I agree, never quite understood the appeal of the games, but I so very much wanted to (and still wants to, I bought Sonic Advance for the GBA) since the characters and universe are all so very appealing.
What really scares me about all this is the worry about adoption rate of the standards that I see everywhere. Web standards has to be the only standardisation field where people start worrying when no standard has been released for a few years. I really cannot see the point of having standards at all if they are changed quicker than they can be sanely implemented (not to mention being used). Look at successful standards efforts, the C language had its last major standard in 1999, it is far from adopted, many compilers still only offer the older 1989 standard and most projects still stick to that one as well. It is however important to note that it took the better part of the nineties to get most code over to the -89 standard and no one particularly worried. Another example is postscript, first standard (level 1) 1984, second 1991, third 1998. These are not even a standards organisations work but in-house at Adobe, and you know what? Many applications still don't support all the features of level 2, 13 years after its release.
Overall a standards effort should in no way be ongoing like the W3C, one needs to get one more or less complete (a bit flawed is OK, a few inconsistencies are easier to handle than having tons of standards to support) and then leave it be for a decade or so while working on the next iteration. Only then will anyone be able to base a sane software project on the foundation provided.
As I said, I know of no standards in history (at least no successful ones) that have been as floating and ever-changing as the web standards. It is no wonder that web-browsers are the huge monoliths of software they are. Web publication is not an intrinsically hard problem, it is just a badly handled problem.
My guess is that they mean that the top 200 software projects in the US costs $250 billion each year. Getting and reading the paper is probably the only chance of really figuring out what this quote is supposed to say though.
Well I would love to hear how all the people posting in this story complaining about the operating system security suggest how to prevent this trojan from working? It does not spread, you have to manually download it or get it in a mail, it does not automatically run, you have to run it yourself, just where is the operating system supposed to look to be able to tell that the user needs to protected from itself?
On the other hand I also read in the jargon file that hackers;
Hackers don't like television.
Hackers don't like character based menu interfaces (?!)
Don't use tobacco
Only use alcohol in moderation if at all
Are only weakly motivated by money and social approval.
Are monumentally disorganized and sloppy about dealing with the physical world (don't pay bills on time, don't clean and so on)
Are more likely to have cats than dogs.
Have horrible handwriting.
And so on and so forth with insane stereotyping throughout the whole thing. Anyone who actually takes anything said in that thing (or by ESR in general) seriously... are taking the wrong things seriously:)
Linking bad code against a great hackers code will crush the bugs out of existance.
The code will over time improve upon itself to remain competitive with any future innovations. Only the code of another great hacker can keep a great hackers code at bay.
A great hackers code will run correctly on any machine, real or virtual, even overcoming machines that are not Turing-complete.
The ground on which a great hacker has walked cannot be crossed by evil being of shadow, making it important to keep the engineering facilities far from marketing and accounting.
Eating the ashes of a print-out of a great hackers code will cure cancer, tooth rot and the common cold.
Great hackers all go to heaven and get the good rooms near the elevator to the bar. Unfortunately they dont dare visit the bar during open hours due to social incompetence.
This is much more believable than "great hackers use Python."
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
I hate to 'me-too' but this is exactly the post I wanted to write. I have never met any really great programmer who was not very flexible in language, platform, libraries and operating systems. A religious attachment to any piece of technology is always bad for the end results.
'Within the first 20 hits' yes, but lets see the first five headlines I got;
Linux gaining steam in China
ITV switches on to Linux
Seagate and Linspire, Inc. Exclusively Bring Linspire Linux OS to Latin America
Susquehanna International Group Selects Reuters Trader (small mention of Linux as an added technology used)
Linux-based Nitix serves the works
The Linux desktop readyness article is actually from osnews.com, which is not overly biased against Linux. The 'How Microsoft Could Embrace Linux' is very pro-Linux, being a Slashdot article suggesting the porting of Microsoft Office to Linux and all that:)
So all in all it sure seems that you are the one doing biased reporting on this news service here.
I tell myself that I will upgrade it piece by piece over the following years every single time I have bought a new PC.
I never do.
In all honesty it is almost never worth the trouble for the small amount of money one might save, the motherboard, RAM and CPU are typically a few generations behind and updating the graphics card alone would make the CPU too much of a bottleneck. All in all I always end up with the same conclusion, just going off and replacing the whole thing makes economic sense and is a lot less trouble.
The Mac users has it right, very few people actually care about upgradeability.
I don't quite follow you at all, you first claim that people don't bother to download the fixes, then you appear to make fun of Microsoft for getting the fixes out later than Mozilla. Would seem that it does not matter one bit how fast you are fixing things if no one downloads the fixes anyway.
Just having a polygon datatype is kinda cool in itself, but the fact that PostgreSQL really supports using R-tree indexes and thus make efficient geometric queries quickly and easily is really great.
PostgreSQL is probably the most well-polished and useful open source project there is (gcc being the runner up, I skip linux since there really are plenty of decent OSS alternatives to it). Good going PostgreSQL team!
For some reason people seem to constantly miss how the X clipboard and selection mechanism works. So here we go again:
The X clipboard work exactly like the Windows and Mac ones. When you chose 'copy' on an edit menu or similar (ctrl+c in a lot of toolkits) the application will claim ownership of the clipboard and copy the text to some internal buffer. When an application gets a paste in some way (edit->paste or ctrl+v perhaps) it will request the text from the clipboard owner.
There is ALSO the selection mechanism. Whenever you select text in an application it will claim ownership of the primary selection, whenever an application receives a middle mouse click it will request the primary selection from the registered application.
These two mechanisms are orhogonal and should in no way interfere with each other in a correctly written application. Hope this clears things up. See JWZ's small guide to the topic for more information.
Have you checked the problems from last year? They read like a prolog advertisement where only the sentences containing the word prolog has been removed.
That is just sadistic, they state problems that just scream 'Please use prolog to crunch me!' and then forbid symolic manipulators (read: prolog). It's like a drinking contest where you cant use your mouth:P
Actually not true, Google solves the probably largest matrix problem in the world once a month. To compute page-rank they solve a 4,285,199,774 x 4,285,199,774 connectivity matrix through power-iteration. As it happens it is a very well-known and easy to distribute problem, but it is a huge math-problem none the less.
It is not an CISC vs. RISC issue, it is an IPC-count issue. The G4 typically has better IPC-counts than a P4 thanks to a pipeline flush being a lot cheaper. They are still slower overall of course on account of the P4's pipeline allowing the rather incredible clock frequencies it does. The current G4 is not really cache-starved, at 512 kilobytes of L2 it is behind the P4 but it is not really bad. It features more L1 cache than a P4 and has lower access latencies for both L1 and L2.
All in all the G4 is faster clock-by-clock than the P4 in most cases. It doesnt make it faster than the P4 either way though since it still clocks far too low, but it is a competent CPU.
Making sure your code is portable is one very good reason to use the microsoft compiler on Windows. Compile with gcc on Linux and Microsofts compiler on Windows and you will catch more bugs in the long run.
Wow, had completely missed that. Really great news considering that Serious Sam is one of the best FPS games in recent years imho.
And for everyone; I meant with "natively" to exclude Wine. A lot of good game do run on Linux with the aid of Wine but;
* Licensing WineX is not all that cheap since it is a subscriptiong model.
* Setting up Wine yourself is not an all that easy thing to do for the newbie
* Even with the games that are listed as supported by WineX it is a troublesome process; Max Payne 2 apparently silently fails if you don't go to the options menu and disable pixel shaders before starting the game. GTA will cause an exception if it is started in another language than english. The opening videos of GTA can randomly hang the game. MOO3 might work out of the box but there are suggestions on the forum that the intro should be disabled with a commandline arguments (unfriendly!).
* The list of games in my post was mostly tongue-in-cheek, it is easy to come up with several hundreds of nice games that cannot be easily played in Linux if one would want to. Claiming that Linux is a good gaming platform is a bit premature at this point imho.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, never quite understood the appeal of the games, but I so very much wanted to (and still wants to, I bought Sonic Advance for the GBA) since the characters and universe are all so very appealing.
What really scares me about all this is the worry about adoption rate of the standards that I see everywhere. Web standards has to be the only standardisation field where people start worrying when no standard has been released for a few years. I really cannot see the point of having standards at all if they are changed quicker than they can be sanely implemented (not to mention being used). Look at successful standards efforts, the C language had its last major standard in 1999, it is far from adopted, many compilers still only offer the older 1989 standard and most projects still stick to that one as well. It is however important to note that it took the better part of the nineties to get most code over to the -89 standard and no one particularly worried. Another example is postscript, first standard (level 1) 1984, second 1991, third 1998. These are not even a standards organisations work but in-house at Adobe, and you know what? Many applications still don't support all the features of level 2, 13 years after its release.
Overall a standards effort should in no way be ongoing like the W3C, one needs to get one more or less complete (a bit flawed is OK, a few inconsistencies are easier to handle than having tons of standards to support) and then leave it be for a decade or so while working on the next iteration. Only then will anyone be able to base a sane software project on the foundation provided.
As I said, I know of no standards in history (at least no successful ones) that have been as floating and ever-changing as the web standards. It is no wonder that web-browsers are the huge monoliths of software they are. Web publication is not an intrinsically hard problem, it is just a badly handled problem.
My guess is that they mean that the top 200 software projects in the US costs $250 billion each year. Getting and reading the paper is probably the only chance of really figuring out what this quote is supposed to say though.
Well I would love to hear how all the people posting in this story complaining about the operating system security suggest how to prevent this trojan from working? It does not spread, you have to manually download it or get it in a mail, it does not automatically run, you have to run it yourself, just where is the operating system supposed to look to be able to tell that the user needs to protected from itself?
And so on and so forth with insane stereotyping throughout the whole thing. Anyone who actually takes anything said in that thing (or by ESR in general) seriously... are taking the wrong things seriously :)
Linking bad code against a great hackers code will crush the bugs out of existance.
The code will over time improve upon itself to remain competitive with any future innovations. Only the code of another great hacker can keep a great hackers code at bay.
A great hackers code will run correctly on any machine, real or virtual, even overcoming machines that are not Turing-complete.
The ground on which a great hacker has walked cannot be crossed by evil being of shadow, making it important to keep the engineering facilities far from marketing and accounting.
Eating the ashes of a print-out of a great hackers code will cure cancer, tooth rot and the common cold.
Great hackers all go to heaven and get the good rooms near the elevator to the bar. Unfortunately they dont dare visit the bar during open hours due to social incompetence.
I hate to 'me-too' but this is exactly the post I wanted to write. I have never met any really great programmer who was not very flexible in language, platform, libraries and operating systems. A religious attachment to any piece of technology is always bad for the end results.
Linux gaining steam in China
ITV switches on to Linux
Seagate and Linspire, Inc. Exclusively Bring Linspire Linux OS to Latin America
Susquehanna International Group Selects Reuters Trader (small mention of Linux as an added technology used)
Linux-based Nitix serves the works
The Linux desktop readyness article is actually from osnews.com, which is not overly biased against Linux. The 'How Microsoft Could Embrace Linux' is very pro-Linux, being a Slashdot article suggesting the porting of Microsoft Office to Linux and all that :)
So all in all it sure seems that you are the one doing biased reporting on this news service here.
Extremely clever, who would have thought that one could use nerdiness to repel women? Will have to try that some day.
I never do.
In all honesty it is almost never worth the trouble for the small amount of money one might save, the motherboard, RAM and CPU are typically a few generations behind and updating the graphics card alone would make the CPU too much of a bottleneck. All in all I always end up with the same conclusion, just going off and replacing the whole thing makes economic sense and is a lot less trouble.
The Mac users has it right, very few people actually care about upgradeability.
Or rather call-with-current-continuation.
I don't quite follow you at all, you first claim that people don't bother to download the fixes, then you appear to make fun of Microsoft for getting the fixes out later than Mozilla. Would seem that it does not matter one bit how fast you are fixing things if no one downloads the fixes anyway.
And we can go on with things like this for a while:
And so on and so forth. I and commandline interfaces mix a bit so-so these days :)
PostgreSQL is probably the most well-polished and useful open source project there is (gcc being the runner up, I skip linux since there really are plenty of decent OSS alternatives to it). Good going PostgreSQL team!
Name one major file format that is forward compatible with a new featureful release. This is natural and very much to be expected.
Demoscene classic stuff, so they are of course not using Java3D, software rendering is still where it is at :)
The X clipboard work exactly like the Windows and Mac ones. When you chose 'copy' on an edit menu or similar (ctrl+c in a lot of toolkits) the application will claim ownership of the clipboard and copy the text to some internal buffer. When an application gets a paste in some way (edit->paste or ctrl+v perhaps) it will request the text from the clipboard owner.
There is ALSO the selection mechanism. Whenever you select text in an application it will claim ownership of the primary selection, whenever an application receives a middle mouse click it will request the primary selection from the registered application.
These two mechanisms are orhogonal and should in no way interfere with each other in a correctly written application. Hope this clears things up. See JWZ's small guide to the topic for more information.
Have you checked the problems from last year? They read like a prolog advertisement where only the sentences containing the word prolog has been removed.
That is just sadistic, they state problems that just scream 'Please use prolog to crunch me!' and then forbid symolic manipulators (read: prolog). It's like a drinking contest where you cant use your mouth :P
Actually not true, Google solves the probably largest matrix problem in the world once a month. To compute page-rank they solve a 4,285,199,774 x 4,285,199,774 connectivity matrix through power-iteration. As it happens it is a very well-known and easy to distribute problem, but it is a huge math-problem none the less.
It is not an CISC vs. RISC issue, it is an IPC-count issue. The G4 typically has better IPC-counts than a P4 thanks to a pipeline flush being a lot cheaper. They are still slower overall of course on account of the P4's pipeline allowing the rather incredible clock frequencies it does. The current G4 is not really cache-starved, at 512 kilobytes of L2 it is behind the P4 but it is not really bad. It features more L1 cache than a P4 and has lower access latencies for both L1 and L2.
All in all the G4 is faster clock-by-clock than the P4 in most cases. It doesnt make it faster than the P4 either way though since it still clocks far too low, but it is a competent CPU.
Actually implicit int return type is no longer legal in C99 so a good compiler should at least warn about it by now imho.
Making sure your code is portable is one very good reason to use the microsoft compiler on Windows. Compile with gcc on Linux and Microsofts compiler on Windows and you will catch more bugs in the long run.
Because it starts to feel like I have wasted several years of my life waiting for g++ by now. g++ is probably the slowest compiler I have ever used.
Wow, had completely missed that. Really great news considering that Serious Sam is one of the best FPS games in recent years imho.
And for everyone; I meant with "natively" to exclude Wine. A lot of good game do run on Linux with the aid of Wine but;
* Licensing WineX is not all that cheap since it is a subscriptiong model.
* Setting up Wine yourself is not an all that easy thing to do for the newbie
* Even with the games that are listed as supported by WineX it is a troublesome process; Max Payne 2 apparently silently fails if you don't go to the options menu and disable pixel shaders before starting the game. GTA will cause an exception if it is started in another language than english. The opening videos of GTA can randomly hang the game. MOO3 might work out of the box but there are suggestions on the forum that the intro should be disabled with a commandline arguments (unfriendly!).
* The list of games in my post was mostly tongue-in-cheek, it is easy to come up with several hundreds of nice games that cannot be easily played in Linux if one would want to. Claiming that Linux is a good gaming platform is a bit premature at this point imho.