Well, I can unconsciously edit out the text-only and rather subdued classic google ads from my perception. I don't even notice them, and more power to google if they are able to give me a good service by making money with something that try its best not to annoy me.
But if they now set to aggressively compete for my attention (ie distract me with flashy garbage), they will get blocked, period.
Advertisement companies don't seem to get that trying to shove the ads by force to people annoy them and antagonize them, which doesn't seem like a good way to convince them to buy something.
I remember reading a rant about this by Tycho on Penny-Arcade, where he explained that companies putting ads on their site kept asking for stupid crap like ads moving in front of the website.
In France, all storage devices are taxed because of those asshat music companies. Even when for instance a company buys hard-disks for their servers afaik.
Dubernard is actually the same guy that did the first hand transplant.
It didn't go well, psychologically: the guy couldn't come to terms with the fact that he had the hand of someone else and was unable to consider it actually part of his own body.
He finally got it amputated again.
I think it will be hard for this woman aswell. On the other hand, after the hand experience, they probably had a better idea of the psychological challenge that she face and were hopefully able to prepare her better.
I hate people who have the pretense to know what's better for everyone out there.
People should stop assuming that real life metaphors are a better solution for everyone.
His arguments in favor of the spatial model are fine as long as you assume that everyone is more used to manipulate real life objects in closets, drawers and boxes than they are to manipulate stuff on a computer.
Because of my job (and centers of interest), I spend most of my time manipulating stuff on a computer. As such, I'd rather have my closet present its contents in a list tree than have my computer files presented as a real life metaphor.
Of course, I don't pretend to know what's best for everyone. That's why suggesting that preferences are unnecessary is idiotic.
The only solution that would be acceptable as far as I'm concerned would be "reasonable defaults" that people more familiar with physical objects than stuff on a computer would be able to deal with more easily, preferences out of the way by default, but existing, and let people switch back to the current way of working if they want to do so.
Also, his article is very critical of the way things are done currently, but don't provide much practical solutions, except get rid of preferences, put stuff in the corner, and a couple random specific use cases, so it's essentially pointless.
At what point is it the responsability of the software developer to build shutdown timers into the system?
Nowhere.
We're talking about a mostly isolated incident here, where a guy who probably had health problems (though he maybe wasn't aware of it) did something that common sense says isn't healthy. This guy could easily have avoided to die. Perhaps the real problem is that he may have had some sort of undiagnosed heart condition, and he would have been more careful if he knew about it.
But goddamnit, looking for a "solution" for something that is not even a problem but rather an isolated incident is a waste of time and energy.
As a game programmer, I already have to put up with enough bullshit from license holders, publishers and console manufacturers who all ask for various, sometime idiotic things to be implemented in games as it is.
I would hate to have to waste my time implementing safeguards for the few people on earth who are dysfunctional enough to be unable to listen to their primitive bodily needs until they die, or who are unable to function as normal human beings because they play too much.
Such people's access to games should be regulated by their friends and their family.
And if they feel like living forever in video games, I think it is only the symptom of a bigger problem that an artificial way of denying them access to games won't solve.
Well, you'd have to learn french and then write the rules in french?
Why ? There are english speaking people everywhere. If that was their concern, they could simply have stated "english speaking people only".
I don't have reference, but I think there is a "no conditions need to be met to participate in a contest" law somewhere. For example, for every contest in Quebec, it is always clearly indicated that no purchase are necessary to enter the contest, etc... In the Ingres case, there is a condition (code up something) to enter the contest.
We have such a law in france, that no purchase should be necessary to enter a contest, but in practice it's not really enforced.
It doesn't prevent, for instance, coca-cola to setup up contests where you have to find something written inside, on the bottom of a can.
Anyway, I don't think it applies here, since you're not supposed to buy anything. It's like a music contest, or a painting contest.
Zelda Windwaker, that took the idea of cel shading and perfected it. Technical achievement. It may give an unique atmosphere to the game, but it's not something that will let you have a totally different experience than playing any other, non cell shaded rpg/adventure game.
Halo 2, which perfected playing online with an incredibly strong interface. It's a first person shooter. Not something new, regardless of whatever usabilty improvements it might be showing over other online games.
PSP, which shows you can turn a game console into a strong movieplayer and vice versa. There's was no doubt before that it could be done. The actual question being whether it should have been done.
World of Warcraft, that brought MMORPGs to the masses and along the way redefined "art" in a video game. You must be kidding me. WoW is nothing but a mrketing achievement. It plays exactly the same as any other MMORPG on the market. It's just one more MMORPG in my book, with about the same theme as most other, at that (heroic fantasy).
Grant Theft Auto 3, the first truly mass market game. Is that everything that counts ? That a game is succesful on a marketing level ?
The core gameplay would likely still be fun, but there's a reason we don't play Space Invaders anymore.
So, just because I don't condone some outright abuse of rendering technology that is detrimental to any other kind of evolution, I'm wanting to play space invaders ? I do think that graphics matter. But there are a lot of other things that matter just as much, and throwing every resource on that single aspect of gaming is stupid in my book.
Do you realize that to produce graphics that make use of the ever more powerful technologies out there, it takes more and more time, more and more sophisticated tools, and thus more and more money ?
The amount of money to produce one hour of game content is rising after each new generation of technology.
The game development budgets aren't rising.
Result: games life duration is shortening. Innovation is more and more relegated only to things that make the game more appealing on a superficial level. Loading times increase. Also, given how bugged games are nowadays, I think that quality insurance budgets are suffering.
I have nothing against the ps3 in particular, the same holds true for the other consoles, and for the whole gaming industry for that matter.
People are so used to having exponential improvements of the graphic quality and overall "wow" factor that everything else is being dissed to keep it going.
When this new crop of new consoles are out, we'll get the same games as we have now, only with more eye candy. And everyone yet still manage to go all "wow, that's amazing" everytime a new console is released.
The battery contains lithium.
If he torn the battery opened, the water probably entered into contact with the lithium.
Lithium explodes in toxic fumes when in contact with water.
However, I think that like IBM, they are at a point where the business model and the vision they had since the begining, which was the right thing to do and took them where they are isn't anymore what the market wants.
So, now they are big and they aren't anymore the nimble little startup that see clearly where the market is headed. They see tons of other companies doing a lot of different stuff, and they don't know which one is right. In addition, they probably have a firm belief that what they are doing since 30 years is the right way to go, since it took them where they are now.
Microsoft's biggest asset is their presence on the market, not their money. If they don't understand where the market is headed, they will loose their monopoly, no matter how much money they throw at the problem.
I think at some point they'll have to realise that being a monopoly spanning every areas of software development isn't something they can sustain anymore, and they'll have to redefine what microsoft is ought to be.
I find it strange that the guy didn't mention the new autovectorisations optimisations that have been added (granted, they are still young and far from complete in 4.0 from what one can read on the gcc wiki). After all, the speed of the generated code seems to be his main concern.
However, not a single word about other useful and interesting improvements and new features.
- Faster C++ compilations, especially with -O0. For this alone, this makes this release very worthy for C++ developers.
- Ability to define which symbols to exort and not to export in shared objects (.so). It won't mean anything for the end-user right now, but down the line, things like KDE that are written in C++ and uses a lot of shared objects will see their size and loading times decrease notably thanks to this. Of course, they first need to do the necessary changes on their side to take advantage of this.
- Compile-time memory and pointers debugging and protection, using a new library called libmudflap. This should prove easier to use and much less of a performance hit than tools like valgrind, as well as probably not too hard to port to windows.
Also, he doesn't talk about how much GCJ got upgraded for 4.0. They completed the merge with classpath, added the ability to gcj to compile whole.jar as native.so, and improved the way native and non native java code works together, up to the point that it can run some big applications like eclipse out of the box.
Basically, this is a review form a gentoo end-user, who as such consider gcc only from the performance standpoint. Don't forget that the main target audience of compilers are developers, and for developers, gcc4.0 is a very attractive release.
Intel compiler's reason why it generate faster code is because it does auto-vectorisation (ie, it automatically finds out how to transform some code patterns to take advantage of native vector operation, such as those provided by sse).
They started to implement this in gcc 4.0, but it's a veyr first iteration that for what I know is still kinda limited. I'm not even sure it's enabled by default, even in -O3.
There are lots of improvement there targeted at gcc4.1.
The real problem of microsoft is that these days, most people don't care about which version of windows they run.
They just use whatever is on the pc they buy. They probably don't even know thay they can buy windows separately, so for them it's more like when amd or intel announce a new processor: it's something that they will care about whenever they decide to buy a new pc.
It's a bit like if a car manufacturer was making a big fuss about a new engine that they're designing. It's not something that will make people change their car.
I don't see what would be wrong with starting a new shell with the new technology, even if it's not finished.
It actually would be a Good Thing, since it'd be a real-world app using the new technology that could let them figure out where the rough edges of the new technology are.
It could also let them play around with the interface to experiment with new ideas and perhaps discover innovative and useful new things that could work. Problem is that microsoft has never been very strong in the creativity department, and they are not very good at usability either, which is why they seem to always copy and not really innovate.
I was disappointed by the gnome performance nack when I last tried it (which was a while ago, so it surely improved since then). However, KDE fast and snappy.
As for windows... Well, the UI, in itself and by itself, is fast. However, performances are dragged down by the less than stellar filesystem and vm management. When I press windows-e, I would expect an explorer to open immediately, but too often I have to wait at few seconds, if no more. When I then browse to some directory on my hard disk, which I must admit are a mess, I can't stand having to wait for seconds before the file list appears. There's no excuse for taking that long on a modern machine to list a directory containing even hundred of items. Konqueror does it just fine. I also hate when the system freeze out of the blue for up to dozens of seconds at a time while I'm using visual studio. I witnessed all these symptoms on various machines, including a freshly installed opteron.
" Obviously, the protection systems are hurting the loyal consumers (yes, there are some, trust me) as a side effect."
Actually, the protection system for CDs only hurts loyal customers. The only thing these CD protection scheme seems to be good at is to prevent legit CDs from being recognized in some car's cd readers, and to force music to be played on PC with some half-assed proprietary player that I often found to quite noticeably reduce quality compared to playing the CD normally.
However, there's one thing it's supposed to prevent me to do, ie ripping the CD (I do buys CDs, quite often even albums I already downloaded from the net if I like them, but I prefer to keep them as mp3 to listen at work), but it never ever prevented me to rip a single one. The best I ever seen a cd copy protection do was to make cdex slow. Great achievement.
So, I know people who buy CDs only to find out they must rip and burn them to be able to listen them in their cars. Or others, like my mother, who once bought a copy-protected CD, saw she couldn't listen to it in her car, returned the CD, and then asked me to download it.
There's an even more perverse consequence to this. It used to not be possible to get refunds on CDs, even if it was unreadable. They exchanged it for a new copy instead. But now, they know that some CDs just doesn't work with some CD readers, so they are willing to refund them. So, it makes it possible for people to buy a CD, copy it, then return it.
Therefore, not only CD copy protection are utterly innefficient at preventing pirating, it also punishes legit customers and make them more likely to turn to piracy, and it create loopholes (buy, copy, get refund) that help pirates.
Music majors are shooting themselves in the foot with these things. The companies that sells them these useless protection schemes must be laughing all the way to the bank.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I can unconsciously edit out the text-only and rather subdued classic google ads from my perception. I don't even notice them, and more power to google if they are able to give me a good service by making money with something that try its best not to annoy me. But if they now set to aggressively compete for my attention (ie distract me with flashy garbage), they will get blocked, period. Advertisement companies don't seem to get that trying to shove the ads by force to people annoy them and antagonize them, which doesn't seem like a good way to convince them to buy something. I remember reading a rant about this by Tycho on Penny-Arcade, where he explained that companies putting ads on their site kept asking for stupid crap like ads moving in front of the website.
In France, all storage devices are taxed because of those asshat music companies. Even when for instance a company buys hard-disks for their servers afaik.
Here is a wired article that will explain it better than I could possibly do: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,69641-0.html
1) Never believe anything anyone tells you: always test for yourself."
Falling from the last story of a building hurts.
I'm not sure AOL users would be able to pass the turing test themselves.
Dubernard is actually the same guy that did the first hand transplant. It didn't go well, psychologically: the guy couldn't come to terms with the fact that he had the hand of someone else and was unable to consider it actually part of his own body. He finally got it amputated again. I think it will be hard for this woman aswell. On the other hand, after the hand experience, they probably had a better idea of the psychological challenge that she face and were hopefully able to prepare her better.
Here's a photo from even earlier days of Google's data center: http://orangehues.com/blog/2004/12/google-and-grea t-mousetrap-fallacy.html
I hate people who have the pretense to know what's better for everyone out there.
People should stop assuming that real life metaphors are a better solution for everyone.
His arguments in favor of the spatial model are fine as long as you assume that everyone is more used to manipulate real life objects in closets, drawers and boxes than they are to manipulate stuff on a computer.
Because of my job (and centers of interest), I spend most of my time manipulating stuff on a computer. As such, I'd rather have my closet present its contents in a list tree than have my computer files presented as a real life metaphor.
Of course, I don't pretend to know what's best for everyone. That's why suggesting that preferences are unnecessary is idiotic.
The only solution that would be acceptable as far as I'm concerned would be "reasonable defaults" that people more familiar with physical objects than stuff on a computer would be able to deal with more easily, preferences out of the way by default, but existing, and let people switch back to the current way of working if they want to do so.
Also, his article is very critical of the way things are done currently, but don't provide much practical solutions, except get rid of preferences, put stuff in the corner, and a couple random specific use cases, so it's essentially pointless.
At what point is it the responsability of the software developer to build shutdown timers into the system?
Nowhere.
We're talking about a mostly isolated incident here, where a guy who probably had health problems (though he maybe wasn't aware of it) did something that common sense says isn't healthy.
This guy could easily have avoided to die. Perhaps the real problem is that he may have had some sort of undiagnosed heart condition, and he would have been more careful if he knew about it.
But goddamnit, looking for a "solution" for something that is not even a problem but rather an isolated incident is a waste of time and energy.
As a game programmer, I already have to put up with enough bullshit from license holders, publishers and console manufacturers who all ask for various, sometime idiotic things to be implemented in games as it is.
I would hate to have to waste my time implementing safeguards for the few people on earth who are dysfunctional enough to be unable to listen to their primitive bodily needs until they die, or who are unable to function as normal human beings because they play too much.
Such people's access to games should be regulated by their friends and their family.
And if they feel like living forever in video games, I think it is only the symptom of a bigger problem that an artificial way of denying them access to games won't solve.
Jabba the Hutt as Darl McBride
I am disturbed by the implication that IBM would then logically be represented as a metal-bikini clad Leia strangling Darl with a chain.
I rarely get BSODs in winXP.
What I do get are performances that are degrading overtime, month after month. On every PC I have/had running winxp.
All my colleagues do aswell.
I shouldn't need any particular knowledge to keep a system running smoothly. By the way, linux does so without needing any form of maintenance.
My job is C++ programmer, not "wipe windows ass on a regular basis because it keeps crapping its pants".
Yes. From wikipedia entry "peugeot", "All numbers from 101 to 909 have been deposited as trademarks."
Peugeot also trademarked all three digit numbers with a 0 in the middle.
Well, you'd have to learn french and then write the rules in french? Why ? There are english speaking people everywhere. If that was their concern, they could simply have stated "english speaking people only". I don't have reference, but I think there is a "no conditions need to be met to participate in a contest" law somewhere. For example, for every contest in Quebec, it is always clearly indicated that no purchase are necessary to enter the contest, etc... In the Ingres case, there is a condition (code up something) to enter the contest. We have such a law in france, that no purchase should be necessary to enter a contest, but in practice it's not really enforced. It doesn't prevent, for instance, coca-cola to setup up contests where you have to find something written inside, on the bottom of a can. Anyway, I don't think it applies here, since you're not supposed to buy anything. It's like a music contest, or a painting contest.
Zelda Windwaker, that took the idea of cel shading and perfected it.
Technical achievement. It may give an unique atmosphere to the game, but it's not something that will let you have a totally different experience than playing any other, non cell shaded rpg/adventure game.
Halo 2, which perfected playing online with an incredibly strong interface.
It's a first person shooter. Not something new, regardless of whatever usabilty improvements it might be showing over other online games.
PSP, which shows you can turn a game console into a strong movieplayer and vice versa.
There's was no doubt before that it could be done. The actual question being whether it should have been done.
World of Warcraft, that brought MMORPGs to the masses and along the way redefined "art" in a video game.
You must be kidding me. WoW is nothing but a mrketing achievement.
It plays exactly the same as any other MMORPG on the market. It's just one more MMORPG in my book, with about the same theme as most other, at that (heroic fantasy).
Grant Theft Auto 3, the first truly mass market game.
Is that everything that counts ? That a game is succesful on a marketing level ?
The core gameplay would likely still be fun, but there's a reason we don't play Space Invaders anymore.
So, just because I don't condone some outright abuse of rendering technology that is detrimental to any other kind of evolution, I'm wanting to play space invaders ?
I do think that graphics matter. But there are a lot of other things that matter just as much, and throwing every resource on that single aspect of gaming is stupid in my book.
Too much technology kills the games.
Do you realize that to produce graphics that make use of the ever more powerful technologies out there, it takes more and more time, more and more sophisticated tools, and thus more and more money ?
The amount of money to produce one hour of game content is rising after each new generation of technology.
The game development budgets aren't rising.
Result: games life duration is shortening. Innovation is more and more relegated only to things that make the game more appealing on a superficial level.
Loading times increase.
Also, given how bugged games are nowadays, I think that quality insurance budgets are suffering.
I have nothing against the ps3 in particular, the same holds true for the other consoles, and for the whole gaming industry for that matter.
People are so used to having exponential improvements of the graphic quality and overall "wow" factor that everything else is being dissed to keep it going.
When this new crop of new consoles are out, we'll get the same games as we have now, only with more eye candy. And everyone yet still manage to go all "wow, that's amazing" everytime a new console is released.
The battery contains lithium. If he torn the battery opened, the water probably entered into contact with the lithium. Lithium explodes in toxic fumes when in contact with water.
They won't go away, just like IBM didn't go away.
However, I think that like IBM, they are at a point where the business model and the vision they had since the begining, which was the right thing to do and took them where they are isn't anymore what the market wants.
So, now they are big and they aren't anymore the nimble little startup that see clearly where the market is headed. They see tons of other companies doing a lot of different stuff, and they don't know which one is right. In addition, they probably have a firm belief that what they are doing since 30 years is the right way to go, since it took them where they are now.
Microsoft's biggest asset is their presence on the market, not their money. If they don't understand where the market is headed, they will loose their monopoly, no matter how much money they throw at the problem.
I think at some point they'll have to realise that being a monopoly spanning every areas of software development isn't something they can sustain anymore, and they'll have to redefine what microsoft is ought to be.
It's indeed very good. Does anyone know of any equivalent for KDE ?
It's a very weird review.
.jar as native .so, and improved the way native and non native java code works together, up to the point that it can run some big applications like eclipse out of the box.
I find it strange that the guy didn't mention the new autovectorisations optimisations that have been added (granted, they are still young and far from complete in 4.0 from what one can read on the gcc wiki).
After all, the speed of the generated code seems to be his main concern.
However, not a single word about other useful and interesting improvements and new features.
- Faster C++ compilations, especially with -O0. For this alone, this makes this release very worthy for C++ developers.
- Ability to define which symbols to exort and not to export in shared objects (.so). It won't mean anything for the end-user right now, but down the line, things like KDE that are written in C++ and uses a lot of shared objects will see their size and loading times decrease notably thanks to this.
Of course, they first need to do the necessary changes on their side to take advantage of this.
- Compile-time memory and pointers debugging and protection, using a new library called libmudflap.
This should prove easier to use and much less of a performance hit than tools like valgrind, as well as probably not too hard to port to windows.
Also, he doesn't talk about how much GCJ got upgraded for 4.0. They completed the merge with classpath, added the ability to gcj to compile whole
Basically, this is a review form a gentoo end-user, who as such consider gcc only from the performance standpoint.
Don't forget that the main target audience of compilers are developers, and for developers, gcc4.0 is a very attractive release.
Intel compiler's reason why it generate faster code is because it does auto-vectorisation (ie, it automatically finds out how to transform some code patterns to take advantage of native vector operation, such as those provided by sse). They started to implement this in gcc 4.0, but it's a veyr first iteration that for what I know is still kinda limited. I'm not even sure it's enabled by default, even in -O3. There are lots of improvement there targeted at gcc4.1.
The real problem of microsoft is that these days, most people don't care about which version of windows they run.
They just use whatever is on the pc they buy. They probably don't even know thay they can buy windows separately, so for them it's more like when amd or intel announce a new processor: it's something that they will care about whenever they decide to buy a new pc.
It's a bit like if a car manufacturer was making a big fuss about a new engine that they're designing. It's not something that will make people change their car.
I don't see what would be wrong with starting a new shell with the new technology, even if it's not finished.
It actually would be a Good Thing, since it'd be a real-world app using the new technology that could let them figure out where the rough edges of the new technology are.
It could also let them play around with the interface to experiment with new ideas and perhaps discover innovative and useful new things that could work.
Problem is that microsoft has never been very strong in the creativity department, and they are not very good at usability either, which is why they seem to always copy and not really innovate.
I guess your mileage may vary.
I was disappointed by the gnome performance nack when I last tried it (which was a while ago, so it surely improved since then).
However, KDE fast and snappy.
As for windows... Well, the UI, in itself and by itself, is fast.
However, performances are dragged down by the less than stellar filesystem and vm management.
When I press windows-e, I would expect an explorer to open immediately, but too often I have to wait at few seconds, if no more.
When I then browse to some directory on my hard disk, which I must admit are a mess, I can't stand having to wait for seconds before the file list appears.
There's no excuse for taking that long on a modern machine to list a directory containing even hundred of items. Konqueror does it just fine.
I also hate when the system freeze out of the blue for up to dozens of seconds at a time while I'm using visual studio.
I witnessed all these symptoms on various machines, including a freshly installed opteron.
" Obviously, the protection systems are hurting the loyal consumers (yes, there are some, trust me) as a side effect."
Actually, the protection system for CDs only hurts loyal customers.
The only thing these CD protection scheme seems to be good at is to prevent legit CDs from being recognized in some car's cd readers, and to force music to be played on PC with some half-assed proprietary player that I often found to quite noticeably reduce quality compared to playing the CD normally.
However, there's one thing it's supposed to prevent me to do, ie ripping the CD (I do buys CDs, quite often even albums I already downloaded from the net if I like them, but I prefer to keep them as mp3 to listen at work), but it never ever prevented me to rip a single one. The best I ever seen a cd copy protection do was to make cdex slow. Great achievement.
So, I know people who buy CDs only to find out they must rip and burn them to be able to listen them in their cars.
Or others, like my mother, who once bought a copy-protected CD, saw she couldn't listen to it in her car, returned the CD, and then asked me to download it.
There's an even more perverse consequence to this. It used to not be possible to get refunds on CDs, even if it was unreadable. They exchanged it for a new copy instead.
But now, they know that some CDs just doesn't work with some CD readers, so they are willing to refund them.
So, it makes it possible for people to buy a CD, copy it, then return it.
Therefore, not only CD copy protection are utterly innefficient at preventing pirating, it also punishes legit customers and make them more likely to turn to piracy, and it create loopholes (buy, copy, get refund) that help pirates.
Music majors are shooting themselves in the foot with these things. The companies that sells them these useless protection schemes must be laughing all the way to the bank.