I am of the opinion now that America (where I am from and I live) deserves President Bush. It's the same philosophy that I have with gas prices: you will only see people switching/demanding, in mass, cleaner/renewable energy sources when gas is over $5/gallon at the pump. People here in the US won't wake up out of their apathetic political stuper until you have someone in office, that they elected, that takes away all their rights and puts the country on pare with such places as Communist Russia and China. Only then will people wake up and start making more rational decisions and taking personal responsibility for the state of our government. Because in the end, the people and their right to vote (for how ever long we can hang onto that right) are the most powerful political force in this country.
Well, you should have checked BEFORE the experiment that your equipment actually supported it. The software may have no issues, but if the mobo and/or card didn't support it, there is nothing the OS can do to keep the magic smoke it:)
Not all patches are security patches. Some patches are version upgrades with new features or performance increases, etc. And even if it is a security update, you can't fault Suse or Redhat for releasing an unstable or unsecure distro since they didn't create all the software in the distro. Even though they didn't create the software, they will help their users by providing a single location to obtains patches, which is soooo much nicer than under Windows. If MS were to do the same and provide updates to all your programs through Windows Update, I guarentee you that their patch count would be 10,000 times higher than Linux's.
There is a very simple issue: settle on a set of standards that are open and free and then even if 100 different programs that do the same thing, like calendering, come out they could still all interoperate. The users would win since they could use the program that they liked the most, not the one that is holding their data hostage. Open and free standards leads to more inovation because it encourages developers to try new things and not worry about loosing users because they can't use their old data. This is what scares Bill and MS the most and why they will NEVER use open and free standards in their products. They will "embrace and extend" standards, which means making their own version and then not giving it out and blaming everyone else for "not following the standard".
Ok, that's just bullshit. The OpenGL API is just that: OPEN!!! There isn't that bs about different implementations from different venders. A person can have OpenGL 1, OpenGL 1.4, OpenGL 1.5, etc, etc, etc, each version being compliant to the OpenGL specification for that version. This is NO different than DirectX. I've programed in OpenGL and dabled in DirectX, and the OpenGL API is simpler because of naming conventions alone. Couple that with the fact that Linux is a superior development environment (free compiler, free IDE's, good documentation, etc) and you have to come to the conclusion that the only reason game developers don't produce for Linux is that they don't want to spend the time.
Well, I can speak from experience that myself and my other male engineer peers do not do anything to make women avoid engineering or computers in general. Maybe it's time we stop looking for some outside source or plan to keep women out of engineering roles and first look to your own for an answer. The women I know in engineering are intelligent, driven, and very much my peers in all respects. There just aren't many of them. Get women more interested in engineering first, then check to see if programs/professors are intentially driving women away. If you want so see more women's name in the credits for Linux, submit a few patches yourself and get some of your female computer friends to do the same. There's no reason they can't get in, they just aren't trying.
I'm of the opinion that religion is best kept at a personal level, and such a child praying over their food at lunch does not create any problem for anyone. It's when school assemblies begin with a "moment of silence", which is just a different label for school sponsored prayer time. Back at my high school, the christian student groups would organize a prayer at the flag poll one morning a month before school time. This was not sponsored by the school nor did it accour during school time, thus it was just students practicing their right to religion. But if the administration promoted this event then it would endorsement. Basic rule of thumb: if it only allows for one sect or type of religion to practice, it is unjust. You either allow for all or for none (this is called the Lemon test from the Supreme Court). Praying at the flag poll one morning a month doesn't prevent other people from practicing a different religion or stop people from not practicing any religion at all. "Moments of silence" only allows those religions that practice prayer to participate, and thus doesn't include all religions. It may make some religious types angry, but it's protection from the mob that such laws are in place. You can practice your religion at a personal level without bothering anyone, just don't force all students to participate in your activities.
The problem with this is that not everyone practices the same religion, and children who are identified as "different" become the targets of ridicule and is the extreme cases violence. Allowing religion into schools creates yet another situation where kids who aren't in the majority to be singled out, which many psycologist will tell you can greatly affect them for their entire life. If a student wants to pray, they can. It's when it becomes organized and school sponsered that it becomes a problem.
I think the engineering departments are doing just fine and are producing decent workers. It's the business departments that need a good "enema" to clear up their practices and reduce the number of "managers" they produce that act like those described in the article. What is the reason for making the design process so political? Personal power and money, the two things business school teaches their students to maximize at all costs. Fix them and a LOT of problems will disappear.
I think you are expecting the problem to be along the lines of a lazy engineer/sysadmin that just doesn't want to spend the time/money to fix an obvious problem. They are working very hard and it's the kind of problem that takes a bit of time to completely get rid of. As soon as they do, WoW will be as great as all us paying customers know it is. Give them more time and they'll get it.
The idea being that it's better to have MS write the code once well, than to have lots of third party vendors wring the same code over and over again, some better than others.
Ahh! Now we come to the critical issue: can MS even do this? I'd say no if their past products are any indication. Large, buggy, and an absolute mess at the code level, expecting MS to write clean, efficient, and secure code is just place silly.
hydrogen is "green" because using it in a fuel cell produces no harmful byproducts: only heat and water vapor. where is comes from isn't not what makes it's green or not. oil isn't because using it produces toxic by products such as CO2, Nx, etc.
Well, when you consider that most of those issues are solved with single commands and the whole procedure is very well documented on the internet and cedega's forums, it's not much harder than solving performance issues on Windows.
First, prelinking must be completely turned off. It's really not that hard to do and RedHat even tells you how to do it.
I don't really know what legacy VA memory layout is, but I know you have to have it enabled no matter what CPU you have (I have a P4, not an AMD chip). Do some google searching on it and exec-shield if you what to know what they are. I do know that exec-shield is a kernel level protection from having data memory bein executed as instruction memory (if I remember correctly). It gets in the way of the Windows binary memory layout, so that's why it has to be turned off.
Cedega is NOT an emulator, that is why these neet new protection schemes interfere with the games. Cedega is a mapper, so it uses the Linux OS to actually run the game and only maps the Windows API calls to equivalent Linux API calls (and D3D to openGL). That's why prelinking and exec-shield interfere with the games and must be turned off.
Basic stuff you have to do to run Windows games under FC3: turn off prelinking (easy), turn on legacy VA memory layout (easy) and disable exec-shield (easy).
The other changes were like using version 6111 of the nvidia drivers instead of 6629 (performance issues), enabling SBA and Fast Writes, etc, all to improve card performance (which benifits all games!). Also had to use openGL instead of D3D rendering in the game (adding -opengl switch to launcher) to increase FPS again.
There is only really one bug with WoW under Cedega and openGL: you can't have the minimap open when you go into a building or dungeon. The screen goes blank when you do and you have to kill the game at the command line. You can bypass this by running the game in D3D, but then it runs slower. I choose to just remember to close my minimap before going into buildings or dungeons.
Well, Blizzard is one of the few MMORPG companies I've used that actually does honor their one month of free gaming you get when you purchase the game. Now, you will still have to pay for the game since it's costs them a fair amount of money to produce all those CDs (and DVDs in the case of the collector's edition), game manuals, boxes, shipping to distributors, etc. It's not an obscene amount considering the quality of all the above named materials and the game itself. But maybe for the future they could look at something similar (but better) to Steam for distribution. Wait, even HL2 cost around $50 through Steam and I didn't get any physical product... hmmm, maybe Blizzard isn't acting like the money grubbing bastards that you are tagging them as.:-P
For me (Linux, Cedega, and WoW user) I was easily able to install and run WoW with Cedega on Fedora Core 3. Needed to make a few changes to my system to get good performance, but it's pretty easy to do. The installation program will error out at the very end of installation, but that didn't effect the game at all.
Well, I do agree with you that as a society we place way to much importance on jobs as a measure on worth and happiness. But there is a reality that must be remembered: money doesn't buy happiness, but it does feed you, cloth you, and allow you to meet the necessities of living. After those are met, you can turn to those aspects of living that do make you happy, but it's hard to be a good neighbor or happy if you have to work 80 hour weeks just to pay the bills. A job as a stock clerk is not a bad job or a bad activity in itself. But when that position can barely support a single human being, it's kind of idiotic to think a family could survive on it, or even two jobs that are equivalent in pay. Again, I'm not saying you have to live in a big house or have 3 cars to be happy. I'm talking about living in a home that isn't rat infested and being able to properly feed your kids. Currently, you can't with lower paying jobs like stock clerk. That is the reality and you either have to work with it or change all of society (Marx provided a solution). I'm not happy because I will probably get a high paying job. I'm happy because I have the ability to experience those aspects of living that provide happiness and because I'm not constantly worrying about being evicted from my little appartment.
Because if X number of students are able to earn their BS and BA degrees, why shouldn't the university award X degrees? What rational would they use to only award Y (with Y less than X) degrees? When the companies out there start putting BS graduates at stock clerks, what's to stop all those people from turning around and getting their MS degree? It's a bad cycle. No one WANTS to be a stock clerk, so most people will work hard to rise above that kind of position. And they, and the schools, are not wrong for wanting to become better, more educated and trying to get better/more rewarding jobs. So again, I blame the companies for not adjusting to these trends and attempting to create entry level positions to train up recent BS grads.
I know you'll probably mention something about how the companies don't owe us anything, but I say they do. Large companies (think Intel, Microsoft, GE, etc) have billion dollar profit margins and enjoy incredibly large tax cuts and tax refunds. They owe society for these benifits. Training the next generation of engineers to replace all the 50-60 year old engineers they currently have is not only a good way to ensure a future for the company, but also a way to giving back to society. It's much better to have a person working in an entry level engineering position than as a stock clerk or not working at all. That person has better purchasing power, more likely to plant roots in a community, and more likely to invest in housing & retirement funds. All these improve the situation for the person and help the economy.
That is all true, about 10 years ago that is. Today, you can't find jobs with just a BS in EE or CE very easily. Oh sure, some students who graduate with just a BS will know someone in hiring at some company and will be able to get their foot in the door that way. But most of the horde of BS holding graduates will be turned away and told to get a MS or PhD before they can get a job (I speak from experience on this). All the entry level jobs have been either eliminated or outsourced, which is why a BS won't get your anywhere these days. I would love to have worked a few years before going to back for my MS, but I didn't have much of a choice.
The companies are really to blame for this situation, not the students. If they seriously want to help BS graduates get experience to either a) go back to grad school to get a MS or PhD, or b) train up a bit and become more skilled and useful they need to have a ready set of entry positions in engineering that they are expected to fill with young graduates with little to no experience. But those positions are largely gone (from what I've seen and been told by many people). Companies don't want to pay to train people any more. They want the higher education system to do that and to hand them a worker who can contribute on their first day of work.
Well, where I have worked had several hundred Linux desktops rolled out to several hundred engineers (and not the kind that know how to use computers, only custom applications) and it was support by just a few people with no problems. OpenLDAP, Samba, NFS, NIS, etc, etc, are all free, open, configurable, and time tested approaches to managing large numbers of files/computers/users. Have I personally done this? No, but I talked with the guys that did and they had more problems from all the Windows boxes on the network spewing viruses than they ever had with the Linux boxes (the Windows boxes were managed by the Windows guys, different group). Oh, and they managed over 3,000 Linux servers with very little effert. They could drop a new rack of 40 in place and have it running in a day (usually before lunch). The biggest problems with running Linux in large numbers is that you need to know what you are doing (and not try to integrate with an existing Windows network/server design. Windows doesn't play well with others).
Why does it seem like Linux is always being held to a much higher standard than Windows? Whenever I talk to someone about how nice Linux is, they always ask it can do this or that, and when I say no it can't yet or that those features are till in beta, they laugh at Linux. But Windows can't do those things they ask about either! It confuses the hell out of me why Windows is concidered OK, and if Linux had all the features of Windows it would still be just a "toy" OS and not taken seriously. It just confuses the hell out of me.
At my University, the Business department refers the Engineering department as "Pre-Business". If you look at the students in business a lot of them started out as engineering students and then got burned out and switched to business because it was easier (and the fact that the department tried to schedual classes so there were no Friday classes didn't hurt much either).
I think the whole business department is creating a really bad feedback loop. You have a lot of (poor) students graduating in business who get jobs and are usually in administrative positions. Since they usually aren't very bright/hard working (in my experience) they either make things worse or more inefficient, putting more red tape and levels of burracracy, thus creating a need for yet more business majors. That is why business departments are usually some of the largest on campus and why businesses, especially large ones, are so huge and convoluted. Until business because as hard as engineering, the loop will continue. That's my opinion at least.
Self resetting domino logic has been known about for a while now (I think since mid 90's), but Intel was the first company to actually do something useful with it in a real product. Synchronizing it to the rest of this chip shouldn't be that hard if you understand domino logic and use memory cells at the input and output ports of the ALU. I personally don't know exactly HOW they do that, but that's my best guess.
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I am of the opinion now that America (where I am from and I live) deserves President Bush. It's the same philosophy that I have with gas prices: you will only see people switching/demanding, in mass, cleaner/renewable energy sources when gas is over $5/gallon at the pump. People here in the US won't wake up out of their apathetic political stuper until you have someone in office, that they elected, that takes away all their rights and puts the country on pare with such places as Communist Russia and China. Only then will people wake up and start making more rational decisions and taking personal responsibility for the state of our government. Because in the end, the people and their right to vote (for how ever long we can hang onto that right) are the most powerful political force in this country.
Well, you should have checked BEFORE the experiment that your equipment actually supported it. The software may have no issues, but if the mobo and/or card didn't support it, there is nothing the OS can do to keep the magic smoke it :)
Not all patches are security patches. Some patches are version upgrades with new features or performance increases, etc. And even if it is a security update, you can't fault Suse or Redhat for releasing an unstable or unsecure distro since they didn't create all the software in the distro. Even though they didn't create the software, they will help their users by providing a single location to obtains patches, which is soooo much nicer than under Windows. If MS were to do the same and provide updates to all your programs through Windows Update, I guarentee you that their patch count would be 10,000 times higher than Linux's.
There is a very simple issue: settle on a set of standards that are open and free and then even if 100 different programs that do the same thing, like calendering, come out they could still all interoperate. The users would win since they could use the program that they liked the most, not the one that is holding their data hostage. Open and free standards leads to more inovation because it encourages developers to try new things and not worry about loosing users because they can't use their old data. This is what scares Bill and MS the most and why they will NEVER use open and free standards in their products. They will "embrace and extend" standards, which means making their own version and then not giving it out and blaming everyone else for "not following the standard".
Ok, that's just bullshit. The OpenGL API is just that: OPEN!!! There isn't that bs about different implementations from different venders. A person can have OpenGL 1, OpenGL 1.4, OpenGL 1.5, etc, etc, etc, each version being compliant to the OpenGL specification for that version. This is NO different than DirectX. I've programed in OpenGL and dabled in DirectX, and the OpenGL API is simpler because of naming conventions alone. Couple that with the fact that Linux is a superior development environment (free compiler, free IDE's, good documentation, etc) and you have to come to the conclusion that the only reason game developers don't produce for Linux is that they don't want to spend the time.
Well, I can speak from experience that myself and my other male engineer peers do not do anything to make women avoid engineering or computers in general. Maybe it's time we stop looking for some outside source or plan to keep women out of engineering roles and first look to your own for an answer. The women I know in engineering are intelligent, driven, and very much my peers in all respects. There just aren't many of them. Get women more interested in engineering first, then check to see if programs/professors are intentially driving women away. If you want so see more women's name in the credits for Linux, submit a few patches yourself and get some of your female computer friends to do the same. There's no reason they can't get in, they just aren't trying.
I'm of the opinion that religion is best kept at a personal level, and such a child praying over their food at lunch does not create any problem for anyone. It's when school assemblies begin with a "moment of silence", which is just a different label for school sponsored prayer time. Back at my high school, the christian student groups would organize a prayer at the flag poll one morning a month before school time. This was not sponsored by the school nor did it accour during school time, thus it was just students practicing their right to religion. But if the administration promoted this event then it would endorsement. Basic rule of thumb: if it only allows for one sect or type of religion to practice, it is unjust. You either allow for all or for none (this is called the Lemon test from the Supreme Court). Praying at the flag poll one morning a month doesn't prevent other people from practicing a different religion or stop people from not practicing any religion at all. "Moments of silence" only allows those religions that practice prayer to participate, and thus doesn't include all religions. It may make some religious types angry, but it's protection from the mob that such laws are in place. You can practice your religion at a personal level without bothering anyone, just don't force all students to participate in your activities.
The problem with this is that not everyone practices the same religion, and children who are identified as "different" become the targets of ridicule and is the extreme cases violence. Allowing religion into schools creates yet another situation where kids who aren't in the majority to be singled out, which many psycologist will tell you can greatly affect them for their entire life. If a student wants to pray, they can. It's when it becomes organized and school sponsered that it becomes a problem.
I think the engineering departments are doing just fine and are producing decent workers. It's the business departments that need a good "enema" to clear up their practices and reduce the number of "managers" they produce that act like those described in the article. What is the reason for making the design process so political? Personal power and money, the two things business school teaches their students to maximize at all costs. Fix them and a LOT of problems will disappear.
I think you are expecting the problem to be along the lines of a lazy engineer/sysadmin that just doesn't want to spend the time/money to fix an obvious problem. They are working very hard and it's the kind of problem that takes a bit of time to completely get rid of. As soon as they do, WoW will be as great as all us paying customers know it is. Give them more time and they'll get it.
Ahh! Now we come to the critical issue: can MS even do this? I'd say no if their past products are any indication. Large, buggy, and an absolute mess at the code level, expecting MS to write clean, efficient, and secure code is just place silly.
hydrogen is "green" because using it in a fuel cell produces no harmful byproducts: only heat and water vapor. where is comes from isn't not what makes it's green or not. oil isn't because using it produces toxic by products such as CO2, Nx, etc.
Well, when you consider that most of those issues are solved with single commands and the whole procedure is very well documented on the internet and cedega's forums, it's not much harder than solving performance issues on Windows.
I don't really know what legacy VA memory layout is, but I know you have to have it enabled no matter what CPU you have (I have a P4, not an AMD chip). Do some google searching on it and exec-shield if you what to know what they are. I do know that exec-shield is a kernel level protection from having data memory bein executed as instruction memory (if I remember correctly). It gets in the way of the Windows binary memory layout, so that's why it has to be turned off.
Cedega is NOT an emulator, that is why these neet new protection schemes interfere with the games. Cedega is a mapper, so it uses the Linux OS to actually run the game and only maps the Windows API calls to equivalent Linux API calls (and D3D to openGL). That's why prelinking and exec-shield interfere with the games and must be turned off.
The other changes were like using version 6111 of the nvidia drivers instead of 6629 (performance issues), enabling SBA and Fast Writes, etc, all to improve card performance (which benifits all games!). Also had to use openGL instead of D3D rendering in the game (adding -opengl switch to launcher) to increase FPS again.
There is only really one bug with WoW under Cedega and openGL: you can't have the minimap open when you go into a building or dungeon. The screen goes blank when you do and you have to kill the game at the command line. You can bypass this by running the game in D3D, but then it runs slower. I choose to just remember to close my minimap before going into buildings or dungeons.
Well, Blizzard is one of the few MMORPG companies I've used that actually does honor their one month of free gaming you get when you purchase the game. Now, you will still have to pay for the game since it's costs them a fair amount of money to produce all those CDs (and DVDs in the case of the collector's edition), game manuals, boxes, shipping to distributors, etc. It's not an obscene amount considering the quality of all the above named materials and the game itself. But maybe for the future they could look at something similar (but better) to Steam for distribution. Wait, even HL2 cost around $50 through Steam and I didn't get any physical product... hmmm, maybe Blizzard isn't acting like the money grubbing bastards that you are tagging them as. :-P
For me (Linux, Cedega, and WoW user) I was easily able to install and run WoW with Cedega on Fedora Core 3. Needed to make a few changes to my system to get good performance, but it's pretty easy to do. The installation program will error out at the very end of installation, but that didn't effect the game at all.
Well, I do agree with you that as a society we place way to much importance on jobs as a measure on worth and happiness. But there is a reality that must be remembered: money doesn't buy happiness, but it does feed you, cloth you, and allow you to meet the necessities of living. After those are met, you can turn to those aspects of living that do make you happy, but it's hard to be a good neighbor or happy if you have to work 80 hour weeks just to pay the bills. A job as a stock clerk is not a bad job or a bad activity in itself. But when that position can barely support a single human being, it's kind of idiotic to think a family could survive on it, or even two jobs that are equivalent in pay. Again, I'm not saying you have to live in a big house or have 3 cars to be happy. I'm talking about living in a home that isn't rat infested and being able to properly feed your kids. Currently, you can't with lower paying jobs like stock clerk. That is the reality and you either have to work with it or change all of society (Marx provided a solution). I'm not happy because I will probably get a high paying job. I'm happy because I have the ability to experience those aspects of living that provide happiness and because I'm not constantly worrying about being evicted from my little appartment.
I know you'll probably mention something about how the companies don't owe us anything, but I say they do. Large companies (think Intel, Microsoft, GE, etc) have billion dollar profit margins and enjoy incredibly large tax cuts and tax refunds. They owe society for these benifits. Training the next generation of engineers to replace all the 50-60 year old engineers they currently have is not only a good way to ensure a future for the company, but also a way to giving back to society. It's much better to have a person working in an entry level engineering position than as a stock clerk or not working at all. That person has better purchasing power, more likely to plant roots in a community, and more likely to invest in housing & retirement funds. All these improve the situation for the person and help the economy.
The companies are really to blame for this situation, not the students. If they seriously want to help BS graduates get experience to either a) go back to grad school to get a MS or PhD, or b) train up a bit and become more skilled and useful they need to have a ready set of entry positions in engineering that they are expected to fill with young graduates with little to no experience. But those positions are largely gone (from what I've seen and been told by many people). Companies don't want to pay to train people any more. They want the higher education system to do that and to hand them a worker who can contribute on their first day of work.
Well, where I have worked had several hundred Linux desktops rolled out to several hundred engineers (and not the kind that know how to use computers, only custom applications) and it was support by just a few people with no problems. OpenLDAP, Samba, NFS, NIS, etc, etc, are all free, open, configurable, and time tested approaches to managing large numbers of files/computers/users. Have I personally done this? No, but I talked with the guys that did and they had more problems from all the Windows boxes on the network spewing viruses than they ever had with the Linux boxes (the Windows boxes were managed by the Windows guys, different group). Oh, and they managed over 3,000 Linux servers with very little effert. They could drop a new rack of 40 in place and have it running in a day (usually before lunch). The biggest problems with running Linux in large numbers is that you need to know what you are doing (and not try to integrate with an existing Windows network/server design. Windows doesn't play well with others).
Why does it seem like Linux is always being held to a much higher standard than Windows? Whenever I talk to someone about how nice Linux is, they always ask it can do this or that, and when I say no it can't yet or that those features are till in beta, they laugh at Linux. But Windows can't do those things they ask about either! It confuses the hell out of me why Windows is concidered OK, and if Linux had all the features of Windows it would still be just a "toy" OS and not taken seriously. It just confuses the hell out of me.
At my University, the Business department refers the Engineering department as "Pre-Business". If you look at the students in business a lot of them started out as engineering students and then got burned out and switched to business because it was easier (and the fact that the department tried to schedual classes so there were no Friday classes didn't hurt much either).
I think the whole business department is creating a really bad feedback loop. You have a lot of (poor) students graduating in business who get jobs and are usually in administrative positions. Since they usually aren't very bright/hard working (in my experience) they either make things worse or more inefficient, putting more red tape and levels of burracracy, thus creating a need for yet more business majors. That is why business departments are usually some of the largest on campus and why businesses, especially large ones, are so huge and convoluted. Until business because as hard as engineering, the loop will continue. That's my opinion at least.
Well, I.. um... just know that Intel has the ALU like that, and let's leave it at that ;)
Self resetting domino logic has been known about for a while now (I think since mid 90's), but Intel was the first company to actually do something useful with it in a real product. Synchronizing it to the rest of this chip shouldn't be that hard if you understand domino logic and use memory cells at the input and output ports of the ALU. I personally don't know exactly HOW they do that, but that's my best guess.