From the article: IBM wants to be the first vendor to offer Unix on Intel's much touted 64-bit Merced chip. IBM is off to a decent start, having completed a 24 hour dry run at an Intel lab last week.
I first read this as a "24 hour dry heave". Man, that's gotta hurt. SCO didn't stink that much at the time though.:-)
I could be missing something of course. The VIA article was so full of abbreviations and marketing diagrams I had problems concentrating on what the real news were.
it'd make the lives of every developer who's trying to stay standards compliant much, much easier.
A quick Googling suggest that inline-block is actually a W3C suggestion. It has not been accepted as a standard yet, and as usual IE has its own ideas of how to implement it.
So while it might be handy to have inline-block, you can't slam Firefox as non-standard for not implementing it yet.
pan & scan is like raping the director, although some directors feel its 'ok' to do this if they are getting enough money, im sure those same directors would feel it ok to pimp their daughters for the right price.
Wow! Someone is even more fanatic about movies than I am. I agree it is unfortunate that they cut away parts of the screen with pan & scan. One of the worst cases I have seen was David Lynch's Blue Velvet. It often lookes as if characters were talking into thin air since the people doing the P&S often cut away the character they were talking to.
But even though we dislike it, you really know the reason they did it. They weren't doing it because they thought it was fun, they did it because they were afraid that the unwashed masses would complain that the picture on their TV sets was "small" and had black bars above and below. Having wide screen TVs and home cinema entertainment systems is fairly new and still mostly the enthusiasts.
On an aside, I find it amusing when I occasionally find someone flying into a rage in a forum because distributors have "butchered" Seven Samurai and similar classical films on the DVD release since it isn't wide screen. However, the 1:33:1 aspect ratio on the DVD is actually correct, that IS the original ratio the film was shot in and shown in the theatres. Widescreen films didn't come until later.
I actually thought it was pretty insightful, but I'll post instead of mod.
So far, all comments are supporting one of two hypotheses: a) The story is a hoax, no one was arrested. b) The story is true, OMG they are after us just for using Lynx!
Grandparent pointed out a possible third alternative: The person was using Lynx, the bastard really tried to hack the tsunami relief site, and that's why he was arrested.
Well, the article uses weather maps. I have met a blind man who at a party drove a car some 10 meters on a dare.:-)
I wonder if the brain can be trained to "see" a mental 3D image from these sounds and how long it would take. A blind woman I knew was an experienced computer user and she had her screen reader set to max speed. For me it was impossible to hear what it was saying, the reader did not attempt to use pronounciation rules, it was all just a confusing staccato of fast phonemes which blended into each other. "ATT-ECK-APP-SA-BA..." Not very pleasant to listen to, but she had no problem "reading" letters using this almost as fast as I could with my eyes.
Perhaps children can learn to see a full picture from sounds, but I wonder about adults. I have tried a "picture book" for blind children. The images were large and very simple. There were in 3D, but very flattened of course, and always "from ahead". Different material textures were used (fuzzy fabric for papa bear's fur, rippled plastic for water etc), but it was INCREDIBLY difficult for me to "see" with my fingers what an image was if I hadn't peeked beforehand. Any attempt to include some sort of perspective would have made it impossible.
"This could be done much faster in my favourite language X"!
Starting countdown to first comment..NOW.
Seriously though, this sounds great. My previous job was at the Swedish national library for the blind/visually disabled. Their lives have gotten a LOT easier with technology, and especially the net, but there are still lots of problems.
The greatest service you can do to them is make sure all web pages you make are HTML 4.01 compliant though. Alt tags for pictures are of course important (even if it just saying "logo"), and screen reader programs are not as forgiving as IE/Mozilla/Firefox et al when it comes to confusing tags.
...Global Warming supporting scientific community have mountains of evidence... But they have NO evidence that this warming is caused by human activity.
There is quite a lot of evidence, or at least indicators. A simple one: As a child, did you ever make a small ecosystem? Basically a plant sealed in a bottle. If you did not, I can tell you that increasing carbon dioxide increases temperature. And as a comparison, burning fossile fuels releases a lot of stored carbon dioxide. Now, the earth is not a closed system like the bottle, but we can suspect that the same principles apply. Get it? Or was I too smart-@ss for you?
Climate, like much in nature goes in cycles, some of very long periodicity compared to the short human life time.
As I, and many others, have mentioned before on Slashdot, scientists do not dispute that climate changes over time. What they worry about is a much more rapid change than has been seen before. And before you say we don't have measurements from the past, we do. We can check trees, sediments, ice layers in the Arctic and Antarctic to see temperatures and levels of carbon dioxide.
Think of it as a pendulum slowly going back and forth. It was already going in the direction of slightly warmer, and no, it has not reached the temperature levels it has in the past. However, when we compare the speed of change, it looks like someone whacked this pendulum hard and sent it rocketing in one direction. And this at the same time that humans started releasing a lot of greenhouse gasses. How far will the pendulum go? Where will it stop? Is there something we can do about it? That is the questions being discussed.
And before the old lie of volcanoes releasing more greenhouse gasses pop up - read this. Volcanoes release more pollutants such as sulfur dioxide, but NOT as much carbon dioxide. Not even close to what humans release.
That is the fault of the programmer, not the language.
Chapter 2: Meanlingless error messages
The application programmer decides the error messages. Uncaught exceptions might show to the end user, but if you don't understand these, show me a language with clearer error messages? "ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException? FileNotFoundException? MidiUnavailableException? What does this mean, I do not understand any of this. Owie my brain hurts...."
Oh, and it is spelled "meaningless". HTH.
Chapter 3: Remaining slow no matter how fast the hardware is. Chapter 4: Losing data.
And finally:
Chapter 5: How to create the blue screen of death.
Every developer's system should already have `make`
Why? Not all people have Unix or program C.
so there's no need for other dependencies or learning some crazy IDE just to compile some Java.
Ant is not just for compiling. Large projects usually have tasks for many steps in the development process - for instance, you can define tasks so you get the following steps just by pressing a button: CVS souce update, souce compile, junit testing with reports mailed to developers, javadoc generation, JAR packaging all into a tidy application.
The following makefile target is about as advanced as I needed, and it's mostly scripting.
No offence, but would like to see your little makefile handle a large project; with hundreds of programmers with different OSes, IDEs and subprojects.
New ways are all fine and dandy until you realize you just reinvented something another programmer has been doing for years. He'll probably laugh and mumble something about "those kids these days."
Sometimes a wheel comes along that is a significant improvement on previous ones.
Well, I love Linux, but let's put things in perspective. A lot of people contributing to open source are students, or people who love programming. They are giving something (free time, programming talent) they have a lot of. So this quote from Jesus could be applied to us too.
This topic ("Well, as a percentage of his total wealth this is nothing") always comes up when Gates charity is discussed. First of all, he can't give away everything he owns at once, much of it (I presume) is tied up in stocks, selling all at once would cause companies and whole markets plummeting.
Besides, if you look at the total over time, as these people have done, you will see that it does in fact add up to quite a lot over the years. (Assuming, like I have, that the source is reliable).
* $1 billion over 20 years to establish the Gates Millennium Scholarship Program, which will support promising minority students through college and some kinds of graduate school.
* $750 million over five years to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, which includes the World Health Organization, the Rockefeller Foundation, Unicef, pharmaceutical companies and the World Bank.
* $350 million over three years to teachers, administrators, school districts and schools to improve America's K-12 education, starting in Washington State.
* $200 million to the Gates Library Program, which is wiring public libraries in America's poorest communities in an effort to close the "digital divide."
* $100 million to the Gates Children's Vaccine Program, which will accelerate delivery of lifesaving vaccines to children in the poorest countries of the world.
* $50 million to the Maternal Mortality Reduction Program, run by the Columbia University School of Public Health.
* $50 million to the Malaria Vaccine Initiative, to conduct research on promising candidates for a malaria vaccine.
* $50 million to an international group called the Alliance for the Prevention of Cervical Cancer.
* $50 million to a fund for global polio eradication, led by the World Health Organization, Unicef, Rotary International and the U.N. Foundation.
* $40 million to the International Vaccine Institute, a research program based in Seoul, South Korea.
* $28 million to Unicef for the elimination of maternal and neonatal tetanus.
* $25 million to the Sequella Global Tuberculosis Foundation.
* $25 million to the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, which is creating coalitions of research scientists, pharmaceutical companies and governments in developing countries to look for a safe, effective, widely accessible vaccine against AIDS.
Oops, that article was from year 2000. According to the BBC, he has now given away $7.1 billion since 1994.
As others have pointed out, the submitter of this news is a well known troll, and the "Let's see if the Linux community can match this" is an obvious flamebait.
Some people fell for it. The people patting themselves on the back about how by giving away an OS for free is more valuable are pretty offensive. As the parent poster said, what does a starving child care about Open Source? Besides, how many of you who include yourself in the "Linux community" have even contributed to Open Source?
If we drop the politics for a second, you can really contribute by giving to SOS Children's villages. For a small fee each month, you can sponsor an individual orphan, or a whole village. They are given food, medicine, education. It's not much per month. I just joined, and I'm currently unemployed.
Seeing the number of similar angry answers to all posts questioning the hype around the Cell, I'm thinking you are a very persistent but boring little troll behind them all.
Why are you so emotionally attached to a piece of hardware, what is there to be so angry about?
If the cell does all it has been promised, Linux (and probably Windows, though I don't care) will be ported to it. I will notice very little difference to my desktop experience. IBM makes the processor inside rather than AMD or Intel. Fine by me. This isn't a war you know.
Maybe you (and others) haven't noticed, but the desktop PC is a deer in the headlights. Game machines will take over before you can say 'service contract'.
Pft. People have been saying this every time a new console generation is coming. When the upcoming Playstation 2 was hyped, some people were claiming it would easily emulate a PC at many times the speed of an x86. When it came, people couldn't take full advantage of the hardware. When they could some years later, PC hardware had surpassed it. Besides, people value the flexibility of a PC. In other words, bs then, bs now.
One more thing I realized I should have put in the above post, the XBox does NOT have the same performance as a high-end or even mid end PC of today. Textures have to be of lower resolution, this is easily seen for instance on Knights of the Old Republic.
Less main memory on the XBox also mean smaller levels or less content on each level. Unfortunately the cost of creating different size or content for two platforms is so expensive time-wise most developers just choose to design for the XBox and let PC users deal with lots of loading screens. This can cause negative reactions for PC owners, see for instance Deus Ex: Invisible War and other games that are percieved to have been "dumbed down" for console hardware (or maybe console owners...).
Take for example an Xbox, which is basically a PC from about seven years ago. (Sub gigahertz P3, 64megs RAM, GeForce3 video) But it plays all the popular games of today's PC with little to no lag. Where as you need a very high end PC to play the same game! This is mostly due to the fact that the architecture with the video is more direct, than it is on a PC. There's no AGP bus, or any bottle neck to access video ram. It's more direct which is probably why an Xbox can perform as well as a current PC rig.
Well no, not exactly. The reason console games don't suffer from lag is that unlike a PC, the hardware specs are not a moving target during development. Developers can optimize textures, audio, algorithms etc with a specific platform in mind. This makes it much easier to create content that you know won't overwhelm the machine.
Compare this with a PC developer. They have to estimate the time it takes to develop the game. Then they have to estimate the average gamer hardware and the cutting edge gaming hardware at the time the game is released. They have to take into consideration at the very least processor speeds, main memory size and speed, graphic card speed and memory size.
If the developers overestimate, the game will be unplayable (when the first System Shock came for instance, I remember reviewers writing "You actually need a PENTIUM to play this game, it's insane!"). If they underestimate hardware or take too long, they will be killed by reviews complaining about "outdated graphics". Oh, and preferably there shouldn't be any problems with any special configuration.
This is extremely difficult to achieve. Half-Life 2 for instance was praised for the fact that it managed to scale its graphics so it was playable on low end yet good looking on high end machines. However, some people experienced stuttering of audio as levels started, this was even more noticable in Vampire: Bloodlines, a great game that uses the HL2 engine. I think this had something to do with the hard drive loading textures or level geometry (I noticed it especially when loading the huge LA Downtown level in Vampire, sound was stuttering for 10 seconds after level loaded). People with fast hard drives, especially those that chose or had to chose low resolution textures didn't suffer from it as much as those with graphics cards with lot of memory for high resolution textures and comparatively slow hard drives.
So, the interaction between the many different hardware configurations on PCs makes it difficult to optimize and that is what causes the lag, not the lack of any AGP bus or anything. A console developer can test on just on one console and be fairly certain it will run the same on all target machines.
Ragnarök is a powerful image, and one consequently many know of from Norse myths, but the story actually has an uplifting ending; life goes on after Ragnarök.
Balder (pronounced BAHL-dehr approximately), god of beauty and spring returns from Hel together with his accidental killer, Höder the blind god of winter; they become the main gods of the new order. A human man and woman survive to repopulate and rebuild the ruins of the world, together with a smattering of other surviving beings (eagles, a few minor gods and demigods such as Tors sons, the daughter of the sun etc).
One alternative to fleeing to another universe I have been thinking of, would it perhaps be possible to create matter ex nihilo by "tricking" the laws of universe at a quantum state? In that case, the expanding universe could not be seen as a doom, but an eternally increasing real estate, truly a free lunch. Perhaps tipping the scales back to a crunch would be a problem, but if we know how to create matter, creating dark matter shouldn't be a problem either.
However, I agree with some previous posters. We need urgently to solve the current environmental problems of Earth (within 10-20 years), and in a longer term the destructive impulses of humanity if we are going to live long enough to solve any problems of an aging universe.
The quality of use of measures of brain mass is an extension of its use in anthropology.
Stephen J. Gould proves in "The Mismeasure of Man" that this is pseudoscience and that is has been been constantly misused by racists, nationalists and misogynists to "prove" the inferiority of others.
Please, the polite way of putting it is "He's a grower, not a shower".
Another possible retort is: "Yeah, but did you see what a great great ass he has? Divine!". Note that this can lead to awkward silences in predominantly male enviroments such as Slashdot though.
It's very nice, probably the most popular Java IDE right now. The Mono IDE borrows a lot of its looks and functionality from it, I've been told (nothing wrong with that of course, the Source is Open). Since Eclipse is so easy to write plugins, there are also people using it for many other languages, Python for instance.
I was browsing an engineering magazine at a friends house and was surprised to read that it is appearently becoming very popular for embedded development.
One of the Gang of Four authors work on it, forgot which one.
yeah, and compilers have had keyhole optimizing for ever too. ohh and looky its not the same thing, yet it has the same goal, to make the program faster.
The difference is that Hotspot and this genetic algoritm performs the optimizing at runtime, not at compile time.
Slashdot Mirror
From the article:
:-)
IBM wants to be the first vendor to offer Unix on Intel's much touted 64-bit Merced chip. IBM is off to a decent start, having completed a 24 hour dry run at an Intel lab last week.
I first read this as a "24 hour dry heave". Man, that's gotta hurt. SCO didn't stink that much at the time though.
With the cross-licensing agreements with Intel, will VIA be prohibited from transitioning these technologies into their chipsets for the AMD platform?
I'm no expert, but the nForce4 chipset seems to give AMD owners just about everything they need anyway.
I could be missing something of course. The VIA article was so full of abbreviations and marketing diagrams I had problems concentrating on what the real news were.
it'd make the lives of every developer who's trying to stay standards compliant much, much easier.
A quick Googling suggest that inline-block is actually a W3C suggestion. It has not been accepted as a standard yet, and as usual IE has its own ideas of how to implement it.
So while it might be handy to have inline-block, you can't slam Firefox as non-standard for not implementing it yet.
pan & scan is like raping the director, although some directors feel its 'ok' to do this if they are getting enough money, im sure those same directors would feel it ok to pimp their daughters for the right price.
Wow! Someone is even more fanatic about movies than I am. I agree it is unfortunate that they cut away parts of the screen with pan & scan. One of the worst cases I have seen was David Lynch's Blue Velvet. It often lookes as if characters were talking into thin air since the people doing the P&S often cut away the character they were talking to.
But even though we dislike it, you really know the reason they did it. They weren't doing it because they thought it was fun, they did it because they were afraid that the unwashed masses would complain that the picture on their TV sets was "small" and had black bars above and below. Having wide screen TVs and home cinema entertainment systems is fairly new and still mostly the enthusiasts.
On an aside, I find it amusing when I occasionally find someone flying into a rage in a forum because distributors have "butchered" Seven Samurai and similar classical films on the DVD release since it isn't wide screen. However, the 1:33:1 aspect ratio on the DVD is actually correct, that IS the original ratio the film was shot in and shown in the theatres. Widescreen films didn't come until later.
I actually thought it was pretty insightful, but I'll post instead of mod.
So far, all comments are supporting one of two hypotheses:
a) The story is a hoax, no one was arrested.
b) The story is true, OMG they are after us just for using Lynx!
Grandparent pointed out a possible third alternative:
The person was using Lynx, the bastard really tried to hack the tsunami relief site, and that's why he was arrested.
I figure you were just trying to be cute and/or get this out of the way
Yep, getting it out of the way. I agree with you on the topic of Java. It was probably because of that I added you as a friend before.
Well, the article uses weather maps. I have met a blind man who at a party drove a car some 10 meters on a dare. :-)
I wonder if the brain can be trained to "see" a mental 3D image from these sounds and how long it would take. A blind woman I knew was an experienced computer user and she had her screen reader set to max speed. For me it was impossible to hear what it was saying, the reader did not attempt to use pronounciation rules, it was all just a confusing staccato of fast phonemes which blended into each other. "ATT-ECK-APP-SA-BA..." Not very pleasant to listen to, but she had no problem "reading" letters using this almost as fast as I could with my eyes.
Perhaps children can learn to see a full picture from sounds, but I wonder about adults. I have tried a "picture book" for blind children. The images were large and very simple. There were in 3D, but very flattened of course, and always "from ahead". Different material textures were used (fuzzy fabric for papa bear's fur, rippled plastic for water etc), but it was INCREDIBLY difficult for me to "see" with my fingers what an image was if I hadn't peeked beforehand. Any attempt to include some sort of perspective would have made it impossible.
"This could be done much faster in my favourite language X"!
Starting countdown to first comment..NOW.
Seriously though, this sounds great. My previous job was at the Swedish national library for the blind/visually disabled. Their lives have gotten a LOT easier with technology, and especially the net, but there are still lots of problems.
The greatest service you can do to them is make sure all web pages you make are HTML 4.01 compliant though. Alt tags for pictures are of course important (even if it just saying "logo"), and screen reader programs are not as forgiving as IE/Mozilla/Firefox et al when it comes to confusing tags.
I thought America was founded by *scientists*, non?
;)
What, the people on the Mayflower where scientists??
But they have NO evidence that this warming is caused by human activity.
There is quite a lot of evidence, or at least indicators. A simple one:
As a child, did you ever make a small ecosystem? Basically a plant sealed in a bottle. If you did not, I can tell you that increasing carbon dioxide increases temperature. And as a comparison, burning fossile fuels releases a lot of stored carbon dioxide. Now, the earth is not a closed system like the bottle, but we can suspect that the same principles apply. Get it? Or was I too smart-@ss for you?
Climate, like much in nature goes in cycles, some of very long periodicity compared to the short human life time.
As I, and many others, have mentioned before on Slashdot, scientists do not dispute that climate changes over time. What they worry about is a much more rapid change than has been seen before. And before you say we don't have measurements from the past, we do. We can check trees, sediments, ice layers in the Arctic and Antarctic to see temperatures and levels of carbon dioxide.
Think of it as a pendulum slowly going back and forth. It was already going in the direction of slightly warmer, and no, it has not reached the temperature levels it has in the past. However, when we compare the speed of change, it looks like someone whacked this pendulum hard and sent it rocketing in one direction. And this at the same time that humans started releasing a lot of greenhouse gasses. How far will the pendulum go? Where will it stop? Is there something we can do about it? That is the questions being discussed.
And before the old lie of volcanoes releasing more greenhouse gasses pop up - read this. Volcanoes release more pollutants such as sulfur dioxide, but NOT as much carbon dioxide. Not even close to what humans release.
Ahh, I see. My apologies.
Chapter 1: Confusing the user.
That is the fault of the programmer, not the language.
Chapter 2: Meanlingless error messages
The application programmer decides the error messages. Uncaught exceptions might show to the end user, but if you don't understand these, show me a language with clearer error messages? "ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException? FileNotFoundException? MidiUnavailableException? What does this mean, I do not understand any of this. Owie my brain hurts...."
Oh, and it is spelled "meaningless". HTH.
Chapter 3: Remaining slow no matter how fast the hardware is.
Chapter 4: Losing data.
And finally:
Chapter 5: How to create the blue screen of death.
Hmm...seems I just responded to a troll.
Every developer's system should already have `make`
Why? Not all people have Unix or program C.
so there's no need for other dependencies or learning some crazy IDE just to compile some Java.
Ant is not just for compiling. Large projects usually have tasks for many steps in the development process - for instance, you can define tasks so you get the following steps just by pressing a button:
CVS souce update, souce compile, junit testing with reports mailed to developers, javadoc generation, JAR packaging all into a tidy application.
The following makefile target is about as advanced as I needed, and it's mostly scripting.
No offence, but would like to see your little makefile handle a large project; with hundreds of programmers with different OSes, IDEs and subprojects.
New ways are all fine and dandy until you realize you just reinvented something another programmer has been doing for years. He'll probably laugh and mumble something about "those kids these days."
Sometimes a wheel comes along that is a significant improvement on previous ones.
Well, I love Linux, but let's put things in perspective. A lot of people contributing to open source are students, or people who love programming. They are giving something (free time, programming talent) they have a lot of. So this quote from Jesus could be applied to us too.
This topic ("Well, as a percentage of his total wealth this is nothing") always comes up when Gates charity is discussed. First of all, he can't give away everything he owns at once, much of it (I presume) is tied up in stocks, selling all at once would cause companies and whole markets plummeting.
Besides, if you look at the total over time, as these people have done, you will see that it does in fact add up to quite a lot over the years. (Assuming, like I have, that the source is reliable).
* $1 billion over 20 years to establish the Gates Millennium Scholarship Program, which will support promising minority students through college and some kinds of graduate school.
* $750 million over five years to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, which includes the World Health Organization, the Rockefeller Foundation, Unicef, pharmaceutical companies and the World Bank.
* $350 million over three years to teachers, administrators, school districts and schools to improve America's K-12 education, starting in Washington State.
* $200 million to the Gates Library Program, which is wiring public libraries in America's poorest communities in an effort to close the "digital divide."
* $100 million to the Gates Children's Vaccine Program, which will accelerate delivery of lifesaving vaccines to children in the poorest countries of the world.
* $50 million to the Maternal Mortality Reduction Program, run by the Columbia University School of Public Health.
* $50 million to the Malaria Vaccine Initiative, to conduct research on promising candidates for a malaria vaccine.
* $50 million to an international group called the Alliance for the Prevention of Cervical Cancer.
* $50 million to a fund for global polio eradication, led by the World Health Organization, Unicef, Rotary International and the U.N. Foundation.
* $40 million to the International Vaccine Institute, a research program based in Seoul, South Korea.
* $28 million to Unicef for the elimination of maternal and neonatal tetanus.
* $25 million to the Sequella Global Tuberculosis Foundation.
* $25 million to the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, which is creating coalitions of research scientists, pharmaceutical companies and governments in developing countries to look for a safe, effective, widely accessible vaccine against AIDS.
Oops, that article was from year 2000. According to the BBC, he has now given away $7.1 billion since 1994.
Well said.
As others have pointed out, the submitter of this news is a well known troll, and the "Let's see if the Linux community can match this" is an obvious flamebait.
Some people fell for it. The people patting themselves on the back about how by giving away an OS for free is more valuable are pretty offensive. As the parent poster said, what does a starving child care about Open Source? Besides, how many of you who include yourself in the "Linux community" have even contributed to Open Source?
If we drop the politics for a second, you can really contribute by giving to SOS Children's villages. For a small fee each month, you can sponsor an individual orphan, or a whole village. They are given food, medicine, education. It's not much per month. I just joined, and I'm currently unemployed.
Seeing the number of similar angry answers to all posts questioning the hype around the Cell, I'm thinking you are a very persistent but boring little troll behind them all.
Why are you so emotionally attached to a piece of hardware, what is there to be so angry about?
If the cell does all it has been promised, Linux (and probably Windows, though I don't care) will be ported to it. I will notice very little difference to my desktop experience. IBM makes the processor inside rather than AMD or Intel. Fine by me. This isn't a war you know.
Maybe you (and others) haven't noticed, but the desktop PC is a deer in the headlights. Game machines will take over before you can say 'service contract'.
Pft. People have been saying this every time a new console generation is coming. When the upcoming Playstation 2 was hyped, some people were claiming it would easily emulate a PC at many times the speed of an x86. When it came, people couldn't take full advantage of the hardware. When they could some years later, PC hardware had surpassed it. Besides, people value the flexibility of a PC. In other words, bs then, bs now.
One more thing I realized I should have put in the above post, the XBox does NOT have the same performance as a high-end or even mid end PC of today. Textures have to be of lower resolution, this is easily seen for instance on Knights of the Old Republic.
Less main memory on the XBox also mean smaller levels or less content on each level. Unfortunately the cost of creating different size or content for two platforms is so expensive time-wise most developers just choose to design for the XBox and let PC users deal with lots of loading screens. This can cause negative reactions for PC owners, see for instance Deus Ex: Invisible War and other games that are percieved to have been "dumbed down" for console hardware (or maybe console owners...).
Take for example an Xbox, which is basically a PC from about seven years ago. (Sub gigahertz P3, 64megs RAM, GeForce3 video) But it plays all the popular games of today's PC with little to no lag. Where as you need a very high end PC to play the same game! This is mostly due to the fact that the architecture with the video is more direct, than it is on a PC. There's no AGP bus, or any bottle neck to access video ram. It's more direct which is probably why an Xbox can perform as well as a current PC rig.
Well no, not exactly. The reason console games don't suffer from lag is that unlike a PC, the hardware specs are not a moving target during development. Developers can optimize textures, audio, algorithms etc with a specific platform in mind. This makes it much easier to create content that you know won't overwhelm the machine.
Compare this with a PC developer. They have to estimate the time it takes to develop the game. Then they have to estimate the average gamer hardware and the cutting edge gaming hardware at the time the game is released. They have to take into consideration at the very least processor speeds, main memory size and speed, graphic card speed and memory size.
If the developers overestimate, the game will be unplayable (when the first System Shock came for instance, I remember reviewers writing "You actually need a PENTIUM to play this game, it's insane!"). If they underestimate hardware or take too long, they will be killed by reviews complaining about "outdated graphics". Oh, and preferably there shouldn't be any problems with any special configuration.
This is extremely difficult to achieve. Half-Life 2 for instance was praised for the fact that it managed to scale its graphics so it was playable on low end yet good looking on high end machines. However, some people experienced stuttering of audio as levels started, this was even more noticable in Vampire: Bloodlines, a great game that uses the HL2 engine. I think this had something to do with the hard drive loading textures or level geometry (I noticed it especially when loading the huge LA Downtown level in Vampire, sound was stuttering for 10 seconds after level loaded). People with fast hard drives, especially those that chose or had to chose low resolution textures didn't suffer from it as much as those with graphics cards with lot of memory for high resolution textures and comparatively slow hard drives.
So, the interaction between the many different hardware configurations on PCs makes it difficult to optimize and that is what causes the lag, not the lack of any AGP bus or anything. A console developer can test on just on one console and be fairly certain it will run the same on all target machines.
Ragnarök is a powerful image, and one consequently many know of from Norse myths, but the story actually has an uplifting ending; life goes on after Ragnarök.
Balder (pronounced BAHL-dehr approximately), god of beauty and spring returns from Hel together with his accidental killer, Höder the blind god of winter; they become the main gods of the new order. A human man and woman survive to repopulate and rebuild the ruins of the world, together with a smattering of other surviving beings (eagles, a few minor gods and demigods such as Tors sons, the daughter of the sun etc).
One alternative to fleeing to another universe I have been thinking of, would it perhaps be possible to create matter ex nihilo by "tricking" the laws of universe at a quantum state? In that case, the expanding universe could not be seen as a doom, but an eternally increasing real estate, truly a free lunch. Perhaps tipping the scales back to a crunch would be a problem, but if we know how to create matter, creating dark matter shouldn't be a problem either.
However, I agree with some previous posters. We need urgently to solve the current environmental problems of Earth (within 10-20 years), and in a longer term the destructive impulses of humanity if we are going to live long enough to solve any problems of an aging universe.
The quality of use of measures of brain mass is an extension of its use in anthropology.
Stephen J. Gould proves in "The Mismeasure of Man" that this is pseudoscience and that is has been been constantly misused by racists, nationalists and misogynists to "prove" the inferiority of others.
Yep. ;)
Look at the little peepee on atlas!!! LOL!!!
Please, the polite way of putting it is "He's a grower, not a shower".
Another possible retort is: "Yeah, but did you see what a great great ass he has? Divine!". Note that this can lead to awkward silences in predominantly male enviroments such as Slashdot though.
Right guys? Guys...?
*crickets*
It's very nice, probably the most popular Java IDE right now. The Mono IDE borrows a lot of its looks and functionality from it, I've been told (nothing wrong with that of course, the Source is Open). Since Eclipse is so easy to write plugins, there are also people using it for many other languages, Python for instance.
I was browsing an engineering magazine at a friends house and was surprised to read that it is appearently becoming very popular for embedded development.
One of the Gang of Four authors work on it, forgot which one.
So yeah, it's good.
yeah, and compilers have had keyhole optimizing for ever too. ohh and looky its not the same thing, yet it has the same goal, to make the program faster.
The difference is that Hotspot and this genetic algoritm performs the optimizing at runtime, not at compile time.