Well now we're just arguing about price and performance aren't we? How fast is fast enough to justify a i7 versus an i5? That's an answer that'll be different for everyone. Maybe someone's OK with dropping a grand more for 32 GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD and a 15" 4K touch screen. Maybe not. With Moore's law eroding, it might be a while longer before the price comes down a lot on the top-end experience, but at some point that experience will still become available to everyone. It's just a matter of whether you want to wait for it or pay for it now.
It's marginally easier to install Ubuntu on a laptop that was running Ubuntu, than on one that was running windows. Plus I then know that all the hardware works (it does.) And I don't have to pay the Microsoft tax. The Dell Precision is a sexy little laptop, entirely unlike any of the Fischer-Price laptops that have been issued to me in the past. It might actually be enough to be a daily driver.
Yeah, we solve problems. Really they don't even need to be programming problems. I was watching a game reviewer play a puzzle game called "IO" on youtube a while back and watched him throwing himself at the wrong path for about 10 minutes before realizing that it wasn't working and trying something else. I realized that I'd actually learned quite a bit about how he solves problems by watching him, probably as much as I ever did from the programming assignment interview test.
A lot of people say they google for API parameter order and such, and I do as well. But I really feel like we're using Google as a crutch -- you'd be surprised at how much you can remember when you don't have access to the internet. No matter how fast google is, your immediate memory cache is a good bit faster. I've found that if I work on a language for any length of time, I'll start remembering stuff like that for the classes and languages that I use the most, and can recall them instantly. That usually goes away within a couple months of not actively using those languages.
There are a good number of Linux-compatible titles on Steam these days. Way more games than there were for OSX when I had my brief flirtation with Apple hardware in the 2000's. And way, way more than there were on Linux, back in the heyday of Loki games. You can run the steam ones with no fuckery whatsover. If you don't mind a little fuckery, I hear you can get at least a couple of the MMOs working with wine. Dunno about Skyrim, though. Haven't tried my VR headset on Linux yet, either, although apparently Valve just released the stuff for that a week or two ago. One of these days I'll plug my Vive into my Linux laptop and take a crack at it.
I did some interviews for a company I worked for a few years back, and my goal for those things wasn't so much to see if they could complete the problem successfully. My goal was to see if I thought the guy I was interviewing would work well with the team. I kept lowering the bar on the programming problem until it was a string reverse, which is just ridiculously simple. Even more so, I allowed the person to do it in the language they felt strongest in. For a couple of the OO scripting languages, that could be as easy as string.reverse(), and I would allowed it if anyone had ever said that. Even so, I was deliberately ambiguous about some things -- did I want the string reversed in place? Were there any error conditions I wanted returned, and should those be exceptions or return values? I had answers prepared, if any of them had ever asked me. I also had a very nice whiteboard, which they would almost to a person go up to and start crapping code onto, immediately. If they'd interacted with me and the whiteboard a bit before doing that, I would have actually stopped them before they'd written a single line of code.
Yeah, you look at current articles recommending VR games, the same 15-20 always come up. Other than those 15-20, most of the stuff on steam for VR is crap. Actually quite a lot of the stuff on steam is absolute crap anyway. There are a ton of games on there that appear to be written by some teenager who is in the process of teaching themselves how to program on unity, with stock purchased assets or stolen ones, and which will barely run at all. Valve doesn't seem to care about the quality of the product on their service, so it's up to you to develop a crap filter. So it should really come as no surprise at all that our crap filters filter out most of the VR offerings. We all own the good titles at the moment, and will no doubt buy new ones that prove to be good, as we learn about them.
That's awesome! I'm pretty sure an episode of X Files started that way. I forget exactly how that one turned out, I think the microbes end up being very nice to everyone and at the end they buy Scully and Mulder milkshakes!
There are actually a decent number of titles on steam, although two or three that I very much like (Skyrim and Defense Grid come to mind) are not available. But I still haven't booted back to windows since early last year on my big fat desktop. And I have a Dell Precision that's going to end up being my main machine in the near future, that only has xubuntu on it. It works remarkably well and is nowhere near as obnoxious as Windows 10.
I've always been able to get games running under wine for a while, but it seems like the setup always eventually breaks if you so much as look at it funny. It's been a while since I tried though, perhaps I'll take another crack at it.
And how exactly does Windows crush steam? Microsoft's strategy appears to be to make the user's computer increasingly inconvenient to use, to the point where even non-technical users are starting to realize that their operating system choice is a problem. In the mean time, steam is adding more and more games for non-windows platform. The only game I'm currently missing, having not booted my computer back to windows for months, is the ability to play a native Linux version of Skyrim. Well, that and having to reboot my computer whenever Microsoft feels that I should be compelled to.
I just weighed my options recently and opted for a Dell Precision with Linux preloaded. It's a beautiful little machine, a far cry from Dell laptops that I'd been issued at work in recent years, and all the hardware on the machine works flawlessly with Linux without the usual sorts of fuckery that I've had to resort to in the past when installing Linux on laptops.
Last time I was really in to MacOS, the game scene wasn't really that great. It wasn't as bad as Linux in the '90's, but it wasn't great either. You could dual-boot your Mac over to Windows to play games, but then you had to live with a video card that was several years behind the Windows state of the art at the time.
Funnily, my linux box with Steam is a better gaming platform than my last Mac was. I still apparently have to jump through hoops to play something like World of Warcraft or Skyrim, but there are an ever-increasing number of indy titles and a lot of those are quite good.
If I could get WoW or Skyrim running effortlessly on my Linux box, Apple and Microsoft could both fuck right off.
When the autonomous killbots show up on my doorstep, I'm sure they'll ask me if I ever donated to protect people from autonomous killbots, and I'll be all like "No! I welcome our robot overlords! It would be inefficient to waste your precious ammunition on me! Why not check with Mr. Hoffman, next door?"
I'm on a comparatively tiny 15" laptop screen that's 4K, and the difference between 4K and 1080p is astounding to me. It's significantly sharper, and I'm quite keen to upgrade to a large 4K screen on my desktop machine. Unfortunately, that would require upgrading the entire machine, which I don't want to pay for just yet, but I will at the first opportunity.
I've also started shooting my skydiving videos with a 4K GoPro, and even when viewing the videos at 1080, the difference is pretty amazing. You can actually see air traffic (Canopies, wingsuit guys, nearby planes, etc) that would not have been visible with the old GoPro. There have been several cases in the past where I'd be flying my wingsuit and spotted planes or tracking groups below me that didn't show up on the video with the old GoPro, and you can actually see the things that I saw on the jump with the new one.
I remember when they used to talk that way about the smog in New York City and LA, back in the 70's. Nixon had just created the EPA and they were just ramping up to deal with that sort of thing. By the mid '80's, people had largely forgotten about that sort of thing in much of the USA. If you want to see what the USA would (will) look like without an EPA, go visit China.
Oh God, I remember years of frustration with AMD drivers, on both Windows, Linux and OSX systems. On the OSX box (2005 or 2006 Mac Pro Desktop,) the card wouldn't spin its fans up when it was overheating, causing it to literally self-destruct with Apple's stock configuration. Their graphics cards have been on my do-not-purchase list for a solid decade! If I blamed every OS because of the experience provided by AMD's shitty drivers, I'd still be running CP/M! Nvidia may be a bunch of cocks, but at least they seem to be able to build some frustration-free drivers!
I got a precision with a touch screen and a Linux preinstall (No windows) a couple months ago and the thing works great. The default wireless doesn't connect so well, though. I found I get much faster wireless if I use wicd-gtk. Touch screen works with Ubuntu, as well!
IBM had no comment on that? They have some experience with that sort of thing in the past. Oh well, I suppose the Department of Final Solutions Department will have to outsource that work to India!
I did a contract with Sun, just before they went under. The employees were quick to tell stories about how they used to hire magicians to come and entertain on the campus. There was this one guy, sat a cube over from me. Near as I could tell, his job was to sit on the phone all day boasting about whatever next conference he was going to and how he was a certified black belt. That was the only time I'd ever heard anyone talking about it. At Sun. Just before they went under.
Damn straight! I'm sitting on a warehouse full of dioxin and DDT here and could have an "All Natural Aloe Vera" company started up in a matter of days if it weren't for those pesky regulations! It's totally a win-win! People pay you a fuck ton of money to take this stuff off your hands and after you've mixed it with a bit of corn starch, they'll pay top dollar for my "Dave's All Natural Organic Aloe Vera!" The FDA ought not to even complain as long as I put some things on the label in sarcastic quote marks!
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking of which, how many potatoes does it take to starve an Irishman? None!
Americans still having way more sex than nerd.
Well now we're just arguing about price and performance aren't we? How fast is fast enough to justify a i7 versus an i5? That's an answer that'll be different for everyone. Maybe someone's OK with dropping a grand more for 32 GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD and a 15" 4K touch screen. Maybe not. With Moore's law eroding, it might be a while longer before the price comes down a lot on the top-end experience, but at some point that experience will still become available to everyone. It's just a matter of whether you want to wait for it or pay for it now.
It's marginally easier to install Ubuntu on a laptop that was running Ubuntu, than on one that was running windows. Plus I then know that all the hardware works (it does.) And I don't have to pay the Microsoft tax. The Dell Precision is a sexy little laptop, entirely unlike any of the Fischer-Price laptops that have been issued to me in the past. It might actually be enough to be a daily driver.
A lot of people say they google for API parameter order and such, and I do as well. But I really feel like we're using Google as a crutch -- you'd be surprised at how much you can remember when you don't have access to the internet. No matter how fast google is, your immediate memory cache is a good bit faster. I've found that if I work on a language for any length of time, I'll start remembering stuff like that for the classes and languages that I use the most, and can recall them instantly. That usually goes away within a couple months of not actively using those languages.
There are a good number of Linux-compatible titles on Steam these days. Way more games than there were for OSX when I had my brief flirtation with Apple hardware in the 2000's. And way, way more than there were on Linux, back in the heyday of Loki games. You can run the steam ones with no fuckery whatsover. If you don't mind a little fuckery, I hear you can get at least a couple of the MMOs working with wine. Dunno about Skyrim, though. Haven't tried my VR headset on Linux yet, either, although apparently Valve just released the stuff for that a week or two ago. One of these days I'll plug my Vive into my Linux laptop and take a crack at it.
I did some interviews for a company I worked for a few years back, and my goal for those things wasn't so much to see if they could complete the problem successfully. My goal was to see if I thought the guy I was interviewing would work well with the team. I kept lowering the bar on the programming problem until it was a string reverse, which is just ridiculously simple. Even more so, I allowed the person to do it in the language they felt strongest in. For a couple of the OO scripting languages, that could be as easy as string.reverse(), and I would allowed it if anyone had ever said that. Even so, I was deliberately ambiguous about some things -- did I want the string reversed in place? Were there any error conditions I wanted returned, and should those be exceptions or return values? I had answers prepared, if any of them had ever asked me. I also had a very nice whiteboard, which they would almost to a person go up to and start crapping code onto, immediately. If they'd interacted with me and the whiteboard a bit before doing that, I would have actually stopped them before they'd written a single line of code.
Yeah, you look at current articles recommending VR games, the same 15-20 always come up. Other than those 15-20, most of the stuff on steam for VR is crap. Actually quite a lot of the stuff on steam is absolute crap anyway. There are a ton of games on there that appear to be written by some teenager who is in the process of teaching themselves how to program on unity, with stock purchased assets or stolen ones, and which will barely run at all. Valve doesn't seem to care about the quality of the product on their service, so it's up to you to develop a crap filter. So it should really come as no surprise at all that our crap filters filter out most of the VR offerings. We all own the good titles at the moment, and will no doubt buy new ones that prove to be good, as we learn about them.
That's awesome! I'm pretty sure an episode of X Files started that way. I forget exactly how that one turned out, I think the microbes end up being very nice to everyone and at the end they buy Scully and Mulder milkshakes!
There are actually a decent number of titles on steam, although two or three that I very much like (Skyrim and Defense Grid come to mind) are not available. But I still haven't booted back to windows since early last year on my big fat desktop. And I have a Dell Precision that's going to end up being my main machine in the near future, that only has xubuntu on it. It works remarkably well and is nowhere near as obnoxious as Windows 10.
I'm guessing the entire memory card will be full of presidential penis pics and sexual text messages to young Russian models.
I've always been able to get games running under wine for a while, but it seems like the setup always eventually breaks if you so much as look at it funny. It's been a while since I tried though, perhaps I'll take another crack at it.
And how exactly does Windows crush steam? Microsoft's strategy appears to be to make the user's computer increasingly inconvenient to use, to the point where even non-technical users are starting to realize that their operating system choice is a problem. In the mean time, steam is adding more and more games for non-windows platform. The only game I'm currently missing, having not booted my computer back to windows for months, is the ability to play a native Linux version of Skyrim. Well, that and having to reboot my computer whenever Microsoft feels that I should be compelled to.
I just weighed my options recently and opted for a Dell Precision with Linux preloaded. It's a beautiful little machine, a far cry from Dell laptops that I'd been issued at work in recent years, and all the hardware on the machine works flawlessly with Linux without the usual sorts of fuckery that I've had to resort to in the past when installing Linux on laptops.
Funnily, my linux box with Steam is a better gaming platform than my last Mac was. I still apparently have to jump through hoops to play something like World of Warcraft or Skyrim, but there are an ever-increasing number of indy titles and a lot of those are quite good.
If I could get WoW or Skyrim running effortlessly on my Linux box, Apple and Microsoft could both fuck right off.
When the autonomous killbots show up on my doorstep, I'm sure they'll ask me if I ever donated to protect people from autonomous killbots, and I'll be all like "No! I welcome our robot overlords! It would be inefficient to waste your precious ammunition on me! Why not check with Mr. Hoffman, next door?"
I've also started shooting my skydiving videos with a 4K GoPro, and even when viewing the videos at 1080, the difference is pretty amazing. You can actually see air traffic (Canopies, wingsuit guys, nearby planes, etc) that would not have been visible with the old GoPro. There have been several cases in the past where I'd be flying my wingsuit and spotted planes or tracking groups below me that didn't show up on the video with the old GoPro, and you can actually see the things that I saw on the jump with the new one.
Yeah. You'd also have to deplete the world's spray-tan reserves and hunt the entire orange guinea pig population to extinction.
I remember when they used to talk that way about the smog in New York City and LA, back in the 70's. Nixon had just created the EPA and they were just ramping up to deal with that sort of thing. By the mid '80's, people had largely forgotten about that sort of thing in much of the USA. If you want to see what the USA would (will) look like without an EPA, go visit China.
Here's the story of how the maneuver was developed.
Oh God, I remember years of frustration with AMD drivers, on both Windows, Linux and OSX systems. On the OSX box (2005 or 2006 Mac Pro Desktop,) the card wouldn't spin its fans up when it was overheating, causing it to literally self-destruct with Apple's stock configuration. Their graphics cards have been on my do-not-purchase list for a solid decade! If I blamed every OS because of the experience provided by AMD's shitty drivers, I'd still be running CP/M! Nvidia may be a bunch of cocks, but at least they seem to be able to build some frustration-free drivers!
I got a precision with a touch screen and a Linux preinstall (No windows) a couple months ago and the thing works great. The default wireless doesn't connect so well, though. I found I get much faster wireless if I use wicd-gtk. Touch screen works with Ubuntu, as well!
IBM had no comment on that? They have some experience with that sort of thing in the past. Oh well, I suppose the Department of Final Solutions Department will have to outsource that work to India!
I did a contract with Sun, just before they went under. The employees were quick to tell stories about how they used to hire magicians to come and entertain on the campus. There was this one guy, sat a cube over from me. Near as I could tell, his job was to sit on the phone all day boasting about whatever next conference he was going to and how he was a certified black belt. That was the only time I'd ever heard anyone talking about it. At Sun. Just before they went under.
Damn straight! I'm sitting on a warehouse full of dioxin and DDT here and could have an "All Natural Aloe Vera" company started up in a matter of days if it weren't for those pesky regulations! It's totally a win-win! People pay you a fuck ton of money to take this stuff off your hands and after you've mixed it with a bit of corn starch, they'll pay top dollar for my "Dave's All Natural Organic Aloe Vera!" The FDA ought not to even complain as long as I put some things on the label in sarcastic quote marks!