The military has been using virtual reality for years now, just not exactly in this form...
I'm talking about flight simulators. They perfectly model the inside of a cockpit, hook the thing up to hydraulics and have an entire room full of minicomputers to drive the simulation with SGI Onyx machines for modeling the landscape and entities. The scenery is provided by 8 projectors which display the surroundings on a curved reflective screen just outside cockpit windows.
These multi-million dollar machines are quite impressive definitely a lot more fun than X-Plane. Machines at separate military bases can even be linked up together for the ultimate multiplayer flight sim.
Getting to check one of these out has definitely been one of the highlights of my life as a geek. I decided that being a systems programmer / maintainer or developer for flight simulator could be a very entertaining use of my future career. I already have the avionics background, I would just need the CS degree and maybe a class or two at Embry-Riddle...
My mom and I have a tradition of getting a Far Side calendar for each other every christmas. I was looking at it and 2002 is supposed to be the last year for the calendar. (For real, this time.)
Woohoo! I bought that awhile back, it's definitely worth the money. There are a LOT of pages and a LOT of art, it takes a long time to get through if you take a fairly long look at each page and read all the passages.
Actually, contratry to the article, I started out on the Tandy 1000TX. Great machine, I remember playing Marble Madness, Thexder, and Sega Outrun on it in 1988. It was without a doubt the top of the line gaming machine in its day, although it was *very* expensive.
After the 286 started really showing its age, I bought an SNES and didn't see much of a difference in graphics and sound until some of the better games starting coming out. (Donkey Kong Country, Street Fighter II, Final Fantasy 6, etc)
Right, in the PSX's day, 2MB was a huge amount of memory for a console. Prior to that, much less memory was typically used because the storage medium of choice, the ROM cartrige, could be accessed extremely quickly.
But I've always had the impression that video game manufacturers have always had the right idea. They make the hardware extremely simple and let the programmers have free reign over how it's used. If you've ever read up on console hardware design, the first thing you'll notice is how much it resembles the basic layout of examples used in Computer Science classes. The only two things that a video game console needs to are push pixels and be able to move data around very quickly. The first is usually met with some special graphics rendering hardware and the second is achieved by giving the hardware an extremely simple but flexible and fast design.
Because of this, I initially believed the X-Box was doomed to fail simply because it was based on PC hardware. Typical PC hardware is so overly complex because the kind of software that runs on a PC... it wouldn't surprise me to hear that a modern PC game goes through a dozen or more layers of software (and hardware, think of the CISC -> RISC tranlation in modern Pentiums) before you get to the point where you're actually shooting at the bad guys.
But despite its PC origins and also despite my typically anti-Microsoft attitude (:P), I believe the X-Box is a pretty nifty piece of kit and will do quite well on the market.
I just hope M$ doesn't use the same business tactics with its console that it does with its operating systems... though I have a feeling that Nintendo and Sony would be much more difficult adversaries than Apple, Netscape, etc. I look foward to seeing how this three-way war turns out.
Try deleting ~/.mozilla (or applicable profile / preferences directory). This usually fixes a lot of stuff for me, especially when upgrading to a new Mozilla version.
I think I agree with your agrument more than the parent post.
First off, 90% of all hands-on IT jobs are probably rather solitary in nature. The only way you would go for a job in IT (programming, sysadmin, or whatever) would be if you didn't mind being not bothered by other pesky humans or if you already had a rich social web outside of your career. I fall into the former category.
I mean, if geeks are so socially ept, then why do they have to make an actual effort to form user groups just to meet each other in real life...
Hardware PCMCIA modems are not as difficult to find as you imply... just check a Linux hardware database or run some searches on Google before buying.
My Linksys PCMLM56k+ (which is both a 10/100 ethernet and 56k modem card) has never given me any trouble in Linux.
But now I can leave that card at home when traveling, since the LTwindom drivers seem to work quite well on my laptop. The only glitch is that there is no sound output, but I can handle that.
I've been following the open source software community for quite a while now, and prior to that, the shareware community.
And I have seen lots of this before. A guy works hard and endless hours trying to perfect his code, his program becomes popular, and then not long after, the critics and flames come along. The writers of the software can't deal with the fact that newbies ask too many questions, or that (heaven forbid) someone decides to extoll his opinions on why the program in question sucks. The pressure mounts, the author gets frustrated and then he gives up and quits.
This is not the way to do it. Like someone else mentioned, flames, critics, and newbies all mean that your program is popular. If it sucked, it wouldn't be popular. Some (not the majority) of open source software writers expect that if their program rocks, they'll be Linus Torvalds overnight. (This is where my habit of pessimism comes in handy.)
Most open source programmers get their reward for their time and effort in knowing that their code is good, their code is useful, and people are using it. That's it, nothing more, nothing less.
You take bug reports, you answer the polite questions (while ignoring the stupid ones), and you thank those who have helped out with testing or the code itself. If the flames get too rough, you just sit back and say to yourself, "Self, this is *my* program and *I* know it's good, so fuck everyone else."
To this Christoph guy, if he reads Slashdot: While it is very unfortunate that the events you list above occured, you need to accept the fact that developing software in the public's eye comes with these downfalls. If you get into another project and begin to face the same problems, do yourself and the open source community a favor. Don't give up quite so easily the next time.
Agreed. You might as well hope for a FreeBSD / Plan9 merge or something on that order.
Don't forget, people, that Linux is a kernel, not an operating system. The interview mentioned that certain code from Linux was used in Hurd, but a merging of the two is simply not going to happen.
That aside, with the GPL, Linus has very little to say should someone try and merge Linux and Hurd.:P
That may be so, but dont expect the opposite and rely on slashdot to only run the stories you want. I bet if slashdot wasnt running stories on kernel updates that stories would still be submitted every release.
CmdrTaco has stated on many occasions and in many interviews that the news that gets posted to slashdot is only that which interests him. Nobody else. Except maybe the other staff at/.. And it's not going to change no matter how much bitching goes on.
Given the state of the economy and the fall of the dotcoms, I'd say many of those smaller independent sites would have fallen a long time ago without OSDN supporting them.
That's what I meant by contributing to the community.
Nice ideas, but keep in mind that Slashdot (and probably Slash, at heart) isn't nearly as flexible with page layout as The Register is. Register webmasters can throw in ads and boxes and stuff at will, but Slashdot probably[1] can't because their engine isn't flexible enough for that.
1. I say probably, because, well... in 4 years Slashdot has had the same exact look and layout. I always presumed that this was because it was simply too hard to change. Yes, I've seen web sites that use the Slash engine look radically different from Slashdot, but Slashdot is a much bigger beast to keep stable.
I tried Guidescope back in the early days and didn't like it much. Most annoying thing was the floating control panel or whatever.
I use good old junkbuster. The blockfile is abso-friggin-loutely huge, but I've only added 8 or so lines to my own. It's pretty rare that I come across a banner ad that it doesn't block (but can with 30 seconds of work).
As for paying to view ad-free Slashdot... That's something I just might do. Not to get rid of the ads (dur, I have junkbuster remember), but to support the site. My only conflict on this is that as time wears on, I seem to visit Slashdot less and less in favour of other sites that are more focused on their respective topics.
In light of this, I would probably subscribe off and on. Sub for one month, block the ads for a few after, and sub again here and there to simply show my appreciation. That's assuming the subscription is a monthly fee type of thing.
Oh, and to the operators of Slashdot: I personally don't believe the OSDN bar is bad at all. I've been wondering when/. was going to display it. I don't think anyone can deny that OSDN has contributed a LOT to the community.
You make a valid point, but I think you miss the intent of Alan Cox's actions.
I view it that he did this to deliberately alarm people into action. Free speech fanatics see this Changelog and go "WTF? DIE DCMA!"
And that's where your plan comes in.
Re:Don't ruin my Emacs! Re:There already IS gtk...
on
GNU Emacs 21
·
· Score: 2
Yes, and it also already runs under generic X11 just fine. To go and add sixteen tons of widgets to something which was completely character-oriented in the first place is beyond feeping creaturism to simple redundancy.
That could be very true (disclaimer: I don't use Emacs), but I wasn't implying that it should be done, merely that it could be done.:)
If I may go on a small tangent, I don't like programs like vi or Emacs, because they're way too complex for what I need to do: edit text. My two favourites are nano (pico clone) and nedit, because they both do nearly everything I want them to. If I need to do some tedious repetitive task, I just cook up a small shell or perl script to do it for me. Admittedly, Emacs might be able to do the same thing in a couple keystrokes, but the time it would take to learn Emacs would be greater than the total time it takes me to write those small scripts.
Okee, fine, you've convinced me it can be done. Go forth and code. Make it so it can be taken in and out of Emacs on a whim.... make it so I can add something to my.emacs file and load GTK if DISPLAY is set and -nw is not set, and leave it in text mode (with the resulting smaller, faster RSS) if I'm on a dummy terminal or equivalent. Hell, I'll even beta test it for you.
This was what I was implying. Except I would make the GUI option available at build time as oppsed to run time. I understand Emacs is big enough as it is, and many successful programs have configure flags or environment variables that determine what type of interface gets built into the binary.
Now, get a'goin', you've got code to write.:)
No thanks, I'll leave that to those who can actually write code.:P
Re:Don't ruin my Emacs! Re:There already IS gtk...
on
GNU Emacs 21
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
you go make this GTK-specific, and we not only lose the Evil Empire but MacOS, VMS, AOS, and who knows what else...
You have completely missed the point of the word "port." No one said anything about making it GTK-specific.:P
IIRC, current versions of vim run on the console on almost any OS as well having an optional GUI. If that's true, there's no reason that you couldn't do the same for Emacs. The same is true of nethack as well.
Slashdot Mirror
The military has been using virtual reality for years now, just not exactly in this form...
I'm talking about flight simulators. They perfectly model the inside of a cockpit, hook the thing up to hydraulics and have an entire room full of minicomputers to drive the simulation with SGI Onyx machines for modeling the landscape and entities. The scenery is provided by 8 projectors which display the surroundings on a curved reflective screen just outside cockpit windows.
These multi-million dollar machines are quite impressive definitely a lot more fun than X-Plane. Machines at separate military bases can even be linked up together for the ultimate multiplayer flight sim.
Getting to check one of these out has definitely been one of the highlights of my life as a geek. I decided that being a systems programmer / maintainer or developer for flight simulator could be a very entertaining use of my future career. I already have the avionics background, I would just need the CS degree and maybe a class or two at Embry-Riddle...
My mom and I have a tradition of getting a Far Side calendar for each other every christmas. I was looking at it and 2002 is supposed to be the last year for the calendar. (For real, this time.)
Woohoo! I bought that awhile back, it's definitely worth the money. There are a LOT of pages and a LOT of art, it takes a long time to get through if you take a fairly long look at each page and read all the passages.
Actually, contratry to the article, I started out on the Tandy 1000TX. Great machine, I remember playing Marble Madness, Thexder, and Sega Outrun on it in 1988. It was without a doubt the top of the line gaming machine in its day, although it was *very* expensive.
After the 286 started really showing its age, I bought an SNES and didn't see much of a difference in graphics and sound until some of the better games starting coming out. (Donkey Kong Country, Street Fighter II, Final Fantasy 6, etc)
I can't remember who tried to look it up, but I remember readint that the Seagate drive model in the X-Box doesn't even show up on Seagate's site.
On a side note, the some of the consoles are shipping with 8GB drives and some with 10GB drives. Seems to be just a matter of luck which one you get.
Right, in the PSX's day, 2MB was a huge amount of memory for a console. Prior to that, much less memory was typically used because the storage medium of choice, the ROM cartrige, could be accessed extremely quickly.
But I've always had the impression that video game manufacturers have always had the right idea. They make the hardware extremely simple and let the programmers have free reign over how it's used. If you've ever read up on console hardware design, the first thing you'll notice is how much it resembles the basic layout of examples used in Computer Science classes. The only two things that a video game console needs to are push pixels and be able to move data around very quickly. The first is usually met with some special graphics rendering hardware and the second is achieved by giving the hardware an extremely simple but flexible and fast design.
Because of this, I initially believed the X-Box was doomed to fail simply because it was based on PC hardware. Typical PC hardware is so overly complex because the kind of software that runs on a PC... it wouldn't surprise me to hear that a modern PC game goes through a dozen or more layers of software (and hardware, think of the CISC -> RISC tranlation in modern Pentiums) before you get to the point where you're actually shooting at the bad guys.
But despite its PC origins and also despite my typically anti-Microsoft attitude (:P), I believe the X-Box is a pretty nifty piece of kit and will do quite well on the market.
I just hope M$ doesn't use the same business tactics with its console that it does with its operating systems... though I have a feeling that Nintendo and Sony would be much more difficult adversaries than Apple, Netscape, etc. I look foward to seeing how this three-way war turns out.
Try deleting ~/.mozilla (or applicable profile / preferences directory). This usually fixes a lot of stuff for me, especially when upgrading to a new Mozilla version.
I do it as well, thus far no body has complained...
I think I agree with your agrument more than the parent post.
First off, 90% of all hands-on IT jobs are probably rather solitary in nature. The only way you would go for a job in IT (programming, sysadmin, or whatever) would be if you didn't mind being not bothered by other pesky humans or if you already had a rich social web outside of your career. I fall into the former category.
I mean, if geeks are so socially ept, then why do they have to make an actual effort to form user groups just to meet each other in real life...
Umm, no... screwing and socializing are often two entirely different things.
Hardware PCMCIA modems are not as difficult to find as you imply... just check a Linux hardware database or run some searches on Google before buying.
My Linksys PCMLM56k+ (which is both a 10/100 ethernet and 56k modem card) has never given me any trouble in Linux.
But now I can leave that card at home when traveling, since the LTwindom drivers seem to work quite well on my laptop. The only glitch is that there is no sound output, but I can handle that.
Give slackware a try. It's a nice, simple little distribution and the installer's pretty easy too.
I've been following the open source software community for quite a while now, and prior to that, the shareware community.
And I have seen lots of this before. A guy works hard and endless hours trying to perfect his code, his program becomes popular, and then not long after, the critics and flames come along. The writers of the software can't deal with the fact that newbies ask too many questions, or that (heaven forbid) someone decides to extoll his opinions on why the program in question sucks. The pressure mounts, the author gets frustrated and then he gives up and quits.
This is not the way to do it. Like someone else mentioned, flames, critics, and newbies all mean that your program is popular. If it sucked, it wouldn't be popular. Some (not the majority) of open source software writers expect that if their program rocks, they'll be Linus Torvalds overnight. (This is where my habit of pessimism comes in handy.)
Most open source programmers get their reward for their time and effort in knowing that their code is good, their code is useful, and people are using it. That's it, nothing more, nothing less.
You take bug reports, you answer the polite questions (while ignoring the stupid ones), and you thank those who have helped out with testing or the code itself. If the flames get too rough, you just sit back and say to yourself, "Self, this is *my* program and *I* know it's good, so fuck everyone else."
To this Christoph guy, if he reads Slashdot: While it is very unfortunate that the events you list above occured, you need to accept the fact that developing software in the public's eye comes with these downfalls. If you get into another project and begin to face the same problems, do yourself and the open source community a favor. Don't give up quite so easily the next time.
Agreed. You might as well hope for a FreeBSD / Plan9 merge or something on that order.
Don't forget, people, that Linux is a kernel, not an operating system. The interview mentioned that certain code from Linux was used in Hurd, but a merging of the two is simply not going to happen.
That aside, with the GPL, Linus has very little to say should someone try and merge Linux and Hurd.
Err, then you're saying that when you take a job, you should already know everything about it before you start? What a fantastic world that would be!
I'm curious what exactly you do. I mean, aside from "coding for yourself." What would your job description be?
That may be so, but dont expect the opposite and rely on slashdot to only run the stories you want. I bet if slashdot wasnt running stories on kernel updates that stories would still be submitted every release.
/.. And it's not going to change no matter how much bitching goes on.
CmdrTaco has stated on many occasions and in many interviews that the news that gets posted to slashdot is only that which interests him. Nobody else. Except maybe the other staff at
Given the state of the economy and the fall of the dotcoms, I'd say many of those smaller independent sites would have fallen a long time ago without OSDN supporting them.
That's what I meant by contributing to the community.
Of course not, I was implying that it would probably be much less stable if Taco & Co began meddling with "unneccessary" things like look and layout.
Mostly places like rootprompt, and The Register. If you go to rootprompt, there's a whole bunch of unix-related links in the links bar to the right.
Nice ideas, but keep in mind that Slashdot (and probably Slash, at heart) isn't nearly as flexible with page layout as The Register is. Register webmasters can throw in ads and boxes and stuff at will, but Slashdot probably[1] can't because their engine isn't flexible enough for that.
1. I say probably, because, well... in 4 years Slashdot has had the same exact look and layout. I always presumed that this was because it was simply too hard to change. Yes, I've seen web sites that use the Slash engine look radically different from Slashdot, but Slashdot is a much bigger beast to keep stable.
I tried Guidescope back in the early days and didn't like it much. Most annoying thing was the floating control panel or whatever.
I use good old junkbuster. The blockfile is abso-friggin-loutely huge, but I've only added 8 or so lines to my own. It's pretty rare that I come across a banner ad that it doesn't block (but can with 30 seconds of work).
As for paying to view ad-free Slashdot... That's something I just might do. Not to get rid of the ads (dur, I have junkbuster remember), but to support the site. My only conflict on this is that as time wears on, I seem to visit Slashdot less and less in favour of other sites that are more focused on their respective topics.
In light of this, I would probably subscribe off and on. Sub for one month, block the ads for a few after, and sub again here and there to simply show my appreciation. That's assuming the subscription is a monthly fee type of thing.
Oh, and to the operators of Slashdot: I personally don't believe the OSDN bar is bad at all. I've been wondering when
You make a valid point, but I think you miss the intent of Alan Cox's actions.
I view it that he did this to deliberately alarm people into action. Free speech fanatics see this Changelog and go "WTF? DIE DCMA!"
And that's where your plan comes in.
Yes, and it also already runs under generic X11 just fine. To go and add sixteen tons of widgets to something which was completely character-oriented in the first place is beyond feeping creaturism to simple redundancy.
:)
.emacs file and load GTK if DISPLAY is set and -nw is not set, and leave it in text mode (with the resulting smaller, faster RSS) if I'm on a dummy terminal or equivalent. Hell, I'll even beta test it for you.
:)
:P
That could be very true (disclaimer: I don't use Emacs), but I wasn't implying that it should be done, merely that it could be done.
If I may go on a small tangent, I don't like programs like vi or Emacs, because they're way too complex for what I need to do: edit text. My two favourites are nano (pico clone) and nedit, because they both do nearly everything I want them to. If I need to do some tedious repetitive task, I just cook up a small shell or perl script to do it for me. Admittedly, Emacs might be able to do the same thing in a couple keystrokes, but the time it would take to learn Emacs would be greater than the total time it takes me to write those small scripts.
Okee, fine, you've convinced me it can be done. Go forth and code. Make it so it can be taken in and out of Emacs on a whim.... make it so I can add something to my
This was what I was implying. Except I would make the GUI option available at build time as oppsed to run time. I understand Emacs is big enough as it is, and many successful programs have configure flags or environment variables that determine what type of interface gets built into the binary.
Now, get a'goin', you've got code to write.
No thanks, I'll leave that to those who can actually write code.
you go make this GTK-specific, and we not only lose the Evil Empire but MacOS, VMS, AOS, and who knows what else...
You have completely missed the point of the word "port." No one said anything about making it GTK-specific.
IIRC, current versions of vim run on the console on almost any OS as well having an optional GUI. If that's true, there's no reason that you couldn't do the same for Emacs. The same is true of nethack as well.