Europe has hundreds of years of evil behind it. The US is, at best, a johnny-come-lately to the game of slaughtering millions of people and supporting brutal dictatorships. European imperialism has done more damage to the world than the US could even dream of.
We dismiss European atrocities of 60 years ago as being old and irrelevant, yet we bring up US sins from the start of the country. Very fair and unbiased.
Our foreign policy is not perfect, but then again, no one's is. The idea is to move forward and try not to repeat the same mistakes. Support democracy and human rights - don't support brutal dictatorial regimes. You'd think it would be easier...
There's a Redeemer (one-shot nuke missile) on top of the big tower in the middle of the Onslaught map, actually. You've got to use the Raptor to get to it, though, and you're kind of a sitting duck while going for it.
It is handy for softening up nodes that are heavily defended, though, and is excellent for attacks on the enemy's core.
I agree - the Onslaught map that they included is absolutely kick-ass. Requires a bit of strategy, but not so much that bots are useless as team-mates. If only they'd jump on the back of the truck and man the damn gun!
It's funny - some of the initial reviews I read complained that the vehicles were done badly. I couldn't agree less - the ground vehicles need a little tweaking, but those air units bring me right back to the days of Tribes 2.
The vehicles also don't destroy balance, which is a good thing. A guy on the ground can take out air units and light vehicles pretty easily, and airborne units can destroy tanks extremely quickly. But, then again, five guys coming down on you with buggies is going to result in you dead, which makes sense.
The AI is good at blowing up air units if: 1. You stay still or move slowly. 2. You fly predictably. If you move like a fox and jink, they generally don't get you.
Interestingly, I also found the Assault map to be fantastic. You've got optional switches and "special events" (airstrike). There's also the cool cutscene at the beginning showing you exactly how to do the map.
Is the Ion Painter (oribital strike) weapon in the demo at all?
I was told by a Microsoft recruiter that they didn't want you looking at GPL code _while you worked there_. That seems fair. They made no clauses on what you do before.
"Said nukes are sufficient to eliminate the need for more "defense funds"."
Nuclear weapons are _not_ a viable option for 99.9% of possible military operations. Were you planning on defending Japan and South Korea from the North Koreans with nukes? Taiwan from the Communists? I think we can both laugh and cringe at the idea of nuking the snot out of North Korea as a "defensive" reaction.
That's not to mention that the _political_ cost for using nuclear weapons is sky-high, and would make Iraq look like a friendly debate. No one wants to step over the line from conventional to nuclear, and even plans in the Pentagon to use them as tactical devices are meeting fierce resistance for this reason.
Nuclear weapons are, at best, a last-ditch weapon to make sure the US stays a soveriegn country under massive foreign invasion. They're not going to do peace-keeping. They're not going to evict Iraq from Kuwait. Considering that, I'd argue the nuclear arsenal is what needs less funding, not the conventional military.
Strategic nuclear weapons are a deterrent, not a substitute for a real military. G-d help us all the day we use strategic nukes on a casual basis.
"Only the dead have seen the end of war." Sad, but true. We've got a few thousand years of killing each other, and I don't think it's going to stop tomorrow, unfortunately.
So Lotus Notes under WINE is a supported configuration? I kind of doubt it.
When businesses want something, they generally don't want a messy hack. They want something that's supported by the vendor. IBM is NOT going to be supporting Notes under WINE.
A while ago (year or two ago), IBM visited my university. One of the first things that came up was Lotus Notes on Linux, or lack thereof.
Basically, the IBM guy said the code of Notes was an absolute mess, and that porting it to Linux would be more trouble than it's worth. So, it might be ported, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting.
Here's a hint: anything involving reformatting your hard drive should not be described as "incredibly easy to use". It's real easy to nuke a drive - it's less easy to back everything important off it.
I'm not sure whether you were ranting or being ignorant, so I'll assume someone else is ignorant and needs me to say the following:
This is done all the time. Take, for instance, the Quadro line of cards by nVidia. You are buying an intentionally crippled card everytime you buy a GeforceFX. Same hardware, sans a couple switched transistors and a slightly modified BIOS. In other words, they made the Quadro, and then crippled it to be the GeForce.
It's certainly not a tactic that only Microsoft employs. Indeed, most firms that sell both to the "individual consumer" and businesses do it. Singling out Microsoft as an evil corporation because they're employing intelligent (and in this case, non-monopolistic) business practices is stupid.
Basic economics. Literally, they taught it at the very lowest level economics course at my school.
At my school U of MD at College Park, computer engineering is usually considered the hardest major in the school, followed by EE, and then CS. The irony is that you'll ask a CS major if he could hack EE, and he'd almost certainly say "HELL NO!", and if you asked the EE whether he could do CS, he'd respond the same way.
Neither engineering nor CS have any sort of GPA requirements. If you can keep your head above water, they'll keep you. Naturally, GPAs are lower because the classes are harder.
The reason CE is considered so hard is that they hit you with the hardest CS courses (Operating Systems comes to mind) and you get more than a bit of EE (which, of course, is not trivial either). CS and EE afford you the luxury of only having to know EE or CS, not both (well, except for a bit of cross-training, not enough to impress anyone).
However, don't confuse this with "CEs can program better than CS majors at UMCP". They can't. Their knowledge of more esoteric languages like Lisp and Prolog ends up suffering in the process, and they're missing out on quite a bit of algorithm theory.
I'm a CS/Econ double major, and it's like accounting and economics. Yes, I've taken a massive amount of statistics and finance courses, but that doesn't mean I'd be the better accountant of a guy with a business degree in finance. Ditto for CE and CS - he's got harder courses, but it doesn't make him a better programmer, because I've got more of them where it counts.
In other words, the two majors aren't at all the same, and the idea of using CEs as the "better" cheap labor for coding isn't thought-out very well. (No, this isn't in response to the parent, but it's something I needed to say). I have no interest in being some kind of lowly code slave, which is why I got the Econ degree, too.
You totally missed the point. The Pentagon is responsible for all those troops overseas (South Kora, Afghanistan, Iraq, Germany, etc.). They've got to have a reliable way to vote. They were examining an electronic way, instead of just mailing the ballots.
People stationed at home will vote at their base, just like your local citizen votes at the schools. Nothing sinister here, it's all in your head.
Speaking as someone who's been there and done that with MIPS assembly code, I'm not entirely convinced that programming stuff in assembly is going to do much of anything for the average program.
Problems with writing in assembly: 1. It's slow to write. IIRC, there was a study done that people who wrote in C and assembly produced the same number of lines of code. That means the assembly guys were producing less work than the C++ guys. 2. It's non-portable. System calls differ. Not all machines have the same register conventions. Hell, the NUMBER of registers differs wildly. Your wonderful hand-coded assembly is going to be mostly worthless outside of the platform you programmed it on, and if it ain't, you probably weren't exploiting the architecture all that well to begin with. 3. Improperly optimized assembly isn't going to net you any performance gain. Even GCC is going to do a better job than the average assembly language coder. So, yeah, the best of programmers 5% could do better on 5% of their code, but that's not going to convince me it's the best idea for even "just great" programmers.
In other words, it's probably better and more efficient to program in a thoughtful way in C rather than try to shove assembly code everywhere in hopes of some sort of speed gain. Certainly, there's reasons to use assembly, but at this point, I would think it's mostly on embedded apps.
The idea of getting to know at least one architecture on an assembly language level (hell, a binary level) is not a bad idea at all, and will indeed probably lead to better higher-level code in general. But trying to say that it's some kind of magic barrier between being mediocre and good is entirely off the mark. Being a good assembly programmer doesn't automagically confer you amazing abilities in Lisp or Prolog.
I have no idea what the submitter thinks goes on in good CS schools these days. I know they worked me to the bone with large projects in assembly, C, Java, Lisp, Prolog, you name it. The idea that they don't teach assembly is idiotic.
Interesting coincidence that Microsoft bought the makers of some PPC-to-x86 virtual machine software, isn't it? It's much easier to emulate an x86 machine in a PPC than vica-versa, due to some architecture differences, too, so I wouldn't count backwards compat out yet.
And in any event, that Wired story is based on a single IBM press release and an IBM rep who may or may not have known what he was talking about. I would take it with a grain of salt.
I suppose I should have written fourth generation, assuming it goes something along the lines of: 1. NES, SMS 2. SNES, Genesis, TG16 3. Playstation, N64, Dreamcast 4. PS2, X-Box, Gamecube
Good catch. You are totally right, and I am totally wrong. Relish that, because you don't hear it often on/.:).
I think you're misinterpreting it. Labor Day is given as the deadline for the total cut (ie, they want it at that $99 price for that weekend). However, the article reports that there may be an intermediate cut to around $130 in between. So, indeed, there is a substantial (20%-25%?) price cut coming soon, and then another one coming after.
My first thought upon reading this was, "That's gonna hurt Nintendo, big time."
Nintendo, at least from what I can see, got their big sales kick this season from slashing down the price so that consumers would see it as the most affordable of the third generation consoles. However, that value proposition is going to be dead if the X-Box goes to the $100, or $120 range. I don't think most people have an issue with kicking in an extra $20 for DVD-playing, a hard drive, and a broadband adapter.
The title, and even the body of the submitted news are somewhat misleading, in that they imply this is the first time X has been put on a PDA. At handhelds.org, GPE has been running on X for a good long time, and IIRC, even Opie has an X port.
To be fair, though, this is the first time I've ever seen full-out KDE running on a PDA, so this is something new. Definitely, it's an interesting accomplishment that the author should be proud of.
You can already do that, provided you've got the appropriate resolutions in your XF86Config. Do a search on "XRandR" - the hooks are indeed there. IIRC, Ximian had a program that did just this.
That's including the R&D costs. Ergo, the next rover will be far cheaper, because they've just got to build another one, not figure out how to make it in the first place.
The Linux-Dreamcast port apparently uses eCos to do some of the initial booting. So, while I wouldn't say I've seen it used practically, it was a nifty application of the OS.
All the report proves is that they (probably) never manufactured any at home _at the time of April 2000_. That was more than three years ago. If the Taiwanese put their heads to it, they could easily have functional nukes by now. The difficulty of building a reliable nuclear weapon is under-rated, but it's not impossible for a country that has the amount of technical resources that the ROC has.
That's also assuming that neither Israel nor South Africa sold them any during the 1970's, when both countries were pariahs on the international stage. There have been hints that the Israelis and the Taiwanese were working together on such a project in the 70's - take a look at some of the links at the bottom of the page you posted the URL to.
In any case, I don't think anyone should doubt that the ROC could throw together nukes on relatively short notice, especially if China starts building a viable amphibious force...
Slashdot Mirror
Europe has hundreds of years of evil behind it. The US is, at best, a johnny-come-lately to the game of slaughtering millions of people and supporting brutal dictatorships. European imperialism has done more damage to the world than the US could even dream of.
We dismiss European atrocities of 60 years ago as being old and irrelevant, yet we bring up US sins from the start of the country. Very fair and unbiased.
Our foreign policy is not perfect, but then again, no one's is. The idea is to move forward and try not to repeat the same mistakes. Support democracy and human rights - don't support brutal dictatorial regimes. You'd think it would be easier...
-Erwos
You've never used the DRI drivers for the Radeon 7xxx series. Those things are about a hundred times worse than the nVidia ones.
Open source is no guarantee of quality.
-Erwos
There's a Redeemer (one-shot nuke missile) on top of the big tower in the middle of the Onslaught map, actually. You've got to use the Raptor to get to it, though, and you're kind of a sitting duck while going for it.
It is handy for softening up nodes that are heavily defended, though, and is excellent for attacks on the enemy's core.
-Erwos
I agree - the Onslaught map that they included is absolutely kick-ass. Requires a bit of strategy, but not so much that bots are useless as team-mates. If only they'd jump on the back of the truck and man the damn gun!
It's funny - some of the initial reviews I read complained that the vehicles were done badly. I couldn't agree less - the ground vehicles need a little tweaking, but those air units bring me right back to the days of Tribes 2.
The vehicles also don't destroy balance, which is a good thing. A guy on the ground can take out air units and light vehicles pretty easily, and airborne units can destroy tanks extremely quickly. But, then again, five guys coming down on you with buggies is going to result in you dead, which makes sense.
The AI is good at blowing up air units if:
1. You stay still or move slowly.
2. You fly predictably.
If you move like a fox and jink, they generally don't get you.
Interestingly, I also found the Assault map to be fantastic. You've got optional switches and "special events" (airstrike). There's also the cool cutscene at the beginning showing you exactly how to do the map.
Is the Ion Painter (oribital strike) weapon in the demo at all?
-Erwos
I was told by a Microsoft recruiter that they didn't want you looking at GPL code _while you worked there_. That seems fair. They made no clauses on what you do before.
-Erwos
And, as a funny addendum, I almost wrote "Taiwan from the Chinese", but then I remembered that they all consider themselves Chinese.
:)
Guess that one's been decided!
-Erwos
"Said nukes are sufficient to eliminate the need for more "defense funds"."
Nuclear weapons are _not_ a viable option for 99.9% of possible military operations. Were you planning on defending Japan and South Korea from the North Koreans with nukes? Taiwan from the Communists? I think we can both laugh and cringe at the idea of nuking the snot out of North Korea as a "defensive" reaction.
That's not to mention that the _political_ cost for using nuclear weapons is sky-high, and would make Iraq look like a friendly debate. No one wants to step over the line from conventional to nuclear, and even plans in the Pentagon to use them as tactical devices are meeting fierce resistance for this reason.
Nuclear weapons are, at best, a last-ditch weapon to make sure the US stays a soveriegn country under massive foreign invasion. They're not going to do peace-keeping. They're not going to evict Iraq from Kuwait. Considering that, I'd argue the nuclear arsenal is what needs less funding, not the conventional military.
Strategic nuclear weapons are a deterrent, not a substitute for a real military. G-d help us all the day we use strategic nukes on a casual basis.
"Only the dead have seen the end of war." Sad, but true. We've got a few thousand years of killing each other, and I don't think it's going to stop tomorrow, unfortunately.
-Erwos
So Lotus Notes under WINE is a supported configuration? I kind of doubt it.
When businesses want something, they generally don't want a messy hack. They want something that's supported by the vendor. IBM is NOT going to be supporting Notes under WINE.
-Erwos
A while ago (year or two ago), IBM visited my university. One of the first things that came up was Lotus Notes on Linux, or lack thereof.
Basically, the IBM guy said the code of Notes was an absolute mess, and that porting it to Linux would be more trouble than it's worth. So, it might be ported, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting.
-Erwos
Here's a hint: anything involving reformatting your hard drive should not be described as "incredibly easy to use". It's real easy to nuke a drive - it's less easy to back everything important off it.
-Erwos
Yes, and if only new pr0n movies only played on Linux, right? EVERYONE would be running it!
-Erwos
I'm not sure whether you were ranting or being ignorant, so I'll assume someone else is ignorant and needs me to say the following:
This is done all the time. Take, for instance, the Quadro line of cards by nVidia. You are buying an intentionally crippled card everytime you buy a GeforceFX. Same hardware, sans a couple switched transistors and a slightly modified BIOS. In other words, they made the Quadro, and then crippled it to be the GeForce.
It's certainly not a tactic that only Microsoft employs. Indeed, most firms that sell both to the "individual consumer" and businesses do it. Singling out Microsoft as an evil corporation because they're employing intelligent (and in this case, non-monopolistic) business practices is stupid.
Basic economics. Literally, they taught it at the very lowest level economics course at my school.
-Erwos
At my school U of MD at College Park, computer engineering is usually considered the hardest major in the school, followed by EE, and then CS. The irony is that you'll ask a CS major if he could hack EE, and he'd almost certainly say "HELL NO!", and if you asked the EE whether he could do CS, he'd respond the same way.
Neither engineering nor CS have any sort of GPA requirements. If you can keep your head above water, they'll keep you. Naturally, GPAs are lower because the classes are harder.
The reason CE is considered so hard is that they hit you with the hardest CS courses (Operating Systems comes to mind) and you get more than a bit of EE (which, of course, is not trivial either). CS and EE afford you the luxury of only having to know EE or CS, not both (well, except for a bit of cross-training, not enough to impress anyone).
However, don't confuse this with "CEs can program better than CS majors at UMCP". They can't. Their knowledge of more esoteric languages like Lisp and Prolog ends up suffering in the process, and they're missing out on quite a bit of algorithm theory.
I'm a CS/Econ double major, and it's like accounting and economics. Yes, I've taken a massive amount of statistics and finance courses, but that doesn't mean I'd be the better accountant of a guy with a business degree in finance. Ditto for CE and CS - he's got harder courses, but it doesn't make him a better programmer, because I've got more of them where it counts.
In other words, the two majors aren't at all the same, and the idea of using CEs as the "better" cheap labor for coding isn't thought-out very well. (No, this isn't in response to the parent, but it's something I needed to say). I have no interest in being some kind of lowly code slave, which is why I got the Econ degree, too.
-Erwos
You totally missed the point. The Pentagon is responsible for all those troops overseas (South Kora, Afghanistan, Iraq, Germany, etc.). They've got to have a reliable way to vote. They were examining an electronic way, instead of just mailing the ballots.
People stationed at home will vote at their base, just like your local citizen votes at the schools. Nothing sinister here, it's all in your head.
-Erwos
Speaking as someone who's been there and done that with MIPS assembly code, I'm not entirely convinced that programming stuff in assembly is going to do much of anything for the average program.
Problems with writing in assembly:
1. It's slow to write. IIRC, there was a study done that people who wrote in C and assembly produced the same number of lines of code. That means the assembly guys were producing less work than the C++ guys.
2. It's non-portable. System calls differ. Not all machines have the same register conventions. Hell, the NUMBER of registers differs wildly. Your wonderful hand-coded assembly is going to be mostly worthless outside of the platform you programmed it on, and if it ain't, you probably weren't exploiting the architecture all that well to begin with.
3. Improperly optimized assembly isn't going to net you any performance gain. Even GCC is going to do a better job than the average assembly language coder. So, yeah, the best of programmers 5% could do better on 5% of their code, but that's not going to convince me it's the best idea for even "just great" programmers.
In other words, it's probably better and more efficient to program in a thoughtful way in C rather than try to shove assembly code everywhere in hopes of some sort of speed gain. Certainly, there's reasons to use assembly, but at this point, I would think it's mostly on embedded apps.
The idea of getting to know at least one architecture on an assembly language level (hell, a binary level) is not a bad idea at all, and will indeed probably lead to better higher-level code in general. But trying to say that it's some kind of magic barrier between being mediocre and good is entirely off the mark. Being a good assembly programmer doesn't automagically confer you amazing abilities in Lisp or Prolog.
I have no idea what the submitter thinks goes on in good CS schools these days. I know they worked me to the bone with large projects in assembly, C, Java, Lisp, Prolog, you name it. The idea that they don't teach assembly is idiotic.
-Erwos
Interesting coincidence that Microsoft bought the makers of some PPC-to-x86 virtual machine software, isn't it? It's much easier to emulate an x86 machine in a PPC than vica-versa, due to some architecture differences, too, so I wouldn't count backwards compat out yet.
And in any event, that Wired story is based on a single IBM press release and an IBM rep who may or may not have known what he was talking about. I would take it with a grain of salt.
-Erwos
I suppose I should have written fourth generation, assuming it goes something along the lines of:
/. :).
1. NES, SMS
2. SNES, Genesis, TG16
3. Playstation, N64, Dreamcast
4. PS2, X-Box, Gamecube
Good catch. You are totally right, and I am totally wrong. Relish that, because you don't hear it often on
-Erwos
I think you're misinterpreting it. Labor Day is given as the deadline for the total cut (ie, they want it at that $99 price for that weekend). However, the article reports that there may be an intermediate cut to around $130 in between. So, indeed, there is a substantial (20%-25%?) price cut coming soon, and then another one coming after.
If it's all true, anyways.
-Erwos
My first thought upon reading this was, "That's gonna hurt Nintendo, big time."
Nintendo, at least from what I can see, got their big sales kick this season from slashing down the price so that consumers would see it as the most affordable of the third generation consoles. However, that value proposition is going to be dead if the X-Box goes to the $100, or $120 range. I don't think most people have an issue with kicking in an extra $20 for DVD-playing, a hard drive, and a broadband adapter.
Hell, for that price, _I_ might get one.
-Erwos
The title, and even the body of the submitted news are somewhat misleading, in that they imply this is the first time X has been put on a PDA. At handhelds.org, GPE has been running on X for a good long time, and IIRC, even Opie has an X port.
To be fair, though, this is the first time I've ever seen full-out KDE running on a PDA, so this is something new. Definitely, it's an interesting accomplishment that the author should be proud of.
-Erwos
You can already do that, provided you've got the appropriate resolutions in your XF86Config. Do a search on "XRandR" - the hooks are indeed there. IIRC, Ximian had a program that did just this.
-Erwos
That's including the R&D costs. Ergo, the next rover will be far cheaper, because they've just got to build another one, not figure out how to make it in the first place.
-Erwos
The Linux-Dreamcast port apparently uses eCos to do some of the initial booting. So, while I wouldn't say I've seen it used practically, it was a nifty application of the OS.
-Erwos
Good place to bring it up: the academic pricing DOES include the x86-64 version of RHEL, too.
When we were discussing this at a system admin meeting, several people who were running Linux clusters got VERY big grins on their faces.
-Erwos
I've read that report, too.
All the report proves is that they (probably) never manufactured any at home _at the time of April 2000_. That was more than three years ago. If the Taiwanese put their heads to it, they could easily have functional nukes by now. The difficulty of building a reliable nuclear weapon is under-rated, but it's not impossible for a country that has the amount of technical resources that the ROC has.
That's also assuming that neither Israel nor South Africa sold them any during the 1970's, when both countries were pariahs on the international stage. There have been hints that the Israelis and the Taiwanese were working together on such a project in the 70's - take a look at some of the links at the bottom of the page you posted the URL to.
In any case, I don't think anyone should doubt that the ROC could throw together nukes on relatively short notice, especially if China starts building a viable amphibious force...
-Erwos