Yep. I know that I've done some things on Linux using Mono writing it in C# lately. We use it on Windows and it's easy to go back and forth with C# rather than use different languages on different platforms. And yes, there's Java with its 'write once, debug everywhere' but the stuff I'm talking about started on Windows and some is going towards Linux so it's nice to be able to do that.
Yup. Back when I was entering college, it was... interesting (back in the 80s). That was when programming was starting to be seen as a viable job opportunity and many people were signing up for CS simply because of the opportunities that were thought to go along with it. I met a number of people in my first CS classes that had only seen computers on TV and maybe in stores. I met a few that had never even seen them in real life (only on TV). Most of those folks bailed out early but some stuck to it because of the expectations of the pots-o-gold that would be showered on you once you got your degree.
This was mind-boggling to me as, even at that time, my friends and I had been learning about computers on our own for a number of years (yes, we were the ones in highschool who were 'assistants' to the teacher in computer classes... mostly because our teacher was smart enough to know that we probably knew more than he did so he asked for our help rather than try to prove that he knew more than we did).
This carried over into work where many of the people who were actual programmers at the time were amazed at this group of people coming in who actually had computers at home and actually did things with them at home. Seeing us basically live-and-breathe computers frightened them because we kept up with (and devoured) any and all tech releases, both hardware and software, because we *love* it, not because we were required to do so for our job. For us, computers were a huge part of our life because we enjoyed them, not because we had to work with them. I know of several of those programmers who actually left the field to go do other things (or simply retire) because they were afraid they couldn't compete with us (more than one actually told me this personally).
The trend of people thinking themselves computer experts because they could send/receive email and surf the web has only increased as computers became more popular and more and more people had contact with them. Heck, these days, I've seen people who have problems sending email try to diagnose and 'fix' computer problems for others who know even less than they do.
It's actually fairly interesting... as OSs get more and more stable and more like set-top boxes, the more users will become strictly users (and rightly so) and less prone to doing more than installing software or maybe something as complicated as a new DVD, HDD, or more RAM. This means that less people will really be able to dig around inside a box and figure out what's wrong but it also means there *should* be less reason to do so (barring a hardware failure, they shouldn't have to do more than install/remove software and maybe click a button to allow OS updates to happen). I can easily see IT getting more hardware oriented and less software oriented over time because of this.
Don't forget all the "Castro" loving people in/near Miami. They love him so much they've already planned a huge party, in a stadium, including lining up bands/etc, for when he dies.
Yep you bet no effort to slow down the standardization process because they refused to be involved.
I didn't follow ODF meetings, but I *have* been involved in more than one (at least a contributor to three) standards bodies and I know for a fact that more than one organization typically sends people to the meetings to observe and take notes while not really participating.
This is so that the organization can track the standard so that they can do things like prepare for it, begin development towards it, and monitor it so that they can see any potential deal-breakers for them among any number of other reasons. Sometimes with the dealbreakers, the representative will actually bring it up so that the standard can be modified to accomodate them better.
This isn't an issue of "not being involved" as much as it is similar to auditing a class in college.
Starcraft works on the principle of management but it also takes skill, speed and dedication. Eve is not such a game, all it takes in eve is time and dedication.
Not entirely true. Many of us who play Eve *like* the fact that you don't have to hop yourself up on caffiene just so you can click like a crack monkey in order to play the game and the primary determination of the encounter being who can click buttons faster than the other person. The main part of 1-vs-1 combat in Eve (or even small gang like 2-vs-2 or 3-vs-3) is fitting your ship (you can't really fit to counter all the possible tactics you'll encounter so you have to work on tactics that you think you can use best), choosing your targets, and then knowing what to do when in order to combat your opponent(s). Almost all of this comes from exactly what you say, time and dedication to the game, but with the additions of experience and being able to anticipate and deal with situations that don't go as you expect. Yes, it's a slower paced fighting game, but the depth of what you have to know in order to PvP well is a lot more than other games. For example, some knowledge of trigonometry is nice to have, if not being able to calculate sin/cos/tan to the 5th decimal place, but knowing how transverse and radial velocities effect your chances to hit your opponent given the weapons you have mounted is critical to the success of your chances of winning a fight (your guns hitting another ship is a bit more than your simply being in range and 'pointed' in the right direction).
Blob fighting is something else entirely (ok... everybody fire on ShipA, now everybody fire on ShipB, etc.)
Back when the NVIDIA GeForce4Ti4600 was released, BestBuy's online store had pre-orders for them up at an erroneous price (very low for what the card cost). BestBuy caught it after a few thousand orders had been placed and invalidated the orders as made, but at least compromised. Those of us who placed orders got $50 off the actual price the card should have been sold for. I think we were all happy enough with that since I don't recall any legal action being taken for it.
And weight/space. If you can get by without bringing a few years' worth of drugs on board to save weight/space, then you'll do without... particularly if you can select candidates who don't need them (so you can leave the drugs behind).
This is why Linux, since it was first being used back in the early 1990s, has been seen as first, the killer of Unix, and then maybe killer of Windows.
Yep. Due to the nature of the work I do, I haven't given anything less than a full month notice at my last three jobs (and just over two months notice at one of those). It gives your current employer time to work with you to transition your duties/work/etc to someone else early and for you to give some oversight/kibitzing to your replacement to make sure things transition smoothly.
However that is still considered beta currently, despite of that
If they ruled out all software packages that were "beta" in either name or numbering convention, how many packages would there be to actually use on Linux?;) - note the winking smiley
Sun has traditionally backed the best performance design
Not entirely true... They may have backed the best performing SPARC based design, but not the best performing design in general. SPARC processors have never really been top of the pack in performance. Sun's machines are pretty good overall for business type loads but they haven't been Top500 material for a *long* time, for example...
Yes, there are many ways to measure performance but Sun machines are more known for bang for the buck than outright performance in any one area. I guess now that pretty much everything non-Intel is dead (IBM is still around), we could say that SPARC is the 2nd best non-Intel CPU, but we'd have to qualify it by saying that there are (realistically) only two entries in that category;)
It's a prediction and actually a self-fulfilling one, to some degree. In fact, it's as much, or more, about economics than technology. If you look, the original wording even states "cost". Upgrade too fast and you'll go broke because people won't upgrade with you that fast (they'll start skipping 'generations' in their upgrades).
Every time it's brought up, just start asking them how the grind is going. WoW, a great single player game with about 350 hours of play in it (only takes 13 days played to get to level 60... I did it several times) but after that, it's nothing but grind.
Ask them how many crypt thing legs they've gotten on the way to the 1200 (gotten ~20 per trip into an instance) to get the 30 tokens needed to buy the stuff from the faction person *AFTER* you've killed the 1000s of mobs to get the faction to actually buy it.
Or, how Blizzard nerfs the amount of honor you get from PvP because people are "earning it too fast".
Or, ask them how many times they've done Molten core (Onyxia/BWL/ZG/etc) in the past month and how was it different every time.
Pretty soon, they'll shut up and/or stop coming over.
One of the arguments I continually hear against OpenDoc is that it assumes (and pretty much defines itself as being) only suitable for the creation of new documents (and, of course, using those documents as you go forward). So, once it is in place, new documents will adhere to it. Unfortunately, there are a large number of older documents that people still use that need to be a) actually used, and b) translated to the new standard. The arguments I hear say that OpenXML better supports backwards compatibility or something.
I haven't looked at either standard very much (or at all) but it seems like a fairly significant argument, if true.
Well... it's more than that. Defense and wartime budgets/economy allow for spending money on risky endeavors. Lots of money goes out to risky research (little hope of useful return) just on the odd case where one of them will be useful. Corporate research is geared towards return on investment so projects that have little chance of return aren't typically persued. Additionally, defense/wartime research projects will typically push boundaries that the politically correct do not feel comfortable pushing at any other time, for example in medicine.
Medicine is another area of science that is advanced not only by the military but by actual wars. Most of the types of experiementation required to advance medicine are "frowned upon" normally. Put people in wars where a patient is most likely going to die and some new, theoretical procedure may save him (and it's the only hope) where doctors can attempt these long shots with no additional risk to the patient and you get new medical procedures, for example.
Others, like radar are pushed out of extreme need they wanted to find the enemy. Luckily, the same thing works good for finding friendlies and other stuff too and because of it, doors are opened to new civilian uses (the Internet is another example of this type).
Defense spending and wartime push more research in short periods of time than any other times in our history... mostly because of a) budgets, b) the acceptance of more risk, and c) need.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep. I know that I've done some things on Linux using Mono writing it in C# lately. We use it on Windows and it's easy to go back and forth with C# rather than use different languages on different platforms. And yes, there's Java with its 'write once, debug everywhere' but the stuff I'm talking about started on Windows and some is going towards Linux so it's nice to be able to do that.
Yup. Back when I was entering college, it was... interesting (back in the 80s). That was when programming was starting to be seen as a viable job opportunity and many people were signing up for CS simply because of the opportunities that were thought to go along with it. I met a number of people in my first CS classes that had only seen computers on TV and maybe in stores. I met a few that had never even seen them in real life (only on TV). Most of those folks bailed out early but some stuck to it because of the expectations of the pots-o-gold that would be showered on you once you got your degree.
This was mind-boggling to me as, even at that time, my friends and I had been learning about computers on our own for a number of years (yes, we were the ones in highschool who were 'assistants' to the teacher in computer classes... mostly because our teacher was smart enough to know that we probably knew more than he did so he asked for our help rather than try to prove that he knew more than we did).
This carried over into work where many of the people who were actual programmers at the time were amazed at this group of people coming in who actually had computers at home and actually did things with them at home. Seeing us basically live-and-breathe computers frightened them because we kept up with (and devoured) any and all tech releases, both hardware and software, because we *love* it, not because we were required to do so for our job. For us, computers were a huge part of our life because we enjoyed them, not because we had to work with them. I know of several of those programmers who actually left the field to go do other things (or simply retire) because they were afraid they couldn't compete with us (more than one actually told me this personally).
The trend of people thinking themselves computer experts because they could send/receive email and surf the web has only increased as computers became more popular and more and more people had contact with them. Heck, these days, I've seen people who have problems sending email try to diagnose and 'fix' computer problems for others who know even less than they do.
It's actually fairly interesting... as OSs get more and more stable and more like set-top boxes, the more users will become strictly users (and rightly so) and less prone to doing more than installing software or maybe something as complicated as a new DVD, HDD, or more RAM. This means that less people will really be able to dig around inside a box and figure out what's wrong but it also means there *should* be less reason to do so (barring a hardware failure, they shouldn't have to do more than install/remove software and maybe click a button to allow OS updates to happen). I can easily see IT getting more hardware oriented and less software oriented over time because of this.
Don't forget all the "Castro" loving people in/near Miami. They love him so much they've already planned a huge party, in a stadium, including lining up bands/etc, for when he dies.
Except when dealing with things outside of Arizona :)
I didn't follow ODF meetings, but I *have* been involved in more than one (at least a contributor to three) standards bodies and I know for a fact that more than one organization typically sends people to the meetings to observe and take notes while not really participating.
This is so that the organization can track the standard so that they can do things like prepare for it, begin development towards it, and monitor it so that they can see any potential deal-breakers for them among any number of other reasons. Sometimes with the dealbreakers, the representative will actually bring it up so that the standard can be modified to accomodate them better.
This isn't an issue of "not being involved" as much as it is similar to auditing a class in college.
I make no comment as to the rest of your post.
Not entirely true. Many of us who play Eve *like* the fact that you don't have to hop yourself up on caffiene just so you can click like a crack monkey in order to play the game and the primary determination of the encounter being who can click buttons faster than the other person. The main part of 1-vs-1 combat in Eve (or even small gang like 2-vs-2 or 3-vs-3) is fitting your ship (you can't really fit to counter all the possible tactics you'll encounter so you have to work on tactics that you think you can use best), choosing your targets, and then knowing what to do when in order to combat your opponent(s). Almost all of this comes from exactly what you say, time and dedication to the game, but with the additions of experience and being able to anticipate and deal with situations that don't go as you expect. Yes, it's a slower paced fighting game, but the depth of what you have to know in order to PvP well is a lot more than other games. For example, some knowledge of trigonometry is nice to have, if not being able to calculate sin/cos/tan to the 5th decimal place, but knowing how transverse and radial velocities effect your chances to hit your opponent given the weapons you have mounted is critical to the success of your chances of winning a fight (your guns hitting another ship is a bit more than your simply being in range and 'pointed' in the right direction).
Blob fighting is something else entirely (ok... everybody fire on ShipA, now everybody fire on ShipB, etc.)
Back when the NVIDIA GeForce4Ti4600 was released, BestBuy's online store had pre-orders for them up at an erroneous price (very low for what the card cost). BestBuy caught it after a few thousand orders had been placed and invalidated the orders as made, but at least compromised. Those of us who placed orders got $50 off the actual price the card should have been sold for. I think we were all happy enough with that since I don't recall any legal action being taken for it.
Dunno... perhaps you could answer that question yourself, now ;)
As others have said, "embarassingly parallel" isn't a derogatory term any more than "greedy algorithm" is.
And weight/space. If you can get by without bringing a few years' worth of drugs on board to save weight/space, then you'll do without... particularly if you can select candidates who don't need them (so you can leave the drugs behind).
Yup... hardware support was a big one back in the early 1990s for us, too.
This is why Linux, since it was first being used back in the early 1990s, has been seen as first, the killer of Unix, and then maybe killer of Windows.
Yep. Due to the nature of the work I do, I haven't given anything less than a full month notice at my last three jobs (and just over two months notice at one of those). It gives your current employer time to work with you to transition your duties/work/etc to someone else early and for you to give some oversight/kibitzing to your replacement to make sure things transition smoothly.
You forgot AOLspeak, in general, but specifically:
its/it's
their/there/they're
dual/duel
and the list goes on...
Alternatively, you could have one core computing as fast as it can and the other one "uncomputing" what the first one did... ;)
I wonder if they have tiny banjos.
Yeah... whoever heard of a Slashdot reader not RTFA and jumping at whatever conclusions are presented in the blurb.... I must be new here.
Not entirely true... They may have backed the best performing SPARC based design, but not the best performing design in general. SPARC processors have never really been top of the pack in performance. Sun's machines are pretty good overall for business type loads but they haven't been Top500 material for a *long* time, for example...
Yes, there are many ways to measure performance but Sun machines are more known for bang for the buck than outright performance in any one area. I guess now that pretty much everything non-Intel is dead (IBM is still around), we could say that SPARC is the 2nd best non-Intel CPU, but we'd have to qualify it by saying that there are (realistically) only two entries in that category
It's a prediction and actually a self-fulfilling one, to some degree. In fact, it's as much, or more, about economics than technology. If you look, the original wording even states "cost". Upgrade too fast and you'll go broke because people won't upgrade with you that fast (they'll start skipping 'generations' in their upgrades).
But only temporarily ;)
You nailed it.
Every time it's brought up, just start asking them how the grind is going. WoW, a great single player game with about 350 hours of play in it (only takes 13 days played to get to level 60... I did it several times) but after that, it's nothing but grind.
Ask them how many crypt thing legs they've gotten on the way to the 1200 (gotten ~20 per trip into an instance) to get the 30 tokens needed to buy the stuff from the faction person *AFTER* you've killed the 1000s of mobs to get the faction to actually buy it.
Or, how Blizzard nerfs the amount of honor you get from PvP because people are "earning it too fast".
Or, ask them how many times they've done Molten core (Onyxia/BWL/ZG/etc) in the past month and how was it different every time.
Pretty soon, they'll shut up and/or stop coming over.
One of the arguments I continually hear against OpenDoc is that it assumes (and pretty much defines itself as being) only suitable for the creation of new documents (and, of course, using those documents as you go forward). So, once it is in place, new documents will adhere to it. Unfortunately, there are a large number of older documents that people still use that need to be a) actually used, and b) translated to the new standard. The arguments I hear say that OpenXML better supports backwards compatibility or something.
I haven't looked at either standard very much (or at all) but it seems like a fairly significant argument, if true.
Well... it's more than that. Defense and wartime budgets/economy allow for spending money on risky endeavors. Lots of money goes out to risky research (little hope of useful return) just on the odd case where one of them will be useful. Corporate research is geared towards return on investment so projects that have little chance of return aren't typically persued. Additionally, defense/wartime research projects will typically push boundaries that the politically correct do not feel comfortable pushing at any other time, for example in medicine.
Medicine is another area of science that is advanced not only by the military but by actual wars. Most of the types of experiementation required to advance medicine are "frowned upon" normally. Put people in wars where a patient is most likely going to die and some new, theoretical procedure may save him (and it's the only hope) where doctors can attempt these long shots with no additional risk to the patient and you get new medical procedures, for example.
Others, like radar are pushed out of extreme need they wanted to find the enemy. Luckily, the same thing works good for finding friendlies and other stuff too and because of it, doors are opened to new civilian uses (the Internet is another example of this type).
Defense spending and wartime push more research in short periods of time than any other times in our history... mostly because of a) budgets, b) the acceptance of more risk, and c) need.
Interesting, maybe you'd like to also read this long thread at Ars about this very subject that a number of people participated in.