Now finally, i'd just like to point out that if you indeed want to run OS X, keep in mind that the "minimum requirements", like 128MB ram, is NOT sufficient imho. My G5 even choked on 512MB:)
I disagree. I run Jaguar on an old Bondi-blue G3 imac at 233Mhz with 96MB Ram !
And it runs just fine. There's only a limitation in startup time (don't power it of : sleep it if you need to. Boot time is around 10 minutes) , most of the iApps (which are to big to fit on the 2GB harddisk anyway) and MS Office (to big also, but easily replaced by textEdit or shareware alternatives).
I run my mySQL/PHP/apache test setup on it, my iCal, and my accounting. Perfect.
people who are trying to port some of the more sophisticated Linux apps to Windows, and may simply give up when they hear that because of this, no porting is required
Look at it the other way : if great linux apps are not ported to windows, but instead are delivered with an easy install of colinux+a small distro (the keyword here will be easy !) then more people will learn to know linux. And one day perhaps install it as 2nd OS on their machine, from which the step to primary OS is a small one !
for linux noobs like me, this is greeat news ! this will allow me to run a distro at work where xp boot is obliged. i hope they come up with an installation tutorial & extensive documentation soon (no docs for now on th website)
from the article:I live on the island of Manhattan, where space is a premium. ... and then further... consuming more and more of my time and curiosity
this confirms a statement of a friend who lives in NYC : "in manhattan, time is no longer money since everyone has loads of'em these days. Space on the other hand..."
- speed : I have a tight inner loop that ahs to check that array at least 3 times per millisecond. If I move to a dynamic list, I have a bunch of pointer derefs that take way to long
- memory : that array is just an array of LONGLONGs, not some huge struct. If I add a back&forth pointer to each LONGLONG, my dynamic list becomes twice as big as what I have now. And I have tons of these arrays : 100 lists of 10.000 arrays is not uncommon.
- more speed : an array ALWAYS fits in the level cache. A list does not always, especially not if the array gets shifted around a bit. Trust me : the cache makes a lot of difference !!!
what we need is not more muscle power, but better condition. Having a large bisceps can be trained in far more satisfying games than pumping a gamepad.
I diesagree. Most rewrites come from the experience learned during long periods of adaptations. The roots of this rewriting problem go back to the source of all coding evil : specs.
In 15 years of coding, i have NEVER worked on a project that had specs which could foresee future futher away than say 4-6 years. After that, either the managers start pushing up new features that simply do not fit the original concepts, or you bump into uses of your software you did not foresee simply because the scale of applications has grown beyond the site of your own usage.
The last 4 years I've been writing an app for authoring psychology priming experiments (somewhat like e-prime, but with far more randomisation capabilities). In the original concept, no-one in our team expected someone to make randomisations wit a tree wider than 6 stages. So I went for 15 in my code. By now, 4 years later, I have seen projects with twice that depth. I could expand the code by changing some #defines to provide for larger arrays, but that ignores the fact that such complex randomisations demand a whole other interface. So after a few weeks of puzzling, we decided.. you guessed it : a rewrite.
the most amazing part in these photos is the eeryness, the emptyness... it's beyond imagination that there is absolutely NOTHING out there on that red dust ball the size of the earth.
If I stop to think about that fact, some cold shivers go over my spine, rubbing my nose in the fact that we're really really really really fucking lucky to even exist.
was sent form my computer (so it took me 3 secs to send it) and had this default message (translated from dutch):
Hi there, I just received a fax from you and wish to inform you that I am not interested in your product since I am a one man company with little budget and strict policy of not buying goods that are sent through unsollicited faxes.<br> Sincerely yours, [name]<br> PS : there is something wrong with our fax- computer : it sometimes sends the text in landscape mode with 512point character size. If this fax is one of those, please let us know and we will re-fax the message.<br><br>
The most amazing thing was that some of them even replied. In which case I did send teh fax again (in 512 point again offcourse, making them pay another solid 6 meter of paper and half a fax cartridge) One of them seemed smart enough to send back a message in 512 point size too, which costed me nothing since I received faxes on my mac. Nowadays many spammers use this feature too, or don't let the fax machine accept my reply. I gave up faxing a long time ago anyway
Being belgian, I can attest that Test-aankoop has a valuable function here. Ther can really scare companies, and have more than once forced companies into admitting faults. The fault itself is not necessarely fixed, but the public humiliation in a small country (with only a handfull national TV channels) is enough to scare them. And being totally independent, they can take some serious badass attitude !
They also have a pretty good website (in dutch & french) that accomagnies their monthly magazine. Each edition has at least a few product comparisions that many many belgians respect. When we bought our childrens car-seats, we followed their advice, even tho their top-pick was 15% more expensive.
They also have a pretty big library of 'target prices' for many products.
forums are pull-tech, mailinglists are push-tech. I don't wat to go reloading a forum 500 times a day for nothing. Plus, I can't filter a forum like I want. I can't properly archive it. I can't set priorities for peeps....
Like I said above : opt-in mass mailing DOES HAVE it's usefull side. It is just overshadowed by the negative effects. I only hope that they don't throw away the baby with the bathwater when they 'reinvent' smtp.
It would kill mailing lists. It would kill group lists for non-profit opt-it announcements (in case you didn't know : mass mailings have their proper use)
SCO is unwilling to minimize damages.
SCO is trying to steal the works of others.
FOr heavens sake ! Where is the difference with IBM, who is playing the role of saviour today ?
Re:You know... things just don't amaze me.
on
Message in a Battle
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I think you're watching the movie with too much critizism : I'd bet my left leg that, if they somehow could remake the battle scenes WITHOUT CG, and showed both real & CG films to many large audiences, on average folks would in both theaters pretend they did recognized CG artifacts and scenes which were clearly computer generated.
The reason my friend, is that you're looking at things which can not exist in our world. They are so far beyond the borders of common daydream imagination that you have the reflex to criticize the reality. How much easier can one do so than by claming the CG stuff is 'unnatural' and 'artifical' and could have been done better ?
(Note : expect lame jokes below about daydream imagination.)
There's one aspect missing in your reasoning : I honestly believe that most folks inside MS (including many bigshot managers) really really think they're doing things the way they are supposed to be done. This survey proves that in some (slightly ridiculous) way
My guess is that, being a monopoly for so long, they are no longer able to see 'the customer' as an entity other than part of the money making process. I don't think it's done on purpose with the idea of 'hey, let's steal more money from them', but rather as just a step in the survival guide for dinosaurs. So simply categorizing them as shoddy or un-ethical is a bit short-sighted.
I do not mean that I agree offcourse, but in the long run, the net effect of a capitalist dinosaur is not so different from a communist one : market-inertia makes most of the money flow to the biggest entities. The big difference is the orginal motivation in the quest for cash.
Oh gosh... i compared something to socialism... better run & hide now
while I applaud the efforts to re-write beos, I wonder where these guys find the time to do so ! And even more : the funding, as I assume they still need $ to feed their families.
I've done some small-scale OS projects, and even those took a serious bite out of my spare time, up to a level where I was getting sloppy in my day-time job... I could not, in any way, manage such a huge project unless some company paid me for it. (and even then i'd probably wouldn't have the skills, but thats another matter)
I can understand that it can't read large.doc files, but:
- I don't expect it to crash. Give me an arror "can't read doc" or sumtin
- They shouldn't advertise Wordpad as a MSWord compatible text-editor
- They shouldn't let WordPad give.doc files as choice of opening files
I downloaded the doc file, and tried to open it with WordPad (which is supposedly compatible with MS Word (which I refuse to buy), at least up to the level of displaying the text (without tables/pics)
Guess what ? WinXPpro SP1 is very sorry for the inconvenience but decides to throw up on me (an exception that is) and bail out !
Not that iTunes is perfect. Chugs like a mofo when you've got 50-60GB of music imported...
You sure ? My lib is 55GB now, and not cluggy at all. Runing on an AMD 1600XP with 512MB ram tho. But if you can afford to waste 55GB on mp3s, 512MB ram is even a small amount..
There's one big difference between Quake3 and Doom3 : competition.
Back in the Q3 days, there was only 1major competitor to ID, which was Epic's unreal engine. Other games were based on the Q2 engine, or had another customer base (TombRaider fon instance was rarely compared to ID games)
Today, things are very different with Unreal2 engine, HalfLife2, Blizzard having a serous engine,...
I don't thing they can pull our Doom3 string as long they did with Q3
well, in belgium things are a bit different due to the rapid growth of the airport (extending landing strips) and the ever increasing price of property. Near airport is one of the few affordable places
of how complex these issues are, is the national airport in Brussels-Belgium : being such a densely populated country, there's no practical way to have airplanes land & take off without flying over housing areas. And with both traffic and houses increasing, the problem has now reached proportions where people are starting lawsuits against the govt for noise terrorism. Some have dozens of planes flying over at low altitude per night. That's a plane every 10 minutes. You try to sleep with that. Even tripple-isolated glass & roofs can't stop the sound of a cargo airplane. Especially old, russian planes (who have now been ruled illegal for flight)
Allthough, personally i would find the noise the least of my worries : my mother in law lives near another airport (Oostende) After those huge, bulky cargo planes took off, there's a very intense kerosene odor that hangs in the streets for 15-30 minutes, depending on the weather. Yikes !
I don't understand how peeps in Singapore survive this (well.. i gues they don't...)
In my book, peeps who make distros are as far from my computer knowledge as me from my mom. I simply can not understand how those websites can be hacked.
Did 'they' really get shell access ? Or did they manage to upload a file into the tree ? Is it not possible at all to secure a server ? Slashdot, being one of the most known websites in nerd-universe must be under attack practically all the time I suppose; How come they can secure the site while Gentoo can not ? Is it so difficult that it requires a fulltime job from someone ? I always thought that it was enough to apply the current patches.
All this leaves me with a very uncomfortable feeling. I have some websites running on linux servers (not mine) from rackspace providers. Should I be worried ?
Slashdot Mirror
Now finally, i'd just like to point out that if you indeed want to run OS X, keep in mind that the "minimum requirements", like 128MB ram, is NOT sufficient imho. My G5 even choked on 512MB :)
I disagree. I run Jaguar on an old Bondi-blue G3 imac at 233Mhz with 96MB Ram !
And it runs just fine. There's only a limitation in startup time (don't power it of : sleep it if you need to. Boot time is around 10 minutes) , most of the iApps (which are to big to fit on the 2GB harddisk anyway) and MS Office (to big also, but easily replaced by textEdit or shareware alternatives).
I run my mySQL/PHP/apache test setup on it, my iCal, and my accounting. Perfect.
people who are trying to port some of the more sophisticated Linux apps to Windows, and may simply give up when they hear that because of this, no porting is required
Look at it the other way : if great linux apps are not ported to windows, but instead are delivered with an easy install of colinux+a small distro (the keyword here will be easy !) then more people will learn to know linux. And one day perhaps install it as 2nd OS on their machine, from which the step to primary OS is a small one !
for linux noobs like me, this is greeat news ! this will allow me to run a distro at work where xp boot is obliged. i hope they come up with an installation tutorial & extensive documentation soon (no docs for now on th website)
from the article :I live on the island of Manhattan, where space is a premium. ... and then further... consuming more and more of my time and curiosity
this confirms a statement of a friend who lives in NYC : "in manhattan, time is no longer money since everyone has loads of'em these days. Space on the other hand..."
I'll give you 3 reasons :
- speed : I have a tight inner loop that ahs to check that array at least 3 times per millisecond. If I move to a dynamic list, I have a bunch of pointer derefs that take way to long
- memory : that array is just an array of LONGLONGs, not some huge struct. If I add a back&forth pointer to each LONGLONG, my dynamic list becomes twice as big as what I have now. And I have tons of these arrays : 100 lists of 10.000 arrays is not uncommon.
- more speed : an array ALWAYS fits in the level cache. A list does not always, especially not if the array gets shifted around a bit. Trust me : the cache makes a lot of difference !!!
what we need is not more muscle power, but better condition. Having a large bisceps can be trained in far more satisfying games than pumping a gamepad.
I diesagree. Most rewrites come from the experience learned during long periods of adaptations. The roots of this rewriting problem go back to the source of all coding evil : specs.
In 15 years of coding, i have NEVER worked on a project that had specs which could foresee future futher away than say 4-6 years. After that, either the managers start pushing up new features that simply do not fit the original concepts, or you bump into uses of your software you did not foresee simply because the scale of applications has grown beyond the site of your own usage.
The last 4 years I've been writing an app for authoring psychology priming experiments (somewhat like e-prime, but with far more randomisation capabilities). In the original concept, no-one in our team expected someone to make randomisations wit a tree wider than 6 stages. So I went for 15 in my code. By now, 4 years later, I have seen projects with twice that depth. I could expand the code by changing some #defines to provide for larger arrays, but that ignores the fact that such complex randomisations demand a whole other interface. So after a few weeks of puzzling, we decided.. you guessed it : a rewrite.
the most amazing part in these photos is the eeryness, the emptyness... it's beyond imagination that there is absolutely NOTHING out there on that red dust ball the size of the earth.
If I stop to think about that fact, some cold shivers go over my spine, rubbing my nose in the fact that we're really really really really fucking lucky to even exist.
The most amazing thing was that some of them even replied. In which case I did send teh fax again (in 512 point again offcourse, making them pay another solid 6 meter of paper and half a fax cartridge) One of them seemed smart enough to send back a message in 512 point size too, which costed me nothing since I received faxes on my mac. Nowadays many spammers use this feature too, or don't let the fax machine accept my reply. I gave up faxing a long time ago anyway
Being belgian, I can attest that Test-aankoop has a valuable function here. Ther can really scare companies, and have more than once forced companies into admitting faults. The fault itself is not necessarely fixed, but the public humiliation in a small country (with only a handfull national TV channels) is enough to scare them.
And being totally independent, they can take some serious badass attitude !
They also have a pretty good website (in dutch & french) that accomagnies their monthly magazine. Each edition has at least a few product comparisions that many many belgians respect. When we bought our childrens car-seats, we followed their advice, even tho their top-pick was 15% more expensive.
They also have a pretty big library of 'target prices' for many products.
wrong again
forums are pull-tech, mailinglists are push-tech. I don't wat to go reloading a forum 500 times a day for nothing. Plus, I can't filter a forum like I want. I can't properly archive it. I can't set priorities for peeps....
Like I said above : opt-in mass mailing DOES HAVE it's usefull side. It is just overshadowed by the negative effects. I only hope that they don't throw away the baby with the bathwater when they 'reinvent' smtp.
It would kill mailing lists. It would kill group lists for non-profit opt-it announcements (in case you didn't know : mass mailings have their proper use)
SCO is unwilling to minimize damages.
SCO is trying to steal the works of others.
FOr heavens sake ! Where is the difference with IBM, who is playing the role of saviour today ?
I think you're watching the movie with too much critizism : I'd bet my left leg that, if they somehow could remake the battle scenes WITHOUT CG, and showed both real & CG films to many large audiences, on average folks would in both theaters pretend they did recognized CG artifacts and scenes which were clearly computer generated.
The reason my friend, is that you're looking at things which can not exist in our world. They are so far beyond the borders of common daydream imagination that you have the reflex to criticize the reality. How much easier can one do so than by claming the CG stuff is 'unnatural' and 'artifical' and could have been done better ?
(Note : expect lame jokes below about daydream imagination.)
There's one aspect missing in your reasoning : I honestly believe that most folks inside MS (including many bigshot managers) really really think they're doing things the way they are supposed to be done. This survey proves that in some (slightly ridiculous) way
My guess is that, being a monopoly for so long, they are no longer able to see 'the customer' as an entity other than part of the money making process. I don't think it's done on purpose with the idea of 'hey, let's steal more money from them', but rather as just a step in the survival guide for dinosaurs. So simply categorizing them as shoddy or un-ethical is a bit short-sighted.
I do not mean that I agree offcourse, but in the long run, the net effect of a capitalist dinosaur is not so different from a communist one : market-inertia makes most of the money flow to the biggest entities. The big difference is the orginal motivation in the quest for cash.
Oh gosh... i compared something to socialism... better run & hide now
while I applaud the efforts to re-write beos, I wonder where these guys find the time to do so ! And even more : the funding, as I assume they still need $ to feed their families.
I've done some small-scale OS projects, and even those took a serious bite out of my spare time, up to a level where I was getting sloppy in my day-time job... I could not, in any way, manage such a huge project unless some company paid me for it. (and even then i'd probably wouldn't have the skills, but thats another matter)
I can understand that it can't read large .doc files, but :
.doc files as choice of opening files
- I don't expect it to crash. Give me an arror "can't read doc" or sumtin
- They shouldn't advertise Wordpad as a MSWord compatible text-editor
- They shouldn't let WordPad give
I downloaded the doc file, and tried to open it with WordPad (which is supposedly compatible with MS Word (which I refuse to buy), at least up to the level of displaying the text (without tables/pics)
Guess what ? WinXPpro SP1 is very sorry for the inconvenience but decides to throw up on me (an exception that is) and bail out !
Not that iTunes is perfect. Chugs like a mofo when you've got 50-60GB of music imported...
You sure ? My lib is 55GB now, and not cluggy at all. Runing on an AMD 1600XP with 512MB ram tho. But if you can afford to waste 55GB on mp3s, 512MB ram is even a small amount..
There's one big difference between Quake3 and Doom3 : competition.
...
Back in the Q3 days, there was only 1major competitor to ID, which was Epic's unreal engine. Other games were based on the Q2 engine, or had another customer base (TombRaider fon instance was rarely compared to ID games)
Today, things are very different with Unreal2 engine, HalfLife2, Blizzard having a serous engine,
I don't thing they can pull our Doom3 string as long they did with Q3
google zeitgeist
lots of old windows98 indeed (29%), but winxp is leading over win2000
Offcourse, this is counting only the internet-ready machines.
"Bush is about as unAmerican as you can get, destroying almost everything that once made your country great"
No, he is improving everything.
Best...
joke...
ever !
That single line just took down any correct argumentation you might have had (which fortunately you didn't)
well, in belgium things are a bit different due to the rapid growth of the airport (extending landing strips) and the ever increasing price of property. Near airport is one of the few affordable places
of how complex these issues are, is the national airport in Brussels-Belgium : being such a densely populated country, there's no practical way to have airplanes land & take off without flying over housing areas. And with both traffic and houses increasing, the problem has now reached proportions where people are starting lawsuits against the govt for noise terrorism. Some have dozens of planes flying over at low altitude per night. That's a plane every 10 minutes. You try to sleep with that. Even tripple-isolated glass & roofs can't stop the sound of a cargo airplane. Especially old, russian planes (who have now been ruled illegal for flight)
Allthough, personally i would find the noise the least of my worries : my mother in law lives near another airport (Oostende) After those huge, bulky cargo planes took off, there's a very intense kerosene odor that hangs in the streets for 15-30 minutes, depending on the weather. Yikes !
I don't understand how peeps in Singapore survive this (well.. i gues they don't...)
In my book, peeps who make distros are as far from my computer knowledge as me from my mom. I simply can not understand how those websites can be hacked.
Did 'they' really get shell access ? Or did they manage to upload a file into the tree ? Is it not possible at all to secure a server ? Slashdot, being one of the most known websites in nerd-universe must be under attack practically all the time I suppose; How come they can secure the site while Gentoo can not ? Is it so difficult that it requires a fulltime job from someone ? I always thought that it was enough to apply the current patches.
All this leaves me with a very uncomfortable feeling. I have some websites running on linux servers (not mine) from rackspace providers. Should I be worried ?