The reason Maxtor got the largest IDE disks is because they are the only harddrive manufacturer using the ATA-133 standard. ATA-100 got a physical limit of 128 GB. While all the previous IDE size limits have been limits in the protocol in some way or another, the 128 GB limit is physical (as far as I've read). The other manufacturers want you to wait for the Serial-ATA standard which is better.
As a parent, I can understand why some people think that playing Max Payne would be like training for the next Columbine. Violence runs rampant in our media.
Yeah, I can imagine a bunch of testosterone-filled teenagers with guns running around in their local school, throwing themselves around the corner, just to realize that Bullet Time doesn't work in real life.
If you read the entire article you would know that there are two versions for sale, one small $20k box which can index up to 150,000 documents, and one "millions of millions" version which costs $250k.
If a large company puts out all the revisions of all their documents it will be quite a lot of documents:). $250k is still quite cheap for something that will index all electronic documents the company has ever produced.
Well, I've not read the entire article, but one solution would be to put the energy one module needs into the module itself. If you need more endurance, just put a few idle modules somewhere which will give their energy to the others. Putting idle modules could be useful for other purposes too, such as backup and ballast (to lower the center of gravity etc).
For the heat problem I guess the one million module monster won't be a 100x100x100 module cube, but a large structure with lot of space.
Re:Inexperienced programmers and C/C++
on
Why Coding Is Insecure
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I went into a big Visual C++ project this year, after an education mostly on Solaris and BSD, and found the answer to that question: because anything that comes after std:: in the Microsoft libraries, such as the STL, is likely to be riddled with bugs to the point where it becomes unusable in anything but a trivial sample program.
I've heard that VS.NET has much better STL support. I'll check it out later, and if it is ok I'll upgrade.
The problem with M$-only code is that it is not standard, and ugly as shit. The reason people are using it is that it was their only alternative at the moment. It is beyond my understanding why people actually are pleased with MFC. Of course there is a lot of 3rd party components which uses MFC, but don't people have portability in their minds at all when they write stuff? Ufortunately I've been modifying a MFC-based application at work, and it has not been a nice experience. I didn't have to change the ui though, but the macros and type-checking stuff was ugly:)
In the end I delayed my project by 3 or 4 weeks ripping out perfectly reasonable STL code that triggered library bugs and replacing it with my own lists and vectors that in the end relied on--yes-- good old char*s, arrays, and their friends.
My point in the previous post was that writing such classes should be done by people that know what they're doing. I've written lists, arrays and string classes at work with late-copying (copy-on-write). Lists and arrays with late-copying may boost performance, readabilty and robustness in a program. Returning a large array of data from a function is done almost with no penalty now. Another reason to use such container classes is that you're 100% sure that they work and that they will report an error (suchs as array bounds write) exactly when they happen with no need to use a analyzing tool like Purify.
Where I work there are people, people who're responsible for an important part in a project, who can't understand why returning pointers to variables on the stack (from functions in c/c++) is bad. When this
happened to one guy, he blamed the library he was
using (an in-house library we're currently developing). When a colleague checked out the code
he was horrified that the guy did just that, returned a pointer to this local variable.
But how do you differentiate between good and bad programmers? First of all I think a good programmers have to really enjoy programming. When I went to college (software development degree), I coded a lot of stuff in my spare time (I'm not saying that I'm a particulary good programmer, but at least I'm better than some of the other guys at work:). Not everyone does that, some hardly complete their programming assignments. This means that after some years of college, they will get their degree but they can't write a good program. But they will still get a job.
When writing software, especially in C, C++, you have to have a good knowledge of how stuff actually works. How virtual functions work, the difference between the stack and the heap, what happends when objects get out of scope and stuff like that. This stuff may be a boring part of the
programming course, but it is actually very important. One problem is that in some places people don't learn C or C++ at all, only Java, and thus they don't need to learn most of this stuff. (Although they maybe have to learn a lot of java-specific stuff, such as how the garbage collector works etc).
The problem, as I see it, isn't that there are
too many inexperienced programmers, just too few of the good ones. Another problem is the tool. Many projects is written in C or C++, which pretty much allows you to do everything. It is possible to write robust programs in C++. If I should manage a large C++ project, one of the first thing I would to is to ban almost all use of pointers and C-style arrays. Smart pointers with reference counting, array-classes with optional boundschecking and things like that. Why use char* when you can use std::string (or your own string class). Another solution is to not use C/C++ at all, but in many cases this is just not an option. And I think that C++ is a really powerful language, which with a tiny bit of effort by the programmer(s) can be a robust language, even for "newbies".
I guess that depends what you use it for. 8MB Level2 cache is quite much, and you can get the Blade 1000 as a dual-processor machine too. Serving multiple users (with remote logins (and maybe X) is probably faster on the Sun-machine).
From the press release: "The starting configuration for the Silicon Graphics Fuel visual workstation is priced at $11,495 U.S. list, and includes: SGI VPro V10 graphics, 32MB of graphics memory, a 500MHz MIPS R14000A CPU with 2MB L2 cache, and 512MB memory."
(This is about the same prices as a Sun Blade 1000 with 900MHz UltraSparc-III, 8MB Level 2 cache, 1 GB of memory, 36 GB disk and a really crappy 3D-card. But the Blade is not a "visual workstation" though.
You mean if the enemy captures one of your systems, it gets its hands on a full-debug-info, easily understandable, non-optimized binary???
Well, I only work with the GUI stuff and other tools, which is written in C/C++. It doesn't have any sensitive info anyway. The code running on the realtime computer does not have debug info.
"We're making weapon systems out of the Gameboy Advance"
Or at lest, my first quick skimming of your post led me to that, though on rereading, I see they're not necessarily connected
Well, I've actually thought of making a Gameboy Advance interface for our air defence system, just for fun. Displaying the radar tracks using sprites and a map background, maybe with corridors and other info. Select target with the arrow buttons, fire with A. The thought of launching an AMRAAM or HAWK missile with GBA is... interesting.:)
A while ago I tested the Intel compiler on some graphic-stuff I've been coding (using Visual C++). I got between 20-30% performance increase. The compiler was horribly slow though, MSVC was probably 4 times as fast compiling the entire project.
I'm using GCC 3.0.x for Gameboy Advance development (ARM7TDI cpu). It works fine for me, but the vendor compiler generates between 30 and 40% faster (and smaller code) (or something like that, don't have the exact numbers right now). But as many others have pointed out, GCC is free, other compilers are not.
GCC is excellent for multi-platform development and cross-compiling. Using the same compiler for Windows, Linux, *BSD, Irix, Solaris and Gameboy Advance is a huge advantage.
Speed (on the generated code) isn't always the issue. At work we always compile and run with full debug information and no optimization (except for tiny, speed-critical parts and very very thouroughly tested libraries). The code is used in weapon systems (we ship the entire system, including the hardware). Coredumps are very nice if you want to find out why something crashed:)
What about playing online games with consoles? The X-Box got ethernet, and PS2 will soon get it (or if you use an USB-Ethernet-device you get it now). I play Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 online (on PS2), and I also have some computers (6 actually) on my home LAN (1 is the NAT server). Even if I only had one computer, I still would have to use some kind of NAT to get my PS2 online. Of course I could've connected it directly to my DSL modem, but I moving cables around all the time is just a pain in the ass. Talking on IRC talking to the people I play against is also a nice thing, especially if some of them don't have a keyboard for their console.
It's becoming more and more common to have more than one piece of hardware which wants to connect to internet, and a local network with NAT is the easiest to do it, especially for ISPs. Sharing your private connection with the neighbours however, is a bad idea unless it is allowed by the ISP. If you want to have flat rate DSL, pay for it.
Fortunately I use a nice ISP which gives me what I really want, static IP, 1MBit up and down,
no monthly limit (I probably download/upload between 50-150 GB each month) and no router, just a modem which sits between the wall and the NIC on my OpenBSD box. It just converts the ethernet-signals into something the copper likes more.
How useful is a .tv domain anyway?
on
VeriSign Buys .tv
·
· Score: 1
Are there any serious companies out there who's using.tv (and.to,.nu etc) for something useful?
I usually don't take such companies seriously(although I have ordered stuff from a.nu site (Star Wars Episode 4-6 DVDs:)). I know that many companies with.com-addresses aren't always to be trusted, but at least they don't have a address which says that the business is located on some remote Pacific island.
On www.tv I see that someone has paid $500.000 for drugstore.tv! I just don't believe it. How can someone think "ah, by letting drugstore.tv point to my website I'll earn $500.000 more" (unless the guy owning it actually plan to sell illegal drugs on TV-shop).
As I see it, the problem with micropayment is that you don't have any way to predict your expenses. Spending 10 cent each time you view a comic strip (or reading an article in an online newspaper) adds to the feeling that the money is actually being spent. Before I got broadband, the online-counter was a constant reminder that I actually was spending money. Today I have DSL, and the only variable expenses I have is phone and electricity (and food and other stuff I buy of course). I find it much easier to have a organized personal economy when I don't have to worry about being online too much (or reading too many comics).
For businesses subscription may be of more interest than micropayments too. Your income won't decrease the moment people stop reading your cartoons, you get some time (by monitoring
popularity) to know that popularity is decreasing.
Just a suggestion, what if the online comic had a subscription service (monthly, quarterly or yearly maybe) where you had the option to get the daily strip/weekly page as email in addition to be able to view it online. The email could either consist of just an gif/jpeg attachement or a link to the comic. The latter could be used to avoid abuse (like people signing up with a mailing-list address). The link in the mail could be unique for each subscriber to monitor abuse (although this may be of some concern to the paranoid people out there:).
You still can't stop people from downloading the images and putting them their own website though, but I don't think "secure" formats is the way to go. I want to be able to read the stuff I've paid for on my Windows laptop, my Indigo2 and my Sparcstation 5 running Linux.:)
The chinese plane was a highly manueverable jet fighter. The american plane was a slow propeller aircraft. There are also footage showing chinese pilots flying close to american surveillance (remember, this was not a spy plane) planes prior to this accident. It is reasonable to assume that the chinese pilot just flew to close.
What about these beauties? A Celeron 733MHz or P3 1GHz with 128 or 256 MB of memory. It got VGA/S-Video/Composite out, 100Mbit ethernet, modem, serial, USB, audio in/out, mouse/keyboard (PS/2) in/out and serial and parallel, a 2,5" HDD and DVD-ROM (or CD-ROM if you want.). And the best part, the size is only 157 x 146 x 45 mm (with external power supply though).
I know, but letting other people create new units, maybe a new enemy or whatever isn't a bad idea.
Re:Why not demand all games 2+ years old be opened
on
Free The TA Source Code
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I checked my box of Total Annihilation. Copyright 1997. That means 4-5 years old. About the age of Quake2 actually (and the Quake2 source *is* released). Releasing the source of a RTS game could result in many different clones. TA is an excellent game for this because it uses 3D models as units instead of pixelled graphics. This will probably make it easier to create new units or themes.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason Maxtor got the largest IDE disks is because they are the only harddrive manufacturer using the ATA-133 standard. ATA-100 got a physical limit of 128 GB. While all the previous IDE size limits have been limits in the protocol in some way or another, the 128 GB limit is physical (as far as I've read). The other manufacturers want you to wait for the Serial-ATA standard which is better.
Yeah, I can imagine a bunch of testosterone-filled teenagers with guns running around in their local school, throwing themselves around the corner, just to realize that Bullet Time doesn't work in real life.
Your story got rejected because it didn't have a funny title. "Texas A&M Clones a Cat", what kind of stupid title is that? :)
If you read the entire article you would know that there are two versions for sale, one small $20k box which can index up to 150,000 documents, and one "millions of millions" version which costs $250k.
If a large company puts out all the revisions of all their documents it will be quite a lot of documents :). $250k is still quite cheap for something that will index all electronic documents the company has ever produced.
Well, I've not read the entire article, but one solution would be to put the energy one module needs into the module itself. If you need more endurance, just put a few idle modules somewhere which will give their energy to the others. Putting idle modules could be useful for other purposes too, such as backup and ballast (to lower the center of gravity etc).
For the heat problem I guess the one million module monster won't be a 100x100x100 module cube, but a large structure with lot of space.
...and It Came For Dessert :)
I've heard that VS.NET has much better STL support. I'll check it out later, and if it is ok I'll upgrade.
The problem with M$-only code is that it is not standard, and ugly as shit. The reason people are using it is that it was their only alternative at the moment. It is beyond my understanding why people actually are pleased with MFC. Of course there is a lot of 3rd party components which uses MFC, but don't people have portability in their minds at all when they write stuff? Ufortunately I've been modifying a MFC-based application at work, and it has not been a nice experience. I didn't have to change the ui though, but the macros and type-checking stuff was ugly :)
My point in the previous post was that writing such classes should be done by people that know what they're doing. I've written lists, arrays and string classes at work with late-copying (copy-on-write). Lists and arrays with late-copying may boost performance, readabilty and robustness in a program. Returning a large array of data from a function is done almost with no penalty now. Another reason to use such container classes is that you're 100% sure that they work and that they will report an error (suchs as array bounds write) exactly when they happen with no need to use a analyzing tool like Purify.
Where I work there are people, people who're responsible for an important part in a project, who can't understand why returning pointers to variables on the stack (from functions in c/c++) is bad. When this happened to one guy, he blamed the library he was using (an in-house library we're currently developing). When a colleague checked out the code he was horrified that the guy did just that, returned a pointer to this local variable.
But how do you differentiate between good and bad programmers? First of all I think a good programmers have to really enjoy programming. When I went to college (software development degree), I coded a lot of stuff in my spare time (I'm not saying that I'm a particulary good programmer, but at least I'm better than some of the other guys at work :). Not everyone does that, some hardly complete their programming assignments. This means that after some years of college, they will get their degree but they can't write a good program. But they will still get a job.
When writing software, especially in C, C++, you have to have a good knowledge of how stuff actually works. How virtual functions work, the difference between the stack and the heap, what happends when objects get out of scope and stuff like that. This stuff may be a boring part of the programming course, but it is actually very important. One problem is that in some places people don't learn C or C++ at all, only Java, and thus they don't need to learn most of this stuff. (Although they maybe have to learn a lot of java-specific stuff, such as how the garbage collector works etc).
The problem, as I see it, isn't that there are too many inexperienced programmers, just too few of the good ones. Another problem is the tool. Many projects is written in C or C++, which pretty much allows you to do everything. It is possible to write robust programs in C++. If I should manage a large C++ project, one of the first thing I would to is to ban almost all use of pointers and C-style arrays. Smart pointers with reference counting, array-classes with optional boundschecking and things like that. Why use char* when you can use std::string (or your own string class). Another solution is to not use C/C++ at all, but in many cases this is just not an option. And I think that C++ is a really powerful language, which with a tiny bit of effort by the programmer(s) can be a robust language, even for "newbies".
Windy City? The BBS? :)
I guess that depends what you use it for. 8MB Level2 cache is quite much, and you can get the Blade 1000 as a dual-processor machine too. Serving multiple users (with remote logins (and maybe X) is probably faster on the Sun-machine).
From the press release: "The starting configuration for the Silicon Graphics Fuel visual workstation is priced at $11,495 U.S. list, and includes: SGI VPro V10 graphics, 32MB of graphics memory, a 500MHz MIPS R14000A CPU with 2MB L2 cache, and 512MB memory."
(This is about the same prices as a Sun Blade 1000 with 900MHz UltraSparc-III, 8MB Level 2 cache, 1 GB of memory, 36 GB disk and a really crappy 3D-card. But the Blade is not a "visual workstation" though.
Well, I only work with the GUI stuff and other tools, which is written in C/C++. It doesn't have any sensitive info anyway. The code running on the realtime computer does not have debug info.
Well, I've actually thought of making a Gameboy Advance interface for our air defence system, just for fun. Displaying the radar tracks using sprites and a map background, maybe with corridors and other info. Select target with the arrow buttons, fire with A. The thought of launching an AMRAAM or HAWK missile with GBA is... interesting. :)
A while ago I tested the Intel compiler on some graphic-stuff I've been coding (using Visual C++). I got between 20-30% performance increase. The compiler was horribly slow though, MSVC was probably 4 times as fast compiling the entire project.
I'm using GCC 3.0.x for Gameboy Advance development (ARM7TDI cpu). It works fine for me, but the vendor compiler generates between 30 and 40% faster (and smaller code) (or something like that, don't have the exact numbers right now). But as many others have pointed out, GCC is free, other compilers are not.
GCC is excellent for multi-platform development and cross-compiling. Using the same compiler for Windows, Linux, *BSD, Irix, Solaris and Gameboy Advance is a huge advantage.
Speed (on the generated code) isn't always the issue. At work we always compile and run with full debug information and no optimization (except for tiny, speed-critical parts and very very thouroughly tested libraries). The code is used in weapon systems (we ship the entire system, including the hardware). Coredumps are very nice if you want to find out why something crashed :)
...and find an employer which gives you a kickass gaming machine to work on.
(Dual P4 Xeon/1GB/Geforce3 here :)
What about playing online games with consoles? The X-Box got ethernet, and PS2 will soon get it (or if you use an USB-Ethernet-device you get it now). I play Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 online (on PS2), and I also have some computers (6 actually) on my home LAN (1 is the NAT server). Even if I only had one computer, I still would have to use some kind of NAT to get my PS2 online. Of course I could've connected it directly to my DSL modem, but I moving cables around all the time is just a pain in the ass. Talking on IRC talking to the people I play against is also a nice thing, especially if some of them don't have a keyboard for their console.
It's becoming more and more common to have more than one piece of hardware which wants to connect to internet, and a local network with NAT is the easiest to do it, especially for ISPs. Sharing your private connection with the neighbours however, is a bad idea unless it is allowed by the ISP. If you want to have flat rate DSL, pay for it.
Fortunately I use a nice ISP which gives me what I really want, static IP, 1MBit up and down, no monthly limit (I probably download/upload between 50-150 GB each month) and no router, just a modem which sits between the wall and the NIC on my OpenBSD box. It just converts the ethernet-signals into something the copper likes more.
Are there any serious companies out there who's using .tv (and .to, .nu etc) for something useful?
I usually don't take such companies seriously(although I have ordered stuff from a .nu site (Star Wars Episode 4-6 DVDs :)). I know that many companies with .com-addresses aren't always to be trusted, but at least they don't have a address which says that the business is located on some remote Pacific island.
On www.tv I see that someone has paid $500.000 for drugstore.tv! I just don't believe it. How can someone think "ah, by letting drugstore.tv point to my website I'll earn $500.000 more" (unless the guy owning it actually plan to sell illegal drugs on TV-shop).
As I see it, the problem with micropayment is that you don't have any way to predict your expenses. Spending 10 cent each time you view a comic strip (or reading an article in an online newspaper) adds to the feeling that the money is actually being spent. Before I got broadband, the online-counter was a constant reminder that I actually was spending money. Today I have DSL, and the only variable expenses I have is phone and electricity (and food and other stuff I buy of course). I find it much easier to have a organized personal economy when I don't have to worry about being online too much (or reading too many comics).
For businesses subscription may be of more interest than micropayments too. Your income won't decrease the moment people stop reading your cartoons, you get some time (by monitoring popularity) to know that popularity is decreasing.
Just a suggestion, what if the online comic had a subscription service (monthly, quarterly or yearly maybe) where you had the option to get the daily strip/weekly page as email in addition to be able to view it online. The email could either consist of just an gif/jpeg attachement or a link to the comic. The latter could be used to avoid abuse (like people signing up with a mailing-list address). The link in the mail could be unique for each subscriber to monitor abuse (although this may be of some concern to the paranoid people out there :).
You still can't stop people from downloading the images and putting them their own website though, but I don't think "secure" formats is the way to go. I want to be able to read the stuff I've paid for on my Windows laptop, my Indigo2 and my Sparcstation 5 running Linux. :)
At least one sale :)
The chinese plane was a highly manueverable jet fighter. The american plane was a slow propeller aircraft. There are also footage showing chinese pilots flying close to american surveillance (remember, this was not a spy plane) planes prior to this accident. It is reasonable to assume that the chinese pilot just flew to close.
...when I accidentaly dropped my Quantum Fireball down the stairs. Gravity was strong that day.
What about these beauties? A Celeron 733MHz or P3 1GHz with 128 or 256 MB of memory. It got VGA/S-Video/Composite out, 100Mbit ethernet, modem, serial, USB, audio in/out, mouse/keyboard (PS/2) in/out and serial and parallel, a 2,5" HDD and DVD-ROM (or CD-ROM if you want.). And the best part, the size is only 157 x 146 x 45 mm (with external power supply though).
I know, but letting other people create new units, maybe a new enemy or whatever isn't a bad idea.
I checked my box of Total Annihilation. Copyright 1997. That means 4-5 years old. About the age of Quake2 actually (and the Quake2 source *is* released). Releasing the source of a RTS game could result in many different clones. TA is an excellent game for this because it uses 3D models as units instead of pixelled graphics. This will probably make it easier to create new units or themes.
Do you use such language in front of your mother?