"Next thing you know, most of the Slashdot editors and programmers will be using Macs... "
I hope that was a light-hearted comment. The reason Mac's not popular with Linux users today is because PC has, by far, the broadest selection of hardware available. Perhaps if Mac clones were available...?
"Didn't chuck-e-cheese used to be called Showbiz pizza?"
I don't know the details of the business side of things, but I can tell you that in Kansas City our local "Show Biz Pizza" turned into Chuck E. Cheese, and yes it did have a bear in the band.
"Oh yeah, and Pitfall was the grandfather of mario!"
Heh. Nintendo's largely responsible for making gaming as successful as it is today. The game market really crashed in the early 80's. Nintendo rejuvinated it with their NES, aith plenty of credit to Super Mario Bros.
Games before then were all about higher scores. Mario Bros. really changed that thought process because instead of trying to get score, instead the goal was the save the princess. The result? The game actually had an ending! Ever since, games have had a much broader approach, thus resulting in the necessary diversity to sustain a good growing market.
"... but Al Gore would claim he's the father of that."
I'm a little surprised he was modded as off-topic. I think he was making a humorous allusion to Steve Russell, the guy who created Space War in the 1960's. This site has the info.
He should have gotten modded up, not down. Oh well, I guess not everybody is versed in Video Game History.
"Having tkPhone allows us to do some things we couldn't on the Zaurus, like make use of a Speex codec which is part of the Xiph umbrella these days, we couldn't use it on the Zaurus because it requires floating point support."
How many of those are typos and how many are actual product names?
yOu aLL comPLaiN abOUt Ms'S AttemptS at woRld DOMinanCE, bUT iApple's tHE OeE chanGIng thE iRules of GRAMMAr.
"You've hit the nail on the head, though a bit circumspectly. It's not about profits, it's about control."
I think they're worried about the value of their content. I mean, what if somebody made a DVD player that re-edited Episode II to be a lot more interesting. Nobody'd pay $20 for 20 minutes of content!
"The major studios and the Directors Guild of America are essentially saying that, when you buy a DVD, you must watch it exactly the way it was created--or not watch it at all."
I wonder what their attitude would be if one of the words of that quote were changed:
"The major studios and the Directors Guild of America are essentially saying that, when you buy a DVD, you must watch it exactly the way it was created--or not buy it at all."
If I were a stockholder in that company, I'd demand to know why they're drawing a line like that for their customers to cross. I mean, if the attitude is "It's our way or the highway", then there's really no reason to think they have customer satisfaction in mind, right? Who'd want to buy a DVD if they're unwilling to listen to people? "Nar, we don't want to put any extras on the DVD. That costs more."
What it basically says is that XP Home and Pro will both support this processor, but 2K won't.
My company has a couple of HT machines here and when the POST comes up it says '2 processors'. Since we Linux on that machine, we never looked up Windows compatibility.
"Shouldn't the OS automatically direct the applications you are using to the 'free' processor?"
Should it? Yes. Does it? No. They default to processor 0. If the app has multi-threaded support, THEN it automatically load balances the processors. (I'm talking strictly Windows here, I have no idea how *nix does this.) Not everything I do is multi-threaded, and even if it was I don't necessarily use it in that mode.
"Aren't you being a little obsessive-compulsive about making sure that your processors are being used?"
Not at all. My work flow is such that my computer can be busy for hours at a time. During those hours, I can't just sit here with my thumb up my bum. So what I do is I delegate the hard-working stuff to processor 1, and the rest of it to processor 0. This means that I can do my other stuff like answer e-mail or work on my next model or something.
It's not a matter of being 'obsessive' or wanting to be in total control, it's a matter of optimizing my work-flow. If my computer's busy, and I'm not, I get in trouble. (Yes, I know how it should work but the managers above my boss don't understand how 3d rendering works.)
" Linux advocates unveiled a new passthrough connection for Linux users that extends the common firewall set IPChains on to any in home phone line... Now you can specify Inbound and Outbound rules for phone calls, it now allows for certain phones in the house to allow incoming calls, and others only can place outgoing calls....."
I know you're being kind of sarcastic here, but you're talking about something I'm sure a lot of people'd like to have. I'd love to run our phone line through my computer so that it can filter the BS calls. One of the features I wanted to have was a 'Press the right 4-digit code in order to make the phone ring, otherwise you will be transferred to voice mail'.
So the rules would be like:
-Let anybody on my contact list through. -Let anybody with the following codes through. -Anybody left over that has a Caller ID number, send them to voicemail. -Anybody left over that does not have a caller ID may only leave their phone number.
"In the PC world, there's also the historical problem of lack of mainstream OS support for multiple CPUs -- I can't remember if XP consumer even supports it, now that I think about it -- which creates that chicken-and-egg problem. NT4 was a highly marginal 'consumer' OS, Win2k had more reach but still not what the 9x series had and XP adoption has been slower due to people just keeping PCs longer."
XP Home does not support dual processors. As a matter of fact, this may render it an unusuable OS for HT processors because what they do is trick the hardware into thinking it has two processors.
There's something else to consider about OS support for multiple processors: The UI needs to support it, too. I run Win2k on a dual machine, and because I'm aware of how to direct a process to an idle CPU, I'm able to make reasonably effective use of the second processor. Unfortunately, though, I have to go into Task Manager and hunt down the process I want to change. I'm able to use it, but I have a difficult time explaining this to other people. The big problem is that it's hard to tell, at a glance, which process is doing what.
I really hope that one day Windows (or whatever OS I end up using in the future) puts something in the titlebar of each app I'm running so I can set which processors it is active on. That would seriously be cool. I'm not a big fan of running apps in multi-threaded mode because I like having the CPU resources to keep the interface etc going. If, at a click, I could say "stop using this processor", I'd be one happy SMP adopter. I'd even be able to recommend this type of machine to less tech saavy people.
I gotta ask, though, does anybody know of a hack for Windows that let's me do this?
"The biggest single benefit I can think of is that it doesn't bottleneck the way a single CPU can when a single process pigs out at 100%, I still have a nearly-idle CPU to work with -- which is the problem with 2 CPUs, one's nearly idle."
True dat! Explorer is well multi-threaded, and is always very responsive on a dual machine. When I first started working on a dual I couldn't believe how enthusiastic Explorer and IE were, even when running a rendering in the background or something. The dual processor support didn't buy me 2x the speed (though potentially it could get close, depending on how efficient I plan on being...) what it did buy me was that my computer was ALWAYS useful, as opposed to having it completely busy chewing away at something.
"No, they should blame Microsoft. Like that article posted earlier about Slammer, the idea of blaming the victim for the crime is a little skewed"
Earlier I made a post in this thread that was along the lines of "there was demand for MS to put auto-install technologies into IE, so blame the content producers for assuming that their customers are bonehead stupid." I put a little more thought into that comment, and I wholly agree with you that MS could have worked out a better implementation.
I'm a reasonably careful net user, but I got bit by 'huntbar.com'. For the life of me, I can't tell you how I got that installed. It didn't come packaged with something I downloaded, so I can only assume that it came through IE. If something like that can sneak through to somebody who pays close attention to stuff like that, then MS definitely did something wrong. (Damn I'm glad I'm an Opera user now.)
The worst part was that the way the plugin scheme works I had to perform a tricky reboot and a registry editing to get the offending files unlocked so I could kill them.
It bugs me that Windows 2000 has a tool that'll back up your files, even the system ones in use, but they can't provide me with a tool to remove stuff like that without a reboot.
Know what? That's the cost of security. You can make an auto-installer work via a risky method, or you can disable it and make computer work harder.
"Even though most slashdotters' morals on music copying are pretty loose..."
Loose?
Normally I wouldn't have a reaction to that comment, but a lot of people have put a SIGNIFICANT amount of money into adopting the lastest technologies into their music hobbies. I don't think it's a matter of cost. How many CD's can you buy for the price of an iPod?
It's really hard to sympathize with the music industry when there's all this demand and all these people spending a surge of money into it, and they respond with "THIEVES!", as opposed to entering that new market.
I know, I know, it's all been said before. I just can't believe how many people forget the investment in money/. geeks have put into playing MP3s, even though they easily could have done it for free by sticking with their computers.
"Let's see, we have the technically illiterate on one hand. These people fall prey *far* more to malicious remote-install links than they are benefitted by deliberately remote-installing software. Not benefit to IE's behavior there."
Blame the dot-bombs for that. My company used to be one of those, and we made a plugin that you had to run a setup to install. Everybody who wanted to use our plugin barfed at that idea. They wanted it to auto-install, or they thought nobody'd ever use it. I'm dead serious.
If that's any indication of the crap other web companies had to go through (Macromedia, for example) then it doesn't surprise me that IE works that way. I wish these people had more faith in the intelligence of their customers.
"Completely offtopic, but the last company I worked for the CTO called himself "The Wizard", said that on his business cards and everything."
I tried to get 'Supreme Commander of the Universe' on my business card. That didn't fly but at least I have a coffee mug with those magical words emblazed on it.
"That's exactly what I was thinking. Germany needs to get with the times, American youths have been making these for years. They aren't even that popular anymore."
Maybe they're just now getting to season 4 of Picket Fences?
" Seriously, this is a fun read by some FX experts that really destroys that alien autopsy stuff."
Your comment reminded me of something I caught on TV once. Evidentally, there's startling video evidence of a UFO over earth (shot from a shuttle) moving slowly just above the upper atmosphere, then suddenly darting the other way at surprising speeds. This 'proof' of alien technology supposedly raised a huge stir.
The video was played again, only zoomed out a bit. (they zoomed in so you could see the moving pixel...) This time, when the UFO darted off, you could see a subtle flash eminating from the shuttle. It's hard for me to explain in text, so I'll have to paint you a picture: An ice crystal fell off the shuttle and slowly moved away from the window. When a navigation jet (RCS thruster? heh) fired to stabilize the shuttle, it pushed the ice crystal away rather rapidly.
This crystal only really showed up as a point of light, so they really had no idea what they were seeing on the video. But they were ready to believe it was an ET even though it was pretty obvious what happened.
Slashdot Mirror
"Next thing you know, most of the Slashdot editors and programmers will be using Macs ... "
I hope that was a light-hearted comment. The reason Mac's not popular with Linux users today is because PC has, by far, the broadest selection of hardware available. Perhaps if Mac clones were available...?
"you need to have a heading like that."
At +2?
"Didn't chuck-e-cheese used to be called Showbiz pizza?"
I don't know the details of the business side of things, but I can tell you that in Kansas City our local "Show Biz Pizza" turned into Chuck E. Cheese, and yes it did have a bear in the band.
"Oh yeah, and Pitfall was the grandfather of mario!"
Heh. Nintendo's largely responsible for making gaming as successful as it is today. The game market really crashed in the early 80's. Nintendo rejuvinated it with their NES, aith plenty of credit to Super Mario Bros.
Games before then were all about higher scores. Mario Bros. really changed that thought process because instead of trying to get score, instead the goal was the save the princess. The result? The game actually had an ending! Ever since, games have had a much broader approach, thus resulting in the necessary diversity to sustain a good growing market.
"... but Al Gore would claim he's the father of that."
I'm a little surprised he was modded as off-topic. I think he was making a humorous allusion to Steve Russell, the guy who created Space War in the 1960's. This site has the info.
He should have gotten modded up, not down. Oh well, I guess not everybody is versed in Video Game History.
"Having tkPhone allows us to do some things we couldn't on the Zaurus, like make use of a Speex codec which is part of the Xiph umbrella these days, we couldn't use it on the Zaurus because it requires floating point support."
How many of those are typos and how many are actual product names?
yOu aLL comPLaiN abOUt Ms'S AttemptS at woRld DOMinanCE, bUT iApple's tHE OeE chanGIng thE iRules of GRAMMAr.
"You've hit the nail on the head, though a bit circumspectly. It's not about profits, it's about control."
I think they're worried about the value of their content. I mean, what if somebody made a DVD player that re-edited Episode II to be a lot more interesting. Nobody'd pay $20 for 20 minutes of content!
"The major studios and the Directors Guild of America are essentially saying that, when you buy a DVD, you must watch it exactly the way it was created--or not watch it at all."
I wonder what their attitude would be if one of the words of that quote were changed:
"The major studios and the Directors Guild of America are essentially saying that, when you buy a DVD, you must watch it exactly the way it was created--or not buy it at all."
If I were a stockholder in that company, I'd demand to know why they're drawing a line like that for their customers to cross. I mean, if the attitude is "It's our way or the highway", then there's really no reason to think they have customer satisfaction in mind, right? Who'd want to buy a DVD if they're unwilling to listen to people? "Nar, we don't want to put any extras on the DVD. That costs more."
"XP does not support dual physical processores. However, it fully supports a hyperthreading CPU and it's second logical CPU."
He's right. I found some info on it here.
What it basically says is that XP Home and Pro will both support this processor, but 2K won't.
My company has a couple of HT machines here and when the POST comes up it says '2 processors'. Since we Linux on that machine, we never looked up Windows compatibility.
"Shouldn't the OS automatically direct the applications you are using to the 'free' processor?"
Should it? Yes. Does it? No. They default to processor 0. If the app has multi-threaded support, THEN it automatically load balances the processors. (I'm talking strictly Windows here, I have no idea how *nix does this.) Not everything I do is multi-threaded, and even if it was I don't necessarily use it in that mode.
"Aren't you being a little obsessive-compulsive about making sure that your processors are being used?"
Not at all. My work flow is such that my computer can be busy for hours at a time. During those hours, I can't just sit here with my thumb up my bum. So what I do is I delegate the hard-working stuff to processor 1, and the rest of it to processor 0. This means that I can do my other stuff like answer e-mail or work on my next model or something.
It's not a matter of being 'obsessive' or wanting to be in total control, it's a matter of optimizing my work-flow. If my computer's busy, and I'm not, I get in trouble. (Yes, I know how it should work but the managers above my boss don't understand how 3d rendering works.)
"psst... it's spelled about.."
Man, if you hadn't come along, I woulda thought he was referring to Celebrity Boxing match between Miss Spelling and Miss Harding.
" Linux advocates unveiled a new passthrough connection for Linux users that extends the common firewall set IPChains on to any in home phone line... Now you can specify Inbound and Outbound rules for phone calls, it now allows for certain phones in the house to allow incoming calls, and others only can place outgoing calls....."
I know you're being kind of sarcastic here, but you're talking about something I'm sure a lot of people'd like to have. I'd love to run our phone line through my computer so that it can filter the BS calls. One of the features I wanted to have was a 'Press the right 4-digit code in order to make the phone ring, otherwise you will be transferred to voice mail'.
So the rules would be like:
-Let anybody on my contact list through.
-Let anybody with the following codes through.
-Anybody left over that has a Caller ID number, send them to voicemail.
-Anybody left over that does not have a caller ID may only leave their phone number.
Man I'd LOVE to institute that on my phone.
"In the PC world, there's also the historical problem of lack of mainstream OS support for multiple CPUs -- I can't remember if XP consumer even supports it, now that I think about it -- which creates that chicken-and-egg problem. NT4 was a highly marginal 'consumer' OS, Win2k had more reach but still not what the 9x series had and XP adoption has been slower due to people just keeping PCs longer."
XP Home does not support dual processors. As a matter of fact, this may render it an unusuable OS for HT processors because what they do is trick the hardware into thinking it has two processors.
There's something else to consider about OS support for multiple processors: The UI needs to support it, too. I run Win2k on a dual machine, and because I'm aware of how to direct a process to an idle CPU, I'm able to make reasonably effective use of the second processor. Unfortunately, though, I have to go into Task Manager and hunt down the process I want to change. I'm able to use it, but I have a difficult time explaining this to other people. The big problem is that it's hard to tell, at a glance, which process is doing what.
I really hope that one day Windows (or whatever OS I end up using in the future) puts something in the titlebar of each app I'm running so I can set which processors it is active on. That would seriously be cool. I'm not a big fan of running apps in multi-threaded mode because I like having the CPU resources to keep the interface etc going. If, at a click, I could say "stop using this processor", I'd be one happy SMP adopter. I'd even be able to recommend this type of machine to less tech saavy people.
I gotta ask, though, does anybody know of a hack for Windows that let's me do this?
"The biggest single benefit I can think of is that it doesn't bottleneck the way a single CPU can when a single process pigs out at 100%, I still have a nearly-idle CPU to work with -- which is the problem with 2 CPUs, one's nearly idle."
True dat! Explorer is well multi-threaded, and is always very responsive on a dual machine. When I first started working on a dual I couldn't believe how enthusiastic Explorer and IE were, even when running a rendering in the background or something. The dual processor support didn't buy me 2x the speed (though potentially it could get close, depending on how efficient I plan on being...) what it did buy me was that my computer was ALWAYS useful, as opposed to having it completely busy chewing away at something.
Ah how I ache for a dual processor laptop.
"No, they should blame Microsoft. Like that article posted earlier about Slammer, the idea of blaming the victim for the crime is a little skewed"
Earlier I made a post in this thread that was along the lines of "there was demand for MS to put auto-install technologies into IE, so blame the content producers for assuming that their customers are bonehead stupid." I put a little more thought into that comment, and I wholly agree with you that MS could have worked out a better implementation.
I'm a reasonably careful net user, but I got bit by 'huntbar.com'. For the life of me, I can't tell you how I got that installed. It didn't come packaged with something I downloaded, so I can only assume that it came through IE. If something like that can sneak through to somebody who pays close attention to stuff like that, then MS definitely did something wrong. (Damn I'm glad I'm an Opera user now.)
The worst part was that the way the plugin scheme works I had to perform a tricky reboot and a registry editing to get the offending files unlocked so I could kill them.
It bugs me that Windows 2000 has a tool that'll back up your files, even the system ones in use, but they can't provide me with a tool to remove stuff like that without a reboot.
Know what? That's the cost of security. You can make an auto-installer work via a risky method, or you can disable it and make computer work harder.
"Even though most slashdotters' morals on music copying are pretty loose..."
/. geeks have put into playing MP3s, even though they easily could have done it for free by sticking with their computers.
Loose?
Normally I wouldn't have a reaction to that comment, but a lot of people have put a SIGNIFICANT amount of money into adopting the lastest technologies into their music hobbies. I don't think it's a matter of cost. How many CD's can you buy for the price of an iPod?
It's really hard to sympathize with the music industry when there's all this demand and all these people spending a surge of money into it, and they respond with "THIEVES!", as opposed to entering that new market.
I know, I know, it's all been said before. I just can't believe how many people forget the investment in money
"Let's see, we have the technically illiterate on one hand. These people fall prey *far* more to malicious remote-install links than they are benefitted by deliberately remote-installing software. Not benefit to IE's behavior there."
Blame the dot-bombs for that. My company used to be one of those, and we made a plugin that you had to run a setup to install. Everybody who wanted to use our plugin barfed at that idea. They wanted it to auto-install, or they thought nobody'd ever use it. I'm dead serious.
If that's any indication of the crap other web companies had to go through (Macromedia, for example) then it doesn't surprise me that IE works that way. I wish these people had more faith in the intelligence of their customers.
"Completely offtopic, but the last company I worked for the CTO called himself "The Wizard", said that on his business cards and everything."
I tried to get 'Supreme Commander of the Universe' on my business card. That didn't fly but at least I have a coffee mug with those magical words emblazed on it.
"These are not the droids you are looking for..."
"Is that your final answer?"
"Unless, of course, you're only referring to the newer episodes."
Those were movies?! I thought those were ILM demo reels!
... until a ship landed a few miles south of my house and unloaded a bunch of droids.
"That's exactly what I was thinking. Germany needs to get with the times, American youths have been making these for years. They aren't even that popular anymore."
Maybe they're just now getting to season 4 of Picket Fences?
"They would always try to argue their grades up. I would just have to tell them that you can't argue the number 25 into the number 10."
If you had said "you can't argueu the num ber 10 into the number 25", I would have assumed Hillary Rosen was one of your students.
Topic of Story: 25 Best Linux Games
Topic of post: Linux's top 25 games.
Moderation Result: -1, Offtopic
Metamoderation Result: -1, Clueless
I can't believe this article about Linux's top 25 games story beat my submission of the top 10 best versions of Mozilla. :(
" Seriously, this is a fun read by some FX experts that really destroys that alien autopsy stuff."
Your comment reminded me of something I caught on TV once. Evidentally, there's startling video evidence of a UFO over earth (shot from a shuttle) moving slowly just above the upper atmosphere, then suddenly darting the other way at surprising speeds. This 'proof' of alien technology supposedly raised a huge stir.
The video was played again, only zoomed out a bit. (they zoomed in so you could see the moving pixel...) This time, when the UFO darted off, you could see a subtle flash eminating from the shuttle. It's hard for me to explain in text, so I'll have to paint you a picture: An ice crystal fell off the shuttle and slowly moved away from the window. When a navigation jet (RCS thruster? heh) fired to stabilize the shuttle, it pushed the ice crystal away rather rapidly.
This crystal only really showed up as a point of light, so they really had no idea what they were seeing on the video. But they were ready to believe it was an ET even though it was pretty obvious what happened.
Yeah.. I understand what you're saying. I definitely could have been more tactful. Oh well, I think peace has been established.
:)
Good night.
P.S. I got Mandrake downloaded today and will be playing with that. I look forward to it!