One of a computer's primary purposes is to save us some of the effort of handwriting. Taking the keyboard away and making the Palm a stylus-only device was IMHO pretty dumb. But I gues some usability "expert" declared keyboards to be user-unfriendly or somesuch.
Nothing against Dylan... but it was made by Apple. I wonder if this is merely an extension of the standard Mac-evangelist's "it's-better'cause-it's-Apple-so-there" philosophy.
As for Java... well, Java Is Cool. It may not be the greatest language for every task but what it does, it does pretty well IMHO.
Great! That means more students for us here! Stevens has been really pumping up its usiness school recently, especially their trendy new "e-business" program. I'm not too fond of all the hype but there's a large contingency of hackers here, and most of the networking is (for the moment) Unix-based (Irix, Solaris, Linux) so at least the business majors here will be working with people and technology that do, more or less, the Right Thing. Maybe some of those UT students will get disgruntled and make the trek up here to continue their studies. Just what we need... more suits in training:)
This reminds me of a thing in PC Mag years and years back. It was called the "IBM Obfuscation Elimination Facility". In its heyday IBM would take a rather ordinary object and slap an impressive-sounding name on it with lots of big words, selling it at highly inflated prices with the IBM brand and these fancy names. Example: They'd stick a serial cable in a bag and sell it at perhaps twice its original price with the name "IBM PC Data Migration Facility" on it. Another good one they came up with: the familiar "Service Pack" for a bug fix. The Obfuscation Elimination Facility was a chart showing you the device's common name and its IBM Name.
ZDnet I've found is not the most reliable source of information in the world, but they're not all Microsoft shills, either. (Dvorak was talking about how cool Linux was in '96 and '97!) Yes, they are most definitely targeting the Wintel-based market because that's how they can fatten the number of subscribers. It's good to see that they occasionally show signs of objectivity and rationality.:)
The resident campus Quake god around here uses a trackball (one of the big Logitech deals). I'd think they'd actually be pretty good for Quaking with sufficient training. You can turn precisely and in a hurry.
You can't draw with a trackball, and you can't Quake with a digitizing pad, so for me it's the good ol' mouse.
Derek Currie is the resident Mac-uber-alles evangelist on alt.destroy.microsoft. Maybe now that they've lost their stomping grounds, this type of ardent troll will become scarcer. Of course, if hornets are forced out of their nest, they tend to become mad...:)
Sorry, you can't create a chip like that in your garage. CPU design and manufacture is one of those things that REQUIRES the kind of big money that corporate megaliths have to throw around. Maybe that'll change in the future, and we'll have whiz-kid hardware hackers visiting their local IBM plant with their latest designs. Open source chips. Sounds cool. But not in this century.:)
Have you tried recent builds of Wine? It can play many games, including Quake 2 and StarCraft, extraordinarily well. Eventch, Windows will be COMPLETELY unnecessary, especially considering what a crufty technology DirectX is.
Well, if Sony is to be believed, then the PSX2 is as fast as a supercomputer, and closer to AI-complete than any other machine on the planet. (The reason for the "emotion Engine" name is so-called "emotion synthesis" technology which, according to SCE's marketing dept., is what it sounds like.) It will be very difficult to separate reality from hype.
Remember the Sega Genesis? It was the first widespread, fully 16-bit system. When the technically superior SNES came out to compete with it, Sega started an ad campaign to pump up its system, claiming it had something nonexistent called "Blast Processing". The ads showed a Formula 1 racer with a Genesis strapped to the back drag-racing a broken down milk truck with a SNES strapped to the back. They were obviously trying to get you to believe that the Genesis was much, much faster than the SNES even though they were comparable speed-wise and the SNES had better graphics and sound.
This is typical of console companies. Pump up the system and try to get the game kiddiez, who can rattle off pixel and polygon counts but don't know that much about the internals of the technology involved, to think it can do more than it actually can. Hopefully some Japanese hackers will try hacking some demos or something on this hardware, to find out what it ACTUALLY can do. Still, I can hardly wait to see it.
Emulators? Fuggeddaboutit. No Wintel hardware is going to run like that kind of machine. I'm sorry. Maybe when Alpha systems proliferate Bleem will get its butt in gear and do a Linux release:)
Netscape 1.1N I believe was the first to have the comets. I remember 'cause that's what I got for school and I was just a shade too late to see the blue block "N" throbber.
The problem is, if it's possible for someone to reverse engineer the implementation details of the PlayStation, it's certainly possible to circumvent the licensing. This is is most likely the problem which Sony and Nintendo are addressing with their go-get-em lawsuits. Not illegal copying of games. See the story about 3Dfx and Glide wrappers for another example.
Pioneered by Apple? Am I the ony one on planet Earth that remembers the IBM PS/1? A lower-end Wintel PC with a one-piece design aimed at the casual home user. It was still boxy and beige, but then IBM was still kind of the boxy beige company. I took one look at the iMac and thought "PS/1 redux". You MacManiacs are so blinded by company loyalty that you don't recall even recent computer history sometimes.
Released-source commercial software is helpful
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You mean like BSDI? I've seen BSDI installed in quite a few places where accessibility to source was beneficial but the admin (or his boss) wasn't ballsy enough to use Linux or FreeBSD.
Forget biochips. I want to see nanocomputers! Or even femtocomputers. Can you imagine a CPU with registers that use entangled subatomic particles, whose states can be changed instantaneously? It'd have *almost* infinite speed. That would rule.
I've been hearing this for months now: The home PC is going to be replaced by an internet device by the phone, a TV/game system in the living room, and a word processing device in the study. Guess what: it ain't gonna happen. The computer revolutionized America, and then the world because of one quality: its versatility. Someone attempting to build a business by replacing a single, does-it-all machine with a bunch of smaller, less cost-effective devices will find themselves looking down the barrel of bankruptcy in a hurry. The fact that PC's are quickly catching up to home game devices, which used to be a considerably cheaper entertainment option, and the fact that dedicated word processors are currently selling about as well as kerosene heaters in the Sahara are testament to the highly marketable versatility of the PC.
I had a fully functional, general-purpose sprite library for X11 in 1996. I used to write the game Xhedgehog (a somewhat playable Sonic clone) which has gotten quite a bit of popularity. Why aren't *I* getting this kind of fanfare? Admittedly the lib isn't as portable as ClanLib but it's getting there... currently it can use Pixmaps or XImages (with DGA support as well) and I'm currently focusing on developing the library along with GNUdius (another, more sophisticated game).
Actually, props should go out to the ClanLib folks. The developers of GAMES (that's me), ClanLib and PenguinPlay all belong to the same online game-development consortium and we've done a lot of helping each other out.
1.Having a few concentrated, talented developers, is better than having a million semi-witless volunteers. And guess what, boys and girls, is the best way to conetrate a group of engineers? Thats right kids - pay them and put them in the same building. Oops, I forgot, corporations aren't in style with the/. crowd, are they?
No one's saying there's anything wrong with corporate development of software. As long as they're concerned mostly about delivering a quality, innovative product to consumers. But big companies seem more inclined to roll out shoddy products and attempt to vendor-lock and price-gouge customers instead. It used to be that the only thing you could do was accept the low quality and pay the high prices due to *certain companies* with their monopoly power.:) Now that free/open source software has become popular, there is an alternative.
Like it or lump it, Mozilla's biggest problem is that their competition actually has out right now something that may be superior to most of what they are still building. Like it or lump it, IE is pretty slick.
Like it or lump it, Mozilla's progress is impressive, especially considering that they jumped from an old codebase to an entirely new system midstream and is shaping up to be faster and more streamlined than Microsoft's bloatware can manage. When Mozilla 5 hits the streets, it'll blow the doors of anything out there except for maybe Opera. You should actually download a binary build of the Windows port before making any comments about how far behind Mozilla is.
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One of a computer's primary purposes is to save us some of the effort of handwriting. Taking the keyboard away and making the Palm a stylus-only device was IMHO pretty dumb. But I gues some usability "expert" declared keyboards to be user-unfriendly or somesuch.
I don't want my browser to crash AND TAKE MY SHELL WITH IT. That alone is reason enough to avoid messing with 'Doze and IE.
That's why they tacked on the meaningless X. PSX, PSX2.
The Emotion Engine is a proprietary chip, and its sole use, IIRC, will be the PlayStation 2.
Doesn't gcj (part of egcs) compile java natively?
As for Java... well, Java Is Cool. It may not be the greatest language for every task but what it does, it does pretty well IMHO.
Great! That means more students for us here! Stevens has been really pumping up its usiness school recently, especially their trendy new "e-business" program. I'm not too fond of all the hype but there's a large contingency of hackers here, and most of the networking is (for the moment) Unix-based (Irix, Solaris, Linux) so at least the business majors here will be working with people and technology that do, more or less, the Right Thing. Maybe some of those UT students will get disgruntled and make the trek up here to continue their studies. Just what we need... more suits in training :)
ZDnet I've found is not the most reliable source of information in the world, but they're not all Microsoft shills, either. (Dvorak was talking about how cool Linux was in '96 and '97!) Yes, they are most definitely targeting the Wintel-based market because that's how they can fatten the number of subscribers. It's good to see that they occasionally show signs of objectivity and rationality.
The resident campus Quake god around here uses a trackball (one of the big Logitech deals). I'd think they'd actually be pretty good for Quaking with sufficient training. You can turn precisely and in a hurry.
You can't draw with a trackball, and you can't Quake with a digitizing pad, so for me it's the good ol' mouse.
I think FlightGear is shaping up to be more realistic than MFS. Something I really want to keep my eyes on, as an aviation fan :)
Derek Currie is the resident Mac-uber-alles evangelist on alt.destroy.microsoft. Maybe now that they've lost their stomping grounds, this type of ardent troll will become scarcer. Of course, if hornets are forced out of their nest, they tend to become mad... :)
Sorry, you can't create a chip like that in your garage. CPU design and manufacture is one of those things that REQUIRES the kind of big money that corporate megaliths have to throw around. Maybe that'll change in the future, and we'll have whiz-kid hardware hackers visiting their local IBM plant with their latest designs. Open source chips. Sounds cool. But not in this century. :)
Have you tried recent builds of Wine? It can play many games, including Quake 2 and StarCraft, extraordinarily well. Eventch, Windows will be COMPLETELY unnecessary, especially considering what a crufty technology DirectX is.
Well, if Sony is to be believed, then the PSX2 is as fast as a supercomputer, and closer to AI-complete than any other machine on the planet. (The reason for the "emotion Engine" name is so-called "emotion synthesis" technology which, according to SCE's marketing dept., is what it sounds like.) It will be very difficult to separate reality from hype.
Remember the Sega Genesis? It was the first widespread, fully 16-bit system. When the technically superior SNES came out to compete with it, Sega started an ad campaign to pump up its system, claiming it had something nonexistent called "Blast Processing". The ads showed a Formula 1 racer with a Genesis strapped to the back drag-racing a broken down milk truck with a SNES strapped to the back. They were obviously trying to get you to believe that the Genesis was much, much faster than the SNES even though they were comparable speed-wise and the SNES had better graphics and sound.
This is typical of console companies. Pump up the system and try to get the game kiddiez, who can rattle off pixel and polygon counts but don't know that much about the internals of the technology involved, to think it can do more than it actually can. Hopefully some Japanese hackers will try hacking some demos or something on this hardware, to find out what it ACTUALLY can do. Still, I can hardly wait to see it.
Well, if the thing's as fast as a supercomputer like Sony keeps saying, why the hell not?
Emulators? Fuggeddaboutit. No Wintel hardware is going to run like that kind of machine. I'm sorry. Maybe when Alpha systems proliferate Bleem will get its butt in gear and do a Linux release :)
LyX is actually quite good. I use it all the time and it produces nicer output than Word for 'Doze when run through a LaTeX formatter. :)
Netscape 1.1N I believe was the first to have the comets. I remember 'cause that's what I got for school and I was just a shade too late to see the blue block "N" throbber.
The problem is, if it's possible for someone to reverse engineer the implementation details of the PlayStation, it's certainly possible to circumvent the licensing. This is is most likely the problem which Sony and Nintendo are addressing with their go-get-em lawsuits. Not illegal copying of games. See the story about 3Dfx and Glide wrappers for another example.
Pioneered by Apple? Am I the ony one on planet Earth that remembers the IBM PS/1? A lower-end Wintel PC with a one-piece design aimed at the casual home user. It was still boxy and beige, but then IBM was still kind of the boxy beige company. I took one look at the iMac and thought "PS/1 redux". You MacManiacs are so blinded by company loyalty that you don't recall even recent computer history sometimes.
You mean like BSDI? I've seen BSDI installed in quite a few places where accessibility to source was beneficial but the admin (or his boss) wasn't ballsy enough to use Linux or FreeBSD.
Forget biochips. I want to see nanocomputers! Or even femtocomputers. Can you imagine a CPU with registers that use entangled subatomic particles, whose states can be changed instantaneously? It'd have *almost* infinite speed. That would rule.
I've been hearing this for months now: The home PC is going to be replaced by an internet device by the phone, a TV/game system in the living room, and a word processing device in the study. Guess what: it ain't gonna happen. The computer revolutionized America, and then the world because of one quality: its versatility. Someone attempting to build a business by replacing a single, does-it-all machine with a bunch of smaller, less cost-effective devices will find themselves looking down the barrel of bankruptcy in a hurry. The fact that PC's are quickly catching up to home game devices, which used to be a considerably cheaper entertainment option, and the fact that dedicated word processors are currently selling about as well as kerosene heaters in the Sahara are testament to the highly marketable versatility of the PC.
Actually, props should go out to the ClanLib folks. The developers of GAMES (that's me), ClanLib and PenguinPlay all belong to the same online game-development consortium and we've done a lot of helping each other out.