The first book of the "Legends of Dune" series has been released, called the "Butlerian Jihad." By Brian and Kevin J Anderson, both of whom wrote the Prequel to Dune (House *) books. There are going to be two more books in the Legends series, and I can't wait. Interesting stuff.
Whoops- sorry aobut the screwed up link. If you would like to see screenshots of NewDeal Office, check out this. NDO even comes with its own free VB-like IDE... everything your kid needs in one package. Programming, games, and more, with a very minimal time setting up and little HD space needed.
On this kind of machine, I'd just install DOS. I think you could get a lot more use out of it relative to the work you'd have to put in to getting Linux working on it much at all. I for one would skip Windows entirely. Win 3.1 is horrible on any hardware....but then again, maybe I am just being nostalgic because I cut my teeth as a youngster under DOS. I miss it somedays, feel like trading in this iBook for a 400 MHz or so PC for running DOS.:P There are still a fair amount of useful and fun software floating around for DOS. You could do MS-DOS 6.2 or FreeDOS. From what I've heard (but not positive) FreeDOS's comatability is pretty good.
Also, you could put OS/2 2.1 on it. If you're interested, I have the original box with manuals, along with 21 disks! Oh wait- that'll require a good 30 MB of HD space. But I did used to run it on a 486 sx/25 with 4 MB of RAM. It was a lot faster and more stable than Win 3.1 on the same machine.;)
If you're willing to spend some money, you could get Breadbox's New Deal Office- same core as Ensemble Lite, but with a lot of bundled apps. Pretty well done, runs on almost anything.
When it comes down to it, the stuff you are learning is the same as all the modern interfaces. The same concepts, not much different. Sure, USB is a bit faster than 56k serial/RS232. But in the end, having the *tools* it takes to learn the stuff you will in the are those that would enable you to learn what is behind USB and Firewire with relative ease. Hell, at least half the class (probably a lot more) will probably forget the information out of lack of it being useful down the line.
Eventually, USB and FireWire may be what is taught in that class, provided they stand the test of time like *MODEM and RS232 have.
In the Abyss, I also saw an underwater city of non-human intelligent life. We should get a probe down there- that must be real too!
How would you discard the PGP key in your ring? toss it in the garbage? It'd be pretty hard to actually destroy if it were made out of Ti with the kind of resources you have at your place.
My girl would rather have many things more than an expensive and gaudy diamond. We will be using an heirloom ring (yes, with diamonds), and spending the money on something we can enjoy a good deal more. While rare, there are women who aren't just interested in shiny junk.
Eiffel isn't my bag either. I've not used it for any real projects, so I don't think I could make any real judgments and certainly no deep thought on the subject. First impressions are that it's a bit wordy.
C-man could likely tell you that you can emulate OO in C quite easily. Nowhere near as natural as a language which inherently supports it (and makes your life easier when you want to use it), but C can do OO.
...and some of us hate C because it is the embodiment of excessive syntax, confusing idioms, and a notorious inease of use. Not all languages are easier to program at the expense of power. I can't say that I'm a huge fan of Pascal (not touched it in years), but C is pretty far down on the list of languages if I had to use only one for the rest of my life.
C has its place, to be sure. So does Pascal. Neither have much of a place in my toolbox for what I do.
Apple may have lost you as a programmer, and you seem to think that is a huge loss on Apple's part. What killer app did you bring to another platform that they missed out on?
Pascal is junk. Free software forever.
RTFA. The port is of GNU Pascal. Which is free software. It's sad to see so many oSs h4k3rz associate C so closeley with Free software that there is no room for any other languages.
Kylix uses Qt. Sure, Kylix as a way of thinking is in competition with Qt/C++, but as far as Qt and TrollTech is concerned, a Kylix user is a Qt user. And yes, Qt works directly on OS X with native-looking windows and widgets- which makes one wonder why Borland hasn't ported Kylix to OS X yet.
Hit that one on the head. Pascal was the first language I learned after BASIC (on the Radio Shack PC-3 portable computer) on an XT. It was a pretty sweet system. Being 12, I didn't pay for it, I inherited the compiler and the machine from an uncle who was getting a super sweet and new 386. Along with it I also got Borland Turbo Prolog- that was even better! I could make programs with windows and widgets, even though they were all DOS text-based (curses-like) widgets. Mighty sweet. But Pascal, how so many of us loved thee!
Some people like Pascal. Such is life. I usually ask myself why people would want to do anything in C when there are better options available. But then I know some people like C, for some reason.
I've wondered this myself, being primarily an OS X user who at one time wanted to try out Delphi/Kylix. Sure, I have an x86/Linux box, but I don't use it nearly as much as the iBook.
Afterall, Qt supports OS X- what else would a port of Kylix to OS X require? It'd be especially cool to have a native-looking Kylux using the OS X Qt (rather than the X11/Qt that also runs on OS X).
Drop JBuilder for OS X? I thought JBuilder was pure-Java- I remember running it on OS X before it supported OS X and had an OS X-specific installer.
Python is compiled to bytecode, but from what I've read, Perl is not. Perl 6 will be, however. I was under the impression that from perl code, an AST was generated, and the AST was them interpreted (executed). But then again, I could be wrong, I'm no perl intenals hacker.
Squeak itself not slow
on
Opencroquet
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· Score: 5, Informative
A lot of people are extrapolating from the statement about speed sans a 3D accelerator that Squeak itself is slow. Not the case. Squeak isn't interpreted, it's bytecode compiled, and the VM is quite well done. I regularily run Squeak on machines which, by today's standards are pretty slow- 75 MHz MIPS, 206 MHz StrongARM, and a 350 MHz K6-2. To me, these machines are still pretty fast and useful, Squeak making them even more so.
Squeak has two different GUI systems which you can use- Morphic and MVC. MVC is the "original WIMP," the first ever GUI system. It has deviated a bit from what came out of Xerox almost 30 years ago, but it has the same API and most of the same source code. It has Mac-like window decorations instead of the BeOS-like tabs now a days. MVC is a lot faster than Morphic for a number of reasons. It is what I will use on the slowest of the machines I use for Squeak (75 MHz). A number of GUI APIs have been modeled after MVC over the years, including Swing (MVC is much faster, don't get me wrong!) and Cocoa AppKit.
Morphic is what most folks use when they are running Squeak. It has a really cool programming model- applications can be built programmatically, with a GUI builder, or by directly manipulating the Morphs (graphical objects). A common example is the Rolodex- you can make on in Squeak without writing a line of code, just drag some Morphs around, make a few menu decisions, and there you go.
Morphic is slower than MVC, but you get what you pay for (computationally!). It is still quite usably fast on a 350 MHz K6-2 (~300 MHz PII), however.
I have not tried Croquet yet. There has been a lot of talk on the Squeak list about it, but in all honesty, 3D worlds aren't really my thing. People have been talking about the 90 MB download- most of that is media. A standard Squeak download is around 10-15 MB for the latest version, including a lot of useful classes and applications. Out-of-box memory footprint is 20 MB or so, but if you trim what you don't need, you can easily end up with a 1-3 MB image and a 2-4 MB memory footprint. This ain't Java, folks.
I am a bit of an oddity, even within the Squeak community. I use Squeak *as* my OS, my computing environment. One could think of it rather like Emacs- a lot of applications [1] are written for it, and it is readily modifiable, so that the environment works like you want it to. Don't like the way Squeak manages windows? Make a couple small changes to a few small methods. I was once a Linux user trying to do just this to my environment, making tweaks to the WM, and it was way more work than it should be. You can imagine how excited I was when I came across Squeak- the entire system is written in Smalltalk, making changes pretty easy, no matter what part of the system they affect.
[1] There are a number of applications written in Squeak. Most new apps are written for Morphic (rather than the older MVC). These apps include: two different forms of handwriting/gesture recognition, a simple web browser, a pretty good email client (although POP only), a couple IRC clients, a bunch of games, an vt100 terminal for use as an xterm or telnet client, all of the programming tools for writing Smalltalk, and more.
Re:prototype?
on
Opencroquet
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· Score: 5, Informative
A correction to the original post:
Squeak isn't an interpreted language like Perl or Basic (usually) is. Squeak is compiled, but to bytecode. The bytecode is then JIT-compiled or interpreted. Never is the code itself interpreted.
Re:it's a stretch
on
Opencroquet
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· Score: 3, Informative
Yes and no. Squeak itself is an operating system which is usually hosted on another OS, like Unix or Windows. However, it is possible for it to run on the bare metal, and there has been some work towards that end. You can even write new hardware drivers in Smalltalk. This is x86 only so far- most people are content to run it ontop of another OS for now, so there hasn't been a huge push towards getting rid of the inferior host OSes quite yet.
Indeed- Neither Best Buy nor Media Play give you a selection of good world music, let alone one of local music (outside a token group or two, unless you have a strong local music scnene)
Why do I get the feeling that so many of these requests are people simply looking for 'free as in beer' solutions?
Because for a lot of people, that is the chief benefit of Free/Open Source software. The vast majority of folks do not choose software based mostly on an abstract idea of morality, but on some other factors, depending on the situation. When it's a group with little money, a package which costs no money to use seems pretty logical. For others, a package which provides the most efficient working environment as possible (no matter how Free, Open, or expensive it is) is the most important thing.
The whole point of free software is to share and give something back to the community.
What makes the post's organization not part of the community? Why are they outside of it, not deserving to benefit from the sharing?
I don't know about you, but I largely write my open software because I enjoy a) programming and b) using the end product. I don't do it because I expect someone else to write some software for me down the line in return. Likewise, there are plenty of folks who don't know how to code- or cannot/willnot learn- or simply don't have the time. The rather suboptimal software development systems which are the norm on the available popular platforms today do not encourage people new to programming to take it up to try making a few tweaks or a small script here or there.
What kind of "Free Software" attitude is: "You say you want a program that does x, y, and z? Write it your self! Sure, a couple such packages exist already, but you gotta pay to play, buddy!"
Um, but Lisp has more than one data type. No Lisp dialect or implementation to my knowledge has only one data type. You at least have to have lambdas, strings, symbols, and numbers.
But yeah, Tcl is largely a reinvention of Lisp with uglier syntax and (usually) poorer performance for a 1-to-1 translation. Sure, you lose the parens, but you get curly braces and dollar signs in return. eww. But all the same, I don't think there is anything wrong with Tcl stealing those ideas- I'd rather have Tcl implement good ideas from Lisp than bad ideas from C.
If you can't wrap your head around the concept of passing arguments by reference, perhaps you've been doing VB for too long.:P It's not all that difficult of a concept, but if you're used to doing things the VB way and have never ventured outside of it, I could see how you could get stuck on it.
Simplicity of syntax is great for academics. Good libraries and good support for various programming paradigms is good for life outside the ivory tower.
Then it's a good thing that Tcl sports a fair amount of decent libraries.
There are plenty of people who do not think that Tcl is the epitome of simple syntax- myself included. It includes syntax elements which I think are unnecesary, and there are certainly languages with simpler syntaxes which also support a good number of libraries.
Tcl may be the only "pure scripting" language" which has won the ACM/SS. By a "pure scripting language" I mean a language which is limited for the most part to scripting and often not used for much else. In contrast, Smalltalk, a language which can be used for scripting, embedding, as well as full-blown client and server side application development has also won the award. (not to dis Tcl, it definately has its uses!)
Slashdot Mirror
A stoneburner is what they call a nuke. Or I was always under that impression.
The first book of the "Legends of Dune" series has been released, called the "Butlerian Jihad." By Brian and Kevin J Anderson, both of whom wrote the Prequel to Dune (House *) books. There are going to be two more books in the Legends series, and I can't wait. Interesting stuff.
Whoops- sorry aobut the screwed up link. If you would like to see screenshots of NewDeal Office, check out this. NDO even comes with its own free VB-like IDE... everything your kid needs in one package. Programming, games, and more, with a very minimal time setting up and little HD space needed.
On this kind of machine, I'd just install DOS. I think you could get a lot more use out of it relative to the work you'd have to put in to getting Linux working on it much at all. I for one would skip Windows entirely. Win 3.1 is horrible on any hardware. ...but then again, maybe I am just being nostalgic because I cut my teeth as a youngster under DOS. I miss it somedays, feel like trading in this iBook for a 400 MHz or so PC for running DOS. :P There are still a fair amount of useful and fun software floating around for DOS. You could do MS-DOS 6.2 or FreeDOS. From what I've heard (but not positive) FreeDOS's comatability is pretty good.
;)
:) On the same download page, you can get an Infocom games interpreter as well! Best thing in the world for a 6-yo- helluva lot better than starting him on Doom!
Also, you could put OS/2 2.1 on it. If you're interested, I have the original box with manuals, along with 21 disks! Oh wait- that'll require a good 30 MB of HD space. But I did used to run it on a 486 sx/25 with 4 MB of RAM. It was a lot faster and more stable than Win 3.1 on the same machine.
GEOS is quite nice. Again, ran it on a 386 SX and 486 SX with 4 MB of RAM. Ran pretty well. You can get a lot of software for it, relatively at least. Check out BreadBox. You can get web browsers, irc and AIM clients, games, etc. Download GeoWorks Ensemble for FREE! Quite nice- choose between a Win95 or Motif look!
If you're willing to spend some money, you could get Breadbox's New Deal Office- same core as Ensemble Lite, but with a lot of bundled apps. Pretty well done, runs on almost anything.
You could also run... MINIX!
When it comes down to it, the stuff you are learning is the same as all the modern interfaces. The same concepts, not much different. Sure, USB is a bit faster than 56k serial/RS232. But in the end, having the *tools* it takes to learn the stuff you will in the are those that would enable you to learn what is behind USB and Firewire with relative ease. Hell, at least half the class (probably a lot more) will probably forget the information out of lack of it being useful down the line.
Eventually, USB and FireWire may be what is taught in that class, provided they stand the test of time like *MODEM and RS232 have.
In the Abyss, I also saw an underwater city of non-human intelligent life. We should get a probe down there- that must be real too!
How would you discard the PGP key in your ring? toss it in the garbage? It'd be pretty hard to actually destroy if it were made out of Ti with the kind of resources you have at your place.
gayest. hrmm, yeah.
why is it that homophobetards always pick the darndest time to call something gay? Oh, this dude is going to marry a women- how gay!
My girl would rather have many things more than an expensive and gaudy diamond. We will be using an heirloom ring (yes, with diamonds), and spending the money on something we can enjoy a good deal more. While rare, there are women who aren't just interested in shiny junk.
Eiffel isn't my bag either. I've not used it for any real projects, so I don't think I could make any real judgments and certainly no deep thought on the subject. First impressions are that it's a bit wordy.
Are you an Eiffel user?
C-man could likely tell you that you can emulate OO in C quite easily. Nowhere near as natural as a language which inherently supports it (and makes your life easier when you want to use it), but C can do OO.
(IMHO, OO in perl is really quite cool.)
...and some of us hate C because it is the embodiment of excessive syntax, confusing idioms, and a notorious inease of use. Not all languages are easier to program at the expense of power. I can't say that I'm a huge fan of Pascal (not touched it in years), but C is pretty far down on the list of languages if I had to use only one for the rest of my life.
C has its place, to be sure. So does Pascal. Neither have much of a place in my toolbox for what I do.
Apple may have lost you as a programmer, and you seem to think that is a huge loss on Apple's part. What killer app did you bring to another platform that they missed out on?
Pascal is junk. Free software forever.
RTFA. The port is of GNU Pascal. Which is free software. It's sad to see so many oSs h4k3rz associate C so closeley with Free software that there is no room for any other languages.
What does C do that Pascal doesn't?
Kylix uses Qt. Sure, Kylix as a way of thinking is in competition with Qt/C++, but as far as Qt and TrollTech is concerned, a Kylix user is a Qt user. And yes, Qt works directly on OS X with native-looking windows and widgets- which makes one wonder why Borland hasn't ported Kylix to OS X yet.
Hit that one on the head. Pascal was the first language I learned after BASIC (on the Radio Shack PC-3 portable computer) on an XT. It was a pretty sweet system. Being 12, I didn't pay for it, I inherited the compiler and the machine from an uncle who was getting a super sweet and new 386. Along with it I also got Borland Turbo Prolog- that was even better! I could make programs with windows and widgets, even though they were all DOS text-based (curses-like) widgets. Mighty sweet. But Pascal, how so many of us loved thee!
Some people like Pascal. Such is life. I usually ask myself why people would want to do anything in C when there are better options available. But then I know some people like C, for some reason.
I've wondered this myself, being primarily an OS X user who at one time wanted to try out Delphi/Kylix. Sure, I have an x86/Linux box, but I don't use it nearly as much as the iBook.
Afterall, Qt supports OS X- what else would a port of Kylix to OS X require? It'd be especially cool to have a native-looking Kylux using the OS X Qt (rather than the X11/Qt that also runs on OS X).
Drop JBuilder for OS X? I thought JBuilder was pure-Java- I remember running it on OS X before it supported OS X and had an OS X-specific installer.
Python is compiled to bytecode, but from what I've read, Perl is not. Perl 6 will be, however. I was under the impression that from perl code, an AST was generated, and the AST was them interpreted (executed). But then again, I could be wrong, I'm no perl intenals hacker.
A lot of people are extrapolating from the statement about speed sans a 3D accelerator that Squeak itself is slow. Not the case. Squeak isn't interpreted, it's bytecode compiled, and the VM is quite well done. I regularily run Squeak on machines which, by today's standards are pretty slow- 75 MHz MIPS, 206 MHz StrongARM, and a 350 MHz K6-2. To me, these machines are still pretty fast and useful, Squeak making them even more so.
Squeak has two different GUI systems which you can use- Morphic and MVC. MVC is the "original WIMP," the first ever GUI system. It has deviated a bit from what came out of Xerox almost 30 years ago, but it has the same API and most of the same source code. It has Mac-like window decorations instead of the BeOS-like tabs now a days. MVC is a lot faster than Morphic for a number of reasons. It is what I will use on the slowest of the machines I use for Squeak (75 MHz). A number of GUI APIs have been modeled after MVC over the years, including Swing (MVC is much faster, don't get me wrong!) and Cocoa AppKit.
Morphic is what most folks use when they are running Squeak. It has a really cool programming model- applications can be built programmatically, with a GUI builder, or by directly manipulating the Morphs (graphical objects). A common example is the Rolodex- you can make on in Squeak without writing a line of code, just drag some Morphs around, make a few menu decisions, and there you go.
Morphic is slower than MVC, but you get what you pay for (computationally!). It is still quite usably fast on a 350 MHz K6-2 (~300 MHz PII), however.
I have not tried Croquet yet. There has been a lot of talk on the Squeak list about it, but in all honesty, 3D worlds aren't really my thing. People have been talking about the 90 MB download- most of that is media. A standard Squeak download is around 10-15 MB for the latest version, including a lot of useful classes and applications. Out-of-box memory footprint is 20 MB or so, but if you trim what you don't need, you can easily end up with a 1-3 MB image and a 2-4 MB memory footprint. This ain't Java, folks.
I am a bit of an oddity, even within the Squeak community. I use Squeak *as* my OS, my computing environment. One could think of it rather like Emacs- a lot of applications [1] are written for it, and it is readily modifiable, so that the environment works like you want it to. Don't like the way Squeak manages windows? Make a couple small changes to a few small methods. I was once a Linux user trying to do just this to my environment, making tweaks to the WM, and it was way more work than it should be. You can imagine how excited I was when I came across Squeak- the entire system is written in Smalltalk, making changes pretty easy, no matter what part of the system they affect.
[1] There are a number of applications written in Squeak. Most new apps are written for Morphic (rather than the older MVC). These apps include: two different forms of handwriting/gesture recognition, a simple web browser, a pretty good email client (although POP only), a couple IRC clients, a bunch of games, an vt100 terminal for use as an xterm or telnet client, all of the programming tools for writing Smalltalk, and more.
A correction to the original post:
Squeak isn't an interpreted language like Perl or Basic (usually) is. Squeak is compiled, but to bytecode. The bytecode is then JIT-compiled or interpreted. Never is the code itself interpreted.
Yes and no. Squeak itself is an operating system which is usually hosted on another OS, like Unix or Windows. However, it is possible for it to run on the bare metal, and there has been some work towards that end. You can even write new hardware drivers in Smalltalk. This is x86 only so far- most people are content to run it ontop of another OS for now, so there hasn't been a huge push towards getting rid of the inferior host OSes quite yet.
Indeed- Neither Best Buy nor Media Play give you a selection of good world music, let alone one of local music (outside a token group or two, unless you have a strong local music scnene)
Why do I get the feeling that so many of these requests are people simply looking for 'free as in beer' solutions?
Because for a lot of people, that is the chief benefit of Free/Open Source software. The vast majority of folks do not choose software based mostly on an abstract idea of morality, but on some other factors, depending on the situation. When it's a group with little money, a package which costs no money to use seems pretty logical. For others, a package which provides the most efficient working environment as possible (no matter how Free, Open, or expensive it is) is the most important thing.
The whole point of free software is to share and give something back to the community.
What makes the post's organization not part of the community? Why are they outside of it, not deserving to benefit from the sharing?
I don't know about you, but I largely write my open software because I enjoy a) programming and b) using the end product. I don't do it because I expect someone else to write some software for me down the line in return. Likewise, there are plenty of folks who don't know how to code- or cannot/willnot learn- or simply don't have the time. The rather suboptimal software development systems which are the norm on the available popular platforms today do not encourage people new to programming to take it up to try making a few tweaks or a small script here or there.
What kind of "Free Software" attitude is:
"You say you want a program that does x, y, and z? Write it your self! Sure, a couple such packages exist already, but you gotta pay to play, buddy!"
Um, but Lisp has more than one data type. No Lisp dialect or implementation to my knowledge has only one data type. You at least have to have lambdas, strings, symbols, and numbers.
But yeah, Tcl is largely a reinvention of Lisp with uglier syntax and (usually) poorer performance for a 1-to-1 translation. Sure, you lose the parens, but you get curly braces and dollar signs in return. eww. But all the same, I don't think there is anything wrong with Tcl stealing those ideas- I'd rather have Tcl implement good ideas from Lisp than bad ideas from C.
If you can't wrap your head around the concept of passing arguments by reference, perhaps you've been doing VB for too long. :P It's not all that difficult of a concept, but if you're used to doing things the VB way and have never ventured outside of it, I could see how you could get stuck on it.
Simplicity of syntax is great for academics. Good libraries and good support for various programming paradigms is good for life outside the ivory tower.
Then it's a good thing that Tcl sports a fair amount of decent libraries.
There are plenty of people who do not think that Tcl is the epitome of simple syntax- myself included. It includes syntax elements which I think are unnecesary, and there are certainly languages with simpler syntaxes which also support a good number of libraries.
What big gap in functionality do you see in Tcl?
Tcl may be the only "pure scripting" language" which has won the ACM/SS. By a "pure scripting language" I mean a language which is limited for the most part to scripting and often not used for much else. In contrast, Smalltalk, a language which can be used for scripting, embedding, as well as full-blown client and server side application development has also won the award. (not to dis Tcl, it definately has its uses!)