I'd -really- like them to come out with a semi-official program to batch convert, and this remark makes me feel like it's less likely now.
No, you would not like that. MP3, obviously, is lossy compression, and so is Vorbis. Differently lossy, and less offensively lossy, if the Vorbis coders have achieved their goals, but still lossy. If you take degraded files (i.e. your MP3 collection), and convert them to Vorbis, you will degrade them further. You don't want that, do you?
If you can get to the heavily slashdotted interview on binaryfreedom.com, you'll see RMS's comments on the license change.
Anyway, if and when you announce a different license for the Vorbis code, feel free to mention that I agree with the decision, as long as you make it clear I support "Free Software" and not "Open Source", and don't imply I agree that there is such a thing as a "Linux operating system".
Why do I get the feeling that if you asked RMS's opinion on slaughtering the innocent for the glory of Satan, and bathing in their warmly splashing blood, he'd reply I'm all for it, as long as you make it clear I support "Free Software" and not "Open Source", and don't imply I agree that there is such a thing as a "Linux operating system".
But seriously though.. the reason the Xiph folks gave for their license switch is that they want Ogg Vorbis to be "a basic building block of the internet for multimedia", and hence chose to go BSD: minimise the restrictions on the source, maximise the chance that it will be widely adopted. Fair call - you gotta look at what you're trying to achieve, and ask yourself if every man and his dog stick my code into a proprietary app, does that help my cause or hurt it? In this case, I think it's quite clear that it would help Ogg Vorbis if, to pick and example at random, Microsoft stuck a closed-source.OGG replay codec into Windows.
I think the most important thing you can have, besides good math and computer science skills, is a *FINISHED* game or demo.
What he said. Every single person I know in the games industry got in like this. OK - I admit, I only know one person in the industry.;-) But yeah, one of the coders from the Amiga demo group I was in, he wrote a game, self published (via one of those cheapie CD pressing places usually patronised by indie bands), and sold by mail order. He ended up with a bunch of unsold CDs in a cupboard and lost a reasonable amount of money, but man, that kind of initiative was like gold when it came to job-hunting..
For this reason, I find it dispicable that companies, such as Microsoft, Sun, etc. would take an open source piece of software and release a proprietary version, often without even providing credit to the original developers. THis practice is plagerism, plain and simple and is a far greater threat to intellectual property than the GPL. But it is legal without the protection of the GPL.
I like the GPL too, and I am no fan of any company taking an open source program and releasing a proprietary version. But you speak too harshly here. You say that this is legal without the protection of the GPL - no, it is only legal if the author of the software specifically chooses to license it thus, e.g. by using a BSD license. This isn't a choice I personally would make, but it is a valid choice, having advantages and disadvantages over the GPL.
e.g. a protocol is far more likely to be widely adopted if there is a reference implemention licensed so liberally (BSD and TCP/IP, for instance) - advantage. But other people, even people that you heartily disapprove of (Microsoft for the/. community, for instance) can profit from your work without ever sharing their improvements with you - disadvantage.
But it's not plagiarism if you clearly say "here, take this source, do what you like with it!". People are using the BSD license to give away code - that's their choice, and you have no right to complain if corporations that you dislike choose to take that which is freely given.
Please see kt.zork.net, I assume all the kernel cousins have moved too.
Oh, you da man! Yes, indeed, Kernel Traffic and all his cousins are there. Cheers to Zack for providing this excellent service despite being laid off by Linuxcare, cheers to you for letting me know, and fuckings to Linuxcare for leaving the old dead page lying around with no hint as to why it's gone stale.
The last place I worked, we were pondering the same question. In our case, we were starting a project to rewrite some old systems (which ran under VMS, with a character mode interface via telnet), with something more modern, namely VB + MS SQL (hey, the company was in bed with Microsoft, there was no way management was going to pick anything else).
Now, I can't tell you which is better because I left the company and the country before a decision was made.:-) But I can tell you what we were thinking. Note that this was from the perspective of a totally Microsoft shop. Depending on your situation, certain factors (like: a web front-end should be inherently cross-platform) which meant nothing to us, might mean something to you.
Distribution: This was a big one for us. We had a strong culture of fixing bugs and adding features by quickly editing and recompiling some code.. on the live system.. (yeah, we had a dev system as well, but for quick changes, we took the "cowboy" attitude and just did it in live). So, it was important for us not to lose the ability to do an instant fix. This pointed us in a web direction.
Ease of Development: I guess from your description of having two "camps" that you have people on hand with the necessary skills to go either way. We didn't - we knew VB, but we were learning as we went when it came to web work. Remember that "what you can do" is often a far more important issue than "what you should do" when it comes to corporate IT.
Quality: As your desktop advocates suggest, you can just plain do a better interface with a local exe than with a web frontend. If you go the web way, you just know that some manager will want some feature which is really, really hard to do nicely on a web page - but you can always do there things in code.
Other things: Using a web server is one extra point of failure. But its also one extra layer of scalability (if it turns out your "business logic" is a bottleneck). But of course you could do a three-tier design without the middle tier being a webserver. If your in-house tool ever needs to be accessed from "out of the house", it's surely easier if all someone needs is a web browser. A client-server application should require less network bandwith than web traffic. Also don't forget that you could do a web page which was basically just a "carrier" for a bunch of Java applets or ActiveX controls, to get the distribution advantage of the web interface with most of the other advantages of the desktop app.
Oh well, just a few ideas for you to throw into the pot..
The guy who wrote this Colorg (Rick) , also maintains cLIeNUX (Client orientated Linux)
Is he the guy that started that huge flamewar by suggesting that/bin,/etc, etc. be renamed to/.bn,/.et etc. to hide them, and then adding symlinks like "/Binaries ->/.bn". What a weird bloke.
Maybe it's just my lack of experince in the real world, but how many times, in all honesty, have you had a hard drive crash on you?
I reckon this would be good for office use. Hard drives might not crash that often, but if you're supporting 1000 users, you're going to get crashes, so the less common you can make them, the better. Also, the (relatively) small size of this HD is less of a problem in an office situation, where all important stuff should be saved on a fileserver rather than locally. I don't expect the average Slashdotter would want their pr0n & w4r3z collection limited to 15gig.:-)
Heh.. once upon a time, the URL http://slashdot.org was so frequently misquoted as http://www.slashdot.org, that the editors had an acronym for the offence - TCWWW, "the cursed WWW". Now, we get that mistake popping up on Slashdot itself.:-)
If a vb script virus is transmitted by someone opening an 'I love you' or 'AnnaKournekova.jpg' how much productivity are you REALLY losing? They just don't have as much time to waste. I suppose it could have a terrible impact on morale...
Lord knows my morale plummeted this morning when I discovered that the hot nude pic of Anna Kournikova that somebody had emailed me was, in fact, just some lame Windows virus..
Diablo, Planescape, those "Whatever his name is" Gate games are all nothing but cute graphical interfaces to a tiny subset of Nethack's gameplay.
As a Nethack fan of many years, and as someone currently heavily embroiled in Baldur's Gate II, I think you're off target. Diablo might be "lame Nethack ripoff + graphics" (I don't know, I haven't played it), but BG2 is all about NPC interaction, which there is truly bugger-all of in Nethack. How much conversation is there in Nethack? You talk to the guy that sends you on your class quest, and that's about it.
BG2 put you in charge of up to 5 NPCs who are constantly talking amongst themselves, some get on well together, others fight. Having different people in your party will lead you into different quests. And so on.
The gameplay is the ONLY thing. Yes, the interface is ASCII, but it's still around, still being enhanced and still more complex and detailed than any of the pretenders with glitz and glamor.
I wouldn't dare flat-out say that one was superior and one was a pretender. They're both excellent games, trying to do very different things. To me, Nethack is like chess. Even if you've been reading the newsgroups for years and know EVERY little trick and spoiler - it's still a real challenge (I've only ascended 4 or 5 times). No matter how careful you are, there can always be some damn gnome early in the game who stumbles onto a polymorph trap and turns into a black dragon. It has this real feeling of every game being different, despite the board having the same pieces set up on it.
But this is nothing to do with Marathon, so I'll click the "No Score +1 Bonus" button, and hope the moderators don't hit me with the Staff of Offtopic -1.
Whoa, dude, you mean there's filez so 'l33t that I can get blowed up real good just by reading the bomb-making instructions, and get high by reading the drug formulae?
1) If, like me, you don't have a development environment to play 2.4.0-pre? on, you sure as heck aren't going to slap it on your live application server and just pray. I hope.
If you don't have an environment that you can sling 2.4.0-pre11 on, then frankly, you don't have an environment that you can sling 2.4.0 on. It's really not that much different, Linus clearly said that it was more a "line in the sand" than a "right, now it's finished" release. If you only have a live application server, you'll be waiting a while before installing any 2.4.n series kernel on it.
Anyway, the sysadmin in the article was installing 2.4.0 on his desktop box, not a live server.
2) one point which I felt came across in the article was that the lines between 'work' and 'leisure' time have been blurred by the hacker ethic and mentality. I enjoy the job I do, even though it means sometimes working 70-80 hours a week, and some of the work I do I could easily classify as leisure because of my enjoyment of it.
Good call. Unfortunately my "work" and "leisure" are clearly delimited by the fact that my work is developing a Windows application.:-)
It all comes down to reasons for doing the job, you do it because you enjoy it, or you do it for the money.
Unfortunately I have no "commercial" experience doing the things I enjoy, so to pay the bills, I have to do the crap that people are willing to employ me to do. Ah well, it's surely better than driving a taxi or working at McDonalds, and I can post to Slashdot while I should be working..;-)
You'd be surprised. Speaking with people in our data checking department in my company, which employs the largest number of low-paid workers in our business, it's clear that the vast majority have second and sometimes even third jobs.
Hmm, good point. Although I don't move solely in geek circles, all the people I've known working low-paid jobs have been young & single, and although they didn't like their lowly pay, they didn't need to work two jobs to get by, and they had plenty of free time to do what they wanted to do (as long as it wasn't expensive. Needless to say, "kicking back and watching TV" was a popular hobby).
However, that was in Sydney. I've since moved to London, and given how expensive it is to live here, and just how low-paid the low-paid jobs are, frankly, I'm amazed I can walk into a cafe and get served. I don't know how the staff haven't all starved to death.
I was at a coffee/bagel place a few months ago and got talking to the waitress. She saw nothing unusual in that she would be working 12 hours that day, and had jobs that kept her working 7 days a week.
That's fucked up. And something to think about if you're a sysadmin who works those kind of hours - 'cos you do have a choice, and you're probably getting paid 5 times as much as her.
1. Surely if this sysadmin was so excited about the prospect of Linux kernel 2.4.0, he would have been running one of the 2.4.0-pren kernels on his box? Anyone who's keen enough to compile a kernel won't have spent the last year running 2.2 and fidgetting impatiently..
2. I find it interesting that he says "most hackers are able to earn their livelihood relatively easily, with enough leisure time to hack for the public good". Sure, most hackers find it easily to earn a livelihood, and a pretty damn good one at that. But I thought long work hours were commonly considered a scourge in this industry of ours? Any full time job leaves you with not too much leisure time, and if you're working much beyond the 9-to-5.. well.. I kind of doubt you'll have enough leisure time to do too much hacking. "A McDonald's cashier or a taxi driver is not so lucky". Well, maybe they're not so well paid, but I don't reckon someone working a menial job is going to have less free time than a pro geek. And you might find it easier to muster the enthusiasm to code for fun if you haven't been doing it for money all day. God knows I coded more for fun before I started working as a programmer..
Of course, if you code at work, you can always be hacking away on your own stuff without it being too obvious. That's how I taught myself Perl and Python (hey, one editor window full of code looks much like any other, from the distance between my desk and the boss's office!);-)
If they could just bump up the capacity to about 64MB;)
If you want 64Mb of portable, USB-connecting storage, just buy a Rio 500 and download Riorio.. and you can listen to music too!
Seriously.. I was kind of keen to get an MP3 walkman, but the factor that pushed me from being "kind of keen", to actually spending the cash, was the ability to do a bit of leeching via the fast net connection at work, and conveniently take the files home..
Dr Rogers thinks that the temperature of the drinks might explain part of the effect. The body has to divert resources to deal with the local cooling effect in the gut.
When I was at uni, I read in the newspaper one day that a study had shown improved mental performance from people who were chewing gum. The theory was that while you were merrily chewing away, the exercise your jaw was getting required extra blood to be pumped to your head. Some of this ended up in your brain, and it performed better, all pumped up with nice fresh oxygenated blood.
(OK, that's a horrible pseudoscience explanation, but I'm no biologist, I'm a programmer!)
Anyway, from that day on I always took a pack of gum into exams, to chew while I worked. Dunno if it helped, but at least psychologically it probably did.:-) Is this a similar effect in reverse? All the blood rushes to your stomach to warm it up after your glass of ice-cold water, and leaves your brain starved? Nice one.
Given sufficient memory, any chip can emulate any other.
It's usually not as slow as an Itanium emulating x86, though..;-)
And as for this great "Intel engineers" troll-fest.. bah, humbug! I say. It's not the engineers we're mocking, it's the foolish decision (presumably handed down from the adminisphere) to do the emulation in hardware (badly) instead of in software (where even if it was done badly, it can at least be improved in the next version!). Now, if there are any Intel managers reading Slashdot.. well maybe they feel insulted. But I'm sure their salaries and stock options will ease the pain.;-)
but, the itanium should excell mostly at running native 64-bit code, hopefully mostly in the floating point area. x86 emulation shouldnt have even been included, let alone talked seriously about.
One would indeed wonder how much smaller / cheaper / cooler / insert-good-thing-here the Itanium would be if they hadn't wasted the effort on hardware x86 emulation then? Surely any modern CPU should be able to do software x86 emulation with better performance than those Itanium benchmarks revealed.. which makes this look like (yet another) costly mis-step for Intel.
dont judge these things by their x86 emulation, benchmark them against a similarly clocked (or similarly priced) alpha
Well, one of the "selling points" for an Itanium over an Alpha is that it does emulate x86.. if the Alpha can do it in software better than the Itanium can do it in hardware (and it does) then where does that leave this as a selling point?
An interesting example of this, it is rumored that Columbia in RHPS is only 15:) makes you feel all dirty now doesn't it:) (btw if you can find a place to confirm this rumor please let me know:)
Slashdot Mirror
We knew this days ago..
I'd -really- like them to come out with a semi-official program to batch convert, and this remark makes me feel like it's less likely now.
No, you would not like that. MP3, obviously, is lossy compression, and so is Vorbis. Differently lossy, and less offensively lossy, if the Vorbis coders have achieved their goals, but still lossy. If you take degraded files (i.e. your MP3 collection), and convert them to Vorbis, you will degrade them further. You don't want that, do you?
If you can get to the heavily slashdotted interview on binaryfreedom.com, you'll see RMS's comments on the license change.
Why do I get the feeling that if you asked RMS's opinion on slaughtering the innocent for the glory of Satan, and bathing in their warmly splashing blood, he'd reply I'm all for it, as long as you make it clear I support "Free Software" and not "Open Source", and don't imply I agree that there is such a thing as a "Linux operating system".
But seriously though.. the reason the Xiph folks gave for their license switch is that they want Ogg Vorbis to be "a basic building block of the internet for multimedia", and hence chose to go BSD: minimise the restrictions on the source, maximise the chance that it will be widely adopted. Fair call - you gotta look at what you're trying to achieve, and ask yourself if every man and his dog stick my code into a proprietary app, does that help my cause or hurt it? In this case, I think it's quite clear that it would help Ogg Vorbis if, to pick and example at random, Microsoft stuck a closed-source .OGG replay codec into Windows.
I think the most important thing you can have, besides good math and computer science skills, is a *FINISHED* game or demo.
What he said. Every single person I know in the games industry got in like this. OK - I admit, I only know one person in the industry. ;-) But yeah, one of the coders from the Amiga demo group I was in, he wrote a game, self published (via one of those cheapie CD pressing places usually patronised by indie bands), and sold by mail order. He ended up with a bunch of unsold CDs in a cupboard and lost a reasonable amount of money, but man, that kind of initiative was like gold when it came to job-hunting..
He works for Tantalus now..
For this reason, I find it dispicable that companies, such as Microsoft, Sun, etc. would take an open source piece of software and release a proprietary version, often without even providing credit to the original developers. THis practice is plagerism, plain and simple and is a far greater threat to intellectual property than the GPL. But it is legal without the protection of the GPL.
I like the GPL too, and I am no fan of any company taking an open source program and releasing a proprietary version. But you speak too harshly here. You say that this is legal without the protection of the GPL - no, it is only legal if the author of the software specifically chooses to license it thus, e.g. by using a BSD license. This isn't a choice I personally would make, but it is a valid choice, having advantages and disadvantages over the GPL.
e.g. a protocol is far more likely to be widely adopted if there is a reference implemention licensed so liberally (BSD and TCP/IP, for instance) - advantage. But other people, even people that you heartily disapprove of (Microsoft for the /. community, for instance) can profit from your work without ever sharing their improvements with you - disadvantage.
But it's not plagiarism if you clearly say "here, take this source, do what you like with it!". People are using the BSD license to give away code - that's their choice, and you have no right to complain if corporations that you dislike choose to take that which is freely given.
Please see kt.zork.net, I assume all the kernel cousins have moved too.
Oh, you da man! Yes, indeed, Kernel Traffic and all his cousins are there. Cheers to Zack for providing this excellent service despite being laid off by Linuxcare, cheers to you for letting me know, and fuckings to Linuxcare for leaving the old dead page lying around with no hint as to why it's gone stale.
..to the fact that there haven't been any new Kernel Cousins on linuxcare.com for 12 days..?
The last place I worked, we were pondering the same question. In our case, we were starting a project to rewrite some old systems (which ran under VMS, with a character mode interface via telnet), with something more modern, namely VB + MS SQL (hey, the company was in bed with Microsoft, there was no way management was going to pick anything else).
Now, I can't tell you which is better because I left the company and the country before a decision was made. :-) But I can tell you what we were thinking. Note that this was from the perspective of a totally Microsoft shop. Depending on your situation, certain factors (like: a web front-end should be inherently cross-platform) which meant nothing to us, might mean something to you.
Distribution: This was a big one for us. We had a strong culture of fixing bugs and adding features by quickly editing and recompiling some code.. on the live system.. (yeah, we had a dev system as well, but for quick changes, we took the "cowboy" attitude and just did it in live). So, it was important for us not to lose the ability to do an instant fix. This pointed us in a web direction.
Ease of Development: I guess from your description of having two "camps" that you have people on hand with the necessary skills to go either way. We didn't - we knew VB, but we were learning as we went when it came to web work. Remember that "what you can do" is often a far more important issue than "what you should do" when it comes to corporate IT.
Quality: As your desktop advocates suggest, you can just plain do a better interface with a local exe than with a web frontend. If you go the web way, you just know that some manager will want some feature which is really, really hard to do nicely on a web page - but you can always do there things in code.
Other things: Using a web server is one extra point of failure. But its also one extra layer of scalability (if it turns out your "business logic" is a bottleneck). But of course you could do a three-tier design without the middle tier being a webserver. If your in-house tool ever needs to be accessed from "out of the house", it's surely easier if all someone needs is a web browser. A client-server application should require less network bandwith than web traffic. Also don't forget that you could do a web page which was basically just a "carrier" for a bunch of Java applets or ActiveX controls, to get the distribution advantage of the web interface with most of the other advantages of the desktop app.
Oh well, just a few ideas for you to throw into the pot..
The guy who wrote this Colorg (Rick) , also maintains cLIeNUX (Client orientated Linux)
Is he the guy that started that huge flamewar by suggesting that /bin, /etc, etc. be renamed to /.bn, /.et etc. to hide them, and then adding symlinks like "/Binaries -> /.bn". What a weird bloke.
Maybe it's just my lack of experince in the real world, but how many times, in all honesty, have you had a hard drive crash on you?
I reckon this would be good for office use. Hard drives might not crash that often, but if you're supporting 1000 users, you're going to get crashes, so the less common you can make them, the better. Also, the (relatively) small size of this HD is less of a problem in an office situation, where all important stuff should be saved on a fileserver rather than locally. I don't expect the average Slashdotter would want their pr0n & w4r3z collection limited to 15gig. :-)
Heh.. once upon a time, the URL http://slashdot.org was so frequently misquoted as http://www.slashdot.org, that the editors had an acronym for the offence - TCWWW, "the cursed WWW". Now, we get that mistake popping up on Slashdot itself. :-)
If a vb script virus is transmitted by someone opening an 'I love you' or 'AnnaKournekova.jpg' how much productivity are you REALLY losing? They just don't have as much time to waste. I suppose it could have a terrible impact on morale...
Lord knows my morale plummeted this morning when I discovered that the hot nude pic of Anna Kournikova that somebody had emailed me was, in fact, just some lame Windows virus..
Diablo, Planescape, those "Whatever his name is" Gate games are all nothing but cute graphical interfaces to a tiny subset of Nethack's gameplay.
As a Nethack fan of many years, and as someone currently heavily embroiled in Baldur's Gate II, I think you're off target. Diablo might be "lame Nethack ripoff + graphics" (I don't know, I haven't played it), but BG2 is all about NPC interaction, which there is truly bugger-all of in Nethack. How much conversation is there in Nethack? You talk to the guy that sends you on your class quest, and that's about it.
BG2 put you in charge of up to 5 NPCs who are constantly talking amongst themselves, some get on well together, others fight. Having different people in your party will lead you into different quests. And so on.
The gameplay is the ONLY thing. Yes, the interface is ASCII, but it's still around, still being enhanced and still more complex and detailed than any of the pretenders with glitz and glamor.
I wouldn't dare flat-out say that one was superior and one was a pretender. They're both excellent games, trying to do very different things. To me, Nethack is like chess. Even if you've been reading the newsgroups for years and know EVERY little trick and spoiler - it's still a real challenge (I've only ascended 4 or 5 times). No matter how careful you are, there can always be some damn gnome early in the game who stumbles onto a polymorph trap and turns into a black dragon. It has this real feeling of every game being different, despite the board having the same pieces set up on it.
But this is nothing to do with Marathon, so I'll click the "No Score +1 Bonus" button, and hope the moderators don't hit me with the Staff of Offtopic -1.
Whoa, dude, you mean there's filez so 'l33t that I can get blowed up real good just by reading the bomb-making instructions, and get high by reading the drug formulae?
Yeah man, Neal Stephenson wrote a book about it..
Where did this non sequitur come from?
Try this exchange from a previous thread..
1) If, like me, you don't have a development environment to play 2.4.0-pre? on, you sure as heck aren't going to slap it on your live application server and just pray. I hope.
If you don't have an environment that you can sling 2.4.0-pre11 on, then frankly, you don't have an environment that you can sling 2.4.0 on. It's really not that much different, Linus clearly said that it was more a "line in the sand" than a "right, now it's finished" release. If you only have a live application server, you'll be waiting a while before installing any 2.4.n series kernel on it.
Anyway, the sysadmin in the article was installing 2.4.0 on his desktop box, not a live server.
2) one point which I felt came across in the article was that the lines between 'work' and 'leisure' time have been blurred by the hacker ethic and mentality. I enjoy the job I do, even though it means sometimes working 70-80 hours a week, and some of the work I do I could easily classify as leisure because of my enjoyment of it.
Good call. Unfortunately my "work" and "leisure" are clearly delimited by the fact that my work is developing a Windows application. :-)
It all comes down to reasons for doing the job, you do it because you enjoy it, or you do it for the money.
Unfortunately I have no "commercial" experience doing the things I enjoy, so to pay the bills, I have to do the crap that people are willing to employ me to do. Ah well, it's surely better than driving a taxi or working at McDonalds, and I can post to Slashdot while I should be working.. ;-)
You'd be surprised. Speaking with people in our data checking department in my company, which employs the largest number of low-paid workers in our business, it's clear that the vast majority have second and sometimes even third jobs.
Hmm, good point. Although I don't move solely in geek circles, all the people I've known working low-paid jobs have been young & single, and although they didn't like their lowly pay, they didn't need to work two jobs to get by, and they had plenty of free time to do what they wanted to do (as long as it wasn't expensive. Needless to say, "kicking back and watching TV" was a popular hobby).
However, that was in Sydney. I've since moved to London, and given how expensive it is to live here, and just how low-paid the low-paid jobs are, frankly, I'm amazed I can walk into a cafe and get served. I don't know how the staff haven't all starved to death.
I was at a coffee/bagel place a few months ago and got talking to the waitress. She saw nothing unusual in that she would be working 12 hours that day, and had jobs that kept her working 7 days a week.
That's fucked up. And something to think about if you're a sysadmin who works those kind of hours - 'cos you do have a choice, and you're probably getting paid 5 times as much as her.
1. Surely if this sysadmin was so excited about the prospect of Linux kernel 2.4.0, he would have been running one of the 2.4.0-pre n kernels on his box? Anyone who's keen enough to compile a kernel won't have spent the last year running 2.2 and fidgetting impatiently..
2. I find it interesting that he says "most hackers are able to earn their livelihood relatively easily, with enough leisure time to hack for the public good". Sure, most hackers find it easily to earn a livelihood, and a pretty damn good one at that. But I thought long work hours were commonly considered a scourge in this industry of ours? Any full time job leaves you with not too much leisure time, and if you're working much beyond the 9-to-5.. well.. I kind of doubt you'll have enough leisure time to do too much hacking. "A McDonald's cashier or a taxi driver is not so lucky". Well, maybe they're not so well paid, but I don't reckon someone working a menial job is going to have less free time than a pro geek. And you might find it easier to muster the enthusiasm to code for fun if you haven't been doing it for money all day. God knows I coded more for fun before I started working as a programmer..
Of course, if you code at work, you can always be hacking away on your own stuff without it being too obvious. That's how I taught myself Perl and Python (hey, one editor window full of code looks much like any other, from the distance between my desk and the boss's office!) ;-)
If they could just bump up the capacity to about 64MB ;)
If you want 64Mb of portable, USB-connecting storage, just buy a Rio 500 and download Riorio.. and you can listen to music too!
Seriously.. I was kind of keen to get an MP3 walkman, but the factor that pushed me from being "kind of keen", to actually spending the cash, was the ability to do a bit of leeching via the fast net connection at work, and conveniently take the files home..
OS X on an x86 box would be fantastic, because then you could use a mouse with more than one button!!
In 1971, John Draper taught Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak how to make blue boxes. They sold them door-to-door on the Berkeley campus.
Decades later, Jobs brings Apple back from the brink of despair by.. selling computers with coloured boxes!
Dr Rogers thinks that the temperature of the drinks might explain part of the effect. The body has to divert resources to deal with the local cooling effect in the gut.
When I was at uni, I read in the newspaper one day that a study had shown improved mental performance from people who were chewing gum. The theory was that while you were merrily chewing away, the exercise your jaw was getting required extra blood to be pumped to your head. Some of this ended up in your brain, and it performed better, all pumped up with nice fresh oxygenated blood.
(OK, that's a horrible pseudoscience explanation, but I'm no biologist, I'm a programmer!)
Anyway, from that day on I always took a pack of gum into exams, to chew while I worked. Dunno if it helped, but at least psychologically it probably did. :-) Is this a similar effect in reverse? All the blood rushes to your stomach to warm it up after your glass of ice-cold water, and leaves your brain starved? Nice one.
Given sufficient memory, any chip can emulate any other.
It's usually not as slow as an Itanium emulating x86, though.. ;-)
And as for this great "Intel engineers" troll-fest.. bah, humbug! I say. It's not the engineers we're mocking, it's the foolish decision (presumably handed down from the adminisphere) to do the emulation in hardware (badly) instead of in software (where even if it was done badly, it can at least be improved in the next version!). Now, if there are any Intel managers reading Slashdot.. well maybe they feel insulted. But I'm sure their salaries and stock options will ease the pain. ;-)
but, the itanium should excell mostly at running native 64-bit code, hopefully mostly in the floating point area. x86 emulation shouldnt have even been included, let alone talked seriously about.
One would indeed wonder how much smaller / cheaper / cooler / insert-good-thing-here the Itanium would be if they hadn't wasted the effort on hardware x86 emulation then? Surely any modern CPU should be able to do software x86 emulation with better performance than those Itanium benchmarks revealed.. which makes this look like (yet another) costly mis-step for Intel.
dont judge these things by their x86 emulation, benchmark them against a similarly clocked (or similarly priced) alpha
Well, one of the "selling points" for an Itanium over an Alpha is that it does emulate x86.. if the Alpha can do it in software better than the Itanium can do it in hardware (and it does) then where does that leave this as a selling point?
An interesting example of this, it is rumored that Columbia in RHPS is only 15 :) makes you feel all dirty now doesn't it :) (btw if you can find a place to confirm this rumor please let me know :)
Well, according to the IMDB, the Rocky Horror Picture Show was made in 1975, and the actress who played Columbia (Nell Campbell) was born in 1953, so I guess the rumour is false.
But you could have figured that yourself, if you'd invested the 60 seconds or so of effort that I just did..