Hey, that a good point! Why the hell are we using freshwater in out toilets? Seems like if a city really felt like saving water, it would be able to convert some part of the system to saltwater. Heck, we could just pump the crap back into the ocean!
The publication was built entirely with Open Source tools, including the GIMP, Scribus and Open Office.
Is this really something to be bragged about? It just seems like it should go without saying that a publication about open source would be written with OSS. I mean, if M$ created a publication with OSS, the laughter would probably inspire it's own news stories at many websites.
Just kinda shows how OSS isn't quite mainstream yet.
If they start trying to support Open Document, it would be a huge pain for them, because they would have to adapt or change their document's structure and DOM, which would probably mean re-doing a good amount of their work on Office. So, instead, they just throw their "open" standard on the table and say "How about you support our format". All of this makes perfect sense in M$'s strategy because they still leverage their complete dominance in this market by forcing their competitors to re-build to their standards, instead of the other way around.
It is very unlikely that M$ will ever release their format in a way that is truly "open" (i.e. usable in open source software). The simple reason is that Microsoft consider's their documents to be their intellectual property. They will always seek some sort of royalties or benefits because they consider them part of their company's assets. The healthy number of patents they apply for each week (what is it, like 30, right?) supports the fact that IP is an emerging part of their business model.
The other downside to this whole thing is that M$ is the last company who should be defining implementations for the rest of the market. The protocols they define in house have always been a huge source of pain for anybody else trying to understand them. At times it almost seems like their protocol is simply defined by how the current version of their software decides to spit out bits. SMB is a good example, and there are probably others. This isn't even particularly bad behavior when you consider that these protocols/formats were never meant to work with anybody else's software; however, when M$ begins dictating that the rest of the world adopt their proprietary formats, you end up with a bunch of buggy software that works about 98% of the time. All the documentation in the world will never create a stable format which is well designed to work with a multitude of implementations. Sadly, this move will probably work well for M$, and we will end up with a situation similiar to SMB, except that it is even more difficult for business's to work around.
But truthfully, if you are actually interested in making a platform independent game, then you use a platform independent api. Epic games has a great example of this in Unreal Tournament 2004 (and 2003, I guess). The game's audio runs using OpenAl, and the video uses SDL. Thus, they have native Linux and Mac versions, and even a (beta) port to amd64! That game is one of the best made programs I have seen, with great attention to detail. Portability, stability, performance, just a great peace of work. Unfortunately, most game manufacturers couldn't care less. The greater part of the video game industry is composed of a people who care more about profits than putting hard work into a well designed program.
This is great news. Clearly, if China is actually designing eco friendly, self sufficient cities, then they have finished fixing all the other ones! No more poor, no more hunger! We can move on to worrying about the plants, cuz the people are taken care of!
I'm torn between my irrational love for google and my hate for annoying as hell search bars. Firefox already has a built in google search, from the noticable Google icon in the left corner or from the address bar! This kind of corporate bundling seems to be at the expense of the sanity of a large number of users who would rather not be hassled by some self-righteous spell checking stock ticking product pricing advertising toolbar!
But of course, who can blame them? I already feel queasy thinking about the unholy amount of MSN crap that will be hard-wired into IE 7.0 and Vista. There really isn't any choice for Google if it wants to keep being everybody's favorite $20 billion search company. Begun, the search wars have!
How is what Google is doing any different than Amazon's offering clips of an albums songs? Have any of these writers actually bothered to read Google's "help" about google print? See number seven! I quote:
I really need to see more of this book. What can I do?
Google Print helps you discover books, not read them online. To read the whole book, we encourage you to use the "Buy this book" link to purchase it online or the "Find this in a library" link to look for a local library that has it.
This is a nice move by Microsoft to "kill" Google, and I would bet a lot that this is what Ballmer has been thinking of when he is throwing chairs and swearing to kill Google. It really fits with what they have been saying all this time, and their "war". It will probably be very successful in some areas (All of the guys I know who are "Official Microsoft Partners" are gonna have a fit), but I don't think it will do what they believe it will. The problem is that Microsoft's overall vision is the same as it has always been, despite the obviously huge amount of work somebody has done to convince management to make this project more open (firefox support).
It is pretty clear that the top brass at Microsoft have a very specific vision about their software. I think they really do have good intentions, and it's probably not bad, with a nice looking Windows interface, and solid.Net platform, and "connectivity" out the yinyang. Of course, it also involves Microsoft holding all the keys, powering all the programs, and generally controlling everything. Even if they believe their marketing department's crap about improving peoples lives and "discovering" something on Windows, their policies are increasingly limiting their effectiveness. Computing is changing, dramatically, and Microsoft is still playing their old games. You still need to buy into their product lines to access the best of these services, and they still only works with Microsoft software. It is just not in Microsoft's nature (i.e. their management) to create products which are truly open, truly innovative, or truly free from the rest of their sources of income. I say good luck to them with this strategy, but it is gonna kill them slowly (unless, of course, their competitors are complete idiots).
I'm certainly not going to tell you that I think there are easy answers to the fundamental questions of our existence, but if you think you have found the "aha!" verse which undermines major Christian theology, your sorely mistaken. Speaking as someone who is all too familiar with modern christian thought, I can tell you that many, many people have been reading and re-reading every verse in the Bible for thousands of years, and your not going to spot something they missed. Modern Christian theology is extremely thorough, despite what those unfamiliar with it may think.
Perhaps you should peruse the rest of the Bible before claiming that God is presented as a creator who just "kicks off" the process.
It really does take a programmer to classify a role-playing game as "creative". No matter how many options and add-ons and rainbow colored suits of armor a game provides you, the real attraction of a mmorpg is that it provides you with a static, usually mathematically defined universe. Yes, there is a social aspect of online games, and Yes, gamers are notoriously bad at it. The reason programmers love role playing games so much is that they can understand it in logical, procedural terms. (Also, because you can play as a huge warrior with the head of a bear and the body of a lion without excersising)
These fears may be well founded, but in the end I don't think they will play out. It really all comes down to the fact that GPS is so tied into military systems. If its a matter of national defense, it will get done. They didn't program all of the navigation systems in the latest attack helicopter to use GPS just to have the system break down a few years from now. And, of course, if you can pull it out of the military budget, then you can practically plate the things in gold;)
Comanies like this make my blood boil. I am planning to be a CS major in college, and I just can't understand how anyone could willingly work to make this kind of product. Have they actually fooled themselves into believing that one of their toolbars is helping people? I couldn't. It flattens me that someone could go on working to create something which is completely useless and harmful. I can only conclude that whoever is working at these companies must either be starvingly desperate for work or just hateful. Maybe that is where bad programmers go when they die. "Welcome to hell, now you will be forced to create spyware for all of eternity! Mwahahahahaha!".
Also, why exactly should we care if this company is "turning around"? There are plenty of struggling software companies which haven't infected anyone. It seems pretty much impossible that one of these establishments could ever produce something useful. Do programmers have any kind of vigilante justice?;)
Wow, so this card is so obnoxiously unnecessary that it upmixes the sound to be better than it was? I gotta have this.;)
That said, I have a creative Audigy2 ZS, and I consider it a great buy, considering that it costs only about as much as 10 good albums. It has an amazing bass and treble boost built in. Of course, I am using the ALSA drivers on linux, so Windows users might get more from a cheaper card with the official drivers.
Has anybody else ever heard of the cybercore? Apparently, the U.S. government selected 6 (or 5?) schools to be part of their program to educate students to work as database security specialists for the government. Similiar to the army core, the government will pay for a few years of college in return for a few years of work.
Sorry but I couldn't find any good links, although I know the University of Tulsa participates. Just wanted to point out a possible positive way that the government is responding to the lack of security experts.
The main reason I feel justified in blocking internet ads is because they are generally created to be even more obnoxious than those on television. It's so difficult to get your add noticed, that you decide to make it a flashing red and white gif, in desperation. Then so does everybody else. Most for-profit sites end up with a serious case of loglo. I don't think I'm alone when I say that "Punch the Monkey!!!!!" is not a valid commercial offer in any sense. Dirty tricks like these have destroyed whatever validity internet advertising ever hoped to have. Also, as a programmer, it kind of ticks me off that my program on my machine is working hard to render something that I really, really hate.
On the flip side, the advertisements on Google are a good indication of where the internet's advertising is likely to end up (IMHO). Instead of thriving off of the stupidity and ignorance of the internet, Google concentrates on the individual, and tries to show you something you might actually want to see. Also, their text only adds are no more obtrusive than the search results. Respectful, personalized, effective, and beneficial to everybody.
All I know about naval warfare, I've read from Tom Clancy books, but...
Isn't blasting the ocean with a massive sound wave a pretty good way to advertise yourself to every submarine and ship within 5,000 km? Obviously, at least one enemy has a good track on you at that point, but we're talking about basically shooting up a flare for any interested parties. Wouldn't that completely compromise any convoy that a navy ship might be protecting, to say nothing of a valuable carrier group? Even sending an identifiable signal in just one direction would be pretty inscrutable behavior from one of todays stealthy ships.
Seems to me that this system is not likely to be used any time soon. Of course, tested is another matter...
Just because you can't change a language like c# without permission from a standards agency does not free it from the influence of Microsoft. If they changed the language, then they would have to tell you for you to write with it, wouldn't they? The language syntax is not the part of.Net which is proprietary, the framework is. Microsoft is in complete control of all of their classes, namespaces, etc. They can change the setup, or expand it, and any time. More importantly, they have never and will never implement this framework themselves.
In my opinion, trying to implement.Net as a cross platform language is like trying to dig with a spoon. Microsoft has never been known for it's elegant (or even competent) designs. Compare any part of the.Net framework with a better implementation, like Java, and it is clear that once again Microsoft has made something which is needlessly over-complicated, inflexible, and just designed badly. I feel more sorry for the poor fools who are trying to copy Microsofts implementation than those who are dumb enough to choose it for cross platform development over better alternatives. In my opinion, of course, speaking as someone who has spent a few years working with ASP.Net.
I'm no expert, but from what I understand, creating an app that can ported to 64 bit architectures is surprisingly difficult. There are apparently a great number of places in C/C++ code where the compiler will just assume that a function returns an integer. When you compile it for x86 where integers are stored using 32 bits, then this doesn't matter very much, because then integers are generally the same as what you were expecting to get. However, when you try to compile for a 64 bit arch, then suddenly you have hundreds of places where you are trying to fit a 64-bit integer (i.e. a square peg) into some 32-bit container (i.e. a round hole). This problem is especially clear when you realize that many of the memory allocating functions are assumed to return integers if they are not used just right.
I've been using Gentoo for a long time now, and I've compiled and installed every release (including every minor release) since, probably, 2.6.9 . To be honest, I'm not using the vanilla sources, but the "ck" patchset which includes the staircase scheduler (compiled specifically for amd64). Even with these changes, I've found the 2.6 kernels to be the most stable software you can run on a computer. I can't remember one time that my system has crashed (unless I had broken something through my own stupidity). As for hardware, most of the 2.4 drivers have been ported to 2.6. Unless you have some pretty obscure hardware, it will probably be supported; and the 2.6 drivers will probably be significantly more up-to-date. I would very much suggest that you upgrade, the 2.6 kernel has great hardware support, and it is the most responsive and stable platform I've ever used.
Slashdot Mirror
I bet there is some group within M$ whose job has been specifically to prevent Linux from running on the xbox 360. They better cross their fingers
Yah, its called slashdot.
Emporer Palpatine, Darth Vader, the Borg, Microsoft
Hey, that a good point! Why the hell are we using freshwater in out toilets? Seems like if a city really felt like saving water, it would be able to convert some part of the system to saltwater. Heck, we could just pump the crap back into the ocean!
The publication was built entirely with Open Source tools, including the GIMP, Scribus and Open Office.
Is this really something to be bragged about? It just seems like it should go without saying that a publication about open source would be written with OSS. I mean, if M$ created a publication with OSS, the laughter would probably inspire it's own news stories at many websites.
Just kinda shows how OSS isn't quite mainstream yet.
[ducking]I love linux! I love linux![/ducking]
If they start trying to support Open Document, it would be a huge pain for them, because they would have to adapt or change their document's structure and DOM, which would probably mean re-doing a good amount of their work on Office. So, instead, they just throw their "open" standard on the table and say "How about you support our format". All of this makes perfect sense in M$'s strategy because they still leverage their complete dominance in this market by forcing their competitors to re-build to their standards, instead of the other way around.
It is very unlikely that M$ will ever release their format in a way that is truly "open" (i.e. usable in open source software). The simple reason is that Microsoft consider's their documents to be their intellectual property. They will always seek some sort of royalties or benefits because they consider them part of their company's assets. The healthy number of patents they apply for each week (what is it, like 30, right?) supports the fact that IP is an emerging part of their business model.
The other downside to this whole thing is that M$ is the last company who should be defining implementations for the rest of the market. The protocols they define in house have always been a huge source of pain for anybody else trying to understand them. At times it almost seems like their protocol is simply defined by how the current version of their software decides to spit out bits. SMB is a good example, and there are probably others. This isn't even particularly bad behavior when you consider that these protocols/formats were never meant to work with anybody else's software; however, when M$ begins dictating that the rest of the world adopt their proprietary formats, you end up with a bunch of buggy software that works about 98% of the time. All the documentation in the world will never create a stable format which is well designed to work with a multitude of implementations. Sadly, this move will probably work well for M$, and we will end up with a situation similiar to SMB, except that it is even more difficult for business's to work around.
Does anybody know which party gives a crap about software patents?
But truthfully, if you are actually interested in making a platform independent game, then you use a platform independent api. Epic games has a great example of this in Unreal Tournament 2004 (and 2003, I guess). The game's audio runs using OpenAl, and the video uses SDL. Thus, they have native Linux and Mac versions, and even a (beta) port to amd64! That game is one of the best made programs I have seen, with great attention to detail. Portability, stability, performance, just a great peace of work. Unfortunately, most game manufacturers couldn't care less. The greater part of the video game industry is composed of a people who care more about profits than putting hard work into a well designed program.
This is great news. Clearly, if China is actually designing eco friendly, self sufficient cities, then they have finished fixing all the other ones! No more poor, no more hunger! We can move on to worrying about the plants, cuz the people are taken care of!
I'm torn between my irrational love for google and my hate for annoying as hell search bars. Firefox already has a built in google search, from the noticable Google icon in the left corner or from the address bar! This kind of corporate bundling seems to be at the expense of the sanity of a large number of users who would rather not be hassled by some self-righteous spell checking stock ticking product pricing advertising toolbar!
But of course, who can blame them? I already feel queasy thinking about the unholy amount of MSN crap that will be hard-wired into IE 7.0 and Vista. There really isn't any choice for Google if it wants to keep being everybody's favorite $20 billion search company. Begun, the search wars have!
How is what Google is doing any different than Amazon's offering clips of an albums songs? Have any of these writers actually bothered to read Google's "help" about google print? See number seven! I quote:
I really need to see more of this book. What can I do?
Google Print helps you discover books, not read them online. To read the whole book, we encourage you to use the "Buy this book" link to purchase it online or the "Find this in a library" link to look for a local library that has it.
This is a nice move by Microsoft to "kill" Google, and I would bet a lot that this is what Ballmer has been thinking of when he is throwing chairs and swearing to kill Google. It really fits with what they have been saying all this time, and their "war". It will probably be very successful in some areas (All of the guys I know who are "Official Microsoft Partners" are gonna have a fit), but I don't think it will do what they believe it will. The problem is that Microsoft's overall vision is the same as it has always been, despite the obviously huge amount of work somebody has done to convince management to make this project more open (firefox support).
.Net platform, and "connectivity" out the yinyang. Of course, it also involves Microsoft holding all the keys, powering all the programs, and generally controlling everything. Even if they believe their marketing department's crap about improving peoples lives and "discovering" something on Windows, their policies are increasingly limiting their effectiveness. Computing is changing, dramatically, and Microsoft is still playing their old games. You still need to buy into their product lines to access the best of these services, and they still only works with Microsoft software. It is just not in Microsoft's nature (i.e. their management) to create products which are truly open, truly innovative, or truly free from the rest of their sources of income. I say good luck to them with this strategy, but it is gonna kill them slowly (unless, of course, their competitors are complete idiots).
It is pretty clear that the top brass at Microsoft have a very specific vision about their software. I think they really do have good intentions, and it's probably not bad, with a nice looking Windows interface, and solid
Please don't argue out of ignorance.
I'm certainly not going to tell you that I think there are easy answers to the fundamental questions of our existence, but if you think you have found the "aha!" verse which undermines major Christian theology, your sorely mistaken. Speaking as someone who is all too familiar with modern christian thought, I can tell you that many, many people have been reading and re-reading every verse in the Bible for thousands of years, and your not going to spot something they missed. Modern Christian theology is extremely thorough, despite what those unfamiliar with it may think.
Perhaps you should peruse the rest of the Bible before claiming that God is presented as a creator who just "kicks off" the process.
It really does take a programmer to classify a role-playing game as "creative". No matter how many options and add-ons and rainbow colored suits of armor a game provides you, the real attraction of a mmorpg is that it provides you with a static, usually mathematically defined universe. Yes, there is a social aspect of online games, and Yes, gamers are notoriously bad at it. The reason programmers love role playing games so much is that they can understand it in logical, procedural terms. (Also, because you can play as a huge warrior with the head of a bear and the body of a lion without excersising)
Well at least you still managed to find a way to be jackass
These fears may be well founded, but in the end I don't think they will play out. It really all comes down to the fact that GPS is so tied into military systems. If its a matter of national defense, it will get done. They didn't program all of the navigation systems in the latest attack helicopter to use GPS just to have the system break down a few years from now. And, of course, if you can pull it out of the military budget, then you can practically plate the things in gold ;)
Comanies like this make my blood boil. I am planning to be a CS major in college, and I just can't understand how anyone could willingly work to make this kind of product. Have they actually fooled themselves into believing that one of their toolbars is helping people? I couldn't. It flattens me that someone could go on working to create something which is completely useless and harmful. I can only conclude that whoever is working at these companies must either be starvingly desperate for work or just hateful. Maybe that is where bad programmers go when they die. "Welcome to hell, now you will be forced to create spyware for all of eternity! Mwahahahahaha!". Also, why exactly should we care if this company is "turning around"? There are plenty of struggling software companies which haven't infected anyone. It seems pretty much impossible that one of these establishments could ever produce something useful. Do programmers have any kind of vigilante justice? ;)
Wow, so this card is so obnoxiously unnecessary that it upmixes the sound to be better than it was? I gotta have this. ;)
That said, I have a creative Audigy2 ZS, and I consider it a great buy, considering that it costs only about as much as 10 good albums. It has an amazing bass and treble boost built in. Of course, I am using the ALSA drivers on linux, so Windows users might get more from a cheaper card with the official drivers.
May be slightly off topic but...
Has anybody else ever heard of the cybercore? Apparently, the U.S. government selected 6 (or 5?) schools to be part of their program to educate students to work as database security specialists for the government. Similiar to the army core, the government will pay for a few years of college in return for a few years of work.
Sorry but I couldn't find any good links, although I know the University of Tulsa participates. Just wanted to point out a possible positive way that the government is responding to the lack of security experts.
The main reason I feel justified in blocking internet ads is because they are generally created to be even more obnoxious than those on television. It's so difficult to get your add noticed, that you decide to make it a flashing red and white gif, in desperation. Then so does everybody else. Most for-profit sites end up with a serious case of loglo. I don't think I'm alone when I say that "Punch the Monkey!!!!!" is not a valid commercial offer in any sense. Dirty tricks like these have destroyed whatever validity internet advertising ever hoped to have. Also, as a programmer, it kind of ticks me off that my program on my machine is working hard to render something that I really, really hate.
On the flip side, the advertisements on Google are a good indication of where the internet's advertising is likely to end up (IMHO). Instead of thriving off of the stupidity and ignorance of the internet, Google concentrates on the individual, and tries to show you something you might actually want to see. Also, their text only adds are no more obtrusive than the search results. Respectful, personalized, effective, and beneficial to everybody.
The X files, right? Mulder ends up driving to the ocean with a passenger who knows too much about the military's super low sound weapons?
All I know about naval warfare, I've read from Tom Clancy books, but...
Isn't blasting the ocean with a massive sound wave a pretty good way to advertise yourself to every submarine and ship within 5,000 km? Obviously, at least one enemy has a good track on you at that point, but we're talking about basically shooting up a flare for any interested parties. Wouldn't that completely compromise any convoy that a navy ship might be protecting, to say nothing of a valuable carrier group? Even sending an identifiable signal in just one direction would be pretty inscrutable behavior from one of todays stealthy ships.
Seems to me that this system is not likely to be used any time soon. Of course, tested is another matter...
Just because you can't change a language like c# without permission from a standards agency does not free it from the influence of Microsoft. If they changed the language, then they would have to tell you for you to write with it, wouldn't they? The language syntax is not the part of .Net which is proprietary, the framework is. Microsoft is in complete control of all of their classes, namespaces, etc. They can change the setup, or expand it, and any time. More importantly, they have never and will never implement this framework themselves.
In my opinion, trying to implement .Net as a cross platform language is like trying to dig with a spoon. Microsoft has never been known for it's elegant (or even competent) designs. Compare any part of the .Net framework with a better implementation, like Java, and it is clear that once again Microsoft has made something which is needlessly over-complicated, inflexible, and just designed badly. I feel more sorry for the poor fools who are trying to copy Microsofts implementation than those who are dumb enough to choose it for cross platform development over better alternatives. In my opinion, of course, speaking as someone who has spent a few years working with ASP .Net.
I'm no expert, but from what I understand, creating an app that can ported to 64 bit architectures is surprisingly difficult. There are apparently a great number of places in C/C++ code where the compiler will just assume that a function returns an integer. When you compile it for x86 where integers are stored using 32 bits, then this doesn't matter very much, because then integers are generally the same as what you were expecting to get. However, when you try to compile for a 64 bit arch, then suddenly you have hundreds of places where you are trying to fit a 64-bit integer (i.e. a square peg) into some 32-bit container (i.e. a round hole). This problem is especially clear when you realize that many of the memory allocating functions are assumed to return integers if they are not used just right.
I've been using Gentoo for a long time now, and I've compiled and installed every release (including every minor release) since, probably, 2.6.9 . To be honest, I'm not using the vanilla sources, but the "ck" patchset which includes the staircase scheduler (compiled specifically for amd64). Even with these changes, I've found the 2.6 kernels to be the most stable software you can run on a computer. I can't remember one time that my system has crashed (unless I had broken something through my own stupidity). As for hardware, most of the 2.4 drivers have been ported to 2.6. Unless you have some pretty obscure hardware, it will probably be supported; and the 2.6 drivers will probably be significantly more up-to-date. I would very much suggest that you upgrade, the 2.6 kernel has great hardware support, and it is the most responsive and stable platform I've ever used.