This can't be right: "Sméagol (Gollum) is a single, 587 year old... When Gollum was 25, the ring was stolen by Bilbo Baggins".
The events of "The Hobit" must be at most a decade or two earlier than those of LotR. By the time that Bilbo aquired the ring, Gollum was already far gone; thus he must have been over 500 years old when he lost the ring to Bilbo.
Gollum's main aliment is a powerful addiction to the strong magic that both sustained and ravaged him over the centuries. Hobbits, which Gollum basically is, do not normally live to be over 150.
Jackson's movies worked with that angle, having him look and act like a totally ravaged junkie.
What Be did with the BeOS is STILL exciting, so much so that there are no fewer than 3 groups trying to do the same thing open source
Ok, so it might be exciting if it inspires similar improvements to open-source software. Of course, if you are a genius with a good idea, you could cut the middleman and work directly with the open source OSs.
Because if Robert and crew come up with something amazing, it might be one day the next big player.
I'm sure that it's very important and exciting to the guy who's spent years of his life writing it. It would have to be, otherwise he would have come to his senses years ago.
But I think it is fair to say that given the current state of the OS market, you don't have any chance at all of being important to the larger world unless your product is either Free Open Source, or already an established player.
Doesn't matter if it is technically good. Doesn't matter if you give it away for free. The market for new proprietary OSs is just not there. See for example BeOs.
Yup, the card costs £80. But if you have a wi-fi capable portable computing device such as a palm with the wi-fi card, a software wifinder should be cheap and more functional.
If you don't have a wi-fi capable portable computing device, your uses for wi-fi are limited. Removing those cables cluttering up the hall, perhaps.
A Palm T3 plus a PalmOne Wi-fi Card plus a NetChaser software. It works great, lots of details, can log the details of the access points found to file.
It's quite expensive if you want a wi-finder device and don't have a palm. But if you already have a palm with wi-fi, it's a cheap ($12.00) fun toy.
Uh, so much for proofreading. That should be "Fusion may be cleaner than fission..."
"your claimed "100 million degrees." I didn't claim it the article (which you read, right?) did. As noted in replies, fusion does not occur on the surface of the sun.
Does this mean I'll finally be getting a Mr. Fusion to put on my Delorean?
Not likely. Fission may be cleaner than fusion, but it's still very big iron, running at a temperature of 100 million degrees centigrade, spewing out heaps of high-energy sub-atomic particles. Without tons of shielding, it would be deadly.
I object to the insinuation that we are the ones splitting the nuclei of the radioactive elements
Well, fine. But you can say that by refining the uranium, and bringing sub-critical amounts of together in a pile, or supercritical amount together in a bomb, we are utilising the nucleus's innate tendency to split, and to thereby trigger a chain reaction in nearby uranium nuclei, in order to generate a self-sustaining level of radioactivity that would not have otherwise occured.
You could also say when making tea that we are not the ones boiling water, we are merely allowing electricity to flow through a restisting metal rod, which generates heat which when transfered to the water causes a rise in temperatre to boiling point that would not have otherwise occured. But that would be very, very pedantic.
Swahili is a regional trade language (a lingua franca), spoken as a first or second language by around 100 million people. It's the most important language in east Africa.
I don't think you can say anything like that for Klingon. But if you're looking for obscure languages, hey, there are around 100 languages spoken in Nigeria alone.
beer cans being kept cool by cold fusion. Of course the beers would be completely frozen,
Uh "cold fusion" is so called becuase it supposedly can occur at room temperatures, not because it refridgerates, or even needs a sub-zero temperature.
Any supposed energy production system that actually sucked up heat as a side-effect would violate the second law of thermodynamics and make entropy run backwards. Don't hold your breath waiting for that.
I disagree. Delphi is mostly used for writing database connected and/or GUI applications for business or personal use. I should know, I've written enough of them in Delphi. Java and C# are aimed squarely at this market (apples vs. apples), and frankly they do it better.
I'm not saying that Delphi is badly designed, far from it, but this is only to be expected given that these languages came later to the party, with the benefit of more hindsight and a cleaner slate.
Delphi is an extremenly cluttered language - stuff from Turbo Pascal 3 still compiles, with keywords like "forward" and "absolute" that are not much used nowadays. Not to mention Delphi's byzantine memory management and type system, which contains the major different categories of: simple stack-based var, pointer, string, object ref, interface ref, object owned and managed by a TComponent
Clearly this system was not designed like that, it got that way over a long time. 15+ major versions of time.
That's enough reason to make it a viable alternative to C++ for Windows-oriented projects.
Whilst I agree, that's not the point. C++ is a an open standard. If you've going to venture away from that, and need a tool for "Windows-oriented projects", typically connecting a GUI to a database, then Delphi has been superceded.
Or rather, it was when it was released about 10 years ago. Since then, a lot has happened to other languages, and not much to Delphi. Java (and C#) have garbage collection and metadata in a simpler type system. Perl and python have other advantages.
Stats that show Delphi is not surging ahead
on
Delphi Renaissance
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Delphi revival? Are you sure? The UK job market stats are as follows:
C# : still ramping up - here Java: Recovered well in the last year - here
Delphi - flat as a pancake. Much smaller market, and has failed to recover when the others did, which means it is losing market share to them - here
Watchmen can't be done in 90-120 minutes with Big Name Actors. You know what? This is exactly what a lot of fans said when they first heard about the little-known director Peter Jackson taking on Lord of the Rings.
And they were right. LotR can't be done right in 90-120 minutes. The difference is that in that case, the director Peter Jackson, knew it too and worked with it. The resulting 11 hour+ product is pretty damn good.
I've got this bug and got it bad, right from the G-Man's opening spspspspspeech. My machine is not underpowered at all - AMD 2600, Radeon 9800 video card, 768Mb RAM - it played Doom3 acceptably. I'm very glad to hear that people are getting on Valve's case about this.
After this, frustratingly sticky ladders, the way things jump and shake when you pick them up, the long loading times, the way it can die a grindingly slow and agonising death if you accidentally whack the windows key instead of ctrl, and a couple of other once-off things (Managed to get stuck halfway through a floor once), my lasting impression is that half-Life 2 is a great game (greater than Doom 3), but a shaky engine (not as good as Doom3).
This may be teething troubles, but you don't get a second chance at a first impression. Not after how far I've already gotten in the game.
If there is a well documented, straight forward method for embedding a browser and you have a choice between a non-portable MS IE browser and a portable Gecko browser - which one are you going to pick.
Leaving aside portability, I picked the Mozilla activeX for my last windows program. A lot of people picked IE, and I can understand why. The immaturity of the Gecko activeX API may change over time, but the second factor is availablity: On any windows box, the IE embeddable is just there. I have to convince my users to install a third-party activeX, and they don't always do it, or do it right. The complaints come back to me. I would rather be "just worrying about the application I am developing".
Linky please? I'd like more information on this for my projects, and a google search for "gecko#" just turns up pages on the care and feeding of small lizards;) Does it work in cross-platform mono?
In the Windows world, developers can just embed the IE browser using an ActiveX control. I'll bet that a lot of commercial developers would have no problem dropping the IE control in exchange for a Gecko control
I am using the Mozilla GRE ActiveX. in fact, I filed a bug report on it yesterday. The drawbacks are that it's a seperate install (even if moz/firefox is present), whereas IE is always present on a windows machine, that the API is not complete, and well, the bug report that I filed.
Slashdot Mirror
This can't be right: "Sméagol (Gollum) is a single, 587 year old ... When Gollum was 25, the ring was stolen by Bilbo Baggins".
The events of "The Hobit" must be at most a decade or two earlier than those of LotR. By the time that Bilbo aquired the ring, Gollum was already far gone; thus he must have been over 500 years old when he lost the ring to Bilbo.
Gollum's main aliment is a powerful addiction to the strong magic that both sustained and ravaged him over the centuries. Hobbits, which Gollum basically is, do not normally live to be over 150.
Jackson's movies worked with that angle, having him look and act like a totally ravaged junkie.
Ok, so it might be exciting if it inspires similar improvements to open-source software. Of course, if you are a genius with a good idea, you could cut the middleman and work directly with the open source OSs.
Because if Robert and crew come up with something amazing, it might be one day the next big player.
I doubt it. See the parent post.
I'm sure that it's very important and exciting to the guy who's spent years of his life writing it. It would have to be, otherwise he would have come to his senses years ago.
But I think it is fair to say that given the current state of the OS market, you don't have any chance at all of being important to the larger world unless your product is either Free Open Source, or already an established player.
Doesn't matter if it is technically good. Doesn't matter if you give it away for free. The market for new proprietary OSs is just not there. See for example BeOs.
the card costs closer to $120.00
Yup, the card costs £80. But if you have a wi-fi capable portable computing device such as a palm with the wi-fi card, a software wifinder should be cheap and more functional.
If you don't have a wi-fi capable portable computing device, your uses for wi-fi are limited. Removing those cables cluttering up the hall, perhaps.
And, in fact, trace amounts of WMD
Trace amounts of Mass destruction, eh? What does that multiply out to, weapons of normal destruction?
A Palm T3 plus a PalmOne Wi-fi Card plus a NetChaser software. It works great, lots of details, can log the details of the access points found to file.
It's quite expensive if you want a wi-finder device and don't have a palm. But if you already have a palm with wi-fi, it's a cheap ($12.00) fun toy.
company with legacy technology in dire straights
What, will all the company board members become homophobic, and sit around saying "this newfangled java is teh gay"?
Or perhaps you meant straits, not straights.
That should read "Fusion may be cleaner than fission..."
Uh, so much for proofreading. That should be " Fusion may be cleaner than fission..."
"your claimed "100 million degrees." I didn't claim it the article (which you read, right?) did. As noted in replies, fusion does not occur on the surface of the sun.
Does this mean I'll finally be getting a Mr. Fusion to put on my Delorean?
Not likely. Fission may be cleaner than fusion, but it's still very big iron, running at a temperature of 100 million degrees centigrade, spewing out heaps of high-energy sub-atomic particles. Without tons of shielding, it would be deadly.
I object to the insinuation that we are the ones splitting the nuclei of the radioactive elements
Well, fine. But you can say that by refining the uranium, and bringing sub-critical amounts of together in a pile, or supercritical amount together in a bomb, we are utilising the nucleus's innate tendency to split, and to thereby trigger a chain reaction in nearby uranium nuclei, in order to generate a self-sustaining level of radioactivity that would not have otherwise occured.
You could also say when making tea that we are not the ones boiling water, we are merely allowing electricity to flow through a restisting metal rod, which generates heat which when transfered to the water causes a rise in temperatre to boiling point that would not have otherwise occured. But that would be very, very pedantic.
PGP's been around for years, and hasn't taken over. Layness is a powerfull force - self-preservation has to work hard to overcome it.
Swahili is a regional trade language (a lingua franca), spoken as a first or second language by around 100 million people. It's the most important language in east Africa.
I don't think you can say anything like that for Klingon. But if you're looking for obscure languages, hey, there are around 100 languages spoken in Nigeria alone.
Do I see Gaudi style catenary arches?
beer cans being kept cool by cold fusion. Of course the beers would be completely frozen,
Uh "cold fusion" is so called becuase it supposedly can occur at room temperatures, not because it refridgerates, or even needs a sub-zero temperature.
Any supposed energy production system that actually sucked up heat as a side-effect would violate the second law of thermodynamics and make entropy run backwards. Don't hold your breath waiting for that.
You're comparing apples and oranges
I disagree. Delphi is mostly used for writing database connected and/or GUI applications for business or personal use. I should know, I've written enough of them in Delphi.
Java and C# are aimed squarely at this market (apples vs. apples), and frankly they do it better.
I'm not saying that Delphi is badly designed, far from it, but this is only to be expected given that these languages came later to the party, with the benefit of more hindsight and a cleaner slate.
Delphi is an extremenly cluttered language - stuff from Turbo Pascal 3 still compiles, with keywords like "forward" and "absolute" that are not much used nowadays. Not to mention Delphi's byzantine memory management and type system, which contains the major different categories of:
simple stack-based var,
pointer,
string,
object ref,
interface ref,
object owned and managed by a TComponent
Clearly this system was not designed like that, it got that way over a long time. 15+ major versions of time.
That's enough reason to make it a viable alternative to C++ for Windows-oriented projects.
Whilst I agree, that's not the point. C++ is a an open standard. If you've going to venture away from that, and need a tool for "Windows-oriented projects", typically connecting a GUI to a database, then Delphi has been superceded.
I don't know (or care) about .NET, but if you are writng a windows program
.NET. The good news is that it's not that hard.
If you are writing windows programs, sooner or later you will need to know and care about
Delphi is some kick-ass technology.
Or rather, it was when it was released about 10 years ago. Since then, a lot has happened to other languages, and not much to Delphi. Java (and C#) have garbage collection and metadata in a simpler type system. Perl and python have other advantages.
Delphi revival? Are you sure? The UK job market stats are as follows:
C# : still ramping up - here
Java: Recovered well in the last year - here
Delphi - flat as a pancake. Much smaller market, and has failed to recover when the others did, which means it is losing market share to them - here
Surely the provision of broadband internet services for a fee is ... not a job for the government.
It may not be a job that the municipality must do, but is it a job that the municipality must not do? That's a much stronger statement.
Unfair competition? I don't give a damn. If enough people benefit, who cares if a company (ie, a few people who own it) misses out on some money.
Watchmen can't be done in 90-120 minutes with Big Name Actors.
You know what? This is exactly what a lot of fans said when they first heard about the little-known director Peter Jackson taking on Lord of the Rings.
And they were right. LotR can't be done right in 90-120 minutes. The difference is that in that case, the director Peter Jackson, knew it too and worked with it. The resulting 11 hour+ product is pretty damn good.
I've got this bug and got it bad, right from the G-Man's opening spspspspspeech. My machine is not underpowered at all - AMD 2600, Radeon 9800 video card, 768Mb RAM - it played Doom3 acceptably. I'm very glad to hear that people are getting on Valve's case about this.
After this, frustratingly sticky ladders, the way things jump and shake when you pick them up, the long loading times, the way it can die a grindingly slow and agonising death if you accidentally whack the windows key instead of ctrl, and a couple of other once-off things (Managed to get stuck halfway through a floor once), my lasting impression is that half-Life 2 is a great game (greater than Doom 3), but a shaky engine (not as good as Doom3).
This may be teething troubles, but you don't get a second chance at a first impression. Not after how far I've already gotten in the game.
I found it (Gecko# 0.5), and the README says this will *not* work on Win32.
While it's nice to know that it exists, please wake me up when it crosses over onto the platform where 90+ of my potential users reside...
If there is a well documented, straight forward method for embedding a browser and you have a choice between a non-portable MS IE browser and a portable Gecko browser - which one are you going to pick.
Leaving aside portability, I picked the Mozilla activeX for my last windows program. A lot of people picked IE, and I can understand why. The immaturity of the Gecko activeX API may change over time, but the second factor is availablity: On any windows box, the IE embeddable is just there. I have to convince my users to install a third-party activeX, and they don't always do it, or do it right. The complaints come back to me. I would rather be "just worrying about the application I am developing".
Linky please? I'd like more information on this for my projects, and a google search for "gecko#" just turns up pages on the care and feeding of small lizards ;) Does it work in cross-platform mono?
In the Windows world, developers can just embed the IE browser using an ActiveX control. I'll bet that a lot of commercial developers would have no problem dropping the IE control in exchange for a Gecko control
I am using the Mozilla GRE ActiveX. in fact, I filed a bug report on it yesterday. The drawbacks are that it's a seperate install (even if moz/firefox is present), whereas IE is always present on a windows machine, that the API is not complete, and well, the bug report that I filed.