We have quite a few problems. Mostly things like parents who neglect their children to game.
In part, though, online gaming with things like MMOs are just less popular here. The online games that most Americans play are FPS games (eg Halo), which aren't the game of kind you find any need to play for three days straight - the game is made up of short rounds, and there is no carry over of gear or experience between rounds, and the game is far too fast paced to use it as a meaningful social experience.
We also have a legal system in which a shop owner that allowed a man to stay in his cafe for three days straight could be sued for negligence, just like a bartender who serves too many drinks allowing a man to drink himself to death can be held legally accountable. If Internet cafe owners were told that they'd be fined or jailed for allowing people to play more than X hours in their cafe, I bet they'd start cutting people off and saving (a small handful) of lives.
First: PCC has not YET supplanted GCC. The BSDs are hoping it will in the future.
Second: The biggest attraction of PCC is NOT the license. The article submitter who stated otherwise is a jackass.
Third: There are techical reasons why GCC is actaully unusable by some BSDs, such as NetBSD, which aims to support many architectures that GCC has dropped. NetBSD uses a combination of GCC 2, 3, and 4 to compile all of its different architectures. The NetBSD developers would rather have a single compiler that handles them all. Obviously PCC is nowhere near that level yet, of course.
Fourth: GCC politics are a pain in the ass for many BSD developers who just want to submit patches to a compiler without the overhead of GNU's policies and GCC's management.
Fifth: GCC produces crappy code more often than anyone would like. GCC bugs are far from unheard of, performance of generated code is often unpredictable between releases, and in many less commonly used architectures or sources GCC will produce incorrect code. Yes, these cases are very rare, but the BSD folks have hit the problem often enough for it to be a concern. PCC, being simpler and less bloated with cruft from multiple rewrites of the internals will hopefully produce correct and predictable code more often than GCC.
Sixth: PCC actually works today. It can compile most of the NetBSD userspace, as I recall, and the kernel will be ready to roll soon after some inline assembler problems are fixed. This isn't some theoretical hacky project - it works right now. It's not ready to replace GCC just yet, by any means, but it's a lot more than some Slashdotters seem to think it is.
The biggest reason for the new compiler (despite the jackass article submitter's position) is that GCC does *NOT* support every architecture. GCC drops architectures frequently as the core contributors lose interest, which hurts OSes like NetBSD that try to support more than the mainstream architectures. NetBSD relies on a combination of GCC 2, 3, and 4 to compile the OS on all of the architectures it supports.
The idea with PCC is not that it will be BSD licensed (nobody really gives a fuck what license the compiler is under), but that it will be supported directly by the BSD community, including the NetBSD hackers who have their bazillion architectures to support.
You realize that Kwin is including all of the 3D graphical foofah in new versions, right? Compiz is a WM that you can swap out with Metacity (or anything else) whenever you want, but your desktop is coming with the special effects built-in to the default window manager.
Thankfully, you're using KDE, so you'll have at least 8 checkboxes to disable it.;)
It's going to suck playing a Druid. "Protect the forest? Or beat the crap out of trees to get talents? I use the talentes to protect the forest, so is it justified? But then, I'm not really protecting it at all if I'm harassing all the animal nests to get talents. I should have been a Cleric, dammit."
Read the fucking link, instead of ripping on the guy for selectively chosen comments without their supporting context and explanation.
(a) He says OOXML is great not because the specification itself is a work of engineering genius, but because out in the Real World is easier to implement than ODF. That might not be for a good reason (OOXML is similar to existing World formats in structure, and so existing code is easily modified to use it, where ODF requires an entirely new approach and so is far harder to add to existing software), but it's certainly a different story than Miguel just blindly loving the OOXML spec.
(b) The patent protection claim is exactly what it sounds like, except for the fact that there are NO known parents which Moonlight or Mono infringe. It's a simple of matter of, "if something comes up, we won't sue your customers." Those same companies (Microsoft and the MPEGLA group) are still totally free to sue the developers and companies behind FFMPEG, Linux, GNOME, KDE, Apache, X.org, OpenOffice.org, etc. Nothing about the protection Novell offers will increase the risk of those lawsuits - all it does is decrease the risk for people who download from them. It's a nice gesture that some suit-wearing types give a fuck about, and the rest of us are free to ignore just like we ignore the patent minefield for every other project, all of which are guaranteed to be infringing _something_.
(c) The article submitter is a sensationalist jackass.
[quote]They just know Microsoft won't do anything, since they are semi-partners and all.[/quote]
Bull. This has NEVER been stated anywhere by anyone with an actual clue as to what the legal agreements in place are, what patents Microsoft has, or what the Mono team knows.
Quit spouting lies without at least trying to back them up with a credible reference.
For what it's worth, Portrait of Ruin got rid of the touchscreen addons. They learned their lesson.
I'd also wager against the motion control being that big of a thing for the Wii. Twilight Princess played much like any other 3D Zelda. Some of the best games on the Wii are virtual console titles that use the classic controller or a Gamecube controller.
If a game can use the new feature, great, but games don't need them. At least some developers know that.
Because you're going to HIS site. He gets paid to support said site by your browsing displaying the ads, which is tracked by image requests to the ad server. The ad blocker extensions usually ignore the ads entirely, so the browser doesn't generate any hits for the ad, and the site owner loses money.
He wouldn't have a problem if the ad blocker would still generate a hit but use CSS to make the image hidden on the browser. Of course, the ad companies themselves would then have a huge problem with that, since they're paying people for "displaying" ads nobody sees.
I'd think that a better ad blocker would be one that just blocked flash and converted animated GIFs into non-animated images and then displayed them. A static image isn't that irritating, it still generates hits, and so long as advertisers aren't being dumbasses, their ads will still be seen.
People said the same damn thing about D&D, and then AD&D, and then second edition AD&D, and then D&D 3.0. "I'm not buying the new edition, I wasted more money than I can count on these [lame-ass over-priced useless] source books!"
A year or two after the new edition was out, they all usually break down and buy the new edition, sell off their old books to collectors or hobby stores, and move on.
Or you can be one of those old foggies who swears by the old edition, never upgrades, and then runs out of people to play with. But then, if you honestly bought every single 3.5 source book (seriously, why the hell would you possibly need all of those?), I imagine you have bigger problems than finding people to play with.
The more you abstract something, the less efficient it becomes. This is not at all true, especially not today. I'd trust an abstract container library to optimize its internals far more than I'd trust you or almost any other individual developer to do the same.
I trust my C compiler to get the vary many high-level optimizations required by today's CPUs right than I'd trust you or almost any other individual developer to do the same.
Yeah, sometimes those high level libraries or languages get things wrong, but that's not a given just because they're more abstract. It's merely an implementation bug.
If you had some C code that was being inefficiently compared to assembler code, then you just don't know how to write efficient C code or you were using a shit compiler.
You can quite clearly see the difference. When the screens get up to 1000 DPI, then maybe we'll have a reason to stop increasing resolution. Until then, the pixels are still way too large. Look at how much effort goes into font rendering (and it still pretty much sucks). If we had 1000 DPI screens, or even 300 DPI screens for that matter, we wouldn't need sub-pixel anti-aliasing, font hinting, etc. And things would look super crystal clear.
I used to say the same thing about HDTV. "TV looks fine now. How much better could it be?" Then I actually saw some HDTV programs. Then I said the same thing about HD-DVD/Bluray. "DVDs are sharp, like HDTV! How much better could it be?" Then I saw some HD-DVD movies on a 1080p TV.
It's going to be a long time before we stop having a need to increase resolution.
We also these days have a color problem. 24-bit (8-bit per component) color seems like a lot, but it doesn't compare to even 10-bit per component color. I can't imagine what a monitor with 12-bit per component color would look let, but I'm willing to bet it'll look better than what we've got now.
What do you need a micro-kernel for? Linux is already a multi-threaded kernel, and can already balance said threads between cores. You don't need a micro-kernel for that. Performance could probably be improved, and the granularity of kernel threads might need some work, but there is nothing at all that stops a monolithic kernel from doing those things.
The lines between monolithic and micro kernels are pretty blurry these days. The only remaining big differentiator is that kernel "threads" in a micro kernel are generally more like processes and have hardware-enforced memory separation from the rest of the kernel. Useful for stability, not really relevant or beneficial for performance.
The old scheduler was filled with huge chunks of complex code to try to guess at which processes were interactive and such, and would then specially treat those processes differently when scheduling.
The CFS does none of that. It schedules all processes the same, in a completely fair manner, and doesn't have any special logic in it that tries to classify processes at all, other than nice levels.
The part yet to be merged is the process grouping, which again isn't anything like the interactivity guessing code. It's just a simple way to say "these processes belong together, so when you do the CPU scheduling, treat them as a single group." It's basically just a weighting mechanism with a logical container.
Any copy - and I mean ANY copy - made in use on a computer counts as a copy in terms of copyright law.
pop quiz: did you know that it's illegal to run a binary of a program you have on your hard-drive unless you are given permission from the copyright holder? It has been ruled that the copy from the hard-disk to system memory counts as a copy in terms of copyright law. Lame? Yup. Still legally valid? According to the federal courts, sure is.
But do I email a couple of my friends some songs or burn them onto a CD and say "Here, check out this great band I just discovered." Yes.
And that's still breaking the law. If this makes it easier to catch you, so be it. Don't break the damn law. If you want your friends to hear the song, then you have many valid choices:
(a) iTMS has a song preview, which have definitely affected by purchase decisions (b) point them to Imeem.com or a site like it (c) tell them to quit being cheap asses and pay the $1 for the song (d) play the song the next time they're over
As I don't believe you're currently buying rights to the file, but still just buying a license to use it (or, at least, that's how the RIAA wishes it worked), said situation is "unsupported." If you no longer want a song, delete it, don't give it away. There is no way to prove you deleted the files and didn't keep a copy, somewhere.
Can you point to any evidence that indicates that it is any particular feature, or even a huge group of features, that causes this increase in memory?
I'm willing to bet that the reason Firefox uses so much memory is because it uses an absolutely huge amount of data. Bookmarks, history, cache, not to mention the bazillion images used by pages (both those loaded and those cached), plus the increasingly complex markup used on pages which requires a staggeringly huge DOM tree to represent, plus all of the layout code necessary to support the increasingly complex CSS specification...
Somehow I doubt that ripping out the existing bookmark code (a reduction in code size) and replacing it with a SQLite backend (which already exists, and is stupidly small to boot) is going to account for any kind of memory consumption increase compared to just loading up the latest version of Slashdot vs. the old version of Slashdot (as one example).
I doubt anyone will be making a concerted effort to switch until it actually becomes necessary. Once the IPv4 address space runs out, hacks will be done to extend it. Ranges will be "repo'd" from companies, or those companies will just start reselling those ranges. Not until there is no space left to squeeze out will people really start caring.
Ease adoption how, exactly? You still need to update the protocol, then update all the software, and all the hardware, and all the documentation and training... you can't just tack that on to existing implementations of software.
If you're going to force all that change, then change to something that isn't a silly half-arsed hackjob.
"IBM's Power line are not PPC chips and aren't suited for desktop use"
Yes, yes they are PPC chips. In terms of core instruction set, they're the same. The PPC970 that Apple used for a short while were derived directly from the Power design, as I recall.
The PC in PowerPC doesn't mean "Personal Computer." It means "Performance Computing." PPC is an instruction set, and Power is an IBM brand/product name. Many companies make PPC chips besides IBM, and the majority of those chips are embedded chips not at all designed for usage in a PC.
He was convicted for distributing three movies. And his term was only three months, which is not at all extreme, IMO. You can get 6 months for traffic violations in many jurisdictions.
Slashdot Mirror
Sun also distributes (or did once, at least) Linux on some machines they sell (sold), plus they also went and Open Sourced their copy of UNIX.
We have quite a few problems. Mostly things like parents who neglect their children to game.
In part, though, online gaming with things like MMOs are just less popular here. The online games that most Americans play are FPS games (eg Halo), which aren't the game of kind you find any need to play for three days straight - the game is made up of short rounds, and there is no carry over of gear or experience between rounds, and the game is far too fast paced to use it as a meaningful social experience.
We also have a legal system in which a shop owner that allowed a man to stay in his cafe for three days straight could be sued for negligence, just like a bartender who serves too many drinks allowing a man to drink himself to death can be held legally accountable. If Internet cafe owners were told that they'd be fined or jailed for allowing people to play more than X hours in their cafe, I bet they'd start cutting people off and saving (a small handful) of lives.
First: PCC has not YET supplanted GCC. The BSDs are hoping it will in the future.
Second: The biggest attraction of PCC is NOT the license. The article submitter who stated otherwise is a jackass.
Third: There are techical reasons why GCC is actaully unusable by some BSDs, such as NetBSD, which aims to support many architectures that GCC has dropped. NetBSD uses a combination of GCC 2, 3, and 4 to compile all of its different architectures. The NetBSD developers would rather have a single compiler that handles them all. Obviously PCC is nowhere near that level yet, of course.
Fourth: GCC politics are a pain in the ass for many BSD developers who just want to submit patches to a compiler without the overhead of GNU's policies and GCC's management.
Fifth: GCC produces crappy code more often than anyone would like. GCC bugs are far from unheard of, performance of generated code is often unpredictable between releases, and in many less commonly used architectures or sources GCC will produce incorrect code. Yes, these cases are very rare, but the BSD folks have hit the problem often enough for it to be a concern. PCC, being simpler and less bloated with cruft from multiple rewrites of the internals will hopefully produce correct and predictable code more often than GCC.
Sixth: PCC actually works today. It can compile most of the NetBSD userspace, as I recall, and the kernel will be ready to roll soon after some inline assembler problems are fixed. This isn't some theoretical hacky project - it works right now. It's not ready to replace GCC just yet, by any means, but it's a lot more than some Slashdotters seem to think it is.
The biggest reason for the new compiler (despite the jackass article submitter's position) is that GCC does *NOT* support every architecture. GCC drops architectures frequently as the core contributors lose interest, which hurts OSes like NetBSD that try to support more than the mainstream architectures. NetBSD relies on a combination of GCC 2, 3, and 4 to compile the OS on all of the architectures it supports.
The idea with PCC is not that it will be BSD licensed (nobody really gives a fuck what license the compiler is under), but that it will be supported directly by the BSD community, including the NetBSD hackers who have their bazillion architectures to support.
You realize that Kwin is including all of the 3D graphical foofah in new versions, right? Compiz is a WM that you can swap out with Metacity (or anything else) whenever you want, but your desktop is coming with the special effects built-in to the default window manager.
;)
Thankfully, you're using KDE, so you'll have at least 8 checkboxes to disable it.
It doesn't pollute the environment... it just incinerates it!
It's going to suck playing a Druid. "Protect the forest? Or beat the crap out of trees to get talents? I use the talentes to protect the forest, so is it justified? But then, I'm not really protecting it at all if I'm harassing all the animal nests to get talents. I should have been a Cleric, dammit."
Read the fucking link, instead of ripping on the guy for selectively chosen comments without their supporting context and explanation.
(a) He says OOXML is great not because the specification itself is a work of engineering genius, but because out in the Real World is easier to implement than ODF. That might not be for a good reason (OOXML is similar to existing World formats in structure, and so existing code is easily modified to use it, where ODF requires an entirely new approach and so is far harder to add to existing software), but it's certainly a different story than Miguel just blindly loving the OOXML spec.
(b) The patent protection claim is exactly what it sounds like, except for the fact that there are NO known parents which Moonlight or Mono infringe. It's a simple of matter of, "if something comes up, we won't sue your customers." Those same companies (Microsoft and the MPEGLA group) are still totally free to sue the developers and companies behind FFMPEG, Linux, GNOME, KDE, Apache, X.org, OpenOffice.org, etc. Nothing about the protection Novell offers will increase the risk of those lawsuits - all it does is decrease the risk for people who download from them. It's a nice gesture that some suit-wearing types give a fuck about, and the rest of us are free to ignore just like we ignore the patent minefield for every other project, all of which are guaranteed to be infringing _something_.
(c) The article submitter is a sensationalist jackass.
[quote]They just know Microsoft won't do anything, since they are semi-partners and all.[/quote]
Bull. This has NEVER been stated anywhere by anyone with an actual clue as to what the legal agreements in place are, what patents Microsoft has, or what the Mono team knows.
Quit spouting lies without at least trying to back them up with a credible reference.
For what it's worth, Portrait of Ruin got rid of the touchscreen addons. They learned their lesson.
I'd also wager against the motion control being that big of a thing for the Wii. Twilight Princess played much like any other 3D Zelda. Some of the best games on the Wii are virtual console titles that use the classic controller or a Gamecube controller.
If a game can use the new feature, great, but games don't need them. At least some developers know that.
Because you're going to HIS site. He gets paid to support said site by your browsing displaying the ads, which is tracked by image requests to the ad server. The ad blocker extensions usually ignore the ads entirely, so the browser doesn't generate any hits for the ad, and the site owner loses money.
He wouldn't have a problem if the ad blocker would still generate a hit but use CSS to make the image hidden on the browser. Of course, the ad companies themselves would then have a huge problem with that, since they're paying people for "displaying" ads nobody sees.
I'd think that a better ad blocker would be one that just blocked flash and converted animated GIFs into non-animated images and then displayed them. A static image isn't that irritating, it still generates hits, and so long as advertisers aren't being dumbasses, their ads will still be seen.
People said the same damn thing about D&D, and then AD&D, and then second edition AD&D, and then D&D 3.0. "I'm not buying the new edition, I wasted more money than I can count on these [lame-ass over-priced useless] source books!"
A year or two after the new edition was out, they all usually break down and buy the new edition, sell off their old books to collectors or hobby stores, and move on.
Or you can be one of those old foggies who swears by the old edition, never upgrades, and then runs out of people to play with. But then, if you honestly bought every single 3.5 source book (seriously, why the hell would you possibly need all of those?), I imagine you have bigger problems than finding people to play with.
I trust my C compiler to get the vary many high-level optimizations required by today's CPUs right than I'd trust you or almost any other individual developer to do the same.
Yeah, sometimes those high level libraries or languages get things wrong, but that's not a given just because they're more abstract. It's merely an implementation bug.
If you had some C code that was being inefficiently compared to assembler code, then you just don't know how to write efficient C code or you were using a shit compiler.
You can quite clearly see the difference. When the screens get up to 1000 DPI, then maybe we'll have a reason to stop increasing resolution. Until then, the pixels are still way too large. Look at how much effort goes into font rendering (and it still pretty much sucks). If we had 1000 DPI screens, or even 300 DPI screens for that matter, we wouldn't need sub-pixel anti-aliasing, font hinting, etc. And things would look super crystal clear.
I used to say the same thing about HDTV. "TV looks fine now. How much better could it be?" Then I actually saw some HDTV programs. Then I said the same thing about HD-DVD/Bluray. "DVDs are sharp, like HDTV! How much better could it be?" Then I saw some HD-DVD movies on a 1080p TV.
It's going to be a long time before we stop having a need to increase resolution.
We also these days have a color problem. 24-bit (8-bit per component) color seems like a lot, but it doesn't compare to even 10-bit per component color. I can't imagine what a monitor with 12-bit per component color would look let, but I'm willing to bet it'll look better than what we've got now.
What do you need a micro-kernel for? Linux is already a multi-threaded kernel, and can already balance said threads between cores. You don't need a micro-kernel for that. Performance could probably be improved, and the granularity of kernel threads might need some work, but there is nothing at all that stops a monolithic kernel from doing those things.
The lines between monolithic and micro kernels are pretty blurry these days. The only remaining big differentiator is that kernel "threads" in a micro kernel are generally more like processes and have hardware-enforced memory separation from the rest of the kernel. Useful for stability, not really relevant or beneficial for performance.
I think you have this TOTALLY backwards.
The old scheduler was filled with huge chunks of complex code to try to guess at which processes were interactive and such, and would then specially treat those processes differently when scheduling.
The CFS does none of that. It schedules all processes the same, in a completely fair manner, and doesn't have any special logic in it that tries to classify processes at all, other than nice levels.
The part yet to be merged is the process grouping, which again isn't anything like the interactivity guessing code. It's just a simple way to say "these processes belong together, so when you do the CPU scheduling, treat them as a single group." It's basically just a weighting mechanism with a logical container.
Any copy - and I mean ANY copy - made in use on a computer counts as a copy in terms of copyright law.
. html
pop quiz: did you know that it's illegal to run a binary of a program you have on your hard-drive unless you are given permission from the copyright holder? It has been ruled that the copy from the hard-disk to system memory counts as a copy in terms of copyright law. Lame? Yup. Still legally valid? According to the federal courts, sure is.
Further reading on the topic:
http://digital-law-online.info/lpdi1.0/treatise20
And that's still breaking the law. If this makes it easier to catch you, so be it. Don't break the damn law. If you want your friends to hear the song, then you have many valid choices:
(a) iTMS has a song preview, which have definitely affected by purchase decisions
(b) point them to Imeem.com or a site like it
(c) tell them to quit being cheap asses and pay the $1 for the song
(d) play the song the next time they're over
Plenty of options that don't make you a criminal.
As I don't believe you're currently buying rights to the file, but still just buying a license to use it (or, at least, that's how the RIAA wishes it worked), said situation is "unsupported." If you no longer want a song, delete it, don't give it away. There is no way to prove you deleted the files and didn't keep a copy, somewhere.
Can you point to any evidence that indicates that it is any particular feature, or even a huge group of features, that causes this increase in memory?
I'm willing to bet that the reason Firefox uses so much memory is because it uses an absolutely huge amount of data. Bookmarks, history, cache, not to mention the bazillion images used by pages (both those loaded and those cached), plus the increasingly complex markup used on pages which requires a staggeringly huge DOM tree to represent, plus all of the layout code necessary to support the increasingly complex CSS specification...
Somehow I doubt that ripping out the existing bookmark code (a reduction in code size) and replacing it with a SQLite backend (which already exists, and is stupidly small to boot) is going to account for any kind of memory consumption increase compared to just loading up the latest version of Slashdot vs. the old version of Slashdot (as one example).
I doubt anyone will be making a concerted effort to switch until it actually becomes necessary. Once the IPv4 address space runs out, hacks will be done to extend it. Ranges will be "repo'd" from companies, or those companies will just start reselling those ranges. Not until there is no space left to squeeze out will people really start caring.
Ease adoption how, exactly? You still need to update the protocol, then update all the software, and all the hardware, and all the documentation and training... you can't just tack that on to existing implementations of software.
If you're going to force all that change, then change to something that isn't a silly half-arsed hackjob.
"IBM's Power line are not PPC chips and aren't suited for desktop use"
Yes, yes they are PPC chips. In terms of core instruction set, they're the same. The PPC970 that Apple used for a short while were derived directly from the Power design, as I recall.
The PC in PowerPC doesn't mean "Personal Computer." It means "Performance Computing." PPC is an instruction set, and Power is an IBM brand/product name. Many companies make PPC chips besides IBM, and the majority of those chips are embedded chips not at all designed for usage in a PC.
The Power6 uses "under 100 watts in performance sensitive applications."
WAAAY too much for a notebook or a mini.
He wasn't convicted for downloading a movie.
He was convicted for distributing three movies. And his term was only three months, which is not at all extreme, IMO. You can get 6 months for traffic violations in many jurisdictions.