I was in a east-european car (Shkoda) when the gasoline pupm exploded, causing the back of the car (where the engine is located) to burst into flames. I was sitting at the back seat, with my parents at the front. I didn't hear it explode, but my father said he did. We just saw the car slow down, my father pulled over, I turned my head back and saw the flames through the back window, opened the door and, following the example of the brave Rincewind, ran my ass off forward. My parents stepped out of the car, the inflamable parts of the engine burning, stopped another vehicle and used a big fire extinguisher to put the fire out (we were lucky that the fire had melted one of the back lights, so they used the opening to spray the fire-extinguishing stuff inside).
Well, the car didn't explode, although it was filled up with gasoline just a few minutes before the accident. The back part of it (where the engine was) was badly burned, but the tyres, the seats and everything else was intact; maybe that has something to do with the fact that the fuel tanks are at the front of the car, under the front seats. Major parts of the engine had to be replaced, as well as new painting was needed. But we were towed all the way to our destination, and we had to leave the car for one year at my grandparent's yard. The car is still in motion today. I can't remember the exact year that happened, but it was easter, and it was sometime at the beginning of the 90s. I guess that made us all a little religious.
Then, of course, I could show off showing the molten back light to my peers.
is create a mega-geek-test-server machine which allows on-the-fly switching between different execution modes: x86, powerpc, Java bytecode, heck even MSIL. Just imagine what could've been accomplished like that: Testing a new video card programming scheme: no problem, write your emulator, load it up on your codemorpher, see how it runs. Writing a distributed native server, which has parts running on a powerpc, others on a x86? again no problem, buy 2 codemorphers, see how it runs, debug. Running a rack full of expensive (but resource eating) Java stuff? again, no problem, buy codemorphers and arrange them in racks - they consume so little power, that it should even be possible to run the stuff at home.
Well, as I look back at all that, most of the stuff woudn't make sense to a marketing dr^H^Hperson. Hm... Maybe it even doesn't make sense at all. Oh, well...
Maybe a littel off-topic... The Ur-Quan Masters, I think, is the best space faring game. Ever (Not that I've played any other...). The latest updates (must be installed manually) even include the PC version intro and ending.
OK, having read what astroturfing means (thanks, google), OK, almost noone knows what osgi is, and those who know hate it. Fine. Sorry! Again, trolling was not my intention, read my other posts around slashdot. I am not even working at that company right now, I am like 7 countries north of it, studying graphics at HIN, making doom 2 levels and enjoying a 6 months non-paid vacation and am eagerly waiting for the white nights here north of the polar circle.
So there. Have a nice day.
Sorry to everyone. I just thought that OSGi might be interesting for Free Software developers. It is a very nice way to implement plugins in Java. It is even not so difficult to implement in a GPL product, it's just a spec of delayed loading of jar files with special a manifest. It's cool, that's all. Didn't mean to troll or anything...:(
Isn't it possible to make the GCC treat short as 32-bit, int and long as 64-bit and long long as, say, 128-bit numbers, and produce code that handles that even on the 32-bit (or the even older 16-bit) machines still hanging around (I can see many problems with multithreaded code that's not properly synchronized, but, alas, `c'est la vie`)? That could make many problems go away in a poof of compiler logic.
"(Dis)Claimer": I am a professional programmer, and have been such for the past five years.
GPL'ed programs can and often are sold. Sometimes authors release their programs under different licenses. It's quite complicated. Software patents will make it illegal to sell almost any software written all by yourself, under almost any license.
What programmers should mainly worry about today is speed and size complexity, not some cheap tricks IMHO. Of course, it depends on the compiler. If it is a promptly hacked together embedded C compiler with no optimization options, you might wish to be much, much more careful about what you are doing. Otherwise, happily use whatever you need, and let the compiler worry about the tiny details.
... living in the US, and if they actually manage to succeed in that outrageous claim of theirs... I'd be packing my bags. But I don't think there is any sane judge in that country that can rule such a thing.
Frankly those guys sound like people who just don't give a dingo's kidney about our "legitimate use" or "i was downloading legal files, like the herd kernel, honestly!" claims. They damn well know that's so out of place. And they damn well know that clueless gulible journalists will be swarming like horny bees to help them get their point across. That's not about getting, that's about FUD. And it's working.
Now think about that. You can't just put more than half of all of your population into jails. That's just not civilized. You can, however, pass laws that make half the people criminals. Then, it's easy to fingerpoint.
Likewise, you just can't sue everybody at once. It just won't work, not even in the US. But you can spread FUD and see what happens. Sometimes scam like this works. Even if it is for a short period of time, it works. It buys you time, it brings a little more profit. Like spam: if only one person in every one million responds positively (gets scared), you've won a truckload of money.
You feel angry about that? Don't! They can't "own you"! Let them be, they will die out as a useless piece of junk of the old times. Enjoy your lives, to hell with those people, what do they concern you? Don't respond to their actions, let them cry their lungs out. It won't save their business, only finding new ways to do useful business will. But then again, perhaps that's why they need to buy time - to reform their businesses?
... how exactly is that going to affect users that just pirate the corporate version (the version that is usually pirated) - that requires no activation in the first place?
You are wrong, that's just what people here in Narvik are doing. My diploma thesis here will be on something similar.
And it is not like there are no contracts with actual companies and real projects going on in Norway. Interesting to see how long it will take Bulgaria to catch up...
I mean, the number of things people would believe...
Counting the number of patches? WTH? So it's better and more secure to have bugs unannounced, and patches issued once a month?
The Chewbacca defence in action again.
Sad.
Experience tell me, however, that people who buy such "expert results" go out of business quickly, so perhaps there's nothing to worry about after all.
The parent is perfectly right. Just forget about memory dumps. If you insist on saving binary data (which is preferable to text data, because it saves loading and saving time), make sure you treat your binary data as a simple stream of bytes. That is, if you need to save anything larger than a byte at once, make sure you use shifts, and etc. math operations to decompose the integer, that will guarantee that the file will be cleanly read on a different architecture such as the macs (where endian-nes might have caused trouble otherwise). If you keep a tree-like structure of objects or some other data system of objects, just make sure you recurse all of them while saving. Maybe you will need some way to recorgnize objects, so that you can link them together at load time, you may use some kind of id-ing system, starting from 0 at each saving, and assigning ids to every object that goes to the hard disk. I think it is possible, but requires more thought. Then again, do not try to create something universal. Just save all the data you need to reconstruct the game state, and do not try to simply dump things. This will possibly save hard disk space (nothing more annoying than a 20 mb savegame file, which otherwise compresses to mere 100 kb - especially when the user likes to save often (like I do)).
Actually, I tried once to get a girl programmer, an ex-schoolmate of mine, currently a student, to work on some of my ideas... I must have been pathetic:)
You seem to be more willing to be organized then I am, though. I tend to describe my thoughts (which stray constantly and without boundary) and my actions as being in a creative chaos or something. Not that anything gets created in the end, but...:D
This may sound crazy but you might have just described some of what I feel all the time.
Those things come as temporary obsessions: Realtime GC designing, Text editor implementation, Inventing the one and only programming language to wipe them all out, other interesting things... But I get bored easily.
Once I have the details in my head (which takes up to a month of reading and thinking) I just dump it all and forget all about it and move on. Sometimes I do start writing some things, but if it ain't my work, I usually stop dealing with it soon. Actually, I feel best if I don't do such things, just watch my work and listen to my favourite style of music (which varies and changes often but now it's trance) but doing repetative work is irritating for me, though I do it when I really have to.
I am not a genius. I know that.
So, is this a serious problem? How do you or other people like you get any of your ideas done? Does this thing prevent you from taking big decisions in your lives? How do I know for sure whether I have any of those conditions?
Slashdot Mirror
I was in a east-european car (Shkoda) when the gasoline pupm exploded, causing the back of the car (where the engine is located) to burst into flames. I was sitting at the back seat, with my parents at the front. I didn't hear it explode, but my father said he did. We just saw the car slow down, my father pulled over, I turned my head back and saw the flames through the back window, opened the door and, following the example of the brave Rincewind, ran my ass off forward. My parents stepped out of the car, the inflamable parts of the engine burning, stopped another vehicle and used a big fire extinguisher to put the fire out (we were lucky that the fire had melted one of the back lights, so they used the opening to spray the fire-extinguishing stuff inside).
Well, the car didn't explode, although it was filled up with gasoline just a few minutes before the accident. The back part of it (where the engine was) was badly burned, but the tyres, the seats and everything else was intact; maybe that has something to do with the fact that the fuel tanks are at the front of the car, under the front seats. Major parts of the engine had to be replaced, as well as new painting was needed. But we were towed all the way to our destination, and we had to leave the car for one year at my grandparent's yard. The car is still in motion today. I can't remember the exact year that happened, but it was easter, and it was sometime at the beginning of the 90s. I guess that made us all a little religious.
Then, of course, I could show off showing the molten back light to my peers.
is create a mega-geek-test-server machine which allows on-the-fly switching between different execution modes: x86, powerpc, Java bytecode, heck even MSIL. Just imagine what could've been accomplished like that: Testing a new video card programming scheme: no problem, write your emulator, load it up on your codemorpher, see how it runs. Writing a distributed native server, which has parts running on a powerpc, others on a x86? again no problem, buy 2 codemorphers, see how it runs, debug. Running a rack full of expensive (but resource eating) Java stuff? again, no problem, buy codemorphers and arrange them in racks - they consume so little power, that it should even be possible to run the stuff at home.
Well, as I look back at all that, most of the stuff woudn't make sense to a marketing dr^H^Hperson. Hm... Maybe it even doesn't make sense at all. Oh, well...
Maybe a littel off-topic... The Ur-Quan Masters, I think, is the best space faring game. Ever (Not that I've played any other...). The latest updates (must be installed manually) even include the PC version intro and ending.
It is unfortunate, but the good things will gradually push through. The important thing about order is that it changes with time.
I hate when companies make people bancrupt with lawsiuts. I really love to see MS make that poor shmuck bancrupt. Yes, I'm a hypocrite.
>> Isn't that one of the signs of the Apocalypse???!?!
Hm, nope, we're still waiting for DNF!
OK, having read what astroturfing means (thanks, google), OK, almost noone knows what osgi is, and those who know hate it. Fine. Sorry! Again, trolling was not my intention, read my other posts around slashdot. I am not even working at that company right now, I am like 7 countries north of it, studying graphics at HIN, making doom 2 levels and enjoying a 6 months non-paid vacation and am eagerly waiting for the white nights here north of the polar circle. So there. Have a nice day.
Sorry to everyone. I just thought that OSGi might be interesting for Free Software developers. It is a very nice way to implement plugins in Java. It is even not so difficult to implement in a GPL product, it's just a spec of delayed loading of jar files with special a manifest. It's cool, that's all. Didn't mean to troll or anything... :(
Eclipse uses an underlying OSGi framework. Much like the one my company makes.
Yeah, like Talana!
Isn't it possible to make the GCC treat short as 32-bit, int and long as 64-bit and long long as, say, 128-bit numbers, and produce code that handles that even on the 32-bit (or the even older 16-bit) machines still hanging around (I can see many problems with multithreaded code that's not properly synchronized, but, alas, `c'est la vie`)? That could make many problems go away in a poof of compiler logic.
Do you have a link or something? I'd like to have a look at it, but I just don't know how to fool google do find it for me :( .
"(Dis)Claimer": I am a professional programmer, and have been such for the past five years.
GPL'ed programs can and often are sold. Sometimes authors release their programs under different licenses. It's quite complicated. Software patents will make it illegal to sell almost any software written all by yourself, under almost any license.
What programmers should mainly worry about today is speed and size complexity, not some cheap tricks IMHO. Of course, it depends on the compiler. If it is a promptly hacked together embedded C compiler with no optimization options, you might wish to be much, much more careful about what you are doing. Otherwise, happily use whatever you need, and let the compiler worry about the tiny details.
... living in the US, and if they actually manage to succeed in that outrageous claim of theirs... I'd be packing my bags. But I don't think there is any sane judge in that country that can rule such a thing.
Frankly those guys sound like people who just don't give a dingo's kidney about our "legitimate use" or "i was downloading legal files, like the herd kernel, honestly!" claims. They damn well know that's so out of place. And they damn well know that clueless gulible journalists will be swarming like horny bees to help them get their point across. That's not about getting, that's about FUD. And it's working.
Now think about that. You can't just put more than half of all of your population into jails. That's just not civilized. You can, however, pass laws that make half the people criminals. Then, it's easy to fingerpoint.
Likewise, you just can't sue everybody at once. It just won't work, not even in the US. But you can spread FUD and see what happens. Sometimes scam like this works. Even if it is for a short period of time, it works. It buys you time, it brings a little more profit. Like spam: if only one person in every one million responds positively (gets scared), you've won a truckload of money.
You feel angry about that? Don't! They can't "own you"! Let them be, they will die out as a useless piece of junk of the old times. Enjoy your lives, to hell with those people, what do they concern you? Don't respond to their actions, let them cry their lungs out. It won't save their business, only finding new ways to do useful business will. But then again, perhaps that's why they need to buy time - to reform their businesses?
What about Asimov's Eternity-Robots-Empire-Foundation grand series?
... how exactly is that going to affect users that just pirate the corporate version (the version that is usually pirated) - that requires no activation in the first place?
Ladies and gentlemen, this is Chewbacca.
"It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs."
... like journalists?
You mean
You are wrong, that's just what people here in Narvik are doing. My diploma thesis here will be on something similar.
And it is not like there are no contracts with actual companies and real projects going on in Norway. Interesting to see how long it will take Bulgaria to catch up...
I mean, the number of things people would believe...
Counting the number of patches? WTH? So it's better and more secure to have bugs unannounced, and patches issued once a month?
The Chewbacca defence in action again.
Sad.
Experience tell me, however, that people who buy such "expert results" go out of business quickly, so perhaps there's nothing to worry about after all.
The parent is perfectly right. Just forget about memory dumps. If you insist on saving binary data (which is preferable to text data, because it saves loading and saving time), make sure you treat your binary data as a simple stream of bytes. That is, if you need to save anything larger than a byte at once, make sure you use shifts, and etc. math operations to decompose the integer, that will guarantee that the file will be cleanly read on a different architecture such as the macs (where endian-nes might have caused trouble otherwise). If you keep a tree-like structure of objects or some other data system of objects, just make sure you recurse all of them while saving. Maybe you will need some way to recorgnize objects, so that you can link them together at load time, you may use some kind of id-ing system, starting from 0 at each saving, and assigning ids to every object that goes to the hard disk. I think it is possible, but requires more thought. Then again, do not try to create something universal. Just save all the data you need to reconstruct the game state, and do not try to simply dump things. This will possibly save hard disk space (nothing more annoying than a 20 mb savegame file, which otherwise compresses to mere 100 kb - especially when the user likes to save often (like I do)).
Actually, I tried once to get a girl programmer, an ex-schoolmate of mine, currently a student, to work on some of my ideas... I must have been pathetic :)
:D
You seem to be more willing to be organized then I am, though. I tend to describe my thoughts (which stray constantly and without boundary) and my actions as being in a creative chaos or something. Not that anything gets created in the end, but...
That sounds like me, alright :) Thanks, someday I may visit a neuropsychiatrist. :D
This may sound crazy but you might have just described some of what I feel all the time.
Those things come as temporary obsessions: Realtime GC designing, Text editor implementation, Inventing the one and only programming language to wipe them all out, other interesting things... But I get bored easily.
Once I have the details in my head (which takes up to a month of reading and thinking) I just dump it all and forget all about it and move on. Sometimes I do start writing some things, but if it ain't my work, I usually stop dealing with it soon. Actually, I feel best if I don't do such things, just watch my work and listen to my favourite style of music (which varies and changes often but now it's trance) but doing repetative work is irritating for me, though I do it when I really have to.
I am not a genius. I know that.
So, is this a serious problem? How do you or other people like you get any of your ideas done? Does this thing prevent you from taking big decisions in your lives? How do I know for sure whether I have any of those conditions?
Maybe I just need a wife.
Please, anyone, mod parent up.