Yep, very disappointed by Gingerbread. I mean, they say a focus was video/ audio encoding, but a quick look at the APIs show it is still not possible to encode a video from anything except a camera, so video editing of any kind is still not possible. iPhone users get to produce high quality video's with all kinds of effects, Android users can't even *bleeping* crop them! And again encoding was a point of focus, yay we get dead-on-arrival WebM support! Let's just hope that they really actually added some relevant things for game development, the only type of app 90% of smart phone users (not me) are interested in.
Your tiger repellant rock does not have all the properties this stuff has. There have been several news stories of this in the Netherlands because a shop owner got killed in a burglary (quite rare over here), and apparently none of the stores that have this system (and have this fact advertised) have been robbed since. And since jewelry stores are hit often apparently that figure is statistically relevant.
Short performance review: Pentium 4 2.8 GHz with FX 5200 does not really cut it. What is nice is that the 'heated air' effects work really nice because it's a DirectX 9.0 card (I also see no real slowdown there), but even at the lowest of all graphics configurations it's realllyyy slow. I wish I would get 13 frames when one of these goblin type creatures enters the picture, feels more like 2 frames a second then.
I always planned on upgrading the videocard after the new generation of games came out, I now know I can be sure of a visible difference.
No longer content to post the same story two times in a day, the editors decided this time to just post the duplicates together in one news item! Everyone is, of course, required to submit comments subtly different in appearance yet identical in content. No longer content to post the same story two times in a day, the editors decided this time to just post the duplicates together in one news item! Everyone is, of course, required to submit comments subtly different in appearance yet identical in content.
Well, PHP 4 has a foreach() construct and also a database abstraction layer. So if these were the only two things you hated about PHP, you
should be jumping for joy now.
I wanted to jump for joy, my major peeve with PHP is the different database interfaces also.
But I could not find the database abstraction layer looking at the manual.
All I could find was a
layer for a couple of specific databases.
I think what the previous poster and I are looking for is a general set of functions that work for MySQL, Postgres, Oracle, ODBC and other SQL-databases, which would only require a change in the connect/open function-call in the code should there be a switch in DBMS.
Is there such a system in PHP now? Otherwise, no jumping....
I was very surprised to read statements in the ruling like
"Hence, it was necessary, he said, to decrypt the DVD on a Windows computer in order
subsequently to play the decrypted files on a Linux machine.78 Assuming that to be true,...
Substantial questions have been raised both at trial and elsewhere as to the veracity of Mr.
Johansen's claim. See Ex. CS, at S10006 ("Our analysis indicates that the primary technical
breakthroughs were developed outside of the Linux development groups.")."
"Hence, the Court finds that Mr. Johansen and the others
who actually did develop DeCSS did not do so solely for the purpose of making a Linux DVD player
if, indeed, developing a Linux-based DVD player was among their purposes."
Does this mean the judge thinks he was lying under oath? IANAL, but from watching Matlock etc. I thought I learned that there are severe punishments for doing that.
So, is he in trouble (if he would ever return to the USA)?
Maybe slightly off topic, but I just read the
FAQ
and now I am confused about this product. I live in the Netherlands so I cannot have access to this product myself, but maybe someone in the know can satisfy my curiosity about some points:
So the machine gets the new information every night over a modem. Is the download-format of this information open? Could you get the information from somebody else, or could you use the information in other ('open') hard- or software?
Since it only gets the information once a day, how does it know exactly when a program starts? In the Netherlands, the TV guide times should be taken as a guideline, there is basically a 5 minute area around this time as to when the program actually starts, are the US networks more timely?
And how about the ads, do networks really give the times to TiVo as to when their commercials start and end?? I could not imagine they would give away this information that would cost them money?
In the Netherlands there is a system called PDC, which allows VCRs to know when programs start later or earlier, e.g. to adjust for when an unscheduled news-bulletin happens; the PDC-signal is sent along with the normal television signal. Do the TiVo-machines make use of these kind of extra information-signals?
Thanks in advance to anyone taking out the time to answer me.
Last thursday there was an article on CNet saying that Ellison was gaining a lot on Gates as far as wealth is concerned. If I combine that with the postscript on this article,
Shares of Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) fell more than seven points in pre-market trading on Monday after two U.S. newspapers reported that the Justice Department and 19 states are leaning toward asking a court to split up the software giant. The stock traded at 71 on Instinet more than three hours before the opening bell, traders said, compared with Friday's closing price of 78-15/16 on Nasdaq.
does that mean that Gates is no longer the richest man on earth??
Since I think ESR and other open-source zealots can not bring themselves to read all the way to the end, I'll copy the conclusion here
Open Source Software certainly does have the potential to be more secure than its closed source counterpart. But make no mistake, simply being open source is no guarantee of security.
So, in the end what he wants to state that it's not a given that open-source software is more secure, but the potential is there....
Could somebody confirm that audience for the German show has been decreasing since the splash 1st emmission?
But it's being licensed accross Europe.
I am not sure what you mean, but if you mean 'why bring it out all over Europe if it ain't popular', the answer is it was a huge hit in the Netherlands, the first country to show it.
I just installed it. The footprint is small, but not very small (11 MB without mail and news or Java). But this program is just to slow to release to a general audience.
I'm by no means an expert, but this looks a lot like Mozilla. It is insanely slow. I have a Pentium 166/64 MB with NT. Not a top-machine, but e.g. IE5 runs on it without problems. Here, if I go past the menu's it takes about a second to build them.
Within 15 seconds I found my first bug. If you ask for a secure site when it isn't secure (accident on my side), like https://www.yahoo.com/ it has a progress indicator for a while, after which it simply ends.
But the speed, or lack of it, is what kills it for me. Am I too cynical or demanding. The strange thing is that the HTML renderer panel is really fast, why did they not use it for the entire user interface?
Does anybody know what is supposed to be new about this thing anyway? I opened an xml-file but nothing spectacular happened...
Disclaimer: I too do believe that viruses have less of a chance to infect Linux machines.
This is a pretty bad article IMHO. It is clearly meant as a rebuttal against what Garfinkle wrote. But it is pretty bad.
For a Linux binary virus to infect executables, those executables must be writable by the user activating the virus. That is not likely to be the case. Chances are, the programs are owned by root and the user is running from a non-privileged account. Further, the less experienced the user, the lower the likelihood that he actually owns any executable programs. Therefore, the users who are the least savvy about such hazards are also the ones with the least fertile home directories for viruses.
This describes the typical Unix situation, which is not the typical Linux situation. There, more people have installed their own system and have root priviliges. And the less savvy the user, the bigger the chance that the root user is the only account on the system.
Linux networking programs are conservatively constructed, without the high-level macro facilities....
Very true, but seconds later
Linux applications and system software is almost all open source. Because so much of the Linux market is accustomed to the availability of source code, binary-only products are rare and have a harder time achieving a substantial market presence. This has two effects on the virus. First, open source code is a tough place for a virus to hide.
Yeah right, so first it says that high level scripts may be a source of viruses, but then when you have source code (in e.g. Makefiles, highlevel), viruses are all of a sudden less likely. I am still afraid that I come into a Makefile someday that holds the line: install: rm -rf / Is this not a virus? If not, why is it a virus if a similar line is contained in some malicious Word macro?
No reason to worry about Linux viruses yet, but mostly because the platform is not popular enough to have a widespread effect (and this is the real lesson of zoology, viruses in nature are mostly used by evolution to limit large populations. This is why there are mostly Windows viruses; evolution wants to limit its growth).
Most games don't even come close to PC qualitity if you look at the resolution. However, if you compare what they get done in their lower resolution (Gran Turismo II looks great in crappy resolution).
But the games graphics quality is not that important compared with actual gameplay.
Can these "emulators" render the graphics any better?
The PSX emulator Bleem! can display the games in higher resolution and they look slightly better (this is in large letters on the box in fact, www.bleem.com), but the graphics source it is based on is not made for these higher resolutions so don't expect miracles.
I'm afraid this is just old school thinking of Katz.
There is no need to make divisions into sectors or whatever, the good thing about the Internet is that there are as many divisions as there are users. The experience is personal and unique.
Sites can fall into different 'continents' according to personal taste, what is a game to some is a business to others. And if there would be this strict division there would be a continent where somebody is 'coming from', I am coming from none of these continents.
I think Jon Katz has some pretty interesting views on racism. Now he brings up 'John Rocker', from the remark he mentions of him (I don't know the man) he is apparently a racist. Then he wants to compare him to online community-members who want to keep certain people out. But is every person who wants to avoid certain people per definition bad? I think what sets racists apart is that they use a very bad division mechanism for dividing people into groups. But where skincolor is a very bad method of dividing, I feel that a persons ideas, feelings and thoughts is a proper one. I do not feel the comparison between racists and 'us' cuts wood. Everybody is entitled to mistakes, but Jon Katz made another mistake dealing with discrimination when in his second part of this awful triptych (will this now make it to the homepage where the Hellmouth articles now are?) he said all geeks were white males.
On his subject, I feel he is forgetting a important item. Namely, that with freedom comes responsibility. Responsibility to reread your articles before you post. Responsibility to address readers concerns (he now just posts without reading people's reactions). Etc.
I claim that Jon Katz has been given his responsibility to post articles on SlashDot much too lightly, and that it should be revoked; not based on his race, his non-geekness or whatever but because of his opinions and thoughts, which basically suck and for which he takes no responsibility.
Wasn't there like this dispute over www.linux.com. That Fred van Kempen (was it him, some Dutch guy?) eventually sold this domain for a lot of money. Shouldn't Linus have been policing there, as he explains if he did not do it in that case about what other domain could he possibly complain??
To make that statement into a question, which GPL engine makes for better graphical quality, GLQuake or this Marathon2 one? Answers from somebody who is familiar with both (unlike us) are appreciated..
I just played the demo, so I can answer my own question right now. The engine of this game really really reminds me of doom, and it isn't the good old days either. If I realize that I just played GLQuake (also GPL'd recently) for about four hours this weekend while I also have quake2 & 3, and I couldn't stand this game long enough to find out how to look up or down, I know I have found out something about Mac-users once again (what's wrong with these people:-)
Don't get me wrong, there still might be a great game there, that's not just about graphics, but the great graphics is just what Mac-users where always whining about in news groups. Also, only the engine is GPL'd, not the entire game. Of course I am also still happy that Bungie made it GPL. Sort of....
As for Pfhreakaz0id's concerns of lack of pixel perfect 'real 3d' shooting, I think that's easier to fix in GLQuake than Marathon's graphic engine.
Oh yeah, if that's not clear yet: Mac-users, as far as I am concerned all the sh*t you get from PC-users is well-deserved, stop boring us with your endless stories about your sucky system:-)) (Moderate away)
which meant using the blast from a gernade launcher to propel yourself in the air (at a cost to your health, of course).
This is also a favorite past-time in team fortress, a quake I mod.
My windows freinds who were Quake heads who came and watched (and joined) us playing were blown away.
I just downloaded the demo, I'll install it tonight (see, you made me look:-)
I personally know three people who bought a power PC for the sole purpose of playing Marathon.
I know of people who buy Macs simply because they have the colour of fruit. I have never been impressed with the amount of thought people put into buying a Mac.
I didn't mean to turn this into a whole "bash doom and quake" thing,
It is amazing that it came to that at all, with your remark that "At the time, all my PC friends were playing doom2 (YAWN!) then quake came out. Still looked like crap next to M2". It's a crazy world I guess....
You could be putting shots that hit just 1 pixel over his shoulder.
And this is what you define as 'real 3d shooting'. Interesting choice of words. Anyway, when you are running around with a rocket launcher kind of device in the real world, precision is not really that important (not getting your own hair on fire is I would imagine, is that in M2?).
This was 1995.
You said it was in the same time as quake I, so both engines that you are comparing were out.
There's more to 3d than whether you are using sprites, or what rendering engine, or how many FPS you are getting!
If 'real 3d shooting' is pixel-perfect aiming, God knows what you mean with more realistically (sp?) display, but I think all the properties you mention have a lot to do with 3d (although there is more of course, but not a lot more since we are discussing engines not game-graphics or whatever).
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, very disappointed by Gingerbread.
I mean, they say a focus was video/ audio encoding, but a quick look at the APIs show it is still not possible to encode a video from anything except a camera, so video editing of any kind is still not possible. iPhone users get to produce high quality video's with all kinds of effects, Android users can't even *bleeping* crop them! And again encoding was a point of focus, yay we get dead-on-arrival WebM support!
Let's just hope that they really actually added some relevant things for game development, the only type of app 90% of smart phone users (not me) are interested in.
Your tiger repellant rock does not have all the properties this stuff has. There have been several news stories of this in the Netherlands because a shop owner got killed in a burglary (quite rare over here), and apparently none of the stores that have this system (and have this fact advertised) have been robbed since. And since jewelry stores are hit often apparently that figure is statistically relevant.
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0264277/
http://us.imdb.com/name/nm1335251/
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0075376/
Too late :-)
Short performance review: Pentium 4 2.8 GHz with FX 5200 does not really cut it. What is nice is that the 'heated air' effects work really nice because it's a DirectX 9.0 card (I also see no real slowdown there), but even at the lowest of all graphics configurations it's realllyyy slow. I wish I would get 13 frames when one of these goblin type creatures enters the picture, feels more like 2 frames a second then.
I always planned on upgrading the videocard after the new generation of games came out, I now know I can be sure of a visible difference.
No longer content to post the same story two times in a day, the editors decided this time to just post the duplicates together in one news item! Everyone is, of course, required to submit comments subtly different in appearance yet identical in content. No longer content to post the same story two times in a day, the editors decided this time to just post the duplicates together in one news item! Everyone is, of course, required to submit comments subtly different in appearance yet identical in content.
I wanted to jump for joy, my major peeve with PHP is the different database interfaces also.
But I could not find the database abstraction layer looking at the manual. All I could find was a layer for a couple of specific databases.
I think what the previous poster and I are looking for is a general set of functions that work for MySQL, Postgres, Oracle, ODBC and other SQL-databases, which would only require a change in the connect/open function-call in the code should there be a switch in DBMS.
Is there such a system in PHP now? Otherwise, no jumping....
So, is he in trouble (if he would ever return to the USA)?
Where do you go from here?
Will you appeal?
What is your favorite color?
Face it Micheal, this is what the American public wants to know. (disclaimer: I'm Dutch)
Thanks in advance to anyone taking out the time to answer me.
If I combine that with the postscript on this article,
Shares of Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) fell more than seven points in pre-market trading on Monday after two U.S. newspapers reported that the Justice Department and 19 states are leaning toward asking a court to split up the software giant. The stock traded at 71 on Instinet more than three hours before the opening bell, traders said, compared with Friday's closing price of 78-15/16 on Nasdaq.
does that mean that Gates is no longer the richest man on earth??
In practice it does. You seem to think that security faults can only be introduced on purpose, but of course 99% are errors made by the programmers.
Open Source Software certainly does have the potential to be more secure than its closed source counterpart.
But make no mistake, simply being open source is no guarantee of security.
So, in the end what he wants to state that it's not a given that open-source software is more secure, but the potential is there....
But it's being licensed accross Europe.
I am not sure what you mean, but if you mean 'why bring it out all over Europe if it ain't popular', the answer is it was a huge hit in the Netherlands, the first country to show it.
Are they kidding?
I just installed it. The footprint is small, but not very small (11 MB without mail and news or Java). But this program is just to slow to release to a general audience.
I'm by no means an expert, but this looks a lot like Mozilla. It is insanely slow. I have a Pentium 166/64 MB with NT. Not a top-machine, but e.g. IE5 runs on it without problems. Here, if I go past the menu's it takes about a second to build them.
Within 15 seconds I found my first bug. If you ask for a secure site when it isn't secure (accident on my side), like https://www.yahoo.com/ it has a progress indicator for a while, after which it simply ends.
But the speed, or lack of it, is what kills it for me. Am I too cynical or demanding. The strange thing is that the HTML renderer panel is really fast, why did they not use it for the entire user interface?
Does anybody know what is supposed to be new about this thing anyway? I opened an xml-file but nothing spectacular happened...
This is a pretty bad article IMHO. It is clearly meant as a rebuttal against what Garfinkle wrote. But it is pretty bad.
For a Linux binary virus to infect executables, those executables must be writable by the user activating the virus. That is not likely to be the case. Chances are, the programs are owned by root and the user is running from a non-privileged account. Further, the less experienced the user, the lower the likelihood that he actually owns any executable programs. Therefore, the users who are the least savvy about such hazards are also the ones with the least fertile home directories for viruses.
This describes the typical Unix situation, which is not the typical Linux situation. There, more people have installed their own system and have root priviliges. And the less savvy the user, the bigger the chance that the root user is the only account on the system.
Linux networking programs are conservatively constructed, without the high-level macro facilities....
Very true, but seconds later
Linux applications and system software is almost all open source. Because so much of the Linux market is accustomed to the availability of source code, binary-only products are rare and have a harder time achieving a substantial market presence. This has two effects on the virus. First, open source code is a tough place for a virus to hide.
Yeah right, so first it says that high level scripts may be a source of viruses, but then when you have source code (in e.g. Makefiles, highlevel), viruses are all of a sudden less likely. I am still afraid that I come into a Makefile someday that holds the line:
install: rm -rf /
Is this not a virus? If not, why is it a virus if a similar line is contained in some malicious Word macro?
No reason to worry about Linux viruses yet, but mostly because the platform is not popular enough to have a widespread effect (and this is the real lesson of zoology, viruses in nature are mostly used by evolution to limit large populations. This is why there are mostly Windows viruses; evolution wants to limit its growth).
Since games like Boulderdash and Indy 500 are PC games too you are right, but Q3A it ain't.
Most games don't even come close to PC qualitity if you look at the resolution. However, if you compare what they get done in their lower resolution (Gran Turismo II looks great in crappy resolution).
But the games graphics quality is not that important compared with actual gameplay.
Can these "emulators" render the graphics any better?
The PSX emulator Bleem! can display the games in higher resolution and they look slightly better (this is in large letters on the box in fact, www.bleem.com), but the graphics source it is based on is not made for these higher resolutions so don't expect miracles.
I'm afraid this is just old school thinking of Katz.
There is no need to make divisions into sectors or whatever, the good thing about the Internet is that there are as many divisions as there are users. The experience is personal and unique.
Sites can fall into different 'continents' according to personal taste, what is a game to some is a business to others. And if there would be this strict division there would be a continent where somebody is 'coming from', I am coming from none of these continents.
Everybody is entitled to mistakes, but Jon Katz made another mistake dealing with discrimination when in his second part of this awful triptych (will this now make it to the homepage where the Hellmouth articles now are?) he said all geeks were white males.
On his subject, I feel he is forgetting a important item. Namely, that with freedom comes responsibility. Responsibility to reread your articles before you post. Responsibility to address readers concerns (he now just posts without reading people's reactions). Etc.
I claim that Jon Katz has been given his responsibility to post articles on SlashDot much too lightly, and that it should be revoked; not based on his race, his non-geekness or whatever but because of his opinions and thoughts, which basically suck and for which he takes no responsibility.
Don't know about that, as I remember it the site was completely void of content at least just before it was sold off. Are you sure about this?
No opinion but a question.
Wasn't there like this dispute over www.linux.com. That Fred van Kempen (was it him, some Dutch guy?) eventually sold this domain for a lot of money. Shouldn't Linus have been policing there, as he explains if he did not do it in that case about what other domain could he possibly complain??
confused...
Not 14 (almost twice that age), not too ignorant, 1600 guilders PC (about $800). But most of all, not cowardice AC!
I just played the demo, so I can answer my own question right now. The engine of this game really really reminds me of doom, and it isn't the good old days either. If I realize that I just played GLQuake (also GPL'd recently) for about four hours this weekend while I also have quake2 & 3, and I couldn't stand this game long enough to find out how to look up or down, I know I have found out something about Mac-users once again (what's wrong with these people :-)
Don't get me wrong, there still might be a great game there, that's not just about graphics, but the great graphics is just what Mac-users where always whining about in news groups. Also, only the engine is GPL'd, not the entire game.
Of course I am also still happy that Bungie made it GPL. Sort of....
As for Pfhreakaz0id's concerns of lack of pixel perfect 'real 3d' shooting, I think that's easier to fix in GLQuake than Marathon's graphic engine.
Oh yeah, if that's not clear yet: Mac-users, as far as I am concerned all the sh*t you get from PC-users is well-deserved, stop boring us with your endless stories about your sucky system :-))
(Moderate away)
This is also a favorite past-time in team fortress, a quake I mod.
My windows freinds who were Quake heads who came and watched (and joined) us playing were blown away.
I just downloaded the demo, I'll install it tonight (see, you made me look :-)
I personally know three people who bought a power PC for the sole purpose of playing Marathon.
I know of people who buy Macs simply because they have the colour of fruit. I have never been impressed with the amount of thought people put into buying a Mac.
I didn't mean to turn this into a whole "bash doom and quake" thing,
It is amazing that it came to that at all, with your remark that "At the time, all my PC friends were playing doom2 (YAWN!) then quake came out. Still looked like crap next to M2". It's a crazy world I guess....
And this is what you define as 'real 3d shooting'. Interesting choice of words. Anyway, when you are running around with a rocket launcher kind of device in the real world, precision is not really that important (not getting your own hair on fire is I would imagine, is that in M2?).
This was 1995.
You said it was in the same time as quake I, so both engines that you are comparing were out.
There's more to 3d than whether you are using sprites, or what rendering engine, or how many FPS you are getting!
If 'real 3d shooting' is pixel-perfect aiming, God knows what you mean with more realistically (sp?) display, but I think all the properties you mention have a lot to do with 3d (although there is more of course, but not a lot more since we are discussing engines not game-graphics or whatever).