I notice that the "indepedent assessment" you cite is website that's specifically about making cartoons and hardly has much in-depth assessment of the competition. Since compressing cartoons is radically different to compressing live-action video, any conclusion drawn by this website isn't exactly applicable to the general case.
In short: is that really the best you could come up with?
For example, before Winsock a Unix geek could have said "Unix does TCP/IP better - in fact Windows doesn't do TCP/IP at all!" And you could have responded, "TCP/IP is a Unix thing. Why judge Windows by something irrelevant like that?"
So what do you consider a fair basis of comparison?
The TCP/IP thing would be fair, because that would be a situation where the box was functionally not up to the job - you couldn't connect to machines that used the TCP/IP protocol. On the other hand, the fork thing is IMHO unfair because that's just an application implementation detail - it's possible on NT to build an app that works just as well in all functional respects without using fork.
Aside: I dislike the use of the term "broadband" to apply to fast Net access. Broadband basically means analog, while baseband basically means digital. Cable Modems *are* broadband, but DSL is not. A 56K modem, on the other *is* broadband.
Newsflash: languages evolve.
Just like "awful" no longer means "inspiring awe", broadband means whatever the majority of people think it does - in this case a connection that offers high bandwidth.
No 'real person' would consider a 56K modem to be "broadband", and most people would consider both DSL and cable modems to be perfectly reasonable examples of "broadband". They simple take the de facto definition of the term.
Your nit-picking is not only pedantic, but there is a very practical sense in which it is wrong.
Are you sure? Which forks a new process faster on equivalent hardware? While I haven't used W2K, I know that NT is abysmally slow at forking.
NT doesn't really have 'fork' at all, and you are correct that spawning new processes is slower on NT. On the other hand, it doesn't matter because no sane NT programmer would write an app that was bottlenecked by how fast it could fork. NT programmers use thread pools, and neato stuff like I/O completion ports instead - which works just as well, if not better, than the Unix equivalent.
Last time I had this argument with some Unix hack who thought Unix architecure was the One True Way and that no other OS architecture could possibly be as good, he went on and on about how slow NT was at forking, and how he'd seen Linux pthreads spawn new threads faster than NT could spawn new threads, etc. etc. Which all went to prove that he just didn't get it - NT server programming is based around keeping pools of the things around and being able to very efficiently wake up pre-existing threads, so their speed of creation is neither here nor there.
In short, judging NT by how it performs on some metric which is only critical to Unix architectures is (a) unfair and (b) meaningless.
Another good reason to redesign the USB port is that the standard USB mechanical design is a little flimsy for a device that's going to be used by kids plugging and unplugging controllers frequently.
Actually, in the original 2001 novel, the first monolith (the one discovered by the man-apes) is actually semi-translucent and puts on a light-show. The other monoliths that appear are indeed jet black though.
Dawn is almost certainly vapourware. If you follow the decent MMORPG sites (e.g. Lum's) you'll have seen them take quite a pasting from most neutral observers and even some of their own fansites.
If 3dfx was serious about selling to OEMs, then why did they produce a graphics card that required an additional power supply FFS? As soon as you start asking OEMs to hook up all sorts of extra crap to the hard-drive power supply just to make a graphics card run, you can pretty much kiss their business goodbye.
That's not much of a business strategy though, is it? "We're going to spend millions of dollars developing something that's never going to sell, but might force the competition to improve their product" is likely to get shot down pretty hard by most executives, I suspect.
I know I shouldn't respond to trolls, and yes, I know that by responding I'm probably just giving you exactly the satisfaction you're after, but this sort of crap really does get me steamed.
I mean, really. Nice job, buddy. We have precious few women in technical jobs in the computer industry as it is, and with posts like yours it's not hard to see why.
To answer the original poster, it shouldn't be too hard to pick up old 486s and early Pentiums for next to nothing. Maybe check out some auctions, or see if a local business is throwing out old machines. Sure, they may not be state of the art, but they'll run Linux quite happily, and give you all you need to learn a lot about programming and how 'nix systems work.
Problem with that is that you'd better be pretty damn sure there are no bugs in the OS, because [I]you're not going to be able to patch it for fear of breaking existing games[/I]. Which is why it would be much more sensible to boot off DVD and therefore bind each game to a version of the OS that it is known to work with and has been thoroughly tested against.
Or perhaps you believe that Linux is currently 100% bug free and there are no security loopholes of any kind waiting to be discovered?
Actually, either way, it doesn't really alter my argument. Indrema must restrict what OS you can install on the box. However they choose to do this, it still defeats much of the point of open source.
The freeware thing is a problem though. The difficulty is that Indrema will need to check fairly thoroughly that any software they certify doesn't do anything it shouldn't (like, say, patch the kernel to remove the certification check - the last thing they'll want is an easy, downloadable, software way to 'chip' your IES). Doing this check takes time, and therefore costs money - so how are they going to provide this service to freeware games developers, unless they severely restrict the number of freeware games they are prepared to certify?
The only way to make the thing really secure is to have the BIOS do the certification check and refuse to boot from uncertified DVDs. Of course, when you do that, you make it impossible to install another OS on the box without Indrema's consent. Which would be a good thing for their business plan, but defeats much of the point of open source - sure, you can have the source-code to the OS, but the user can't actually install any changes he makes.
One way or another, some freedoms are going to have to go out of the window in order for the thing to fly financially. In fact, by the time you've removed enough freedoms for profitability, you wind up with something that isn't really that much freer in practical terms than a PS2 or Xbox.
If the article is to be believed, they're planning to sell the thing for $299. Unfortunately for them, it's probably going to cost at least that to build and distribute (not to mention market). So, they'd better have some other source of revenue, because they're certainly not going to break even selling the boxes.
Problem is, of course, that with a completely open source OS and API set, it's hard to see how they can make any money off 3rd party titles. In the traditional console model, the console vendor gets a royalty on every single copy of a game sold (or, in Nintendo's case, every single one manufactered!). They're just not going to be able to do that here. Indeed, the handy comparison chart even admits as much when it says that some games will be freeware!
In short, although the lack of games and marketing muscle are indeed a big problem (as others have already noted), they're just a drop in the ocean compared to the gaping hole in the financial plan.
Totalitarianism: The government tells you what to do.
Socialism: The goverment tells you what to do, and takes all your money to "redistribute".
Not too far off with totalitarianism, but way off base with socialism. A socialist government doesn't tell you what to do. It may well have a policy of progressive redistribution of wealth, so that everyone in society gets a similar opportunity regardless of accident of birth, but it needn't "take all your money" or dictate how you live your life.
I hardly think that a system which requires people to wait upwards of 10 months to see a doctor is something to be proud of. NHS is a failure, and even the Britons know it. People complain about healthcare in the US, but at least you can handle your own medical needs without the government's approval.
Yes, the NHS has its problems (although I think you exaggerate - I can see my doctor more or less any time I like at no notice, although it's true that I might have to wait for certain procedures). However, I am also completely free to choose to have private medical care should I be prepared to pay for it. Hardly an oppressive regime.
Regardless of the merits or otherwise of socialist economics, the point is that it's a heck of a long way from your trollish "socialism is death" statement. The NHS may not be perfect, but people weren't sent to concentration camps by the British government.
I understand the reasons why you are so brainwashed. (And you are brainwashed if your only notion of socialism is that it automatically leads to the slaughter of millions.) During the cold war it was much easier to simply paint the entire opposing philosophy as fundamentally evil, than to have a more complex argument that accepts that socialism might not be intrinsically evil and that Stalin et al. had a very twisted view of what socialism actually meant.
Concerning China, it's not nearly as cut and dried as you think. Yes, the regime did plenty of horrific things. But they also fed everyone - which given China's history of widespread famine is actually no mean feat. I don't agree with the way the Chinese regime operates, and I think their bullying of states like Tibet is appalling, but not everything they did was bad.
Of course, Stalin and Pol Pot's regimes weren't really socialist, they were totalitarian.
For an example of a real socialist government, try the post-war Labour government in Britain. They introduced the National Health Service, which ensures proper medical care to the millions of people that could not afford it, and has saved an enourmous number of lives.
As another poster has already noted - your reply doesn't answer the question of why America brainwashes its schoolchildren against socialism, but merely provides frightening evidence that it is taking place.
This really isn't intended to be a troll, although I fully expect to get modded into oblivion...but isn't this entire story just one big karma whore?
I mean, really. Asking Slashdot whether it thinks governments should use open source code? Why don't we ask Microsoft employees if they'd like the DOJ case to be dropped? Or perhaps we should ask the Pope if he's a Catholic?
Also, regardless of how secure the driver model is or isn't, surely it's possible to engage in a spot of reverse engineering to recover the appropriate performance keys, and then simply decode the encrypted audio data offline with user mode code without having to go anywhere near the "secure audio path" or driver signing.
"I was looking for some text that might be based in Oxford myself, like a text of Newton's or something. Suck."
Sorry, don't mean to be too picky, but Newton is more usually associated with Cambridge than Oxford. Y'know, what with him studying at Caius College, and holding the same maths chair at Cambridge now occupied by Stephen Hawking.
Difference between NP-complete and NP-hard?
on
Does P = NP?
·
· Score: 1
Forgive my ignorance, but although I understand what P, NP, and NP-complete mean, I'm not sure I know what NP-hard is and how it differs from NP-complete. Anyone care to enlighten me?
Just because real money is involved doesn't make the point any less valid. Indeed, if real money is involved it's even more important to be clear about the meaningfulness or otherwise of some of the statements you see about this kind of thing.
Exactly my point. Yet here someone is suddenly saying "but Microsoft isn't dominant, it only has 16% market share". Sure, they're talking about a different slice of the market, but the point is that you can come up with any market share figure you like simply by redefining the market in a way that suits the case you are trying to make.
Funny, but when the DOJ case was in full swing, I don't remember many/.ers rushing around saying "Microsoft only has 16% of the market". In fact, people were only too happy to accept figures like 90% or 95% market share without any comment because it suited their case.
Yes, I know that we're talking about different market segments, but that's actually part of the problem. Who gets to define the market? I'm reminded of the 3dfx ads which said something like "fastest, most popular 3D only card available!", which was true, but only because almost all the competition were combined 2D/3D cards.
Make up your minds, people. Either Microsoft is dominant, or it isn't.
So they go into the software distribution business as well. Well, that's one possibility, but if you're going to make that argument, then you might as well say they go into any other kind of business you like (used-car sales, whatever) and use the profits to prop up the console business.
Whichever way you slice it, they are shutting themselves off from the primary revenue stream that Sony et al. have, and they don't seem to have any alternatives that aren't also open to those companies. So, I'll say it again: why do they think they'll be able to make money?
Slashdot Mirror
In short: is that really the best you could come up with?
The TCP/IP thing would be fair, because that would be a situation where the box was functionally not up to the job - you couldn't connect to machines that used the TCP/IP protocol. On the other hand, the fork thing is IMHO unfair because that's just an application implementation detail - it's possible on NT to build an app that works just as well in all functional respects without using fork.
Newsflash: languages evolve.
Just like "awful" no longer means "inspiring awe", broadband means whatever the majority of people think it does - in this case a connection that offers high bandwidth.
No 'real person' would consider a 56K modem to be "broadband", and most people would consider both DSL and cable modems to be perfectly reasonable examples of "broadband". They simple take the de facto definition of the term.
Your nit-picking is not only pedantic, but there is a very practical sense in which it is wrong.
NT doesn't really have 'fork' at all, and you are correct that spawning new processes is slower on NT. On the other hand, it doesn't matter because no sane NT programmer would write an app that was bottlenecked by how fast it could fork. NT programmers use thread pools, and neato stuff like I/O completion ports instead - which works just as well, if not better, than the Unix equivalent.
Last time I had this argument with some Unix hack who thought Unix architecure was the One True Way and that no other OS architecture could possibly be as good, he went on and on about how slow NT was at forking, and how he'd seen Linux pthreads spawn new threads faster than NT could spawn new threads, etc. etc. Which all went to prove that he just didn't get it - NT server programming is based around keeping pools of the things around and being able to very efficiently wake up pre-existing threads, so their speed of creation is neither here nor there.
In short, judging NT by how it performs on some metric which is only critical to Unix architectures is (a) unfair and (b) meaningless.
When you're in a hole, stop digging.
You might want to take that on board...
Another good reason to redesign the USB port is that the standard USB mechanical design is a little flimsy for a device that's going to be used by kids plugging and unplugging controllers frequently.
Actually, in the original 2001 novel, the first monolith (the one discovered by the man-apes) is actually semi-translucent and puts on a light-show. The other monoliths that appear are indeed jet black though.
Dawn is almost certainly vapourware. If you follow the decent MMORPG sites (e.g. Lum's) you'll have seen them take quite a pasting from most neutral observers and even some of their own fansites.
If 3dfx was serious about selling to OEMs, then why did they produce a graphics card that required an additional power supply FFS? As soon as you start asking OEMs to hook up all sorts of extra crap to the hard-drive power supply just to make a graphics card run, you can pretty much kiss their business goodbye.
That's not much of a business strategy though, is it? "We're going to spend millions of dollars developing something that's never going to sell, but might force the competition to improve their product" is likely to get shot down pretty hard by most executives, I suspect.
I mean, really. Nice job, buddy. We have precious few women in technical jobs in the computer industry as it is, and with posts like yours it's not hard to see why.
To answer the original poster, it shouldn't be too hard to pick up old 486s and early Pentiums for next to nothing. Maybe check out some auctions, or see if a local business is throwing out old machines. Sure, they may not be state of the art, but they'll run Linux quite happily, and give you all you need to learn a lot about programming and how 'nix systems work.
Or perhaps you believe that Linux is currently 100% bug free and there are no security loopholes of any kind waiting to be discovered?
Actually, either way, it doesn't really alter my argument. Indrema must restrict what OS you can install on the box. However they choose to do this, it still defeats much of the point of open source.
The only way to make the thing really secure is to have the BIOS do the certification check and refuse to boot from uncertified DVDs. Of course, when you do that, you make it impossible to install another OS on the box without Indrema's consent. Which would be a good thing for their business plan, but defeats much of the point of open source - sure, you can have the source-code to the OS, but the user can't actually install any changes he makes.
One way or another, some freedoms are going to have to go out of the window in order for the thing to fly financially. In fact, by the time you've removed enough freedoms for profitability, you wind up with something that isn't really that much freer in practical terms than a PS2 or Xbox.
Problem is, of course, that with a completely open source OS and API set, it's hard to see how they can make any money off 3rd party titles. In the traditional console model, the console vendor gets a royalty on every single copy of a game sold (or, in Nintendo's case, every single one manufactered!). They're just not going to be able to do that here. Indeed, the handy comparison chart even admits as much when it says that some games will be freeware!
In short, although the lack of games and marketing muscle are indeed a big problem (as others have already noted), they're just a drop in the ocean compared to the gaping hole in the financial plan.
Socialism: The goverment tells you what to do, and takes all your money to "redistribute".
Not too far off with totalitarianism, but way off base with socialism. A socialist government doesn't tell you what to do. It may well have a policy of progressive redistribution of wealth, so that everyone in society gets a similar opportunity regardless of accident of birth, but it needn't "take all your money" or dictate how you live your life.
I hardly think that a system which requires people to wait upwards of 10 months to see a doctor is something to be proud of. NHS is a failure, and even the Britons know it. People complain about healthcare in the US, but at least you can handle your own medical needs without the government's approval.
Yes, the NHS has its problems (although I think you exaggerate - I can see my doctor more or less any time I like at no notice, although it's true that I might have to wait for certain procedures). However, I am also completely free to choose to have private medical care should I be prepared to pay for it. Hardly an oppressive regime.
Regardless of the merits or otherwise of socialist economics, the point is that it's a heck of a long way from your trollish "socialism is death" statement. The NHS may not be perfect, but people weren't sent to concentration camps by the British government.
I understand the reasons why you are so brainwashed. (And you are brainwashed if your only notion of socialism is that it automatically leads to the slaughter of millions.) During the cold war it was much easier to simply paint the entire opposing philosophy as fundamentally evil, than to have a more complex argument that accepts that socialism might not be intrinsically evil and that Stalin et al. had a very twisted view of what socialism actually meant.
Concerning China, it's not nearly as cut and dried as you think. Yes, the regime did plenty of horrific things. But they also fed everyone - which given China's history of widespread famine is actually no mean feat. I don't agree with the way the Chinese regime operates, and I think their bullying of states like Tibet is appalling, but not everything they did was bad.
For an example of a real socialist government, try the post-war Labour government in Britain. They introduced the National Health Service, which ensures proper medical care to the millions of people that could not afford it, and has saved an enourmous number of lives.
As another poster has already noted - your reply doesn't answer the question of why America brainwashes its schoolchildren against socialism, but merely provides frightening evidence that it is taking place.
I mean, really. Asking Slashdot whether it thinks governments should use open source code? Why don't we ask Microsoft employees if they'd like the DOJ case to be dropped? Or perhaps we should ask the Pope if he's a Catholic?
Or have I missed something?
Cambridge either way though.
Sorry, don't mean to be too picky, but Newton is more usually associated with Cambridge than Oxford. Y'know, what with him studying at Caius College, and holding the same maths chair at Cambridge now occupied by Stephen Hawking.
Forgive my ignorance, but although I understand what P, NP, and NP-complete mean, I'm not sure I know what NP-hard is and how it differs from NP-complete. Anyone care to enlighten me?
Just because real money is involved doesn't make the point any less valid. Indeed, if real money is involved it's even more important to be clear about the meaningfulness or otherwise of some of the statements you see about this kind of thing.
Exactly my point. Yet here someone is suddenly saying "but Microsoft isn't dominant, it only has 16% market share". Sure, they're talking about a different slice of the market, but the point is that you can come up with any market share figure you like simply by redefining the market in a way that suits the case you are trying to make.
Yes, I know that we're talking about different market segments, but that's actually part of the problem. Who gets to define the market? I'm reminded of the 3dfx ads which said something like "fastest, most popular 3D only card available!", which was true, but only because almost all the competition were combined 2D/3D cards.
Make up your minds, people. Either Microsoft is dominant, or it isn't.
Whichever way you slice it, they are shutting themselves off from the primary revenue stream that Sony et al. have, and they don't seem to have any alternatives that aren't also open to those companies. So, I'll say it again: why do they think they'll be able to make money?