When I was running NeXTSTEP on generic x86 machines, it was rock-solid. Installation was the hurdle, but once you were up, you were up.
While this is true, and NOBODY - trust me on this one - NOBODY is/was a bigger fan of NeXTStep Intel than I...
A definite part of the problem NeXTStep for Intel had in gaining acceptance was the relatively short list of hardware configurations it supported. Things that were on the list, generally speaking, were rock-solid, but compared to 'generic Windows PC' stuff, it was a short list. You couldn't just grab any ISA card and have a good feeling that it would work on your NeXT beige box.
This, of course, wasn't really NeXT's fault : most Windows drivers were written by the hardware manufacturer, not Microsoft, and Microsoft ( we now know ) had in a variety of cases agreements preventing various key OEMs from offering support to operating systems other than their own.
My initial comments were limited to what we know of the current scope and aim. I don't disagree with you, but I think that level of danger is down the road if we don't act now.
The word "inevitable" comes to mind.
The truth is we have no idea, no way of knowing, what this data is being used for. The shield of secrecy around the program is in fact one if it's key problems... and it's a clear matter of politics and trust as to if you think the data obtained by the NSA is or is not being used for financial or political gain by a small number of well-connected individuals.
Clearly, poll numbers indicate that a vast majority of US citizens do not trust the president and his cabinet to act ethically... are they wrong ? We can only hope the administration is afraid of whistle-blowers within the NSA to the point where they really are only looking for 'terrorists'... or are members of the Sierra Club 'terrorist' suspects already?
Sorry, I don't trust the government, especially this administration. If anyone is going to use a massive data-gathering spy program to promote themselves financially and politically, it's going to be these guys. It's a stretch to attempt to believe that they wouldn't be tempted, and there are absolutely no checks in place on this program to prevent it from being used in an unethical manner.
I dont understand when people assume is any privacy at all unless you do it yourself with PGP (or the newly announced digital streaming PGP). Its so easy to evesdrop on anyone else. Plus even easier for the US governement with its largest collection of supercomputers and switches on the planet.
This isn't about people presuming privacy. This is about people expecting the US government to abide by it's own laws.
Of course, I suppose you could ask why anyone would assume that the executive branch of the US government would abide by the laws of the land. However, some of us do expect our federal officials to at least be law-abiding. In particular, it's hard for many people to grasp what is so difficult about this particular law :
Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
In essence, this creates a widespread, if passive, surveillance structure which creates a chilling effect on legitimate political discussions. If you think it only effects terrorists, you are incredibly mistaken. It effects anyone who takes an interest in Middle-Eastern politics, anyone who wants to have religious discussions online with Muslims, and anyone who is afraid he/she might have had a runin with people who might be watched by even rogue members of the NSA.
You left out people who might oppose, for legitimate reasons, policies put forward by the executive branch. The policy may not even have a security or foreign affairs component. If the order comes down from the White House to monitor and report on everyone communicating with the Sierra Club ( or any other individual or organization ), is the NSA operative following that order "rogue" ?
The concern is not so much over rogue agents, as much as it is over this level of surveillance in anyone's hands without appropriate public oversight.
Actually, the summary says "tend to have a slow start in the development of their cortex" which is true from the article.
Right, what I meant to say was "Ignore Title", rather than "Ignore summary"
Everyone knows what "Slow Starters" means, and it's *obvious* that "Slow starters have higher IQ" is NOT what the article, or the data, suggests at all. Regardless of who put that title in there, the editor or the submitter, it's not correct without further explaination of "when I said slow starter, I meant...", which is just BS.
Really, are you just yanking my chain here, are you purposely focusing on the text of the summary and ignoring the title just to demonstrate your superior analysis of the article, or what ? Are you somehow looking to defend the completely inaccurate title ?
Again, yea, my bad, the summary is actually quite accurate... it's just marred by a completely misleading and inaccurate title.
Slower thickening of the cortext != slow starters. Actually, it's not even slower thickening... it's that it gets thicker, takes longer to thin...
Where the heck in this article would you get that it's "slow starters" ?
Now, there may be something about the somewhat different early development of the brain for these smarter kids with the thicker, later-maturing cortexes, and how that changes their early behavior compared to others, but TFA ( and the study ) didn't cover that, now, did they ?
Damn crappy wrong article summaries like this make me mad... somewhat at the submitters, but mostly at the admins. Thanks for actually reading and interpreting ( incorrectly ) the article, ScuttleMonkey !
Duh! Despite tons of speculation, there was nothing substantial that Apple did for their 25th anniversary.
I predict the same for this year. The number of years the company has been around isn't terribly important, and Steve is probably right in not spending the company's resources on the anniversary. If they announce something, it'll be something they've had cooking anyway. In terms of publicity, CNet and other news sources and fans are doing a fine job of that, and Apple doesn't seem to be hurting for exposure these days anyway. What's to gain by disrupting everything the company is doing just to say "wee, we didn't go out of business!" ??
Great big non-story. CNet trolling for page views. Nothing to see here.
Actually I wonder which half is being re-written?
Legacy code causing issues, so they re-write it, thus Vista is essentially a clean new windows? Or is is the new stuff not working, which means that there is even less reason to pugrade from XP? Which half is bad really does matter in this case (at least to me it does).
Reading in between the lines ( and reading TFA ), it looks like a lot of the code has to do with Media ( big M ) and DRM issues. Bring in guys from the Xbox team... gee, what does Vista support that's changed recently ? Something about HD-DVD encryption sounds familiar. And yea, 'rewrite' might be an extreme spin on what's going to go down, but what kind of stuff tends to touch many points of code ? Security, DRM, encryption... oh, and the whole recently-talked-about IE-separate-from-OS thing, that might play a part in all of this as well, and just by looking at functionality you can probably think of places where HTML rendering and other IE-related functionality needs to be available to the system.
So it's probably less an issue of legacy v.s. new, and more an issue of several sets of changes that touch a lot of parts of the code, adding up to a large percentage needing fairly extensive changes and full testing. Just a guess, of course.
My guess is that is exactly why Microsoft is releasing Vista to certain parties still this year. The delay is only for end consumers of Vista, to which Microsoft has no contractual upgrade requirements.
Wow. Just wow.
It's so obvious, we all missed it. Thank you. That's some awesome corporate crap in action right there. I'm not even sure I understand all of the implications fully, it's so mind-numbingly corporate-contract-hardball. Wow.
Did these guys all just pay for support contracts that essentially make them paying beta testers? Can someone pick this up and explain what's going on here a little more? I'm fascinated by this contract date expiration date and what it means... what is Microsoft obligated to provide in terms of OS to these support contract holders?
Is this some sort of underhanded way to penalize folks who don't have these contracts, providing further incentive for them to get similar contracts in the future ? Might that imply that the 2007 ship date was envisioned long ago ? Is that too sneaky even for Microsoft, am I reading too much into this ?
The problem with using only that technique is that they tend to become lethargic if they play video games for too long. Then they don't perform very well even *if* they leave the game when they're told. As a result, we tend to limit them to less than an hour on weekdays, and then allow them to take turns on the Gameboy on the weekends.
Oh yea! I guess I left it out as common sense ( espeicially with our kid, who isn't yet 5 for cryin' out loud ), but about an hour and a half is pretty much an upper limit for gaming in a day, and we really push for breaks every half hour or so anyway. Though our kid doesn't get lethargic... that would be a nice change, a break for us... he just gets grumpy.
I didn't have money or a game system when I was a kid, so I guess I'm making up for that now. I play games when I'm too worn out to code or study... I suppose I do it instead of watching TV or, unfortunately, reading, though I do still find time for the occasional book... occasional...
Speak for yourself. I get easily bored with many modern games, and actually spend very little time playing the classics. My wife and I try to keep our kids from playing video games for too long because they've shown that their behavior is negatively impacted. ("Waaahh! I don't want to eat dinner/go to the park/do my schoolwork, I want to play Mario!") Therefore, we limit them.
Oh, so then you're *not* one of the 33% of adult gamers who put in more than 10 hours a week? I try not to put it together like that, but I probably do average more than 10 hours a week, or at least close to it.
When it comes to the behavioral changes, we put it right out there like that : if you're going to complain when I tell you it's time to put the game on pause, you're just not going to get to play again for quite a while. Playing video games is a reward, not a daily fact of life... it has to be, or the kid just isn't going to want to go outside or play with toys or friends or do all of those 'healthy' things we supposedly did as kids.
And I'm pretty sure the reason 12-14 year-olds spend more time playing than 15-17 year-olds really is all about free time ( i.e. homework )... the huge number of kids playing online v.s. adults is interesting, though it makes a certain amount of sense; I'm perfectly happy playing older games, why would I want to get camped by some kid?
No matter how many times I do it, running around in GTA:SA trying to take back the 'hood from the Ballas just doesn't get old...
I fire up GTA:SA, or some other game that's just way too heavy in the realistic violence department for my preschooler.
We gaming adults spend a lot of time and effort getting our kids out and about, having them do things that don't involve a video display, because we know otherwise they'd do nothing but play video games all frickin' day.
Because that's what we'd do, if given a chance. The only reason my kid doesn't play more video games than I do is because his bedtime is earlier and we limit the time he spends playing otherwise. The teenagers I know have such heavy homework loads these days, they don't have as much video game time as you'd think, either. As long as I don't watch to much TV or actually tackle any of my to-do list of household projects, I can cram in at least a couple of hours of gaming in the evening, even with a full-time job and a few hours of family time...
Sourceforge is a pretty good model. It works for a lot of open source software out there. There are a few similar communities out there. I'd start by looking at their features and figure out which ones meet your needs.
While I absolutely agree and love SourceForge, I'm just cynical enough that the second I saw the title for this story, I thought "gee, why on earth do they think they need to advertise SourceForge on Slashdot with an AskSlashdot question ?"...
But I probably only thought that because it's the obvious answer.
luke just hung out on his uncle's farm. if he actually did anything interesting, that would fly in the face of everything he says and does in ep 4.
Well, it should be cheap to make. Lots of desert scenes. Re-used special effects and props developed for the movies.
You do point out a major problem, though... Luke's life is supposed to have been deadly boring. They'll either not have to focus exclusively on him, or they'll have to ( shudder ) milk some sappy drama out of relatively boring day-to-day life on a desert planet on the outskirts of a developing revolution. That, or they'll screw up A New Hope for my kid even more than has already been done.
It could be done, I suppose, but I'm afraid it might be as interesting as Chewbacca's family life on that scary-bad Christmas special... maybe Lucas will hand the creative direction to someone else, and it'll actually turn out OK. Don't get me wrong, I actually still have some respect left for the man's abilities ( though it's difficult after watching Attack of the Clones a couple of times )... but his skills clearly lie in getting a special effects department to do a good space battle, not in directing human actors in drama... and a relatively cheap, made-for-TV show with Luke stuck on his uncle's farm is going to be all about human actors and drama, I'm afraid...
It's a terrible article. But what it's trying to say (or I took it to mean) apart from the trolling is mildly interesting, if not new. Guess the lesson has to be relearned periodically. Simple, fast, small, and interesting content is "ugly" but effective, while 1337 and "beautiful" don't necessarily sell. Google got this point across a decade ago.
I'm not sure it's a terrible article. It might just be better to say it's not terribly well-written, or fails to make it's point about what "ugly" means in a web page. What's really interesting is that it starts out slamming websites for simple design, then ends saying "Function Over Form"... it starts lame, ends good, and in the long run contracticts the point it seems to be trying to make in the first paragraph. It starts "Ugly Sells" then ends "It's not neccessarily ugliness that sells"... and, like you say, really screws up by not defining "ugly", other than to complain about using the default font, which... does there exist anywhere a single browser that does not let you pick the default font ? I like having a little control over the font and size of text I read, thanks. Websites that change the default font look different than many websites I visit, and that difference does not usually mean 'pretty'.
In the end, I think the writer is saying they agree with me; a simple, easy-to-use website wins over a flashy, confusing web site any day. On the way, though, they don't get it; default font is good; simple web sites don't make me think "oh, these guys are trustworthy because they're not using a lot of design guys", they make me think "this page shows exactly the information I want without distractions"... most importantly, they don't have creepy, animated talking SitePal ads, what the hell is that thing?
Oh, what the hell am I saying? No, I guess you're right, it is a pretty terrible article.
I'm sorry... a simple web page does not usually mean an ugly web page.
What's so ugly about that web page ? The colors are pleasing, the eye flows down the page, the content is easy to navigate. What did you want, a stupid Flash splash screen ?
My idea of an ugly web page is one with lots of dancing sausage, banner and other ads not only at the top but down the side, a web page where you just don't know what to look at, with an unpredictable mishmash of colors and unrelated content. I like a simple, fast loading web page better than some flash/javascript/rollover-magic animated slow-loading mess. Somehow I'm not shocked that a simple web page often does better than a complex one. The only people shocked to learn simple, organized groupings of information are more popular than some complex ones are graphic designers and such who are too impressed by their own tricks.
If this can be automated, and it sounds like it can, this can be used to get Macbooks into businesses, because it reduces the risk that an employee won't be able to use the latest middleware-client-of-the-week when they need it. The employees who get them may end up using rdesktop to a shared XP box for their timecard or purchasing, but they'll get them because they can say "if it doesn't work with Obscuresoft Collaboration Mangler I can always boot to XP".
I hope so, but wasn't there something about having to modify bits to get VGA working ? That sounds bad. No working video acceleration ?
I'm sure it'll be worked out soon, but it sounds like you're not going to be able to immediately play high-end games or even watch video using this system without more work. That's a bit of a problem. Like I said, it'll probably be solved soon, but still, that's a problem for the vast majority of people interested in booting their Intel Mac into Windows.
My prediction ( for what little it is worth ) is that, when it's all said in done, people will really end up using VPC-like solutions, not dual-booting Windows on their Macs. Not that it won't be done, but the benefits of the the VPC/Qume/Wine-like solutions ( since it'll be *fast* unlike VPC on PPC ) would likely outweigh the benefits of dual-booting for most users.
And in AOP, you'll never know that it happens from reading the source code.
You and I are so on the same page, it makes me smile a little. I officially apologize for pushing the hprof debate just to get this comment out of you, by the way. I think the injection technique looks pretty cool, as I'd much rather do that than modify ( and then have to change, by hand, again ) the source code to place timing information.
On the other hand, I'm a huge fan of writing unit and 'prototype' tests, although I understand those don't always show the source of problems in already-deployed very large systems.
For the record, my experience shows 90% of those problems end up being SQL queries, FWIW.
I've tried to use hprof on complex systems, and it just isn't up to the task. Try throwing a system that has a few hundred threads, a couple of databases, and a servlet container at it. hprof quickly loses track of what's going on and stops recording long before my first servlet gets control.
Thanks, that was exactly the sort of post I was looking for.
So, to continue the discussion... do you think the approach outlined in the article would be usable or appropriate for the system you just described ? How might that compare to the AOP approach others have suggested ?
It's interesting that hprof simply stops recording... any theories as to why that would happen? What causes it to lose track of the application state ? Does it have some hard ( or soft ) limit as to how much it can record ?
I know I'm setting myself up, but... do you really have profiling needs that aren't met by hprof ?
Using hprof and decent unit testing, you can work out where your problems are, I've found. All of this bytecode hacking and AOP stuff might show how l33t you are, but I'm not convinced it's really *needed*. Just my humble, uninformed opinion, of course, I'm very willing to hear from others. It could be that I'm just not working on sufficiently complex systems, or that I'm spending more time writing unit tests and pouring through hprof results than most folks.
You could as easily ask "Why use AspectJ", couldn't you?
I mean... what you're trying to do in the case of profiling is _not_ change the actual byte code you're working on any more than neccessary. Is using the aspectj runtime somehow better than using the -javaagent JVM option? I'm going to guess here... not neccessarilly, unless you're using AspectJ anyway. If you're _not_ using AspectJ and are not familiar with all of the extra syntax that AspectJ introduces, it becomes very unclear that doing your profiling that way is really a good way to go.
How would you specifically do the same thing they're talking about in the article using AspectJ ? I'm asking as a Java programmer who has shied away from using AspectJ ( the reasons for using it to me have not become terribly compelling; I'm aware that some folks love it ). Is there an article somewhere that spells out how to do the same sort of thing using AspectJ or some other AOP system? Maybe that would be a helpful link, or make another good story.
In fact, if people are buying macs intending to install windows, Apple may hope to use that as a bate and switch tactic. I think they're more likely to attempt to prevent people from running OS X on bog standard beige PCs
Damn straight. In fact, there'd be no bait-and-switch about it... once you've bought Apple's hardware, you've already done what they want you to do.
Apple's people have in fact already laid it out bare : they are not going to support running Windows on their hardware. They're not going to do anything special to stop you from doing so, they're just not going to help, and they're not going to help if you trash your machine trying to do so. They probably aren't ( without some serious, um, incentive ) going to help Microsoft help you run Windows, either... um, do OEMs have to do something special to market their computers as being supported by Windows? Apple wouldn't do that, if there was something there to do.
Anyway, back to the point : both Apple and Intel have stated that the one thing you won't be able to do is run OS X on non-Apple hardware. Well, obviously that statement has to be refined to mean non-hacked, supportable, updateable current-version release-quality OS X to be true right now, but I suppose with all that, it's true. But if you want to hack up a BIOS emulator or something to run a copy of Windows on your Apple? What does it matter to Apple as long as it doesn't incur support costs ? They still made their sale, and you could still use that system to connect to iTMS... fine by them.
Which is great. Some day we'll all be able to run OS X, and at the end of the day if we just _have_ to play some game that stupidly is made only for Windows, I could still manage to do so without owning more than one machine.
And as a person who's played a significant number of FPS'es, I can tell you that "deadliness" is very relative. What's the "deadliest" gun in Counter-Strike? If neither of us have great aim, and we meet in a hallway at close range, you with a sniper and me with a shotgun, I bet my shotgun wins. Way across a courtyard, however, the shotgun's weak as hell -- even if I get three or four shots in while you're aiming for me, I'll probably just ding you down to 50 health, and you'll probably kill me.
In real life, the deadliest gun is a handgun. No contest. It's the one that's easy to conceal. It's the one you can get close to someone with. It's the "Satuday Night Special" that "ain't good for nothing, but puttin' a man six feet in a hole". It's the one that the vast majority of homicides are committed with.
Anyway, the point stands. Deal with the real problem, the people. Gun control is not the answer. But, people control is not the answer either. We are not cattle.
Is there an answer? I don't really know.
My point as well... media control isn't the answer, either. On the other hand... I'm not saying it'd work, or be the right thing to do, but if you're going to have gun control, the *first* weapon you should ban is the handgun. Is there an answer ? Not a simple one, that's for sure... there's an entire culture of violence that we'd need to re-direct into a culture of respect... maybe role-playing games, coupled with some decent economic opportunity and punishments for violent crimes that are actually longer than those for non-violent crimes would help ?
I don't know, either... but it does seem extra-stupid to ban a game but allow a gun... keeping in mind that I'm saying banning a gun is stupid, too... it's just that banning a game is even more stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
While this is true, and NOBODY - trust me on this one - NOBODY is/was a bigger fan of NeXTStep Intel than I...
A definite part of the problem NeXTStep for Intel had in gaining acceptance was the relatively short list of hardware configurations it supported. Things that were on the list, generally speaking, were rock-solid, but compared to 'generic Windows PC' stuff, it was a short list. You couldn't just grab any ISA card and have a good feeling that it would work on your NeXT beige box.
This, of course, wasn't really NeXT's fault : most Windows drivers were written by the hardware manufacturer, not Microsoft, and Microsoft ( we now know ) had in a variety of cases agreements preventing various key OEMs from offering support to operating systems other than their own.
The word "inevitable" comes to mind.
The truth is we have no idea, no way of knowing, what this data is being used for. The shield of secrecy around the program is in fact one if it's key problems... and it's a clear matter of politics and trust as to if you think the data obtained by the NSA is or is not being used for financial or political gain by a small number of well-connected individuals.
Clearly, poll numbers indicate that a vast majority of US citizens do not trust the president and his cabinet to act ethically... are they wrong ? We can only hope the administration is afraid of whistle-blowers within the NSA to the point where they really are only looking for 'terrorists'... or are members of the Sierra Club 'terrorist' suspects already?
Sorry, I don't trust the government, especially this administration. If anyone is going to use a massive data-gathering spy program to promote themselves financially and politically, it's going to be these guys. It's a stretch to attempt to believe that they wouldn't be tempted, and there are absolutely no checks in place on this program to prevent it from being used in an unethical manner.
This isn't about people presuming privacy. This is about people expecting the US government to abide by it's own laws.
Of course, I suppose you could ask why anyone would assume that the executive branch of the US government would abide by the laws of the land. However, some of us do expect our federal officials to at least be law-abiding. In particular, it's hard for many people to grasp what is so difficult about this particular law :
Amendment IV
You left out people who might oppose, for legitimate reasons, policies put forward by the executive branch. The policy may not even have a security or foreign affairs component. If the order comes down from the White House to monitor and report on everyone communicating with the Sierra Club ( or any other individual or organization ), is the NSA operative following that order "rogue" ?
The concern is not so much over rogue agents, as much as it is over this level of surveillance in anyone's hands without appropriate public oversight.
Right, what I meant to say was "Ignore Title", rather than "Ignore summary"
Everyone knows what "Slow Starters" means, and it's *obvious* that "Slow starters have higher IQ" is NOT what the article, or the data, suggests at all. Regardless of who put that title in there, the editor or the submitter, it's not correct without further explaination of "when I said slow starter, I meant...", which is just BS.
Really, are you just yanking my chain here, are you purposely focusing on the text of the summary and ignoring the title just to demonstrate your superior analysis of the article, or what ? Are you somehow looking to defend the completely inaccurate title ?
Again, yea, my bad, the summary is actually quite accurate... it's just marred by a completely misleading and inaccurate title.
Where the heck in this article would you get that it's "slow starters" ?
Now, there may be something about the somewhat different early development of the brain for these smarter kids with the thicker, later-maturing cortexes, and how that changes their early behavior compared to others, but TFA ( and the study ) didn't cover that, now, did they ?
Damn crappy wrong article summaries like this make me mad... somewhat at the submitters, but mostly at the admins. Thanks for actually reading and interpreting ( incorrectly ) the article, ScuttleMonkey !
Duh! Despite tons of speculation, there was nothing substantial that Apple did for their 25th anniversary. I predict the same for this year. The number of years the company has been around isn't terribly important, and Steve is probably right in not spending the company's resources on the anniversary. If they announce something, it'll be something they've had cooking anyway. In terms of publicity, CNet and other news sources and fans are doing a fine job of that, and Apple doesn't seem to be hurting for exposure these days anyway. What's to gain by disrupting everything the company is doing just to say "wee, we didn't go out of business!" ?? Great big non-story. CNet trolling for page views. Nothing to see here.
Reading in between the lines ( and reading TFA ), it looks like a lot of the code has to do with Media ( big M ) and DRM issues. Bring in guys from the Xbox team... gee, what does Vista support that's changed recently ? Something about HD-DVD encryption sounds familiar. And yea, 'rewrite' might be an extreme spin on what's going to go down, but what kind of stuff tends to touch many points of code ? Security, DRM, encryption... oh, and the whole recently-talked-about IE-separate-from-OS thing, that might play a part in all of this as well, and just by looking at functionality you can probably think of places where HTML rendering and other IE-related functionality needs to be available to the system.
So it's probably less an issue of legacy v.s. new, and more an issue of several sets of changes that touch a lot of parts of the code, adding up to a large percentage needing fairly extensive changes and full testing. Just a guess, of course.
Thank you, clickety6. How I didn't think of that myself, I'll never know. Frickin' Borg indeed.
Wow. Just wow.
It's so obvious, we all missed it. Thank you. That's some awesome corporate crap in action right there. I'm not even sure I understand all of the implications fully, it's so mind-numbingly corporate-contract-hardball. Wow.
Did these guys all just pay for support contracts that essentially make them paying beta testers? Can someone pick this up and explain what's going on here a little more? I'm fascinated by this contract date expiration date and what it means... what is Microsoft obligated to provide in terms of OS to these support contract holders?
Is this some sort of underhanded way to penalize folks who don't have these contracts, providing further incentive for them to get similar contracts in the future ? Might that imply that the 2007 ship date was envisioned long ago ? Is that too sneaky even for Microsoft, am I reading too much into this ?
Oh yea! I guess I left it out as common sense ( espeicially with our kid, who isn't yet 5 for cryin' out loud ), but about an hour and a half is pretty much an upper limit for gaming in a day, and we really push for breaks every half hour or so anyway. Though our kid doesn't get lethargic... that would be a nice change, a break for us... he just gets grumpy.
I didn't have money or a game system when I was a kid, so I guess I'm making up for that now. I play games when I'm too worn out to code or study... I suppose I do it instead of watching TV or, unfortunately, reading, though I do still find time for the occasional book... occasional...
Oh, so then you're *not* one of the 33% of adult gamers who put in more than 10 hours a week? I try not to put it together like that, but I probably do average more than 10 hours a week, or at least close to it.
When it comes to the behavioral changes, we put it right out there like that : if you're going to complain when I tell you it's time to put the game on pause, you're just not going to get to play again for quite a while. Playing video games is a reward, not a daily fact of life... it has to be, or the kid just isn't going to want to go outside or play with toys or friends or do all of those 'healthy' things we supposedly did as kids.
And I'm pretty sure the reason 12-14 year-olds spend more time playing than 15-17 year-olds really is all about free time ( i.e. homework )... the huge number of kids playing online v.s. adults is interesting, though it makes a certain amount of sense; I'm perfectly happy playing older games, why would I want to get camped by some kid?
No matter how many times I do it, running around in GTA:SA trying to take back the 'hood from the Ballas just doesn't get old...
We gaming adults spend a lot of time and effort getting our kids out and about, having them do things that don't involve a video display, because we know otherwise they'd do nothing but play video games all frickin' day.
Because that's what we'd do, if given a chance. The only reason my kid doesn't play more video games than I do is because his bedtime is earlier and we limit the time he spends playing otherwise. The teenagers I know have such heavy homework loads these days, they don't have as much video game time as you'd think, either. As long as I don't watch to much TV or actually tackle any of my to-do list of household projects, I can cram in at least a couple of hours of gaming in the evening, even with a full-time job and a few hours of family time...
While I absolutely agree and love SourceForge, I'm just cynical enough that the second I saw the title for this story, I thought "gee, why on earth do they think they need to advertise SourceForge on Slashdot with an AskSlashdot question ?"...
But I probably only thought that because it's the obvious answer.
Well, it should be cheap to make. Lots of desert scenes. Re-used special effects and props developed for the movies.
You do point out a major problem, though... Luke's life is supposed to have been deadly boring. They'll either not have to focus exclusively on him, or they'll have to ( shudder ) milk some sappy drama out of relatively boring day-to-day life on a desert planet on the outskirts of a developing revolution. That, or they'll screw up A New Hope for my kid even more than has already been done.
It could be done, I suppose, but I'm afraid it might be as interesting as Chewbacca's family life on that scary-bad Christmas special... maybe Lucas will hand the creative direction to someone else, and it'll actually turn out OK. Don't get me wrong, I actually still have some respect left for the man's abilities ( though it's difficult after watching Attack of the Clones a couple of times )... but his skills clearly lie in getting a special effects department to do a good space battle, not in directing human actors in drama... and a relatively cheap, made-for-TV show with Luke stuck on his uncle's farm is going to be all about human actors and drama, I'm afraid...
I'm not sure it's a terrible article. It might just be better to say it's not terribly well-written, or fails to make it's point about what "ugly" means in a web page. What's really interesting is that it starts out slamming websites for simple design, then ends saying "Function Over Form"... it starts lame, ends good, and in the long run contracticts the point it seems to be trying to make in the first paragraph. It starts "Ugly Sells" then ends "It's not neccessarily ugliness that sells"... and, like you say, really screws up by not defining "ugly", other than to complain about using the default font, which... does there exist anywhere a single browser that does not let you pick the default font ? I like having a little control over the font and size of text I read, thanks. Websites that change the default font look different than many websites I visit, and that difference does not usually mean 'pretty'.
In the end, I think the writer is saying they agree with me; a simple, easy-to-use website wins over a flashy, confusing web site any day. On the way, though, they don't get it; default font is good; simple web sites don't make me think "oh, these guys are trustworthy because they're not using a lot of design guys", they make me think "this page shows exactly the information I want without distractions"... most importantly, they don't have creepy, animated talking SitePal ads, what the hell is that thing?
Oh, what the hell am I saying? No, I guess you're right, it is a pretty terrible article.
What's so ugly about that web page ? The colors are pleasing, the eye flows down the page, the content is easy to navigate. What did you want, a stupid Flash splash screen ?
My idea of an ugly web page is one with lots of dancing sausage, banner and other ads not only at the top but down the side, a web page where you just don't know what to look at, with an unpredictable mishmash of colors and unrelated content. I like a simple, fast loading web page better than some flash/javascript/rollover-magic animated slow-loading mess. Somehow I'm not shocked that a simple web page often does better than a complex one. The only people shocked to learn simple, organized groupings of information are more popular than some complex ones are graphic designers and such who are too impressed by their own tricks.
Form fitting function- that's beauty in design.
I wish I could mod that up. Obviously I missed the references in the original article. Thanks.
I hope so, but wasn't there something about having to modify bits to get VGA working ? That sounds bad. No working video acceleration ?
I'm sure it'll be worked out soon, but it sounds like you're not going to be able to immediately play high-end games or even watch video using this system without more work. That's a bit of a problem. Like I said, it'll probably be solved soon, but still, that's a problem for the vast majority of people interested in booting their Intel Mac into Windows.
My prediction ( for what little it is worth ) is that, when it's all said in done, people will really end up using VPC-like solutions, not dual-booting Windows on their Macs. Not that it won't be done, but the benefits of the the VPC/Qume/Wine-like solutions ( since it'll be *fast* unlike VPC on PPC ) would likely outweigh the benefits of dual-booting for most users.
You and I are so on the same page, it makes me smile a little. I officially apologize for pushing the hprof debate just to get this comment out of you, by the way. I think the injection technique looks pretty cool, as I'd much rather do that than modify ( and then have to change, by hand, again ) the source code to place timing information.
On the other hand, I'm a huge fan of writing unit and 'prototype' tests, although I understand those don't always show the source of problems in already-deployed very large systems.
For the record, my experience shows 90% of those problems end up being SQL queries, FWIW.
Thanks, that was exactly the sort of post I was looking for.
So, to continue the discussion... do you think the approach outlined in the article would be usable or appropriate for the system you just described ? How might that compare to the AOP approach others have suggested ?
It's interesting that hprof simply stops recording... any theories as to why that would happen? What causes it to lose track of the application state ? Does it have some hard ( or soft ) limit as to how much it can record ?
Using hprof and decent unit testing, you can work out where your problems are, I've found. All of this bytecode hacking and AOP stuff might show how l33t you are, but I'm not convinced it's really *needed*. Just my humble, uninformed opinion, of course, I'm very willing to hear from others. It could be that I'm just not working on sufficiently complex systems, or that I'm spending more time writing unit tests and pouring through hprof results than most folks.
You could as easily ask "Why use AspectJ", couldn't you?
I mean... what you're trying to do in the case of profiling is _not_ change the actual byte code you're working on any more than neccessary. Is using the aspectj runtime somehow better than using the -javaagent JVM option? I'm going to guess here... not neccessarilly, unless you're using AspectJ anyway. If you're _not_ using AspectJ and are not familiar with all of the extra syntax that AspectJ introduces, it becomes very unclear that doing your profiling that way is really a good way to go.
How would you specifically do the same thing they're talking about in the article using AspectJ ? I'm asking as a Java programmer who has shied away from using AspectJ ( the reasons for using it to me have not become terribly compelling; I'm aware that some folks love it ). Is there an article somewhere that spells out how to do the same sort of thing using AspectJ or some other AOP system? Maybe that would be a helpful link, or make another good story.
Damn straight. In fact, there'd be no bait-and-switch about it... once you've bought Apple's hardware, you've already done what they want you to do.
Apple's people have in fact already laid it out bare : they are not going to support running Windows on their hardware. They're not going to do anything special to stop you from doing so, they're just not going to help, and they're not going to help if you trash your machine trying to do so. They probably aren't ( without some serious, um, incentive ) going to help Microsoft help you run Windows, either... um, do OEMs have to do something special to market their computers as being supported by Windows? Apple wouldn't do that, if there was something there to do.
Anyway, back to the point : both Apple and Intel have stated that the one thing you won't be able to do is run OS X on non-Apple hardware. Well, obviously that statement has to be refined to mean non-hacked, supportable, updateable current-version release-quality OS X to be true right now, but I suppose with all that, it's true. But if you want to hack up a BIOS emulator or something to run a copy of Windows on your Apple? What does it matter to Apple as long as it doesn't incur support costs ? They still made their sale, and you could still use that system to connect to iTMS... fine by them.
Which is great. Some day we'll all be able to run OS X, and at the end of the day if we just _have_ to play some game that stupidly is made only for Windows, I could still manage to do so without owning more than one machine.
In real life, the deadliest gun is a handgun. No contest. It's the one that's easy to conceal. It's the one you can get close to someone with. It's the "Satuday Night Special" that "ain't good for nothing, but puttin' a man six feet in a hole". It's the one that the vast majority of homicides are committed with.
Anyway, the point stands. Deal with the real problem, the people. Gun control is not the answer. But, people control is not the answer either. We are not cattle. Is there an answer? I don't really know.
My point as well... media control isn't the answer, either. On the other hand... I'm not saying it'd work, or be the right thing to do, but if you're going to have gun control, the *first* weapon you should ban is the handgun. Is there an answer ? Not a simple one, that's for sure... there's an entire culture of violence that we'd need to re-direct into a culture of respect... maybe role-playing games, coupled with some decent economic opportunity and punishments for violent crimes that are actually longer than those for non-violent crimes would help ?
I don't know, either... but it does seem extra-stupid to ban a game but allow a gun... keeping in mind that I'm saying banning a gun is stupid, too... it's just that banning a game is even more stupid.