Thanks for the clarification. This has been a huge source of frustration for me in the past so much that I just completely gave up and decided to never bother with content from Real streams. I don't know what pull you have over there, but here's my experience going to your web site today.
I see graphics pointing me towards RealOne. It says you can get a 14 Day Trial. Immediately I fear I have to shell out money for a media player (despite the endless "Free" text). I found a link reading "FREE RealOne Player" that takes me to a page where I need to shell out $20. This is horrible, Rob.
When I navigate to the 14 Day Trial nonsense, I am asked for a login. It demands I register. Already I don't like this... now I have to have yet another account on another random site which I can only assume will deliver more random spam to my inbox.
Usually, I'd just leave and not put up with this nonsense. But, for the sake of science, I proceed to create a new user account. Asks for a first and last name, password, and a password reminder. That's not so bad. Next screen...
Your web site then asks me for my personal information short of my life history. In addition, it asks for a credit card number. Rob, this is bologna. Fuck it, I'll go download Windows Media Player or QuickTime instead. (Well, I wouldn't... I don't run Windows. Many other people will.) Each of those required no more than 30 seconds of my attention and bandwidth to get to an actual download link. Much better than what Real offers (which is nothing short of "please don't use our product").
I call this "Four Easy Steps To Defeating Potential Customers", and since Real has enacted these steps, I've completely stopped using their software.
You have pointed out a very easy link to get to the free software. Nevertheless, the average user out there is not going to stumble upon this Slashdot thread. Real is Really stupid for making it so hard to get to their media player (I keep emphasising that because this isn't something you should make hard to get or even charge for -- it's an avenue for your marketing and I don't want to fit the bill for that).
Whoever it is at Real that thought out your marketing flow is a real dipshit. You should never make customers work for you. There's a dozen alternatives to this in hooking customers. If people can actually get your software, they will more likely become customers. At this stage, you don't even give them that much.
So whatever these people claim about the quality of Apache is really not useful. For being the most used web server software (a factor of 3 over certain commercial offerings) with continued growth, it suffers from the least bugs and is generally the most stable.
Is it just me or does Real make it unreasonably difficult to download their player? It seems to me that if you want to encourage proliferation of your media format, you don't want to force users to go through a dozen or so clicks on your web site and then ask for a credit card number when issuing a trial! Since Real stopped offering a free player, I no longer bother with the format. Dealing with all the players in nonsense enough, I do not need the added hassle or even financial burden of paying for another one. You might want to consider encouraging your friend to switch to something a little more accessible. Of course, this all could have changed in the past couple months. As far as I remember however, Real required payment for a media player (absurd, I don't even pay for an OS).
...that believes if you special effects are 100% digital, they are 100% soulless. Digital effects are useful and can add a lot, but they cannot stand by themselves unless the effects are the center piece (as in Shrek and Nemo, etc). You still need natural, real, organic elements in a scene to make it feel natural, real, and organic. FotR and especially TTT did this very well. Think of the Black Gates of Mordor. The gates and walls were models with humans superimposed on them. The giganic trolls doing the grunt work were computer graphics. The scene has such excellent balance that you feel almost overwhelmed emotionally by their daunting presence. You aren't even thinking about special effects when you watch the scene.
Re:Oh, come on. What are YOU talking about!?
on
Bill Gates On Linux
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· Score: -1, Troll
How the hell is this insightful!? It's FUD!
Windows XP has USB 2.0
Wow, what an innovation... they have drivers for USB 2.0 devices. Wow... So do we.
Wow, do you think other platforms could do that? Yes, I think so.
it has translucent windows
Well actually, it doesn't. However, these guys have had it for a while and these guys are pretty close.
built-in NAT
Linux has had this since version 2.0. It worked great even back in 1999.
drag-and-drop CD recording
OKay, I'll conceed on this point, but I'll definitely mention you could find this here before Microsoft ever had a clue. As for XP drag and drop CD recording... it still doesn't work right.
an MPEG-4 media player
Once again, I reference these guys again. What's so impressive about that? Microsoft aren't even the people who introduced it.
it has an encrypted, compressed file system
Well, let's see here... yes, we definite have that too. As a matter of fact, I've been using encrypted file systems in Linux for years. As far as I recall, I was doing that before Windows was. No wait, Windows still doesn't offer encryption beneath the file system. Weak.
they have fine-grained access controls
Only very recently. Linux has enjoyed ACL from here and here as well.
they have a common language runtime
Funny thing is it was implemented by the open source community faster than Microsoft did.
They are pushing and developing modern programming languages so that we aren't all stuck programming in C.
A language is a tool Some languages are good for some tasks, some are better for others. For example, you couldn't quite write an operating system in Lisp like you could with C. To make this point shows how much of a fool you are. By the way, GCC compiles langauges other than C too.
Some of this technology sucks, and most of it they didn't invent, but they are pushing new technology.
Yes, most of it does suck but none of it is new. Microsoft only pushes regurgitations of what the rest of the industry has had (often for years).
(I also know that most of this stuff is available on linux, but it's also kind of a pain in the ass.)
I don't see any problems. None of what you mentioned was hard to find nor is any of it any harder to use than in Windows. For example, I play a DVD by loading my DVD player and press the button with the little triangle on it (play).
Your "points" fall down to absolutely nothing. Microsoft offers no advantages, just disadvantages over open source technologies.
You sir are a major corporate whore, completely deceived, clueless, not too bright, and giving free marketing hype to a multibillion dollar company. How does that make you feel?
OKay, we read something about 9/11 in this article. I'm not sure what that was about. Then the author goes on to compare Google to God. This somehow comes from: God is wireless, knows everything, and is everywhere. Google can be accessed wirelessly, seems to know everything, and is everywhere. Right. Well, I don't really have much experience from finding out anything from God, but that's just fruity. He throws in some statistics about Internet growth then tries to horrify us with how we're going to see more people making bombs and trying to kill us (all thanks to the Internet of course). Oh yeah, and Osama bin Laden's highly effective recruiting videos are going to be "more effective over broadband." How he can conclude that from Google's top search criteria being about sex, jobs and wrestling, I do not know. I guess wrestling is a form of stupidity terrorism or something? What idiot posted this to the front page of Slashdot? That was the single most useless piece of writing I've ever seen.
I'd say that the ClearType fonts on the XP one look far better to me than the ones on the iBook did.
RGB decimation exists on OS X as well. I use it on my 15" TiPB and I am quite pleased with it. Assuming your display's pixels are in the same order as those on my laptop (RGB), then this screenshot should look pretty good for you.
OKay, let me try again. So it should be illegal for someone to write software that can read, modify, and write Microsoft Word formatted documents then?
the only difference being the graphics
Or none, as the FreeCraft engine can use the original WC2 graphics if you own a legal copy of WC2. It seems to me that all FreeCraft does is promote the sale of more copies of WC2. It expands the WC2 market into the Linux and Macintosh world. How terrible.
Maxis owns the whole game. Not just the pretty little pictures.
So does Blizzard have some sort of patent on a game involving the building of structures and training of units for battle purposes in a game like setting? The FreeCraft project is writing code with clean room techniques. They are looking at how WC2 works from a user's perspective, and trying to implement it in their own code.
Blizzard have a copyright on WarCraft, not a patent on the concept of a RTS game. Virtually every RTS game out there has the same model as WarCraft does, so why doesn't Blizzard go take out Command & Conquor or any of the others?
Some (or) all of those screenshots are fake. Fonts look exceptional on OS X, far superior to any other platform's font rendering (of course this is also due to Apple's patents on hinting bytecodes in truetype fonts). Go buy an iMac, they are great machines.
Some of those images either look faked or I simply do not understand what is happening.
What's up with this image? If you'll notice, the menu bar across the top appears to be "normal" size, but everything else is kind of scaled down. Is there some new feature that lets you set the "magnification" of the windows rather than just their dimensions? Also notice that the windows are not scaled well at all. Reminds me of nearest neighbor as opposed to bilinear.
AFAIK, it's a violation of Apple's own Human Interface Guidelines to have several selectable items on the same line of a menu, such as in this picture, and this one too.
Lastly, this image shows the System Preferences window, yet the titlebar text is faded like it's unfocused. Unfocused windows in OS X have their titlebars made slightly transluscent. I hope they haven't changed this, it was a good idea.
Also, I didn't know they were removing many of the stiples from the UI. That would be very unlike Apple since users choke whenever the interface look even the slightest bit changed.
Attention moderators, this guy is just plain wrong. Worse still, he's pure FUD. Must work for Blizzard.
The purpose of the FreeCraft project is to create an open source WC2 implementation that can be played on any platform. If you own a legal copy of WC2, you can use the datafiles from the CD for artwork, music, and so forth. If you do not, there's a rather low-quality substitute that is entirely free for anyone to use. This project is great because you might own WC2, but you may not be running Windows (anymore). Wouldn't it suck that your money would have to go down the toilet just because you chose to run a differerent (superior) OS? That's bullshit. FreeCraft is interoperability software and it's perfectly legit. I could see an argument on the name, but there's no reason they can't build a clone of the engine.
If anything, just stop and think about the basics of the situation. You have a group of volunteers creating a program for free who are being shut down by a greedy mega-corporation. Do you really think the FreeCraft project is so evil and Blizzard is justified?
It's not illegal to write software that can process data from another application. Can this apply to the FreeCraft project? I can see them changing the name, but not caving on the engine. (Meanwhile as I write this, I see ads at the top of each page for another company that uses litigation to smite competition.)
You can't blame IBM for this, otherwise it just gets ridiculous... after all, Ford isn't responsible if a bank robber makes his getaway in a Ford truck, is it?
Funny you should mention it. Henry Ford was awarded one of these by the Nazi party. What involvement did Ford have?
FYI, I'm 30, I've long since graduated from programming to design, and no I did not make the numbers up.
That's funny because you said you have 20 years of work experience in the industry. So you worked for 6 years illegally or you're John Carmack, but that's impossible since you hate low-level stuff.
I'll leave you to understand how to cull since you've obviously would rather insult me than ask how it could possibly be done.
Ah, but you said that you "ran" 1,000,000,000+ records in 1/100 seconds. I very generously gave your "run" 1 cycle per record... now you try to tack this on. Since you don't care how things work intenerally, you must assume that culling is a noop. It's not. Try agian. Perhaps you could explain to me in detail how this is done. Describe your algorithm. Give an analysis of its complexity. How do you overcome the bottlenecks? Desecribe what a "run" is on a reecord. I understand caching can be used to improve IO performance, but that has nothing to do with how fast the operation itself is performed. Whether or not you read from a buffer or a disk, any given operation will take n time. It's not as if a buffer makes something a noop! Care to lend us your insight?
With your logic it should be a requirement to understand all material science of a car in order to let a driver use one so they can make, replace or mend any part that could go wrong.
Uh, no. With my logic, it would be a requirement to understand material science to engineer a car. The user is analogous to the driver. I agree, the user need not know about how the computer works because they are not programming it.
But, if you knew design you would have realized that your CPU argument doesn't hold water because the issue is really how to handle the I/O bottleneck, which is asynchronous. So, your 1 CPU per record doesn't even work because you don't understand how buffering works-- it is possible to have a well below 1 CPU per record count rate, but I digress.
This makes no absolutely no sense and you failed to comprehend the argument. First of all, I said cycle, not record. There's a big difference. I never suggested 1billion CPUs were necessary to process 1billion records. Let me break this down and explain it to you again.
Your claim: 1,000,000,000 records processed in 1/100 seconds.
Let's assume 1 CPU cycle is required to process each record. For simplicity sake, we are not going to take into account any processor time required to read the records regardless of the source, memory, disk, or any other magic buffer. The reason we are disregarding this is becaue clearly, any operation to read data, regardless of its source, takes additional time. If you take IO into account, your claim is not even remotely possible. We will only concentrate on the actual "processing" of a record. Even the processing of the record is arbitrary in this argument. Any kind of practical record manipulation would likely involve many cycles. Incidentally, to examine a record to determine if it can be culled also requires some CPU time.
Now, let's do some very complex math. 1,000,000,000 records at 1 CPU cycle per record in 1/100 seconds would require a CPU to perform 1,000,000,000 * 100 cycles per second. That would be 100,000,000,000 cycles per second, or 100GHz.
If we take into account practical operations on records (involving many more cycles), reading them from disk and/or memory, the CPU would clearly have to execute far more instructions. I am still disregarding IO bottlenecks for your benefit. If it takes 1 CPU cycle to process and 1 CPU cycle to read, again assuming that IO takes zero time, then we now require a 200GHz processor. This is true even if the CPU is a specialized processor that performs the operation on each record and IO in 1 cycle each.
Now if you had a cluster of 100 systems running our
I've got news for you: not everyone wants or can be the expert programmer. blah blah blah blah blah.
Not everyone wants to be an expert at building bridges. Fortunately for the rest of us, those people aren't out building bridges. I am getting the strong impression you're either 14 years old or have the mentality of one. "I don't wanna do it that way! *pout*" Sorry, but I need to vent frustration from time to time.
The software industry is a mess. The vast majority of software sucks, particularly in the Windows world (where, by the by, most of the coders are with attitudes of "don't do it right, just do it fast"). The quality of any type of worker directly affects the quality of their work. If you have people who don't know jack about programming computers, the quality of their product will reflect that. If you're someone who knows what they're doing, you're going to write better, more solid code because you have consideration for what your code may be doing at a deeper level.
I'm not going get into the sarcasm of database technology. It wasn't SQL, it ran a billion plus records and did reports across them in a hundredth of second, and no-- it did not make up results.
Yes, you did make up those results. You don't even have the mental capacity to run some basic math in your head before dreaming up figures. You are clearly 14 years old by this statement. I should stop, but you need taught. Let's assume it takes 1 CPU clock cycle to, uhm, "run" a record in your database (but database operations are often complex enough to involve hundreds of cycles). That would mean that your processor runs at 1,000,000,000 * 100 cycles per second. So what era do you come from where they have 100GHz processors? This is of course not even taking into consideration the fact that you have limited bus bandwidth, limited memory, IO constraints and so forth.
But you see, I realize all those things and know you're full of shit because I know how stuff works.
Code is for humans, not computers.
*muffled laugher from crowd*
BASIC allows training and it is not the be-all and end-all. It is, however, an excellent place to start and to give people the opportunity to see many different things that they may come across.
It does not give people the opportunity to see many different thigns that they may have come across. In fact, by your own argument, it hides and much as possible and limits the functionality of the machine to the simplest form. At least try to be consistent in your ramblings.
Different people have different skills and to bluntly treat people all the same and then apologize that the system is just that complex and some people aren't going to get it is just wrong.
Let's take a very closely related example to computer science. What if I was a mathematician who didn't wnat to know how the hell an integral works or even how to do one. I just wanted to be able to plug the values in and BOOM, I get my value back. I am not going to be a very successful mathematician, now am I? I won't have the first clue about what I'm doing or how to advance or even how to solve problems because I would lack basic understanding of the science I am trying to use.
*sigh*
Do you hold a disgree in computer science by chance? Or is it just IT? If it's the former, how could you have even graduated! You're probably one of those people who didn't pay attention in your discrete math or autonoma classes.
I ask again, did you work for Microsoft for your "20 years" of work experience?
As far as the industry is concerned, a language the achieves the desired goals in the easiest format wins.
Yes, I agree. Those are the cases were the inferior product is produced. You can develop something fast, but it may not be stable, extensible, or reusable. And if you pick a level that is too high on the abstraction ladder, and you want to do something more interesting than manipulate your little Win32 GUI widgets, you've got a problem. You have to go and write lowlevel code anyway and chances are the result will be flaky. I know, because I was forced into that situation at my company.
The simple truth is that direct memory management is NOT necessary for 99% applications and when it is it can always be abstracted away into a procedure/object. I have personally written tools that allowed junior programmers to program things way beyond their design abilities because instead of taking the attitude that they had better learn how to do things, I abstrated the system for them. I then made a simple framework and explained what was needed to get it to work, but NOT how it worked. They produced a lot of useful code.
Then I truly feel sorry for your students. You have done them a terrible disservice. It's a shame that there are so many coders out there who have no idea what allocating anything is all about. When you learn how to allocate memory properly, you begin to understand what resource management on a computer is all about. Someone like you who doesn't care about these things probably has never coded anything that gets connections from a pool (or similar limited resource) or uses threads.
As I mentioned in my post, Computer Engineering is taught from the bottom up, not the top down. They teach you how a thing works before you use a thing. At a glance, I'd say the software industry is full of a lot of crappy products whereas the hardware industry (save fringe engineering to pack too much capasity on a platter, for instance) is full of higher quality stuff.
I'm sorry, but you are absolutely wrong. You cannot code responsibly without knowing the internals of what you're using. There are always oddities and quirks that are going to emerge, no matter how much abstraction you have. Look at Java. You run into memory nonsense such as logical leaks (particularly when dealing with Hashtable) and GC oddities. But all the hype says you don't need to worry about these things! That's bologna.
You say, "I then made a simple framework and explained what was needed to get it to work, but NOT how it worked. They produced a lot of useful code." They may have produced some useful code but you produced some terrible coders. It's programmers like those that create many of the nasty problems in most software today. They use something without any comprehension of what it actually entails. This potentially creates plenty of nightmares, especially performance disasters.
I gave up pointers years ago when figured out that 99% of bugs come from them.
You mustn't be a very good developer then. Most of us have comprehended pointers and use them properly. You said you worked 20 years in the industry?
The trick is that you have to have a firm hand on teaching good programming practice.
Which involves languages that encourage good programming practice. Of course, there's two sides to that. There's being a good programmer and there's following good programming principles (computer science). Being a good programmer involves knowing the consequences of what you're doing. Following good principles means using the right datastructures, creating good algorithms and so on. Granted, either of these can be accomplished in any language, lower level languages encourage it.
When your program blows up because you used unallocated memory, you learn quickly that you must always allocate memory. Otherwise, if your program just chugs merrily along, you never realize you made a mistake and so yo
You mean concepts like variable types, expressions, operators, and control structures?
No, I mean things that are essential to the language, such as GOTO/SUB (use of which is otherwise discouraged), lack of scope, and its sorry excuse for functions.
Reply with your argument. My post was not meant to be a troll and even if it was, if you think an argument is compelling or with discussing, do so.:P
I learned QBASIC first, then much of what I knew about programming out when I started with C++. C++ stuff has stayed with me and remained useful. QBASIC and its concepts haven't.
I have two systems that receive heavy use. Both of them are often used for ripping and the dual processor system is used for encoding. Whenever either of these systems is under heavy load, and I rip a DVD or image a CD, weird things happen. I get IO timeouts and sometimes even lock ups. Under normal load, there is absolutely no trouble at all, except with the dual processor system. That machine does filesystem crypto and thus, it's processors are quite stressed by cryptoloop processes whenver the disks are active. Dumping a disc to a filesystem on that box sometimes produces annoying problems. I've had solid lock ups, inability to unmount and eject discs because processes won't release them, and sometimes even X just stops responding.
Both systems are running 2.4.20. Now, question: are problems like these resolved in 2.4.21 with these IO fixes? Remember, the drives doing the reading are probably fine. The one machine has two, a DVD-ROM and a CD-RW, and the other has a DVD+-RW. All three drives cannot possibly be faulty, nor can both IDE controllers. The problem has got to be with software. I cannot think back to when this began, but it may have been for the life of 2.4.20.
So is there been something screwy with the IDE-CD subsystem in Linux lately?
Don't mess around with any variety or descendent of BASIC as a learning language. You've got one thing right: it teaches you the wrong things to do in a lot of ways. It will only add confusion when a programmer goes on to more complex (perhaps the wrong word here) languages.
So, I suggest C++. That may sound appauling at first to some, but here's why.
Programmers absolutely have to know how to work with memory. It's a fact and it's one I think will never change, no matter how abstracted or garbage-collected languages become. You might suggest using C, but I think that's a bad idea for two reasons. The first I'll describe here: it's a little too hard. You want programmers to learn the hard stuff, but not too fast. new and delete are clearly not as powerful as malloc and free, but they do basically the same thing: allocation and deallocation of memory. The former two are easier to use at first and more intuitive to the programmer, especially when dealing with objects. The second reason for not starting on C comes in my next point.
We live in a world of objected oriented abstraction. It's essential for the development of a lot of modern software, particularly anything that exhibits a sophisticated user interface. Classes are not particularly difficult to learn with C++ and C lacks object oriented programming altogether (well, for the most part). Once you know C++, the object oriented programming skills obtained can be passed on to a number of other languages, including Java with very little relearning.
C++ is more relevant by far than *BASIC. Aside from skills developed while learning it, the language is self is widely used and has a relatively small learning curve. *BASIC may or may not be much easier to learn, but that's irrelevant because it is very rarely used. You wouldn't bother learning *BASIC for the same reasons you don't really bother learning COBOL or Pascal these days. I'm not saying they're lousy languages, just not particularly useful. (You could argue that VisualBASIC is used a lot. May be true, but usually only for RAD throw-away applications or application prototyping. It's piss-poor for anything serious.)
Of course, you could also argue that CS should be taught the same way as CE: learn why the tiny pieces work, then learn how to use the tiny pieces, then learn how to use complex pieces made of tiny pieces, and so on. In that case, everyone needs to learn Assembly first then move to higher level languages one at a time. That is another discussion altogether, but it contradicts learning *BASIC first.:-)
How, might you ask? Quite simply, my relationship would be significantly less interesting if not for my knowledge of PEEK and POKE. You gotta make sure you know where to PEEK, then where and what to POKE. See! QBASIC isn't dead!
It does come as any surprise. The Sun will surely fail once it exhausts all of its fuel. Yes, it will take billions perhaps trillions of years, but no energy source is infinite no matter what the marketing hype says. All that remains is for Netcraft to confirm it.
Slashdot Mirror
I call this "Four Easy Steps To Defeating Potential Customers", and since Real has enacted these steps, I've completely stopped using their software.
You have pointed out a very easy link to get to the free software. Nevertheless, the average user out there is not going to stumble upon this Slashdot thread. Real is Really stupid for making it so hard to get to their media player (I keep emphasising that because this isn't something you should make hard to get or even charge for -- it's an avenue for your marketing and I don't want to fit the bill for that).
Whoever it is at Real that thought out your marketing flow is a real dipshit. You should never make customers work for you. There's a dozen alternatives to this in hooking customers. If people can actually get your software, they will more likely become customers. At this stage, you don't even give them that much.
Apache isn't dying.
So whatever these people claim about the quality of Apache is really not useful. For being the most used web server software (a factor of 3 over certain commercial offerings) with continued growth, it suffers from the least bugs and is generally the most stable.
Are we to read this as anything other than FUD?
Is it just me or does Real make it unreasonably difficult to download their player? It seems to me that if you want to encourage proliferation of your media format, you don't want to force users to go through a dozen or so clicks on your web site and then ask for a credit card number when issuing a trial! Since Real stopped offering a free player, I no longer bother with the format. Dealing with all the players in nonsense enough, I do not need the added hassle or even financial burden of paying for another one. You might want to consider encouraging your friend to switch to something a little more accessible. Of course, this all could have changed in the past couple months. As far as I remember however, Real required payment for a media player (absurd, I don't even pay for an OS).
...that believes if you special effects are 100% digital, they are 100% soulless. Digital effects are useful and can add a lot, but they cannot stand by themselves unless the effects are the center piece (as in Shrek and Nemo, etc). You still need natural, real, organic elements in a scene to make it feel natural, real, and organic. FotR and especially TTT did this very well. Think of the Black Gates of Mordor. The gates and walls were models with humans superimposed on them. The giganic trolls doing the grunt work were computer graphics. The scene has such excellent balance that you feel almost overwhelmed emotionally by their daunting presence. You aren't even thinking about special effects when you watch the scene.
How the hell is this insightful!? It's FUD!
Windows XP has USB 2.0
Wow, what an innovation... they have drivers for USB 2.0 devices. Wow... So do we.
it has low-latency audio
Let's see, does Linux...? Yep, we got that too.
it can play DVDs
Wow, do you think other platforms could do that? Yes, I think so.
it has translucent windows
Well actually, it doesn't. However, these guys have had it for a while and these guys are pretty close.
built-in NAT
Linux has had this since version 2.0. It worked great even back in 1999.
drag-and-drop CD recording
OKay, I'll conceed on this point, but I'll definitely mention you could find this here before Microsoft ever had a clue. As for XP drag and drop CD recording... it still doesn't work right.
an MPEG-4 media player
Once again, I reference these guys again. What's so impressive about that? Microsoft aren't even the people who introduced it.
it has an encrypted, compressed file system
Well, let's see here... yes, we definite have that too. As a matter of fact, I've been using encrypted file systems in Linux for years. As far as I recall, I was doing that before Windows was. No wait, Windows still doesn't offer encryption beneath the file system. Weak.
they have fine-grained access controls
Only very recently. Linux has enjoyed ACL from here and here as well.
they have a common language runtime
Funny thing is it was implemented by the open source community faster than Microsoft did.
They are pushing and developing modern programming languages so that we aren't all stuck programming in C.
A language is a tool Some languages are good for some tasks, some are better for others. For example, you couldn't quite write an operating system in Lisp like you could with C. To make this point shows how much of a fool you are. By the way, GCC compiles langauges other than C too.
Some of this technology sucks, and most of it they didn't invent, but they are pushing new technology.
Yes, most of it does suck but none of it is new. Microsoft only pushes regurgitations of what the rest of the industry has had (often for years).
(I also know that most of this stuff is available on linux, but it's also kind of a pain in the ass.)
I don't see any problems. None of what you mentioned was hard to find nor is any of it any harder to use than in Windows. For example, I play a DVD by loading my DVD player and press the button with the little triangle on it (play).
Your "points" fall down to absolutely nothing. Microsoft offers no advantages, just disadvantages over open source technologies.
You sir are a major corporate whore, completely deceived, clueless, not too bright, and giving free marketing hype to a multibillion dollar company. How does that make you feel?
OKay, we read something about 9/11 in this article. I'm not sure what that was about. Then the author goes on to compare Google to God. This somehow comes from: God is wireless, knows everything, and is everywhere. Google can be accessed wirelessly, seems to know everything, and is everywhere. Right. Well, I don't really have much experience from finding out anything from God, but that's just fruity. He throws in some statistics about Internet growth then tries to horrify us with how we're going to see more people making bombs and trying to kill us (all thanks to the Internet of course). Oh yeah, and Osama bin Laden's highly effective recruiting videos are going to be "more effective over broadband." How he can conclude that from Google's top search criteria being about sex, jobs and wrestling, I do not know. I guess wrestling is a form of stupidity terrorism or something? What idiot posted this to the front page of Slashdot? That was the single most useless piece of writing I've ever seen.
Let's implement a technology that detonates bombs carried by potential terrorists before they get on the plane...
We have all kinds of sites that offer an easy avenue for opposition to write their representatives, telling them to not do something.
Is there a web site for this particular issue with a pre-(well)-written letter encouraging our representatives to support this?
I'd say that the ClearType fonts on the XP one look far better to me than the ones on the iBook did.
RGB decimation exists on OS X as well. I use it on my 15" TiPB and I am quite pleased with it. Assuming your display's pixels are in the same order as those on my laptop (RGB), then this screenshot should look pretty good for you.
microsoft word = warcraft II
Word processor = RTS
OKay, let me try again. So it should be illegal for someone to write software that can read, modify, and write Microsoft Word formatted documents then?
the only difference being the graphics
Or none, as the FreeCraft engine can use the original WC2 graphics if you own a legal copy of WC2. It seems to me that all FreeCraft does is promote the sale of more copies of WC2. It expands the WC2 market into the Linux and Macintosh world. How terrible.
Maxis owns the whole game. Not just the pretty little pictures.
So does Blizzard have some sort of patent on a game involving the building of structures and training of units for battle purposes in a game like setting? The FreeCraft project is writing code with clean room techniques. They are looking at how WC2 works from a user's perspective, and trying to implement it in their own code.
Blizzard have a copyright on WarCraft, not a patent on the concept of a RTS game. Virtually every RTS game out there has the same model as WarCraft does, so why doesn't Blizzard go take out Command & Conquor or any of the others?
Some (or) all of those screenshots are fake. Fonts look exceptional on OS X, far superior to any other platform's font rendering (of course this is also due to Apple's patents on hinting bytecodes in truetype fonts). Go buy an iMac, they are great machines.
Some of those images either look faked or I simply do not understand what is happening.
What's up with this image? If you'll notice, the menu bar across the top appears to be "normal" size, but everything else is kind of scaled down. Is there some new feature that lets you set the "magnification" of the windows rather than just their dimensions? Also notice that the windows are not scaled well at all. Reminds me of nearest neighbor as opposed to bilinear.
AFAIK, it's a violation of Apple's own Human Interface Guidelines to have several selectable items on the same line of a menu, such as in this picture, and this one too.
Lastly, this image shows the System Preferences window, yet the titlebar text is faded like it's unfocused. Unfocused windows in OS X have their titlebars made slightly transluscent. I hope they haven't changed this, it was a good idea.
Also, I didn't know they were removing many of the stiples from the UI. That would be very unlike Apple since users choke whenever the interface look even the slightest bit changed.
It is illegal to freely provide such a close imitaion of a retail game, no matter how low-quality you can make it.
So what you're saying is that it is illegal for anyone to make a word processor because Microsoft has one?
Attention moderators, this guy is just plain wrong. Worse still, he's pure FUD. Must work for Blizzard.
The purpose of the FreeCraft project is to create an open source WC2 implementation that can be played on any platform. If you own a legal copy of WC2, you can use the datafiles from the CD for artwork, music, and so forth. If you do not, there's a rather low-quality substitute that is entirely free for anyone to use. This project is great because you might own WC2, but you may not be running Windows (anymore). Wouldn't it suck that your money would have to go down the toilet just because you chose to run a differerent (superior) OS? That's bullshit. FreeCraft is interoperability software and it's perfectly legit. I could see an argument on the name, but there's no reason they can't build a clone of the engine.
If anything, just stop and think about the basics of the situation. You have a group of volunteers creating a program for free who are being shut down by a greedy mega-corporation. Do you really think the FreeCraft project is so evil and Blizzard is justified?
It's not illegal to write software that can process data from another application. Can this apply to the FreeCraft project? I can see them changing the name, but not caving on the engine. (Meanwhile as I write this, I see ads at the top of each page for another company that uses litigation to smite competition.)
You can't blame IBM for this, otherwise it just gets ridiculous... after all, Ford isn't responsible if a bank robber makes his getaway in a Ford truck, is it?
Funny you should mention it. Henry Ford was awarded one of these by the Nazi party. What involvement did Ford have?
FYI, I'm 30, I've long since graduated from programming to design, and no I did not make the numbers up.
That's funny because you said you have 20 years of work experience in the industry. So you worked for 6 years illegally or you're John Carmack, but that's impossible since you hate low-level stuff.
I'll leave you to understand how to cull since you've obviously would rather insult me than ask how it could possibly be done.
Ah, but you said that you "ran" 1,000,000,000+ records in 1/100 seconds. I very generously gave your "run" 1 cycle per record... now you try to tack this on. Since you don't care how things work intenerally, you must assume that culling is a noop. It's not. Try agian. Perhaps you could explain to me in detail how this is done. Describe your algorithm. Give an analysis of its complexity. How do you overcome the bottlenecks? Desecribe what a "run" is on a reecord. I understand caching can be used to improve IO performance, but that has nothing to do with how fast the operation itself is performed. Whether or not you read from a buffer or a disk, any given operation will take n time. It's not as if a buffer makes something a noop! Care to lend us your insight?
With your logic it should be a requirement to understand all material science of a car in order to let a driver use one so they can make, replace or mend any part that could go wrong.
Uh, no. With my logic, it would be a requirement to understand material science to engineer a car. The user is analogous to the driver. I agree, the user need not know about how the computer works because they are not programming it.
But, if you knew design you would have realized that your CPU argument doesn't hold water because the issue is really how to handle the I/O bottleneck, which is asynchronous. So, your 1 CPU per record doesn't even work because you don't understand how buffering works-- it is possible to have a well below 1 CPU per record count rate, but I digress.
This makes no absolutely no sense and you failed to comprehend the argument. First of all, I said cycle, not record. There's a big difference. I never suggested 1billion CPUs were necessary to process 1billion records. Let me break this down and explain it to you again.
Your claim: 1,000,000,000 records processed in 1/100 seconds.
Let's assume 1 CPU cycle is required to process each record. For simplicity sake, we are not going to take into account any processor time required to read the records regardless of the source, memory, disk, or any other magic buffer. The reason we are disregarding this is becaue clearly, any operation to read data, regardless of its source, takes additional time. If you take IO into account, your claim is not even remotely possible. We will only concentrate on the actual "processing" of a record. Even the processing of the record is arbitrary in this argument. Any kind of practical record manipulation would likely involve many cycles. Incidentally, to examine a record to determine if it can be culled also requires some CPU time.
Now, let's do some very complex math. 1,000,000,000 records at 1 CPU cycle per record in 1/100 seconds would require a CPU to perform 1,000,000,000 * 100 cycles per second. That would be 100,000,000,000 cycles per second, or 100GHz.
If we take into account practical operations on records (involving many more cycles), reading them from disk and/or memory, the CPU would clearly have to execute far more instructions. I am still disregarding IO bottlenecks for your benefit. If it takes 1 CPU cycle to process and 1 CPU cycle to read, again assuming that IO takes zero time, then we now require a 200GHz processor. This is true even if the CPU is a specialized processor that performs the operation on each record and IO in 1 cycle each.
Now if you had a cluster of 100 systems running our
I've got news for you: not everyone wants or can be the expert programmer. blah blah blah blah blah.
Not everyone wants to be an expert at building bridges. Fortunately for the rest of us, those people aren't out building bridges. I am getting the strong impression you're either 14 years old or have the mentality of one. "I don't wanna do it that way! *pout*" Sorry, but I need to vent frustration from time to time.
The software industry is a mess. The vast majority of software sucks, particularly in the Windows world (where, by the by, most of the coders are with attitudes of "don't do it right, just do it fast"). The quality of any type of worker directly affects the quality of their work. If you have people who don't know jack about programming computers, the quality of their product will reflect that. If you're someone who knows what they're doing, you're going to write better, more solid code because you have consideration for what your code may be doing at a deeper level.
I'm not going get into the sarcasm of database technology. It wasn't SQL, it ran a billion plus records and did reports across them in a hundredth of second, and no-- it did not make up results.
Yes, you did make up those results. You don't even have the mental capacity to run some basic math in your head before dreaming up figures. You are clearly 14 years old by this statement. I should stop, but you need taught. Let's assume it takes 1 CPU clock cycle to, uhm, "run" a record in your database (but database operations are often complex enough to involve hundreds of cycles). That would mean that your processor runs at 1,000,000,000 * 100 cycles per second. So what era do you come from where they have 100GHz processors? This is of course not even taking into consideration the fact that you have limited bus bandwidth, limited memory, IO constraints and so forth.
But you see, I realize all those things and know you're full of shit because I know how stuff works.
Code is for humans, not computers.
*muffled laugher from crowd*
BASIC allows training and it is not the be-all and end-all. It is, however, an excellent place to start and to give people the opportunity to see many different things that they may come across.
It does not give people the opportunity to see many different thigns that they may have come across. In fact, by your own argument, it hides and much as possible and limits the functionality of the machine to the simplest form. At least try to be consistent in your ramblings.
Different people have different skills and to bluntly treat people all the same and then apologize that the system is just that complex and some people aren't going to get it is just wrong.
Let's take a very closely related example to computer science. What if I was a mathematician who didn't wnat to know how the hell an integral works or even how to do one. I just wanted to be able to plug the values in and BOOM, I get my value back. I am not going to be a very successful mathematician, now am I? I won't have the first clue about what I'm doing or how to advance or even how to solve problems because I would lack basic understanding of the science I am trying to use.
*sigh*
Do you hold a disgree in computer science by chance? Or is it just IT? If it's the former, how could you have even graduated! You're probably one of those people who didn't pay attention in your discrete math or autonoma classes.
I ask again, did you work for Microsoft for your "20 years" of work experience?
As far as the industry is concerned, a language the achieves the desired goals in the easiest format wins.
Yes, I agree. Those are the cases were the inferior product is produced. You can develop something fast, but it may not be stable, extensible, or reusable. And if you pick a level that is too high on the abstraction ladder, and you want to do something more interesting than manipulate your little Win32 GUI widgets, you've got a problem. You have to go and write lowlevel code anyway and chances are the result will be flaky. I know, because I was forced into that situation at my company.
The simple truth is that direct memory management is NOT necessary for 99% applications and when it is it can always be abstracted away into a procedure/object. I have personally written tools that allowed junior programmers to program things way beyond their design abilities because instead of taking the attitude that they had better learn how to do things, I abstrated the system for them. I then made a simple framework and explained what was needed to get it to work, but NOT how it worked. They produced a lot of useful code.
Then I truly feel sorry for your students. You have done them a terrible disservice. It's a shame that there are so many coders out there who have no idea what allocating anything is all about. When you learn how to allocate memory properly, you begin to understand what resource management on a computer is all about. Someone like you who doesn't care about these things probably has never coded anything that gets connections from a pool (or similar limited resource) or uses threads.
As I mentioned in my post, Computer Engineering is taught from the bottom up, not the top down. They teach you how a thing works before you use a thing. At a glance, I'd say the software industry is full of a lot of crappy products whereas the hardware industry (save fringe engineering to pack too much capasity on a platter, for instance) is full of higher quality stuff.
I'm sorry, but you are absolutely wrong. You cannot code responsibly without knowing the internals of what you're using. There are always oddities and quirks that are going to emerge, no matter how much abstraction you have. Look at Java. You run into memory nonsense such as logical leaks (particularly when dealing with Hashtable) and GC oddities. But all the hype says you don't need to worry about these things! That's bologna.
You say, "I then made a simple framework and explained what was needed to get it to work, but NOT how it worked. They produced a lot of useful code." They may have produced some useful code but you produced some terrible coders. It's programmers like those that create many of the nasty problems in most software today. They use something without any comprehension of what it actually entails. This potentially creates plenty of nightmares, especially performance disasters.
I gave up pointers years ago when figured out that 99% of bugs come from them.
You mustn't be a very good developer then. Most of us have comprehended pointers and use them properly. You said you worked 20 years in the industry?
The trick is that you have to have a firm hand on teaching good programming practice.
Which involves languages that encourage good programming practice. Of course, there's two sides to that. There's being a good programmer and there's following good programming principles (computer science). Being a good programmer involves knowing the consequences of what you're doing. Following good principles means using the right datastructures, creating good algorithms and so on. Granted, either of these can be accomplished in any language, lower level languages encourage it.
When your program blows up because you used unallocated memory, you learn quickly that you must always allocate memory. Otherwise, if your program just chugs merrily along, you never realize you made a mistake and so yo
You mean concepts like variable types, expressions, operators, and control structures?
No, I mean things that are essential to the language, such as GOTO/SUB (use of which is otherwise discouraged), lack of scope, and its sorry excuse for functions.
Reply with your argument. My post was not meant to be a troll and even if it was, if you think an argument is compelling or with discussing, do so. :P
I learned QBASIC first, then much of what I knew about programming out when I started with C++. C++ stuff has stayed with me and remained useful. QBASIC and its concepts haven't.
I have two systems that receive heavy use. Both of them are often used for ripping and the dual processor system is used for encoding. Whenever either of these systems is under heavy load, and I rip a DVD or image a CD, weird things happen. I get IO timeouts and sometimes even lock ups. Under normal load, there is absolutely no trouble at all, except with the dual processor system. That machine does filesystem crypto and thus, it's processors are quite stressed by cryptoloop processes whenver the disks are active. Dumping a disc to a filesystem on that box sometimes produces annoying problems. I've had solid lock ups, inability to unmount and eject discs because processes won't release them, and sometimes even X just stops responding.
Both systems are running 2.4.20. Now, question: are problems like these resolved in 2.4.21 with these IO fixes? Remember, the drives doing the reading are probably fine. The one machine has two, a DVD-ROM and a CD-RW, and the other has a DVD+-RW. All three drives cannot possibly be faulty, nor can both IDE controllers. The problem has got to be with software. I cannot think back to when this began, but it may have been for the life of 2.4.20.
So is there been something screwy with the IDE-CD subsystem in Linux lately?
Don't mess around with any variety or descendent of BASIC as a learning language. You've got one thing right: it teaches you the wrong things to do in a lot of ways. It will only add confusion when a programmer goes on to more complex (perhaps the wrong word here) languages.
:-)
So, I suggest C++. That may sound appauling at first to some, but here's why.
Programmers absolutely have to know how to work with memory. It's a fact and it's one I think will never change, no matter how abstracted or garbage-collected languages become. You might suggest using C, but I think that's a bad idea for two reasons. The first I'll describe here: it's a little too hard. You want programmers to learn the hard stuff, but not too fast. new and delete are clearly not as powerful as malloc and free, but they do basically the same thing: allocation and deallocation of memory. The former two are easier to use at first and more intuitive to the programmer, especially when dealing with objects. The second reason for not starting on C comes in my next point.
We live in a world of objected oriented abstraction. It's essential for the development of a lot of modern software, particularly anything that exhibits a sophisticated user interface. Classes are not particularly difficult to learn with C++ and C lacks object oriented programming altogether (well, for the most part). Once you know C++, the object oriented programming skills obtained can be passed on to a number of other languages, including Java with very little relearning.
C++ is more relevant by far than *BASIC. Aside from skills developed while learning it, the language is self is widely used and has a relatively small learning curve. *BASIC may or may not be much easier to learn, but that's irrelevant because it is very rarely used. You wouldn't bother learning *BASIC for the same reasons you don't really bother learning COBOL or Pascal these days. I'm not saying they're lousy languages, just not particularly useful. (You could argue that VisualBASIC is used a lot. May be true, but usually only for RAD throw-away applications or application prototyping. It's piss-poor for anything serious.)
Of course, you could also argue that CS should be taught the same way as CE: learn why the tiny pieces work, then learn how to use the tiny pieces, then learn how to use complex pieces made of tiny pieces, and so on. In that case, everyone needs to learn Assembly first then move to higher level languages one at a time. That is another discussion altogether, but it contradicts learning *BASIC first.
How, might you ask? Quite simply, my relationship would be significantly less interesting if not for my knowledge of PEEK and POKE. You gotta make sure you know where to PEEK, then where and what to POKE. See! QBASIC isn't dead!
It does come as any surprise. The Sun will surely fail once it exhausts all of its fuel. Yes, it will take billions perhaps trillions of years, but no energy source is infinite no matter what the marketing hype says. All that remains is for Netcraft to confirm it.