The ideal solution, at least for the end-users and the environment, is to ship the manuals in electronic form but allow the user to order a printed version for a nominal printing fee.
I prefer electronic versions for the searching capabilities. Other people may want printed manuals...for reading away from the computer. Personally, I like to read some computer-related books away from the computer, but I hardly ever do that with manuals for a specific piece of software (which is what the original question was about).
Why do Slashdotters, including the Slashdot editors, continue to pretend that Napster is some sort of free speech issue?
Have you actually ever logged into Napster?
If yes, can you now tell me with a straight face that it is NOT used primarily (like 99.9999%) for the purpose of illegally trading copyright material? Are you the same people that would then have a shit-fit if any company stepped outside of the boundaries of using GPL software? Yeah, I thought so.
If you want to know the whole story, read the old posts under the message board at http://www.genesis3d.com.
The short version is -- Genesis 3D V1 came out.... It was a pretty good engine, about as good as Quake2, a little slower but more flexible. Eclipse Entertainment made the source available (whether or not their licence is or was 'Open Source' is debatable). Eclipse nearly went bankrupt, there was some sort of deal with Microsoft (who were going to publish some of their games) that fell through.
Eclipse ended up selling off its technology, including Genesis 3D Version 2 to WildTangent (http://www.wildtangent.com). WildTangent was interested in taking the Genesis 3D V2 engine, then in heavy development, and making it run in a browser using an ActiveX interface. Most of the original Eclipse developers moved to WildTangent to continue working on the engine. David Stafford, the founder of Eclipse (who has been a fulltime employee of Microsoft for quite a while now, handling Eclipse stuff on the side in his spare time) was given the right to distribute the Genesis3D V2 technology at the time the deal was struck in any manner he saw fit. He decided to continue using a source-available Genesis 3D V1 type licence. So, there are essentially two forks of Genesis 3D V2 -- Jet3D and WildTangent's GameDriver. As a result of all this, the Jet3D fork has some strange licensing restrictions to avoid competing with GameDriver, such as the no-in-a-browser clause.
Its kind of a shame the original Eclipse model wasn't profitable for them, as WildTangent's GameDriver has come along much further than Jet3D, as the original Genesis 3D V2 developers have made great progress on their source. The Jet3D source -- which was basically dumped onto the public with very little to no documentation or anyone who worked on it previously to give pointers -- hasn't progressed nearly as far, though there are some dedicated developers working on it.
If the program uses standard known formats or its data formats are created by someone with half a clue, the endianness of the format is pre-defined, and converting during import/export is a rather easy task.
If you're running net code, it should be using ntoh* calls for any binary data anyways. If not the person who coded it is a dumb ass and you shouldnt be runnning his/her software anyway.
Very little software worries/cares what endianness things are while data is in memory. As long as the import/export routines (whether they be disk based, net based, or whatever) know the difference, 95% of software can be ported easily.
There's no way in hell Microsoft is behind this. Many of the slogans are far too...um..colorful, for any big family-friendly company like Microsoft to be involved with them.
From the tone of the commentary above you'd think the US Government is going to mandate everyone use these keyboards...
If you don't want an AOL keyboard, don't buy one. There's probably plenty of AOL users who will find this cool and useful. You don't have to be one of them.
For the record, as much as dislike many things Microsoft does (despite my username, which is meant as irony), I use a Microsoft Internet Keyboard that has 10 extra buttons. The default for some of them is to send you to hotmail, etc, but they are labelled generically and can easily be reprogrammed with Microsoft software (under Windows) or keymapping under Linux.
While your PC is nice, there's currently nothing on the PC video-card wise that can come close to what the NVidia processor in the XBox will do. Of course, NVidia is likely to release PC versions too, in the future...
However, your PC has a vastly inferior memory architecture and system bus than the X-Box will.
Also, games written for the X-Box will make use of a lot more of the available power than PC games, which are written for multiple video cards. When you know exactly what video card you need to target, you get eek out every last optimization from it. PC games don't have that luxury.
XBox will blow away PC games at the time of its release..The PC will catch up and surpass it within a year after that. PC games have the advantage of high resolution (how many people have HDTVs for their XBox or PS2? Not many).
A compiler could do the same sort of optimizations Dynamo is doing before-hand..clearly.
But you don't always have the code for applications you might want to speed up. You'd be depending upon the vendor to go back and recompile with the new optimizer...
Also...
The other problem would be that the compiler would generate abnormally large binaries (due to all the unrolled/prebranched fragments). Doing it in runtime allows you to get the same sort of speed advantage without users doing a doubletake when the binary that used to be 3 megabytes compiled is now closer to 37 or so megabytes... even if it is a few percent faster to run.
There's a fairly large difference, when you drill down to the details level, between runtime morphing of pcode-based and/or interpreted languages like Smalltalk and Java and native code, which is being discussed here. This stuff is obviously based off of lots of past research, but it IS a rather nice new use of ideas and technology. I'd love to see widespread usage of this type of tech on the x86 and other platforms.
Also, the Mac emulators for the Amiga, even the hardware based ones, did no code morphing. The Amiga and Mac were both based on the exact same processor line (680x0), and thus no translation was needed. My guess is you are thinking of that one Mac emulator that came out that promised it would be useful for emulating all sorts of other computers. That was mostly smoke and mirrors. The board was pretty much just a hardware add-on for the Amiga that would let you plug a Mac ROM in so you didn't have to use a binary image on disk.
Most Mac emulators on the Amiga at the time, even the software-only ones, were ever so slightly faster than a Mac running the same CPU. This was no fancy code trickery... just superior (at the time) video hardware in the Amiga, coupled with the fact that the Mac ROM would be cached within fast RAM if it was available.
Sometimes casting outside of a character's original age is fine. But in the case of YT, I think changing her age with creative casting would either look really silly, or she'd be a whole different character than the book.
Juliet as depicted in the play is far more mature than a 12 year old girl is in this day and age, so casting up in that case makes sense. With Kyle in Dune (which I hated), the 10 year difference is fairly insignificant..
But with YT, the whole young, naive, brash part of her is what makes the character work. It would look silly having a 20+ actress playing that part, IMO.
Phil is completely right about bits & pieces of H Ross Perot and Ted Turner showing up in L Bob Rife...But the whole issue of him being a pseudo-religious/cult leader, the name, and the fact that he floated around on The Raft (L Ron and his cronies in Scientology used to float around in international waters to avoid the IRS) are clearly L Ron influenced.
The story is complex, the sets would have to be extremely expensive and/or digital ala Episode1, the Uneducated Masses would think it was a rip-off of The Matrix...
But another thing to consider is that large portions of the book are a thinly veiled jab at L Ron Hubbard (AKA L Bob Rife).
The Scientologists are pretty powerful in Hollywood...How do you think John Travolta managed to make what looks to be the huge stinking turd of this year... Battlefield Earth?
No company, especially not one Microsoft's size, would make a specific effort to steal code from a GPL'ed program. The potential risk in bad PR, legal costs, and the 'viral' nature of the GPL isn't worth the relatively small amount of money they'd save vs doing it from scratch.
Having said that, its difficult/impossible for large companies to completely audit all the code going into their products vs known "Open Source" code. So there's always the potential that some lazy programmer will cut and paste some GPL into his/her code and just change some variable and function names, etc.
IF THEY KNEW WHERE TO SEND THE FILE TO THE FUGITIVE, WHO CARES WHAT INFORMATION HE CAN GLEAN FROM IT? HE'LL BE CAUGHT WHEN HE PICKS IT UP!!! YOU STUPID FAGGET!!
6. Is this a precursor to Sun announcing Open Source for the Java platform?
No, we have no plans currently to make the Java platform Open Source. Open Source does not allow us to enforce compatibility requirements, which we continue to feel are vital for the success of the Java platform.
Also (kind of sucky):
2. Is everything in Forte for Java, Community Edition being open-sourced?
No. The binary version of Forte for Java, Community Edition includes two components that will not be open-sourced: the browser and the compiler. If required, the modular design of Forte for Java, Community Edition permits developers to replace these components with alternatives.
I'm not an anti-Sun bigot by any means, but I think pointing to Sun's cross-platform support as some sort of good-will gesture is misguided. Sun supports multiple platforms because they have to -- if they didn't, a vastly smaller number of users would use their software/platform. Microsoft had much better cross-platform support back in the days before they owned the desktop. Sun is in no position to dictate Solaris-only software to anyone.
Take Java, for instance. If non-cross-platform, it is just an amazingly slow object oriented language. No better than Smalltalk, or many others that have the same level of support for objects.
If you listen to Scott McNealy rant, it becomes pretty obvious pretty soon that he is insanely jealous of Bill Gates, and he is on a Quixotic mission to somehow "beat" Bill, even though the fight was over 7 or so years ago. Put Larry Elison in that column too.
Not likely. Microsoft has been talking to developers about this for the better part of a year. That's why everyone knew this announcement was coming. This is not a spur of the moment decision.
Well, UnrealTournament IS (within Epic Megagames, at least) on the PSX2. Also, the Quake III engine, if its not already (it probably is), will be running on the PSX2 real soon now. A number of 3rd parties who have Quake 3 engine games coming have announced PSX2 support in addition to PC.
Actually, consoles generally only break even or lose money on hardware sales at launch. Even at their current low pricepoints, N64, PSX and even now Dreamcast hardware have hit economies of scale that net the companies involved a profit off the hardware-only sale.
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I prefer electronic versions for the searching capabilities. Other people may want printed manuals...for reading away from the computer. Personally, I like to read some computer-related books away from the computer, but I hardly ever do that with manuals for a specific piece of software (which is what the original question was about).
Have you actually ever logged into Napster?
If yes, can you now tell me with a straight face that it is NOT used primarily (like 99.9999%) for the purpose of illegally trading copyright material? Are you the same people that would then have a shit-fit if any company stepped outside of the boundaries of using GPL software? Yeah, I thought so.
Sheesh
If you want to know the whole story, read the old posts under the message board at http://www.genesis3d.com.
The short version is -- Genesis 3D V1 came out.... It was a pretty good engine, about as good as Quake2, a little slower but more flexible. Eclipse Entertainment made the source available (whether or not their licence is or was 'Open Source' is debatable). Eclipse nearly went bankrupt, there was some sort of deal with Microsoft (who were going to publish some of their games) that fell through.
Eclipse ended up selling off its technology, including Genesis 3D Version 2 to WildTangent (http://www.wildtangent.com). WildTangent was interested in taking the Genesis 3D V2 engine, then in heavy development, and making it run in a browser using an ActiveX interface. Most of the original Eclipse developers moved to WildTangent to continue working on the engine. David Stafford, the founder of Eclipse (who has been a fulltime employee of Microsoft for quite a while now, handling Eclipse stuff on the side in his spare time) was given the right to distribute the Genesis3D V2 technology at the time the deal was struck in any manner he saw fit. He decided to continue using a source-available Genesis 3D V1 type licence. So, there are essentially two forks of Genesis 3D V2 -- Jet3D and WildTangent's GameDriver. As a result of all this, the Jet3D fork has some strange licensing restrictions to avoid competing with GameDriver, such as the no-in-a-browser clause.
Its kind of a shame the original Eclipse model wasn't profitable for them, as WildTangent's GameDriver has come along much further than Jet3D, as the original Genesis 3D V2 developers have made great progress on their source. The Jet3D source -- which was basically dumped onto the public with very little to no documentation or anyone who worked on it previously to give pointers -- hasn't progressed nearly as far, though there are some dedicated developers working on it.
If the program uses standard known formats or its data formats are created by someone with half a clue, the endianness of the format is pre-defined, and converting during import/export is a rather easy task.
If you're running net code, it should be using ntoh* calls for any binary data anyways. If not the person who coded it is a dumb ass and you shouldnt be runnning his/her software anyway.
Very little software worries/cares what endianness things are while data is in memory. As long as the import/export routines (whether they be disk based, net based, or whatever) know the difference, 95% of software can be ported easily.
In short, its not a big problem.
There's no way in hell Microsoft is behind this. Many of the slogans are far too...um..colorful, for any big family-friendly company like Microsoft to be involved with them.
If you don't want an AOL keyboard, don't buy one. There's probably plenty of AOL users who will find this cool and useful. You don't have to be one of them.
For the record, as much as dislike many things Microsoft does (despite my username, which is meant as irony), I use a Microsoft Internet Keyboard that has 10 extra buttons. The default for some of them is to send you to hotmail, etc, but they are labelled generically and can easily be reprogrammed with Microsoft software (under Windows) or keymapping under Linux.
While your PC is nice, there's currently nothing on the PC video-card wise that can come close to what the NVidia processor in the XBox will do. Of course, NVidia is likely to release PC versions too, in the future...
However, your PC has a vastly inferior memory architecture and system bus than the X-Box will.
Also, games written for the X-Box will make use of a lot more of the available power than PC games, which are written for multiple video cards. When you know exactly what video card you need to target, you get eek out every last optimization from it. PC games don't have that luxury.
XBox will blow away PC games at the time of its release..The PC will catch up and surpass it within a year after that. PC games have the advantage of high resolution (how many people have HDTVs for their XBox or PS2? Not many).
But you don't always have the code for applications you might want to speed up. You'd be depending upon the vendor to go back and recompile with the new optimizer...
Also...
The other problem would be that the compiler would generate abnormally large binaries (due to all the unrolled/prebranched fragments). Doing it in runtime allows you to get the same sort of speed advantage without users doing a doubletake when the binary that used to be 3 megabytes compiled is now closer to 37 or so megabytes... even if it is a few percent faster to run.
There's a fairly large difference, when you drill down to the details level, between runtime morphing of pcode-based and/or interpreted languages like Smalltalk and Java and native code, which is being discussed here. This stuff is obviously based off of lots of past research, but it IS a rather nice new use of ideas and technology. I'd love to see widespread usage of this type of tech on the x86 and other platforms.
Also, the Mac emulators for the Amiga, even the hardware based ones, did no code morphing. The Amiga and Mac were both based on the exact same processor line (680x0), and thus no translation was needed. My guess is you are thinking of that one Mac emulator that came out that promised it would be useful for emulating all sorts of other computers. That was mostly smoke and mirrors. The board was pretty much just a hardware add-on for the Amiga that would let you plug a Mac ROM in so you didn't have to use a binary image on disk.
Most Mac emulators on the Amiga at the time, even the software-only ones, were ever so slightly faster than a Mac running the same CPU. This was no fancy code trickery... just superior (at the time) video hardware in the Amiga, coupled with the fact that the Mac ROM would be cached within fast RAM if it was available.
Juliet as depicted in the play is far more mature than a 12 year old girl is in this day and age, so casting up in that case makes sense. With Kyle in Dune (which I hated), the 10 year difference is fairly insignificant..
But with YT, the whole young, naive, brash part of her is what makes the character work. It would look silly having a 20+ actress playing that part, IMO.
Phil is completely right about bits & pieces of H Ross Perot and Ted Turner showing up in L Bob Rife...But the whole issue of him being a pseudo-religious/cult leader, the name, and the fact that he floated around on The Raft (L Ron and his cronies in Scientology used to float around in international waters to avoid the IRS) are clearly L Ron influenced.
The story is complex, the sets would have to be extremely expensive and/or digital ala Episode1, the Uneducated Masses would think it was a rip-off of The Matrix...
But another thing to consider is that large portions of the book are a thinly veiled jab at L Ron Hubbard (AKA L Bob Rife).
The Scientologists are pretty powerful in Hollywood...How do you think John Travolta managed to make what looks to be the huge stinking turd of this year... Battlefield Earth?
She certainly has that SoCal punk/ska/sk8grrl thing going on.
Having said that, its difficult/impossible for large companies to completely audit all the code going into their products vs known "Open Source" code. So there's always the potential that some lazy programmer will cut and paste some GPL into his/her code and just change some variable and function names, etc.
I just don't see Gwen playing a young teen and pulling it off!
And..I think YT's age is pretty important in terms of her overall character development.
You can find a bit of background on Corona's Coming Attractions site... They started reporting on it back in 1996, though there are very few updates.
THAT SURE IS SOME GREAT PRIZE!!!
BRITTNEY SPEARS HAS A NICE SET OF KNOCKERS!!
IF THEY KNEW WHERE TO SEND THE FILE TO THE FUGITIVE, WHO CARES WHAT INFORMATION HE CAN GLEAN FROM IT? HE'LL BE CAUGHT WHEN HE PICKS IT UP!!! YOU STUPID FAGGET!!
YOU SMALL DICK FAGGET!!!
6. Is this a precursor to Sun announcing Open Source for the Java platform?
No, we have no plans currently to make the Java platform Open Source. Open Source does not allow us to enforce compatibility requirements, which we continue to feel are vital for the success of the Java platform.
Also (kind of sucky):
2. Is everything in Forte for Java, Community Edition being open-sourced?
No. The binary version of Forte for Java, Community Edition includes two components that will not be open-sourced: the browser and the compiler. If required, the modular design of Forte for Java, Community Edition permits developers to replace these components with alternatives.
Take Java, for instance. If non-cross-platform, it is just an amazingly slow object oriented language. No better than Smalltalk, or many others that have the same level of support for objects.
If you listen to Scott McNealy rant, it becomes pretty obvious pretty soon that he is insanely jealous of Bill Gates, and he is on a Quixotic mission to somehow "beat" Bill, even though the fight was over 7 or so years ago. Put Larry Elison in that column too.
Not likely. Microsoft has been talking to developers about this for the better part of a year. That's why everyone knew this announcement was coming. This is not a spur of the moment decision.
Well, UnrealTournament IS (within Epic Megagames, at least) on the PSX2. Also, the Quake III engine, if its not already (it probably is), will be running on the PSX2 real soon now. A number of 3rd parties who have Quake 3 engine games coming have announced PSX2 support in addition to PC.
Actually, consoles generally only break even or lose money on hardware sales at launch. Even at their current low pricepoints, N64, PSX and even now Dreamcast hardware have hit economies of scale that net the companies involved a profit off the hardware-only sale.