How fucking stupid is that? It's bad enough that the UK government want to fingerprint everyone, but I think they'd draw the line at sticking an RFID in people too.
Besides, if ID cards and fingerprinting did come in, they could simply fingerprint the corpses to find out who they are. Perhaps they can list this as one the "advantages" of forcing through this white elephant.
It might be quick and painless if you're using XCode and Cocoa. I seriously doubt it would be quick and painless if a) you're not using XCode, b) your tool does not generate x86 code, c) it does not know what a fat binary is, d) your app is dependent on 3rd party PPC libraries, e) your app or 3rd party code is filled with endian issues.
You say it would be a huge coup, but don't forget your history here. OS/2 could also run DOS and Windows 3.1 apps. It even came in a red and blue flavour that allowed you to choose if you wanted Windows 3.1 built-in or to install your own copy. A fat lot of good it did them.
And for all you know, Microsoft might be working on a way to make OS X run under Windows. They're working on virtualization stuff and own Virtual PC so who's to say that OS X isn't something they could get going. From a licencing & administration point of view I expect it's much cheaper to buy a Dell, Longhorn & Virtual PC and run OS X on top than to buy a Mac with OS X and run a retail version of Longhorn on top, especially if the rest of your org is using PCs anyway.
It has a zoom slider. That and the map dragging implemented as a bunch of tiled images and repositioned with CSS tricks.
The wheel is the only "innovation" but as implemented it is horrible. When you wheel the mouse, the existing map is rescaled to produce a "zoom" effect and then the map is reloaded at the new scale. It's slow and it's clunky. It would be better to just zoom in without the fancy effects.
And pretty shitty it is too if you don't live in the US. It's still in beta of course, but so far it looks like a straight rip-off of the Google Maps servers, even down to the panning and zooming behaviour. I wonder how long before Google launch a patent lawsuit against MS.
The only innovation I can see is the mouse wheel, which is actually pretty sucky.
And I'm sure similar noises were made when Macs went from 68000 to PPC. Fact is that no company, be it Apple or 3rd parties wants to support two different architectures. Essentially since it doubles the QA and increases development costs.
Apple will be aiming to make PPC as obsolete in as short a space of time as possible. How they do that remains to be seen, but my guess is that the leap to x86 will "coincide" with a transitional version of OS X which will be declared the last to support PPC.
After that, it's just tough luck if you own a PPC. If that sounds far fetched, just look at the model for OS X right now. It's a moving target. If you're not running the latest and greatest version, your choice of new software dries up to practically zero once you're a few point releases behind. The same will happen with the PPC to x86 migration.
I recall some Disney animation package which had an 'onion skin' effect for drawing cels which was probably done the same way. The problem was that if you just want to set a pixel (e.g. to draw the points on a line), you have a lot of screwing around to achieve it - grabbing up to 5 words and setting the bit on each. Setting a single pixel meant dozens of instructions instead of a couple on any sane display system. Not only that, but you had to time it so your drawing didn't happen as the scan line passed through. The blitter helped for copying data but not a great deal.
To be honest I only dabbled in assembly and hardware programming (I produced a simple scrolling shooter game with it). I did most of my programming in C through gfx.library where the problem was even more pronounced. Trying to sync stuff to the display was the bane of my existence. I wrote a Dungeon Master like game and I swear that most of my time in compositing scenes was spent trying to stop bitplane flicker. My switch to PCs meant I never finished the game though I still have the disks.
Funnily enough, my dad found all my Amiga programming manuals recently. I must put them up on Ebay sometime.
Show me a machine circa 1985 that had *anything* like HAM's 4096 color capability without its restrictions.
That's not the point I was making. The original person as talking about technical issues and I chipped in with a few more. HAM was was moderately impressive to see, but the fact was that it was also nearly entirely useless as a technology since it was impossible to do anything with it except produce nice slideshows (assuming the pixels were mostly the same colour). DPaint had a moderately usable HAM mode, but other than that it was a waste of time. Some games also used copper tricks to switch the palette on the fly which could also get you a few more colours. Bitplanes were as bad since to set a single pixel meant changing up to five bits in entirely separate planes.
The Amiga was miles ahead of the competition, but it was just too blase about its lead. By the time of the A4000 / A1200, there was little that an Amiga could do (except pre-emptive multitasking) that a PC or Mac couldn't do. Even multi-tasking could be had on a PC with OS/2. Macs were outrageously expensive, but a PC fitted with a decent VGA & SoundBlaster card was comparable to an Amiga and much more modular with it. In fact in some ways PCs were gaining an obvious lead, such as TrueType fonts. DTP & Wordprocessing were killer apps at the time but the ones that existed on the Amiga were horrible. I remember using WordSmith for a bit which implemented its own font scaling, but it was no comparison against Word 2 or Word Perfect on the PC.
I don't know what the reason for the A4000 price hike was but it infuriated me. I wasn't exactly rich and an extra £100 would have taken me an extra months wages to set aside. So I bought a 486sx PC with 8Mb & 40Mb harddrive for about the same price as an A4000 yet it still more powerful. DOS & Windows 3.1 were crap and clunky but Windows 3.1 had virtual memory to stretch the memory even the VGA DOS games were better than the Amiga ones by then. Then I got a copy of OS/2 2.1 sent to me from IBM (for free no less!), boosted my memory to 32Mb to run it and I got my pre-emptive multitasking too. That PC lasted literally 9 years morphing one CPU, case, board, card at a time into a P90 with 120Mb HD. It finally ended its days acting as a router firewall & Mandrake Linux before its last HD died and I scrapped it.
I still fire up an Amiga emulator from time to time. I'm even tempted to buy an Amiga disk reader to grab some code I wrote back then which I have on floppy still and run it. I even downloaded some Fred Fish stuff for a bit of nostalgia. Some of the workbenches such as Amiga In A Box are very impressive thanks to Picasso emulation. I think if the Picasso board had been standardized into the Amiga and if VM had been worked on, it could have been seen a new spurt of life.
I can think of a few technical issues that the Amiga suffered from. Bitplanes were horrible to programme, interlaced mode and HAM were just as bad. Decent performance could only be gotten by hitting the hardware. The APIs were okay but no good for serious game writing or even advanced applications like word processors which needed fonts and other stuff it didn't do for a long time. The hardware dependencies seriously hamstrung the platform because it meant future versions had to be register compatible.
But to me it was the piss poor marketing that did it in. The Amiga was far, far more technically advanced than either the Mac or the PC for several years but CBM sat on their hands for most of that. There were a few enhancements e.g. ECS & AGA and 680x0 CPU upgrades but too little too late. The A3000 was too expensive, and the A4000 / A1200 turned up when the battle was nearly over.
My personal experience mostly bore that out. I was an A500 owner for years and had an external HD. I was just about fed up with the speed of it so I was looking to upgrade. I thought the A1200 was great but to add a harddrive and memory meant I might as well buy an A4000. So I saved up to discover CBM had hiked the price by £100. So instead I looked through Personal Computer World and located a 486sx with more memory, sound and a monitor for the same price as an A4000 and never looked back. Even then I was wowed because the Cirrus Logic card could do 16.8 million colours at 640x840 and 65k at 800x600!
Certainly Windows 3.1 was pretty shitty compared to AmigaOS, but soon I was running OS/2 2.1 and I had a desktop that was miles better than Amiga had ever been. The switch opened my whole career up. I I began by programming OS/2 and the similar APIs meant it was easy to switch to Win32. I also dabbled with Linux. I loved that my PC was modular so the CPU, memory, graphics, harddrive were all upgraded as my needs and pocket allowed. That same PC eventually became a Pentium, one component at a time until I bought a new machine.
I hate to imagine what would have happened if Commodore hadn't forced me down another path. It certainly opened my eyes and allowed me to observe with some amusement those desperately clinging to every rumour that have filled the last 13 or so years after the Amiga had clearly died.
I have a secret which I'll call A. When I encrypt it, I have a choice of supplying an additional (benign) message B of my choice *or* letting the tool generate a random B for me. A and B are encrypted together and the tool lets me decrypt either depending on which key I supply. When the police demand the key I give them the key to B.
So what's to stop them accusing me of supplying key B? Well they can do that, but they can't *prove* I've given key B since B could be randomly generated by the tool. I can claim (in feigned ignorance) that this is so and I've given them the key to A. They might suspect I've given them a key to B but they can't prove it. And if my benign B is sufficiently lurid that its possible I *did* encrypt it, how are they the wiser?
So they might jail me anyway but a 50% chance of innocence is still a better defence than none at all unless I hand over a key.
Slashing a throat is a special move. Don't know how you do it on PS2 / XBox but on the PC you right mouse to target to someone, walkup from behind and then also press the left mouse. You cut their throat in one go and instakill them.
Some missions like the one where you're stealing something from a mansion and another on a cargo ship virtually require you use the move.
This is a game that requires you to slash people's throats, murder, kill cops, blow things up, run people over, steal, hijack vehicles and generally cause bloody mayhem. All accompanied by a profanity laden script and radio tracks.
Yet the ESRB are getting worked up over a mod that that is similar yet tamer than the sex scene in Team America and even less erotic.
I have an Acer Travelmate 803 in my menagerie of computers and I haven't had much trouble with it at all. The screen is excellent, the wireless works well, the keyboard is spacious, it has lots of ports (4 USB & 1 Firewire) and it's pretty fast for the price I paid for it.
The only gripe (and it is a big gripe) is that the 3D support sucks. It does have accelerated 3D but the ATI Radeon driver is horrible and hasn't been upgraded. I hate manufacturers that just dump machines after 6 or 12 months on the market with barely any support after that. It's not just Acer but HP and no doubt others too.
Of course I'm assuming that that VPNs, SSH can be supported. It would not surprise me in the least if the aircraft only supported http through some kind of proxy.
Even so, I'm sure its not beyond the realms of fiction to think of ways one might use SSL, innocuous code words, or even stego to hide what they're truly doing.
Some kind of crypto is in order. I'm sure the fasttracked wiretapping will be a massive help when faced with terrorists using a VPN or other means to obscure what they're doing.
What a waste of money. Assuming it ever got the greenlight I'm sure it will never occur to the terrorists to switch to another target.
I'm sure it won't occur to them to simply set their bombs off in a commuter train, or a bus, or a concert, or a cinema or anywhere else with a sizable crowd.
It's actually scary to see the massive lines of people queuing to go through security at most airports thanks to more stringent screening. It would be trivial enough for someone to walk up to that line with a suitcase full of explosives and kill several hundred people.
This is a game where you can creep up behind a woman and slit her throat, or murder cops, or mow people down in a car. All with the approval of the ESRB and their rating system. But a sex scene? How dare they!
Heh garbage yourself. Why do you think things will be any different from when the Mac switched from the 68000 to PPC? Supporting 2 architectures when only 1 has a future is a burden that no vendor is going to shoulder for long. It didn't in the past and there is no reason to suppose they will in the future. I expect that Apple may support the old architecture for 18 months after the introduction of its replacement but the software support will begin dying long before that. Then you will be the proud owner of an obsolete machine.
I don't see why you think any different. You just have to look at OS X to see how it will pan out. Apple have actually turned a moving target OS into a business model. How many new apps these days run on OS X 10.1, or even 10.2? And that's when the hardware is the same. When the architecture changes Apple will be keen to shift people onto it as soon as possible. The easiest way is to choke off support for the PowerPC.
I'm happy for you if you want to buy a machine which you know will be obsolete soon (sooner than you think). Personally I tend to buy machines which are to some extent future proof. On the plus side, an iMac might make for a nice Linux box.
That's right. They won't support PowerPC & x86 chips. There will be a transitional period where both with exist and where Apple will make noises about how strongly they support the PPC, but the writing is on the wall. Two architectures means double the QA and significantly more development - not just for Apple but every 3rd party vendor too. The switch will be happen in as short a time as they can get away with.
All this talk about "fat" binaries is bullshit. Very few vendors is going to have the resources to support both architectures. Perhaps the Adobes of the world might while a significant PPC market lingers on but after that it's so long.
Basically the G4 & G5 Macs are two years from being obsolete. Even for Apple this is short. I was sorely tempted recently to get a Mini Mac but the announcement means I won't bother now. Instead I'll run my old 500Mhz G4 into the ground and wait the few years to see what happens. I think I'll use the cash to get a nice new XP or Linux box instead.
And if you're fighting a war of occupation as many Iraqis are right now, such a notion would be monumentally stupid. If that's the definition you could also lump in the French resistance and other underground groups as terrorists during WWII.
Except that description would cover all the US, South African & European mercenaries who will gladly fight in any war if you pay them. You don't hear them being called terrorists, although undoubtedly they are if you happen to be the tinpot government they're fighting to overthrow.
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Besides, if ID cards and fingerprinting did come in, they could simply fingerprint the corpses to find out who they are. Perhaps they can list this as one the "advantages" of forcing through this white elephant.
It might be quick and painless if you're using XCode and Cocoa. I seriously doubt it would be quick and painless if a) you're not using XCode, b) your tool does not generate x86 code, c) it does not know what a fat binary is, d) your app is dependent on 3rd party PPC libraries, e) your app or 3rd party code is filled with endian issues.
And for all you know, Microsoft might be working on a way to make OS X run under Windows. They're working on virtualization stuff and own Virtual PC so who's to say that OS X isn't something they could get going. From a licencing & administration point of view I expect it's much cheaper to buy a Dell, Longhorn & Virtual PC and run OS X on top than to buy a Mac with OS X and run a retail version of Longhorn on top, especially if the rest of your org is using PCs anyway.
It has a zoom slider. That and the map dragging implemented as a bunch of tiled images and repositioned with CSS tricks.
The wheel is the only "innovation" but as implemented it is horrible. When you wheel the mouse, the existing map is rescaled to produce a "zoom" effect and then the map is reloaded at the new scale. It's slow and it's clunky. It would be better to just zoom in without the fancy effects.
And pretty shitty it is too if you don't live in the US. It's still in beta of course, but so far it looks like a straight rip-off of the Google Maps servers, even down to the panning and zooming behaviour. I wonder how long before Google launch a patent lawsuit against MS.
The only innovation I can see is the mouse wheel, which is actually pretty sucky.
Apple will be aiming to make PPC as obsolete in as short a space of time as possible. How they do that remains to be seen, but my guess is that the leap to x86 will "coincide" with a transitional version of OS X which will be declared the last to support PPC.
After that, it's just tough luck if you own a PPC. If that sounds far fetched, just look at the model for OS X right now. It's a moving target. If you're not running the latest and greatest version, your choice of new software dries up to practically zero once you're a few point releases behind. The same will happen with the PPC to x86 migration.
To be honest I only dabbled in assembly and hardware programming (I produced a simple scrolling shooter game with it). I did most of my programming in C through gfx.library where the problem was even more pronounced. Trying to sync stuff to the display was the bane of my existence. I wrote a Dungeon Master like game and I swear that most of my time in compositing scenes was spent trying to stop bitplane flicker. My switch to PCs meant I never finished the game though I still have the disks.
Funnily enough, my dad found all my Amiga programming manuals recently. I must put them up on Ebay sometime.
That's not the point I was making. The original person as talking about technical issues and I chipped in with a few more. HAM was was moderately impressive to see, but the fact was that it was also nearly entirely useless as a technology since it was impossible to do anything with it except produce nice slideshows (assuming the pixels were mostly the same colour). DPaint had a moderately usable HAM mode, but other than that it was a waste of time. Some games also used copper tricks to switch the palette on the fly which could also get you a few more colours. Bitplanes were as bad since to set a single pixel meant changing up to five bits in entirely separate planes.
The Amiga was miles ahead of the competition, but it was just too blase about its lead. By the time of the A4000 / A1200, there was little that an Amiga could do (except pre-emptive multitasking) that a PC or Mac couldn't do. Even multi-tasking could be had on a PC with OS/2. Macs were outrageously expensive, but a PC fitted with a decent VGA & SoundBlaster card was comparable to an Amiga and much more modular with it. In fact in some ways PCs were gaining an obvious lead, such as TrueType fonts. DTP & Wordprocessing were killer apps at the time but the ones that existed on the Amiga were horrible. I remember using WordSmith for a bit which implemented its own font scaling, but it was no comparison against Word 2 or Word Perfect on the PC.
I don't know what the reason for the A4000 price hike was but it infuriated me. I wasn't exactly rich and an extra £100 would have taken me an extra months wages to set aside. So I bought a 486sx PC with 8Mb & 40Mb harddrive for about the same price as an A4000 yet it still more powerful. DOS & Windows 3.1 were crap and clunky but Windows 3.1 had virtual memory to stretch the memory even the VGA DOS games were better than the Amiga ones by then. Then I got a copy of OS/2 2.1 sent to me from IBM (for free no less!), boosted my memory to 32Mb to run it and I got my pre-emptive multitasking too. That PC lasted literally 9 years morphing one CPU, case, board, card at a time into a P90 with 120Mb HD. It finally ended its days acting as a router firewall & Mandrake Linux before its last HD died and I scrapped it.
I still fire up an Amiga emulator from time to time. I'm even tempted to buy an Amiga disk reader to grab some code I wrote back then which I have on floppy still and run it. I even downloaded some Fred Fish stuff for a bit of nostalgia. Some of the workbenches such as Amiga In A Box are very impressive thanks to Picasso emulation. I think if the Picasso board had been standardized into the Amiga and if VM had been worked on, it could have been seen a new spurt of life.
But to me it was the piss poor marketing that did it in. The Amiga was far, far more technically advanced than either the Mac or the PC for several years but CBM sat on their hands for most of that. There were a few enhancements e.g. ECS & AGA and 680x0 CPU upgrades but too little too late. The A3000 was too expensive, and the A4000 / A1200 turned up when the battle was nearly over.
My personal experience mostly bore that out. I was an A500 owner for years and had an external HD. I was just about fed up with the speed of it so I was looking to upgrade. I thought the A1200 was great but to add a harddrive and memory meant I might as well buy an A4000. So I saved up to discover CBM had hiked the price by £100. So instead I looked through Personal Computer World and located a 486sx with more memory, sound and a monitor for the same price as an A4000 and never looked back. Even then I was wowed because the Cirrus Logic card could do 16.8 million colours at 640x840 and 65k at 800x600!
Certainly Windows 3.1 was pretty shitty compared to AmigaOS, but soon I was running OS/2 2.1 and I had a desktop that was miles better than Amiga had ever been. The switch opened my whole career up. I I began by programming OS/2 and the similar APIs meant it was easy to switch to Win32. I also dabbled with Linux. I loved that my PC was modular so the CPU, memory, graphics, harddrive were all upgraded as my needs and pocket allowed. That same PC eventually became a Pentium, one component at a time until I bought a new machine.
I hate to imagine what would have happened if Commodore hadn't forced me down another path. It certainly opened my eyes and allowed me to observe with some amusement those desperately clinging to every rumour that have filled the last 13 or so years after the Amiga had clearly died.
So what's to stop them accusing me of supplying key B? Well they can do that, but they can't *prove* I've given key B since B could be randomly generated by the tool. I can claim (in feigned ignorance) that this is so and I've given them the key to A. They might suspect I've given them a key to B but they can't prove it. And if my benign B is sufficiently lurid that its possible I *did* encrypt it, how are they the wiser?
So they might jail me anyway but a 50% chance of innocence is still a better defence than none at all unless I hand over a key.
Slashing a throat is a special move. Don't know how you do it on PS2 / XBox but on the PC you right mouse to target to someone, walkup from behind and then also press the left mouse. You cut their throat in one go and instakill them.
Some missions like the one where you're stealing something from a mansion and another on a cargo ship virtually require you use the move.
Yet the ESRB are getting worked up over a mod that that is similar yet tamer than the sex scene in Team America and even less erotic.
How fucking ridiculous is that?
The only gripe (and it is a big gripe) is that the 3D support sucks. It does have accelerated 3D but the ATI Radeon driver is horrible and hasn't been upgraded. I hate manufacturers that just dump machines after 6 or 12 months on the market with barely any support after that. It's not just Acer but HP and no doubt others too.
If you're too incompetant to fix a PC, at least give it to a charity (or to me) where some use might be made of it.
Oh yes it is. My guess is within 24 hours of the official release.
One wonders why these publishing houses don't sell their own e-book at a reasonable price and soak up most of the demand for the 'unofficial' copy.
Someone intent on blowing up or hijacking a plane isn't going to care about lesser crimes.
Even so, I'm sure its not beyond the realms of fiction to think of ways one might use SSL, innocuous code words, or even stego to hide what they're truly doing.
Some kind of crypto is in order. I'm sure the fasttracked wiretapping will be a massive help when faced with terrorists using a VPN or other means to obscure what they're doing.
I'm sure it won't occur to them to simply set their bombs off in a commuter train, or a bus, or a concert, or a cinema or anywhere else with a sizable crowd.
It's actually scary to see the massive lines of people queuing to go through security at most airports thanks to more stringent screening. It would be trivial enough for someone to walk up to that line with a suitcase full of explosives and kill several hundred people.
It really would do them good to sell it as an e-book seeing as it will instantly become one anyway.
This is a game where you can creep up behind a woman and slit her throat, or murder cops, or mow people down in a car. All with the approval of the ESRB and their rating system. But a sex scene? How dare they!
I don't see why you think any different. You just have to look at OS X to see how it will pan out. Apple have actually turned a moving target OS into a business model. How many new apps these days run on OS X 10.1, or even 10.2? And that's when the hardware is the same. When the architecture changes Apple will be keen to shift people onto it as soon as possible. The easiest way is to choke off support for the PowerPC.
I'm happy for you if you want to buy a machine which you know will be obsolete soon (sooner than you think). Personally I tend to buy machines which are to some extent future proof. On the plus side, an iMac might make for a nice Linux box.
All this talk about "fat" binaries is bullshit. Very few vendors is going to have the resources to support both architectures. Perhaps the Adobes of the world might while a significant PPC market lingers on but after that it's so long.
Basically the G4 & G5 Macs are two years from being obsolete. Even for Apple this is short. I was sorely tempted recently to get a Mini Mac but the announcement means I won't bother now. Instead I'll run my old 500Mhz G4 into the ground and wait the few years to see what happens. I think I'll use the cash to get a nice new XP or Linux box instead.
And if you're fighting a war of occupation as many Iraqis are right now, such a notion would be monumentally stupid. If that's the definition you could also lump in the French resistance and other underground groups as terrorists during WWII.
Except that description would cover all the US, South African & European mercenaries who will gladly fight in any war if you pay them. You don't hear them being called terrorists, although undoubtedly they are if you happen to be the tinpot government they're fighting to overthrow.