So the real question would be: why (and how?) do you propose to write portable, cross-platform code for this processor anyway? In my experience, with devices as limited as this, you're almost always better off writing the code in hand-crafted assembler anyway, which given the size limitations is entirely possible. Heck, you could write the code in binray, if you wanted to. No portability there, I'm afraid...
And if you look at the Inkscape roadmap, you'll find that in the (distant) future, they intend to use Cairo as the rendering library for inkscape as well.
Easy - the "Calligraphy" tool. With pressure sensitivity (or some of the more advanced angle/tilt stuff found in high-end graphics tablets), this allows you to vary the width/angle of the stroke.
Look at any comic book - the ink lines (which are normally drawn with a brush) vary a lot in width to give the drawing a much more dynamic feel.
This is something that can be very useful for a vector-based drawing program.
That said, I have been using Inkscape for quite a while and am extremely happy with it. I wasn't even tempted to pirate illustrator or something similar. Big kudos to the Inkscape developers.
However, one very notable missing feature is the "Gradient Mesh" function found in illustator. After looking at the SVG standard, I understand why it is not there - the standard in its current form cannot support free-form gradients. I have been thinking of how to implement this, but I cannot think of a clean, non-hacky, non-workaround way of doing this...
This is very unfortunate, as this prevents you from drawing things with gradients that are not linear or circular (for example a shaded tube, where the shadow should follow the curve). I noticed in one of the screenshots (the chrome "pills") that the gradients on the pills seem to do just that - however, looking more closely (at the one pill in the bottom left corner), it appears that the caps on the pills are simply separate objects with a circular gradient applied.
We are developing J2EE applications using a continous integration server (currently anthill open source, but others are available). Ant is used for building, testing and deploying.
Now we have a number of environment-specific settings, for example database connection details, etc. All environment-specific stuff goes into.properties files which are included conditionally by the ant script (based on a single environment variable or ant parameter). All of those properties files live in a directory conf/<environment name>, where environment name is either a developer's name, or "test", "production", "staging", etc.
Each night, new deployment packages for each of the different deployment targets (test, prod, etc.) are built and made available through anthill. Some of those targets are also automatically deployed for the testing team every night, so the latest features are always available to be tested somewhere the next day.
Every successful build is tagged in CVS with an autoincrementing build number. When we have identified a release candidate, it is as simple as instructing anthill to (re)build a deployment bundle for a particular target with a specific build number. That deployment bundle (usually a.ear or.war) is then simply dropped into the production environment - remember that all the environment-specific settings are already included in that particular bundle. The benefit of this is that all environmental settings are maintained in the main source repository, the downside being that different packages exist for the different targets, but in practice that has not proved to cause any problems.
An additional benefit is that each environment's individual settings (including development machines) is always available to all developers for comparison and troubleshooting.
I guess the lesson learned is this:
Automate your build!
Extend your build system to include the environmental configuration
Automatically build separate targets for different environments
Something linux will have trouble with due to GLP vs binary drivers from NVIDIA and ATI.
I don't quite see the validity of that argument. True, the closed-source drivers are a bit of a pain, but as long as there is full OpenGL support provided by those vendors, there is nothing that prevents GPU-accelerated rendering on Linux. The bigger problem, IMHO is that - at this point in time - XFree86 is still the dominant windowing system. But the X.org implementation is likely to get a compositing extension (hopefully) in the near future (backoprted from the modular Xserver) where compositing of the backbuffer is performed by a compositing manager similar to a window manager. This compositing manager could, for example, use OpenGL to perform the compositing, and with a driver supporting the full OpenGL fragment program specification, this can all be done with vertex/pixel shader.
You see, the problem for me is that I'm not. I am left-handed and use the mose with my left hand. Therefore, Ctrl-C-V and friends require some serious acrobatics on my part. I use KDE and have assigned Ctrl-Ins, Shift-Ins and Shift-Del (which is Cut, by the way) as alternate key combinations. Of course, those work in even fewer apps. Drives me insane!!!
BTW, the CTRL-Ins stuff was, I believe, introduced by Wordperfect.
I like to start every call to tech support with the line "please be aware that I will be recording this call for quality assurance purposes". That normally gets them on edge;) I also have, through many many interactions with my ISP's helpdesk, gotten a fairly good understanding of what they will ask me. So I just rattle off a list of all the things I have "tried", including reinstalling dialer software rebooting a hundred times, powercycling the cable modem, disabling my firewall, tried two different machines with four different operating systems, etc. If they still ask me to reboot anything, I'll ask for a supervisor...
Middle-clicking doesn't work for me, as I have a double-click mapped to the middle mouse button and for some reason the stupid touchpad driver on my laptop eats the proper middle-click messags that should be sent.
That's the only bit I would like to see go back into the firefox core, as the control you have over the tabs is just not good enough (for example, I absolutely have to have close boxes in all tabs). Apart from that, I use a number of plugins, of which radial context menus is the most important one. It's da shiznit, dawg. And firesomething always makes me smile...
Then there's Adblock, Zoom Image for those who need it (wink wink), but seriously, this is very helpful for working on a 1920x1200 screen.
I am recommending firefox to everybody I know and have so far successfully converted my whole family and at least two thirds of my colleagues.
It also buys me some time because it will take my parents a while to figure out how to./configure:make:make install;)
And, for me, it has the added benefit of being easily administrated remotely and securely via SSH - I live in Australia, while my parents live in Germany. I can also apply much more finely-grained access controls. Of course I know about Terminal Services in Windows, but I don't trust those either.
to clarify: netants is a download manager for windows that until fairly recently was free of spyware. It now comes with cydoor and all the stuff that gets in through the website. I used to use netants quite regularly, but have now switched to fresh downloads which does the job admirably.
Out of interest, when I rebuild my home server recently, I installed a fresh Windows XP (with SP1(!)), but nothing else. Then pointed my browser at www.netants.com (that site would probably deserve a good whacking) and sat back and watched the show.
Within five minutes, there was porn everywhere. The browser homepage (which also downloaded new tasty bits of spyware whenever the browser was launched), the favorites (it would take a determined smut-lover months to accumulate a list of porn sites that long!), the browser history, lots of links on the desktop, porn quick-bars, search bars, the start menu, and every other piece of mal-, spy-, ad- and crapware under the sun.
The scary thing is, I did not click on any buttons, links or otherwise. The website simply exploited IE flaws to install all this crap.
I then ran ad-aware and spybot search and destroy and the amount of shit that had been installed in about five minutes was absolutely staggering! After that, I continued using the machine for a few minutes, but could not shake the feeling that there was still a fair amount of *ware left on the box. I had to repartition, reformat and take a shower to feel clean again.
So it would be all too easy for Joe User, who does not quite grasp the concept of IT security in general and the necessity to upgrade in particular, to stumble upon a site like that and catch all that junk. After witnessing this, I will certainly be migrating my parents and other relatives to Linux/Mozilla as soon as I can.
I have now prepared an old laptop that I can restore quickly by re-ghosting with a virgin XP install. Every time I need to impress the importance of updating, configuring your system properly and generally staying away from MS software, I take the laptop along, open abovementioned site and ask people to clean up the machine. Normally they give up in disgust after firing up IE for the first time. Might be an idea to do that in court, too.
That's a statement by RadonLabs, who are a commercial games developer. They build for their target market, which is on Windows. Nebula1 was written from the ground up for linux and windows and opensourced by RL.
Nebula is open source, and there are several people working on a OpenGL/CGFx/Linux port as we speak. Almost everything else (input system, resource loaders, scenegraph handling has already been ported. And if you really want to write a gam right now, use Nebula1, which is perfectly adequate.
Part of the problem is that when Nebula2 was originally developed, there was no defined pixel shader support in OpenGL. An alternative would be to use NVidia's CGFx, but that locks out all ATI cards under Linux initially. OpenGL 1.5 will have pixel shader support, but it's not out yet and who knows how long it will take until Mesa picks up the new extensions.
The FA makes some valid points about the cost of porting games to linux. However, there are commercial-quality game engines out there that do run under linux. One of them, Nebula if even open source (even though Nebula2 is still lacking graphics support for linux, but that's in the works). Nebula1 is perfectly useable and has all kinds of goodies, including input handling, sound, and a slick architecture.
I believe the major problem at the moment is definitely the difference in availability/quality of hardware accelerated graphics drivers. One ATI get their shit together, the story might be different...
I tried to get around the expense for a standalone dvd player and used my xbox for watching dvds for a while. A couple of problems though: some DVDs would not play at all (e.g. Harry Potter). Some would have bad video skipping (LOTR FOTR). In addition, the remote sucks a$$.
Now these problems might be related to my particular xbox, but I would strongly suggest you take some of your favourite DVDs to a store and demand to play them on an xbox there. Don't know wether these problems might be fixable byb using Xbmp (xbox media player) instead... good luck.
What I've found recently is that I don't like to spend as much time anymore on games and rather get on with my "real" life instead. This results in me choosing games that I can play for say 15 minutes at a time rather than having to invest hours into each gaming session. Still, whenever I go on a business trip, I take a couple of good old-fashioned RPGs (think Baldur's Gate and similar) and spend a lot of time playing those in the bland boring hotel rooms.
I therefore conclude it is not the games that are at fault, but my priorities of what I like to do with my spare time have changed. That said, I recently started playing Rainbow 6 on XBox live and this game, I can't get enough of. Maybe that's because of the more social nature of the co-op game modes I like to play, maybe it's just the novelty (at least for me) of being able to talk to people in multiplayer games.
Yes it does. I'm having some problems on my Dell Inspiron though, where the display backlight won't turn off. Standby mode works well otherwise. Although S0 (suspend to disk) is not yet supported, there have been successes reported using swsusp.
You'll need to pass acpi=on to the kernel on startup, and preferrably tinker with the acpi scripts a bit, but if you have a google around, I'm sure you'll find some for yor machine as well.
I believe the website in question is http://www.carrodoleao.com/, I went and had a look when I first saw it in the game - and there is no porn there whatsoever! There might be soon, however, as the guy who owns the domain seems to be willing to sell...
Slashdot Mirror
So the real question would be: why (and how?) do you propose to write portable, cross-platform code for this processor anyway? In my experience, with devices as limited as this, you're almost always better off writing the code in hand-crafted assembler anyway, which given the size limitations is entirely possible. Heck, you could write the code in binray, if you wanted to. No portability there, I'm afraid...
Now that's a very good idea to put a reference to erotic images and a link to a flash-based site on the main page of slashporn^H^H^H^Hdot.
And if you look at the Inkscape roadmap, you'll find that in the (distant) future, they intend to use Cairo as the rendering library for inkscape as well.
Easy - the "Calligraphy" tool. With pressure sensitivity (or some of the more advanced angle/tilt stuff found in high-end graphics tablets), this allows you to vary the width/angle of the stroke.
Look at any comic book - the ink lines (which are normally drawn with a brush) vary a lot in width to give the drawing a much more dynamic feel.
This is something that can be very useful for a vector-based drawing program.
That said, I have been using Inkscape for quite a while and am extremely happy with it. I wasn't even tempted to pirate illustrator or something similar. Big kudos to the Inkscape developers.
However, one very notable missing feature is the "Gradient Mesh" function found in illustator. After looking at the SVG standard, I understand why it is not there - the standard in its current form cannot support free-form gradients. I have been thinking of how to implement this, but I cannot think of a clean, non-hacky, non-workaround way of doing this...
This is very unfortunate, as this prevents you from drawing things with gradients that are not linear or circular (for example a shaded tube, where the shadow should follow the curve). I noticed in one of the screenshots (the chrome "pills") that the gradients on the pills seem to do just that - however, looking more closely (at the one pill in the bottom left corner), it appears that the caps on the pills are simply separate objects with a circular gradient applied.
Now we have a number of environment-specific settings, for example database connection details, etc.
All environment-specific stuff goes into
Every successful build is tagged in CVS with an autoincrementing build number. When we have identified a release candidate, it is as simple as instructing anthill to (re)build a deployment bundle for a particular target with a specific build number. That deployment bundle (usually a
An additional benefit is that each environment's individual settings (including development machines) is always available to all developers for comparison and troubleshooting.
I guess the lesson learned is this:
Something linux will have trouble with due to GLP vs binary drivers from NVIDIA and ATI.
I don't quite see the validity of that argument. True, the closed-source drivers are a bit of a pain, but as long as there is full OpenGL support provided by those vendors, there is nothing that prevents GPU-accelerated rendering on Linux. The bigger problem, IMHO is that - at this point in time - XFree86 is still the dominant windowing system. But the X.org implementation is likely to get a compositing extension (hopefully) in the near future (backoprted from the modular Xserver) where compositing of the backbuffer is performed by a compositing manager similar to a window manager. This compositing manager could, for example, use OpenGL to perform the compositing, and with a driver supporting the full OpenGL fragment program specification, this can all be done with vertex/pixel shader.
assuming you're mousing with your right hand
You see, the problem for me is that I'm not. I am left-handed and use the mose with my left hand. Therefore, Ctrl-C-V and friends require some serious acrobatics on my part. I use KDE and have assigned Ctrl-Ins, Shift-Ins and Shift-Del (which is Cut, by the way) as alternate key combinations. Of course, those work in even fewer apps. Drives me insane!!!
BTW, the CTRL-Ins stuff was, I believe, introduced by Wordperfect.
Appeared suddenly? On a one-picture-an-hour webcam? What else could it have done - walked very very slowly into the picture???
I like to start every call to tech support with the line "please be aware that I will be recording this call for quality assurance purposes". That normally gets them on edge ;)
I also have, through many many interactions with my ISP's helpdesk, gotten a fairly good understanding of what they will ask me. So I just rattle off a list of all the things I have "tried", including reinstalling dialer software rebooting a hundred times, powercycling the cable modem, disabling my firewall, tried two different machines with four different operating systems, etc. If they still ask me to reboot anything, I'll ask for a supervisor...
Middle-clicking doesn't work for me, as I have a double-click mapped to the middle mouse button and for some reason the stupid touchpad driver on my laptop eats the proper middle-click messags that should be sent.
That's the only bit I would like to see go back into the firefox core, as the control you have over the tabs is just not good enough (for example, I absolutely have to have close boxes in all tabs). Apart from that, I use a number of plugins, of which radial context menus is the most important one. It's da shiznit, dawg. And firesomething always makes me smile...
Then there's Adblock, Zoom Image for those who need it (wink wink), but seriously, this is very helpful for working on a 1920x1200 screen.
I am recommending firefox to everybody I know and have so far successfully converted my whole family and at least two thirds of my colleagues.
It also buys me some time because it will take my parents a while to figure out how to ./configure:make:make install ;)
And, for me, it has the added benefit of being easily administrated remotely and securely via SSH - I live in Australia, while my parents live in Germany. I can also apply much more finely-grained access controls. Of course I know about Terminal Services in Windows, but I don't trust those either.
to clarify: netants is a download manager for windows that until fairly recently was free of spyware. It now comes with cydoor and all the stuff that gets in through the website. I used to use netants quite regularly, but have now switched to fresh downloads which does the job admirably.
Out of interest, when I rebuild my home server recently, I installed a fresh Windows XP (with SP1(!)), but nothing else. Then pointed my browser at www.netants.com (that site would probably deserve a good whacking) and sat back and watched the show.
Within five minutes, there was porn everywhere. The browser homepage (which also downloaded new tasty bits of spyware whenever the browser was launched), the favorites (it would take a determined smut-lover months to accumulate a list of porn sites that long!), the browser history, lots of links on the desktop, porn quick-bars, search bars, the start menu, and every other piece of mal-, spy-, ad- and crapware under the sun.
The scary thing is, I did not click on any buttons, links or otherwise. The website simply exploited IE flaws to install all this crap.
I then ran ad-aware and spybot search and destroy and the amount of shit that had been installed in about five minutes was absolutely staggering! After that, I continued using the machine for a few minutes, but could not shake the feeling that there was still a fair amount of *ware left on the box. I had to repartition, reformat and take a shower to feel clean again.
So it would be all too easy for Joe User, who does not quite grasp the concept of IT security in general and the necessity to upgrade in particular, to stumble upon a site like that and catch all that junk. After witnessing this, I will certainly be migrating my parents and other relatives to Linux/Mozilla as soon as I can.
I have now prepared an old laptop that I can restore quickly by re-ghosting with a virgin XP install. Every time I need to impress the importance of updating, configuring your system properly and generally staying away from MS software, I take the laptop along, open abovementioned site and ask people to clean up the machine. Normally they give up in disgust after firing up IE for the first time. Might be an idea to do that in court, too.
80% of all women prefer men with BIGGER email accounts! Now you can be a BIG BOY 2!
This is already being done in the marketplace today, even at the highest levels
That's a statement by RadonLabs, who are a commercial games developer. They build for their target market, which is on Windows. Nebula1 was written from the ground up for linux and windows and opensourced by RL.
Nebula is open source, and there are several people working on a OpenGL/CGFx/Linux port as we speak. Almost everything else (input system, resource loaders, scenegraph handling has already been ported. And if you really want to write a gam right now, use Nebula1, which is perfectly adequate.
Part of the problem is that when Nebula2 was originally developed, there was no defined pixel shader support in OpenGL. An alternative would be to use NVidia's CGFx, but that locks out all ATI cards under Linux initially. OpenGL 1.5 will have pixel shader support, but it's not out yet and who knows how long it will take until Mesa picks up the new extensions.
The FA makes some valid points about the cost of porting games to linux. However, there are commercial-quality game engines out there that do run under linux. One of them, Nebula if even open source (even though Nebula2 is still lacking graphics support for linux, but that's in the works). Nebula1 is perfectly useable and has all kinds of goodies, including input handling, sound, and a slick architecture.
I believe the major problem at the moment is definitely the difference in availability/quality of hardware accelerated graphics drivers. One ATI get their shit together, the story might be different...
It will be able to understand 1,000 words, dance, and allow you to contact it via 3G phones
sounds like most girls you meet in clubs today...
I tried to get around the expense for a standalone dvd player and used my xbox for watching dvds for a while. A couple of problems though: some DVDs would not play at all (e.g. Harry Potter). Some would have bad video skipping (LOTR FOTR). In addition, the remote sucks a$$.
Now these problems might be related to my particular xbox, but I would strongly suggest you take some of your favourite DVDs to a store and demand to play them on an xbox there. Don't know wether these problems might be fixable byb using Xbmp (xbox media player) instead... good luck.
What I've found recently is that I don't like to spend as much time anymore on games and rather get on with my "real" life instead. This results in me choosing games that I can play for say 15 minutes at a time rather than having to invest hours into each gaming session.
Still, whenever I go on a business trip, I take a couple of good old-fashioned RPGs (think Baldur's Gate and similar) and spend a lot of time playing those in the bland boring hotel rooms.
I therefore conclude it is not the games that are at fault, but my priorities of what I like to do with my spare time have changed. That said, I recently started playing Rainbow 6 on XBox live and this game, I can't get enough of. Maybe that's because of the more social nature of the co-op game modes I like to play, maybe it's just the novelty (at least for me) of being able to talk to people in multiplayer games.
"...because it spent more time than initially planned studying rocks and soil along the way"
Look - something shiny!!!
Yes it does. I'm having some problems on my Dell Inspiron though, where the display backlight won't turn off. Standby mode works well otherwise. Although S0 (suspend to disk) is not yet supported, there have been successes reported using swsusp. You'll need to pass acpi=on to the kernel on startup, and preferrably tinker with the acpi scripts a bit, but if you have a google around, I'm sure you'll find some for yor machine as well.
I believe the website in question is http://www.carrodoleao.com/, I went and had a look when I first saw it in the game - and there is no porn there whatsoever! There might be soon, however, as the guy who owns the domain seems to be willing to sell...
that giving away things for free is unconstitutional and therefore illegal?
That's gonna be a very boring Christmas this year.