2) Therefore, porting games OR pirating them should be trivial.
3) If I have a PC, why would I ever buy an X-box?
4) PC's have gotten *easier* to design for; we have consistent APIs for gaming now, like SDL, OpenGL, and OpenAL; Quake III looks beautiful on my new Linux box, but it should look the same on Windows. The same goes for Mozilla... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, you're supposed to believe it because it's from InfoWorld, but even if the facts are wrong, I've heard this sort of thing in the past.
I know a guy who used to work for Microsoft, and I believe he did most of his work in HP/UX. They did use a lot of Unix internally, at least back then. And what do you expect? If I wanted to get work done, I'd use Unix too.
I'm sure they have to use a lot of Windows boxes nowadays since they've made sure not much else works with Windows, and present-day versions of Windows *do* have better multi-tasking and memory protection than Win 3.1 did. Of course, if they've ported all their stuff to Unix already, that part wouldn't matter.
I wonder how long they held onto Xenix? There were some funny quotes from back when they were pushing that. The same for OS/2, before they stabbed IBM in the back again. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Yeah, freepascal is pretty good; it's better now. I found it when it was fpk-pascal, and some basic functions weren't quite the same. (also, my event loops could take up 100% cpu in Linux until I explicitly told them to sleep; it's not like DOS anymore!) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Yeah, but that's an ugly kludge. Too bad DOS never had a standard way to do dynamic linking.
In any case, just pointing out some features that are nice to have in your target OS. I programmed enough Pascal in DOS to know how annoying an arbitrary 64k limit is on allocating blocks of memory; now I use Linux instead. Coincidence? I think not... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Okay, I think this could help for at least Pentium optimizations, but it seems to leave the K6(/K7) out of the mix.
I'll have to look it up, or test instruction timing on different machines, because I seem to remember a few simple things being drastically different. (like using loop instead of jmp, and whatnot)
gcc and the like don't do *anything* in the way of AMD optimizations, do they? Or has anyone looked into what would be an acceptable compromise?
I know they didn't do much for the Pentium before, and I really don't think they use much past 386 instructions either, but a lot of times the original instruction set ends up being more optimized-for anyhow. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Did gorski get a suggestion in? 'cause he's the *only* person I've heard use that term.
(other geeks from elsewhere chime in: where did you hear this one? I've always heard of it being a pizza decided upon by a group, compromised on by everyone and palatable by no-one...) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Watcom was an excellent C compiler; I hope some of their floating-point optimizations will eventually be folded into egcs, because I remember the default DOS-compiled BYTEMarks had a bit of an edge there.
(Also, someone told me that when IBM recompiled the Windows source with it, it was about 30% faster at the time. I think that was for OS/2, but it was funny at the time.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
There's lots of other info out there too, like FOLDOC, which could probably be incorporated into a project like this. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Thank you; it's been a while since I've been to that museum.
Their main attraction back then had to do with calculating path length between cities in Pascal on a very *large* computer; back then, it looked pretty impressive!:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
1.Easily understood; intelligible.
2.Mentally sound; sane or rational.
3.Translucent or transparent. See Synonyms at clear.
[Latin lcidus, from lcre, to shine; see leuk- in Indo-European Roots.]
lucidity or lucidness n.
lucidly adv.
I was going for the first definition; unfortunately, there is no convention for this in English, so I will use the convention used in unix(7) man(1) pages.
Even a lucid(1) history* with pointers to resources would be nice(1).
*BASH_BUILTINS(1) SEE ALSO bash(1), sh(1) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
There's a computer museum in Boston, and Bruce Sterling has written about it.
I don't know if you could get a formal position, but by all means, start a web site! Even a lucid history with pointers to resources would be nice.
I have a good book from ~'86 that goes over the languages and the computer internals of the day (specs on the C64 hardware, a basic memory layout of the TRS-80, etc., etc.), and I'm sure you can find more of that at your local library. I got that one from a library book sale, actually! --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
That really doesn't make any sense--therefore, invest in it!
I now have incredibly high-tech phone misdirection and blocking devices! They're called "prisms".
Oh well. Even if it *does* work, my phone card still won't be activated, and I'll have to call the company somehow to tell them my phone service doesn't work...
I liked the paper-cups-and-string method much better. And I didn't have to rent the string! What am I doing now, leasing the air? --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Taking it at face-value, incompetent would mean "not competent"; this could be construed as unskilled, ignorant, or not versed in a field, just as unqualified could be... But I suppose it has worse connotations attached to it, regardless. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
It's about time a judge realized that he's incompetent to legislate what he doesn't understand; it's rare that they ever back down and admit their mistakes.
Now if only we could teach Congress the same lesson...
Mind you, I'm not saying there should be no controls placed on the Internet, or the computer industry in general; just that they should be informed.
If it were possible to start a tech-savvy regulation board that occupies the same sort of position as the FDA or the FCC, but in charge of computers or the internet, I'd be all for it. But I have a feeling that they either wouldn't be impartial or wouldn't be tech-savvy, or wouldn't get anything done...
So as usual, we'll probably have to do it all ourselves, and attempt to advise the people who have and exercise the power over what they do not understand. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Judging from the cartoons, I'd say "Just because it's political doesn't mean it's serious".
The text I can take or leave; it reads at only slightly more comprehensible than a Katz article. (I give it a 0.7 Katz rating, where 0 is comprehensible and 1 is obviously computer-generated)
However, the cartoons are hilarious! Balmer's codename is Bald Weasel? Double-plus-negative Microsoft speak? And that's just the beginning.
So, regardless of what your motives are, or what your opinion of the article was, thanks for submitting it! Occasionally, Suck does not suck. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
If the Obfuscated C Contest didn't have such small size limitations on C files, I'd post the source code to Perl!
...however, I need to see what silly rules the Obfuscated Perl contest has. If it doesn't have that many, you can just *bet* that I'll write a source filter that decrypts to Perl, runs itself, and calls the C preprocessor! (and maybe I'll have it generate and compile some C code while I'm at it... hmm.) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
That's cool; is there some sort of method naming convention?
What I like about Scheme is that you can query the datatype to see what it is, and it will be an atom or a list; atoms are like scalars, and lists just need to be parsed recursively.
Perl doesn't really support that well for its scalars, and arrays and hashes sort of have their own namespaces, and look like they came from BASIC. But at least you can get types from references.
And C is downright horrible on this because a pointer could be anything! You'd have to make a struct with a field that identifies it, always in the same place, or something similar. But you have the power to do whatever you want... sort of...
On the other side of the fence, Java has a type for everything, and is correspondingly complex, too.
Those are the issues I see, anyhow. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
There's a C library that does garbage collection already. Actually, I think there are a few of them.
And it's a shame to not see good template (genericity?) support in C#. Or any language, for that matter.
I think choosing a good type system is where a lot of languages fall flat, and I'm not a big fan of the huge C++/Java Object/Type/Library approach, although I haven't seen a truly good solution to this problem yet. C, Pascal, Java, Perl, Scheme... They all have different ideas and solutions, and I haven't seen a "Right Way" yet. Although I think Scheme has the right idea with its first class data types, it still all needs some work. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Slashdot Mirror
1) The X-box *is* a PC.
2) Therefore, porting games OR pirating them should be trivial.
3) If I have a PC, why would I ever buy an X-box?
4) PC's have gotten *easier* to design for; we have consistent APIs for gaming now, like SDL, OpenGL, and OpenAL; Quake III looks beautiful on my new Linux box, but it should look the same on Windows. The same goes for Mozilla...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
My question is, how the hell did they fit James Earl Jones into that little Darth Vader suit?
(and how did he turn into a crusty white guy after that?)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, you're supposed to believe it because it's from InfoWorld, but even if the facts are wrong, I've heard this sort of thing in the past.
I know a guy who used to work for Microsoft, and I believe he did most of his work in HP/UX. They did use a lot of Unix internally, at least back then. And what do you expect? If I wanted to get work done, I'd use Unix too.
I'm sure they have to use a lot of Windows boxes nowadays since they've made sure not much else works with Windows, and present-day versions of Windows *do* have better multi-tasking and memory protection than Win 3.1 did. Of course, if they've ported all their stuff to Unix already, that part wouldn't matter.
I wonder how long they held onto Xenix? There were some funny quotes from back when they were pushing that. The same for OS/2, before they stabbed IBM in the back again.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
That's ok, no one's looking at it now... :)
Yeah, freepascal is pretty good; it's better now. I found it when it was fpk-pascal, and some basic functions weren't quite the same. (also, my event loops could take up 100% cpu in Linux until I explicitly told them to sleep; it's not like DOS anymore!)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Yeah, but that's an ugly kludge. Too bad DOS never had a standard way to do dynamic linking.
In any case, just pointing out some features that are nice to have in your target OS. I programmed enough Pascal in DOS to know how annoying an arbitrary 64k limit is on allocating blocks of memory; now I use Linux instead. Coincidence? I think not...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
YES! Rendering under DOS!
Wanna make a movie?
(two weeks later...)
What do you mean DOS is (at best) 16 bit and not running in protected mode?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Wow; the assembler dumps are very interesting.
Okay, I think this could help for at least Pentium optimizations, but it seems to leave the K6(/K7) out of the mix.
I'll have to look it up, or test instruction timing on different machines, because I seem to remember a few simple things being drastically different. (like using loop instead of jmp, and whatnot)
gcc and the like don't do *anything* in the way of AMD optimizations, do they? Or has anyone looked into what would be an acceptable compromise?
I know they didn't do much for the Pentium before, and I really don't think they use much past 386 instructions either, but a lot of times the original instruction set ends up being more optimized-for anyhow.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
DUDE!
OMF absolutely rules; I love that game!
If they came out with anything like that again, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
(or, well, any decently-coded demostyle game...)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Did gorski get a suggestion in? 'cause he's the *only* person I've heard use that term.
(other geeks from elsewhere chime in: where did you hear this one? I've always heard of it being a pizza decided upon by a group, compromised on by everyone and palatable by no-one...)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Wow; you've taken Freshmeat crossposting to a new level!
:)
...but... isn't there a web site for that?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Watcom was an excellent C compiler; I hope some of their floating-point optimizations will eventually be folded into egcs, because I remember the default DOS-compiled BYTEMarks had a bit of an edge there.
:)
(Also, someone told me that when IBM recompiled the Windows source with it, it was about 30% faster at the time. I think that was for OS/2, but it was funny at the time.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
That's okay, I tend to use language loosely.
However, there's nothing wrong with trying to explain something, or clear things up for the rest of us.
Eschew obfuscation, that's what I always say...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
The Computer History Graphing Project -- it looks like it needs some work, but we'll see.
There's lots of other info out there too, like FOLDOC, which could probably be incorporated into a project like this.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Thank you; it's been a while since I've been to that museum.
:)
Their main attraction back then had to do with calculating path length between cities in Pascal on a very *large* computer; back then, it looked pretty impressive!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I was going for the first definition; unfortunately, there is no convention for this in English, so I will use the convention used in unix(7) man(1) pages.
Even a lucid(1) history* with pointers to resources would be nice(1).
*BASH_BUILTINS(1) SEE ALSO bash(1), sh(1)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
There's a computer museum in Boston, and Bruce Sterling has written about it.
I don't know if you could get a formal position, but by all means, start a web site! Even a lucid history with pointers to resources would be nice.
I have a good book from ~'86 that goes over the languages and the computer internals of the day (specs on the C64 hardware, a basic memory layout of the TRS-80, etc., etc.), and I'm sure you can find more of that at your local library. I got that one from a library book sale, actually!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
That really doesn't make any sense--therefore, invest in it!
I now have incredibly high-tech phone misdirection and blocking devices! They're called "prisms".
Oh well. Even if it *does* work, my phone card still won't be activated, and I'll have to call the company somehow to tell them my phone service doesn't work...
I liked the paper-cups-and-string method much better. And I didn't have to rent the string! What am I doing now, leasing the air?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, that's still semantics.
Taking it at face-value, incompetent would mean "not competent"; this could be construed as unskilled, ignorant, or not versed in a field, just as unqualified could be... But I suppose it has worse connotations attached to it, regardless.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
The Nazi says, "I'm really sorry about what happened; I was just following orders!"
The Rabbi looks upwards with a puzzled look on his face.
The Nazi says, "What, what is it?"
The Rabbi grabs a heavy pewter pitcher and brains the Nazi with it.
The Bartender says to the Rabbi, "What was that for? I thought Rabbis were peaceful, and I'll have no trouble from anyone in my bar!"
The Rabbi looks upwards again, and tries to explain.
"I'm really sorry, I was just following orders!"
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
It's about time a judge realized that he's incompetent to legislate what he doesn't understand; it's rare that they ever back down and admit their mistakes.
Now if only we could teach Congress the same lesson...
Mind you, I'm not saying there should be no controls placed on the Internet, or the computer industry in general; just that they should be informed.
If it were possible to start a tech-savvy regulation board that occupies the same sort of position as the FDA or the FCC, but in charge of computers or the internet, I'd be all for it. But I have a feeling that they either wouldn't be impartial or wouldn't be tech-savvy, or wouldn't get anything done...
So as usual, we'll probably have to do it all ourselves, and attempt to advise the people who have and exercise the power over what they do not understand.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Judging from the cartoons, I'd say "Just because it's political doesn't mean it's serious".
The text I can take or leave; it reads at only slightly more comprehensible than a Katz article. (I give it a 0.7 Katz rating, where 0 is comprehensible and 1 is obviously computer-generated)
However, the cartoons are hilarious! Balmer's codename is Bald Weasel? Double-plus-negative Microsoft speak? And that's just the beginning.
So, regardless of what your motives are, or what your opinion of the article was, thanks for submitting it! Occasionally, Suck does not suck.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
If the Obfuscated C Contest didn't have such small size limitations on C files, I'd post the source code to Perl!
...however, I need to see what silly rules the Obfuscated Perl contest has. If it doesn't have that many, you can just *bet* that I'll write a source filter that decrypts to Perl, runs itself, and calls the C preprocessor! (and maybe I'll have it generate and compile some C code while I'm at it... hmm.)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
That actually sounds really interesting; I'll have to check it out.
:)
I take it there's a bit of a learning curve, though?
Thanks!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
That's cool; is there some sort of method naming convention?
What I like about Scheme is that you can query the datatype to see what it is, and it will be an atom or a list; atoms are like scalars, and lists just need to be parsed recursively.
Perl doesn't really support that well for its scalars, and arrays and hashes sort of have their own namespaces, and look like they came from BASIC. But at least you can get types from references.
And C is downright horrible on this because a pointer could be anything! You'd have to make a struct with a field that identifies it, always in the same place, or something similar. But you have the power to do whatever you want... sort of...
On the other side of the fence, Java has a type for everything, and is correspondingly complex, too.
Those are the issues I see, anyhow.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
There's a C library that does garbage collection already. Actually, I think there are a few of them.
And it's a shame to not see good template (genericity?) support in C#. Or any language, for that matter.
I think choosing a good type system is where a lot of languages fall flat, and I'm not a big fan of the huge C++/Java Object/Type/Library approach, although I haven't seen a truly good solution to this problem yet. C, Pascal, Java, Perl, Scheme... They all have different ideas and solutions, and I haven't seen a "Right Way" yet. Although I think Scheme has the right idea with its first class data types, it still all needs some work.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.