the art of writing is discovering what you believe
oreilly.com — Online Catalog: Physics for Game Developers
Colliding billiard balls. Missile trajectories. Cornering dynamics in speeding cars. By applying the laws of physics, you can realistically model nearly everything in games that bounces around, flies, rolls, slides, or isn’t sitting still, to create compelling, believable content for computer games, simulations, and animation. Physics for Game Developers serves as the starting point for enriching games with physics-based realism.
Nu Shortcuts in School R 2 Much 4 Teachers
Melanie Weaver was stunned by some of the term papers she received from a 10th-grade class she recently taught as part of an internship. “They would be trying to make a point in a paper, they would put a smiley face in the end,” said Ms. Weaver, who teaches at Alvernia College in Reading, Pa. “If they were presenting an argument and they needed to present an opposite view, they would put a frown.”
O’Reilly Network: Switcher Stories Follow Up [Sep. 17, 2002]
BSD is for people who love Unix.
Linux is for people who hate Microsoft.
I found this article on the Interesting People mailing list’s archives: required reading if you want to know what’s really being talked about/acted upon.
Often the lynchpin is a standardised file format policy — so you can buy whatever you want, so long as it is 100 per cent Microsoft file format compatible, which is all but impossible as Microsoft changes its formats so often and for no real purpose other than to lock in customers.
Isn’t file compatibility the chief gripe most people have with trying to work with MSFT applications? Between locking non-Windows licensees out and locking its own customers in, there’s a lot to put up with.
Here’s a note on Tim O’Reilly’s weblog to the same effect: Forcing Microsoft to open the office file formats would have done more to encourage competition than just about anyone else. It would be nice to see users’ data belong to them again, with the power to switch to other applications if they so choose.
Users owning their data? What a radical concept. He has a link to a story at the Register on Sun’s XML/open standards initiative.
O’Reilly Network: More on MS Mac FUD [September 18, 2002]
An excerpt from one of a few emails Tim O’Reilly shared on his weblog.
. . . . you can basically sum up Microsoft’s position as “our software strategy is screwed, our vendors hate us, our developers aren’t buying in, and the Mac guys have gotten their act together again”.
Other notes: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/1743 and http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/1710
I wasn’t sure what I would find here: I suspected it might reinforce my thinking that for J Q Public, it all comes down to applications and Windows clearly owns the corporate desktop right now.
But claiming Windows has an edge in scalability, file systems, and security seems a stretch.
“We’re still working with our partner in this, and we’re not ready to say who that is,” Peter Houston, Microsoft’s Windows platform senior director, told TechTarget on the LinuxWorld floor, where Microsoft had its first LinuxWorld booth. “We’re finding there’s a slight margin in TCO for Linux in very simple Web serving [and] for Windows in super-Web serving, things like hosting environments, that don’t have anything to do with Web-centric applications. There’s a larger [Windows] advantage … in file systems, network infrastructure and security infrastructure.”
I created a new category — rated X — to hold my burgeoning collection of notes relating to OS X. Now, if I only knew how I could re-categorize a buncha notes at one shot . . ..
I couldn’t find a better way than this: I just put the Installer Disc 1 in the drive and looked for perl bits.
[/Volumes/Mac OS X Install Disc 1]# cd /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ Install\ Disc\ 1/
(root@pink)-(12:03 PM / Wed Sep 18)
[/Volumes/Mac OS X Install Disc 1]# find . -name "*perl*"
./System/Library/Perl/darwin/auto/Apache/mod_perl.exp
./System/Library/Perl/darwin/auto/mod_perl
./System/Library/Perl/darwin/CORE/libperl.dylib
./System/Library/Perl/darwin/mod_perl.pm
./System/Library/Perl/darwin/mod_perl_hooks.pm
./System/Library/Perl/darwin/mod_perl_hooks.pm.PL
./System/Library/Perl/ExtUtils/Miniperl.pm
./System/Library/Perl/perl5db.pl
./usr/bin/perl
./usr/bin/perl5.6.0
Then I just copied them over. No luck compiling the 5.6.x releases, for some reason . . . .
Why doesn’t fink
The New Challenge to Microsoft
[ . . . ] outside programmers have long complained that Microsoft makes it hard for them to create software compatible with Windows-based computers.
The government’s antitrust lawsuit was aimed at solving these problems. If it fails to do that — a ruling on a proposed settlement is expected soon — the best hope may be Linux. Since Linux software is free, hundreds of dollars could be cut off the price of a computer. No less important, since Linux’s source code — the intricacies of how it works — is publicly available, programmers don’t have to get permission or assistance from anyone.
But how many IT shops can exploit the power of Open Source code? Take a bunch of earnest young techs with fanny packs full of CDs, armed with the latest server packs and hot fixes, who always seem to fall back on “format and reinstall” as their problem solving technique, and picture them trying to manage Linux. There’s the command line to deal with, the lack of paper manuals, and the painful requirement that one think and understand the system as more than a disposable collection of licenses.
Too harsh a view? I’ve worked in a software development environment that was unable to leverage unencumbered code: would I expect the average MCSE at a non-technical firm to do better?
It’s interesting to monitor the drumbeat of these articles as they sound the deathknell for MSFT’s unquestioned dominance, but it’s hardly credible. Linux, FreeBSD,et al, are not as revolutionary as the personal computer was in the age of Big Iron.
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Wake-up call
It was at this point that the generals and admirals monitoring the war game called time out.
“A phrase I heard over and over was: ‘That would never have happened,'” Van Riper recalls. “And I said: nobody would have thought that anyone would fly an airliner into the World Trade Centre… but nobody seemed interested.”
I agree with the idea that a knockout blow in the 1st day of a 14 day exercise doesn’t mean everyone goes home, but scripting and meddling with the opponent’s chain of command tells me you don’t think you can win any other way.
Being exposed to and possibly trounced by unorthodox tactics is exactly what we should expect in these exercises. The USS Cole, the WTC were both unorthodox, and successful: I don’t suggest we use suicide pilots but we should expect others to and we should have a defense against that.
<from Rebecca’a Pocket>