Theoretically, on a completely empty highway I can achieve speeds in excess of 200mph in a sufficiently powerful car. In practice, most highways will be congested, police officers will be present, the weather may be bad, etc., and I will never be able to go above an average of 60 (in rush hours of many cities, even less). To that effect my compact car is all I really need, and I am more interested in routes to and from work that will avoid congested areas instead of freeways that offer a theoretically higher speed.
Likewise, this article isn't about raw speed, it's about what is practically possible. This is an excellent guide for those interested in data plans.
The original poster's sentence isn't a dichotomy. There's no implicit statement that working in any of the jobs listed are the only options; the poster is simply expressing a personal opinion via a comparison.
...but the power of such a system is in interpreting the data. It sounds as if the 'ants' themselves wander about the network observing specific attributes, then leaving behind a few notes on anomalies found. Other ants come along, attracted by the 'scent' of the data, and add their own observations. This is all well and good, but my skepticism comes in when we try to interpret the 'odors'. The ants have a chance of observing an event they or another ant caused to happen, which introduces false positives. Other ants arrive, further interfering with the results and pointing virtual fingers at what could be an illusionary culprit. Therefore, the trouble with this approach is that there always exists a possibility of that which 'smelt' it, 'dealt' it.
Good chance that the GUI request deals primarily with user-friendly aspects of using the cluster. There are always alternatives to GUI-based apps, but there are plenty of times where using one will save you time and effort. Have you ever tried substituting Gimp with Image Magick? You can't beat the latter for batch image processing, but I wouldn't ask anyone to design a logo with it.
ASRock actually had a solution to this that I owned, known as the 939Dual-VSTA, which offered both fullspeed AGP and PCIe slots. Despite what you might think, it was a shockingly stable board that survived tortuous sessions of Planetside and several amateur computing experiments. It eased my transition to PCIe while even providing an upgrade path to AM2 cores.
Sadly, it wasn't really available until a good time after PCIe began to go mainstream.
I honestly love Criminal Minds. I can forgive a lot. But why is it that Garcia is still 'clicking' away on a frickin' rubber keyboard? Don't get me wrong, any self respecting hacker would settle for nothing less than a true Das Keyboard (or better yet, one of the IBM originals).
There's been a lot of talk about HTML5 transforming today's browsers into tomorrow's platforms as this simple search suggests. Essentially, with all of these additions, there seems to be a keen interest in providing "local application" experiences to web-based tools. For example, many of these additions essentially provide access to hardware devices in one form or another.
This is all nice in theory, but once we start including the 'kitchensink' tag, who's to say that browsers won't end up as bloated as Adobe Reader?
Don't assume that multiple monitors means someone is trying to juggle multiple tasks.
3 monitors has become a part of my life at work. Here's how:
Left - Maximized browser window looking at my web app
Center - Maximized IDE to develop/debug my web app, providing sufficient space for my code, log monitoring, and package browsing
Right - IM Window, Resource Monitor (particularly CPU and Memory), and a handful of widgets. If there's a web-share meeting, it gets maximized here.
When I switch to a portable environment or lose a monitor, believe me, my productivity suffers.
Although there's plenty that can go wrong, 'cloud' storage is a cool concept for my save data. It's not fun having to scrounge up a compatible device to backup my PS3's saves when I've upgraded the drive, and I'd hate to have to restart a game on my portable just because I lost my save on a Tiny-Micro-Whatever SD card no bigger than my pinky-nail.
That said, it raises the stakes on what happens if I decide to jailbreak my devices. Is there always going to be a hard copy, or do I get a nastygram message at startup saying "Your account (and all of those saves) have been locked out due to unlicensed use of your hardware"? Let's not forget that many manufacturers (Sony and Nintendo included) are moving towards digital delivery systems.
You've written quite a bit here about optimization. I certainly won't dispute that there's room for improvement, but I think you're missing something crucial.
Minecraft has, and perhaps never will be, a game that relies on graphics, high-performance architecture, or even a reasonable FPS. If architecture bothers you that much, there's no shortage of games out there built on very robust engines such as the UDK.
Instead, Notch has wisely chosen to focus on doing his best to refine the actual gameplay. The end result is a literally endless, randomly generated world that for some reason people are willing to pay good money to play in.
As for his choice of rendering tech, it's noteworthy to point out OpenGL 1.1 is one of the few graphics choices left that will practically run on anything calling itself a GPU.
I rely on my phone to keep me in touch with friends, family and work. As much as I'd love to get one, I'm concerned a smartphone will be a liability if I decided to play one too many rounds of Canabalt on a road trip or checking Slashdot in the checkout line. Instead, I "get by" with an iPod Touch and a dedicated phone. If my touch ever loses power, it's new big deal.
I'm wondering if my concerns are valid, and if so, when news reports start headlining car crash victims unable to dial for help due to one game too many of 'Angry Birds'.
Just because a device can play games doesn't mean it should.
Wait, wait, my bad. You can just remove the battery, and poof, that problematic phone won't spend the next two hours messing with your AT&T phone bill and personal life by disabling the soft off button.
I am curious as to how much longer we will go until the next security hole isn't used so benevolently.
Who's up for a virus that can't be removed by the user once it's in? How about a friendly bugger that takes advantage of your contact list? For that matter, let's bring back the old dialer viruses and have your phone call a 10$/minute hotline every night for an hour.
OTOH having that Arduino board and a mess of wires attached to your camera does score you a lot more geek cred than photographing using an plain old mobile phone.
Cred, yes. Easy passage through an airport checkpoint, not so much.
Modern IDEs do quite a bit these days beyond just organizing files and giving you a color coded editor. Between parsing your code as you write it, context-sensitive auto-complete, and dynamic recompilation of the files you're changing, there's plenty of things for it to do to try and make your life easier as a developer.
Re:The Achilles heel of this...
on
Phoenix BIOSOS?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
If the manufacturers will release the damn specs the geeks write the drivers for them and those drivers get included with every distribution by default.
While that is an interesting argument, there are a few fundamental problems that bother me:
a) The incentive of manufacturers to release said specifications is low. Regardless of money made on the acquisition of a wider user base (often through more hardware sales), such specifications create issues for intellectual property and often serve as an opportunity for any competing manufacturers to digest a well-prepared buffet of the inner workings of hardware and the software that supports it.
b) The incentive of said 'geek' to actually sit down and not only write but actively maintain said drivers is based on demand and free time. This leads to the parent post "now you see it, now you don't" support syndrome.
c) The incentive of a manufacturer to release quality specifications is next to non-existent. In many cases, only the most determined OSS master-mind is capable of both understanding what are often meant as 'internal use only' documents and actually creating a driver. While I have little doubt such people exist, there is only so much time, sweat, blood, and tears that many people are willing to give for results.
Note that I actively contribute to the open source community and use Linux on a regular basis. That said, I don't believe manufacturers are (entirely) to blame.
I completely disagree; IDEs make more sense on larger projects. Don't get me wrong; none of my IDE's can beat VI's ability to handle large files, and nothing says convenient like an inline diff. When you're working on something that starts to reach the 100+ file mark, I'd rather not rely on a simple editor and my window manager.
A good IDE helps you to organize, track, and maintain your sanity at this scale. In Netbeans 6+, I can jump to a class's declaration, find all usages of a method (regardless of any nasty nesting), and refactor a name change across a project and everything that depends on it. I know where most of my stuff is when I write it, but I find that it can be a NIGHTMARE reviewing a huge project written by a team without sensible documentation.
If you love regular expressions, don't let me stop you, but I think you're missing out.
Whether or not the community responds really doesn't matter to the admins. When a personal favorite of mine (8 Easy Bits, now given up on by the author) was considered 'un-noteworthy', a sizable turnout appeared on the comments section of people voting to keep the comic. It may have been sprite based, but the author clearly took a great deal of time with the plot, it has an established history with the community, and most importantly, it was friggin' funny. However, despite these qualifications, the article linking to it was taken down, on the grounds that it "was not popular enough" according to a single statistical engine.
When the fan base got a response on discussion forums, it was "this isn't a vote". I understand that Wikipedia wants to guard against lone-rangers taking liberty with the articles and re-writing history, but this is ludicrous.
"The Free Encyclopedia That Anyone Can Edit". Editable by anyone, censored by a few, in what has essentially become a popularity contest.
Aye. Frankly, when I first heard of the new series, I was quite hopeful that we'd see a reprisal of Mr. Tartakovsky's gifts once again. I think the BIGGEST example of the man's work was when I went to see episode 3 and said to myself, "Wow, what happened to the bad-a$$ characters I fell in love with?!?"
Let's be honest with ourselves; the new series will be a much more 'genuine' extension of the prequels: corporate machinery capitalizing on a loyal fan base.
Selfish selection of peers can lead to cliques of clients on the same network. Tit-for-tat has been proven as a highly effective strategy in games resembling the iterated prisoner's dilemna, but it can be defeated when a large enough group of of agents cooperate. This link has more.
I think the issue is that they used the same disc format technology from the GameCube and up-sized it. Unlike traditional traditional CD/DVD-ROM formats, which reads and writes tracks at fixed-angles regardless of the distance from the center, the GC format used a fixed-velocity organization method that arranges the data a bit differently. This was done to reduce pirating (see this article), but I'm betting it comes at the cost of being able to read CDs and DVDs.
I doubt any representative of the RIAA could keep their blood pressure down with the words 'losslessly reproduceable content' and 'internet' in the same sentence. Given the disputes over uniform music cost and how much they resisted distributing even lossy DRM'd audio in the first place, what are the odds we'll see this?
Slashdot Mirror
Theoretically, on a completely empty highway I can achieve speeds in excess of 200mph in a sufficiently powerful car. In practice, most highways will be congested, police officers will be present, the weather may be bad, etc., and I will never be able to go above an average of 60 (in rush hours of many cities, even less). To that effect my compact car is all I really need, and I am more interested in routes to and from work that will avoid congested areas instead of freeways that offer a theoretically higher speed.
Likewise, this article isn't about raw speed, it's about what is practically possible. This is an excellent guide for those interested in data plans.
The original poster's sentence isn't a dichotomy. There's no implicit statement that working in any of the jobs listed are the only options; the poster is simply expressing a personal opinion via a comparison.
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-dichotomy.htm
...but the power of such a system is in interpreting the data. It sounds as if the 'ants' themselves wander about the network observing specific attributes, then leaving behind a few notes on anomalies found. Other ants come along, attracted by the 'scent' of the data, and add their own observations. This is all well and good, but my skepticism comes in when we try to interpret the 'odors'. The ants have a chance of observing an event they or another ant caused to happen, which introduces false positives. Other ants arrive, further interfering with the results and pointing virtual fingers at what could be an illusionary culprit. Therefore, the trouble with this approach is that there always exists a possibility of that which 'smelt' it, 'dealt' it.
Good chance that the GUI request deals primarily with user-friendly aspects of using the cluster. There are always alternatives to GUI-based apps, but there are plenty of times where using one will save you time and effort. Have you ever tried substituting Gimp with Image Magick? You can't beat the latter for batch image processing, but I wouldn't ask anyone to design a logo with it.
ASRock actually had a solution to this that I owned, known as the 939Dual-VSTA, which offered both fullspeed AGP and PCIe slots. Despite what you might think, it was a shockingly stable board that survived tortuous sessions of Planetside and several amateur computing experiments. It eased my transition to PCIe while even providing an upgrade path to AM2 cores.
Sadly, it wasn't really available until a good time after PCIe began to go mainstream.
What bothers me is the sound effect...
There's been a lot of talk about HTML5 transforming today's browsers into tomorrow's platforms as this simple search suggests. Essentially, with all of these additions, there seems to be a keen interest in providing "local application" experiences to web-based tools. For example, many of these additions essentially provide access to hardware devices in one form or another.
This is all nice in theory, but once we start including the 'kitchensink' tag, who's to say that browsers won't end up as bloated as Adobe Reader?
Don't assume that multiple monitors means someone is trying to juggle multiple tasks. 3 monitors has become a part of my life at work. Here's how:
Left - Maximized browser window looking at my web app
Center - Maximized IDE to develop/debug my web app, providing sufficient space for my code, log monitoring, and package browsing
Right - IM Window, Resource Monitor (particularly CPU and Memory), and a handful of widgets. If there's a web-share meeting, it gets maximized here.
When I switch to a portable environment or lose a monitor, believe me, my productivity suffers.
Although there's plenty that can go wrong, 'cloud' storage is a cool concept for my save data. It's not fun having to scrounge up a compatible device to backup my PS3's saves when I've upgraded the drive, and I'd hate to have to restart a game on my portable just because I lost my save on a Tiny-Micro-Whatever SD card no bigger than my pinky-nail.
That said, it raises the stakes on what happens if I decide to jailbreak my devices. Is there always going to be a hard copy, or do I get a nastygram message at startup saying "Your account (and all of those saves) have been locked out due to unlicensed use of your hardware"? Let's not forget that many manufacturers (Sony and Nintendo included) are moving towards digital delivery systems.
You've written quite a bit here about optimization. I certainly won't dispute that there's room for improvement, but I think you're missing something crucial. Minecraft has, and perhaps never will be, a game that relies on graphics, high-performance architecture, or even a reasonable FPS. If architecture bothers you that much, there's no shortage of games out there built on very robust engines such as the UDK. Instead, Notch has wisely chosen to focus on doing his best to refine the actual gameplay. The end result is a literally endless, randomly generated world that for some reason people are willing to pay good money to play in.
As for his choice of rendering tech, it's noteworthy to point out OpenGL 1.1 is one of the few graphics choices left that will practically run on anything calling itself a GPU.
"new" --> "no". Pardon the horrific typo.
I rely on my phone to keep me in touch with friends, family and work. As much as I'd love to get one, I'm concerned a smartphone will be a liability if I decided to play one too many rounds of Canabalt on a road trip or checking Slashdot in the checkout line. Instead, I "get by" with an iPod Touch and a dedicated phone. If my touch ever loses power, it's new big deal.
I'm wondering if my concerns are valid, and if so, when news reports start headlining car crash victims unable to dial for help due to one game too many of 'Angry Birds'.
Just because a device can play games doesn't mean it should.
Wait, wait, my bad. You can just remove the battery, and poof, that problematic phone won't spend the next two hours messing with your AT&T phone bill and personal life by disabling the soft off button.
I am curious as to how much longer we will go until the next security hole isn't used so benevolently.
Who's up for a virus that can't be removed by the user once it's in? How about a friendly bugger that takes advantage of your contact list? For that matter, let's bring back the old dialer viruses and have your phone call a 10$/minute hotline every night for an hour.
OTOH having that Arduino board and a mess of wires attached to your camera does score you a lot more geek cred than photographing using an plain old mobile phone.
Cred, yes. Easy passage through an airport checkpoint, not so much.
Modern IDEs do quite a bit these days beyond just organizing files and giving you a color coded editor. Between parsing your code as you write it, context-sensitive auto-complete, and dynamic recompilation of the files you're changing, there's plenty of things for it to do to try and make your life easier as a developer.
You win again, Heisenberg!
If the manufacturers will release the damn specs the geeks write the drivers for them and those drivers get included with every distribution by default.
While that is an interesting argument, there are a few fundamental problems that bother me:
a) The incentive of manufacturers to release said specifications is low. Regardless of money made on the acquisition of a wider user base (often through more hardware sales), such specifications create issues for intellectual property and often serve as an opportunity for any competing manufacturers to digest a well-prepared buffet of the inner workings of hardware and the software that supports it.
b) The incentive of said 'geek' to actually sit down and not only write but actively maintain said drivers is based on demand and free time. This leads to the parent post "now you see it, now you don't" support syndrome.
c) The incentive of a manufacturer to release quality specifications is next to non-existent. In many cases, only the most determined OSS master-mind is capable of both understanding what are often meant as 'internal use only' documents and actually creating a driver. While I have little doubt such people exist, there is only so much time, sweat, blood, and tears that many people are willing to give for results.
Note that I actively contribute to the open source community and use Linux on a regular basis. That said, I don't believe manufacturers are (entirely) to blame.
I completely disagree; IDEs make more sense on larger projects. Don't get me wrong; none of my IDE's can beat VI's ability to handle large files, and nothing says convenient like an inline diff. When you're working on something that starts to reach the 100+ file mark, I'd rather not rely on a simple editor and my window manager.
A good IDE helps you to organize, track, and maintain your sanity at this scale. In Netbeans 6+, I can jump to a class's declaration, find all usages of a method (regardless of any nasty nesting), and refactor a name change across a project and everything that depends on it. I know where most of my stuff is when I write it, but I find that it can be a NIGHTMARE reviewing a huge project written by a team without sensible documentation.
If you love regular expressions, don't let me stop you, but I think you're missing out.
Whether or not the community responds really doesn't matter to the admins. When a personal favorite of mine (8 Easy Bits, now given up on by the author) was considered 'un-noteworthy', a sizable turnout appeared on the comments section of people voting to keep the comic. It may have been sprite based, but the author clearly took a great deal of time with the plot, it has an established history with the community, and most importantly, it was friggin' funny. However, despite these qualifications, the article linking to it was taken down, on the grounds that it "was not popular enough" according to a single statistical engine.
When the fan base got a response on discussion forums, it was "this isn't a vote". I understand that Wikipedia wants to guard against lone-rangers taking liberty with the articles and re-writing history, but this is ludicrous.
"The Free Encyclopedia That Anyone Can Edit". Editable by anyone, censored by a few, in what has essentially become a popularity contest.
User Agent Swticher
Let's be honest with ourselves; the new series will be a much more 'genuine' extension of the prequels: corporate machinery capitalizing on a loyal fan base.
Selfish selection of peers can lead to cliques of clients on the same network. Tit-for-tat has been proven as a highly effective strategy in games resembling the iterated prisoner's dilemna, but it can be defeated when a large enough group of of agents cooperate. This link has more.
The question then becomes, can it read audio CDs?
I doubt any representative of the RIAA could keep their blood pressure down with the words 'losslessly reproduceable content' and 'internet' in the same sentence. Given the disputes over uniform music cost and how much they resisted distributing even lossy DRM'd audio in the first place, what are the odds we'll see this?