I think the fun part is when the video card is disconnected or the signal strength drops. Bus dropouts should be especially fun when the GPU is running some kind of program code...
But there's a reason why the copyright headers are missing in that PDF---they say that this code is under University of California copyright, so both System V and GNU/Linux copied it.
And for those who don't want to take this on faith, look in/usr/include/sys/syslog.h
No, but I'm starting to become a little scared about how much might need to be replaced when mine finally dies. I do like the idea of having a particle accelerator in the living room, though.
You're supposed to port your C++ codebase such that all array accesses and pointer accesses go through templates. Then the templates are implemented twice: in terms of pointers on unmanaged platforms (PC, Mac, Apple iOS, Android NDK) and in terms of C++/CLI handles on.NET platforms (WP7, 360).
An interesting approach, I hadn't considered that. However, I had a look and about half of the software I'm responsible for is C, mostly in the form of OSS libraries like libpng, libjpeg, zlib and the commercial version of SQlite. Porting them once to that design might work but keeping them in lockstep with the main source tree would require more staff...
If the app was a properly-structured by-the-book C++ program that didn't use any external libraries, that approach would probably work (except on things like PalmOS which IIRC doesn't/didn't support any advanced C++ stuff).
Then again, I'm not sure how well it would cope with the function pointers in the script interpreter, the DLL/.sh plugins and at the end of the day, I'm not sure there's a C++ compiler for WP7 at all, targeting either native or bytecode...
So would this be a fair assessment for someone familiar with the current product lineup?
1. WEC7 is a rebranding/retread of Windows CE 6. There will be industrial PDAs using it like the MC55, Psion Ikon, DAPtech etc
2. WEH is basically the Windows Mobile shell on top of WEC7, just as WM6 was the shell on top of CE5. In theory it should be possible to recompile/port existing C++ codebases and will be a useful upgrade path for large corporations who currently run their bespoke stocktaking/delivery/survey applications on top of WM6.
3. Windows Phone 7 is a completely new offering built on the WEC7 kernel. It has a locked-down userland aimed at being flashy for the consumer market which cannot run native code (and is useless if you have 8 years of C++ codebase you want to run on it).
KDE4 has an icon in the corner of a desktop shaped like a cashew nut. It allows you to add and remove desktop widgets. Kind of like pressing F12 on the MacOS.
I've seen the picture before, but only by clicking on the one in the article to get a higher-res version do I finally think I understand what it is I'm seeing.
See, there was this darker bit at the bottom that you couldn't make out properly, I figured it was an artifact of the image, or a heap of black stuff at the bottom. When it first went around the office, people were saying 'Why can't you see the bits of the building at the bottom?'
Now that I can see it more clearly, it seems to me that the brown bit is the crust, and the black bit is a hole into a fuck-off big cavern, which could quite easily be as big as the rest of the picture, if not much of the town.
If ARM netbooks/tablets with Windows come out, you can be sure that many Windows applications will be quickly ported to ARM. For most, it would be just a recompile away, anyway. For.NET stuff, not even that.
Yeah, as long as they can fit happily in 16MB of memory(*), don't try to allocate more than about 600k in a single chunk and don't use any of the hundreds of API calls that CE doesn't support or emulate properly.
(*)Officially CE supports 32MB/process, but in practice, we get about 16MB free on current PocketPC devices.
I've found that's the best way to merge SQLite's core (a multi-megabyte.c file) with its (commercial) encryption core without having to cat the two together each time a new one is released. Especially on platforms like windows which don't have cat.
Actually, it's possible that they're doing something similar to the SQLite amalgamation, i.e. trying to pack as much of it into a single file as they can to improve the global optimisations. Of course, they might simply be on crack.
My understanding is you can use ad-hoc distribution for internal apps with no minimum number of employees. They also specifically have another level of distribution (the base level) which allows internal distribution to up to 100 devices.
Maybe I've missed it in your link, but those methods seem to be one and the same, i.e. the ad-hoc method is the one with a 100-device limit.
I had actually heard of that, but it's going to suck for a 150-200 device deployment, or 5 25-unit deployments to different customers.
If that's per-binary, it might be possible to frig it by creating a new app with different internal branding per client, but I suspect Apple would shut that route down pretty quick if they found out.
I've used a Palm OS-based Handspring and a PocketPC Dell Axim, and let me tell you, the Handspring, with its limited feature set and a slow CPU, did the core PDA things (calendar, todo) a lot better than the Axim. The Axim felt slow (despite a several times faster CPU) and it was harder to work with the calendar (more taps to do things, weird options I didn't need).
The Axim was Windows Mobile 5, which was slow as molasses. They did some major architectural change from PocketPC 2003, and it totally killed I/O performance. I have this weird feeling it was to do with the way they used flash instead of DRAM for the filesystem. PocketPC 2003 was fast, but if you pulled the battery, everything went down the drain.
WM6 and later versions of WM5 got it back to some semblance of performance. Still not as good as 2003, but far more usable than the original WM5 release and it didn't lose everything when the battery ran out.
The app store has nothing at all to do with custom-built corporate apps. There's a totally different distribution method for that, under the control of the company doing the deployment. (My understanding is that at this point it needs refinement, that it's too much work for IT, but still, it's possible for a company to develop and deploy whatever apps they want without any involvement in the app store.)
If I read correctly, you have to have more than 500 employees before Apple will allow you to do that and it's quite simply not the way the industry works, at least not in my country.
What actually happens around here is that you have a lot of small shops which actually develop the app with, say, a dozen or so employees. Margins are fairly thin and there's a lot of competition so you'll probably never have a 500-employee mobile data outfit. The core product is then sold on to a number of larger firms and most of the deployments are less than 500 units each.
Much as I dislike Windows Mobile, it and CE are still the best platform for doing this kind of thing, with full native development and no dicking around with approval unless you need to do kernel-level access. Though the firm I work for is starting to branch out into Android as well. While I'd love to develop for the iPhone, it doesn't look like we're going to be allowed to.
I can't help but question the continued usefulness of Wine, though. I recently tried to run some apps in Wine and failed. I ended up just running the app (and several others) in a VM (VirtualBox) - a no-muss, no-fuss solution.
Do we actually need Wine anymore?
Oblivion is pretty playable inside Wine, even on my 2008-era processor and some people have got Fallout 3 going, though I haven't.
To the best of my knowledge - and I did a lot of Googling when Windows 7 ate itself the other week - no-one has ever got either game working inside a VM, it's just too resource-intensive.
I dunno about the GP, but I haven't yet seen a suitable replacement for it.
AFAIK the G1 is still the only device with a 5-row keyboard. The devices made immediately after it didn't have a keyboard at all and besides most of them are still stuck on 1.6 anyway AFAIK.
I didn't know it required 3D acceleration. The main problem with the G1 is the limited amount of flash memory in the device.
I'm sure I read somewhere that 2.2 had been made more modular, with most of the google apps stuffed into a different package to reduce the overall footprint. But yes, one of these days I'll bite the bullet and give the Cyanogen system a go.
I wish they'd done the organ prelude. They didn't even try to do it on the PC speaker version. I remember going into the church after I'd upgraded to a Soundblaster 2.0 (OPL2), and was completely blown away by it. To this day I'm impressed by the realism of the organ sound.
As for OPL done right, the electric pianos in Simon the Sorcerer really take the cake. Using 2-operator FM, they managed to produce a wurlitzer sound that I wasn't able to approach until physical modelling came along.
I seem to recall from the Microsoft case that the EU is not generally amused if they check later and find it's still happening. That is, they cartel will start to get a series of considerably larger fines unless they actually stop.
I recall that a common graphics viewer those cool new GIF files (among many other formats) wrote that if you continued using their software after 30 days without paying then a demon would be visited by demons who would torment you.
Graphics Workshop had something like this. In fact:
If you want to see additional features in Graphic Workshop, register
it. If we had an Arcturian mega-dollar for everyone who has said
they'd most certainly register their copy if we'd add just one
more thing to it, we could buy ourselves a universe and retire.
Oh yes, should you fail to support this program and continue to
use it, a leather winged demon of the night will tear itself,
shrieking blood and fury, from the endless caverns of the nether
world, hurl itself into the darkness with a thirst for blood on
its slavering fangs and search the very threads of time for the
throbbing of your heartbeat. Just thought you'd want to know
that.
...If I remember correctly, you could get a discount if you sent the author a photocopy of the cover of his novel.
I think you'll find that is its codename, the release itself is called "Theora 1.2". Like Vista was called 'Longhorn' and XP was called 'Whistler' or whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the fun part is when the video card is disconnected or the signal strength drops. Bus dropouts should be especially fun when the GPU is running some kind of program code...
There are some actual similarities beyond API necessities. This PDF contains a striking example of that:
http://www.mcbride-law.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Tab-247.pdf
But there's a reason why the copyright headers are missing in that PDF---they say that this code is under University of California copyright, so both System V and GNU/Linux copied it.
And for those who don't want to take this on faith, look in /usr/include/sys/syslog.h
No, but I'm starting to become a little scared about how much might need to be replaced when mine finally dies. I do like the idea of having a particle accelerator in the living room, though.
You're supposed to port your C++ codebase such that all array accesses and pointer accesses go through templates. Then the templates are implemented twice: in terms of pointers on unmanaged platforms (PC, Mac, Apple iOS, Android NDK) and in terms of C++/CLI handles on .NET platforms (WP7, 360).
An interesting approach, I hadn't considered that. However, I had a look and about half of the software I'm responsible for is C, mostly in the form of OSS libraries like libpng, libjpeg, zlib and the commercial version of SQlite. Porting them once to that design might work but keeping them in lockstep with the main source tree would require more staff...
If the app was a properly-structured by-the-book C++ program that didn't use any external libraries, that approach would probably work (except on things like PalmOS which IIRC doesn't/didn't support any advanced C++ stuff).
Then again, I'm not sure how well it would cope with the function pointers in the script interpreter, the DLL/.sh plugins and at the end of the day, I'm not sure there's a C++ compiler for WP7 at all, targeting either native or bytecode...
So would this be a fair assessment for someone familiar with the current product lineup?
1. WEC7 is a rebranding/retread of Windows CE 6. There will be industrial PDAs using it like the MC55, Psion Ikon, DAPtech etc
2. WEH is basically the Windows Mobile shell on top of WEC7, just as WM6 was the shell on top of CE5. In theory it should be possible to recompile/port existing C++ codebases and will be a useful upgrade path for large corporations who currently run their bespoke stocktaking/delivery/survey applications on top of WM6.
3. Windows Phone 7 is a completely new offering built on the WEC7 kernel. It has a locked-down userland aimed at being flashy for the consumer market which cannot run native code (and is useless if you have 8 years of C++ codebase you want to run on it).
KDE4 has an icon in the corner of a desktop shaped like a cashew nut. It allows you to add and remove desktop widgets. Kind of like pressing F12 on the MacOS.
See, there was this darker bit at the bottom that you couldn't make out properly, I figured it was an artifact of the image, or a heap of black stuff at the bottom. When it first went around the office, people were saying 'Why can't you see the bits of the building at the bottom?'
Now that I can see it more clearly, it seems to me that the brown bit is the crust, and the black bit is a hole into a fuck-off big cavern, which could quite easily be as big as the rest of the picture, if not much of the town.
Will it run my games? Y/N
Will it run them reliably, effecivly and as table as Windows 7? Y/N
will it have support, patching, ease of use and compatibility with 3d party aspects? (printers for example) Y/N
if N to any... thanks, i'll stick to windows.
Will the iPad do those? Because that's what this thing is, essentially - an OS for making an iPad-alike.
Ah, my bad.
If ARM netbooks/tablets with Windows come out, you can be sure that many Windows applications will be quickly ported to ARM. For most, it would be just a recompile away, anyway. For .NET stuff, not even that.
Yeah, as long as they can fit happily in 16MB of memory(*), don't try to allocate more than about 600k in a single chunk and don't use any of the hundreds of API calls that CE doesn't support or emulate properly.
(*)Officially CE supports 32MB/process, but in practice, we get about 16MB free on current PocketPC devices.
Take two if you find a C file in a #include. http://github.com/blinry/gish/blob/master/main.c
I've found that's the best way to merge SQLite's core (a multi-megabyte .c file) with its (commercial) encryption core without having to cat the two together each time a new one is released. Especially on platforms like windows which don't have cat.
Actually, it's possible that they're doing something similar to the SQLite amalgamation, i.e. trying to pack as much of it into a single file as they can to improve the global optimisations. Of course, they might simply be on crack.
My understanding is you can use ad-hoc distribution for internal apps with no minimum number of employees. They also specifically have another level of distribution (the base level) which allows internal distribution to up to 100 devices.
Maybe I've missed it in your link, but those methods seem to be one and the same, i.e. the ad-hoc method is the one with a 100-device limit.
I had actually heard of that, but it's going to suck for a 150-200 device deployment, or 5 25-unit deployments to different customers.
If that's per-binary, it might be possible to frig it by creating a new app with different internal branding per client, but I suspect Apple would shut that route down pretty quick if they found out.
I've used a Palm OS-based Handspring and a PocketPC Dell Axim, and let me tell you, the Handspring, with its limited feature set and a slow CPU, did the core PDA things (calendar, todo) a lot better than the Axim. The Axim felt slow (despite a several times faster CPU) and it was harder to work with the calendar (more taps to do things, weird options I didn't need).
The Axim was Windows Mobile 5, which was slow as molasses. They did some major architectural change from PocketPC 2003, and it totally killed I/O performance. I have this weird feeling it was to do with the way they used flash instead of DRAM for the filesystem. PocketPC 2003 was fast, but if you pulled the battery, everything went down the drain.
WM6 and later versions of WM5 got it back to some semblance of performance. Still not as good as 2003, but far more usable than the original WM5 release and it didn't lose everything when the battery ran out.
The app store has nothing at all to do with custom-built corporate apps. There's a totally different distribution method for that, under the control of the company doing the deployment. (My understanding is that at this point it needs refinement, that it's too much work for IT, but still, it's possible for a company to develop and deploy whatever apps they want without any involvement in the app store.)
If I read correctly, you have to have more than 500 employees before Apple will allow you to do that and it's quite simply not the way the industry works, at least not in my country.
What actually happens around here is that you have a lot of small shops which actually develop the app with, say, a dozen or so employees. Margins are fairly thin and there's a lot of competition so you'll probably never have a 500-employee mobile data outfit. The core product is then sold on to a number of larger firms and most of the deployments are less than 500 units each.
Much as I dislike Windows Mobile, it and CE are still the best platform for doing this kind of thing, with full native development and no dicking around with approval unless you need to do kernel-level access. Though the firm I work for is starting to branch out into Android as well. While I'd love to develop for the iPhone, it doesn't look like we're going to be allowed to.
This state change also changes its reflectivity, similar to how a CD-RW works.
One of them is a web radio station, one of them makes a pocket netbook. I'm really not seeing how their markets overlap.
I can't help but question the continued usefulness of Wine, though. I recently tried to run some apps in Wine and failed. I ended up just running the app (and several others) in a VM (VirtualBox) - a no-muss, no-fuss solution.
Do we actually need Wine anymore?
Oblivion is pretty playable inside Wine, even on my 2008-era processor and some people have got Fallout 3 going, though I haven't.
To the best of my knowledge - and I did a lot of Googling when Windows 7 ate itself the other week - no-one has ever got either game working inside a VM, it's just too resource-intensive.
I dunno about the GP, but I haven't yet seen a suitable replacement for it.
AFAIK the G1 is still the only device with a 5-row keyboard. The devices made immediately after it didn't have a keyboard at all and besides most of them are still stuck on 1.6 anyway AFAIK.
I didn't know it required 3D acceleration. The main problem with the G1 is the limited amount of flash memory in the device.
I'm sure I read somewhere that 2.2 had been made more modular, with most of the google apps stuffed into a different package to reduce the overall footprint. But yes, one of these days I'll bite the bullet and give the Cyanogen system a go.
I don't suppose it will be made available for the G1...
As for OPL done right, the electric pianos in Simon the Sorcerer really take the cake. Using 2-operator FM, they managed to produce a wurlitzer sound that I wasn't able to approach until physical modelling came along.
http://textmode.cwahi.net/
I seem to recall from the Microsoft case that the EU is not generally amused if they check later and find it's still happening. That is, they cartel will start to get a series of considerably larger fines unless they actually stop.
I recall that a common graphics viewer those cool new GIF files (among many other formats) wrote that if you continued using their software after 30 days without paying then a demon would be visited by demons who would torment you.
Graphics Workshop had something like this. In fact:
If you want to see additional features in Graphic Workshop, register
it. If we had an Arcturian mega-dollar for everyone who has said
they'd most certainly register their copy if we'd add just one
more thing to it, we could buy ourselves a universe and retire.
Oh yes, should you fail to support this program and continue to
use it, a leather winged demon of the night will tear itself,
shrieking blood and fury, from the endless caverns of the nether
world, hurl itself into the darkness with a thirst for blood on
its slavering fangs and search the very threads of time for the
throbbing of your heartbeat. Just thought you'd want to know
that.
I think you'll find that is its codename, the release itself is called "Theora 1.2". Like Vista was called 'Longhorn' and XP was called 'Whistler' or whatever.