Open Source really doesn't need a set QA system, it already has one. It's called peer review. Say Hacker X creates a program with obvious bugs. He/she releases it, and Hacker Y downloads it. Because Hacker Y has access to the source code, he/she can find the bug and fix it.
This is a myth. Problems:
1. Most people, even hackers, don't have the incentive or time to track down a bug in huge software products.
2. Fixes made by people who aren't familiar with a code base are unreliable. Changing code is scary if you don't understand the .
3. Most people who touch OSS code don't do regression testing. Heck, most OSS doesn't have test suites available.
4. Many "bugs" end up being differences of opinion or simply a user not understanding things properly. Jumping in and fixing those is bad.
I remember a number of years ago on Usenet Darek would violently attack people who said anything other than glowing about his company or products. In a few cases he basically said "Fuck off!" to his customers, using colorful language. He's a great programmer, but understand that he likes to rant and stamp his feet.
So yeah, of course it's going to take up the processor time - we're asking our operating systems and programs to do WAY more than they did even just a few years ago. It has nothing to do with bad code.
It has everything to do with bad code. The bad code is in layers. The Windows kernel has bad code in it, the GDI has bad code in it, the GUI layer has bad code in it, Explorer has bad code in it, applications have bad code in them. It snowballs. It is also difficult to avoid, unless you focus on the particular problems you are trying to solve, rather than just making a big desktop thingy that's self-referentially designed around manipulating and customing a big desktop thingy. I think the KDE and Gnome people have started realizing this. Once you start running down that road, you end up in the same place.
We're definitely at the stage where re-architecting software can pay off much more than Moore's law. The Moore disciples are willing to put up with crap, because they know they can get 2x faster crap in under two years. They could get a 10x speed-up in less time if they just realized they were using crap and looked for alternatives.
Think how much more Blizzard would make if they re-released all their titles for Linux
Judging from past experiences, including Q3 for Linux, I think the answer is "not much." Linux may be growing 2000% a year or whatever, but it's a strange market. If you make one minor license screw up, you end up as a Slashdot headline and vigilantes bring down your site. Warning: This is how many developers see the culture surrounding Linux. Don't laugh it off.
If John Carmack isn't the founder of modern gaming, I don't know who is.
Let's think about this. There were 3D games in the late 1970s and all through the 1980s. Remember Atari's Hard Drivin' coin-op from 1989? Fully 3D polygonal graphics, including realistic physics (and physics didn't start becoming a buzzword until 1997 or so). I could name dozens more 3D games released before 1992. The Wolfenstein 3D graphics technique of ray casting was used in a couple of games from 1983 (Way Out and Capture the Flag). There were multiplayer networked games before Doom and Quake, too. You need to learn your gaming history!
Wolfenstein 3D and Doom jumpstarted 3D gaming on the PC. There were 3D PC games before that, but John Carmack did a bang-up job of bringing us all up to date. Doom and Quake (which, remember, had John Romero as co-designer), are linked to the rise of 3D graphics on the PC, and the rise of the First Person Shooter Genre.
The mistake you are making is saying that gaming can be equated to these items. No, it cannot be. Consider Civilization, The Sims, X-Com, all the Ultima games (including Ultima Underworld), everything Sid Meier has done, everything Shigeru Miyamoto has done, the Freespace games, the Final Fantasy series, The Need for Speed games (which started before Quake, BTW), and so on and so on.
A classic fanboy mistake is thinking that not only are the Quake and Unreal engines the epitome of 3D technology, but that the development of these engines are the foundation for gaming. Neither of these is true. It's just that all the other 3D game developers out there aren't poster children for PC graphics card manufacturers.
Am I insulting John Carmack? Certainly not. I'm insulting the fanboys who insist that Carmack and Sweeney are the Sole Carriers of The Gaming Torch, well, that's just misguided.
John Carmack is brilliant. That really doesn't need to be said. He's a top notch programmer, and a 3D graphics expert. He exerts great influence over PC video hardware. He brought 3D graphics research from decades earlier to the PC. He came up with some cool ways of getting high-end looking graphics on fairly low-end PCs.
Obviously, though, this is all very technology oriented. There's more to games than that. It gets tiring to read interviews in which he is called the Top Dog of computer games, and all the questions are about 3D APIs and which video card is best and what console has faster hardware. In short, he's The King of 3D Tech on the PC, but this is being equated with the driving pulse of computer games. In a way it's sort of depressing that PC gaming has been reduced to video cards and benchmarks. This isn't Mr. Carmack's fault, of course, but it all feels very materialistic and empty.
Sequel of sorts to the video game portion
on
Hackers
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· Score: 2
A number of the people from the video game section of the book, including John Harris, were interviews for a book that came out a few years ago. John Harris, who was a primary player in the original book, talks about how Levy twisted details around and made him look in a much poorer light. Some of the other video game programmers from Hackers are included as well. Good stuff, if you like detailed interviews with programmers and game designers.
The reasoning here is simple : if they're too cheap to upgrade their fossil box, they're probably too cheap to pay 40-50$ for a game, but 15$ for 5-10 games is an acceptable indulgence for those people.
We're not talking about 33 MHz 486s here, we're talking about 300+ MHz processors. Those machines fly for Windows, Excel, Word, Photoshop, whatever. Heck, you can do high-end 3D modelling on such machines (note: a company I used to work for was doing 3D modelling on 486-based machines, because, at the time, that was the "high end"). Now we have people putting down 400 and 500 MHz processors as worthless for everything except word processing and web browsing. Why would you want to upgrade if your "fossil" is ten times faster than machines that were used for hardcore software development only a few years ago?
Seriously, some people need to get a clue about performance. I suppose fooling yourself into thinking anything that's now brand new is slow and crappy, but you're putting down some seriously fast hardware.
lol, I loved that line about "If you optimize too heavily, then fans will be disappointed because their 1GHz Athlon isn't showing any benefit over a 400MHz Pentium II". That was just funny, as the athlon has so many ways to further optimize it then a P2 that such could never be the case...
See how some people are clueless? I do hardcore software development on a PII 400 and have no speed complaints whatsoever. You can convince yourself that you need 3x the speed to do 3x less, but there's not much I can do about that.
This is a perfect example of why companies are scared as hell of open source and the Linux-type crowd. It's not because of changing business models or a lack of willingness to explore new technology. It's because a significant segment the Slashdot-type of crowd is volatile and misguided. Cracking a web site and stealing user info because you don't like a EULA? Look, just because you don't agree with them isn't any reason to become a vigilante. If you don't agree with their business practices, then don't use the product. (Note: That doesn't mean "start a crusade against them.")
But there is more to the game world than first-person shooters, and a persistent war/strategy / flight simulator like Longbow spent more than half the processing power at the time on keeping track of the hundreds of units on the battlefield. Very little of the processing power was shown on the screen (but Voodoo sure made it look better!).
What I'm saying--and I'm a game developer--is that a Voodoo 2 could be pushed about 5x farther than anyone has pushed it, but we're so busy playing catch-up with new cards and bad drivers that there's no incentive. So we use a new card and get a 3x speedup, even though the old card could do the same. People who get involved in the whole upgrade cycle and "my computer is bigger than yours" nonsense don't want to hear this.
There was a popular coin-op game a few years ago--San Francsisco Rush--that still looks better than just about any racer released on the PC. What was powering SF Rush in the arcades? A Voodoo 1.
Yes, there are other things to use CPU power for. "AI." Pathfinding. Complex animation systems. Physics. But everyone in the game business knows that you don't need to optimize too much on the PC, because everyone will upgrade. If you optimize too heavily, then fans will be disappointed because their 1GHz Athlon isn't showing any benefit over a 400MHz Pentium II.
The end result is that many people are fooled into thinking that you need insane machines in order to do things that could be done with 10x less processing power.
Gamers arre the people how really push the emveope.
Hee-hee. You have no idea at all how underutilized the typical game-playing PC is. Heck, there are games on the five year old PlayStation that outgun high-end PC games, which is damn amazing considering that the PS has about 1/3 the graphics power of a Voodoo 1. Game developers mostly try to support high end hardware rather than getting performance out of current systems because that's what lunatic fanboy gamers buy. Seriously. I'm not trying to flame you in the least.
3D APIs get talked about as if they're doing all the work. OpenGL and Direct3D are just that--APIs--and there's nothing magical about them. It's not like OpenGL is doing the "creating" here. It's just being used for the back-end polygon rendering. That's it. The rest of the code has nothing to do with OpenGL.
One other thing I'd like to add while I'm here is that in a typical 3D game, only about 2-5% of the code involves 3D API calls. Two to five percent. There's a consistent myth that OpenGL rendering is the bulk of most 3D games and such, which is certainly not even close to true.
Im curious why Slashdot is posting this as well. Online polls (especially OS related ones) have to be the WORST way to proove anything. I myself have read alot of posts on Mac forums (Lets vote on every Mac vs. Win poll in existance) posting URLS to polls where Windows was dominating, the next day MacOS is in the lead. Stupid polls like "Which is a better gaming platform" and the Mac ends up winning even tho it had an ATI 128 (vs a GeForce SDR in the PC).
Ditto for Linux users. It's only Windows users that really don't seem to fixate on operating systems. The people that vote in these polls are the ones that are the underdogs. For a long while, the "best operating system" poll at deja.com was like this:
1. OS/2
2. BeOS
3. Amiga OS
4. Free BSD
5. Linux
6. MacOS
7. Windows
I see lots of comments about recycling and about donating computers to charity. Recyling is good, yes, but a good part of the problem falls on the shoulders of the consumer. How many computers have you bought in the last ten years? How many times have you upgraded your video card? How many times have you bought a larger hard drive?
Upgrading can be good, but I think we're in a bad cycle of upgrading and not getting solidly tangible results from the upgrade. Okay, a bigger hard drive will let you store more stuff. But at the same time, the average game is taking 500MB to install. A video card may be faster, but are developers really taking good advantage of that card, or is it that developers were only taking 40% advantage of the previous generation, so you upgraded to make up the difference? When you look back at the amazing stuff being done on the five year old PlayStation--which has specs that aren't even up to the Voodoo 1 level--and see games that frequently look like high-end PC games, it makes you wonder.
About donating to charity: you need to be careful not to use this as a way to justify your consumerism. The Salvation Army and other charities gets heaps of junk dumped on them that they often end up having to pay to get hauled away. Mattresses hard difficult to recycle, so mattress stores often talk about how they'll give your old mattress to charity for you. It's common for charities to not know what to do with thousands of old, stained mattresses, so they just dump them. You can't funnel the castaways of hundreds of millions of people down the much smaller charity pipe.
Let's compare this to when the P6 was introduced
on
Pentium IV Problems?
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· Score: 2
It's interesting to think back to how things were when the P6 (Pentium Pro) was coming onto the scene:
1. Windows and Word and Excel were not past the threshold where you stopped caring about CPU speed increases.
2. 2D hardware acceleration was still fairly unusual, so the CPU was bogged down more than it should have been in GUI-oriented tasks.
3. 3D games were becoming commonplace, and 90% of the execution time in a typical game was being spent in a software texture mapping loop.
Here's how things are today:
1. Windows and Word and Excel feel the same on a 200MHz Pentium and a 1GHz Athlon. They're not CPU bound at all. 2D graphics accleration has helped a lot here.
2. 2D hardware acceleration is standard on all machines, and has been for years.
3. Software rendering is on the verge of extinction. Average cards like the Voodoo 2 are on the order of 500x faster than the best software renderer out there. Cards like the GeForce 2 are maybe 2000x.
In general, CPU speed is not nearly the issue that it once was. Yeah, some games or applications feel slow, but that's usually because of either slopping programming or a profile that's bound in other parts of the system. Adobe Acrobat Reader never seems to get any faster, even if you double the speed of the CPU. And you still get that damned hourglass or watch icon when opening tiny documents. So these crazy expensive CPUs are coming out, chips with multiple fans and huge heatsinks, CPUs that use 20x the power of ten years ago...and, quite frankly, nobody cares. Oh, the techno-geek fanboys care, because they'll plunk down $300 every six months just so they can get a card with even more unstable drivers, but everyone else quietly ignores them. Considering that most people only surf the web and play MP3s, a 1+ GHz chip is like a 400HP lawnmower.
So if the organization that thinks it's inappropriate for me to see spreads of cum gargling sluts also thinks it's inappropriate for me to read What Whitman or James Joyce, what then?
You're already dealing with it. Libraries can't afford to buy every book out there. You have to make due with what they don't have. Is that censorship? Libraries are already carrying videos and DVDs, but you're not going to find them carrying hardcore porn in most cases. Is that a problem? Libraries have to make a call about what they can deal with and what they can't. Turning T1 lines into pornpipes is not a good use of resources.
I'm pretty surprised to see this comment moderated down by two. It's becoming fairly obvious that so-called "geek culture" is doing more harm than good. Well, maybe I don't mean it like that. It's more that geek-culture has become a lifestyle that seems to prevent its followers from being productive outside of that lifestyle. For example, there are fearsome programmers out there: Zawinski, Pike, Norvig, Bentley, Abrash, Graham, etc. But they tend to be more the object of geek obsession rather than wrapped up in the culture themselves. The "culture" tends to be more of a "technology twiddling as an end unto itself" thing than just being someone with extreme knowledge about a particular area. So Pike does research into operating systems, and thousands of other people try to split license hairs, argue about Napster, upgrade their kernels, proclaim AMD and NVidia the saviors of computing, and so on. I tend to think that female programmers would operate outside this circle, which would give them a huge advantage over people on the inside.
Most libraries get Playboy and have lots of books about sex, being gay, whatever. That's good! But they also don't usually carry really explicit pictorial magazines ("Cumshot Monthly"), and they don't have bulletin boards filled with ads for buying used panties and having live sex chats with nude women. Does that stuff belong in a library? No. Is removing it censorship? No; it's outside of the realm of what a library is for. There's the issue of how to filter how that stuff without filtering legitimate sites. But that's not the issue that's being debated here. (Realize, though, that not every library contains every book ever written either. Is that because they're censoring books? No.)
The reason more women aren't in computer science isn't because of the subject matter, but more because of the culture surrouning that field. My wife majored in computer science, as did I, and she's a bang-up programmer. But she's not interesting in dinking around for the heck of it, as many guys seemingly are. I'm referring to dinking around in a "okay, now let get the latest GeForce 2 drivers and grab some new Winamp skins and then recompile the kernel," and not "Hmmm...now that's an interesting logic problem; I wonder how I could solve it?" The peculiar culture of constant upgrading, fixating on operating systems and languages and choice of text editor, and an obsession with the speed and make of hardware...those are things that can ruin a programmer. A programmer who could live outside that culture would be a force to be reckoned with.
Perfect example, wouldn't you say? IIRC, Google rates their sites based a good deal on how many other sites link to them. That is going to be non-trivial to hack
Nah, easy. You ever look into reigstering a domain name. Notice how there are all those bulk registration specials, like "only $9.95 each if you register 250 or more?" That's because there are a good many web companies out there with dozens or hundreds of domains. In the case of porn, maybe thousands. It's pretty easy to cross link everything so you look more popular than you are.
Hate to correct you, but we hate those corporations too!
Yeah, but that won't stop us from doing without! "Evil" is also relative here at Slashdot. These are acceptable:
* Child labor.
* Giving money to the Chinese government for the development of nuclear weapons.
* Millions of computers and video cards tossed in landfills every year because "400MHz is yesterday's news" and "the Voodoo 2 is slow crap."
And these are not:
* Having a receptionist somewhere who uses Windows 98.
* Questionable bullet items in licenses of software that is given away free of charge.
* Any suggestion that constant upgrading is maybe not the best idea.
Argh. No more license related stories with headlines starting with "possibly" or "maybe" or ending with question marks. These are getting to be embarrassing for Slashdot in general. Half the time the "violation" is a misinterpretation by some wacked out do-gooder who hates The Man, and the other half of the time things are blown out of proportion. In all cases there's more conjecture and bad information than anything else. These are just like stereotypical local news stories: "Could something in your house kill you without warning? More after this commercial about margarine."
Of course we only hate evil corporations. Corporations that do things we find entertaining, like publishing games, creating episodes of The Simpsons, making big budget movies, and distributing carbonated beverages..they're all right. It's all those other corporations that we hate. You know, the ones we don't know that they do.
Slashdot Mirror
Open Source really doesn't need a set QA system, it already has one. It's called peer review. Say Hacker X creates a program with obvious bugs. He/she releases it, and Hacker Y downloads it. Because Hacker Y has access to the source code, he/she can find the bug and fix it.
This is a myth. Problems:
1. Most people, even hackers, don't have the incentive or time to track down a bug in huge software products.
2. Fixes made by people who aren't familiar with a code base are unreliable. Changing code is scary if you don't understand the .
3. Most people who touch OSS code don't do regression testing. Heck, most OSS doesn't have test suites available.
4. Many "bugs" end up being differences of opinion or simply a user not understanding things properly. Jumping in and fixing those is bad.
I remember a number of years ago on Usenet Darek would violently attack people who said anything other than glowing about his company or products. In a few cases he basically said "Fuck off!" to his customers, using colorful language. He's a great programmer, but understand that he likes to rant and stamp his feet.
So yeah, of course it's going to take up the processor time - we're asking our operating systems and programs to do WAY more than they did even just a few years ago. It has nothing to do with bad code.
It has everything to do with bad code. The bad code is in layers. The Windows kernel has bad code in it, the GDI has bad code in it, the GUI layer has bad code in it, Explorer has bad code in it, applications have bad code in them. It snowballs. It is also difficult to avoid, unless you focus on the particular problems you are trying to solve, rather than just making a big desktop thingy that's self-referentially designed around manipulating and customing a big desktop thingy. I think the KDE and Gnome people have started realizing this. Once you start running down that road, you end up in the same place.
We're definitely at the stage where re-architecting software can pay off much more than Moore's law. The Moore disciples are willing to put up with crap, because they know they can get 2x faster crap in under two years. They could get a 10x speed-up in less time if they just realized they were using crap and looked for alternatives.
Think how much more Blizzard would make if they re-released all their titles for Linux
Judging from past experiences, including Q3 for Linux, I think the answer is "not much." Linux may be growing 2000% a year or whatever, but it's a strange market. If you make one minor license screw up, you end up as a Slashdot headline and vigilantes bring down your site. Warning: This is how many developers see the culture surrounding Linux. Don't laugh it off.
If John Carmack isn't the founder of modern gaming, I don't know who is.
Let's think about this. There were 3D games in the late 1970s and all through the 1980s. Remember Atari's Hard Drivin' coin-op from 1989? Fully 3D polygonal graphics, including realistic physics (and physics didn't start becoming a buzzword until 1997 or so). I could name dozens more 3D games released before 1992. The Wolfenstein 3D graphics technique of ray casting was used in a couple of games from 1983 (Way Out and Capture the Flag). There were multiplayer networked games before Doom and Quake, too. You need to learn your gaming history!
Wolfenstein 3D and Doom jumpstarted 3D gaming on the PC. There were 3D PC games before that, but John Carmack did a bang-up job of bringing us all up to date. Doom and Quake (which, remember, had John Romero as co-designer), are linked to the rise of 3D graphics on the PC, and the rise of the First Person Shooter Genre.
The mistake you are making is saying that gaming can be equated to these items. No, it cannot be. Consider Civilization, The Sims, X-Com, all the Ultima games (including Ultima Underworld), everything Sid Meier has done, everything Shigeru Miyamoto has done, the Freespace games, the Final Fantasy series, The Need for Speed games (which started before Quake, BTW), and so on and so on.
A classic fanboy mistake is thinking that not only are the Quake and Unreal engines the epitome of 3D technology, but that the development of these engines are the foundation for gaming. Neither of these is true. It's just that all the other 3D game developers out there aren't poster children for PC graphics card manufacturers.
Am I insulting John Carmack? Certainly not. I'm insulting the fanboys who insist that Carmack and Sweeney are the Sole Carriers of The Gaming Torch, well, that's just misguided.
John Carmack is brilliant. That really doesn't need to be said. He's a top notch programmer, and a 3D graphics expert. He exerts great influence over PC video hardware. He brought 3D graphics research from decades earlier to the PC. He came up with some cool ways of getting high-end looking graphics on fairly low-end PCs.
Obviously, though, this is all very technology oriented. There's more to games than that. It gets tiring to read interviews in which he is called the Top Dog of computer games, and all the questions are about 3D APIs and which video card is best and what console has faster hardware. In short, he's The King of 3D Tech on the PC, but this is being equated with the driving pulse of computer games. In a way it's sort of depressing that PC gaming has been reduced to video cards and benchmarks. This isn't Mr. Carmack's fault, of course, but it all feels very materialistic and empty.
A number of the people from the video game section of the book, including John Harris, were interviews for a book that came out a few years ago. John Harris, who was a primary player in the original book, talks about how Levy twisted details around and made him look in a much poorer light. Some of the other video game programmers from Hackers are included as well. Good stuff, if you like detailed interviews with programmers and game designers.
The reasoning here is simple : if they're too cheap to upgrade their fossil box, they're probably too cheap to pay 40-50$ for a game, but 15$ for 5-10 games is an acceptable indulgence for those people.
We're not talking about 33 MHz 486s here, we're talking about 300+ MHz processors. Those machines fly for Windows, Excel, Word, Photoshop, whatever. Heck, you can do high-end 3D modelling on such machines (note: a company I used to work for was doing 3D modelling on 486-based machines, because, at the time, that was the "high end"). Now we have people putting down 400 and 500 MHz processors as worthless for everything except word processing and web browsing. Why would you want to upgrade if your "fossil" is ten times faster than machines that were used for hardcore software development only a few years ago?
Seriously, some people need to get a clue about performance. I suppose fooling yourself into thinking anything that's now brand new is slow and crappy, but you're putting down some seriously fast hardware.
lol, I loved that line about "If you optimize too heavily, then fans will be disappointed because their 1GHz Athlon isn't showing any benefit over a 400MHz Pentium II". That was just funny, as the athlon has so many ways to further optimize it then a P2 that such could never be the case...
See how some people are clueless? I do hardcore software development on a PII 400 and have no speed complaints whatsoever. You can convince yourself that you need 3x the speed to do 3x less, but there's not much I can do about that.
This is a perfect example of why companies are scared as hell of open source and the Linux-type crowd. It's not because of changing business models or a lack of willingness to explore new technology. It's because a significant segment the Slashdot-type of crowd is volatile and misguided. Cracking a web site and stealing user info because you don't like a EULA? Look, just because you don't agree with them isn't any reason to become a vigilante. If you don't agree with their business practices, then don't use the product. (Note: That doesn't mean "start a crusade against them.")
But there is more to the game world than first-person shooters, and a persistent war /strategy / flight simulator like Longbow spent more than half the processing power at the time on keeping track of the hundreds of units on the battlefield. Very little of the processing power was shown on the screen (but Voodoo sure made it look better!).
What I'm saying--and I'm a game developer--is that a Voodoo 2 could be pushed about 5x farther than anyone has pushed it, but we're so busy playing catch-up with new cards and bad drivers that there's no incentive. So we use a new card and get a 3x speedup, even though the old card could do the same. People who get involved in the whole upgrade cycle and "my computer is bigger than yours" nonsense don't want to hear this.
There was a popular coin-op game a few years ago--San Francsisco Rush--that still looks better than just about any racer released on the PC. What was powering SF Rush in the arcades? A Voodoo 1.
Yes, there are other things to use CPU power for. "AI." Pathfinding. Complex animation systems. Physics. But everyone in the game business knows that you don't need to optimize too much on the PC, because everyone will upgrade. If you optimize too heavily, then fans will be disappointed because their 1GHz Athlon isn't showing any benefit over a 400MHz Pentium II.
The end result is that many people are fooled into thinking that you need insane machines in order to do things that could be done with 10x less processing power.
Gamers arre the people how really push the emveope.
Hee-hee. You have no idea at all how underutilized the typical game-playing PC is. Heck, there are games on the five year old PlayStation that outgun high-end PC games, which is damn amazing considering that the PS has about 1/3 the graphics power of a Voodoo 1. Game developers mostly try to support high end hardware rather than getting performance out of current systems because that's what lunatic fanboy gamers buy. Seriously. I'm not trying to flame you in the least.
3D APIs get talked about as if they're doing all the work. OpenGL and Direct3D are just that--APIs--and there's nothing magical about them. It's not like OpenGL is doing the "creating" here. It's just being used for the back-end polygon rendering. That's it. The rest of the code has nothing to do with OpenGL.
One other thing I'd like to add while I'm here is that in a typical 3D game, only about 2-5% of the code involves 3D API calls. Two to five percent. There's a consistent myth that OpenGL rendering is the bulk of most 3D games and such, which is certainly not even close to true.
3) An evil empire to rebel against (micros~1), thus making all the time hacking worth it in the end (that's just my own little take on it).
You forget that IBM was the "evil empire" for a long, long time.
Im curious why Slashdot is posting this as well. Online polls (especially OS related ones) have to be the WORST way to proove anything. I myself have read alot of posts on Mac forums (Lets vote on every Mac vs. Win poll in existance) posting URLS to polls where Windows was dominating, the next day MacOS is in the lead. Stupid polls like "Which is a better gaming platform" and the Mac ends up winning even tho it had an ATI 128 (vs a GeForce SDR in the PC).
:)
Ditto for Linux users. It's only Windows users that really don't seem to fixate on operating systems. The people that vote in these polls are the ones that are the underdogs. For a long while, the "best operating system" poll at deja.com was like this:
1. OS/2
2. BeOS
3. Amiga OS
4. Free BSD
5. Linux
6. MacOS
7. Windows
Kind of in order by lack of marketshare
I see lots of comments about recycling and about donating computers to charity. Recyling is good, yes, but a good part of the problem falls on the shoulders of the consumer. How many computers have you bought in the last ten years? How many times have you upgraded your video card? How many times have you bought a larger hard drive?
Upgrading can be good, but I think we're in a bad cycle of upgrading and not getting solidly tangible results from the upgrade. Okay, a bigger hard drive will let you store more stuff. But at the same time, the average game is taking 500MB to install. A video card may be faster, but are developers really taking good advantage of that card, or is it that developers were only taking 40% advantage of the previous generation, so you upgraded to make up the difference? When you look back at the amazing stuff being done on the five year old PlayStation--which has specs that aren't even up to the Voodoo 1 level--and see games that frequently look like high-end PC games, it makes you wonder.
About donating to charity: you need to be careful not to use this as a way to justify your consumerism. The Salvation Army and other charities gets heaps of junk dumped on them that they often end up having to pay to get hauled away. Mattresses hard difficult to recycle, so mattress stores often talk about how they'll give your old mattress to charity for you. It's common for charities to not know what to do with thousands of old, stained mattresses, so they just dump them. You can't funnel the castaways of hundreds of millions of people down the much smaller charity pipe.
It's interesting to think back to how things were when the P6 (Pentium Pro) was coming onto the scene:
1. Windows and Word and Excel were not past the threshold where you stopped caring about CPU speed increases.
2. 2D hardware acceleration was still fairly unusual, so the CPU was bogged down more than it should have been in GUI-oriented tasks.
3. 3D games were becoming commonplace, and 90% of the execution time in a typical game was being spent in a software texture mapping loop.
Here's how things are today:
1. Windows and Word and Excel feel the same on a 200MHz Pentium and a 1GHz Athlon. They're not CPU bound at all. 2D graphics accleration has helped a lot here.
2. 2D hardware acceleration is standard on all machines, and has been for years.
3. Software rendering is on the verge of extinction. Average cards like the Voodoo 2 are on the order of 500x faster than the best software renderer out there. Cards like the GeForce 2 are maybe 2000x.
In general, CPU speed is not nearly the issue that it once was. Yeah, some games or applications feel slow, but that's usually because of either slopping programming or a profile that's bound in other parts of the system. Adobe Acrobat Reader never seems to get any faster, even if you double the speed of the CPU. And you still get that damned hourglass or watch icon when opening tiny documents. So these crazy expensive CPUs are coming out, chips with multiple fans and huge heatsinks, CPUs that use 20x the power of ten years ago...and, quite frankly, nobody cares. Oh, the techno-geek fanboys care, because they'll plunk down $300 every six months just so they can get a card with even more unstable drivers, but everyone else quietly ignores them. Considering that most people only surf the web and play MP3s, a 1+ GHz chip is like a 400HP lawnmower.
So if the organization that thinks it's inappropriate for me to see spreads of cum gargling sluts also thinks it's inappropriate for me to read What Whitman or James Joyce, what then?
You're already dealing with it. Libraries can't afford to buy every book out there. You have to make due with what they don't have. Is that censorship? Libraries are already carrying videos and DVDs, but you're not going to find them carrying hardcore porn in most cases. Is that a problem? Libraries have to make a call about what they can deal with and what they can't. Turning T1 lines into pornpipes is not a good use of resources.
I'm pretty surprised to see this comment moderated down by two. It's becoming fairly obvious that so-called "geek culture" is doing more harm than good. Well, maybe I don't mean it like that. It's more that geek-culture has become a lifestyle that seems to prevent its followers from being productive outside of that lifestyle. For example, there are fearsome programmers out there: Zawinski, Pike, Norvig, Bentley, Abrash, Graham, etc. But they tend to be more the object of geek obsession rather than wrapped up in the culture themselves. The "culture" tends to be more of a "technology twiddling as an end unto itself" thing than just being someone with extreme knowledge about a particular area. So Pike does research into operating systems, and thousands of other people try to split license hairs, argue about Napster, upgrade their kernels, proclaim AMD and NVidia the saviors of computing, and so on. I tend to think that female programmers would operate outside this circle, which would give them a huge advantage over people on the inside.
Most libraries get Playboy and have lots of books about sex, being gay, whatever. That's good! But they also don't usually carry really explicit pictorial magazines ("Cumshot Monthly"), and they don't have bulletin boards filled with ads for buying used panties and having live sex chats with nude women. Does that stuff belong in a library? No. Is removing it censorship? No; it's outside of the realm of what a library is for. There's the issue of how to filter how that stuff without filtering legitimate sites. But that's not the issue that's being debated here. (Realize, though, that not every library contains every book ever written either. Is that because they're censoring books? No.)
The reason more women aren't in computer science isn't because of the subject matter, but more because of the culture surrouning that field. My wife majored in computer science, as did I, and she's a bang-up programmer. But she's not interesting in dinking around for the heck of it, as many guys seemingly are. I'm referring to dinking around in a "okay, now let get the latest GeForce 2 drivers and grab some new Winamp skins and then recompile the kernel," and not "Hmmm...now that's an interesting logic problem; I wonder how I could solve it?" The peculiar culture of constant upgrading, fixating on operating systems and languages and choice of text editor, and an obsession with the speed and make of hardware...those are things that can ruin a programmer. A programmer who could live outside that culture would be a force to be reckoned with.
Perfect example, wouldn't you say? IIRC, Google rates their sites based a good deal on how many other sites link to them. That is going to be non-trivial to hack
Nah, easy. You ever look into reigstering a domain name. Notice how there are all those bulk registration specials, like "only $9.95 each if you register 250 or more?" That's because there are a good many web companies out there with dozens or hundreds of domains. In the case of porn, maybe thousands. It's pretty easy to cross link everything so you look more popular than you are.
Hate to correct you, but we hate those corporations too!
Yeah, but that won't stop us from doing without! "Evil" is also relative here at Slashdot. These are acceptable:
* Child labor.
* Giving money to the Chinese government for the development of nuclear weapons.
* Millions of computers and video cards tossed in landfills every year because "400MHz is yesterday's news" and "the Voodoo 2 is slow crap."
And these are not:
* Having a receptionist somewhere who uses Windows 98.
* Questionable bullet items in licenses of software that is given away free of charge.
* Any suggestion that constant upgrading is maybe not the best idea.
Argh. No more license related stories with headlines starting with "possibly" or "maybe" or ending with question marks. These are getting to be embarrassing for Slashdot in general. Half the time the "violation" is a misinterpretation by some wacked out do-gooder who hates The Man, and the other half of the time things are blown out of proportion. In all cases there's more conjecture and bad information than anything else. These are just like stereotypical local news stories: "Could something in your house kill you without warning? More after this commercial about margarine."
Of course we only hate evil corporations. Corporations that do things we find entertaining, like publishing games, creating episodes of The Simpsons, making big budget movies, and distributing carbonated beverages..they're all right. It's all those other corporations that we hate. You know, the ones we don't know that they do.