Borland C++ for OS/2 - a warning!
on
Borland C++ For Linux
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· Score: 3, Informative
I hope Borland learns from past mistakes.
About 8 years ago I got into OS/2 in a big way and wanted to start developing for it. CSet from IBM was very expensive so I was ecstatic when Borland C++ came out for OS/2. Version 1.0 was pretty damned good - a powerful IDE, a decent set of helper classes (no GUI ones though) and a syntax highlighting editor in an age when IBM CSet++ shipped with no editor whatsoever. All was good or so I thought and I put aside concerns about the few bugs because it worked dammit and 1.01 would iron out the remaining problems.
Version 1.01 came and had some fixes for the existing problems but overall had *more* bugs than 1.0. The classes didn't work as designed, the debugger more frequently hung your machine than worked and worst of all the IDE crashed - randomly. All was getting decidely iffy but I knew that 1.5 was out so I still held out hope.
Version 1.5 and all hope flew out the window and emigrated to Australia. I had never seen a buggy piece of shit in life! The all new improved version may as well had alpha written all over it. It was unusable and I gave up after discovering threading was completely broken - a feature I had used up until then.
Soon after I switched to IBM CSet++. Now that was a compiler. It might have had a totally stinky UI (none at all), but the command line tools were excellent and it came with some pretty good classes too.
I think you'll find the web will become considerably more friendly towards Mozilla & Netscape 6.x when AOL uses the Gecko engine in its clients. AFAIK the Compuserve is going to switch over pretty soon now.
It does have a killfile, it's called the message filter. Admittedly it's a bit clunky to have to open the dialog to kill someone, but it is open source so someone motivated enough could fix it...
Of course non-AOL companies can buy pop-up ads on AOL. How else do they make money?? In fact if you run AOL or go to their website you'll see they've got hundreds of partners selling content & merchandise. This is no different than what happens if you visit MSN or Yahoo!
As for Netscape... how are they meant to compete when Microsoft (which owns the OS) ships IE with the OS and threatens manufacturers to dump Netscape's browser or face higher OEM costs and other punitive measures? You cannot compete in a market if your competitor has systematically destroyed it.
I can think of worse companies. AOL might be a corporate mega-giant but one thing they don't do is buy something just to smother it under their stifling work practice. Companies such as ICQ, Netscape, Nullsoft and more have pretty much been allowed to continue the way they always have. Besides, AOL has already shown its commitment to open source by funding Mozilla to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
If Alan Cox wants to leave that his own business, but I doubt he would notice much difference in the way Red Hat operated after a buyout than before.
I programmed QNX 2 for 3 years for use in medical diagnostics instruments and I have to say it was the worst, most nasty OS I have ever used. Yes it did multitasking, but the tools were diabolical, the compiler was a joke, it had an ugly OpenLook-like UI, it was proprietary and not in a good way and it cost a lot of money. I have no idea how it ended up inside mission critical software because it looked like a hobbiest OS gone bad. It didn't even have a decent editor and I had to port MicroEmacs to it. It's only saving grace was it was fast, realtime and had some natty messaging protocols.
Quantum made a very wise and sensible decision with QNX 4 (what happened to 3?) to go Posix since it made the OS tolerable and almost Unix like. Still, by that time I was getting restless feet and I moved onto bigger and better things. I still wonder about the company I left - I bet there are poor souls working there who have to fix problems in QNX 2. May god have mercy on their souls.
Konq is okay for browsing but if you want something to render just about anything you can throw at it then mozilla wins hands down. It is a great browser. I haven't noticed it being any slower at all. As long as you have the memory to load it up it renders extremely quickly.
Aside from that I also happen to like Mozilla because of the integrated mail & news, and the powerful bookmarking features - drag and drop & edit in-place, aliases etc. much better than any other browser I've seen.
As a non-console owner I was curious to see what all XBox fuss was about. And after playing playing Halo for 20 minutes on one I still don't know what the fuss is about. It was quite clear after my experience that you can throw all the hardware you like into a console but if the games are mediocre or uninspiring, the platform is too.
And Halo (the flagship launch title) struck me as extremely mediocre. It certainly looked pretty but the gameplay itself stuck me as tedious and repetitive with the gamepad not helping at all. Give me Quake or Wolfenstein anyday.
Compared to the other platforms, perhaps it has more potential but then it costs a lot more. The Gamecube is dirt cheap in comparison and the PS/2 has thousands of titles to choose from.
If I were seriously looking to buy a console I think the XBox would be my 3rd choice by a long stretch at the moment.
The message threatens that the guy can track the propogation of this message. If I were an MS worker, I would be pretty pissed if this feature were enabled on my email servers. Of course, plain old cut and paste and encryption can help you in this regard.
Re:One simple reason why it won't work:
on
The Euro
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· Score: 2
Yes, it's easy to work in any country in the EU. I myself upped roots from the UK and now live and work in Ireland. Aside from getting a new social security number, it was pretty much routine. I have French friends who work in the UK and Ireland with similar ease.
Obviously it helps that you speak the language of the country you're going to, but its surprising how quickly you'll pick up a language by working there.
The thing is, none of these problems should have been there in the first place.
If Verant had tested this thing properly they would have easily discovered that:
Skeletons looked like they were doing quicktime
Wolfform people looked like rats / chihuahuas
All the mobs in a zone "floated" about the land when you zone in
Clipping is all wrong on boats
You crash eqgame if you hit the Windows key
Bard and wizards had serious functionality problems to the point of being broken
Spell animations weren't working
Single layer skys caused buildings and other terrain to shimmer
All in all it was a shocking, inexcusable release. Everyone expects glitches, but this amount showed they really didn't test the thing at all. And the rollout was much too short. They should have been rolling stuff out into the client for weeks before to catch these kinds of bugs.
Verant well and truly screwed up this release. Until last week their EQ client was a solid if workmanlike piece of software. In that space of time, it has turned into a bug infested piece of crap, with glitches, crashes, and frequent downtime.
And you don't escape any of this if you don't upgrade to Luclin. No, EVERYONE is suffering this. Worse yet, EVERYONE has been forced onto DirectX 8.1, despite this breaking the system requirments pledge that it runs on Windows 95.
There are a lot of shills on the usenet groups who are bleating that if you don't like it you should go elsewhere. What they don't realise is most people EQ the game, but think the administration of EQ stinks to high heaven. The amount of downtime is totally unacceptable. If Verant ran a proper ship it wouldn't nearly half as much and fiascos like this and last week could have been avoided.
Certainly that was a problem, but others and possibly the biggest by far were:
IBM
I contracted for them for 8 months and I have never seen such disorganized company. The PC division was promoting Win3.1 while another division was trying to sell OS/2. Our group never got to reuse code from another group and the OS/2 developers played second fiddle to the Win3.1 ones. The left hand hadn't a clue what the right was doing. By the time they started putting it in the hands of home users with discounts and cover CDs it was already way, way too late.
Usability
The UI for OS/2 - the Workplace Shell was fine in principle, but crap in practice. It looked drab, was inconsistent, it needed too many mouse buttons and it was only "logical" if someone taught you the WPS logic. I think usability was a dirty word in IBM since the WPS was just perverse; commonly used options being buried in the fifth page of some settings dialog, and usused appearing in the popup menus. And no two OS/2 applications looked or behaved alike because apparantly no one in IBM saw fit to share code such as toolbar classes. Apps did have to comply to a bizzaro UI compliance standard called CUA which meant they handled Shift+Insert the same way and other superficial similarities but that was it. I have a sneaking suspicion that some genius in the upper echelons of IBM actually thought unfriendly apps was a good idea to drum sales from selling training.
Microsoft
We know all about that one. They put the boot in and IBM (the world's largest computer company) mumbled not very convincingly about unfair competition. But whatever dirty tricks Microsoft were playing, they still had more of a clue about usability. They have people an easy to use (certainly easier than OS/2) operating system. And apps such as MS Office looked consistent and clean.
Now I programmed OS/2 and loved the thing, but it was and is screamingly obvious why it was doomed. IBM had its head up its butt (just like Commodore with the Amiga) and simply dithered around wondering why every one was buying someone elses supposedly inferior product.
An analogy would be a master chef wondering why people doesn't buy his delicious cakes when makes them to look like a giant dog turd. I wonder why not...
This thing would be absolutely no use whatsoever in any crowded asian city I've been to. Typically, the pavements are jam packed with pedestrians with huge steps, cracks, litter, obstacles, and holes all over the place and aren't even wheelchair friendly let alone for this contraption. And neither would you want to take it on the roads when they are essentially chaotic, rules-free, killing zones for people foolhardy enough to step out onto them.
That's a valid point, but I didn't say the GUI would *replace* the text based installer. I see it working in much the same way as Mandrake or Redhat do - choose console install at the start and that's what you get, otherwise the default is a GUI.
As I mentioned, both these OS's are commercial products. The case for a GUI is much stronger for FreeBSD (it's screaming for one), but both could benefit.
User friendly can be little things such as being able to mouse around dialogs instead of tabbing, or providing help in a more readable font, or visual hints such as grouping related options together, or the liberal use of colour and graphics to denote progress, and just generally being less intimidating than a text only console. It's also gives early reassurance that the OS actually recognizes your mouse and graphics card.
To be sure you can royally screw up a GUI and make it as nasty as you want, but if done sensibly it does make installation more pleasant.
That's a funny attitude to take. An install with an graphics mode would do much to dispell the image of BSD as a niche OS. And seeing as both FreeBSD and OpenBSD are commercial products, one would think that their repective owners would be keen to broaden their appeal.
Besides, adding GUI doesn't necessarily represent a "dumbing down" of the product. The installer can still ask the same questions, but in a more user friendly manner.
Turning copyright over to the FSF doesn't mean that RMS is entitled to charge in like in a bull in a chinashop. If he wants to control within a project it must be with the consent of the maintainers, in this case the GNOME contributors. If this case, there was a vote, the other candidates were better and he didn't get in.
If he's that determined to run GNOME his way (e.g. into the ground just like Hurd), he's perfectly entitled to fork the code, but I seriously doubt many people would bother to use it.
In fact GNOME needs to sweep some of the politics aside and encourage pragmatism. Getting usable code out the door and being able to run it anywhere is the best way it's likely to increase its mindshare.
Sure he sacrificed a lot of his lifetime to free software, but precious little of it was for GNOME. Probably most of the other people on that list have expended more than he, with the consequence that they got voted in and he didn't.
Besides, it's pretty clear what people thought he would bring to GNOME - politics, rifts, negative publicity and an agenda that meant it lost even more ground to KDE.
As an unwilling convert to KDE, I hope the committee address the fundamental problems in GNOME that prevent me from using it - bloat, integration, usability & packaging. While I wouldn't put KDE up on a pedestal as the perfect UI (far from it), at least it feels like a seamless whole rather than a bunch of cobbled together stuff. GNOME has some fantastic technology but until their comes as close to KDE for letting me do Real Work, I can't switch over.
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About 8 years ago I got into OS/2 in a big way and wanted to start developing for it. CSet from IBM was very expensive so I was ecstatic when Borland C++ came out for OS/2. Version 1.0 was pretty damned good - a powerful IDE, a decent set of helper classes (no GUI ones though) and a syntax highlighting editor in an age when IBM CSet++ shipped with no editor whatsoever. All was good or so I thought and I put aside concerns about the few bugs because it worked dammit and 1.01 would iron out the remaining problems.
Version 1.01 came and had some fixes for the existing problems but overall had *more* bugs than 1.0. The classes didn't work as designed, the debugger more frequently hung your machine than worked and worst of all the IDE crashed - randomly. All was getting decidely iffy but I knew that 1.5 was out so I still held out hope.
Version 1.5 and all hope flew out the window and emigrated to Australia. I had never seen a buggy piece of shit in life! The all new improved version may as well had alpha written all over it. It was unusable and I gave up after discovering threading was completely broken - a feature I had used up until then.
Soon after I switched to IBM CSet++. Now that was a compiler. It might have had a totally stinky UI (none at all), but the command line tools were excellent and it came with some pretty good classes too.
I think you'll find the web will become considerably more friendly towards Mozilla & Netscape 6.x when AOL uses the Gecko engine in its clients. AFAIK the Compuserve is going to switch over pretty soon now.
Ugh you're right. I thought it did usenet too but I was obviously thinking of 4.x. Time to file a bug.
It does have a killfile, it's called the message filter. Admittedly it's a bit clunky to have to open the dialog to kill someone, but it is open source so someone motivated enough could fix it...
As for Netscape... how are they meant to compete when Microsoft (which owns the OS) ships IE with the OS and threatens manufacturers to dump Netscape's browser or face higher OEM costs and other punitive measures? You cannot compete in a market if your competitor has systematically destroyed it.
Tell me which market AOL holds a monopoly in and you may have a point.
If Alan Cox wants to leave that his own business, but I doubt he would notice much difference in the way Red Hat operated after a buyout than before.
Quantum made a very wise and sensible decision with QNX 4 (what happened to 3?) to go Posix since it made the OS tolerable and almost Unix like. Still, by that time I was getting restless feet and I moved onto bigger and better things. I still wonder about the company I left - I bet there are poor souls working there who have to fix problems in QNX 2. May god have mercy on their souls.
Aside from that I also happen to like Mozilla because of the integrated mail & news, and the powerful bookmarking features - drag and drop & edit in-place, aliases etc. much better than any other browser I've seen.
... what a sad pair of tossers!
And Halo (the flagship launch title) struck me as extremely mediocre. It certainly looked pretty but the gameplay itself stuck me as tedious and repetitive with the gamepad not helping at all. Give me Quake or Wolfenstein anyday.
Compared to the other platforms, perhaps it has more potential but then it costs a lot more. The Gamecube is dirt cheap in comparison and the PS/2 has thousands of titles to choose from.
If I were seriously looking to buy a console I think the XBox would be my 3rd choice by a long stretch at the moment.
The message threatens that the guy can track the propogation of this message. If I were an MS worker, I would be pretty pissed if this feature were enabled on my email servers. Of course, plain old cut and paste and encryption can help you in this regard.
Obviously it helps that you speak the language of the country you're going to, but its surprising how quickly you'll pick up a language by working there.
If Verant had tested this thing properly they would have easily discovered that:
All in all it was a shocking, inexcusable release. Everyone expects glitches, but this amount showed they really didn't test the thing at all. And the rollout was much too short. They should have been rolling stuff out into the client for weeks before to catch these kinds of bugs.
And you don't escape any of this if you don't upgrade to Luclin. No, EVERYONE is suffering this. Worse yet, EVERYONE has been forced onto DirectX 8.1, despite this breaking the system requirments pledge that it runs on Windows 95.
There are a lot of shills on the usenet groups who are bleating that if you don't like it you should go elsewhere. What they don't realise is most people EQ the game, but think the administration of EQ stinks to high heaven. The amount of downtime is totally unacceptable. If Verant ran a proper ship it wouldn't nearly half as much and fiascos like this and last week could have been avoided.
So I assume that you credit it when it is? What about all the other non-GNU software which you undoubtedly run?
I contracted for them for 8 months and I have never seen such disorganized company. The PC division was promoting Win3.1 while another division was trying to sell OS/2. Our group never got to reuse code from another group and the OS/2 developers played second fiddle to the Win3.1 ones. The left hand hadn't a clue what the right was doing. By the time they started putting it in the hands of home users with discounts and cover CDs it was already way, way too late.
The UI for OS/2 - the Workplace Shell was fine in principle, but crap in practice. It looked drab, was inconsistent, it needed too many mouse buttons and it was only "logical" if someone taught you the WPS logic. I think usability was a dirty word in IBM since the WPS was just perverse; commonly used options being buried in the fifth page of some settings dialog, and usused appearing in the popup menus. And no two OS/2 applications looked or behaved alike because apparantly no one in IBM saw fit to share code such as toolbar classes. Apps did have to comply to a bizzaro UI compliance standard called CUA which meant they handled Shift+Insert the same way and other superficial similarities but that was it. I have a sneaking suspicion that some genius in the upper echelons of IBM actually thought unfriendly apps was a good idea to drum sales from selling training.
We know all about that one. They put the boot in and IBM (the world's largest computer company) mumbled not very convincingly about unfair competition. But whatever dirty tricks Microsoft were playing, they still had more of a clue about usability. They have people an easy to use (certainly easier than OS/2) operating system. And apps such as MS Office looked consistent and clean.
Now I programmed OS/2 and loved the thing, but it was and is screamingly obvious why it was doomed. IBM had its head up its butt (just like Commodore with the Amiga) and simply dithered around wondering why every one was buying someone elses supposedly inferior product.
An analogy would be a master chef wondering why people doesn't buy his delicious cakes when makes them to look like a giant dog turd. I wonder why not...
It's too AOL is so myopic about standards. On the one hand you have Mozilla and perhaps this and then on the other you have AIM.
This thing would be absolutely no use whatsoever in any crowded asian city I've been to. Typically, the pavements are jam packed with pedestrians with huge steps, cracks, litter, obstacles, and holes all over the place and aren't even wheelchair friendly let alone for this contraption. And neither would you want to take it on the roads when they are essentially chaotic, rules-free, killing zones for people foolhardy enough to step out onto them.
As I mentioned, both these OS's are commercial products. The case for a GUI is much stronger for FreeBSD (it's screaming for one), but both could benefit.
To be sure you can royally screw up a GUI and make it as nasty as you want, but if done sensibly it does make installation more pleasant.
Besides, adding GUI doesn't necessarily represent a "dumbing down" of the product. The installer can still ask the same questions, but in a more user friendly manner.
If he's that determined to run GNOME his way (e.g. into the ground just like Hurd), he's perfectly entitled to fork the code, but I seriously doubt many people would bother to use it.
In fact GNOME needs to sweep some of the politics aside and encourage pragmatism. Getting usable code out the door and being able to run it anywhere is the best way it's likely to increase its mindshare.
Besides, it's pretty clear what people thought he would bring to GNOME - politics, rifts, negative publicity and an agenda that meant it lost even more ground to KDE.
As an unwilling convert to KDE, I hope the committee address the fundamental problems in GNOME that prevent me from using it - bloat, integration, usability & packaging. While I wouldn't put KDE up on a pedestal as the perfect UI (far from it), at least it feels like a seamless whole rather than a bunch of cobbled together stuff. GNOME has some fantastic technology but until their comes as close to KDE for letting me do Real Work, I can't switch over.
Thanks for your insightful comments shit for brains, but since I'm an active Mozilla developer I've already done plenty for the Galeon folks.