But wouldn't a much better obligatory Matrix quote be:
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid... afraid of us. You're afraid of change. I don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell how it's going to begin. I'm going to hang up this phone, and then show these people what you don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a world without you. A world without rules or controls, borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you.
...it is unregulated bandwidth. Microwaves, cordless phones, etc. all generated singal in this area long before Bluetooth.
Its easy to generate a signal at reasonable powerlevels. Its easy to build antena/reflectors/repeaters because the wavelengths are long enough (or short depending on how you look). It really is the general all purpose low power transmition frequency of choice.
Magic In The Office Place?
on
Ask Neil Gaiman
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
One theme that seems to popup in multiple places is that magic is all around us yet most of us are too engrossed in our day to day existence to notice.
Mr. Giaman, have you ever considered doing a set of stories or a full novel about the magic in the every day cubical farm? So many of us are highly "deterministic" (there is a logical, objective soultion to any problem presented) but fail to realize how wide and unexplainable and unsolvable the world really is. It would be a double whammy theme!
Although its true that many people aren't savy enough to relize that they are being tricked, it does not make it any more legal. A scam is a scam.
If they send the notice by mail your company should turn around an immediately ask for an invoice or purchase order. Contact your legal council if you have any questions but the law seems pretty clear. If SCO can not produce a record of what services have been rendered then there is no money to collect from you or your company.
It is very well known where Mars would be in the sky and how to find it (right now you can't miss it anyway).
An interesting question would be for this celestial event: How does Earth look from Mars? Since Earth is interior to Mars would someone one Mars look up and see the large cresent blue dot? Or would Earth not even be see able because we are positioned in the middle of the Martian day?
It is always fun to apply our knowledge of gravitation to predict position of planets from Earth. We should by now have the knowledge to predict it from other vantage points.
While it is true that a lot of these things rely on social engineering, the other part is why does the OS allow the user to do these things in the first place? If you don't want users to do something destructive, why offer them the choice?
One of the first rules of design seems to be lost on MS designers. If you don't want users to do something then don't offer it as an option. You can pop up dialog after dialog warning users like this:
Do not click 'yes'. If you click 'yes' will crash the machine. Only click 'no'.
[Yes] [No]
How stupid is it for a user to click "yes"? How stupid was it for the programmer to put the "yes" button there?
Yet in MS program after MS program they tell you something is dangerous and allow you to do it anyway. I guarentee as long as applications allow this some malicious hacker will use a little word play or social engineering to allow them to do something destructive.
I really want to throttle the person at MS who tried to get people to believe computers are as easy to operate as toaster ovens. Computers are complex machines. Hiding the fact from the user is not only dubious but dangerous.
People in Open Source/Free Software attack SCO because of their own beliefs in OS/FS. Not because IBM says too. There is no Star Chamber secret masonic gathering conspiring to put SCO down. Its people who code and contribute to OS/FS projects that are just plain mad they are accused of stealing.
So they can't figure out where the source code for their product or the ground swell annomosity is coming from. Better blame IBM and sue.
In their zeal to sell the house, MS gave the keys away.
No application scripting language should be able to perform in an "untrusted" mode. There is no reason for it but due to functional designs someone at MS came up it has to be there. Someone demanded that Office documents integrate into Outlook seemlessly and this is what you get.
No one in any Unix environment will believe this message:
Attached is a perl script with my message in it. Please extract and run it to read it.
However MS has made a buisness of making people believe using a computer is as easy and as safe as using a toaster. So you get hackers who can apply a little social engineering to cause a disaster chain of events. Users are more than happy to click click click away when instructed.
The trick is who ever controls distribution gets a big chunk of the chain.
Take your poplicious boy bad who sells truckloads of CDs at $15. The band gets some paultry amount ($0.10 for each CD?) which if they go platnium still makes them millionares. But where did the rest of the money go? Into the hands of the producers and companies.
This is why you see the (smart) big stars go off and start their own recording companies. They can record their own music and get the big chunk of the money instead of having it disappear.
Online and music sharing changes the distribution model. You no longer need most of what the producers and music companies provide. No wonder why they aren't interested in it. No wonder why they fight it at every turn.
I personally see CD music as a commodity at the moment. Bands and producers should be using CDs to get people to go to stage shows and concerts to make more money for themselves instead of suing the living day lights out of some student. They should be working to produce a product that is less than desirable copied: a stellar stage performance. But doing tours and shows is a lot more work than just paying the government to pass laws in your favor.
This thing is good because it is a topic that needs to be discussed in Anime fandom. Ignoring does not make it go away. Discussing it doesn't legitimizes it. Its some crazy puritanical non-sense that says one can't know what is wrong or be tempted by it.
In any event, pirates need to die. Its one thing to fansub something and let others pick it up at their own descression. Its something else to pawn yourself off as legit licensed merchandise. Being able to spot fake merchandise at some vendor's table at the con maybe the only thing that stands between these greedy bastards and your money.
No fan should ever buy pirate material. There is enough fan networked support out there now to allow free trades. There is enough infrastructure support to buy real merchandise (no more odd hour calls to Japan tracing what happened to things you ordered). Let the pirates die.
There is nothing wrong with making money when a company's sock goes up.
However what is illegal is when you use fraud to pump up the level to sell off. You basically have Executive Officers canibalize the company at cost of shareholds so they can make a profit. This isn't what shareholders bought into. This isn't what Execs are supposed to do with companies.
This has always been a weakness in the system. When the CEO sees profit, why operate in a manner that is healthy for the company? The only thing standing in the way is the government who can and will take all of the ill gotten money and throw you in prison.
Let this be a small lesson for future Linux advocates.
Back in 95 I started playing around with free software because I just got a new machine but the old one still worked just fine. So it was time for a little experimentation. So with a box of floppies I went to the main computer lab and downloaded Slackware Linux and FreeBSD.
I tried FreeBSD first. I distinctly remember it being a bad install experience. When the system came up it didn't work quite right. That is too be expected since this was a Packard Bell elcheapo machine with proprietary integrated hardware all over. But the level of problems seemed severe so I thought I was doing something wrong. Off to irc and to find people who could help
Me: Hey out there. I installed FreeBSD and got some problems. Someone: Did you FTFM? Me: The stuff that came with downloads...but it didn't help. The video just will not work and the logs say there is something weird with the IDE controler. SomeoneElse: That only happens when you use a POS computer for BSD. Buy better stuff and try again. Me: That is kind of a poor fix. Is there anything I can do to make the drivers behave better. AnotherGuy: Yeah but you are clearly too stupid to figure it or you would have done so. So its impossible for you.
Needless to say their attitudes were less than helpful. So the next step was to remove FreeBSD and try Linux. Although it seemed to exhibit the same problems at the start I actually got much friendlier help from people. I was pointed out what files to try and mess with. I got hints on how to work around problems. What I ended up with was a pretty cobbled together machine but I had a much better feeling about it.
So while Linux wasn't perfect it was a far more enjoyable experience. I formated the FreeBSD floppies and never looked back. So advocates on both sides need to take note: cursing newbies is a sure way to drive future users away.
The original Slate article makes use of a logical falacy. It assumes that if you google for "flowers" the correct response should be general information on flowers. How correct is that over getting sellers of flowers since that is just as correct? The search in question is so generic what possible information could anyone get from it. Google just spits out its best guess since it can't read your mind.
In my studies of information, "general information" is generally useless. It is only useful in refining a search. If you don't know how to begin you may start with a generic search to get an idea where to go to next but the generic information is thrown away. Instead of typing "flowers" into Google which will net unexpected results, how about "how to care for flowers"?
Google, and in my humble opinion, is properly geared to look for specific things. If one types in just "flowers" looking for information on how to grow a daisy or daffodil then you aren't going to get the right information. Google doesn't read minds. It can't tell you want information on how to grow flowers over buying flowers without telling it.
As the parent noted, "flowers" might not have been exactly the best generic question to flag on. Google at its heart measures the presense of information on the Internet. Flower sellers will have far more information and pages than those who have "general" information.
A Drop Shadows Is a Great UI Cue
on
Menu Shadows in GTK2
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Drop Shadows are simply a great UI indication of "depth" and "boundry". I wish more UI primatives had it. Given a jumble of rectangles which one is the top most? So far the answer has been to highlight or focus the top one differently than the others (ie. title bar is a different color to stand out from the rest which may not work if your focus is different than your top most). Drop Shadows enhances this distinction since your brain has already been looking for the most contiguous rectange and assuming that is the top most. Sometimes that is hard to spot but things like Drop Shadows can help flag where windows end and at a glance show their stacking order.
Its great that UIs have Drop Shadows but I wonder why they aren't applied to even more primatives? Why don't entire windows have drop shadows?
The problem isn't that benchmarks lie. We all know they do. The problem is we don't know how they lie. Creating open source benchmark applications can show how the driver is excirsed so everyone who wants to know or learn where cards and drivers are strong and weak. Everyone is on the level if everyone can look at the code that came up with numbers. Not to mention there are things to learn from code in benchmarks that excirse the fringe elements of graphics cards and drivers.
The alternative is what we have now: hand waving voodoo. Not only do we have to take the vendor's word they aren't monkeying around with the driver to match execution of the benchmark but now we have to question where the aligence of the benchmark makers.
Lucas is actively rejecting the mystical nature of the original Star Wars. The last two movies barely talk about the theology and the philosophy of The Force. Why is the light side of the force better than the dark side? Why are anything the people in the story doing right or wrong? Instead he concentrated on wall to wall action.
Instead The Matrix appears to actively looks at issues and still includes a lot of action. What is wrong with having humans in the Matrix? Why is having a false reality presented bad no matter how comfortable it is?
At this point I'll watch and think about The Matrix movies far more than Star Wars.
One real issue with the way MS patches there products is simply that you can't roll them back. Without large IT bugdets that support "beta" servers, the only real way to test to see if a patch works is to try it in a semi-live environment. If it doesn't work budget some time to reinstall because there is no way to take it back.
Instead of the patch/rollback thing other OSes enjoy its a shoot in the dark with MS server products. "Oops" are less costly if you can rollback. How is MS Server 2003 going to save me money if I spend just as much time or more with spooky patches?
There are plenty of reasons why and why not to make a game on.NET. They aren't good or bad just different.
One of the issues with Direct X and other.NET API calls directly onto the OS layer is that they are really just wrappers on the Win32 called via PInvoke. So while the.NET binary maybe portable to whatever platforms that can support the CLR, the underlying Win32 calls need to be supported.
So the MS dream of a write once run anywhere game is still a bit off. They still need to port Win32 to platforms they are targeting. Maybe this will change in the future but that will progress (or regress) to the mess Java had with UI.
...is the fact that soon after the alpha release of Mosiac, CERN's directors stated that WWW technology to be freely usable by anyone. Being free is what bulid up Web technology more than any browser or server.
I'm so tired of people pooh-poohing C because it can leak. C, when it is the right technology can outshine other platforms. The trick is to make sure you are choosing the right technology for the task. For Samba, C is pretty damn close to perfect.
Samba is supposed to be a cross platform networking technology. C is perfect for that because it is supported on nearly every system out there. Writing a program in C conforming to POSIX standards means that it will work 99.99997% of the platforms out there now.
Another reason why C is a good choice for Samba is because it can directly access memory. A lot of Samba is reading bytes off of this buffer and writing these bytes to that buffer. In a memory managed system you need to fight against the GC to make this work. It is also harder to write kernel parts in a language other than C.
As for Object C, it does not contain garbage collecting or stack protection. As for writing Samba in Java, you would have just as much success porting it to Perl instead and you will probably hit more platforms.
C isn't perfect. You can hang yourself easily with the language. However to say "C Sucks!" is a gross characterization. It definately has its place and it looks like Samba is one of them.
Who cares what modifications I make to my Linux kernel? Linus doesn't nor would anyone on kernel dev. Nowhere in the GPL does it say I need to make modifications of my kernel, privately used software, to the world.
If on the other hand I was going to offer people MyCustom Linux Kernel I would have to give the source with it.
This has always bugged the hell out of me when people misread the GPL. The GPL only enemerates the sharing contract between contributors. If you are going to share and contribute, do it completely and freely. If you aren't (ie. as a user) then don't worry about it.
Although I like Excel Saga because its funny it is honestly problematic to show on Cartoon Network. Two big things off the top of my head are:
- PC Alert: Pedro. Although I'm not terribly conerned about being politically correct, some of the jokes around him were definately flat and sometimes made me squirm. Making fun of a Latin American immigrant worker subject to the random bad luck just doesn't work so well in the US.
- Major portion of the fun around Excel Saga is the fact it pokes fun at Anime and Manga conventions. If you don't realize that there was an old magical girl show called Minky Momo wouldn't realize that Excel getting creamed by a garbage truck was funny. Nor would you get the multiple multiple other anime references and spoofs. The average CN watcher just isn't as versed and will wonder why some of the strange moments are funny.
As for Trigun its good stuff for Cartoon Network. Vash is a good man and the show clearly shows it. It has no nudity and is generally light hearted approach to things. Vash is a good hero and his friends remain true. Its really a nice show to show to people.
If you pick over the Cold War/Pre Three Mile Island information people made Nuclear out to the "next big thing" too. "Its cheap and efficient and will solve all of the power problems of tomorrow's world." Of course it didn't turn out like that because they glossed over a few wrinkles.
With advanced hydrogen systems, there are devils in the details. There were problems with Nuclear and there are problem with Advanged Hydrogren too.
As mentioned by stratjakt, hydrogen is in everything but no one knows of a cheap and clean way to pull it out of "everything" in large enough quantities. Just like with Nuclear, are the cotainers and storage devices for the power plants safe?
The flip side is that although some aspects are undesirable or unsafe we should still continue researching. Giving up on both Nuclear and Advanced Hydrogen systems just because they are too messy or expensive at the moment is the wrong thing to do. You can't make them clean and cheap just by wishing they were. It takes R&D time and effort. I hope people and companies continue to see that instead of day dreaming about the perfect power sources.
...was that MMOG are A LOT harder to create and run than your standard game (console and PC included).
Just like with FPS and RTS games there is this rush with the success of UO and EQ to make these MMOG persistent games by small companies. These games will more than likely fail due to the lack of resources. This is deluting the MMOG genre because everyone is promissing to be the next "EQ Killer" and failing to deliver in one way or another.
So if you have a company and are thinking about making some persistent world, stop and make damn sure you plan a lot of resource and time into it...then double it. If word of mouth can kill a stand alone game it will uttery destroy an online one.
Slashdot Mirror
But wouldn't a much better obligatory Matrix quote be:
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid... afraid of us. You're afraid of change. I don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell how it's going to begin. I'm going to hang up this phone, and then show these people what you don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a world without you. A world without rules or controls, borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you.
...it is unregulated bandwidth. Microwaves, cordless phones, etc. all generated singal in this area long before Bluetooth.
Its easy to generate a signal at reasonable powerlevels. Its easy to build antena/reflectors/repeaters because the wavelengths are long enough (or short depending on how you look). It really is the general all purpose low power transmition frequency of choice.
One theme that seems to popup in multiple places is that magic is all around us yet most of us are too engrossed in our day to day existence to notice.
Mr. Giaman, have you ever considered doing a set of stories or a full novel about the magic in the every day cubical farm? So many of us are highly "deterministic" (there is a logical, objective soultion to any problem presented) but fail to realize how wide and unexplainable and unsolvable the world really is. It would be a double whammy theme!
Although its true that many people aren't savy enough to relize that they are being tricked, it does not make it any more legal. A scam is a scam.
If they send the notice by mail your company should turn around an immediately ask for an invoice or purchase order. Contact your legal council if you have any questions but the law seems pretty clear. If SCO can not produce a record of what services have been rendered then there is no money to collect from you or your company.
It is very well known where Mars would be in the sky and how to find it (right now you can't miss it anyway).
An interesting question would be for this celestial event: How does Earth look from Mars? Since Earth is interior to Mars would someone one Mars look up and see the large cresent blue dot? Or would Earth not even be see able because we are positioned in the middle of the Martian day?
It is always fun to apply our knowledge of gravitation to predict position of planets from Earth. We should by now have the knowledge to predict it from other vantage points.
While it is true that a lot of these things rely on social engineering, the other part is why does the OS allow the user to do these things in the first place? If you don't want users to do something destructive, why offer them the choice?
One of the first rules of design seems to be lost on MS designers. If you don't want users to do something then don't offer it as an option. You can pop up dialog after dialog warning users like this:
Do not click 'yes'. If you click 'yes' will crash the machine. Only click 'no'.
[Yes] [No]
How stupid is it for a user to click "yes"? How stupid was it for the programmer to put the "yes" button there?
Yet in MS program after MS program they tell you something is dangerous and allow you to do it anyway. I guarentee as long as applications allow this some malicious hacker will use a little word play or social engineering to allow them to do something destructive.
I really want to throttle the person at MS who tried to get people to believe computers are as easy to operate as toaster ovens. Computers are complex machines. Hiding the fact from the user is not only dubious but dangerous.
People in Open Source/Free Software attack SCO because of their own beliefs in OS/FS. Not because IBM says too. There is no Star Chamber secret masonic gathering conspiring to put SCO down. Its people who code and contribute to OS/FS projects that are just plain mad they are accused of stealing.
So they can't figure out where the source code for their product or the ground swell annomosity is coming from. Better blame IBM and sue.
In their zeal to sell the house, MS gave the keys away.
No application scripting language should be able to perform in an "untrusted" mode. There is no reason for it but due to functional designs someone at MS came up it has to be there. Someone demanded that Office documents integrate into Outlook seemlessly and this is what you get.
No one in any Unix environment will believe this message:
Attached is a perl script with my message in it. Please extract and run it to read it.
However MS has made a buisness of making people believe using a computer is as easy and as safe as using a toaster. So you get hackers who can apply a little social engineering to cause a disaster chain of events. Users are more than happy to click click click away when instructed.
The trick is who ever controls distribution gets a big chunk of the chain.
Take your poplicious boy bad who sells truckloads of CDs at $15. The band gets some paultry amount ($0.10 for each CD?) which if they go platnium still makes them millionares. But where did the rest of the money go? Into the hands of the producers and companies.
This is why you see the (smart) big stars go off and start their own recording companies. They can record their own music and get the big chunk of the money instead of having it disappear.
Online and music sharing changes the distribution model. You no longer need most of what the producers and music companies provide. No wonder why they aren't interested in it. No wonder why they fight it at every turn.
I personally see CD music as a commodity at the moment. Bands and producers should be using CDs to get people to go to stage shows and concerts to make more money for themselves instead of suing the living day lights out of some student. They should be working to produce a product that is less than desirable copied: a stellar stage performance. But doing tours and shows is a lot more work than just paying the government to pass laws in your favor.
This thing is good because it is a topic that needs to be discussed in Anime fandom. Ignoring does not make it go away. Discussing it doesn't legitimizes it. Its some crazy puritanical non-sense that says one can't know what is wrong or be tempted by it.
In any event, pirates need to die. Its one thing to fansub something and let others pick it up at their own descression. Its something else to pawn yourself off as legit licensed merchandise. Being able to spot fake merchandise at some vendor's table at the con maybe the only thing that stands between these greedy bastards and your money.
No fan should ever buy pirate material. There is enough fan networked support out there now to allow free trades. There is enough infrastructure support to buy real merchandise (no more odd hour calls to Japan tracing what happened to things you ordered). Let the pirates die.
There is nothing wrong with making money when a company's sock goes up.
However what is illegal is when you use fraud to pump up the level to sell off. You basically have Executive Officers canibalize the company at cost of shareholds so they can make a profit. This isn't what shareholders bought into. This isn't what Execs are supposed to do with companies.
This has always been a weakness in the system. When the CEO sees profit, why operate in a manner that is healthy for the company? The only thing standing in the way is the government who can and will take all of the ill gotten money and throw you in prison.
Let this be a small lesson for future Linux advocates.
Back in 95 I started playing around with free software because I just got a new machine but the old one still worked just fine. So it was time for a little experimentation. So with a box of floppies I went to the main computer lab and downloaded Slackware Linux and FreeBSD.
I tried FreeBSD first. I distinctly remember it being a bad install experience. When the system came up it didn't work quite right. That is too be expected since this was a Packard Bell elcheapo machine with proprietary integrated hardware all over. But the level of problems seemed severe so I thought I was doing something wrong. Off to irc and to find people who could help
Me: Hey out there. I installed FreeBSD and got some problems.
Someone: Did you FTFM?
Me: The stuff that came with downloads...but it didn't help. The video just will not work and the logs say there is something weird with the IDE controler.
SomeoneElse: That only happens when you use a POS computer for BSD. Buy better stuff and try again.
Me: That is kind of a poor fix. Is there anything I can do to make the drivers behave better.
AnotherGuy: Yeah but you are clearly too stupid to figure it or you would have done so. So its impossible for you.
Needless to say their attitudes were less than helpful. So the next step was to remove FreeBSD and try Linux. Although it seemed to exhibit the same problems at the start I actually got much friendlier help from people. I was pointed out what files to try and mess with. I got hints on how to work around problems. What I ended up with was a pretty cobbled together machine but I had a much better feeling about it.
So while Linux wasn't perfect it was a far more enjoyable experience. I formated the FreeBSD floppies and never looked back. So advocates on both sides need to take note: cursing newbies is a sure way to drive future users away.
The original Slate article makes use of a logical falacy. It assumes that if you google for "flowers" the correct response should be general information on flowers. How correct is that over getting sellers of flowers since that is just as correct? The search in question is so generic what possible information could anyone get from it. Google just spits out its best guess since it can't read your mind.
In my studies of information, "general information" is generally useless. It is only useful in refining a search. If you don't know how to begin you may start with a generic search to get an idea where to go to next but the generic information is thrown away. Instead of typing "flowers" into Google which will net unexpected results, how about "how to care for flowers"?
Google, and in my humble opinion, is properly geared to look for specific things. If one types in just "flowers" looking for information on how to grow a daisy or daffodil then you aren't going to get the right information. Google doesn't read minds. It can't tell you want information on how to grow flowers over buying flowers without telling it.
As the parent noted, "flowers" might not have been exactly the best generic question to flag on. Google at its heart measures the presense of information on the Internet. Flower sellers will have far more information and pages than those who have "general" information.
Drop Shadows are simply a great UI indication of "depth" and "boundry". I wish more UI primatives had it. Given a jumble of rectangles which one is the top most? So far the answer has been to highlight or focus the top one differently than the others (ie. title bar is a different color to stand out from the rest which may not work if your focus is different than your top most). Drop Shadows enhances this distinction since your brain has already been looking for the most contiguous rectange and assuming that is the top most. Sometimes that is hard to spot but things like Drop Shadows can help flag where windows end and at a glance show their stacking order.
Its great that UIs have Drop Shadows but I wonder why they aren't applied to even more primatives? Why don't entire windows have drop shadows?
The problem isn't that benchmarks lie. We all know they do. The problem is we don't know how they lie. Creating open source benchmark applications can show how the driver is excirsed so everyone who wants to know or learn where cards and drivers are strong and weak. Everyone is on the level if everyone can look at the code that came up with numbers. Not to mention there are things to learn from code in benchmarks that excirse the fringe elements of graphics cards and drivers.
The alternative is what we have now: hand waving voodoo. Not only do we have to take the vendor's word they aren't monkeying around with the driver to match execution of the benchmark but now we have to question where the aligence of the benchmark makers.
Lucas is actively rejecting the mystical nature of the original Star Wars. The last two movies barely talk about the theology and the philosophy of The Force. Why is the light side of the force better than the dark side? Why are anything the people in the story doing right or wrong? Instead he concentrated on wall to wall action.
Instead The Matrix appears to actively looks at issues and still includes a lot of action. What is wrong with having humans in the Matrix? Why is having a false reality presented bad no matter how comfortable it is?
At this point I'll watch and think about The Matrix movies far more than Star Wars.
...when Toatyfrog's interpetation is just as accurate and 1300000x cheaper?
One real issue with the way MS patches there products is simply that you can't roll them back. Without large IT bugdets that support "beta" servers, the only real way to test to see if a patch works is to try it in a semi-live environment. If it doesn't work budget some time to reinstall because there is no way to take it back.
Instead of the patch/rollback thing other OSes enjoy its a shoot in the dark with MS server products. "Oops" are less costly if you can rollback. How is MS Server 2003 going to save me money if I spend just as much time or more with spooky patches?
There are plenty of reasons why and why not to make a game on .NET. They aren't good or bad just different.
.NET API calls directly onto the OS layer is that they are really just wrappers on the Win32 called via PInvoke. So while the .NET binary maybe portable to whatever platforms that can support the CLR, the underlying Win32 calls need to be supported.
One of the issues with Direct X and other
So the MS dream of a write once run anywhere game is still a bit off. They still need to port Win32 to platforms they are targeting. Maybe this will change in the future but that will progress (or regress) to the mess Java had with UI.
...is the fact that soon after the alpha release of Mosiac, CERN's directors stated that WWW technology to be freely usable by anyone. Being free is what bulid up Web technology more than any browser or server.
I'm so tired of people pooh-poohing C because it can leak. C, when it is the right technology can outshine other platforms. The trick is to make sure you are choosing the right technology for the task. For Samba, C is pretty damn close to perfect.
Samba is supposed to be a cross platform networking technology. C is perfect for that because it is supported on nearly every system out there. Writing a program in C conforming to POSIX standards means that it will work 99.99997% of the platforms out there now.
Another reason why C is a good choice for Samba is because it can directly access memory. A lot of Samba is reading bytes off of this buffer and writing these bytes to that buffer. In a memory managed system you need to fight against the GC to make this work. It is also harder to write kernel parts in a language other than C.
As for Object C, it does not contain garbage collecting or stack protection. As for writing Samba in Java, you would have just as much success porting it to Perl instead and you will probably hit more platforms.
C isn't perfect. You can hang yourself easily with the language. However to say "C Sucks!" is a gross characterization. It definately has its place and it looks like Samba is one of them.
Who cares what modifications I make to my Linux kernel? Linus doesn't nor would anyone on kernel dev. Nowhere in the GPL does it say I need to make modifications of my kernel, privately used software, to the world.
If on the other hand I was going to offer people MyCustom Linux Kernel I would have to give the source with it.
This has always bugged the hell out of me when people misread the GPL. The GPL only enemerates the sharing contract between contributors. If you are going to share and contribute, do it completely and freely. If you aren't (ie. as a user) then don't worry about it.
Although I like Excel Saga because its funny it is honestly problematic to show on Cartoon Network. Two big things off the top of my head are:
- PC Alert: Pedro. Although I'm not terribly conerned about being politically correct, some of the jokes around him were definately flat and sometimes made me squirm. Making fun of a Latin American immigrant worker subject to the random bad luck just doesn't work so well in the US.
- Major portion of the fun around Excel Saga is the fact it pokes fun at Anime and Manga conventions. If you don't realize that there was an old magical girl show called Minky Momo wouldn't realize that Excel getting creamed by a garbage truck was funny. Nor would you get the multiple multiple other anime references and spoofs. The average CN watcher just isn't as versed and will wonder why some of the strange moments are funny.
As for Trigun its good stuff for Cartoon Network. Vash is a good man and the show clearly shows it. It has no nudity and is generally light hearted approach to things. Vash is a good hero and his friends remain true. Its really a nice show to show to people.
If you pick over the Cold War/Pre Three Mile Island information people made Nuclear out to the "next big thing" too. "Its cheap and efficient and will solve all of the power problems of tomorrow's world." Of course it didn't turn out like that because they glossed over a few wrinkles.
With advanced hydrogen systems, there are devils in the details. There were problems with Nuclear and there are problem with Advanged Hydrogren too.
As mentioned by stratjakt, hydrogen is in everything but no one knows of a cheap and clean way to pull it out of "everything" in large enough quantities. Just like with Nuclear, are the cotainers and storage devices for the power plants safe?
The flip side is that although some aspects are undesirable or unsafe we should still continue researching. Giving up on both Nuclear and Advanced Hydrogen systems just because they are too messy or expensive at the moment is the wrong thing to do. You can't make them clean and cheap just by wishing they were. It takes R&D time and effort. I hope people and companies continue to see that instead of day dreaming about the perfect power sources.
...was that MMOG are A LOT harder to create and run than your standard game (console and PC included).
Just like with FPS and RTS games there is this rush with the success of UO and EQ to make these MMOG persistent games by small companies. These games will more than likely fail due to the lack of resources. This is deluting the MMOG genre because everyone is promissing to be the next "EQ Killer" and failing to deliver in one way or another.
So if you have a company and are thinking about making some persistent world, stop and make damn sure you plan a lot of resource and time into it...then double it. If word of mouth can kill a stand alone game it will uttery destroy an online one.