I don't understand this at all. If you argue that burning and ripping produces and almost identical copy, then why not just let people remove the protection from the original and skip the hassle of a burn/rip cycle?
Clearly there must be a difference between the copies, or else there would be no point not allowing stright copying but allowing burn/rip
Finally, for those who know lots about these things, on this picture notice how the on the right and bottom of the page the scroll bar and status bar are clipped. This is a bug in crossover office but is fixed in the latest wine, so they appear to have basically made a crossover varient and not even bothered merging the latest release of the offical wine in. poor.
There is the kind where you must hone your skills to razor-sharp levels to defeat the game. In my opinion, thats fine (some people might not like it, but thats their problem).
On the other hand, there are the bad kinds of difficulty:
Too far between save points: In some games this is OK, but mostly it's annoying because nowadays I don't have the time to play in 3 hours segments that often anymore. Of course this is nowhere near as bad as it was in the megadrive/SNES era where it was common for a game to take 6+ hours to finish and have no save states, passwords, or anything.
Related to this, I'd like to take the opportunity to moan about "Viewtiful Joe". It's a lovely game, but has one really annoying feature. Every time you kill and enemy you get money to spend on powerups, which make the game easier. If however you turn off without finishing a level, you lose it all. Therefore my game playing tended to go: Play for 3 hours, build up 150,000 points, turn off in frustration. Turn back on, build up 20,000 points and finish level refreshed. Meaning I end up low-powered for the next level. grr!
Impossible to survive first time: Lots of games face you with parts which are impossible (in my opinion) to pass first time, so you have to go along, die, and then repeat.
Save coins / get level-ups: Some games (like Final Fantasy) are "hard" because you have to every so often break off and spend 3 hours doing random battles to get harder. Almost no-one enjoys doing this, it's just extending the game in an un-natural way.
Poor controls: One big problem 3d games had for a long time was poor controls (although they are getting better). I don't mind dying in games, but I hate dying when I feel it wasn't my fault (see Tomb raider and stupid jumps, turning around oh-so-slowly in Resident Evil, etc.)
So to sum up (and is anyone still reading?) Difficulty is good, as long as it is actual skill-based difficulty and not some artifical hack to make finishing the game take longer
No, you don't have to edit the codebase. The point is that you can get exactly the same effect as the preprocessor via const ints, while not having to worry about any nasty possible preprocessor-related errors that might have crept in.
Just one little thing.. before you say Halo is "nothing cutting edge or new", just remember how long it's been out now on the X-box. It was one of the best FPSes available when it came out.
Seriously, have you ever worked with latex or technical journals?
Mark up? you do it yourself in latex Cropping? eh? why? You just make it the right size in the first place Pantone matching? 99.9% of technical journals are in black and white. Kerning? Latex does it and does it well. etc.
I've had a number of papers published in computer science journals and I promise you what happens is they send you a latex style-sheet, you apply it to your document, format everything nicely and then accept it exactly how you send it and print it. Nothing more, nothing less.
One of the major reasons for this is nothing I've seen handles maths as well as latex.
If you think that Boost Lamba and FC++ have anywhere near the power of haskall, then you haven't used it yet. One of the major problems of constructing things via templates in C++ is that you have to define everything statically at compile time. As soon as you start generating any kind of complex system or want to construct functions based upon user input or compuatation you do at run-time, then you reach a wall with these libraries.
Now don't get me wrong, I like boost::lambda and use it a lot, but comparing it to a functional language is like comparing c++ to a turing machine. (Before anyone posts a smart reply, yes I know c++ and a turing machine have equivalent power, but I'll write a heapsort in c++, you on a turing machine, and we'll see who finishes first ^_^ )
Let me be the first to get the obvious joke out of the way.
Why is there only a windows client? Because all the worms only effect windows machines, what would be the point of a client on anything else?:)
Although of course, the more serious answer is "A client on something other than windows would be sensible, because if a new worm comes out and hits a 0-day windows hole then your machine could be infected and dead before it gets the chance to report that it is being attacked. (Just why is it that all these worms people write nowadays just seem so.. nice? I remember the days when 90% of viruses would at the very least format your hard disc.. now they just sit there. It's almost a shame, because one good formating worm might finally make people take them more seriously.. it's only a matter of time)
*sigh* I really shouldn't reply to an anonymous coward, but why not.
If you'd read my post, you'd see why people aren't switching. It is because microsoft will not provide people the information necessary to get their documents out of microsoft proporiatary standards and to interact with windows machines. Therefore unless you can pursade everyone you know to change to linux at the same time it is very hard to escape windows altogether (believe me, I've tried)
Microsoft goes out of it's way (and even does illegal things, check the various lawsuits) to stop competition having the right to live on a level playing field with windows. I'm not saying linux is better, I'm just saying microsoft should be made to provide a level playing field for those who wish to complete.
Microsoft doesn't have to do that really. They can just carry on doing what they do, which is change the office document standard every year, break SAMBA with a service pack and tell computer sellers that they can't make dual-boot computers without paying more for windows (out of all the things microsoft does, THIS is the one that I can't believe they keep getting away with. How can this be seen as anything other than monopoly abuse?)
True, but in most other languages, one of two things would happen.
a) The pointer wouldn't have been invalidated b) The program would have stopped.
I find c++'s single biggest problem is the fact thart when you do have dodgy memory corruption it can be almost impossible to track down, and almost all big c++ programs end up with this problem. What I'd really like would be a c++ compiler that runs on a virtual machine that can do complete memory and pointer protection:)
No, capitalism would not allow the RIAA to have a partly-government helped strangehold over the music market and the right to keep draggin people through court without any real evidence of charges
It would be interesting to see if they are simply the first people to admit this.
Do you think AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo! mail and every other ISP in the world dig through their backups when you quit and make sure they delete all copies of your mail? I'd be very, very, very surprised if they do.
I'm still not entirely sure what everyone's complaint is here. You don't have to join Gmail to use google. They openly admit that they may combine data (unlike everyone else who do combine data but refuse to tell anyone about it)
If you don't want google using your data, don't give it to them. Personally, I'm happy for google to have all my data if it will improve my browsing and emailing experience, and that is my personal choice to make.
What people should be complaining about is insurance and credit card companies which buy incomplete and incorrect sets of data and judge your credit rating based on it (it's happened to me). Now thats dodgy.
I think you underestimate enginners. Battery life is one of THE big problems at the moment. No-one really wants laptops which are twice as fast in business, but if you could get a battery which allowed a normalish laptop to run for 12 or 24 hours, the world (and millions of pounds) would be yours.
Personally I feel the much more important part of these results is not the athlon64 pentium 4, but the athlon64 on 32-bit and 64-bit code. This is a set of benchmarks I've been trying to find for some time
If we ignore the cases where the 32-bit code has been optimised via ASM, it looks like the athlon64 is noticably faster on 64-bit code, and often much faster. This backs up what a number of people had been saying, that even if 64-bit code takes up more space the extra registers are a bonus (I'm thinking it's quite likely that gcc hasn't got around to using the various new instructions available yet)
Remember, there are different levels of ripping off look and feel.
While windows was cleared inspiried by mac os, you could never mistake one for the other. I have mistaken XPde (and to be honest to a lesser degree the default KDE and gnome setups) for an actual windows machine. Thats too close.
Emphasis mine. So visualize this. You're walking down the street, and you do a sudden about face. Regardless of how fancy your technology is, your velocity must reach 0 before you begin moving in the opposite direction.
What you mean is your velocity will reach zero realitive to the street.
In space there is no street, no "absolute not-moving". You could probably make one if you really wanted by comparing yourself to the nearest planet / sun, but it wouldn't be anywhere near as important as it is on earth
WHile this is cool, on the other hand we mainly need random numbers for two things. The first is to make algorithms which require random numbers to run correctly work and to make games interesting to play. For that kind of purpose this is overkill:)
The other reason we need them is for secure encryption purposes. If you felt paranoid enough to need quantumly generated random numbers, would you really get the numbers over the internet from an untrusted source?
What would be much more interesting would be if intel/AMD started including a random number generator directly on processors which allowed you to get some random numbers via some random process on chip.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't understand this at all. If you argue that burning and ripping produces and almost identical copy, then why not just let people remove the protection from the original and skip the hassle of a burn/rip cycle?
Clearly there must be a difference between the copies, or else there would be no point not allowing stright copying but allowing burn/rip
this pic for references to an install of wine.
Finally, for those who know lots about these things, on this picture notice how the on the right and bottom of the page the scroll bar and status bar are clipped. This is a bug in crossover office but is fixed in the latest wine, so they appear to have basically made a crossover varient and not even bothered merging the latest release of the offical wine in. poor.
There are lots of different kinds of difficulty.
There is the kind where you must hone your skills to razor-sharp levels to defeat the game. In my opinion, thats fine (some people might not like it, but thats their problem).
On the other hand, there are the bad kinds of difficulty:
Too far between save points: In some games this is OK, but mostly it's annoying because nowadays I don't have the time to play in 3 hours segments that often anymore. Of course this is nowhere near as bad as it was in the megadrive/SNES era where it was common for a game to take 6+ hours to finish and have no save states, passwords, or anything.
Related to this, I'd like to take the opportunity to moan about "Viewtiful Joe". It's a lovely game, but has one really annoying feature. Every time you kill and enemy you get money to spend on powerups, which make the game easier. If however you turn off without finishing a level, you lose it all. Therefore my game playing tended to go:
Play for 3 hours, build up 150,000 points, turn off in frustration.
Turn back on, build up 20,000 points and finish level refreshed.
Meaning I end up low-powered for the next level. grr!
Impossible to survive first time: Lots of games face you with parts which are impossible (in my opinion) to pass first time, so you have to go along, die, and then repeat.
Save coins / get level-ups: Some games (like Final Fantasy) are "hard" because you have to every so often break off and spend 3 hours doing random battles to get harder. Almost no-one enjoys doing this, it's just extending the game in an un-natural way.
Poor controls: One big problem 3d games had for a long time was poor controls (although they are getting better). I don't mind dying in games, but I hate dying when I feel it wasn't my fault (see Tomb raider and stupid jumps, turning around oh-so-slowly in Resident Evil, etc.)
So to sum up (and is anyone still reading?) Difficulty is good, as long as it is actual skill-based difficulty and not some artifical hack to make finishing the game take longer
No, you don't have to edit the codebase. The point is that you can get exactly the same effect as the preprocessor via const ints, while not having to worry about any nasty possible preprocessor-related errors that might have crept in.
Just do this.
//Turn debug on/off at runtime //Turn it off for release time
... }
In debug code have:
bool debugcode;
and turn it on and off. In the final code have:
const bool debugcode=true;
and then all the debugging code will disappear.
If you want to moan at this, then have:
bool debugcode;
const bool release=false;
then have:
if(!release && debugcode) {
That will remove the code if release is definied to true, and have it switchable if release is false (obviously you can make it look a bit nicer)
Just one little thing.. before you say Halo is "nothing cutting edge or new", just remember how long it's been out now on the X-box. It was one of the best FPSes available when it came out.
Seriously, have you ever worked with latex or technical journals?
Mark up? you do it yourself in latex
Cropping? eh? why? You just make it the right size in the first place
Pantone matching? 99.9% of technical journals are in black and white.
Kerning? Latex does it and does it well.
etc.
I've had a number of papers published in computer science journals and I promise you what happens is they send you a latex style-sheet, you apply it to your document, format everything nicely and then accept it exactly how you send it and print it. Nothing more, nothing less.
One of the major reasons for this is nothing I've seen handles maths as well as latex.
If you think that Boost Lamba and FC++ have anywhere near the power of haskall, then you haven't used it yet. One of the major problems of constructing things via templates in C++ is that you have to define everything statically at compile time. As soon as you start generating any kind of complex system or want to construct functions based upon user input or compuatation you do at run-time, then you reach a wall with these libraries.
Now don't get me wrong, I like boost::lambda and use it a lot, but comparing it to a functional language is like comparing c++ to a turing machine. (Before anyone posts a smart reply, yes I know c++ and a turing machine have equivalent power, but I'll write a heapsort in c++, you on a turing machine, and we'll see who finishes first ^_^ )
Let me be the first to get the obvious joke out of the way.
:)
Why is there only a windows client? Because all the worms only effect windows machines, what would be the point of a client on anything else?
Although of course, the more serious answer is "A client on something other than windows would be sensible, because if a new worm comes out and hits a 0-day windows hole then your machine could be infected and dead before it gets the chance to report that it is being attacked. (Just why is it that all these worms people write nowadays just seem so.. nice? I remember the days when 90% of viruses would at the very least format your hard disc.. now they just sit there. It's almost a shame, because one good formating worm might finally make people take them more seriously.. it's only a matter of time)
We'll get them right around the time we get 50tb magnetic disks for 100 dollars.
Don't forget, you can now get 128MB solid state devices for pennies, and I remember when my hard disc was only that big.
*sigh* I really shouldn't reply to an anonymous coward, but why not.
If you'd read my post, you'd see why people aren't switching. It is because microsoft will not provide people the information necessary to get their documents out of microsoft proporiatary standards and to interact with windows machines. Therefore unless you can pursade everyone you know to change to linux at the same time it is very hard to escape windows altogether (believe me, I've tried)
Microsoft goes out of it's way (and even does illegal things, check the various lawsuits) to stop competition having the right to live on a level playing field with windows. I'm not saying linux is better, I'm just saying microsoft should be made to provide a level playing field for those who wish to complete.
Microsoft doesn't have to do that really. They can just carry on doing what they do, which is change the office document standard every year, break SAMBA with a service pack and tell computer sellers that they can't make dual-boot computers without paying more for windows (out of all the things microsoft does, THIS is the one that I can't believe they keep getting away with. How can this be seen as anything other than monopoly abuse?)
Hmm.. it's an open source application, so viewing the source lets you do what exactly? Why not just download the whole lot instead?
You say no OS-specific code, but note that C/C++ don't understand things like directories in their default setup.
So for a start you need linux/windows
With this kind of application endian could be important, so you have linux/windows/mac os x.
Then of course he might have to compile it against multiple libcs under linux.
And you are going to want different versions optimised for the various different processors.
I'm up to at least 10 or so versions here and I'm not even really trying
Oh yes, *BSD users might want a version to, theres another 3 or so.
Or one java version
I understand that. But don't claim that this is capitalism at work (and therefore somehow "right")
True, but in most other languages, one of two things would happen.
:)
a) The pointer wouldn't have been invalidated
b) The program would have stopped.
I find c++'s single biggest problem is the fact thart when you do have dodgy memory corruption it can be almost impossible to track down, and almost all big c++ programs end up with this problem. What I'd really like would be a c++ compiler that runs on a virtual machine that can do complete memory and pointer protection
No, capitalism would not allow the RIAA to have a partly-government helped strangehold over the music market and the right to keep draggin people through court without any real evidence of charges
It would be interesting to see if they are simply the first people to admit this.
Do you think AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo! mail and every other ISP in the world dig through their backups when you quit and make sure they delete all copies of your mail? I'd be very, very, very surprised if they do.
I'm still not entirely sure what everyone's complaint is here. You don't have to join Gmail to use google. They openly admit that they may combine data (unlike everyone else who do combine data but refuse to tell anyone about it)
If you don't want google using your data, don't give it to them. Personally, I'm happy for google to have all my data if it will improve my browsing and emailing experience, and that is my personal choice to make.
What people should be complaining about is insurance and credit card companies which buy incomplete and incorrect sets of data and judge your credit rating based on it (it's happened to me). Now thats dodgy.
I think you underestimate enginners. Battery life is one of THE big problems at the moment. No-one really wants laptops which are twice as fast in business, but if you could get a battery which allowed a normalish laptop to run for 12 or 24 hours, the world (and millions of pounds) would be yours.
If we ignore the cases where the 32-bit code has been optimised via ASM, it looks like the athlon64 is noticably faster on 64-bit code, and often much faster. This backs up what a number of people had been saying, that even if 64-bit code takes up more space the extra registers are a bonus (I'm thinking it's quite likely that gcc hasn't got around to using the various new instructions available yet)
While windows was cleared inspiried by mac os, you could never mistake one for the other. I have mistaken XPde (and to be honest to a lesser degree the default KDE and gnome setups) for an actual windows machine. Thats too close.
Does this mean... maybe some of the other stories today were april fools jokes too? No free food? No BSD on gameboy?
What you mean is your velocity will reach zero realitive to the street.
In space there is no street, no "absolute not-moving". You could probably make one if you really wanted by comparing yourself to the nearest planet / sun, but it wouldn't be anywhere near as important as it is on earth
WHile this is cool, on the other hand we mainly need random numbers for two things. The first is to make algorithms which require random numbers to run correctly work and to make games interesting to play. For that kind of purpose this is overkill :)
The other reason we need them is for secure encryption purposes. If you felt paranoid enough to need quantumly generated random numbers, would you really get the numbers over the internet from an untrusted source?
What would be much more interesting would be if intel/AMD started including a random number generator directly on processors which allowed you to get some random numbers via some random process on chip.