That's one of those home-made "rules" that really annoys me, like the one about not being allowed to buy anything until you've been around the board 3 (or 5) times. Foo. I have the rules somewhere. And those people that throw the dice when in jail, don't get a double and then pay their 50. You're supposed to pay the 50 then go, or try for a double. And don't get me started on the cretins who try to put 4 houses on one space and none of the others in a set...."Oh look, I've got Mayfair, I'll put a hotel on it." But you haven't got Park Lane!!!! And you have to pay for 4 houses on each of them first. That'll cost you 1600+200 for the hotel. Make that a round 2k for hotels on both. Oh, you've only got 352? Bad luck.
I'm still using my TNT2 Ultra which I bought in the Xmas sales in 1999 in my Athlon. The display qulaity is superb, but it's really long in the tooth. I bought it for playing Quake 3 on Linux (I don't have Windows) and nowadays I don't do much gaming, but I'd like to upgrade and migrate this excellent card into one of my old machines.
I tried a no-name GeForce 4 MX440 a couple of years back, but the display quality was awful. It was so poor I had to downgrade to 1280x1024 on my 19" Trinitron screen. After a few months the card broke and I went back to my TNT2 Ultra (Creative Labs) and back up to 1600x1200.
I was thinking about getting something fanless and by nVidia since their (binary-only) drivers are superb on Linux (I don't do the idealogical zealotry as much nowadays).
High-performance 3D is nice when you need it, but nowadays stuff is so powerful for under $100 that there's not much point to buying something really expensive. Some of us want a crisp, high-resolution display, flicker-free (70Hz+) without a great big noisy fan.
dare I suggest using common sub libraries within libraries, that is people like KDE and GTK get thier heads together and say "are thier functions we include in our libraies that could just as well be linked to an underlying library?"
Well, you see, KDE is written in C++. GTK is C. C++ stuff does not play well with different version of the same compiler let alone different compilers or even different languages.
In theory you're only "supposed" to use either GNOME or KDE and therefore only have one set of libraries installed. In practice you often want to use applications from both systems, and end up installing them both. The problem is political and religious as well as technical.
It's specifically designed to give good performance on single-threaded code vs. Niagra which is for heavily multithreaded code. I believe they refer to Niagra as "network facing" and rock as "data facing". Anyway, that's just what the sales people told me. They were a bit short on technical details.
On a realted note, I'd like to seem him and Roger Penrose with tea and sticky buns sitting by a table and ranting at each other for an hour or so on TV. That would be well worth my TV License fee:-)
You lucky so-and-sos. I have to pay for rubbish like Eastenders and the Weakest Link whether I like it or not:-( And we have an unelected dynastic dictator (although fairly benevolent) as head of state.br>
Really? I thought the new European law said you can't rip your own music, but you can pay to dowload it from "legitimate sources" whether you have the original or not? Perhaps I forgot about the "encryption" or "copy protection" part?
Who knows what the hell you're allowed to do nowadays. It's getting so complicated that we'll all be criminals by accident soon. Combine that with compulsory national ID cards, and location tracking schemes, and we might all end up under house arrest. Or maybe the government could just fine us automatically for every "transgresion" thereby effectively making a civil naughtiness tax? I'm having a bad day. Can you tell?
I wish you people would get it through your heads! You (say it with me) ARE NOT breaking the law.
Yes I am. I live in the UK, which is in the EU which recently passed a law, not unlike the ones in the USA, which prohibit ripping from media that you already own for personal use. It's been discussed here before.
It's only a matter of time and sods law before someone is sent to jail for it.
love the addition of two more authorized computers as well. I'm getting a new PB this spring to give my four Macs/PCs that I would have iTunes on and now I can keep them all authorized!
In my house, there are at least seven currently working CD and DVD players. I can put whatever the hell CD I like in any of them and play it. I can take my CDs up to my computer and rip using CD paranioa and encode to FLAC or OGG (or MP3 if I am feeling crazy), and in fact hard disks are so cheap now I don't even have to bother compressing the music.
Technically, I'm breaking the law, even though I'm not depriving anyone of a music sale... (I already bought the damned CDs).
I worked for a place like that too. We had a couple of UNIX workstations (SPARC). They once tried to audit them by powercycling with a DOS boot floppy in the drive.
Ethernet was banned. Only Token Ring was allowed. We had to spend $$$$ on a Tolken Ring card for our workstation (that had built-in ethernet).
Free software (i.e. GNU etc.) was banned because it was "Shareware" and "all Shareware has viruses." That one got ignored. Luckily an employment opportunity in another company came along...
You can say what you like about Java being a failure. You're entitled to your opinion, and you will be modded up since it is a fashionable one here at the moment. However, rumours of Java's demise are greatly exaggerated.
The number of Java developers continues to grow, and Java continues to evolve and improve. New projects continue to chose Java over "rival" technologies. I could rabbit on, but I'd just sound like a Java salesman.
Personally, I don't use Java but I do use it at work for specific purposes. It's not a panacea, and nothing is, however it's a very powerful and useful tool.
More and more people are looking to move away from Windows, either to the Mac or Linux and are considering Java. With the power of todays machines, performace isn't an issue.
If you're deploying a critical application, you can take the time and trouble to chose your JRE and deploy it on the clients as required.
Anyway, I'm not a serious Java developer, but I know people who are.
The pundits tend to overemphasise it's percieved disadvantages.
Yes, but, with Microsoft, there's usually a waterfall at the end of the river. There's often no escape.
I have two problems with GNOME. One, it's really bloated and slow these days. I can't afford to keep buying a new top-of-the-range computer every year. That's why I don't do GNOME or KDE. WindowMaker does me fine. No "desktop environments" here.
Two, there's too much Microsoft flattery.
Don't get me started on KDE. That is an abhorrence of the highest order. However, it's useable on my dual 2.8GHz Pentium 4 Xeon with hyperthreading at work. I use WindowMaker at work too. Still no stinking desktop environment. Give me xterm, vim and pine and I'm a happy chap.
Not that you care or are remotely interested, you understand.
Yes, I agree. I was thinking along the lines of a new bandwagon to jump on. GNOME is huge and bloated, and its future is less than clear. I've tried to build GNUstep at home a couple of times now, but I'm lazy and I only get so far before it breaks.
GNUstep has a lot of potential. It's semi-compatibility with the Apple stuff in interesting. It's pretty light-weight. It looks a bit old fashioned, but I'm sure the artists will fix that.
Perhaps it's time for a GNU sandbox system, or at least a portable byte code. What about GNU Lightning, the GNU JIT? How far did that get?
How important are portable binaries nowadays that a lot of stuff is "open source?"
Why can't the Linux community produce something better than this horrible hack of a copycat?
Someone once said not to worry about people stealing your good ideas, since if you have a truly great, innovative, new idea, you'll have to work hard to get others to accept it.
This manifests itself in the world of Free and Open Source software, where the developers are human just like everyone else. You see, they'd rather stick to tried, proven, trusted solutions and mabe add a few bells and whistles rather that do anything radical.
The upshot of this is, as in all walks of life, if you do have a radical new idea, you have to do the first implementation all by yourself. It's a lot of work, technically challenging and takes a lot of time, especially for people who are already busy.
The advantages that Free and Open Source developers have is access to excellent free tools and a wealth of information. However, the next radical, new, fresh, exciting thing will come from a "crazy" lone developer with nothing but a whacko idea, and a lot of motivation. It will not come from GNOME or KDE.
I don't know about that. If you believe what Sun says, there are 1.5 billion devices out in the field that run Java. I don't know if that's just embedded devices or if that includes web browsers, PeeCees, servers etc. but that's a heck of a large install-base.
The more pragmatic Linux distributions, for example slackware do come with a Sun JVM nowadays, and Microsoft is now having to refrain from shipping its broken JVM as part of the settlement with Sun. This means that millions of Microsoft users will be finding their way inadvertantly to java.sun.com.
Maybe I'm on a fruitbreak or something, but why not pick up GNUstep and enhance that? That way you get some semblance of source compatibility with Mac OSX Cocoa apps. Why follow Microsoft's example? It has always ended in tears in the past.
...and even if you're a "native code" zealot, the gcc support for compiling Java source down to native binaries is coming along quite nicely. Allegedly they even have Eclipse using SWT compiling to native code and running quite well. So it goes...
One of the first computers I saw was a Ferranti Argus 700. It was used as a SCADA system for an oil platform. The OS and the applications were written in CORAL 66. My dad worked on the machine, right from being involved in writing the OS, commissioning the machine through to writing some of the applications and operating it for several years. As you might have guessed, he bought me a computer for Christmas when I was 8, and taught me a lot about computer, maths and physics.
I used to wish I was gay because of the number of men who used to chat me up, but I wasn't. I never used to have much luck with women until I was in my late 20s. It used to be a standing joke with me and my friends: which bloke is going to chat old turgid up tonight. Also, when I was younger and thinner and wasn't going bald, drunk young men mistook me for a girl. The was this leering, drunk, sexist in Norwich a few years back. You should have heard the slaggin he got from his mates when they saw that I was male. It was hilarious.
Slashdot Mirror
...we should stop looking backwards and look forward to a future where all superstition is relegated to where it belongs: in the past.
That's one of those home-made "rules" that really annoys me, like the one about not being allowed to buy anything until you've been around the board 3 (or 5) times. Foo. I have the rules somewhere. And those people that throw the dice when in jail, don't get a double and then pay their 50. You're supposed to pay the 50 then go, or try for a double. And don't get me started on the cretins who try to put 4 houses on one space and none of the others in a set...."Oh look, I've got Mayfair, I'll put a hotel on it." But you haven't got Park Lane!!!! And you have to pay for 4 houses on each of them first. That'll cost you 1600+200 for the hotel. Make that a round 2k for hotels on both. Oh, you've only got 352? Bad luck.
I tried a no-name GeForce 4 MX440 a couple of years back, but the display quality was awful. It was so poor I had to downgrade to 1280x1024 on my 19" Trinitron screen. After a few months the card broke and I went back to my TNT2 Ultra (Creative Labs) and back up to 1600x1200.
I was thinking about getting something fanless and by nVidia since their (binary-only) drivers are superb on Linux (I don't do the idealogical zealotry as much nowadays).
High-performance 3D is nice when you need it, but nowadays stuff is so powerful for under $100 that there's not much point to buying something really expensive. Some of us want a crisp, high-resolution display, flicker-free (70Hz+) without a great big noisy fan.
Well, you see, KDE is written in C++. GTK is C. C++ stuff does not play well with different version of the same compiler let alone different compilers or even different languages.
In theory you're only "supposed" to use either GNOME or KDE and therefore only have one set of libraries installed. In practice you often want to use applications from both systems, and end up installing them both.
The problem is political and religious as well as technical.
Well, it's a rant, so it could be either flamebait, troll or funny. Consider yourself lucky.
It's specifically designed to give good performance on single-threaded code vs. Niagra which is for heavily multithreaded code. I believe they refer to Niagra as "network facing" and rock as "data facing". Anyway, that's just what the sales people told me. They were a bit short on technical details.
They announced ROCK recently too, which addresses just that.
On a realted note, I'd like to seem him and Roger Penrose with tea and sticky buns sitting by a table and ranting at each other for an hour or so on TV. That would be well worth my TV License fee :-)
You lucky so-and-sos. I have to pay for rubbish like Eastenders and the Weakest Link whether I like it or not :-( And we have an unelected dynastic dictator (although fairly benevolent) as head of state.br>
Who knows what the hell you're allowed to do nowadays. It's getting so complicated that we'll all be criminals by accident soon. Combine that with compulsory national ID cards, and location tracking schemes, and we might all end up under house arrest. Or maybe the government could just fine us automatically for every "transgresion" thereby effectively making a civil naughtiness tax? I'm having a bad day. Can you tell?
Yes I am. I live in the UK, which is in the EU which recently passed a law, not unlike the ones in the USA, which prohibit ripping from media that you already own for personal use. It's been discussed here before.
It's only a matter of time and sods law before someone is sent to jail for it.
In my house, there are at least seven currently working CD and DVD players. I can put whatever the hell CD I like in any of them and play it. I can take my CDs up to my computer and rip using CD paranioa and encode to FLAC or OGG (or MP3 if I am feeling crazy), and in fact hard disks are so cheap now I don't even have to bother compressing the music.
Technically, I'm breaking the law, even though I'm not depriving anyone of a music sale... (I already bought the damned CDs).
Ethernet was banned. Only Token Ring was allowed. We had to spend $$$$ on a Tolken Ring card for our workstation (that had built-in ethernet).
Free software (i.e. GNU etc.) was banned because it was "Shareware" and "all Shareware has viruses." That one got ignored. Luckily an employment opportunity in another company came along...
The number of Java developers continues to grow, and Java continues to evolve and improve. New projects continue to chose Java over "rival" technologies. I could rabbit on, but I'd just sound like a Java salesman.
Personally, I don't use Java but I do use it at work for specific purposes. It's not a panacea, and nothing is, however it's a very powerful and useful tool.
More and more people are looking to move away from Windows, either to the Mac or Linux and are considering Java. With the power of todays machines, performace isn't an issue.
If you're deploying a critical application, you can take the time and trouble to chose your JRE and deploy it on the clients as required.
Anyway, I'm not a serious Java developer, but I know people who are.
The pundits tend to overemphasise it's percieved disadvantages.
I have two problems with GNOME. One, it's really bloated and slow these days. I can't afford to keep buying a new top-of-the-range computer every year. That's why I don't do GNOME or KDE. WindowMaker does me fine. No "desktop environments" here.
Two, there's too much Microsoft flattery.
Don't get me started on KDE. That is an abhorrence of the highest order. However, it's useable on my dual 2.8GHz Pentium 4 Xeon with hyperthreading at work. I use WindowMaker at work too. Still no stinking desktop environment. Give me xterm, vim and pine and I'm a happy chap.
Not that you care or are remotely interested, you understand.
Right, you've put a bee in my bonnet now.
GNUstep has a lot of potential. It's semi-compatibility with the Apple stuff in interesting. It's pretty light-weight. It looks a bit old fashioned, but I'm sure the artists will fix that.
Perhaps it's time for a GNU sandbox system, or at least a portable byte code. What about GNU Lightning, the GNU JIT? How far did that get?
How important are portable binaries nowadays that a lot of stuff is "open source?"
Someone once said not to worry about people stealing your good ideas, since if you have a truly great, innovative, new idea, you'll have to work hard to get others to accept it.
This manifests itself in the world of Free and Open Source software, where the developers are human just like everyone else. You see, they'd rather stick to tried, proven, trusted solutions and mabe add a few bells and whistles rather that do anything radical.
The upshot of this is, as in all walks of life, if you do have a radical new idea, you have to do the first implementation all by yourself. It's a lot of work, technically challenging and takes a lot of time, especially for people who are already busy.
The advantages that Free and Open Source developers have is access to excellent free tools and a wealth of information. However, the next radical, new, fresh, exciting thing will come from a "crazy" lone developer with nothing but a whacko idea, and a lot of motivation. It will not come from GNOME or KDE.
I don't know about that. If you believe what Sun says, there are 1.5 billion devices out in the field that run Java. I don't know if that's just embedded devices or if that includes web browsers, PeeCees, servers etc. but that's a heck of a large install-base.
The more pragmatic Linux distributions, for example slackware do come with a Sun JVM nowadays, and Microsoft is now having to refrain from shipping its broken JVM as part of the settlement with Sun. This means that millions of Microsoft users will be finding their way inadvertantly to java.sun.com.
Maybe I'm on a fruitbreak or something, but why not pick up GNUstep and enhance that? That way you get some semblance of source compatibility with Mac OSX Cocoa apps. Why follow Microsoft's example? It has always ended in tears in the past.
...and even if you're a "native code" zealot, the gcc support for compiling Java source down to native binaries is coming along quite nicely. Allegedly they even have Eclipse using SWT compiling to native code and running quite well. So it goes...
One of the first computers I saw was a Ferranti Argus 700. It was used as a SCADA system for an oil platform. The OS and the applications were written in CORAL 66. My dad worked on the machine, right from being involved in writing the OS, commissioning the machine through to writing some of the applications and operating it for several years. As you might have guessed, he bought me a computer for Christmas when I was 8, and taught me a lot about computer, maths and physics.
The aliens came down in their flying-saucer one night and told me so so it must be true :-)
I used to wish I was gay because of the number of men who used to chat me up, but I wasn't. I never used to have much luck with women until I was in my late 20s. It used to be a standing joke with me and my friends: which bloke is going to chat old turgid up tonight. Also, when I was younger and thinner and wasn't going bald, drunk young men mistook me for a girl. The was this leering, drunk, sexist in Norwich a few years back. You should have heard the slaggin he got from his mates when they saw that I was male. It was hilarious.