Actually, no, it does not. I have a genuine XP Professional SP2 install disc, and it does not contain the drivers for my nVidia SATA RAID on my nForce 4 motherboard. I had to download and create a floppy containing the drivers in order to be able to access the drives.
Of course they're working on a new system. Inevitably during any project you have to draw a line and say "This is as far as we go." Anything beyond that goes into the next iteration. Video game systems are part of a cycle. If you want to stay in the game you always have to be looking at least 5 years down the road.
I recently attended IBM's "Performance Tuning with AIX" course. It could basically be summed up as "Don't Use Paging Space. Ever." Then it went into lots of detail about AIX memory management techniques and the VM subsystems, with a brief foray into network performance.
It is a very sickening feeling to go and power-cycle a production system which is completely halted due to running out of memory. Almost as bad is a system which is hitting the swap and responding like molasses.
Look at the work you need your server to do, then put the RAM in it you need to get the job done. I've not worked with Linux in a full-on production environment, but I will go look into its systems for dealing with OOM errors. I'm sure it will be interesting.
My father is a P.E., and my grandfather as well. Even from a young age I learned about the duty of an Engineer to conduct himself ethically and take personal responsibility for one's projects. Rather than tending towards mechanical engineering as my forebears did, I found myself entering the world of writing and designing computer software.
Where is the equivalent of a Professional Engineer for a writer of software? When will we have true Software Engineering in our schools and in our businesses? As software runs more and more of the infrastructure we depend on, from voting machines to banking to the engine of your car, this question becomes paramount.
I applaud Mr. De Kort for his bravery in standing up as an example for true Engineers.
I use a Bluetooth headset with my cell phone. Most times when I make a call I don't even dig the phone out of my holster. If I'm calling an automated system I'm perfectly happy to speak a number rather than having to dig out my phone, locate the (probably unlit) key I need to press, and press it on the somewhat flimsy keypad before some timer runs out and the system shunts me to a "failed response" reply.
I've had good luck with accurate recognition, but I have a slight advantage over many people. I have a very neutral accent due to having moved around the US a lot in my youth. I just make sure to eununciate clearly and the systems usually understand me just fine. My only wish would be that these systems allow longer for a reply - oftentimes I'm digging an account number out of my files while I'm talking to the system, and just need it to wait a few more minutes while I find the relevant number.
The nickel-arcade in Provo, UT is an excellent example of this. Some games are free. Most are a nickel. A few (like the DDR machines) cost all of twenty cents. $2.50 cover fee, then $5 worth of nickels keeps you entertained for an evening.
It's a blast. They're also raking in money hand over fist.
I will second these suggestions. It's almost point-for-point what I used at my last shop. I'm currently looking into doing some consulting of my own and am setting up such a system for personal use. Once you've got the tools doing all the background stuff such that the system takes care of itself, it really frees you up to get some real work done.
My grandfather worked on the Saturn V rockets. He told me that when they ran the first engine test they had to send out radio warnings to the 5 surrounding counties that this was not, in fact, a nuclear explosion.
I think that this lawsuit is frivolous - the seizure warnings have been in place for as long as I can remember. And 6 seizures is an incredibly small number, for as many people as play video games.
On the other hand, I can kind of sympathize with these people. A friend of mine had a seizure while we were playing Xtreme G 3 on the GameCube a couple of years ago. It was scary.
I heard a strange noise coming from his direction, and when I turned and looked, I realized that he was choking, and had passed out. His body tensed up and was contorting in unnatural ways. It was all I could do to keep his head from banging into the endtable as he slid out of his chair. After a few excruciating minutes he just went limp and was unconscious. At least he wasn't tensing and straining against his own limbs anymore. I called 911 and after a few minutes an ambulance arrived. He woke up as the EMTs got there, but was completely out of it. His speech was slurred, and he had a hard time answering questions like where he was, and the date, things like that. Then they took him to the local hospital, and I didn't see him for a few days.
Apparently he didn't remember anything from the time the seizure started until he woke up in a hospital bed. I felt strange relaying the sequence of events back to him, as if he hadn't been there.
This seizure wasn't entirely unexpected - he'd had one when he was young (we were 20 and 21 when this seizure occurred.). But since he hadn't had a relapse in so long, he had actually been able to get his driver's license the week prior! It turned out that the doctors had phased out his epilepsy medications the month before, because they thought he was out of the danger zone. He went back on the meds, and hasn't had a problem since.
I don't blame the game makers for what happened, or anyone really. His doctor thought he should stop the seizure meds, and in another case that may have been the right thing to do. I'm just trying to convey how frightening and unnerving it is to see your good friend suddenly lose control over his own body; going from being a laughing, playing, joking person to being slumped on the floor in about 45 seconds.
I've had one of these for about 2 weeks now. My folks preordered it for me for my last birthday.. came in the mail just recently.
It's a beast of a calculator. It does everything I want a calculator to do. It's nice that someone's finally made some concessions to modern computing - USB, SD memory cards, a 75mhz processor. Very nice.
This thing is wicked fast. 3d graphing with free camera movement. Symbolic integration. Solving large systems of equations. It's great.
The interface is nice too. The buttons have a solid "click" to them, and the key layout is very nice. I'd never used RPN before, but once I realized that it was just a stack machine, I felt right at home. And there are some handy shortcuts for manipulating the stack in various ways. Slick.
The Equation Writer mode is very nice too. Enter an equation and it shows up in a graphical "Textbook mode" which makes for easy verification that you typed a particular equation in properly.
The manual is kind of bollocks though. It's verbose and doesn't really explain the underlying "why we do things this way" design principles of the device. It runs through examples but doesn't really explain why we are pressing these keys in this sequence. There *is* a 1000-page PDF file on the CD that came with the calculator, but I haven't delved very deeply into it yet.
One thing I do appreciate about the calculator is that it's running a saturn emulation, so the software is just like the previous HP48 jobs. That means I can run all of the software over at www.hpcalc.org, and I get the advantage of a thoroughly debugged calculator. I think that's pretty cool.
Here's a question though - I don't have a PC of my own at the moment (shock! horror!), but I've been using Knoppix to help ease the hurting. Knoppix is capable of using USB drives to store profile data and home directory type stuff. Can you clever slashdot folks think of a way to use my HP49g+ with SD memory card as a USB drive to store my Knoppix home directory? I think that might be an efficient use of my resources at hand...
Each and every point on this list of additions to the languages addresses problems that I have personally run into in my use of Java at work. These things will make the writing and maintenance of java projects small and large much, much easier.
Generics: Thank you God, yes! Having to explicitly cast objects out of Containers is tedious and error-prone.
Iterators/Enhanced 'for': Make iteration much easier to read and understand.
Autoboxing/Unboxing: This helps alleviate the enormous kludge that is the Object/primitive dichotomy. Casting to and from wrapper types just to pass ints, etc. around really sucks.
static import: Not having to fully specify tedious class names to access static members is a big boon for making stuff digestible and easy to read.
Metadata: Writing boilerplate sucks the big one. How many hours have I lost writing boilerplate? Way too many. Having language support for generating code from the metadata cuts my implementation times way down.
I could sit here and argue with folks about the 'new Java' versus C++ or C# or Smalltalk or whatever endlessly. But man, these things sure make Java a whole lot more pleasant to use.
On the contrary, archive.org simply caches FREELY AVAILABLE information that is made available by the COPYRIGHT HOLDER. It also respects things like the robots.txt file and owner responses, so that it is trivial to determine what goes into the archive or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, no, it does not. I have a genuine XP Professional SP2 install disc, and it does not contain the drivers for my nVidia SATA RAID on my nForce 4 motherboard. I had to download and create a floppy containing the drivers in order to be able to access the drives.
Of course they're working on a new system. Inevitably during any project you have to draw a line and say "This is as far as we go." Anything beyond that goes into the next iteration. Video game systems are part of a cycle. If you want to stay in the game you always have to be looking at least 5 years down the road.
I recently attended IBM's "Performance Tuning with AIX" course. It could basically be summed up as "Don't Use Paging Space. Ever." Then it went into lots of detail about AIX memory management techniques and the VM subsystems, with a brief foray into network performance.
It is a very sickening feeling to go and power-cycle a production system which is completely halted due to running out of memory. Almost as bad is a system which is hitting the swap and responding like molasses.
Look at the work you need your server to do, then put the RAM in it you need to get the job done. I've not worked with Linux in a full-on production environment, but I will go look into its systems for dealing with OOM errors. I'm sure it will be interesting.
My father is a P.E., and my grandfather as well. Even from a young age I learned about the duty of an Engineer to conduct himself ethically and take personal responsibility for one's projects. Rather than tending towards mechanical engineering as my forebears did, I found myself entering the world of writing and designing computer software.
Where is the equivalent of a Professional Engineer for a writer of software? When will we have true Software Engineering in our schools and in our businesses? As software runs more and more of the infrastructure we depend on, from voting machines to banking to the engine of your car, this question becomes paramount.
I applaud Mr. De Kort for his bravery in standing up as an example for true Engineers.
I use a Bluetooth headset with my cell phone. Most times when I make a call I don't even dig the phone out of my holster. If I'm calling an automated system I'm perfectly happy to speak a number rather than having to dig out my phone, locate the (probably unlit) key I need to press, and press it on the somewhat flimsy keypad before some timer runs out and the system shunts me to a "failed response" reply.
I've had good luck with accurate recognition, but I have a slight advantage over many people. I have a very neutral accent due to having moved around the US a lot in my youth. I just make sure to eununciate clearly and the systems usually understand me just fine. My only wish would be that these systems allow longer for a reply - oftentimes I'm digging an account number out of my files while I'm talking to the system, and just need it to wait a few more minutes while I find the relevant number.
The nickel-arcade in Provo, UT is an excellent example of this. Some games are free. Most are a nickel. A few (like the DDR machines) cost all of twenty cents. $2.50 cover fee, then $5 worth of nickels keeps you entertained for an evening.
It's a blast. They're also raking in money hand over fist.
There's no such thing as fairies.
This is not a new idea.
It still pisses me off when Shakespeare does it too.
I will second these suggestions. It's almost point-for-point what I used at my last shop. I'm currently looking into doing some consulting of my own and am setting up such a system for personal use. Once you've got the tools doing all the background stuff such that the system takes care of itself, it really frees you up to get some real work done.
My grandfather worked on the Saturn V rockets. He told me that when they ran the first engine test they had to send out radio warnings to the 5 surrounding counties that this was not, in fact, a nuclear explosion.
Pretty amazing.
Well, when you exist as a group of genius vat-grown clones, it's bound to happen sometime....
I think that this lawsuit is frivolous - the seizure warnings have been in place for as long as I can remember. And 6 seizures is an incredibly small number, for as many people as play video games.
On the other hand, I can kind of sympathize with these people. A friend of mine had a seizure while we were playing Xtreme G 3 on the GameCube a couple of years ago. It was scary.
I heard a strange noise coming from his direction, and when I turned and looked, I realized that he was choking, and had passed out. His body tensed up and was contorting in unnatural ways. It was all I could do to keep his head from banging into the endtable as he slid out of his chair. After a few excruciating minutes he just went limp and was unconscious. At least he wasn't tensing and straining against his own limbs anymore. I called 911 and after a few minutes an ambulance arrived. He woke up as the EMTs got there, but was completely out of it. His speech was slurred, and he had a hard time answering questions like where he was, and the date, things like that. Then they took him to the local hospital, and I didn't see him for a few days.
Apparently he didn't remember anything from the time the seizure started until he woke up in a hospital bed. I felt strange relaying the sequence of events back to him, as if he hadn't been there.
This seizure wasn't entirely unexpected - he'd had one when he was young (we were 20 and 21 when this seizure occurred.). But since he hadn't had a relapse in so long, he had actually been able to get his driver's license the week prior! It turned out that the doctors had phased out his epilepsy medications the month before, because they thought he was out of the danger zone. He went back on the meds, and hasn't had a problem since.
I don't blame the game makers for what happened, or anyone really. His doctor thought he should stop the seizure meds, and in another case that may have been the right thing to do. I'm just trying to convey how frightening and unnerving it is to see your good friend suddenly lose control over his own body; going from being a laughing, playing, joking person to being slumped on the floor in about 45 seconds.
I've had one of these for about 2 weeks now. My folks preordered it for me for my last birthday.. came in the mail just recently.
It's a beast of a calculator. It does everything I want a calculator to do. It's nice that someone's finally made some concessions to modern computing - USB, SD memory cards, a 75mhz processor. Very nice.
This thing is wicked fast. 3d graphing with free camera movement. Symbolic integration. Solving large systems of equations. It's great.
The interface is nice too. The buttons have a solid "click" to them, and the key layout is very nice. I'd never used RPN before, but once I realized that it was just a stack machine, I felt right at home. And there are some handy shortcuts for manipulating the stack in various ways. Slick.
The Equation Writer mode is very nice too. Enter an equation and it shows up in a graphical "Textbook mode" which makes for easy verification that you typed a particular equation in properly.
The manual is kind of bollocks though. It's verbose and doesn't really explain the underlying "why we do things this way" design principles of the device. It runs through examples but doesn't really explain why we are pressing these keys in this sequence. There *is* a 1000-page PDF file on the CD that came with the calculator, but I haven't delved very deeply into it yet.
One thing I do appreciate about the calculator is that it's running a saturn emulation, so the software is just like the previous HP48 jobs. That means I can run all of the software over at www.hpcalc.org, and I get the advantage of a thoroughly debugged calculator. I think that's pretty cool.
Here's a question though - I don't have a PC of my own at the moment (shock! horror!), but I've been using Knoppix to help ease the hurting. Knoppix is capable of using USB drives to store profile data and home directory type stuff. Can you clever slashdot folks think of a way to use my HP49g+ with SD memory card as a USB drive to store my Knoppix home directory? I think that might be an efficient use of my resources at hand...
T-Splines or nuttin' baby.
You know, I've just got to say this.
Each and every point on this list of additions to the languages addresses problems that I have personally run into in my use of Java at work. These things will make the writing and maintenance of java projects small and large much, much easier.
Generics: Thank you God, yes! Having to explicitly cast objects out of Containers is tedious and error-prone.
Iterators/Enhanced 'for': Make iteration much easier to read and understand.
Autoboxing/Unboxing: This helps alleviate the enormous kludge that is the Object/primitive dichotomy. Casting to and from wrapper types just to pass ints, etc. around really sucks.
static import: Not having to fully specify tedious class names to access static members is a big boon for making stuff digestible and easy to read.
Metadata: Writing boilerplate sucks the big one. How many hours have I lost writing boilerplate? Way too many. Having language support for generating code from the metadata cuts my implementation times way down.
I could sit here and argue with folks about the 'new Java' versus C++ or C# or Smalltalk or whatever endlessly. But man, these things sure make Java a whole lot more pleasant to use.
What? I didn't do anything! Honest, officer!
On the contrary, archive.org simply caches FREELY AVAILABLE information that is made available by the COPYRIGHT HOLDER. It also respects things like the robots.txt file and owner responses, so that it is trivial to determine what goes into the archive or not.
Hardly what I would call theft.
the press release has a link to Penny Arcade. Bnetd, PA Style