If some re$ources get put behind proper games (e.g. Blizzard) in time to fend off the onslaught of f*cking Sims and footbal titles from EA, that's a GOOD THING.
Also, if a mysterious virus passed via game packaging suddenly wipes out the hordes of spotty drones who cluster around the whole shelves of EA Sims'n'Sports games at the local game store, that's an even BETTER THING.
Give gaming back to the geeks! And yes, MS are geeks.
Just keep buildin' and buyin' and throwin' away... keep the economy ticking over, keep the boys employed, keep suckin' up those natural resources... mm.
I still think that the most striking feature of this market is not so much the spread of Linux now -- after all, it offers obvious benefits -- as the fact that people are finally *stopping* spending huge amounts of money on Unix (read Sun) hardware.
I've occasionally had to do with projects where costs were reduced to 1/8 or so (yes, about what the article says) by replacing Sun with NT hardware. With hardware savings like that, it doesn't matter if you have a whole entire backup system with it's own set of staff.
What the popularity of Linux really means in money terms is that sites that kept spending millions a year on Sun, because of internal opposition to Microsoft, now have a politically correct way to buy cheap Intel hardware.
This is good. It's just a pity so many sites upgraded to ma$$ive Sun-hardware j2ee systems during the boom... it'll take forever to get rid of 'em all!
Yes, when I was a kid (80s) the Scientific American used to quite often have articles about new theories in how to launch nuclear strikes. The EMP idea was frequently put forward as a way to destroy communications and prevent a counterstrike, along with many fascinating theories on whether anything would survive the initial fallout from the EMP warheads, and whether a 95% reduction in the strength of the counterattack would allow anything to survive on the attacking side.
It was very depressing.
I'm glad we've forgotten all about that cold war stuff now, and just concentrate on going around starting fights while more and more countries build nuclear weapons.
...not so good against the USA's actual enemies, i.e. 20 beardy guys with assault rifles in a cave. Still, if war ever breaks out with Taiwan or Belgium or somewhere, these things will rock!
On the other hand, the scary robot plane in the picture is COOL.
The weird thing is, although pretty well 100% of the companies with silly business models, excessive amounts of venture capital, and offices with space invaders machines in went bust, quite a lot of imature, talentless 'jounalist' types who'd be dunked in the toilet daily at a real newspaper are still making a living on the web, typing rude words, giggling, and making fun of the few things they can find even less imposing than themselves.
I dunno why I mention this, I just suddenly thought of it for some reason:D
I've used a rigid, zero-feedback keyboard (a TouchStream prototype) quite a lot.
For typing tasks like programming and writing articles, it starts off mildly annoying and rapidly becomes agonizingly horrible. However, I was very impressed by the potential for non-typing input, e.g. gestures, dragging the mouse pointer without having to move your hand off the keyboard.
I think these boards would be great for the pda/cellphone market but for heavy workstation use it's just terrible ergonomics -- specially when the perfect keyboard already exists! That's the Kinesis Contour for those trapped in the land of flat keyboards.
The advantages of SVG
on
SVG On the Rise
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I (and thus my company) have found SVG to offer compelling advantages over existing formats. This is in the field of presenting financial data. The main advantages seem to be:
1 -- It's just XML. Whatever can emit XML can emit SVG, from a perl script to a huge j2ee system. Andthe perl script doesn't take long to write because SVG is a compact format that should be intuitive to anyone who understands scene graphs (and anyone else really).
2 -- It's scriptable and interactive. In fact, SVG has an object model that integrates with that of a web page. This makes it easy to provide interactive charts or SVG graphic elements that participate in navigation -- and they'll do the same thing whether they're hosted in a web page or in an application or whatever.
3 -- SVG is predictable and easy to handle. Bitmaps are horrible for presenting detailed technical data -- you can't zoom, you don't know how they'll print, you can't edit them easily when they're finished, they take up space. SVG is small, predictable, and can be 'fixed' by making changes to the text of the file.
4 -- SVG is accurate. It is easy to generate SVG according to precise algorithms and know that the SVG renderer will draw the resulting lines in a predictable way. You do not have scaling/rasterizing issues (at least not as much).
Overall, we have found SVG to be easy to teach, easy to distribute, and produce very good-looking and interactive results. I think it's a big, serious advance in presenting complex data, especially if you need to present it over the web or interactively. I do not see SVG as a replacement for Flash/other pretty picture formats, I see it as a replacement for.gif charts and.ps files, and it does very very well in this role.
It's also a geek-freindly technology -- lots of cool filter toys, easy to integrate with your silly scripting language of choice. I love it:)
In Korea (and actually Japan) there's an expression 'legs on a snake', meaning a completely useless and pointless addition.
Now, maybe I'll go play a little Angband, or Crawl, perhaps Omega. To us old-timers, 'D' means a terrifying ancient dragon, whereas a 32x32 bitmap of a dragon means 'silly':)
Intel doesn't need to keep spending money researching new chips if it's current generation are so far ahead of its competitors.
The thing is, this isn't a chip technology race. It's a chip fabrication/distribution/pricing race.
Intel's chips are not technologically superior to AMDs (I know Intel has some major technology assets, but they mostly don't affect the chips in production now). On the other hand, Intel's capital, fabrication capacity, distribution, and market clout are far superior to AMDs. Intel is concentrating on the areas where it has the advantage, which are also the decisive areas.
If only this *was* a technology race. But that's market forces for you.
So, Apple decided not to take on the considerable risk of being seen to sponsor music piracy.
Sounds reasonable.
Now, this is a more interesting question: why do some people believe that Apple had a responsibility to risk it's neck so you can download tunez more easily? Why do some people believe that just because Apple sold a certain product, they must have a responsibility to provide other things, such as use of their software for music distribution, too?
I'm not sure about the answer... I expect it's something depressing.
I don't have any opinions either way on the 'Oh No The Cheap Labor Is Coming' issue, but I have worked with Wipro quite a lot -- in fact I've worked for two large companies that outsourced large amounts of labor to Wipro.
In both cases, the result was terrible -- Wipro sent out terribly nice and bright people with no knowledge of what they could expect in real world business at all, paid them nothing and treated them like medieval serfs.
Naturally the quality of their work was somewhere between 'bad' and 'actually worse than if nobody had done it at all'. Not the fault of the programmers, just a natural result of the silly business model. By the time both companies learned what tasks could be given to Wipro and which ones couldn't, both companies had lost huge sums of money, both in fees paid to Wipro and in the various disasters caused by frightened Wipro serfs.
What particularly struck me was the indifference Wipro showed to its own employees. On the other hand, I've also dealt with some semi-cheap labor outsourced from eastern europe and it worked out very well because the outsourcing company cared about what it was doing.
The story is not 'Cheap countries benefit at expense of US!' so much as 'Nasty outsourcing companies benefit at the expense of everybody else, until people get wise to them!'
In my experience, publishers do lots of work, but most of it involves *competing with other publishers*, which benefits neither the author nor the readers (nor even the publishers themselves, ultimately).
Actually, I suspect there are a lot of businesses like that.
I've occasionally wondered if the very rapid spread of Japanese characters (as in anime and game characters) through US and European culture has been connected with the loose way Japanese companies tend to enforce character copyrights.
If you want to dress up as Mickey Mouse or paint Mickey Mouse on your garage or write a story about Mickey Mouse skateboarding through Tibet and post it on the internet, you can't -- you'll get a sharp letter about it followed by nuclear legal action. This tends to mean that US characters penetrate only as far as the commercial level, and not to the hobbyist/cultist/otaku level.
By contrast, if you want to paint Sailor Moon on the side of your ice cream truck or make your own Sailor Moon video or, god help you, dress up as Sailor Moon, then that's fine. As a result, Japan is awash with images of all the famous Japanese characters, and the penetration of these characters into individual lives is (tragically) very high.
If the Mouse was similarly accessible, American toons could well have displaced Japanese ones even in Japan.
The point about this judgement is that it creates a firm precedent for extending copyright. Therefore, copyright can be extended again next time it starts to run out. It will always be in the interests of Disney et al to keep their copyrights; therefore, it may well be that no copyright will ever expire again, any more.
This is *one* of the reasons that this judgement is such a setback for the Forces o'Good (tm).
Please do not assume that just because civil rights people are getting riled up, they must automatically be getting riled up about nothing.
The judiciary is certainly the least venial of the three branches of the US government. It is sad to see it going the way of the executive and legislative brances, but there ya go.
Yay ruby.
Activescript's thing of separating the functionalityh exposed by an application from the language used to script it was groundbreaking, but the interfaces aren't exactly things you can pick up and use in a day... I wonder if.NET will supply anything.
I like it when a news source quotes it's own reporters for use as supporting material. And as a red-blooded American, I just can't wait to get home and fire up the pollution machine I've got rigged up on my roof. Puh-leeez.
Don't we care about if things are *good* anymore?
on
Why not Ruby?
·
· Score: 1
So many of these responses seem to be on the lines of 'It can't help me make money'.
For me, Ruby is the language which, after many years with C++, Java, VB(ahem), and Perl, finally made programming fun again. The sense of power I felt when I realised how flexible, orthogonal, and expandable the Ruby package was, was just like using C for the very first time!
Of course, I could have experienced that flexibility and orthogonality by using Smalltalk or one of those other academic languages. But the real power of Ruby is that you get all that stuff, but you can still do actual useful things with it that get results.
Within minutes (quite a lot of minutes, but hey) of compilation on my W2K box, I was scripting MS Office, bringing up a TK GUI, calling native C code, and animating a web page, all in Ruby -- and simultaneously I was coming to terms with the fact that at last I was doing all this in a language that was actually fun.
Oh yes.
BEGIN NITPICK
That said, considering that the language originates in Japan, it's quite wonderful how appalling the internationalization features are. If you want to use any calendar or character encoding other than the ones it comes with, you are f***ed, and even THEN it sticks to this weird-ass 'one byte == one character' belief.
Slashdot Mirror
If some re$ources get put behind proper games (e.g. Blizzard) in time to fend off the onslaught of f*cking Sims and footbal titles from EA, that's a GOOD THING.
Also, if a mysterious virus passed via game packaging suddenly wipes out the hordes of spotty drones who cluster around the whole shelves of EA Sims'n'Sports games at the local game store, that's an even BETTER THING.
Give gaming back to the geeks! And yes, MS are geeks.
I think they're trying to make it look like an SUV. They just couldn't make it an actual SUV because they're being 'green'.
Just keep buildin' and buyin' and throwin' away... keep the economy ticking over, keep the boys employed, keep suckin' up those natural resources... mm.
I still think that the most striking feature of this market is not so much the spread of Linux now -- after all, it offers obvious benefits -- as the fact that people are finally *stopping* spending huge amounts of money on Unix (read Sun) hardware.
I've occasionally had to do with projects where costs were reduced to 1/8 or so (yes, about what the article says) by replacing Sun with NT hardware. With hardware savings like that, it doesn't matter if you have a whole entire backup system with it's own set of staff.
What the popularity of Linux really means in money terms is that sites that kept spending millions a year on Sun, because of internal opposition to Microsoft, now have a politically correct way to buy cheap Intel hardware.
This is good. It's just a pity so many sites upgraded to ma$$ive Sun-hardware j2ee systems during the boom... it'll take forever to get rid of 'em all!
Yes, when I was a kid (80s) the Scientific American used to quite often have articles about new theories in how to launch nuclear strikes. The EMP idea was frequently put forward as a way to destroy communications and prevent a counterstrike, along with many fascinating theories on whether anything would survive the initial fallout from the EMP warheads, and whether a 95% reduction in the strength of the counterattack would allow anything to survive on the attacking side.
It was very depressing.
I'm glad we've forgotten all about that cold war stuff now, and just concentrate on going around starting fights while more and more countries build nuclear weapons.
On the other hand, the scary robot plane in the picture is COOL.
The weird thing is, although pretty well 100% of the companies with silly business models, excessive amounts of venture capital, and offices with space invaders machines in went bust, quite a lot of imature, talentless 'jounalist' types who'd be dunked in the toilet daily at a real newspaper are still making a living on the web, typing rude words, giggling, and making fun of the few things they can find even less imposing than themselves.
:D
I dunno why I mention this, I just suddenly thought of it for some reason
I've used a rigid, zero-feedback keyboard (a TouchStream prototype) quite a lot.
For typing tasks like programming and writing articles, it starts off mildly annoying and rapidly becomes agonizingly horrible. However, I was very impressed by the potential for non-typing input, e.g. gestures, dragging the mouse pointer without having to move your hand off the keyboard.
I think these boards would be great for the pda/cellphone market but for heavy workstation use it's just terrible ergonomics -- specially when the perfect keyboard already exists! That's the Kinesis Contour for those trapped in the land of flat keyboards.
I (and thus my company) have found SVG to offer compelling advantages over existing formats. This is in the field of presenting financial data. The main advantages seem to be:
.gif charts and .ps files, and it does very very well in this role.
:)
1 -- It's just XML. Whatever can emit XML can emit SVG, from a perl script to a huge j2ee system. Andthe perl script doesn't take long to write because SVG is a compact format that should be intuitive to anyone who understands scene graphs (and anyone else really).
2 -- It's scriptable and interactive. In fact, SVG has an object model that integrates with that of a web page. This makes it easy to provide interactive charts or SVG graphic elements that participate in navigation -- and they'll do the same thing whether they're hosted in a web page or in an application or whatever.
3 -- SVG is predictable and easy to handle. Bitmaps are horrible for presenting detailed technical data -- you can't zoom, you don't know how they'll print, you can't edit them easily when they're finished, they take up space. SVG is small, predictable, and can be 'fixed' by making changes to the text of the file.
4 -- SVG is accurate. It is easy to generate SVG according to precise algorithms and know that the SVG renderer will draw the resulting lines in a predictable way. You do not have scaling/rasterizing issues (at least not as much).
Overall, we have found SVG to be easy to teach, easy to distribute, and produce very good-looking and interactive results. I think it's a big, serious advance in presenting complex data, especially if you need to present it over the web or interactively. I do not see SVG as a replacement for Flash/other pretty picture formats, I see it as a replacement for
It's also a geek-freindly technology -- lots of cool filter toys, easy to integrate with your silly scripting language of choice. I love it
Actually, I'm thinking of a 2-kanji word. It could be an abbreviation of one of those 4-kanji proverbs, though.
:)
Ten men, ten colors, after all
In Korea (and actually Japan) there's an expression 'legs on a snake', meaning a completely useless and pointless addition.
:)
Now, maybe I'll go play a little Angband, or Crawl, perhaps Omega. To us old-timers, 'D' means a terrifying ancient dragon, whereas a 32x32 bitmap of a dragon means 'silly'
Ah, but this is a *java* webserver with okay performance. And *that's* quite a big deal :)
(This space left blank for Java evangelists to
rage in).
Seriously, this article was the first time it ever occurred to me that MOV might be a more obvious way to clear a register.
Now I'm afraid that there are legions of people out there zeroing registers with MOV and I'm left out.
It's not; the limiting factor is disk speed, not connection speed, and that's likely to stay true for a long time.
This is just an iteration of the general serial-parallell-serial alternation that comms technologies tend to go through.
The thing is, this isn't a chip technology race. It's a chip fabrication/distribution/pricing race.
Intel's chips are not technologically superior to AMDs (I know Intel has some major technology assets, but they mostly don't affect the chips in production now). On the other hand, Intel's capital, fabrication capacity, distribution, and market clout are far superior to AMDs. Intel is concentrating on the areas where it has the advantage, which are also the decisive areas.
If only this *was* a technology race. But that's market forces for you.
So, Apple decided not to take on the considerable risk of being seen to sponsor music piracy.
Sounds reasonable.
Now, this is a more interesting question: why do some people believe that Apple had a responsibility to risk it's neck so you can download tunez more easily? Why do some people believe that just because Apple sold a certain product, they must have a responsibility to provide other things, such as use of their software for music distribution, too?
I'm not sure about the answer... I expect it's something depressing.
I don't have any opinions either way on the 'Oh No The Cheap Labor Is Coming' issue, but I have worked with Wipro quite a lot -- in fact I've worked for two large companies that outsourced large amounts of labor to Wipro.
In both cases, the result was terrible -- Wipro sent out terribly nice and bright people with no knowledge of what they could expect in real world business at all, paid them nothing and treated them like medieval serfs.
Naturally the quality of their work was somewhere between 'bad' and 'actually worse than if nobody had done it at all'. Not the fault of the programmers, just a natural result of the silly business model. By the time both companies learned what tasks could be given to Wipro and which ones couldn't, both companies had lost huge sums of money, both in fees paid to Wipro and in the various disasters caused by frightened Wipro serfs.
What particularly struck me was the indifference Wipro showed to its own employees. On the other hand, I've also dealt with some semi-cheap labor outsourced from eastern europe and it worked out very well because the outsourcing company cared about what it was doing.
The story is not 'Cheap countries benefit at expense of US!' so much as 'Nasty outsourcing companies benefit at the expense of everybody else, until people get wise to them!'
In my experience, publishers do lots of work, but most of it involves *competing with other publishers*, which benefits neither the author nor the readers (nor even the publishers themselves, ultimately).
Actually, I suspect there are a lot of businesses like that.
I've occasionally wondered if the very rapid spread of Japanese characters (as in anime and game characters) through US and European culture has been connected with the loose way Japanese companies tend to enforce character copyrights.
If you want to dress up as Mickey Mouse or paint Mickey Mouse on your garage or write a story about Mickey Mouse skateboarding through Tibet and post it on the internet, you can't -- you'll get a sharp letter about it followed by nuclear legal action. This tends to mean that US characters penetrate only as far as the commercial level, and not to the hobbyist/cultist/otaku level.
By contrast, if you want to paint Sailor Moon on the side of your ice cream truck or make your own Sailor Moon video or, god help you, dress up as Sailor Moon, then that's fine. As a result, Japan is awash with images of all the famous Japanese characters, and the penetration of these characters into individual lives is (tragically) very high.
If the Mouse was similarly accessible, American toons could well have displaced Japanese ones even in Japan.
Yes, ever.
The point about this judgement is that it creates a firm precedent for extending copyright. Therefore, copyright can be extended again next time it starts to run out. It will always be in the interests of Disney et al to keep their copyrights; therefore, it may well be that no copyright will ever expire again, any more.
This is *one* of the reasons that this judgement is such a setback for the Forces o'Good (tm).
Please do not assume that just because civil rights people are getting riled up, they must automatically be getting riled up about nothing.
The judiciary is certainly the least venial of the three branches of the US government. It is sad to see it going the way of the executive and legislative brances, but there ya go.
Yay ruby. .NET will supply anything.
Activescript's thing of separating the functionalityh exposed by an application from the language used to script it was groundbreaking, but the interfaces aren't exactly things you can pick up and use in a day... I wonder if
...so why do I care about *this*?
For me, Ruby is the language which, after many years with C++, Java, VB(ahem), and Perl, finally made programming fun again. The sense of power I felt when I realised how flexible, orthogonal, and expandable the Ruby package was, was just like using C for the very first time!
Of course, I could have experienced that flexibility and orthogonality by using Smalltalk or one of those other academic languages. But the real power of Ruby is that you get all that stuff, but you can still do actual useful things with it that get results.
Within minutes (quite a lot of minutes, but hey) of compilation on my W2K box, I was scripting MS Office, bringing up a TK GUI, calling native C code, and animating a web page, all in Ruby -- and simultaneously I was coming to terms with the fact that at last I was doing all this in a language that was actually fun.
Oh yes.
BEGIN NITPICK
That said, considering that the language originates in Japan, it's quite wonderful how appalling the internationalization features are. If you want to use any calendar or character encoding other than the ones it comes with, you are f***ed, and even THEN it sticks to this weird-ass 'one byte == one character' belief.
This is being fixed in version 1.7 -- badly.
Still love it, though.
END NITPICK