Heh, yup, another laid off Puddle-towner here. And it's up to 8.1% now. Only problem with working at Fry's is commuting out to Wilsonville every day -- if I were willing to completely and utterly waste my time, I'd go work at Stream, which pays better and is MAX-accessible.
I've got a job interview up in Seattle this coming week -- if it falls through I'm probably going to throw in the towel and start taking as many classes as I can at PSU with transfer status, and start going for a master's in CS.
Other posters have done an excellent job of dissecting flawed analogies in this piece (which is a nice bit of idealism, but impractical)... but there's one other thing that I personally find amusing.
I'm a programmer by trade -- OSS doesn't feed me. My job does. (Actually, I'm laid off, so someone, please, hire me, because my OSS work still isn't feeding me.) And when I'm programming off the job, I'm going to do it in a way that I enjoy, on the platform that I enjoy working with most, because I'm doing it for me.
To this end, I'm pasting the following rant, which was originally written by Webb of geeknews.net before it went lame. I can't find it on Google anymore, so that's all the attribution I've got.
---
I have to admit: I'm one of those overly stereotypical males when it comes to directions. Never asked for 'em, probably never will. Sure, I realize I could probably get to my destination quicker if I did; but my joy is in the journey, rather than the destination. I apply the same logic when I choose what I code for. I could take Linux, for example, and have the huge, detailed, everything-available road map. Or Windows, let's say; the closed, mysterious unknown. Which would give me more satisfaction in accomplishing something? Windows. Because I, quite simply, am not sure how it does what it does. It's the thrill of the unknown. It's like the long courtship. Again, I'll draw an analogy: What's more fun, the woman who "gives it up" the night of the first date, or the woman who takes a month or two of playing hard to get? I suppose for some of the teenage readers, the first would sound good; hey, I'd agree if I were a few years younger. But for me, it's the long, slow, feeling out period. Getting to know my surroundings, having to work for what I end up with. That's why, as many people have questioned, I code for Windows.
Now, some of you may say: "But why support x y z that Microsoft does? It's 'so bad.'" To which I would reply, frankly, "Thbbbpt." I don't care what Microsoft does. They make software. It's almost like a game that I play with them, now, they make it, I find out what it does. It's fun. I enjoy it. With Linux, there is no hunt, there's no secrets. There's just code, no fun. "Wait a second, did he just call Windows FUN?" Yes, I did, as a matter of fact. It's fun like ripping open the box that your barbecue came in, and putting it together without the instructions, with 2 bolts and 3 nuts left over, and the damn thing still works admirably. It's the ultimate in do-it-yourself. It's this mass of stuff, that comes with a great set of tools (Win32 API), that you get to screw around with, dissect, and try to make something with it. Linux is simply the set of tools. Again, no secrets, nothing hidden, what you see is what you get. Yawn. Where's the prestige in fixing other people's mistakes? Where's the secrecy in having everyone else see the marvels that you've accomplished? I don't buy this rubbish about having your ego stroked; I have a girlfriend, writing code doesn't even compare. Not even close.
One of the other big things about Linux that doesn't interest me is the fact that it's so community-based. It's akin to bringing along your friends on the journey to destination X. So not only do you have the map, but you have a group of hangers-on that you have to bring with you! Why, exactly, should I care what Citizen Y has to say about my code? I don't get that in the Windows journey. I just have my car, my tools, and my secret bits. If other people want to come along; that's fine. But they stay out of your way. They bring their own car, and search for their own secret bits. They don't try to ride in your car, sleep in your tent, or eat your food. They understand that you're doing this for yourself, and they're doing it for themselves, and all is good. They're also a lot more flexible than the Linux community. They understand that there is more than one way to get a job done. There's no all-or-nothing mentality to Windows people. For some things, Open Source is
Get a clue -- the business, who are already quite rich from patenting bowling shoes and then renting out the balls and pins, merely has to pay the government off to pass a law to make those restrictions legal. Tada, the business plan makes perfect sense!
"Should not" has no place in the business world, where the regulatory bodies are just as stupid as the business owners. (More so, actually, since they're selling away their own freedoms.) The only thing to do is figure out ways to work around it -- or to move to another country where the government officials aren't so stupid.
Re:"Actively searching for new suppliers"?
on
iBox Episode 2
·
· Score: 1
Well, I definitely think the company in question is in the wrong. They broke contract and they should get fucked for it. And yes, Apple is a corporation and is required by law to exercise due diligence.
But I do think there are better ways for Apple to maintain and increase their market share and visibility among users than creating an artifical hardware shortage to drive up per-unit price. Ever tried to ebay for a replacement screen for a TiBook? They go as high as $700 for a 15".
It's the reason that I'm still using a Beige G3 minitower and stretching its life out with a ZIF-socket G4 instead of buying a new Mac, and why I use my much beefier PC more.
Re:"Actively searching for new suppliers"?
on
iBox Episode 2
·
· Score: 1
Well, Apple is certainly taking the standard monopoly practice of restricting output to raise both short-term and long-term prices... but the problem is, they're not big enough for that, and doing so means they lose the whole advantage of efficiency of scale that a monopoly provides... but at the same time they're small enough that the excess capacity theorem hasn't bitten them in the ass yet. And OEMs aren't one of the rare natural situations where single-firm production is cheapest... in fact, the current OEM market is a textbook oligopoly.
I think Apple's doing the smartest business move possible, even if it's not the most ethical. Even when Jobs' iMac singlehandedly revived the company, most Slashdotters blew it off because MacOS 9 sucked, and for the most part it did. Now, everyone's drooling over Mac OS X, with good reason. Apple needs to keep a stranglehold on the hardware in order to keep their software in that desirable area instead of just "the OS that Macs happen to use." I think it's actually more of a social target than an economic one.
Of course, you can still build a Mac from raw parts these days, you just can't do them in bulk the way the company in question needs.
Fellowship of the Ring Extended Edition. A four-disc set they released around Christmas-time last year that added another half hour or so to the movie. Notably so, also -- the scenes not just made the movie clearer, they actually prompted rearranging the shot order in some parts, and having actors speak lines previously said by other actors.
It was actually a nice addition to the movie, although I thought that the original was outstanding as is.
> An âoeaddictâ (to me at least) sticks with the same game even when more sophisticated one comes out.
Well, yes, but as you said, the draw of an MMORPG tends to transcend the actual game. I have two friends who play EQ pretty heavily despite the fact that there are superior games (superior both visually and gameplay-wise) such as AO, DAoC, and Shadowbane out: because all of their friends stay there. EQ has merely become a medium over which a very large group of friends communicate and share experiences -- the game is really just something for them all to do, and if physical distances weren't an issue they'd probably sit around a fire and drink just as readily.
However, they're somewhat well-adjusted people too -- they have jobs that they go to, friends like me that they hang out with in real life also, etc. So I think they're more hard-core players than addicts. Having played a lot of MMORPGs in the past and currently playing none, I think of the addicts as the kind who play constantly and will allow NO interruption -- neglecting marriages, children, jobs, etc. in pursuit of the game and the people within. Their life is the game, instead of the game being one of the largest parts of their life.
On the other hand, we tend to use it in the US to describe enthusiastic anime fans as a general group... in Japan, to call someone an otaku is nearly an insult; it has the connotations of having almost no social graces (or hygiene), it's someone whose life is pretty much defined solely by anime and related subjects.
But then, the lack of hygiene and social graces would define most/. posters too -- just replace anime with GPLed software.
The credit for this one goes to USian Pie, posted on April 18th 2001. The damned thing still makes me laugh to this day. Alas, I've had to modify the punctuation and spacing a little because of the minimum-avg-characters-per-line rule. The stupid filters aren't stopping the trolls anyways, you know... they're just as clever as you.
A long, long time ago I can still remember how the trollers used to make me smile And I knew that if I had to boast that I could try to get first post and maybe I'd be happy for a while But moderators made me shiver, with every minus they'd deliver DoS scripts couldn't stop it -- they scored them all "Offtopic." I know that it's cheap crack they smoke, and meta-moderation's broke, At first I thought it was a joke... The day that trolltalk died
Chorus: [2] Bye, bye, MEEPTy, OOG, and Grits guy Drove the Cruiser like some loser who starts posts with a *sigh* Those Steve Woston posts that we all knew were a lie Wonder what became of girls petrified? What became of girls petrified?
Did you write a bunch of Perl, and did it make you want to hurl feces at the wall? Can you believe these lame-ass polls? Do you post big stretched-out assholes? Can you make the goatse.cx link not show? Well I know you think that Siggy sucked -- Will the real Bruce Perens please stand up? The bots don't have a clue. Man, I dig those trolls from Shoe! I was a rabid Free Speech advocate, with a Red Hat T-shirt and a Free Beer gut Bought my Sony laptop working Pizza Hut, the day that trolltalk died...
-- Repeat Chorus --
It's been two years since the IPO, and LNUX sinks to all-time lows, but that's not how it used to be When Spiral showed how it was done, trolling as Jon Erikson, who worked for NPO Technologies Oh, and while they tried to filter posts, somebody rooted Slashdot's host. "Crack Slashdot? That's absurd!" Better go change your password... While JonKatz wrote a Hellmouth book by using posts he simply took And we flamed him till he was cooked, the day that trolltalk died
And we were singin...
-- Repeat Chorus --
10 grams. Inchfan. Didn't log out, goddamn -- the mods will find the sid real soon, man. You can't hide if you aren't AC... Your bud (George here) tried BSD, a dead streetlawyer's tips were free And WIPO helped letsriot turn Nazi 70 made his percents up, while 80md warned "liberals suck" The moon does not exist, it's just a liberal myth! Oh, and as Taco tried to take a nap, we forced him to invoke bitchslaps Do you recall the flood of crap the day that trolltalk died?
We started singin...
-- Repeat Chorus --
Oh and then we were wearing out "All your base" and started posting monospace, the better for our penis birds So come on, be a zealot, be a dick, you don't think Anne Marie's a chick? Because lying's all we do about HURD So go and push for BSD, and say GPL isn't free Slow down, cowboy! The limit is one post every minute! Now tell the right wing facist slime infringing on Your Rights Online that they can't censor all the time The day that trolltalk died...
-- Repeat Chorus --
I met a troll they called The Rev and asked him if CD BREAK HEAD. He said, "That's old. Get over it." And with all the courage I could muster, "Imagine what a Beowulf cluster..." but it wasn't worth the trouble to submit The karma caps are just plain jive, and everyone's moved to K5 The steelcage has grown rusted. and Geekizoid is busted And the three sites I don't see for weeks: Segfault, kernel, and Comp-u-geek Code is not art. This ain't Freshmeat. The day that trolltalk died
-- Repeat Chorus --
On that note, I wonder why there haven't been any stories about NVidia claiming that Futuremark is lying and trying to smear their name... funny how things have changed from the days where everyone cheating on benchmarks was just a given. But then, ATI seems to be cheating on 3DMark03 too -- they just didn't do nearly as thorough of a job as NVidia.
Java programs can still crash -- and believe me, grade homework for undergrad CS students for a few years and you'll see plenty of it. The only difference is that Java tosses an exception that isn't handled, and C either asserts and calls exit(-1) or segfaults.
I don't think it's fair to say that any one language is "safer" than another -- once you reach a certain level of expertise, one can write a stable and robust program in C or C++ or Java or Haskell (my preference) with equal effort. The effort is mental: being persistent enough to define solid logical definitions for each part of the program, failure conditions, etc. and then execute them to the letter in the language of choice. If the program behaves logically, you can prove that it works using logical principles -- induction and so on. (And if you ever do govt contracting or any other project that calls for requirement tracability, you'll need to.)
The difference between languages is merely the way the code is expressed. Java and C++ have exceptions; C does not. For some situations, return codes are better than exceptions, and for some situations the opposite is true. Java has robust runtime safety -- C and C++ do not. C and C++ have templated containers -- Java's just now getting such genericity. All languages and all approaches to problems have tradeoffs: the mark of a good programmer is knowing those tradeoffs and picking which is best for the situation.
Well, in all fairness, there's gameplay reasons to do it too. The classic example is Quake3 -- there was a bug in the engine where your in-game avatar could literally jump higher if you were going at least 120fps, because of inaccuracies in the physics engine. As a result there's a number of tricks -- jumps from one area to another, etc. -- that are extremely common in tournament play in Quake3-based games but that are impossible to do unless you can get at least 120 fps out of your system.
Of course, if programmers did their job, you'd be absolutely right.
Heh... I live in Multnomah County, and I actually know someone who could qualify. *rolled eyes*
(No, it's not me, I'm a Wars freak instead. Although my GF is a Trekkie.)
This will probably get stopped though once it hits the local news -- the state's in a nasty budget crisis right now (especially WRT the public school system... and right after we paid off MSFT to not audit us) and people are desperate to save money anywhere. Although you're likely right that they're required by law to provide it. If JEDI couldn't become an official religion, maybe TREK can...
I'm dead sure this is a troll, but it's a common enough misconception, so I'll bite. Quicktime and AVI are both generic interleaving formats; they can contain audio and video data of any form. A lot of movie prerelease groups are now doing releases in XviD or DivX5 with 5.1 AC3 transcoded to a lower bitrate, with decoding and re-encoding into 6ch Ogg or AAC if you're desperate for space.
Just like QT, AVIs can contain lossless codecs as well. HuffYUV and FLAC or Monkey's Audio (or just uncompressed PCM streams) work just fine inside AVI, and even better inside an Ogg stream.
And OGM's not immature, it's just new... it's just a multiplexed ogg stream that happens to have video. The Ogg stream format is certainly mature.
Macs are dominant for video editing because they have the best NLE software... the fact that FCP is cheap and works incredibly well has nothing to do with any qualities of the Quicktime container format. And if you're working in NLE, you're NOT likely to be using the Sorensen codecs that QT is known for.
What seems to be even more common in my experience are endings that are happy, but come after a major change in the setting or cast.
Examples: RahXephon,.hack//SIGN, Trigun
And then, there's some that just end, neither happy nor sad. Hellsing, Lain, etc...
(BTW: Any other SIGN fans out there really disappointed by.hack//tasogare no udewa densetsu? Blah. There's supposed to be an extra disc in addition to the OAV for the fourth PS/2 game containing a halfhour ep called.hack//Another Story that trails the SIGN cast after the finale and ties sign into the games, I'm praying that the fansubbers jump on it.)
The year is 1650. We've already made a couple of voyages to the new colonies. Everyone says that if you want to go there on your own, you need to spend a lot of money: building a rather large ship with multiple masts, training a crew of sailors to operate it, filling it with provisions for the journey, etc. Even if you plan ahead and take every precaution, it's still a perilous journey.
Steve Bennett claims that he can get to America on a tiny single-mast vessel made out of cheap wood by himself. If people point out the problems in this -- catching enough wind to move, rowing when there's no wind, lack of room for food, etc. he blows them off as saying that they're afraid of him accomplishing the impossible.
In all likelihood, he's going to end up drowning in the Pacific.
I mean, seriously. The man has never had any astronaut training, never been subjected to high Gs, and his last press frenzy involves him strapping a bunch of rockets to a converted cement mixer and launching himself into the air. That's nearly 12 Gs of acceleration -- we feed high-oxygen air to fighter pilots who experience 3 or 4 Gs at best to keep them from blacking out.
1) Jobs' ego. Jobs has said on the record that he'll resign before he builds an Apple box with an Intel chip. (I honestly don't remember where that rivalry originates.)
2) Developer opinion. Dvorak is primarly a PC man -- I think he missed much of the outcry that occurred when we switched from 68K to PPC. For that matter, there's still bits of Carbon that date back to 68K, such as setting and unsetting the A5 world register for callback routines. Also consider that the killer apps of the Mac world (Adobe products, Quark, etc) are just now becoming native to OS X. The outcry if we had to switch to a new OS would be massive. There's also the fact that the PPC ISA is backwards compatible with the 68K -- all existing apps for Apple would have to be emulated. Can you say "fuck no," children?
3) Architecture differences. True, you can recompile the Darwin microkernel for Intel. There's a lot of differences though in the hardware -- for example, Macs directly work with the INT# lines on the PCI bus, they don't have IRQs. It would be incredibly costly for Apple to eschew the current standards in PC motherboard design and make their own chipset.
4) IBM. The PowerPC architecture is not slow in and of itself -- it's just a spec for a RISC instruction set. The problem lies in Motorola, who no longer relies on Apple for business now that their wireless division supports the company, and who has been dragging their heels on their PPC line. IBM's new PowerPC 970 is a desktop version of their Power5 server processor (including its unusual pipeline design) planned to debut at 1.8GHz on a 0.13 micron process. Yum.
There's also the point that Dvorak is known as a rumor-spouting gasbag... and one who has a chip on his shoulder for Apple. The guy used to write for MacWorld until he had a falling out with Apple management, and has become notorious for his anti-Apple bias ever since.
Very true. The article mentioned a similar problem with SOAP, using XML to encode parameters for RPC calls and transmitting them using HTTP. Utter tripe, but it'll probably become accepted by force since Microsoft uses it in.Net:\
Part of it is also the fact that XML's strengths are in hierarchical data. If I write something that works with tabular data, you know what I'm gonna use? CSV. Simple and works, and if it ain't broke, don't fix it. *grin*
(My biggest beef with XML actually came once I tried to write my own processor -- writing a fully compliant parser prevents cheap stupid recursive descent parsing; you have to use LR or LALR. And that's after you've put together the required code to handle UTF-8 and the other myriad encodings... I'm tempted to write a program that takes as input a XML schema and target encoding, and outputs a table implementing a NFA/DFA that blindly parses a data file and just chokes fatally on any errors.)
Since you apparently know nothing about XML, try reading the article. You'll learn something new, and you won't have to talk out your ass on this topic.
XML's not a language -- it's a grammar, a guide of sorts, for hierarchical data storage. You design file formats that conform to XML. The goal is that it's easy to read that file format in any language or platform (given a XML processor/parser for that platform), since your data is stored in plain human-readable UTF8-encoded text.
Might as well poke fun at the rest of your idiocy -- as it happens, HTML 4 is pretty close to being XML-conformant, and the W3C's now pushing XHTML which is fully conformant.
Granted, a lot of people treat XML as another buzzword, the way that OOP once was. It's not a magic bullet -- it's just a guide to making cross-platform file formats, and it works pretty well for that.
Err... minor correction, PortTalk is opensource. However, it just traps the inport/outport instructions in software written for 9x (which allows direct port writes) and allows it to go through. WinIO allows direct mapping of physical memory addresses and other handy bits... and again, actually doing the port work safely tends to take more precision and robustness that most coders are willing to put into their work.
PortTalk and Port95NT are closed source and produced by a commercial company, whereas there are better libraries such as WinIO that are BSD-license.
And, you'll find that most of the code out there just blindly writes to the data bus at 0x0378. The more complex stuff, such as scanning the BIOS configuration area for addresses and then doing ECP config register writes for each one, and working with the status/control pins, are a bit beyond the average Perl hack.
And then, there's the actual art of getting the info you need.
One thing to remember though is that you're not allowed access to the ports under Win32 NT-family kernels except through a Ring 0 driver. That can get a little ugly.
Google for "Beyond Logic" and you'll find a site that lays out more info on the legacy ports and on making peripherals for them (and for USB) than you could read in a day.
(Mind, it's pretty easy to make a serial one too. There's a UART called the CDP6402 that's specifically designed to run without a master uC; just add an osc to get 4x the desired baud rate and use an octal latch to maintain the output with an RC circuit to generate the rcv ack pulse, and you're set.)
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, yup, another laid off Puddle-towner here. And it's up to 8.1% now. Only problem with working at Fry's is commuting out to Wilsonville every day -- if I were willing to completely and utterly waste my time, I'd go work at Stream, which pays better and is MAX-accessible.
I've got a job interview up in Seattle this coming week -- if it falls through I'm probably going to throw in the towel and start taking as many classes as I can at PSU with transfer status, and start going for a master's in CS.
Other posters have done an excellent job of dissecting flawed analogies in this piece (which is a nice bit of idealism, but impractical)... but there's one other thing that I personally find amusing.
I'm a programmer by trade -- OSS doesn't feed me. My job does. (Actually, I'm laid off, so someone, please, hire me, because my OSS work still isn't feeding me.) And when I'm programming off the job, I'm going to do it in a way that I enjoy, on the platform that I enjoy working with most, because I'm doing it for me.
To this end, I'm pasting the following rant, which was originally written by Webb of geeknews.net before it went lame. I can't find it on Google anymore, so that's all the attribution I've got.
---
I have to admit: I'm one of those overly stereotypical males when it comes to directions. Never asked for 'em, probably never will. Sure, I realize I could probably get to my destination quicker if I did; but my joy is in the journey, rather than the destination. I apply the same logic when I choose what I code for. I could take Linux, for example, and have the huge, detailed, everything-available road map. Or Windows, let's say; the closed, mysterious unknown. Which would give me more satisfaction in accomplishing something? Windows. Because I, quite simply, am not sure how it does what it does. It's the thrill of the unknown. It's like the long courtship. Again, I'll draw an analogy: What's more fun, the woman who "gives it up" the night of the first date, or the woman who takes a month or two of playing hard to get? I suppose for some of the teenage readers, the first would sound good; hey, I'd agree if I were a few years younger. But for me, it's the long, slow, feeling out period. Getting to know my surroundings, having to work for what I end up with. That's why, as many people have questioned, I code for Windows.
Now, some of you may say: "But why support x y z that Microsoft does? It's 'so bad.'" To which I would reply, frankly, "Thbbbpt." I don't care what Microsoft does. They make software. It's almost like a game that I play with them, now, they make it, I find out what it does. It's fun. I enjoy it. With Linux, there is no hunt, there's no secrets. There's just code, no fun. "Wait a second, did he just call Windows FUN?" Yes, I did, as a matter of fact. It's fun like ripping open the box that your barbecue came in, and putting it together without the instructions, with 2 bolts and 3 nuts left over, and the damn thing still works admirably. It's the ultimate in do-it-yourself. It's this mass of stuff, that comes with a great set of tools (Win32 API), that you get to screw around with, dissect, and try to make something with it. Linux is simply the set of tools. Again, no secrets, nothing hidden, what you see is what you get. Yawn. Where's the prestige in fixing other people's mistakes? Where's the secrecy in having everyone else see the marvels that you've accomplished? I don't buy this rubbish about having your ego stroked; I have a girlfriend, writing code doesn't even compare. Not even close.
One of the other big things about Linux that doesn't interest me is the fact that it's so community-based. It's akin to bringing along your friends on the journey to destination X. So not only do you have the map, but you have a group of hangers-on that you have to bring with you! Why, exactly, should I care what Citizen Y has to say about my code? I don't get that in the Windows journey. I just have my car, my tools, and my secret bits. If other people want to come along; that's fine. But they stay out of your way. They bring their own car, and search for their own secret bits. They don't try to ride in your car, sleep in your tent, or eat your food. They understand that you're doing this for yourself, and they're doing it for themselves, and all is good. They're also a lot more flexible than the Linux community. They understand that there is more than one way to get a job done. There's no all-or-nothing mentality to Windows people. For some things, Open Source is
Get a clue -- the business, who are already quite rich from patenting bowling shoes and then renting out the balls and pins, merely has to pay the government off to pass a law to make those restrictions legal. Tada, the business plan makes perfect sense!
"Should not" has no place in the business world, where the regulatory bodies are just as stupid as the business owners. (More so, actually, since they're selling away their own freedoms.) The only thing to do is figure out ways to work around it -- or to move to another country where the government officials aren't so stupid.
Well, I definitely think the company in question is in the wrong. They broke contract and they should get fucked for it. And yes, Apple is a corporation and is required by law to exercise due diligence.
But I do think there are better ways for Apple to maintain and increase their market share and visibility among users than creating an artifical hardware shortage to drive up per-unit price. Ever tried to ebay for a replacement screen for a TiBook? They go as high as $700 for a 15".
It's the reason that I'm still using a Beige G3 minitower and stretching its life out with a ZIF-socket G4 instead of buying a new Mac, and why I use my much beefier PC more.
Well, Apple is certainly taking the standard monopoly practice of restricting output to raise both short-term and long-term prices... but the problem is, they're not big enough for that, and doing so means they lose the whole advantage of efficiency of scale that a monopoly provides... but at the same time they're small enough that the excess capacity theorem hasn't bitten them in the ass yet. And OEMs aren't one of the rare natural situations where single-firm production is cheapest... in fact, the current OEM market is a textbook oligopoly.
I think Apple's doing the smartest business move possible, even if it's not the most ethical. Even when Jobs' iMac singlehandedly revived the company, most Slashdotters blew it off because MacOS 9 sucked, and for the most part it did. Now, everyone's drooling over Mac OS X, with good reason. Apple needs to keep a stranglehold on the hardware in order to keep their software in that desirable area instead of just "the OS that Macs happen to use." I think it's actually more of a social target than an economic one.
Of course, you can still build a Mac from raw parts these days, you just can't do them in bulk the way the company in question needs.
It's utter bullshit, is what it is.
BeOS was a microkernel. Wasn't necessarily commercially successful by some people's metrics, but it was certainly a sellable product.
Mac OS X is based on the Mach 3 microkernel.
The NT kernel is monolithic. About the only part that's segmented out is that it takes advantage of the 386 protected-mode privilege rings.
The rest of the article is alright, but that's one hell of a technical error.
Fellowship of the Ring Extended Edition. A four-disc set they released around Christmas-time last year that added another half hour or so to the movie. Notably so, also -- the scenes not just made the movie clearer, they actually prompted rearranging the shot order in some parts, and having actors speak lines previously said by other actors.
It was actually a nice addition to the movie, although I thought that the original was outstanding as is.
> An âoeaddictâ (to me at least) sticks with the same game even when more sophisticated one comes out.
Well, yes, but as you said, the draw of an MMORPG tends to transcend the actual game. I have two friends who play EQ pretty heavily despite the fact that there are superior games (superior both visually and gameplay-wise) such as AO, DAoC, and Shadowbane out: because all of their friends stay there. EQ has merely become a medium over which a very large group of friends communicate and share experiences -- the game is really just something for them all to do, and if physical distances weren't an issue they'd probably sit around a fire and drink just as readily.
However, they're somewhat well-adjusted people too -- they have jobs that they go to, friends like me that they hang out with in real life also, etc. So I think they're more hard-core players than addicts. Having played a lot of MMORPGs in the past and currently playing none, I think of the addicts as the kind who play constantly and will allow NO interruption -- neglecting marriages, children, jobs, etc. in pursuit of the game and the people within. Their life is the game, instead of the game being one of the largest parts of their life.
On the other hand, we tend to use it in the US to describe enthusiastic anime fans as a general group... in Japan, to call someone an otaku is nearly an insult; it has the connotations of having almost no social graces (or hygiene), it's someone whose life is pretty much defined solely by anime and related subjects.
/. posters too -- just replace anime with GPLed software.
But then, the lack of hygiene and social graces would define most
I thought it was herring breath... if you fail save vs. breath weapon you take 1d6+6 damage from suffocation :P
The credit for this one goes to USian Pie, posted on April 18th 2001. The damned thing still makes me laugh to this day. Alas, I've had to modify the punctuation and spacing a little because of the minimum-avg-characters-per-line rule. The stupid filters aren't stopping the trolls anyways, you know... they're just as clever as you.
..." but it wasn't worth the trouble to submit
A long, long time ago
I can still remember how
the trollers used to make me smile
And I knew that if I had to boast
that I could try to get first post
and maybe I'd be happy for a while
But moderators made me shiver, with every minus they'd deliver
DoS scripts couldn't stop it -- they scored them all "Offtopic."
I know that it's cheap crack they smoke, and meta-moderation's broke,
At first I thought it was a joke... The day that trolltalk died
Chorus: [2]
Bye, bye, MEEPTy, OOG, and Grits guy
Drove the Cruiser like some loser who starts posts with a *sigh*
Those Steve Woston posts that we all knew were a lie
Wonder what became of girls petrified?
What became of girls petrified?
Did you write a bunch of Perl, and did it make you want to hurl feces at the wall?
Can you believe these lame-ass polls? Do you post big stretched-out assholes?
Can you make the goatse.cx link not show?
Well I know you think that Siggy sucked -- Will the real Bruce Perens please stand up?
The bots don't have a clue. Man, I dig those trolls from Shoe!
I was a rabid Free Speech advocate, with a Red Hat T-shirt and a Free Beer gut
Bought my Sony laptop working Pizza Hut, the day that trolltalk died...
-- Repeat Chorus --
It's been two years since the IPO, and LNUX sinks to all-time lows, but that's not how it used to be
When Spiral showed how it was done, trolling as Jon Erikson, who worked for NPO Technologies
Oh, and while they tried to filter posts, somebody rooted Slashdot's host.
"Crack Slashdot? That's absurd!" Better go change your password...
While JonKatz wrote a Hellmouth book by using posts he simply took
And we flamed him till he was cooked, the day that trolltalk died
And we were singin...
-- Repeat Chorus --
10 grams. Inchfan. Didn't log out, goddamn -- the mods will find the sid real soon, man.
You can't hide if you aren't AC...
Your bud (George here) tried BSD, a dead streetlawyer's tips were free
And WIPO helped letsriot turn Nazi
70 made his percents up, while 80md warned "liberals suck"
The moon does not exist, it's just a liberal myth!
Oh, and as Taco tried to take a nap, we forced him to invoke bitchslaps
Do you recall the flood of crap the day that trolltalk died?
We started singin...
-- Repeat Chorus --
Oh and then we were wearing out "All your base"
and started posting monospace, the better for our penis birds
So come on, be a zealot, be a dick, you don't think Anne Marie's a chick?
Because lying's all we do about HURD
So go and push for BSD, and say GPL isn't free
Slow down, cowboy! The limit is one post every minute!
Now tell the right wing facist slime infringing on Your Rights Online that they can't censor all the time
The day that trolltalk died...
-- Repeat Chorus --
I met a troll they called The Rev and asked him if CD BREAK HEAD. He said, "That's old. Get over it."
And with all the courage I could muster, "Imagine what a Beowulf cluster
The karma caps are just plain jive, and everyone's moved to K5
The steelcage has grown rusted. and Geekizoid is busted
And the three sites I don't see for weeks: Segfault, kernel, and Comp-u-geek
Code is not art. This ain't Freshmeat. The day that trolltalk died
-- Repeat Chorus --
On that note, I wonder why there haven't been any stories about NVidia claiming that Futuremark is lying and trying to smear their name... funny how things have changed from the days where everyone cheating on benchmarks was just a given. But then, ATI seems to be cheating on 3DMark03 too -- they just didn't do nearly as thorough of a job as NVidia.
The video is of the Return of the King video game, as shown at E3... not the movie.
At least, that's what the article seems to imply.
Java programs can still crash -- and believe me, grade homework for undergrad CS students for a few years and you'll see plenty of it. The only difference is that Java tosses an exception that isn't handled, and C either asserts and calls exit(-1) or segfaults.
I don't think it's fair to say that any one language is "safer" than another -- once you reach a certain level of expertise, one can write a stable and robust program in C or C++ or Java or Haskell (my preference) with equal effort. The effort is mental: being persistent enough to define solid logical definitions for each part of the program, failure conditions, etc. and then execute them to the letter in the language of choice. If the program behaves logically, you can prove that it works using logical principles -- induction and so on. (And if you ever do govt contracting or any other project that calls for requirement tracability, you'll need to.)
The difference between languages is merely the way the code is expressed. Java and C++ have exceptions; C does not. For some situations, return codes are better than exceptions, and for some situations the opposite is true. Java has robust runtime safety -- C and C++ do not. C and C++ have templated containers -- Java's just now getting such genericity. All languages and all approaches to problems have tradeoffs: the mark of a good programmer is knowing those tradeoffs and picking which is best for the situation.
Well, in all fairness, there's gameplay reasons to do it too. The classic example is Quake3 -- there was a bug in the engine where your in-game avatar could literally jump higher if you were going at least 120fps, because of inaccuracies in the physics engine. As a result there's a number of tricks -- jumps from one area to another, etc. -- that are extremely common in tournament play in Quake3-based games but that are impossible to do unless you can get at least 120 fps out of your system.
Of course, if programmers did their job, you'd be absolutely right.
Heh... I live in Multnomah County, and I actually know someone who could qualify. *rolled eyes*
(No, it's not me, I'm a Wars freak instead. Although my GF is a Trekkie.)
This will probably get stopped though once it hits the local news -- the state's in a nasty budget crisis right now (especially WRT the public school system... and right after we paid off MSFT to not audit us) and people are desperate to save money anywhere. Although you're likely right that they're required by law to provide it. If JEDI couldn't become an official religion, maybe TREK can...
I'm dead sure this is a troll, but it's a common enough misconception, so I'll bite. Quicktime and AVI are both generic interleaving formats; they can contain audio and video data of any form. A lot of movie prerelease groups are now doing releases in XviD or DivX5 with 5.1 AC3 transcoded to a lower bitrate, with decoding and re-encoding into 6ch Ogg or AAC if you're desperate for space.
Just like QT, AVIs can contain lossless codecs as well. HuffYUV and FLAC or Monkey's Audio (or just uncompressed PCM streams) work just fine inside AVI, and even better inside an Ogg stream.
And OGM's not immature, it's just new... it's just a multiplexed ogg stream that happens to have video. The Ogg stream format is certainly mature.
Macs are dominant for video editing because they have the best NLE software... the fact that FCP is cheap and works incredibly well has nothing to do with any qualities of the Quicktime container format. And if you're working in NLE, you're NOT likely to be using the Sorensen codecs that QT is known for.
What seems to be even more common in my experience are endings that are happy, but come after a major change in the setting or cast.
.hack//SIGN, Trigun
.hack//tasogare no udewa densetsu? Blah. There's supposed to be an extra disc in addition to the OAV for the fourth PS/2 game containing a halfhour ep called .hack//Another Story that trails the SIGN cast after the finale and ties sign into the games, I'm praying that the fansubbers jump on it.)
Examples: RahXephon,
And then, there's some that just end, neither happy nor sad. Hellsing, Lain, etc...
(BTW: Any other SIGN fans out there really disappointed by
Hahah -- indeed. Sorry, was talking with someone about Pacific Rim volcanos at the time, and dyslexia struck :P
Bad comparisons. Here's a better one.
The year is 1650. We've already made a couple of voyages to the new colonies. Everyone says that if you want to go there on your own, you need to spend a lot of money: building a rather large ship with multiple masts, training a crew of sailors to operate it, filling it with provisions for the journey, etc. Even if you plan ahead and take every precaution, it's still a perilous journey.
Steve Bennett claims that he can get to America on a tiny single-mast vessel made out of cheap wood by himself. If people point out the problems in this -- catching enough wind to move, rowing when there's no wind, lack of room for food, etc. he blows them off as saying that they're afraid of him accomplishing the impossible.
In all likelihood, he's going to end up drowning in the Pacific.
I mean, seriously. The man has never had any astronaut training, never been subjected to high Gs, and his last press frenzy involves him strapping a bunch of rockets to a converted cement mixer and launching himself into the air. That's nearly 12 Gs of acceleration -- we feed high-oxygen air to fighter pilots who experience 3 or 4 Gs at best to keep them from blacking out.
1) Jobs' ego. Jobs has said on the record that he'll resign before he builds an Apple box with an Intel chip. (I honestly don't remember where that rivalry originates.)
2) Developer opinion. Dvorak is primarly a PC man -- I think he missed much of the outcry that occurred when we switched from 68K to PPC. For that matter, there's still bits of Carbon that date back to 68K, such as setting and unsetting the A5 world register for callback routines. Also consider that the killer apps of the Mac world (Adobe products, Quark, etc) are just now becoming native to OS X. The outcry if we had to switch to a new OS would be massive. There's also the fact that the PPC ISA is backwards compatible with the 68K -- all existing apps for Apple would have to be emulated. Can you say "fuck no," children?
3) Architecture differences. True, you can recompile the Darwin microkernel for Intel. There's a lot of differences though in the hardware -- for example, Macs directly work with the INT# lines on the PCI bus, they don't have IRQs. It would be incredibly costly for Apple to eschew the current standards in PC motherboard design and make their own chipset.
4) IBM. The PowerPC architecture is not slow in and of itself -- it's just a spec for a RISC instruction set. The problem lies in Motorola, who no longer relies on Apple for business now that their wireless division supports the company, and who has been dragging their heels on their PPC line. IBM's new PowerPC 970 is a desktop version of their Power5 server processor (including its unusual pipeline design) planned to debut at 1.8GHz on a 0.13 micron process. Yum.
There's also the point that Dvorak is known as a rumor-spouting gasbag... and one who has a chip on his shoulder for Apple. The guy used to write for MacWorld until he had a falling out with Apple management, and has become notorious for his anti-Apple bias ever since.
Very true. The article mentioned a similar problem with SOAP, using XML to encode parameters for RPC calls and transmitting them using HTTP. Utter tripe, but it'll probably become accepted by force since Microsoft uses it in .Net :\
Part of it is also the fact that XML's strengths are in hierarchical data. If I write something that works with tabular data, you know what I'm gonna use? CSV. Simple and works, and if it ain't broke, don't fix it. *grin*
(My biggest beef with XML actually came once I tried to write my own processor -- writing a fully compliant parser prevents cheap stupid recursive descent parsing; you have to use LR or LALR. And that's after you've put together the required code to handle UTF-8 and the other myriad encodings... I'm tempted to write a program that takes as input a XML schema and target encoding, and outputs a table implementing a NFA/DFA that blindly parses a data file and just chokes fatally on any errors.)
Since you apparently know nothing about XML, try reading the article. You'll learn something new, and you won't have to talk out your ass on this topic.
XML's not a language -- it's a grammar, a guide of sorts, for hierarchical data storage. You design file formats that conform to XML. The goal is that it's easy to read that file format in any language or platform (given a XML processor/parser for that platform), since your data is stored in plain human-readable UTF8-encoded text.
Might as well poke fun at the rest of your idiocy -- as it happens, HTML 4 is pretty close to being XML-conformant, and the W3C's now pushing XHTML which is fully conformant.
Granted, a lot of people treat XML as another buzzword, the way that OOP once was. It's not a magic bullet -- it's just a guide to making cross-platform file formats, and it works pretty well for that.
Err... minor correction, PortTalk is opensource. However, it just traps the inport/outport instructions in software written for 9x (which allows direct port writes) and allows it to go through. WinIO allows direct mapping of physical memory addresses and other handy bits... and again, actually doing the port work safely tends to take more precision and robustness that most coders are willing to put into their work.
PortTalk and Port95NT are closed source and produced by a commercial company, whereas there are better libraries such as WinIO that are BSD-license.
And, you'll find that most of the code out there just blindly writes to the data bus at 0x0378. The more complex stuff, such as scanning the BIOS configuration area for addresses and then doing ECP config register writes for each one, and working with the status/control pins, are a bit beyond the average Perl hack.
And then, there's the actual art of getting the info you need.
One thing to remember though is that you're not allowed access to the ports under Win32 NT-family kernels except through a Ring 0 driver. That can get a little ugly.
Google for "Beyond Logic" and you'll find a site that lays out more info on the legacy ports and on making peripherals for them (and for USB) than you could read in a day.
(Mind, it's pretty easy to make a serial one too. There's a UART called the CDP6402 that's specifically designed to run without a master uC; just add an osc to get 4x the desired baud rate and use an octal latch to maintain the output with an RC circuit to generate the rcv ack pulse, and you're set.)