The Xbox does have slightly better graphics, if you're looking real close
I beg to differ. Compare NFS Underground on the PS2 with the xbox or gamecube. I keep running into walls on the PS2 because I can't tell that there's a turn up ahead. The graphics on the PS2 are awful.
I'm not even talking about poly count.. i'm talking about how fucking *dirty* the graphics are.
Well, all your favorite apps are here. You wouldn't need to run the anti-virus or firewall. And you'll find that the GTK apps you're using look a crapload better on linux than they do on windows.
But, contrary to what most rabid slashdotters will tell you windows actually does "Just Work(tm)" for a lot of people. My parents and my wife don't have problems with it. They use firefox (and they use webmail).. they're NATed behind linksys access points... I don't worry about them.
I say, go download the Ubuntu livecd and try it out.. it's no-commitment linux.. you might like it better.
That's why when I was a kid every school had Apples, and every business and home (except teachers) had PCs.
True, sort of. PCs won the war because parents were buying home computers that were familiar to them (the same PCs they used at work)
But it took over a decade before PCs caught up with Apple's game library.
If you were a kid in the 80s, you played Apple ][e games (and atari/colecovision games of course). If your parents had a PC.. you went to a friend's house.
Wow, bad wireless support in a Linux Distro? What next? No major vendor games?
Wireless support in linux distros is actually quite good these days.
I'm on an older pismo powerbook that dual boots osx and ydl. I plugged in a dlink 802.11b card and osx didn't see it at all. I ended up paying for a $40 aerocard driver. (There is an opensource driver but it doesn't support wep or wpa for 90% of the cards). Linux did see it and prompted me for the wep key etc.
Then a year later I got an airport card from work. I plugged it in, and removed the dlink card. OSX made me reconfigure the card, including plugging in my wep key again. Linux asked me if I wanted to migrate my wireless settings over to the new airport. It required 0 setup and "just worked".
Not really. Google, for example, uses the term "beta" to mean "unsupported". gmail, maps, froogle, etc.. they're all neat tools but Google hasn't really decided whether or not any of those projects merit the full force of Google behind them, but it costs Google next to nothing to provide them on their site.
Apple does the same thing. Quicktime Broadcaster is beta.. hell, Apple has called it "a technology example" not a finished product.
The question becomes, would you rather companies not release their little pet projects at all?
Apple has DRM to keep sloppy people from being stupid and sharing everything on line, but normal "fair-use" is mostly supported..
Apple's DRM does more than that though. It also prevents other companies from selling music that can be played on the ipod (and none of this "just make it an mp3" bullshit. If Apple has to DRM it's music because of the RIAA, so does everyone else).
It always comes down to DRM hurting the customer.. in this case it's more about Apple's DRM stifling competition.
Anyway, I've often wondered why the OS insists on redetecting hardware when BIOS does it for me already.
I'm actually glad that it does. We did the TiVo hack, and our bios didn't see the tivo harddrive at all. Luckily, linux saw it just fine and was able to mount it without a problem.
While Mac OS X does use gcc and its associated tool-chain, an old Slashdot discussion seems to imply that cross-compiling is better under OpenDarwin than Mac OS X.
And what does that have to do with the price of tea in china?
We're talking about Assembly here...you wouldn't use gcc.. you'd use GAS (which is awful).
NASM will compile on OSX, but it uses AT&T syntax, rather than intel syntax.
Odds are good that you're going to be learning Intel syntax.
We use MySQL on a G5 xserve. Performance hasn't been a problem for us, but we haven't really stress tested it yet. We also use MySQL on two of our Suns (V210 Dual 1.25) and it has been rock solid and extremely fast on both machines. We stress tested Apache2 on the xserve and it fell apart before the V210... so I'm going to say that the v210 is probably a better mysql box than the xserve as well.. but the xserve is $1000 cheaper.
FWIW, mysql says that the most *stable* platforms for mysql is Solaris and SuSE Linux. Strange, I know.
There are two things you are wrong about, but since they're both AIM related, it's understandable that you missed them.
On a Mac OSX system. You application icon can leaps up and down in the dock if it needs attention
Except for ichat, which pops a window that, while it doesn't steal focus, does sit *above* all other windows until you click on it and "expand" the goddamn thing.
On other Unix (Irix, HP-UX, Solaris) systems nothing bothers you.
Again, except for gaim, which pops a focus stealing window whenever you get a message.
the printer icon in the dock starts bouncing. I can ignore it
You must have amazing will power. The bouncing dock icon is the most distracting thing ever invented. Especially for those of us who hide the dock since it pops out of nowhere.
Um, are you required to write working code by hand in 5 minutes? Or solve impromptu design and/or theory questions on the spot?
I don't have to solve impromptu design or theory questions on the spot (well, maybe a little, but they're not abstract questions, they're practical "we need to do this, what is the best way to do it" type questions).
But I'm an inhouse programmer. I write tools for our newsroom and write frontend code for our readers. Unlike other programmers where stuff they write goes through many hands before ending up on the customer's computer, my stuff get's used immediately. If my backend tools don't work perfectly, I get a phonecall at 3AM and have to fix whatever I broke. That's pressure. Fixing something at 3AM as fast as you can because the guy on the other end of the line can't go home until it works.
Every web programmer has to modify live pages on the fly. Sure we have development boxes to test large projects on, but it isn't feasable to do that for everything.
To be fair, after 6 years of this, you get really good at writing code that works the very first time it's run.
They really don't let you demonstrate your skill set, as the interview environment (high pressure) is very much different from almost all working environments (loose and unconstrained).
Oh man, you are going to be so screwed when you graduate.
It's not rare for me to be working on 4 different projects, all due within a week or two, just to get a new "top priority" project that's due tomorrow.
And what does 'those who are perceived as likely to succeed' mean?
I always thought that conventional wisdom said that the people voted "most likely to succeed" in highschool were the "most likely to be found raving on the top of a building with a loaded shotgun"
I love when self proclaimed "geniuses" choke under pressure.. because when they crack, it is usually spectacular.
My old 600mhz g3 ibook runs panther, safari, quicktime, iphoto, itunes and everything else I need on a daily basis pretty well. Try saying that about a five year old PC.
5 year old? Your 600mhz g3 ibook came out October 2001. That machine is just a few months older than 3 years old.
In October of 2001, the P4 was at 2.0ghz, and the Athlon 2000+ was just coming out. Are you going to tell me that a 2ghz P4 isn't adequate for browsing the web, listing to mp3s and importing digital photos?!
We're talking about powersupplies actually catching fire. If you're lucky, you need to buy a new powersupply. If you're unlucky, the fire dept is outside your house right now, making sure that anything that survived the inferno is now currently under water.
Slashdotters always seem to overstate the power of a slashdotting.
When the PS2 came out, it was a huge leap over the ammount of memory in the PS1 (I believe 32 MB for the PS2 and 2 MB for the PS1... but I may be off).
Dreamcast came out before the PS2 and had 26megs of ram, the PS2 has 32 megs of ram. Not exactly a huge leap.
The PS2 has only 4 megs of video ram, the dreamcast had 8. (which is what this article is all about)
Slashdot Mirror
FYI, SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512 are all referred to as SHA-2.
Doesn't matter. The only difference is key length. The algorithm is the same.
One of the big weaknesses of .Net in my opinion is how friendly it is to untyped code.
.Net you're talking about, but it sure isn't C#.
.. }
I'm not sure what part of
In C++ this is perfectly legal:
while (i--) {
Because implicit casts to boolean are allowed.
In C# it's illegal because you cannot implicitly cast to boolean.
The security implication is demonstrated below:
if (i=1) { do something }
C# will catch the typo (and not just give a warning, but refuse to compile). C++ won't say a word.
The breach of trade secrets was done by, I assume, someone from inside Apple.
My question is: was that info really a trade secret? Can you call a description of a product that Apple intends to release a trade secret?
The Xbox does have slightly better graphics, if you're looking real close
I beg to differ. Compare NFS Underground on the PS2 with the xbox or gamecube. I keep running into walls on the PS2 because I can't tell that there's a turn up ahead. The graphics on the PS2 are awful.
I'm not even talking about poly count.. i'm talking about how fucking *dirty* the graphics are.
Replace "PS3" with "PS2" and "Xbox2" with "Dreamcast", and we're 5 years all over again.
However, every console that has survived long enough has has stumbled with the introduction of their third generation product.
Atari 2600, Atari 5200, *trip* Atari 7800
SMS, Genesis, *trip* Saturn
NES, SNES, *trip* N64
So which is more likely to happen? The xbox2 graphics are considered "crappy" compared to the PS3.. or the PS3 is a giant, expensive, flop.
Why should _I_ switch to Linux?
Well, all your favorite apps are here. You wouldn't need to run the anti-virus or firewall. And you'll find that the GTK apps you're using look a crapload better on linux than they do on windows.
But, contrary to what most rabid slashdotters will tell you windows actually does "Just Work(tm)" for a lot of people. My parents and my wife don't have problems with it. They use firefox (and they use webmail).. they're NATed behind linksys access points... I don't worry about them.
I say, go download the Ubuntu livecd and try it out.. it's no-commitment linux.. you might like it better.
That's why when I was a kid every school had Apples, and every business and home (except teachers) had PCs.
True, sort of. PCs won the war because parents were buying home computers that were familiar to them (the same PCs they used at work)
But it took over a decade before PCs caught up with Apple's game library.
If you were a kid in the 80s, you played Apple ][e games (and atari/colecovision games of course). If your parents had a PC.. you went to a friend's house.
Wow, bad wireless support in a Linux Distro? What next? No major vendor games?
Wireless support in linux distros is actually quite good these days.
I'm on an older pismo powerbook that dual boots osx and ydl. I plugged in a dlink 802.11b card and osx didn't see it at all. I ended up paying for a $40 aerocard driver. (There is an opensource driver but it doesn't support wep or wpa for 90% of the cards). Linux did see it and prompted me for the wep key etc.
Then a year later I got an airport card from work. I plugged it in, and removed the dlink card. OSX made me reconfigure the card, including plugging in my wep key again. Linux asked me if I wanted to migrate my wireless settings over to the new airport. It required 0 setup and "just worked".
Not really. Google, for example, uses the term "beta" to mean "unsupported". gmail, maps, froogle, etc.. they're
all neat tools but Google hasn't really decided whether or not any of those projects merit the full force of
Google behind them, but it costs Google next to nothing to provide them on their site.
Apple does the same thing. Quicktime Broadcaster is beta.. hell, Apple has called it "a technology example" not
a finished product.
The question becomes, would you rather companies not release their little pet projects at all?
Apple has DRM to keep sloppy people from being stupid and sharing everything on line, but normal "fair-use" is mostly supported..
Apple's DRM does more than that though. It also prevents other companies from selling music that can be played on the ipod (and none of this "just make it an mp3" bullshit. If Apple has to DRM it's music because of the RIAA, so does everyone else).
It always comes down to DRM hurting the customer.. in this case it's more about Apple's DRM stifling competition.
Anyway, I've often wondered why the OS insists on redetecting hardware when BIOS does it for me already.
I'm actually glad that it does. We did the TiVo hack, and our bios didn't see the tivo harddrive at all. Luckily, linux saw it just fine and was able to mount it without a problem.
While Mac OS X does use gcc and its associated tool-chain, an old Slashdot discussion seems to imply that cross-compiling is better under OpenDarwin than Mac OS X.
And what does that have to do with the price of tea in china?
We're talking about Assembly here...you wouldn't use gcc.. you'd use GAS (which is awful).
NASM will compile on OSX, but it uses AT&T syntax, rather than intel syntax.
Odds are good that you're going to be learning Intel syntax.
AT&T syntax: movl %eax, %ebx
Intel syntax: mov ebx, eax
Nice try, but how does that explain IE being faster than FireFox under MacOS X as well in some areas?
Well, when you don't support entire chunks of the language you can be faster.
Speed tests mean nothing if the browsers don't render the results properly.
How fucking stupid does one have to be as an editor to dupe the same story albeit different articles in a 24 hr period....
About as stupid as you are for duping a comment made 10 minutes earlier in this same thread.
Can't you be bothered to read the comments before posting?
What about Mac OS X?
We use MySQL on a G5 xserve. Performance hasn't been a problem for us, but we haven't really stress tested it yet. We also use MySQL on two of our Suns (V210 Dual 1.25) and it has been rock solid and extremely fast on both machines. We stress tested Apache2 on the xserve and it fell apart before the V210... so I'm going to say that the v210 is probably a better mysql box than the xserve as well.. but the xserve is $1000 cheaper.
FWIW, mysql says that the most *stable* platforms for mysql is Solaris and SuSE Linux. Strange, I know.
There are two things you are wrong about, but since they're both AIM related, it's understandable that you missed them.
On a Mac OSX system. You application icon can leaps up and down in the dock if it needs attention
Except for ichat, which pops a window that, while it doesn't steal focus, does sit *above* all other windows until you click on it and "expand" the goddamn thing.
On other Unix (Irix, HP-UX, Solaris) systems nothing bothers you.
Again, except for gaim, which pops a focus stealing window whenever you get a message.
the printer icon in the dock starts bouncing. I can ignore it
You must have amazing will power. The bouncing dock icon is the most distracting thing ever invented. Especially for those of us who hide the dock since it pops out of nowhere.
Um, are you required to write working code by hand in 5 minutes? Or solve impromptu design and/or theory questions on the spot?
I don't have to solve impromptu design or theory questions on the spot (well, maybe a little, but they're not abstract questions, they're practical "we need to do this, what is the best way to do it" type questions).
But I'm an inhouse programmer. I write tools for our newsroom and write frontend code for our readers. Unlike other programmers where stuff they write goes through many hands before ending up on the customer's computer, my stuff get's used immediately. If my backend tools don't work perfectly, I get a phonecall at 3AM and have to fix whatever I broke. That's pressure. Fixing something at 3AM as fast as you can because the guy on the other end of the line can't go home until it works.
Every web programmer has to modify live pages on the fly. Sure we have development boxes to test large projects on, but it isn't feasable to do that for everything.
To be fair, after 6 years of this, you get really good at writing code that works the very first time it's run.
They really don't let you demonstrate your skill set, as the interview environment (high pressure) is very much different from almost all working environments (loose and unconstrained).
Oh man, you are going to be so screwed when you graduate.
It's not rare for me to be working on 4 different projects, all due within a week or two, just to get a new "top priority" project that's due tomorrow.
Lucky for me, I thrive under pressure.
And what does 'those who are perceived as likely to succeed' mean?
I always thought that conventional wisdom said that the people voted "most likely to succeed" in highschool were the "most likely to be found raving on the top of a building with a loaded shotgun"
I love when self proclaimed "geniuses" choke under pressure.. because when they crack, it is usually spectacular.
it is too bad that even Google can't get a webpage to render properly on any modern browser, such as Safari.
Safari doesn't support XSLT. It's not google's fault that Safari is behind even IE6 in this respect.
There are only two big, big sources of street data out there - Navteq and TeleAtlas.
Um... what about TIGER? Good enough for the US Census Bureau... and it's free for commercial and non-commercial use.
My old 600mhz g3 ibook runs panther, safari, quicktime, iphoto, itunes and everything else I need on a daily basis pretty well. Try saying that about a five year old PC.
5 year old? Your 600mhz g3 ibook came out October 2001. That machine is just a few months older than 3 years old.
In October of 2001, the P4 was at 2.0ghz, and the Athlon 2000+ was just coming out. Are you going to tell me that a 2ghz P4 isn't adequate for browsing the web, listing to mp3s and importing digital photos?!
Slashdot the crap out of it.
No. That will only stun a PC.
We're talking about powersupplies actually catching fire. If you're lucky, you need to buy a new powersupply. If you're unlucky, the fire dept is outside your house right now, making sure that anything that survived the inferno is now currently under water.
Slashdotters always seem to overstate the power of a slashdotting.
When the PS2 came out, it was a huge leap over the ammount of memory in the PS1 (I believe 32 MB for the PS2 and 2 MB for the PS1... but I may be off).
Dreamcast came out before the PS2 and had 26megs of ram, the PS2 has 32 megs of ram. Not exactly a huge leap.
The PS2 has only 4 megs of video ram, the dreamcast had 8. (which is what this article is all about)