"Barely functional?" I think you're overstating your case. I have successfully deployed XServes running OS X Server. They handle the apache load admirably. I have had some problems with MySQL (which the recent Anandtech article mentions), but this is because MySQL does more on OSX than it does on Linux to ensure transactions complete.
Do you have any real examples of this "Barely functional" behavior? Mach is probably slightly slower. I don't think it really makes a huge difference unless you're doing realtime programming (it sure hasn't made a difference for me).
I don't know what that has to do with WINE but I think you missed my point completely so I'll leave that alone.
No. It was not there on 68k. The Mach-O ABI assumes the programmatic availability of a program counter register. The PowerPC RISC architecture did not provide one, and was not written to leverage one. There was a logical and real disconnect in these ideologies which led to a noticable speed penalty on PowerPC machines.
GCC4.0 has a new option to help eliminate this flaw. But the flaw never existed on 68k.
Again, I think we are not connecting here. I wasn't addressing the Mach-O problem specifically but speaking more generally.
Also, the state of x86 at the time was simply not caught up with its competitiors. The processors were just slower, and when you asked them to do more, they showed it. Blaming the OS because of the hardware is both unfair and incorrect. It ran great before the x86 switch.
OK, I should give up at this point. We're not talking about the same things. You are just restating what I said.
Oh, and if you're really calling a function so often that you begin to see the dispatch latency, you just lookup and retain the C function pointer reference. But at that point, why were you using a non-inlined function in the first place?
It all adds up. Every little bit of ineffiency at that deep a level (OS) slows the system.
By the same token, developers work much faster in languages like Objective-C. Apple's response? Objective-C++. Use C++ where you need it (for legacy or performance reasons, like MacSTL), and Objective-C for its ease of use.
Again, we're just not connecting. I never said it couldn't be fixed, I just said there are reasons why OS X has problems now.
It does, but they all do. No OS is perfect. Before you go making posts that might cause FUD (like your first post), please consider that.
Again you are just restating what I said. I don't know what fight you are fighting but it's not the one I'm in. I think I'm done.;)
Endian issues are minor though (usually not a problem at all) compared to the API differences.
I don't see the difference between porting between Windows/Linux, and Windows/OS X (Intel). The same problems will still be there.
I don't see Linux ports all over the place dispite the fact that my CPU and even my hardware is the same as I use in Windows. I don't see why OS X would be any different (other than industry support, but that doesn't make it easier).
That's incorrect. XNU has made massive strides in performance.
That is a bit like saying WINE has made massive strides in providing a Windows layer. It has made massive progress but it is barely close to functional except for a specific set of applications. Maybe that's a bad example, but what I'm saying is that dispite all the progress the problem persists (relative to other solutions BSD-on-Mach is slow).
And the Mach-O problem? Didn't exist on 68k machines or Intel machines (from the NeXT days). There is still work to do, but that doesn't mean you can invalidate the progress made.
No, it was still there. Speaking as a former NeXTSTEP user, OS X performs nearly identical (if you take into account hardware advances and the monster that is Aqua). Except a few areas where there have been improvements (like pre-linking) it still has many of the old warts. A lot of the high performance neato things done back in the day where due to the NeXT hardware (because PC hardware completely sucked at the time). When NeXTSTEP finally went Intel it was a lot slower than Windows.
NeXTSTEP had a great development environment. All object oriented and stuff. Objective-C is a cool language. However, there are serious penalties to be paid for that type of design. All method calls in Objective-C are virtual functions requiring a pointer dereference (possibly a hash lookup, I can't remember) and there is very limited opportunity to inline code. That gives you a pretty hefty performance penalty. You can't do too much stuff at runtime without penalty (Smalltalk et al). I know someone will argue about computers being fast enough and all that, but it's a performance penalty just the same (ie. compared to C++, Objective-C is quite slow).
I also did Mach development back in the early 90's. It's a flexible microkernel but over-engineered and was/is lacking in some critical areas.
It's that type of problem that can be found throughout OS X (again, speaking as an OS X developer). Another problem is that OS X is a funky mix of C, Objective-C, C++, and Java. All of those languages can be found all over the place, blech.
With that said, I agree with you. I think because of the switch to Intel Apple will become a major player in a few years which will be quite good and exciting. I really like OS X but like all operating systems it has issues.
Err, you say you're a developer, but then you say things like this. The Mach/BSD issue is not the bottleneck. That Anandtech article was painfully innacurate and uninformed.
I wasn't talking about the Anandtech article.
There are some bottlenecks in this region, but they are not inherent to the design. For example, the Mach-O ABI has a weakness on RISC machines, and the kernel resource locking needs to be more finely articulated.
I didn't say it was inherent in the design. However, if it is so easily fixed then why is it still a problem? (This problem is not new, like I said, it has been around for nearly 20 years)
OS X has a lightweight OO architecture for device drivers, but this is in C++, so it hardly matters once the code is compled.
Is is quite easy to write slow C++ code.
For me, one of the major attractions of OS X is how damn good Cocoa and its dev platform is. GNOME and KDE suck by comparison, in nearly every way you compare. At unlike KDE, at least Apple is honest about being proprietary.
Whatever... I have to work with what my customers are using. I can't just pick a platform and go with it. Maybe I should have made that more clear in my previous post, although I thought it should be evident. I also didn't say GNOME or KDE are kick-ass. I know they suck but I never mentioned API's. We're talking about which OS I use, not which desktop environment is best, and not programming against that OS. Nor what I would pick if I could do anything I wanted on any system I wanted.
Obviously you are a Apple fan. That's fine if it suits you. I was simply stating why I use Linux as my primary OS. Everything I stated is true.
I am a developer. I use Linux, OS X, and Windows for development all the time. However, I run Linux as my primary OS because it's light(er)-weight and easier to secure than the alternatives.
Windows is insecure, plain and simple. You have no source code and there is all sorts of legacy code and other crap in there that you can't control. Except for the stupid licensing/activation it is a fine operating environment but I just can't trust it. That plus the lack of a nice scripting environment that Unix-like systems provide make it unusable as a primary OS.
OS X is slow, bloated, and somewhat insecure. The slow and bloated parts are just a problem with the design. BSD on Mach is wasteful and they do way too much object-oriented stuff that is inefficient (not that OO is bad, just their design which has Smalltalk-like issues). This goes way back the design of NextStep which had similar problems. As for the insecurity, it's the same problem I have with Windows. I don't have the source code to most of the system and there are is lot of legacy and convenience stuff in there that will eventually lead to insecurities just like on Windows (just wait and see when OS X is more pervasive). Although I trust it more than Windows, I can't live with its performance and that nagging insecurity feeling won't go away.
So I'm left with Linux. BSD is not an option because I need VMware to run Windows for development purposes. Linux can be a pain in the ass to work with but it is getting better and at least I have full control. For me this is mostly about security and performance. I know what's going on and can control all the details. This can be a huge pain and I try to mitigate the problem by using the proper tools but at least it lets me sleep at night. Also with Linux I can control what I run. I don't need an Aqua-like eye-candy system to do development on. I can chose to run GNOME, KDE, or something lightweight. I like that control because it keeps my system performance up in the places I need it (eg. I need to run VMware fast, I need to compile fast, etc.).
Not just the programmers, the game artists are in the same position. They sometimes get paid less than even the programmers. Without the game content there wouldn't be much of a game.
However artists, much like voice actors, are a dime a dozen. The problem is that typically the end user doesn't give a crap how technically good the art and voice acting is, just as long as it's good enough. Pretty much anyone can tell if art or voice acting is good enough.
On the other hand a programmer is a lot like an artist except it's not so easy to spot good talent (for one thing talent is less obvious when evaluating a programmer) and there are many crappy programmers out there because it's complex work and people rarely devote the time to practicing like other artists do. It's also rare to find someone that has the passion about their programming that traditional artists have about their art.
As a UPS employee I can see why you would say that. I have had terrible luck with UPS. I send and receive a fairly large number of packages and I never ever use UPS unless I have to. My "favorite" experience was when UPS left several thousands of dollars in electronic equipment sitting on the porch of a house, in the rain, about a mile away from my address.
However, FedEx and DHL have been nearly flawless. Also, the cheap FedEx ground is very often cheaper and 2 or 3 times faster than the same from UPS when going long distances.
The US Postal service is just slightly better than UPS. Mostly due to the fact they are more likely (just more likely, they still get it wrong some times) to actually deliver the package to the right address and you can get a confirmation receipt. Speed-wise and damage-wise they are no better than UPS.
One thing you have to keep in mind is that the current Apple user base is minuscule compared to the Wintel crowd.
I'm sure Jobs knows this and is trying to build Apple and put them in a power position. It's not that they don't care about their current user base, but the fact of the matter is that they just don't matter compared to the massive number of people they will gain by going x86.
As a side note, I'm not entirely happy with how OS X is designed. It's the whole problem of its lackluster performance (Aqua on top of Darwin/BSD on top of Mach gives you a nasty penalty; just look at the benchmarks).
Mirai is the step up from Wings 3D (see also Nendo on that same site, although Wings has surpassed Nendo in most areas at this point). I don't know if you can even get Mirai but if you can it's quite fun. It's like Wings 3D on steroids. Animation, etc...
Of course there is Maya and other stuff like 3DSMAX, both of which you can get free versions to play around with. You're still stuck with their ass interfaces though. Although if you're a Blender user then obviously that must not matter to you. 3DS was the worst until Blender came along. Gak;)
Mirai, Nendo, and Wings 3D have the best, fastest, and easiest to use interfaces. Too often modelers pass them over simply because they are easy to use. It's too bad because they also contain a lot of power, especially in terms of modeling productivity.
I am a small business owner. The price for 50 developers is a quarter million dollars.
Look at it this way, the cross-platform market is small. There just isn't much money to be made there so the cross-platform toolkits should be cheap. Most of the time I would like to support other platforms but the cost can't be justified due to Qt's huge price and the relatively small cross-platform market. The only people it hurts are the users.
If it weren't for the one or two cash-cows Trolltech has they would already be out of business. They're like a government contractor sucking the teet of wasteful spending (I wonder if one of their cash cows is some government).
The reason I want Qt to be cheap is specifically so it does become massively widespread. This will make platform dependance a thing of the past. This helps us all.
Is there a list of what is planned for KDE 4? Like what will be new and updated, new functionality, etc. ?
Trolltech just pisses me off so much. I mean Qt is OK but damn if the price doesn't keep going up, and up, and up... It's already insanely expensive and it just keeps going higher. Who the hell are they trying to target with that thing anyway?! If they sold it for $1000 I can guarantee they would sell 3 or 4 times the number of licenses. They would lose nothing moneywise but gain massive market dominance (snowball effect). Then regular folk like myself could purchase and use Qt to do great things because it really is the best cross-platform toolkit out there (free or not).
No one should assume this is RFID just because it is contactless.
There are other better technologies available that provide quite good crypto services using proven methods. Things like contactless smartcards are quite secure.
I have been typing for some 22 years, nearly every day since I was 10 years old. Usually 10-16 hours every day, 7 days a week (yes, even as a teenager). I use the "rogue" style. I have no idea how fast I type, but it's pretty fast.
I have never, ever, not once had any inkling of a repetitive stress injury. Now that's a crapload of typing to never have any problems. I chalk it up to using the rogue typing style which causes my hands and fingers to move around into different and sometimes bizarre positions (eg. I often don't hit the same keys with the same fingers).
and I don't think it's due to superior genes or somesuch because I also do 3D work and if I use the mouse for more than a couple hours at a time over the course of a couple of days then my tendons and hand will start to hurt like a sonuvabitch (I switch hands, don't use the mouse so much, and wait for it to heal when this happens).
(a) You can't, and they probably don't know anyway. Worth a try though.
(b) True, but there are a crapload of template standards and it's rare that any two companies use the same format. There is (currently) no standardization at all. However, like I said, it's super-easy to get fingerprints from all sorts of sources anyway. It's semi-hard to inject raw templates into the system because that would require hacking the server and/or the hardware.
Anyway, fingerprints are more for convenience than real security.
I would never, ever use a biometric for anything that required real security (like bank transactions), except maybe in the case where you're using biometrics to unlock a smartcard (but only if the biometric matching is done on-card).
Ask them if they store the image or just the template. If they store the image then I would be less likely to do it. If they just store the template then that would be OK in my book.
Although it is possible to sometimes reconstruct your fingerprint from a template, it is a non-trival operation and if you have people capable of doing something like that, they can do far worse things than get your fingerprint off some health club system.
Remember, you leave fingerprints on everything you touch anyway. I can wash something you touched with the proper chemicals and take a picture that will match your fingerprint anyway. Meh...
Smartcards solve this problem nicely because they allow you to carry your biometric data with you and it never gets sent to other systems. You then use it to unlock the card which then provides the identification information. This is a much better system from a privacy standpoint.
I would say this is mostly due to its friendly nature. You get a lot of people writing code that have no business being there. For those of us that know what we are doing Access can be very useful. After you build a good system it's easy for them to be maintained afterwards because it is so friendly.
There is nothing inherently wrong with Access other than it's easy to use. It can be a quick a powerful tool when wielded correctly. Much like Perl.
Re:Why are old arcade games considered good?
on
10 Gateway Games
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I'll give you Centipede is no fun without proper controls. Women love that game though. Me too.
Pac-Man on the other hand can be played with simple controls on just about anything. Women love that game also. It's simple.
I enjoy simple games. I hate things that suck all my time away with no pupose. I like games that don't pretend to be anything other than a distraction (eg. most 80's arcade games and most of the games in that list; also simple online deathmatch like Q3/UT).
If anything should not be on the list it would be The Sims. Meh, I thought that game sucked. It's just a time stealer designed to trick people into thinking they are accomplishing something when in the end your are left with nothing (see Everquest et al).
Elecraft has the best tutorial I have ever used. I thought I knew how to solder until I read their guide. They will have you wanting to buy a fancy soldering station in no time:)
Try the tutorial on this page. (I'm not linking to the pdf directly as they are not a huge company so don't kill their bandwidth)
I find that very interesting. That opened up some new thought processes in my brain. However...
Maybe geeks arn't suppose to survive? As a geek I find that disturbing but the world is larger than technology alone. Generally things eventually sort themselves out one way or another.
Although one has to wonder when it comes to humans and our society because so many things are not "natural" but human ideas and inventions. We are the only known organisms that could redefine "survival of the fittest." Whether or not that means smart people, strong people, or some combination is open for discussion.
Are we evolving in a particular direction or is there a moderate balance forming? There is that whole idea of "superhumans" that are incredibly smart, strong, and healthy all the same time.
I have this tendency to respond to serious posts with a joke, and jokes with a serious post. I tend to come at problems from angles of perception that other people do not see.
Heh, I do the same thing. I often consider myself the ultimate Devil's Advocate.
When others are stressed, I'm calm. When others are calm, I'm stressed. Bizarre, but that's the way I work. Unfortunately this causes problems for me even in geek circles because they don't see what I see and often I can't explain why I know the things I do.
As for the socks thing, I think it just depends on what you think is important enough to put energy into caring about.
Slashdot Mirror
Software patents suck. I don't care who is trying to use them, they suck. Microsoft is the victim today, tomorrow it could be you.
It is like patenting how I make my breakfast in the morning. It's just stupid.
"Barely functional?" I think you're overstating your case. I have successfully deployed XServes running OS X Server. They handle the apache load admirably. I have had some problems with MySQL (which the recent Anandtech article mentions), but this is because MySQL does more on OSX than it does on Linux to ensure transactions complete.
;)
Do you have any real examples of this "Barely functional" behavior? Mach is probably slightly slower. I don't think it really makes a huge difference unless you're doing realtime programming (it sure hasn't made a difference for me).
I don't know what that has to do with WINE but I think you missed my point completely so I'll leave that alone.
No. It was not there on 68k. The Mach-O ABI assumes the programmatic availability of a program counter register. The PowerPC RISC architecture did not provide one, and was not written to leverage one. There was a logical and real disconnect in these ideologies which led to a noticable speed penalty on PowerPC machines.
GCC4.0 has a new option to help eliminate this flaw. But the flaw never existed on 68k.
Again, I think we are not connecting here. I wasn't addressing the Mach-O problem specifically but speaking more generally.
Also, the state of x86 at the time was simply not caught up with its competitiors. The processors were just slower, and when you asked them to do more, they showed it. Blaming the OS because of the hardware is both unfair and incorrect. It ran great before the x86 switch.
OK, I should give up at this point. We're not talking about the same things. You are just restating what I said.
Oh, and if you're really calling a function so often that you begin to see the dispatch latency, you just lookup and retain the C function pointer reference. But at that point, why were you using a non-inlined function in the first place?
It all adds up. Every little bit of ineffiency at that deep a level (OS) slows the system.
By the same token, developers work much faster in languages like Objective-C. Apple's response? Objective-C++. Use C++ where you need it (for legacy or performance reasons, like MacSTL), and Objective-C for its ease of use.
Again, we're just not connecting. I never said it couldn't be fixed, I just said there are reasons why OS X has problems now.
It does, but they all do. No OS is perfect. Before you go making posts that might cause FUD (like your first post), please consider that.
Again you are just restating what I said. I don't know what fight you are fighting but it's not the one I'm in. I think I'm done.
Endian issues are minor though (usually not a problem at all) compared to the API differences.
I don't see the difference between porting between Windows/Linux, and Windows/OS X (Intel). The same problems will still be there.
I don't see Linux ports all over the place dispite the fact that my CPU and even my hardware is the same as I use in Windows. I don't see why OS X would be any different (other than industry support, but that doesn't make it easier).
That's incorrect. XNU has made massive strides in performance.
That is a bit like saying WINE has made massive strides in providing a Windows layer. It has made massive progress but it is barely close to functional except for a specific set of applications. Maybe that's a bad example, but what I'm saying is that dispite all the progress the problem persists (relative to other solutions BSD-on-Mach is slow).
And the Mach-O problem? Didn't exist on 68k machines or Intel machines (from the NeXT days). There is still work to do, but that doesn't mean you can invalidate the progress made.
No, it was still there. Speaking as a former NeXTSTEP user, OS X performs nearly identical (if you take into account hardware advances and the monster that is Aqua). Except a few areas where there have been improvements (like pre-linking) it still has many of the old warts. A lot of the high performance neato things done back in the day where due to the NeXT hardware (because PC hardware completely sucked at the time). When NeXTSTEP finally went Intel it was a lot slower than Windows.
NeXTSTEP had a great development environment. All object oriented and stuff. Objective-C is a cool language. However, there are serious penalties to be paid for that type of design. All method calls in Objective-C are virtual functions requiring a pointer dereference (possibly a hash lookup, I can't remember) and there is very limited opportunity to inline code. That gives you a pretty hefty performance penalty. You can't do too much stuff at runtime without penalty (Smalltalk et al). I know someone will argue about computers being fast enough and all that, but it's a performance penalty just the same (ie. compared to C++, Objective-C is quite slow).
I also did Mach development back in the early 90's. It's a flexible microkernel but over-engineered and was/is lacking in some critical areas.
It's that type of problem that can be found throughout OS X (again, speaking as an OS X developer). Another problem is that OS X is a funky mix of C, Objective-C, C++, and Java. All of those languages can be found all over the place, blech.
With that said, I agree with you. I think because of the switch to Intel Apple will become a major player in a few years which will be quite good and exciting. I really like OS X but like all operating systems it has issues.
Err, you say you're a developer, but then you say things like this. The Mach/BSD issue is not the bottleneck. That Anandtech article was painfully innacurate and uninformed.
I wasn't talking about the Anandtech article.
There are some bottlenecks in this region, but they are not inherent to the design. For example, the Mach-O ABI has a weakness on RISC machines, and the kernel resource locking needs to be more finely articulated.
I didn't say it was inherent in the design. However, if it is so easily fixed then why is it still a problem? (This problem is not new, like I said, it has been around for nearly 20 years)
OS X has a lightweight OO architecture for device drivers, but this is in C++, so it hardly matters once the code is compled.
Is is quite easy to write slow C++ code.
For me, one of the major attractions of OS X is how damn good Cocoa and its dev platform is. GNOME and KDE suck by comparison, in nearly every way you compare. At unlike KDE, at least Apple is honest about being proprietary.
Whatever... I have to work with what my customers are using. I can't just pick a platform and go with it. Maybe I should have made that more clear in my previous post, although I thought it should be evident. I also didn't say GNOME or KDE are kick-ass. I know they suck but I never mentioned API's. We're talking about which OS I use, not which desktop environment is best, and not programming against that OS. Nor what I would pick if I could do anything I wanted on any system I wanted.
Obviously you are a Apple fan. That's fine if it suits you. I was simply stating why I use Linux as my primary OS. Everything I stated is true.
I am a developer. I use Linux, OS X, and Windows for development all the time. However, I run Linux as my primary OS because it's light(er)-weight and easier to secure than the alternatives.
Windows is insecure, plain and simple. You have no source code and there is all sorts of legacy code and other crap in there that you can't control. Except for the stupid licensing/activation it is a fine operating environment but I just can't trust it. That plus the lack of a nice scripting environment that Unix-like systems provide make it unusable as a primary OS.
OS X is slow, bloated, and somewhat insecure. The slow and bloated parts are just a problem with the design. BSD on Mach is wasteful and they do way too much object-oriented stuff that is inefficient (not that OO is bad, just their design which has Smalltalk-like issues). This goes way back the design of NextStep which had similar problems. As for the insecurity, it's the same problem I have with Windows. I don't have the source code to most of the system and there are is lot of legacy and convenience stuff in there that will eventually lead to insecurities just like on Windows (just wait and see when OS X is more pervasive). Although I trust it more than Windows, I can't live with its performance and that nagging insecurity feeling won't go away.
So I'm left with Linux. BSD is not an option because I need VMware to run Windows for development purposes. Linux can be a pain in the ass to work with but it is getting better and at least I have full control. For me this is mostly about security and performance. I know what's going on and can control all the details. This can be a huge pain and I try to mitigate the problem by using the proper tools but at least it lets me sleep at night. Also with Linux I can control what I run. I don't need an Aqua-like eye-candy system to do development on. I can chose to run GNOME, KDE, or something lightweight. I like that control because it keeps my system performance up in the places I need it (eg. I need to run VMware fast, I need to compile fast, etc.).
Non-developers have different needs of course.
Not just the programmers, the game artists are in the same position. They sometimes get paid less than even the programmers. Without the game content there wouldn't be much of a game.
However artists, much like voice actors, are a dime a dozen. The problem is that typically the end user doesn't give a crap how technically good the art and voice acting is, just as long as it's good enough. Pretty much anyone can tell if art or voice acting is good enough.
On the other hand a programmer is a lot like an artist except it's not so easy to spot good talent (for one thing talent is less obvious when evaluating a programmer) and there are many crappy programmers out there because it's complex work and people rarely devote the time to practicing like other artists do. It's also rare to find someone that has the passion about their programming that traditional artists have about their art.
As a UPS employee I can see why you would say that. I have had terrible luck with UPS. I send and receive a fairly large number of packages and I never ever use UPS unless I have to. My "favorite" experience was when UPS left several thousands of dollars in electronic equipment sitting on the porch of a house, in the rain, about a mile away from my address.
However, FedEx and DHL have been nearly flawless. Also, the cheap FedEx ground is very often cheaper and 2 or 3 times faster than the same from UPS when going long distances.
The US Postal service is just slightly better than UPS. Mostly due to the fact they are more likely (just more likely, they still get it wrong some times) to actually deliver the package to the right address and you can get a confirmation receipt. Speed-wise and damage-wise they are no better than UPS.
At least that has been my experience.
It's the sound of Mr. Gates crapping his pants.
One thing you have to keep in mind is that the current Apple user base is minuscule compared to the Wintel crowd.
I'm sure Jobs knows this and is trying to build Apple and put them in a power position. It's not that they don't care about their current user base, but the fact of the matter is that they just don't matter compared to the massive number of people they will gain by going x86.
As a side note, I'm not entirely happy with how OS X is designed. It's the whole problem of its lackluster performance (Aqua on top of Darwin/BSD on top of Mach gives you a nasty penalty; just look at the benchmarks).
Mirai is the step up from Wings 3D (see also Nendo on that same site, although Wings has surpassed Nendo in most areas at this point). I don't know if you can even get Mirai but if you can it's quite fun. It's like Wings 3D on steroids. Animation, etc...
;)
Of course there is Maya and other stuff like 3DSMAX, both of which you can get free versions to play around with. You're still stuck with their ass interfaces though. Although if you're a Blender user then obviously that must not matter to you. 3DS was the worst until Blender came along. Gak
Mirai, Nendo, and Wings 3D have the best, fastest, and easiest to use interfaces. Too often modelers pass them over simply because they are easy to use. It's too bad because they also contain a lot of power, especially in terms of modeling productivity.
Maybe it's just me but those numbers look highly skewed. Look at the size of the "E-Disk". 155 GB?!
Those figures are for writing across the entire range of 155 GB worth of chips. They only write to 4% of the memory each day. 72 years my ass.
It's not chump change. If you think it is then you'll never be a successful business owner.
That money would pay for MSDN subscriptions for those same developers for 5 years.
I am a small business owner. The price for 50 developers is a quarter million dollars.
Look at it this way, the cross-platform market is small. There just isn't much money to be made there so the cross-platform toolkits should be cheap. Most of the time I would like to support other platforms but the cost can't be justified due to Qt's huge price and the relatively small cross-platform market. The only people it hurts are the users.
If it weren't for the one or two cash-cows Trolltech has they would already be out of business. They're like a government contractor sucking the teet of wasteful spending (I wonder if one of their cash cows is some government).
The reason I want Qt to be cheap is specifically so it does become massively widespread. This will make platform dependance a thing of the past. This helps us all.
Is there a list of what is planned for KDE 4? Like what will be new and updated, new functionality, etc. ?
Trolltech just pisses me off so much. I mean Qt is OK but damn if the price doesn't keep going up, and up, and up... It's already insanely expensive and it just keeps going higher. Who the hell are they trying to target with that thing anyway?! If they sold it for $1000 I can guarantee they would sell 3 or 4 times the number of licenses. They would lose nothing moneywise but gain massive market dominance (snowball effect). Then regular folk like myself could purchase and use Qt to do great things because it really is the best cross-platform toolkit out there (free or not).
presumably using RFID technology
No one should assume this is RFID just because it is contactless.
There are other better technologies available that provide quite good crypto services using proven methods. Things like contactless smartcards are quite secure.
I have been typing for some 22 years, nearly every day since I was 10 years old. Usually 10-16 hours every day, 7 days a week (yes, even as a teenager). I use the "rogue" style. I have no idea how fast I type, but it's pretty fast.
I have never, ever, not once had any inkling of a repetitive stress injury. Now that's a crapload of typing to never have any problems. I chalk it up to using the rogue typing style which causes my hands and fingers to move around into different and sometimes bizarre positions (eg. I often don't hit the same keys with the same fingers).
and I don't think it's due to superior genes or somesuch because I also do 3D work and if I use the mouse for more than a couple hours at a time over the course of a couple of days then my tendons and hand will start to hurt like a sonuvabitch (I switch hands, don't use the mouse so much, and wait for it to heal when this happens).
(a) You can't, and they probably don't know anyway. Worth a try though.
(b) True, but there are a crapload of template standards and it's rare that any two companies use the same format. There is (currently) no standardization at all. However, like I said, it's super-easy to get fingerprints from all sorts of sources anyway. It's semi-hard to inject raw templates into the system because that would require hacking the server and/or the hardware.
Anyway, fingerprints are more for convenience than real security.
I would never, ever use a biometric for anything that required real security (like bank transactions), except maybe in the case where you're using biometrics to unlock a smartcard (but only if the biometric matching is done on-card).
I work in the security/smartcard/biometric field.
Ask them if they store the image or just the template. If they store the image then I would be less likely to do it. If they just store the template then that would be OK in my book.
Although it is possible to sometimes reconstruct your fingerprint from a template, it is a non-trival operation and if you have people capable of doing something like that, they can do far worse things than get your fingerprint off some health club system.
Remember, you leave fingerprints on everything you touch anyway. I can wash something you touched with the proper chemicals and take a picture that will match your fingerprint anyway. Meh...
Smartcards solve this problem nicely because they allow you to carry your biometric data with you and it never gets sent to other systems. You then use it to unlock the card which then provides the identification information. This is a much better system from a privacy standpoint.
Pop a gigabit ethernet card in your big machine and use a regular network connection. No need to get complicated with Firewire networking or whatever.
I would say this is mostly due to its friendly nature. You get a lot of people writing code that have no business being there. For those of us that know what we are doing Access can be very useful. After you build a good system it's easy for them to be maintained afterwards because it is so friendly.
There is nothing inherently wrong with Access other than it's easy to use. It can be a quick a powerful tool when wielded correctly. Much like Perl.
I'll give you Centipede is no fun without proper controls. Women love that game though. Me too.
Pac-Man on the other hand can be played with simple controls on just about anything. Women love that game also. It's simple.
I enjoy simple games. I hate things that suck all my time away with no pupose. I like games that don't pretend to be anything other than a distraction (eg. most 80's arcade games and most of the games in that list; also simple online deathmatch like Q3/UT).
If anything should not be on the list it would be The Sims. Meh, I thought that game sucked. It's just a time stealer designed to trick people into thinking they are accomplishing something when in the end your are left with nothing (see Everquest et al).
Elecraft has the best tutorial I have ever used. I thought I knew how to solder until I read their guide. They will have you wanting to buy a fancy soldering station in no time :)
Try the tutorial on this page. (I'm not linking to the pdf directly as they are not a huge company so don't kill their bandwidth)
I find that very interesting. That opened up some new thought processes in my brain. However...
Maybe geeks arn't suppose to survive? As a geek I find that disturbing but the world is larger than technology alone. Generally things eventually sort themselves out one way or another.
Although one has to wonder when it comes to humans and our society because so many things are not "natural" but human ideas and inventions. We are the only known organisms that could redefine "survival of the fittest." Whether or not that means smart people, strong people, or some combination is open for discussion.
Are we evolving in a particular direction or is there a moderate balance forming? There is that whole idea of "superhumans" that are incredibly smart, strong, and healthy all the same time.
I have this tendency to respond to serious posts with a joke, and jokes with a serious post. I tend to come at problems from angles of perception that other people do not see.
Heh, I do the same thing. I often consider myself the ultimate Devil's Advocate.
When others are stressed, I'm calm. When others are calm, I'm stressed. Bizarre, but that's the way I work. Unfortunately this causes problems for me even in geek circles because they don't see what I see and often I can't explain why I know the things I do.
As for the socks thing, I think it just depends on what you think is important enough to put energy into caring about.