Ok, I can see the idea of bounds checking and memory mangament and such things being done in a more transparent way (I hate things like String classes - Borland's AnsiString class disturbs me to no end! And don't even get me started on C++ exception handling...).
BUT, things like overrunning array bounds or dereferencing a free'd pointer is generally a case I want to know about and fix (i.e. have the app crash and burn), rather then have it be implicitly handled and keep running without my knowing about it. (mind you, I'm doing stand alone app development and not anything mission critical...)
And if it is a team of programmers and someone wrote an aspect to "silently fix and keep running" these types of problems, then I may be in a world of hurt later on. And finding a bug that was thus hidden would be a nightmare.
I mean, if I really want my program to handle "errors" in an "intuitive manner" and keep going, I'd write in Perl. (N.B. I *LIKE* Perl, but only for certain types of things).
Not really - such a huge number of games were released for the older systems, but we only remember the best of those games.
Today, you see a huge number of games released for your current system and are reminded every time you walk into a video game store of the ratio of good to bad games.
I remember playing Day of Defeat and finding it entirely too disturbing. I'm love studying WWII, but those who really died couldn't just respawn. I had to stop playing after just a few minutes on the Normandy scenario.
That depends. I sure wouldn't want to work with 20 other programmers, but if you've got, say 4-5 programmers, 1-2 designers, 2-3 sound/music guys and 15+ artists, that's quite workable and is 20+.
I don't think so - most hard core gamers will buy Windows just to play games, and most non-hard core gamers (i.e. the Wal Mart crowd) is already running windows anyways.
Macs and Unix are still just a drop in the bucket, OS wise. OpenGL, while it mostly works, isn't the bestest thing in the world.
Anyways, a good development house will have their own video library that wraps all the DirectX stuff, making it possible without too much pain to port to another library by just linking in a different DLL with the same wrapper functions (or maybe even use the same library but just with different state flags set!). Most don't do the port cause the market isn't there, but it isn't as horrible a thing as you might imagine.
It is interesting to see that many of the best games out there (Half-Life comes to mind) are games that were not subject to milestones or budget limitations or skew schedules. Games that developers could develop on their own terms.
Publishers don't like to let developers develop on their own terms, even though the best games are done that way.
They need to be more venture capitalist minded - sure, 10 out of 12 will go bust, one might break even and the 12th one will be a big hit that makes more money then was lost on all the rest.
But they are too risk averse, so we get crap. *sigh*
One of the big problems is that people (mostly really just hard core gamers) want better and better "quality", which really means graphics and sound and everything BUT gameplay. But making the highest quality stuff is quite expensive - motion capture is not cheap, and developing the code to support it takes time and money as well. Original music for the soundtack? Also potentially quite expensive.
Small independent developers just can't afford these things. Those Madden games cost millions to make, but bring in tens to hundreds of millions. Only the big players can really sink that kind of cash in development.
I've heard many in the game industry say that production is moving to Hollywood style, with huge budgets, fancy graphics work, entire fresh musical scores, the works. And that's just darn expensive to do.
Heh - I agree fully. I had the great pleasure of working at Holistic Design for several years, which has designers who have, in fact, read Aristotle and many others. They are fantastic story tellers and excellent writers, but then, they were also the original authors for Vampire (Andrew Greenberg) and Werewolf (Bill Bridges) (commerical: Fading Suns is probably one of the deepest and richest RPGs on the market - go buy it, you'll like it:-)
But many (most?) games are seriously lacking in this regard. I was reading the MOO3 website and they were calling for fan fiction to create the backstory. Bleh.
George: "Tony, Tony, hurry, we found one" Tony: "Yes georgie, I have my thumb already on the button" George: "Shouldn't we first ring our friends and allies" Tony: "Sure thing - I'll get on the phone right away to Italy, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Macedonia, Slovenia, Croatia, Japan and Kuwait!"
What would be the point of a model a second 0? We're already pretty close to that. What we really need is a model of second -1! But unfortunately, no amount of quantum physics will ever tell us what existed before the bigbang.
As far as Denmark, I'm not sure what constitutes a credible source on this (most of the sites covering it seem a bit wacko-ish), but try these: http://www.policyreview.org/dec00/Bering.h tml (towards the bottom) http://worldwatchdaily.org/index.cfm/fuse action/ho me.showEditorial/article/545.htm
Ever since the UN starting proposing splitting the land into two states, one jewish, one arab, each new map has created a larger and larger arab state and smaller and smaller jewish state. Every single time, the jews were willing to accept this, and every single time the arabs refused.
It isn't just that the arabs want a new country for the Palestinians (who have NEVER had an independent country throughout all of history), the arabs don't want any jews. The Palestinians are pawns for the other arab countries, and they seem content to play out that role.
Here's an column written by Martin Sherman on Dec 26, 2002 at IsraelNationalNews - yeah, it's heavily biased by the fact that he's jewish, but still quite an interesting read anyways:
---- Article 16: "...the people of Palestine, desiring to befriend all nations which love freedom, justice, and peace, look forward to their support in restoring the legitimate situation to Palestine... and [in] enabling its people to exercise national sovereignty and freedom."
Article 24: "This Organization does not exercise any territorial sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, [or] on the Gaza Strip..."
Article 26: "The Liberation Organization... does not interfere in the internal affairs of any Arab states."
These excerpts from the Palestinian National Charter, as it was formulated in 1964 by the inaugural convention of the Palestinian National Council in Cairo (where the Palestinian Liberation Organization was founded) are of significant consequence, for they point to a fundamental fallacy in the authenticity of the Palestinian claims for national self-determination. As can be seen, they explicitly eschew any claims of sovereignty in the territories of Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank") and the Gaza Strip, which they openly concede to the jurisdiction of the Jordanians and the Egyptians respectively.
This seriously cuts away the ground from under any claim that the "West Bank" and Gaza constitute the Palestinians ancient and long-yearned-for motherland, and to which they have unalienable and inexorable rights. On the one hand, this submissive concession of sovereignty over these territories to non-Palestinian rule indicates a remarkable malleability in the national aspirations of the Palestinians, which seems to fly in the face of conventional wisdom.
On the other hand, it is entirely consistent with the position taken by the late Zuheir Muhsin, formerly the head of the PLOs Military Department and member of its Executive Council.
Almost a decade and a half after the first public endorsement of the Palestinian Charter, on March 31, 1977, Muhsin made the following declaration in an interview with the Dutch daily Trouw: "There are no differences between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. We are all part of one nation. It is only for political reasons that we carefully underline our Palestinian identity, because it is in the interest of the Arabs to encourage a separate Palestinian identity. Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity serves only tactical purposes. The founding of a Palestinian state is a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel."
It thus appears that there is room for the "heretical" postulation that the true Palestinian desire is not really a state. Indeed, perhaps the time has come to suggest most of the prevailing conventional wisdom regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is totally unfounded, even misguided. For according to this wisdom, the fuel of the conflict is the lack of Palestinian self-determination, and that the goal of the Palestinians struggle is to establish a state for themselves. However, the competing explanation, which seems to emerge from the words and deeds of the Palestinians themselves, is quite the opposite. According to this explanation, the fuel of the conflict is not the lack of Palestinian self-determination, but the existence of Jewish self-determination. As long as Jewish self-determination persists, so will the conflict. Moreover, according to the alternative explanation, the goal of the Palestinians is not to establish a state for themselves but to dismantle a state for others - the Jews.
The question that now arises is: Which of these two alternative versions has the greater explanatory power? The answer seems to be unequivocally the latter. For it offers eminently plausible explanations for a range of events, which the former is powerless to account for.
For example:
- It explains why every territorial proposal, which would have allowed them to create a state of their own (from the 1947 partition plan to Baraks offer at Camp David in 2000), never satisfied Arab leadership.
- It explains why only the total negation of Jewish independence would appear acceptable to the Palestinians, as evidenced not only by their rejection of any viable offer for statehood, but by much of their rhetoric and symbolism, in which they invariably portray the whole the Land of Israel, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, as constituting part of Arab Palestine.
- It explains not only why the Palestinians refrained from attempting to exert their national sovereignty in the pre-1967 "West Bank" (as evidenced by their original National Charter), but why today the Palestinians, as an overwhelming majority in Jordan, resign themselves to the rule by a Hashemite Bedouin despot, who represents the minority in the land.
- It explains not only why they rejected the far-reaching generosity of the Barak proposal, but also the violent manner in which they rejected it.
- It explains why the Palestinians stubbornly insist on the "right of return," which would imply placing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians now living in Arab lands under Israeli jurisdiction. It is hardly consistent with an alleged desire to be free of oppressive Israeli control or with an equitable two-state solution.
By contrast, none of the above phenomena can be reconciled with the explanation propounded by the advocates of conventional wisdom. For, in reality, the Palestinians appear to have little motivation in expressing their national sovereignty in territories when they are under non-Palestinian, but Arab, rule. Strangely, this desire only manifests itself in these territories when they fall under Jewish rule. Indeed, Palestinian efforts seem far more comprehensible if seen as directed toward the the undermining and elimination of Jewish sovereignty (by demanding either Israeli withdrawals, where possible, or Arab repatriation, where not), than in the realization of their own independence.
If this is true, then making ever more generous proposals regarding Palestinian statehood will be totally unproductive, indeed counterproductive, for these will induce no peaceable response whatsoever. After all, as Muhsin said, "The founding of a Palestinian state is a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel."
It will be of great interest to see which explanation the next Israeli government adopts as the foundation of its policy toward the Palestinians - that which has considerable power to account for Palestinian behavior, or that which has none.
Some muslims in Denmark already openly declare that when they have enough muslim bodies in the country, they will convert it to islamic law. If they succeed in Denmark, they will not stop there. There's MUCH more involved here then just simply "Foreign troops on holy soil."
---- This is an interesting data point to want to collect, but how much does it really mean? Both Islam & Judaism shun pork, but only the former are "known" to be the bomber type. ----
Actually, before the creation of Isreal in the 1940s, the Jews were every bit as terroristic as the Palestinians are today. In fact, they were very good at it. Of course, once the Jews got what they wanted (a country), they stopped.
Question is, what is it the muslims really want, i.e. what will it take to stop them?
Not that I think this pork thing is a good idea - it's dumb for all the reasons you point out.
My boss at my last job was amazed about the box cutter thing. He said if someone on a plane pulled out a box cutter on him, he'd be like "Dude, that's a bloody box cutter. Now put it away and sit down."
Of course, my boss was very tall and imposing - former army.
A 486, a P133, an AMD-K6 300, a P3-650. My office computer is 2 GH.
Ironically, the 2 Gigahertz machine has worse performance then the 650. The former has less RAM (!) and a more bloated OS. I asked my boss for more RAM, but I doubt it's gonna happen.
But seriously, for application development, what's the point of a 2 gig CPU if you're gonna be stuck with 256 megs of RAM and Win2K? I'll take the P650 with 512 megs of RAM and Win98 instead - it's about twice as fast:-p
My experience has been that more RAM is often just as good, or even better then, more CPU speed.
2. Google records everything they can: For all searches they record the cookie ID, your Internet IP address, the time and date, your search terms, and your browser configuration. Increasingly, Google is customizing results based on your IP number. This is referred to in the industry as "IP delivery based on geolocation."
----
It's a good thing I access it from many different locations (home, office, school, different office, friends' house, etc. etc.), many of which have dynamic IP addresses and/or firewalls and/or IP masquerading.
I have to say that IP devliery based on geolocation is a Bad Thing, at least as far as I'm concerned - I want raw results and let me sort through it all, please. They may think they know what I want, but they don't:-p
Clinton never had more then 49% of the popular vote, and that was in 1996, in 1992 is was only 43%. Should Clinton not have been elected president then? Oh wait, I'm sure such rules about requiring a true majority only apply to Republican candidates, right?:-P
My Yamaha SCSI CD-ROM works beautifully. It's over three years old and is a pitiful 4x speed, but I'm not desparate enough for speed to want to replace it as long it still works. Also, I'm not burning huge numbers of CDs (rather, I use it to do backups, which is mostly about once a month), so usage is fairly low. Still, I've been very, very happy with it.
Gesture based back/forward would seriously annoy the piss out of me. I'm no doubt a freak in this regard, but I like to randomly press my mouse keys and move the mouse around:-p Guess my mouse hand gets bored while I'm reading the page and just does stuff to stay busy.
But then, I assume it would be a configurable option, so probably nothing to worry about.
As for tab replacing back, I had been using "Open in New Window" for years before I switched to Mozilla, so the tabs just replaced new windows for me. I only rarely use the back button in any event.
I started doing that because browsers, astonishingly [to me], did not use cached pages when using the back button. Which boggles my mind as it is completely obvious to me that that is what they should do. Especially if the page took a long time to load (e.g. heavy congestion, or high bandwidth site) or if you're on a slow connection (which many people were years ago, and quite few still are today).
If you know you are going back to a given page, better to open a new window (or tab) and leave the old page open so you don't have to wait for the reload.
But then, I have some ideas for automobile design that seem completely obvious to me that could have been done 50 years ago that apparently nobody else has thought of yet:-p
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, I can see the idea of bounds checking and memory mangament and such things being done in a more transparent way (I hate things like String classes - Borland's AnsiString class disturbs me to no end! And don't even get me started on C++ exception handling...).
BUT, things like overrunning array bounds or dereferencing a free'd pointer is generally a case I want to know about and fix (i.e. have the app crash and burn), rather then have it be implicitly handled and keep running without my knowing about it. (mind you, I'm doing stand alone app development and not anything mission critical...)
And if it is a team of programmers and someone wrote an aspect to "silently fix and keep running" these types of problems, then I may be in a world of hurt later on. And finding a bug that was thus hidden would be a nightmare.
I mean, if I really want my program to handle "errors" in an "intuitive manner" and keep going, I'd write in Perl. (N.B. I *LIKE* Perl, but only for certain types of things).
Not really - such a huge number of games were released for the older systems, but we only remember the best of those games.
Today, you see a huge number of games released for your current system and are reminded every time you walk into a video game store of the ratio of good to bad games.
I remember playing Day of Defeat and finding it entirely too disturbing. I'm love studying WWII, but those who really died couldn't just respawn. I had to stop playing after just a few minutes on the Normandy scenario.
That depends. I sure wouldn't want to work with 20 other programmers, but if you've got, say 4-5 programmers, 1-2 designers, 2-3 sound/music guys and 15+ artists, that's quite workable and is 20+.
I don't think so - most hard core gamers will buy Windows just to play games, and most non-hard core gamers (i.e. the Wal Mart crowd) is already running windows anyways.
Macs and Unix are still just a drop in the bucket, OS wise. OpenGL, while it mostly works, isn't the bestest thing in the world.
Anyways, a good development house will have their own video library that wraps all the DirectX stuff, making it possible without too much pain to port to another library by just linking in a different DLL with the same wrapper functions (or maybe even use the same library but just with different state flags set!). Most don't do the port cause the market isn't there, but it isn't as horrible a thing as you might imagine.
It is interesting to see that many of the best games out there (Half-Life comes to mind) are games that were not subject to milestones or budget limitations or skew schedules. Games that developers could develop on their own terms.
Publishers don't like to let developers develop on their own terms, even though the best games are done that way.
They need to be more venture capitalist minded - sure, 10 out of 12 will go bust, one might break even and the 12th one will be a big hit that makes more money then was lost on all the rest.
But they are too risk averse, so we get crap.
*sigh*
One of the big problems is that people (mostly really just hard core gamers) want better and better "quality", which really means graphics and sound and everything BUT gameplay. But making the highest quality stuff is quite expensive - motion capture is not cheap, and developing the code to support it takes time and money as well. Original music for the soundtack? Also potentially quite expensive.
Small independent developers just can't afford these things. Those Madden games cost millions to make, but bring in tens to hundreds of millions. Only the big players can really sink that kind of cash in development.
I've heard many in the game industry say that production is moving to Hollywood style, with huge budgets, fancy graphics work, entire fresh musical scores, the works. And that's just darn expensive to do.
Heh - I agree fully. I had the great pleasure of working at Holistic Design for several years, which has designers who have, in fact, read Aristotle and many others. They are fantastic story tellers and excellent writers, but then, they were also the original authors for Vampire (Andrew Greenberg) and Werewolf (Bill Bridges) (commerical: Fading Suns is probably one of the deepest and richest RPGs on the market - go buy it, you'll like it :-)
But many (most?) games are seriously lacking in this regard. I was reading the MOO3 website and they were calling for fan fiction to create the backstory. Bleh.
Iraq is not Germany and the US is not France (thank God...). There is no way this war will even remotely resemble either world war.
Historically speaking, two dozen countries is a HUGE coalition. MEGA huge. Practically unheard of, short of the two world wars.
I think you mean:
George: "Tony, Tony, hurry, we found one"
Tony: "Yes georgie, I have my thumb already on the button"
George: "Shouldn't we first ring our friends and allies"
Tony: "Sure thing - I'll get on the phone right away to Italy, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Macedonia, Slovenia, Croatia, Japan and Kuwait!"
What would be the point of a model a second 0? We're already pretty close to that. What we really need is a model of second -1! But unfortunately, no amount of quantum physics will ever tell us what existed before the bigbang.
As far as Denmark, I'm not sure what constitutes a credible source on this (most of the sites covering it seem a bit wacko-ish), but try these:h tml (towards the bottom)e action/ho me.showEditorial/article/545.htm
http://www.policyreview.org/dec00/Bering.
http://worldwatchdaily.org/index.cfm/fus
Ever since the UN starting proposing splitting the land into two states, one jewish, one arab, each new map has created a larger and larger arab state and smaller and smaller jewish state. Every single time, the jews were willing to accept this, and every single time the arabs refused.
It isn't just that the arabs want a new country for the Palestinians (who have NEVER had an independent country throughout all of history), the arabs don't want any jews. The Palestinians are pawns for the other arab countries, and they seem content to play out that role.
Here's an column written by Martin Sherman on Dec 26, 2002 at IsraelNationalNews - yeah, it's heavily biased by the fact that he's jewish, but still quite an interesting read anyways:
----
Article 16: "...the people of Palestine, desiring to befriend all nations which love freedom, justice, and peace, look forward to their support in restoring the legitimate situation to Palestine... and [in] enabling its people to exercise national sovereignty and freedom."
Article 24: "This Organization does not exercise any territorial sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, [or] on the Gaza Strip..."
Article 26: "The Liberation Organization... does not interfere in the internal affairs of any Arab states."
These excerpts from the Palestinian National Charter, as it was formulated in 1964 by the inaugural convention of the Palestinian National Council in Cairo (where the Palestinian Liberation Organization was founded) are of significant consequence, for they point to a fundamental fallacy in the authenticity of the Palestinian claims for national self-determination. As can be seen, they explicitly eschew any claims of sovereignty in the territories of Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank") and the Gaza Strip, which they openly concede to the jurisdiction of the Jordanians and the Egyptians respectively.
This seriously cuts away the ground from under any claim that the "West Bank" and Gaza constitute the Palestinians ancient and long-yearned-for motherland, and to which they have unalienable and inexorable rights. On the one hand, this submissive concession of sovereignty over these territories to non-Palestinian rule indicates a remarkable malleability in the national aspirations of the Palestinians, which seems to fly in the face of conventional wisdom.
On the other hand, it is entirely consistent with the position taken by the late Zuheir Muhsin, formerly the head of the PLOs Military Department and member of its Executive Council.
Almost a decade and a half after the first public endorsement of the Palestinian Charter, on March 31, 1977, Muhsin made the following declaration in an interview with the Dutch daily Trouw: "There are no differences between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. We are all part of one nation. It is only for political reasons that we carefully underline our Palestinian identity, because it is in the interest of the Arabs to encourage a separate Palestinian identity. Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity serves only tactical purposes. The founding of a Palestinian state is a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel."
It thus appears that there is room for the "heretical" postulation that the true Palestinian desire is not really a state. Indeed, perhaps the time has come to suggest most of the prevailing conventional wisdom regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is totally unfounded, even misguided. For according to this wisdom, the fuel of the conflict is the lack of Palestinian self-determination, and that the goal of the Palestinians struggle is to establish a state for themselves. However, the competing explanation, which seems to emerge from the words and deeds of the Palestinians themselves, is quite the opposite. According to this explanation, the fuel of the conflict is not the lack of Palestinian self-determination, but the existence of Jewish self-determination. As long as Jewish self-determination persists, so will the conflict. Moreover, according to the alternative explanation, the goal of the Palestinians is not to establish a state for themselves but to dismantle a state for others - the Jews.
The question that now arises is: Which of these two alternative versions has the greater explanatory power? The answer seems to be unequivocally the latter. For it offers eminently plausible explanations for a range of events, which the former is powerless to account for.
For example:
- It explains why every territorial proposal, which would have allowed them to create a state of their own (from the 1947 partition plan to Baraks offer at Camp David in 2000), never satisfied Arab leadership.
- It explains why only the total negation of Jewish independence would appear acceptable to the Palestinians, as evidenced not only by their rejection of any viable offer for statehood, but by much of their rhetoric and symbolism, in which they invariably portray the whole the Land of Israel, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, as constituting part of Arab Palestine.
- It explains not only why the Palestinians refrained from attempting to exert their national sovereignty in the pre-1967 "West Bank" (as evidenced by their original National Charter), but why today the Palestinians, as an overwhelming majority in Jordan, resign themselves to the rule by a Hashemite Bedouin despot, who represents the minority in the land.
- It explains not only why they rejected the far-reaching generosity of the Barak proposal, but also the violent manner in which they rejected it.
- It explains why the Palestinians stubbornly insist on the "right of return," which would imply placing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians now living in Arab lands under Israeli jurisdiction. It is hardly consistent with an alleged desire to be free of oppressive Israeli control or with an equitable two-state solution.
By contrast, none of the above phenomena can be reconciled with the explanation propounded by the advocates of conventional wisdom. For, in reality, the Palestinians appear to have little motivation in expressing their national sovereignty in territories when they are under non-Palestinian, but Arab, rule. Strangely, this desire only manifests itself in these territories when they fall under Jewish rule. Indeed, Palestinian efforts seem far more comprehensible if seen as directed toward the the undermining and elimination of Jewish sovereignty (by demanding either Israeli withdrawals, where possible, or Arab repatriation, where not), than in the realization of their own independence.
If this is true, then making ever more generous proposals regarding Palestinian statehood will be totally unproductive, indeed counterproductive, for these will induce no peaceable response whatsoever. After all, as Muhsin said, "The founding of a Palestinian state is a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel."
It will be of great interest to see which explanation the next Israeli government adopts as the foundation of its policy toward the Palestinians - that which has considerable power to account for Palestinian behavior, or that which has none.
I worry that leaving Muslim lands is not enough.
Some muslims in Denmark already openly declare that when they have enough muslim bodies in the country, they will convert it to islamic law. If they succeed in Denmark, they will not stop there. There's MUCH more involved here then just simply "Foreign troops on holy soil."
----
This is an interesting data point to want to collect, but how much does it really mean? Both Islam & Judaism shun pork, but only the former are "known" to be the bomber type.
----
Actually, before the creation of Isreal in the 1940s, the Jews were every bit as terroristic as the Palestinians are today. In fact, they were very good at it. Of course, once the Jews got what they wanted (a country), they stopped.
Question is, what is it the muslims really want, i.e. what will it take to stop them?
Not that I think this pork thing is a good idea - it's dumb for all the reasons you point out.
My boss at my last job was amazed about the box cutter thing. He said if someone on a plane pulled out a box cutter on him, he'd be like "Dude, that's a bloody box cutter. Now put it away and sit down."
Of course, my boss was very tall and imposing - former army.
Ooh, ooh! I got a 286 LAPTOP! :-D
:-p
A 486, a P133, an AMD-K6 300, a P3-650.
My office computer is 2 GH.
Ironically, the 2 Gigahertz machine has worse performance then the 650. The former has less RAM (!) and a more bloated OS. I asked my boss for more RAM, but I doubt it's gonna happen.
But seriously, for application development, what's the point of a 2 gig CPU if you're gonna be stuck with 256 megs of RAM and Win2K? I'll take the P650 with 512 megs of RAM and Win98 instead - it's about twice as fast
My experience has been that more RAM is often just as good, or even better then, more CPU speed.
2. Google records everything they can:
:-p
For all searches they record the cookie ID, your Internet IP address, the time and date, your search terms, and your browser configuration. Increasingly, Google is customizing results based on your IP number. This is referred to in the industry as "IP delivery based on geolocation."
----
It's a good thing I access it from many different locations (home, office, school, different office, friends' house, etc. etc.), many of which have dynamic IP addresses and/or firewalls and/or IP masquerading.
I have to say that IP devliery based on geolocation is a Bad Thing, at least as far as I'm concerned - I want raw results and let me sort through it all, please. They may think they know what I want, but they don't
It's unlikely that Gore won Florida:
t m
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a14ee867d3d.h
http://weber.ucsd.edu/~mruben/florida.htm
Clinton never had more then 49% of the popular vote, and that was in 1996, in 1992 is was only 43%. Should Clinton not have been elected president then? Oh wait, I'm sure such rules about requiring a true majority only apply to Republican candidates, right? :-P
http://www.fec.gov/pdf/eleccoll.pdf
Er, CD-RW. Duh.
My Yamaha SCSI CD-ROM works beautifully. It's over three years old and is a pitiful 4x speed, but I'm not desparate enough for speed to want to replace it as long it still works. Also, I'm not burning huge numbers of CDs (rather, I use it to do backups, which is mostly about once a month), so usage is fairly low. Still, I've been very, very happy with it.
Yes, having a new browser window remember the "back" of the most recently closed browser would also be very handy to me as well.
Ah well.
Gesture based back/forward would seriously annoy the piss out of me. I'm no doubt a freak in this regard, but I like to randomly press my mouse keys and move the mouse around :-p
:-p
Guess my mouse hand gets bored while I'm reading the page and just does stuff to stay busy.
But then, I assume it would be a configurable option, so probably nothing to worry about.
As for tab replacing back, I had been using "Open in New Window" for years before I switched to Mozilla, so the tabs just replaced new windows for me. I only rarely use the back button in any event.
I started doing that because browsers, astonishingly [to me], did not use cached pages when using the back button. Which boggles my mind as it is completely obvious to me that that is what they should do. Especially if the page took a long time to load (e.g. heavy congestion, or high bandwidth site) or if you're on a slow connection (which many people were years ago, and quite few still are today).
If you know you are going back to a given page, better to open a new window (or tab) and leave the old page open so you don't have to wait for the reload.
But then, I have some ideas for automobile design that seem completely obvious to me that could have been done 50 years ago that apparently nobody else has thought of yet