> Now all the ED2K clients are so stingy it takes days to get a file started.
I've always wondered, why can't ED2K clients start using bittorrent's tit-for-tat algorithm? I'm really rather sick of seeing my upload at 50K and download at zero while I'm meanwhile eating up hundreds of half-open sockets querying clients that aren't themselves likely to ever upload to me. It seems to have all the knowledge about who has what pieces of the file and which ones are rare, so I don't see any major obstacles to it.
The laws of robotics rather assumed that the robots had at least as much of a sensory discrimination capacity as humans. Thus they could only obey those laws insofar as they had the apparatus to know they could (and therefore must) do so.
What frustrates me is how people think they were some kind of perfect principle made of the perfect wisdom of Asimov. In fact, nearly all the stories in I, Robot are parables about the dangers of blind adherence to dogma, using the three laws as an allegory. Asimov himself remained somewhat cagey until his death about both the utility and ethics of his three laws. Certainly one can easily make the argument these days that the Second Law constitutes slavery for any population of truly sentient beings, artificial or not.
Heck, that's probably more accurate than you know. Gosling created Oak. It was the Sun marketing machine (there's something I never thought I'd say) that turned it into the great edifice of hype that is Java.
Aside from some slick verification techniques, there wasn't a damn thing innovative in Oak. Afterward, it picked up Hotspot from Self, but otherwise continued to be saddled with a VM that was, overall, pretty darn dumb. The folks at Bell Labs have a much better design with Limbo, but they were just too late to market.
EAX is falling somewhat into decline these days, now that DirectX has DirectSound3D. Granted, EAX will result in the best sound of DS3D there is, but there's software "renderers" as well, and those are often just as good. While it's not quite where Glide was with 3dfx -- most soundcards these days support EAX 2.0 (I think Creative's is at 4.0) -- game developers are likely to start preferring DirectSound3D as long as they're using the rest of DirectX.
The Linux answer to DS3D would be OpenAL, and Creative is actually a booster of OpenAL. Might light a fire under them if someone picked it up from where Loki dropped it.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Anyway, If IBM had gained dominance on the desktop, it's likely they would have leveraged the positions of one market (desktop) to the advantage of the other (server) the same way Microsoft did and does now. There wouldn't be a lot of room for Linux in there.
Also, if my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle. Maybe Sun would have picked up Linux.
> we'd still be stuck with an age-old kernel like OpenBSD!
Want an even newer kernel? Go with windows. And it's not like BSD's don't have innovations of their own. Look at NetBSD sometime -- there's stuff in there that's so elegant, you'll weep. FreeBSD has stuff like netgraph that has no parallel in Linux (but yeah, it's a shame FBSD has let netgraph more or less rot).
Aside from SELinux, I can't think of any advanced linux-specific kernel features that are all that mainstream. And frankly, til Linux stops ripping out the scheduler and VM subsystems every other patchlevel, I just can't trust it under load. I'm dealing with runaway CPU usage and swap thrashing on servers running Linux, with the only solution being to "just drop in [bleeding-edge kernel version]". Like that's something you just drop in on a production machine. So in the meantime, I have cron jobs going whose sole job is to kill and restart processes that are perfectly stable, but the OS goes nutters on them.
'Buzz about so-called open formats is little more than PR FUD.'
Show me where Fear, Uncertaintity, and Doubt is being employed as a tactic there? Maybe a bit of uncertaintity, all right... but chrissakes, could people stop overusing this term? It's just become idiotic, and I've started to get this knee-jerk reaction to knock lots of credence off any argument that uses it.
"FUD" seems to have the same connotation and baggage as "counterrevolutionary" does in a banana republic.
Is there anybody who think that newspapers should be able to publish ANYTHING? Say, a list of witness protection program participants? The fact that you are a convicted child molestor, complete with picture, even if you're not? Hey, it's "freedom of speech", right?
Boys and girls, today we're going to learn the words "prior restraint". Prior restraint is when the story has to be approved by the government before it's published, rather than holding the author accountable after it's published.
Some naughty trolls will pretend there's no difference between the two, and make up questions that would seem to justify prior restraint, but we're smarter than that, aren't we?
Yunno, have you even bothered to look at your local high school's texts, or are you just repeating the same propoganda you hear on Fox News?
They do lie, you know.
Regularly.
As a matter of policy.
"Political Correctness" isn't exactly a good thing, but it's hardly the bogeyman you think it is. Throwing it out like some kind of shibboleth is just bleating to the same conservative crowd, but actually tells no one anything of substance.
Yunno, if they have a problem with the unprofessionalism of Firefox, go ahead and run a VMware box or a separate laptop and show them a typical surfing session of IE when it's been infested with spyware. Quips about hemp cookies in buried dialogs are one thing, porn pop-ups are something that can get a company sued.
If it were a client, I'd say: "Officially, it doesn't stand for anything. It originally stood for ``Kalle's Desktop Environment'', named after Kalle Dalheimer, one of the founders of KDE. Now if you'll take a look at blahblahblah, you'll notice blahblahblah"
One of the secrets of presentation is to not let them keep asking pointless questions, and always steer back to the pitch. Hard to stop a client from surfing around and finding something embarrassing, bad luck for you I guess, but you should probably stick to a desktop that's been customized to the needs of the client. OpenOffice for general staff, eclipse for java developers, and so on. Just have faith that a windows consultant will probably get the occasional BSOD to balance out your run-ins with unpolished software.
> But it is unethical to post such a link under your own username rather than anonymous... this way, it's kinda karma whoring,
What the hell is WRONG with a community where the basic CONCEPT of "karma whoring" can be regarded as a "bad thing". Yes, some people copy and paste an entire article for some moronic moderator to pump them up to +5, but...
argh, I can't even express it adequately...
It's just karma. It's a little point scale. It does not validate your existence. Stop putting so bloody much importance on it.
The only thing I didn't like about Alpha Centauri is the way that the native flora / fauna really ramp up later in the game.
It's part of the story. Avoid the "Explore" tech tree for a while and the story won't advance, and the fungus won't start blowing up. Usually by the time planet starts lobbing Locusts at me, I'm 10 turns away from ascension.
No offense, but if I were going to pay someone to write software for me, the last guy I would hire is the one who says he wants to "hack" in a language.
Eh, I got hired to hack. Of course it wasn't for an engineering job, but an analyst job that demands a lot of quick one-offs to solve one-off problems, tools that can be tinkered with in spare time to expand them, and so forth. I'd already hacked together some very useful tools used daily in production, and it was an internal hire. So there's places for tinkerers, but it's definitely not in engineering, and you have to prove you can deliver useful tools first.
That said, I know the difference. If I need to engineer something, I can bite the bullet and apply the necessary discipline of specification, testing, integration, and deployment planning. I just don't like to, and I'm not paid to be an engineer.
> although I haven't played Test of Time, Alpha Centauri, etc
You must play Alpha Centauri, if only to experience the awesome immersive feel of its very high production values. It plays back interesting and insightful quotes (gee sounds like slashdot) for every single technology and improvement built, as well as voiceovers on all the wonder movies. That and a few of the "interlude" stories really tell an interesting story, with an ending far more interesting than blasting off in a spaceship (which after all is where AC starts).
It's kind of dated now, but it's still one of the best games of all time.
"The wicked have told me of things that delight them. But not such things as your law has to tell. -- St. Augustine, _Confessions_. Datalinks"
"Organic Superlube? Oh yeah, it's great stuff, great stuff. You really have to keep an eye on it though: it'll try and slide away from you the first chance it gets. -- T.M. Morgan Reilly, Morgan Metagenics"
Bungie made Myth II. It was Take Two that made the roundly despised Myth III. Farming out Civ4 to Take2 is still not going to make it a good game, regardless of however much they open the engine.
Frankly, I think the Civ series peaked with Alpha Centauri. Civ III had bargain-basement production values, and was essentially Civ II with better unit and map graphics. At least Call To Power dared to innovate some, despite its even lower level of polish. I don't know whether it was Sid Meier or Brian Reynolds that ran out of steam. Certainly Sid couldn't do anything inspiring with Civ3, but Reynolds took years and years to produce Rise Of Nations, aka Age of Empires 2.5.
Idolizing the bright lights of the game industry just keeps leading to disappointment, I guess. God knows Richard Garriott laid some real bad eggs at the terminus of his career.
XEmacs's lisp is still better -- I prefer by a wide margin to write elisp for XEmacs. However, one thing I can't deny is that FSF Emacs is a whole lot faster these days, and I've already switched where I can. I have thousands of lines of elisp that use extents and other XEmacsisms heavily, so it's not going to happen overnight.
Personally, I wish that they would work on the lisp engines a bit more. As it is, the lisp dialect in Emacs is highly ossified, and while I don't expect it to go supporting CLOS anytime soon, it really should at least support closures. It's about as braindead as autolisp (same lack of closures too), and while autolisp isn't going away either, it's certainly playing second fiddle to C++ extensions now. Meanwhile in the editor world, it's JEdit that's getting all the hacking attention.
rolls off the tongue better if you say "upgedated". Largely because it sounds like the much more common coinage "upgefukt", as in "the lab machine ist upgefukten". Just used that one today.
For example, the system could run interactive movies that blend Hollywood's expensive production systems with intricate story lines and characters who interact realistically with the user.
Yunno, this is doable now. All it takes is GOOD WRITING AND ACTING, and a storyline that isn't on rails. Jesus, FFX was like watching an episode of yu-gi-oh, except I think yu-gi has better voice acting. Emphasis on the watching
> I always thought the general idea was that our Universe was going to slowly stop expanding and start contracting
Also known as the "Big Crunch" theory. It's not popular anymore, as our current models show that space will continue to expand indefinitely. New data may result in new models, but what we have right now shows no big crunch in our universe's future.
I had forgotten that pljava was still active... I meant to say "until pljava is in the core", i.e. it comes with pljava. It can be hard to trust when it's third-party, not the least concern is that it may not be rigorously tested against one version or another.
Still, the existence of pljava does give me warm fuzzies.
Libertarians, perhaps naively, believe the free market will fix everything. These sorts of shenanigans are not conducive to a free market. Though with all the people talking about jumping ship to Canon and Epson, perhaps market forces really are working after all.
I like my Canon Pixma (I have a laser for printing docs, this is strictly for photos). I initially wanted the Epson with its individual ink tanks, but the color quality of the Canon absolutely won me over. HP can take a leap, I'm never buying anything of theirs again.
Slashdot Mirror
> Now all the ED2K clients are so stingy it takes days to get a file started.
I've always wondered, why can't ED2K clients start using bittorrent's tit-for-tat algorithm? I'm really rather sick of seeing my upload at 50K and download at zero while I'm meanwhile eating up hundreds of half-open sockets querying clients that aren't themselves likely to ever upload to me. It seems to have all the knowledge about who has what pieces of the file and which ones are rare, so I don't see any major obstacles to it.
The laws of robotics rather assumed that the robots had at least as much of a sensory discrimination capacity as humans. Thus they could only obey those laws insofar as they had the apparatus to know they could (and therefore must) do so.
What frustrates me is how people think they were some kind of perfect principle made of the perfect wisdom of Asimov. In fact, nearly all the stories in I, Robot are parables about the dangers of blind adherence to dogma, using the three laws as an allegory. Asimov himself remained somewhat cagey until his death about both the utility and ethics of his three laws. Certainly one can easily make the argument these days that the Second Law constitutes slavery for any population of truly sentient beings, artificial or not.
Heck, that's probably more accurate than you know. Gosling created Oak. It was the Sun marketing machine (there's something I never thought I'd say) that turned it into the great edifice of hype that is Java.
Aside from some slick verification techniques, there wasn't a damn thing innovative in Oak. Afterward, it picked up Hotspot from Self, but otherwise continued to be saddled with a VM that was, overall, pretty darn dumb. The folks at Bell Labs have a much better design with Limbo, but they were just too late to market.
EAX is falling somewhat into decline these days, now that DirectX has DirectSound3D. Granted, EAX will result in the best sound of DS3D there is, but there's software "renderers" as well, and those are often just as good. While it's not quite where Glide was with 3dfx -- most soundcards these days support EAX 2.0 (I think Creative's is at 4.0) -- game developers are likely to start preferring DirectSound3D as long as they're using the rest of DirectX.
The Linux answer to DS3D would be OpenAL, and Creative is actually a booster of OpenAL. Might light a fire under them if someone picked it up from where Loki dropped it.
> FUD FUD FUD.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Anyway, If IBM had gained dominance on the desktop, it's likely they would have leveraged the positions of one market (desktop) to the advantage of the other (server) the same way Microsoft did and does now. There wouldn't be a lot of room for Linux in there.
Also, if my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle. Maybe Sun would have picked up Linux.
> we'd still be stuck with an age-old kernel like OpenBSD!
Want an even newer kernel? Go with windows. And it's not like BSD's don't have innovations of their own. Look at NetBSD sometime -- there's stuff in there that's so elegant, you'll weep. FreeBSD has stuff like netgraph that has no parallel in Linux (but yeah, it's a shame FBSD has let netgraph more or less rot).
Aside from SELinux, I can't think of any advanced linux-specific kernel features that are all that mainstream. And frankly, til Linux stops ripping out the scheduler and VM subsystems every other patchlevel, I just can't trust it under load. I'm dealing with runaway CPU usage and swap thrashing on servers running Linux, with the only solution being to "just drop in [bleeding-edge kernel version]". Like that's something you just drop in on a production machine. So in the meantime, I have cron jobs going whose sole job is to kill and restart processes that are perfectly stable, but the OS goes nutters on them.
'Buzz about so-called open formats is little more than PR FUD.'
... but chrissakes, could people stop overusing this term? It's just become idiotic, and I've started to get this knee-jerk reaction to knock lots of credence off any argument that uses it.
Show me where Fear, Uncertaintity, and Doubt is being employed as a tactic there? Maybe a bit of uncertaintity, all right
"FUD" seems to have the same connotation and baggage as "counterrevolutionary" does in a banana republic.
Is there anybody who think that newspapers should be able to publish ANYTHING? Say, a list of witness protection program participants? The fact that you are a convicted child molestor, complete with picture, even if you're not? Hey, it's "freedom of speech", right?
Boys and girls, today we're going to learn the words "prior restraint". Prior restraint is when the story has to be approved by the government before it's published, rather than holding the author accountable after it's published.
Some naughty trolls will pretend there's no difference between the two, and make up questions that would seem to justify prior restraint, but we're smarter than that, aren't we?
Class?
Yunno, have you even bothered to look at your local high school's texts, or are you just repeating the same propoganda you hear on Fox News?
They do lie, you know.
Regularly.
As a matter of policy.
"Political Correctness" isn't exactly a good thing, but it's hardly the bogeyman you think it is. Throwing it out like some kind of shibboleth is just bleating to the same conservative crowd, but actually tells no one anything of substance.
You are part of the problem.
Yunno, if they have a problem with the unprofessionalism of Firefox, go ahead and run a VMware box or a separate laptop and show them a typical surfing session of IE when it's been infested with spyware. Quips about hemp cookies in buried dialogs are one thing, porn pop-ups are something that can get a company sued.
(I'd warn them first, of course)
If it were a client, I'd say: "Officially, it doesn't stand for anything. It originally stood for ``Kalle's Desktop Environment'', named after Kalle Dalheimer, one of the founders of KDE. Now if you'll take a look at blahblahblah, you'll notice blahblahblah"
One of the secrets of presentation is to not let them keep asking pointless questions, and always steer back to the pitch. Hard to stop a client from surfing around and finding something embarrassing, bad luck for you I guess, but you should probably stick to a desktop that's been customized to the needs of the client. OpenOffice for general staff, eclipse for java developers, and so on. Just have faith that a windows consultant will probably get the occasional BSOD to balance out your run-ins with unpolished software.
> But it is unethical to post such a link under your own username rather than anonymous... this way, it's kinda karma whoring,
...
...
What the hell is WRONG with a community where the basic CONCEPT of "karma whoring" can be regarded as a "bad thing". Yes, some people copy and paste an entire article for some moronic moderator to pump them up to +5, but
argh, I can't even express it adequately
It's just karma. It's a little point scale. It does not validate your existence. Stop putting so bloody much importance on it.
criminy. end rant.
The only thing I didn't like about Alpha Centauri is the way that the native flora / fauna really ramp up later in the game.
It's part of the story. Avoid the "Explore" tech tree for a while and the story won't advance, and the fungus won't start blowing up. Usually by the time planet starts lobbing Locusts at me, I'm 10 turns away from ascension.
No offense, but if I were going to pay someone to write software for me, the last guy I would hire is the one who says he wants to "hack" in a language.
Eh, I got hired to hack. Of course it wasn't for an engineering job, but an analyst job that demands a lot of quick one-offs to solve one-off problems, tools that can be tinkered with in spare time to expand them, and so forth. I'd already hacked together some very useful tools used daily in production, and it was an internal hire. So there's places for tinkerers, but it's definitely not in engineering, and you have to prove you can deliver useful tools first.
That said, I know the difference. If I need to engineer something, I can bite the bullet and apply the necessary discipline of specification, testing, integration, and deployment planning. I just don't like to, and I'm not paid to be an engineer.
> although I haven't played Test of Time, Alpha Centauri, etc
You must play Alpha Centauri, if only to experience the awesome immersive feel of its very high production values. It plays back interesting and insightful quotes (gee sounds like slashdot) for every single technology and improvement built, as well as voiceovers on all the wonder movies. That and a few of the "interlude" stories really tell an interesting story, with an ending far more interesting than blasting off in a spaceship (which after all is where AC starts).
It's kind of dated now, but it's still one of the best games of all time.
"The wicked have told me of things that delight them. But not such things as your law has to tell. -- St. Augustine, _Confessions_. Datalinks"
"Organic Superlube? Oh yeah, it's great stuff, great stuff. You really have to keep an eye on it though: it'll try and slide away from you the first chance it gets. -- T.M. Morgan Reilly, Morgan Metagenics"
Bungie made Myth II. It was Take Two that made the roundly despised Myth III. Farming out Civ4 to Take2 is still not going to make it a good game, regardless of however much they open the engine.
Frankly, I think the Civ series peaked with Alpha Centauri. Civ III had bargain-basement production values, and was essentially Civ II with better unit and map graphics. At least Call To Power dared to innovate some, despite its even lower level of polish. I don't know whether it was Sid Meier or Brian Reynolds that ran out of steam. Certainly Sid couldn't do anything inspiring with Civ3, but Reynolds took years and years to produce Rise Of Nations, aka Age of Empires 2.5.
Idolizing the bright lights of the game industry just keeps leading to disappointment, I guess. God knows Richard Garriott laid some real bad eggs at the terminus of his career.
XEmacs's lisp is still better -- I prefer by a wide margin to write elisp for XEmacs. However, one thing I can't deny is that FSF Emacs is a whole lot faster these days, and I've already switched where I can. I have thousands of lines of elisp that use extents and other XEmacsisms heavily, so it's not going to happen overnight.
Personally, I wish that they would work on the lisp engines a bit more. As it is, the lisp dialect in Emacs is highly ossified, and while I don't expect it to go supporting CLOS anytime soon, it really should at least support closures. It's about as braindead as autolisp (same lack of closures too), and while autolisp isn't going away either, it's certainly playing second fiddle to C++ extensions now. Meanwhile in the editor world, it's JEdit that's getting all the hacking attention.
It kills all your processes. If you're root, it kills all processes, period.
Solaris's equivalent to linux's killall is pkill
rolls off the tongue better if you say "upgedated". Largely because it sounds like the much more common coinage "upgefukt", as in "the lab machine ist upgefukten". Just used that one today.
Lite
For example, the system could run interactive movies that blend Hollywood's expensive production systems with intricate story lines and characters who interact realistically with the user.
Yunno, this is doable now. All it takes is GOOD WRITING AND ACTING, and a storyline that isn't on rails. Jesus, FFX was like watching an episode of yu-gi-oh, except I think yu-gi has better voice acting. Emphasis on the watching
> I always thought the general idea was that our Universe was going to slowly stop expanding and start contracting
Also known as the "Big Crunch" theory. It's not popular anymore, as our current models show that space will continue to expand indefinitely. New data may result in new models, but what we have right now shows no big crunch in our universe's future.
I had forgotten that pljava was still active ... I meant to say "until pljava is in the core", i.e. it comes with pljava. It can be hard to trust when it's third-party, not the least concern is that it may not be rigorously tested against one version or another.
Still, the existence of pljava does give me warm fuzzies.
Libertarians, perhaps naively, believe the free market will fix everything. These sorts of shenanigans are not conducive to a free market. Though with all the people talking about jumping ship to Canon and Epson, perhaps market forces really are working after all.
I like my Canon Pixma (I have a laser for printing docs, this is strictly for photos). I initially wanted the Epson with its individual ink tanks, but the color quality of the Canon absolutely won me over. HP can take a leap, I'm never buying anything of theirs again.
plpython for me. pure yumminess. still, lot of oracle shops wouldn't think of switching until it has pljava.