I guess I'm just pessimistic about the prospects of meeting women in the gaming world. I know just as many men who pretend to be women gamers as I do actual women gamers (as far as I can tell).
I suspect that most of the women gamers out there pretend to be guys, to avoid all the lameness that choosing a female nickname attracts.
Turn on the XP firewall before going online or get a $20 NAT. Either will protect you, except the XP firewall against IPv6 traffic, but no worms I know of support IPv6.
And forget Norton/Symantec, at least for now. Their virus scanner is a big performance hit, so much that you'll feel the difference on any computer. It has historically been a cause of many problems, like system freezes scanning some compressed exes, though I haven't experienced any with recent versions. With good practices alone you will probably never get a worm or virus.
5% might not sound like big competition, but it's growing, and it's starting on the software developer end, which is a cause for concern.
I'm using Linux (Fedora) and Mozilla Firefox right now. Thunderbird for email. And I have Windows XP, Office XP, Visual Studio.NET, etc. and have barely touched them since my switch to Linux. I use Visual Studio when required for homework assignments, and Microsoft products at work, but that's it.
OpenOffice is a little too slow for me personally. I use it when I need to, but Abiword and Gnumeric can serve most of my needs.
Most of the CS students I know at my college have switched to Linux. So 5% is pretty serious competition when it contains nearly half of the demographic that decides the future of software development.
At least for any long term career. Contractors will probably need them because they often work short jobs with companies who don't know them well enough and can't wait for them to learn something. But for everyone else, certifications are absolutely, positively, meaningless.
Certifications are narrow, and rarely test genuine problem solving skills. They're a marketting tool more than anything else. They sell you the study guide, the test, and once you've invested so much into getting the certification you've just gotta recommend their products in the workplace, otherwise, why did you just go through all that work of getting certified?
The most important skills are a lot more general than any piece of software you apply them to, and can't be easily verified with a certification. If you can learn on demand, quickly, solve any problem, and have a working understand of good design practices, that's more important than proving you know how to use a piece of software.
But what do I know? I have no certifications. Never needed or wanted one.
How about -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer -funroll-loops? Those two extra optimizations are pretty important, but disabled even with -O3 because they hinder debugging, which is not a concern when producing a release build.
First of all, g++ actually sucks big time in terms of performance.
Just in this case, it sucked much more than usual. -O2 is no match for something that does automatic loop unrolling and function inlining. And the loop unrolling doesn't even get enabled in -O3. My own preference is to start with O3 and enable loop unrolling and omit-frame-pointer, which seems to make a noticeable difference.
If you write highly modular code and only use the -O2 setting for optimization. I'd have used something like "-O3 -fomit-frame-pointer -funroll-loops", which is what I compile almost everything with. The JVM does loop unrolling and inlining, which gcc doesn't do when using -O2.
With the exception of the object creation benchmark, I believe that the results would favor C++ if the optimization flags were not so crippled.
You're basically just renting the game until the CD is damaged beyond usability. At an inflated price nonetheless, to pay for all their extra work, lawsuits, lobbying, and lost sales due to copy protection.
I can still listen to my music, despite some of the original CD's having turned into coasters, frisbees, or messes of shattered plastic. Had my purchases died with the CD's, I'd be out of luck.
I expect the same courtesy with my games. And it's not just the backup issue. "Copy protection" doesn't always work like it should, causing other problems. But since copy protection is now so widespread, my gaming budget has gone to the open source crowd. Commercial game developers don't want my money anymore, so now I just give it away freely to those who've earned it. $70 in the past year to support open source games, of which none of them demanded anything, only $20 to buy two commercial games from the bargain rack, and no piracy ever.
Just search google for "http proxy list" and you can find tens of thousands of anonymous proxy servers for those freedom loving Chinese to use. They can't block them all can they?
It depends on how you're using it. If purchasing for a web server, one of my main concerns is not transfer rate, but seek time. If reading small bits of data at random, you're not going to notice even a 2 to 1 difference in transfer rate, but you will definitely notice a 2 to 1 difference in seek time. Though it's less of a concern nowadays, with memory being so cheap, such that with most apps everything fits nicely into cache memory.
I just upgraded from 0.8 to 0.9RC1 on Linux, and now my firefox load script is unable to --remote an existing instance to open a new window without to avoid loading multiple instances, which is bad because multiple instances can't share a profile. The problem seems to happen unpredictably for me. Sometimes it succeeds, but other times it fails, leaving me having to open a new window manually and paste in my url.
Overall it's a great browser, and this is just a minor problem that will no doubt be fixed (unless the problem is my own). But at this moment I'm running Konqueror.
What I dislike is the "mime-magic" feature, where it attempts to read every file in the current folder to determine the file types, for 3 reasons: 1) You can't turn it off without downloading the source and rebuilding. 2) It makes the file browser run unbearably slow. 3) Nautilus will ignore your file type settings almost entirely, except to refuse to open a file when it disagreees with you on the type of a particular file. There's no way to tell it "screw you, I'm right and you're wrong, so stop bugging me and let me open the file with a double click"
This is not all entirely bad. Gnome has become an experimental desktop, with cool bleeding edge ideas mixed in with some bad or underdeveloped bleeding edge ideas, the better of which will survive in the long run. If we don't have at least one desktop environment on the bleeding edge, developing new ideas before anyone else, Microsoft, Apple, or some other company is going to patent those ideas and all open source desktops, not just gnome, will be held back by stagnation and threats of patent litigation.
So on the whole, we shouldn't be criticizing gnome, but helping to make it better.
I think JavaScript got a low score because the author didn't fully understand the depth of its functionality (the todo's in the score table), only very simple tasks were tested, and the only measure was size.
So that's why Stanford costs so much. Not better quality, just higher costs due to poor budgeting and incompetence. Nobody should spend $60 million over 10 years on something they could probably do in house for $500k in just one.
For their price they could have had 600 programmers for a year, or 60 for 10 years. Seeing that it's still not done, I doubt they had even a single good programmer on average working on their project for the majority of its lifetime. Maybe someone who could do what'd take a normal programmer a week, spread over a year, for the price $6m a year (Though I doubt he could have been paid more than $30/hr). Oracle & PeopleSoft might call this a spectacular success.
The pirates will always crack it. They only wind up hurting paying end users. It seems nowadays the more you pay for a game the more worthless it is, due to the increased amounts of so called copy protection, which actually does little at all to halt piracy. CD's get scratched. Their attitude is "if it gets scratched beyond repair, that's just one more reason to buy a new game to take it's place" and preventing piracy is just the excuse. I've never pirated a game in my life. I know a couple people who have, but copy protection never stopped them.
I've never had to code in hex. At best I'd assemble then copy the hex to use with languages that didn't support inline assembler. On the x86, about all I remember is that CD is INT, EE is OUT DX, AL, EB xx is JMP SHORT, FA is CLI, and FA EB FD freezes win9x.
Honestly, a fair understanding of assembly language may help you in the long run, despite the fact that you can probably go your entire career without using it directly, and that you're probably going too far most times you do use it. It's just part of knowing how a computer works.
Crackers will dissect your patches to create exploits, but you'll at least have protection available when the exploits go wild. If they don't find vulnerabilities from the patches, they'll just spend more time trying to find them manually, and the more you leave unpatched, the better the odds they have of finding one. Your customers who care about security the most will install the patches on time, and get pissed if a cracker exploits something before you've patched it.
But it's even better to find them before the product ships, and design early on to avoid the common ones. I believe the author of qmail is still offering thousands of dollars to the first person who finds even a single vulnerability.
Microsoft demands that I stop using Windows. They tried year after year and they've achieved their goal of making me give up on Windows. With their licensing, their throttling (desktop Windows is intentionally crappy, in ways intended to mostly affect server apps but other software is affected as well), their decommoditization, the nondeterminism of Windows, their poor support of emerging standards (IE6 is like 4 years old), the fact that you don't have as full control over Windows as you get with Linux, and their marketting and bullying tactics, among other things.
If it weren't for Microsoft's payments to SCO, the paid "studies", and their "Get the facts" campaign, I might have bought another Windows PC. But Microsoft demanded, "No, don't buy our software, support open source instead," and I just had to give in.
I primarily use Linux at home. And the computer I run it on came with no OS, so no $50 oem fee for them. Still stuck with Windows at work and school though.
Then I could build that massive jamming antenna I've always wanted so that I can play jokes on my neighborhood, briefly knocking out tv reception whenever, say, the neighbor's dog barks. And after a couple dozen times they'll all blame the dog. That'll teach that dog to chase my cats.
I don't own an Xbox. So it's their loss if they want to put all their eggs in one basket. There are plenty of game developers who will still support the PC.
Get enough of them hooked on the SDL+OpenGL combo and we may even see more games for Linux/*BSD/MacOS, since they can just write their games once and they will run on every modern platform with little or no extra work.
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Don't forget Rob Enderle. Biggest shill of them all.
It'll just attract more male gamers.
I guess I'm just pessimistic about the prospects of meeting women in the gaming world. I know just as many men who pretend to be women gamers as I do actual women gamers (as far as I can tell).
I suspect that most of the women gamers out there pretend to be guys, to avoid all the lameness that choosing a female nickname attracts.
Turn on the XP firewall before going online or get a $20 NAT. Either will protect you, except the XP firewall against IPv6 traffic, but no worms I know of support IPv6.
And forget Norton/Symantec, at least for now. Their virus scanner is a big performance hit, so much that you'll feel the difference on any computer. It has historically been a cause of many problems, like system freezes scanning some compressed exes, though I haven't experienced any with recent versions. With good practices alone you will probably never get a worm or virus.
5% might not sound like big competition, but it's growing, and it's starting on the software developer end, which is a cause for concern.
I'm using Linux (Fedora) and Mozilla Firefox right now. Thunderbird for email. And I have Windows XP, Office XP, Visual Studio.NET, etc. and have barely touched them since my switch to Linux. I use Visual Studio when required for homework assignments, and Microsoft products at work, but that's it.
OpenOffice is a little too slow for me personally. I use it when I need to, but Abiword and Gnumeric can serve most of my needs.
Most of the CS students I know at my college have switched to Linux. So 5% is pretty serious competition when it contains nearly half of the demographic that decides the future of software development.
At least for any long term career. Contractors will probably need them because they often work short jobs with companies who don't know them well enough and can't wait for them to learn something. But for everyone else, certifications are absolutely, positively, meaningless.
Certifications are narrow, and rarely test genuine problem solving skills. They're a marketting tool more than anything else. They sell you the study guide, the test, and once you've invested so much into getting the certification you've just gotta recommend their products in the workplace, otherwise, why did you just go through all that work of getting certified?
The most important skills are a lot more general than any piece of software you apply them to, and can't be easily verified with a certification. If you can learn on demand, quickly, solve any problem, and have a working understand of good design practices, that's more important than proving you know how to use a piece of software.
But what do I know? I have no certifications. Never needed or wanted one.
How about -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer -funroll-loops? Those two extra optimizations are pretty important, but disabled even with -O3 because they hinder debugging, which is not a concern when producing a release build.
First of all, g++ actually sucks big time in terms of performance.
Just in this case, it sucked much more than usual. -O2 is no match for something that does automatic loop unrolling and function inlining. And the loop unrolling doesn't even get enabled in -O3. My own preference is to start with O3 and enable loop unrolling and omit-frame-pointer, which seems to make a noticeable difference.
If you write highly modular code and only use the -O2 setting for optimization. I'd have used something like "-O3 -fomit-frame-pointer -funroll-loops", which is what I compile almost everything with. The JVM does loop unrolling and inlining, which gcc doesn't do when using -O2.
With the exception of the object creation benchmark, I believe that the results would favor C++ if the optimization flags were not so crippled.
You're basically just renting the game until the CD is damaged beyond usability. At an inflated price nonetheless, to pay for all their extra work, lawsuits, lobbying, and lost sales due to copy protection.
I can still listen to my music, despite some of the original CD's having turned into coasters, frisbees, or messes of shattered plastic. Had my purchases died with the CD's, I'd be out of luck.
I expect the same courtesy with my games. And it's not just the backup issue. "Copy protection" doesn't always work like it should, causing other problems. But since copy protection is now so widespread, my gaming budget has gone to the open source crowd. Commercial game developers don't want my money anymore, so now I just give it away freely to those who've earned it. $70 in the past year to support open source games, of which none of them demanded anything, only $20 to buy two commercial games from the bargain rack, and no piracy ever.
Just search google for "http proxy list" and you can find tens of thousands of anonymous proxy servers for those freedom loving Chinese to use. They can't block them all can they?
It depends on how you're using it. If purchasing for a web server, one of my main concerns is not transfer rate, but seek time. If reading small bits of data at random, you're not going to notice even a 2 to 1 difference in transfer rate, but you will definitely notice a 2 to 1 difference in seek time. Though it's less of a concern nowadays, with memory being so cheap, such that with most apps everything fits nicely into cache memory.
I just upgraded from 0.8 to 0.9RC1 on Linux, and now my firefox load script is unable to --remote an existing instance to open a new window without to avoid loading multiple instances, which is bad because multiple instances can't share a profile. The problem seems to happen unpredictably for me. Sometimes it succeeds, but other times it fails, leaving me having to open a new window manually and paste in my url.
Overall it's a great browser, and this is just a minor problem that will no doubt be fixed (unless the problem is my own). But at this moment I'm running Konqueror.
>
That's funny, because I first encountered these problems with the version I'm using right this very moment, 2.6.
If you try all 3 and decide you like the free ones better, they've already got your money.
The forced spatial mode is bearable.
What I dislike is the "mime-magic" feature, where it attempts to read every file in the current folder to determine the file types, for 3 reasons:
1) You can't turn it off without downloading the source and rebuilding.
2) It makes the file browser run unbearably slow.
3) Nautilus will ignore your file type settings almost entirely, except to refuse to open a file when it disagreees with you on the type of a particular file. There's no way to tell it "screw you, I'm right and you're wrong, so stop bugging me and let me open the file with a double click"
This is not all entirely bad. Gnome has become an experimental desktop, with cool bleeding edge ideas mixed in with some bad or underdeveloped bleeding edge ideas, the better of which will survive in the long run. If we don't have at least one desktop environment on the bleeding edge, developing new ideas before anyone else, Microsoft, Apple, or some other company is going to patent those ideas and all open source desktops, not just gnome, will be held back by stagnation and threats of patent litigation.
So on the whole, we shouldn't be criticizing gnome, but helping to make it better.
rabble! rabble! rabble!
I think JavaScript got a low score because the author didn't fully understand the depth of its functionality (the todo's in the score table), only very simple tasks were tested, and the only measure was size.
rabble!
rabble! rabble!
So that's why Stanford costs so much. Not better quality, just higher costs due to poor budgeting and incompetence. Nobody should spend $60 million over 10 years on something they could probably do in house for $500k in just one.
For their price they could have had 600 programmers for a year, or 60 for 10 years. Seeing that it's still not done, I doubt they had even a single good programmer on average working on their project for the majority of its lifetime. Maybe someone who could do what'd take a normal programmer a week, spread over a year, for the price $6m a year (Though I doubt he could have been paid more than $30/hr). Oracle & PeopleSoft might call this a spectacular success.
Most binary Linux distributions are compiled for the 386. Not that you'd ever notice the speed difference, but it just seems silly.
The pirates will always crack it. They only wind up hurting paying end users. It seems nowadays the more you pay for a game the more worthless it is, due to the increased amounts of so called copy protection, which actually does little at all to halt piracy. CD's get scratched. Their attitude is "if it gets scratched beyond repair, that's just one more reason to buy a new game to take it's place" and preventing piracy is just the excuse. I've never pirated a game in my life. I know a couple people who have, but copy protection never stopped them.
I've never had to code in hex. At best I'd assemble then copy the hex to use with languages that didn't support inline assembler. On the x86, about all I remember is that CD is INT, EE is OUT DX, AL, EB xx is JMP SHORT, FA is CLI, and FA EB FD freezes win9x.
You need it to work on the zsnes project.
Honestly, a fair understanding of assembly language may help you in the long run, despite the fact that you can probably go your entire career without using it directly, and that you're probably going too far most times you do use it. It's just part of knowing how a computer works.
Crackers will dissect your patches to create exploits, but you'll at least have protection available when the exploits go wild. If they don't find vulnerabilities from the patches, they'll just spend more time trying to find them manually, and the more you leave unpatched, the better the odds they have of finding one. Your customers who care about security the most will install the patches on time, and get pissed if a cracker exploits something before you've patched it.
But it's even better to find them before the product ships, and design early on to avoid the common ones. I believe the author of qmail is still offering thousands of dollars to the first person who finds even a single vulnerability.
Microsoft demands that I stop using Windows. They tried year after year and they've achieved their goal of making me give up on Windows. With their licensing, their throttling (desktop Windows is intentionally crappy, in ways intended to mostly affect server apps but other software is affected as well), their decommoditization, the nondeterminism of Windows, their poor support of emerging standards (IE6 is like 4 years old), the fact that you don't have as full control over Windows as you get with Linux, and their marketting and bullying tactics, among other things.
If it weren't for Microsoft's payments to SCO, the paid "studies", and their "Get the facts" campaign, I might have bought another Windows PC. But Microsoft demanded, "No, don't buy our software, support open source instead," and I just had to give in.
I primarily use Linux at home. And the computer I run it on came with no OS, so no $50 oem fee for them. Still stuck with Windows at work and school though.
Then I could build that massive jamming antenna I've always wanted so that I can play jokes on my neighborhood, briefly knocking out tv reception whenever, say, the neighbor's dog barks. And after a couple dozen times they'll all blame the dog. That'll teach that dog to chase my cats.
I don't own an Xbox. So it's their loss if they want to put all their eggs in one basket. There are plenty of game developers who will still support the PC.
Get enough of them hooked on the SDL+OpenGL combo and we may even see more games for Linux/*BSD/MacOS, since they can just write their games once and they will run on every modern platform with little or no extra work.