Well, the other explanations are OK, but the main explanation is...
mass production
They'll be churning these things out in *outrageous* volumes. I mean look at their aims, a PS in *every* American home, plus Japan, Europe, the rest of Asia... --
The "under the hood" analogy is an old one, but I've not come across the "Ford buy tyres from Michelin, engine blocks from foo, etc -- we get a web server from Apache, compiler from cygnus, etc" analogy before.
All analogies fall apart if you take them too far; these analogies make the point they're meant to.
The analogy I really liked was the Heinz ketchup analogy. It made a point I'd never considered before. --
You cross-compile on a computer. You have a development console which is connected to the computer, so instead of reading a CD, it mounts a filesystem from the computer.
I imagine the development consoles will run a slightly different OS to the consumer model, with more in the way of diagnostics etc. Look at the developer's PalmOS ROMS for comparisom.
Of course, developers are free to choose whether to write in assembly or C, or anything else. Usually it's a combination of C for the high-level stuff and ASM for stuff like graphics engines.
One reason the PSX took off, was that Sony provided nice easy to use APIs to the graphics hardware, so early game development was fast. By comparisom, although the Saturn could outperform the PSX, it was fiddly. Only later in the PSX's life did developers start to need more oomph, and began to replace Sony's APIs with their own. --
"malloc by hand"?! HAHAHAHAHA!
on
Unix in Perl
·
· Score: 1
Heh. I dunno what he meant... but I'm gonna be charitable and assume that when he said "malloc by hand" he really meant "keep track of pointers and free() by hand".
Sure, experienced C programmers instinctively write well structured algorithms where pointers don't get lost, and everything malloc()d is free()d when it's done with, but to the mortal among us, that's hard work, and having our garbage collected for us is a blessing.
Pah. There are laws against slavery. Probably rather verbosely written laws.
I won't spell out the analogy -- but would you say that the freed slaves are not free, because their owners rights to do with them as they pleased were taken away?
It's nice to see this kind of article in the press -- but did you notice that nowhere does the article actually explain what Open Source *is*.
I've noticed this in many, many mainstream press articles -- they either merrily drop phrases like "open source" without pausing to explain, or they use "free" to mean "free beer"... or worse they describe Linux/Apache/GNU/whatever as (argh) "public domain".
Find out about Turing Machines here Find out about the Turing Test here
They may not be the best resources on the matter, but they seem to be OK, and will link to other places...
As you will see, the Turing Test and the Turing Machine are only related by the fact that the same clever geezer thought them up, and they have something to do with computing.
BTW the Turing Test was a nice idea, but clearly flawed, since many machines have passed the test which quite clearly do not display *any form* of intelligence.
Don't go confusing Turing Machines with the Turing Test. One is a conceptual machine involving a tape moving back and forth... The Turing Machine has been proven to be equivalent to a Von Neumann Machine, which is the model that *all* modern computers follow. (hey, why has nobody mentioned Von Neumann yet?) The simplicity of the Turing Machine means it can be used to prove deep things about computability and so forth. You can get Turing Machine emulators if you want to play about with one... apparently the estate of Alan Turing isn't suing anyone over it;) The Turing Test is an attempt at an answer to the question "How would be know if we'd managed to develop machine intelligence?". Two different things. As to the idiot who said "Turing was a faggot who killed himself"... Well, Turing was gay, and he killed himself as a result of the intolerance of society at the time (so their fault, not his) and the pressure of his work at Bletchley Park, you know, winning World War II....
My old LISP teacher explained that people who's minds had already been trapped in the procedural way of thinking, by C, Pascal, whatever often found it difficult to get the hang of functional languages like Miranda, Scheme, LISP.
Conversely, moving from functional to procedural is less of a wrench, and the resulting procedural programs are likely to be more elegant.
Also, newcomers (I'm told) find functional languages easier to learn "cold" than procedural.
"I bet you SONY probly hired some coders to do it to piss of ninendo and they fake the whole thing and make it look like some backyard dudez did this with no knowledge"
Bah, if you're going to put forward a conspiracy theory, may as well make it interesting. *I* reckon Nintendo wrote UltraHLE. Think - existing emulators weren't good enough or relevant enough to modern high-profile consoles to capture the public and media interest. In order to get a test case with which they could set a precedent and go on to crush other emulators, they needed a high quality emulator for a current console, to use as a strawman. The reverse-vampires were involved somewhere, too...
Of course it's worth mentioning that when the games *can* be bought, I do. I own a playstation, and I have no intention of ever playing a gold CD on it (except possibly Thrill Kill, but that's bound to suck).. What's more, after a few weeks enjoying Snes9X, I went out and bought a SNES. OK, it was second hand, as are all the games, so Nintendo haven't gained a penny, but the point stands....
First of all -- great article, it told the truth for once.
However, I just want to draw the line between "breaking the law" and "being in the wrong".
I drive at 40MPH, on long straight wide roads with 30MPH limits, because in this case, I think the limit is stupid, so it's a law I choose to ignore. I drank beer in pubs when I was 17... and I play games I don't legally own, using MAME. So there.
These games *can't* be bought. Maybe if the copyright owners bundled the ROMS onto a CD which I could buy, for a reasonable price, then I'd buy it. But until then, the only way I can play 'em is by breaking the law, but not my concience.
I've got a similar box here. I sneaked it in, it does a lot of stuff which people rely on. And now I'm leaving, and nobody's going to know how to admin it...
That's the "but"... How do you get your employers to realise they need to recruit a replacement who groks UNIX, when your UNIX box was sneaked in through the back door?
Jon says he's "never been anything close to root before".
Well, I hate to be pedantic, but here goes:
You've been root, Jon, on your Mac. On Mac and on Windows, there is only one user, and that user can do *anything* -- delete any file, change any configuration. So to all intents and purposes, that user is root. Part of Unix's power is that you make yourself *not* root, making it so much easier to do your day to day stuff without accidentally buggering stuff up -- because only root can do that.
And when you're root, you sit on your hands before hitting return, every time...:)
The world needs idealists, or extremists... whatever you want to call them... RMS has an ideal, and he's actually working hard towards building that ideal -- he's devoted his life to it.
So, sure he's creepy. And he doesn't make compromises to try and appeal to the "norm" - I mean, taking his shoes off at lectures, and stuff -- not the way to win over suits, is it.
This is where ESR would like his place to be - the spokesperson...
I dunno if you Americans realise this, but to us in the UK, gun-toting libertarians are pretty creepy too. It's just not an ideal we're used to.
I've played two. I've also played two "creature from the balck lagoon" pins.
It seems like they create new tables, but reuse elements of the art and back-matrix software from the previous version...
Re: P2000 - call me a luddite, but I like to go to Blackpool and play as many of the all-electromechanical pins as I can -- the ones with mechanical score displays. Cool!
blaah... I'l stick to good old 2.0.36
on
Linux 2.2 Released
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· Score: 1
Fine. Me too.
The upgrade to 2.2 requires a good few changes to other programs and libraries, not just the kernel.
I for one just can't be bothered, and I'll be waiting 'til a 2.2 based full distribution arrives.
Possibly -- but one of the reasons I bought a "proper" CD player, instead of just using the one in my Playstation, was that I was pissed off with having to switch on the TV just to know what was going on.
Slashdot Mirror
Hrm, what books get the extinct cover animals?
"Mastering Scientific Programming with FORTRAN", also known as "The Dodo Book"...
--
Well, the other explanations are OK, but the main explanation is...
mass production
They'll be churning these things out in *outrageous* volumes. I mean look at their aims, a PS in *every* American home, plus Japan, Europe, the rest of Asia...
--
The "under the hood" analogy is an old one, but I've not come across the "Ford buy tyres from Michelin, engine blocks from foo, etc -- we get a web server from Apache, compiler from cygnus, etc" analogy before.
All analogies fall apart if you take them too far; these analogies make the point they're meant to.
The analogy I really liked was the Heinz ketchup analogy. It made a point I'd never considered before.
--
No.
Cross compilation.
The binaries will be neither Linux binaries nor intel binaries
At least I hope not.
Gaming needs a realtime OS
Linux is not a realtime OS
Gaming does not need the stuff Linux is good at
--
You cross-compile on a computer. You have a development console which is connected to the computer, so instead of reading a CD, it mounts a filesystem from the computer.
I imagine the development consoles will run a slightly different OS to the consumer model, with more in the way of diagnostics etc. Look at the developer's PalmOS ROMS for comparisom.
Of course, developers are free to choose whether to write in assembly or C, or anything else. Usually it's a combination of C for the high-level stuff and ASM for stuff like graphics engines.
One reason the PSX took off, was that Sony provided nice easy to use APIs to the graphics hardware, so early game development was fast. By comparisom, although the Saturn could outperform the PSX, it was fiddly. Only later in the PSX's life did developers start to need more oomph, and began to replace Sony's APIs with their own.
--
Heh. I dunno what he meant... but I'm gonna be charitable and assume that when he said "malloc by hand" he really meant "keep track of pointers and free() by hand".
Sure, experienced C programmers instinctively write well structured algorithms where pointers don't get lost, and everything malloc()d is free()d when it's done with, but to the mortal among us, that's hard work, and having our garbage collected for us is a blessing.
Pah. There are laws against slavery. Probably rather verbosely written laws.
I won't spell out the analogy -- but would you say that the freed slaves are not free, because their owners rights to do with them as they pleased were taken away?
It's nice to see this kind of article in the press -- but did you notice that nowhere does the article actually explain what Open Source *is*.
I've noticed this in many, many mainstream press articles -- they either merrily drop phrases like "open source" without pausing to explain, or they use "free" to mean "free beer"... or worse they describe Linux/Apache/GNU/whatever as (argh) "public domain".
.... unless the PC soundcard had a digital audio output (coax or optical), since most minidisc recorders support that...
Find out about Turing Machines
here
Find out about the Turing Test
here
They may not be the best resources on the matter,
but they seem to be OK, and will link to other places...
As you will see, the Turing Test and the Turing Machine are only related by the fact that the same clever geezer thought them up, and they have something to do with computing.
There's no confusion. You're just wrong.
BTW the Turing Test was a nice idea, but clearly
flawed, since many machines have passed the test
which quite clearly do not display *any form* of
intelligence.
Don't go confusing Turing Machines with the Turing Test. ;)
One is a conceptual machine involving a tape moving back and forth... The Turing Machine has been proven to be equivalent to a Von Neumann Machine, which is the model that *all* modern computers follow. (hey, why has nobody mentioned Von Neumann yet?) The simplicity of the Turing Machine means it can be used to prove deep things about computability and so forth. You can get Turing Machine emulators if you want to play about with one... apparently the estate of Alan Turing isn't suing anyone over it
The Turing Test is an attempt at an answer to the question "How would be know if we'd managed to develop machine intelligence?".
Two different things.
As to the idiot who said "Turing was a faggot who killed himself"...
Well, Turing was gay, and he killed himself as
a result of the intolerance of society at the time (so their fault, not his)
and the pressure of his work at Bletchley Park, you know, winning World War II....
My old LISP teacher explained that people who's minds had already been trapped in the procedural way of thinking, by C, Pascal, whatever often found it difficult to get the hang of functional languages like Miranda, Scheme, LISP.
Conversely, moving from functional to procedural is less of a wrench, and the resulting procedural programs are likely to be more elegant.
Also, newcomers (I'm told) find functional languages easier to learn "cold" than procedural.
"I bet you SONY probly hired some coders to do it to piss of ninendo
and they fake the whole thing and make it look like some backyard
dudez did this with no knowledge"
Bah, if you're going to put forward a conspiracy theory, may as well make it interesting.
*I* reckon Nintendo wrote UltraHLE. Think - existing emulators weren't good enough
or relevant enough to modern high-profile consoles to capture the public and media interest. In order to get
a test case with which they could set a precedent and go on to crush other emulators,
they needed a high quality emulator for a current console, to use as a strawman.
The reverse-vampires were involved somewhere, too...
Sure, following up my own comment, ne'er mind...
Of course it's worth mentioning that when the games *can* be bought,
I do. I own a playstation, and I have no intention of ever
playing a gold CD on it (except possibly Thrill Kill, but that's bound to suck)..
What's more, after a few weeks enjoying Snes9X, I went out and bought a SNES. OK, it was second hand, as are all the games, so Nintendo haven't gained a penny, but the point stands....
First of all -- great article, it told the truth for once.
However, I just want to draw the line between "breaking the law" and "being in the wrong".
I drive at 40MPH, on long straight wide roads with 30MPH limits, because in this case, I think the limit is stupid, so it's a law I choose to ignore.
I drank beer in pubs when I was 17... and I play games I don't legally own, using MAME. So there.
These games *can't* be bought. Maybe if the copyright owners bundled the ROMS onto a CD which I could buy, for a reasonable price, then I'd buy it. But until then, the only way I can play 'em is by breaking the law, but not my concience.
I've got a similar box here. I sneaked it in, it
does a lot of stuff which people rely on. And
now I'm leaving, and nobody's going to know
how to admin it...
That's the "but"... How do you get your employers
to realise they need to recruit a replacement who
groks UNIX, when your UNIX box was sneaked in through the back door?
Try this:
http://www.cs.newcastle.edu.au/~c95117 13/sesem
Jon says he's "never been anything close to root before".
:)
Well, I hate to be pedantic, but here goes:
You've been root, Jon, on your Mac. On Mac and on Windows, there is only one user, and that user can do *anything* -- delete any file, change any configuration. So to all intents and purposes, that user is root.
Part of Unix's power is that you make yourself *not* root, making it so much easier to do your day to day stuff without accidentally buggering stuff up -- because only root can do that.
And when you're root, you sit on your hands before hitting return, every time...
Just so you don't get sued - consider replacing
the commercial games with free ones.
Curses is *fabulous* - better than any genuine Infocom game I've played.
Christminster is good too.
Theatre's nice....
Get your CGI to run freefall.z5, and I'll be very impressed indeed.
All these can be found at ftp.gmd.de/if-archive
The world needs idealists, or extremists... whatever you want to call them... RMS has an ideal, and he's actually working hard towards building that ideal -- he's devoted his life to it.
So, sure he's creepy. And he doesn't make compromises to try and appeal to the "norm" - I mean, taking his shoes off at lectures, and stuff -- not the way to win over suits, is it.
This is where ESR would like his place to be - the spokesperson...
I dunno if you Americans realise this, but to us in the UK, gun-toting libertarians are pretty creepy too. It's just not an ideal we're used to.
Why is the loss of real plungers a "necessary sacrifice"?
I always feel a bit cheated when it's just a button.
I've played two. I've also played two "creature from the balck lagoon" pins.
It seems like they create new tables, but reuse elements of the art and back-matrix software from the previous version...
Re: P2000 - call me a luddite, but I like to go to Blackpool and play as many of the all-electromechanical pins as I can -- the ones with mechanical score displays. Cool!
Fine. Me too.
The upgrade to 2.2 requires a good few changes to other programs and libraries, not just the kernel.
I for one just can't be bothered, and I'll be waiting 'til a 2.2 based full distribution arrives.
Possibly -- but one of the reasons I bought a "proper" CD player, instead of just using the one in my Playstation, was that I was pissed off with having to switch on the TV just to know what was going on.