The tech said (via a post) that there was no flashing utility for windows. I would have to use Linux. I said that I couldn't just wipe my hard drive and install linux, and the guy laughed at me and told me to buy another hard drive.
Intel did the right thing and deployed their SSD upgrade software as a bootable CD. In my opinion, this is currently the best way to distribute any kind of PC firmware. You can burn the disc from inside any operating system, and when you boot from that medium, you get a nice clean environment to update the device without a full-blown OS interfering with the process.
I have a friend taking a Software Engineering degree right now and when I look at his code I shutter. Well his code is pretty and utilizes managed run-times and style, it's generally a resource disaster and he's admitted to me they don't even have a course on resource management. He can't tell me how many bytes of memory his program will use, how to optimize the pipeline for better run-time, how to save I/O loading through DMA requests and etc...
But how would he even know that stuff? The issues you are describing are very platform-specific and deep down to hardware. They should be mostly the problem of the compiler and operating system.
I agree though that you have to know what happens under the hood to be a good programmer. That could mean, for example: knowing a bit about executable formats, how a CPU works (registers, program counter, flags...), what kind of init code does the compiler insert, how are stack and heap organized, and how to use a debugger.
+1 for this. In the current world situation, FPGAs let a DIY hardware hacker to do a lot of cool stuff with quite free hands. Of course the design tools are proprietary, but they are free of cost and they let you do any kind of implementations that you want.
Saying something like that is politically incorrect in Slashdot... basically the atmosphere here is "OSS or GTFO". Personally, I like your comment as it balances things a bit here.
Maybe, but in this case you couldn't practically access the "money printer" (the files behind the torrents) without the existence of IsoHunt, so they definitely were a key partner making the crime possible.
LCD monitors absolutely do not ignore VSync. Now let's not forget that the primary function of a VSync signal is to tell the monitor (CRT or LCD) where the start of the picture begins. There's also HSync to break the picture into scanlines. VSync always takes a certain amount of time which the monitor will "take a breath" (CRT will also move the gun back to top). At this time, it is the perfect moment for the GPU to quickly swap its framebuffers in the video memory. The "scratch" draw buffer will be moved as the final output image and then the GPU can begin drawing the next one in the background. At the same time the completed image is sent to the monitor in the normal picture signal when the monitor gets back to work to draw a frame. If the buffers are swapped in the process of the monitor drawing the frame, the halves of two frames will get shown together which leads to the video artifact called "tearing".
If we are a good citizen and swap buffers only during the VSync period we can get a nice tear-free (typically 60fps) image. However if instead it takes more than the time of one picture (which about 16ms) to draw the next one, we have to wait a long time for the next VSync and that means that we also slide all the way down to a 30fps frame rate. Now if the game runs fast at some moments but slower at some others, the bouncing back between 60fps and 30fps (or even 15fps) makes this annoying jerky effect. NVIDIA's G-Sync tries to solve this problem by making the frame time dynamic.
Are we supposed to be happy that the blood, sweat and tears of the thousands of developers who gave their time to an ideal of free software are now being used by the world's favorite rogue state to bring death and destruction to far flung corners of the globe?
I also heard that a screwdriver was used in assembling the computers. The same kind of screwdriver which is used to put together computers targeted to run peaceful operations with open source software. This must end.
In some way yes, because writing this required one guy with knowledge of a very common and relatively simple language for web pages, instead of serveral guys knowing whatever language that was used for writing original Super Mario.
I don't even know if these web frameworks are the simpler way in this case. There's a lot of stuff you have to figure out to make a full game running inside a web browser. The early Mario games were probably written in assembly, but also those systems were simple enough to be understood quite well by only one person, even at the low level.
I just heard that there was to be a remake of Day of the Tentacle, that was canned. I wasn't even aware such a thing was in the works until it was gone.:-(
I still think that making all these remakes is a bit overrated. If an old game warms the heart, why not try to find out what makes it so great and make something new based on those qualities. Don't get me wrong, I love those old Sierra and LucasArts games too, but it shouldn't only be about playing those same crusty games over and over. Companies like Wadget Eye Games are doing the right thing, they concentrate on the beautiful 2D pixel art graphics and good and interesting gameplay, but they also write new stories.
Lubuntu is actually somewhat buggy. For example, just try changing the height of the default panel and see what happens. Also the configuration is lacking, there isn't even an option to disable touchpad tapping. For slower computers (actually, any computer) Xubuntu is a far more robust choice, and not essentially more heavyweight than Lubuntu.
Still not immune from viruses and worms - needs continuous stream of patches
Actually these days MS has pretty good toolkit against malware: the standard NX protection, signed binaries, Windows Defender, Windows Resource Protection, and User Account Control. All of those are quite well implemented tools with minimal degradation to system performance. And it's really not a continuous stream of patches -- usually you are disturbed only once per month with a handful of patches.
My power users like to whine about having to go look for that's now split between Control Panel and the Settings modern app, but power users always whine about things and I don't care.
It's still a rather unelegant split. If Microsoft wanted to go with the Modern UI, they could (and should) have implemented the classic Control Panel in its fullest, inside the Modern UI. Also some of the Windows Accessories are still missing a Modern UI counterpart, including Notepad! These things don't make sense. They didn't do the proper integration work and that's why the new UI still sometimes looks like a taped-on quick tech demo.
I don't even need to search my PC. There's these things called directories. In those I put my stuff nicely where it belongs.
I'm not sure if it serves anyone to have this colorful jumble of icons mixed with local files (with no idea of their location), application shortcuts and web results. At least me it only makes nauseous and disorganized.
I have also been running 8.1 RTM for a couple of weeks and my experience is similar. Little glitches here and there. Microsoft has released quite stable stuff lately so I didn't expect this level of bugginess.
Some examples:
- On various laptops, the screen brightness indicator displays wrong dynamic range after coming out from suspend or hibernation
- When a device is connected to the computer, a "Device Setup" dialog appears and it can hang there forever
- The automatic installer for.NET Framework 3.5 gets stuck and the manual DISM utility has to be used instead
- Windows Explorer displays Korean characters correctly, but Japanese characters are displayed as squares
- When I have two monitors connected (8.1 can show a taskbar on both screens) and set the taskbar setting to "Never combine" (a Vista-style look), the taskbar button labels are shown only on the primary display
- When I turn Bluetooth off, the settings application freezes for a long time
- The verification code to authorize my Windows Live account is often not successfully sent via e-mail
I wonder if they will try and turn XP into a form of Chrome-OS, push the brand forward with their windowed apps from Chrome as they are doing on Windows 8, then start advertising to the users about Chrome books. Then when their poor old XP machines fail, the users will already be familiar with the Chrome ecosystem, look at the cost of a Chromebook and think "why do I need a full blown desktop".
It is indeed possible that they have thought about the upgrade path which you described.
This. My favorites are XFCE and KDE for the performance, but Unity and Compiz really are complete shit in terms of performance. It's sad that the mainstream Ubuntu desktop performs so badly. Opening and navigating in Dash is laggy, dragging shortcut icons from Dash to taskbar is very laggy. Opening the settings manager takes a second or two (not that you could configure almost anything there anyway). On low-end (Atom/Bobcat) hardware even the basic window animations are choppy and the desktop practically completely unusable.
Exactly. You just take the mainboard of a 1Gbit router, locate all the clock sources and replace them with 400 times as fast oscillator. Then you turn the power back on, crack open a beer, and enjoy your new intertubez with a wide grin.
It needs a killer game that can't be open source so that it can't be ported to other platforms. Of course if it's not open source, Linux users won't touch it.
It's not terribly important that games are open source, as they are individual works of art. The need for open source is much higher for operating systems and general purpose software. Then again, as id Software has shown, publishing the source code after few years of release, doesn't really hurt a game company either...
The best candidate on the horizon is Half-Life 3 running on Valve's upcoming SteamOS linux distro. Would Steam take that chance to push it's own gaming platform?
Port Grand Theft Auto V to Linux. Just like that. I know it's not gonna happen, but man would it be awesome.
Slashdot Mirror
What has the reliability of the Corsair drives been? I don't currently have a clear picture whether it's a good or bad brand when it comes to SSDs.
The tech said (via a post) that there was no flashing utility for windows. I would have to use Linux. I said that I couldn't just wipe my hard drive and install linux, and the guy laughed at me and told me to buy another hard drive.
Intel did the right thing and deployed their SSD upgrade software as a bootable CD. In my opinion, this is currently the best way to distribute any kind of PC firmware. You can burn the disc from inside any operating system, and when you boot from that medium, you get a nice clean environment to update the device without a full-blown OS interfering with the process.
I have a friend taking a Software Engineering degree right now and when I look at his code I shutter. Well his code is pretty and utilizes managed run-times and style, it's generally a resource disaster and he's admitted to me they don't even have a course on resource management. He can't tell me how many bytes of memory his program will use, how to optimize the pipeline for better run-time, how to save I/O loading through DMA requests and etc...
But how would he even know that stuff? The issues you are describing are very platform-specific and deep down to hardware. They should be mostly the problem of the compiler and operating system.
I agree though that you have to know what happens under the hood to be a good programmer. That could mean, for example: knowing a bit about executable formats, how a CPU works (registers, program counter, flags...), what kind of init code does the compiler insert, how are stack and heap organized, and how to use a debugger.
+1 for this. In the current world situation, FPGAs let a DIY hardware hacker to do a lot of cool stuff with quite free hands. Of course the design tools are proprietary, but they are free of cost and they let you do any kind of implementations that you want.
Saying something like that is politically incorrect in Slashdot... basically the atmosphere here is "OSS or GTFO". Personally, I like your comment as it balances things a bit here.
Maybe, but in this case you couldn't practically access the "money printer" (the files behind the torrents) without the existence of IsoHunt, so they definitely were a key partner making the crime possible.
LCD monitors absolutely do not ignore VSync. Now let's not forget that the primary function of a VSync signal is to tell the monitor (CRT or LCD) where the start of the picture begins. There's also HSync to break the picture into scanlines. VSync always takes a certain amount of time which the monitor will "take a breath" (CRT will also move the gun back to top). At this time, it is the perfect moment for the GPU to quickly swap its framebuffers in the video memory. The "scratch" draw buffer will be moved as the final output image and then the GPU can begin drawing the next one in the background. At the same time the completed image is sent to the monitor in the normal picture signal when the monitor gets back to work to draw a frame. If the buffers are swapped in the process of the monitor drawing the frame, the halves of two frames will get shown together which leads to the video artifact called "tearing".
If we are a good citizen and swap buffers only during the VSync period we can get a nice tear-free (typically 60fps) image. However if instead it takes more than the time of one picture (which about 16ms) to draw the next one, we have to wait a long time for the next VSync and that means that we also slide all the way down to a 30fps frame rate. Now if the game runs fast at some moments but slower at some others, the bouncing back between 60fps and 30fps (or even 15fps) makes this annoying jerky effect. NVIDIA's G-Sync tries to solve this problem by making the frame time dynamic.
Are we supposed to be happy that the blood, sweat and tears of the thousands of developers who gave their time to an ideal of free software are now being used by the world's favorite rogue state to bring death and destruction to far flung corners of the globe?
I also heard that a screwdriver was used in assembling the computers. The same kind of screwdriver which is used to put together computers targeted to run peaceful operations with open source software. This must end.
Would it being "pure Linux" or "fully open source" make things automatically somehow more holy then?
In some way yes, because writing this required one guy with knowledge of a very common and relatively simple language for web pages, instead of serveral guys knowing whatever language that was used for writing original Super Mario.
I don't even know if these web frameworks are the simpler way in this case. There's a lot of stuff you have to figure out to make a full game running inside a web browser. The early Mario games were probably written in assembly, but also those systems were simple enough to be understood quite well by only one person, even at the low level.
I just heard that there was to be a remake of Day of the Tentacle, that was canned. I wasn't even aware such a thing was in the works until it was gone. :-(
I still think that making all these remakes is a bit overrated. If an old game warms the heart, why not try to find out what makes it so great and make something new based on those qualities. Don't get me wrong, I love those old Sierra and LucasArts games too, but it shouldn't only be about playing those same crusty games over and over. Companies like Wadget Eye Games are doing the right thing, they concentrate on the beautiful 2D pixel art graphics and good and interesting gameplay, but they also write new stories.
The contents of those torrents infringed copyright.
What if someone printed fake money, would you still say that "I thought printing was legal"?
Lubuntu is actually somewhat buggy. For example, just try changing the height of the default panel and see what happens. Also the configuration is lacking, there isn't even an option to disable touchpad tapping. For slower computers (actually, any computer) Xubuntu is a far more robust choice, and not essentially more heavyweight than Lubuntu.
The video and audio players are already in need of unnecessary rework, too.
Still not immune from viruses and worms - needs continuous stream of patches
Actually these days MS has pretty good toolkit against malware: the standard NX protection, signed binaries, Windows Defender, Windows Resource Protection, and User Account Control. All of those are quite well implemented tools with minimal degradation to system performance. And it's really not a continuous stream of patches -- usually you are disturbed only once per month with a handful of patches.
My power users like to whine about having to go look for that's now split between Control Panel and the Settings modern app, but power users always whine about things and I don't care.
It's still a rather unelegant split. If Microsoft wanted to go with the Modern UI, they could (and should) have implemented the classic Control Panel in its fullest, inside the Modern UI. Also some of the Windows Accessories are still missing a Modern UI counterpart, including Notepad! These things don't make sense. They didn't do the proper integration work and that's why the new UI still sometimes looks like a taped-on quick tech demo.
I don't even need to search my PC. There's these things called directories. In those I put my stuff nicely where it belongs.
I'm not sure if it serves anyone to have this colorful jumble of icons mixed with local files (with no idea of their location), application shortcuts and web results. At least me it only makes nauseous and disorganized.
I have also been running 8.1 RTM for a couple of weeks and my experience is similar. Little glitches here and there. Microsoft has released quite stable stuff lately so I didn't expect this level of bugginess.
Some examples: .NET Framework 3.5 gets stuck and the manual DISM utility has to be used instead
- On various laptops, the screen brightness indicator displays wrong dynamic range after coming out from suspend or hibernation
- When a device is connected to the computer, a "Device Setup" dialog appears and it can hang there forever
- The automatic installer for
- Windows Explorer displays Korean characters correctly, but Japanese characters are displayed as squares
- When I have two monitors connected (8.1 can show a taskbar on both screens) and set the taskbar setting to "Never combine" (a Vista-style look), the taskbar button labels are shown only on the primary display
- When I turn Bluetooth off, the settings application freezes for a long time
- The verification code to authorize my Windows Live account is often not successfully sent via e-mail
I wonder if they will try and turn XP into a form of Chrome-OS, push the brand forward with their windowed apps from Chrome as they are doing on Windows 8, then start advertising to the users about Chrome books. Then when their poor old XP machines fail, the users will already be familiar with the Chrome ecosystem, look at the cost of a Chromebook and think "why do I need a full blown desktop".
It is indeed possible that they have thought about the upgrade path which you described.
This. My favorites are XFCE and KDE for the performance, but Unity and Compiz really are complete shit in terms of performance. It's sad that the mainstream Ubuntu desktop performs so badly. Opening and navigating in Dash is laggy, dragging shortcut icons from Dash to taskbar is very laggy. Opening the settings manager takes a second or two (not that you could configure almost anything there anyway). On low-end (Atom/Bobcat) hardware even the basic window animations are choppy and the desktop practically completely unusable.
Exactly. You just take the mainboard of a 1Gbit router, locate all the clock sources and replace them with 400 times as fast oscillator. Then you turn the power back on, crack open a beer, and enjoy your new intertubez with a wide grin.
Since a self-written forum likely will have far less features, it will be far easier to make secure.
Also, it is not directly vulnerable to specific exploits crafted against well-known bulletin board software.
It needs a killer game that can't be open source so that it can't be ported to other platforms. Of course if it's not open source, Linux users won't touch it.
It's not terribly important that games are open source, as they are individual works of art. The need for open source is much higher for operating systems and general purpose software. Then again, as id Software has shown, publishing the source code after few years of release, doesn't really hurt a game company either...
The best candidate on the horizon is Half-Life 3 running on Valve's upcoming SteamOS linux distro. Would Steam take that chance to push it's own gaming platform?
Port Grand Theft Auto V to Linux. Just like that. I know it's not gonna happen, but man would it be awesome.
+1