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Programming

Submission + - Can "Page's Law" be Broken? 1

Submitted by
theodp
theodp writes: "Speaking at the Google I/O Developer Conference, Sergey Brin described Google's efforts to defeat "Page's Law," the tendency of software to get twice as slow every 18 months. 'Fortunately, the hardware folks offset that,' Brin joked. 'We would like to break Page's Law and have our software become increasingly fast on the same hardware.' Page, of course, refers to Google co-founder Larry Page, last seen delivering a nice from-the-heart commencement address at Michigan that's worth a watch (or read)."

Comment Re:99% of the answers are going to be Eclipse (Score 5, Insightful) 1055

by C3c6e6 (#28106005) Attached to: What Free IDE Do You Use?

I don't think the parent's point about handling 10k lines of code has to do with with ability to load these files into memory but rather about managing the complexity of such projects. When a program becomes this big, it becomes harder to keep track of all the names of variables, the argument types of subroutines etc. IDEs like Netbeans or Eclipse have autocompletion functionality that make your life as a developer at lot easier.

It's possible of course that Emacs or vi provide similar functionality but the main point is that you need some type of IDE when managing a large, complex development project.
Games

The Perils of Pointless Innovation In Games 260

Posted by Soulskill from the why-does-my-rocket-launcher-have-reloading-minigame dept.
Negative Gamer is running a story discussing the need felt by the major game developers to create the next huge blockbuster, which often leads to innovation and change for their own sake rather than simply focusing on what makes a game fun. Quoting: "There seems to be this invisible pressure to create something that is highly 'intuitive' and incorporates the highest level of innovation that we have ever seen. The problem is that the newest ideas put into games are either gimmicky, terrible in execution, or blatantly ripping off another title. On the other hand there are series that feel the need to completely revamp a game that played perfectly fine before into something completely new that falls flat on its face. ... There's a critical problem with popular, mainstream video games that isn't as large with other mediums; they are expensive to make and require a lot of time and effort put in to create something masterful. With that, games must take cautious paths. I fully understand the risks, but adding unneeded material to certain games is not justifiable."
Programming

Strange Glitches In Games 282

Posted by Soulskill from the where-did-the-walls-go dept.
Parz writes "Even the best of game developers can leave a big dirty glitch buried within its products that can turn a gameplay experience on its head (sometimes literally). Gameplayer has trawled through the web to locate video footage of some of the more amazing and hilarious examples of glitches in games. It acts as an interesting insight into the bugs that some games — especially today — ship with. What interesting bugs have you encountered?"
Windows

Submission + - Torvalds: Windows 7 makes "angels sing again&# (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by
Barence
Barence writes: "Linus Torvalds has warned that Windows 7 is set to ride a wave of popularity, simply because it is not Vista. The Linux founder admitted he could see Windows 7 making "angels sing again". "Windows 7 being better than Vista is saying a lot. Microsoft may have a huge PR advantage as people will compare it to Vista and think it is good ... like they did with Windows 95 compared to Windows 3.1. Maybe Microsoft did this on purpose.""
Software

Submission + - Fallback plan for Google Apps

Submitted by mallumax
mallumax writes: A lot of small businesses use Google apps to simplify the IT administration and to take adavantage of the excellent web interface. My company is one among them.Right now, we are completely dependent on google for our email. In light of recent Gmail outages, it has become increasingly necessary to have a backup/fallback plan in place. We have around 60 employees and our mail volume is moderate. Setting up an email server is well within our capability. Considering all this, what are our fallback options ?
Government

Submission + - DHS: "Taser bracelet for every airline passeng (washingtontimes.com) 1

Submitted by
Bert de Jong
Bert de Jong writes: "The Washington Times is reporting about a new gadget of the Department of Homeland Security.

Forget Kafka, Dilbert really is a joke, and even on April 1st no one would believe this.

A (euphemistically named) "Safety Bracelet" is soon to replace your flight ticket and boarding pass, if the federal authorities have their way.
This wouldn't be very spectacular, hadn't a few clever techies at the DHS thought of some particular nifty features for this device:
It will have your personal data stored in it electronically, it will have a GPS-tracker so your whereabouts can always be known, and it will sport a taser, to painfully completely immobilise you for several minutes if the airline crew deems you a security threat.

Have a look at the promotion video here (3'20 is where the interesting bit starts.)

The idea is you'll be wearing it from checkin to disembarking.

I wonder how the UCLA finds about this.. shocking I guess"
The Courts

Submission + - SCO's Darl McBride Lies Under Oath (arstechnica.com) 4

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "Here's a short update on the recent Novell Vs SCO case we've been following. Our good friend Darl McBride made some interesting comments in court yesterday. He stated (under oath): "many Linux contributors were originally UNIX developers ... We have evidence System V is in Linux ... When you go to the bookstore and look in the UNIX section, there's books on 'How to Program UNIX' but when you go to the Linux section and look for 'How to Program Linux' you're not gonna find it, because it doesn't exist. Linux is a copy of UNIX, there is no difference [between them]." This flies directly in the face of what SCO found in extensive investigations in 2002 and did not correspond with what SCO Senior Vice President Chrs Sontag just finished testifying earlier that day. Mmmmmm, that's some good perjury!"
Announcements

Submission + - Linus announcing the 2.6.25 Linux kernel (reviewk.com)

Submitted by
LinuxWatch
LinuxWatch writes: "It's been long promised, but there it is now," began Linux creator Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.25 Linux kernel. He continued, "special thanks to Ingo who found and fixed a nasty-looking regression that turned out to not be a regression at all, but an old bug that just had not been triggering as reliably before. That said, that was just the last particular regression fix I was holding things up for, and it's not like there weren't a lot of other fixes too, they just didn't end up being the final things that triggered my particular worries." Linus added... Read more"
Programming

Submission + - Q: Who Really Creates Linux? A: The Enterprise (linux-watch.com) 1

Submitted by
sjvn
sjvn writes: "Some people are still under the delusion that Linux is written by unwashed hackers living in their parents' basements whose only social life is playing D&D and having flame wars over IRC (Internet Relay Chat) about whether vi or EMACS better and debating Picard versus Kirk. Nothing, nothing could be further from the truth according to the Linux Foundation's latest survey."
Music

Submission + - Deutsche Grammophon offering DRM-free downloads (deutschegrammophon.com)

Submitted by C3c6e6
C3c6e6 writes: Deutsche Grammophon, one of world's leading record labels for classical music, has launched today an online-shop where people can download high-quality (320Kbps) versions of 2400 classical recordings, including 600 albums that are currently out of print. The idea is apparently to make the entire catalog of probably the oldest surviving record label (founded in 1898) available online.

It's nice to see that yet another record company is steering clear of DRM.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Demands Patent for Saying 'Goodbye' 7

Submitted by
theodp
theodp writes: "Demonstrating its commitment to high-quality U.S. patents, Microsoft has submitted a just-published patent application to the USPTO for Automatic Goodbye Messages. By automatically sending messages like 'Have a great afternoon!', 'Sorry, I have got to go!', 'Have a terrific day!', 'Ciao, Harry!', or even a simple 'Bye!' at the end of an IM session, Microsoft explains, one avoids insulting a converser with whom a conversation is ended. Hopefully the USPTO will give this one the quick buh-bye it deserves."
Operating Systems

Submission + - Is Gentoo in crisis?

Submitted by
TheCoop1984
TheCoop1984 writes: "A recent article on distrowatch, and an extended thread on the gentoo forums, have pointed out that gentoo is not what it used to be. Daniel Robbins came back and went again after only a few days, developer turnover is as high as ever, personal attacks on the mailing lists are common, and people are generally not happy about the current state of affairs. Is gentoo rotting from the inside, and can anything be done about it?"

Wii to Launch Nov. 19th for $250 495

Posted by Zonk from the right-price-right-on dept.
PygmySurfer writes "According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Nintendo is going to announce today that the Wii will go on sale on November 19th in North and South America, at a cost of $250. It will come bundled with Wii Sports and channels for such things as viewing photos, as well as news and weather. Finally, Wii will also make it possible to browse the web on your television. Nintendo will also announce that 25-30 games will be published this year, as well as about 30 classic games available on the virtual console, costing about $5-10."

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