Why is it "dissapointing" that Intel's top of the line server CPUs can crunch more numbers than AMD's workstation CPU?
You can only be "dissapointed" by such news if you're a fanboy expecting a certain outcome.
The love-in with certain companies on slashdot is so sickening it's funny. I'm supposed to believe that AMD, Apple and IBM are friends to the world with big warm fuzzy hearts, and Microsoft, Compaq and Intel are sinister spawns from hell who always have an ulterior motive.
News flash: All public corporations exist for one reason only - profit for shareholders. Period. Despite what their PR and marketting departments say, it's all about the bottom line.
So who really cares which processor is faster? There's no competition in the CPU market, just two companies alternating who gets 60% or 40% of the pie. They work together to screw us all over. If there was any real competition, a mid to high end workstation CPU would be less than 50 bucks.
Those skills you learned are the root cause of carpal tunnel syndrome, and the reason all those cubicle jockeys have those wrist braces on.
Remember when they used to make you do sit-ups in phys ed, until it was shown that it was incredibly bad for your lower back?
Besides, not everyone is going to grow up to enter data into a computer. Lots of folks will become carpenters or plumbers or mechanics or doctors or space marines.
Save the vocational training till after public school is done with you, thats what I say.
You can learn to type just as well by spending 5 bucks on a Mavis Beacon CD.
The classic touch-typing homerow thing is the cause of the rash of carpal tunnel syndrome in office workers.
Sure, hunting and pecking tires out your forearms and wrists (forcing you to take a break), but holding your arms and wrists static while your fingers and hands move really fucks up that carpal nerve or tendon or whatever the hell it is.
Back when, few people had computers at home, or typewriters. The only place to learn typing skills was at school, or some sort of specific training.
Now, everyone has a computer, everyone knows how, or will find out how to type intuitively.
I've never seen typing as something that need be taught, if you spend enough time in front of a keyboard, you pick it up.
I picked it up as a wee lad from my C64, just sort of naturally discovered the "home row" and all that jazz.
For the secretary who wants/needs really mega-typing dictation taking skills, she can always practice with Mavis Beacon.
Similarly, I never needed to take driver's ed, since as a pseudo farm boy I'd been driving all kinds of stuff around the fields since I was about 10. And kids who live in Hawaii probably dont need swimming lessons, etc.. Unless you want to be a NASCAR driver or Olympic relay champion.
Biodiesel doesn't have anything to do with cutting down emissions. You're still burning hydrocarbons.
Yeah, Daryl Hannah is on the interview circuit telling the world that the only byproducts are harmless steam and a wonderful flowery smell. She's a fucking moron.
Not relying on fossil fuels is a noble goal, but the problems of CO and CO2 emissions (and others) are still there. Burning biodiesel even creates a whole new range of compounds that burning petrolium diesel doesnt.
PSX and PS2 already have plenty of low-quality games. That was Sony's battle-plan. While Nintendo has had a history of not rubber-stamping things, sending games back to the developers for polishing, Sony focused on "fill the shelves". It worked for them.
Ie; quantity vs quality. AFAIK, it's much harder to get your game approved for market for Gamecube or Xbox than it is for Sony. Go down to the used game shop and just look at the stacks and stacks of pure crap in the PS2 and PSX bins. "Hooters Racing" comes to mind. Yeah, lets take this horse-turd joke of a racing game, stick in a couple still publicity photo's of Hooters girls, and make some bucks.
I'm not saying every PS2 game is shit, some are great. I'm just saying that the "bury 'em in titles" philosophy has worked well for them in the past.
When you walk into Best Buy and the PS2 section is twice the size of the Xbox and GCN sections, that makes a big impact on your average shopper.
It's also how gameboy buried all of it's competition over the years.
And quickly unmandated it when it was realized it was a pile of shit.
The goal was noble: "One language to rule them all", but in practice what happened was every hacky construct and wonky bit of syntax wound up in Ada. It managed to, for the most part, encompass the worst of all worlds.
It was designed in an age where interoperability sucked. Contractor A's libraries were in C, and Contractor B's were in FORTRAN. There was no way to get them to play nice.
A "one language" mandate seemed the only solution. In hindsight, it was a poor one. Some applications require raw speed, real-time embedded components. Some require sophistated IO, fancy graphics..
Today, with the various binary object formats (from com and.net/mono and CORBA), it's irrelevant. Contractors A and B can code in whatever the hell they want (to a degree).
But, you're right. It's still around. I live in the DC area (so pretty much all coding work here is DoD related somehow) and there's a good bit of demand for Ada knowledge, but the projects usually involve porting some Ada app to something else.
This has little to do with wanting to "fight microsoft". The PSX brand already dominates, and MSFT really isn't a threat.
This is just Sony listening to developers, who didn't care for the PS2 dev kits and all the wacky proprietary calls.
The focus inside the industry really isn't on ports, it never has been. Ports, by rule of thumb, sell very poorly. Are you going to buy Doom 3 for Xbox and PC? Given the choice of one or the other, which would you choose? So would I.
From the developers perspective, it's good to get your game to the widest possible audience. That means, if practical, PS2, PC, XBOX, and GCN.
But, Sony (and MSFT or Nintendo for that matter) thrive on *excusive* titles. Believe me, Halo sold more Xboxes than probably every other Xbox title combined. Ditto MGS or GTA3 for PS2. Nintendo's stable of exclusive titles is well known.
Anyhow, Sony picking library A over B has shit all to do with competing with Microsoft, embracing RMS's values, or any of that. It was just a decision they made based on feedback from their first tier developers.
Anyone know where I can find a decent quality image of Ingignogdt giving the earth the finger out of the window of his Mooninite spacecraft?
It's linux related, so it's OK to ask - mod me up! I want to make a silent bootsplash where the "progress bar" is ignignotds' finger getting longer and longer.
On second thought, I'll just start a sourceforge project and wait for someone else to come along and do it for me.
I actually found iTunes to be bloated annoying crapware, but that's just me. Real has a lot of headroom to improve and change their business model. If they can make money selling songs, the adware stuff can dissappear. Thats how they used to make money.
Don't see why I need that big floppy app to download a song. Much rather just use a regular website, save it to a regular file, and play it back through a regular codec in whatever player I like.
Oh, wait, that's exactly what Apple doesn't want me to be able to do.
Notice how Apple is slowly turning the screws, inching towards complete draconian lock-in? iTunes is out a couple months, suddenly the DRM restrictions tighten just a little, costs go up just a little, they start waving the DMCA around at anyone who seeks to compete on the same field as they do..
It'll continue, and only get worse. Mark my words. You can love the shiny hardware all you want, it doesnt make Apple the corporation any "better" ethically than any other corporation. They have shareholders, shareholders want profits not feel-good hugs and kisses and lectures about Free as in freedom. Hell, the concept of Free as in anything makes investors die a little inside.
Sure, all corporations, in the end, no matter how you try to personify them, what kind of "personalities" or "ethics" you try to attach to them, behave in the same way. They are out to turn a profit for their investors, period.
I don't understand why slashbots can't see this. All this MS is evil, IBM is good (that was backwards 10 years ago), Apple is good, SCO is evil. Blah blah blah. It's moronic. Quit looking at them as moral entities, look at them as what they are, and their behavior is completely predictable.
Situations reversed, Real would behave the same way as Apple is. Sure, it's absolutely predictable. And they'd be just as wrong in my eyes.
Not only that, if Apple was on it's last financial legs, on the verge of solvency, they'd whip out that stable of patents and copyrights and sue everyone they see, just like SCO is doing now. It's what dying companies do. One source of revenue dries up, they look for another, and eventually litigation is the only avenue left.
How all of the ad stuff works, how to get your ads listed, all of those advanced and personalized features. Gmail, googlegroups, froogle, etc..
224 pages sounds like a lot, but at the same time, I know google has about a million features I don't know about. I don't care about them either, but that's besides the point.
Sure, because apparently everyone in middle-class America is a mid-level programmer or tech support drone.
Don't you see, those are the only jobs there are!
Don't pay much heed. This is just thinly veiled racism. See any stories about outsourcing to Canada, Ireland, Germany, or the UK? It happens. But those are white people getting the jobs.
It's only offensive when one of those races, whom we've been raised to feel superior to, starts to compete with us.
Here's what I don't get. If you take the URL for this article, replace it. with games. you get the games color scheme.
In other words, all that matters is slashdot.org, the "section" only adds the shitty color scheme.
So why not let users pick a scheme they like in user prefs? Personally I'd rather never see the games. or it. again, though it. is particularly crap-tastic, I honestly thought the games. was as ugly as/. could be.
If someone fights against Mozilla, just have this conversation:
"I'm installing Firefox on your machine to use instead of IE"
"NO! I need IE, I dont want to try some other software!"
"Ummm, ok, how about Netscape?"
"Sure!"
Firefox isn't even to a 1.0 release. It's good, but it's not finished. It's not ready to be shoved down everybodies throats, there are still plenty of issues.
Or a submitted post will come back to a blank screen, rather than the "Submitted" page.
I've seen lots of weird quirks viewing/. on Firefox (same quirks with big brother Mozilla too). Oh, the irony of it, that/. seems to have been coded specifically for IE.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is it "dissapointing" that Intel's top of the line server CPUs can crunch more numbers than AMD's workstation CPU?
You can only be "dissapointed" by such news if you're a fanboy expecting a certain outcome.
The love-in with certain companies on slashdot is so sickening it's funny. I'm supposed to believe that AMD, Apple and IBM are friends to the world with big warm fuzzy hearts, and Microsoft, Compaq and Intel are sinister spawns from hell who always have an ulterior motive.
News flash: All public corporations exist for one reason only - profit for shareholders. Period. Despite what their PR and marketting departments say, it's all about the bottom line.
So who really cares which processor is faster? There's no competition in the CPU market, just two companies alternating who gets 60% or 40% of the pie. They work together to screw us all over. If there was any real competition, a mid to high end workstation CPU would be less than 50 bucks.
Those skills you learned are the root cause of carpal tunnel syndrome, and the reason all those cubicle jockeys have those wrist braces on.
Remember when they used to make you do sit-ups in phys ed, until it was shown that it was incredibly bad for your lower back?
Besides, not everyone is going to grow up to enter data into a computer. Lots of folks will become carpenters or plumbers or mechanics or doctors or space marines.
Save the vocational training till after public school is done with you, thats what I say.
You can learn to type just as well by spending 5 bucks on a Mavis Beacon CD.
The classic touch-typing homerow thing is the cause of the rash of carpal tunnel syndrome in office workers.
Sure, hunting and pecking tires out your forearms and wrists (forcing you to take a break), but holding your arms and wrists static while your fingers and hands move really fucks up that carpal nerve or tendon or whatever the hell it is.
Back when, few people had computers at home, or typewriters. The only place to learn typing skills was at school, or some sort of specific training.
Now, everyone has a computer, everyone knows how, or will find out how to type intuitively.
I've never seen typing as something that need be taught, if you spend enough time in front of a keyboard, you pick it up.
I picked it up as a wee lad from my C64, just sort of naturally discovered the "home row" and all that jazz.
For the secretary who wants/needs really mega-typing dictation taking skills, she can always practice with Mavis Beacon.
Similarly, I never needed to take driver's ed, since as a pseudo farm boy I'd been driving all kinds of stuff around the fields since I was about 10. And kids who live in Hawaii probably dont need swimming lessons, etc.. Unless you want to be a NASCAR driver or Olympic relay champion.
.. reported on a bullshit-powered website!
Nah, you just design some sort of system that reinjects that nitrous into the engine. More power, less emissions.
Biodiesel doesn't have anything to do with cutting down emissions. You're still burning hydrocarbons.
Yeah, Daryl Hannah is on the interview circuit telling the world that the only byproducts are harmless steam and a wonderful flowery smell. She's a fucking moron.
Not relying on fossil fuels is a noble goal, but the problems of CO and CO2 emissions (and others) are still there. Burning biodiesel even creates a whole new range of compounds that burning petrolium diesel doesnt.
PSX and PS2 already have plenty of low-quality games. That was Sony's battle-plan. While Nintendo has had a history of not rubber-stamping things, sending games back to the developers for polishing, Sony focused on "fill the shelves". It worked for them.
Ie; quantity vs quality. AFAIK, it's much harder to get your game approved for market for Gamecube or Xbox than it is for Sony. Go down to the used game shop and just look at the stacks and stacks of pure crap in the PS2 and PSX bins. "Hooters Racing" comes to mind. Yeah, lets take this horse-turd joke of a racing game, stick in a couple still publicity photo's of Hooters girls, and make some bucks.
I'm not saying every PS2 game is shit, some are great. I'm just saying that the "bury 'em in titles" philosophy has worked well for them in the past.
When you walk into Best Buy and the PS2 section is twice the size of the Xbox and GCN sections, that makes a big impact on your average shopper.
It's also how gameboy buried all of it's competition over the years.
And quickly unmandated it when it was realized it was a pile of shit.
.net/mono and CORBA), it's irrelevant. Contractors A and B can code in whatever the hell they want (to a degree).
The goal was noble: "One language to rule them all", but in practice what happened was every hacky construct and wonky bit of syntax wound up in Ada. It managed to, for the most part, encompass the worst of all worlds.
It was designed in an age where interoperability sucked. Contractor A's libraries were in C, and Contractor B's were in FORTRAN. There was no way to get them to play nice.
A "one language" mandate seemed the only solution. In hindsight, it was a poor one. Some applications require raw speed, real-time embedded components. Some require sophistated IO, fancy graphics..
Today, with the various binary object formats (from com and
But, you're right. It's still around. I live in the DC area (so pretty much all coding work here is DoD related somehow) and there's a good bit of demand for Ada knowledge, but the projects usually involve porting some Ada app to something else.
Ada: The "esperanto" of computer languages.
This has little to do with wanting to "fight microsoft". The PSX brand already dominates, and MSFT really isn't a threat.
This is just Sony listening to developers, who didn't care for the PS2 dev kits and all the wacky proprietary calls.
The focus inside the industry really isn't on ports, it never has been. Ports, by rule of thumb, sell very poorly. Are you going to buy Doom 3 for Xbox and PC? Given the choice of one or the other, which would you choose? So would I.
From the developers perspective, it's good to get your game to the widest possible audience. That means, if practical, PS2, PC, XBOX, and GCN.
But, Sony (and MSFT or Nintendo for that matter) thrive on *excusive* titles. Believe me, Halo sold more Xboxes than probably every other Xbox title combined. Ditto MGS or GTA3 for PS2. Nintendo's stable of exclusive titles is well known.
Anyhow, Sony picking library A over B has shit all to do with competing with Microsoft, embracing RMS's values, or any of that. It was just a decision they made based on feedback from their first tier developers.
So forget it. It's not good enough, they have to interoperate with too many subcontracters, government agencies, etc, etc..
And, like it or not, the world uses MS Office formats. OO.o isn't good enough.
They wouldn't save anything. They'd waste a lot of time and effort reformatting documents sent to them, resending documents to others, etc.
Seriously, it's called reality, you all might want to look into it.
Anyone know where I can find a decent quality image of Ingignogdt giving the earth the finger out of the window of his Mooninite spacecraft?
It's linux related, so it's OK to ask - mod me up! I want to make a silent bootsplash where the "progress bar" is ignignotds' finger getting longer and longer.
On second thought, I'll just start a sourceforge project and wait for someone else to come along and do it for me.
I actually found iTunes to be bloated annoying crapware, but that's just me. Real has a lot of headroom to improve and change their business model. If they can make money selling songs, the adware stuff can dissappear. Thats how they used to make money.
Don't see why I need that big floppy app to download a song. Much rather just use a regular website, save it to a regular file, and play it back through a regular codec in whatever player I like.
Oh, wait, that's exactly what Apple doesn't want me to be able to do.
Notice how Apple is slowly turning the screws, inching towards complete draconian lock-in? iTunes is out a couple months, suddenly the DRM restrictions tighten just a little, costs go up just a little, they start waving the DMCA around at anyone who seeks to compete on the same field as they do..
It'll continue, and only get worse. Mark my words. You can love the shiny hardware all you want, it doesnt make Apple the corporation any "better" ethically than any other corporation. They have shareholders, shareholders want profits not feel-good hugs and kisses and lectures about Free as in freedom. Hell, the concept of Free as in anything makes investors die a little inside.
Oh well, it's hardly worth discussing.
Sure, all corporations, in the end, no matter how you try to personify them, what kind of "personalities" or "ethics" you try to attach to them, behave in the same way. They are out to turn a profit for their investors, period.
I don't understand why slashbots can't see this. All this MS is evil, IBM is good (that was backwards 10 years ago), Apple is good, SCO is evil. Blah blah blah. It's moronic. Quit looking at them as moral entities, look at them as what they are, and their behavior is completely predictable.
Situations reversed, Real would behave the same way as Apple is. Sure, it's absolutely predictable. And they'd be just as wrong in my eyes.
Not only that, if Apple was on it's last financial legs, on the verge of solvency, they'd whip out that stable of patents and copyrights and sue everyone they see, just like SCO is doing now. It's what dying companies do. One source of revenue dries up, they look for another, and eventually litigation is the only avenue left.
And meanwhile you're eating Ramen noodles in mommys basement.
Do OS folks ever feel like complete chumps when they see IBM exec's sipping champagne and gulping down caviar paid for by OS zealots hard work?
Those giant ass boxes of manuals (I too remember when MS Office weighed about 40 lbs) cost too much to ship, store on shelves, etc..
I mean, you could probably ship a crate of CDs for the cost of one of those boxes.
This allows the software publishers to pass on the savings directly to us, the consumers!
Not if you're doing a phrase search, ie with quotes, matches the entire phrase.
"Netcraft confirms: * is dying"
and
"Netcraft confirms: is dying"
and
Netcraft confirms is dying
Are wholly different.
Sounds like you need this book!
Preperation H carries a warning label "Not to be taken internally".
You just know someone wrote in; "I ate the whole goddamned tube and for all the good it did me I may as well have shoved it up my ass!!!"
How all of the ad stuff works, how to get your ads listed, all of those advanced and personalized features. Gmail, googlegroups, froogle, etc..
224 pages sounds like a lot, but at the same time, I know google has about a million features I don't know about. I don't care about them either, but that's besides the point.
Sure, because apparently everyone in middle-class America is a mid-level programmer or tech support drone.
Don't you see, those are the only jobs there are!
Don't pay much heed. This is just thinly veiled racism. See any stories about outsourcing to Canada, Ireland, Germany, or the UK? It happens. But those are white people getting the jobs.
It's only offensive when one of those races, whom we've been raised to feel superior to, starts to compete with us.
It's bad for MSFT et all to outsource programming work to cheaper labor markets.
It's good for corporations to expect Open Source zealots to write it all for free.
Cheap software takes away more jobs than free software?
I thought the whole point of the OS movement was to make the programmer completely irrelevant.
Here's what I don't get. If you take the URL for this article, replace it. with games. you get the games color scheme.
/. could be.
In other words, all that matters is slashdot.org, the "section" only adds the shitty color scheme.
So why not let users pick a scheme they like in user prefs? Personally I'd rather never see the games. or it. again, though it. is particularly crap-tastic, I honestly thought the games. was as ugly as
Galoob, yeah that's the name I was looking for. Tengen was one I forgot.
I was actually thinking about some obscure left-wing religious company. They released stuff like "Bible Adventures" and "Noah's Ark".
Tengen wasn't based in the US, so really isn't relevant as far as any precedents it set. Galoob and this other case went through the US courts.
Netscape still has the name recognition.
If someone fights against Mozilla, just have this conversation:
"I'm installing Firefox on your machine to use instead of IE"
"NO! I need IE, I dont want to try some other software!"
"Ummm, ok, how about Netscape?"
"Sure!"
Firefox isn't even to a 1.0 release. It's good, but it's not finished. It's not ready to be shoved down everybodies throats, there are still plenty of issues.
Or a submitted post will come back to a blank screen, rather than the "Submitted" page.
/. on Firefox (same quirks with big brother Mozilla too). Oh, the irony of it, that /. seems to have been coded specifically for IE.
I've seen lots of weird quirks viewing