I'd like a larger display so I can more easily write.
I suggest you try ScreenWrite. This is a Palm extension that lets you write Graffiti in the whole screen display area, instead of in the little Graffiti box at the bottom. Shareware, $5 to register it.
160x160, same as any other Palm device. Most Palm devices are 2-bit greyscale (== 4 shades of grey), and the IIIc has 256 colors.
The Palm V showed how readable and usable a Palm device can be with a physically smaller screen. Compared to previous Palm devices, the V's screen has much better contrast and is much easier to read; the slightly smaller pixels tend to make it look a little bit sharper, which doesn't hurt.
Therefore I predict that the new Palm devices are using a screen the same size as the Palm V. Most likely, the same exact screen as the V; that way they can order them in larger quantities and maybe get the price down a little.
A larger format screen would allow more info to be viewd at once.
Well, actually, a higher screen resolution would be required too.
Right now, the Palms are really locked-in to 160x160 resolution. Someday, they are going to have to crack out of the 160x160 box.
If I were Palm/Handspring, I would be prototyping new units with 360x360 resolution, and a backwards-compatibility mode for older apps that treats each 2x2 square as a single pixel, thus providing 160x160. And I want one of those!
Long-term, someday we will be carrying palmtops that have 1200dpi resolution, and really excellent contrast... in other words, we will have palmtops whose displays are about as readable as paper is. When that day comes, I want a box the size of a paperback book, waterproof, with enough storage to contain a whole bunch of books.
The legacy code issue would be logical except for its surprising portability to alternate platforms, i.e. Macintosh.
Sorry; you're wrong, and edhall is right.
I used to work at Microsoft, and I spent some time working in the Word development group. Word is a seething mass of legacy code. Sometimes it gets re-used, sometimes large chunks of new code get added on top, but every version carries everything forward.
The Mac version is built out of the exact same source tree as the Windows version. In Mac Word97 they use some compatibility libraries, sort of like WINE; I don't know for sure about Word2K, but I'll bet it still uses them.
Re:About Quake3's serial numbers....
on
Copyrant
·
· Score: 1
Mr. Carmack, I would like to respectfully request that id reconsider the disk-check.
I personally own several CD-ROM burners. My friends have them, too. If I wanted to pirate a game, the disk-check wouldn't be any sort of an issue. Even if some 8-year-old doesn't have access to a CD-ROM burner, odds are good (and increasing) that someone in his circle of friends has one. It just takes one.
Meanwhile, every time the disk-check bites me, I am annoyed, again. I have bought every id game from Doom onwards, and this is the thanks I get? Okay, that's not rational, but there it is.
How many people are there who are willing to pirate a game, but who don't have access to a CD-ROM burner and don't download a no-CD patch from the Internet? How many of those will actually buy the game just because of the disk-check? I'm not sure, but on the other hand every single customer who buys the game must tolerate the disk-check.
Best of luck with the new Doom, and thank you for all you have done. Thank you especially for releasing old source code to the community.
I suppose it depends on what you consider a "port".
I am quite sure about Word, because I used to work at Microsoft and I did some work on Word 97. MacWord was definitely built out of the same sources as WinWord.
I am also quite sure about Excel. A friend of mine in the Excel group told me once about how Excel had been set up to build three versions out of the same sources. (Win, Mac, OS/2... at one time, Microsoft really thought OS/2 would succeed.)
As I said, I only know for sure about Word and Excel, but I can't believe that the rest of Office is different.
When MacWord 6 shipped, Microsoft took flak because it was so much bigger and slower than before. The slowness was partially because of the increased size, and partially because they did an incomplete job of performance tuning. The features they felt were most-used were well-tuned, but some magazine articles railed at how much slower the Word Count feature in particular had become. As a result of this bad publicity, Microsoft did some more tuning, and things got a bit better. I'm certain that Microsoft was remembering the MacWord 6 fiasco when they were promising "not a port".
By the way, despite the firestorm of bad publicity, MacWord 6 was a success. Many people complained about it, but the big corporate customers bought lots. 100% file compatability with WinWord 6, and near-total feature compatability, were more important to them that maximum performance, and the Macs got faster anyway.
I haven't worked at Microsoft since 1996, so I'm not current with what's going on there now, but I'll bet cash they didn't fork the code base after I left. New, Mac-specific features I believe. Some Mac-only developers I believe. But separate code projects, with each feature coded twice? No.
The breakfast cereal-based Doom game is Chex Quest. (Chex is a breakfast cereal.) The game actually came on a CD-ROM inside the cereal box; they could afford to do this because the CD was also an AOL CD.
If you have played Doom, you have pretty much played Chex Quest. New maps, new "skins" for monsters and weapons, a few new cut scenes, but it is still Doom.
There also is a Chex Quest II. You downloaded this from www.chexquest.com, but it isn't there anymore.
You don't get killed; you get slimed. You don't kill the enemies; you send them back to the dimension they came from. The weapon bound to the '1' key isn't a fist, it is a cereal-eating spoon!
Oh, they definitely make a boatload of revenue on Office for Mac, but how is the net gain? If it's not tremendous (I don't know one way or the other, do you?), they might decide to shunt those coders into other projects
I know for sure that Word and Excel are built out of a single unified code base, and I am pretty much certain the rest of Office is the same way. Microsoft decided it could not afford to have two teams, each redundantly coding similar features into the Win and Mac products, so the code bases had to be unified. Now, the Mac version adds an incremental cost, rather than a whole separate team.
I don't have hard numbers, but consider this: at the time Microsoft made the decision to unify the code bases, Mac was about 10% of the market. This implies to me that if Linux (as a personal desktop system, not as a server) can take 10% of the dollars spent on software, Microsoft might start to consider Linux Office.
(It might have to be more than 10% since Microsoft doesn't already have Linux developers, testers, and development tools in-house.)
If Microsoft does Linux Office, it will be built out of the same code base as Win Office; it will use WINE, much like Corel Office, to ease the port; and it will probably ignore non-x86 versions of Linux, at least at first. There is zero chance that there will be a huge Linux Team to code something up from zero; Microsoft will leverage what it has.
To nitpick, it's more like the Windows version is built out of the same sources as the Mac version. The Mac version was written first, so that when the Mac came out, it would have an office suite. Writing it gave Microsoft all its ideas for Windows UI & API's, and, naturally, they ported it...
Nonsense. This is like saying that Linux is built out of the same sources as Minix.
Before version 6 of Microsoft Word, there were two teams: the Windows Word team, and the Mac Word team. The two products had completely separate code bases. It's true that early WinWord was probably ported from MacWord, just as early MacWord owes something to DOS Word, but that's just history, and not important. WinWord had hundreds more features than MacWord. If WinWord got a new feature, MacWord didn't get it unless it was coded in from scratch by a MacWord developer. From version 6 on, the Mac version has been built out of the same code base as the Win version. (This is why hundreds of new features appeared suddenly in MacWord6, and also why MacWord6 was so much bigger and slower compared to previous MacWord versions.)
Excel is a similar story, except they unified sooner, and as far as I know they did a tidier job of things. (Word uses compatibility libraries, not completely unlike WINE, for the Mac version. Excel doesn't need them.) The other parts of Office are, I'm sure, similar stories.
The essential lesson: Microsoft figured it had to leverage a single code base for the Mac version. Since Mac has 10% of the market or less, Microsoft felt it could not afford another whole development team coding duplicate features.
My original point stands: now that Microsoft has invested the effort into the unified code base, Mac Office is in no danger of being shut down.
It's more likely that they'll kill off Office for Macintosh if it's not making much money, as they no longer need to falsely prop up the Mac platform to make it look like they don't have a monopoly.
Microsoft makes good money on the Mac, and there is no reason why they should throw that money away.
As for Office for Linux, that will happen only when it begins to look like someone else might be making good money off a Linux Office product. If Corel Office suddenly started raking in the bucks, Microsoft would look into a port. (And, by the way, it would be a port, not a rewrite; the Mac version is built out of the same sources as the Windows version, and they will do the same for any future version. It just makes sense.)
[Pentagrams] were in quake, and are back in quake 3.
The pentagrams stuff dates back to Doom. The story in Doom was that a project attempting to create teleporter gates accidentally opened a gate into Hell and demons came out and took over. Thus, the maps had Satanic stuff such as pentagrams, impaled victims, etc. (One map in Doom even had a Nazi symbol, but they removed that in a later patch so the game would not be illegal to have in Germany.)
The maps for Quake were not designed with a coherent theme. Some of them were like Doom again, some were not.
And how often in Canada do people get shot in a holdup? Aside from the odd armored truck heist..never..
Wrong. I haven't seen the statistics, so perhaps people get shot in holdups less often in Canada, but it does happen.
One sad story I read about: a shopkeeper was standing behind the counter, and a robber just walked in, pulled out a gun, and shot him dead. Ironically, it was a gun shop, but the owner obeyed Canadian law and didn't have a loaded gun for protection.
the initial CGI work was done on Video Toasters (and later on less then top-noth graphics worstations)
J. Michael Straczynski, the creator of the show, said that they were saving the 3D models for re-rendering later.
The filming was done in widescreen, not normal TV aspect ratio, so that they could release a widescreen version later. But the graphics were only rendered to the standard TV aspect ratio. The plan was to re-render the models, this time in widescreen. It would be very possible to swap in more recent, better-detailed models for some of the more primitive early models.
IMHO AOL should be steered clear of. It has long been a major DRAG on system resources, and in my experience, only the most illiterate of users actually runs it.
Look, I have no use for AOL, either. But it is very, very popular.
And, guess what? If it's popular, that means that it is doing something right! Have you ever actually used AOL? It's been years, but I did use it for a little while, and it was very simple and very non-intimidating. There's a market for that.
You seem to think that anyone who likes AOL isn't cool enough to be a Linux user. I disagree. I will be happy, not sad, on the day when Linux is polished enough that even the most timid users do not fear it.
There is a saying: If it's stupid but it works, it isn't stupid. AOL isn't stupid. It's not the right choice for the typical/. reader, but that doesn't make it stupid. Adding newbie features isn't "dumbing down" Linux; the cool features of Linux will still be there, and some of the users (not all, but not none either) will learn Linux more and grow into it.
I am a big fan of the Thompson Toolkit. I've been using it for over a dozen years now, and there *is* a 16-bit DOS version. It provides a Korn-compatible shell with some C shell features added as extras. It has history, and command and filename completion. The best thing is that you can mix UNIX-isms in with your use of DOS; for example, there is a feature where it will re-write your command line before passing it to DOS, replacing all '-' with '/' and all backslashes with '/'. You can also enable all your DOS commands with alias, like this:
I am a big fan of the Thompson Toolkit. I've been using it for over a dozen years now, and there *is* a 16-bit DOS version. It provides a Korn-compatible shell with some C shell features added as extras. It has history, and command and filename completion. The best thing is that you can mix UNIX-isms in with your use of DOS; for example, there is a feature where it will re-write your command line before passing it to DOS, replacing all '-' with '/' and all backslashes with '/'. You can also enable all your DOS commands with alias, like this: alias cls '$COMSPEC/c cls' http://www.tasoft.com/toolkit.html
I have prepared a fill-in-the-blanks file based on the questions. I took the questions, formatted them nicely into paragraphs, and put notes in angle brackets where you should enter text. I made two versions, an RTF file and an HTML file, so no matter what you use you can probably import one of the versions.
By the way, I used Microsoft Word to prepare these. I formatted the sections and questions with Heading styles, and the answers as Body Text, which means that the Outline view will work; you can browse the document as a collapsable tree. Also, I formatted all the government text with the "no proofing" language attribute, so Word will not put red or green squiggles (i.e. text flagged by the spelling checker or grammar checker) under any of the questions. If you use Word, definitely open the RTF version rather than the HTML version.
If you use Word 2000 or Word 97, be sure to save with the Save As... command, and choose the "Save as Word 6.0/95" option. They prefer PDF, but Word documents 7.0 or earlier are okay. (Word 7.0 == Word 95, and the document format is identical to Word 6.0.)
Can anyone please tell me what the status is of the latency improvements to the 2.4 kernel? Linux resisted the big, horrible, kludgy patch, but I seem to recall that there was a much smaller and cleaner patch that made nice reductions in latency. Did that make it in? If so, how big is the improvement? Thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
I suggest you try ScreenWrite. This is a Palm extension that lets you write Graffiti in the whole screen display area, instead of in the little Graffiti box at the bottom. Shareware, $5 to register it.
http://www.inkverse.com/screenwrite.html>
steveha
160x160, same as any other Palm device. Most Palm devices are 2-bit greyscale (== 4 shades of grey), and the IIIc has 256 colors.
The Palm V showed how readable and usable a Palm device can be with a physically smaller screen. Compared to previous Palm devices, the V's screen has much better contrast and is much easier to read; the slightly smaller pixels tend to make it look a little bit sharper, which doesn't hurt.
Therefore I predict that the new Palm devices are using a screen the same size as the Palm V. Most likely, the same exact screen as the V; that way they can order them in larger quantities and maybe get the price down a little.
Well, actually, a higher screen resolution would be required too.
Right now, the Palms are really locked-in to 160x160 resolution. Someday, they are going to have to crack out of the 160x160 box.
If I were Palm/Handspring, I would be prototyping new units with 360x360 resolution, and a backwards-compatibility mode for older apps that treats each 2x2 square as a single pixel, thus providing 160x160. And I want one of those!
Long-term, someday we will be carrying palmtops that have 1200dpi resolution, and really excellent contrast... in other words, we will have palmtops whose displays are about as readable as paper is. When that day comes, I want a box the size of a paperback book, waterproof, with enough storage to contain a whole bunch of books.
Any guesses how long I must wait?
steveha
Sorry; you're wrong, and edhall is right.
I used to work at Microsoft, and I spent some time working in the Word development group. Word is a seething mass of legacy code. Sometimes it gets re-used, sometimes large chunks of new code get added on top, but every version carries everything forward.
The Mac version is built out of the exact same source tree as the Windows version. In Mac Word97 they use some compatibility libraries, sort of like WINE; I don't know for sure about Word2K, but I'll bet it still uses them.
I personally own several CD-ROM burners. My friends have them, too. If I wanted to pirate a game, the disk-check wouldn't be any sort of an issue. Even if some 8-year-old doesn't have access to a CD-ROM burner, odds are good (and increasing) that someone in his circle of friends has one. It just takes one.
Meanwhile, every time the disk-check bites me, I am annoyed, again. I have bought every id game from Doom onwards, and this is the thanks I get? Okay, that's not rational, but there it is.
How many people are there who are willing to pirate a game, but who don't have access to a CD-ROM burner and don't download a no-CD patch from the Internet? How many of those will actually buy the game just because of the disk-check? I'm not sure, but on the other hand every single customer who buys the game must tolerate the disk-check.
Best of luck with the new Doom, and thank you for all you have done. Thank you especially for releasing old source code to the community.
I am quite sure about Word, because I used to work at Microsoft and I did some work on Word 97. MacWord was definitely built out of the same sources as WinWord.
I am also quite sure about Excel. A friend of mine in the Excel group told me once about how Excel had been set up to build three versions out of the same sources. (Win, Mac, OS/2... at one time, Microsoft really thought OS/2 would succeed.)
As I said, I only know for sure about Word and Excel, but I can't believe that the rest of Office is different.
When MacWord 6 shipped, Microsoft took flak because it was so much bigger and slower than before. The slowness was partially because of the increased size, and partially because they did an incomplete job of performance tuning. The features they felt were most-used were well-tuned, but some magazine articles railed at how much slower the Word Count feature in particular had become. As a result of this bad publicity, Microsoft did some more tuning, and things got a bit better. I'm certain that Microsoft was remembering the MacWord 6 fiasco when they were promising "not a port".
By the way, despite the firestorm of bad publicity, MacWord 6 was a success. Many people complained about it, but the big corporate customers bought lots. 100% file compatability with WinWord 6, and near-total feature compatability, were more important to them that maximum performance, and the Macs got faster anyway.
I haven't worked at Microsoft since 1996, so I'm not current with what's going on there now, but I'll bet cash they didn't fork the code base after I left. New, Mac-specific features I believe. Some Mac-only developers I believe. But separate code projects, with each feature coded twice? No.
If you have played Doom, you have pretty much played Chex Quest. New maps, new "skins" for monsters and weapons, a few new cut scenes, but it is still Doom.
There also is a Chex Quest II. You downloaded this from www.chexquest.com, but it isn't there anymore.
You don't get killed; you get slimed. You don't kill the enemies; you send them back to the dimension they came from. The weapon bound to the '1' key isn't a fist, it is a cereal-eating spoon!
I know for sure that Word and Excel are built out of a single unified code base, and I am pretty much certain the rest of Office is the same way. Microsoft decided it could not afford to have two teams, each redundantly coding similar features into the Win and Mac products, so the code bases had to be unified. Now, the Mac version adds an incremental cost, rather than a whole separate team.
I don't have hard numbers, but consider this: at the time Microsoft made the decision to unify the code bases, Mac was about 10% of the market. This implies to me that if Linux (as a personal desktop system, not as a server) can take 10% of the dollars spent on software, Microsoft might start to consider Linux Office.
(It might have to be more than 10% since Microsoft doesn't already have Linux developers, testers, and development tools in-house.)
If Microsoft does Linux Office, it will be built out of the same code base as Win Office; it will use WINE, much like Corel Office, to ease the port; and it will probably ignore non-x86 versions of Linux, at least at first. There is zero chance that there will be a huge Linux Team to code something up from zero; Microsoft will leverage what it has.
Nonsense. This is like saying that Linux is built out of the same sources as Minix.
Before version 6 of Microsoft Word, there were two teams: the Windows Word team, and the Mac Word team. The two products had completely separate code bases. It's true that early WinWord was probably ported from MacWord, just as early MacWord owes something to DOS Word, but that's just history, and not important. WinWord had hundreds more features than MacWord. If WinWord got a new feature, MacWord didn't get it unless it was coded in from scratch by a MacWord developer. From version 6 on, the Mac version has been built out of the same code base as the Win version. (This is why hundreds of new features appeared suddenly in MacWord6, and also why MacWord6 was so much bigger and slower compared to previous MacWord versions.)
Excel is a similar story, except they unified sooner, and as far as I know they did a tidier job of things. (Word uses compatibility libraries, not completely unlike WINE, for the Mac version. Excel doesn't need them.) The other parts of Office are, I'm sure, similar stories.
The essential lesson: Microsoft figured it had to leverage a single code base for the Mac version. Since Mac has 10% of the market or less, Microsoft felt it could not afford another whole development team coding duplicate features.
My original point stands: now that Microsoft has invested the effort into the unified code base, Mac Office is in no danger of being shut down.
Microsoft makes good money on the Mac, and there is no reason why they should throw that money away.
As for Office for Linux, that will happen only when it begins to look like someone else might be making good money off a Linux Office product. If Corel Office suddenly started raking in the bucks, Microsoft would look into a port. (And, by the way, it would be a port, not a rewrite; the Mac version is built out of the same sources as the Windows version, and they will do the same for any future version. It just makes sense.)
The pentagrams stuff dates back to Doom. The story in Doom was that a project attempting to create teleporter gates accidentally opened a gate into Hell and demons came out and took over. Thus, the maps had Satanic stuff such as pentagrams, impaled victims, etc. (One map in Doom even had a Nazi symbol, but they removed that in a later patch so the game would not be illegal to have in Germany.)
The maps for Quake were not designed with a coherent theme. Some of them were like Doom again, some were not.
Wrong. I haven't seen the statistics, so perhaps people get shot in holdups less often in Canada, but it does happen.
One sad story I read about: a shopkeeper was standing behind the counter, and a robber just walked in, pulled out a gun, and shot him dead. Ironically, it was a gun shop, but the owner obeyed Canadian law and didn't have a loaded gun for protection.
J. Michael Straczynski, the creator of the show, said that they were saving the 3D models for re-rendering later.
The filming was done in widescreen, not normal TV aspect ratio, so that they could release a widescreen version later. But the graphics were only rendered to the standard TV aspect ratio. The plan was to re-render the models, this time in widescreen. It would be very possible to swap in more recent, better-detailed models for some of the more primitive early models.
Look, I have no use for AOL, either. But it is very, very popular.
And, guess what? If it's popular, that means that it is doing something right! Have you ever actually used AOL? It's been years, but I did use it for a little while, and it was very simple and very non-intimidating. There's a market for that.
You seem to think that anyone who likes AOL isn't cool enough to be a Linux user. I disagree. I will be happy, not sad, on the day when Linux is polished enough that even the most timid users do not fear it.
There is a saying: If it's stupid but it works, it isn't stupid. AOL isn't stupid. It's not the right choice for the typical /. reader, but that doesn't make it stupid. Adding newbie features isn't "dumbing down" Linux; the cool features of Linux will still be there, and some of the users (not all, but not none either) will learn Linux more and grow into it.
alias cls '$COMSPEC /c cls'
http://www.tasoft.com/toolkit.html
I am a big fan of the Thompson Toolkit. I've been using it for over a dozen years now, and there *is* a 16-bit DOS version. It provides a Korn-compatible shell with some C shell features added as extras. It has history, and command and filename completion. The best thing is that you can mix UNIX-isms in with your use of DOS; for example, there is a feature where it will re-write your command line before passing it to DOS, replacing all '-' with '/' and all backslashes with '/'. You can also enable all your DOS commands with alias, like this: alias cls '$COMSPEC /c cls' http://www.tasoft.com/toolkit.html
I have prepared a fill-in-the-blanks file based on the questions. I took the questions, formatted them nicely into paragraphs, and put notes in angle brackets where you should enter text. I made two versions, an RTF file and an HTML file, so no matter what you use you can probably import one of the versions.
By the way, I used Microsoft Word to prepare these. I formatted the sections and questions with Heading styles, and the answers as Body Text, which means that the Outline view will work; you can browse the document as a collapsable tree. Also, I formatted all the government text with the "no proofing" language attribute, so Word will not put red or green squiggles (i.e. text flagged by the spelling checker or grammar checker) under any of the questions. If you use Word, definitely open the RTF version rather than the HTML version.
If you use Word 2000 or Word 97, be sure to save with the Save As... command, and choose the "Save as Word 6.0/95" option. They prefer PDF, but Word documents 7.0 or earlier are okay. (Word 7.0 == Word 95, and the document format is identical to Word 6.0.)
"dcma_cm" == "DCMA comments"
Here are the URLs:
ftp://ftp.blarg.net/users/steveha/dcm a_cm.rtf
ftp://ftp.blarg.net/users/steveha/dc ma_cm.html
Incorrect.
Word 6.0 for Windows NT was identical to 6.0, except recompiled to support all the shiny new Win32 stuff and long filenames.
Word95 took NT Word 6 as a starting point, and added several man-years of work. There were several (IMHO) worthwhile features added.
steveha
Where can I get a SB128? I just ran a web search and came up with few hits. Is this an OEM-only card?