Just like old browsers, IPv4 only clients will continue to haunt us for years to come. It depends a lot on your audience, Game! for example sees something like 10-20% IE users (all versions combined), the rest using Firefox, Chrome or Opera. But if you look at the cross-section of browser usage in big companies, you'll see something closer to 80% IE usage (and primarily IE6/IE7 at that).
I predict that once XP goes off extended support, people will finally start migrating away from it and IE6 will die with it. This will be a massive step forward for the web and can't happen soon enough. Even ignoring the fact that we can stop working around IE6's remarkable retardedness, being able to use SNI willl be a major plus.
I call Susan on your 'it's nature' argument. Prove it's natural to be heterosexual. Go on. You'll please a lot of fundamentals, and greatly displease me. Prove it.
Well, if it wasn't, our population count would certainly take a nose dive. Consider that most first world countries average somewhere close to two children per family. Now, what happens if ~90% of people are homosexual instead of ~10%?
Don't get me wrong, if that's what you want to do, go for it. However, I think it's difficult to argue that we're not hardwired to reproduce given that we're still around.
That might be the draw for some, but given the number of cookie cutter builds in D2, I think it's fair to say that the draw for most was finding items. Creating new characters was just an afterthought when you realize you have all these new items sitting around and nothing to do with them.
For others, the draw was neither of these though. I know some people would spend the entire day in one of the trading channels gradually trading their way into more items. If you knew the typical prices of common/desirable items, you could pretty easily trade your way up this way. Arguably, this is just an extension of finding items though.
A big part of games is learning, but also that of mastery and accomplishment. People like to get things done, and they also like to feel that they're constantly getting better. Today's games have picked up on this and virtually all of them have "achievements". People like these because they can put numbers to what they've done and compare themselves to others easily. If I have a thousand achievement points, I obviously much better than the guy over there with just fifty.
For all the time and effort that high budget games put into fancy graphics, they often miss the simple things that make a game fun (learning, achievement, mastery). Take Game! for example, it's deceptively simple at first, allowing you to learn things at your own pace, but for the OCD crowd there's so many things to find, combine, and cook that to do all of it is quite the task. However, more importantly, there's direct feedback in Game! about how many items you have out of the total, how many combinations you've found out of the total, etc. This gives people a concrete goal that they can strive for. Ideally, you strike a balance between casual and OCD so that casual players can play through the entire game without too much trouble (even if they might only get 10% of the 'achievements"), while the more OCD players can gradually work their way through every single "achievement".
Oh, and one final thing: ALSA is broken for user switching. Whichever user grabs the sound device keeps it, and keeps playing audio while switched to another user. All other users are locked out of sound. That is completely broken behavior, and PulseAudio fixes it. Audio is now controlled by the current user, and all other users are muted.
Welcome to... oh about 2005 when ALSA enabled dmix by default so that people who have sound cards without hardware mixing (most of them) can still have any number of apps open and playing sound independently. Revolutionary!
Completely plausible for a short race on a dirt track. Certainly, the dog would have no chance on a paved track, but the car is at a huge disadvantage on the dirt.
Get $100 taken out of your paycheck every month for 40 or 50 years (480 months * 100 = $48,000) and then get a meager 600/month back for maybe 10 (120 months = however much $72,000 will be worth within 40 years) and if you're healthy enough 15 years.
My employer pays for my pension plan and they put in $100 and the $600 is what the fund says I will get even though my investments are very aggressive at this point (50% goes in the tech and asian markets with very good dividends that double the investment every quarter, 50% in the safe 'recommended' aggregated funds which doesn't ever seem to make a profit but is promised to be always there even if the markets crash). If I make another $250 contribution every month they say I should be able to have the same income as I do now but measured against the historic devaluation of money that is not what I want to be making within 40 years and I really could use the 250 right now.
The only way the pension funds work is if you're in the middle-to-upper class (>$250,000/year income) and can contribute easily a good $1000/month into your own managed investment funds. Then you should be able to cash in when you're 60 and live comfortably if off course you're investments paid off over time and you're not committing large funds in bubble's and crashes.
How on EARTH do you need to earn >$250k/year to contribute $1k/month to your retirement savings? I own a condo, have a paid off car (bought new) and contribute over $1k/month to my retirement... and I make less than 6 figures.
What are you talking about? The early Itaniums were x86-32 compatible.
"Itanium processors released prior to 2006 had hardware support for the IA-32 architecture to permit support for legacy server applications"
It wasn't until later the Itaniums lost their hardware based x86 compatibility.
While true, you omitted the crucial continuation of that sentence:
Itanium processors released prior to 2006 had hardware support for the IA-32 architecture to permit support for legacy server applications, but performance for IA-32 code was much worse than for native code and also worse than the performance of contemporaneous x86 processors.
I don't think the bubble ever really went away; it just jumped to the next new, hot, sure thing. It'll only ever go away when people stop being stupid.
So what you're saying is that it'll never go away?
Since the beginning, the iPhone has had busted CSS support for position: fixed; elements, which is terribly unfortunate as it makes Game! difficult to play. How does the Nexus S fare?
I'm the last person in the world to defend Dell, but their servers do ship with standard IPMI implementations that you can connect to with anything that speaks IPMI. I'm not sure what this browser nonsense is all about.
Of course, the real question is what's the real life performance of 1 Gbit wireless... Better or worse than 100 Mbit wired? I'm not hopeful based on existing implementations of a/b/g/n wireless.
If you had read the GP's post, you'd see that he's pointing out that the marginal cost of bandwidth is virtually zero (which is true), while the same cannot be said about fuel, electricity and water, which is why your analogy is not appropriate.
While true, it's not as bad as it could be. The nvidia blob depends on a compatibility shim, and the compatibility shim is open source (or at least, not a binary blob). In practice, it has been feasible to patch to shim to support more kernel versions without having to rely on Nvidia.
Game! is also similar in that all moves are permanent, however it does have the permadeath option (dubbed hardcore mode) available for new characters (once you get at least one past level 10).
It's obvious that you don't understand the issue, kernel ABI is completely irrelevant here. Not only is the overwhelming majority of the software that requires updating here in userspace (Mesa, Xorg libraries and Intel DDX driver), you can already switch out the kernel version in use freely, without a stable ABI!
No, what the article is trying to say is that because not every driver completely reinvents the wheel like they do on Windows, there needs to be more coordination between the driver and the other libraries that it depends upon, instead of just being able to dump the latest development code as a new release and call it a day.
Slashdot Mirror
Just like old browsers, IPv4 only clients will continue to haunt us for years to come. It depends a lot on your audience, Game! for example sees something like 10-20% IE users (all versions combined), the rest using Firefox, Chrome or Opera. But if you look at the cross-section of browser usage in big companies, you'll see something closer to 80% IE usage (and primarily IE6/IE7 at that).
I predict that once XP goes off extended support, people will finally start migrating away from it and IE6 will die with it. This will be a massive step forward for the web and can't happen soon enough. Even ignoring the fact that we can stop working around IE6's remarkable retardedness, being able to use SNI willl be a major plus.
I call Susan on your 'it's nature' argument. Prove it's natural to be heterosexual. Go on. You'll please a lot of fundamentals, and greatly displease me. Prove it.
Well, if it wasn't, our population count would certainly take a nose dive. Consider that most first world countries average somewhere close to two children per family. Now, what happens if ~90% of people are homosexual instead of ~10%?
Don't get me wrong, if that's what you want to do, go for it. However, I think it's difficult to argue that we're not hardwired to reproduce given that we're still around.
I'd really rather that they keep him indefinitely. He's doing an excellent job of running the company into the ground.
And there are tons of ways to make windows more secure.
Such as wiping the drive, or unplugging the power and network cords.
That might be the draw for some, but given the number of cookie cutter builds in D2, I think it's fair to say that the draw for most was finding items. Creating new characters was just an afterthought when you realize you have all these new items sitting around and nothing to do with them.
For others, the draw was neither of these though. I know some people would spend the entire day in one of the trading channels gradually trading their way into more items. If you knew the typical prices of common/desirable items, you could pretty easily trade your way up this way. Arguably, this is just an extension of finding items though.
A big part of games is learning, but also that of mastery and accomplishment. People like to get things done, and they also like to feel that they're constantly getting better. Today's games have picked up on this and virtually all of them have "achievements". People like these because they can put numbers to what they've done and compare themselves to others easily. If I have a thousand achievement points, I obviously much better than the guy over there with just fifty.
For all the time and effort that high budget games put into fancy graphics, they often miss the simple things that make a game fun (learning, achievement, mastery). Take Game! for example, it's deceptively simple at first, allowing you to learn things at your own pace, but for the OCD crowd there's so many things to find, combine, and cook that to do all of it is quite the task. However, more importantly, there's direct feedback in Game! about how many items you have out of the total, how many combinations you've found out of the total, etc. This gives people a concrete goal that they can strive for. Ideally, you strike a balance between casual and OCD so that casual players can play through the entire game without too much trouble (even if they might only get 10% of the 'achievements"), while the more OCD players can gradually work their way through every single "achievement".
Yeah, except this isn't 250 gigs, it's 31.25 gigs, also known as 250 gigabits.
no command line HTTP file transfer clients ever sprang up
Let me introduce you to wget and curl.
Oh, and one final thing: ALSA is broken for user switching. Whichever user grabs the sound device keeps it, and keeps playing audio while switched to another user. All other users are locked out of sound. That is completely broken behavior, and PulseAudio fixes it. Audio is now controlled by the current user, and all other users are muted.
Welcome to... oh about 2005 when ALSA enabled dmix by default so that people who have sound cards without hardware mixing (most of them) can still have any number of apps open and playing sound independently. Revolutionary!
Completely plausible for a short race on a dirt track. Certainly, the dog would have no chance on a paved track, but the car is at a huge disadvantage on the dirt.
Get $100 taken out of your paycheck every month for 40 or 50 years (480 months * 100 = $48,000) and then get a meager 600/month back for maybe 10 (120 months = however much $72,000 will be worth within 40 years) and if you're healthy enough 15 years.
My employer pays for my pension plan and they put in $100 and the $600 is what the fund says I will get even though my investments are very aggressive at this point (50% goes in the tech and asian markets with very good dividends that double the investment every quarter, 50% in the safe 'recommended' aggregated funds which doesn't ever seem to make a profit but is promised to be always there even if the markets crash). If I make another $250 contribution every month they say I should be able to have the same income as I do now but measured against the historic devaluation of money that is not what I want to be making within 40 years and I really could use the 250 right now.
The only way the pension funds work is if you're in the middle-to-upper class (>$250,000/year income) and can contribute easily a good $1000/month into your own managed investment funds. Then you should be able to cash in when you're 60 and live comfortably if off course you're investments paid off over time and you're not committing large funds in bubble's and crashes.
How on EARTH do you need to earn >$250k/year to contribute $1k/month to your retirement savings? I own a condo, have a paid off car (bought new) and contribute over $1k/month to my retirement... and I make less than 6 figures.
...and when you don't save for retirement, you're gambling with your life. Pick your poison.
You're really not familiar with government, are you?
What are you talking about? The early Itaniums were x86-32 compatible. "Itanium processors released prior to 2006 had hardware support for the IA-32 architecture to permit support for legacy server applications"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium#Architectural_changes
It wasn't until later the Itaniums lost their hardware based x86 compatibility.
While true, you omitted the crucial continuation of that sentence:
Unlike XP, less than 50% of Linux users are using distributions from 2001.
So what you're saying is that it'll never go away?
Since the beginning, the iPhone has had busted CSS support for position: fixed; elements, which is terribly unfortunate as it makes Game! difficult to play. How does the Nexus S fare?
I'm the last person in the world to defend Dell, but their servers do ship with standard IPMI implementations that you can connect to with anything that speaks IPMI. I'm not sure what this browser nonsense is all about.
Of course, the real question is what's the real life performance of 1 Gbit wireless... Better or worse than 100 Mbit wired? I'm not hopeful based on existing implementations of a/b/g/n wireless.
If you had read the GP's post, you'd see that he's pointing out that the marginal cost of bandwidth is virtually zero (which is true), while the same cannot be said about fuel, electricity and water, which is why your analogy is not appropriate.
Hey, either way, at least they won't have to upgrade to play Game!.
While true, it's not as bad as it could be. The nvidia blob depends on a compatibility shim, and the compatibility shim is open source (or at least, not a binary blob). In practice, it has been feasible to patch to shim to support more kernel versions without having to rely on Nvidia.
Game! is also similar in that all moves are permanent, however it does have the permadeath option (dubbed hardcore mode) available for new characters (once you get at least one past level 10).
The plural of anecdote is not data.
It's obvious that you don't understand the issue, kernel ABI is completely irrelevant here. Not only is the overwhelming majority of the software that requires updating here in userspace (Mesa, Xorg libraries and Intel DDX driver), you can already switch out the kernel version in use freely, without a stable ABI!
No, what the article is trying to say is that because not every driver completely reinvents the wheel like they do on Windows, there needs to be more coordination between the driver and the other libraries that it depends upon, instead of just being able to dump the latest development code as a new release and call it a day.