I work for a company that develops software, and Linux is one of our supported platforms for a couple of our products.
What are we looking for in a 'stable' distribution? Simple - that the core system packages and dependencies are not changing on an almost daily basis. We want to know that if we have tested our products against Debian, that they will still work next week (and not need to be recompiled because some library package changed suddenly).
The 'stable' moniker has less to do with OS stability in terms of up-time, and more to do with stability in the sense of "It is what it is". Debian stable doesn't really change, so we know that if our product works with Debian stable today, it should work next week.
I work in the tech support department, and I hate to tell people that we cannot support Debian testing. But, we don't officially [though I try to give people some tips on how they might go about trying to get it working], because from a practical standpoint, there is no real guarantee stuff won't change next week.
But, since Debian stable is so old, most people are using testing (as the parent suggests), because stable doesn't have recent package versions.
The reason Debian NEEDS a stable release soon, is so that it can be a 'supported platform' for many, many companies.
And this transcends software development and support: while 'testing' is usually quite good about not breaking stuff, on my computer at home I've had XFree stop working numerous times after updating Debian, because the Linux kernel had changed and I needed to recompile the nvidia kernel module (the frustrating thing was, the linux kernel package was the exact same version of the Linux kernel, just a different build; e.g. was running linux-kernel-2.4.28-k7-1 and it got upgraded to linux-kernel-2.4.28-k7-2 or something like that - I don't remember the exact version numbers).
So, from a system administration standpoint, you wouldn't want to necessarily deploy Debian 'testing' to a bunch of workstations, because they might break overnight.
You might not want to deploy debian testing on a server, again, because every time you run an update on the server (to ensure you have the latest security fixes), your server might suddenly stop working (rare, but it can happen).
These are the reasons people want a 'stable' distribution. One that isn't changing *constantly*, but does have fairly recent versions of popular packages.
To me, the answer is that Debian should split off non-core packages from the distro, and version them seperately. That way, it would be a heck of a lot easier for them to release an updated 'stable' version of the core distro every 3 or 6 months, and as packages move from one 'stable' version to another 'stable' version of the package, you could just update that package.
My computer is MY computer. I assert the right to retain control over it. Your server is YOUR server, you have the right to assert control over it. The problem is, there is no way for me to know ahead of time, often times, if a website will have annoying popups or popunders. Or flash adds that do annoying things and can't be 'paused' in their animation, or easily muted without muting my whole computer.
This is where Adblock type technologies fulfill the other end of the "Social Contract" - letting me control my computer. If you don't want me viewing your content unless I view the ad also, fine, then give me a way to decline both. Come up with a way to deny the content if I don't view the advert, and instead just return a generic page stating, "This site uses {insert ad-type here}. In order to view the content, you must allow this type of advertising."
Then I can choose whether to accept the popup, or browse on to someone else.
The problem with this "social contract" theory is, I never *agreed* to this social contract. One can argue that by viewing the content, I am implicitly agreeing to it. But the problem is, until I actually go to a site, and either get a popup, or block it, I don't know what the 'terms' of this social contract are.
It's like saying you have to accept the terms of any contract, without even knowing those terms ahead of time.
I REFUSE to give up control over my computer to any site on the internet just because I followed a link to them.
Yeah, I love how LN is giving the people 1 year of free credit monitoring, identity theft protection, etc. Guess what - the people who stole the info will still have that info after that year runs out. That's just plain retarded. A publicity gimmick more than a real fix.
Government should require them to pay for those services for LIFE for those people.
With the prices LN charges for their service, they better be able to afford it, or else someone is laundering some money offshore.
And the download can *still* be blocked (if you are worried about a massive bandwidth hit as a lot of machines try to download it). Surprised no one else has mentioned this yet, but it isn't that difficult for a network administrator that knows what he/she's doing, to block connections to download.microsoft.com.
So, Microsoft's tool won't let you block the download. Big whoop. Block it yourself on your network router/firewall.
And in other Slashdot news. . . THE SKY IS FALLING OMGOMGOMGOMG
Yes, you are correct. You can, in any program, create 'ghetto threads', by breaking up your functions in small chunks that you can call repeatedly, and setup program execution to cycle through them.
But, for doing this, it really makes more sense to break it into multiple threads. That way, you can write a simple function that loads the map/zone, and another simple function that handles chat and UI stuff, and just tell the system to run both threads. (Granted, it adds some other complexity, like which thread is controlling the screen - you'd need some communication to transfer screen control from the UI thread to the game engine thread once the map loads.) And, while the benefit would probably be negligible in this case, you do get the benefit of being able to run on multiple cpus in multi-cpu systems. And, it would still probably work ok in single-cpu/single-core systems.
Ok, granted the main article that this discussion forked from was about multi-cpu cores. But, it also talked about multi-threaded game programming.
It's true that you don't need multiple cpu's to take advantage of multi-threading. Something like my suggestion could probably do well in multiple threads on the same cpu, as the 'secondary' thread of execution (e.g. chat and control) really wouldn't require a lot of cpu-time.
That would put the pressure back where it should be - on the level designers - to make sure that each segment was challenging enough so that a player couldn't pass through two loadzones simply by running so fast that the first zone hasn't fully loaded yet and wind up in a scary blank world full of placeholder objects.
Well, that is one approach to getting rid of loading screens, yes, and I've seen that used in some games.
But, every game at some point has a load screen, whether it is when you initially enter to world, or use some sort of 'rapid-travel' system, like teleportation, portals, shuttles/boats, etc. Or, in FPS games, when you just finish one map, and everyone goes on to the next map in the cycle.
My point is, when you have the inevitable load screen up, because at some point you have to, at least let the players chat, quit, and do other meaningful interactions with the program while it loads.
Another example of things to do while the map loads: In the game Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, about the first thing you have to do when you start playing a map, is select what team you want to be on, what class you want to play (e.g. medic, field ops, soldier, covert ops, engineer), and sometimes, what spawn point you want to appear at in the game.
It would be very cool if I could select those options while the map is still loading, instead of being forced to wait until it has completely finished loading. Since my computer is a little slower than some people's, and some ET servers have a *very* short 'warm-up' period between matches, I very often find myself loading with like 2 seconds until the game starts. Which means that by the time I've selected team/class/spawnpoint, I've missed the first spawn of the game. (And many a game is won or lost in the first 30 seconds, sadly). Being able to interact with the game, and make these choices while I wait for the map to load, would be good user-interface design, enabled by multi-threaded techniques (that is, the game engine is loading the map/zone in one thread, and doing UI/chat/control stuff in another thread).
I would like to see a more multi-threaded approach to game programming in general, and not all the benefits would necessarily be about performance.
One thing that has bugged me a long time about a lot of games (this has particular relevence to multi-player games, but also single player games to some extent) is the 'game loading' screen. Or rather, the fact that during the 'loading' screen I lose all control of, and ability to interact, with the program.
It has always seemed to me, that it should be possible, with a sufficiently clever multi-threaded approach, to create a game engine where I could, for example, keep chatting with other players while the level/zone/map that I'm transitioning to is being loaded.
Or maybe I really want to just abort the level load and quit the game, because something important in Real Life has just started occuring and I want to just kill the game and move on. With most games, you have to wait until it is done loading before you can then quit out of the game.
In other words, even ignoring performance benefits for a moment, if a game engine is correctly multi-threaded, I could continue to have 'command and control', and chat, functionality while the game engine, in another thread, is loading models and textures.
However many sites previously used popups to display such content and yet the world hasnt come to an end with the introduction of popup blockers.
That is partly because, in the case of popups, you can distinguish between a popup that the user wants (e.g. they clicked a link which opens content in a new window), and automatic popups. Popup blockers still allow new windows when you click a link, typically. They just kill automatic popups.
Unfortunately, in the case of dhtml layers, it *is* harder, as you said, to distinguish. Maybe someone could think up a solution though, that doesn't throw the baby out with the bathwater, as it were.
Perhaps instead would be a way where you could hold ctrl and click a layer and it would disappear.
That is definitely a better solution. You still have to see the ad initially, but it at least returns control to the user. I'm all about user-control when it comes to the web. Control of your browser and your computer should rest with *you*, not some random, untrusted site on the public internet.
I know exactly the ad you are reffering to. I was listening to music, and browsing the web, and suddenly I started hearing this buzzing overlaying my music. At first I thought something was wrong with my PC lol. Then I noticed the flyswatter ad.
The biggest annoyance isn't even the ad - it's Flash Player. Flash player will NOT let you disable *any* flash animation that is embedded in a webpage. *Some* flash animations seem to allow you to stop them (by right-clicking, and toggling the 'Play' menu option), but it appears to be something that webpages can disable. This is something that has always made me royally angry with Macromedia. It's *my* computer, I should have the final control over it, not the person embedding flash content on the page. I should *always* have the option of stopping the flash animation.
I would just get rid of flash, but unfortunately, too many sites use it for critical parts of their webpages. *sigh*.
And now for something completely different (and on topic). ..
The difference between FoxNews and ABCNews probably isn't really about what they will ultimately do lol. Just ABC tells you to screw yourself to your face, and FoxNews gives you a nice sounding line. ..
Ok, well, maybe they *will* decide from the complaints that annoying ads will hurt their bottom line ultimately, and actually do something about it. I'll give them the benfit of the doubt this time. ..
If you can relate a complaint about an ad (or anything really) to their bottom line, that is something they can understand, and are more likely to act on than other complaints. By telling them that they might lose your readership if they don't do something about it, you put it in terms they can understand. Good for you.
While I agree that it is kind of a band-aid approach, your approach doesn't work either. If you disallow divs to overlap any other content, then you have just disabled a lot of non-offending uses of dhtml. For example, drop down menus that don't use flash (really, I'd rather have dhtml menus than flash menus). Lots of different types of animation effects (like, for example, maybe a web-app would use a 'slide-out' notifier to alert you when you have new messages, like when using a web-forum with private messaging built in).
Some people use this in a highly annoying way, it's true. But the solution is NOT "to not allow layered content like that to cover up the page in the actual browser core." If you are going to do that, you might as well just turn off javascript, which most browsers will let you do, already.
Ok, ok, that's, I'm sure, not the proper term as applied to trademark law. But still, doesn't the principle of prior-use also carry weight in trademark law? As I recall, back around oh 1994-95 some idiot tried to trademark 'Linux', which wound up in court, and the court eventually transferred the trademark to Linus Torvalds because the mark was already previously used by and on behalf of Linus to describe the kernel project he founded, and the guy was obviously trying to steal a mark he had no right to.
Wouldn't the same apply here to MAME? Wouldn't it just require the MAME authors to step up and object to the copyright registration?
Hello,
Yes it is an interesting discussion, why spouses don't have the same rights as employers lol. One of the reasons that employers are allowed to eavesdrop, is because while you work for them, everything you do is considered something done by the company, so they need the ability (at least they claim) to monitor you in order to 1) ensure you are doing your job, in a manner consistent with company standards, and 2) to have control over what employees are saying on behalf of the company, because the company can be sued over something done by it's employees (and, honestly, it wouldn't be fair to make companies liable for employee actions if you take away the companies' ability to monitor and enforce discipline on their employees.
While the situations aren't identical, I do think the argument that anyone (spouse or otherwise) has a right to monitor communications on equipment they (co)own. I could potentially be sued, even jailed, because of any traffic that can be shown to have originated from my internet connection and computer. If I am held liable for what is done with my electronic communications equipment, I should have the legal right to ensure that it is being properly used. Granted, if you need to resort to this in marriage, there is already something seriously wrong with your marriage.
Per-cpu licensing has been around a long time, and has been a retarded idea a long time. Hopefully, this will spell the death-knell for per-cpu licensing.
Licensing should be per-computer. Or possibly per-user in some cases. The number of cpus/cores in your computer shouldn't drive up the cost of the license.
Oracle, MS, et. al were able to get away with per-cpu licensing as long as the only really multi-cpu machines were corporate 'big-iron' that had 8 processors. But now that cpu makers are trying to shove multiple cores into the cpu, and multi-cpu systems are gradually becoming more mainstream, it's not gonna wash. Home users will never agree to pay microsoft $1200 for licensing an 8-cpu copy of windows for their 8-core computer.
Granted, the immediate thing in question, Oracle, isn't a home-user situation, but even companies are going to get fed up with it. If Oracle gets too greedy, companies may just choose from among a fewotheralternatives. And if they are really smart, and as long as it can do what they need, they might choose a free software database, like PostgreSQL or the ever-popular-on-slashdot MySQL.
Hello,
Yes, this is one major disadvantage of VoIP - it's not as robust yet. I think, down the line, it's possible that this *might* be overcome. I know there is a standard for power-over-ethernet, which allows low-voltage current to be run on the ethernet line along with your data, in order to power small devices attached to the ether. Think small cameras and, um, phones.
If you extend that kind of technology to the broadband networks that provide you data in the first place, and then the broadband carrier invests in an independent power supply, the way the telcos do, then you could possibly get a digital phone system that works when the normal power grid is down. It *could*, hypothetically, work like this: When the power goes out, your DSL/Cable/Whatever router/modem starts drawing power off the network provider (note this would *not* work with fiber-to-the-curb as you cannot run electricity over fiberglass), the Cable modem then relays some of the power to your network switch/hub, via the power-over-ethernet technology, and the switch powers your phone.
I don't know, really, if you could run enough power over cable/DSL to actually make this work, but it strikes me as theoretically plausible, anyhow.
Consider this: maybe I don't care about 5.1 surround, but I *still* want higher compression. Why? Right now, I basically have to dedicate my internet connection to listening to streaming audio. I would *love* for streaming audio to be low enough bit rate that I could, for example, play online games while listening to streaming audio in the background. Or, possibly as low-bitrate high-quality technologies advance, and simultaneously, broadband becomes more prevalent and higher speed, you could see all sorts of new things, like on-line games with built-in streaming radio stations.
Like, consider you are playing a space-based ship game, like Earth and Beyond, Eve Online, or Star Wars Galaxies: Jump to Lightspeed. (Or any kind of game where it could make sense you would have access to a radio as part of the game - think Grand Theft Auto online). Wouldn't it *rock* to be able to have a selection of in-game stations. One could be a news radio station with various in-game news bulletins, and *live* coverage of live events from a journalistic perspective. Another could be a 'public access' channel where guilds could record and submit audio announcements of up-coming public events being arranged by the guilds. Or some lover-boy could record a sweet "Joey loves Krista" message lol (ok maybe I don't want that *grin*).
This is just one, kind of off-the-wall idea of why lower-bandwidth, high-quality audio is a *good thing.* Now granted, if you are not doing music, there are already some pretty aggresive audio codecs designed just for voice to crunch things down. But, the bottom line is, there is NO SUCH THING as TOO much bandwidth. The more you can compress things down, the more other things you can do with the remaining bandwidth.
The interesting bit is that so many people have such little imagination about the possibilities of what can be done with lower-bandwidth *whatever*.
For one thing, I suspect that the spammers could probably figure out what the base username is, and then just hammer your account with spam.
Secondly, I've been noticing this week in the spam folder, that I'm getting a lot of copies of the exact same message, sent to myusernameXX where XX are just two random numbers.
So now, instead of getting one copy of any given spam consuming my storage, I'm getting multiple copies sent to invalid addresses that just happen to start with my username.
"Write 10 new buggy pieces of UNIX software. That'd be the creative way to solve the assignment."
Yeah. Nice try, except the student said, "The homework for the course was to find and exploit 10 previously undiscovered security holes in currently deployed Unix software". I don't think writing a strawman-program that you can then "find and exploit" security holes in exactly fits that requirement.
I deal with this at work all the time. To me, spyware/malware isn't that different from a virus, and the logical thing is that symantec/mcafee/panda/etc add spyware/malware detection to their current anti-virus offerings.
In theory, they already have. We have Symantec A/V 9 installed on our the computers at work. There is actually an option to tell it to scan for spyware/malware. The problem is, it seems to be be able to find a lot of it, but then is unable to actually remove it most of the time.
So, we end up having to run ad-aware to actually remove the spyware/malware. It's silly that we need Spybot for immunization (to make it difficult for the spyware to install in the first place), plus ad-aware for spyware removal (it seems to do a better job of removing than Spybot does, but doesn't provide the immunization feature), plus Symantec A/V 9.
Symantec, are you listening? Would be nice to have a comprehensive solution that works *all the time*. We're already paying big bucks for your anti-virus software, you could at least get it to work well for all threats. . .
I was mostly responding to the current state of affairs, and the article, which mentioned using a PC with two NICs. Using Xorp as a replacement for IOS, in hardware optimized for routing certainly could be a cisco-killer combo, I agree. If someone could get the hardware reliable enough and fast enough. And actually cheaper than Cisco at that point. While providing similar levels of support.
It's unlikely that any *one* company could do all that and end up cheaper than Cisco. However, if you can build an *industry* around Xorp, then yeah I could see some real action happening around Xorp.
Kind of like Apple vs. PC. Most people won't argue that Apple doesn't have great hardware, and software, and support. But, because the PC industry is made up of orders of magnitude more companies than the Apple industry (which is fundamentally Apple and a relatively small number of partners, which are focused on a proprietary solution, vs. the PC industry, which is an open platform with seemingly countless vendors developing stuff for it), you get a *lot* of development effort around it, and very competitive prices.
I suppose Cisco could become the Apple of the router industry, if Xorp becomes the software core of an open routing hardware industry.
That a bunch of general purpose commodity hardware is going to replace their highly engineered, specialized hardware. Because, you know, I'm sure that businesses of all sizes are *very* anxious to rely on general purpose PC's for their high-performance routing needs.
Don't get me wrong, I think XORP could be usefull in certain applications. I'm currently running Linux on an old Pentium for sharing internet access on my home network, so I understand that for small networks with relatively slow internet connections, general purpose hardware, running routing software, can be usefull.
But I doubt it's going to 'slay the giant'. So much hyperbole in tech journalism these days (oh well, how else are you going to get people to read the article?)
Quoth grasshoppa: "Granted, most of it is not offensive ( except for the odd jury summons ), but that doesn't change the fact that it's unsolicited junk mail, albeit arriving via physical means instead of electronic."
Ok, I know this is getting off on a tangent, but *what* do Jury Summons have to do with junk mail? Granted, it might not be solicited, but since it is government business, involving you directly, and not just a mass-mailed advert, I'm a bit confused how that fits the definition of unsolicited junk mail. ..
Yeah, I know, the ocean is salt water, not fresh water. But, if you are super-heating the water with a nuclear reactor, it'll seperate from the salt anyhow. Just have to clean the salt (and other dissolved minerals/metals) that accumulates in the evaporator out periodically (daily?), and, probably, dump most of the salt back into the ocean (not directly though - use it for road salt or table salt or whatever - it'll get back to the ocean eventually).
So, what's the problem? I don't think there's any shortage of water in the ocean. ..
And before anyone goes on a rant about making the oceans gradually more and more (or maybe less and less) concentrated by this process, remember that 1) the water will eventually go back in the ocean as rain, and 2) The salt will probably end up back in the ocean eventually, also. As for the minerals, I doubt the oceans will miss the small amounts of minerals we pull out, and I suspect we will find them usefull.
Slashdot Mirror
I work for a company that develops software, and Linux is one of our supported platforms for a couple of our products.
What are we looking for in a 'stable' distribution? Simple - that the core system packages and dependencies are not changing on an almost daily basis. We want to know that if we have tested our products against Debian, that they will still work next week (and not need to be recompiled because some library package changed suddenly).
The 'stable' moniker has less to do with OS stability in terms of up-time, and more to do with stability in the sense of "It is what it is". Debian stable doesn't really change, so we know that if our product works with Debian stable today, it should work next week.
I work in the tech support department, and I hate to tell people that we cannot support Debian testing. But, we don't officially [though I try to give people some tips on how they might go about trying to get it working], because from a practical standpoint, there is no real guarantee stuff won't change next week.
But, since Debian stable is so old, most people are using testing (as the parent suggests), because stable doesn't have recent package versions.
The reason Debian NEEDS a stable release soon, is so that it can be a 'supported platform' for many, many companies.
And this transcends software development and support: while 'testing' is usually quite good about not breaking stuff, on my computer at home I've had XFree stop working numerous times after updating Debian, because the Linux kernel had changed and I needed to recompile the nvidia kernel module (the frustrating thing was, the linux kernel package was the exact same version of the Linux kernel, just a different build; e.g. was running linux-kernel-2.4.28-k7-1 and it got upgraded to linux-kernel-2.4.28-k7-2 or something like that - I don't remember the exact version numbers).
So, from a system administration standpoint, you wouldn't want to necessarily deploy Debian 'testing' to a bunch of workstations, because they might break overnight.
You might not want to deploy debian testing on a server, again, because every time you run an update on the server (to ensure you have the latest security fixes), your server might suddenly stop working (rare, but it can happen).
These are the reasons people want a 'stable' distribution. One that isn't changing *constantly*, but does have fairly recent versions of popular packages.
To me, the answer is that Debian should split off non-core packages from the distro, and version them seperately. That way, it would be a heck of a lot easier for them to release an updated 'stable' version of the core distro every 3 or 6 months, and as packages move from one 'stable' version to another 'stable' version of the package, you could just update that package.
My computer is MY computer. I assert the right to retain control over it. Your server is YOUR server, you have the right to assert control over it. The problem is, there is no way for me to know ahead of time, often times, if a website will have annoying popups or popunders. Or flash adds that do annoying things and can't be 'paused' in their animation, or easily muted without muting my whole computer.
This is where Adblock type technologies fulfill the other end of the "Social Contract" - letting me control my computer. If you don't want me viewing your content unless I view the ad also, fine, then give me a way to decline both. Come up with a way to deny the content if I don't view the advert, and instead just return a generic page stating, "This site uses {insert ad-type here}. In order to view the content, you must allow this type of advertising."
Then I can choose whether to accept the popup, or browse on to someone else.
The problem with this "social contract" theory is, I never *agreed* to this social contract. One can argue that by viewing the content, I am implicitly agreeing to it. But the problem is, until I actually go to a site, and either get a popup, or block it, I don't know what the 'terms' of this social contract are.
It's like saying you have to accept the terms of any contract, without even knowing those terms ahead of time.
I REFUSE to give up control over my computer to any site on the internet just because I followed a link to them.
Yeah, I love how LN is giving the people 1 year of free credit monitoring, identity theft protection, etc. Guess what - the people who stole the info will still have that info after that year runs out. That's just plain retarded. A publicity gimmick more than a real fix.
Government should require them to pay for those services for LIFE for those people.
With the prices LN charges for their service, they better be able to afford it, or else someone is laundering some money offshore.
And the download can *still* be blocked (if you are worried about a massive bandwidth hit as a lot of machines try to download it). Surprised no one else has mentioned this yet, but it isn't that difficult for a network administrator that knows what he/she's doing, to block connections to download.microsoft.com.
So, Microsoft's tool won't let you block the download. Big whoop. Block it yourself on your network router/firewall.
And in other Slashdot news. . . THE SKY IS FALLING OMGOMGOMGOMG
Yes, you are correct. You can, in any program, create 'ghetto threads', by breaking up your functions in small chunks that you can call repeatedly, and setup program execution to cycle through them.
But, for doing this, it really makes more sense to break it into multiple threads. That way, you can write a simple function that loads the map/zone, and another simple function that handles chat and UI stuff, and just tell the system to run both threads. (Granted, it adds some other complexity, like which thread is controlling the screen - you'd need some communication to transfer screen control from the UI thread to the game engine thread once the map loads.) And, while the benefit would probably be negligible in this case, you do get the benefit of being able to run on multiple cpus in multi-cpu systems. And, it would still probably work ok in single-cpu/single-core systems.
Ok, granted the main article that this discussion forked from was about multi-cpu cores. But, it also talked about multi-threaded game programming.
It's true that you don't need multiple cpu's to take advantage of multi-threading. Something like my suggestion could probably do well in multiple threads on the same cpu, as the 'secondary' thread of execution (e.g. chat and control) really wouldn't require a lot of cpu-time.
Well, that is one approach to getting rid of loading screens, yes, and I've seen that used in some games.
But, every game at some point has a load screen, whether it is when you initially enter to world, or use some sort of 'rapid-travel' system, like teleportation, portals, shuttles/boats, etc. Or, in FPS games, when you just finish one map, and everyone goes on to the next map in the cycle.
My point is, when you have the inevitable load screen up, because at some point you have to, at least let the players chat, quit, and do other meaningful interactions with the program while it loads.
Another example of things to do while the map loads: In the game Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, about the first thing you have to do when you start playing a map, is select what team you want to be on, what class you want to play (e.g. medic, field ops, soldier, covert ops, engineer), and sometimes, what spawn point you want to appear at in the game.
It would be very cool if I could select those options while the map is still loading, instead of being forced to wait until it has completely finished loading. Since my computer is a little slower than some people's, and some ET servers have a *very* short 'warm-up' period between matches, I very often find myself loading with like 2 seconds until the game starts. Which means that by the time I've selected team/class/spawnpoint, I've missed the first spawn of the game. (And many a game is won or lost in the first 30 seconds, sadly). Being able to interact with the game, and make these choices while I wait for the map to load, would be good user-interface design, enabled by multi-threaded techniques (that is, the game engine is loading the map/zone in one thread, and doing UI/chat/control stuff in another thread).
I would like to see a more multi-threaded approach to game programming in general, and not all the benefits would necessarily be about performance.
One thing that has bugged me a long time about a lot of games (this has particular relevence to multi-player games, but also single player games to some extent) is the 'game loading' screen. Or rather, the fact that during the 'loading' screen I lose all control of, and ability to interact, with the program.
It has always seemed to me, that it should be possible, with a sufficiently clever multi-threaded approach, to create a game engine where I could, for example, keep chatting with other players while the level/zone/map that I'm transitioning to is being loaded.
Or maybe I really want to just abort the level load and quit the game, because something important in Real Life has just started occuring and I want to just kill the game and move on. With most games, you have to wait until it is done loading before you can then quit out of the game.
In other words, even ignoring performance benefits for a moment, if a game engine is correctly multi-threaded, I could continue to have 'command and control', and chat, functionality while the game engine, in another thread, is loading models and textures.
Oh, thought of one more response heh.
That is partly because, in the case of popups, you can distinguish between a popup that the user wants (e.g. they clicked a link which opens content in a new window), and automatic popups. Popup blockers still allow new windows when you click a link, typically. They just kill automatic popups.
Unfortunately, in the case of dhtml layers, it *is* harder, as you said, to distinguish. Maybe someone could think up a solution though, that doesn't throw the baby out with the bathwater, as it were.
That is definitely a better solution. You still have to see the ad initially, but it at least returns control to the user. I'm all about user-control when it comes to the web. Control of your browser and your computer should rest with *you*, not some random, untrusted site on the public internet.
I know exactly the ad you are reffering to. I was listening to music, and browsing the web, and suddenly I started hearing this buzzing overlaying my music. At first I thought something was wrong with my PC lol. Then I noticed the flyswatter ad.
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The biggest annoyance isn't even the ad - it's Flash Player. Flash player will NOT let you disable *any* flash animation that is embedded in a webpage. *Some* flash animations seem to allow you to stop them (by right-clicking, and toggling the 'Play' menu option), but it appears to be something that webpages can disable. This is something that has always made me royally angry with Macromedia. It's *my* computer, I should have the final control over it, not the person embedding flash content on the page. I should *always* have the option of stopping the flash animation.
I would just get rid of flash, but unfortunately, too many sites use it for critical parts of their webpages. *sigh*.
And now for something completely different (and on topic). .
The difference between FoxNews and ABCNews probably isn't really about what they will ultimately do lol. Just ABC tells you to screw yourself to your face, and FoxNews gives you a nice sounding line. .
Ok, well, maybe they *will* decide from the complaints that annoying ads will hurt their bottom line ultimately, and actually do something about it. I'll give them the benfit of the doubt this time. .
If you can relate a complaint about an ad (or anything really) to their bottom line, that is something they can understand, and are more likely to act on than other complaints. By telling them that they might lose your readership if they don't do something about it, you put it in terms they can understand. Good for you.
While I agree that it is kind of a band-aid approach, your approach doesn't work either. If you disallow divs to overlap any other content, then you have just disabled a lot of non-offending uses of dhtml. For example, drop down menus that don't use flash (really, I'd rather have dhtml menus than flash menus). Lots of different types of animation effects (like, for example, maybe a web-app would use a 'slide-out' notifier to alert you when you have new messages, like when using a web-forum with private messaging built in).
Some people use this in a highly annoying way, it's true. But the solution is NOT "to not allow layered content like that to cover up the page in the actual browser core." If you are going to do that, you might as well just turn off javascript, which most browsers will let you do, already.
Ok, ok, that's, I'm sure, not the proper term as applied to trademark law. But still, doesn't the principle of prior-use also carry weight in trademark law? As I recall, back around oh 1994-95 some idiot tried to trademark 'Linux', which wound up in court, and the court eventually transferred the trademark to Linus Torvalds because the mark was already previously used by and on behalf of Linus to describe the kernel project he founded, and the guy was obviously trying to steal a mark he had no right to.
Wouldn't the same apply here to MAME? Wouldn't it just require the MAME authors to step up and object to the copyright registration?
Hello,
Yes it is an interesting discussion, why spouses don't have the same rights as employers lol. One of the reasons that employers are allowed to eavesdrop, is because while you work for them, everything you do is considered something done by the company, so they need the ability (at least they claim) to monitor you in order to 1) ensure you are doing your job, in a manner consistent with company standards, and 2) to have control over what employees are saying on behalf of the company, because the company can be sued over something done by it's employees (and, honestly, it wouldn't be fair to make companies liable for employee actions if you take away the companies' ability to monitor and enforce discipline on their employees.
While the situations aren't identical, I do think the argument that anyone (spouse or otherwise) has a right to monitor communications on equipment they (co)own. I could potentially be sued, even jailed, because of any traffic that can be shown to have originated from my internet connection and computer. If I am held liable for what is done with my electronic communications equipment, I should have the legal right to ensure that it is being properly used. Granted, if you need to resort to this in marriage, there is already something seriously wrong with your marriage.
Per-cpu licensing has been around a long time, and has been a retarded idea a long time. Hopefully, this will spell the death-knell for per-cpu licensing.
Licensing should be per-computer. Or possibly per-user in some cases. The number of cpus/cores in your computer shouldn't drive up the cost of the license.
Oracle, MS, et. al were able to get away with per-cpu licensing as long as the only really multi-cpu machines were corporate 'big-iron' that had 8 processors. But now that cpu makers are trying to shove multiple cores into the cpu, and multi-cpu systems are gradually becoming more mainstream, it's not gonna wash. Home users will never agree to pay microsoft $1200 for licensing an 8-cpu copy of windows for their 8-core computer.
Granted, the immediate thing in question, Oracle, isn't a home-user situation, but even companies are going to get fed up with it. If Oracle gets too greedy, companies may just choose from among a few other alternatives. And if they are really smart, and as long as it can do what they need, they might choose a free software database, like PostgreSQL or the ever-popular-on-slashdot MySQL.
Hello,
Yes, this is one major disadvantage of VoIP - it's not as robust yet. I think, down the line, it's possible that this *might* be overcome. I know there is a standard for power-over-ethernet, which allows low-voltage current to be run on the ethernet line along with your data, in order to power small devices attached to the ether. Think small cameras and, um, phones.
If you extend that kind of technology to the broadband networks that provide you data in the first place, and then the broadband carrier invests in an independent power supply, the way the telcos do, then you could possibly get a digital phone system that works when the normal power grid is down. It *could*, hypothetically, work like this: When the power goes out, your DSL/Cable/Whatever router/modem starts drawing power off the network provider (note this would *not* work with fiber-to-the-curb as you cannot run electricity over fiberglass), the Cable modem then relays some of the power to your network switch/hub, via the power-over-ethernet technology, and the switch powers your phone.
I don't know, really, if you could run enough power over cable/DSL to actually make this work, but it strikes me as theoretically plausible, anyhow.
Consider this: maybe I don't care about 5.1 surround, but I *still* want higher compression. Why? Right now, I basically have to dedicate my internet connection to listening to streaming audio. I would *love* for streaming audio to be low enough bit rate that I could, for example, play online games while listening to streaming audio in the background. Or, possibly as low-bitrate high-quality technologies advance, and simultaneously, broadband becomes more prevalent and higher speed, you could see all sorts of new things, like on-line games with built-in streaming radio stations.
Like, consider you are playing a space-based ship game, like Earth and Beyond, Eve Online, or Star Wars Galaxies: Jump to Lightspeed. (Or any kind of game where it could make sense you would have access to a radio as part of the game - think Grand Theft Auto online). Wouldn't it *rock* to be able to have a selection of in-game stations. One could be a news radio station with various in-game news bulletins, and *live* coverage of live events from a journalistic perspective. Another could be a 'public access' channel where guilds could record and submit audio announcements of up-coming public events being arranged by the guilds. Or some lover-boy could record a sweet "Joey loves Krista" message lol (ok maybe I don't want that *grin*).
This is just one, kind of off-the-wall idea of why lower-bandwidth, high-quality audio is a *good thing.* Now granted, if you are not doing music, there are already some pretty aggresive audio codecs designed just for voice to crunch things down. But, the bottom line is, there is NO SUCH THING as TOO much bandwidth. The more you can compress things down, the more other things you can do with the remaining bandwidth.
The interesting bit is that so many people have such little imagination about the possibilities of what can be done with lower-bandwidth *whatever*.
For one thing, I suspect that the spammers could probably figure out what the base username is, and then just hammer your account with spam.
Secondly, I've been noticing this week in the spam folder, that I'm getting a lot of copies of the exact same message, sent to myusernameXX where XX are just two random numbers.
So now, instead of getting one copy of any given spam consuming my storage, I'm getting multiple copies sent to invalid addresses that just happen to start with my username.
"Write 10 new buggy pieces of UNIX software. That'd be the creative way to solve the assignment."
Yeah. Nice try, except the student said, "The homework for the course was to find and exploit 10 previously undiscovered security holes in currently deployed Unix software". I don't think writing a strawman-program that you can then "find and exploit" security holes in exactly fits that requirement.
I deal with this at work all the time. To me, spyware/malware isn't that different from a virus, and the logical thing is that symantec/mcafee/panda/etc add spyware/malware detection to their current anti-virus offerings.
In theory, they already have. We have Symantec A/V 9 installed on our the computers at work. There is actually an option to tell it to scan for spyware/malware. The problem is, it seems to be be able to find a lot of it, but then is unable to actually remove it most of the time.
So, we end up having to run ad-aware to actually remove the spyware/malware. It's silly that we need Spybot for immunization (to make it difficult for the spyware to install in the first place), plus ad-aware for spyware removal (it seems to do a better job of removing than Spybot does, but doesn't provide the immunization feature), plus Symantec A/V 9.
Symantec, are you listening? Would be nice to have a comprehensive solution that works *all the time*. We're already paying big bucks for your anti-virus software, you could at least get it to work well for all threats. . .
I was mostly responding to the current state of affairs, and the article, which mentioned using a PC with two NICs. Using Xorp as a replacement for IOS, in hardware optimized for routing certainly could be a cisco-killer combo, I agree. If someone could get the hardware reliable enough and fast enough. And actually cheaper than Cisco at that point. While providing similar levels of support.
It's unlikely that any *one* company could do all that and end up cheaper than Cisco. However, if you can build an *industry* around Xorp, then yeah I could see some real action happening around Xorp.
Kind of like Apple vs. PC. Most people won't argue that Apple doesn't have great hardware, and software, and support. But, because the PC industry is made up of orders of magnitude more companies than the Apple industry (which is fundamentally Apple and a relatively small number of partners, which are focused on a proprietary solution, vs. the PC industry, which is an open platform with seemingly countless vendors developing stuff for it), you get a *lot* of development effort around it, and very competitive prices.
I suppose Cisco could become the Apple of the router industry, if Xorp becomes the software core of an open routing hardware industry.
That a bunch of general purpose commodity hardware is going to replace their highly engineered, specialized hardware. Because, you know, I'm sure that businesses of all sizes are *very* anxious to rely on general purpose PC's for their high-performance routing needs.
Don't get me wrong, I think XORP could be usefull in certain applications. I'm currently running Linux on an old Pentium for sharing internet access on my home network, so I understand that for small networks with relatively slow internet connections, general purpose hardware, running routing software, can be usefull.
But I doubt it's going to 'slay the giant'. So much hyperbole in tech journalism these days (oh well, how else are you going to get people to read the article?)
Quoth grasshoppa: "Granted, most of it is not offensive ( except for the odd jury summons ), but that doesn't change the fact that it's unsolicited junk mail, albeit arriving via physical means instead of electronic."
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Ok, I know this is getting off on a tangent, but *what* do Jury Summons have to do with junk mail? Granted, it might not be solicited, but since it is government business, involving you directly, and not just a mass-mailed advert, I'm a bit confused how that fits the definition of unsolicited junk mail. .
Oh, and how are jury summons offensive?
Yeah, I know, the ocean is salt water, not fresh water. But, if you are super-heating the water with a nuclear reactor, it'll seperate from the salt anyhow. Just have to clean the salt (and other dissolved minerals/metals) that accumulates in the evaporator out periodically (daily?), and, probably, dump most of the salt back into the ocean (not directly though - use it for road salt or table salt or whatever - it'll get back to the ocean eventually).
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So, what's the problem? I don't think there's any shortage of water in the ocean. .
And before anyone goes on a rant about making the oceans gradually more and more (or maybe less and less) concentrated by this process, remember that 1) the water will eventually go back in the ocean as rain, and 2) The salt will probably end up back in the ocean eventually, also. As for the minerals, I doubt the oceans will miss the small amounts of minerals we pull out, and I suspect we will find them usefull.
Graphite and wood into a pencil. . .
(it's slashdot. . . someone had to say it)