I've concluded that music with vocals is very distracting. I believe there is contention for the language part of my brain which is simultaneously trying to decode the lyrics and decode the words on the computer screen.
I agree with this, that's why I keep a playlist of Psytrance/goa while I work, it drowns out the irritating noise around, and makes for an entertaining background music that isn't distracting for the most part. That works for me.
Wait, you don't care about a cool data center in a silo?
Sir, please turn in your geek card.
Also, if somehow you don't care solely because it is located in Québec, you may pretend it is located somewhere you like better, if that helps you get past that.
Every single time I end up thinking "Geez, this website is taking forever to load", I glance down at the status bar and see "Waiting for adserver3.adcompany.com". Then, I hit refresh and get another ad from another round robin'ed server, and the page loads sucessfully. It's very frustrating to know that the only reason the page is still blank or half-rendered is because of a third party ad.
In this regard, AdBlock makes a significant difference if you tell it to not download ads at all, but I am not comfortable with denying revenue streams to the websites I visit, after all, they are providing me with a service I enjoy, for free.
I just wish that all ads could be loaded last in a manner that doesn't affect the rendering of the website you're trying to view...
On a related note, the same applies to external javascript. Two transactional websites I maintain are sometimes slowed down to a crawl because of the crappy external Javascript marketing made us insert in the page header to track stuff. It's always very frustrating when things end up being slow because of third parties. I wish there was a simple way to cache these things.
I second this. At first I tried using a sync solution in.net/mono made by Novell, the name escapes me at the moment. It was dodgy at best. Then I tried using unison.
Then I realized I had a subversion repository, and just shoved all of my work documents in it. No huge binary files aside from the occasional giant word document and PDF. It works fairly well and handles all my needs.
Were I do to it again from scratch, i'd probably use Bazaar or git. The ability to push and pull my local repos everywhere it is needed would be useful, but right now I don't mind syncing with a centralized master. I have had very little conflicts over the years, except when I did stupid things like do my Quickbooks invoices in a rush on random machines. Changes were difficult to reconcile, but that would have been a problem no matter what solution I would have used.
Apple has ONLY ever sold upgrade discs (apart from the system restore discs that come with hardware), as you need an existing Mac to run them according to the license terms, and that Mac came with a previous version of the OS. Just because you can do a clean install doesn't mean it isn't an upgrade. There are plenty of software packages out there where you can buy an upgrade if you own a previous version, but the disc is the same as the one that would be sold to a new purchaser.
That is simply not true. The retail, full, non-upgrade boxed copies of Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6 on my desk beg to differ.
Large difference in price between the two editions, even if, as you say, the disc is the same.
But 3dfx cards where slow and crappy. They died and nVidia picked up what was left after nVidia and ATI killed them. nVidia has for many years produced the best 3d drivers available for Linux even though they where closed source they where free as beer. Not perfect but nVidia was supporting Linux before it was cool.
What's the point of having 128 bit compatibility? 128 bit CPUs don't even exist yet. Heck most of us are still just using 32, and haven't even visited the 64 generation yet.
Just a hypothesis, but maybe perhaps this would open the door to a migration away from x86 and x86_64 to something entirely new, without it turning into another Itanium. I couldn't in good conscience formulate an opinion on x86 but I have read many people time and time again saying that it was a bunch of shit legacy and bad design decisions lugged around in the name of compatibility. I'm not educated enough in that area to agree or disagree, but if many people voiced that concern so far, maybe there's something there.
I mean, without necessarily ditching backwards compatibility (which *is* being slowly ditched anyways, if you see how many backwards compatibility subsystems are being dropped from each new release of windows. Also, Windows Server 2008 R2 doesn't even offer a 32 bits version. At all). Maybe these new hypothetical processors would enable for dynamic recompilation or just fast enough emulation, like Apple did when they switched from motorola 64k to PowerPC, and how they just did again from PowerPC to Intel with rosetta.
Again, I have no clue what I'm talking about, it's just an hypothesis.
I'd either use a centralized auth solution that would ensure my UIDs are consistent accross systems or use a windows-compatible filesystem and create a zero'ed file of a few gigabytes, create an ext3/reiserfs filesystem on it and mount/that/ via loopback when I want to keep permissions around. For OS X i'd use a dmg, same idea, with the added bonus of natively supporting AES encryption and allowing HFS+ resource forks to exist.
My 16gb USB flash drive is formatted as NTFS because I need to accomodate large files (>4gb), but I do have a TrueCrypt volume on it with an ext3 filesystem on it which amounts to the same. Lack of native NTFS write support on OS X is annoying though...
I feel that as far as making use of a console, the SEGA decision to allow the Dreamcast to boot ordinary CDs was a far bigger deal.
Unless I am severly mistaken, the Dreamcast did not, by design, boot games from ordinary CDs. At first, the homebrew/piracy scene for the Dreamcast consisted of people using the Kallisto Boot CD (I mean, past the cable debugger stage, uploading code at 9600 bauds is as exciting as watching paint dry), which performed black magic exploting a design flaw, being the ability of the dreamcast to execute MIL-CD disks, if I recall well.
Ripping games off the proprietary GDRom format was terribly difficult because it had a low density track near the center, a small non-data track (visible, containing an hologram) that was normally not bypassable by normal cdrom drives, followed by a 1GiB, high density data track that wasn't exactly impervious to wear and tear.
Pirated games also had to be "padded" with garbage data to push the actual game data towards the outer edge of the disk since unlike ordinary disks, the drive read from the outside towards the inside, probably in order to avoid having the head skip over the low density. This had the result of making any pirated copy unbearably slow and glitchy unless padded, for the head had to move back to the inner track all the time while being noisy and probably shortening its lifespan. For example, crazy taxi would have a hard time loading environnement textures in time, and you'd end up floating on invisible roads and bumping in undefined walls.
You'd think the Dreamcast booted normal CDs because after a while people began embedding the boot cd code into the rips themselves, negating the need for a boot disk.
Don't get me wrong, deep inside i'm a Sega fanboy, but they certainly tried to prevent end users from running unlicensed code on their console, just like they did on the Genesis, even if it was cartridge based. They certainly did not embrace homebrew software, hacking, and piracy.
This piece of information made me feel like i'm slowing drifting into the older generation of the internet. Is it too early to start drinking?
Why? I tried Doom on the Nintendo Gameboy Advance. It utterly sucked. Its going to be even worse on the iphone.
I take it you have not played the Wolfenstein 3D port Carmack has made for the iphone, because it plays really well. I have played Spear of Destiny on my Pocket PC devices and various other places where it was ported in the past, and it was more of a "hey neat, the game runs" than an actual, enjoyable gameplay experience.
If Carmack could make Wolfenstein 3D the only game I truely enjoy playing on my iPhone, I trust he can repeat the feat with Doom.
Doom EVERYWHERE. God, I'm going to spend hours on the can now.
When your embedded system has 8-16 MB of Flash and SD RAM, it matters.
If that's the case then you don't use glibc anyways, you use uClibc or dietlibc. At the very least that seems to be what most embedded systems are doing nowadays.
What would happen to Solaris, GlassFish, NetBeans, etc?
The NetBeans/GlassFish combo is a killer combination for developing Java EE/J2EE applications. I would hate to see those two products disappear, since they compete directly with Eclipse and Websphere from IBM.
Netbeans and Tomcat? Or what about Eclipse and Tomcat?
Last time I checked, Tomcat was just a servlet container, not a full J2EE stack.
J2EE is more than just parsing jsp files, it's also JDBC, RMI, javamail, JMS, web services and friends with several API specs, as well as Enterprise Java Beans and Servlets/Portlets...
It annoys me ever so slightly when people think Tomcat is this magical replacement for anything "java for the web". In fact, JBoss uses Tomcat as a servlet container.
In fact, even Glassfish uses Catalina, if I recall some stack traces I have seen in production...
I also didn't like how I couldn't completely uninstall Parallels when I tried a demo of it. It left pieces installed and I ended up rebuilding my MBP at one point partially because of that.
Funny you should say that, I had the exact opposite experience. Some vmware scripts and devices are still present on my system, even after vmware fusion is since long gone:(
This reviews reads a bit like "Misdeeds of the tobacco", by Anton Tchekov.
We are promised a review of how well the Kindle is suited to read the new york times on a daily basis, but the author spends a few paragraphs right off the bat informing us that he shoved his kindle in a bag with other junk (candy bars?) and scratched the screen, and then is surprised Amazon will not outright send him a new one to compensate. He even repeats it in the "the screen" section.
I don't know, but I spent a while thinking "yeah that's good to know and all, but where's the New York Times in there? Why is he trying so hard to justify how he scratched the screen?
I would like to see what terrible, terrible things happen when some idiot let loose near your computer decides that the knob on it looks weird and takes it for a spin. In the middle of a kernel compile.
Mod me off-topic, but why do you always refer to companies using stock symbols? Is there a particular reason, especially since the article has nothing to do with stocks at all?
Slashdot Mirror
I've concluded that music with vocals is very distracting. I believe there is contention for the language part of my brain which is simultaneously trying to decode the lyrics and decode the words on the computer screen.
I agree with this, that's why I keep a playlist of Psytrance/goa while I work, it drowns out the irritating noise around, and makes for an entertaining background music that isn't distracting for the most part. That works for me.
"Point you finger back far enough and some germ gets blamed for splitting in two." How fitting.
Wait, you don't care about a cool data center in a silo?
Sir, please turn in your geek card.
Also, if somehow you don't care solely because it is located in Québec, you may pretend it is located somewhere you like better, if that helps you get past that.
Every single time I end up thinking "Geez, this website is taking forever to load", I glance down at the status bar and see "Waiting for adserver3.adcompany.com". Then, I hit refresh and get another ad from another round robin'ed server, and the page loads sucessfully. It's very frustrating to know that the only reason the page is still blank or half-rendered is because of a third party ad.
In this regard, AdBlock makes a significant difference if you tell it to not download ads at all, but I am not comfortable with denying revenue streams to the websites I visit, after all, they are providing me with a service I enjoy, for free.
I just wish that all ads could be loaded last in a manner that doesn't affect the rendering of the website you're trying to view...
On a related note, the same applies to external javascript. Two transactional websites I maintain are sometimes slowed down to a crawl because of the crappy external Javascript marketing made us insert in the page header to track stuff. It's always very frustrating when things end up being slow because of third parties. I wish there was a simple way to cache these things.
I second this. At first I tried using a sync solution in .net/mono made by Novell, the name escapes me at the moment. It was dodgy at best. Then I tried using unison.
Then I realized I had a subversion repository, and just shoved all of my work documents in it. No huge binary files aside from the occasional giant word document and PDF. It works fairly well and handles all my needs.
Were I do to it again from scratch, i'd probably use Bazaar or git. The ability to push and pull my local repos everywhere it is needed would be useful, but right now I don't mind syncing with a centralized master. I have had very little conflicts over the years, except when I did stupid things like do my Quickbooks invoices in a rush on random machines. Changes were difficult to reconcile, but that would have been a problem no matter what solution I would have used.
Apple has ONLY ever sold upgrade discs (apart from the system restore discs that come with hardware), as you need an existing Mac to run them according to the license terms, and that Mac came with a previous version of the OS. Just because you can do a clean install doesn't mean it isn't an upgrade. There are plenty of software packages out there where you can buy an upgrade if you own a previous version, but the disc is the same as the one that would be sold to a new purchaser.
That is simply not true. The retail, full, non-upgrade boxed copies of Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6 on my desk beg to differ. Large difference in price between the two editions, even if, as you say, the disc is the same.
But 3dfx cards where slow and crappy. They died and nVidia picked up what was left after nVidia and ATI killed them. nVidia has for many years produced the best 3d drivers available for Linux even though they where closed source they where free as beer. Not perfect but nVidia was supporting Linux before it was cool.
Your flawed view of history offends me.
I'm still confused.
What's the point of having 128 bit compatibility? 128 bit CPUs don't even exist yet. Heck most of us are still just using 32, and haven't even visited the 64 generation yet.
Just a hypothesis, but maybe perhaps this would open the door to a migration away from x86 and x86_64 to something entirely new, without it turning into another Itanium. I couldn't in good conscience formulate an opinion on x86 but I have read many people time and time again saying that it was a bunch of shit legacy and bad design decisions lugged around in the name of compatibility. I'm not educated enough in that area to agree or disagree, but if many people voiced that concern so far, maybe there's something there.
I mean, without necessarily ditching backwards compatibility (which *is* being slowly ditched anyways, if you see how many backwards compatibility subsystems are being dropped from each new release of windows. Also, Windows Server 2008 R2 doesn't even offer a 32 bits version. At all). Maybe these new hypothetical processors would enable for dynamic recompilation or just fast enough emulation, like Apple did when they switched from motorola 64k to PowerPC, and how they just did again from PowerPC to Intel with rosetta.
Again, I have no clue what I'm talking about, it's just an hypothesis.
I'd either use a centralized auth solution that would ensure my UIDs are consistent accross systems or use a windows-compatible filesystem and create a zero'ed file of a few gigabytes, create an ext3/reiserfs filesystem on it and mount /that/ via loopback when I want to keep permissions around. For OS X i'd use a dmg, same idea, with the added bonus of natively supporting AES encryption and allowing HFS+ resource forks to exist.
My 16gb USB flash drive is formatted as NTFS because I need to accomodate large files (>4gb), but I do have a TrueCrypt volume on it with an ext3 filesystem on it which amounts to the same. Lack of native NTFS write support on OS X is annoying though...
I feel that as far as making use of a console, the SEGA decision to allow the Dreamcast to boot ordinary CDs was a far bigger deal.
Unless I am severly mistaken, the Dreamcast did not, by design, boot games from ordinary CDs. At first, the homebrew/piracy scene for the Dreamcast consisted of people using the Kallisto Boot CD (I mean, past the cable debugger stage, uploading code at 9600 bauds is as exciting as watching paint dry), which performed black magic exploting a design flaw, being the ability of the dreamcast to execute MIL-CD disks, if I recall well.
Ripping games off the proprietary GDRom format was terribly difficult because it had a low density track near the center, a small non-data track (visible, containing an hologram) that was normally not bypassable by normal cdrom drives, followed by a 1GiB, high density data track that wasn't exactly impervious to wear and tear.
Pirated games also had to be "padded" with garbage data to push the actual game data towards the outer edge of the disk since unlike ordinary disks, the drive read from the outside towards the inside, probably in order to avoid having the head skip over the low density. This had the result of making any pirated copy unbearably slow and glitchy unless padded, for the head had to move back to the inner track all the time while being noisy and probably shortening its lifespan. For example, crazy taxi would have a hard time loading environnement textures in time, and you'd end up floating on invisible roads and bumping in undefined walls.
You'd think the Dreamcast booted normal CDs because after a while people began embedding the boot cd code into the rips themselves, negating the need for a boot disk.
Don't get me wrong, deep inside i'm a Sega fanboy, but they certainly tried to prevent end users from running unlicensed code on their console, just like they did on the Genesis, even if it was cartridge based. They certainly did not embrace homebrew software, hacking, and piracy.
This piece of information made me feel like i'm slowing drifting into the older generation of the internet. Is it too early to start drinking?
Now that makes me think of buying an iPhone
Why? I tried Doom on the Nintendo Gameboy Advance. It utterly sucked. Its going to be even worse on the iphone.
I take it you have not played the Wolfenstein 3D port Carmack has made for the iphone, because it plays really well. I have played Spear of Destiny on my Pocket PC devices and various other places where it was ported in the past, and it was more of a "hey neat, the game runs" than an actual, enjoyable gameplay experience.
If Carmack could make Wolfenstein 3D the only game I truely enjoy playing on my iPhone, I trust he can repeat the feat with Doom.
Doom EVERYWHERE. God, I'm going to spend hours on the can now.
I had no idea what the music sounded like, so I obtained the album for sampling purposes.
I'm not quite sure how that can sound like anything remotely close to "techno handbag disco". I hear no techno, no disco, and even worse, no handbag.
LTTFA?
When your embedded system has 8-16 MB of Flash and SD RAM, it matters.
If that's the case then you don't use glibc anyways, you use uClibc or dietlibc. At the very least that seems to be what most embedded systems are doing nowadays.
My initial reaction was "Eeeew."
Then I read it again and went "Oh, Apple Snags Former Xbox Exec."
What would happen to Solaris, GlassFish, NetBeans, etc?
The NetBeans/GlassFish combo is a killer combination for developing Java EE/J2EE applications. I would hate to see those two products disappear, since they compete directly with Eclipse and Websphere from IBM.
Netbeans and Tomcat? Or what about Eclipse and Tomcat?
Last time I checked, Tomcat was just a servlet container, not a full J2EE stack.
J2EE is more than just parsing jsp files, it's also JDBC, RMI, javamail, JMS, web services and friends with several API specs, as well as Enterprise Java Beans and Servlets/Portlets...
It annoys me ever so slightly when people think Tomcat is this magical replacement for anything "java for the web". In fact, JBoss uses Tomcat as a servlet container.
In fact, even Glassfish uses Catalina, if I recall some stack traces I have seen in production...
I don't get it really. Can't run FreeBSD in a vm? Run FreeBSD in a vm!
The new mac mini can handle world of warcraft without it looking like the original Quake, only blurrier. I wouldn't call this a "minor update".
Funny you should say that, I had the exact opposite experience. Some vmware scripts and devices are still present on my system, even after vmware fusion is since long gone :(
This reviews reads a bit like "Misdeeds of the tobacco", by Anton Tchekov.
We are promised a review of how well the Kindle is suited to read the new york times on a daily basis, but the author spends a few paragraphs right off the bat informing us that he shoved his kindle in a bag with other junk (candy bars?) and scratched the screen, and then is surprised Amazon will not outright send him a new one to compensate. He even repeats it in the "the screen" section.
I don't know, but I spent a while thinking "yeah that's good to know and all, but where's the New York Times in there? Why is he trying so hard to justify how he scratched the screen?
I would like to see what terrible, terrible things happen when some idiot let loose near your computer decides that the knob on it looks weird and takes it for a spin. In the middle of a kernel compile.
And by terrible things, I mean manslaughter.
I don't understand why a dupe would be posted while being fully aware that it is, in fact, a dupe. Even after stating so in the summary.
Mod me off-topic, but why do you always refer to companies using stock symbols? Is there a particular reason, especially since the article has nothing to do with stocks at all?
You can then download the iPhone API
I was under the impression that this was called a SDK, and not an API?
Then again, maybe I am just being Lord Pedantro the Quarrelsome.
I want to see Milla Jovovich as Ed. That would be perfect.
This happens in a Tintin book, and result in the same image.