If you look at the second screen shot (Butterfly Demo: Above the pond (hi-res)) the reflection of the bridge in the water looks quite jaggy and out of place. Although this could be "rippling water" rather than a jaggy reflection I couldn't help but notice it. The same thing can be seen in the next picture (Butterfiles landing). I must say though, that overall I am very impressed. The images look fantastic. Now - show me the real thing, and tell me when it's gonna be released and M$ just might have a customer.
I'm no linux zealot (perhaps I should coin a new acrony, IANALZ), but I can't believe they gave the Applications section to the Mac on the strenght of "there's no MS-Office support for linux". What about star office? Also it's fairly ironic that, while most of the internet is powered by web servers running linux, OS 9 is given the nod in terms of internet connectivity.
I know this is off-topic but while you're going through server side scripting languages.... Has anyone got any experience with Java Server Pages (JSP)? What do you all think of them?
This may become a more common occurance now that "Open Source" is the buzz-word of the minute. I seem to remember reading (on/.) that Interbase was abandoned by Inprise/Borland when some of the project's key players jumped ship. I guess the difference in this case is that Interbase adds a very cool RDBMS to the open-source movement's stable of powerful RDBMS's (a stable which is pretty empty at the moment, save for PostgreSQL) while Forums (from the sounds of it) doesn't add much at all.
anyone who buys stock at that high point right after an IPO needs too seriously reconsider their investment plans Perhaps I don't appreciate the irony in your comment, but even if you were trying to be ironic saying something like this makes you a contender for the "stating the bleeding obvious" award. No one ever plans to buy a stock at a "high point", not ipo, not ever, sometimes it just works out that way.
The washington post ran the article, Berkshire Hathaway owns a controlling share in the post. Warren Buffett owns a controlling share in Berkshire Hataway, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are good friends. Warreb Buffet was the richest man in America until he was eclipsed by his bill-ness, and from what I know of Warren Buffett he is hardly the sort of person who would want to 'put someone in their place' like you suggest (since he's not exactly Ivy League himself). Of course this whole theory of mine (that warren would tell the post to print a pro-microsoft article) falls down when you find out that (AFAIK) Buffett plays no role in the day to day running of the post, and has given his voting rights to the current managers of the paper. Still, it shows that viewing everything through marx-coloured conspiracy theory glasses can give you a slightly warped perspective.
Do you understand the implications of what you are saying? If you want it to look 'right' under each platform you're going to need a) a seperate, and probably significantly different code base for each platform. Smaller platforms like BeOS can kiss their version of Mozilla goodbye. or b) someone to develop skins for each and every platform and build each version of mozilla with it's corresponding skin as the default.(hint: B is the feasible one - but it would still take a bit of doing). I think the fact that it looks the same under all OS's IS a feature and not just marketoid Bu11Sh1t, it hints at a future where the OS that is running will be fairly transparent to the user. With the proliferation of net appliances in the near future it may be that the Joe Average User is using mozilla on a device other than a PC, and quite possibly without a clue (or a care) as to what OS the appliance uses.
I couldn't agree more. Usabilility is the key. I have no problems with the way mozilla looks. True, the widgets are not 'standard' for that platform but they still function in the same way. Pointing out (bitching) that Mozilla/Netscape6 doesn't look like a windows application on windows and a mac application on the mac is obvious and counter-productive. Of course they don't look the same. In order to keep the same code base for all the versions of mozilla they either had to either pick an existing os 'theme' and develop to it or make up their own. The choice is obvious. I think to decry the problems of mozilla looking 'non standard' on every platform is also to miss one of the big advantages. Mozilla looks the same on EVERY PLATFORM. I can switch platforms and mozilla will still look the same, no need to learn anything new to use it. On the topic of skins I think the Suck author is also way off. Skinz give apps an individual look and individual character. My toaster doesn't have the same "look and feel" as my television, but that doesn't mean I can't use them. If skins frighten you don't use them, if the program you want to use has no skins you find usable, or no 'default - no skin' option then don't use it. Many apps that use skinz do so to differentiate themselves from the crowd. If the crowd is where you want to be then go ahead.
I'm glad my misconceptions on this point have been cleared up, and it's great to learn that Interbase has a strong future. Looking at some of the other posts in this forum it's clear that there's a lot of people out there with good things to say about interbase.
I'm no Bruce Perens but I heard that Inprise Open-Sourced Interbase because most of that project's development team and management jumped ship and they didn't have/were unwilling to throw more bodies at it. The code was mostly nasty K&R style C so they essentially gave up on it. I don't know, that's just what I heard.
Wow, my new 21" monitor (19.7" viewable) allow me to read an entire John Katz story without scrolling. What an amazingly "non-interactive" experience that was. I really think he's clutching at straws, trying to make disconnected events fit a grand scheme of a new digital millenium of which he is the leading social commentator. It's a shame that many of the pieces fit so poorly.
Actually, from what I read on ArsTechnica a while back the G4 and Athlon aren't that different at all. If I remember rightly the main architectural diferences were due to the fact that AMD's engineers had to fully support the x86 instruction set while the G4 engineers had the luxury of doing their own thing. Here's the link if you'd like to read the article.
I always loved GamesWorkshop's Warhammer RPG system. Too bad they ditched it (I think they figured they got a better return on their money selling the figurines for tabletop battles, as well as updating the rules to their games every other year, along with all the "supplamentary materials" that go along with it). I think I heard recently that another company had bought the rights to warhammer off GW (can't remember who though). The thing I never liked about RPGs and a lot of tabletop battle games was the numbers of different dice that you needed to play them. Back in the day I devised a complete tabletop battle system where all die rolls could be resolved using D10 (or a number of). I think any "standard" RPG system should try and make things simple by useing one type of dice for all dice-rolls. I don't know anything about the D20 system but (judging from the name alone) I'm hoping they've made things simple for everyone and standardised on one type of dice.
I though some of the more recent milestone builds (circa 12 & 13) were a little slow, certainly slower than IE5, that was until I tried a build that had the message logging functions removed (these are presumably testing tools to help catch bugs etc and will not be standard in the production release) WOW! It was fast, certainly faster than IE5. As for crashes I've never had it crash on me (unless you count the times the imbedded activeX gecko control has crashed in the program I've been writing). It isn't my primary web browser (yet) but I have used it a fair bit. I can't wait for the beta release.
This article has already been posted on Jan 28th by 'Taco. Unless it's been updated since then it is redundant. Perhaps when Taco he gets back we'll stop getting the duplicate stories. If you're considering posting to this thread you should probably read this one to make sure your not repeating yourself, or someone else (unless of course someone has already pointed out that this is a duplicate article (I couldn't see anyone), in which case I'M THE SIMPLETON).
I don't mean to break your spirits. It's great that you've worked out the gameplay etc for your game but how long did it take? The equivalent of 1 whole week? 2 weeks? For the two of you to write the game (even if you were "expert") might take six months to a year (did I mention artwork also? even more time). Coming up with ideas is fun, it's important, but it's probably got more of an instant gratification factor than programming the damn thing (did you ever have a "bug" in your storyline that you couldn't track down). Each one of those great little game-play features that you thought "wow, cool" could take weeks to get working. I don't mean to dissuade you, but you should be realistic about where the majority of work in game development lies.
Sorry, I was going a bit too far there by saying that stuff about "no profits, no prospect of profits", yes, it's true that e-bay do have profits (which are obviously very small compared to it's valuation). In Australia it has been funny to watch the market recently. Here certain parts of the mining sector have traditionally been very speculative (due, no doubt to the speculative nature of looking for minerals, sometimes you find them and sometimes you don't). Anyway when the price of gold died horribly (as central banks around the world started selling down their reserves) some of the more "speculative" mining companies quickly set up.com companies (talk about becoming a diversified industrial). Then a couple of months ago when there was a bit of a scare on the NASDAQ and the price of gold was up I read a few interviews by these same companies saying how they were getting back to their roots in minerals and forgetting about the internet. After the short lived resurgence in gold died they were straight back into.com mode. It's hard not to become a jaded cynic.
what the hell happened in the late 1990's and early 21st century. Internet companies with sky-high valuations that are bleeding red ink like a stuck pig start buying up the "establishment". Although I have little to no doubt that the internet (and associated technologies) will become integral to our every day life the whole stockmarket side of things reminds me of the Tulipomania that spread through Holland in the 1600's. No matter how big you think the internet will be, "investment" companies with no profits and no prospect of profits for some time cannot be considered anything more than speculation (Especially in the high-tech field where things can change so quickly).! There, did that get off-topic quick enough for you all.
Borland's Delphi programming language which (AFAIK) is based on Pascal (with some OO features, like C++ is to C) is a very popular programming language (on the windoze platform at least, but it sounds like Linux will be getting it soon also which is great) which is supposed to be both a fundamentally sound OO language (e.g. Java, SmallTalk) and very quick and easy to develop in (like VB is proported to be). So while Pascal may have not made an impact I think time has shown it's basic structure to be quite practical, hence the popularity of Delphi.
The article sould have come from the "Don't let the fact that they've just won an award stop you from sticking the knife into them" department. "and if I might add a comment, please improve the GUI installer, maybe even release a beta version before going gold." Congratulating someone and then finishing off by saying something like this. I hope HeUnique doesn't start throwing any compliments my way.
Slashdot Mirror
If you look at the second screen shot (Butterfly Demo: Above the pond (hi-res)) the reflection of the bridge in the water looks quite jaggy and out of place. Although this could be "rippling water" rather than a jaggy reflection I couldn't help but notice it. The same thing can be seen in the next picture (Butterfiles landing). I must say though, that overall I am very impressed. The images look fantastic. Now - show me the real thing, and tell me when it's gonna be released and M$ just might have a customer.
I'm no linux zealot (perhaps I should coin a new acrony, IANALZ), but I can't believe they gave the Applications section to the Mac on the strenght of "there's no MS-Office support for linux". What about star office? Also it's fairly ironic that, while most of the internet is powered by web servers running linux, OS 9 is given the nod in terms of internet connectivity.
My brother has the M16 nightly from the 4th of May working on his win2k box. Give it a try.
I know this is off-topic but while you're going through server side scripting languages.... Has anyone got any experience with Java Server Pages (JSP)? What do you all think of them?
This may become a more common occurance now that "Open Source" is the buzz-word of the minute. I seem to remember reading (on /.) that Interbase was abandoned by Inprise/Borland when some of the project's key players jumped ship. I guess the difference in this case is that Interbase adds a very cool RDBMS to the open-source movement's stable of powerful RDBMS's (a stable which is pretty empty at the moment, save for PostgreSQL) while Forums (from the sounds of it) doesn't add much at all.
anyone who buys stock at that high point right after an IPO needs too seriously reconsider their investment plans
Perhaps I don't appreciate the irony in your comment, but even if you were trying to be ironic saying something like this makes you a contender for the "stating the bleeding obvious" award. No one ever plans to buy a stock at a "high point", not ipo, not ever, sometimes it just works out that way.
If you're a nerd being buff is really not that important.
After reading about the 'Slash' variety of Fanfic I'm starting to view slashdot in a whole new way.
The washington post ran the article, Berkshire Hathaway owns a controlling share in the post. Warren Buffett owns a controlling share in Berkshire Hataway, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are good friends. Warreb Buffet was the richest man in America until he was eclipsed by his bill-ness, and from what I know of Warren Buffett he is hardly the sort of person who would want to 'put someone in their place' like you suggest (since he's not exactly Ivy League himself). Of course this whole theory of mine (that warren would tell the post to print a pro-microsoft article) falls down when you find out that (AFAIK) Buffett plays no role in the day to day running of the post, and has given his voting rights to the current managers of the paper. Still, it shows that viewing everything through marx-coloured conspiracy theory glasses can give you a slightly warped perspective.
Do you understand the implications of what you are saying? If you want it to look 'right' under each platform you're going to need a) a seperate, and probably significantly different code base for each platform. Smaller platforms like BeOS can kiss their version of Mozilla goodbye. or b) someone to develop skins for each and every platform and build each version of mozilla with it's corresponding skin as the default.(hint: B is the feasible one - but it would still take a bit of doing). I think the fact that it looks the same under all OS's IS a feature and not just marketoid Bu11Sh1t, it hints at a future where the OS that is running will be fairly transparent to the user. With the proliferation of net appliances in the near future it may be that the Joe Average User is using mozilla on a device other than a PC, and quite possibly without a clue (or a care) as to what OS the appliance uses.
I couldn't agree more. Usabilility is the key. I have no problems with the way mozilla looks. True, the widgets are not 'standard' for that platform but they still function in the same way. Pointing out (bitching) that Mozilla/Netscape6 doesn't look like a windows application on windows and a mac application on the mac is obvious and counter-productive. Of course they don't look the same. In order to keep the same code base for all the versions of mozilla they either had to either pick an existing os 'theme' and develop to it or make up their own. The choice is obvious. I think to decry the problems of mozilla looking 'non standard' on every platform is also to miss one of the big advantages. Mozilla looks the same on EVERY PLATFORM. I can switch platforms and mozilla will still look the same, no need to learn anything new to use it. On the topic of skins I think the Suck author is also way off. Skinz give apps an individual look and individual character. My toaster doesn't have the same "look and feel" as my television, but that doesn't mean I can't use them. If skins frighten you don't use them, if the program you want to use has no skins you find usable, or no 'default - no skin' option then don't use it. Many apps that use skinz do so to differentiate themselves from the crowd. If the crowd is where you want to be then go ahead.
I'm glad my misconceptions on this point have been cleared up, and it's great to learn that Interbase has a strong future. Looking at some of the other posts in this forum it's clear that there's a lot of people out there with good things to say about interbase.
I'm no Bruce Perens but I heard that Inprise Open-Sourced Interbase because most of that project's development team and management jumped ship and they didn't have/were unwilling to throw more bodies at it. The code was mostly nasty K&R style C so they essentially gave up on it. I don't know, that's just what I heard.
Wow, my new 21" monitor (19.7" viewable) allow me to read an entire John Katz story without scrolling. What an amazingly "non-interactive" experience that was. I really think he's clutching at straws, trying to make disconnected events fit a grand scheme of a new digital millenium of which he is the leading social commentator. It's a shame that many of the pieces fit so poorly.
Actually, from what I read on ArsTechnica a while back the G4 and Athlon aren't that different at all. If I remember rightly the main architectural diferences were due to the fact that AMD's engineers had to fully support the x86 instruction set while the G4 engineers had the luxury of doing their own thing. Here's the link if you'd like to read the article.
I always loved GamesWorkshop's Warhammer RPG system. Too bad they ditched it (I think they figured they got a better return on their money selling the figurines for tabletop battles, as well as updating the rules to their games every other year, along with all the "supplamentary materials" that go along with it). I think I heard recently that another company had bought the rights to warhammer off GW (can't remember who though). The thing I never liked about RPGs and a lot of tabletop battle games was the numbers of different dice that you needed to play them. Back in the day I devised a complete tabletop battle system where all die rolls could be resolved using D10 (or a number of). I think any "standard" RPG system should try and make things simple by useing one type of dice for all dice-rolls. I don't know anything about the D20 system but (judging from the name alone) I'm hoping they've made things simple for everyone and standardised on one type of dice.
I though some of the more recent milestone builds (circa 12 & 13) were a little slow, certainly slower than IE5, that was until I tried a build that had the message logging functions removed (these are presumably testing tools to help catch bugs etc and will not be standard in the production release) WOW! It was fast, certainly faster than IE5. As for crashes I've never had it crash on me (unless you count the times the imbedded activeX gecko control has crashed in the program I've been writing). It isn't my primary web browser (yet) but I have used it a fair bit. I can't wait for the beta release.
This article has already been posted on Jan 28th by 'Taco. Unless it's been updated since then it is redundant. Perhaps when Taco he gets back we'll stop getting the duplicate stories. If you're considering posting to this thread you should probably read this one to make sure your not repeating yourself, or someone else (unless of course someone has already pointed out that this is a duplicate article (I couldn't see anyone), in which case I'M THE SIMPLETON).
I'm not sure if my favourite combination was Scotty-Fondle-Enterprise or Scotty-Fondle-Clingons, both work for me.
I don't mean to break your spirits. It's great that you've worked out the gameplay etc for your game but how long did it take? The equivalent of 1 whole week? 2 weeks? For the two of you to write the game (even if you were "expert") might take six months to a year (did I mention artwork also? even more time). Coming up with ideas is fun, it's important, but it's probably got more of an instant gratification factor than programming the damn thing (did you ever have a "bug" in your storyline that you couldn't track down). Each one of those great little game-play features that you thought "wow, cool" could take weeks to get working. I don't mean to dissuade you, but you should be realistic about where the majority of work in game development lies.
Sorry, I was going a bit too far there by saying that stuff about "no profits, no prospect of profits", yes, it's true that e-bay do have profits (which are obviously very small compared to it's valuation). In Australia it has been funny to watch the market recently. Here certain parts of the mining sector have traditionally been very speculative (due, no doubt to the speculative nature of looking for minerals, sometimes you find them and sometimes you don't). Anyway when the price of gold died horribly (as central banks around the world started selling down their reserves) some of the more "speculative" mining companies quickly set up .com companies (talk about becoming a diversified industrial). Then a couple of months ago when there was a bit of a scare on the NASDAQ and the price of gold was up I read a few interviews by these same companies saying how they were getting back to their roots in minerals and forgetting about the internet. After the short lived resurgence in gold died they were straight back into .com mode. It's hard not to become a jaded cynic.
what the hell happened in the late 1990's and early 21st century. Internet companies with sky-high valuations that are bleeding red ink like a stuck pig start buying up the "establishment". Although I have little to no doubt that the internet (and associated technologies) will become integral to our every day life the whole stockmarket side of things reminds me of the Tulipomania that spread through Holland in the 1600's. No matter how big you think the internet will be, "investment" companies with no profits and no prospect of profits for some time cannot be considered anything more than speculation (Especially in the high-tech field where things can change so quickly).!
There, did that get off-topic quick enough for you all.
Borland's Delphi programming language which (AFAIK) is based on Pascal (with some OO features, like C++ is to C) is a very popular programming language (on the windoze platform at least, but it sounds like Linux will be getting it soon also which is great) which is supposed to be both a fundamentally sound OO language (e.g. Java, SmallTalk) and very quick and easy to develop in (like VB is proported to be). So while Pascal may have not made an impact I think time has shown it's basic structure to be quite practical, hence the popularity of Delphi.
This is great for LinuxOne, now they'll have another product to rip-off when creating their "LinuxMac" distro.
The article sould have come from the "Don't let the fact that they've just won an award stop you from sticking the knife into them" department.
"and if I might add a comment, please improve the GUI installer, maybe even release a beta version before going gold."
Congratulating someone and then finishing off by saying something like this. I hope HeUnique doesn't start throwing any compliments my way.