The perception is quite valid if you use a Java GUI app. Eclipse and Azureus are really cool, but their interfaces are incredibly sluggish. Compare this to, say, wxPython or Tcl/Tk (interpreted languages using a native C or C++ library), which run GUIs just fine.
garbage collection... No virtual machine
How do they square that particular circle?
It's really not that difficult. Hans Boehm wrote a garbage collector for C/C++ years ago, which happens to be the same one that the Digital Mars implementation of D uses.
Try using.NET for systems programming. Or projects (I've made several thousand dollars from one so far) that must be portable to NT4, 2K/XP without requiring your clients to install extra junk on every computer, etc. Contrary to what Microsoft may want you to believe,.NET is not the solution to all the world's problems.
Because C and C++ suck in many ways. The number of useful languages that can be compiled to native code is very small. I'm not sure about D, though. I'm looking through the tutorials, and it seems like strings are implemented as C-style character arrays. That seems incredibly stupid and Unicode-hostile.
Uhhhh...what? I think you just said that culture = office buildings. That is, seriously, some of the stupidest shit I've ever read. You speak like you have no appreciation for life, let alone culture.
When I think of American culture, I think of Manhattan, probably because I grew up on Long Island. I love Manhattan for the open-air markets, the theaters (and Shakespeare in the Park), the diverse restaurants, the museums (MOMA, Guggenheim, Museum of Natural History), Chinatown, the musicians in the subway stations and on the street, the people I meet in Union Square, etc. I could say many of the same things about New Orleans, which has its own unique flavor. Europe packs more cultural diversity into a few hundred square miles than we have in the entire US, and adds centuries of history wherever you go.
That's a good thing. It means that a strong information campaign might change some minds. I think we'd have a chance with any of the current Democratic frontrunners (Clinton, Obama, Edwards), though my money is still on Edwards, who seems to "get it" in a way the other two don't.
Unfortunately, the continued survival of FOSS relies on our political action. You've seen it with software patents and DRM, and now we have hardware to deal with. They're trying to beat us with the law, so we have to change the law.
What use is circumvention software that can break only a few months of releases?
And then somebody else will extract another key, ad infinitum. It's a bit like the Linux model of reverse-engineering device drivers; only the newest stuff will be , everything else will be fine. And I'm sure a good cracking group or two will grab a key and not publicize the fact, so it won't be revoked and they can do instant releases. DRM, like all forms of copy protection, is broken by design. You can add all the layers of encryption and obfuscation you want, but you still need to give the keys to the user in some form or another.
Ehhhh...my onboard Intel Pro 10/100 (e100 on Linux, for many years) doesn't work without Dell's drivers on XP SP2. I think it finally works on Vista, some four years and a major OS version after the PC was made. On a newer computer, the XP installer doesn't work if I run my SATA drives in AHCI mode (surprise, runs fine on recent Linux kernels). If you look at default compatibility with modern hardware, Linux is way ahead of Windows. Linux fails on a tiny subset of just-released hardware that require their own drivers, and hardware where the vendor has threatened legal action (ie: Broadcom wireless adapters, until recently).
What kind of fucked up unix has a/usr/tmp? That's just wrong. Stop using it./usr is a read-only filesystem.
GP probably meant/var/tmp, but otherwise I agree with you. The idea is that a secure Unix system should have RO partitions and directories that are pointless to encrypt. And there's nothing wrong with pointing apps to ~/.tmp instead of/tmp.
Now if they wanted to release an API that could be used to develope software that could then run on any OS that supports the API, that would be another story. Then those that like the stability that comes with a OS hardware package could continue with Mac, and someone else could create an OS for generic hardware that ran the same exact applications
You're describing what Qt has done for years. Though I suppose ~$3300 is a bit much to pay for your typical Mac shareware developer.
Out of curiosity, why use a language like Perl to do something dynamic like this? I'm no code jockey, but I always thought that Perl was meant for run-it-once type applications that handle things like text processing and database searching.
The question is valid, but the nonsensical rambling that follows detracts from it. So I'll just say that modern scripting languages like Perl, Python, or Ruby can do just about anything but systems programming. In fact, they are perfect for doing what the summary seems to describe: taking the output from one program, parsing it, and sending instructions to another program.
And eventually you reach the uncanny valley, though I suppose that's not quite as applicable to a racing game. IMO, we reached "good enough" about seven years ago with Quake 3. Anything beyond that serves no functional purpose. Fun with serviceable graphics beats flashy and shallow any day.
2. Stop developing drugs for stupid shit. Yes, lots of people have Type2 diabetes. We already have a cure for that; a treadmill. Stop wasting money to develop a drug *just* to make money off a stupid disease.
But that's the nature of research. Yeah, sometimes it can be targeted, but very often you're exploring some area and discover something completely unexpected, which has a different application.
3. If a company develops a truly amazing cure/drug, the government should step in and buy it for the cost of development. The drug should them be distributed for the cost of production inside the US and for twice the cost of production outside the US. Once the costs are recouped, it should be just the cost of production inside and outside the US.
And encourage private pharmaceutical companies to focus even more on penis pills? Bad idea, generally.
9. Mandate one special project for major companies. Wanna do business? Then you have to work on a cure for AIDS.
Now that's interesting. I'd combine ideas #3 and #9 and give out large grants for research (we don't do nearly enough of this, and the national labs we have are embarrassingly underfunded), with the provision that any resulting patents are owned by the US government.
Those two statements are not mutually exclusive. While they were impressed that it could survive a few serious drops with minimal damage, they also debunked the absurd claim of 26 drops.
If you're so smart that you can critcize Blizzard and apparently CCP about their design systems, please show me your popular and successful MMO and how it can handle maintenance, updates, etc.
Give me a few days and a large budget (which Blizzard certainly has), and yes, I can design a real-time system with multiple redundancies that can be taken offline piece by piece. It's not about "smart", it's about understanding how these systems work and some basic engineering principles. The system already has multiple database servers, game servers, etc. for each game world. The fact that they're doing maintenance without downtime now is testament enough to the fact that it's obviously possible.
I am sure Amazon require's regular maintenance too, it just doesn't require downtime because not everyone is constantly accessing all information.
Huh? Of course people are constantly accessing all of Amazon's information. Do you want to tell me which part of their service they can take offline for a few hours while no one is using it? Obviously they have redundancies, so they don't need downtime.
Not sure when self hating nerds started hating WoW
I played the 10-day trial, enjoyed it, didn't feel a need to pay $15/mo. for it. I'm fairly indifferent to WoW, I generally like Blizzard, but I do hate bad technical design. And a system that needs to be taken offline weekly for no other reason than "maintenance" is terrible design.
As with any system that is processing large volumes of data, the World of Warcraft realms require regular maintenance to ensure they are operating correctly.
Really? I can't remember the last time Amazon.com was down for maintenance.
This maintenance consists of hardware and software updates.
Hardware - Come on, they must have enough redundant servers so they can take one offline at a time without disrupting anything.
Software - I suppose this means updates to the game data/code itself. A restart of the server program might make sense in that case, though I can't see it taking more than a few minutes.
Blecch. I still haven't found a single GTK2 theme that doesn't make all its apps look like a clunky piece of crap. I'll take Plastik over just about anything.
I don't think the amount of alleged pain it takes to run a program such as dosbox from a menu in Linux is much worse than running a dos-shell window.
There's the one-time "pain" of setting up a mount point for DOSBox, but that's about it. From the perspective of people who need it - gamers and businesses - it's really not worth screeching about, especially considering that DOSBox offers vastly better compatibility than Microsoft's NTVDM. The mythical average user who just wants to run his apps doesn't give a shit about compatibility with 15-year old DOS junk.
Uh, okay. Now try running a few older games, which tend to do more complicated things than simple spreadsheet apps. You can forget about most DOS games. Windows 95/98 games are even more dodgy. If you're lucky, there game developer has released an XP compatibility patch that you can apply, which sometimes makes it work.
Windows Vista has expanded the incompatibility problem to include applications, as well. Try running Nero or TortoiseSVN. Try installing MS Visual Studio 2005, clicking OK on the huge incompatibility warning, and praying that the features you use aren't broken. Tell me again how Windows is amazingly backwards-compatible?
AIUI, the one part of the malware that can't morph is the part that does the morphing
That's just not true. If you know assembly language, it should be fairly obvious that it's easy to alter any code and have it retain the same functionality. Take the simplest case of randomly inserting NOPs. Then take it to the next level of writing multi-instruction code that is the equivalent of a NOP (the possibilities are effectively infinite). Suddenly you can obfuscate ANY chunk of machine code without changing the functionality, including the code that does the obfuscating.
There have been a number of articles written on the subject, but I can't remember the authors offhand. Poke around on Google for polymorphic code.
Slashdot Mirror
The perception is quite valid if you use a Java GUI app. Eclipse and Azureus are really cool, but their interfaces are incredibly sluggish. Compare this to, say, wxPython or Tcl/Tk (interpreted languages using a native C or C++ library), which run GUIs just fine.
Try using .NET for systems programming. Or projects (I've made several thousand dollars from one so far) that must be portable to NT4, 2K/XP without requiring your clients to install extra junk on every computer, etc. Contrary to what Microsoft may want you to believe, .NET is not the solution to all the world's problems.
Uhhhh...what? I think you just said that culture = office buildings. That is, seriously, some of the stupidest shit I've ever read. You speak like you have no appreciation for life, let alone culture.
When I think of American culture, I think of Manhattan, probably because I grew up on Long Island. I love Manhattan for the open-air markets, the theaters (and Shakespeare in the Park), the diverse restaurants, the museums (MOMA, Guggenheim, Museum of Natural History), Chinatown, the musicians in the subway stations and on the street, the people I meet in Union Square, etc. I could say many of the same things about New Orleans, which has its own unique flavor. Europe packs more cultural diversity into a few hundred square miles than we have in the entire US, and adds centuries of history wherever you go.
Unfortunately, the continued survival of FOSS relies on our political action. You've seen it with software patents and DRM, and now we have hardware to deal with. They're trying to beat us with the law, so we have to change the law.
Ehhhh...my onboard Intel Pro 10/100 (e100 on Linux, for many years) doesn't work without Dell's drivers on XP SP2. I think it finally works on Vista, some four years and a major OS version after the PC was made. On a newer computer, the XP installer doesn't work if I run my SATA drives in AHCI mode (surprise, runs fine on recent Linux kernels). If you look at default compatibility with modern hardware, Linux is way ahead of Windows. Linux fails on a tiny subset of just-released hardware that require their own drivers, and hardware where the vendor has threatened legal action (ie: Broadcom wireless adapters, until recently).
Yeah, that was my first thought. The skit is also on SNL's Best of Dana Carvey DVD. It's on Google Video here at the moment.
And eventually you reach the uncanny valley, though I suppose that's not quite as applicable to a racing game. IMO, we reached "good enough" about seven years ago with Quake 3. Anything beyond that serves no functional purpose. Fun with serviceable graphics beats flashy and shallow any day.
Those two statements are not mutually exclusive. While they were impressed that it could survive a few serious drops with minimal damage, they also debunked the absurd claim of 26 drops.
I played the 10-day trial, enjoyed it, didn't feel a need to pay $15/mo. for it. I'm fairly indifferent to WoW, I generally like Blizzard, but I do hate bad technical design. And a system that needs to be taken offline weekly for no other reason than "maintenance" is terrible design.
Hardware - Come on, they must have enough redundant servers so they can take one offline at a time without disrupting anything.
Software - I suppose this means updates to the game data/code itself. A restart of the server program might make sense in that case, though I can't see it taking more than a few minutes.
That's vaguely guitar-shaped controllers. No matter which one you buy, you're still just a jackass playing with a toy guitar.
Uh, okay. Now try running a few older games, which tend to do more complicated things than simple spreadsheet apps. You can forget about most DOS games. Windows 95/98 games are even more dodgy. If you're lucky, there game developer has released an XP compatibility patch that you can apply, which sometimes makes it work.
Windows Vista has expanded the incompatibility problem to include applications, as well. Try running Nero or TortoiseSVN. Try installing MS Visual Studio 2005, clicking OK on the huge incompatibility warning, and praying that the features you use aren't broken. Tell me again how Windows is amazingly backwards-compatible?
There have been a number of articles written on the subject, but I can't remember the authors offhand. Poke around on Google for polymorphic code.
The authors provided ample evidence that the information that was redacted had already been publicly disclosed.