A game environment doesn't limit you to a natural human's walking speed? The horror! Of all of the things to complain about with SL (the enormous resources required to run it, the chunky AI, the furries), you actually managed to latch on to the things that are probably good for the game. Being able to fly is the only reason anybody can get anywhere in the game, since vehicles are so dodgy and walking is so slow.
The basic graphics do look pretty bad, which is why it is so impressive when someone does make something that looks good.
Does LL even consider those activities "undesirable"? From what I've seen, the only thing they dislike is people ignoring the age ratings of the region they are in or crashing the server.
Except for the cybersex, I think the most popular feature about Secondlife is the ability to make something (art!), that will theoretically be seen by the masses. Of course the tools are crude and the service is slow, but the ability is there to make something cool and have it be explorable by people from all over the world.
Are you sure it wasn't just an experiment in injecting a social element back into online courses? I'm not sure it's a great idea, but I can see this being a help to those people who work better when there is peer pressure from other students.
Frankly, even if it didn't work, you have an amazing amount of vitriol over what seems like a reasonable experiment in sociology. I'm reasonably certain the instructor wasn't going to dress in a furry suit and force students to have cybersex or something. The only major concern I have with the experiment is that Secondlife is buggy and requires a powerful machine, so technical problems could easily interfere with the class, especially if the students are running on lower end hardware.
In a politics section you'll have people decrying your outright and blatent bias no matter what you do or how little bias you actually have. That's the way politics sections work, you decry their obvious bias in an effort to bias them.
As for which articles the Slashdot editors choose, it seems to be the ones designed to generate the most comment traffic. They may not be completely factual, but if they say something outrageous (Gnome is going to Qt!) then they're in. This is the same principle that most 24 hour news sites operate on, if it will draw viewers, put it on the air.
The problem of course is that PIO is expensive when you're driving a 1600x1200x24 display at 85Hz. Assuming you have a 32 bit processor, that much PIO would eat up 122.4 Mhz worth of your processor. That's a lot of CPU cycles, and that's the bare minimum, real life would be worse than that. Screen resolutions only go up with CPU speeds too, so you can't even wait for the CPUs to get fast enough to make this a non-issue.
I'd be surprised if they successfully move the graphics driver out of kernel space. It's so high throughput and performance critical that adding layers of indirection is just asking for slowdowns.
High end enthusiast cards like this tend to come at high end enthusiast price points. I wouldn't be surprised to see the 4870x2 in the $500-$600 range.
Why does it even need that? Just to milk businesses for more money? If the home user doesn't want to join a domain, well, they don't have to, but there's no reason to sell them the OS with those bits turned off except as a way of wringing more money out of business users. Same with services. Make it a checkbox on install and be done with it. If you really want to charge for an extra option, just make it a pay download or something so people can pick and choose what they need instead of having to pick up deluxe-ultimate for that one feature they needed over the bare-bones-basic version.
The big difference is that ZFS will be available in your lifetime (in fact it's available now!). WinFS is one of those features Microsoft has been promising since NT4 that has never worked out for them. Frankly, I'm not so sure it's a good idea anyway.
Unless you were buying it today, since only one of those boards can be bought by mere mortals at this point. You are correct however that the G280 is really looking like a Spruce Goose for nVidia right now. I guess the 8800GTX really was a hard act to follow.
Ebay has always had a solid financial base in taking a cut of every sale and not spending it on customer support or anything else. It's one of the few dot coms that was a smart investment way back in 2000, because they had a solid revenue stream that wasn't dependent on online advertising or other such voodoo sources.
Putting work data on a personal laptop often carries a lot of risk as well. Also, it's not always practical to buy a copy of your work applications for home use (who wants to install something like Opnet on a home machine), especially if the application has some sort of exotic license checking scheme (or even just flexlm).
If you do bring your work machine home regularly, then there is no excuse for not installing a product like Pointsec on it, and have some sort of off-machine backup solution. Frankly, laptop hard drives are flaky enough that you'd better have that backup solution anyway.
It's still pretty early in the lifetime to declare the SSD to be the "most reliable device". Granted, it's not that hard to be more reliable than a laptop HDD, but we don't have nearly as much data on SSDs (commercial notebook ones are barely a couple of years old).
Maybe Activision is bringing their genius management and support staff. I can't wait for Blizzard games to be pushed out the door in November 80% done and then never supported again.
I've tried using stuff like width: 80% and I have to say that CSS has some serious fundimental flaws that prevent it from being useful.
Say for instance you want a page with a layout like this: three boxes each 1/3 of the screen on one row on the top, and two boxes below them at 1/2 of the screen each. Both rows of boxes should occupy 50% of the vertical screen space. All percentage can be tweaked down just a touch to leave some room between the boxes. Try to create that webpage in XHTML + CSS without using tables for layout or absolute positioning. You'd think that would be a simple thing to do right? Turns out it's really difficult and getting it to work in all browsers is even harder. That's just one example as well, there are a lot of things CSS does surprisingly badly.
They open sourced the compiler (for C++, Java, and Python) that lets you actually use the data interchange format. If you follow the link you can download the code and start using it today. The code is open source.
The point of this isn't so much that it's faster than XML (so is everything else), it's that google took everything that a real person needs in a IDL and cut out everything else. Most IDLs have a serious case of second system effect, where features are added that nobody uses but seriously complicate the API. Even XML suffers from that (have you ever seen the kind of data structure you need to store a DOM, or what that does to library APIs for manipulating XML)?
I'd use it because 95% of the time all I need is something simple like this, and the other 5% of the time I should go back and rethink my design anyway.
That said, there is still a case for XML, especially the self documenting and human readable nature of the document, but there are a lot of cases where it is used today where it only adds unnecessary complexity and actually makes your code more difficult to maintain instead of simpler.
Slashdot Mirror
A game environment doesn't limit you to a natural human's walking speed? The horror! Of all of the things to complain about with SL (the enormous resources required to run it, the chunky AI, the furries), you actually managed to latch on to the things that are probably good for the game. Being able to fly is the only reason anybody can get anywhere in the game, since vehicles are so dodgy and walking is so slow.
The basic graphics do look pretty bad, which is why it is so impressive when someone does make something that looks good.
Does LL even consider those activities "undesirable"? From what I've seen, the only thing they dislike is people ignoring the age ratings of the region they are in or crashing the server.
Except for the cybersex, I think the most popular feature about Secondlife is the ability to make something (art!), that will theoretically be seen by the masses. Of course the tools are crude and the service is slow, but the ability is there to make something cool and have it be explorable by people from all over the world.
Are you sure it wasn't just an experiment in injecting a social element back into online courses? I'm not sure it's a great idea, but I can see this being a help to those people who work better when there is peer pressure from other students.
Frankly, even if it didn't work, you have an amazing amount of vitriol over what seems like a reasonable experiment in sociology. I'm reasonably certain the instructor wasn't going to dress in a furry suit and force students to have cybersex or something. The only major concern I have with the experiment is that Secondlife is buggy and requires a powerful machine, so technical problems could easily interfere with the class, especially if the students are running on lower end hardware.
Internet advertising in the year 2000? Voodoo was actually a pretty nice way of describing it.
In a politics section you'll have people decrying your outright and blatent bias no matter what you do or how little bias you actually have. That's the way politics sections work, you decry their obvious bias in an effort to bias them.
As for which articles the Slashdot editors choose, it seems to be the ones designed to generate the most comment traffic. They may not be completely factual, but if they say something outrageous (Gnome is going to Qt!) then they're in. This is the same principle that most 24 hour news sites operate on, if it will draw viewers, put it on the air.
The problem of course is that PIO is expensive when you're driving a 1600x1200x24 display at 85Hz. Assuming you have a 32 bit processor, that much PIO would eat up 122.4 Mhz worth of your processor. That's a lot of CPU cycles, and that's the bare minimum, real life would be worse than that. Screen resolutions only go up with CPU speeds too, so you can't even wait for the CPUs to get fast enough to make this a non-issue.
Maybe around where you live, around here asking for a Wii still gets you laughs from the salespeople.
I'd be surprised if they successfully move the graphics driver out of kernel space. It's so high throughput and performance critical that adding layers of indirection is just asking for slowdowns.
High end enthusiast cards like this tend to come at high end enthusiast price points. I wouldn't be surprised to see the 4870x2 in the $500-$600 range.
NT is already based around a microkernel, and all new versions of Windows are based on NT.
Why does it even need that? Just to milk businesses for more money? If the home user doesn't want to join a domain, well, they don't have to, but there's no reason to sell them the OS with those bits turned off except as a way of wringing more money out of business users. Same with services. Make it a checkbox on install and be done with it. If you really want to charge for an extra option, just make it a pay download or something so people can pick and choose what they need instead of having to pick up deluxe-ultimate for that one feature they needed over the bare-bones-basic version.
The big difference is that ZFS will be available in your lifetime (in fact it's available now!). WinFS is one of those features Microsoft has been promising since NT4 that has never worked out for them. Frankly, I'm not so sure it's a good idea anyway.
Unless you were buying it today, since only one of those boards can be bought by mere mortals at this point. You are correct however that the G280 is really looking like a Spruce Goose for nVidia right now. I guess the 8800GTX really was a hard act to follow.
1GB == 8Gb
Ebay has always had a solid financial base in taking a cut of every sale and not spending it on customer support or anything else. It's one of the few dot coms that was a smart investment way back in 2000, because they had a solid revenue stream that wasn't dependent on online advertising or other such voodoo sources.
I think you've missed the point of telecommuting, which after all was the entire reason this article exists in the first place.
Putting work data on a personal laptop often carries a lot of risk as well. Also, it's not always practical to buy a copy of your work applications for home use (who wants to install something like Opnet on a home machine), especially if the application has some sort of exotic license checking scheme (or even just flexlm).
If you do bring your work machine home regularly, then there is no excuse for not installing a product like Pointsec on it, and have some sort of off-machine backup solution. Frankly, laptop hard drives are flaky enough that you'd better have that backup solution anyway.
Well that and the administration ignored even the toothless oversight that the FISA courts provided.
Yeah, a great many shells scripts can be done in by simply putting spaces in your filenames. The builtin unix tools just handle spaces poorly.
It's still pretty early in the lifetime to declare the SSD to be the "most reliable device". Granted, it's not that hard to be more reliable than a laptop HDD, but we don't have nearly as much data on SSDs (commercial notebook ones are barely a couple of years old).
Maybe Activision is bringing their genius management and support staff. I can't wait for Blizzard games to be pushed out the door in November 80% done and then never supported again.
I've tried using stuff like width: 80% and I have to say that CSS has some serious fundimental flaws that prevent it from being useful.
Say for instance you want a page with a layout like this: three boxes each 1/3 of the screen on one row on the top, and two boxes below them at 1/2 of the screen each. Both rows of boxes should occupy 50% of the vertical screen space. All percentage can be tweaked down just a touch to leave some room between the boxes. Try to create that webpage in XHTML + CSS without using tables for layout or absolute positioning. You'd think that would be a simple thing to do right? Turns out it's really difficult and getting it to work in all browsers is even harder. That's just one example as well, there are a lot of things CSS does surprisingly badly.
They open sourced the compiler (for C++, Java, and Python) that lets you actually use the data interchange format. If you follow the link you can download the code and start using it today. The code is open source.
The point of this isn't so much that it's faster than XML (so is everything else), it's that google took everything that a real person needs in a IDL and cut out everything else. Most IDLs have a serious case of second system effect, where features are added that nobody uses but seriously complicate the API. Even XML suffers from that (have you ever seen the kind of data structure you need to store a DOM, or what that does to library APIs for manipulating XML)?
I'd use it because 95% of the time all I need is something simple like this, and the other 5% of the time I should go back and rethink my design anyway.
That said, there is still a case for XML, especially the self documenting and human readable nature of the document, but there are a lot of cases where it is used today where it only adds unnecessary complexity and actually makes your code more difficult to maintain instead of simpler.