Webb can't even be reached once launched, let alone be repaired.
Uh... if Webb can get there, then it's position CAN be reached.
Sure, it's out of range for the plausible human spacewalk profiles, but that doesn't mean a disposable repairbot can't be shot to LaGrange.
The reasons the Webb is less repairable are multiple: It costs less than half what Hubble did, and only 3x that of a rocket launch, so replacement isn't cost-prohibitive over repair. And since spacewalkers can't reach it, it was built to be less accessible...
Pop-ups are YOUR code running on MY computer without my authorisation
You authorized it when you decided to run Windows. If you don't like seeing little boxes jump onto your screen, how about not running software to throw little boxes onto your screen?
I disagree with the absolute statement that state protection from corporate tyranny is anathema to the Libertarian Party
Well, the LP is fundamentally nonsensical. (The most generous way to describe them is as arguing an extreme position in anticipation of a compromise. More aggressively, they can be called deluded utopianists or even nascent crypto-fascist elites).
Their platform is that the government should only exist to protect citizens from "force or fraud". Unfortunately, in real life there is no firm dividing line between forced and unforced interactions. So much of the governance they decry is genuinely working at that very challenging question.
In the case of corporate tyranny, it's quite possible for a monopolist to wield immense and harmful power without ever resorting to force or fraud. A doctrinal Libertarian would have no recourse.
(However, Microsoft could never become a monopoly in a Libertarian nation- indeed, it couldn't even survive as a going concern, once copyright law is abolished.)
A better example of how a Libertarian might not always be a libertarian is slavery. The Libertarian position says that a person should be able to sell himself into permanent slavery for a one-time fee. (Many Libertarians won't admit this, but it's a direct consequence of their simplistic platform). Of course, a general libertarian will say that the existence of some non-force, non-fraud freedoms still infringe liberty overall, so you shouldn't be able to volunteer for slavehood.
There's only one logical conclusion: we are the first ones, the first race to appear.
Haha! Hubris.
More logically, radio transmitters and atomic bombs are invented within 50 years of each other, leaving only a short timeframe wherein a species is capable of being heard before it self-eradicates.
On Macs, back in the mid-90s Word and Excel completely displaced Word Perfect and Lotus 1-2-3, and did so without the benefit of being tied to the underlying OS.
Really? I never thought WordPerfect had much of a Mac presense to displace. As well as I can remember, MS Word was already dominant on the Mac in 1987. Microsoft had been Apple's prime non-artistic application partner.
But if Wordperfect did somehow last on Mac into the mid-90s, then by that time they would've faced the cross-platform compatibilty problem: if MS Office had already won on IBM PC, then Mac users needing file transfers would be encouraged to get the same program their PC peers had.
Just to clarify, not only is liberalism not libertarianism, but neither is "Libertarian" equal to "libertarian". (No more than Republican means republican)
The lower-case form is the simple idea that personal/individual liberty is valuable. A libertarian can, for example, argue that strong state protections are needed to protect individuals from corporate tyranny, a position anathema to the Libertarian Party.
is I didn't see how your comment related to this:
There's no good business reason for the dominant player in a market to use open standards... unless facing the threat of eventual government antitrust action, a threat which wouldn't exist in a Libertarian nation.
Word Perfect? Lotus 1-2-3? Ami-Pro? Quattro Pro? all out-competed and out-classed. Yes, they abused their monopoly position later,
No. Abusing a monopoly was part of beating WordPerfect, Lotus, and AmiPro.
Prior to the release of Windows 3.1, special features were added to it... not part of the documented API, so that only Microsofties knew of them. Those features gave a performance boost to Word and Excel, which their competitors couldn't hope to equal on the same platform. (A little like the later situation when Internet Explorer seemed to take less RAM than Mozilla, because IE was permantently loaded).
The OS monopoly was gifted to Microsoft from IBM, who was afraid of appearing monopolistic. Microsoft used OS dominance to achieve "Office" dominance, and since then their two monopoly markets have achieved a mutually-reinforcing feedback loop.
I guess there's not much more to be said about that, as there's really no way for me to prove that to you, or vice versa.
There's always science to produce undisputable objective facts. But unfortunately, my software budget doesn't permit complete experimentation at this time.
However, using free software, I can provide a few hard numbers for you. The game is "Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory", a $0 FPS on the Quake3 engine, which is available in Windows and Linux versions. I ran it 4 times, in either native Linux or Cedega (WineX 4.0), at quality settings of either Fastest (640x480) or High (1024x768). Each time I loaded the "Siwa Oasis" map and recorded the output of "cg_drawFPS 1".
The data:
Cedega Fastest: 33 fps
Linux Fastest: 37 fps Cedega High: 31 fps Linux high: 35 fps
So, the native version is consistently 4fps better than Wine-style emulation. However, that result isn't as extreme as I hoped to show- 4fps is inside the margin of tolerable, not painful. (I'd never tried Wolfenstein under Cedega before, as it seemed pointless).
Other games hadn't worked at all adequately when I tried them- in particular, Battlefield 1942 was a huge disappointment, considering it had motivated my purchase of a commercial Wine variant.
Note that to continue the sciencetific research, it would be useful to measure the framerate of the same game running in Linux, WinXP, and Wine on the same computer... that would be a useful study for one of those hardware-review websites to publish. (Unfortunately, one such site did just review Cedega, and their insipid results did nothing to answer the obvious question: "How fast is it compared to Windows on the same hardware?")
watching Quicktime movies,
Why use Wine for that? Linux players can load Apple's DLLs well enough- and that way, you aren't stuck with the constrained Quicktime GUI.
I should have said "if the attack was from the bottom"
So with corrections, your sentence becomes equivalent to "The building couldn't possibley fall on top of itself if the attack was from the bottom"
So now, instead of being incomprehensible, the claim is simply wrong. It absolutely could've fallen. In fact, there's no reason the WTC couldn't have been brought down by a bomb in the basement (although to do that, you'd need an engineer to select the placement).
A large, fueled airplane striking at any floor aside from nearly the top would've taken down the entire building. The lower the impact, the faster it would happen, although that's a minor and unimportant effect considering that the lower collision would trap a greater proportion of victims in the building.
You can't rule that breathing air is illegal because the law enforcement couldn't follow the law and still make it take effect.
You can't rule that possessing cocaine is illegal, because the law enforcemetn couldn't follow the law and still make it take effect.
After all, to prove someone had cocaine, they'd need to present it as evidence in court. But to do that, they'd have to confiscate it and bring it there themselves, which would be illegal, because they can't possess cocaine.
Everyone knows that they're for downloading MP3s and DivX's and warez.
Interestingly, the act's sponsor disagrees with you. Orrin Hatch claims that users of Kazaa and eDonkey assume that because the program is from a corporation, then it's major use must be legal.
it bans the setup of networks explicitly for exchanging pirated materials..
No, it says nothing about networks or piracy. Sounds like you might be arguing from ignorance. Since the INDUCE Act is trivially short, I'll post the whole thing here:
the term 'intentionally infringes' means intentionally aids, abets, induces, or procures, and intent may be shown by acts which a reasonable person would find intent to induce infringement based upon all relevant information about such acts then reasonably available to the actor, including whether the activity relies on infringement for its commercial viability.
Whoever intentionally induces any violation indentified in (...) shall be liable as an infringer.
Nothing in this subsection shall enlarge or diminish the doctrines of vicarious and contributory liability for copyright infringement or require any court to unjustly withhold or impose any secondary liability for copyright infringement
So what it says is that "inducing copyright infringement" is now a form of copyright infringement itself, which is already illegal.
That's a nonsensical and moderately dangerous path: creating redundant laws. Copyright infringement is already illegal. Inducing a crime is also already illegal. Therefore INDUCE either has absolutely no effect and was a waste of Congressional time, or it means that inducement of infringement will be interpreted more loosely in the future.
Note that under this act, Bram Moolenar would've been guilty for the publication of the BitTorrent protocol, which by his own admission was intended to aid in copyright infringement (of Phish concert tapes, which are illegal to share, even though the band has no intention of ever enforcing).
The "Save The iPod" stuff is a stretch, but it'd be possible to prosecute Apple under this law too. All you'd have to do is show that iPod sales are somehow higher due to illegal copying. I bet a survey could be done showing that buyers of iPods often had pre-existing MP3 music collections, and that some of that came from copyright infringement.
Furthermore, and more realistically, freenet and similar anonymizing networks would become illegal. Anyone running a freenet node will be subject to arrest.
but the point remains that all machine code is executed right on the CPU
That's not too meaningful. Yes, if the machine code was executed in software, then it would be impossibly slow, instead of just painfully slow.
But VMWare and Win4Lin also execute all machine code on the native CPU- and they provide speed almost indistinguishable from running Windows alone. (Because, of course, they are running the actual Windows, and Microsoft's implementation of Windows is far faster than Wine can ever be)
However, as I mentioned before, over the course of computing history, the term "emulation" has come to imply that an extra software layer is emulating machine language
If a large group chooses to use a different meaning for a word, that's their choice- but they have no right to insist that other people using the original meaning are wrong, as "Wine Is Not an Emulator" does.
Under such a system, the emulated binary will always run significantly slower than it would natively under comparable hardware.
No. Not necessarily. You are talking about "realtime emulation", which again is a specific subset (and again, the most common subset). As the program counter moves through each instruction, it is read, and then instructions to an equivalent effect are executed on the host. But there is also pre-execution emulation, exemplified by UltraHLE, which overwrites each instruction with a native one, once only. As you can imagine, this is supremely faster. (But not compatible with all possible programs on all possible hardware)
I think in general you'll have really good luck, speedwise.
No I won't. I've tried heavy-duty Windows apps under Wine, and also the proprietarialy-improved WineX (now called Cedega). Wine sometimes allows a program to run, but it frequently fails due to incomplete features. Cedega provides enough additional features so that many more programs can actually work (in particular, installers can complete), but the performance never comes close to fooling anyone.
In my own video-game tests, a 500mhz Celeron with an NVidia GeForce2MX with WinXP beat an Athlon 1700 with GeForceFX5700 using Cedega on Linux, by sometimes 60% FPS. (Other versions of Wine were even slower)
but it bears repeating that any slowness is the result of nonoptimal code
The code is nonoptimal because of the emulation. I've examined the technical reasons for Wine's sometimes huge slowness, and it comes down to one main thing. Linux systems are split into more different processes than Windows, so an function that a Windows app expects to have serviced immediately instead takes at least 3 process time-slices as we wait first for the separate server to wake up and respond, and then wait again for the app to reactivate and proceed onward.
You can hardly accuse Wine of "nonoptimal code" for that problem- the only way they could avoid it is to integrate Wine, Wineserver, and XFree86 into a single huge process space. And then it's not so much "running Windows applications on Linux", because your system no longer resembles a usual "Linux" desktop environment.
(The other approach that could work would be to dynamically re-write the application's function calls as it loads, replacing Windows/DirectX things with Linux/OpenGL equivalents. I've never heard of it being tried, though... but if it worked, the application would be very fast, after the initial delay is over)
(the menuing system in Half-Life, in particular, suffers from a problem here, or the opening movies on the Half-Life games)
Note that Half-Life isn't new; in fact, it was released six years ago! And it's overwhelming popularity across that time has made it a focus of Wine's developers (featured on their homepage, etc). Yet, as you mention, Half-Life still doesn't work decently. That's a lesson as to how useful Wine is likely to be.
The practice and training needed to pass such a test is what makes the driver safer.
Yes... so can't you follow the logic? Requiring licenses means that young drivers need some training to pass the test, which makes them safer. Therefore licenses makes them safer.
Licenses are important for other reasons, too. They give the state a mechanism to take a dangerous driver off the roads, without slamming him in prison. If a man gets drunk and totals two of his cars, but survives because of airbags and crumple zones, won't you feel safer when he's forced to the backseat?
Licensing re-exams also protect us from hazardous elderly drivers. Extreme age reduces perception, reflexes, and concentration- but also makes people unwilling to detect or unable to admint their own deterioration. Licensing re-tests helps get non-longer-capable drivers off the roads; hopefully before they kill 9 people.
(Re-testing every 5 years is probably a mistake, and a test frequency more based on your actual age could be both less intrusive for the middle-aged and more likely to catch deteriorating elders)
Are you arguing for a repeal of minimum driving ages?
There is not (in the USA) a firm minimum driving age, like you advocated. The right to drive is granted partially: first at 14, then 16, then 18, then 21. (It isn't uniform across all states- in particular, only a few rural areas let you begin road-driving at 14). The partial-priviledge system is more fair than the firm cutoff you want.
It couldn't possibley fall on top of itself if it was from the bottom up. Those very words imply that it is hit from the top.
Are you ESL? Those sentences aren't comprehensible at all. I suggest you learn about "pronouns", and try again. Or if you can't handle pronouns, then just repeat the statement with each word "it" replaced with the actual noun you meant.
Prove it.
Prove that the terrorists didn't know the buildings would collapse? Sure, read their own words. They were pleasntly suprised at the total destruction.
Ironically, British troops had attacked Washington DC 24 years earlier, burning nearly everything except those patents, which they very carefully avoided.
Irrelevant. The topic is not GPL'ed projects, but projects controlled by GNU. You are confused because the GPL is today more famous than GNU which spawned it.
If you want to get a patch included into an actual GNU project, such as emacs or gcc, you must assign copyright to GNU. Otherwise they'll reject your patch (you're always free to fork, of course, but then don't get the benefit high-profile placement)
But why are you assuming that open() has to be called?
The only way Wine could get around calling open() would be for them to replace Linux's glibc or kernel and perform the functions they normally provide to it. Then it would no longer be "emulating Windows on top of Unix", but "cloning Windows as an x86 OS". It wouldn't be Wine anymore, but ReactOS.
(Note: Wine is not an x86 emulator. But Wine is a Windows emulator)
Emulation, with relation to computers, generally involves taking machine language instruction-per-instruction and emulating the physical environment
That's not the definition of "emulation". You are referring to "CPU emulation", which is a specific subset of emulation. Software can be emulated too- "emulate" merely means to copy something else; to do what it does. Humans generally have 2 arms and 2 legs; but that doesn't make it OK to say "Max Cleland is not a human"- a statement that is equally as correct as "Wine is not an emulator".
Ask yourself if Wine is just "implementing the Windows API", or imitating Windows. If there's a bug in Windows XP where it doesn't obey it's own API docs, do you think the Wine developers will follow the docs, or the real behavior?
But that's got nothing to do with actual hardware emulation.
No, it has to do with software emulation. Wine emulates Windows, but is not a clone of Windows, because it doesn't have all it's own OS kernel and video drivers (it gets those services from Linux instead). As such, Wine will always have at least one additional layer of function calls beyond what real Windows would have, and that means it will be slower. The only way Wine could meet the speed of Windows is if Microsoft had made a real error in their own implementation.
and even design som monster to be _attracted_ to bright light.
Problem- that'd actually be a benefit, considering Doom3's gameplay. Altering the monsters to your approach earlier would help you, because it'd lure them out of ambushes and into the line of (well-lit) fire. (Or if it didn't draw them out, then it'd be having no effect at all, and not be a "penalty")
Let me try to think for just two seconds how I'd handled it instead...
What I'd have done: Provide multiple different lights sources the player can collect. 1: The normal flashlight, but you can hold it at the same time as a pistol. 2: A lantern, which takes both hands but gives a wider field of illumination. 3: A tactical light mountable to the shotgun (or similar medium-sized weapons). Weaker than normal flashlight, but better than nothing. Not found for several levels.
Give the player a choice - you can use the flashlight,
A more realistic tradeoff would be that using the flashlight alerts the monsters to your presence, when otherwise you might surprise them (or sneak past). But that wouldn't work in Doom as-is, because the monsters have inexplicably-arranged ambushes and stealth just isn't part of their gameplay.
However in multiplayer Doom3 deathmatches, I wouldn't be surprised if the flashlight (if it's enabled there? Haven't tried) is treated as a mixed blessing- shining light helps you find targets, but also makes you visible to enemies hiding in the darkness.
The thing is, most videogame heros can jump 3-4 feet straight up from standing. Their vertical leaps are great! It's just when they'd actually need to lay a palm on the grimy concrete that they wimp out.
(However, Lara Croft never exhibited this weakness...)
No, it preserves the immersion. If you flashlight wasn't limited by selecting it to exclusion of weapons, then the game would be permantently bright, so they'd have to weaken the flashlight some other way- such as limited batteries, or smashing the bulb whenever a demon kicks you down the stairs.
Any balancing solutions like that would've eventually left you with no flashlight at all, trapped in fatal darkness. Gamers would find that drastically more irritating than having to switch guns to see.
Slashdot Mirror
They do indeed, which is why I always custom-install.
Can you actually instruct RedHat not to install "shutdown" ??
Webb can't even be reached once launched, let alone be repaired.
Uh... if Webb can get there, then it's position CAN be reached.
Sure, it's out of range for the plausible human spacewalk profiles, but that doesn't mean a disposable repairbot can't be shot to LaGrange.
The reasons the Webb is less repairable are multiple: It costs less than half what Hubble did, and only 3x that of a rocket launch, so replacement isn't cost-prohibitive over repair. And since spacewalkers can't reach it, it was built to be less accessible...
Pop-ups are YOUR code running on MY computer without my authorisation
You authorized it when you decided to run Windows. If you don't like seeing little boxes jump onto your screen, how about not running software to throw little boxes onto your screen?
I disagree with the absolute statement that state protection from corporate tyranny is anathema to the Libertarian Party
Well, the LP is fundamentally nonsensical. (The most generous way to describe them is as arguing an extreme position in anticipation of a compromise. More aggressively, they can be called deluded utopianists or even nascent crypto-fascist elites).
Their platform is that the government should only exist to protect citizens from "force or fraud". Unfortunately, in real life there is no firm dividing line between forced and unforced interactions. So much of the governance they decry is genuinely working at that very challenging question.
In the case of corporate tyranny, it's quite possible for a monopolist to wield immense and harmful power without ever resorting to force or fraud. A doctrinal Libertarian would have no recourse.
(However, Microsoft could never become a monopoly in a Libertarian nation- indeed, it couldn't even survive as a going concern, once copyright law is abolished.)
A better example of how a Libertarian might not always be a libertarian is slavery. The Libertarian position says that a person should be able to sell himself into permanent slavery for a one-time fee. (Many Libertarians won't admit this, but it's a direct consequence of their simplistic platform). Of course, a general libertarian will say that the existence of some non-force, non-fraud freedoms still infringe liberty overall, so you shouldn't be able to volunteer for slavehood.
Inevitable, endless, eternal Wine
The argument was OVER 5 posts ago until you came in and restarted it, genius.
There's only one logical conclusion: we are the first ones, the first race to appear.
Haha! Hubris.
More logically, radio transmitters and atomic bombs are invented within 50 years of each other, leaving only a short timeframe wherein a species is capable of being heard before it self-eradicates.
On Macs, back in the mid-90s Word and Excel completely displaced Word Perfect and Lotus 1-2-3, and did so without the benefit of being tied to the underlying OS.
Really? I never thought WordPerfect had much of a Mac presense to displace. As well as I can remember, MS Word was already dominant on the Mac in 1987. Microsoft had been Apple's prime non-artistic application partner.
But if Wordperfect did somehow last on Mac into the mid-90s, then by that time they would've faced the cross-platform compatibilty problem: if MS Office had already won on IBM PC, then Mac users needing file transfers would be encouraged to get the same program their PC peers had.
That's Libertarianism, not liberalism...
Just to clarify, not only is liberalism not libertarianism, but neither is "Libertarian" equal to "libertarian". (No more than Republican means republican)
The lower-case form is the simple idea that personal/individual liberty is valuable. A libertarian can, for example, argue that strong state protections are needed to protect individuals from corporate tyranny, a position anathema to the Libertarian Party.
is I didn't see how your comment related to this:
There's no good business reason for the dominant player in a market to use open standards... unless facing the threat of eventual government antitrust action, a threat which wouldn't exist in a Libertarian nation.
Word Perfect? Lotus 1-2-3? Ami-Pro? Quattro Pro? all out-competed and out-classed. Yes, they abused their monopoly position later,
No. Abusing a monopoly was part of beating WordPerfect, Lotus, and AmiPro.
Prior to the release of Windows 3.1, special features were added to it... not part of the documented API, so that only Microsofties knew of them. Those features gave a performance boost to Word and Excel, which their competitors couldn't hope to equal on the same platform. (A little like the later situation when Internet Explorer seemed to take less RAM than Mozilla, because IE was permantently loaded).
The OS monopoly was gifted to Microsoft from IBM, who was afraid of appearing monopolistic. Microsoft used OS dominance to achieve "Office" dominance, and since then their two monopoly markets have achieved a mutually-reinforcing feedback loop.
There's always science to produce undisputable objective facts. But unfortunately, my software budget doesn't permit complete experimentation at this time.
However, using free software, I can provide a few hard numbers for you. The game is "Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory", a $0 FPS on the Quake3 engine, which is available in Windows and Linux versions. I ran it 4 times, in either native Linux or Cedega (WineX 4.0), at quality settings of either Fastest (640x480) or High (1024x768). Each time I loaded the "Siwa Oasis" map and recorded the output of "cg_drawFPS 1".
The data:
Linux Fastest: 37 fps
Cedega High: 31 fps
Linux high: 35 fps
So, the native version is consistently 4fps better than Wine-style emulation. However, that result isn't as extreme as I hoped to show- 4fps is inside the margin of tolerable, not painful. (I'd never tried Wolfenstein under Cedega before, as it seemed pointless).
Other games hadn't worked at all adequately when I tried them- in particular, Battlefield 1942 was a huge disappointment, considering it had motivated my purchase of a commercial Wine variant.
Note that to continue the sciencetific research, it would be useful to measure the framerate of the same game running in Linux, WinXP, and Wine on the same computer... that would be a useful study for one of those hardware-review websites to publish. (Unfortunately, one such site did just review Cedega, and their insipid results did nothing to answer the obvious question: "How fast is it compared to Windows on the same hardware?")
watching Quicktime movies,
Why use Wine for that? Linux players can load Apple's DLLs well enough- and that way, you aren't stuck with the constrained Quicktime GUI.
I should have said "if the attack was from the bottom"
So with corrections, your sentence becomes equivalent to "The building couldn't possibley fall on top of itself if the attack was from the bottom"
So now, instead of being incomprehensible, the claim is simply wrong. It absolutely could've fallen. In fact, there's no reason the WTC couldn't have been brought down by a bomb in the basement (although to do that, you'd need an engineer to select the placement).
A large, fueled airplane striking at any floor aside from nearly the top would've taken down the entire building. The lower the impact, the faster it would happen, although that's a minor and unimportant effect considering that the lower collision would trap a greater proportion of victims in the building.
You can't rule that breathing air is illegal because the law enforcement couldn't follow the law and still make it take effect.
You can't rule that possessing cocaine is illegal, because the law enforcemetn couldn't follow the law and still make it take effect.
After all, to prove someone had cocaine, they'd need to present it as evidence in court. But to do that, they'd have to confiscate it and bring it there themselves, which would be illegal, because they can't possess cocaine.
Interestingly, the act's sponsor disagrees with you. Orrin Hatch claims that users of Kazaa and eDonkey assume that because the program is from a corporation, then it's major use must be legal.
it bans the setup of networks explicitly for exchanging pirated materials..
No, it says nothing about networks or piracy. Sounds like you might be arguing from ignorance. Since the INDUCE Act is trivially short, I'll post the whole thing here:
So what it says is that "inducing copyright infringement" is now a form of copyright infringement itself, which is already illegal.
That's a nonsensical and moderately dangerous path: creating redundant laws. Copyright infringement is already illegal. Inducing a crime is also already illegal. Therefore INDUCE either has absolutely no effect and was a waste of Congressional time, or it means that inducement of infringement will be interpreted more loosely in the future.
Note that under this act, Bram Moolenar would've been guilty for the publication of the BitTorrent protocol, which by his own admission was intended to aid in copyright infringement (of Phish concert tapes, which are illegal to share, even though the band has no intention of ever enforcing).
The "Save The iPod" stuff is a stretch, but it'd be possible to prosecute Apple under this law too. All you'd have to do is show that iPod sales are somehow higher due to illegal copying. I bet a survey could be done showing that buyers of iPods often had pre-existing MP3 music collections, and that some of that came from copyright infringement.
Furthermore, and more realistically, freenet and similar anonymizing networks would become illegal. Anyone running a freenet node will be subject to arrest.
but the point remains that all machine code is executed right on the CPU
That's not too meaningful. Yes, if the machine code was executed in software, then it would be impossibly slow, instead of just painfully slow.
But VMWare and Win4Lin also execute all machine code on the native CPU- and they provide speed almost indistinguishable from running Windows alone. (Because, of course, they are running the actual Windows, and Microsoft's implementation of Windows is far faster than Wine can ever be)
However, as I mentioned before, over the course of computing history, the term "emulation" has come to imply that an extra software layer is emulating machine language
If a large group chooses to use a different meaning for a word, that's their choice- but they have no right to insist that other people using the original meaning are wrong, as "Wine Is Not an Emulator" does.
Under such a system, the emulated binary will always run significantly slower than it would natively under comparable hardware.
No. Not necessarily. You are talking about "realtime emulation", which again is a specific subset (and again, the most common subset). As the program counter moves through each instruction, it is read, and then instructions to an equivalent effect are executed on the host. But there is also pre-execution emulation, exemplified by UltraHLE, which overwrites each instruction with a native one, once only. As you can imagine, this is supremely faster. (But not compatible with all possible programs on all possible hardware)
I think in general you'll have really good luck, speedwise.
No I won't. I've tried heavy-duty Windows apps under Wine, and also the proprietarialy-improved WineX (now called Cedega). Wine sometimes allows a program to run, but it frequently fails due to incomplete features. Cedega provides enough additional features so that many more programs can actually work (in particular, installers can complete), but the performance never comes close to fooling anyone.
In my own video-game tests, a 500mhz Celeron with an NVidia GeForce2MX with WinXP beat an Athlon 1700 with GeForceFX5700 using Cedega on Linux, by sometimes 60% FPS. (Other versions of Wine were even slower)
but it bears repeating that any slowness is the result of nonoptimal code
The code is nonoptimal because of the emulation. I've examined the technical reasons for Wine's sometimes huge slowness, and it comes down to one main thing. Linux systems are split into more different processes than Windows, so an function that a Windows app expects to have serviced immediately instead takes at least 3 process time-slices as we wait first for the separate server to wake up and respond, and then wait again for the app to reactivate and proceed onward.
You can hardly accuse Wine of "nonoptimal code" for that problem- the only way they could avoid it is to integrate Wine, Wineserver, and XFree86 into a single huge process space. And then it's not so much "running Windows applications on Linux", because your system no longer resembles a usual "Linux" desktop environment.
(The other approach that could work would be to dynamically re-write the application's function calls as it loads, replacing Windows/DirectX things with Linux/OpenGL equivalents. I've never heard of it being tried, though... but if it worked, the application would be very fast, after the initial delay is over)
(the menuing system in Half-Life, in particular, suffers from a problem here, or the opening movies on the Half-Life games)
Note that Half-Life isn't new; in fact, it was released six years ago! And it's overwhelming popularity across that time has made it a focus of Wine's developers (featured on their homepage, etc). Yet, as you mention, Half-Life still doesn't work decently. That's a lesson as to how useful Wine is likely to be.
The practice and training needed to pass such a test is what makes the driver safer.
Yes... so can't you follow the logic?
Requiring licenses means that young drivers need some training to pass the test, which makes them safer. Therefore licenses makes them safer.
Licenses are important for other reasons, too. They give the state a mechanism to take a dangerous driver off the roads, without slamming him in prison. If a man gets drunk and totals two of his cars, but survives because of airbags and crumple zones, won't you feel safer when he's forced to the backseat?
Licensing re-exams also protect us from hazardous elderly drivers. Extreme age reduces perception, reflexes, and concentration- but also makes people unwilling to detect or unable to admint their own deterioration. Licensing re-tests helps get non-longer-capable drivers off the roads; hopefully before they kill 9 people.
(Re-testing every 5 years is probably a mistake, and a test frequency more based on your actual age could be both less intrusive for the middle-aged and more likely to catch deteriorating elders)
Are you arguing for a repeal of minimum driving ages?
There is not (in the USA) a firm minimum driving age, like you advocated. The right to drive is granted partially: first at 14, then 16, then 18, then 21. (It isn't uniform across all states- in particular, only a few rural areas let you begin road-driving at 14). The partial-priviledge system is more fair than the firm cutoff you want.
It couldn't possibley fall on top of itself if it was from the bottom up. Those very words imply that it is hit from the top.
Are you ESL? Those sentences aren't comprehensible at all. I suggest you learn about "pronouns", and try again. Or if you can't handle pronouns, then just repeat the statement with each word "it" replaced with the actual noun you meant.
Prove it.
Prove that the terrorists didn't know the buildings would collapse? Sure, read their own words. They were pleasntly suprised at the total destruction.
Ironically, British troops had attacked Washington DC 24 years earlier, burning nearly everything except those patents, which they very carefully avoided.
From GNU page about the GPL
Irrelevant. The topic is not GPL'ed projects, but projects controlled by GNU. You are confused because the GPL is today more famous than GNU which spawned it.
If you want to get a patch included into an actual GNU project, such as emacs or gcc, you must assign copyright to GNU. Otherwise they'll reject your patch (you're always free to fork, of course, but then don't get the benefit high-profile placement)
But why are you assuming that open() has to be called?
The only way Wine could get around calling open() would be for them to replace Linux's glibc or kernel and perform the functions they normally provide to it. Then it would no longer be "emulating Windows on top of Unix", but "cloning Windows as an x86 OS". It wouldn't be Wine anymore, but ReactOS.
(Note: Wine is not an x86 emulator. But Wine is a Windows emulator)
Actually, no it's not.
Yes it is.
Wine merely implements the Windows API.
Bochs merely implements the Intel 386 opcodes.
Emulation, with relation to computers, generally involves taking machine language instruction-per-instruction and emulating the physical environment
That's not the definition of "emulation". You are referring to "CPU emulation", which is a specific subset of emulation. Software can be emulated too- "emulate" merely means to copy something else; to do what it does. Humans generally have 2 arms and 2 legs; but that doesn't make it OK to say "Max Cleland is not a human"- a statement that is equally as correct as "Wine is not an emulator".
Ask yourself if Wine is just "implementing the Windows API", or imitating Windows. If there's a bug in Windows XP where it doesn't obey it's own API docs, do you think the Wine developers will follow the docs, or the real behavior?
But that's got nothing to do with actual hardware emulation.
No, it has to do with software emulation. Wine emulates Windows, but is not a clone of Windows, because it doesn't have all it's own OS kernel and video drivers (it gets those services from Linux instead). As such, Wine will always have at least one additional layer of function calls beyond what real Windows would have, and that means it will be slower. The only way Wine could meet the speed of Windows is if Microsoft had made a real error in their own implementation.
and even design som monster to be _attracted_ to bright light.
Problem- that'd actually be a benefit, considering Doom3's gameplay. Altering the monsters to your approach earlier would help you, because it'd lure them out of ambushes and into the line of (well-lit) fire. (Or if it didn't draw them out, then it'd be having no effect at all, and not be a "penalty")
Let me try to think for just two seconds how I'd handled it instead...
What I'd have done: Provide multiple different lights sources the player can collect.
1: The normal flashlight, but you can hold it at the same time as a pistol.
2: A lantern, which takes both hands but gives a wider field of illumination.
3: A tactical light mountable to the shotgun (or similar medium-sized weapons). Weaker than normal flashlight, but better than nothing. Not found for several levels.
Give the player a choice - you can use the flashlight,
A more realistic tradeoff would be that using the flashlight alerts the monsters to your presence, when otherwise you might surprise them (or sneak past). But that wouldn't work in Doom as-is, because the monsters have inexplicably-arranged ambushes and stealth just isn't part of their gameplay.
However in multiplayer Doom3 deathmatches, I wouldn't be surprised if the flashlight (if it's enabled there? Haven't tried) is treated as a mixed blessing- shining light helps you find targets, but also makes you visible to enemies hiding in the darkness.
you go on with your six-inch vertical, scary man.
The thing is, most videogame heros can jump 3-4 feet straight up from standing. Their vertical leaps are great! It's just when they'd actually need to lay a palm on the grimy concrete that they wimp out.
(However, Lara Croft never exhibited this weakness...)
my only problem is this hurts the immersion.
No, it preserves the immersion. If you flashlight wasn't limited by selecting it to exclusion of weapons, then the game would be permantently bright, so they'd have to weaken the flashlight some other way- such as limited batteries, or smashing the bulb whenever a demon kicks you down the stairs.
Any balancing solutions like that would've eventually left you with no flashlight at all, trapped in fatal darkness. Gamers would find that drastically more irritating than having to switch guns to see.
Disney should've did a laptop. All the kids want a laptop.
NONE of the kids want to be SEEN with a Disney Laptop.