This was a special setup to break the speed record. In commercial use, the fastest tgv currently goes at 320 kmh (200 mph).
And as far as safety goes, how does a handful casualties in 26 years of operation sound? Interestingly, none of them are from derailments, which only resulted in a few passengers suffering minor injuries. This include the world fastest derailment at 294 km/h (182 mph).
Well, one could naturally believe that it's slow because it checks the content of the file for possible markers that it is a file containing protected content, or something like this.
The alternative explanation is that it's slow because vista's coding sucks, which is seems just as likely but is even less flattering.
Basically, is it slow because they are evil, or because they are incompetent? Pick your poison. A file copy using the most expensive desktop OS on the market shouldn't be slow.
I think the only actual purpose of those UAC dialogs is just to shift the blame to the user (even though most probably end up always clicking ok without looking out of habit) if something goes wrong.
Oh, so you're projecting on me you're anger of being modded down. How is that my fault, exactly? I don't agree with modding down for difference of opinion, and I never modded down people for defending an opposite viewpoint to mine myself.
You can't hold me responsible for the actions of the majority here, can you?
As for my opinions, I have formed them myself from 7 years of professional experience of development under windows environment mostly with microsoft tools (which means that a large majority of my time is spent working with microsoft products), and before that using microsoft products when I was a student, and generally having doing programming as a hobby on various systems for about 20 years. So my opinions are based in facts aswell.
Oh, and thanks for my new signature. There is no use debating with someone who just diss your opinions as irrational dogma, therefore I will not try to resume our original discussion from before you threw a tantrum for being modded down.
You think I care about my karma on slashdot? I barely ever read it these days. Karma is pointless anyway except if you like to mod, and I actually don't and rarely do it even when I get modding points. You are the one who seems to be caring way too much about this stuff, really (you claim not to care in some of your insane posts, yet you post as an Anonymous Coward - hypocrisy much?)
I am glad to have been able to clarify what happened, which is even more stupid and less worth getting worked up over than I thought and won't bother with you anymore. The whole thing might be encyclopedia dramatica material though, but I'm lazy so it will probably not come to pass.
responds by silencing the dissenting view with the capabilites given him by being such a slashdot sycophant.
Huh, what? I posted my first reply to you yesterday, and I only checked back today out of boredom and saw there was 10 replies (that I didn't even receive any email notification about), including your crazy ranting over getting banned or something, probably for a totally unrelated reason - but somehow you attribute it to some magical power I would have over slashdot.
I have no idea what the fuck happened here, nor do I care - but I can assure you that I have nothing to do with it. I don't know anybody here.
However, seeing how immature and paranoiac you seem to react about the whole thing, you getting banned for some reason or another doesn't surprise me too much. A lesser being would have tried to figure out what happened by contacting the slashdot team, but you chose to do the right thing and post a boatload of paranoid and immature comments all over the place.
Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if you merely forgot your password and thought I banned you with my mystical black magic powers because you disagreed with me.
Seeing people foaming at the mouth over an internet forum is pretty entertaining. Continue being a good lolcow and reply to this with more insanity if you will.
I bow before your well presented and thought-provoking argumentation. You proved your point quite nicely, but what that point might be could use some clarification.
Myself, I think that your point is that you are a crazed lol-cow on crack.
Why doesn't anybody complain about Safari, or Voyager or Konqueror being bundled with thier respective OS distributions? (Yes, I know Konqueror belongs to KDE, but think Knoppix and the like)
Because those OS distributions are not occupying 90% of the market, and are not essentially shoved down the throat of everyone who wants to buy a PC.
When you have a product that is a monopoly, you have additional rules to follow. It includes not taking advantage of this monopoly (the OS one) to force an unrelated product (IE) on your customers. What is so hard to understand?
But between all the jokes about flying penises and the ritual mocking of the furries, I think SL is going to prove to be historically important in shaping an "avatar space."
I think all the historical importance of SL in the end will be nothing more than a serie of article on something awful. The whole thing is hyped way out of proportions.
The way you construct things in second life is made of failure.
You assemble a bunch of primitives together. People make complicated things by assembling boatloads of ellipsoids and cubes.
The problem is that you end up with something that is not merely "not pretty". Anything complicated looks like utter shit in SL, and involve lots of unnecessary polygons that are not visible but drawn. So it's full of overdraw.
Also, people are free to put different textures on these primitives. In fact, the lack of UV mapping makes it necessary, so you have a boatload of render calls.
Given how awfully slow it is, I'm willing to bet that each primitive is rendered with its own rendercall, or something close.
It also evidently lack occlusion, so even if you're staring at one of those numerous wall with a stretched generic texture that is the staple of SL architecture, it's slow as hell nonetheless because of all of the garbage rendered behind it.
Achieving performance in a 3d game involve a lot of tricks that professional artists like those working at video game companies know.
SL is a virtual world where everything is built using an awful building system, and by amateurs who don't have the slightest idea nor the tools to optimize their objects to render quickly, or in other words it looks like shit and runs like shit.
Factor in the horrible and clunky camera and movement controls and I just can't understand how anyone can withstand that thing.
and could potentially save programmers a great deal of development and debugging time.
No, They could do that by not writing shitty code like most video game programmers in my experience, do. Java won't magically make them better programmers. And it has quite some memory consumption issues. Consoles have a limited amount of memory, you can't carelessly let the heap bloat to hell and back like you can on the desktop.
Their effort seems to be misguided. The case exemplified here shows that they just have way too many people working on that thing, and the overhead reached astronomical proportions.
The company I work for has a similar tendency, on a much smaller scale. We also have a pretty fat, cumbersome and difficult to manage code base with lots of legacy code, and there is this misguided belief that just throwing more people at it will improve things.
"4. Does anyone really care ? If Novell and FSF don't talk, how will they (FSF) stop Novell from using open source code ? They can't, as long as they respect the licencing."
FSF upgrade the license of its open source software to Gplv3 -> Novell can't use them (incompatible with MS agreement), so they are stuck with the last versions licensed with gplv2 -> They now have to maintain it themselves.
The software whose FSF holds the copyright includes gcc, binutils and glibc, so good luck to Novell with that.
Yes, I've seen this. Cube was already nifty and Sauerbraten is indeed very cool.
However, as far as I could tell, while editing the scenery is easy and flexible, adding new kind of entities can't be just done with some scripting and editing some properties.
But this is very cool indeed. With some development, that thing could have the potential to put second life to shame.
Comparing Ogre and Unreal is comparing apples with oranges.
Ogre is only a rendering engine. Unreal is not only that, it include the necessary high level framework, scripting integration, and editing tools to make a game.
There is no open source equivalent of this stuff that I know of at the time. And all that high level and toolset stuff is hard to get right, even for most video game companies who often develop awful solutions for this stuff.
Re:"Links" are not necessarily a fs feature
on
Vista's Limited Symlinks
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
POSIX isn't supposed to be closer to the metal than the native OS api. It's supposed to be a standard, non os-specific way to access files.
It's the job of the OS makers to provide a POSIX implementation that works on top on the native api. You'll find that developers writing cross-platform apps are not fond of having to conditionally use platform specific code, especially in situations like file io that has been standardized for ages.
Yes, for a web page, I agree that XML is more appropriate than JSON. But I think that's because XML is too "rich text document" oriented.
As for abstracting implementation and data format, I sort of agree. But I don't see how XML not allowing arrays or including specifications for numerical types help. Those things are basic data structure just like objects and properties are. You find them in every language.
The only reason I can think of is that XML was originally designed to store rich text documents. The concept of document can be applied to about anything, however. Take a 3d scene graph, for instance. You seldom need text in there.
You do need, however, arrays and numerical values. You also need to be able to represent more general graphs than just a tree, but you have to create your own way for an object to reference another in other ways than an implicit parent/child relation (not that JSON is better on that aspect as far as I know)
I think that the main problem is binding classes and objects from the programming language to a storage format (xml or otherwise). The issue of making the format independent of the implementation is simply an issue of cleanly separating the classes that form the document from the presentation/edition/etc. layer.
I don't see how XML actually help you to make a more implementation independent format, anyway. Any language or format flexible enough to be useful allows an infinite number of bad approachs for each good one.
Code, XML or otherwise, have to be both writable and _readable_ by humans. You cannot work properly on code that is difficult to read.
What I essentially dislike with XML is that people keep using it for task where it is just terrible.
Storing large amount of data in XML? Doesn't scale. You can't access the data randomly, unless you keep an index on the side with offsets into the file for particular pieces of data, but then it's not longer xml. It's XML-with-some-redundant-data-on-the-side-to-overco me-the-shortcomings-of-xml. And don't come up with xml databases, because they're just database that store trees and interface with the application using xml.
Using XML so you don't have to bother writing a parser? You still need to parse SAX events or a DOM to construct something actually useful for your application. You just moved parsing to a higher level of abstraction, but you still need parsing.
Using XML to store large amounts of data? It cannot efficiently store large amount of structured data, so you end up with stupid things like svg using long strings containing a structured, but non xml format (that you will have to parse manually in addition of parsing the sax or dom).
Want to store an array of floating point numbers, or integer values in hexadecimal? Too bad, xml doesn't standardize the representation of such data types. You'll have to decide how to translate them to ascii, and parse them back when reading. "don't write a parser ever again". Yeah, right.
Want to store a huge array of small structured objects containing for instance several attributes in xml? Again, throw scalability out the window because of the redundant tags, or store them in a non structured way (which is kind of a failure for a format intended to store structured data)
I'd much rather use JSON, which has a clean, non uselessly noisy syntax, includes the ability to define arrays, and specifies numerical types.
"Microsoft is not a monopoly, it is just able to use the preferential treatment of the law better than their competitors. If you voted for the State, you are part of the reason that Microsoft has grown. Sure, some will say that they violated anti-trust laws, but those laws have enough loopholes to let any big company get around them."
It is a monopoly. The quality of their product is not a factor affecting their sales because of it. Free market strives to achieve balance by pitting every company against each other and encouraging each of them to be as combative as possible, but this system does not yield a perfect, stable balance. It is bound to be chaotic. So sometimes, it tips in favor of a single company in a particular market.
When a company manage to upset the balance, then whether they like it or not, they have to obey some specific laws so that they won't extend this counter productive unbalance into other markets.
The mission of the state is not primarily to ensure that companies can do all they want, all the time. It is to ensure that free market works, and while it involve letting it work itself most of the time, it also involve intervening when the randomness of it all endangers its primary purpose, which is to have a diverse and balanced marketplace.
They don't have a problem with windows being an OS monopoly. They have a problem with leveraging that monopoly to prevent other companies to compete in other market than operating systems.
I'm toying around with embeddable language interpreters to use in my current hobby project, and I'm very fond of lua.
I recently discovered javascript, which I didn't give much attention before, and I was surprised to discover that it's actually a pretty good language. It pretty much does all the things I like in Lua (functional programming among other things), and even a few more things that could be useful to me.
The downside is that lua currently beats the crap out of it when it comes to performance. The new JIT VM from adobe should reverse this tendency (at least regarding speed, maybe not regarding memory footprint).
Slashdot Mirror
This was a special setup to break the speed record. In commercial use, the fastest tgv currently goes at 320 kmh (200 mph).
And as far as safety goes, how does a handful casualties in 26 years of operation sound? Interestingly, none of them are from derailments, which only resulted in a few passengers suffering minor injuries. This include the world fastest derailment at 294 km/h (182 mph).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV_accidents
Well, one could naturally believe that it's slow because it checks the content of the file for possible markers that it is a file containing protected content, or something like this.
The alternative explanation is that it's slow because vista's coding sucks, which is seems just as likely but is even less flattering.
Basically, is it slow because they are evil, or because they are incompetent? Pick your poison. A file copy using the most expensive desktop OS on the market shouldn't be slow.
French are rude
I'm french and I think you're full of shit.
I think the only actual purpose of those UAC dialogs is just to shift the blame to the user (even though most probably end up always clicking ok without looking out of habit) if something goes wrong.
Tourists worry too much. This is why you print "don't panic" in large, friendly letters on digital guide books.
Oh, so you're projecting on me you're anger of being modded down. How is that my fault, exactly? I don't agree with modding down for difference of opinion, and I never modded down people for defending an opposite viewpoint to mine myself.
You can't hold me responsible for the actions of the majority here, can you?
As for my opinions, I have formed them myself from 7 years of professional experience of development under windows environment mostly with microsoft tools (which means that a large majority of my time is spent working with microsoft products), and before that using microsoft products when I was a student, and generally having doing programming as a hobby on various systems for about 20 years. So my opinions are based in facts aswell.
Oh, and thanks for my new signature.
There is no use debating with someone who just diss your opinions as irrational dogma, therefore I will not try to resume our original discussion from before you threw a tantrum for being modded down.
You think I care about my karma on slashdot? I barely ever read it these days. Karma is pointless anyway except if you like to mod, and I actually don't and rarely do it even when I get modding points.
You are the one who seems to be caring way too much about this stuff, really (you claim not to care in some of your insane posts, yet you post as an Anonymous Coward - hypocrisy much?)
I am glad to have been able to clarify what happened, which is even more stupid and less worth getting worked up over than I thought and won't bother with you anymore. The whole thing might be encyclopedia dramatica material though, but I'm lazy so it will probably not come to pass.
responds by silencing the dissenting view with the capabilites given him by being such a slashdot sycophant.
Huh, what? I posted my first reply to you yesterday, and I only checked back today out of boredom and saw there was 10 replies (that I didn't even receive any email notification about), including your crazy ranting over getting banned or something, probably for a totally unrelated reason - but somehow you attribute it to some magical power I would have over slashdot.
I have no idea what the fuck happened here, nor do I care - but I can assure you that I have nothing to do with it. I don't know anybody here.
However, seeing how immature and paranoiac you seem to react about the whole thing, you getting banned for some reason or another doesn't surprise me too much. A lesser being would have tried to figure out what happened by contacting the slashdot team, but you chose to do the right thing and post a boatload of paranoid and immature comments all over the place.
Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if you merely forgot your password and thought I banned you with my mystical black magic powers because you disagreed with me.
Seeing people foaming at the mouth over an internet forum is pretty entertaining. Continue being a good lolcow and reply to this with more insanity if you will.
I bow before your well presented and thought-provoking argumentation. You proved your point quite nicely, but what that point might be could use some clarification.
Myself, I think that your point is that you are a crazed lol-cow on crack.
Why doesn't anybody complain about Safari, or Voyager or Konqueror being bundled with thier respective OS distributions? (Yes, I know Konqueror belongs to KDE, but think Knoppix and the like)
Because those OS distributions are not occupying 90% of the market, and are not essentially shoved down the throat of everyone who wants to buy a PC.
When you have a product that is a monopoly, you have additional rules to follow. It includes not taking advantage of this monopoly (the OS one) to force an unrelated product (IE) on your customers. What is so hard to understand?
I always wanted to add a maybe tag when it happens.
But really, I love the humor in the slashdot tags: "The Need For A Tagging Standard", tagged with: tag, tagging, and tags.
The "fuckoff" tag on "Is A Bad Attitude Damaging The IT Profession?" was pretty good, too.
Yeah, Second Life is serious fucking business.
But between all the jokes about flying penises and the ritual mocking of the furries, I think SL is going to prove to be historically important in shaping an "avatar space."
I think all the historical importance of SL in the end will be nothing more than a serie of article on something awful. The whole thing is hyped way out of proportions.
The way you construct things in second life is made of failure.
You assemble a bunch of primitives together. People make complicated things by assembling boatloads of ellipsoids and cubes.
The problem is that you end up with something that is not merely "not pretty". Anything complicated looks like utter shit in SL, and involve lots of unnecessary polygons that are not visible but drawn. So it's full of overdraw.
Also, people are free to put different textures on these primitives. In fact, the lack of UV mapping makes it necessary, so you have a boatload of render calls.
Given how awfully slow it is, I'm willing to bet that each primitive is rendered with its own rendercall, or something close.
It also evidently lack occlusion, so even if you're staring at one of those numerous wall with a stretched generic texture that is the staple of SL architecture, it's slow as hell nonetheless because of all of the garbage rendered behind it.
Achieving performance in a 3d game involve a lot of tricks that professional artists like those working at video game companies know.
SL is a virtual world where everything is built using an awful building system, and by amateurs who don't have the slightest idea nor the tools to optimize their objects to render quickly, or in other words it looks like shit and runs like shit.
Factor in the horrible and clunky camera and movement controls and I just can't understand how anyone can withstand that thing.
It might happen, but I don't think the shitty second life technology is what will become it.
and could potentially save programmers a great deal of development and debugging time.
No, They could do that by not writing shitty code like most video game programmers in my experience, do.
Java won't magically make them better programmers. And it has quite some memory consumption issues.
Consoles have a limited amount of memory, you can't carelessly let the heap bloat to hell and back like you can on the desktop.
Their effort seems to be misguided. The case exemplified here shows that they just have way too many people working on that thing, and the overhead reached astronomical proportions.
The company I work for has a similar tendency, on a much smaller scale. We also have a pretty fat, cumbersome and difficult to manage code base with lots of legacy code, and there is this misguided belief that just throwing more people at it will improve things.
Don't they know about the mythical man-month?
"4. Does anyone really care ? If Novell and FSF don't talk, how will they (FSF) stop Novell from using open source code ? They can't, as long as they respect the licencing."
FSF upgrade the license of its open source software to Gplv3 -> Novell can't use them (incompatible with MS agreement), so they are stuck with the last versions licensed with gplv2 -> They now have to maintain it themselves.
The software whose FSF holds the copyright includes gcc, binutils and glibc, so good luck to Novell with that.
All the GNU tools bash, cp, mv, rm, etc have copyrights owned by the FSF.
And more importantly, gcc, binutils and glibc. Good luck to Novell to maintain those all by themselves.
Yes, I've seen this. Cube was already nifty and Sauerbraten is indeed very cool.
However, as far as I could tell, while editing the scenery is easy and flexible, adding new kind of entities can't be just done with some scripting and editing some properties.
But this is very cool indeed. With some development, that thing could have the potential to put second life to shame.
Comparing Ogre and Unreal is comparing apples with oranges.
Ogre is only a rendering engine. Unreal is not only that, it include the necessary high level framework, scripting integration, and editing tools to make a game.
There is no open source equivalent of this stuff that I know of at the time. And all that high level and toolset stuff is hard to get right, even for most video game companies who often develop awful solutions for this stuff.
POSIX isn't supposed to be closer to the metal than the native OS api. It's supposed to be a standard, non os-specific way to access files.
It's the job of the OS makers to provide a POSIX implementation that works on top on the native api. You'll find that developers writing cross-platform apps are not fond of having to conditionally use platform specific code, especially in situations like file io that has been standardized for ages.
Yes, for a web page, I agree that XML is more appropriate than JSON. But I think that's because XML is too "rich text document" oriented.
As for abstracting implementation and data format, I sort of agree. But I don't see how XML not allowing arrays or including specifications for numerical types help. Those things are basic data structure just like objects and properties are. You find them in every language.
The only reason I can think of is that XML was originally designed to store rich text documents.
The concept of document can be applied to about anything, however. Take a 3d scene graph, for instance. You seldom need text in there.
You do need, however, arrays and numerical values. You also need to be able to represent more general graphs than just a tree, but you have to create your own way for an object to reference another in other ways than an implicit parent/child relation (not that JSON is better on that aspect as far as I know)
I think that the main problem is binding classes and objects from the programming language to a storage format (xml or otherwise). The issue of making the format independent of the implementation is simply an issue of cleanly separating the classes that form the document from the presentation/edition/etc. layer.
I don't see how XML actually help you to make a more implementation independent format, anyway. Any language or format flexible enough to be useful allows an infinite number of bad approachs for each good one.
XML is a terrible format for manual editing.
o me-the-shortcomings-of-xml.
Code, XML or otherwise, have to be both writable and _readable_ by humans. You cannot work properly on code that is difficult to read.
What I essentially dislike with XML is that people keep using it for task where it is just terrible.
Storing large amount of data in XML? Doesn't scale. You can't access the data randomly, unless you keep an index on the side with offsets into the file for particular pieces of data, but then it's not longer xml. It's XML-with-some-redundant-data-on-the-side-to-overc
And don't come up with xml databases, because they're just database that store trees and interface with the application using xml.
Using XML so you don't have to bother writing a parser? You still need to parse SAX events or a DOM to construct something actually useful for your application. You just moved parsing to a higher level of abstraction, but you still need parsing.
Using XML to store large amounts of data? It cannot efficiently store large amount of structured data, so you end up with stupid things like svg using long strings containing a structured, but non xml format (that you will have to parse manually in addition of parsing the sax or dom).
Want to store an array of floating point numbers, or integer values in hexadecimal? Too bad, xml doesn't standardize the representation of such data types. You'll have to decide how to translate them to ascii, and parse them back when reading.
"don't write a parser ever again". Yeah, right.
Want to store a huge array of small structured objects containing for instance several attributes in xml? Again, throw scalability out the window because of the redundant tags, or store them in a non structured way (which is kind of a failure for a format intended to store structured data)
I'd much rather use JSON, which has a clean, non uselessly noisy syntax, includes the ability to define arrays, and specifies numerical types.
Sounds like something that could have came out of Renault's car model name generator (Twingo, Kangoo, Logan, Koleos...)
"Microsoft is not a monopoly, it is just able to use the preferential treatment of the law better than their competitors. If you voted for the State, you are part of the reason that Microsoft has grown. Sure, some will say that they violated anti-trust laws, but those laws have enough loopholes to let any big company get around them."
It is a monopoly. The quality of their product is not a factor affecting their sales because of it.
Free market strives to achieve balance by pitting every company against each other and encouraging each of them to be as combative as possible, but this system does not yield a perfect, stable balance. It is bound to be chaotic. So sometimes, it tips in favor of a single company in a particular market.
When a company manage to upset the balance, then whether they like it or not, they have to obey some specific laws so that they won't extend this counter productive unbalance into other markets.
The mission of the state is not primarily to ensure that companies can do all they want, all the time. It is to ensure that free market works, and while it involve letting it work itself most of the time, it also involve intervening when the randomness of it all endangers its primary purpose, which is to have a diverse and balanced marketplace.
They don't have a problem with windows being an OS monopoly. They have a problem with leveraging that monopoly to prevent other companies to compete in other market than operating systems.
I'm toying around with embeddable language interpreters to use in my current hobby project, and I'm very fond of lua.
I recently discovered javascript, which I didn't give much attention before, and I was surprised to discover that it's actually a pretty good language. It pretty much does all the things I like in Lua (functional programming among other things), and even a few more things that could be useful to me.
The downside is that lua currently beats the crap out of it when it comes to performance.
The new JIT VM from adobe should reverse this tendency (at least regarding speed, maybe not regarding memory footprint).
It might become a very interesting choice.