This is done using the most abundant energy source in the universe [and the atmosphere;)], the SUN!
The sun is a relatively small star, so it's obviously not the source of the most abundant energy in the universe. It's not in "the atmosphere" either, I dont know what you're thinking there.
So why don't you just shut up? This chink put a lot of wok into his new house so dont be pissin on his parade, bitch.
Windows supports a few present (Itanium, AMD64, X86) and past (Alpha) architectures.
Windows CE supports several architectures, and IMO is as much Windows as the zaurus kernel is "linux".
All of which is besides the point, which is, getting some regular joe type stuff to work in linux (Sound, Video, CD/DVD Burning, USB, printing) can be a colossal pain in the ass, compared to doing the same in a Windows machine.
Hey if you just installed a distro that autodetected all of that and set it up, cool. Hooray for todays installers.
But what about that machine thats a couple years old, and you just got back from Best Buy with a new soundcard and USB2.0 DVD burner.
Perhaps you dont want to format and reinstall the latest nightly build of your favorite distro. What do you do?
You wade through half-written and obsolete FAQs and HOWTOs, get in flame wars with the twits on IRC "help" channels, etc..
Example, I wanted to add a raid card I found to a server I'd had running for a few years. If it was a Windows 2000 server, I could shut it down, add the card, install the driver, format the array, and move on. But, it's a linux box, so I had to move to kernel 2.6, since the support in 2.4 wasnt trustworthy, which of course was an undertaking in itself, and meant getting my hands dirty building it myself, upgrading dependencies, etc, etc...
Linux desperately needs a more uniform way to upgrade older installs, and support newer hardware on those older installs.
You can swear and put down everyone who doesn't enjoy tweaking config files and hand-compiling patches into the kernel, but the fact is, its a pain in the ass and needs to be addressed.
Yeah, piddly stuff like sound, video, net cards, usb and video capture devices are a pain in the ass to get working, but linux is still vastly superiour to anything microsoft has written, because it's free, and I'm cheap.
It could be infinately long, but only in one or two dimensions, maybe?
A line or plane have no volume, only length and area, but could be infinately long.
Hell I dunno. This type of stuff is just words pulled out of some academics ass anyways.
Every few months some PhD justifies his tenure with some "The universe is shaped like a... " (scanning around the office for an object not yet proposed) "coffee mug" paper.
If you were Mr Finks boss, you'd have a stockholder revolt on your hands.
HP is a business trying to make money, not "push" software ideologies.
His statement is right on the money. There is no market for a consumer level desktop linux. And until there is one, established businesses aren't interested. There is a market for linux at the corporate level, hence you see IBM and the big boys getting involved.
Perhaps as more and more folks get accustomed to it in their cubicles, they'd be more willing to take it home with them. People are like that, if they use OO.org all day at work, they want to use it at home too.
But, (most) people don't care that it's free. They'll gladly pay a nominal fee to eliminate all the headaches of stup, configuring, upgrading, installing new apps, etc.. Even the distros with the slickest installers don't match what OSX or XP offer in this regard.
A large part of the (vocal) linux community are poor college students. When I was a poor college student I was all gung-ho about free-as-in-beer. I had all the spare time in the world, and little pocket cash. Now it's a complete reverse. I have some FU money, but no time to sit there tweaking modelines in vi to make my desktop resolution higher than 640x480.
Yeah, it's all configurable. Whoopee, I don't have time to sit there configuring it, it needs to work out of the box.
Besides, it's easy, not mind numbing. I have a 10 port A/V switch that switches component video, svideo, composite, plus analog audio, optical and coax. It even does ethernet. My TV and stereo receiver autodetect what's coming in.
So I just plug in my consoles as best as they can (ie; xbox, ps2 and gcn get component, n64, saturn, neogeo get svideo, etc) and push the button that matches the one I want to play.
USB isn't fast enough for that anyways. Nowhere near fast enough for a 720p HDTV stream. And anyone who wants to talk about compression can jump up my ass.
The physics of a car crash are relatively simple. Black box or not they could easily calculate that he was going around 150kph based on the evidence at the scene - skid marks, damage to the vehicles, angle of impact, etc..
The black box is just another piece of evidence. If they went to court with the black box alone the defense lawyers would eat them for lunch. They show up with photos of demolished cars, diagrams of 100 foot long skid marks, etc, etc..
At that speed, with that serious of a collision, proving the guy was driving recklessly would be like shooting fish in a barrel.
Yeah, but CDRWIN sucks for anything other than burning bin/cues you downloaded off of bittorrent. And even then, Alcohol 120 is the new king of the hill, imo.
It's really awkward to lay out a data iso with it, compared to dragging and dropping folders onto nero, ezcd, whathave you. Actually, for just throwing files onto a CD the burning wizard in XP doesn't do too bad of a job.
The bloat in there is to widen the audience of a product. Nero has features to recompress many different video formats to MPEG1 or MPEG2 so you can master your own VCDs, for example. It'll decompress MP3s on the fly for audio CDs, etc, etc. It can do Karaoke CD-Gs, etc..
Even if only 5% of people with CD burners care about making a VCD or CD-G, that's 5% more potential revenue. That's why Word or Excel have 9 billion features that I know I'll never use, but someone, somewhere will.
No, this isn't true. Often optimizing for speed is at odds with optimizing for size. They're (with exceptions) mutually exclusive. Pick one of the two, not both.
Statically linked binaries are a tad faster than dynamic ones.
Pixel shader effects are SLOW. Look at Halo PC as an example, and all of the bitching from gamers about "how shitty they ported it". The GPU has to do maybe 200 times the work per pixel.
Using static arrays, prerendered graphics (whats faster, raytracing the pieces for your chess game on the fly, or using some premade bitmaps) speeds things up.
How about an example from something I wrote, back in the day of 486s that didnt necessarily have a FPU..
It was a 3D app for a class project, a goldfish swimming around in a tank. I wanted his fins and tail to 'ripple' in sort of an undulating way. I figured the best way to do it would be to offset some of the vertexes, following a sine wave over time.
So, first I wrote something like this:
for (each fin)
for (each vertex)
yoffset = yoffset + sin(t + (180 * VertexNumber));
That approach worked, sort of, the fins moved like I wanted them too. The binary was tiny, since the sin function lives elsewhere. But it was slow as hell, especially on machines with no FPU.
What I went with was a lookup table, like this:
Create an array of 1080 entries (so I could follow sin's to a quarter degree)
Fill the array with values of the sin function
Replace calls to sin() with a simple array lookup.
It was orders of magnitude faster. Of course, the running size was larger with a big array of floats. Startup time still bothered me, so I eventually put the entire array of values into a header, which made the code much larger.
You would call it bloat if all you looked at was code size, but I got an A because mine was the only fish with wiggly fins who rendered (in software mesa on el cheapo lab machines circa 1996) in realtime with 8 independent lights rotating around him (also thanks to my sin lookup table). He did backflips too.
If it's a commercial game, it's going to ship on a CD-ROM, or more and more on DVD-ROM these days (like UT2k4).
I don't care if the coders stayed up all night coming up with the worlds tiniest collision detection algorithm, hand assembled. (Bad example, the DirectX API and ultimately the GPU does stuff like that, but anyways).
I really don't care if the textures are procedural or compressed bitmaps. Actually, do I want to wait 20 minutes for the game to compute all textures at startup? Nope, I'd rather have static data ready to go. I hate load times. Especially on a hard level where you die every 30 seconds and have to wait 5 minutes for it to recreate the world.
You can save the code-bloat arguments for another topic, like the kernel or web browser. I just like to play fun games. I have 200gb of space to install 'em on. It's not a big deal.
It's impressive how small they managed to make this thing, but really, who gives a shit? Tiny code might make for a better browser or word processor, but it wont make it a fun game.
Howard Stern was dropped from a handful of stations (he's on hundreds) in markets that he was doing poorly in.
The timing of the move was orchestrated to come as a "look! we care about our listeners and decency!", but it was really just business as usual.
They pitched a fit when he was dropped in Montreal too, made a big free speech deal out of it, but the fact was, noone there was listening.
Frankly, his show has gotten tired. I've gone from someone who listened every day on the drive to work, to listening for about 3 seconds as the scan feature on my car stereo goes past him. There are now a million-and-one "shock jocks", all of whom pretty much have the same schtick.
He'll be off the air eventually, but it'll be because he has no audience left.
To most people, the 'net is not a part of the real world.
A mountain of handwritten (not boilerplate) letters, or an angry mob chanting cheesy slogans "hey ho thin and fat uns - we dont want no software patents" would be more effective.
Are you saying there's no way at all to gain superuser priveledges on a Macintosh?
MS wants to do that, they call it Palladium, and slashbots throw a tantrum about it. But for OSX, every-fucking-bit as closed source as Windows XP (oh yay a useless darwin kernel, the userland stuff is closed), it's a "good thing" that those sweet folks at Apple decided to keep control over your systems to protect you.
And if I wanted to do the same with OSX, I'd replace "Log in as the user root" with whatever hoop you'd have to jump through in OSX to accomplish the same thing.
Hell, I told a guy on IRC to try wrapping his mouse with tinfoil and unplugging it, as it may have been recieving interference from the TV. An hour later he came back saying "it didn't work". He actually drove to rite-aid to buy tinfoil.
You've seen those websites with "You must download and install porn_dialer.exe to continue" popups, complete with step-by-step directions on how to do just that. And people do it.
As stupid people move away from windows, so too will the security concerns.
All the "secure code" in the world wont shield the system from a clueless user.
As secure as you think OSX is, anyone who wanted to write an application to fuck stuff up, call it "Super Happy Funtime Sexy Game", and email it to morons, could do so just as easily as they could with a VBScript file. I could write:
#!\bin\sh rm -rf/ cat/dev/rand >/dev/dsp echo Linux is teh gay!
Email it to some stupid people, tell them they have to run it as root or else they wont see the video of Condoleeza Rice's tits.
Stupid people will run what came with the box they bought at Best Buy. When those boxes start shipping with linux, they'll be on linux. The REALLY stupid people shop at K-Mart, who I understand are in the business of ubercheap linux boxes these days.
Be afraid, be very afraid, of the rootkits that get put on this new army of lindows boxes.
Slashdot Mirror
How is that the moral of the story?
Dude showed himself to be a hell of a salesman, and a big corp took notice, and came and offered him a metric assload of cash to come work for them.
Fourth was a gross exageration of the amount of 'victims' by the plantiffs.
Please, you may not like Microsoft, but you can't tell me you like phony horse-shit taxpayer dollar gobbling class action nonsense, do you?
This isn't about helping Free software or punishing a bad corporation, this is some greedy lawyers using broken court system to extract revenue.
This is done using the most abundant energy source in the universe [and the atmosphere ;)], the SUN!
The sun is a relatively small star, so it's obviously not the source of the most abundant energy in the universe. It's not in "the atmosphere" either, I dont know what you're thinking there.
So why don't you just shut up? This chink put a lot of wok into his new house so dont be pissin on his parade, bitch.
Windows supports a few present (Itanium, AMD64, X86) and past (Alpha) architectures.
Windows CE supports several architectures, and IMO is as much Windows as the zaurus kernel is "linux".
All of which is besides the point, which is, getting some regular joe type stuff to work in linux (Sound, Video, CD/DVD Burning, USB, printing) can be a colossal pain in the ass, compared to doing the same in a Windows machine.
Hey if you just installed a distro that autodetected all of that and set it up, cool. Hooray for todays installers.
But what about that machine thats a couple years old, and you just got back from Best Buy with a new soundcard and USB2.0 DVD burner.
Perhaps you dont want to format and reinstall the latest nightly build of your favorite distro. What do you do?
You wade through half-written and obsolete FAQs and HOWTOs, get in flame wars with the twits on IRC "help" channels, etc..
Example, I wanted to add a raid card I found to a server I'd had running for a few years. If it was a Windows 2000 server, I could shut it down, add the card, install the driver, format the array, and move on. But, it's a linux box, so I had to move to kernel 2.6, since the support in 2.4 wasnt trustworthy, which of course was an undertaking in itself, and meant getting my hands dirty building it myself, upgrading dependencies, etc, etc...
Linux desperately needs a more uniform way to upgrade older installs, and support newer hardware on those older installs.
You can swear and put down everyone who doesn't enjoy tweaking config files and hand-compiling patches into the kernel, but the fact is, its a pain in the ass and needs to be addressed.
Look at all the zealots in a tizzy.
Yeah, piddly stuff like sound, video, net cards, usb and video capture devices are a pain in the ass to get working, but linux is still vastly superiour to anything microsoft has written, because it's free, and I'm cheap.
When will the pleasure model be made available to consumers?
Would you ever fuck a robot?
A random shuffle feature. Those iPods sure are marvellous.
For fuck sakes, can you not pass up an opportunity to schill those stupid iPods?
It could be infinately long, but only in one or two dimensions, maybe?
... " (scanning around the office for an object not yet proposed) "coffee mug" paper.
A line or plane have no volume, only length and area, but could be infinately long.
Hell I dunno. This type of stuff is just words pulled out of some academics ass anyways.
Every few months some PhD justifies his tenure with some "The universe is shaped like a
STUDENT: Professor, what is the Universe shaped like?
PROF: Ummm, a big horn. Next question.
STUDENT: Professor, what causes cancer?
PROF: Umm, breadsticks.
STUDENT: Professor, is Linux going to take over the desktop this year?
PROF: Umm, yeah sure.
DONT YOU BELIEVE IT!
If you were Mr Finks boss, you'd have a stockholder revolt on your hands.
HP is a business trying to make money, not "push" software ideologies.
His statement is right on the money. There is no market for a consumer level desktop linux. And until there is one, established businesses aren't interested. There is a market for linux at the corporate level, hence you see IBM and the big boys getting involved.
Perhaps as more and more folks get accustomed to it in their cubicles, they'd be more willing to take it home with them. People are like that, if they use OO.org all day at work, they want to use it at home too.
But, (most) people don't care that it's free. They'll gladly pay a nominal fee to eliminate all the headaches of stup, configuring, upgrading, installing new apps, etc.. Even the distros with the slickest installers don't match what OSX or XP offer in this regard.
A large part of the (vocal) linux community are poor college students. When I was a poor college student I was all gung-ho about free-as-in-beer. I had all the spare time in the world, and little pocket cash. Now it's a complete reverse. I have some FU money, but no time to sit there tweaking modelines in vi to make my desktop resolution higher than 640x480.
Yeah, it's all configurable. Whoopee, I don't have time to sit there configuring it, it needs to work out of the box.
Is Microsoft finally about to face real competition in desktop-computer software?
No.
Next article, please.
Bleh, nowhere near fast enough.
Besides, it's easy, not mind numbing. I have a 10 port A/V switch that switches component video, svideo, composite, plus analog audio, optical and coax. It even does ethernet. My TV and stereo receiver autodetect what's coming in.
So I just plug in my consoles as best as they can (ie; xbox, ps2 and gcn get component, n64, saturn, neogeo get svideo, etc) and push the button that matches the one I want to play.
USB isn't fast enough for that anyways. Nowhere near fast enough for a 720p HDTV stream. And anyone who wants to talk about compression can jump up my ass.
No prosecutor would go into court armed with nothing but some log from some piece of electronics.
Show a few photos of the scene, a couple diagrams of where the various bits of car wound up, and proving this guy was reckless would be a no brainer.
The black box is just another piece of evidence, useless on it's own.
This whole story is ridiculous.
The physics of a car crash are relatively simple. Black box or not they could easily calculate that he was going around 150kph based on the evidence at the scene - skid marks, damage to the vehicles, angle of impact, etc..
The black box is just another piece of evidence. If they went to court with the black box alone the defense lawyers would eat them for lunch. They show up with photos of demolished cars, diagrams of 100 foot long skid marks, etc, etc..
At that speed, with that serious of a collision, proving the guy was driving recklessly would be like shooting fish in a barrel.
Yeah, but CDRWIN sucks for anything other than burning bin/cues you downloaded off of bittorrent. And even then, Alcohol 120 is the new king of the hill, imo.
It's really awkward to lay out a data iso with it, compared to dragging and dropping folders onto nero, ezcd, whathave you. Actually, for just throwing files onto a CD the burning wizard in XP doesn't do too bad of a job.
The bloat in there is to widen the audience of a product. Nero has features to recompress many different video formats to MPEG1 or MPEG2 so you can master your own VCDs, for example. It'll decompress MP3s on the fly for audio CDs, etc, etc. It can do Karaoke CD-Gs, etc..
Even if only 5% of people with CD burners care about making a VCD or CD-G, that's 5% more potential revenue. That's why Word or Excel have 9 billion features that I know I'll never use, but someone, somewhere will.
No, this isn't true. Often optimizing for speed is at odds with optimizing for size. They're (with exceptions) mutually exclusive. Pick one of the two, not both.
Statically linked binaries are a tad faster than dynamic ones.
Pixel shader effects are SLOW. Look at Halo PC as an example, and all of the bitching from gamers about "how shitty they ported it". The GPU has to do maybe 200 times the work per pixel.
Using static arrays, prerendered graphics (whats faster, raytracing the pieces for your chess game on the fly, or using some premade bitmaps) speeds things up.
How about an example from something I wrote, back in the day of 486s that didnt necessarily have a FPU..
It was a 3D app for a class project, a goldfish swimming around in a tank. I wanted his fins and tail to 'ripple' in sort of an undulating way. I figured the best way to do it would be to offset some of the vertexes, following a sine wave over time.
So, first I wrote something like this:
for (each fin)
for (each vertex)
yoffset = yoffset + sin(t + (180 * VertexNumber));
That approach worked, sort of, the fins moved like I wanted them too. The binary was tiny, since the sin function lives elsewhere. But it was slow as hell, especially on machines with no FPU.
What I went with was a lookup table, like this:
Create an array of 1080 entries (so I could follow sin's to a quarter degree)
Fill the array with values of the sin function
Replace calls to sin() with a simple array lookup.
It was orders of magnitude faster. Of course, the running size was larger with a big array of floats. Startup time still bothered me, so I eventually put the entire array of values into a header, which made the code much larger.
You would call it bloat if all you looked at was code size, but I got an A because mine was the only fish with wiggly fins who rendered (in software mesa on el cheapo lab machines circa 1996) in realtime with 8 independent lights rotating around him (also thanks to my sin lookup table). He did backflips too.
Frankly, who cares?
If it's a commercial game, it's going to ship on a CD-ROM, or more and more on DVD-ROM these days (like UT2k4).
I don't care if the coders stayed up all night coming up with the worlds tiniest collision detection algorithm, hand assembled. (Bad example, the DirectX API and ultimately the GPU does stuff like that, but anyways).
I really don't care if the textures are procedural or compressed bitmaps. Actually, do I want to wait 20 minutes for the game to compute all textures at startup? Nope, I'd rather have static data ready to go. I hate load times. Especially on a hard level where you die every 30 seconds and have to wait 5 minutes for it to recreate the world.
You can save the code-bloat arguments for another topic, like the kernel or web browser. I just like to play fun games. I have 200gb of space to install 'em on. It's not a big deal.
It's impressive how small they managed to make this thing, but really, who gives a shit? Tiny code might make for a better browser or word processor, but it wont make it a fun game.
Think bells, as in "tinker".
I agree, tux is gay, hopefully these guys aren't zealot enough to have like a big airbrushed tux on the side of the case or something like that.
That'd be a one-way ticket to receivership.
Howard Stern was dropped from a handful of stations (he's on hundreds) in markets that he was doing poorly in.
The timing of the move was orchestrated to come as a "look! we care about our listeners and decency!", but it was really just business as usual.
They pitched a fit when he was dropped in Montreal too, made a big free speech deal out of it, but the fact was, noone there was listening.
Frankly, his show has gotten tired. I've gone from someone who listened every day on the drive to work, to listening for about 3 seconds as the scan feature on my car stereo goes past him. There are now a million-and-one "shock jocks", all of whom pretty much have the same schtick.
He'll be off the air eventually, but it'll be because he has no audience left.
But the big guys, that they'd notice, want this because they stand to profit from patents.
It'd be like expecting Universal Studios to protest the DeCSS case(s).
To most people, the 'net is not a part of the real world.
A mountain of handwritten (not boilerplate) letters, or an angry mob chanting cheesy slogans "hey ho thin and fat uns - we dont want no software patents" would be more effective.
Either way, I dont care.
Are you saying there's no way at all to gain superuser priveledges on a Macintosh?
MS wants to do that, they call it Palladium, and slashbots throw a tantrum about it. But for OSX, every-fucking-bit as closed source as Windows XP (oh yay a useless darwin kernel, the userland stuff is closed), it's a "good thing" that those sweet folks at Apple decided to keep control over your systems to protect you.
Except I was talking about linux.
And if I wanted to do the same with OSX, I'd replace "Log in as the user root" with whatever hoop you'd have to jump through in OSX to accomplish the same thing.
Hell, I told a guy on IRC to try wrapping his mouse with tinfoil and unplugging it, as it may have been recieving interference from the TV. An hour later he came back saying "it didn't work". He actually drove to rite-aid to buy tinfoil.
You've seen those websites with "You must download and install porn_dialer.exe to continue" popups, complete with step-by-step directions on how to do just that. And people do it.
As stupid people move away from windows, so too will the security concerns.
All the "secure code" in the world wont shield the system from a clueless user.
/ /dev/rand > /dev/dsp
As secure as you think OSX is, anyone who wanted to write an application to fuck stuff up, call it "Super Happy Funtime Sexy Game", and email it to morons, could do so just as easily as they could with a VBScript file.
I could write:
#!\bin\sh
rm -rf
cat
echo Linux is teh gay!
Email it to some stupid people, tell them they have to run it as root or else they wont see the video of Condoleeza Rice's tits.
Stupid people will run what came with the box they bought at Best Buy. When those boxes start shipping with linux, they'll be on linux. The REALLY stupid people shop at K-Mart, who I understand are in the business of ubercheap linux boxes these days.
Be afraid, be very afraid, of the rootkits that get put on this new army of lindows boxes.