heh.. i feel stupid now. I actually have icab, and like it and have used it from time to time.. but the version i had was an older beta with slightly different cookie support.
thanks for correcting me. I now have the newer version..
But yeh, icab's great, and WAY more flexible than anything else i've ever seen, and if their java "filters" are any indication, if they ever get around to implementing some degree of javascript support, it will be just as flexible. (they still might want to consider an option that would disallow cookies over GIF, but that's not really a problem.)
encrypting the DVDs has no real effect other than causing problems for people who wish to use it legally. what it comes down to is almost security through obscurity.
The way i see it, there are three types of people who are going to be pirating DVDS, and none of them are going to be stopped by the current "security" methods.
Random people at home who rent DVDs from a store and make copies. Of course, things will be much more difficult for these people than the days of the late 80s (where you could just go to Randalls, rent a tape and a VCR, and copy off the rented VCR onto your home VCR..). But things won't be more difficult for these people because of CSS encryption; things will be more difficult because of the fact DVDs aren't easily writable. Of course, if these people are willing to settle for second-rate quality, the option of borrowing a VCR and making a tape copy STILL EXISTS! remember: an s-video out port has _no idea_ what happens at the other end. No system will _ever_ be devised where it is more difficult to send the video into a recording device than it is to send the video into a TV to watch it.
People on the internet who trade around copies of movies. This is pretty much similar to the first one; there's still the fact that the video-out of a DVD player can always be sent to a recording device. Of course, an entire DVD would not be fun to download over the internet, so probably any movies on the internet will be re-encoded at lower quality, making any quality loss caused by not making a byte-for-byte copy of the DVD irrelivant. And after all, there are MPEG-1 versions of movies that are in _theaters_ floating around at warez sites everywhere, and i'll bet a lot of the others come from tapes. I doubt that being able to put keys on DVD-RAMs or whatever will affect this much.
Big-time piraters, sometimes in third-world countries, which make huge numbers of exact copies and distribute them widely. These people will probably be wanting the "keys", or whatever you're talking about, as they'd want it identical to the original DVD. But these people also will probably not be using an average consumer PC. They'll be making enough money from this that they can afford to use some kind of customized hardware that will do whatever "special drive commands" they want. Even if such hardware doesn't exist at the moment, for the makers of the DVD spec to pretend such hardware will not come into existance the instant there's some amount of money in DVD pirating is just silly.
I'm pretty sure that if the DVD companies will already be losing the revenue from these people, any money _saved_ by the CSS will be pocket change..
i'd like to take this opportunity to bitch and moan a bit. really i think the problem here is that web browsers don't give the users quite enough choice as to what kind of things the remote sites are going to do to them.
someone suggested that cookies are a trade-off; they give you customisation but you lose privacy. why do they have to be a trade-off? Why is there not one single web browser out there that will let me say "accept cookies ONLY from "www.slashdot.org"? or "no new cookies"?
the closest i've seen yet is a feature in IE4/mac (and maybe other browsers, i'm not sure..), which i use, which asks you every time you visit a site whether you want to accept cookies from there in the future. if you say "no", it throws out any cookie information from that adress in the future. But, of course, this means that every time i visit a site i've never been to, i have to deal with a little dialog box saying "do you want to accept cookies from www.blah.com?". And because for some reason this dialog box has been made modal, and because of the mac os's cooperative multitasking, this means that until i go and click that dialog IE doesn't load anything. grr.
what i'd LIKE to be able to do is get the cookie from www.slashdot.org in my file, and then tell the browser to never accept any cookies again and not let any sites except slashdot.org read cookies. But that's not an option, so i put up with the constant dialog boxes.
It's too bad the web browser companies go all or nothing with their features. There's some situations where you want something more flexible than a simple on/off switch. Instead of having a little click box saying "allow javascript" it would be very nice to be able to allow only _parts_ of javascript; like, allow document.write()s and mouseovers and things that pages require to work, and then disable things like popup windows.
Of course, this is why mozilla is such a good thing. i like the idea of being able to delete huge swaths of code from my web browser.
thank you for your time.
-mcc-baka why web browsers suck: http://home.earthlink.net/~mcclure111/cyberleary.h tml#discontent
well, first off, since egcs is technically part of mac os x server, the most important thing an altivec-enhanced mac os x server release would imply is that it came with an altivec-enhanced egcs.
Either way Apple has been working to use altivec in the OS whenever possible, particularly in system API calls and things like graphics routines. Copybits is AV-enhanced in OS 9, for the only specific example i've heard yet outside of quicktime. the purpose is to make it so that even if you don't enhance for altivec you wind up getting some small altivec boost through the system so that altivec doesn't turn into a big joke the way MMX did. I dunno what besides Quicktime and display routines would make use of altivec, but then again i've never written, say, a preemptive multitasking thread manager, so i wouldn't be very knowledgable about whether such things involve vector math.
but like i said the main point of asking about an altivec-enhanced mac os x server was not anything involving actual mac os x server itself, but that they would almost certainly wind up making whatever egcs compiler they used to build it publicly available. whatever
-mcc-baka http://home.earthlink.net/~mcclure111/prog.html (copybits is your friend)
mac_on_linux (free sheepshaver alternative)
on
iBook boots Linux
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· Score: 1
this is just the standard comment that i feel compelled to post whenever anyone brings up sheepshaver: you might want to consider checking out the mac_on_linux project instead. It's free and open, and unlike sheepshaver (which is still in beta) it has actually been released. http://www.ibrium.se/linux/mac_on_linux.html
it's hardware support isn't that wide-ranging though, i don't think. i doubt it will work on an ibook at this moment, although they'd probably be happy if someone would make it work on an ibook (hint, hint).
someone tell linuxppc.org.. they don't seem to have heard about it yet. http://www.linuxppc.org/hardware/
now we just have to wait for G4 support to show up. question: there isn't an altivec-enhanced gcc out yet, is there? why not? isn't apple using egcs for mac os x? won't they have to release the version they're using to the public? is there even an altivec-enhanced version of mac os x server out yet?
Boolean statements and partial word completion. Google does none of these things, and altavista is about as good as any search engine of it's type i'm aware of. If google can't find it it's nice to be able to still have a simple layout on AV. Altavista's text-only section, yahoo and google all have their places depending on the specific search term..
still, it came out in an odd-numbered year (1999), so they're still going by the original plan. maybe they'll continue this pattern and release Office 2001 for the mac in the year 2000, and then Office 2010 for windows in the year 2001, and so on until by 2006 they release "office 4029" for linux and go bankrupt.. [trails off]
another thing you might want to think about is that maybe mac users don't _want_ games which are a year and a half old.
Game companies frequently release their mac versions just as the game is ending its cycle of life; frequently the release of the mac version is simultanious with the release of the windows version of the sequel, or the windows version of the next generation of the same kind of game. and then they just assume the mac users won't mind, because hey, they're mac users. Like mac tomb raider I and II.. they came out at the same windows tomb tomb raider III was released. Mac Starcraft came out at about the same time that the PC Broodwars expansion pack became really popular. These are bad examples, because tomb raider I and II for mac had extra levels that the windows version didn't, and tomb raider III looked pretty bad from the PSX-based demo i got from Pizza Hut, and Starcraft still has a very healthy online gaming community based around it even so long after the original release. But the point is the same; why would mac users want the cold, leftover crumbs of the windows world? Even if they HAD released halflife, why would we want it NOW? Quake3 (like halflife only better) is just around the corner, and some form of Tribes (an ORIGINAL game, instead of just more derivitive mindless point-and-shoot..) may be released. Having Halflife would have been cool at the time it was released, but now I for one am no longer very interested in it.
If the game companies really want any serious showing from the mac users, they should develop all versions of the game at the same time.. or exersize *gasp* good programming, and have a bit of an abstraction layer and write the programs in such a way that instead of calling things in MS-propeitary functions directly, you call functions of your own that call the MS API up for you.. so that later instead of doing the mac/linux version ground-up you can just replace the abstraction layer functions with Sprockets/X (i'm totally BSing this, by the way, i've never written a game and i don't know whether you could really do this without taking a massive performance hit. Maybe if you inlined/#defined the functions it would..? never mind)
Anyway, the point is, if you release the mac version a year later, when all the mac users have been playing it on friend's PCs for over a year, the mac users are _much_ less likely to actually buy the game. Meaning you'll make less money. Oh, and then a funny thinghappens; the game companies just scoff at the idea of porting to the mac in the first place, saying "mac users don't buy games". And ignoring _why_ mac users don't buy games, and if there's anything they could do to get the mac users to buy games..
[ramble] PS.. whatever happened to ambrosia? they used to be the bomb. Avara was so far ahead of its time it was rediculous. Ah well. Anyway, i want tribes 2 for mac. and a mac capable of running tribes 2. Instead of this 7200/75 with no hardware acceleration. WORMS ARMAGGEDDON ROCKS!! [/ramble]
office 98 was not released "late". the mac versions are on a different timetable. they release odd numbered years for windows and even numbered years for mac. So office '97 and '99 were windows, office '98 and '00 are for mac. At least, this was the original plan, i dunno if they're still sticking to it. And office '98 really wasn't office '97, it was a slightly differnet program that was written for mac ground-up to be for the mac. They really don't want to release the same product for mac and windows because mac and windows are different.. for an example of this look at Word 6, which was a massive insult to all mac users. Word 6 was actually running on a win32 emulation layer, and it was slow as all-get-out, and almost everyone who got it continued to use word 5. (Word6/mac is also a cautionary tale for everyone who thinks they want a WINE-like MS-sponsored win32 layer for linux..) This isn't important, really, but kind of interesting.
yes, so your IPv6 adress WILL be static, possibly even on a dailup. This means that it may be easier for websites to track you without the use of cookies. It means if you get glined from an irc network you can't just logoff and log back on.
But it also means that you can host a web/ftp/etc server and have it be in the same location all the time; it also means you can buy a.com or.net or whatever domain name. Basically it means everything that having a static IPv4 adress meant.
This is not something that the IPv6 protocol makers should be worrying about. After all, if you'll remember, the entire point of the IPv6 standard is to create a system whereby everyone gets their own static IP. The privacy concerns are something that your ISP should be handling. Talk to them. And the ISP can handle this probably by setting up a system whereby you change your IP occationally if you want to; this is how some *dsl and cable providers handle the exact same privacy problems (since *dsl and cable also have static IPs).
But the fact is that a lot of people-- me, for instance-- would _want_ a static IP. And there's no real way that the people writing the IPv6 protocol _can_ do anything about privacy concerns arising from static IPs, since there's no system i can think of where you can't be tracked but can have a DNS name.. The ISP should be the one you should be complaining to.
from the article: "there were no immediate reports of injuries or damage".
RAM prices won't be affected by these quakes; the quakes didn't do anything. This isn't really something that needed to have been put on/.-- all it's gonna do is set off a couple hundred random people who didn't read the article flaming the poster for daring to examine the practical, direct consequences of an event in which people were hurt.. except, nobody was hurt this time. it's ok if roblimo gave more attention to electronics than to humans, because neither of these things were affected..
Those of you who actually have something to say, good luck being heard.
maybe i missed something.. but how would requiring a windows computer make ballot-stuffing any more difficult than not requiring one?
were you required to be using some propeitary MSN voting program? even then, couldn't you just uninstall and reinstall the voting program? or have a script do it for you?
or did they just assume those wild, open-source fanatic linux users and the tree-hugging hippie mac users would be the only ones unethical enough to ballot-stuff?
would it really have been that difficult for microsoft to take the segfault.org strategy and just log IPs? sure, you could still ballot-stuff if you had a lot of shells or were in a computer lab or had a dynamic IP, but at least you'd be limited by the number of shells or computers or IPs available. as opposed to any other method, whereby ballot-stuffing would be nearly impossible to hinder..
why don't we just wait until apple gives some kind of clear, definitive statement on this? like, maybe just wait a day or two, until we have some idea what is going on? Or would you rather just go on with your current strategy of reprinting and magnifying and making a big deal out of what are essentially rumors?
I mean, if apple did cancel the orders that wasn't very nice of them; if they're going to give people who ordered G4s, discounts, that's nice. But do you have to know one way or the other right this instant?? can't you wait a bit until we can have some kind of news report that is definately true one way or the other? instead of the columbine/lewinsky-style drudge reporting we have now?
Damn kids these days. No patience whatsoever. they have to have instant gratification. Can't wait for reliable reports on anything, have to know immediately even if it means it's maybe innacurate.. Hey, wait a minute, i just remembered-- i'm 16, i'm one of the damn kids. and the whole instant-gratification demands in news were brought about by CNN, which was started by baby boomers, and fed by tabloids bought and run by baby boomers.. Hmm. Aw, whatever.
with so many of these projects (RC5, SETI, this, distributed.net) it seems sad that every time someone does a new distributed computing system they have to reinvent the wheel and make a totally new client from scratch.
would be nice if somone would just write a protocol and open-souce client for the darn thing. like, some way to send out abstract work blocks of various kinds over a network, processed with spare cycles, and have those work blocks returned. it would have to be something very abstract, or at least extensible, so you could easily swap projects promiscuously without downloading and configuring a new client. and it would have to be processor-agnostic, maybe just put in a bunch of mathematic instructions (though a VM of any kind would just be stupid) and a standard way of parsing them. although you'd want to put in hints (vector instruction here, floating-point instruction here) so that things like MMX and altivec and 3d cards could be used to their full potential. And there would have to be _very_ clearly defined limits on the way they can access the hard drive, and ways to make sure it doesn't interfere with other applications. And it might need to try to make sure it only consumes network bandwidth if it isn't taking away bandwidth being used by something else. I dunno how you'd deal with the question of whether the work blocks are getting returned correctly; only thing i can think of is extreme redundancy. Send out all work blocks two or three times, if there's _any_ difference in the returned blocks redo it and maybe put the computer that returned the bad block on a list of computers not to trust. So it would be kinda complex to make a generic protocol instead of a specific implementation.. but wouldn't that be COOL?
especially if it wasn't just an internet thing, but a generic network thing; we have a _lot_ of computers at the school just sitting there all day waiting for someone to ctrl-alt-del and put a username in the login box. would be nice if they could be put to some meaningful use in their downtime.. like just say on one computer "rip this mp3 for me", or like an entire queue of mp3s and 3d renderings or whatever, and have all the computers on the network not in use do the work while i continue using the computer i'm on. 'course the network admin might not be too happy about his entire network being turned into an mp3 encoder, but hey, he doesn't need to know about it. It's his own damn fault for using NT, esp. without reading the damn manual..
distributed.net seems to be using the more use-a-specific-client-for-each-specific-task tactic, but maybe they could be raided for useful source code..
(p.s. mp3s are a hypothetical example, of course.. i wouldn't actually do that, that would be illegal! Riiight..)
apple apparently has a very good learning objective C guide free on the internet. it is linked to from the top of http://www.santafe.edu/projects/swarm/ObjC/objec tive-c.html
it isn't really "recent"-- it's from 1993-- but i doubt objc has changed much since 1993. I haven't actually read it yet, but it's supposedly pretty good. There's some other stuff at that URL too. May get around to it this weekend..
Metrowerks Codewarrior and, as you noted, gcc can use objective c.. anyone know what the situation under windows is?
as a mac codewarrior user, i just have a couple small notes. the whole thing with the popup menu letting you jump to functions or wherever you put a #pragma mark seems like a small feature, but you get addicted to it quickly..
also, it has (at least on mac) an FTP postlinker which will allow you to develop, say, a windows program in mac codewarrior, and every time it compiles simply dump the compiled file via ftp onto a windows machine on the network for running.. is this something common for IDEs?
and the mac version seems to have come with Playstation development tools.. does the linux version?:) if you don't have java though i guess you wouldn't have PSX.
codewarrior also has the most amazing multiple-file find/replace capabilities i've ever seen.. but then again that wouldn't apply on linux, since you people have grep and awk and such things.
maybe not important. but if anyone's interested.. codewarrior's pretty nice..
i was hoping he'd answer at least one question relating in some way to the future of ray-tracing/voxels/progressive algorythms (nervana) in 3d gaming.. but i think i'll settle for the interview we got.
no, i'm advocating beliefs tests being avoided.. i'm saying people shouldn't be chosen on the basis of their opinions on creationism, they should be chosen on the basis of their ability to teach/run a school system.
most of the people pushing creationism are doing so for religious reasons and not scientific reasons. since science is the point of a science class.. well, science ought to be more imporant than religion.
whatever. this is a kind of a dumb argument anyway and i'm sorry i started it.
ok.. so apple makes a kind of bad decision that annoys some of its customers. by 24 hours later, it has realized its mistake, listented to its customers, and done something rather nice to everyone who had ordered a 450 model. (in the process giving up quite a bit of money..)
after apple makes the mistake, slashdot is flooded with people flaming apple. Apple is arrogant, apple is screwing its customers, apple is nonresponsive, apple is self-destructive and stupid. Almost none of these people posting were affected in any way by the order cancellations. The people posting who _were_ affected were just kind of calmly shrugged it off.
so now that apple has actually _listened to its customers_.. what happens? do the slashdot posters come back and appologize for being too hasty to flame? well, no. instead what we get is.. more apple bashing. people say "well it's a good thing apple is doing this", and then immediately go right on with the flaming. Mostly saying the exact same thing they were after yesterday's article. What is this? How many other companies would _do_ this? If compaq cancelled a bunch of orders and said "i'm sorry, we can't fufill these, you'll have to reorder".. would _they_ have listened to any customer complaints? (Compaq being a hypothetical example.. i've never dealt with them)
Oh, and btw i think i can say with almost absoloute certainty that apple did _not_ make the decision to give discounts to the people who had originally ordered 500s based on anything related in any way to slashdot. And the downgrade wasn't covered by any other "media" sources except macintouch/macnn. Apple based what they did on customer feedback..
meanwhile, other people in the current thread are complaining that apple effectively raised the prices for people who are going to buy new G4s after that. um, so? are you going to be buying a G4? if not why are you complaining? shouldn't apple have the right to charge what they like, especially if (because of rising DRAM prices) it is costing them more to make the product then it was awhile back? it's amazing the people who don't care about or pay attention to apple _at all_.. except when there's a/. posting about some mistake apple made, and then suddenly they're experts.. there are times when slashdot is full of interesting people with great technical knowledge and a willingness to share it, and informed insights on the thing being spoken on. These times almost never occur if apple's involved in some way. oh well. i'm done ranting now.
1.IBM comes to dominate the computer world. 2.Microsoft works itself into a position where people buying IBM products are heavily directed toward Microsoft DOS. 3.Microsoft works itself into a position where it is independant of IBM. 4.Microsoft comes to dominate the computer world. 5.IBM ceases to be of any importance and collapses in a mess of antitrust lawsuits. It never really goes back into the consumer market. 6.Intel works itself into a position where people buying Microsoft products are heavily directed toward the x86 architecture. ((YOU ARE HERE)) 7.Intel works itself into a position where it is independant of Microsoft
Do you see a pattern? Can you guess step 8? Of course, this is probably looking at things the wrong way, and exaggerating things a lot, and assuming that Intel really can work itself into a position where when microsoft falls Intel won't come crashing down with it (which is not _that_ likely). But still, it's awful suspicious.
If i wanted to be even MORE paranoid, i'd refer to the other postings here stating that TurboLinux is thinking about putting propeitary stuff in their distro; the way i look at it, that sounds an awful lot like closed-source and-- as a result-- not quite as hardware-independant, since mr. end user can't just./configure;make all. Is Intel trying to destroy the hardware independance of Linux by promoting things which will tether it to a limited number of processors? Is the shadowy and much-feared Covert Ops arm of Intel planning on replacing the Turbolinux management with evil androids which will slavishly refuse to support any non-intel microchips well?
Who knows? Certainly not me. But the truth is out there. The truth is out there..
[if you wish, you may insert in this space a random and uninformed flamebait about integrating support for PPC and Alpha machines into the main linux kernel tree]
-mcc-baka (this post was originally written with Mozilla M10 for macintosh. Its form support lacks many things, for instance full support for the left arrow key. After clicking "preview" i discovered that Mozilla M10 randomly deletes about half of what you put into any form you try to send. I had to retype it in a more finished browser. Hey; it's beta.)
Slashdot Mirror
hmm. i'm annoyed that a digital camera can do something more impressive than my beloved TI-86.
anyway, the logical next step is to make LinuxPPC run on it.
heh.. i feel stupid now.
I actually have icab, and like it and have used it from time to time.. but the version i had was an older beta with slightly different cookie support.
thanks for correcting me. I now have the newer version..
But yeh, icab's great, and WAY more flexible than anything else i've ever seen, and if their java "filters" are any indication, if they ever get around to implementing some degree of javascript support, it will be just as flexible. (they still might want to consider an option that would disallow cookies over GIF, but that's not really a problem.)
The way i see it, there are three types of people who are going to be pirating DVDS, and none of them are going to be stopped by the current "security" methods.
Random people at home who rent DVDs from a store and make copies. Of course, things will be much more difficult for these people than the days of the late 80s (where you could just go to Randalls, rent a tape and a VCR, and copy off the rented VCR onto your home VCR..). But things won't be more difficult for these people because of CSS encryption; things will be more difficult because of the fact DVDs aren't easily writable. Of course, if these people are willing to settle for second-rate quality, the option of borrowing a VCR and making a tape copy STILL EXISTS! remember: an s-video out port has _no idea_ what happens at the other end. No system will _ever_ be devised where it is more difficult to send the video into a recording device than it is to send the video into a TV to watch it.
People on the internet who trade around copies of movies. This is pretty much similar to the first one; there's still the fact that the video-out of a DVD player can always be sent to a recording device. Of course, an entire DVD would not be fun to download over the internet, so probably any movies on the internet will be re-encoded at lower quality, making any quality loss caused by not making a byte-for-byte copy of the DVD irrelivant. And after all, there are MPEG-1 versions of movies that are in _theaters_ floating around at warez sites everywhere, and i'll bet a lot of the others come from tapes. I doubt that being able to put keys on DVD-RAMs or whatever will affect this much.
Big-time piraters, sometimes in third-world countries, which make huge numbers of exact copies and distribute them widely. These people will probably be wanting the "keys", or whatever you're talking about, as they'd want it identical to the original DVD. But these people also will probably not be using an average consumer PC. They'll be making enough money from this that they can afford to use some kind of customized hardware that will do whatever "special drive commands" they want. Even if such hardware doesn't exist at the moment, for the makers of the DVD spec to pretend such hardware will not come into existance the instant there's some amount of money in DVD pirating is just silly.
I'm pretty sure that if the DVD companies will already be losing the revenue from these people, any money _saved_ by the CSS will be pocket change..
-mcc-baka
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS THEFT
C:\DOS
C:\DOS\RUN
RUN\DOS\RUN
i'd like to take this opportunity to bitch and moan a bit.
h tml#discontent
really i think the problem here is that web browsers don't give the users quite enough choice as to what kind of things the remote sites are going to do to them.
someone suggested that cookies are a trade-off; they give you customisation but you lose privacy. why do they have to be a trade-off?
Why is there not one single web browser out there that will let me say "accept cookies ONLY from "www.slashdot.org"? or "no new cookies"?
the closest i've seen yet is a feature in IE4/mac (and maybe other browsers, i'm not sure..), which i use, which asks you every time you visit a site whether you want to accept cookies from there in the future. if you say "no", it throws out any cookie information from that adress in the future. But, of course, this means that every time i visit a site i've never been to, i have to deal with a little dialog box saying "do you want to accept cookies from www.blah.com?". And because for some reason this dialog box has been made modal, and because of the mac os's cooperative multitasking, this means that until i go and click that dialog IE doesn't load anything. grr.
what i'd LIKE to be able to do is get the cookie from www.slashdot.org in my file, and then tell the browser to never accept any cookies again and not let any sites except slashdot.org read cookies. But that's not an option, so i put up with the constant dialog boxes.
It's too bad the web browser companies go all or nothing with their features. There's some situations where you want something more flexible than a simple on/off switch. Instead of having a little click box saying "allow javascript" it would be very nice to be able to allow only _parts_ of javascript; like, allow document.write()s and mouseovers and things that pages require to work, and then disable things like popup windows.
Of course, this is why mozilla is such a good thing. i like the idea of being able to delete huge swaths of code from my web browser.
thank you for your time.
-mcc-baka
why web browsers suck: http://home.earthlink.net/~mcclure111/cyberleary.
well, first off, since egcs is technically part of mac os x server, the most important thing an altivec-enhanced mac os x server release would imply is that it came with an altivec-enhanced egcs.
Either way Apple has been working to use altivec in the OS whenever possible, particularly in system API calls and things like graphics routines. Copybits is AV-enhanced in OS 9, for the only specific example i've heard yet outside of quicktime. the purpose is to make it so that even if you don't enhance for altivec you wind up getting some small altivec boost through the system so that altivec doesn't turn into a big joke the way MMX did.
I dunno what besides Quicktime and display routines would make use of altivec, but then again i've never written, say, a preemptive multitasking thread manager, so i wouldn't be very knowledgable about whether such things involve vector math.
but like i said the main point of asking about an altivec-enhanced mac os x server was not anything involving actual mac os x server itself, but that they would almost certainly wind up making whatever egcs compiler they used to build it publicly available. whatever
-mcc-baka
http://home.earthlink.net/~mcclure111/prog.html (copybits is your friend)
this is just the standard comment that i feel compelled to post whenever anyone brings up sheepshaver: you might want to consider checking out the mac_on_linux project instead. It's free and open, and unlike sheepshaver (which is still in beta) it has actually been released.
http://www.ibrium.se/linux/mac_on_linux.html
it's hardware support isn't that wide-ranging though, i don't think. i doubt it will work on an ibook at this moment, although they'd probably be happy if someone would make it work on an ibook (hint, hint).
someone tell linuxppc.org..
they don't seem to have heard about it yet.
http://www.linuxppc.org/hardware/
now we just have to wait for G4 support to show up.
question: there isn't an altivec-enhanced gcc out yet, is there? why not? isn't apple using egcs for mac os x? won't they have to release the version they're using to the public? is there even an altivec-enhanced version of mac os x server out yet?
i like it.. same concept as thae whole "jam echelon day" thing. let's do it.
the "echoes from the formless void" page is actually their 404 page.
k ie=adfasda
for example check
http://www.forum2000.org/matrix/forum_reply?coo
which obviously does not and never has existed.
Boolean statements and partial word completion. Google does none of these things, and altavista is about as good as any search engine of it's type i'm aware of. If google can't find it it's nice to be able to still have a simple layout on AV. Altavista's text-only section, yahoo and google all have their places depending on the specific search term..
still, it came out in an odd-numbered year (1999), so they're still going by the original plan.
maybe they'll continue this pattern and release Office 2001 for the mac in the year 2000, and then Office 2010 for windows in the year 2001, and so on until by 2006 they release "office 4029" for linux and go bankrupt.. [trails off]
another thing you might want to think about is that maybe mac users don't _want_ games which are a year and a half old.
Game companies frequently release their mac versions just as the game is ending its cycle of life; frequently the release of the mac version is simultanious with the release of the windows version of the sequel, or the windows version of the next generation of the same kind of game. and then they just assume the mac users won't mind, because hey, they're mac users.
Like mac tomb raider I and II.. they came out at the same windows tomb tomb raider III was released. Mac Starcraft came out at about the same time that the PC Broodwars expansion pack became really popular.
These are bad examples, because tomb raider I and II for mac had extra levels that the windows version didn't, and tomb raider III looked pretty bad from the PSX-based demo i got from Pizza Hut, and Starcraft still has a very healthy online gaming community based around it even so long after the original release. But the point is the same; why would mac users want the cold, leftover crumbs of the windows world?
Even if they HAD released halflife, why would we want it NOW? Quake3 (like halflife only better) is just around the corner, and some form of Tribes (an ORIGINAL game, instead of just more derivitive mindless point-and-shoot..) may be released. Having Halflife would have been cool at the time it was released, but now I for one am no longer very interested in it.
If the game companies really want any serious showing from the mac users, they should develop all versions of the game at the same time.. or exersize *gasp* good programming, and have a bit of an abstraction layer and write the programs in such a way that instead of calling things in MS-propeitary functions directly, you call functions of your own that call the MS API up for you.. so that later instead of doing the mac/linux version ground-up you can just replace the abstraction layer functions with Sprockets/X (i'm totally BSing this, by the way, i've never written a game and i don't know whether you could really do this without taking a massive performance hit. Maybe if you inlined/#defined the functions it would..? never mind)
Anyway, the point is, if you release the mac version a year later, when all the mac users have been playing it on friend's PCs for over a year, the mac users are _much_ less likely to actually buy the game. Meaning you'll make less money.
Oh, and then a funny thinghappens; the game companies just scoff at the idea of porting to the mac in the first place, saying "mac users don't buy games". And ignoring _why_ mac users don't buy games, and if there's anything they could do to get the mac users to buy games..
[ramble] PS.. whatever happened to ambrosia? they used to be the bomb. Avara was so far ahead of its time it was rediculous. Ah well. Anyway, i want tribes 2 for mac. and a mac capable of running tribes 2. Instead of this 7200/75 with no hardware acceleration. WORMS ARMAGGEDDON ROCKS!! [/ramble]
office 98 was not released "late". the mac versions are on a different timetable. they release odd numbered years for windows and even numbered years for mac. So office '97 and '99 were windows, office '98 and '00 are for mac. At least, this was the original plan, i dunno if they're still sticking to it. And office '98 really wasn't office '97, it was a slightly differnet program that was written for mac ground-up to be for the mac. They really don't want to release the same product for mac and windows because mac and windows are different.. for an example of this look at Word 6, which was a massive insult to all mac users. Word 6 was actually running on a win32 emulation layer, and it was slow as all-get-out, and almost everyone who got it continued to use word 5. (Word6/mac is also a cautionary tale for everyone who thinks they want a WINE-like MS-sponsored win32 layer for linux..)
This isn't important, really, but kind of interesting.
-mcc-baka
i use clariworks.
yes, so your IPv6 adress WILL be static, possibly even on a dailup. This means that it may be easier for websites to track you without the use of cookies. It means if you get glined from an irc network you can't just logoff and log back on.
But it also means that you can host a web/ftp/etc server and have it be in the same location all the time; it also means you can buy a .com or .net or whatever domain name. Basically it means everything that having a static IPv4 adress meant.
This is not something that the IPv6 protocol makers should be worrying about. After all, if you'll remember, the entire point of the IPv6 standard is to create a system whereby everyone gets their own static IP. The privacy concerns are something that your ISP should be handling. Talk to them. And the ISP can handle this probably by setting up a system whereby you change your IP occationally if you want to; this is how some *dsl and cable providers handle the exact same privacy problems (since *dsl and cable also have static IPs).
But the fact is that a lot of people-- me, for instance-- would _want_ a static IP. And there's no real way that the people writing the IPv6 protocol _can_ do anything about privacy concerns arising from static IPs, since there's no system i can think of where you can't be tracked but can have a DNS name.. The ISP should be the one you should be complaining to.
RAM prices won't be affected by these quakes; the quakes didn't do anything. This isn't really something that needed to have been put on /.-- all it's gonna do is set off a couple hundred random people who didn't read the article flaming the poster for daring to examine the practical, direct consequences of an event in which people were hurt.. except, nobody was hurt this time. it's ok if roblimo gave more attention to electronics than to humans, because neither of these things were affected..
Those of you who actually have something to say, good luck being heard.
maybe i missed something.. but how would requiring a windows computer make ballot-stuffing any more difficult than not requiring one?
were you required to be using some propeitary MSN voting program? even then, couldn't you just uninstall and reinstall the voting program? or have a script do it for you?
or did they just assume those wild, open-source fanatic linux users and the tree-hugging hippie mac users would be the only ones unethical enough to ballot-stuff?
would it really have been that difficult for microsoft to take the segfault.org strategy and just log IPs? sure, you could still ballot-stuff if you had a lot of shells or were in a computer lab or had a dynamic IP, but at least you'd be limited by the number of shells or computers or IPs available. as opposed to any other method, whereby ballot-stuffing would be nearly impossible to hinder..
please explain.
why don't we just wait until apple gives some kind of clear, definitive statement on this? like, maybe just wait a day or two, until we have some idea what is going on? Or would you rather just go on with your current strategy of reprinting and magnifying and making a big deal out of what are essentially rumors?
I mean, if apple did cancel the orders that wasn't very nice of them; if they're going to give people who ordered G4s, discounts, that's nice. But do you have to know one way or the other right this instant?? can't you wait a bit until we can have some kind of news report that is definately true one way or the other? instead of the columbine/lewinsky-style drudge reporting we have now?
Damn kids these days. No patience whatsoever. they have to have instant gratification. Can't wait for reliable reports on anything, have to know immediately even if it means it's maybe innacurate..
Hey, wait a minute, i just remembered-- i'm 16, i'm one of the damn kids. and the whole instant-gratification demands in news were brought about by CNN, which was started by baby boomers, and fed by tabloids bought and run by baby boomers.. Hmm. Aw, whatever.
with so many of these projects (RC5, SETI, this, distributed.net) it seems sad that every time someone does a new distributed computing system they have to reinvent the wheel and make a totally new client from scratch.
would be nice if somone would just write a protocol and open-souce client for the darn thing. like, some way to send out abstract work blocks of various kinds over a network, processed with spare cycles, and have those work blocks returned.
it would have to be something very abstract, or at least extensible, so you could easily swap projects promiscuously without downloading and configuring a new client. and it would have to be processor-agnostic, maybe just put in a bunch of mathematic instructions (though a VM of any kind would just be stupid) and a standard way of parsing them. although you'd want to put in hints (vector instruction here, floating-point instruction here) so that things like MMX and altivec and 3d cards could be used to their full potential. And there would have to be _very_ clearly defined limits on the way they can access the hard drive, and ways to make sure it doesn't interfere with other applications. And it might need to try to make sure it only consumes network bandwidth if it isn't taking away bandwidth being used by something else. I dunno how you'd deal with the question of whether the work blocks are getting returned correctly; only thing i can think of is extreme redundancy. Send out all work blocks two or three times, if there's _any_ difference in the returned blocks redo it and maybe put the computer that returned the bad block on a list of computers not to trust. So it would be kinda complex to make a generic protocol instead of a specific implementation..
but wouldn't that be COOL?
especially if it wasn't just an internet thing, but a generic network thing; we have a _lot_ of computers at the school just sitting there all day waiting for someone to ctrl-alt-del and put a username in the login box. would be nice if they could be put to some meaningful use in their downtime.. like just say on one computer "rip this mp3 for me", or like an entire queue of mp3s and 3d renderings or whatever, and have all the computers on the network not in use do the work while i continue using the computer i'm on. 'course the network admin might not be too happy about his entire network being turned into an mp3 encoder, but hey, he doesn't need to know about it. It's his own damn fault for using NT, esp. without reading the damn manual..
distributed.net seems to be using the more use-a-specific-client-for-each-specific-task tactic, but maybe they could be raided for useful source code..
(p.s. mp3s are a hypothetical example, of course.. i wouldn't actually do that, that would be illegal! Riiight..)
-mcc-baka
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS THEFT
apple apparently has a very good learning objective C guide free on the internet. it is linked to from the top ofc tive-c.html
http://www.santafe.edu/projects/swarm/ObjC/obje
it isn't really "recent"-- it's from 1993-- but i doubt objc has changed much since 1993. I haven't actually read it yet, but it's supposedly pretty good. There's some other stuff at that URL too. May get around to it this weekend..
Metrowerks Codewarrior and, as you noted, gcc can use objective c.. anyone know what the situation under windows is?
as a mac codewarrior user, i just have a couple small notes.
:) if you don't have java though i guess you wouldn't have PSX.
the whole thing with the popup menu letting you jump to functions or wherever you put a #pragma mark seems like a small feature, but you get addicted to it quickly..
also, it has (at least on mac) an FTP postlinker which will allow you to develop, say, a windows program in mac codewarrior, and every time it compiles simply dump the compiled file via ftp onto a windows machine on the network for running.. is this something common for IDEs?
and the mac version seems to have come with Playstation development tools.. does the linux version?
codewarrior also has the most amazing multiple-file find/replace capabilities i've ever seen.. but then again that wouldn't apply on linux, since you people have grep and awk and such things.
maybe not important. but if anyone's interested.. codewarrior's pretty nice..
i was hoping he'd answer at least one question relating in some way to the future of ray-tracing/voxels/progressive algorythms (nervana) in 3d gaming.. but i think i'll settle for the interview we got.
no, i'm advocating beliefs tests being avoided.. i'm saying people shouldn't be chosen on the basis of their opinions on creationism, they should be chosen on the basis of their ability to teach/run a school system.
most of the people pushing creationism are doing so for religious reasons and not scientific reasons. since science is the point of a science class.. well, science ought to be more imporant than religion.
whatever. this is a kind of a dumb argument anyway and i'm sorry i started it.
ok.. so apple makes a kind of bad decision that annoys some of its customers. by 24 hours later, it has realized its mistake, listented to its customers, and done something rather nice to everyone who had ordered a 450 model. (in the process giving up quite a bit of money..)
/. posting about some mistake apple made, and then suddenly they're experts..
after apple makes the mistake, slashdot is flooded with people flaming apple. Apple is arrogant, apple is screwing its customers, apple is nonresponsive, apple is self-destructive and stupid. Almost none of these people posting were affected in any way by the order cancellations. The people posting who _were_ affected were just kind of calmly shrugged it off.
so now that apple has actually _listened to its customers_.. what happens? do the slashdot posters come back and appologize for being too hasty to flame? well, no. instead what we get is.. more apple bashing. people say "well it's a good thing apple is doing this", and then immediately go right on with the flaming. Mostly saying the exact same thing they were after yesterday's article. What is this? How many other companies would _do_ this? If compaq cancelled a bunch of orders and said "i'm sorry, we can't fufill these, you'll have to reorder".. would _they_ have listened to any customer complaints? (Compaq being a hypothetical example.. i've never dealt with them)
Oh, and btw i think i can say with almost absoloute certainty that apple did _not_ make the decision to give discounts to the people who had originally ordered 500s based on anything related in any way to slashdot. And the downgrade wasn't covered by any other "media" sources except macintouch/macnn. Apple based what they did on customer feedback..
meanwhile, other people in the current thread are complaining that apple effectively raised the prices for people who are going to buy new G4s after that. um, so? are you going to be buying a G4? if not why are you complaining? shouldn't apple have the right to charge what they like, especially if (because of rising DRAM prices) it is costing them more to make the product then it was awhile back? it's amazing the people who don't care about or pay attention to apple _at all_.. except when there's a
there are times when slashdot is full of interesting people with great technical knowledge and a willingness to share it, and informed insights on the thing being spoken on. These times almost never occur if apple's involved in some way. oh well. i'm done ranting now.
-mcc-baka
(this message sent from LinuxPPC r5)
interesting chain of events..
./configure;make all. Is Intel trying to destroy the hardware independance of Linux by promoting things which will tether it to a limited number of processors? Is the shadowy and much-feared Covert Ops arm of Intel planning on replacing the Turbolinux management with evil androids which will slavishly refuse to support any non-intel microchips well?
1.IBM comes to dominate the computer world.
2.Microsoft works itself into a position where people buying IBM products are heavily directed toward Microsoft DOS.
3.Microsoft works itself into a position where it is independant of IBM.
4.Microsoft comes to dominate the computer world.
5.IBM ceases to be of any importance and collapses in a mess of antitrust lawsuits. It never really goes back into the consumer market.
6.Intel works itself into a position where people buying Microsoft products are heavily directed toward the x86 architecture.
((YOU ARE HERE))
7.Intel works itself into a position where it is independant of Microsoft
Do you see a pattern? Can you guess step 8? Of course, this is probably looking at things the wrong way, and exaggerating things a lot, and assuming that Intel really can work itself into a position where when microsoft falls Intel won't come crashing down with it (which is not _that_ likely). But still, it's awful suspicious.
If i wanted to be even MORE paranoid, i'd refer to the other postings here stating that TurboLinux is thinking about putting propeitary stuff in their distro; the way i look at it, that sounds an awful lot like closed-source and-- as a result-- not quite as hardware-independant, since mr. end user can't just
Who knows? Certainly not me. But the truth is out there. The truth is out there..
[if you wish, you may insert in this space a random and uninformed flamebait about integrating support for PPC and Alpha machines into the main linux kernel tree]
-mcc-baka
(this post was originally written with Mozilla M10 for macintosh. Its form support lacks many things, for instance full support for the left arrow key. After clicking "preview" i discovered that Mozilla M10 randomly deletes about half of what you put into any form you try to send. I had to retype it in a more finished browser. Hey; it's beta.)