So, then, if you don't program in C and you don't program in BASIC, what non-OO language do you program in? Surely you can't be talking about Perl scripts?
I've witnessed your condemnation of OO languages here on slashdot for a while now, but I haven't actually seen you do more than say "Show me the evidence that OO is better". Ironically, in many cases no one is saying that OO is better. They're simply describing what they like. So I'm curious (and I'm genuinely curious, not attacking you), what kind of non-OO code do you write, and in what language? You show me why procedural is better.
Actually, that quote was from Iron Man Crash, by Mike Saenz, which is probably what you're thinking of, as it was marketed as "the first computerized graphic novel". And yes, it was done entirely with Macs.
How could I have forgotten that? Crash totally slipped my mind -- now that I look back on the quote, I can't see how I could have mistaken one for the other. You're right of course, sorry for being confused about that.
Still, if you liked Crash, you might like Pepe Moreno's Digital Justice. I felt that Crash should have been a series rather than a standalone graphic novel, it just wraps up way too quickly. And while I like the art in Digital Justice, overall Saenz's style (Shatter, Crash, Spaceship Warlock) appeals to me more, even if all his main characters look like Tom Cruise somehow.
For mindless D & D -themed hack 'n' slash, nothing beat these arcade games:
Golden Axe (also released for Genesis)
Gauntlet (so popular it even came out for Mac II)
Magician Lord (actually a Neo Geo game but appeared in arcades)
Few will probably remember Magician Lord, but it was really an amazing game. Picture Castlevania with amazing graphics (in 1992), but you can have multiple characters that follow you around and fight for you...
Unfortunately, no. I think it was on MacFixit. They post their news for a little while and then it becomes subscriber-only, and I'm not a subscriber. But I still haven't upgraded to 10.1.5 yet because of the problems... google around I'm sure there's more info out there.
If I'm not mistaken, though, Digital Justice was written and drawn by Pepe Moreno, though I think I read somewhere that he was at least a distant friend of Mike Saenz. I think Digital Justice was marketed as "the first computerized graphic novel" (also done entirely with Mac computers).
D.J. was definitely a step up from Shatter's 72 dpi graphics, but they each have an appealing style. There is definitely a similarity between Shatter's alien nation (at the Ravenwood tanks) and D.J.'s mutants, both representing subordinated cultural groups. The alien nation is more like a ghettoized minority community and the mutants represent the marginalized youth.
I don't mean to troll here, but isn't this similar to laws against removing VIN (vehicle id numbers) and serial numbers from high-cost goods in the US?
Of course, if this law extends to prohibit other modification of the phone that interferes with fair use, I suppose that's different....
...and everyone also knows that women were hired (and sometimes still are I think) to go out into public places and smoke cigarettes, offering cigarettes and a light to men.
What some might not know is that DeBeers paid actresses to wear diamond jewelry during the 1930s, and allowed them to keep the jewels, as diamonds were not as desirable then as they are now. (Similarly, DeBeers' marketroids also crafted the association between diamonds and engagement, forever changing the ritual of courtship in the U.S.)
I was only 14, and at the time I was very interested in graphic design -- I faked a company to get a free subscription to "New Media" magazine. (I remember reading Mondo 2000 around that time too.)
With the interest in graphics software, I recall walking around the Boston Bayside Expo with my bag of hats and logo-emblazoned giveaways. I checked out Wacom's new wireless stylus & tablet with a pressure-sensitive tip for controlling airbrush paint flow, and a cool-looking game (that never quite emerged on my gaming horizon) called Blade, which was kind of a Shadow of the Beast clone.
But the real highlight of the day was that I got Mike Saenz's autograph, he was the artist behind Shatter (first computerized comic, designed on a Mac no less) and, along with Joe Sparks, the creator of the pioneering MacroMind Director -based Spaceship Warlock.
He also created Virtual Valerie, and that seemed pretty cool at the time....
Seriously, I have thought long and hard about the role of cell phones in society (yeah I was a cultural studies scholar in college), and I see it as a form of primitive telepathy. I'm not trying to be weird or joke around; if you really think about it -- cell phones give you instant communication with others.
(Not the kind of telepathy where you can read others' minds, the kind where you can communicate instantly with other telepaths.)
I wrote the article so that people would have a feel for what's new in the book.
As with almost every other programmer out there, I agree that "Mastering Regular Expressions" is one of the best-written and most useful programming books there is. I know a lot of people would probably buy the second edition regardless. But the article/book review cemented my decision, since it covers Java and PHP (and even that wacky MS stuff, huh?).
I know and use regular expressions, but use of regular expressions is often symptomatic of poor design, this makes me somewhat suspicious of those who live and breath regexp's and preach them to the world.
I find regexes to be very useful for checking user input in HTML forms. You can do a JavaScript regex check for the user's convenience (so that s/he doesn't need to submit the form to find out that s/he made a mistake or invalid input), then a second check on the server side with whatever server language you are using.
Regular expressions come across as a stringy diarreac glob of an irriducable mess of symbols if you don't keep up. It is like forgetting to ride a bicycle if you do not do it every 3 months or so to refresh.
Not to pick nits, but the expression "it's like riding a bicycle" implies that once you learn how to ride a bicycle, you never forget, no matter how long you go without actually riding one.
Well, it's about ten bucks a month. Though I agree with the poster who said that iTools should be a perk for people who buy Macs (even though to be honest with you, I think Mac OS X makes it worthy of the price), and that it's kind of crappy for Apple to offer this for free and then start charging, I would actually sign up and pay for it if I got all of the features at other hosts. Namely, I want to use.htaccess, mod_rewrite, mod_perl, mod_php and have access to MySQL or something. You know, these are getting to be pretty standard offerings for hosting.
But I wish they'd offer a $15/year option for people who just want their measly 5 MB email and 20 MB of storage.
Congratulations: In four years of having an email address/slashdot nick referring to Brataccas, you are the first person to have actually mentioned it to me.
Yes, it's definitely a classic. I had it on my old Mac Plus, no less. Was it actually possible to win?
I just can't afford the hardware. The day they find a way to release OS X for x86, I (and i would bet a large portion of the market) are there. It's just got to be so hard to support so much hardware.
This is such a tired excuse, really. It's not even true. The problem is more likely that you're afraid to purchase hardware that doesn't dual-boot with windows, as your "backup OS" for when you don't feel like dealing with Linux.
The evidence is all over the web if you want to Google search. (For individual consumers that is, no they are not cheaper if you're buying hundreds of them -- strange logic but business's needs are different, since they are less likely to get the the DVD superdrive, the graphics acceleration, etc In other words, a great mac is cheaper than a great PC with the same features.)
Mr Joe Average is someone who wants to install their OS, boot it up, and it works. He wants to be able to upgrade his PC , and have the hardware work in a few short minutes. He wants to read email, browse the web, talk to his mates online, and play some games. Feel free to disagree with me, this is merely how I see myself. Note: I'm not referring to Grandma using Linux, or even my mum using it. I'm referring to average users who know a little about their computer.
Sounds like you want Mac OS X.
Step forward, not back. It's real, it's powerful, it's easy, and you can sleep at night.
I am not by any means saying that Perl is dead - indeed, it will be many years before Python is able to offer the versatility and brevity that Perl has provided me with for ages.
Not to be argumentative, but brevity is not a concern of Python's. Python is explicitly verbose because it makes the syntax easier to read, understand, and maintain. At least, that's what its proponents claim.
(FWIW I really like both Python and Perl, and agree with the parent -- Python is very deserving of further investment/attention.)
I don't know. I mean, that sounds pretty easy. To tell you the truth, nuclear threat scares the crap out of me, and while everyone's focused on countries in southwestern Asia, it would probably be easier to smuggle in some weapon of vengeance. And a lot of people would probably feel even more justified.
Maybe the CIA should never have tried to use drug smuggling (to inner cities) as a means of raising money. Maybe we should evaluate our own degree of responsibility in the drug "problem" before we consider launching another "full scale war".
The Xbox console isn't profitable for the Redmond, Wash., company and its costs are believed to be higher than Sony's, partly because of the hard drive and a version of its powerful Windows operating system included with each machine.
Oh yes -- it is very unprofitable to ship a powerful version of the Windows operating system. A big investment on Microsoft's part. That set them back quite a bit I'll reckon. (What??)
While "the Xbox is a full-feature BMW, the PS2 is a Toyota,"
Yeah, maybe. The Xbox is a 318ti, and the PS2 is a Toyota Supra.
Sorry, MSNBC, but that is ridiculous. And I realize the quote came from an executive at InfoGrames -- of course an executive at a company with an interest in porting its PC titles to the console market is interested in the Xbox.
You've mentioned that it's a bit more difficult to learn, and it's probably not as well designed (my guess), but how's the performance under OS X? I hear AppleScript Studio allows you to compile your scripts into apps. Is this true? What's the Python support like in OS X?
Basically, what I'm asking is: Should I pick up the O'Reilly AppleScript book now, or just stick with Python and Tkinter? Anything you can tell me would be great.
If you currently program in Python, I would only bother with AppleScript for stuff that is difficult to do in Python (or rather, would take more coding). AppleScript is great for writing more-advanced macros -- for instance, an idea I've been toying around with is writing an AppleScript that calls a Perl script to parse a MySQL database dump and create an object in OmniGraffle
to represent that in a database diagram. But you can see, even from this example, I would use another language (Perl) to parse the data and then use that to tell the AppleScript how to interact with OmniGraffle and draw the object. If the Perl OSA becomes more mature, I can bypass AppleScript altogether.
Basically, I think it can be useful, esp with AS Studio, to create a "wrapper" script that calls a more advanced script that is written in Perl or Python, unless all you want to do is some basic system stuff. There are AppleScript gurus who will disagree with this, and they are probably geniuses who can make AS do what they want -- but I prefer the more pithy (hah a pun) syntax of Python to the sentences of AppleScript.
Python support in OS X -- well, OS X is Unix, so you just grab the source and compile it (it's a piece of cake) and now you have Python. Since OS X does not have the Tk or certain other windowing toolkits built-in, you should probably use Fink to install X11 onto your Mac and then you can use the Tk toolkits (and other graphical toolkits like Gtk and that TrollTech one I forget what it's called) to build GUI apps. Of course, I think that it's supposed to be relatively easy to build a Cocoa wrapper around a Perl script in the next version of OS X (10.2), so perhaps a Python one will be forthcoming as well.
To answer your final question, I purchased that book but it was written in OS X's infancy (10.0.x) and barely covers OS X. I'd wait for a new edition for that one, since really AS is not very different between OS9 and OS X. But that book has a lot more content for applications that exist in OS 9.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps in an amazing instance of precognition, media execs have already made a movie about it!
So, then, if you don't program in C and you don't program in BASIC, what non-OO language do you program in? Surely you can't be talking about Perl scripts?
I've witnessed your condemnation of OO languages here on slashdot for a while now, but I haven't actually seen you do more than say "Show me the evidence that OO is better". Ironically, in many cases no one is saying that OO is better. They're simply describing what they like. So I'm curious (and I'm genuinely curious, not attacking you), what kind of non-OO code do you write, and in what language? You show me why procedural is better.
Actually, that quote was from Iron Man Crash, by Mike Saenz, which is probably what you're thinking of, as it was marketed as "the first computerized graphic novel". And yes, it was done entirely with Macs.
How could I have forgotten that? Crash totally slipped my mind -- now that I look back on the quote, I can't see how I could have mistaken one for the other. You're right of course, sorry for being confused about that.
Still, if you liked Crash, you might like Pepe Moreno's Digital Justice. I felt that Crash should have been a series rather than a standalone graphic novel, it just wraps up way too quickly. And while I like the art in Digital Justice, overall Saenz's style (Shatter, Crash, Spaceship Warlock) appeals to me more, even if all his main characters look like Tom Cruise somehow.
For mindless D & D -themed hack 'n' slash, nothing beat these arcade games:
Few will probably remember Magician Lord, but it was really an amazing game. Picture Castlevania with amazing graphics (in 1992), but you can have multiple characters that follow you around and fight for you...
Unfortunately, no. I think it was on MacFixit. They post their news for a little while and then it becomes subscriber-only, and I'm not a subscriber. But I still haven't upgraded to 10.1.5 yet because of the problems... google around I'm sure there's more info out there.
Sorry
LOL. It could go both ways.
If I'm not mistaken, though, Digital Justice was written and drawn by Pepe Moreno, though I think I read somewhere that he was at least a distant friend of Mike Saenz. I think Digital Justice was marketed as "the first computerized graphic novel" (also done entirely with Mac computers).
D.J. was definitely a step up from Shatter's 72 dpi graphics, but they each have an appealing style. There is definitely a similarity between Shatter's alien nation (at the Ravenwood tanks) and D.J.'s mutants, both representing subordinated cultural groups. The alien nation is more like a ghettoized minority community and the mutants represent the marginalized youth.
I don't mean to troll here, but isn't this similar to laws against removing VIN (vehicle id numbers) and serial numbers from high-cost goods in the US?
Of course, if this law extends to prohibit other modification of the phone that interferes with fair use, I suppose that's different....
What some might not know is that DeBeers paid actresses to wear diamond jewelry during the 1930s, and allowed them to keep the jewels, as diamonds were not as desirable then as they are now. (Similarly, DeBeers' marketroids also crafted the association between diamonds and engagement, forever changing the ritual of courtship in the U.S.)
I remember MacWorld Boston 1992.
I was only 14, and at the time I was very interested in graphic design -- I faked a company to get a free subscription to "New Media" magazine. (I remember reading Mondo 2000 around that time too.)
With the interest in graphics software, I recall walking around the Boston Bayside Expo with my bag of hats and logo-emblazoned giveaways. I checked out Wacom's new wireless stylus & tablet with a pressure-sensitive tip for controlling airbrush paint flow, and a cool-looking game (that never quite emerged on my gaming horizon) called Blade, which was kind of a Shadow of the Beast clone.
But the real highlight of the day was that I got Mike Saenz's autograph, he was the artist behind Shatter (first computerized comic, designed on a Mac no less) and, along with Joe Sparks, the creator of the pioneering MacroMind Director -based Spaceship Warlock.
He also created Virtual Valerie, and that seemed pretty cool at the time....
Seriously, I have thought long and hard about the role of cell phones in society (yeah I was a cultural studies scholar in college), and I see it as a form of primitive telepathy. I'm not trying to be weird or joke around; if you really think about it -- cell phones give you instant communication with others.
(Not the kind of telepathy where you can read others' minds, the kind where you can communicate instantly with other telepaths.)
Yeah, but does it require 10.1.5 or can i upgrade while still in 10.1.4 ? I'm avoiding 10.1.5 b/c of reported problems with DHCP.
I almost fell over because my weight distribution was "different"
Right there with ya buddy.
I wrote the article so that people would have a feel for what's new in the book.
As with almost every other programmer out there, I agree that "Mastering Regular Expressions" is one of the best-written and most useful programming books there is. I know a lot of people would probably buy the second edition regardless. But the article/book review cemented my decision, since it covers Java and PHP (and even that wacky MS stuff, huh?).
I know and use regular expressions, but use of regular expressions is often symptomatic of poor design, this makes me somewhat suspicious of those who live and breath regexp's and preach them to the world.
I find regexes to be very useful for checking user input in HTML forms. You can do a JavaScript regex check for the user's convenience (so that s/he doesn't need to submit the form to find out that s/he made a mistake or invalid input), then a second check on the server side with whatever server language you are using.
Skip the JavaScript if you're lazy or in a hurry.
Regular expressions come across as a stringy diarreac glob of an irriducable mess of symbols if you don't keep up. It is like forgetting to ride a bicycle if you do not do it every 3 months or so to refresh.
Not to pick nits, but the expression "it's like riding a bicycle" implies that once you learn how to ride a bicycle, you never forget, no matter how long you go without actually riding one.
Well, it's about ten bucks a month. Though I agree with the poster who said that iTools should be a perk for people who buy Macs (even though to be honest with you, I think Mac OS X makes it worthy of the price), and that it's kind of crappy for Apple to offer this for free and then start charging, I would actually sign up and pay for it if I got all of the features at other hosts. Namely, I want to use .htaccess, mod_rewrite, mod_perl, mod_php and have access to MySQL or something. You know, these are getting to be pretty standard offerings for hosting.
But I wish they'd offer a $15/year option for people who just want their measly 5 MB email and 20 MB of storage.
Congratulations: In four years of having an email address/slashdot nick referring to Brataccas, you are the first person to have actually mentioned it to me.
Yes, it's definitely a classic. I had it on my old Mac Plus, no less. Was it actually possible to win?
I just can't afford the hardware. The day they find a way to release OS X for x86, I (and i would bet a large portion of the market) are there. It's just got to be so hard to support so much hardware.
This is such a tired excuse, really. It's not even true. The problem is more likely that you're afraid to purchase hardware that doesn't dual-boot with windows, as your "backup OS" for when you don't feel like dealing with Linux.
The evidence is all over the web if you want to Google search. (For individual consumers that is, no they are not cheaper if you're buying hundreds of them -- strange logic but business's needs are different, since they are less likely to get the the DVD superdrive, the graphics acceleration, etc In other words, a great mac is cheaper than a great PC with the same features.)
Mr Joe Average is someone who wants to install their OS, boot it up, and it works. He wants to be able to upgrade his PC , and have the hardware work in a few short minutes. He wants to read email, browse the web, talk to his mates online, and play some games. Feel free to disagree with me, this is merely how I see myself. Note: I'm not referring to Grandma using Linux, or even my mum using it. I'm referring to average users who know a little about their computer.
Sounds like you want Mac OS X.
Step forward, not back. It's real, it's powerful, it's easy, and you can sleep at night.
Now if we could just get people to stop buying station wagons and stick to either tanks or batmobiles, we'd be in business.
But you have to admit, the European sports cars have gotten much better.
I am not by any means saying that Perl is dead - indeed, it will be many years before Python is able to offer the versatility and brevity that Perl has provided me with for ages.
Not to be argumentative, but brevity is not a concern of Python's. Python is explicitly verbose because it makes the syntax easier to read, understand, and maintain. At least, that's what its proponents claim.
(FWIW I really like both Python and Perl, and agree with the parent -- Python is very deserving of further investment/attention.)
I talked to my registrar (Register.com) and they're aware of it.
That's interesting, I have a letter from Register.com asking me if I want to extend my domain name term. But my registrar is easyDNS.com.
I'm not kidding, I have it right here.
We'll just go in there and bomb them.
I don't know. I mean, that sounds pretty easy. To tell you the truth, nuclear threat scares the crap out of me, and while everyone's focused on countries in southwestern Asia, it would probably be easier to smuggle in some weapon of vengeance. And a lot of people would probably feel even more justified.
Maybe the CIA should never have tried to use drug smuggling (to inner cities) as a means of raising money. Maybe we should evaluate our own degree of responsibility in the drug "problem" before we consider launching another "full scale war".
The Xbox console isn't profitable for the Redmond, Wash., company and its costs are believed to be higher than Sony's, partly because of the hard drive and a version of its powerful Windows operating system included with each machine.
Oh yes -- it is very unprofitable to ship a powerful version of the Windows operating system. A big investment on Microsoft's part. That set them back quite a bit I'll reckon. (What??)
While "the Xbox is a full-feature BMW, the PS2 is a Toyota,"
Yeah, maybe. The Xbox is a 318ti, and the PS2 is a Toyota Supra.
Sorry, MSNBC, but that is ridiculous. And I realize the quote came from an executive at InfoGrames -- of course an executive at a company with an interest in porting its PC titles to the console market is interested in the Xbox.
You've mentioned that it's a bit more difficult to learn, and it's probably not as well designed (my guess), but how's the performance under OS X? I hear AppleScript Studio allows you to compile your scripts into apps. Is this true? What's the Python support like in OS X?
Basically, what I'm asking is: Should I pick up the O'Reilly AppleScript book now, or just stick with Python and Tkinter? Anything you can tell me would be great.
If you currently program in Python, I would only bother with AppleScript for stuff that is difficult to do in Python (or rather, would take more coding). AppleScript is great for writing more-advanced macros -- for instance, an idea I've been toying around with is writing an AppleScript that calls a Perl script to parse a MySQL database dump and create an object in OmniGraffle to represent that in a database diagram. But you can see, even from this example, I would use another language (Perl) to parse the data and then use that to tell the AppleScript how to interact with OmniGraffle and draw the object. If the Perl OSA becomes more mature, I can bypass AppleScript altogether.
Basically, I think it can be useful, esp with AS Studio, to create a "wrapper" script that calls a more advanced script that is written in Perl or Python, unless all you want to do is some basic system stuff. There are AppleScript gurus who will disagree with this, and they are probably geniuses who can make AS do what they want -- but I prefer the more pithy (hah a pun) syntax of Python to the sentences of AppleScript.
Python support in OS X -- well, OS X is Unix, so you just grab the source and compile it (it's a piece of cake) and now you have Python. Since OS X does not have the Tk or certain other windowing toolkits built-in, you should probably use Fink to install X11 onto your Mac and then you can use the Tk toolkits (and other graphical toolkits like Gtk and that TrollTech one I forget what it's called) to build GUI apps. Of course, I think that it's supposed to be relatively easy to build a Cocoa wrapper around a Perl script in the next version of OS X (10.2), so perhaps a Python one will be forthcoming as well.
To answer your final question, I purchased that book but it was written in OS X's infancy (10.0.x) and barely covers OS X. I'd wait for a new edition for that one, since really AS is not very different between OS9 and OS X. But that book has a lot more content for applications that exist in OS 9.