If I recall, the protagonist of Dune (and the guy who won in the end) was the one who had the balls to say, "If I am not obeyed, the spice will not flow."
Let's not follow that book. I don't look forward to God-Emperor Sprint.
Apple uses a patched gcc. If you really want to, there's nothing stopping you from using the exact same toolchain on Linux as you have on OS X.
Microsoft is at least debatable -- I think Visual Du Jour is crap, but some parts of.NET look interesting. But at least it's actually different enough to talk about.
Again, I seem to be missing the point -- what are the "benefits of a third dimension"?
I realize I can hold a piece of paper above the table, which shows an alternate projection. Why would I want to, when I can just drag a virtual piece of paper around the table?
for the big guys: ie and firefox, chrome represents a smaller slice of the piechart
Frankly, I think awareness of alternatives helps Firefox as much as it helps Opera.
Every user who leaves IE for any other browser makes my job as a web developer that much easier.
the truth though is that chrome just slows down coders responsible for cross browser testing and compatibility
Except that Chrome is based on Webkit, so there aren't going to be many Chrome bugs that aren't also Safari and Konqueror bugs.
More relevantly, all of these browsers follow the standards much more closely than IE. The day IE becomes marginal enough for a website to just throw up a "Get Firefox" banner and stop testing on it is a day life gets much easier.
Easily 90% of the time, when I develop something on Firefox (because of Firebug), it works on Firefox, Safari, Konqueror, Epiphany, Opera, Chrome, and iCab, yet fails on IE. This is because every browser other than IE actually cares about standards.
In other words: I would have to do about ten times less work on cross-browser compatibility if IE was gone. Adding Chrome to the mix really doesn't change that.
its dom and javascript quirks seem very safari like. did google base chrome on safari code?
They used Webkit.
The story goes, roughly: KHTML, used by Konqueror (and other parts of KDE), was forked by Apple and used for Safari. Because it was LGPL'd, Apple has to release all their source, at least to the rendering engine, under something called Webkit. And Webkit is used all over the place.
They did, however, write their own Javascript engine. That, or they massively improved Safari's.
All this provides is a completely separate view for the tracing paper. From your description, it sounds like if you had that, you could just print it, no problem -- and you could trace either way.
It's not about whether it's open source or not. It's about whether there's any point at all. I get why Surface is cool -- I really don't get this.
Clearly I'm missing something obvious, but other than looking cool, is there any practical advantage to this?
It would seem that the very thing that makes it look cool -- that "added dimension" -- is also going to mean that the way in which the images are superimposed varies depending on where you're standing. The only way the roads in that "road map" idea would be in the right place is if you were hovering directly over the table -- except you'd be blocking the projector, and it still wouldn't be right towards the edges of the table.
I mean, I get the point of Surface itself. I do. What I don't get is what value this other layer has over doing the same thing in software.
I consider Perl to have a poor design which makes everything that should be simple convoluted
On the contrary, I see Perl as an incredibly simple, transparent design. Particularly the object system -- objects are just hash references associated with modules, and this is absolutely bare to the user.
Contrast this to Ruby -- perhaps it's implemented as a hash, but instance variables cannot be accessed like a hash without some extra work.
Perl inheritance was simple, multi-inheritance through the @ISA array. If there's a way to change the inheritance of a class in Ruby, I don't know how -- and Ruby only supports single inheritance. (Yeah, I know, mixins -- but you can't exactly un-include mixins either.)
I currently use Ruby, and I don't really want to go back to Perl, I'm just saying -- the complaint you have is actually the opposite of my experience. Ruby has simpler syntax, but there are things which are much harder to do than in Perl.
I'd prefer that Ruby&Python provide a 'use strict' mode as Perl do, except that it should be on by default.
Absolutely. In fact, there's one thing I really miss here: Local variables.
Sure, they exist, but there is no syntax for pre-declaring them, and no way to error if they aren't pre-declared. That would catch some obvious typos.
There's also the issue that sometimes (but not always), attempting to access or set a certain local variable will actually call the accessors on the current object. You can force that explicitly, but it seems like it would lead to subtle bugs.
All of which could be solved easily by forcing locals to be predefined, and at least warning when they aren't.
That's the one thing I'd actually want to port from Perl to these other languages.
All that said, I'm still not going back to Perl, but I certainly don't hate it.
Try reading my entire post, next time... If they truly were "more interested in making a game", why not go with one of the major labels? Greenhouse is a political stand.
And this is a laugh:
XBLA DRM is not draconian.
The Xbox itself has some pretty draconian DRM. To put this in perspective:
The DRM in Bioshock, and in Spore, wouldn't let you run a specific list of programs, such as Daemon Tools. That's a blacklist.
The Xbox won't let you run anything but a specific list of (signed) programs. That's a whitelist.
So yes, I'd call a whitelist more draconian than a blacklist, any day of the week.
Also: Read my sig, and read my post again. Nowhere have I said they should have boycotted the whole platform. Only that they could have. The fact that they didn't -- that they went out of their way to port it -- is a statement that they're actually OK with XBLA DRM.
Ok, but that's a technicality as Rails is built on Ruby. If Ruby has scaling problems then Rails does.
Actually, it'd apply to a specific Ruby implementation. By my count, there are at least two Ruby implementations capable of running Rails (MRI and JRuby), and if Rubinius doesn't, it's not far off.
more of them than Democrats are true fiscal conservatives.
More of them than democrats are also true fiscal lemmings.
Look at the history: Under Republican administrations, the national debt increases. Under Democratic administrations, it decreases. This is a pretty constant trend.
If only "tired old whining about mods" got -1 offtopic...
Honestly, scroll up and read. There's almost none of the posts you describe, and very few have more than mediocre mods anyhow. The +5 insightfuls are all completely nonpartisan.
If I may let my bias show for a moment, as I did already vote...
What/is/ important is that he surrounds himself with competent advisors.
Setting aside the economy for a moment, which candidate has a technology adviser who's a former MIT professor? And which one has a former MPAA exec in that role?
What you need to watch out for is a candidate who/presumes/ to know/exactly/ how to resolve the situation and who justifies this with a reference to some ideology or other.
"I know how to get Osama Bin Laden, my friends. I'll get him. I know how to get him. I'll get him no matter what, and I know how to do it."
It might be helpful to hear some ideology, or some strategy, or something other than "Trust me, I know what I'm doing..."
Sure, it's more important that they can delegate to people who know what they're doing. But in order to know that your adviser knows what he's doing, you have to know at least a bit about the subject matter in the first place.
And, if that fails, maybe we should be looking at who the candidates have surrounded themselves with. (*cough* Palin...)
the speed is impressive, and it was worth the first few days of fighting with it.
I think I've said it farther up in this thread, but...
I found no difference in speed. The difference was largely what I chose to install, but frankly, I run a full Kubuntu/KDE desktop, it works well, and I can't actually make it feel slow. (Yes, I've tried.)
About the most I could do to optimize at this point is to shave a few more seconds off boot time, but... it's login in 25 seconds, and usable maybe 3 seconds after login.
Yes, I do have very good hardware. But you know what? Spending days fighting with something is no longer fun, and is also no longer economical. It doesn't take that many days of fighting with it to realize I could be working instead, and simply buy more speed.
First: It's actually really difficult to figure out whether or not Zed Shaw is kidding. I'm talking about his blog in general, not just that post.
I mean, are you going to take a blog called "Zed's So Fucking Awesome" seriously?
Second: You're confusing Ruby and Rails. Rails adds a lot of things, but a garbage collector isn't one of them.
Third: This particular problem has been solved pretty thoroughly. In fact, it was solved something like a year before it bit Zed, according to that rant.
You apparently don't know a lot of people who actually understand Perl.
Of course, everyone who know and dislike Perl are just those who don't "understand it".
I didn't see that. I said you apparently don't know a lot of people who actually understand Perl.
I know people who understand Perl and are indifferent. I know people who understand Perl and love it. I know people who never learned much Perl, and are indifferent.
I don't actually know people who hate Perl. Those I hear from most often hate it for things like "line noise", which shows a bit of snobbery and an unwillingness to explore deeper.
Of course, this argument is a lot more powerful when applied to Javascript...
They never said "let's put DRM into the XBLA version."
They did, however, say "let's put out an XBLA version."
But you have to be clear that the game shouldn't be dinged points because it has XBLA "DRM." It's not a choice in that case.
Again: They could have simply boycotted that whole platform.
As it is, it's like any other dev shop working for any other major label. It seems likely the developers would read Slashdot, and, being developers, would also understand the inherent flaws in any attempt at DRM. But at the end of the day, the label is writing your check, so they call the shots.
Then why the hell were any of you running Gentoo in the first place ?
Because, at the time, it seemed logical -- after all, it would give me a faster computer (though mostly because I was more careful about which packages to install, not because I was so incredibly optimized).
And it was easier to hack, in some respects.
What happened was, I grew up, I got a job, and I now have significantly less time to spend fucking around in a terminal just to get my OS to work.
And because of said job, I can now afford computers that are fast enough that I can't actually keep them busy. I used to be all about Fluxbox, -Os (not a lot of RAM or cache), and removing everything I possibly could from USE, killing as many daemons as I could, etc. Now I realize that I can load up a full KDE, and pile things on top of that (including several GNOME apps, even a Windows app), even install MySQL (which on Ubuntu means it's always running) and forget about it for months, and the only thing that ever feels slow on this machine is Flash.
And this is a laptop.
Gentoo is all about tinkering and customising, and being offered the flexibility to do so, not ease of setting up.
The point is that I can tinker and customize Ubuntu, also -- and it's easy to setup.
The things which Gentoo provides that Ubuntu doesn't -- mainly, the compile-time tweaks and optimizations -- ok, it's cool to play with those, but in the end, they don't do much for me. Maybe -- maybe, possibly, if I sacrifice a goat -- I could squeeze a few more frames per second out of a game. Now, I get ten or twenty more by rebooting to Windows.
Just because you can easily tweak anything doesn't mean you should or need to.
However, if I don't need to tweak more than what Ubuntu gives me, what's the point of Gentoo? At least with Ubuntu, I'm not compiling all the time.
Apparently you need the barriers of an OS that is more difficult to tweak in order to keep you on task.
I haven't found Ubuntu to be more difficult to tweak, for things that I care about. I could probably use Gentoo just fine.
But again -- no point. Ubuntu just works, out of the box, no tweaking needed, no waiting for things to compile. It installs faster, and it updates faster.
On top of that, it's popular, which means more packages out of the box, more tutorials, etc.
It's probably the same reason that many people prefer Windows to linux
I've found Windows to be harder to tweak in ways that I actually want to tweak it.
Example: I had to use a Mac for a week or two, when my old laptop was dead. I was mousing all the time. The few things which had decent keyboard shortcuts, they were all different than what I had on Ubuntu, and pretty much none of them were customizable.
Then I bought this new laptop, with Ubuntu preloaded -- wiped it and installed Kubuntu.
Within the first few hours of use, I'd either set or discovered keyboard shortcuts for everything. Logout menu is win+backspace -- then alt+s to suspend, alt+t for turn off, etc. Win+arrowkeys packs the current window to the next edge -- makes it very easy to organize my windows, or pack things against the edge of the screen. When dragging or resizing windows, they snap to each other and the screen. Sloppy focus. Good package management.
I could go on...
These are all things that I was able to do either out of the box, or within the first hour or two of use. Most of them simply are not available, in any form, on Windows or OS X. The exceptions aren't customizable.
Understand: These are things I can tweak quickly and easily, and directly improve my user experience. Changing a USE flag, or playing with -Os/O2/O3/etc, provides no obvious benefit, often no measurable benefit, over the defaults Ubuntu gives me.
And that ignores sibling poster -- yes, Gentoo does require a lot of maintenance. But even if it didn't, I've simply found Ubuntu to be as good or better in almost every respect.
Slashdot Mirror
If I recall, the protagonist of Dune (and the guy who won in the end) was the one who had the balls to say, "If I am not obeyed, the spice will not flow."
Let's not follow that book. I don't look forward to God-Emperor Sprint.
Apple and Microsoft do.
Apple? Heh...
Apple uses a patched gcc. If you really want to, there's nothing stopping you from using the exact same toolchain on Linux as you have on OS X.
Microsoft is at least debatable -- I think Visual Du Jour is crap, but some parts of .NET look interesting. But at least it's actually different enough to talk about.
Again, I seem to be missing the point -- what are the "benefits of a third dimension"?
I realize I can hold a piece of paper above the table, which shows an alternate projection. Why would I want to, when I can just drag a virtual piece of paper around the table?
for the big guys: ie and firefox, chrome represents a smaller slice of the piechart
Frankly, I think awareness of alternatives helps Firefox as much as it helps Opera.
Every user who leaves IE for any other browser makes my job as a web developer that much easier.
the truth though is that chrome just slows down coders responsible for cross browser testing and compatibility
Except that Chrome is based on Webkit, so there aren't going to be many Chrome bugs that aren't also Safari and Konqueror bugs.
More relevantly, all of these browsers follow the standards much more closely than IE. The day IE becomes marginal enough for a website to just throw up a "Get Firefox" banner and stop testing on it is a day life gets much easier.
Easily 90% of the time, when I develop something on Firefox (because of Firebug), it works on Firefox, Safari, Konqueror, Epiphany, Opera, Chrome, and iCab, yet fails on IE. This is because every browser other than IE actually cares about standards.
In other words: I would have to do about ten times less work on cross-browser compatibility if IE was gone. Adding Chrome to the mix really doesn't change that.
its dom and javascript quirks seem very safari like. did google base chrome on safari code?
They used Webkit.
The story goes, roughly: KHTML, used by Konqueror (and other parts of KDE), was forked by Apple and used for Safari. Because it was LGPL'd, Apple has to release all their source, at least to the rendering engine, under something called Webkit. And Webkit is used all over the place.
They did, however, write their own Javascript engine. That, or they massively improved Safari's.
And one way to ensure the standards are being followed tightly is to have a number of alternative browsers.
Haha, Linux folk. Release the specs! Ok. No, release the source! Ok. No, port it for us!
People are working on the port, I'm sure.
Keep in mind, it's been out for a grand total of two months. Can you port that fast?
archaic tool chain
You've got something better?
Chromium is what we want.
CrossOver is not...
Wait, I'm confused.
What about Surface didn't allow tracing before?
All this provides is a completely separate view for the tracing paper. From your description, it sounds like if you had that, you could just print it, no problem -- and you could trace either way.
It's not about whether it's open source or not. It's about whether there's any point at all. I get why Surface is cool -- I really don't get this.
Obligatory XKCD
That's what I want to know.
Clearly I'm missing something obvious, but other than looking cool, is there any practical advantage to this?
It would seem that the very thing that makes it look cool -- that "added dimension" -- is also going to mean that the way in which the images are superimposed varies depending on where you're standing. The only way the roads in that "road map" idea would be in the right place is if you were hovering directly over the table -- except you'd be blocking the projector, and it still wouldn't be right towards the edges of the table.
I mean, I get the point of Surface itself. I do. What I don't get is what value this other layer has over doing the same thing in software.
I consider Perl to have a poor design which makes everything that should be simple convoluted
On the contrary, I see Perl as an incredibly simple, transparent design. Particularly the object system -- objects are just hash references associated with modules, and this is absolutely bare to the user.
Contrast this to Ruby -- perhaps it's implemented as a hash, but instance variables cannot be accessed like a hash without some extra work.
Perl inheritance was simple, multi-inheritance through the @ISA array. If there's a way to change the inheritance of a class in Ruby, I don't know how -- and Ruby only supports single inheritance. (Yeah, I know, mixins -- but you can't exactly un-include mixins either.)
I currently use Ruby, and I don't really want to go back to Perl, I'm just saying -- the complaint you have is actually the opposite of my experience. Ruby has simpler syntax, but there are things which are much harder to do than in Perl.
I'd prefer that Ruby&Python provide a 'use strict' mode as Perl do, except that it should be on by default.
Absolutely. In fact, there's one thing I really miss here: Local variables.
Sure, they exist, but there is no syntax for pre-declaring them, and no way to error if they aren't pre-declared. That would catch some obvious typos.
There's also the issue that sometimes (but not always), attempting to access or set a certain local variable will actually call the accessors on the current object. You can force that explicitly, but it seems like it would lead to subtle bugs.
All of which could be solved easily by forcing locals to be predefined, and at least warning when they aren't.
That's the one thing I'd actually want to port from Perl to these other languages.
All that said, I'm still not going back to Perl, but I certainly don't hate it.
Try reading my entire post, next time... If they truly were "more interested in making a game", why not go with one of the major labels? Greenhouse is a political stand.
And this is a laugh:
XBLA DRM is not draconian.
The Xbox itself has some pretty draconian DRM. To put this in perspective:
The DRM in Bioshock, and in Spore, wouldn't let you run a specific list of programs, such as Daemon Tools. That's a blacklist.
The Xbox won't let you run anything but a specific list of (signed) programs. That's a whitelist.
So yes, I'd call a whitelist more draconian than a blacklist, any day of the week.
Also: Read my sig, and read my post again. Nowhere have I said they should have boycotted the whole platform. Only that they could have. The fact that they didn't -- that they went out of their way to port it -- is a statement that they're actually OK with XBLA DRM.
One was an acquaintance, many years ago.
The other is a running mate.
Ok, but that's a technicality as Rails is built on Ruby. If Ruby has scaling problems then Rails does.
Actually, it'd apply to a specific Ruby implementation. By my count, there are at least two Ruby implementations capable of running Rails (MRI and JRuby), and if Rubinius doesn't, it's not far off.
more of them than Democrats are true fiscal conservatives.
More of them than democrats are also true fiscal lemmings.
Look at the history: Under Republican administrations, the national debt increases. Under Democratic administrations, it decreases. This is a pretty constant trend.
If only "tired old whining about mods" got -1 offtopic...
Honestly, scroll up and read. There's almost none of the posts you describe, and very few have more than mediocre mods anyhow. The +5 insightfuls are all completely nonpartisan.
Well, then it becomes:
Are you going to vote for McCain/Palin, or are you a sexist?
Yeah, not funny. Let's talk about stuff that matters.
If I may let my bias show for a moment, as I did already vote...
What /is/ important is that he surrounds himself with competent advisors.
Setting aside the economy for a moment, which candidate has a technology adviser who's a former MIT professor? And which one has a former MPAA exec in that role?
What you need to watch out for is a candidate who /presumes/ to know /exactly/ how to resolve the situation and who justifies this with a reference to some ideology or other.
"I know how to get Osama Bin Laden, my friends. I'll get him. I know how to get him. I'll get him no matter what, and I know how to do it."
It might be helpful to hear some ideology, or some strategy, or something other than "Trust me, I know what I'm doing..."
Sure, it's more important that they can delegate to people who know what they're doing. But in order to know that your adviser knows what he's doing, you have to know at least a bit about the subject matter in the first place.
And, if that fails, maybe we should be looking at who the candidates have surrounded themselves with. (*cough* Palin...)
the speed is impressive, and it was worth the first few days of fighting with it.
I think I've said it farther up in this thread, but...
I found no difference in speed. The difference was largely what I chose to install, but frankly, I run a full Kubuntu/KDE desktop, it works well, and I can't actually make it feel slow. (Yes, I've tried.)
About the most I could do to optimize at this point is to shave a few more seconds off boot time, but... it's login in 25 seconds, and usable maybe 3 seconds after login.
Yes, I do have very good hardware. But you know what? Spending days fighting with something is no longer fun, and is also no longer economical. It doesn't take that many days of fighting with it to realize I could be working instead, and simply buy more speed.
First: It's actually really difficult to figure out whether or not Zed Shaw is kidding. I'm talking about his blog in general, not just that post.
I mean, are you going to take a blog called "Zed's So Fucking Awesome" seriously?
Second: You're confusing Ruby and Rails. Rails adds a lot of things, but a garbage collector isn't one of them.
Third: This particular problem has been solved pretty thoroughly. In fact, it was solved something like a year before it bit Zed, according to that rant.
You apparently don't know a lot of people who actually understand Perl.
Of course, everyone who know and dislike Perl are just those who don't "understand it".
I didn't see that. I said you apparently don't know a lot of people who actually understand Perl.
I know people who understand Perl and are indifferent. I know people who understand Perl and love it. I know people who never learned much Perl, and are indifferent.
I don't actually know people who hate Perl. Those I hear from most often hate it for things like "line noise", which shows a bit of snobbery and an unwillingness to explore deeper.
Of course, this argument is a lot more powerful when applied to Javascript...
$876.58 adds up.
...to less than one developer's salary.
leasing 400 rather than 600 easily covers the salary and overhead for the guy who makes it possible.
Assuming that, at that stage, only one guy would be enough to make it possible.
Now, granted, one guy probably could, by tweaking some algorithms, adding caching in just the right places, etc.
But one guy is not the difference between, say, a Ruby team and a C team.
They never said "let's put DRM into the XBLA version."
They did, however, say "let's put out an XBLA version."
But you have to be clear that the game shouldn't be dinged points because it has XBLA "DRM." It's not a choice in that case.
Again: They could have simply boycotted that whole platform.
As it is, it's like any other dev shop working for any other major label. It seems likely the developers would read Slashdot, and, being developers, would also understand the inherent flaws in any attempt at DRM. But at the end of the day, the label is writing your check, so they call the shots.
Then why the hell were any of you running Gentoo in the first place ?
Because, at the time, it seemed logical -- after all, it would give me a faster computer (though mostly because I was more careful about which packages to install, not because I was so incredibly optimized).
And it was easier to hack, in some respects.
What happened was, I grew up, I got a job, and I now have significantly less time to spend fucking around in a terminal just to get my OS to work.
And because of said job, I can now afford computers that are fast enough that I can't actually keep them busy. I used to be all about Fluxbox, -Os (not a lot of RAM or cache), and removing everything I possibly could from USE, killing as many daemons as I could, etc. Now I realize that I can load up a full KDE, and pile things on top of that (including several GNOME apps, even a Windows app), even install MySQL (which on Ubuntu means it's always running) and forget about it for months, and the only thing that ever feels slow on this machine is Flash.
And this is a laptop.
Gentoo is all about tinkering and customising, and being offered the flexibility to do so, not ease of setting up.
The point is that I can tinker and customize Ubuntu, also -- and it's easy to setup.
The things which Gentoo provides that Ubuntu doesn't -- mainly, the compile-time tweaks and optimizations -- ok, it's cool to play with those, but in the end, they don't do much for me. Maybe -- maybe, possibly, if I sacrifice a goat -- I could squeeze a few more frames per second out of a game. Now, I get ten or twenty more by rebooting to Windows.
Just because you can easily tweak anything doesn't mean you should or need to.
However, if I don't need to tweak more than what Ubuntu gives me, what's the point of Gentoo? At least with Ubuntu, I'm not compiling all the time.
Apparently you need the barriers of an OS that is more difficult to tweak in order to keep you on task.
I haven't found Ubuntu to be more difficult to tweak, for things that I care about. I could probably use Gentoo just fine.
But again -- no point. Ubuntu just works, out of the box, no tweaking needed, no waiting for things to compile. It installs faster, and it updates faster.
On top of that, it's popular, which means more packages out of the box, more tutorials, etc.
It's probably the same reason that many people prefer Windows to linux
I've found Windows to be harder to tweak in ways that I actually want to tweak it.
Example: I had to use a Mac for a week or two, when my old laptop was dead. I was mousing all the time. The few things which had decent keyboard shortcuts, they were all different than what I had on Ubuntu, and pretty much none of them were customizable.
Then I bought this new laptop, with Ubuntu preloaded -- wiped it and installed Kubuntu.
Within the first few hours of use, I'd either set or discovered keyboard shortcuts for everything. Logout menu is win+backspace -- then alt+s to suspend, alt+t for turn off, etc. Win+arrowkeys packs the current window to the next edge -- makes it very easy to organize my windows, or pack things against the edge of the screen. When dragging or resizing windows, they snap to each other and the screen. Sloppy focus. Good package management.
I could go on...
These are all things that I was able to do either out of the box, or within the first hour or two of use. Most of them simply are not available, in any form, on Windows or OS X. The exceptions aren't customizable.
Understand: These are things I can tweak quickly and easily, and directly improve my user experience. Changing a USE flag, or playing with -Os/O2/O3/etc, provides no obvious benefit, often no measurable benefit, over the defaults Ubuntu gives me.
And that ignores sibling poster -- yes, Gentoo does require a lot of maintenance. But even if it didn't, I've simply found Ubuntu to be as good or better in almost every respect.