You are correct, different colors of light have different wavelengths. I left out the words "shorter than." The actual unit used, IIRC, is slightly inside the infrared spectrum. The DVI documentation clarifies.
Well, you'd want to be comparing PDF to DVI, or the Device-Independent Imaging format, not [La]TeX to PDF. LaTeX simply is a way to mark up the structure of a document and then process that and turn it into a well-formatted, ready-for-print version. DVI is the output files you get after running LaTeX on a source file, and, like PDF, they are platform-independent files that can be viewed at any resolution and used to be used in conjunction with PostScript for printing. My understanding of PDFs vs. DVI is as follows:
Both support essentially unlimited resolution (DVI's default measuring unit is the wavelength of light, while PDF uses a point but allows you to go to something like one one-millionth of that)
Both support hyperlinks
PDF allows you to embed fonts and images easily, while DVI relies on a PostScript renderer to be available for these features
PDF allows you to have a table of contents pane for quick navigation, while DVI does not (or, if it does, I've never seen a viewer implement this functionality)
I believe both allow you to theoretically embed content in other formats (indeed, as I just said, this is how DVI handles EPS images), but this is much more fully fleshed-out in PDF where one can easily embed movies and audio clips
PDF allows forms and "secure content," while DVI does not (and if you followed the Skylarov deal, you know PDF really doesn't either.)
and the biggest advantage of PDF:
It's far, far more widely available.
I'm sure there are other differences, but even many people I know simply use pdfLaTeX now to generate PDFs from LaTeX markup instead of the old DVIs, so presumably even they see an advantage in Adobe's format. When it comes down to it, I suspect that PDF's font embedding, better handling of other embedded content, and on top of that simply its pervasiveness are the biggest factors. Anyone is welcome to correct me on any of this, however.
Taligent became reborn as the OO C++ frameworks that power (among other things) VisualAge, and so has been extensively used by OS/2 and AIX developers. They're actually very nice frameworks, unmatched by anything except OpenStep (although Java is gradually improving to that point). I believe IBM and Apple were also able to reuse some of Taligent's technology in the development of OpenDoc. So while it never really materialized into a full operating system, massive portions of Taligent did live on.
Kaleida, meanwhile, was not system software. Its function was almost identical to that of Macromedia Director. Furthermore, Kaleida was finished, and released as a product called ScriptX. The only problem was that, by that time, Macromedia Director had been out long enough to saturate the market, leading ScriptX to a quick and untimely demise as it found no buyers.
Your overall point's fine, but I thought it worth pointing out that two of those three technologies lived on well after their death and one was not system software.
While I can't vouch for the iPod or iTunes (sadly), I can make a comment about QuickTime: one group of developers has finally written an Ogg QT plugin that allows you to use Vorbis audio in QuickTime just like everything else. That's definitely a step in the right direction. It should allow you to play Oggs from within QT. If iTunes can play any QT-supported audio codec (and quite frankly I simply cannot remember whether or not it relies on QuickTime; sorry), then you now have the ability to play Oggs from within iTunes if you wish.
IIRC, BeOS's video drivers were in user space, and seeing as that was a media OS, I'm assuming that there's some merit to keeping such drivers out of the kernel. The trick more likely has to do with the fact that Linux lacks real-time scheduling and the extremely low-cost context switches that were absolutely essential on an OS so pervasively threaded as Be, so I honestly do not know if such a solution would be practical in Linux without a major rewrite of the scheduler, etc.
Off topic, I don't care. Does Dylan really offer anything over Common LISP? (Other than an arguably more readable syntax.) It never really seemed to for me, for whatever it's worth, but then it died so quickly after being born I never looked at it very seriously.
Programmer -- "Well, probably not. It probably got saved in an odd location. Hmm, this seems to happen a lot, I get a lot of complaints about this. Perhaps I should re-think this whole heirarchal filesystem, and instead think about how to use this powerful computer with scads of RAM to keep track of things like this in a relational database so you can arbitrarily organize files by date, project, or manager rather than the physical location on a spinning magnetic platter you probably have never seen."
What I don't get is that Be figured out how to integrate this into a "legacy" hierarchial file system back in 1995 with folders where you'd save search criteria with the folder and they'd update themselves constantly with little to no overhead. For example, I could attach the search criteria "any file whose MIME type is 'text/html'" and the folder would always contain a list of every HTML file on my hard disk. And the kicker was that there was essentially no speed penalty. It was truly just an awsome setup, and a functionality I haven't seen on any other OS. I can't imagine that this would be terribly difficult to implement in Linux, and the adition of a feature like this would definitely be at least close to a "killer feature" compared to Windows. Granted, a better solution ultimately would probably be to design a new OS around data bags like what the Newton did, but the BFS solution seems like it makes sense in the near term...
Bad comparison; a better one would be to point out that the U.S. only has one currency. Way back when, the United States of America was united not by the Constitution, but by the Articles of Confederation, which was actually similar in many respects to the EU, things were quite different. In the single-house Congress, each state got one vote, unanimous consent was required to pass a law, and each state could (and did) coin its own currency, raise its own armies, and so on. As the Europeans have figured out, this doesn't work too well, so when the Articles of Confederation was replaced with the Constitution of the United States of America, the states gave up a number of rights, including the ability to coin their own currencies. So if you want to compare the EU's situation to something, compare it to the American states forming their own union and adopting a common currency, as opposed to North America now.
(As a side note, I don't think the Euro is such a wise idea for Europe. The states had the benefit of having far less economic unbalance at the time it decided to unify their currencies than Europe does right now, which is why countries such as England and Denmark that already have stable currencies and strong economies are loathe to join. This ends up leaving the Euro as the currency of those countries with weaker economies, and then the odd exception of Germany, which is making quick strides to join the crowd via stagflation.)
While I definitely understand why using OS X may simply not be an option on older machines (which I always find amazing, since OPENSTEP ran on 33 MHz machines with 32 MB RAM just fine), Linux to me doesn't make any sense on any computer where Darwin is supported. With Darwin, you get the Unix, you get the X window support, but you also get drivers for a slew of peripherals, you get an easier install than any Linux, you get, by definition, essentially perfect support for the Apple motherboards, you get flawless HFS/HFS+ and AppleTalk support built-in, you get the ability to tie in easily with a NetInfo network, etc., and the requirements for Darwin are just as low as LinuxPPC, as near as I can tell. PPC Linux has in my mind shifted as the solution only where someone either insists on Linux for whatever reason, or where hardware is old enough that Darwin doesn't support it. (And with Darwin now supporting pretty much all PCI Macs, that area is dwindling.) I am being completely serious when I ask, is there any reason to use Linux over Darwin in a case where both are supported, other than you "just want to use Linux"? (I even run Linux under the latter excuse, and enjoy it, so this is not Linux bashing. It's just that if I wanted to set up a production server, there's no compelling reason I've found where Linux on my system greatly outpeforms Darwin, or the opposite, for that matter. They both are very similar except when I want to do things such as add a user, at which point on one system I use traditional Unix tools and on the other I use NetInfo.) I am sure there are some reasons to use Linux over Darwin; I just don't know what they are, which is why I'm asking.
Are you sure? How would you write a VGA emulator for Display PostScript? VGA essentially is just an area of memory where you use a bit blitter to draw. Display PostScript is, well, the display version of PostScript. So for every single bit you blitted onto the VGA memory area, you'd generate three DPS calls: a moveto, a setrgbcolor, and a drawpoint (sorry if that last one's off, I haven't used DPS in a looooong time). And that's not even taking into account the context switching. That's a HUGE amount of overhead, especially for a game.....
It's unlikely that Carmack designed the game itself on NEXTSTEP for a couple of reasons. First, NeXT's development tools really wouldn't have been any better than vi for a video game, since you wouldn't be able to use InterfaceBuilder for the interface (there is none) and ProjectBuilder really offers nothing for a program that is written in pure C and targetted at the command line. Further, he would have had to write the game for Display PostScript instead of the VGA commands he'd eventually want to use, forcing him to eventually rewrite the game engine, and wouldn't be able to optimise anything in assembler, since NEXTSTEP at that time was 68k only and the main target platform was DOS, an x86-based OS with really nothing at all in common with NEXTSTEP. It is, however, highly believable that things like the map makers were designed on NEXTSTEP, since there you would be able to make full use of Interface Builder and the NeXT FoundationKit/AppKit to quickly develop those tools and portability wasn't a concern.
Does it have to be C++?
on
GTK-- vs. QT
·
· Score: 1
If you were willing to be flexible with language, then I would take a very serious look at Borland's Delphi and Kylix. You'll get a toolkit that's been extremely well-tested and is thoroughly evolved, an extremely fast Pascal compiler that compiles thousand-line apps in literally seconds, a GUI builder, strong use of components, and literally a recompile with no changes to move from Windows to Linux. The one major problem I see here is that Kylix is still is more of a Linux than a Unix app. However, it and its executables ought to run fine really on pretty much any Unix that can run a Linux emulation layer (which includes Solaris, FreeBSD, and a few more). At any rate, if you could deal with the language (which is extremely pleasant to work in if you take the time to learn) and the potential Linux lock-in doesn't bother you tremendously, it would probably be the easiest and fastest development solution you could pursue.
I'm an American, not a German, but I thought that Germany's constitution forbade this. In particular, quoting from Article 5:
(1) Jeder hat das Recht, seine Meinung in Wort, Schrift und Bild frei zu äußern und zu verbreiten und sich aus allgemein zugänglichen Quellen ungehindert zu unterrichten. Die Pressefreiheit und die Freiheit der Berichterstattung durch Rundfunk und Film werden gewährleistet. Eine Zensur findet nicht statt.
Or, in English:
(1) Everyone has the right to freely express and disseminate his opinion in speech, writing, and pictures and to freely inform himself from generally accessible sources. Freedom of the press and freedom of reporting by means of broadcasts and films are guaranteed. There will be no censorship.
Could someone who is German or who has studied German law please clarify?
Languages such as this are called prototype-based languages, and are generally seen as the successor to object-oriented programming.
"Generally seen" by whom? Perhaps I'm out of touch, but I have never heard this before. Is this really a common belief?
I honestly don't know if it's a common belief, but I can tell you where I got the idea that it was. The Self project at Sun was the first language which truly fleshed out the idea of prototype-based languages, and their goal was clearly stated as designing the successor to OO. This sentiment is also stated in the beginning of the Newton's programming manual. If I can find it, I will post it here later. Whether this is merely the opinions of two prominent prototype-based languages or actually the general concensus in the research community, I have no idea. Personally, I'm still just waiting for someone to write a Unix implementation of Dylan that's as good as Functional Object's design for Windows.
(Disclaimer: I'm not an expert in prototype-based languages, but I'm fairly confident that the description below is quite accurate. Corrections are, therefore, very welcome.)
Languages such as this are called prototype-based languages, and are generally seen as the successor to object-oriented programming. However, no prototype-based language has, to my knowledge, actually gone anywhere (the one that got closest was NewtonScript, which would have made it if it weren't for the fact that the only place to use it was on the Apple Newton), so it's nice to see that at least one actually made some progress towards general acceptance.
For those unfamiliar with the concept of prototype-based programming languages, Bob (and all prototype-based languages, for that matter) are by their very nature single-inheritence. The general idea is to eliminate the whole idea of classes, and instead treat everything as an already existing object. You them modify those objects as necessary, and, if it's an object which is handy, you just make lots of copies of it. I find it much clearer to use the word "copy" instead of "initiate," as you did for this reason. For example, define anObject = new Foo() makes a new copy of the already existing Foo object, that will have all of the same values, etc. as Foo. You can then modify that copy by adding new values as necessary.
The reason I make this distinction is that one of the powerful things you can do in prototype-based languages is give an instance of a class a new function. For an example of when you'd want to do this, let's say you have a Canvas object in a GUI. Now, you, at some point, are going to need a screen, and the screen is going to need some variables and methods you don't need for a standard Canvas (for example, Screen.refreshRate or Screen.setColorDepth()). The normal way to do this in a regular OO language would probably be to declare a subclass of Canvas that had the extra functionality, and then to make a single instance of it, probably called theScreen. This is awkward, however, because, 99.9% of the time, you really only want one screen object, so making a subclass just for a single instance seems odd. In a prototype-based language, however, you'd simply "copy" a new instance of a Canvas (called theScreen) and add your extra methods and functionality specifically to that object. Ultimately decide that you really do need multiple screens? No problem! Probably you'll want to add a monitorNumber attribute directly to the already existing screen object, and then make a copy of that. Similar functionality is also present in Dylan, and, by extension, probably LISP's CLOS, although I'm honestly just not familiar enough to know.
I have to disagree with you a bit, because I thought the ending was entirely unambiguous. It seemed, to me as if Prot was in fact truly an alien and truly a friend of Robert, merely occupying his body for a bit to take care of it and get Robert some help. What he did, why he came back, had a lot to do with simply getting Robert to an appropriate facility. One there, he left it, knowing that it would be well cared-for in the ward. It fits in perfectly with the rest of the movie: it explains his knowledge of space, his ability to see things that are beyond human range, his ability to simply disappear for a few days, as well as why, even in deep hypnosis, he continued to insist he was Prot. (While I don't know for sure, it would strike me that in hypnosis it shouldn't have been that hard to unearth the other personality if it were a multiple personality disorder, although this may be more of a technical flaw than anything else.) It also explains why Bes went away, and explains Spacey's statement near the end that "...But now that you've found Robert, take care of him," or however that line went specifically.
Anyway, that was my interpretation, and I think it explains everything quite well. All you have to do is accept that Prot has ulterior (but nevertheless very good) motives, and there you are.
Re:Looking for Massacre on Seasame St
on
Bert Is Evil
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· Score: 3, Funny
***NEWS UPDATE***
AP Online
AP 05/08 10:03 EST V055
Copyright 1995. All Rights Reserved.
NEW YORK
NEW YORK (AP) -- Big Bird, the famed friendly muppet of Sesame Street, has apparently gone on a rampage. Several muppets are known to be dead; including Prairie Dawn, Oscar the Grouch, and Bert -- long time friend, room-mate, and lover of Ernie. The bird is now reportedly holding Maria hostage in a five floor tenement near Hooper's Store. New York City Police SWAT teams have surrounded the building. Stay tuned for updates on this situation, as they occur.
***TRAGEDY IN NEW YORK CITY***
AP Online
AP 05/08 11:48 EST V743
Copyright 1995. All Rights Reserved.
NEW YORK
NEW YORK (AP) -- Big Bird, Sesame Street muppet, is reported dead at this hour after an hour-and-a-half hostage standoff with New York City Police. Kermit-The-Frog, Sesame Street Muppet on the scene, reports that as police stormed the five story tenement building where the bird was holding Maria hostage, Big Bird flew out an upper story window at them in a Kamikaze-like attack. Police SWAT units brought down the bird in a hail of automatic weapons fire. Dead are: Prairie Dawn, Oscar the Grouch, Bert, and Big Bird. There is no information available concerning Maria.
***NEWS UPDATE***
AP Online
AP 05/08 13:25 EST V246
Copyright 1995. All Rights Reserved.
NEW YORK
NEW YORK (AP) -- The Professor and his assistant, Beaker, muppet chemist, have reportedly found Angel Dust in Big Bird's feed. Big Bird was killed by Police earlier today after the bird went on a killing spree on Sesame Street. Maria, taken hostage during the ordeal, has survived unharmed. Three muppets were killed by the bird: Prairie Dawn (a friendly, pig-tailed muppet girl-child), Oscar the Grouch (a green garbage-can dwelling grumpy muppet) and Bert (the famous gay paper clip collector and pigeon friend). Authorities in the area report that the bad seed was purchased at the local Hooper's.
***NEWS UPDATE***
AP Online
AP 05/08 14:03 EDT V543
Copyright 1995. All Rights Reserved.
NEW YORK
NEW YORK (AP) -- Police are asking all motorists and humans to stay away from Sesame Street today as tensions are running high among the muppets. Many reportedly are outraged at the tainted food supply and at how the police handled the hostage situation. According to bystanders on the scene at the time, Mr. Snuffalupagus pleaded with police to be allowed to talk Big Bird down. Instead, police stormed the building with deadly results. Ernie is said to be despondent at the loss of his good buddy Bert.
***LATEST ON THE SESAME STREET CRISIS***
AP Online
AP 05/09 07:12 EST V927
Copyright 1995. All Rights Reserved.
NEW YORK
NEW YORK (AP) -- Violence erupted again on Sesame Street last night. As thousands of humans driving home took a sightseeing tour of the scene of Big Bird's deadly rampage, muppets became enraged. Hundreds of muppets, large and small, stalked the streets and surrounded humans in their cars. In at least one case, ten muppets pulled a motorist from his car and beat him with large, Styrofoam numbers. Police again arrived on the scene in force. At this hour, quiet is restored -- but tensions are very high.
***NEWS UPDATE***
AP Online
AP 05/09 08:43 EST V211
Copyright 1993. All Rights Reserved.
NEW YORK
NEW YORK (AP) -- Police and fire units have been called to Sesame Street. Reporters on the scene describe a nightmarish atmosphere. Furry muppets ranging in size from only inches to seven feet in height are looting Hooper's Store and firebombing the entire neighborhood. Orange and blue firelight is rising over many buildings. Cardboard backdrops, props, and storehouses full of numbers and letters are burning to the ground. Muppets are taunting firemen and police from windows high above the street with counting and alphabet songs. Stay tuned for late-breaking news updates, as they happen.
***LATE BREAKING NEWS UPDATE***
AP Online
AP 05/10 07:06 EST V482
Copyright 1993. All Rights Reserved.
NEW YORK
NEW YORK (AP) -- The morning fog has brought an eerie calm to Sesame Street after a night of rioting. Smoke rises from most buildings. On the street, lifeless, crumpled fur lies in mute testament of the night of wild outrage. Unknown numbers of muppets have died or been shot to death by Police in full riot gear. Here and there, a muppet--still animated with life--can be seen staring at the wreckage, or sweeping vacantly at the rubble. The Count was reported running down the street crying and yelling, "Ten, Ten Lifeless Muppet Bodies!" No humans were killed in the rioting, although several people reported rug-burns.
***NEWS FLASH***
AP Online
AP 05/11 11:35 EST V335
Copyright 1993. All Rights Reserved.
NEW YORK
NEW YORK (AP) -- Ernie, gay friend and roommate of the murdered muppet Bert, broke his two day silence today with a eulogy address at a mass muppet funeral.
The following is the complete transcript of his address:
I come here today to honor a man I loved. A man who was loved by millions throughout the world. Bert was a giant among muppets. His paper-clip collection was viewed with awe by many of the world's leaders. Just one year ago, as President Clinton campaigned on Sesame Street for the muppet vote, it was Bert who everyone turned to for advice. It was Bert who told us all, "anyone who can hang as many paper clips together as Bill Clinton, can certainly run the country." I also come here today to honor Big Bird. Bird was such a loving creature. His large size and bright color alarmed many who first met him, but it was his innocent and curious nature which taught us all to love him. Bird wouldn't have wanted us to remember him, or to memorialize him, with violence. All he ever wanted was for all creatures to "just get along" with each other. Big Bird has come to a bad end, friends, but is wasn't his fault. It was just some bad seed.
Given that spending literally about twenty seconds on the website revealed that their OS runs on a Palm (see http://www.linuxda.com/store/index.html), I think it's a reasonable assumption that you can also upload (albeit with shady legal reprecussions) the Palm OS onto their system. Thus, their handheld is Palm-compatible in the same way that my FreeBSD box is Windows-compatible: the hardware is identical.
While I am hardly an expert in German, I've studied it plenty enough to tell you that that, as far as I can tell, the joke does not mean a thing. There are some German words there (e.g. oder), but they're not put in the right place to mean anything. (Der Oder = "the or," for example. As in, opposed to "the and" or "the maybe.") So I'm about 95% confident that it's meaningless, just like pretty much anything Danny Kaye says that's in a foreign tongue. (He made that all up on the spot just based on the sounds of the language.)
Wenn ist das Nunstuck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
For those of us in high school German who stared at your post blankly for several minutes trying to figure out what was going on, you could have at least put a tiny disclaimer...
Student 1: Hrm. That's not German. Must be Yiddish! Student 2: I speak Yiddish. That's not it. It must be German. Student 1: That's not German. Student 3: You idiots, it's French!
I've run LinuxPPC R4 on my beige G3 (266 MHz, 64 MB RAM) before, and was extremely impressed. It was highly responsive, and seemed quite capable of saturating my 100 Mbit Ethernet connection when I was testing. I will admit that I eventually removed it because I missed the Mac OS interface too much, (and am about ready to move to OS X, so probably won't go back to Linux on my Mac), but I have only good things to say about Linux's PPC performance.
They are both RISC processors, so the general principles are the same.
This isn't your fault, it's the fault of marketing drones, but the PPC really isn't a RISC CPU. It does take some RISC concepts--for example, it has many registers (32x32bit integer and 32x64bit floating point registers on all PPC CPUs, and 32x128bit vector registers on the G4), all instructions are 32-bits in length, the chip was designed to enable things like OOO from the start, etc. However, the PowerPC actually has just about as many instructions as an Intel chip. In fact, IBM redefined RISC to mean "Reduced Instruction Set Cycles" when they decided they wanted to advertise the PPC as a RISC chip. (See http://www3.sk.sympatico.ca/jbayko/cpu.html#Sec5Pa rt3 for details.) (As an example, the G4's AltiVec unit adds 160 new instructions for SIMD ops. It's really hard to call the G4 a RISC chip anymore even if you do consider the G3 one.) So I wouldn't exactly group the SPARC, which last time I checked doesn't have a multiply instruction in its standard spec, with the G4, which has an instruction that means "add these eight integers to those eight and then multiply them all by this constant" as a standard opcode.)
You know, I can't begin to count the number of times I've read here something like "I wish that Linux would become the server OS and that BeOS would become the client," or "Linux makes a great server, but it's just not well suited for the desktop." Well, folks, what we have here is an OS that is very well suited for the desktop. So far, it appears considerably easier to use, is much smaller (diskspace-wise) than the comperable Linux setup (namely Linux kernel + utilities + X + Qt + KDE), and is progressing nicely. If those who have said that they wished open source/free software had as good a client OS as it has a server OS were serious, we really need to take a very serious look at throwing some massive muscle behind AtheOS.
Think about it: Linux would no longer have to try to be both a server OS and a desktop OS (and an embedded OS too, now, it would seem), but could concentrate on being the best server OS out there. AtheOS, meanwhile, would become the best client. Where it makes sense, you share the source. (Heck, we've already got Konquerer running on AtheOS; if that's doable, then moving other stuff shouldn't be hard at all.) But we'd suddenly move from having just a single product that competes pretty well with Windows 2000 Server and kind of well with Windows 2000 Professional, and end up with two products: one which clobbers the Server (Linux), one which clobbers the Professional (AtheOS).
Maybe this isn't necessary just yet. I'm almost certain that, eventually, Linux can become just as easy, possibly easier, than Windows (though what sacrifices in power may be necessary to finally truly achieve that goal I don't know). But I still think this is something we should really look at.
The amazing thing is that this really seems to work. Now, where I work, we have hundreds of Macs, and the best solution -- the best solution BY FAR -- is simply to walk around with an IBM ThinkPad under your arm (the one I carry literally does not even work) and mutter about how Windows is more stable and/or easier to use. I have never seen such low-maintenance computers in my life.
(Tip: praising Steve Jobs also works well. The machines begin then to radiate a yellow light and you can hear angel-like voices coming quietly from the speakers, praising your name.)
I've seen Slashdot repeat itself before, but I think that this is the first time that a single story truly managed to duplicate twoother stories in one shot -- one of which is still on the front page!:)
I want y'all to know that I fully expect this incredible thoroughness to continue.
Slashdot Mirror
You are correct, different colors of light have different wavelengths. I left out the words "shorter than." The actual unit used, IIRC, is slightly inside the infrared spectrum. The DVI documentation clarifies.
and the biggest advantage of PDF:
I'm sure there are other differences, but even many people I know simply use pdfLaTeX now to generate PDFs from LaTeX markup instead of the old DVIs, so presumably even they see an advantage in Adobe's format. When it comes down to it, I suspect that PDF's font embedding, better handling of other embedded content, and on top of that simply its pervasiveness are the biggest factors. Anyone is welcome to correct me on any of this, however.
Taligent became reborn as the OO C++ frameworks that power (among other things) VisualAge, and so has been extensively used by OS/2 and AIX developers. They're actually very nice frameworks, unmatched by anything except OpenStep (although Java is gradually improving to that point). I believe IBM and Apple were also able to reuse some of Taligent's technology in the development of OpenDoc. So while it never really materialized into a full operating system, massive portions of Taligent did live on.
Kaleida, meanwhile, was not system software. Its function was almost identical to that of Macromedia Director. Furthermore, Kaleida was finished, and released as a product called ScriptX. The only problem was that, by that time, Macromedia Director had been out long enough to saturate the market, leading ScriptX to a quick and untimely demise as it found no buyers.
Your overall point's fine, but I thought it worth pointing out that two of those three technologies lived on well after their death and one was not system software.
While I can't vouch for the iPod or iTunes (sadly), I can make a comment about QuickTime: one group of developers has finally written an Ogg QT plugin that allows you to use Vorbis audio in QuickTime just like everything else. That's definitely a step in the right direction. It should allow you to play Oggs from within QT. If iTunes can play any QT-supported audio codec (and quite frankly I simply cannot remember whether or not it relies on QuickTime; sorry), then you now have the ability to play Oggs from within iTunes if you wish.
IIRC, BeOS's video drivers were in user space, and seeing as that was a media OS, I'm assuming that there's some merit to keeping such drivers out of the kernel. The trick more likely has to do with the fact that Linux lacks real-time scheduling and the extremely low-cost context switches that were absolutely essential on an OS so pervasively threaded as Be, so I honestly do not know if such a solution would be practical in Linux without a major rewrite of the scheduler, etc.
Off topic, I don't care. Does Dylan really offer anything over Common LISP? (Other than an arguably more readable syntax.) It never really seemed to for me, for whatever it's worth, but then it died so quickly after being born I never looked at it very seriously.
What I don't get is that Be figured out how to integrate this into a "legacy" hierarchial file system back in 1995 with folders where you'd save search criteria with the folder and they'd update themselves constantly with little to no overhead. For example, I could attach the search criteria "any file whose MIME type is 'text/html'" and the folder would always contain a list of every HTML file on my hard disk. And the kicker was that there was essentially no speed penalty. It was truly just an awsome setup, and a functionality I haven't seen on any other OS. I can't imagine that this would be terribly difficult to implement in Linux, and the adition of a feature like this would definitely be at least close to a "killer feature" compared to Windows. Granted, a better solution ultimately would probably be to design a new OS around data bags like what the Newton did, but the BFS solution seems like it makes sense in the near term...
Bad comparison; a better one would be to point out that the U.S. only has one currency. Way back when, the United States of America was united not by the Constitution, but by the Articles of Confederation, which was actually similar in many respects to the EU, things were quite different. In the single-house Congress, each state got one vote, unanimous consent was required to pass a law, and each state could (and did) coin its own currency, raise its own armies, and so on. As the Europeans have figured out, this doesn't work too well, so when the Articles of Confederation was replaced with the Constitution of the United States of America, the states gave up a number of rights, including the ability to coin their own currencies. So if you want to compare the EU's situation to something, compare it to the American states forming their own union and adopting a common currency, as opposed to North America now.
(As a side note, I don't think the Euro is such a wise idea for Europe. The states had the benefit of having far less economic unbalance at the time it decided to unify their currencies than Europe does right now, which is why countries such as England and Denmark that already have stable currencies and strong economies are loathe to join. This ends up leaving the Euro as the currency of those countries with weaker economies, and then the odd exception of Germany, which is making quick strides to join the crowd via stagflation.)
And so I suppose you prefer the old-fashioned centralized girlfriends where everyone connects directly to the main port?
While I definitely understand why using OS X may simply not be an option on older machines (which I always find amazing, since OPENSTEP ran on 33 MHz machines with 32 MB RAM just fine), Linux to me doesn't make any sense on any computer where Darwin is supported. With Darwin, you get the Unix, you get the X window support, but you also get drivers for a slew of peripherals, you get an easier install than any Linux, you get, by definition, essentially perfect support for the Apple motherboards, you get flawless HFS/HFS+ and AppleTalk support built-in, you get the ability to tie in easily with a NetInfo network, etc., and the requirements for Darwin are just as low as LinuxPPC, as near as I can tell. PPC Linux has in my mind shifted as the solution only where someone either insists on Linux for whatever reason, or where hardware is old enough that Darwin doesn't support it. (And with Darwin now supporting pretty much all PCI Macs, that area is dwindling.) I am being completely serious when I ask, is there any reason to use Linux over Darwin in a case where both are supported, other than you "just want to use Linux"? (I even run Linux under the latter excuse, and enjoy it, so this is not Linux bashing. It's just that if I wanted to set up a production server, there's no compelling reason I've found where Linux on my system greatly outpeforms Darwin, or the opposite, for that matter. They both are very similar except when I want to do things such as add a user, at which point on one system I use traditional Unix tools and on the other I use NetInfo.) I am sure there are some reasons to use Linux over Darwin; I just don't know what they are, which is why I'm asking.
Are you sure? How would you write a VGA emulator for Display PostScript? VGA essentially is just an area of memory where you use a bit blitter to draw. Display PostScript is, well, the display version of PostScript. So for every single bit you blitted onto the VGA memory area, you'd generate three DPS calls: a moveto, a setrgbcolor, and a drawpoint (sorry if that last one's off, I haven't used DPS in a looooong time). And that's not even taking into account the context switching. That's a HUGE amount of overhead, especially for a game.....
It's unlikely that Carmack designed the game itself on NEXTSTEP for a couple of reasons. First, NeXT's development tools really wouldn't have been any better than vi for a video game, since you wouldn't be able to use InterfaceBuilder for the interface (there is none) and ProjectBuilder really offers nothing for a program that is written in pure C and targetted at the command line. Further, he would have had to write the game for Display PostScript instead of the VGA commands he'd eventually want to use, forcing him to eventually rewrite the game engine, and wouldn't be able to optimise anything in assembler, since NEXTSTEP at that time was 68k only and the main target platform was DOS, an x86-based OS with really nothing at all in common with NEXTSTEP. It is, however, highly believable that things like the map makers were designed on NEXTSTEP, since there you would be able to make full use of Interface Builder and the NeXT FoundationKit/AppKit to quickly develop those tools and portability wasn't a concern.
If you were willing to be flexible with language, then I would take a very serious look at Borland's Delphi and Kylix. You'll get a toolkit that's been extremely well-tested and is thoroughly evolved, an extremely fast Pascal compiler that compiles thousand-line apps in literally seconds, a GUI builder, strong use of components, and literally a recompile with no changes to move from Windows to Linux. The one major problem I see here is that Kylix is still is more of a Linux than a Unix app. However, it and its executables ought to run fine really on pretty much any Unix that can run a Linux emulation layer (which includes Solaris, FreeBSD, and a few more). At any rate, if you could deal with the language (which is extremely pleasant to work in if you take the time to learn) and the potential Linux lock-in doesn't bother you tremendously, it would probably be the easiest and fastest development solution you could pursue.
I'm an American, not a German, but I thought that Germany's constitution forbade this. In particular, quoting from Article 5:
Or, in English:
Could someone who is German or who has studied German law please clarify?
I honestly don't know if it's a common belief, but I can tell you where I got the idea that it was. The Self project at Sun was the first language which truly fleshed out the idea of prototype-based languages, and their goal was clearly stated as designing the successor to OO. This sentiment is also stated in the beginning of the Newton's programming manual. If I can find it, I will post it here later. Whether this is merely the opinions of two prominent prototype-based languages or actually the general concensus in the research community, I have no idea. Personally, I'm still just waiting for someone to write a Unix implementation of Dylan that's as good as Functional Object's design for Windows.
(Disclaimer: I'm not an expert in prototype-based languages, but I'm fairly confident that the description below is quite accurate. Corrections are, therefore, very welcome.)
Languages such as this are called prototype-based languages, and are generally seen as the successor to object-oriented programming. However, no prototype-based language has, to my knowledge, actually gone anywhere (the one that got closest was NewtonScript, which would have made it if it weren't for the fact that the only place to use it was on the Apple Newton), so it's nice to see that at least one actually made some progress towards general acceptance.
For those unfamiliar with the concept of prototype-based programming languages, Bob (and all prototype-based languages, for that matter) are by their very nature single-inheritence. The general idea is to eliminate the whole idea of classes, and instead treat everything as an already existing object. You them modify those objects as necessary, and, if it's an object which is handy, you just make lots of copies of it. I find it much clearer to use the word "copy" instead of "initiate," as you did for this reason. For example, define anObject = new Foo() makes a new copy of the already existing Foo object, that will have all of the same values, etc. as Foo. You can then modify that copy by adding new values as necessary.
The reason I make this distinction is that one of the powerful things you can do in prototype-based languages is give an instance of a class a new function. For an example of when you'd want to do this, let's say you have a Canvas object in a GUI. Now, you, at some point, are going to need a screen, and the screen is going to need some variables and methods you don't need for a standard Canvas (for example, Screen.refreshRate or Screen.setColorDepth()). The normal way to do this in a regular OO language would probably be to declare a subclass of Canvas that had the extra functionality, and then to make a single instance of it, probably called theScreen. This is awkward, however, because, 99.9% of the time, you really only want one screen object, so making a subclass just for a single instance seems odd. In a prototype-based language, however, you'd simply "copy" a new instance of a Canvas (called theScreen) and add your extra methods and functionality specifically to that object. Ultimately decide that you really do need multiple screens? No problem! Probably you'll want to add a monitorNumber attribute directly to the already existing screen object, and then make a copy of that. Similar functionality is also present in Dylan, and, by extension, probably LISP's CLOS, although I'm honestly just not familiar enough to know.
I have to disagree with you a bit, because I thought the ending was entirely unambiguous. It seemed, to me as if Prot was in fact truly an alien and truly a friend of Robert, merely occupying his body for a bit to take care of it and get Robert some help. What he did, why he came back, had a lot to do with simply getting Robert to an appropriate facility. One there, he left it, knowing that it would be well cared-for in the ward. It fits in perfectly with the rest of the movie: it explains his knowledge of space, his ability to see things that are beyond human range, his ability to simply disappear for a few days, as well as why, even in deep hypnosis, he continued to insist he was Prot. (While I don't know for sure, it would strike me that in hypnosis it shouldn't have been that hard to unearth the other personality if it were a multiple personality disorder, although this may be more of a technical flaw than anything else.) It also explains why Bes went away, and explains Spacey's statement near the end that "...But now that you've found Robert, take care of him," or however that line went specifically.
Anyway, that was my interpretation, and I think it explains everything quite well. All you have to do is accept that Prot has ulterior (but nevertheless very good) motives, and there you are.
***NEWS UPDATE***
AP Online
AP 05/08 10:03 EST V055
Copyright 1995. All Rights Reserved.
NEW YORK
NEW YORK (AP) -- Big Bird, the famed friendly muppet of Sesame Street, has apparently gone on a rampage. Several muppets are known to be dead; including Prairie Dawn, Oscar the Grouch, and Bert -- long time friend, room-mate, and lover of Ernie. The bird is now reportedly holding Maria hostage in a five floor tenement near Hooper's Store. New York City Police SWAT teams have surrounded the building. Stay tuned for updates on this situation, as they occur.
***TRAGEDY IN NEW YORK CITY***
AP Online
AP 05/08 11:48 EST V743
Copyright 1995. All Rights Reserved.
NEW YORK
NEW YORK (AP) -- Big Bird, Sesame Street muppet, is reported dead at this hour after an hour-and-a-half hostage standoff with New York City Police. Kermit-The-Frog, Sesame Street Muppet on the scene, reports that as police stormed the five story tenement building where the bird was holding Maria hostage, Big Bird flew out an upper story window at them in a Kamikaze-like attack. Police SWAT units brought down the bird in a hail of automatic weapons fire. Dead are: Prairie Dawn, Oscar the Grouch, Bert, and Big Bird. There is no information available concerning Maria.
***NEWS UPDATE***
AP Online
AP 05/08 13:25 EST V246
Copyright 1995. All Rights Reserved.
NEW YORK
NEW YORK (AP) -- The Professor and his assistant, Beaker, muppet chemist, have reportedly found Angel Dust in Big Bird's feed. Big Bird was killed by Police earlier today after the bird went on a killing spree on Sesame Street. Maria, taken hostage during the ordeal, has survived unharmed. Three muppets were killed by the bird: Prairie Dawn (a friendly, pig-tailed muppet girl-child), Oscar the Grouch (a green garbage-can dwelling grumpy muppet) and Bert (the famous gay paper clip collector and pigeon friend). Authorities in the area report that the bad seed was purchased at the local Hooper's.
***NEWS UPDATE***
AP Online
AP 05/08 14:03 EDT V543
Copyright 1995. All Rights Reserved.
NEW YORK
NEW YORK (AP) -- Police are asking all motorists and humans to stay away from Sesame Street today as tensions are running high among the muppets. Many reportedly are outraged at the tainted food supply and at how the police handled the hostage situation. According to bystanders on the scene at the time, Mr. Snuffalupagus pleaded with police to be allowed to talk Big Bird down. Instead, police stormed the building with deadly results. Ernie is said to be despondent at the loss of his good buddy Bert.
***LATEST ON THE SESAME STREET CRISIS***
AP Online
AP 05/09 07:12 EST V927
Copyright 1995. All Rights Reserved.
NEW YORK
NEW YORK (AP) -- Violence erupted again on Sesame Street last night. As thousands of humans driving home took a sightseeing tour of the scene of Big Bird's deadly rampage, muppets became enraged. Hundreds of muppets, large and small, stalked the streets and surrounded humans in their cars. In at least one case, ten muppets pulled a motorist from his car and beat him with large, Styrofoam numbers. Police again arrived on the scene in force. At this hour, quiet is restored -- but tensions are very high.
***NEWS UPDATE***
AP Online
AP 05/09 08:43 EST V211
Copyright 1993. All Rights Reserved.
NEW YORK
NEW YORK (AP) -- Police and fire units have been called to Sesame Street. Reporters on the scene describe a nightmarish atmosphere. Furry muppets ranging in size from only inches to seven feet in height are looting Hooper's Store and firebombing the entire neighborhood. Orange and blue firelight is rising over many buildings. Cardboard backdrops, props, and storehouses full of numbers and letters are burning to the ground. Muppets are taunting firemen and police from windows high above the street with counting and alphabet songs. Stay tuned for late-breaking news updates, as they happen.
***LATE BREAKING NEWS UPDATE***
AP Online
AP 05/10 07:06 EST V482
Copyright 1993. All Rights Reserved.
NEW YORK
NEW YORK (AP) -- The morning fog has brought an eerie calm to Sesame Street after a night of rioting. Smoke rises from most buildings. On the street, lifeless, crumpled fur lies in mute testament of the night of wild outrage. Unknown numbers of muppets have died or been shot to death by Police in full riot gear. Here and there, a muppet--still animated with life--can be seen staring at the wreckage, or sweeping vacantly at the rubble. The Count was reported running down the street crying and yelling, "Ten, Ten Lifeless Muppet Bodies!" No humans were killed in the rioting, although several people reported rug-burns.
***NEWS FLASH***
AP Online
AP 05/11 11:35 EST V335
Copyright 1993. All Rights Reserved.
NEW YORK
NEW YORK (AP) -- Ernie, gay friend and roommate of the murdered muppet Bert, broke his two day silence today with a eulogy address at a mass muppet funeral.
The following is the complete transcript of his address:
I come here today to honor a man I loved. A man who was loved by millions throughout the world. Bert was a giant among muppets. His paper-clip collection was viewed with awe by many of the world's leaders. Just one year ago, as President Clinton campaigned on Sesame Street for the muppet vote, it was Bert who everyone turned to for advice. It was Bert who told us all, "anyone who can hang as many paper clips together as Bill Clinton, can certainly run the country." I also come here today to honor Big Bird. Bird was such a loving creature. His large size and bright color alarmed many who first met him, but it was his innocent and curious nature which taught us all to love him. Bird wouldn't have wanted us to remember him, or to memorialize him, with violence. All he ever wanted was for all creatures to "just get along" with each other. Big Bird has come to a bad end, friends, but is wasn't his fault. It was just some bad seed.
Given that spending literally about twenty seconds on the website revealed that their OS runs on a Palm (see http://www.linuxda.com/store/index.html), I think it's a reasonable assumption that you can also upload (albeit with shady legal reprecussions) the Palm OS onto their system. Thus, their handheld is Palm-compatible in the same way that my FreeBSD box is Windows-compatible: the hardware is identical.
While I am hardly an expert in German, I've studied it plenty enough to tell you that that, as far as I can tell, the joke does not mean a thing. There are some German words there (e.g. oder), but they're not put in the right place to mean anything. (Der Oder = "the or," for example. As in, opposed to "the and" or "the maybe.") So I'm about 95% confident that it's meaningless, just like pretty much anything Danny Kaye says that's in a foreign tongue. (He made that all up on the spot just based on the sounds of the language.)
For those of us in high school German who stared at your post blankly for several minutes trying to figure out what was going on, you could have at least put a tiny disclaimer...
Student 1: Hrm. That's not German. Must be Yiddish!
Student 2: I speak Yiddish. That's not it. It must be German.
Student 1: That's not German.
Student 3: You idiots, it's French!
Ah well.
I've run LinuxPPC R4 on my beige G3 (266 MHz, 64 MB RAM) before, and was extremely impressed. It was highly responsive, and seemed quite capable of saturating my 100 Mbit Ethernet connection when I was testing. I will admit that I eventually removed it because I missed the Mac OS interface too much, (and am about ready to move to OS X, so probably won't go back to Linux on my Mac), but I have only good things to say about Linux's PPC performance.
This isn't your fault, it's the fault of marketing drones, but the PPC really isn't a RISC CPU. It does take some RISC concepts--for example, it has many registers (32x32bit integer and 32x64bit floating point registers on all PPC CPUs, and 32x128bit vector registers on the G4), all instructions are 32-bits in length, the chip was designed to enable things like OOO from the start, etc. However, the PowerPC actually has just about as many instructions as an Intel chip. In fact, IBM redefined RISC to mean "Reduced Instruction Set Cycles" when they decided they wanted to advertise the PPC as a RISC chip. (See http://www3.sk.sympatico.ca/jbayko/cpu.html#Sec5Pa rt3 for details.) (As an example, the G4's AltiVec unit adds 160 new instructions for SIMD ops. It's really hard to call the G4 a RISC chip anymore even if you do consider the G3 one.) So I wouldn't exactly group the SPARC, which last time I checked doesn't have a multiply instruction in its standard spec, with the G4, which has an instruction that means "add these eight integers to those eight and then multiply them all by this constant" as a standard opcode.)
Think about it: Linux would no longer have to try to be both a server OS and a desktop OS (and an embedded OS too, now, it would seem), but could concentrate on being the best server OS out there. AtheOS, meanwhile, would become the best client. Where it makes sense, you share the source. (Heck, we've already got Konquerer running on AtheOS; if that's doable, then moving other stuff shouldn't be hard at all.) But we'd suddenly move from having just a single product that competes pretty well with Windows 2000 Server and kind of well with Windows 2000 Professional, and end up with two products: one which clobbers the Server (Linux), one which clobbers the Professional (AtheOS).
Maybe this isn't necessary just yet. I'm almost certain that, eventually, Linux can become just as easy, possibly easier, than Windows (though what sacrifices in power may be necessary to finally truly achieve that goal I don't know). But I still think this is something we should really look at.
(Tip: praising Steve Jobs also works well. The machines begin then to radiate a yellow light and you can hear angel-like voices coming quietly from the speakers, praising your name.)
I want y'all to know that I fully expect this incredible thoroughness to continue.