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MacHack Keynote By Curses Developer Ken Arnold
Porsupah writes "A look at this year's MacHack keynote, from the MacFixIt folks.
This year the opening keynote speaker was Ken Arnold [...] a member of the BSD team at the University of California at Berkeley and developed the curses library. [...] At Sun Microsystems, Ken was an original architect of the Jini platform."
Go figure - He just got up on stage and started cursing at everyone!!!
Funny thing is most people just thought it was Steve Jobs.
To my knowledge, MacHack focuses on writing software that makes creative use of the various technologies and features of the platform. From that perspective, MacOSX contains a lot more than "just Aqua with Darwin at the core."
Foiled again!
You, quite obviously, have never attended MacHack nor seen some of the absolutely hilarious and / or cool hacks that come as a result of the hack contest.
Some of the hacks that were presented this year include: AirPong (pong across many computer screens), Unstopable Progress (a hack that made all progress bars "spill out" water into the window when they reached the end), GLCheat, an app that would make any app utilizing GL go into wireframe mode, meaning that you can "see" through walls, as games often "draw" things that aren't truly into view yet), Interface Unbuilder (a hack that would let you drag *any* control *anywhere* on your screen, even into other windows, and they would still work), Size Doesn't Matter (remember that Longhorn demo that spun windows around? this was the exact same thing), and much much more.
Hey, even Taco himself was here! Can you top that?
My point: yes you can "hack" MacOS X, and it's an amazing amount of fun, as this conference proves every year.
[clicks on MacFixIt link...]
MacHack 18: Experiencing the Unstoppable...
MacHack 18 Opens with a Keynote Address from Ken Arnold
Find: taco
Not found
Much better. Reality just bites, doesn't it. Maybe next year the donkey basketball teams will be available and we can get back to a meaningful event. One can only hope.
Sorry to go slightly off-topic here, but the MacHack guys are not doing anyone a favor by creating GLCheat for OS X. As a Windows gamer, we already have to deal with enough problems of people using such cheats in games(CS comes to mind first and foremost), so it's not very pleasing to see that now the Mac guys have to worry about such cheating going on in their games either(while Q3, Jedi Knight, etc are multi-platform, OS X still has games that are platform locked, and up until now, GLCheat free). Some of the hacks turned out are indeed impressive, but please hack responsibly guys; GLCheat is not doing anyone any favors.
Just look at it this way - while you windows guy get 150 FPS we get to use GL cheats to level the playing field.
Hey, even Taco himself was here! Can you top that?
/. editors, but you could say that about almost any (beer-drinking) schmoe on the planet.
I always figured it might be fun to have a beer or six with some of the
Those hacks sound cool but I don't get excited about them, even though I code enough to know how hard some of that stuff is. (Airpong sounds like the toughest one due to the networking.)
I saw the Halflife 2 movie... now that's really amazing. (I'd say Halo 2, but, at some point Bungie has got to realize that people just don't walk around pointing their guns whereever they go. It looks ridiculous.)
Wow, it really looks like a lot of people are interested in what this guy has to say by the look of this thread. :p
i doubt any of these cheat will ever make it to a game hack. hacking is not inherently a bad thing. people learn how things are constructed by hacking and become better at what they do. i think you miss the spirit and the point of the exercise.
Also, the whole OS X desktop in rendered in OGL (something you wont see anything remotely similar on windows until Longhorn), these hackers are doing more than hacking Quake or some other such nonsense.
And besides Mac gamers are no where near the lamers PC gamers are.
I was just about to try to start a post on this very topic.
With all the "buzz" surrounding WWDC it seems MacHack 18 is getting the
short end of the stick news wise. I was hoping you all could come up
with more news/blogs/snippets whatever on the goings on in Dearborn
than I have. I have googled, netnewswired and macsurfered till my eyes
hurt , and these stories are all I can come up with, any help, or
discussion?
PS: Any links to MacMania II blogs score bonus points.
MacHack
18: Experiencing the Unstoppable
by Shawn Platkus MacHack is a conference for professional developers
who make their living developing for the Macintosh platform. The
conference, now in its eighteenth year, has obviously had to deal with
many changes throughout its history.
MacHack
18 Opens with a Keynote Address from Ken Arnold
by Shawn Platkus As is traditional, MacHack 18 opened first
thing Thursday morning at 12:00 am with its keynote address. This
year the opening keynote speaker was Ken Arnold who is currently the
Chief Architect of EventMonitor, In
A Really Long Portage in the
Digital River : AI's Yellow Text : Well, here's one for the record
books: I'm at MacHack , and my access to the 'net is even worse than it
is at home.
MacHack
Report
Macmegasite : I'm now at MacHack with a usable network connection. The
show is a lot smaller than previous years, but still lots of fun.
Macmegasite reports:
"Several changes were announced for next year's MacHack. The name is changing to Advanced Developers Hands On Conference (ADHOC) and the date is moving to the last week of July.
The name change reflects a widening focus on open source systems and alternate platforms (but not Windows) and a management change."
After I rest up, look for FWDemo here.
FWDemo wasn't really meant to be a brilliant hack, so much as to be sample code for my talk on device drivers. But I didn't have a proper hack, so I showed off FWDemo.
(What it does is use a kernel extension to work around OS X' exclusive hardware access policy, to do a little SCSI I/O to a mounted FireWire disk via SBP2. To be safe, it just does an inquiry, but you can use your imagination to do more creative things.)
Request your free CD of my piano music.
There have been such hacks for the PC before, so this isn't exactly something new.
So just calm the fuck down!
Maybe they'll still use MacHack.com - that's where everyone's going to be looking anyway.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Jini platform, Schmini platform. Ken Arnold helped develop Rogue, and if that's not a worthwhile contribution to the human race worth mentioning, I don't know what is.