As we become a more sophisticated community and our products become more sophisticated we will have to constantly be on the watch for this stuff. It's part of the deal.
Anyone remember LinuxOne? I don't know about you guys but I just get
a sleazy feeling from Lindows, the same kind of vibe I got from LinuxOne. How about Loki? I'm not trying to lump
Loki in with them per se, there were some good guys that worked there
but the company, the CEO, were on the sleezier side of things. I
think they are a bit more honest than LinuxOne but I don't think that
they are looking to do anything other than make a quick buck. This
conference thing is just what I'd expect from them; now I could be
wrong and maybe Bruce couldn't speak or something like that but it
sounds underhanded.
It's just something as a community we're going to need to watch,
especially if we want to stay a community. I don't know how many
times I've heard Redhat descibed as the next redmond or how they're
taking over the world with blue curve and bucking; the truth is Redhat
has been walking the walk as much as talking the talk and giving a lot
back. They still have one of the most free (libre) distributions out
there. We need to keep outselves honest and we need to support the
community and the companies that benefit it. Maybe it's time for some
kind of Linux community watch effort. Like a website where we could
post information about companies in this space and what they've given
to the community vs. what they've taken and how they've interacted. I
know that stuff is hard to do but some kind of self policing might be
useful.
There isn't anything wrong exactly with taking from the community but
when a company like MandrakeSoft is on the ropes and a company like
Lindows is screwing over other people in the community to push their
own message and agenda we need to tell them how to behave with our
pocket books. If you're going to pay for a Linux this year, think
hard about grabbing a copy of Mandrake and avoid Lindows. Let them take on MS by themselves and see how much they need the community to help them.
I can sympathize with paying the bill and the slow connection, there are solutions though. Building blacklists and te vigilantism that goes with them is nothing more and digital road rage.
People like him use VCRPlus numbers. They get them off of their digital cable or out of the TV guide or the tv guide channel they plug them in and then they do the rewind shuffle and remember counters. I've seen them do it. They are very similar, in a perverse way, to high end audiophiles who insist that nothing will ever perform as well as tubes and direct-drive turn tables. You can't argue with them, they are beyond reason and they've made their minds up regardless of continued innovation and fact. (You know the ones that think hiss and crackle add the "warmth," there are real audiophiles out there but there are also a fair number of cranks who are just luddites with money) There is something to be said for sticking with what works and enjoying it but many of us have to press onward and try to improve, even if we fall short.
I spent close to 2 years developing a PVR at my ex company. I did the platform work. (GO LINUX!) Accoustics is everything, cheaper processor to get away from fans and fluidic barings in drives are the norm. I had a maxtor drive that I couldn't tell if it was on, seriously, dead on silent all of the time. Nothing sucks more than listening to the grinding noise when a PVR disk starts to "get tired" you can hear it through walls, at one point I didn't sleep for about a week because I couldn't not hear it. It's also a very minimal problem that is getting better and better, a good new PVR is probably more quite than a VCR.
His points are valid. Nobody needs a PVR, until they see one in action. Nobody watches "that much TV" and then they see one and they're sold.
Put a DVD player in them (been done, failed, it'll get done again) and you've got a single point of access to the digital TV experience. Explain it to a layperson who likes to not watch a lot of TV and it's a gadget. At my ex-company there were tons of people who didn't understand the PVR products until they saw them. His point about saving the industry is valid also, drives are already primarily being used for media. I've got a 600GB system and I can't even dent it with my "data," start putting movies, pictures and MP3s on it and I can fill it up.
If you look at the health of Tivo and replay as companies and you know how easy it is to build a PVR (the code is simple, with digital TV, it's really pretty simple, it's moslty an excercise in cost reduction engineering) I kind of expect that PVRs may die and then come back in more favorable economic times. Tivo looks like they are getting traction and brand recog. but I have a hard time believing that Sony and Matsushita can't do it better and more cheaply if they choose to. I think that if a couple of Japanese companies put their minds to it they could simply wipe out Tivo and replay; they are hurting as it is and since the Japs aren't playing ball I'm guessing that nobody has figured out how to sell it to the masses and that's the bigger problem.
This would be interesting and useful if it were modern games. I can go to Costco or game shops and there are hundreds of PS/2 games, most I've never heard of. I've wondered, why not buy 2 or 3 of those $15-20 games instead of a brand spankin' new game that I know kicks butt?
I don't know, I guess I buy in to the hype and buy the known winner (GTA3, VC, MGS2, FFX, etc) instead of taking the shot on that Mosquito game or some of the other lesser known titles. I know there are really crappy games being made right now. List those so I can avoid them.
I don't know how many countless hours I lost to some games in the mid
1980s. I had these disks of shareware and freeware games, maybe 10
disks with about 20 games a piece on them. Willy the Worm, Janitor
Joe, and several others. It would be awesome to see those games
alive and well on Linux. I wouldn't be surprised if the source code
was inaccessable anymore on some 5.25" disk that won't play on
anything anymore, lost forever.
Same thing with some of the early games. Star Con 2 went opensource
recently and the original PC source is gone. Fortunately there is a
workable base to use but I'm not sure that's the case with the early
Sierra games and the early Epix games. Sierra is out of business,
they aren't doing games any more. The legend will live on for ages.
Too bad the games won't. There was some real craft to games back in
the day, in retrospect I'm amazed that TestDrive one fit on a floppy
disk.
Look at what Doom and Quake did. The availability of that code
changed the gaming world, the benchmark got raised alot and you can
get Doom or quake on just about any platform around.
It's not just games either. There have been times when I'd kill to
have Bank Street Writer or Dr. Halo on Linux. I know there are better
things today but damn if it wasn't simple and fast. Maybe I'm just
rememeber the past in too good of terms but BSW fit on 2 disks (you
only needed the first, it had a 60,000 word dictionary and all the
basic editing and word processing you could use. Or 1-2-3...
Bet: Moive makes more money than Sun this year!
on
Solaris: Another View
·
· Score: 4, Funny
It has huge practical benefits. LinuxBIOS like derivatives are used in tons of embedded projects. I can go from powerup to multitasking Linux kernel in about 3 seconds on a slow machine without doing a lot of optimization (ie decoding the kernel out of flash) I bet I could drop that the about 1.5 seconds if needed. init is running within about 5 seconds as is.
Spam goes away if you authenticate and encrypt your email.
you have a simple rule, if the mail is signed by someone within the web of trust then I see it, else throw it in the garbage bin. Likewise, if I see someone spamming from a trusted account then we cut it out of the web and revoke its trust. It becomes a collective white list.
Mozilla with enigmil, kmail,evolution, and there are outlook plugins for GPG and PGP. Start signing your email today!
md5 checksums are nice but if I was going to put a trojan in to something, I'd probably rebuild the md5sum too. Basically md5sum is a glorified CRC at the end of the gzip, nothing more and nothing less.
Do this: Download gpg from gnupg.org. Build it. Generate yourself a key. Try to get some of your friends to sign it. submit it to keyserver.net. Sign your code with that key. While you're at it, start using kmail, evolution, or mozilla with enigmail and start signing your emails too. Do it religiously.
I probably will be 3.0. It's a pretty minor detail really. The tentative plan is 2.6 but it will most likely be a 3.0 release. There are huge differences between it an 2.0 and substantial ones between it and 2.4.
Bummer, when you ask about this stuff, it's usually pretty late and
there are often legacy decision that have been made that are hard to
break free from. Or your young and naive and don't like something at work..
This stuff is done for real. At IBM I worked on a very large project
that compiled on AIX (several distinct versions that we were sensitive
to) Solaris, Windows NT, Linux, HPUX, and supposedly OS/400 although I
never actually built the OS/400 piece nor have I seen it operate.
First things first, you need good coding conventions, don't let some
punk break them either. Secondly you have to design some abstractions
and build some foundation classes; or buy a really good set or
downlaod some good free ones, I've heard positive things about ACE.
This is mostly a problem with windows any more, back a few years
you might support win16, win32, PM, and UNIX now it's pretty much
just POSIX and Windows. You need to abstract the machine stuff out.
Threads, possibly strings and such (Unicode vs. non-unicode..)
possibly basic types (big endian vs. little) networking code.. A rule
of thumb is that on this kind of project you should never talk to the
OS directly without something in between, it's a huge effort to make
that OS abstraction layer or learn the ins and outs of an off the
shelf one but it's worth it, even if you pay with a little
performance. Nothing sucks more than coding away on AIX building some
cool classes and adding some cool new stuff, then checking it in and
finding that it doesn't compile on any other platforms.. and you've
got to figure that crap out ASAP to make a deadline. If you build one
from scratch, as IBM usually does or did, you can tune some things for
your application; your OS abstraction layer can be a great "helper" or
"utility" layer.
Typically well coded C and C++ can go from compiler to compiler pretty
easily. Then you can use Pro64 on Mips, ACC on sparc, Intel C on
Windows for performance critical portions of code. You have to be
smart about it though and use some good conventions. The biggest rule
would be avoid MS Visual Studio which is by far the most non-standard
setup out there and if you do use it don't use their projects unless
you have to. Some good make files with some good rules can help
make this pretty easy. I don't know why more people don't do it but
look at the Linux kernel's rules file. I have a Rules.make that I've
built up and it includes things like different options for debug
builds, profiled builds, and optimized builds, sets up some common
rules for compiling C++ code and C code and what have you. My
makefile include that file and then they are usually pretty short,
generally not much more than a list of.cxx files and a library name.
Then it's easy to make sweeping changes too. I think a good build
system, one that will last should usually take a day or two to kind of
put together pretty early on in a project, unless you can carp some
good stuff from another project. The goal is a flexable and reliable
build system that you don't have to worry about. Far too often people
start cobbeling a build system together and then after 6-9 months it's
broken and britle and hard to change because so many things have been
changed and added through out the project. Put some effort in up
front, consolidate your rules in to one place, use some environment
variables to control some build switches. Use some shell scripts to
figure out various things, not hundreds of lines of Bourne shell code,
just little bits. Do this until AAP is ready and rocking and then use
that. Also, if it needs to be said, use GNU Make; it runs damn near
everywhere and it's pretty good at what it does the 15 minutes it
takes to learn it will save you hours and even days worth of time in
the long run.
I'm a huge advocate of a solid and strong build. Mozilla is a project
that festered for weeks or maybe even months becuase you couldn't
build the damn thing when it went open source. Building code is
something that can be done so well by tools that if you're worried
about it then you need to fix the build. Building software is
hardwork so take the pieces you can out of the equation, the build is
the first one.
Next, I assume you've abstracted out the GUI from the meat. If not,
make this job one if you wish to have any chance in hell against your
one platform competitors or even your mulitplatform competitors when
you get down to it. View/Data Model and client/server: learn it,
live it, love it. Or switch to a web based interface, lot's of
people do it.
While we're on abstraction. If you guys are really serious then
you're probably going to have machine specific components. Look at/usr/src/linux/include and/usr/src/linux/arch for a starting point of
reference. I would envision a project like this have a set of small Mips,
Wintel, Linux-x86, etc. directories. Everything else can probably be
compiled with GCC and then in those directories you'd have your
assembly and machine specific compiled code.
Lastly, you want to have a staged check in process. People hate not
being able to commit code but at the same time you don't want them to
commit code for real until it compiles on all of your platforms.
Honestly, I don't know of a really good way to do this. Set up a
build lab, do nightlies against the real code. Do nightlies against
the "staged" code. Then have some kind of weekly merge meeting.
That's how I've seen it, it's time consuming and somewhat painful.
You bite off too much and you're spending a shitload of time merging stuff.
This is interesting news. Very interesting. I'm not a web
developer, I'm a bit twiddler. I've been trying to work on that area
simply so I can do more, it's fun to learn and as a consultant you
need to be able to do that stuff for clients from time to time.
I've mostly explored JSP, Zope, and PHP. JSP is cool, tons of
support, it feels like and acts like it's the enterprise solution. As
such, it's a logical choice for a lot of things because if you need a
hammer it's nice to have a sledge hammer. The reality, at least as
I've seen it, is it's a bitch. It's huge, it's slow, it takes a super
computer to really run, I've seen a fair share of sloppy JSP. It's
cool, has all the gizmos that java has and it also has all the gizmos
that java has. It seems like you need a ton of crap to build a lot of
java stuff, even things from Sun like the JMAPI need 3 or 4 30MB
downloads before you can build them and get them working, maybe that's
just me complaining though. I'm also not sure what kind of vibe I get
about Sun and java as a whole technology any more, I'm not saying
it's going away or anything like that but it's not the goose that laid
the golden egg anymore either. I don't know I'd tie my cart to java
if my cart was as big a yahoo! Again, just my opinions, my C++ and
assembly (of all things) skills have taken me farther the last couple
years and got me jobs when there weren't any, java has just filled out
the resume. While I'm knocking one of the most popular platforms out
there let me also throw out the java developer base issue. Java was
like a dot.com programming language, in no time it instantly had a
huge developer base; how quickly do you think they'll run to the next
great thing when/if it happens? I've wondered what would happen if sun
started charging for the JDK. Or if.Net 2.0 really rocks and mono
takes off.
Zope. What to say about it. It's the bomb. It's also Python which
is huge and on the cusp of going really huge, but hasn't yet. It's
its own custom thing. It has a ton of cool parts you can drop in to
it. It's probably my favorite. It is also a pain in the ass going to
zope.org downloading something and trying to get it to work. It's
like they have their own little sourceforget.net running in zope
space and it makes the number of available parts look bigger than it
really is. It's getting better but there is a lot of dead stuff on
there. It also won't drop in to Apache that easily, you usually
use their custom server and transport layer. It's not so bad but it's
nice to be on mainstreet; it's more trustworthy. Other than that, it
rocks, it's just a bit tough to sell it to someone who knows some of
the buzz. If it were all up to me Zope would be the next big thing
but it doesn't look like it's all up to me.
Then I stumbled on to PHP and it kind of rocked my world when I first started screwing around with
it. For simple kinds of web things, like dumping some tables out of a
database or something it's kicks the hell out of anything else I've
seen. It seems like a few lines of PHP and it's done. No magic web
server/container, just the apache server on your redhat box.. Then
some of the tools and kits that have been put together with it make it
a much more compelling application platform. Zope really appeals to
my aesthetic sense of software engineering, I like python, I like
the structure and the object nature it just hasn't caught on like the
wildfire I think it is. PHP is close to it in terms of pontential and
reusable stuff and it's like the second coming of perl. There are
still the stock issues, is it fast enough? can it scale? will it
last? It seems like those answers are yes. Can it scale better than
JSP? I bet for a shop like yahoo! there isn't a comparison; I bet
PHP wins unless they triple the amount of RAM that they have or switch
off of FreeBSD boxes to S/390s or Sun "Enterprise servers." Also, PHP
has such a grass roots following and has really grown up slowly
compared to java, I don't see a lot of PHPers really dumping it
anytime soon as it is. Now that Yahoo! is involved, PHP may go up to
that next level.
I'm a big fan of GTAIII and I've already ordered my copy of VC. It's a great game. It's an adult game made for adults. Nothing wrong with that.
How on earth can you win it peacefully though? How many of the missions are to kill somebody? I think we lose credibility and the argument when such claims are made. There is no way to win that game without taking the life of some of the characters in it. Can you win it by taking fewer lives? Sure but that's far cry from peaceful.
I'm not particularly in favor of banning games or things like that. I don't really mind the labels on them, parents should know what they are getting their children and then ultimately I think a good parent would play along or at least observe their kids gaming habbits. You're a parent and don't lke GTA3, then don't let your kids play it. There isn't a credible way that you can claim that the game can be played peacefully though; unless you're talking about just driving around and exploring which isn't really playing. By saying such things you make the statements of the opposition more credible.
Violent game? Certainly, you're lying if you think it can be played peacefully. Morally objectionable? Probably in the same league as watching CSI or paying to see Red Dragon, in other words, not terribly extreme. Morally objectionable to let young teenagers play without supervision? Possibly, that's really for parents to decide though.
Energy is the exact problem. That's the one thing that holds a large chunk of the 20th century "future ideas" back. There are no problems making really small and powerful computers, other than energy, suppliying it and getting rid of it.
No reason we couldn't have personal planes, accept energy.
If we create room temperature super conductors and cold fusion in a bottle then it all might happen when we've got energy to just piss away but until then I wouldn't hold my breath.
Next time it happens, stand up, walk out of the theater. Speak to the manager and get your money back. If you have to do that 3 times then on that 3rd time notify them that you won't be returning.
It works. Some theaters have family hours, some will remove you if you are too noisey.
If it upsets you then leave, get your money back and go to a different showing.
If it really upsets you then wait 3 weeks before you see a movie. Don't go the opening weekend with every showing is full. Wait until they show it to a theater with 15 people in it.
The US laws do not apply where it could inconvenience any US company.
Yes and no. This clearly isn't the case that shows that. You will never find an American company building modchips to help you pirate stuff on MS's platform. MS has too much power and it's against the law.
Giving modchips away might be a possibility but selling them is out.
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Anyone remember LinuxOne? I don't know about you guys but I just get a sleazy feeling from Lindows, the same kind of vibe I got from LinuxOne. How about Loki? I'm not trying to lump Loki in with them per se, there were some good guys that worked there but the company, the CEO, were on the sleezier side of things. I think they are a bit more honest than LinuxOne but I don't think that they are looking to do anything other than make a quick buck. This conference thing is just what I'd expect from them; now I could be wrong and maybe Bruce couldn't speak or something like that but it sounds underhanded.
It's just something as a community we're going to need to watch, especially if we want to stay a community. I don't know how many times I've heard Redhat descibed as the next redmond or how they're taking over the world with blue curve and bucking; the truth is Redhat has been walking the walk as much as talking the talk and giving a lot back. They still have one of the most free (libre) distributions out there. We need to keep outselves honest and we need to support the community and the companies that benefit it. Maybe it's time for some kind of Linux community watch effort. Like a website where we could post information about companies in this space and what they've given to the community vs. what they've taken and how they've interacted. I know that stuff is hard to do but some kind of self policing might be useful.
There isn't anything wrong exactly with taking from the community but when a company like MandrakeSoft is on the ropes and a company like Lindows is screwing over other people in the community to push their own message and agenda we need to tell them how to behave with our pocket books. If you're going to pay for a Linux this year, think hard about grabbing a copy of Mandrake and avoid Lindows. Let them take on MS by themselves and see how much they need the community to help them.
I could have sworn I heard some of those loops on Amnesiac somewhere.
I know 2 kernel hackers that run Mandrake. Users that tend to bitch about like to think that they are technically oriented.
I don't mind if they build that stuff into a BIOS unless I'm not going to be able to use my hardware under GNU/Linux.
Do you mind if I start using that as my sig?
You might come up with new ways to organize the tree, maybe some different ways but it's still the only way you can process data.
I can sympathize with paying the bill and the slow connection, there are solutions though. Building blacklists and te vigilantism that goes with them is nothing more and digital road rage.
I spent close to 2 years developing a PVR at my ex company. I did the platform work. (GO LINUX!) Accoustics is everything, cheaper processor to get away from fans and fluidic barings in drives are the norm. I had a maxtor drive that I couldn't tell if it was on, seriously, dead on silent all of the time. Nothing sucks more than listening to the grinding noise when a PVR disk starts to "get tired" you can hear it through walls, at one point I didn't sleep for about a week because I couldn't not hear it. It's also a very minimal problem that is getting better and better, a good new PVR is probably more quite than a VCR.
His points are valid. Nobody needs a PVR, until they see one in action. Nobody watches "that much TV" and then they see one and they're sold.
Put a DVD player in them (been done, failed, it'll get done again) and you've got a single point of access to the digital TV experience. Explain it to a layperson who likes to not watch a lot of TV and it's a gadget. At my ex-company there were tons of people who didn't understand the PVR products until they saw them. His point about saving the industry is valid also, drives are already primarily being used for media. I've got a 600GB system and I can't even dent it with my "data," start putting movies, pictures and MP3s on it and I can fill it up.
If you look at the health of Tivo and replay as companies and you know how easy it is to build a PVR (the code is simple, with digital TV, it's really pretty simple, it's moslty an excercise in cost reduction engineering) I kind of expect that PVRs may die and then come back in more favorable economic times. Tivo looks like they are getting traction and brand recog. but I have a hard time believing that Sony and Matsushita can't do it better and more cheaply if they choose to. I think that if a couple of Japanese companies put their minds to it they could simply wipe out Tivo and replay; they are hurting as it is and since the Japs aren't playing ball I'm guessing that nobody has figured out how to sell it to the masses and that's the bigger problem.
I don't know, I guess I buy in to the hype and buy the known winner (GTA3, VC, MGS2, FFX, etc) instead of taking the shot on that Mosquito game or some of the other lesser known titles. I know there are really crappy games being made right now. List those so I can avoid them.
Same thing with some of the early games. Star Con 2 went opensource recently and the original PC source is gone. Fortunately there is a workable base to use but I'm not sure that's the case with the early Sierra games and the early Epix games. Sierra is out of business, they aren't doing games any more. The legend will live on for ages. Too bad the games won't. There was some real craft to games back in the day, in retrospect I'm amazed that TestDrive one fit on a floppy disk.
Look at what Doom and Quake did. The availability of that code changed the gaming world, the benchmark got raised alot and you can get Doom or quake on just about any platform around.
It's not just games either. There have been times when I'd kill to have Bank Street Writer or Dr. Halo on Linux. I know there are better things today but damn if it wasn't simple and fast. Maybe I'm just rememeber the past in too good of terms but BSW fit on 2 disks (you only needed the first, it had a 60,000 word dictionary and all the basic editing and word processing you could use. Or 1-2-3...
Any takers?
I don't want to compile something in to C and then into object code. Why not an eiffel front end for GCC?
you have a simple rule, if the mail is signed by someone within the web of trust then I see it, else throw it in the garbage bin. Likewise, if I see someone spamming from a trusted account then we cut it out of the web and revoke its trust. It becomes a collective white list.
Mozilla with enigmil, kmail,evolution, and there are outlook plugins for GPG and PGP. Start signing your email today!
Do this: Download gpg from gnupg.org. Build it. Generate yourself a key. Try to get some of your friends to sign it. submit it to keyserver.net. Sign your code with that key. While you're at it, start using kmail, evolution, or mozilla with enigmail and start signing your emails too. Do it religiously.
Check sigs when you download code too.
FWIW, it's looking to be a hell of a kernel.
This stuff is done for real. At IBM I worked on a very large project that compiled on AIX (several distinct versions that we were sensitive to) Solaris, Windows NT, Linux, HPUX, and supposedly OS/400 although I never actually built the OS/400 piece nor have I seen it operate. First things first, you need good coding conventions, don't let some punk break them either. Secondly you have to design some abstractions and build some foundation classes; or buy a really good set or downlaod some good free ones, I've heard positive things about ACE. This is mostly a problem with windows any more, back a few years you might support win16, win32, PM, and UNIX now it's pretty much just POSIX and Windows. You need to abstract the machine stuff out. Threads, possibly strings and such (Unicode vs. non-unicode..) possibly basic types (big endian vs. little) networking code.. A rule of thumb is that on this kind of project you should never talk to the OS directly without something in between, it's a huge effort to make that OS abstraction layer or learn the ins and outs of an off the shelf one but it's worth it, even if you pay with a little performance. Nothing sucks more than coding away on AIX building some cool classes and adding some cool new stuff, then checking it in and finding that it doesn't compile on any other platforms.. and you've got to figure that crap out ASAP to make a deadline. If you build one from scratch, as IBM usually does or did, you can tune some things for your application; your OS abstraction layer can be a great "helper" or "utility" layer.
Typically well coded C and C++ can go from compiler to compiler pretty easily. Then you can use Pro64 on Mips, ACC on sparc, Intel C on Windows for performance critical portions of code. You have to be smart about it though and use some good conventions. The biggest rule would be avoid MS Visual Studio which is by far the most non-standard setup out there and if you do use it don't use their projects unless you have to. Some good make files with some good rules can help make this pretty easy. I don't know why more people don't do it but look at the Linux kernel's rules file. I have a Rules.make that I've built up and it includes things like different options for debug builds, profiled builds, and optimized builds, sets up some common rules for compiling C++ code and C code and what have you. My makefile include that file and then they are usually pretty short, generally not much more than a list of .cxx files and a library name.
Then it's easy to make sweeping changes too. I think a good build
system, one that will last should usually take a day or two to kind of
put together pretty early on in a project, unless you can carp some
good stuff from another project. The goal is a flexable and reliable
build system that you don't have to worry about. Far too often people
start cobbeling a build system together and then after 6-9 months it's
broken and britle and hard to change because so many things have been
changed and added through out the project. Put some effort in up
front, consolidate your rules in to one place, use some environment
variables to control some build switches. Use some shell scripts to
figure out various things, not hundreds of lines of Bourne shell code,
just little bits. Do this until AAP is ready and rocking and then use
that. Also, if it needs to be said, use GNU Make; it runs damn near
everywhere and it's pretty good at what it does the 15 minutes it
takes to learn it will save you hours and even days worth of time in
the long run.
I'm a huge advocate of a solid and strong build. Mozilla is a project that festered for weeks or maybe even months becuase you couldn't build the damn thing when it went open source. Building code is something that can be done so well by tools that if you're worried about it then you need to fix the build. Building software is hardwork so take the pieces you can out of the equation, the build is the first one.
Next, I assume you've abstracted out the GUI from the meat. If not, make this job one if you wish to have any chance in hell against your one platform competitors or even your mulitplatform competitors when you get down to it. View/Data Model and client/server: learn it, live it, love it. Or switch to a web based interface, lot's of people do it.
While we're on abstraction. If you guys are really serious then you're probably going to have machine specific components. Look at /usr/src/linux/include and /usr/src/linux/arch for a starting point of
reference. I would envision a project like this have a set of small Mips,
Wintel, Linux-x86, etc. directories. Everything else can probably be
compiled with GCC and then in those directories you'd have your
assembly and machine specific compiled code.
Lastly, you want to have a staged check in process. People hate not being able to commit code but at the same time you don't want them to commit code for real until it compiles on all of your platforms. Honestly, I don't know of a really good way to do this. Set up a build lab, do nightlies against the real code. Do nightlies against the "staged" code. Then have some kind of weekly merge meeting. That's how I've seen it, it's time consuming and somewhat painful. You bite off too much and you're spending a shitload of time merging stuff.
Not surprised by the rigged review but are there any that show the opposite?
I believe that's kind of what the article is announcing. A fork and Linus likes it enough to include it in his kernel.
I've mostly explored JSP, Zope, and PHP. JSP is cool, tons of support, it feels like and acts like it's the enterprise solution. As such, it's a logical choice for a lot of things because if you need a hammer it's nice to have a sledge hammer. The reality, at least as I've seen it, is it's a bitch. It's huge, it's slow, it takes a super computer to really run, I've seen a fair share of sloppy JSP. It's cool, has all the gizmos that java has and it also has all the gizmos that java has. It seems like you need a ton of crap to build a lot of java stuff, even things from Sun like the JMAPI need 3 or 4 30MB downloads before you can build them and get them working, maybe that's just me complaining though. I'm also not sure what kind of vibe I get about Sun and java as a whole technology any more, I'm not saying it's going away or anything like that but it's not the goose that laid the golden egg anymore either. I don't know I'd tie my cart to java if my cart was as big a yahoo! Again, just my opinions, my C++ and assembly (of all things) skills have taken me farther the last couple years and got me jobs when there weren't any, java has just filled out the resume. While I'm knocking one of the most popular platforms out there let me also throw out the java developer base issue. Java was like a dot.com programming language, in no time it instantly had a huge developer base; how quickly do you think they'll run to the next great thing when/if it happens? I've wondered what would happen if sun started charging for the JDK. Or if .Net 2.0 really rocks and mono
takes off.
Zope. What to say about it. It's the bomb. It's also Python which is huge and on the cusp of going really huge, but hasn't yet. It's its own custom thing. It has a ton of cool parts you can drop in to it. It's probably my favorite. It is also a pain in the ass going to zope.org downloading something and trying to get it to work. It's like they have their own little sourceforget.net running in zope space and it makes the number of available parts look bigger than it really is. It's getting better but there is a lot of dead stuff on there. It also won't drop in to Apache that easily, you usually use their custom server and transport layer. It's not so bad but it's nice to be on mainstreet; it's more trustworthy. Other than that, it rocks, it's just a bit tough to sell it to someone who knows some of the buzz. If it were all up to me Zope would be the next big thing but it doesn't look like it's all up to me.
Then I stumbled on to PHP and it kind of rocked my world when I first started screwing around with it. For simple kinds of web things, like dumping some tables out of a database or something it's kicks the hell out of anything else I've seen. It seems like a few lines of PHP and it's done. No magic web server/container, just the apache server on your redhat box.. Then some of the tools and kits that have been put together with it make it a much more compelling application platform. Zope really appeals to my aesthetic sense of software engineering, I like python, I like the structure and the object nature it just hasn't caught on like the wildfire I think it is. PHP is close to it in terms of pontential and reusable stuff and it's like the second coming of perl. There are still the stock issues, is it fast enough? can it scale? will it last? It seems like those answers are yes. Can it scale better than JSP? I bet for a shop like yahoo! there isn't a comparison; I bet PHP wins unless they triple the amount of RAM that they have or switch off of FreeBSD boxes to S/390s or Sun "Enterprise servers." Also, PHP has such a grass roots following and has really grown up slowly compared to java, I don't see a lot of PHPers really dumping it anytime soon as it is. Now that Yahoo! is involved, PHP may go up to that next level.
How on earth can you win it peacefully though? How many of the missions are to kill somebody? I think we lose credibility and the argument when such claims are made. There is no way to win that game without taking the life of some of the characters in it. Can you win it by taking fewer lives? Sure but that's far cry from peaceful.
I'm not particularly in favor of banning games or things like that. I don't really mind the labels on them, parents should know what they are getting their children and then ultimately I think a good parent would play along or at least observe their kids gaming habbits. You're a parent and don't lke GTA3, then don't let your kids play it. There isn't a credible way that you can claim that the game can be played peacefully though; unless you're talking about just driving around and exploring which isn't really playing. By saying such things you make the statements of the opposition more credible.
Violent game? Certainly, you're lying if you think it can be played peacefully. Morally objectionable? Probably in the same league as watching CSI or paying to see Red Dragon, in other words, not terribly extreme. Morally objectionable to let young teenagers play without supervision? Possibly, that's really for parents to decide though.
Seriously, I really don't give a shit about overclocking. I don't want to block out all hardware news though.
No reason we couldn't have personal planes, accept energy.
If we create room temperature super conductors and cold fusion in a bottle then it all might happen when we've got energy to just piss away but until then I wouldn't hold my breath.
It works. Some theaters have family hours, some will remove you if you are too noisey.
If it upsets you then leave, get your money back and go to a different showing.
If it really upsets you then wait 3 weeks before you see a movie. Don't go the opening weekend with every showing is full. Wait until they show it to a theater with 15 people in it.
Yes and no. This clearly isn't the case that shows that. You will never find an American company building modchips to help you pirate stuff on MS's platform. MS has too much power and it's against the law.
Giving modchips away might be a possibility but selling them is out.