Our lead developer "needed" a quad-processor server ($25,000) just to do.Net development, while I set up a linux server on an old Pentium II at zero cost and ran one of our web apps from there in Java.
Then your lead developer's clueless: one of my ASP.NET test machines is a P2-233 and it runs fine. It shakes a bit if you hit the database hard but it's an old desktop recycled and was never built as a DB server (ATA-33, not enough RAM, etc.) On the other hand, he may have just made excuses to get cool new kit and I can understand that:-)
IMO pure web front-ends are evil anyway - you have to make too many usability compromises to map the usual UI controls into HTML. I'd using a lightweight.NET forms interface on top of.NET's built-in RPC to webservices (which is excellent) - but in that case you could also use X, I suppose, if you're willing to install linux everywhere or buy Exceed licences and re-educate your users.
But you haven't told us what your apps are. GUI apps for a small audience? for Joe Public? Server daemons? Web front-end? Some things are well suited to be re-done in Linux, some aren't. And if you're already in an MS-shop then.NET is a shorter, safer-looking hop than to Linux.
that.Net is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
In fairness, ASP.NET is really very good. Don't know the forms stuff.
Politicians and decision makers who have never did any service AND play PC games...?
Well, their children or grandchildren do. And the media have taken an interest in the game so the army's profile has gone up. And one day *this* generation, raised on video games, will be in power - and they'll bring with them the opinions they formed now.
(The 'have never did' was a mis-edit:-p I typed 'have never done' then meant to change it to 'never did'.)
If it was not a recruitment tool, it would be a waste of taxpayer's money.
There's also the general PR role - promote general interest and awareness of the army, especially amongst politicians and decision makers who have never did any service.
its only been in the test for a few years though i think so there hasn't been a noticable effect yet. judging from where i work (chocca with student cars) people's ability to parallel park varies greatly.:D
Back in my day, '94, you got any two of parallel parking, reverse around a corner or three-point turn.
But it's like anything else you learn - I crammed it for the test but I've probably lost it because I don't get any practice. I've a garage at home and I use a car park for the shops and station. I think I've done maybe two parallel parks in the last five years.
(As an aside, I'm highly amused that you think the Whitehouse should be under a.com TLD. You cheeky liberal, you!)
Yeah, but people do pick the wrong TLD. whitehouse.org, one of the better parodies, gets lots of feedback from people who think it's the real thing - e.g. over the recent immigration policy (parody here).
It may well allow them to put a stop to the old trick of soldering in a new bios chip that takes precedence over the onboard bios,
Uh, no. You put code in the chip to load the EFI code from disk and then, before executing it, patch out the anti-pirate functions and self checksums.
If you can control what gets executed first, you win. Now if they move the EFI framework inside the CPU silicon then they've pretty much won, but at the cost of flexibility of the CPU and nightmare EFI code updates.
well, except for the API change from 95 to 95 w/USB, 95 to 98, 98 to 98SE, 98SE to ME.
I don't know the video interface well, but the networking changes are simple, backward compatible evolutions of the old interface.
Around 98, ME and 2K the driver interfaces for the 9x line and NT line converged. Unfortunately, the kernel interfaces for drivers diverged slightly (e.g. paged memory allocation) - you could use ME drivers on 2k but the kernel spits warnings at you when you fire it up in debug mode.
Every different card line however, requries a different underlying layer to handle all the little tweaks and get maximium performance. Its not nearly as simple as you think.
OK, but they can lift this out of their Windows drivers.
I used to work for a network card manufacturer, and we wrote our drivers in three layers: OS-specific hardware interface layer, general card control layer, OS-specific API. So once we'd got the top and bottom layers right, we got all any fixes and improvements in the card control logic across all OSes for free.
NVidia are big on their "unified driver architecture" and stuff so I'd be very surprised if they didn't do it this way too. So all they need to do is to swap the Linux glue layers into their latest Windows drivers and recompile.
The problem with the Human Pac-man is that the human body can only consume about 6lbs of food per sitting.
Robert "Kryten" Llewellyn investigated this in the BBC's Hollywood Science:
"In The Great Outdoors John Candy eats a 96-ounce steak. Well, we made the equivalent weight in hamburgers - 26 massive burgers. I ate two and half pounds (40 ounces) of the stuff . The first two were quite nice but after that... my jaw ached for days from all the chewing..."
I can't really remember the show but I think they also made a model approximating John Candy's stomach and filled that with steak and fluid to also show it wouldn't work.
I don't know how tough it is to convince them to sell you a MSDN subscription, but it seems like anyone developing anything like software has a subscription. Of course, they usually have only one subscription, and they install the software everywhere, but that's their decision I guess.
It's not tough - anyone can buy an MSDN subscription.
But you should become a Microsoft Certified Partner. You need to put a couple of staff through MS exams but then it's roughly $1600 a year for a 5+-seat licence for MSDN Universal plus software licences for production use too (you're not supposed to use Exchange from MSDN for your live mailserver, etc.). Well worth it if you develop for Windows.
I wish people would stop fighting over which stupid video card is better than which other stupid video card.
The faster and further they push the bleeding edge the better affordable cards for we masses will get. (Assuming they can keep handing the R&D costs off to the early adopters, that is.)
This "loss" will help Microsoft plug huge security holes in IE
On the user-experience page linked there are patent-friendly' ways to work around the ruling. The only differences you'll see are if the designers don't edit their pages to be patent-friendly - or if you've got ActiveX enabled and Javascript disabled.
Why can't Microsoft just licence the patent? Its interesting to see to matter what happens and what it costs microsoft will aways prefer to get round something that pay for it, even if it would be cheaper to pay for it.
They're still appealing againts the ruling. Perhaps they'll licence it if they lose.
But if MS win, there may be a good legal precedent that judges can use to throw out other unreasonable software patents. I'm pleased they're pouring money into that.
the first 2 or 3 minutes of using Windows involves blinking hourglasses and a constantly churning hard drive
You almost certainly need more RAM. One of our servers did this and we found it was loading ~1Gb of services into swap. Now we have a motherboard that takes more RAM it gets a desktop in 20 secs or so.
In other words, it loads everything AFTER you login, no joke;)
No, it doesn't - it offers you the login prompt whilst it's still loading services. But it does finish loading most / all the services before it'll give you a desktop.
If you left it for a minute or so and *then* logged in it'll go straight in.
plus you dont have a windows and linux versions, you have BOTH damn binaries on the same CD, unless your a clueless manager that has some anal marketing reason for it.
e.g. you'd have to slip the product launch date because you really needed more than one Linux guy? That's a huge deal.
Assuming the shipping date does not change (and, other than editorials there is no indication it will), the version they used is most probably the final one the publishers have, giving them a couple of days to ok the product for duplication.
Well, sounds like it's the developers running these test. And it sounds to me this a show-stopper performance problem - they'll alienate the huge NVidia-owning fraction of the market. Unless they're in bed with ATI (or they haven't got on with NVidia developer relations) and these are unrealistic tests.
Could you redesign this with a manual push mechanism? Neat though this is, if I were disabled I'd prefer to push myself. Mostly for exercise - I'm young, why let the rest of me rot? But also in case of mechanical / battery failure, etc.
Does this gyro technology work at any speed or is it kept it on a smooth motor to avoid overstretching it? Could you make a push-scooter Segway?
It's a good, fun game. There's no steep learning curve and it's addictive. You'll get more play time from it than you will from some full-priced games. It's professionally done (they worked for the ill-fated Rage before they set up on their own).
Surely the objective C pre-processor would turn the O-C into POB-C (plain old boring C) and then IBM's C compiler would take over?
I don't know what Apple ship but the standard GCC Objective C front-end talks directly to the optimization and code generation back-end rather than via C code.
It is possible to write a C-generating back end (some Sun guy did it) but this is discouraged by RMS; he's worried that it would let compiler vendors use GCC as a preprocessor to get extra optimization passes for free without having to link it into their closed-source compiler and so accept the GPL.
he didn't even do a survey of available processors (forget including non-Intel architecures)
because he wants to run Fritz and that's Intel only.
I don't know if its the strongest engine around but Fritz has excellent database and game analysis features and they've a quote from Kasparov that says he uses Fritz for analysis.
Perhaps the maps weren't quite complete when it came time to release to manufacturing but weren't worth holding the release up for. So they dumped whatever version they had on the game disk so they could just issue a small patch later to put the fixed maps live.
I'm not sure if I believe this or not. If they'd already implemented an after-the-fact level patch system (and it'd be a sensible thing to do) then this would be a no-brainer. But if they hadn't, it would be a lot of work to save everyone a bit of download.
Haven't the XBox hacking lot already worked out if the content is on the disk?
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Our lead developer "needed" a quad-processor server ($25,000) just to do .Net development, while I set up a linux server on an old Pentium II at zero cost and ran one of our web apps from there in Java.
:-)
.NET forms interface on top of .NET's built-in RPC to webservices (which is excellent) - but in that case you could also use X, I suppose, if you're willing to install linux everywhere or buy Exceed licences and re-educate your users.
Then your lead developer's clueless: one of my ASP.NET test machines is a P2-233 and it runs fine. It shakes a bit if you hit the database hard but it's an old desktop recycled and was never built as a DB server (ATA-33, not enough RAM, etc.) On the other hand, he may have just made excuses to get cool new kit and I can understand that
IMO pure web front-ends are evil anyway - you have to make too many usability compromises to map the usual UI controls into HTML. I'd using a lightweight
But you haven't told us what your apps are. GUI apps for a small audience? for Joe Public? Server daemons? Web front-end? Some things are well suited to be re-done in Linux, some aren't. And if you're already in an MS-shop then .NET is a shorter, safer-looking hop than to Linux.
.Net is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
that
In fairness, ASP.NET is really very good. Don't know the forms stuff.
Politicians and decision makers who have never did any service AND play PC games...?
:-p I typed 'have never done' then meant to change it to 'never did'.)
Well, their children or grandchildren do. And the media have taken an interest in the game so the army's profile has gone up. And one day *this* generation, raised on video games, will be in power - and they'll bring with them the opinions they formed now.
(The 'have never did' was a mis-edit
If it was not a recruitment tool, it would be a waste of taxpayer's money.
There's also the general PR role - promote general interest and awareness of the army, especially amongst politicians and decision makers who have never did any service.
its only been in the test for a few years though i think so there hasn't been a noticable effect yet. judging from where i work (chocca with student cars) people's ability to parallel park varies greatly. :D
Back in my day, '94, you got any two of parallel parking, reverse around a corner or three-point turn.
But it's like anything else you learn - I crammed it for the test but I've probably lost it because I don't get any practice. I've a garage at home and I use a car park for the shops and station. I think I've done maybe two parallel parks in the last five years.
(As an aside, I'm highly amused that you think the Whitehouse should be under a .com TLD. You cheeky liberal, you!)
Yeah, but people do pick the wrong TLD. whitehouse.org, one of the better parodies, gets lots of feedback from people who think it's the real thing - e.g. over the recent immigration policy (parody here).
It may well allow them to put a stop to the old trick of soldering in a new bios chip that takes precedence over the onboard bios,
Uh, no. You put code in the chip to load the EFI code from disk and then, before executing it, patch out the anti-pirate functions and self checksums.
If you can control what gets executed first, you win. Now if they move the EFI framework inside the CPU silicon then they've pretty much won, but at the cost of flexibility of the CPU and nightmare EFI code updates.
well, except for the API change from 95 to 95 w/USB, 95 to 98, 98 to 98SE, 98SE to ME.
I don't know the video interface well, but the networking changes are simple, backward compatible evolutions of the old interface.
Around 98, ME and 2K the driver interfaces for the 9x line and NT line converged. Unfortunately, the kernel interfaces for drivers diverged slightly (e.g. paged memory allocation) - you could use ME drivers on 2k but the kernel spits warnings at you when you fire it up in debug mode.
Every different card line however, requries a different underlying layer to handle all the little tweaks and get maximium performance. Its not nearly as simple as you think.
OK, but they can lift this out of their Windows drivers.
I used to work for a network card manufacturer, and we wrote our drivers in three layers: OS-specific hardware interface layer, general card control layer, OS-specific API. So once we'd got the top and bottom layers right, we got all any fixes and improvements in the card control logic across all OSes for free.
NVidia are big on their "unified driver architecture" and stuff so I'd be very surprised if they didn't do it this way too. So all they need to do is to swap the Linux glue layers into their latest Windows drivers and recompile.
Robert "Kryten" Llewellyn investigated this in the BBC's Hollywood Science:
I can't really remember the show but I think they also made a model approximating John Candy's stomach and filled that with steak and fluid to also show it wouldn't work.
I don't know how tough it is to convince them to sell you a MSDN subscription, but it seems like anyone developing anything like software has a subscription. Of course, they usually have only one subscription, and they install the software everywhere, but that's their decision I guess.
It's not tough - anyone can buy an MSDN subscription.
But you should become a Microsoft Certified Partner. You need to put a couple of staff through MS exams but then it's roughly $1600 a year for a 5+-seat licence for MSDN Universal plus software licences for production use too (you're not supposed to use Exchange from MSDN for your live mailserver, etc.). Well worth it if you develop for Windows.
I wish people would stop fighting over which stupid video card is better than which other stupid video card.
The faster and further they push the bleeding edge the better affordable cards for we masses will get. (Assuming they can keep handing the R&D costs off to the early adopters, that is.)
There are American football Leagues in Europe???
I think they're talking about basketball. But there *is* an American Football World League with teams across Europe.
This "loss" will help Microsoft plug huge security holes in IE
On the user-experience page linked there are patent-friendly' ways to work around the ruling. The only differences you'll see are if the designers don't edit their pages to be patent-friendly - or if you've got ActiveX enabled and Javascript disabled.
Why can't Microsoft just licence the patent? Its interesting to see to matter what happens and what it costs microsoft will aways prefer to get round something that pay for it, even if it would be cheaper to pay for it.
They're still appealing againts the ruling. Perhaps they'll licence it if they lose.
But if MS win, there may be a good legal precedent that judges can use to throw out other unreasonable software patents. I'm pleased they're pouring money into that.
the first 2 or 3 minutes of using Windows involves blinking hourglasses and a constantly churning hard drive
You almost certainly need more RAM. One of our servers did this and we found it was loading ~1Gb of services into swap. Now we have a motherboard that takes more RAM it gets a desktop in 20 secs or so.
In other words, it loads everything AFTER you login, no joke;)
No, it doesn't - it offers you the login prompt whilst it's still loading services. But it does finish loading most / all the services before it'll give you a desktop.
If you left it for a minute or so and *then* logged in it'll go straight in.
plus you dont have a windows and linux versions, you have BOTH damn binaries on the same CD, unless your a clueless manager that has some anal marketing reason for it.
e.g. you'd have to slip the product launch date because you really needed more than one Linux guy? That's a huge deal.
Assuming the shipping date does not change (and, other than editorials there is no indication it will), the version they used is most probably the final one the publishers have, giving them a couple of days to ok the product for duplication.
Well, sounds like it's the developers running these test. And it sounds to me this a show-stopper performance problem - they'll alienate the huge NVidia-owning fraction of the market. Unless they're in bed with ATI (or they haven't got on with NVidia developer relations) and these are unrealistic tests.
This is a worthwhile goal. Certainly the device would sell millions.
I agree - but you've got to do it fast while portable DVD players are still way expensive.
There's not a huge cost difference between CD drives and DVD drives, DVD's already an established format and DVD decoder chips will be as cheap soon.
Could you redesign this with a manual push mechanism? Neat though this is, if I were disabled I'd prefer to push myself. Mostly for exercise - I'm young, why let the rest of me rot? But also in case of mechanical / battery failure, etc.
Does this gyro technology work at any speed or is it kept it on a smooth motor to avoid overstretching it? Could you make a push-scooter Segway?
Are you saying that's too much?
It's a good, fun game. There's no steep learning curve and it's addictive. You'll get more play time from it than you will from some full-priced games. It's professionally done (they worked for the ill-fated Rage before they set up on their own).
What's your complaint?
Surely the objective C pre-processor would turn the O-C into POB-C (plain old boring C) and then IBM's C compiler would take over?
I don't know what Apple ship but the standard GCC Objective C front-end talks directly to the optimization and code generation back-end rather than via C code.
It is possible to write a C-generating back end (some Sun guy did it) but this is discouraged by RMS; he's worried that it would let compiler vendors use GCC as a preprocessor to get extra optimization passes for free without having to link it into their closed-source compiler and so accept the GPL.
he didn't even do a survey of available processors (forget including non-Intel architecures)
because he wants to run Fritz and that's Intel only.
I don't know if its the strongest engine around but Fritz has excellent database and game analysis features and they've a quote from Kasparov that says he uses Fritz for analysis.
Perhaps the maps weren't quite complete when it came time to release to manufacturing but weren't worth holding the release up for. So they dumped whatever version they had on the game disk so they could just issue a small patch later to put the fixed maps live.
I'm not sure if I believe this or not. If they'd already implemented an after-the-fact level patch system (and it'd be a sensible thing to do) then this would be a no-brainer. But if they hadn't, it would be a lot of work to save everyone a bit of download.
Haven't the XBox hacking lot already worked out if the content is on the disk?