Unreal Tournament has been v. good in this respect
on
New Q3A Patch And Mods
·
· Score: 1
Unreal Tournament's patches have been backwards-compatible (well, almost completely, maybe break a few mods) and network-compatible, so that people with an older patch (heck, as old as retail version on CD) can still play on a latest-patch server.
No doubt this Q3A upgrade is disappointing and frustrating to authors...
All I wish is that UT's rendering engine was as fast as Q3A's--that's the primary reason I play UT very seldom--it's too slow on my computer (it pushes 10-15fps average during fights, while Q3A manages 25-35fps average during fights--HUGE difference).
Yes, link directly to the PDF file with the novel, it really helps to prove you right, jamie! There are tons of Slashdot visitors that haven't had a clue that they had to pay up a $1 (or at least haven't read Stephen King's reasoning), yet mechanically downloaded the novel.
I can't applaud louder! Slashdot always attains its objective to get paid things for free! Congratulations, another success, Slashdot!
But really, article's author is hyperskeptical of Stephen King's success. The author is citing all these "profit and loss" matrices. That's bull, you know.
A loss of $1 isn't loss to me. I doubt it's a big loss to anybody. Get out on the street, get four quarters from strangers and I got my $1 back.
Indeed, wonderful reasoning: because people will be losing a WHOLE ONE DOLLAR if they give this a try, 85% of people won't be gullible enough to incur such losses.
Oh my, one US dollar. As a high schooler, I have to wait a whole week to get allowance that is probably from five to fifty times more than that. As a college student, I have to work a whole one hour at my work study job to get over five times of my lossage.
Doesn't Stephen King understand that people will feel SO RIPPED OFF if the 75% thing doesn't go through?
C'mon, jamie, real world, reality check! Earth to jamie, earth to jamie!
The $3 escrow idea is much more unrealistic than Stephen King's undertaking. Who will EVER bother to allocate the resources and time to keep track of every single buyer and return a whole lotta $3 to that every single buyer if the novel doesn't sell enough? Really, the overhead of reimbursing $3 to thousands of people is simply too much to make any business sense.
I have just bought the first installment. I wrote out a check for a dollar (since I don't have a credit card, thank you for permitting check payments or I wouldn't have bought the novel) and put it in an envelope.
It's a dollar. Gimme a break. Even people with no checking accounts can just take a dollar in cash, wrap it in colored or thick paper and send thru mail. Every Slashdotter that dislikes big, monopolitic corporations can SPARE A DOLLAR to this great cause.
There are a lot of differences between MySQL and PostgreSQL. Except that the vast majority of them is small and can be went around easily (take subselects for example: I was able to work around this limitation of MySQL at all times with almost no performance hit).
Arguments about both database's stability are irrelevant: both databases are rock-solid (the MySQL server I've been using has never had a problem, despite the user load). Whether they fail almost always depends on the environment--if the database is set up on an unstable system (e.g. Win32) or with poorly choosen system settings, then both databases are going to take a performance and possibly a stability hit.
Let me tell you the stuff that matters. MySQL is fast. PostgreSQL is slow. MySQL shifts a lot of responsibility on the programmer, while PostgreSQL keeps this responsibility within itself. That's it. Comparison is over. Details are then just details.
In other words, I suggest that you use MySQL if: 1) you're writing simple databases (and therefore don't require things such as transactions, complex subselects, foreign keys) or 2) you're writing complex databases AND you're willing to shift some functionality into your application (do some extra work to imitate subselects, lock all tables and keep an internal "undo table" to imitate transactions, make sure your program keeps the correct relations and otherwise does the right thing for foreign keys)
This way you get the fastest performance with all the desired functionality.
If you're not willing to move some functionality into your own programs, then use PostgreSQL, at cost of decreased speed.
IMHO. Note: I'm a biased MySQL user, but I tried to be objective.
(I hope that the Berlin project will take the right path and emerge as *the* graphical interface system for Unix systems.)
I would have to agree that user interface research is ignored in the Linux community. When this community is asked what prevents Linux from becoming widespread amongst new users, a common response is "well, the not-so-easy-to-use UI is probably why." HOWEVER, when Linux is criticized for UI inconsistency and/or actual steps to make Linux UI consistent are taken, the same people kick and scream that they want their "to the last pixel" configurability, they praise the different Linux UIs because it adds variety, freedom, etc.
As long as Linux community continues to kick and scream to keep the "rainbow of UIs" alive, there isn't much hope for widespread Linux acceptance.
Note: when I say "Linux community", I don't mean everyone--I just mean the great majority, especially the vocal Slashdot majority.
I sigh when I see another announcement that "UI-system-Blah now supports transparent windows" or other UI junk. This is clearly a signal of the wrong focus.
I wouldn't say that imitating the Windows interface is bad. On the second thought, it is bad: this imitiation is never complete--GNOME and KDE always have this "half-assed attempt" feel: "look, it sorta looks like windows and behaves like windows, but it still has its own innovations." Yeah, innovations are good but when the UI is halfway there and halfway here, the result is, umm, halfway good.
I would love to see a Linux UI standard for applications. Not stuff like "titlebar must be teal with close buttons on the right" but stuff like "every application should use this common file save/open dialog box" or "menus should conform to these and these guidelines".
Unfortunately, such a standard will never happen--Linux community is too fixed on the "don't tell me what to do" approach.
Ion Storm employee? Suspicious I would say, considering that you know so much about the demo the day it's released, and you're the lone voice defending this horrible excuse of 3 year's work.
It actually took me five minutes to figure this out, since the game was otherwise running mad slow (talking.5 fps here) and it was either do something about it or delete the demo. A quick look through the config files and the.DLL files in the installed dir gave me an idea and it worked. That makes me an Ion Storm employee now?
I'm not talking about getting killed, I'm talking about the technology. It's horribly pathetic and ugly, especially compared to other Quake2 games like Soldier of Fortune, which has been in development for a much shorter time. The controls in the game are very sluggish, and overall the first few levels are very dark and murky, probably meant to cover up the lack of polygons gone into the levels.
The controls feel fine to me, not sluggish at all. Dark levels... is that new? At any rate, I don't care much about technology (my computer can't run most of the latest technology without low detail and stuff like that), so I guess I'm the lone voice that cares about gameplay.
We'll see what happens when the game hits the stores.
I just beat the entire demo and I must say that the emphasis on content paid off. The maps look great (within the Quake 2 engine capabilities) and there are plenty of monsters bigger than tiny.
Also, I liked the sidekick action. Once you get one, all those tiny spiders get smashed by a sidekick before you see them.
You say that the game is just not fun, but I just beat it and I had a lot of fun.
Oh well, I guess different people like different styles of gameplay.
Man, armies of crappedy-ass FPS players whining and whining and whining on Slashdot, getting their posts moderated up.
It's pretty easy to shoot the mosquitos, same goes for the frogs and keep moving while battling the alligator. Turrets can be taken out by simply shooting the control panels at a distance, the turrets won't even touch you.
There are secrets that can make your life much easier, such as the wraithorb (invisibility) near the bridge where a shitload of mosquitos come out and there's that huge bird/whatever that drops a megashield if you kill it.
Then you have a something walking/zombie monster, I killed it too fast for me to see what it was. I paused playing the game when I got to the next save gem, so I can't tell you more.
But, damn, people, PUT SOME SKILL into your playing and beat at least three or four levels before you bitch and moan about Daikatana the worst game released!
For 3dfx AMD K-6 3dNow! users, go into your config.cfg and daikatana.cfg files and change the line that says 'set gl_driver "opengl"' to 'set gl_driver "amd3dgl"'. You'll get DAMN GOOD performance. The game is running sweet here with a VooDoo 2 and AMD K6-2 450. Users without AMD, but with 3dfx chipsets, might want to use 'set gl_driver "3dfxgl"'.
I mean, come on, can we see some effort being put into this game instead of "download the demo real quick, get killed and pissed real quick, post to slashdot as soon as possible to get post moderated up."
Of course, if you actually used a little bit of brain and noticed that all turrets have a control panel next to them that you can blow up from a distance, you wouldn't even see one pop up.
Smart gamers evaluate Daikatana: top-rated posts on this story.
There's a very promising open-source software project, OCTAL (supported by GNU, btw), being developer right now and it uses, instead of traditional musical notation, a tracker notation (probably most/. readers don't know about tracking, so they can find out at united-trackers.org). (note that it's only an alternative, not a replacement.. both notations have their pros and cons)
Basically, the idea is that you have patterns of rows, in which you can input data, such as note trigging, effect parameters, etc. Then you make a sequence out of these patterns and the program plays them.
OCTAL is going to have virtual sound machines, meaning modules that can produce or transform sound. You then program each of these machines to play music or produce effects.
An app similar to OCTAL is already out for Windoze, called Buzz and it has proven that such a concept works great and has the ability to produce unique sounds. (I should know, I wrote a whole lot of songs using Buzz). Unfortunately, Buzz is not open-source (albeit it's free) and it's not available for Linux or anything like that. So, I'm definitely looking forward to OCTAL coming out, as it's going to kick loads of ass.
I don't like using CSound because it's too cumbersome and nonrealtime for me. With OCTAL (and Buzz), things are much easier (although you don't have as much power), yet you still get very nice results. Finally, compared to old-style trackers that only played samples at different speeds (that's where tracking began), OCTAL soft-synthesizes sound right on the spot, giving you the best sound possible. The main disadvantage of this all is that it's quite CPU intensive.
So, check it out: http://www.gnu.org/software/octal/ I can't wait till it comes out and I'm drooling over it. Serious. Very exciting stuff (at least for me).
When reading/., my jaw normally doesn't drop to the floor (althogh sometimes it's close), but this time I'm really angry!
Mandatory: What the hell are they thinking?
In March 1999, I implemented a whole damn CGI application in C++ to do the whole damn affiliate registration, tracking, crediting and administration process! And now, what do I see? Amazon.com patenting this process, which I don't know how many, perhaps hundreds and hundreds of merchant sites online have implemented!
Every large shopping site that I know has a similar--to Amazon.com's--sort of affiliate tracking set up. Is Amazon.com now going to sue all those merchants? Are they going to sue the developers of these systems for violating the patent, even though they completed the projects even before Amazon.com got a patent on that?
The 1-click patent didn't really bother me, since I never really used it, so I didn't bother boycotting or ignoring Amazon. But this is over the limit. What were the people in the US Patent & Trademark office thinking?
Is that patent really valid, given so much "prior art" or did Amazon.com really pioneer this affiliate tracking program?
Sorry for the language and fury, but I thought I was going to have a good day today.
Just saw an article on Slashdot with "Rebirth" in the title and thought "Whee, they are writing about a soft synth prog I use!" Well, of course not.
Rebirth. Not only the program called "Rebirth" which is a software synthesizer has been out for years and more or less popular, but a whole bunch of other projects got named "Rebirth."
And, here we go, yet another "Rebirth" project. Where's the originality? What if I name my next big project "Enlightenment"? or "Gnome" (yes, case intentional)?
I thought programmers were some of the most original and imaginative people, and here we go.
I see quite a number of posts criticizing abstraction and all those "advanced" languages for not providing enough speed.
No, I'm not going to say that speed becomes decreasingly important as computing technology becomes faster.
This reminds me of the C vs C++ situation years ago. A few C programmers were complaining that the same program written in C++ runs three times as slow, naming the "damned abstraction" as the cause. The true cause, however, was the programmers' incompetence (used pass-by-value instead of pass-by-reference a number of times, kept using post-(in|de)crement for complex classes, etc) and the compilers' immaturity (only recent C++ compilers have truly advanced optimization techniques that look beyond assembly optimization level).
When you abstract something, amongst other things, you move gory details from the hands of the programmer to the tool. What this means is that not only "implementation-of-abstraction" details move from the programmer to the programming language & the compiler, but also optimization moves from the programmer to the compiler.
For example, take C++'s virtal functions. Any savvy C++ programmers knows how these virtual functions are really implemented in most compilers. Any experienced C programmer can whip out a struct with virtual-table-like "virtual functions", which, if optimized by him/her to death, may end up being slightly faster than the same thing in C++. A point here would be that the same thing in C++ ends up to be pretty damn fast without the programmer having to do any sort of optimization.
That is not the main point however. The main point is that the computer technology evolves all the time. Programming languages have evolved, through abstraction, from machine-instruction-level to procedural to object-oriented. The task of nitty-gritty optimization has evolved from trivial assembler-level optimization to complex optimization that must know how the program behaves to properly optimize it (e.g. must know the scope of an object, etc.) The optimization itself became more abstract!
Thus, as things evolve, the optimization "layer" will move along with the abstraction layer (from the programmer to the tool). We also have intelligent systems that optimize the program while it's running (an example here would be the Crusoe processor, although it's not that complex of such an optimizer), using special techniques that modify the code being ran to make the program run fastest for whatever task it's currently doing *now* (I'm not going to go in detail what sort of things can be done).
Therefore, I don't worry about performance at all. Give me a well-thought-out language that abstracts better, hides more redundant/gory detail from me and makes me more productive and I'll use it. I'll use it without much concern for speed because I know that if I use the features correctly, the speed will keep up.
Note that no optimizer can optimize bad design. With assembler and C, both good and bad designs were just as fast. With C++, bad design begins to reflect on the program's performance. With whatever higher-level languages may come, I'm sure that the gap in performance between good design and stupid/bad/not-well-thought-out design will continually increase.
The most exciting feature, for me, of Crusoe is code morphing. Reading the white paper on technology behind the chip (something that *a lot* of posters here should do before posting) got me excited even more.
Basically, after a piece of code is translated to native code and optimized, it is cached. Next time it is executed, if it's still cached, the already translated and optimized verison executes.
The benefit of this is speed. A lot of people doubt this speed, saying things like "an emulator can't possibly run at 75% speed of the native system", etc. There are two reasons why Crusoe can outperform the native system, one of which is really not apparent and ignored by almost every person that criticizes Crusoe.
The main thing to remember here is that Crusoe has some radical, very different technology decisions.
First, as any experienced software engineer would point out (backed by experimental data), 90% of a program's execution time is spent in 10%(!) percent of its code. What this means is that if ONLY that 10% of the code is optimized, it will speed up 90% of program's execution time. Crusoe's code caching mechanism helps this immensely because as a program runs, these 10% become cached in native code and translation from non-native machine code is done only ONCE.
You may be saying, "So what, in the best case, the program will run almost as fast as the native system, but it simply can't beat the native system." That's where you're wrong.
The second reason is that the software layer not only performs translation, but optimization as well. You may now object that if the original program is optimized by the best optimizers, Crusoe's optimizer can't do better. Well, it can because of Crusoe's architecture. Note that, for example, x86 processors have a small number of registers (which are areas for data stored internally *in* the processor; such data is accessed the *fastest*). Crusoe's VLIW architecture, however, has a lot more registers and its out-of-order pipelining, branch prediction. Also being a very-long-instruction word processor, it executes a lot of small instructions (atoms) in one big full instruction (molecule). Molecules can be executed in parallel (pipelining). Crusoe's optimizer takes advantage of these features, making the translated code use more native registers, instead of accessing normal memory or L1/L2 cache (which are slower) and groups code to be processed in parallel.
Crusoe's optimizer performs really aggressive optmiziation. Perhaps the neatest feature is how Crusoe handles aliasing. Here's some pseudo-assembler code that loads from the same memory location twice:
load from %X to %register ...(do some stuff with %register)... store %anotherregister to %Y load from %X to %register add %register and something else etc.
This is the tightest optmiziation a compiler can perform. The compiler can't eliminate the second load operation to the register because %Y may be an alias for %X (that is, %Y may point to the same memory location as %X). Such aliases come up rarely, but they can come up, and so the compiler can't risk eliminating the second load instruction because it can't predict whether %X is an alias for the %Y. Nobody can, not even the processor.
Crusoe takes a radically different approach in this situation. Its optimizer ELIMINATES the second load operation, assuming that %Y is not an alias for %X. However, in case it is, it marks an internal bit that protects %X from being overwritten by the store instruction. So the code that one ends up with doesn't have that load instruction and when the case of %Y being an alias for %X does happen, it simply generates the extra load instruction on the fly.
This may seem like an insignificant optimization, but in reality, it can be quite significant since things such as these happen in programs very often (and often %Y ends up being not an alias for %X). Elimination of extra loads permits better pipelining (more code executed in parallel), and an extra load may take quite a bit of time if the load has to be done from the memory.
There are a whole bunch of cool other things about Crusoe's technology which makes it a great all-around processor.
So, what this means is that thanks to the revolutionary architecture, Crusoe's optimizer can optimize that 10% BEYOND the original and actually run faster.
Users of computationally-intensive programs will especially benefit from this. For example, a 3d ray tracing program spends a lot of time in the small, tight rendering code. Having that optimized so well by the processor can have a significant effect.
Crusoe also uses filtering techniques to avoid caching code that is executed once-an-hour (thereby preserving translated native often-executed code in the cache as long as possible).
As the website mentions, most benchmarks only measure a bunch of tasks done in 10 or 20 minutes. The website asks: do you really repetitively do 10 different tasks on your word processor for half-hour or do you actually sit in front of a processor and type most of the time? This is indeed a valid rhetorical question.
Most benchmarks are too short to let Crusoe speed things up as much as possible.
Although I don't like the "mobility features" that Transmeta keeps pushing every other sentence (damn marketing) and I don't like the fact that their benchmarks mix performance with "mobility features" (even though there is some validity in doing tat), I think that Crusoe is a very exciting technology and wish I had one.
Stop thinking in terms of megahertz. As processor technology gets more advanced, all these things stop mattering. In one app, your 700Mhz AMD may perform much slower, in another it can perform much faster. It's never same speed all the time.
If I was a customer of cduniverse.com, I wouldn't get upset too much. Of course, I would get upset at the merchant not being secure and letting such things happen, but it wouldn't bother me much.
I have my credit card company by my side. My credit card agreement/contract protects me from any unauthorized charges and the credit card company will investigate any such charges. Of course, there is the problem of going through phone calls and other communication to get the matter straightened out, but not a single unauthorized/fradulent charge makes it past one statement!
So, if you are/were a customer of cduniverse.com, don't get too worried. You're protected.
First, as many have already pointed out, Netscape's beta will come out later than Mozilla's beta.
Second, I see WAY too many posts describing IE as superior to Mozilla in its support for DOM, XML and other standards. I don't whether to cry or laugh; after all, I expect an average "slashdot reader" to be smart enough to check Mozilla and its development out. It turns out that I'm wrong. It seems that most people didn't even bother to read more than two or three pages on mozilla.org, if any.
And that sucks. To give all those unenlightened a crash course in Mozilla: - it has unprecendented support for standards. Period. Even new IE 5.5, as MozillazZine points out, still doesn't support CSS1 (one, not two!) completely, as Microsoft promised. - it has its own set of widgets, which are going to be polished to become equal or superior to all other. Amongst other things, that means that Mozilla is going to have the same look and feel across *ALL* platforms, and web pages are doing to have same widget look and feel across all platforms. That is truly great. - it's not even alpha yet! Why are people complaining about the browser being delayed? Do you want Mozilla to turn out rushed like Windows 95? or do you want it turn out to be a quality piece of software?
Give Mozilla a break. All of you are hot-headed open source advocates, and when it comes down to business, most of you scream: "Ahh, it's being delayed, it has no standards support, it's dead/crap!" instead of actually bothering to help out, even a little! Mozilla.org has lists of small tasks to be done in all sorts of areas (C++, DOM, JavaScript, etc.), there's surely something for you. Don't sit on your arse: Mozilla is open source and if you want it to happen sooner, go and help.
For those lazy to naviage the site, here's a direct link to the "Get Involved" page: http://www.mozilla.org/get-involved.html
Unfortunately, one has to repat this again and agian. The article called "The Fable of the Keys" to Dvorak is what recent Microsoft's "Linux Myths Explained" to Linux. Pure FUD.
For the Nth time, peruse this link: http://www.ccsi.com/~mbrooks/dvorak/dissent.html
To quote a poster to a different story, "All of the current anti-Dvorak hype stems from a _single_ paper, The Fable of The Keys."
And guess what, an overwhelming majority of posters to this story mention "The Fable of The Keys" as the only source of proof.
Alas, many don't bother to follow the above link either, so I'll just summarize a few key points:
- The Fable of The Keys is based on very sketchy and weak evidence. The most referred-to study in that article is the 1956 GSA study conducted by Dr. Earl Strong, who was an anti-Dvorak advocate. It's best illustrated by what Strong said a few years before the study:
"I have developed a great deal of material on how to get this increased production on the part of typists on the standard [QWERTY] keyboard....I strongly feel that the present keyboard has not been fully exploited, and I am out to exploit it to its very utmost in opposition to the change to new keyboards."
Again, to provide analogies with Microsoft vs. Linux battle, that "convincing" 1956 GSA study is same as that recent Metrowerks "Windows NT vs Linux" comparison test--paid by Microsoft, biased, etc.
- The paper talks about "lack of solid evidence that Dvorak is objectively better." Damn, this angers me so much: so many people have reported great or just-as-good results with Dvorak, so many people reported hard, undisputable numbers that Dvorak reduces hand movements and thus has a great potential to increase typing speed and especially decrease typing injuries, that anyone talking about "lack of solid evidence for Dvorak" automatically has their IQ dropped to 20 in my mind.
- The reason you don't see Dvorak bundled with new computers (or otherwise be popular) is because it traditionally has been difficult/expensive to switch typewriters to Dvorak. The mechanisms were often hardwired for a layout and rearranging it was quite a costly process. For a similar reason, because it was not too easy to convert from Windows to Linux (e.g. when there was no UMSDOS or friendly installation programs), Linux did not gain such a wide acceptance as it deserved to.
- Just like the British system of measurements, QWERTY is outdated but too common to be easily replaced. QWERTY was designed to slow down (PERIOD), plus it was also designed so that salesmen could type "TYPEWRITER" using the top row only, saving them the semi-embarrasing task of hunting and pecking.
It is really upsetting to see such FUD and crap as "The Fable of the Keys" (again, comparable to Microsoft's "Linux Myths Explained") appear on the net and gain wide acceptance.
As far as Dvorak being faster than QWERTY. A friend of mine was typing 55-65wpm using QWERTY a year ago. Eight months ago he switched to Dvorak. His current speed is 60-70wpm (which is not much faster), but he says that his hands feel a lot better with Dvorak than with QWERTY.
QWERTY was designed to slow down. Dvorak was designed to speed up and simplify typing. Both keyboard layouts have achieved their goals.
I am currently a QWERTY user, but I'm switching to Dvorak as soon as I have a week or so of no important typing to do.
From the above URL, as an argument for Dvorak, one can form about 12 times more English words using just the homerow on a Dvorak keyboard compared to a QWERTY keyboard. Think about it: **12** times more words without having to move your arms off the home row.
I can't believe that the world is still using a keyboard that was designed with *salesmen* in mind (that is, the top row of the QWERTY keyboard contains all the letters necessary for typewriter salesmen to type "typewriter", saving them trouble of hunting and pecking back in the day).
I strongly suggest you use Dvorak. Its only flaw is that its really not as widespread as QWERTY.
This is great: now CVS will have more potential development going on because of more "company support" behind it. Also, SourceGear will provide support for CVS users, something that Cyclic decided to recently abandon. This will definitely rock.
Slashdot Mirror
Unreal Tournament's patches have been backwards-compatible (well, almost completely, maybe break a few mods) and network-compatible, so that people with an older patch (heck, as old as retail version on CD) can still play on a latest-patch server. No doubt this Q3A upgrade is disappointing and frustrating to authors... All I wish is that UT's rendering engine was as fast as Q3A's--that's the primary reason I play UT very seldom--it's too slow on my computer (it pushes 10-15fps average during fights, while Q3A manages 25-35fps average during fights--HUGE difference).
Consistency is the hobgoblin of the little minds.
Translation: stubborn--bad.
Yes, link directly to the PDF file with the novel, it really helps to prove you right, jamie! There are tons of Slashdot visitors that haven't had a clue that they had to pay up a $1 (or at least haven't read Stephen King's reasoning), yet mechanically downloaded the novel.
I can't applaud louder! Slashdot always attains its objective to get paid things for free! Congratulations, another success, Slashdot!
But really, article's author is hyperskeptical of Stephen King's success. The author is citing all these "profit and loss" matrices. That's bull, you know.
A loss of $1 isn't loss to me. I doubt it's a big loss to anybody. Get out on the street, get four quarters from strangers and I got my $1 back.
Indeed, wonderful reasoning: because people will be losing a WHOLE ONE DOLLAR if they give this a try, 85% of people won't be gullible enough to incur such losses.
Oh my, one US dollar. As a high schooler, I have to wait a whole week to get allowance that is probably from five to fifty times more than that. As a college student, I have to work a whole one hour at my work study job to get over five times of my lossage.
Doesn't Stephen King understand that people will feel SO RIPPED OFF if the 75% thing doesn't go through?
C'mon, jamie, real world, reality check! Earth to jamie, earth to jamie!
The $3 escrow idea is much more unrealistic than Stephen King's undertaking. Who will EVER bother to allocate the resources and time to keep track of every single buyer and return a whole lotta $3 to that every single buyer if the novel doesn't sell enough? Really, the overhead of reimbursing $3 to thousands of people is simply too much to make any business sense.
I have just bought the first installment. I wrote out a check for a dollar (since I don't have a credit card, thank you for permitting check payments or I wouldn't have bought the novel) and put it in an envelope.
It's a dollar. Gimme a break. Even people with no checking accounts can just take a dollar in cash, wrap it in colored or thick paper and send thru mail. Every Slashdotter that dislikes big, monopolitic corporations can SPARE A DOLLAR to this great cause.
And I hope every Slashdotter does.
There are a lot of differences between MySQL and PostgreSQL. Except that the vast majority of them is small and can be went around easily (take subselects for example: I was able to work around this limitation of MySQL at all times with almost no performance hit).
Arguments about both database's stability are irrelevant: both databases are rock-solid (the MySQL server I've been using has never had a problem, despite the user load). Whether they fail almost always depends on the environment--if the database is set up on an unstable system (e.g. Win32) or with poorly choosen system settings, then both databases are going to take a performance and possibly a stability hit.
Let me tell you the stuff that matters. MySQL is fast. PostgreSQL is slow. MySQL shifts a lot of responsibility on the programmer, while PostgreSQL keeps this responsibility within itself. That's it. Comparison is over. Details are then just details.
In other words, I suggest that you use MySQL if:
1) you're writing simple databases (and therefore don't require things such as transactions, complex subselects, foreign keys)
or
2) you're writing complex databases AND you're willing to shift some functionality into your application (do some extra work to imitate subselects, lock all tables and keep an internal "undo table" to imitate transactions, make sure your program keeps the correct relations and otherwise does the right thing for foreign keys)
This way you get the fastest performance with all the desired functionality.
If you're not willing to move some functionality into your own programs, then use PostgreSQL, at cost of decreased speed.
IMHO. Note: I'm a biased MySQL user, but I tried to be objective.
(I hope that the Berlin project will take the right path and emerge as *the* graphical interface system for Unix systems.)
I would have to agree that user interface research is ignored in the Linux community. When this community is asked what prevents Linux from becoming widespread amongst new users, a common response is "well, the not-so-easy-to-use UI is probably why." HOWEVER, when Linux is criticized for UI inconsistency and/or actual steps to make Linux UI consistent are taken, the same people kick and scream that they want their "to the last pixel" configurability, they praise the different Linux UIs because it adds variety, freedom, etc.
As long as Linux community continues to kick and scream to keep the "rainbow of UIs" alive, there isn't much hope for widespread Linux acceptance.
Note: when I say "Linux community", I don't mean everyone--I just mean the great majority, especially the vocal Slashdot majority.
I sigh when I see another announcement that "UI-system-Blah now supports transparent windows" or other UI junk. This is clearly a signal of the wrong focus.
I wouldn't say that imitating the Windows interface is bad. On the second thought, it is bad: this imitiation is never complete--GNOME and KDE always have this "half-assed attempt" feel: "look, it sorta looks like windows and behaves like windows, but it still has its own innovations." Yeah, innovations are good but when the UI is halfway there and halfway here, the result is, umm, halfway good.
I would love to see a Linux UI standard for applications. Not stuff like "titlebar must be teal with close buttons on the right" but stuff like "every application should use this common file save/open dialog box" or "menus should conform to these and these guidelines".
Unfortunately, such a standard will never happen--Linux community is too fixed on the "don't tell me what to do" approach.
It actually took me five minutes to figure this out, since the game was otherwise running mad slow (talking .5 fps here) and it was either do something about it or delete the demo. A quick look through the config files and the .DLL files in the installed dir gave me an idea and it worked. That makes me an Ion Storm employee now?
The controls feel fine to me, not sluggish at all. Dark levels... is that new? At any rate, I don't care much about technology (my computer can't run most of the latest technology without low detail and stuff like that), so I guess I'm the lone voice that cares about gameplay.
We'll see what happens when the game hits the stores.
I don't know what you expected.
I just beat the entire demo and I must say that the emphasis on content paid off. The maps look great (within the Quake 2 engine capabilities) and there are plenty of monsters bigger than tiny.
Also, I liked the sidekick action. Once you get one, all those tiny spiders get smashed by a sidekick before you see them.
You say that the game is just not fun, but I just beat it and I had a lot of fun.
Oh well, I guess different people like different styles of gameplay.
Man, armies of crappedy-ass FPS players whining and whining and whining on Slashdot, getting their posts moderated up.
It's pretty easy to shoot the mosquitos, same goes for the frogs and keep moving while battling the alligator. Turrets can be taken out by simply shooting the control panels at a distance, the turrets won't even touch you.
There are secrets that can make your life much easier, such as the wraithorb (invisibility) near the bridge where a shitload of mosquitos come out and there's that huge bird/whatever that drops a megashield if you kill it.
Then you have a something walking/zombie monster, I killed it too fast for me to see what it was. I paused playing the game when I got to the next save gem, so I can't tell you more.
But, damn, people, PUT SOME SKILL into your playing and beat at least three or four levels before you bitch and moan about Daikatana the worst game released!
For 3dfx AMD K-6 3dNow! users, go into your config.cfg and daikatana.cfg files and change the line that says 'set gl_driver "opengl"' to 'set gl_driver "amd3dgl"'. You'll get DAMN GOOD performance. The game is running sweet here with a VooDoo 2 and AMD K6-2 450. Users without AMD, but with 3dfx chipsets, might want to use 'set gl_driver "3dfxgl"'.
I mean, come on, can we see some effort being put into this game instead of "download the demo real quick, get killed and pissed real quick, post to slashdot as soon as possible to get post moderated up."
Grr.
Of course, if you actually used a little bit of brain and noticed that all turrets have a control panel next to them that you can blow up from a distance, you wouldn't even see one pop up.
Smart gamers evaluate Daikatana: top-rated posts on this story.
Basically, the idea is that you have patterns of rows, in which you can input data, such as note trigging, effect parameters, etc. Then you make a sequence out of these patterns and the program plays them.
OCTAL is going to have virtual sound machines, meaning modules that can produce or transform sound. You then program each of these machines to play music or produce effects.
An app similar to OCTAL is already out for Windoze, called Buzz and it has proven that such a concept works great and has the ability to produce unique sounds. (I should know, I wrote a whole lot of songs using Buzz). Unfortunately, Buzz is not open-source (albeit it's free) and it's not available for Linux or anything like that. So, I'm definitely looking forward to OCTAL coming out, as it's going to kick loads of ass.
I don't like using CSound because it's too cumbersome and nonrealtime for me. With OCTAL (and Buzz), things are much easier (although you don't have as much power), yet you still get very nice results. Finally, compared to old-style trackers that only played samples at different speeds (that's where tracking began), OCTAL soft-synthesizes sound right on the spot, giving you the best sound possible. The main disadvantage of this all is that it's quite CPU intensive.
So, check it out: http://www.gnu.org/software/octal/ I can't wait till it comes out and I'm drooling over it. Serious. Very exciting stuff (at least for me).
When reading /., my jaw normally doesn't drop to the floor (althogh sometimes it's close), but this time I'm really angry!
Mandatory: What the hell are they thinking?
In March 1999, I implemented a whole damn CGI application in C++ to do the whole damn affiliate registration, tracking, crediting and administration process! And now, what do I see? Amazon.com patenting this process, which I don't know how many, perhaps hundreds and hundreds of merchant sites online have implemented!
Every large shopping site that I know has a similar--to Amazon.com's--sort of affiliate tracking set up. Is Amazon.com now going to sue all those merchants? Are they going to sue the developers of these systems for violating the patent, even though they completed the projects even before Amazon.com got a patent on that?
The 1-click patent didn't really bother me, since I never really used it, so I didn't bother boycotting or ignoring Amazon. But this is over the limit. What were the people in the US Patent & Trademark office thinking?
Is that patent really valid, given so much "prior art" or did Amazon.com really pioneer this affiliate tracking program?
Sorry for the language and fury, but I thought I was going to have a good day today.
Just saw an article on Slashdot with "Rebirth" in the title and thought "Whee, they are writing about a soft synth prog I use!" Well, of course not.
Rebirth. Not only the program called "Rebirth" which is a software synthesizer has been out for years and more or less popular, but a whole bunch of other projects got named "Rebirth."
And, here we go, yet another "Rebirth" project. Where's the originality? What if I name my next big project "Enlightenment"? or "Gnome" (yes, case intentional)?
I thought programmers were some of the most original and imaginative people, and here we go.
No, I'm not going to say that speed becomes decreasingly important as computing technology becomes faster.
This reminds me of the C vs C++ situation years ago. A few C programmers were complaining that the same program written in C++ runs three times as slow, naming the "damned abstraction" as the cause. The true cause, however, was the programmers' incompetence (used pass-by-value instead of pass-by-reference a number of times, kept using post-(in|de)crement for complex classes, etc) and the compilers' immaturity (only recent C++ compilers have truly advanced optimization techniques that look beyond assembly optimization level).
When you abstract something, amongst other things, you move gory details from the hands of the programmer to the tool. What this means is that not only "implementation-of-abstraction" details move from the programmer to the programming language & the compiler, but also optimization moves from the programmer to the compiler.
For example, take C++'s virtal functions. Any savvy C++ programmers knows how these virtual functions are really implemented in most compilers. Any experienced C programmer can whip out a struct with virtual-table-like "virtual functions", which, if optimized by him/her to death, may end up being slightly faster than the same thing in C++. A point here would be that the same thing in C++ ends up to be pretty damn fast without the programmer having to do any sort of optimization.
That is not the main point however. The main point is that the computer technology evolves all the time. Programming languages have evolved, through abstraction, from machine-instruction-level to procedural to object-oriented. The task of nitty-gritty optimization has evolved from trivial assembler-level optimization to complex optimization that must know how the program behaves to properly optimize it (e.g. must know the scope of an object, etc.) The optimization itself became more abstract!
Thus, as things evolve, the optimization "layer" will move along with the abstraction layer (from the programmer to the tool). We also have intelligent systems that optimize the program while it's running (an example here would be the Crusoe processor, although it's not that complex of such an optimizer), using special techniques that modify the code being ran to make the program run fastest for whatever task it's currently doing *now* (I'm not going to go in detail what sort of things can be done).
Therefore, I don't worry about performance at all. Give me a well-thought-out language that abstracts better, hides more redundant/gory detail from me and makes me more productive and I'll use it. I'll use it without much concern for speed because I know that if I use the features correctly, the speed will keep up.
Note that no optimizer can optimize bad design. With assembler and C, both good and bad designs were just as fast. With C++, bad design begins to reflect on the program's performance. With whatever higher-level languages may come, I'm sure that the gap in performance between good design and stupid/bad/not-well-thought-out design will continually increase.
Off the tank now.
Ahh yes, but because of your soundcard, and possibly CD player you're going to lose quality and add noise.
Esp. cheap soundcards sound awful.
The most exciting feature, for me, of Crusoe is code morphing. Reading the white paper on technology behind the chip (something that *a lot* of posters here should do before posting) got me excited even more.
...(do some stuff with %register)...
Basically, after a piece of code is translated to native code and optimized, it is cached. Next time it is executed, if it's still cached, the already translated and optimized verison executes.
The benefit of this is speed. A lot of people doubt this speed, saying things like "an emulator can't possibly run at 75% speed of the native system", etc. There are two reasons why Crusoe can outperform the native system, one of which is really not apparent and ignored by almost every person that criticizes Crusoe.
The main thing to remember here is that Crusoe has some radical, very different technology decisions.
First, as any experienced software engineer would point out (backed by experimental data), 90% of a program's execution time is spent in 10%(!) percent of its code. What this means is that if ONLY that 10% of the code is optimized, it will speed up 90% of program's execution time. Crusoe's code caching mechanism helps this immensely because as a program runs, these 10% become cached in native code and translation from non-native machine code is done only ONCE.
You may be saying, "So what, in the best case, the program will run almost as fast as the native system, but it simply can't beat the native system." That's where you're wrong.
The second reason is that the software layer not only performs translation, but optimization as well. You may now object that if the original program is optimized by the best optimizers, Crusoe's optimizer can't do better. Well, it can because of Crusoe's architecture. Note that, for example, x86 processors have a small number of registers (which are areas for data stored internally *in* the processor; such data is accessed the *fastest*). Crusoe's VLIW architecture, however, has a lot more registers and its out-of-order pipelining, branch prediction. Also being a very-long-instruction word processor, it executes a lot of small instructions (atoms) in one big full instruction (molecule). Molecules can be executed in parallel (pipelining). Crusoe's optimizer takes advantage of these features, making the translated code use more native registers, instead of accessing normal memory or L1/L2 cache (which are slower) and groups code to be processed in parallel.
Crusoe's optimizer performs really aggressive optmiziation. Perhaps the neatest feature is how Crusoe handles aliasing. Here's some pseudo-assembler code that loads from the same memory location twice:
load from %X to %register
store %anotherregister to %Y
load from %X to %register
add %register and something else
etc.
This is the tightest optmiziation a compiler can perform. The compiler can't eliminate the second load operation to the register because %Y may be an alias for %X (that is, %Y may point to the same memory location as %X). Such aliases come up rarely, but they can come up, and so the compiler can't risk eliminating the second load instruction because it can't predict whether %X is an alias for the %Y. Nobody can, not even the processor.
Crusoe takes a radically different approach in this situation. Its optimizer ELIMINATES the second load operation, assuming that %Y is not an alias for %X. However, in case it is, it marks an internal bit that protects %X from being overwritten by the store instruction. So the code that one ends up with doesn't have that load instruction and when the case of %Y being an alias for %X does happen, it simply generates the extra load instruction on the fly.
This may seem like an insignificant optimization, but in reality, it can be quite significant since things such as these happen in programs very often (and often %Y ends up being not an alias for %X). Elimination of extra loads permits better pipelining (more code executed in parallel), and an extra load may take quite a bit of time if the load has to be done from the memory.
There are a whole bunch of cool other things about Crusoe's technology which makes it a great all-around processor.
So, what this means is that thanks to the revolutionary architecture, Crusoe's optimizer can optimize that 10% BEYOND the original and actually run faster.
Users of computationally-intensive programs will especially benefit from this. For example, a 3d ray tracing program spends a lot of time in the small, tight rendering code. Having that optimized so well by the processor can have a significant effect.
Crusoe also uses filtering techniques to avoid caching code that is executed once-an-hour (thereby preserving translated native often-executed code in the cache as long as possible).
As the website mentions, most benchmarks only measure a bunch of tasks done in 10 or 20 minutes. The website asks: do you really repetitively do 10 different tasks on your word processor for half-hour or do you actually sit in front of a processor and type most of the time? This is indeed a valid rhetorical question.
Most benchmarks are too short to let Crusoe speed things up as much as possible.
Although I don't like the "mobility features" that Transmeta keeps pushing every other sentence (damn marketing) and I don't like the fact that their benchmarks mix performance with "mobility features" (even though there is some validity in doing tat), I think that Crusoe is a very exciting technology and wish I had one.
Stop thinking in terms of megahertz. As processor technology gets more advanced, all these things stop mattering. In one app, your 700Mhz AMD may perform much slower, in another it can perform much faster. It's never same speed all the time.
I have my credit card company by my side. My credit card agreement/contract protects me from any unauthorized charges and the credit card company will investigate any such charges. Of course, there is the problem of going through phone calls and other communication to get the matter straightened out, but not a single unauthorized/fradulent charge makes it past one statement!
So, if you are/were a customer of cduniverse.com, don't get too worried. You're protected.
First, as many have already pointed out, Netscape's beta will come out later than Mozilla's beta.
Second, I see WAY too many posts describing IE as superior to Mozilla in its support for DOM, XML and other standards. I don't whether to cry or laugh; after all, I expect an average "slashdot reader" to be smart enough to check Mozilla and its development out. It turns out that I'm wrong. It seems that most people didn't even bother to read more than two or three pages on mozilla.org, if any.
And that sucks. To give all those unenlightened a crash course in Mozilla:
- it has unprecendented support for standards. Period. Even new IE 5.5, as MozillazZine points out, still doesn't support CSS1 (one, not two!) completely, as Microsoft promised.
- it has its own set of widgets, which are going to be polished to become equal or superior to all other. Amongst other things, that means that Mozilla is going to have the same look and feel across *ALL* platforms, and web pages are doing to have same widget look and feel across all platforms. That is truly great.
- it's not even alpha yet! Why are people complaining about the browser being delayed? Do you want Mozilla to turn out rushed like Windows 95? or do you want it turn out to be a quality piece of software?
Give Mozilla a break. All of you are hot-headed open source advocates, and when it comes down to business, most of you scream: "Ahh, it's being delayed, it has no standards support, it's dead/crap!" instead of actually bothering to help out, even a little! Mozilla.org has lists of small tasks to be done in all sorts of areas (C++, DOM, JavaScript, etc.), there's surely something for you. Don't sit on your arse: Mozilla is open source and if you want it to happen sooner, go and help.
For those lazy to naviage the site, here's a direct link to the "Get Involved" page:
http://www.mozilla.org/get-involved.html
--
Unfortunately, one has to repat this again and agian. The article called "The Fable of the Keys" to Dvorak is what recent Microsoft's "Linux Myths Explained" to Linux. Pure FUD.
...I strongly feel that the present keyboard has not been fully exploited, and I am out to exploit it to its very utmost in opposition to the change to new keyboards."
For the Nth time, peruse this link: http://www.ccsi.com/~mbrooks/dvorak/dissent.html
To quote a poster to a different story, "All of the current anti-Dvorak hype stems from a _single_ paper, The Fable of The Keys."
And guess what, an overwhelming majority of posters to this story mention "The Fable of The Keys" as the only source of proof.
Alas, many don't bother to follow the above link either, so I'll just summarize a few key points:
- The Fable of The Keys is based on very sketchy and weak evidence. The most referred-to study in that article is the 1956 GSA study conducted by Dr. Earl Strong, who was an anti-Dvorak advocate. It's best illustrated by what Strong said a few years before the study:
"I have developed a great deal of material on how to get this increased production on the part of typists on the standard [QWERTY] keyboard.
Again, to provide analogies with Microsoft vs. Linux battle, that "convincing" 1956 GSA study is same as that recent Metrowerks "Windows NT vs Linux" comparison test--paid by Microsoft, biased, etc.
- The paper talks about "lack of solid evidence that Dvorak is objectively better." Damn, this angers me so much: so many people have reported great or just-as-good results with Dvorak, so many people reported hard, undisputable numbers that Dvorak reduces hand movements and thus has a great potential to increase typing speed and especially decrease typing injuries, that anyone talking about "lack of solid evidence for Dvorak" automatically has their IQ dropped to 20 in my mind.
- The reason you don't see Dvorak bundled with new computers (or otherwise be popular) is because it traditionally has been difficult/expensive to switch typewriters to Dvorak. The mechanisms were often hardwired for a layout and rearranging it was quite a costly process. For a similar reason, because it was not too easy to convert from Windows to Linux (e.g. when there was no UMSDOS or friendly installation programs), Linux did not gain such a wide acceptance as it deserved to.
- Just like the British system of measurements, QWERTY is outdated but too common to be easily replaced. QWERTY was designed to slow down (PERIOD), plus it was also designed so that salesmen could type "TYPEWRITER" using the top row only, saving them the semi-embarrasing task of hunting and pecking.
It is really upsetting to see such FUD and crap as "The Fable of the Keys" (again, comparable to Microsoft's "Linux Myths Explained") appear on the net and gain wide acceptance.
.
The Myth of the Keys is extremely biased, has no true evidence and makes no sense in certain places.
Here's the "truth": http://www.ccsi.com/~mbrooks/dvora k/dissent.html
As far as Dvorak being faster than QWERTY. A friend of mine was typing 55-65wpm using QWERTY a year ago. Eight months ago he switched to Dvorak. His current speed is 60-70wpm (which is not much faster), but he says that his hands feel a lot better with Dvorak than with QWERTY.
QWERTY was designed to slow down. Dvorak was designed to speed up and simplify typing. Both keyboard layouts have achieved their goals.
I am currently a QWERTY user, but I'm switching to Dvorak as soon as I have a week or so of no important typing to do.
From the above URL, as an argument for Dvorak, one can form about 12 times more English words using just the homerow on a Dvorak keyboard compared to a QWERTY keyboard. Think about it: **12** times more words without having to move your arms off the home row.
I can't believe that the world is still using a keyboard that was designed with *salesmen* in mind (that is, the top row of the QWERTY keyboard contains all the letters necessary for typewriter salesmen to type "typewriter", saving them trouble of hunting and pecking back in the day).
I strongly suggest you use Dvorak. Its only flaw is that its really not as widespread as QWERTY.
Going to http://mail.dotcomnow.com/signup/poll/webmaster?dl ang=default now results in:
we are sorry, but this service is not available.
Ehh, they seem to have woken up.
This rocks!
Now if they only port Elite: Final Frontier to Linux, I'm going to trash my Windows forever.
I don't know why. Look at CVS in use at Mozilla.org (huge, gigantic project), AbiSource.
I've been using CVS for a moderate-size project and it's one of the best things that happened to our development process.
This is great: now CVS will have more potential development going on because of more "company support" behind it. Also, SourceGear will provide support for CVS users, something that Cyclic decided to recently abandon. This will definitely rock.