You see, this is exactly what I was talking about when I said "group masturbation" (which means "mutual ego-boosting" in less derogatory terms).
First someone complains about a post I made. Then a few other people jump in the bandwagon and join in. An impromptu gang has been formed. An implicit unwritten agreement is in place that nobody in the "gang" will turn on anybody else in it, even if somebody goes a bit too far. An implicit "I won't criticize anybody else, and nobody else will criticize me" pact, which will make everyone in the "gang" feel good about themselves. Mutual ego-boosting.
Am I overanalyzing this? Maybe. But think about it. You can't deny something like this isn't happening.
Because I know for a fact that Lex's claims are BS, but nobody will admit it if he doesn't. There's nothing "obnoxious" about "question talking" or using the expression "as I explained earlier". Those are completely normal forms of expression, and this is the first time in my life that I have seen anybody making this kind of claims. He's just making this shit up. He could probably come up with any number of things (like "overanalyzing things is obnoxious" or "using words that a 6th grader can't understand is obnoxious" or whatever) and nobody will openly disagree with him. This is just ridiculous.
And this takes the cake:
Lex wrote:
You are either a master troll or a complete idiot.
So now we are down to outright name calling. Great. Just great.
Derakon wrote:
So Warp, my advice to you would be to stop trying to understand, and instead to pay attention to the behaviors that other people don't like, and even though you don't understand why they don't like them, try to behave differently.
Sounds like good advice. The problem is that the appropriate "rules of behavior" seem to be completely arbitrary, made up on the spot, and impossible to predict in advance. You never know when somebody will find something "obnoxious" and complain about it.
The only "rule" which seems to be somewhat consistent is the one about post length. Of course this rule seems to be only imposed on me, nobody else (there are people who have made way, way longer posts than I have ever made, with no complaints whatsoever, so this is demonstrably a strongly biased "rule"). I'm sorry, but I find this one rule completely ridiculous, and I will ignore it.
For this once (and not just this once), please do believe it that people are trying to help you into seeing what exactly is it that causes your posts to be perceived in a manner that puts your very personality into very negative light, so that you might learn from it.
Could you please explain to me exactly how I should have known that one person in this forum would find an expression like "as I commented earlier" and question-talking (whatever that means) "obnoxious" and offensive, and how I could have avoided offending this one person? Because I have no idea, honestly. I still don't understand what's so "obnoxious" about them. (Heck, I still don't even know what this "question-talking" is, and why it's offensive.) Let's start there.
Please also explain to me why the length of my posts is an issue. This is the umpteenth time that very thing has been brought up (it was mentioned in this thread). I have asked this very thing several times, and I don't remember anybody actually explaining it to me. Apparently people have a strange aversion to long posts, yet seem to be unable to explain why. It would be nice to know.
Being talkative and explaining things in detail is a personality trait, and I have never heard of it being considered offensive. If you have a friend who likes to talk in length and go into detail about things, do you go and tell him "you talk too much, that's annoying"? I don't think that person would be your friend for long.
From what I've talked with you for who knows how many years, your position has always been basically "if someone doesn't understand me the way I intended to be perceived, so be it, it's their fault" (paraphrase).
You are oversimplifying. If someone doesn't want to understand what I meant even when I explain it, and they stubborningly just keep attacking me on how I "offended" them and whatever, completely ignoring my explanation that I did not mean it like that, what else can I do?
We're seriously not trolling you. We're trying to make you understand how annoying you are so we can help you fix your posting habits. Sticky's post on this page is the best post in this thread. It's only humorous because it's satisfyingly accurate. I couldn't have said it better myself.
If you (plural) disagree to an actual point I made then feel free to do so. We can discuss that. If you simply find my style of writing annoying and enjoy engaging in personal attacks, why don't you go and create a topic, or heck, a group, named "why warp is annoying" or whatever and engage in your little group masturbation there. You can then "seriously not troll" me how much you like there.
It seems this topic is dead.
I don't even understand what you are talking about. I'm suspecting you are not being serious. Haha, good joke, whatever. Can we get back to the topic?
(I suppose I'll just have to stop responding to attempts to troll me, or else this derailment will go forever. I have to admit that I get trolled easily, a personality trait that is difficult to overcome.)
You are correct. Written text does not always convey tone of voice.
Does writing a PC emulator in javascript and running linux on it make any sense? No. Can it be cool and interesting? Yes.
Is jslinux a toy project with little practical application? Yes. Is saying that bashing the project? If you really want to interpret it like that, I can't stop you.
This menuetOS can be an interesting toy project, but you should understand why in practice it can be much less useful than it might sound. That's just like it is. If you want to interpret this as bashing, then go ahead.
Hey, Warp, we should swap avatars for a while and see if people read your posts differently! I have often posited that people think I am more friendly and happy than I actually am.
That could be pretty confusing because at first glance it would look like all of your posts would be mine and all of my posts yours (AFAIK if you change your avatar it will change in all of your existing posts). But perhaps I could some day try just changing my avatar(s) to something else completely (something lighter and happier), just to see if the average reaction to my posts changes in any way... :)
Even if the US government could legally demand the browsing history of an individual from an ISP or Google (I don't know if it does), AFAIK it would still require a permit from a judge (at least if CSI is to be believed), and I don't think they would go that route unless the crime is pretty severe (such as terrorism, drug trafficking, distribution of child pornography or the like). I think it's pretty unlikely that the government will be even interested in your data in normal circumstances (even assuming they have the right to get it in the first place).
Of course we could always imagine the government being/becoming corrupt and start persecuting its citizens for nefarious reasons, building up an orwellian Big Brother totalitarian system, but that goes to the conspiracy theory territory.
But yes, I don't put my personal info and browsing habits on the open for anybody to see either. Some rational amount of caution is not a bad thing.
It seems whenever someone finds something interesting, whether useful or not, you feel the need to tear it apart and write reasons why it does not deserve to live. That is great for some professions, but annoying for hobbyists. Can't something just be cool?
I find that remark pretty ironic, taking into account it's posted right after I linked to something I consider cool.
Seriously, why do people always assume the worst? Just because I overanalyze and write in length about something I find interesting doesn't mean I'm bashing it.
I sincerely hope you don't laugh at your friends if they explain something to you in detail, even if you didn't ask for it. They wouldn't be your friends for long.
Using ", as I already commented." was clearly meant to explain to the reader that they should read the comment you repeated (!) from your previous post because they must have missed it, since their dispute against your comment couldn't possibly hold any weight or meaning.
I honestly can't understand where you are getting this from. I really, honestly meant just exactly what I said, ie. "see my previous post". Nothing more, nothing less. Rereading my own post which contains the expression in question, I still can't see anything "obnoxious" or derogatory. It was by no means meant to be condescending or anything (and no, I'm not trying to lie myself out of a pinch here, I'm being completely honest.)
This is way off-topic in this thread. If you don't want to believe me, then don't.
Warp, nobody claimed that having no OS was a good idea. MinuetOS is an OS. It aims to achieve your described optimizations with manual assembly programming (which, if done cleverly, is more efficient than compiler-generated machine code) and minimal extra software layering. I'm not sure if MinuetOS achieves this, but it is a nice goal with definite possibility.
You see, that's where I think there's the misconception. There is a relatively widespread notion that writing in asm using "clever tricks" will make the system more efficient. This may be true in a limited way, on small things, on a specific platform, but it isn't true on the grand scale and especially on subsequent platforms (as asm cannot be "auto-upgraded" to the new optimizations of new platforms).
", as I already commented." is a really obnoxious thing to say.
It has never even crossed my mind that the expression "as I already commented" could be interpreted as obnoxious. I have always thought it to be simply a reference to a previous post (as in "for more details, see my previous posts, there's no need for me to repeat them again").
Your comments aren't necessarily always the truth.
That should be a given, a self-evident fact. I don't think it's crucial to litter one's posts with abundant instances of "AFAIK", "in my experience", "I think", "I believe" and other such weasel words to make sure that the reader understands that I'm writing about what I think is the case, not a claim of "this is the absolute truth, bow before my masterful knowledge".
Murphy's law of online forums: If something can be interpreted in more than one way, somebody will interpret in the worst possible way and get offended. No exceptions.
Corollary: If something cannot possibly be interpreted in a negative way, someone nevertheless will.
Any chances of this being uploaded to youtube? (For some reason the video player at ustream.tv is so heavy that my system is unable to play the video in real-time. It plays like at 2 FPS, skipping forward. Not nice.)
Warp, right click on the video and select "Show Video Info".
Tell us if your PC is performing hardware accelerated video decoding or not. Most people I see that have issues with YouTube don't have hardware based video decoding.
It says "software video rendering, software video decoding". (It might be that Flash Player does not support hardware rendering/deconding on Linux.) Anyways, there's no problem I am having with YouTube, what gives you that impression?
Lex wrote:
Wouldn't that be because YouTube transcodes everything into lower-quality versions? I'm almost certain that's the reason.
Wouldn't that affect bandwidth requirements rather than the video decoding/rendering speed?
I suppose that automatically collected browsing data could theoretically be abused if eg. applicants could be connected to their gmail accounts by the employer, and then Google would sell out the browsing information to them. Seems rather unlikely, though (unless you are seeking a job at Google).
My intention is not to start a fight, but to share information. I know that many people have misconceptions about these issues, and correcting misinformation is a positive thing. Why someone would get upset by this is beyond my comprehension.
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
YouTube being a light player has nothing to do with YouTube. All flash player are based from Adobe themselves. You did not download something special from YouTube to playback their videos. All YouTube made was the GUI for the "flash player."
I don't really understand what you are trying to say. I do know that youtube causes a cpu load of about 30-50% on my system, while most other video sites hit 80% cpu load easily. (For comparison playing a video with mplayer takes something like 10%) My point was that while the youtube player is relatively lightweight, it's still heavy, and doubling the framerate is probably not going to help.
Sorting is a problem if we want to sort the games by their "main" title (eg. "legend of zelda", "aladdin", "battle of olympus", etc) rather than the preposition ("the", "a"...), company/author name ("Disney's", "American McGee's"...), etc. The standard solution to that is to move the prefix word(s) after the main part. If one would want to keep it in the front but still sort it by the "main" part of the name, it would become complicated. (Basically the only flexible and sureproof way would be to mark the prefix part somehow, so that the comparison function can skip it.)
Btw, I oppose the form "Boy and his Blob, A" because in this particular case the "A" preposition is an integral part of the name, and people will search for the game in question in the "A" section of a sorted list, not the "B" section. (Of course one could argue whether "The" belongs to the "main" part of "The Legend of Zelda" or not...)
Using Youtube means being signed on on Google and I guess the development could go into a direction where they outo-sign-on me onto Google+ as well. That would make me very pissed. Linking my profile, my browsing behaviour, everything together.
Yeah, you are such an important person that they are really interested in your browsing habits. From the hundreds of millions of people using google every day, you are the one they'll single out as the interesting one. Must keep your browsing habits secret at all costs.
"Google cares (about you)." Would be a great slogan.
Warp, I'm pretty sure you didn't understand the creators' intent. Read the front page.
And what exactly is this intent? The only thing related to something like that I can see on the front page is:
The design goal, since the first release in year 2000, has been to remove the extra layers between different parts of an OS, which normally complicate programming and create bugs.
What does this have to do with asm? You can achieve the exact same goal with any language you can write an OS with (most typically C). Making it in asm only complicates things unnecessarily, as I already commented.
It's a common misconception that the operating system is somehow a "hindrance", an extra overhead on the system that slows down programs, and thus a program that is run directly, without any OS whatsoever, will be much more efficient and fast. There's also a relatively common misconception that writing a program in asm will automatically make the program faster. (This latter misconception might originate from the 80's, when interpreted BASIC and asm were usually the only alternatives in home computers.)
An OS might consume some additional RAM which, technically speaking, is away from the application. However, in modern PCs that's only a small fraction of a typical basic setup (yes, even with Windows Vista, although that is more memory-hungry than most). However, modern operating systems do no consume significant amounts of CPU time which would be away from applications. Basically the only thing an OS does most of the time is task switching, and that's a very light operation (I'd estimate that it typically takes only a fraction of a percent of CPU time). Bypassing the OS completely would not speed up the application basically at all.
In fact, in many cases it can be the opposite: It may even be that the OS helps the application run faster, as ironic as that might sound. Not necessarily in terms of CPU time (although there might be some situations where it helps even with that, especially in modern multicore CPUs), but with most other hardware, most prominently the display hardware and I/O. The thing about the OS is that it has hardware drivers, and these drivers are usually optimized for the hardware in question (being usually written by the manufacturers of the hardware in question).
For example, thanks to the display driver (which ultimately can run thanks to the OS) the application will run much faster when displaying graphics on screen (be it 2D or 3D). Without such a driver the application would have to use some generic "standard" implementation which will inevitably be a lot less efficient than the highly-optimized implementation provided by the hardware-specific driver. (Also, there's no universal standard to use very high resolutions or 3D acceleration, so any generic implementation would not work with a big bunch of existing hardware.)
The OS can also help with I/O. It can, for example, provide buffers, caches and other types of optimizations which are fine-tuned for a specific type of I/O hardware, and which could be hard to support on a per-app basis. The I/O thus becomes typically much faster.
So, ironically, operating systems typically make applications run faster, not slower.
A quick question - all of this seems to be based on the fact that youtube... sucks. Seriously, seriously, sucks.
It "sucks" because it only supports 30 FPS? I don't see the connection.
Take into account that YouTube's player is the lightest flash-based video player I have encountered (playing a video consumes something like 30-50% CPU on my system with YouTube, while the video player of basically any other video sharing site consumes at least 80% of CPU), but it's still quite heavy. I'm pretty certain that if it tried to play a video at 60 FPS the system requirements would almost double, making it unplayable in most older systems. Not everybody has a 64-bit quad-core.(Another issue would be that the bandwidth requirement would also increase. Not everybody has a gigabit internet connection.)
YouTube's main purpose is to share home videos. Most cameras can't even record over 30 FPS. What possible advantage would there be in YouTube supporting framerates higher than that?
From the perspective of the original consoles, take also into account that TV sets were also 30 FPS (in NTSC systems) or 25 FPS (in PAL systems). The game switching the visibility of a sprite on each frame (in other words the visibility flag changing 60 times per second on NTSC) wouldn't have caused the sprite to flicker on screen. It would have caused the sprite to be seen only on each other scanline (because TVs use interlacing). There would have not been a visible flicker.
Writing an OS in asm makes absolutely no sense (and has made absolutely no sense for over 30 years; perhaps in the early 70's it made sense because there were no other options, but that hasn't been the case for a long, long time.) There are several reasons for this:
1) Asm, no matter how much it is enhanced with preprocessor macros and such, is a very rigid and non-modular language. After all, you are writing CPU opcodes directly, and CPUs are not designed for modularity. This makes writing and managing large projects a nightmare, greatly increases the chance (and severity) of bugs, and many other problems.
2) There's no speed nor size advantage to speak of, when compared to modern higher-level language compilers. It might have been an issue in the 70's and 80's, but it hasn't been so for a long, long time. Making the size/speed argument in favor of asm makes little sense. (It could make sense if you are writing an OS for an embedded system with very little RAM, especially if that system in question has poor compiler support, but this OS is targetted at PCs.)
3) It's not portable. Just count the number of systems to which Linux and NetBSD have been ported (in fact, the slogan for the latter is "Of course it runs NetBSD"). Why is this so? Certainly not because they are written in asm.
4) And even more importantly, and related to the same thing as the previous point: It becomes stagnant. The OS might be optimal for the system it was written for at the time, but it will quickly become more and more suboptimal as new processors are released. The OS cannot take advantage of optimizing compilers, which are always updated to take advantage of new CPU designs. Consider that, for example, an OS written in asm for the 80386 (and highly optimized for that system) would be significantly more inefficient in a modern PC than an OS which has been compiled from a higher-level language and optimized for the latter.
Maybe the real Stryker died during the tournament and Shang Tsung took his place and went on to save the world on his behalf...
(Nice hypothesis, except that, IIRC, Shang Tsung is one of the bad guys... :P )
