Time to brush up on your Ayn Rand and your ESR. Most open-source developers (including me) couldn't care less about "the benefit of everyone on earth", "the common good", or any of those other throwaway commie bromides.
I love it. You even used the word bromide. Let's see if we can't work the phrase "angular planes of his face" into there too...
I'm a denizen of LambdaMOO, one of the longest-running social MUDs out there. It chugged along for nine years on a SparcCenter 1000, with uptime of hundreds of days, going down for maintenance because of bugs in the moo process itself. It just recently moved to a linux box, which is much quicker, but I just got this news item on login.
Saturday, June 14, 2003 OUTAGE Network card driver randomly decided to shut itself down at around 8 this morning. Actually it's done this a few times before already (most of which I was around to catch after a few minutes; we weren't quite so lucky this time). I originally thought this was dhcpd rising from the grave but now I'm not so sure anymore. Time to see if a reboot helps.
It's not so much that Linux is unstable, it's just that the stability seems to be a function of whatever mood Linus and random driver writers are in at the time of whichever version is released. Right now the OS randomly kills processess when you start running out of memory. Randomly.
There's a reason people use QNX, and the fact that their lunch money won't buy a copy of it isn't usually a factor.
Having said that, I do note that you are perpetuating the myth that Java runs on "any OS/hardware combo". This is untrue of any language but I suspect "C" comes closer to achieving it than Java.
I suspect you'll have a hard time running compiled C on any platform for which there is a compiler. Or for that matter, even build it unmodified without the benefit of autoconf unless it's among the most trivial of programs.
Not that Java has a lock on portability -- Perl and Python do just fine in that area too.
> IIRC, Winshit (allegedly?) uses a network stack copied from BSD. BSD is an often-theorized alternative source for the "stolen" code, and this could make M$ just as liable.
Yes, allegedly. So substantiate it. All I see so far is that they ported some BSD userland programs like ftp, and that they used BSD header files in their BSD socket API implementation. This hardly constitutes copying the stack.
Does it kill you to say "Windows" BTW? I mean, really.
> Just like people should have savings to tide them over rough times, shouldn't companies?
Because companies are valued by their stock price. It's illegal to "smooth" your balance sheets with cash assets (because it's not really income), so when your quarterly earnings reports fluctuate, people dump your stock, your value goes down, you can't get financed, you are history. It's not all that bad if you warn people beforehand that the next couple quarters will be bad, but if I had that kind of power I'd be picking horses (hey I won $5 betting against Funny Cide, maybe I should)
Some companies (Ferarri is one I believe) steadfastly ignore demands to issue a quarterly earnings report, and issue only annual reports. They usually end up looking a lot more stable as a result.
Some AC recommended this reply (also from an AC) which had been languishing in score 0 territory be modded up. I'll go ahead and post it so it gets noticed by people reading at a threshold.
I'm still not a great fan of it simply refusing to create the file and then returning an error code that isn't that explanatory (tho it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that EBUSY on creat is an overflowed bucket), but a failure is definitely the preferred behavior here.
I personally think filesystems need about 10 years to shake out all the bugs. NTFS is just now getting to where I can trust it, for example (and it still has serious warts). ReiserFS is definitely getting there, but til then I'm a fan of good ol ufs -- with softupdates of course, yes I'm a BSD bigot:)
-------------------8<------------ Oh hey I WOULD have posted it, but the god damn lameness filter stopped it. Can't have a site populated by NERDS actually having CODE in its discussions. So go adjust your threshold, read the parent, and it's time for a new sig.
The example doesn't really add up -- stick that code in a utility class static final method and it'll inline. You probably wanted something that'd actually transform its input instead of just saving some typing. Most lisp macros need to work on the parsed form of the sexp that is their argument, splicing bits in here and there, inserting control statements or special forms that wouldn't work in a function. Java has neither the sexp format nor any special forms in such formats that would lend itself to a macro facility like lisp.
Anyway, if you really want to extend the language in a clean way, just use OpenJava like everyone else does. As long as OJ is developed independently from Sun, it stands more chance of being actually being useful and not crippled.
Good god, is this truly the case? I don't think I'd trust the filesystem even after this bug was fixed... who knows what one could lose -- invisibly, allowing backups to become corrupted if they're not verified against each other -- due to some other cavalier mistreatment of precious data.
Maybe this is why data like prescriptions shouldn't be stored in a filesystem. And I was just starting to think that filesystems were starting to get to the point where that attitude should be revisited. Maybe with XFS, but if this is true, then certainly not reiser.
> And of course anyone seriously creating PNG images cannot do without PNGCrush, which can shave off every single bit of bloat
Why isn't the algorithm of PNGCrush part of the standard, or at least built in to the standard libraries that create them, so it's simply a matter of a checkbox to compress colors with some degree of loss? Why not a mime type of image/x-png-crushed so a browser can negotiate it as a preferred type and have either a proxy or the web server at the end crush them on the fly?
No one will care about PNGCrush inless it's really part of PNG.
Unfortunately, since Java's generics act solely through type erasure, you're still screwed -- all Java generics do is insert invisible casts into your code, with all the overhead you expect from that. Type erasure is overall a good thing -- the fact that Foo is a subclass of Foo is very useful, and lets you avoid many of the ugly traits hacks in C++, and it does give good hints to the compiler, but at the same time, lack of a typedef also removes many of the things that are still useful in traits classes, and all the extra casts you don't see still cost as much as the ones you write by hand.
The current release of jsr104 will even create mysterious ClassCastExceptions in some cases because the type inference is unsound. The documentation even warns of being able to do invalid casts (e.g. a String to a JFrame), which casts doubt on the safety of the complier. If that's the case, you can be sure that the jsr104 compiler is going to have one or more of its features axed before it makes it into tiger.
Gross oversimplification alert: perhaps the desktop really isn't spatial navigation at all, but it's more of a symbolic recognition task which is very much the province of the left brain, a faculty you may even more keenly posess because you're using it full-time now.
I mean, think about it: I'm typing this on a 15" laptop display, which doesn't even come close to filling my field of vision. The only time spatial awareness comes into play is when I'm moving the mouse around -- and guess what, I prefer keyboard shortcuts most of the time. If I had to navigate the desktop by thinking about where my windows were instead of alt-tabbing or finding the taskbar button by icon and clicking it. Moving the pointer to the taskbar is still a reflex guesture, I certainly don't have to go look for it.
Who "wins" in terms of symbolic recognition, anyway? I suspect it isn't very clear-cut. I rather wonder if the study wasn't tainted by environmental factors, or perhaps social conditioning factors from the computer environment itself. From my own anecdotal and secondhand accounts, I'm sure men are more likely to see a user-hostile application as a learning challenge in itself, whereas women are more it as an obstacle to the goal (we men like bright shiny distractions don't we:)
But hey anything that pushes for the desktop of the future being the size of a desktop and not a legal pad has my support:)
What a waste of time.. I pirate my books the old-fashioned way.. I borrow a copy from a friend or the library!
Libraries buy their books. And you were never enjoined from lending out your CD for free (even if the music companies would like it that way).
Sometimes, when I'm feeling particularly criminal, I go to the bookst^H^H^H^H^H^H local pirate's den and read the book without paying for it!
And run off your own bound printed copy on an inline-publishing printer/copier without paying for paper.
Hey, the music companies did themselves in with their own greed, and I grab the occasional song off shareaza myself without feeling like I'm funding Al Qaeda or something, but do us all a favor and quit it with these weak rationalizations and shoddy analogies, ok?
> You can't make such a gateway - you'd need to know the filenames and cryptographic hashes of every file on the gnutella network, and have to insert each one individually.
No you don't. Any one gateway just needs to know the filenames and hashes of the files it intends to gateway from freenet, then issue queries as requests come in. In fact you could build this list up lazily, but I hate to think of the spurious chatter this would cause on freenet. Multiple gateway-enabled servents would distribute the task of enumerating the files on freenet.
> 1. Can this version prevent abuse from folks that try to flood the system with bogus or damaged files?
Here's how I do it, because I have a dial-up and can't waste my time downloading junk:
1. Use the result with the most hosts. Not only the most reliable download, but it's probably been verified by some of them.
2. If it's really big, I'll verify it with Bitzi (it's one click from shareaza), plus I can bookmark the page if I want to grab it later (since it has ed2k links).
3. If I see a "XXX IS BOGUS.txt" file, I grab it so I'm one more node sharing it and passing on the word. The file usually contains a hash.
Not going to be a perfect system, and not likely to stand up to organized attack (not even freenet can do that). Speaking of freenet, given the nature of the internet, freenet would be required to do such a thing as anonymous downloads. gnutella simply brokers peer connections, freenet is a virtual network itself, serving somewhat different needs. A freenet/gnutella gateway would certainly be nice, but probably in freenet's scope, not gnutella's.
Simply put, if you expect your web application to get any amount of decent traffic (say 100,000 pageviews+ per day), then MySQL is simply not an option
Sure it is, if you're running a blog like slashdot, which is 99.999% reads of the same few dozen datasets over and over.
Get more than a hundred or so simultaneous writes to a MySQL database and watch it just fall over dead, or queue them up like breadlines in SOVIET RUSSIA (sorry, that just slipped out). Heck, I don't even think it even has any deadlock detection.
> A number of the comments above revolve around Tcl's percieved lack of a standard object system. There is one, it's called [incr Tcl]
It's definitely incremental. Here's how you instantiate a class in [incr tcl], straight from the manpage:
fileselectiondialog.foo.bar.#auto -background red
This creates a fileselectiondialog with the path.foo.bar.(someautogeneratedname). See, in tcl, you have to create all your components in the top level namespace, you have to know the path to them (don't bother trying to set it in an enclosing scope, your event handlers won't execute in them), and you have to delete them when you're finished -- no garbage collection going on for objects here.
There's of course ways to get static scope and local variables. Each of them requires extra syntactic decoration that generates unique global names for you. All of a sudden, python+tkInter starts looking a whole lot better to prototype your GUI with...
> I've racked my brain trying to figure out why Tcl is hated by so many in the "pop" geek community.
It is slow. Granted it's faster than a shell script, but even ruby runs circles around it.
It has oodles of "gotchas" on when things are evaled, on pass-by-name, and so forth
Making actual complex apps with GUIs is impossible with any modern design pattern because all events execute at the topmost scope, so you need to keep everything important in globals.
Ousterhout flogged it constantly with buzzwords as a b2b-leveraging, cross-synergy-enabling, pick-the-buzzword-of-the-week solution.
The shame about TCL is that it's almost an awesome language, but I just keep finding it lacking where I really needed something from it. The syntax is beautiful, I haven't seen a language this unpolluted with punctuation characters as syntax decorations since lisp. Its killer app is still expect, since no other expect package I've seen for other language comes near the ease of programming expect (shame about those lousy primitive regexes though, get with the times and use pcre). I just don't see Tcl evolving to add anything that people have come to expect, like anonymous functions (having to name and explicitly delete my "lambda" functions does not cut it) =.
That had thousands of systems, planets, bases, stations, etc... set up in a game that had "realistic" physics. You could actually land on the planets yourself!
It was 1 disk big (1.44 floppy).
True, it had thousands of planets and solar systems, full of nothing. All you need to do to generate millions of systems is a plasma fractal algorithm and a random seed. Elite 2 sucked immensely, and frankly Elite 1 wasn't so interesting as it sounds. You spent ages accellerating to get to your destination, then spent an equal amount of time decellerating. Fighting pirates feels like you're moving a fixed turret, because you're screwed if you actually maneuver to fight them, because you'll lose your orbital approach or just head in too fast to dock.
Gotta agree with the other poster, it's just sepia tinted memory at work -- grab an emulator and you'll find that you just don't have the patience or tolerance for these limited and primitive games any more. I was playing the Bards Tale II on my emulator the other day, but I just couldn't bring myself to haul out the graph paper to make those dungeon maps like I used to.
Correct me if I am wrong, but wouldnt that slow windows down even more. You computer will now have to search through your registry to find the correct DLL for your application
I've always wondered, though... why did MS choose to keep the extension ".DLL" for.NET assemblies?
Because MS is using.EXE for the extension of.NET executables. They are basically changing executable file formats from PE to.NET. Putting differing object formats that require differing behavior from the runtime linker and the hosting application is nothing new -- they've been putting OLE servers into DLL's from day one, even though you can't call them directly either..EXE and.DLL are like.WAV, they're meta-formats that require peeking into the file ("magic" in unix parlance) to discover the actual format. It's only confusing now because.NET isn't very well integrated into the system, requiring you to deploy assemblies yourself instead of the runtime linker doing so automatically.
> Really, AOL gets such big numbers because their system is not very efficient.
Oh, it's efficient all right, it's just not very convenient. Yes, there's overzealous blockers that drop entire netblocks, but you said it yourself, it's all originating from the same IP Address. What do you propose they do? Implement an entire account structure for SMTP auth for every potential email sender on the internet?
Have you thought about calling your ISP and telling them just why your mails aren't getting through? And switching service if they don't get it or don't care?
all programmers really NEED here is a much simpler API than either D3D or OpenGL. A way to clear the screen, a way to download texture maps, a bulk vertex data transfer mechanism and a way to download shader programs.
Last I looked they also needed to place the camera, arrange the scene, and light it up. Moving stuff around helps too. Which kinda describes an engine, not a low level API -- It's like bemoaning the lack of high level languages because you're using C instead of lisp. A number of engines exist, some of which must be at least dipping their toes into shader language support.
Slashdot Mirror
Time to brush up on your Ayn Rand and your ESR. Most open-source developers (including me) couldn't care less about "the benefit of everyone on earth", "the common good", or any of those other throwaway commie bromides.
I love it. You even used the word bromide. Let's see if we can't work the phrase "angular planes of his face" into there too...
How long until SCO claim that SCO IP was stolen and put into plan9?
That's impossible. Plan 9 is from outer space.
I guess we can predict what SCO will claim next...
I'm a denizen of LambdaMOO, one of the longest-running social MUDs out there. It chugged along for nine years on a SparcCenter 1000, with uptime of hundreds of days, going down for maintenance because of bugs in the moo process itself. It just recently moved to a linux box, which is much quicker, but I just got this news item on login.
Saturday, June 14, 2003
OUTAGE
Network card driver randomly decided to shut itself down at around 8 this morning. Actually it's done this a few times before already (most of which I was around to catch after a few minutes; we weren't quite so lucky this time). I originally thought this was dhcpd rising from the grave but now I'm not so sure anymore. Time to see if a reboot helps.
It's not so much that Linux is unstable, it's just that the stability seems to be a function of whatever mood Linus and random driver writers are in at the time of whichever version is released. Right now the OS randomly kills processess when you start running out of memory. Randomly.
There's a reason people use QNX, and the fact that their lunch money won't buy a copy of it isn't usually a factor.
Having said that, I do note that you are perpetuating the myth that Java runs on "any OS/hardware combo". This is untrue of any language but I suspect "C" comes closer to achieving it than Java.
I suspect you'll have a hard time running compiled C on any platform for which there is a compiler. Or for that matter, even build it unmodified without the benefit of autoconf unless it's among the most trivial of programs.
Not that Java has a lock on portability -- Perl and Python do just fine in that area too.
> IIRC, Winshit (allegedly?) uses a network stack copied from BSD. BSD is an often-theorized alternative source for the "stolen" code, and this could make M$ just as liable.
Yes, allegedly. So substantiate it. All I see so far is that they ported some BSD userland programs like ftp, and that they used BSD header files in their BSD socket API implementation. This hardly constitutes copying the stack.
Does it kill you to say "Windows" BTW? I mean, really.
> Just like people should have savings to tide them over rough times, shouldn't companies?
Because companies are valued by their stock price. It's illegal to "smooth" your balance sheets with cash assets (because it's not really income), so when your quarterly earnings reports fluctuate, people dump your stock, your value goes down, you can't get financed, you are history. It's not all that bad if you warn people beforehand that the next couple quarters will be bad, but if I had that kind of power I'd be picking horses (hey I won $5 betting against Funny Cide, maybe I should)
Some companies (Ferarri is one I believe) steadfastly ignore demands to issue a quarterly earnings report, and issue only annual reports. They usually end up looking a lot more stable as a result.
Some AC recommended this reply (also from an AC) which had been languishing in score 0 territory be modded up. I'll go ahead and post it so it gets noticed by people reading at a threshold.
:)
I'm still not a great fan of it simply refusing to create the file and then returning an error code that isn't that explanatory (tho it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that EBUSY on creat is an overflowed bucket), but a failure is definitely the preferred behavior here.
I personally think filesystems need about 10 years to shake out all the bugs. NTFS is just now getting to where I can trust it, for example (and it still has serious warts). ReiserFS is definitely getting there, but til then I'm a fan of good ol ufs -- with softupdates of course, yes I'm a BSD bigot
-------------------8<------------
Oh hey I WOULD have posted it, but the god damn lameness filter stopped it. Can't have a site populated by NERDS actually having CODE in its discussions. So go adjust your threshold, read the parent, and it's time for a new sig .
the "and" and "or" macros you showed are in fact part of ISO C++ and C99. #include (or ciso646 for C++) and see for yourself. Personally, I love 'em.
The example doesn't really add up -- stick that code in a utility class static final method and it'll inline. You probably wanted something that'd actually transform its input instead of just saving some typing. Most lisp macros need to work on the parsed form of the sexp that is their argument, splicing bits in here and there, inserting control statements or special forms that wouldn't work in a function. Java has neither the sexp format nor any special forms in such formats that would lend itself to a macro facility like lisp.
Anyway, if you really want to extend the language in a clean way, just use OpenJava like everyone else does. As long as OJ is developed independently from Sun, it stands more chance of being actually being useful and not crippled.
Good god, is this truly the case? I don't think I'd trust the filesystem even after this bug was fixed ... who knows what one could lose -- invisibly, allowing backups to become corrupted if they're not verified against each other -- due to some other cavalier mistreatment of precious data.
Maybe this is why data like prescriptions shouldn't be stored in a filesystem. And I was just starting to think that filesystems were starting to get to the point where that attitude should be revisited. Maybe with XFS, but if this is true, then certainly not reiser.
> And of course anyone seriously creating PNG images cannot do without PNGCrush, which can shave off every single bit of bloat
Why isn't the algorithm of PNGCrush part of the standard, or at least built in to the standard libraries that create them, so it's simply a matter of a checkbox to compress colors with some degree of loss? Why not a mime type of image/x-png-crushed so a browser can negotiate it as a preferred type and have either a proxy or the web server at the end crush them on the fly?
No one will care about PNGCrush inless it's really part of PNG.
Should read: ... The fact that Foo<Bar> is a subclass of Foo ...
Wouldn't it be nice if any disallowed HTML were just passed through as literal text instead of being stripped out?
Unfortunately, since Java's generics act solely through type erasure, you're still screwed -- all Java generics do is insert invisible casts into your code, with all the overhead you expect from that. Type erasure is overall a good thing -- the fact that Foo is a subclass of Foo is very useful, and lets you avoid many of the ugly traits hacks in C++, and it does give good hints to the compiler, but at the same time, lack of a typedef also removes many of the things that are still useful in traits classes, and all the extra casts you don't see still cost as much as the ones you write by hand.
The current release of jsr104 will even create mysterious ClassCastExceptions in some cases because the type inference is unsound. The documentation even warns of being able to do invalid casts (e.g. a String to a JFrame), which casts doubt on the safety of the complier. If that's the case, you can be sure that the jsr104 compiler is going to have one or more of its features axed before it makes it into tiger.
Gross oversimplification alert: perhaps the desktop really isn't spatial navigation at all, but it's more of a symbolic recognition task which is very much the province of the left brain, a faculty you may even more keenly posess because you're using it full-time now.
:)
:)
I mean, think about it: I'm typing this on a 15" laptop display, which doesn't even come close to filling my field of vision. The only time spatial awareness comes into play is when I'm moving the mouse around -- and guess what, I prefer keyboard shortcuts most of the time. If I had to navigate the desktop by thinking about where my windows were instead of alt-tabbing or finding the taskbar button by icon and clicking it. Moving the pointer to the taskbar is still a reflex guesture, I certainly don't have to go look for it.
Who "wins" in terms of symbolic recognition, anyway? I suspect it isn't very clear-cut. I rather wonder if the study wasn't tainted by environmental factors, or perhaps social conditioning factors from the computer environment itself. From my own anecdotal and secondhand accounts, I'm sure men are more likely to see a user-hostile application as a learning challenge in itself, whereas women are more it as an obstacle to the goal (we men like bright shiny distractions don't we
But hey anything that pushes for the desktop of the future being the size of a desktop and not a legal pad has my support
What a waste of time.. I pirate my books the old-fashioned way .. I borrow a copy from a friend or the library!
Libraries buy their books. And you were never enjoined from lending out your CD for free (even if the music companies would like it that way).
Sometimes, when I'm feeling particularly criminal, I go to the bookst^H^H^H^H^H^H local pirate's den and read the book without paying for it!
And run off your own bound printed copy on an inline-publishing printer/copier without paying for paper.
Hey, the music companies did themselves in with their own greed, and I grab the occasional song off shareaza myself without feeling like I'm funding Al Qaeda or something, but do us all a favor and quit it with these weak rationalizations and shoddy analogies, ok?
> You can't make such a gateway - you'd need to know the filenames and cryptographic hashes of every file on the gnutella network, and have to insert each one individually.
No you don't. Any one gateway just needs to know the filenames and hashes of the files it intends to gateway from freenet, then issue queries as requests come in. In fact you could build this list up lazily, but I hate to think of the spurious chatter this would cause on freenet. Multiple gateway-enabled servents would distribute the task of enumerating the files on freenet.
> 1. Can this version prevent abuse from folks that try to flood the system with bogus or damaged files?
Here's how I do it, because I have a dial-up and can't waste my time downloading junk:
1. Use the result with the most hosts. Not only the most reliable download, but it's probably been verified by some of them.
2. If it's really big, I'll verify it with Bitzi (it's one click from shareaza), plus I can bookmark the page if I want to grab it later (since it has ed2k links).
3. If I see a "XXX IS BOGUS.txt" file, I grab it so I'm one more node sharing it and passing on the word. The file usually contains a hash.
Not going to be a perfect system, and not likely to stand up to organized attack (not even freenet can do that). Speaking of freenet, given the nature of the internet, freenet would be required to do such a thing as anonymous downloads. gnutella simply brokers peer connections, freenet is a virtual network itself, serving somewhat different needs. A freenet/gnutella gateway would certainly be nice, but probably in freenet's scope, not gnutella's.
Simply put, if you expect your web application to get any amount of decent traffic (say 100,000 pageviews+ per day), then MySQL is simply not an option
Sure it is, if you're running a blog like slashdot, which is 99.999% reads of the same few dozen datasets over and over.
Get more than a hundred or so simultaneous writes to a MySQL database and watch it just fall over dead, or queue them up like breadlines in SOVIET RUSSIA (sorry, that just slipped out). Heck, I don't even think it even has any deadlock detection.
> A number of the comments above revolve around Tcl's percieved lack of a standard object system. There is one, it's called [incr Tcl]
.foo.bar.#auto -background red
.foo.bar.(someautogeneratedname). See, in tcl, you have to create all your components in the top level namespace, you have to know the path to them (don't bother trying to set it in an enclosing scope, your event handlers won't execute in them), and you have to delete them when you're finished -- no garbage collection going on for objects here.
It's definitely incremental. Here's how you instantiate a class in [incr tcl], straight from the manpage:
fileselectiondialog
This creates a fileselectiondialog with the path
There's of course ways to get static scope and local variables. Each of them requires extra syntactic decoration that generates unique global names for you. All of a sudden, python+tkInter starts looking a whole lot better to prototype your GUI with...
The shame about TCL is that it's almost an awesome language, but I just keep finding it lacking where I really needed something from it. The syntax is beautiful, I haven't seen a language this unpolluted with punctuation characters as syntax decorations since lisp. Its killer app is still expect, since no other expect package I've seen for other language comes near the ease of programming expect (shame about those lousy primitive regexes though, get with the times and use pcre). I just don't see Tcl evolving to add anything that people have come to expect, like anonymous functions (having to name and explicitly delete my "lambda" functions does not cut it) =.
That had thousands of systems, planets, bases, stations, etc... set up in a game that had "realistic" physics. You could actually land on the planets yourself!
It was 1 disk big (1.44 floppy).
True, it had thousands of planets and solar systems, full of nothing. All you need to do to generate millions of systems is a plasma fractal algorithm and a random seed. Elite 2 sucked immensely, and frankly Elite 1 wasn't so interesting as it sounds. You spent ages accellerating to get to your destination, then spent an equal amount of time decellerating. Fighting pirates feels like you're moving a fixed turret, because you're screwed if you actually maneuver to fight them, because you'll lose your orbital approach or just head in too fast to dock.
Gotta agree with the other poster, it's just sepia tinted memory at work -- grab an emulator and you'll find that you just don't have the patience or tolerance for these limited and primitive games any more. I was playing the Bards Tale II on my emulator the other day, but I just couldn't bring myself to haul out the graph paper to make those dungeon maps like I used to.
Correct me if I am wrong, but wouldnt that slow windows down even more. You computer will now have to search through your registry to find the correct DLL for your application
As opposed to the filesystem in use now?
I've always wondered, though... why did MS choose to keep the extension ".DLL" for .NET assemblies?
.EXE for the extension of .NET executables. They are basically changing executable file formats from PE to .NET. Putting differing object formats that require differing behavior from the runtime linker and the hosting application is nothing new -- they've been putting OLE servers into DLL's from day one, even though you can't call them directly either. .EXE and .DLL are like .WAV, they're meta-formats that require peeking into the file ("magic" in unix parlance) to discover the actual format. It's only confusing now because .NET isn't very well integrated into the system, requiring you to deploy assemblies yourself instead of the runtime linker doing so automatically.
Because MS is using
> Really, AOL gets such big numbers because their system is not very efficient.
Oh, it's efficient all right, it's just not very convenient. Yes, there's overzealous blockers that drop entire netblocks, but you said it yourself, it's all originating from the same IP Address. What do you propose they do? Implement an entire account structure for SMTP auth for every potential email sender on the internet?
Have you thought about calling your ISP and telling them just why your mails aren't getting through? And switching service if they don't get it or don't care?
all programmers really NEED here is a much simpler API than either D3D or OpenGL. A way to clear the screen, a way to download texture maps, a bulk vertex data transfer mechanism and a way to download shader programs.
Last I looked they also needed to place the camera, arrange the scene, and light it up. Moving stuff around helps too. Which kinda describes an engine, not a low level API -- It's like bemoaning the lack of high level languages because you're using C instead of lisp. A number of engines exist, some of which must be at least dipping their toes into shader language support.