Yeah! How does this thing run under Wine? I'm pretty happy with IE6 on Linux. It's faster than running IE natively under Windows.... native port? The closest thing I remember was the IE port for Solaris. What a hunk of crap.
First, it should add numbers accurately. Nothing fancy, just count what each persons votes for and make sure it adds up to the totals.
Second, don't allow poll workers to "adjust" votes with administration screens. If the machine can count 'em right in the first place, you don't need to "fine tune" them.
Third, the machine should work as intended. They shouldn't lock up when you use the touch screen (like the "touchscreen" Diebolds that now require mice).
Fourth, they should be at least as secure against hacking as say... an ATM (another Diebold product, that actually works!)
Fifth, print all electronic votes on a government issued printer roll for verification. Get the treasury to design it for anti-counterfeiting.
Sixth, don't allow a company that funds election campaigns to design voting machinery.
I've been waiting for something like this for a long time... Hiring voice actors isn't always feasible. I can work on engine code no problem, but my voice isn't the prettiest. Without repositories like this, projects like Sphinx can have a considerable barrier to entry for the uninitiated. The variety in sources can only improve quality.
Bubble sort is super efficient on lists of less than three elements. 'Leetness isn't determined by the technology. Java has lamers too. Their called college freshman.
Consider for a moment, that keeping the XP experience as crappy as possible, will only make Vista look that much better. Trashing obsolete products is good for business - good for microsoft. If XP becomes a heaping pile of garbage, users might be compelled to upgrade to the next future-heaping-pile-of-garbage sooner.
Actually, this is probably the result of a stupid, but really hot, marketing intern making decisions.
I've written distributed applications using: - Java EE - CORBA using C, C++, Pascal, and Java - Microsoft DCOM - Various proprietary protocols
AJAX isn't really a distributed software development technology... it's a sloppy mixture of features written by a varied group of contributors. What makes it interesting, is that no matter how implemented, the goal is the same. I think that's what the writer of this article was trying to articulate. With Java, there's only ONE way to do anything. Drink the punch, or don't use Java. If you dare suggest that any part of Java needs work, you get a room full of angry & militant Java advocates ready to stone you into submission. I'd like to say that I'm exaggerating, and I am, but only a little. I too wish that Java engineers could think outside of the "sandbox," instead of encouraging others to make due.
Gentoo is not an end-user distribution. Despite how "easy to use" it may or may not be, it will always be a developer distro. Rare exceptions may be meta-distributions built on top of Gentoo for end users.
I grow quite tired of people lamenting how much "harder" it is to install Gentoo than Red-Hat. Of course it is. They're totally different beasts. It's not unlike complaining that your Ferrari F50 doesn't steer like your Chevy 4-door sedan... or that the Ferrari takes 10 minutes for the engine to warm up... or that the Ferrari takes more maintenance. Of course it does.
I'm a registered owner of SoundJam for OS9. I found out that my registration fee wouldn't entitle me to upgrades, because Apple bought the MP3 player. If you look (not very hard), iTunes is SoundJam enhanced a bit. Even if they don't share any of the same code today, iTunes 1.0 probably did.
Even if Apple did see this "product", it's clear that Apple engineers didn't "rip off" this guy... it was someone else. Can you really blame a company for its acquisitions?
Why isn't this chump going after Nullsoft / AOL / Time Warner? I'm pretty sure that WinAmp predated both iTunes and SoundJam. Why does every waste of sperm have to try to get a piece of other people's success?
It's one thing to imagine a computer playing music... it's another to actually make it work. I imagine having sex with my laptop. I'm not going to file a patent though, since I have no idea how to make it work. I'm sure not going to sue the genius that fulfills my dreams. I'll just buy their product and be done with it.
Conversely, vim also has all of these features and more. If you're coming from emacs, you can set vim to use emacs-style keyboard bindings, if you wish. Some emacs-style completion is supported by default.
My colleagues and I had an all out war (emacs vs. vim). In the end, we discovered that they are both just as feature complete and able to emulate each other quite well. Emacs could be a tad more efficient, as it requires more RAM, disk space, and CPU time than vim. It's a non-issue if you have enough resources. For us, it was an issue (flash drive).
In any case, if you are willing to invest the time to master either emacs or vim, I think you'd be best served. Graphical IDE's are often easier on the eyes, but I've yet to find one as customizable. All the features you'd ever need can be had in either of these two editors and they really are superb at what they do.
In a society that hates fair use, you simply cannot have an OS that assimilates ideas that might be redistributed elsewhere. Lawyers would force DRM on every I/O & messaging call. Of course, this article doesn't even try to get that deep.
The sci-fi bend is more along the lines of A.I., which disturbs me. Not because I don't want my computer to take over the world, but the feeble-minded author seemed more excited about the prospect of needing to do less than he was about being able to do more.
My grandpa always said, "You can't turn crap to gold." Had Snakes on a Plane been Oscar award winner material, the Internet hype might have made a difference.
I guess everyone doesn't believe everything they read online anymore. Movie studios will need to find another gimick, because everybody knows they won't try making better movies.
I almost agree with ignoring him... but it's litigious asses like him that destroy fun. They won't stop until all video games are as fun as a night at Morman bible study. I don't think I'm exaggerating.
It's not just games. Lawyers have completely destroyed the fun of playgrounds. As a parent, that pisses me off. You definitely can't have anything that spins because someone might fall off or get dizzy. Nothing too tall. Big slides & swings? Not a chance. It's even hard to find sand in a playground anymore, because a kid might throw some in another kid's eye.
Getting hurt when you do stupid things is an important life lesson that lawyers are ruining. Elementary schools have banned nearly every competative sport. No baseball, football, handball, volleyball, tennis, running or tag! No after school programs. No skateboards, rollerskates, or scooters. And definitely nothing that might offend anyone for any reason at all. Maybe Columbine would be less likely to happen if people like Mr. Jack didn't make life suck so badly for the kids he wants to "protect."
Mortal Kombat didn't cause America's youth to murder their parents any more than heavy metal music did during the 80's. Despite all of the concerns about young people holding hands, dancing, watching violent films, listening to gangsta rap, and such... violent crime is down. Youth crime is down. Why can guys like this spout off to politicians when their "concerns" have absolutely no rational basis? I'm not for book burning and I'm definitely against censorship for no good reason.
If Thompson is allowed to continue his bogus mislead fight, games will suck bigtime... like playgrounds, school recess, and everything else about childhood that guys like him want to destroy. He wants to make sure that every kid is having a fun time the Jack Thompson way, and that scares the hell out of me.
Globals aren't the only place that memory leaks occur in Java. Bad Java code can "leak" memory just as badly as C++. Poorly formed closures can definitely cause your memory to waste away. Dealing with garbage collected languages isn't always as straight forward as proponents often suggest.
Correction: You send objects the "autorelease" message to use autorelease pools. "release" is the same as "delete object_here;" Otherwise, the general idea of my posting is the same.
Yes, but in Objective C there ARE standards for who frees memory. Whomever allocates an object must free it. This seemingly difficult methodology is accomplished with auto_release pools.
When you return a new instance of an object, you send it a release message, which adds it to the auto release pool. Once your event loop is complete, every object in the pool is destroyed. If the recipient wants to keep a returned object around for a little bit longer, it sends it a retain message, which removes it from the pool.
In practice, this method is exceptionally simple to use. The overhead is larger than manual destruction, but much less than garbage collection.
Autorelease pools are great because object destruction is delayed until the next event loop iteration. This means that lazy access to the object, immediately after release, will work without penalty.
Objective C has one of the most elegant reference counting implementations on the planet. Virtually no thinking at all is required to manage memory. Cyclical relationships, which shouldn't exist in decent code, are its only limitation. It's also very fast. Anyone who argues that memory management in Objective C is difficult, should have their head examined.
Garbage collection is a step backward, IMO, but every language seems to be moving in this direction. I really do believe that resource awareness is crucial to efficient programming. Garbage collection encourages lazy programming habits, which I've seen in quite a few Java developers. Bad habits, once bred, are hard to get rid of.
Now, instead of profiling memory for leaks, you can profile the garbage collector, which I predict will be just as much of a headache as tracking down a memory leak. In the end, little work is saved, at least from my experience debugging other developers' Java applications. I won't know for sure until I play with XCode 3.
If the lead developers don't want to support Oracle, or anything else for that matter, then don't. If your userbase really wants Oracle support, then they can rally some developers together to help contribute to the effort. It's not the lead team's job to support things that are outside their areas of expertise or interest. If the feature has merit, someone will contribute. That's how the opensource ecosystem is supposed to work.
Users tend to have this misnotion that opensource developers are obligated beyond their already immense contributions. They don't understand that this kind of development is primarily a volunteer effort. The demands and expectations they have impose on the contributors' own personal time. I think it's best to let *developers* decide where there efforts are best spent and for users to be more grateful that the project even exists.
No, NURBS aren't supported in hardware, but bezier patches are. It would be great if OpenGL supported them as well as some chipsets do. You can't do everything with bezier curves that you can do with NURBS, but you can get pretty darn close.
Granted, OpenGL extensions aren't that bad, for the reasons you cited. I'm just tired of supporting ATI-specific *and* Nvidia-specific extensions. The vendor-specific junk has got to go.
What about nightly backups? Even if your drives spin down at 5pm, they'll have to spin back up between 9pm and 4am for tape backup (or other time block).
All of my servers, even at home, use RAID. The idea of 18 drives starting and stopping makes me cringe. The power saved by spinning them down is potentially lost by the amount of power it takes just to start them back up. Then there's added stress to the Taiwanese power supplies, which thank God, are redundant on my systems.
Each drive starts 5 seconds before the next to prevent the UPS from being tapped out. If I start them too close together, the UPS beeps, complains, and trips a fuse. That's one and a half minutes before the RAID is completely online... assuming that the requested data isn't already cached, which makes starting the drives a total waste of time. This is assuming that hybrid drives will even be supported by suitable RAID controllers.
I just don't see how hybrid drives work in a real IT department. A workgroup server in a five person company... sure, but that's hardly enterprise class. A server than doesn't have RAID, for redundancy alone, is bad form. Starting and stopping the drives will only add to the wear and tear making RAID that much more necessary.
Pop in a $99 USB flash drive for log files and use the standard power management features in your O/S, and you have a hybrid solution today. I honestly don't think hybrid drives will be that much better.
OpenGL has been stagnate for quite some time. Most of the newer features of 3D cards have only been accessible with their horrible extensions interface. Well, it's not horrible, but it's not ideal either. At a minimum, better support for pixel shaders (nearly a decade old feature) is much desired. Better support for NURBS & subdivision surfaces (without using evaluators) would rock. I doubt that things like this are on the agenda.
OpenGL, IMHO, has no place on mobile phones... not yet anyway. Poor Java stacks, pathetic amounts of RAM, and CPU's slower than my TI-82 calculator make phones a questionable 3D platform. How on earth can OpenGL grow if it always has to support the lowest common denominator.
I'd hate to see the focus change toward embedded systems and not have enough energy dedicated toward advancing desktop development, where OpenGL has a very important role. Outside of DirectX, it's the only game in town... especially on the Mac & Linux.
I write all of my 3D apps on top of OpenGL, so this decision is very important to me. I like that OpenGL will finally get some much needed attention, I just hope it's the kind that benefits me... not just teenagers and their cell phones.
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Yeah! How does this thing run under Wine? I'm pretty happy with IE6 on Linux. It's faster than running IE natively under Windows. ... native port? The closest thing I remember was the IE port for Solaris. What a hunk of crap.
Some kind of wicked crypto couldn't be used on each entry?
Is all the environmental hype about styrofoam over blown? Will some ancient civilization mine for it like we mine for oil? ... or will it disappear?
First, it should add numbers accurately. Nothing fancy, just count what each persons votes for and make sure it adds up to the totals.
Second, don't allow poll workers to "adjust" votes with administration screens. If the machine can count 'em right in the first place, you don't need to "fine tune" them.
Third, the machine should work as intended. They shouldn't lock up when you use the touch screen (like the "touchscreen" Diebolds that now require mice).
Fourth, they should be at least as secure against hacking as say... an ATM (another Diebold product, that actually works!)
Fifth, print all electronic votes on a government issued printer roll for verification. Get the treasury to design it for anti-counterfeiting.
Sixth, don't allow a company that funds election campaigns to design voting machinery.
I've been waiting for something like this for a long time... Hiring voice actors isn't always feasible. I can work on engine code no problem, but my voice isn't the prettiest. Without repositories like this, projects like Sphinx can have a considerable barrier to entry for the uninitiated. The variety in sources can only improve quality.
Bubble sort is super efficient on lists of less than three elements. 'Leetness isn't determined by the technology. Java has lamers too. Their called college freshman.
Consider for a moment, that keeping the XP experience as crappy as possible, will only make Vista look that much better. Trashing obsolete products is good for business - good for microsoft. If XP becomes a heaping pile of garbage, users might be compelled to upgrade to the next future-heaping-pile-of-garbage sooner.
Actually, this is probably the result of a stupid, but really hot, marketing intern making decisions.
I've written distributed applications using:
- Java EE
- CORBA using C, C++, Pascal, and Java
- Microsoft DCOM
- Various proprietary protocols
AJAX isn't really a distributed software development technology... it's a sloppy mixture of features written by a varied group of contributors. What makes it interesting, is that no matter how implemented, the goal is the same. I think that's what the writer of this article was trying to articulate. With Java, there's only ONE way to do anything. Drink the punch, or don't use Java. If you dare suggest that any part of Java needs work, you get a room full of angry & militant Java advocates ready to stone you into submission. I'd like to say that I'm exaggerating, and I am, but only a little. I too wish that Java engineers could think outside of the "sandbox," instead of encouraging others to make due.
Gentoo is not an end-user distribution. Despite how "easy to use" it may or may not be, it will always be a developer distro. Rare exceptions may be meta-distributions built on top of Gentoo for end users.
I grow quite tired of people lamenting how much "harder" it is to install Gentoo than Red-Hat. Of course it is. They're totally different beasts. It's not unlike complaining that your Ferrari F50 doesn't steer like your Chevy 4-door sedan... or that the Ferrari takes 10 minutes for the engine to warm up... or that the Ferrari takes more maintenance. Of course it does.
I'm a registered owner of SoundJam for OS9. I found out that my registration fee wouldn't entitle me to upgrades, because Apple bought the MP3 player. If you look (not very hard), iTunes is SoundJam enhanced a bit. Even if they don't share any of the same code today, iTunes 1.0 probably did.
Even if Apple did see this "product", it's clear that Apple engineers didn't "rip off" this guy... it was someone else. Can you really blame a company for its acquisitions?
Why isn't this chump going after Nullsoft / AOL / Time Warner? I'm pretty sure that WinAmp predated both iTunes and SoundJam. Why does every waste of sperm have to try to get a piece of other people's success?
It's one thing to imagine a computer playing music... it's another to actually make it work. I imagine having sex with my laptop. I'm not going to file a patent though, since I have no idea how to make it work. I'm sure not going to sue the genius that fulfills my dreams. I'll just buy their product and be done with it.
Conversely, vim also has all of these features and more. If you're coming from emacs, you can set vim to use emacs-style keyboard bindings, if you wish. Some emacs-style completion is supported by default.
My colleagues and I had an all out war (emacs vs. vim). In the end, we discovered that they are both just as feature complete and able to emulate each other quite well. Emacs could be a tad more efficient, as it requires more RAM, disk space, and CPU time than vim. It's a non-issue if you have enough resources. For us, it was an issue (flash drive).
In any case, if you are willing to invest the time to master either emacs or vim, I think you'd be best served. Graphical IDE's are often easier on the eyes, but I've yet to find one as customizable. All the features you'd ever need can be had in either of these two editors and they really are superb at what they do.
In a society that hates fair use, you simply cannot have an OS that assimilates ideas that might be redistributed elsewhere. Lawyers would force DRM on every I/O & messaging call. Of course, this article doesn't even try to get that deep.
The sci-fi bend is more along the lines of A.I., which disturbs me. Not because I don't want my computer to take over the world, but the feeble-minded author seemed more excited about the prospect of needing to do less than he was about being able to do more.
My grandpa always said, "You can't turn crap to gold." Had Snakes on a Plane been Oscar award winner material, the Internet hype might have made a difference.
I guess everyone doesn't believe everything they read online anymore. Movie studios will need to find another gimick, because everybody knows they won't try making better movies.
I've worked for this man. He seriously knows what he's talking about.
I find that only hunt-and-peckers hate the key. Sorry if you can't type fast enough to appreciate the value.
If you want to talk about wasted keys, how about:
- Scroll Lock
- The Windows Key
- Break / Pause
- Everything above F12
I almost agree with ignoring him... but it's litigious asses like him that destroy fun. They won't stop until all video games are as fun as a night at Morman bible study. I don't think I'm exaggerating.
It's not just games. Lawyers have completely destroyed the fun of playgrounds. As a parent, that pisses me off. You definitely can't have anything that spins because someone might fall off or get dizzy. Nothing too tall. Big slides & swings? Not a chance. It's even hard to find sand in a playground anymore, because a kid might throw some in another kid's eye.
Getting hurt when you do stupid things is an important life lesson that lawyers are ruining. Elementary schools have banned nearly every competative sport. No baseball, football, handball, volleyball, tennis, running or tag! No after school programs. No skateboards, rollerskates, or scooters. And definitely nothing that might offend anyone for any reason at all. Maybe Columbine would be less likely to happen if people like Mr. Jack didn't make life suck so badly for the kids he wants to "protect."
Mortal Kombat didn't cause America's youth to murder their parents any more than heavy metal music did during the 80's. Despite all of the concerns about young people holding hands, dancing, watching violent films, listening to gangsta rap, and such... violent crime is down. Youth crime is down. Why can guys like this spout off to politicians when their "concerns" have absolutely no rational basis? I'm not for book burning and I'm definitely against censorship for no good reason.
If Thompson is allowed to continue his bogus mislead fight, games will suck bigtime... like playgrounds, school recess, and everything else about childhood that guys like him want to destroy. He wants to make sure that every kid is having a fun time the Jack Thompson way, and that scares the hell out of me.
Globals aren't the only place that memory leaks occur in Java. Bad Java code can "leak" memory just as badly as C++. Poorly formed closures can definitely cause your memory to waste away. Dealing with garbage collected languages isn't always as straight forward as proponents often suggest.
Correction: You send objects the "autorelease" message to use autorelease pools. "release" is the same as "delete object_here;" Otherwise, the general idea of my posting is the same.
Yes, but in Objective C there ARE standards for who frees memory. Whomever allocates an object must free it. This seemingly difficult methodology is accomplished with auto_release pools. When you return a new instance of an object, you send it a release message, which adds it to the auto release pool. Once your event loop is complete, every object in the pool is destroyed. If the recipient wants to keep a returned object around for a little bit longer, it sends it a retain message, which removes it from the pool. In practice, this method is exceptionally simple to use. The overhead is larger than manual destruction, but much less than garbage collection. Autorelease pools are great because object destruction is delayed until the next event loop iteration. This means that lazy access to the object, immediately after release, will work without penalty.
Objective C has one of the most elegant reference counting implementations on the planet. Virtually no thinking at all is required to manage memory. Cyclical relationships, which shouldn't exist in decent code, are its only limitation. It's also very fast. Anyone who argues that memory management in Objective C is difficult, should have their head examined.
Garbage collection is a step backward, IMO, but every language seems to be moving in this direction. I really do believe that resource awareness is crucial to efficient programming. Garbage collection encourages lazy programming habits, which I've seen in quite a few Java developers. Bad habits, once bred, are hard to get rid of.
Now, instead of profiling memory for leaks, you can profile the garbage collector, which I predict will be just as much of a headache as tracking down a memory leak. In the end, little work is saved, at least from my experience debugging other developers' Java applications. I won't know for sure until I play with XCode 3.
So modchips will be available when?
If the lead developers don't want to support Oracle, or anything else for that matter, then don't. If your userbase really wants Oracle support, then they can rally some developers together to help contribute to the effort. It's not the lead team's job to support things that are outside their areas of expertise or interest. If the feature has merit, someone will contribute. That's how the opensource ecosystem is supposed to work.
Users tend to have this misnotion that opensource developers are obligated beyond their already immense contributions. They don't understand that this kind of development is primarily a volunteer effort. The demands and expectations they have impose on the contributors' own personal time. I think it's best to let *developers* decide where there efforts are best spent and for users to be more grateful that the project even exists.
No, NURBS aren't supported in hardware, but bezier patches are. It would be great if OpenGL supported them as well as some chipsets do. You can't do everything with bezier curves that you can do with NURBS, but you can get pretty darn close.
Granted, OpenGL extensions aren't that bad, for the reasons you cited. I'm just tired of supporting ATI-specific *and* Nvidia-specific extensions. The vendor-specific junk has got to go.
What about nightly backups? Even if your drives spin down at 5pm, they'll have to spin back up between 9pm and 4am for tape backup (or other time block).
All of my servers, even at home, use RAID. The idea of 18 drives starting and stopping makes me cringe. The power saved by spinning them down is potentially lost by the amount of power it takes just to start them back up. Then there's added stress to the Taiwanese power supplies, which thank God, are redundant on my systems.
Each drive starts 5 seconds before the next to prevent the UPS from being tapped out. If I start them too close together, the UPS beeps, complains, and trips a fuse. That's one and a half minutes before the RAID is completely online... assuming that the requested data isn't already cached, which makes starting the drives a total waste of time. This is assuming that hybrid drives will even be supported by suitable RAID controllers.
I just don't see how hybrid drives work in a real IT department. A workgroup server in a five person company... sure, but that's hardly enterprise class. A server than doesn't have RAID, for redundancy alone, is bad form. Starting and stopping the drives will only add to the wear and tear making RAID that much more necessary.
Pop in a $99 USB flash drive for log files and use the standard power management features in your O/S, and you have a hybrid solution today. I honestly don't think hybrid drives will be that much better.
OpenGL has been stagnate for quite some time. Most of the newer features of 3D cards have only been accessible with their horrible extensions interface. Well, it's not horrible, but it's not ideal either. At a minimum, better support for pixel shaders (nearly a decade old feature) is much desired. Better support for NURBS & subdivision surfaces (without using evaluators) would rock. I doubt that things like this are on the agenda.
OpenGL, IMHO, has no place on mobile phones... not yet anyway. Poor Java stacks, pathetic amounts of RAM, and CPU's slower than my TI-82 calculator make phones a questionable 3D platform. How on earth can OpenGL grow if it always has to support the lowest common denominator.
I'd hate to see the focus change toward embedded systems and not have enough energy dedicated toward advancing desktop development, where OpenGL has a very important role. Outside of DirectX, it's the only game in town... especially on the Mac & Linux.
I write all of my 3D apps on top of OpenGL, so this decision is very important to me. I like that OpenGL will finally get some much needed attention, I just hope it's the kind that benefits me... not just teenagers and their cell phones.