So spend about 1-3 months learning what the code does, taking notes and documenting as you go, writing down both your discoveries and what questions you're left with. Revisit that documentation regularly during the process rewriting any information you got wrong or learned more about including any gotchas you may have found. Start making a list of serious questions ("Why was this done this way," "What would happen if this component failed," "Why couldn't this have been done this way") and see if there are answers by the time you reach the end.
It's really not as hard as everybody seems to make it out to be unless the original writers tried overly hard to be "clever." I've read and learned several undocumented and, worse, incorrectly documented (the documentation didn't reflect the current state of code at all) code bases of this size. It takes patience, it makes your head hurt and it's not always fun, but the payoff is excellent - you understand the code, you've become better at reading strange code (yes, it is a learned skill) and you probably understand the code nearly as well as the people who wrote them by the time you've finished.
Do you think they intend to torture consumers until they buy the device? Or something like that?
And force authors to use that publisher?
No, they're going to make it attractive for publishers, pay them for exclusives, make it not super inconvenient for readers, encourage subsidized reader programs in schools, give them away like iPods, sell them to college students promising cheaper textbooks, etc.
Then they're going to torture the customer, once they've become a preferred conduit for the paperback market.
Actually, that's logic. You don't need evidence for simple symbol manipulation.
What he states in that quote there is telcos call people hogs when they maximize their utilization of the connection they were sold. The telcos blame them for causing network congestion, ergo they believe that they cannot provide what they sold to their customers.
The telco T claims they can provide bandwidth B to the customer C. The average customer Q never uses what they've been sold, while the alleged hog H does, all the time at full capacity. However, H and Q are both subsets of C, the people guaranteed the bandwidth B. If T claims they cannot provide B to H because it affects Q's performance, this admits that T cannot provide B to all of C.
There's no part of that which requires sourcing, except perhaps the implicit understanding that it's not possible for a DSL customer to use more than the bandwidth that they were sold.
I far preferred Dune 2 until Warcraft 2 came out. I loved the mod tools they provided in that second Warcraft game. Subsequent games lacked the charm of that one.
Under Catalyst Control Center, go to "Desktops & Displays," select your primary monitor (on the bottom) click the down arrow and click "Configure." You'll have the settings pages you're used to from the old Catalyst drivers there. (I use a 4890 on Win7)
You'll notice that "Enable GPU Scaling" is grayed out. It's only changeable when you're not running at your display's native resolution. The solution? Switch to a slightly lower or higher res, turn the setting on and run your game.
Depends on what part of the 80s we're talking about. Some games looked far better in EGA with 16 colors than the C64 version simply because of the improved resolution. Others looked better with more colors on the C64. Some were subjective.... Wasteland had a better UI on the PC, but the graphics were roughly equivalent on the C64 and the PC (with an EGA).
By the time ubiquitous MCGA/VGA adapters hit the market in 1987, the only competition point the C64 had was the superior sound chip.
Native game resolution is 640x480. Twice that is 1280x960. You're running at 1680x1050 or 1920x1080. You run the VM at 1280x960 resolution, then run the game fullscreen in the VM.
Now you have the game running with doubled pixels at native resolution with the proper aspect ratio and it takes up a respectably-sized window on the screen.
Often (at least in US public schools) teachers aren't compensated for time spent developing their curriculum and lesson plans. These are done off-hours and are just expected that the teachers do them. This is why frequently you see pisspoor teaching in public schools; the few teachers who can't be bothered to develop a lesson plan that addresses their students just use the crap from the books, and frequently fail to update them when the new version of the book comes out.
If teachers have an avenue to make money by developing decent lesson plans and better curricula(?) then we might actually see some improvement in the quality of education in US public schools.
Precisely. Comments about code that the developer himself doesn't understand, usually because he employed some nasty hack and he's not sure exactly why it worked, are usually short and contain the word "magic" in them.../* I went on a vodka bender last night, and this was on my screen when I woke up. I don't know what it is, but it compiles, so let's ship the fucker. We'll call it Vista. */
On a few occasions I've found myself *needing* to code something while having an alarmingly high fever. Sometimes this is because something is actually due and sometimes it's because I just think I understand something.
The surprising thing about this was when I had a fever of 103.4 and was snowed in so I couldn't get to the hospital so I stayed awake all night. I programmed a 3d graphics engine... without properly understanding what I was doing... and it worked. It took me the next 2 weeks to figure out what I'd done, why it worked, and what it was doing before I could improve it. Took me almost that long to verify that I hadn't just cut and pasted from random websites while in my delirium. My browsing history was full of all sorts of random crap. I'm still not sure how it happened.
There's an issue there though - C# is loosely derived from C. Go! is not derived from Go. It's a terrible idea for Google to keep the name if for no other reason than simply confusing users.
Reinforcement for that - the Sony Playstation 3 enables HDCP whenever it is outputting to an HDMI connection, whether you're playing "protected content" or not. Even though the act of playing a video game should not be content-locked, if you start up anything in HD on the PS3, it runs copy protected.
Why did they do that? Pick one of three reasons:
It's just plain easier to make the HDCP module always on.
It makes it less likely that somebody will find a backdoor way of disabling the HDCP module when playing protected content.
They can sell special PS3s to media outlets for inflated prices so they know who is making videos of their content and get extra cash to boot.
Maybe "4. All of the Above."
The downside to this is that it creates an artificial cost-of-entry barrier for independent video game media. It increases the cost of ownership - people with older HDTVs which do not support HDCP cannot play their PS3 in any of the digital HD modes, so it necessitates the purchase of more expensive hardware. What's the actual benefit for Sony? The HDCP was still bypassed by simply copying from the BD-ROM when running the official Linux installation for the PS3. As the parent said, it's a completely uninformed decision caused by simply not considering the negative effects.
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So spend about 1-3 months learning what the code does, taking notes and documenting as you go, writing down both your discoveries and what questions you're left with. Revisit that documentation regularly during the process rewriting any information you got wrong or learned more about including any gotchas you may have found. Start making a list of serious questions ("Why was this done this way," "What would happen if this component failed," "Why couldn't this have been done this way") and see if there are answers by the time you reach the end.
It's really not as hard as everybody seems to make it out to be unless the original writers tried overly hard to be "clever." I've read and learned several undocumented and, worse, incorrectly documented (the documentation didn't reflect the current state of code at all) code bases of this size. It takes patience, it makes your head hurt and it's not always fun, but the payoff is excellent - you understand the code, you've become better at reading strange code (yes, it is a learned skill) and you probably understand the code nearly as well as the people who wrote them by the time you've finished.
Lots of people swap their wife for their girlfriend. It's called 'divorce.'
They tend to load them up with crapware.
That and they tend to use the very cheapest motherboard they can find, which usually means extremely bad northbridges.
Yes.
They'd have better luck trying Europa... At least they think there may be liquid water under the ice on Europa. Find some mermaids.
Come to think of it, whatever happened to that Europa lander they were planning which was supposed to bore through the ice?
Great, so your genius solution to the problem is threatening to kill programmers if they don't concentrate 100%.
The CueCat is a fabulous example of how not to give away free technology.
They need to give it away like the iPod - in contests, sweepstakes, Oprah shows, affiliate deals, car trade-ins and open houses.
Do you think they intend to torture consumers until they buy the device? Or something like that?
And force authors to use that publisher?
No, they're going to make it attractive for publishers, pay them for exclusives, make it not super inconvenient for readers, encourage subsidized reader programs in schools, give them away like iPods, sell them to college students promising cheaper textbooks, etc. Then they're going to torture the customer, once they've become a preferred conduit for the paperback market.
Actually, that's logic. You don't need evidence for simple symbol manipulation.
What he states in that quote there is telcos call people hogs when they maximize their utilization of the connection they were sold. The telcos blame them for causing network congestion, ergo they believe that they cannot provide what they sold to their customers.
The telco T claims they can provide bandwidth B to the customer C. The average customer Q never uses what they've been sold, while the alleged hog H does, all the time at full capacity. However, H and Q are both subsets of C, the people guaranteed the bandwidth B. If T claims they cannot provide B to H because it affects Q's performance, this admits that T cannot provide B to all of C.
There's no part of that which requires sourcing, except perhaps the implicit understanding that it's not possible for a DSL customer to use more than the bandwidth that they were sold.
Most of the man pages are either lacking, don't install properly, or are completely out of date for anything other than core *sh commands as well.
I'll use "apropos" and gamely read a man page, but it's useless if the information is wrong or incomplete, which it often is.
I would buy Super Marx Bros.
Good, yes, as genuinely funny, no, at least not to me.
I far preferred Dune 2 until Warcraft 2 came out. I loved the mod tools they provided in that second Warcraft game. Subsequent games lacked the charm of that one.
I'd try completely uninstalling the Catalyst drivers and reinstalling them. Seems like something got borked in the configs.
Under Catalyst Control Center, go to "Desktops & Displays," select your primary monitor (on the bottom) click the down arrow and click "Configure." You'll have the settings pages you're used to from the old Catalyst drivers there. (I use a 4890 on Win7)
You'll notice that "Enable GPU Scaling" is grayed out. It's only changeable when you're not running at your display's native resolution. The solution? Switch to a slightly lower or higher res, turn the setting on and run your game.
Depends on what part of the 80s we're talking about. Some games looked far better in EGA with 16 colors than the C64 version simply because of the improved resolution. Others looked better with more colors on the C64. Some were subjective.... Wasteland had a better UI on the PC, but the graphics were roughly equivalent on the C64 and the PC (with an EGA).
By the time ubiquitous MCGA/VGA adapters hit the market in 1987, the only competition point the C64 had was the superior sound chip.
The speed it defaults to can be adjusted just by hitting Ctrl+F11 and Ctrl+F12 or by changing the settings files.
Still missing the point.
Native game resolution is 640x480. Twice that is 1280x960. You're running at 1680x1050 or 1920x1080. You run the VM at 1280x960 resolution, then run the game fullscreen in the VM.
Now you have the game running with doubled pixels at native resolution with the proper aspect ratio and it takes up a respectably-sized window on the screen.
Perfect, then your game will look blurry AND your face will catch on fire from the obscene amount of heat being emitted.
Often (at least in US public schools) teachers aren't compensated for time spent developing their curriculum and lesson plans. These are done off-hours and are just expected that the teachers do them. This is why frequently you see pisspoor teaching in public schools; the few teachers who can't be bothered to develop a lesson plan that addresses their students just use the crap from the books, and frequently fail to update them when the new version of the book comes out.
If teachers have an avenue to make money by developing decent lesson plans and better curricula(?) then we might actually see some improvement in the quality of education in US public schools.
Precisely. Comments about code that the developer himself doesn't understand, usually because he employed some nasty hack and he's not sure exactly why it worked, are usually short and contain the word "magic" in them... /* I went on a vodka bender last night, and this was on my screen when I woke up. I don't know what it is, but it compiles, so let's ship the fucker. We'll call it Vista. */
On a few occasions I've found myself *needing* to code something while having an alarmingly high fever. Sometimes this is because something is actually due and sometimes it's because I just think I understand something.
The surprising thing about this was when I had a fever of 103.4 and was snowed in so I couldn't get to the hospital so I stayed awake all night. I programmed a 3d graphics engine... without properly understanding what I was doing... and it worked. It took me the next 2 weeks to figure out what I'd done, why it worked, and what it was doing before I could improve it. Took me almost that long to verify that I hadn't just cut and pasted from random websites while in my delirium. My browsing history was full of all sorts of random crap. I'm still not sure how it happened.
Suffice it to say that I now believe in the Ballmer Peak.
"Go Bang" is good advice though. Relieves stress.
I remember reading a BASIC listing which caused a floppy drive's stepper motor to play a digitized voice crying for help. It was very long.
There's an issue there though - C# is loosely derived from C. Go! is not derived from Go. It's a terrible idea for Google to keep the name if for no other reason than simply confusing users.
Reinforcement for that - the Sony Playstation 3 enables HDCP whenever it is outputting to an HDMI connection, whether you're playing "protected content" or not. Even though the act of playing a video game should not be content-locked, if you start up anything in HD on the PS3, it runs copy protected.
Why did they do that? Pick one of three reasons:
Maybe "4. All of the Above."
The downside to this is that it creates an artificial cost-of-entry barrier for independent video game media. It increases the cost of ownership - people with older HDTVs which do not support HDCP cannot play their PS3 in any of the digital HD modes, so it necessitates the purchase of more expensive hardware. What's the actual benefit for Sony? The HDCP was still bypassed by simply copying from the BD-ROM when running the official Linux installation for the PS3. As the parent said, it's a completely uninformed decision caused by simply not considering the negative effects.