Moore's Law: the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every 12-18 months
Intel's Law: the number of unneccessary MMI instructions on a microchip doubles every 10-16 months
Microsoft's Law: the efficiency of hardware utilization in software halves every 8-14 months
All this project really has to do to reach its goal is to re-implement the core Windows DLLs (same as WINE). There are already open-source DOS clones around, plently of open-source shells and file managers, and plently of open-source Solitaire programs. The only thing they can't just adapt from others is Windows itself, the core DLLs, which means going through basically the same things WINE did.
The potential advantages of this over real Windows are speed (maybe), flexibility (reimplement all of Win32 and you don't make hardware auto-detect non-overridable again), and the possibility of filling in some missing but badly needed features (symlinks, breaking the registry into multiple files, maybe support for some alternate file systems). I think their only real chance of success is by taking various open-source projects, adapting them, and copying and pasting a lot of code out of WINE. It's not very likely, though.
But, it has already been said numerous times on Slashdot that the RIAA takes such a large percentage, the artists don't get any significant amount of money off of CD sales. They make all their money on concerts instead. Saying "we don't make much money off of your purchases" is a clearly false statement. Considering the insignificant cost of producing a CD and the percentage which goes to the artist, your profit margin on CDs makes up nearly all of the cost. Thus, I presume that this post is merely a futile attempt to stop a boycott that has already started, using the misinformation and propoganda that are the trademarks of both the RIAA and MPAA. Except we're not the mass market. We don't take things at face value.
There has, for a long time, been a need for an instant messaging standard, which is well supported. The reason for this is because, at present, I have not been able to find a single instant messaging client in which I have not found one or more major flaws. ICQ has server downtime issues, poor ease of use, no encryption by default, and severely cluttered menus. AIM is disgusting, because it uses way too much space for ads, which I really, really don't want to see. ICQ and AIM cannot be made compatible with eachother because of their fundamentally different naming conventions and interface principles. Yahoo! Messenger has a cluttered interface, and while most of it can be turned off, it still takes more screen space than it should.
IMUnified does say that it will "make publically available" specifications in their press release, which means that open-source messaging clients could (and will) be built around it, with the compatibility of bigger messaging clients as well as all the benefits of being open source.
The games that would really benefit from being open sourced (as in code only), would be the games that were extremely strong in some areas but prematurely released or weak in coding (a few names spring to mind: Freespace 2, some of the Ultimas). Fact is, a game that doesn't have a good base won't attract many open source developers to it, because starting at the release people will only buy it if the reviewers like it.
The proper URL to download the Windows demo from AVault is ftp://ftp.avault.com/demos/TerminusDem oWinFull.exe. AVault has a bad link, yet despite this their FTP server seems to have been slashdotted anyways, unless it was intolerably slow to begin with.
This comment was in a VB program I wrote. I rewrote that section to work a lot better, but left the toilet in for coolness, with a note explaining what it was.
Descent 3's Linux port has been under development for quite some time now. I stopped following it awhile ago, at which point it was about at the point of just not having sound or joystick support implemented.
I, myself, started early in programming. I'm 13 now, and consider myself somewhat of a pre-larval hacker. One of the languages I started early with was Visual Basic. Now, I regret it. Like all things Microsoft, it is VERY hard to migrate away from. Once you go far with Visual Basic, I think for me learning the Bitblt API was the big thing, it's not easy turning back to C. It is also very hard to do the important little things. What would be routine memory management tasks in C are often nearly impossible in Visual Basic. Doing anything low-level yields painfully bad performance. Dealing with strings as byte arrays is complicated by unicode-standard differences. The addition and string concatenation operator symbols are ambiguous. Sure, it's a good learning platform because of how you can draw forms, but if you want your child doing Visual Basic, don't wait too long to guide them away.
Slashdot Mirror
Moore's Law: the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every 12-18 months Intel's Law: the number of unneccessary MMI instructions on a microchip doubles every 10-16 months Microsoft's Law: the efficiency of hardware utilization in software halves every 8-14 months
Actually, the benchmarks show pretty clearly that DDR-DRAM is faster both in bandwidth and latency than RDRAM.
All this project really has to do to reach its goal is to re-implement the core Windows DLLs (same as WINE). There are already open-source DOS clones around, plently of open-source shells and file managers, and plently of open-source Solitaire programs. The only thing they can't just adapt from others is Windows itself, the core DLLs, which means going through basically the same things WINE did.
The potential advantages of this over real Windows are speed (maybe), flexibility (reimplement all of Win32 and you don't make hardware auto-detect non-overridable again), and the possibility of filling in some missing but badly needed features (symlinks, breaking the registry into multiple files, maybe support for some alternate file systems). I think their only real chance of success is by taking various open-source projects, adapting them, and copying and pasting a lot of code out of WINE. It's not very likely, though.
But, it has already been said numerous times on Slashdot that the RIAA takes such a large percentage, the artists don't get any significant amount of money off of CD sales. They make all their money on concerts instead. Saying "we don't make much money off of your purchases" is a clearly false statement. Considering the insignificant cost of producing a CD and the percentage which goes to the artist, your profit margin on CDs makes up nearly all of the cost. Thus, I presume that this post is merely a futile attempt to stop a boycott that has already started, using the misinformation and propoganda that are the trademarks of both the RIAA and MPAA. Except we're not the mass market. We don't take things at face value.
There has, for a long time, been a need for an instant messaging standard, which is well supported. The reason for this is because, at present, I have not been able to find a single instant messaging client in which I have not found one or more major flaws. ICQ has server downtime issues, poor ease of use, no encryption by default, and severely cluttered menus. AIM is disgusting, because it uses way too much space for ads, which I really, really don't want to see. ICQ and AIM cannot be made compatible with eachother because of their fundamentally different naming conventions and interface principles. Yahoo! Messenger has a cluttered interface, and while most of it can be turned off, it still takes more screen space than it should.
IMUnified does say that it will "make publically available" specifications in their press release, which means that open-source messaging clients could (and will) be built around it, with the compatibility of bigger messaging clients as well as all the benefits of being open source.
The games that would really benefit from being open sourced (as in code only), would be the games that were extremely strong in some areas but prematurely released or weak in coding (a few names spring to mind: Freespace 2, some of the Ultimas). Fact is, a game that doesn't have a good base won't attract many open source developers to it, because starting at the release people will only buy it if the reviewers like it.
The proper URL to download the Windows demo from AVault is ftp://ftp.avault.com/demos/TerminusDem oWinFull.exe. AVault has a bad link, yet despite this their FTP server seems to have been slashdotted anyways, unless it was intolerably slow to begin with.
'   _______    _______ __Elegancep \/_ - |n bsp     /n bsp    /
'  |_______|  |
'   |   -= | &nbs
'   |     |______
'   |     |------
'   |     | &
'    |    | &
'    |____|___ /
This comment was in a VB program I wrote. I rewrote that section to work a lot better, but left the toilet in for coolness, with a note explaining what it was.
Descent 3's Linux port has been under development for quite some time now. I stopped following it awhile ago, at which point it was about at the point of just not having sound or joystick support implemented.
I, myself, started early in programming. I'm 13 now, and consider myself somewhat of a pre-larval hacker. One of the languages I started early with was Visual Basic. Now, I regret it. Like all things Microsoft, it is VERY hard to migrate away from. Once you go far with Visual Basic, I think for me learning the Bitblt API was the big thing, it's not easy turning back to C. It is also very hard to do the important little things. What would be routine memory management tasks in C are often nearly impossible in Visual Basic. Doing anything low-level yields painfully bad performance. Dealing with strings as byte arrays is complicated by unicode-standard differences. The addition and string concatenation operator symbols are ambiguous. Sure, it's a good learning platform because of how you can draw forms, but if you want your child doing Visual Basic, don't wait too long to guide them away.
:)