used CD inventory that we do.
But, lack of rental abilities, pay-per-download, and poor variety on the airwaves means that often you have to buy-to-try. If you don't like the CD, you can resell it to anyone you like - including a used CD store - at any price they will offer.
I'm all about free (as in liberty) software -- and drivers are already free-as-in-beer. But aren't we missing something here? Why does it matter if you can't get a GPL driver for a closed proprietary piece of hardware?
I think if you're going to be an ass about the GPL-only software, you should be an ass about the hardware too. Hell, the BIOS on your motherboard probably isn't GPL, but you use it. The driver for your GeForce isn't too different, except it runs in the OS instead of below it.
Get off your high horse and put your money where your mouth is. Buy hardware that has GPL drivers, or live with what you have. So many other posters had it right - it's NOT wise for ATI and NVidia to put out GPL versions of their drivers, they obviously have a lot of trade secrets in there - have you seen the performance and features that they get between driver versions?
The best solution I've seen to this is to put a shim over the binary module. You recompile an interface layer to suit YOUR kernel. The interfaces aren't changing too often, and nobody that can put on the new kernel right away is looking for high-performance graphics and/or rock-solid stability.
"Dr McDonald said in teaching open-source platforms to students it is important not to "just ram open-source issues down their throats. It's important to explain why there is a difference in philosophy, why it's reasonable to not to totally tread the path of one particular vendor, one particular monopoly."
I wonder WHICH monopoly he refers to?
I think it's important to teach skills and not languages. The platform shouldn't really matter. But what I read there is "we're gonna teach non-proprietary solutions". I don't think the OS matters for the undergrads.
I learned programming on Solaris and later Linux, and honestly there's no real difference between them for 95% of what you do in school, since you are NOT administering the box, and the interesting tools are opensource, portable, and provided by the school - you just have to USE them. This probably holds true for BSD as well.
I do believe that we shouldn't be teaching kids to develop in MSVC++ and MFC. I think that's god-awful - we should learn to use makefiles and know the dependencies in our code, and not waste time on things that aren't portable to our jobs, on a yet-to-be-determined platform.
Isn't Ctrl-D bookmark? It is in IE and Netscape for Win32, at least. Why are you bookmarking penis enlargment sites?
You're spot-on. A real desktop OS needs a fully-accelerated GUI. I love X11 for some things, but it is NOT the best solution for a desktop. This is why I prefer to use Win32 or OSX for my headed machines and Xservers for the few linux tasks that I have.
It's still ridiculously difficult to make a linux desktop environment like KDE or Gnome look as pretty as Aqua or Windows out of the box. You have to fiddle with fonts, it's much slower, doesn't take advantage of hardware acceleration for 2D as well, all the apps look different and use their own widgets. "It Just Works" is pretty much the reason that people haven't widely adopted linux as their desktop of choice. Some corporations have, but thats a business decision based on support and/or licensing cost, not on personal preference.
It's flamebait because he knows it's not /.'s fault that his company filters it. Slashdot never promised to be safe enough for my company's filter or yours or anyone elses. And unless you're paying them for the service (which you probably aren't) then you don't have any right to say what they should or shouldn't put on the sight. Even if you DO pay for slashdot, it doesn't give you the right, just a little voice with which you can ask nicely.
First off, AC's usually don't deserve a response, but this one is just off in left field.
Spirited Away is a _children's story_. You could let your 6-year-old watch this. So quit throwing around the 'japanese porno' catch-all description of anime. Yes, they do exist, but it's a relatively small segment of the market (in the US AND in Japan).
That's TPS reports; didn't you get the memo?
That's when Paul Allen decides he really wants a monorail and waves even more under their nose. I mean, cmon, wouldn't you want to have a monorail go right by your office?
(Paul Allen is a microsoft exec who owns a part of Seahawks Stadium, a big office complex across the street where I work, Experience Music Project in Seattle Center, and Allen Island out by the San Juans. In other words, a lot of big public landmarks)
16.9 Megs is a SMALL app where I work. Consider yourself lucky.
>>(If this guy was any good, we'll find out that this British suspect was just a patsy)
Actually, if he was VERY good, that would be true but you wouldn't find it out.
You had to be pretty clueless to rent such a pair of movies. First, they had to be marked as rated R/ adults only. Second, adult anime is a pretty small genre compared to the whole of anime, just like the porno industry here is pretty small compared to hollywood.
Many animes do have sexual themes in them, even if they are not explicitly about sex. But they're usually well done and suggestive, just like sexual references are in everyday life.
Sounds like you just hit the wrong two rentals. Frankly, I doubt that you picked two adult-only rentals on accident; I think you knew what you were getting into (hardcore animated sex), but didn't realize how sick it would be.
I happen to think my powerbook is 'that good'.
/Applications and all personal settings get put under ~/Library. This beats most windows installers by a long shot. Tons of Win32 apps use the registry or .ini' files in non-multi-user friendly ways.
Especially in laptops, aesthetics matter a lot. There's basically nothing in the market that matches the powerbook G4 in terms of display size/resolution (not to mention aspect ratio), size, weight, thickness, at any price point. I really like having a 15" screen at 5 lbs and 1 inch thick.
I also like that things 'just work'. I hook up a second monitor, and it automatically spans the desktop, remembers my resolution and color depth based on the monitors's PnP ID, and the wallpaper I assigned it last, and that I prefer my Dock on the monitor instead of built-in display.
Lastly, while I know we're not all keen on OSX here, I do think that OSX got the install process right. You drop a bundle into
The only place I feel like I got cheated on my powerbook is that the CPU (667) isn't as fast as the competition by ANY means. But it doesn't really matter when I'm not running a PSX emulator.
All of that said, I probably couldn't do with a Mac as my main computer. The lack of software choices is a big problem.
I totally agree. There's no reason that a game needs to be in 3d. Tons of good game genre's were based around 2d. Side-scrolling shooters and platformers, top-down adventure/RPG games were extremely fun. 3D games inevitably run into control and camera issues that 2d/top down games don't have.
If the 3d perspective doesn't add anything to the game, then don't use it.
As a side note, maybe the GBA is selling games left and right because there's no other handheld on the market, and certainly none that have the horsepower to emulate such games. It's not just because they are 2d, it's mainly because they're portable.
Well, I wouldn't mind a little drive to see the same people they have on Girls Gone Wild. After all, it's only gas money.
But cops, on the other hand, I'll pass on. They film in redneck towns.
If the studios would lengthen the time between releasing a movie to theatres and releasing it to DVD, then they could get more people into the theatre. Unfortunately, you need to train people to expect a 1+ year (or 2 year?) delay for your blockbusters before this is effective, as you want them to go see it while it is still in theatres.
It seems that these days they want to milk the movie in the theatre and rush it to DVD - if they weren't so anxious to release the DVDs and beat out the other studios, then maybe we'd go see them in theatres while they're fresh. But for now, I'll just wait the 4 months until it's on DVD.
Owning a PowerbookG4 and thinkpad 600, I'll say flat-out that my Thinkpad is a more solid build. I'd wager thats sill true of the Thinkpad T-series - a friend has one and it seems rock-solid.
I've stood on the thing (by accident, of course) and done zero dmg to it. I'm fairly certain it could be dropped and turn out just fine. It's sturdy, only moderately heavy - around 6 lbs - and just generally feels like a tank. It just feels more solid - the lcd mount to the rest of the case never wiggles or wobbles, whereas my powerbooks screen bounces around if I shift my legs.
Maybe I think of it as tough because it's 4 years old and generally worthless now, but it's been thrown around the house a lot, and hasn't come up with any structure problems. And quiet too, but I guess thats to be expected from a P2-233. It's a shame it was just too underpowered for my uses.
Mod parent up :) I never had mod points when I need them.
I like a mouse and keyboard for FPS as well, but Halo with the X-box controller is a pretty good second. It takes all of a day to get used to it. My only complaint would be that it doesn't have trigger and shoulder buttons - I'd like to have both sticks usable at all times and more than just two buttons available to pull/push.
You can't really knock it until you try it. Split-screen, two people, is really fun. You can see each others views and play co-op through the campaign missions.
But hard drives don't work like this. The heads move to a radius, and the platters spin together. So you could only read/write simultaneously if the blocks you wanted to access were at the same angular positions. You might see a small performance boost if you treated the r/w head as master and let the other head read whenever it's sector's came up. But it'd have NOTHING over a mirrored raid solution. In fact, it would be worse with respect to reliability. More likelihood of a head crash, no redundance.
With proper branching in your source repository, you can isolate different areas of change, and thus keep build breakages limited to subsets of developers.
With regards to isolating who broke a build, that would require a clean build for each and every checkin, which just isn't practical in terms of hardware resources. A more practical solution is to grab tip, build, if fail -> indicate all checkins since last green build. This gives you a bigger culprit set, but it's MUCH cheaper in terms of hardware.
I think you're way off-base on the Code Review comment. At my job, code reviews take roughly 3-5% of the time I spend writing code, and very often find problems (in having my own code reviewed, or reviewing someone elses code).
And even if no bugs are found, it helps to have another pair of eyes go over code for readability. It may make sense to you, but it may not to someone else. When you leave and that code needs fixing, NOBODY will understand it because they don't have preconceived notions about how it operates.
The BEST thing you can do to improve quality of code, and of your developers, is to code review before every checkin. Find someone who is more/as intelligent as you, and have them scour your code while sitting next to you. At worst, they'll understand the code. At best, you'll find a bug before it goes out there, or you'll learn something new about the language/library you're using that you didn't know before.
If you read the whole book (Mythical Man Month), you'll find that he qualifies that by pointing out that some projects parallelize better than others. You can write the scheduling, GUI, and scsi drivers all pretty much separately, with non really affecting the other. That list can be expanded for sure.
To be truly accurate, we'd have to correlate the increase in developers with the increase in unrelated new features - they're not throwing more developers at existing problems, they're throwing new developers at new problems, which is perfectly fine.
Now, if a particular coupled set of features are late, throwing more manpower at them isn't necessarily a good idea.
Clearly, failing harddrive companies should turn to writing bloated sofware.
There's still an MS tax on the Xbox purchase. But Mr. Gates is paying it, they lose money on each one.
Thats the best kind of tax, after all.