Yes, but on the other hand, the PS2 games don't look anywhere near as good as Sony claimed they would. Remember the claims that in PS2 games individual hairs on a persons head would be modelled? Both the GC and Xbox games generally have better graphics than PS2 games.
Well, how about buildings, then? They are supposed to keep burglars out, and yet very few houses crash regularly.
The difference is that a computer program can do so many different things. If buying a new toaster could install an invisible front door with no lock right next to your regular door, then I think we would have a lot more real world security problems.
Quiet! You'll make Tuomo Valkonen, author of Ion3 mad. He only linkes bitmap fonts. He's already holding antialiasing support in Ion3 hostage learns to understand his point of view, if you set him off, there is no telling what he'll do.
Yes, cameraphones fill a need, that's why they are popular. My point is that compared to regular cameras, they suck. And while some people swear by their cellphone-pda devices, those people are a tiny minority. The Nokia communicator has existed for something like a decade, and it is still a small niche product. There are both better pdas and better cellphones than the Communicator.
Numerous attempts have been made to make mp3-playing phones, cellphone pda:s, cell phones that are gaming devices and a million other convergence devices. There are hundreds of 'camera phones' but none of them take decent pictures. The best way to get a good phone with a good mp3-player is STILL to tape a Nano to your razr.
Convergence devices suck. They have always sucked. There is always a new convergence device around the corner that reportedly won't suck. But it will. Get over it.
You are correct in stating what the potential problem is. But I have yet to see anything which makes me think that goverment intervention is needed to prevent that from happening. Market forces will keep ISPs in line. If an ISP starts throtling Wikipedia, then users will switch ISP.
It could be argued that the UNIX 'building block' concept was a sham from the beginning. All traditional shells implement lot's of commands like 'echo', 'kill' and 'printf' as builtins improve performance.
I think this is a bad idae, since it only improves performance in cases where you fork of lots of processes, i.e. loops. But proper shellscripts avoid loops in favour of complex pipelines. So you only really notice the performance difference when you're doing something wrong in the first place.
The drawbacks of keeping everything in the shell are mostly the same as the drawbacks from keeping everything in the kernel; a huge monolithic lump of code, if anything crashes then you're dead. But unlike in the microkernel case, you actually have a real chance of recovery if a component crashes. (How exactly do you recover if your process spawning demon dies?)
Zsh takes this monolithic shell idea even further by implementing a regular expression-like language for matching inside the shell.
I'd be surprised if you won't be able to buy some form of HDMI dongle from Sony for something like $50. Given that Sony most probably delayed the PS3 launch for half a year because of Blueray issues, I think it's a good bet to assume that they want the PS3 to be a good Blueray player.
No GM needed, hemp plants without THC have always existed. It's illegal to grow hemp because it is hard to tell 'stoner hemp' and 'non-stoner hemp' apart. And by hard, I mean it's not enough to glance at the shape of the leaves from a distance.
This is only true if your ripoff is good and brings something new to the table. Sony's live ripoff will most probably suck, since Sony are worthless at producing usable user interface. Did you ever use the software for their NetMD's? Flashy graphics, insane DRM and shoddy coding will make sure that Xbox live is where it's at.
You are confusing an open reference implementation with an open standard. They are not the same, and so long as Sun controls the standard, there is no harm in making their reference implementation open.
Yes, but my argument is that the standard and an implementation of that standard are two completely separate things. They are using the argument that by opening up their reference implementation, the standard itself is opened, and that is just plain false.
The way I see it, there are three relevant levels of openness here:
* A standard which is well defined, whose license can not be arbitrarily terminated and is provided to everybody free of charge or at a reasonable cost. (This is the most important one) * An open sourced reference implementation of that standard, prefereably released under the BSD licence so anybody can extend it. (This is nice but not crucial) * An open standards process. (If the standard is stable and well written, this is not all that important)
Sun is doing the first but is avoid doing the second by giving the strawman argument that it would somehow imply the third.
In what way is this related to the MS J++ effort? MS tried to pervert the _standard_ through an incompatible implementation, they could have done it without any access to the Sun source. It might even be easier to write a subtly incompatible Java version if you don't look at the source.
If anything, I think the Sun vs. MS war on Java shows why an open reference implementation can strengthen a standard.
That's the fault of lazy packagers, not a problem with RPM itself. You can specify dependencies on a particular file (like/usr/bin/java) insesad of a package if you want to. And if that's not enough (e.g. if you want to allow people installing into/usr/local/ or/opt) you can write little dependency checking scripts at install-time. For example, this snippet makes sure a few X headers are present, regardless of if they are installed in/usr or/usr/X11:
%define xinclude %( if test -d/usr/X11R6/include; then echo/usr/X11R6/include; else echo/usr/include; fi ) Requires: %{xinclude}/X11/StringDefs.h, %{xinclude}/X11/Xlib.h
I have met my fair share of bad people in my life, but I have yet to meet anyone who considered themselves 'bad' or 'evil'. We have an amazing capacity to rationalize our behaviour. Most serial killers, dictators and child molestors consider themselves good people. Aside from a small group of mentally unbalanced, no one considers themselves 'evil'.
In the end, the _only_ good meassure I've seen of an individual is what they _do_. In other words, it does not matter if a practicing pedophile says he loves children and thinks that what he does is good for the children, it only matters that he molests children and by doing so scars them for life. That makes him a _bad_ person. Even if he thinks that he does what he does to make children happy.
A pedophile who does _not_ molest children but has the urge to do so is not a bad person. He is a sich person in need of help and with my sympathy.
I'm still amazed by the fact that even though the PS3 will be released a full year later than the 360, the hardware specs strongly indicate that the GPU will be significantly weaker than the 360. This makes even less sense when you consider that Sony claim that the PS3 will have lots of games running in 1080p. How are they going to push twice the number of pixels with ~80% of the hardware power?
I guess Sony is hoping that programmers will increase their use of dynamic LOD to replace some of the GPU work with CPU cycles. Such techniques are already common, and they usually result in a lot of rendering artifacts, so I'm a bit sceptical if this can really save Sony.
This is nonsense. x86 is in no way more sensitive to buffer overflow bugs than other popular architectures. It is probably possible to implement hardware acceleration of guard pages and some form of privilige separation, making such protection mechanisms slightly faster, but I know of no hardware that does so, so this is in no way x86-specific. Also, on a 64-bit platform, you have more address space, meaning that if you randomize the memory space layout on each invocation, an attacker will have a pretty hard time figuring out what to do with an overflow error, but again this is not x86-specific. I think you're thinking about the C computer language, which is designed with fixed-sized memory buffers in mind, making it much more work to avoid buffer overflows in C than in e.g. Java or C#.
A modern web browser gives you a turing complete language, some form of network connection and rough control of most of the things going on on-screen. This is enough of a platform to do almost anything, but fact of the matter is, it is not a _good_ platform.
Issues:
* Javascript is a bad language. It is also bad as a code distribution format, as in your HappyJoy example, though the drawbacks are a bit different. * The standard library is anemic - anything cool will have to be distributed, meaning slow startup times, low performance and large memory requirements. * The browser is not suited for hosting an OS. The back button will kill the OS, etc.
In the end, I think that the browser as an application framework _will_ become even more common than today, because the benefits of this distribution model are tremendous for many types of applications. But the platform will suck for a long time, because it wasn't designed for this, and fixing it will take a huge amount of time and effort.
That's wrong. The HDTV spec only specifies support for 1080p in framerates of 30 Hz or less. I belive the reason for this is that HDMI doesn't have enough bandwidth for 1080p@60.
This makes it extremely obvious that the Sony PS3 talk about 1080p support is all talk - who'd want to settle for jerky 30 Hz momvement, just to get a little higher resoultion? (Look at the insane amounts of motion blur you need to use in the ciname to make 24 Hz look ok) Consoles will use 720p$60Hz or 1080i@60Hz, both of which contaion roughlt the same amount of information per second.
I'd guess that the fact that it's becoming pretty common with parents who are gamers is also a common reason why playing games seems less cool these days.
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Yes, but on the other hand, the PS2 games don't look anywhere near as good as Sony claimed they would. Remember the claims that in PS2 games individual hairs on a persons head would be modelled? Both the GC and Xbox games generally have better graphics than PS2 games.
Yes, but on the other hand you do say "Mack the knife", "Minnie the Mooch", "Vash the stampede" and "Kermit the frog", right?
Technically that may be true, but they both have roots in piratbyrån. Though the pirate bay was mostly brached of as a separate organization long ago.
Well, how about buildings, then? They are supposed to keep burglars out, and yet very few houses crash regularly.
The difference is that a computer program can do so many different things. If buying a new toaster could install an invisible front door with no lock right next to your regular door, then I think we would have a lot more real world security problems.
Quiet! You'll make Tuomo Valkonen, author of Ion3 mad. He only linkes bitmap fonts. He's already holding antialiasing support in Ion3 hostage learns to understand his point of view, if you set him off, there is no telling what he'll do.
Yes, cameraphones fill a need, that's why they are popular. My point is that compared to regular cameras, they suck. And while some people swear by their cellphone-pda devices, those people are a tiny minority. The Nokia communicator has existed for something like a decade, and it is still a small niche product. There are both better pdas and better cellphones than the Communicator.
Numerous attempts have been made to make mp3-playing phones, cellphone pda:s, cell phones that are gaming devices and a million other convergence devices. There are hundreds of 'camera phones' but none of them take decent pictures. The best way to get a good phone with a good mp3-player is STILL to tape a Nano to your razr.
Convergence devices suck. They have always sucked. There is always a new convergence device around the corner that reportedly won't suck. But it will. Get over it.
You are correct in stating what the potential problem is. But I have yet to see anything which makes me think that goverment intervention is needed to prevent that from happening. Market forces will keep ISPs in line. If an ISP starts throtling Wikipedia, then users will switch ISP.
Actual releases?
(Though I hope Etch will be the start of a new trend there)
I wouldn't stop reading /. if the third one won, but I agree with your comments about it. I like the current design much better.
It could be argued that the UNIX 'building block' concept was a sham from the beginning. All traditional shells implement lot's of commands like 'echo', 'kill' and 'printf' as builtins improve performance.
I think this is a bad idae, since it only improves performance in cases where you fork of lots of processes, i.e. loops. But proper shellscripts avoid loops in favour of complex pipelines. So you only really notice the performance difference when you're doing something wrong in the first place.
The drawbacks of keeping everything in the shell are mostly the same as the drawbacks from keeping everything in the kernel; a huge monolithic lump of code, if anything crashes then you're dead. But unlike in the microkernel case, you actually have a real chance of recovery if a component crashes. (How exactly do you recover if your process spawning demon dies?)
Zsh takes this monolithic shell idea even further by implementing a regular expression-like language for matching inside the shell.
I'd be surprised if you won't be able to buy some form of HDMI dongle from Sony for something like $50. Given that Sony most probably delayed the PS3 launch for half a year because of Blueray issues, I think it's a good bet to assume that they want the PS3 to be a good Blueray player.
No GM needed, hemp plants without THC have always existed. It's illegal to grow hemp because it is hard to tell 'stoner hemp' and 'non-stoner hemp' apart. And by hard, I mean it's not enough to glance at the shape of the leaves from a distance.
This is only true if your ripoff is good and brings something new to the table. Sony's live ripoff will most probably suck, since Sony are worthless at producing usable user interface. Did you ever use the software for their NetMD's? Flashy graphics, insane DRM and shoddy coding will make sure that Xbox live is where it's at.
You are confusing an open reference implementation with an open standard. They are not the same, and so long as Sun controls the standard, there is no harm in making their reference implementation open.
Yes, but my argument is that the standard and an implementation of that standard are two completely separate things. They are using the argument that by opening up their reference implementation, the standard itself is opened, and that is just plain false.
The way I see it, there are three relevant levels of openness here:
* A standard which is well defined, whose license can not be arbitrarily terminated and is provided to everybody free of charge or at a reasonable cost. (This is the most important one)
* An open sourced reference implementation of that standard, prefereably released under the BSD licence so anybody can extend it. (This is nice but not crucial)
* An open standards process. (If the standard is stable and well written, this is not all that important)
Sun is doing the first but is avoid doing the second by giving the strawman argument that it would somehow imply the third.
In what way is this related to the MS J++ effort? MS tried to pervert the _standard_ through an incompatible implementation, they could have done it without any access to the Sun source. It might even be easier to write a subtly incompatible Java version if you don't look at the source.
If anything, I think the Sun vs. MS war on Java shows why an open reference implementation can strengthen a standard.
That's the fault of lazy packagers, not a problem with RPM itself. You can specify dependencies on a particular file (like /usr/bin/java) insesad of a package if you want to. And if that's not enough (e.g. if you want to allow people installing into /usr/local/ or /opt) you can write little dependency checking scripts at install-time. For example, this snippet makes sure a few X headers are present, regardless of if they are installed in /usr or /usr/X11:
/usr/X11R6/include; then echo /usr/X11R6/include; else echo /usr/include; fi )
%define xinclude %( if test -d
Requires: %{xinclude}/X11/StringDefs.h, %{xinclude}/X11/Xlib.h
I have met my fair share of bad people in my life, but I have yet to meet anyone who considered themselves 'bad' or 'evil'. We have an amazing capacity to rationalize our behaviour. Most serial killers, dictators and child molestors consider themselves good people. Aside from a small group of mentally unbalanced, no one considers themselves 'evil'.
In the end, the _only_ good meassure I've seen of an individual is what they _do_. In other words, it does not matter if a practicing pedophile says he loves children and thinks that what he does is good for the children, it only matters that he molests children and by doing so scars them for life. That makes him a _bad_ person. Even if he thinks that he does what he does to make children happy.
A pedophile who does _not_ molest children but has the urge to do so is not a bad person. He is a sich person in need of help and with my sympathy.
I'm still amazed by the fact that even though the PS3 will be released a full year later than the 360, the hardware specs strongly indicate that the GPU will be significantly weaker than the 360. This makes even less sense when you consider that Sony claim that the PS3 will have lots of games running in 1080p. How are they going to push twice the number of pixels with ~80% of the hardware power?
I guess Sony is hoping that programmers will increase their use of dynamic LOD to replace some of the GPU work with CPU cycles. Such techniques are already common, and they usually result in a lot of rendering artifacts, so I'm a bit sceptical if this can really save Sony.
This is nonsense. x86 is in no way more sensitive to buffer overflow bugs than other popular architectures. It is probably possible to implement hardware acceleration of guard pages and some form of privilige separation, making such protection mechanisms slightly faster, but I know of no hardware that does so, so this is in no way x86-specific. Also, on a 64-bit platform, you have more address space, meaning that if you randomize the memory space layout on each invocation, an attacker will have a pretty hard time figuring out what to do with an overflow error, but again this is not x86-specific. I think you're thinking about the C computer language, which is designed with fixed-sized memory buffers in mind, making it much more work to avoid buffer overflows in C than in e.g. Java or C#.
A modern web browser gives you a turing complete language, some form of network connection and rough control of most of the things going on on-screen. This is enough of a platform to do almost anything, but fact of the matter is, it is not a _good_ platform.
Issues:
* Javascript is a bad language. It is also bad as a code distribution format, as in your HappyJoy example, though the drawbacks are a bit different.
* The standard library is anemic - anything cool will have to be distributed, meaning slow startup times, low performance and large memory requirements.
* The browser is not suited for hosting an OS. The back button will kill the OS, etc.
In the end, I think that the browser as an application framework _will_ become even more common than today, because the benefits of this distribution model are tremendous for many types of applications. But the platform will suck for a long time, because it wasn't designed for this, and fixing it will take a huge amount of time and effort.
That's wrong. The HDTV spec only specifies support for 1080p in framerates of 30 Hz or less. I belive the reason for this is that HDMI doesn't have enough bandwidth for 1080p@60.
This makes it extremely obvious that the Sony PS3 talk about 1080p support is all talk - who'd want to settle for jerky 30 Hz momvement, just to get a little higher resoultion? (Look at the insane amounts of motion blur you need to use in the ciname to make 24 Hz look ok) Consoles will use 720p$60Hz or 1080i@60Hz, both of which contaion roughlt the same amount of information per second.
I'd guess that the fact that it's becoming pretty common with parents who are gamers is also a common reason why playing games seems less cool these days.