Slashdot Mirror

http://www.interact-sw.co.uk/altair/index2.html

What I was saying is that the compiler converts code in an Expression-Tree. Here is a good article which explains this - C# 3.0 and LINQ - Expression Trees

And funny, IanG also mentions this in the post:
"there has been a tendency to dismiss all the new features of C# 3.0 as 'syntactic sugar'. If you think this is another example, then I guess you probably feel the same way about assembly language, and feel that there haven't really been any significant coding innovations since the front panel with toggle switches".

Its pretty obvious this is the case, because there hasnt been any runtime changes to support anything functional...
Well, the same instruction set and architecture that runs C code runs a LISP application as well. You don't need runtime changes to support functional languages - for example, F# works well on .Net and Mono and is a functional programming language.

Ian Griffiths implemented a deep zoom for the BBC in their Big Weekend festival. Rather pleasingly they chose to call it the "Big Zoomy Thing" in a nice bit of anti-jargon.

May I suggest Kenny Kerr's Window Clippings, a (freeware) screenshot utility that "generates a transparent image - the shadow and glass have their alpha channel set".

From a review: "This isn't a perfect simulation of what real Glass does - it won't blur the area behind the title bar. This is because there's no way of building a bitmap file that will have such an effect. But given the limitations of what you can do with existing bitmap formats, Kenny's utility is as good as it's possible to get".

You should really be looking at lunchbox machines. It's a portable form factor that puts a more-or-less-standard motherboard behind an LCD panel, with a bunch of slots and usually a few drive bays. Next Computing's offerings seem to top out at 16GB, but that's at least a little headroom.

If you're stuck on the traditional battery-powered laptop form factor, Dell even offers a 4GB-capable machine, though like all 32-bit machines, it sets aside some of that for device address space, leaving you with about 3GB for apps.

It just so happens that I'm in the camp against continuations. Looking at the negative aspects of it, I can't make the case for its inclusion into the Java spec. Continuations is simply a modern term for GOTOs and I can't understand why any sane person would want to go back to the nightmare that was GOTOs. As for first class functions, it's inclusion will make it easy to write non object oriented code. That isn't necessarily a bad thing but then again Java was born to be an OO language.

Actually OS X has been resolution independent since Tiger:

http://www.interact-sw.co.uk/iangblog/2005/05/20/t igerresolution

One page among others explaining how to turn it on.

Granted it wasn't enabled out of the box but it was there ready for developers to test their applications in preparation for when it was enabled (which now appears to be in Leopard rather than a 10.4.x update).

the ginourmous Spotlight and Universal Access icons? Betcha one of those Top Secret features is a scalable UI with 512x512 icon support. At last!

Like this

Let's not forget that story about Apple suggesting scalable graphics in webpages.

For me, it's Longhorn's vector-based approach to the UI. While everybody's busy giggling and snorting at the 'eye-candy' at Longhorn, the reality is you'll be able to use it on monitors with > 3,000 pixels in width without having to use a microscope to read the text.

You mean, like OS X already has?

// loving the experimental pixel-resolution scaling feature in Tiger.. (I have VNC windows scaled at 150%, Safari at 200%, and the rest are normal sized. )

/// i almost forgot..

BURN IN HELL, WINDOWS LOSERS!

:)

On the subject of what a platform's graphics library can do vs. what it actually does/is forced to do in practice, you might find this article interesting.