My understanding is that we can thank MS for the single input queue--and by the time MS dumped it, there was a large pile of software that expected it. I'll agree that it's broken, but to some extent IBM was stuck with it, and Warp 4 provides a way (admittedly requiring human intervention) to unwedge it.
The page icons are quite cute, though I was disappointed in one respect...I went to www.microsoft.com, and the page icon wasn't Bill Gates as Borg. Can I correct this?
In the US, at least, once you're a "public figure," you're fair game, and it's almost impossible for a "public figure" to win any sort of slander or libel suit.
Um, the strict stack nature of C keeps it from allowing a functional programming style in the same manner as Lisp. Just to prove it to yourself, you might try writing a function that takes one argument and returns a function of one argument that returns the product of its argument and the argument passed to the first function.
Your brain only hurts because it hurt a lot as a child when you had "My Dear Aunt Sally" and infix notation drilled into it, so much so that alternatives seem unnatural. With prefix (or postfix; FORTH chooses that alternative) notation, there's none of this operator precedence stuff to worry about; it's all simple and straightforward. Give it a chance.
I wouldn't call C typing strict. While C does require declarations for variables, there are sufficiently common tricks for subverting the type system that I would say that C is "sleazily typed."
Ah. Rolls Royce isn't a better car, otherwise more people would use it, right?
Of course, Linux is free, so the reason more people don't use it isn't the same as the reason more people don't drive Ferraris or Mercedes Benz...the average person doesn't want to mess around with his or her computer any more than he or she wants to have to do his or her own car repairs, and thus if, thanks to MS's restrictive OEM licenses, you have to build your own computer to run Linux and have to install it yourself and, thanks to the applications barrier to entry, have to go looking for Linux applications, the average person won't bother, but will instead be an obedient consumer and use Windows.
Earth to AC: Read The Fine Court Decision. MS has a monopoly, and can and does use it to crush competition.
I do support intellectual expressions of our culture...but I presume what you mean by that is that we have the duty to let people take our money so that they can give it to someone else in support of intellectual expressions of our culture. I disagree with that claim utterly.
What on earth did you do with your home computer to make the heat sink fall off your graphics card? (Or was it not attached properly to begin with?) I'm sorry, but it looks to me as though Tom's Hardware was pretty desperate to make any sort of anti-AMD point it could (BTW, it was running Intel ads on its site back when the 2 GHz P4 came out)--rather like Car and Driver running an exposé of what happens to your car if you take the fan and radiator off and then go drag racing. Duh...
Just got through setting up OS/2 (Warp 4 w/Convenience Pack) and Linux on my new machine (Athlon XP 1500, 1 Gbyte PC2100 DDR, All in Wonder Radeon). Works nicely, and if IBM would port WPS over to run atop X, I'd be that much happier.
It's good in parts. I do like the bit about not retaliating against OEMs who offer multiple OSs...but the part about the revealing of interfaces has the drawback of "RAND", i.e. it can be used against Open Source. ("You're going to give the program away, how can you make a 'business case' for us disclosing the MS Mumble interface to you?" Then there are the "reasonable fees"...)
Perhaps this is one place where Bill Clinton could provide an actual service to humanity--take documents like this proposed settlement to him and ask how he'd try to weasel out of them.:-)
Quake ]/[ is THE standard for PC game benchmarks. John Carmack's engines are generally regarded as the best and fastest in the industry...
I'm curious about this. From reading the various hardware web sites, it looks like Quake also makes Intel CPUs look good in comparison with AMD's CPUs. Part of this gap may have been narrowed by the Athlon XP's addition of the SSE instruction set, but has anyone analyzed Quake to see just why it works so much better in terms of fps on Intel CPUs than on Athlons? (I ask because especially with the XP debut, the majority of benchmarks appear to run faster on the Athlon.)
Remember the compiler whose authors hacked it so that it would recognize the Dhrystone benchmark and perform optimizations that happened to work for Dhrystone but which couldn't be applied in general? (It's mentioned in Hennesy and Patterson, if memory serves.) This is the same sort of thing--doing something special for the benchmark that can't be done in general. It makes the benchmark figures misleading for their supposed purpose. Based on other messages already posted, this case is in fact worse than the compiler hack, because the compiler hack resulted in a program that would at least generate the expected output; the driver hack, according to the referenced pages on other posts, degrades the display quality to get speed. If I had bought that graphics card, heck yes, I'd be upset.
That will put us in a perpetual game of catch-up, and MS has played that one before. If MS gets its way with apps sitting on the net and automated updates, it will be that much easier to propagate new versions designed to break Linux apps...and modifying code with the sole purpose of breaking competitors' software is a famous MS technique as well.
Lifespan? Hmmm. Where biological life is concerned, we're so far stuck with what we have. (If you think that two decades of backwards compatibility in the 80x86 has resulted in a barnacle-encrusted crufty system, how about two or three billion years of backwards compatibility for life on earth?:-) I don't see any a priori constraints that would make us design in things like those little cellular fuses, telomeres.
As for gymnasiums, I can sympathize with future autonomous systems..."Aw, do I have to go to the health club and defragment?"
I disagree in most regards with one of my Senators (Tom Harkin, D-Iowa), but I have to respect him for, as nearly as I can tell, individually responding to the mail I send him--even email. Admittedly, I have no way of knowing whether he or an aide actually wrote the letter, but it's definitely from a human who paid attention to what I wrote.
My favorite part of the newsforge article was the bit about Senator Hollings replying to all questions with "I'm not qualified to address that issue." Maybe it's just me, but I don't think I'd try to make something the law of the land if I didn't understand it myself.
You yourself point out one of the reasons: it's to MS's advantage to provide a moving target, precisely to keep not only other products, but older versions of their own product--once they're paid for, they're as bad as competition--from reading them.
No, not only the Minnesota State Fair. This year at the Iowa State Fair, there was, in addition to the traditional butter cow, a butter John Wayne. (In the past there's been a butter Elvis and a butter Garth Brooks.) I hope that Ms. Duffy Lyon, the sculptress who does the Iowa butter sculpture, will be a bit more high tech next year.
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My understanding is that we can thank MS for the single input queue--and by the time MS dumped it, there was a large pile of software that expected it. I'll agree that it's broken, but to some extent IBM was stuck with it, and Warp 4 provides a way (admittedly requiring human intervention) to unwedge it.
In any case, I would hope the matter is settled, and a proper port of mplayer done.
The page icons are quite cute, though I was disappointed in one respect...I went to www.microsoft.com, and the page icon wasn't Bill Gates as Borg. Can I correct this?
In the US, at least, once you're a "public figure," you're fair game, and it's almost impossible for a "public figure" to win any sort of slander or libel suit.
Um, the strict stack nature of C keeps it from allowing a functional programming style in the same manner as Lisp. Just to prove it to yourself, you might try writing a function that takes one argument and returns a function of one argument that returns the product of its argument and the argument passed to the first function.
Your brain only hurts because it hurt a lot as a child when you had "My Dear Aunt Sally" and infix notation drilled into it, so much so that alternatives seem unnatural. With prefix (or postfix; FORTH chooses that alternative) notation, there's none of this operator precedence stuff to worry about; it's all simple and straightforward. Give it a chance.
I wouldn't call C typing strict. While C does require declarations for variables, there are sufficiently common tricks for subverting the type system that I would say that C is "sleazily typed."
You might want to look at icrontic.com or at this blurb about how to use trace tape to unlock the Athlon XP. I know I saw the latter something like a week before I saw the Tom's Hardware article.
Of course, Linux is free, so the reason more people don't use it isn't the same as the reason more people don't drive Ferraris or Mercedes Benz...the average person doesn't want to mess around with his or her computer any more than he or she wants to have to do his or her own car repairs, and thus if, thanks to MS's restrictive OEM licenses, you have to build your own computer to run Linux and have to install it yourself and, thanks to the applications barrier to entry, have to go looking for Linux applications, the average person won't bother, but will instead be an obedient consumer and use Windows.
Earth to AC: Read The Fine Court Decision. MS has a monopoly, and can and does use it to crush competition.
I do support intellectual expressions of our culture...but I presume what you mean by that is that we have the duty to let people take our money so that they can give it to someone else in support of intellectual expressions of our culture. I disagree with that claim utterly.
I don't think those are mutually contradictory statements; I wouldn't characterize Britney Spears or the Spice Girls as artists.
What on earth did you do with your home computer to make the heat sink fall off your graphics card? (Or was it not attached properly to begin with?) I'm sorry, but it looks to me as though Tom's Hardware was pretty desperate to make any sort of anti-AMD point it could (BTW, it was running Intel ads on its site back when the 2 GHz P4 came out)--rather like Car and Driver running an exposé of what happens to your car if you take the fan and radiator off and then go drag racing. Duh...
Just got through setting up OS/2 (Warp 4 w/Convenience Pack) and Linux on my new machine (Athlon XP 1500, 1 Gbyte PC2100 DDR, All in Wonder Radeon). Works nicely, and if IBM would port WPS over to run atop X, I'd be that much happier.
Perhaps this is one place where Bill Clinton could provide an actual service to humanity--take documents like this proposed settlement to him and ask how he'd try to weasel out of them. :-)
Gee...if I'm ever found guilty of a crime, will I get to tell the court what penalties I find unacceptable?
You're right. "Putrid" doesn't even begin to describe it.
I'm curious about this. From reading the various hardware web sites, it looks like Quake also makes Intel CPUs look good in comparison with AMD's CPUs. Part of this gap may have been narrowed by the Athlon XP's addition of the SSE instruction set, but has anyone analyzed Quake to see just why it works so much better in terms of fps on Intel CPUs than on Athlons? (I ask because especially with the XP debut, the majority of benchmarks appear to run faster on the Athlon.)
Remember the compiler whose authors hacked it so that it would recognize the Dhrystone benchmark and perform optimizations that happened to work for Dhrystone but which couldn't be applied in general? (It's mentioned in Hennesy and Patterson, if memory serves.) This is the same sort of thing--doing something special for the benchmark that can't be done in general. It makes the benchmark figures misleading for their supposed purpose. Based on other messages already posted, this case is in fact worse than the compiler hack, because the compiler hack resulted in a program that would at least generate the expected output; the driver hack, according to the referenced pages on other posts, degrades the display quality to get speed. If I had bought that graphics card, heck yes, I'd be upset.
That will put us in a perpetual game of catch-up, and MS has played that one before. If MS gets its way with apps sitting on the net and automated updates, it will be that much easier to propagate new versions designed to break Linux apps...and modifying code with the sole purpose of breaking competitors' software is a famous MS technique as well.
As for gymnasiums, I can sympathize with future autonomous systems..."Aw, do I have to go to the health club and defragment?"
I disagree in most regards with one of my Senators (Tom Harkin, D-Iowa), but I have to respect him for, as nearly as I can tell, individually responding to the mail I send him--even email. Admittedly, I have no way of knowing whether he or an aide actually wrote the letter, but it's definitely from a human who paid attention to what I wrote.
My favorite part of the newsforge article was the bit about Senator Hollings replying to all questions with "I'm not qualified to address that issue." Maybe it's just me, but I don't think I'd try to make something the law of the land if I didn't understand it myself.
You yourself point out one of the reasons: it's to MS's advantage to provide a moving target, precisely to keep not only other products, but older versions of their own product--once they're paid for, they're as bad as competition--from reading them.
...will there be a version letting one write in the original Klingon?
No, not only the Minnesota State Fair. This year at the Iowa State Fair, there was, in addition to the traditional butter cow, a butter John Wayne. (In the past there's been a butter Elvis and a butter Garth Brooks.) I hope that Ms. Duffy Lyon, the sculptress who does the Iowa butter sculpture, will be a bit more high tech next year.
It's like they say; the street finds its own use for things.