I know conclude that despite all of CmdrTaco's talk about anime and such, he is clearly a sci-fi poser. Lexx is the bottom of the barrel, below even all those bad Mark Hamill movies (which at least have the fact that they document the plummeting career of a scifi beloved going for them).
Lexx is crap. Not Andromeda crap (i.e. sketchy scifi/science) which is still fun. Lexx is crap-crap. Utterly iredeemable. It is the TV equivalent of Battlefield Earth.
Why was this inane comment moderated informative? The only thing the poster said was "Lexx is crap". That tells us nothing. For this to be informative, tell us why you think Lexx is crap; that would (possibly) be informative, or at least interesting. Are the characters unbelieveable? Do the plots have internal or external consistency? Is the writing poor? Are the sets so badly constructed that they wobble when an actor walks by?
And some examples to back up your claims would be good.
But just saying "Lexx is crap" is worthless. It is certainly not informative.
Re:Why use PDAs anyway?
on
PDAs, PDAs
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· Score: 2
Give me one example when a paper-equivalent to PDAs is not better than any given PDA.
I used to use a "paper PDA". Every time someone's contact details changed, I had to re-write their entry. The address book quickly became a nasty mess.
My paper PDA didn't have an alarm.
My paper PDA doesn't include a phone that is synced to my address book. So on my paper PDA I can't tap on a person's name to call them and speak to them.
Every year I had to copy the annual reminders from my old paper PDA into the new one (mainly family birthdays I should remember). Man, I hated that New Year ritual.
Oh, if you find an example, tell me how much you are willing to pay for that feature.
I paid around$500 for these features, and I am very happy with that, thank you.
You're assuming that higher-level code is all written in PowerPC assembly language. I don't think that is the case. I would expect that most of the OS X code is written in C, C++, or Objective C (the object-oriented dialect of C used on NeXTstep).
Actually, I'm not assuming that Mac OS X is written in PPC assembly language. I worked for Apple as a senior software engineer for four years, up through the Mac OS X beta. I spent a lot of time working on the internals of Mac OS X. Porting an OS written in C/C++ is not a case of recompiling for a new instruction set. It would be a significant amount of work to bring the upper software layers of Mac OS X up on Intel.
The biggest technical challenges would probably be the Classic environment (which has to run PowerPC and 68K machine code), device support for the millions of different PC I/O configurations, and reoptimization of low-level code that takes advantage of AltiVec.
Classic would be a major challenge. Not only the technical issues of running a PowerPC emulator on Intel, but also the usability issue that emulation brings - namely your emulated Classic apps would run very, very slowly on Intel.
But the real reasons you won't see OS X on x86 are business reasons. Apple thinks of themselves as a hardware company -- they weren't willing to tolerate even limited competition from authorized cloners, and so they certainly wouldn't want to have to compete for hardware sales in the x86 world. And Office gives Microsoft a lot of hold over Apple, even if using one monopoly to maintain or extend another is supposed to be against the law.
I agree, the major reasons for not porting Mac OS X to Intel are business-related, not technical. The technical reasons are huge however. To re-iterate what you said, Apple is a company that does around $8 billion a year in revenue. Of this about 95% is from hardware. So the first year that Apple transitions from being a hardware company to being a software company, its revenues drop from $8 billion to $400 million. Its hard to see how any company could justify that kind of decision. Can you imagine how their shareholders would react?
Personally I don't think Microsoft has much hold over Apple. That's just a red herring as far as I can see. Its the revenue drop they couldn't stomach.
With the x86 release of Darwin a complete OS X release for the x86 platform wouldn't be far away
Sadly Darwin is a tiny part of the effort required to bring Mac OS X to x86. Above this sit many layers of software, including Quartz, Carbon, Aqua, Classic, Cocoa, QuickTime, Java... Don't forget, Apple has had a team of up to 500 engineers working on Mac OS X for PPC for the last three years or so. Of that effort, only a tiny subset has been dedicated to bringing up Darwin.
I'd guess that you'd be looking at several hundred man years of effort to get the rest of Mac OS X ported to Intel, particularly if you want it to run on a decent spread of hardware. I wouldn't hold your breath...
Unfortunately, this is completely the wrong measure of how long this operation takes. What you have measured is the length of time it takes in Office 2000 once you know how to do it.
The real problem is if you don't know the magic sequence of operations and you spend time looking in the tools section (is it Customize or Options?) then clicking on various confusing tabs and other options looking for the bit that turns off that damned paperclip.
Damn media. Ok, I read the article. All it really shows me is that AOL users are easily duped. Other than being yet another example of how easily script kiddies can work, was there anything informative about that article? I think not.
It may not have been informative for you or most other Slashdot readers, but it wasn't aimed at you. If you notice, the article was posted on MSNBC News, not on Slashdot. It wasn't aimed at informing people who already know about this problem, it was aimed at informing the vast majority of Internet users who aren't aware of this kind of activity.
Sometimes its easy to forget that 99.9% of Internet users have never even heard of Slashdot and don't have the same background and interest in technical matters that Slashdot readers have.
Didn't Michaelangelo have the idea if not the plans for a mechanical adding machine?
Yes, but an adding machine is not necessarily a computer. There were many mechanical and electro-mechanical calculators available before the first electronic computers. IBM had a flourishing business making such beasts long before WWII.
I know the idea isn't anywhere near new. What it really comes down to is how we classify the word "computer".
There is a precise and definitive answer to this question. Alan Turing's famous paper "On Computable Numbers" proposes the logical foundation for all computing machines. Take a look at this page on Andrew Hodges' web site. If you want to dive in to it, buy Hodges' excellent biography of Turing. Another great source of information on the mathematical basis for all computation is Douglas Hofstader's tour de force book "Godel, Escher and Bach". If you really want to understand computers you have to understand Turing's work.
The first computer was designed by Charles Babbage
in 1882.
Babbages analytical engine is not a true computer, in the modern sense. It isn't fully programmable because it it not Turing-compatible. There is a large set of programs that you can run on your Intel box that the analytical engine couldn't compute.
Although he never built one, a unviersty did from his original 1822 designs in the early 90's and it DOES work.
I believe you are thinking of the Science Museum in London, which built a replica of Babbage's difference engine. Thhe difference engine is a much simpler machine that is a sophisticated mechanical calculator. It is certainly not a computer. The Science Museum are considering building a replica of the analytical engine, but haven't started work onit yet.
That aside, this is an outstanding idea. I know (and work) with many people trapped in H1-B hell. Even worse off are the poor individuals who are brave enough to try and make it through the tangle of the immigration beauracracy to try and become citizens... that takes 4-5 years, nowadays; and if you change employers, then you need to go back to square one and start from the beginning.
Bring me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses... and I will shaft them any way I can.
Actually its even worse than that. You first have to gain permanent residence status (aka a Green Card). This took me three years. After that, its a minimum of 5 year before you can even take the citizenship exam. While you are applying for your Green Card, you cannot change employer. If you do, you have to restart your Green Card application from scratch. You cannot start a Green Card application for at least 1 year after entering the US on an H1B visa. Your H1B visa is only valid for 6 years, so you have a fairly short window of opportunity to get a Green Card before your H1B runs out and you are thrown out of the US.
It sounds inevitable that a Big Iron fork will occur, and as Linus says above, this is not necessarily a bad thing. The problem comes when you have competing factions trying to do the same thing and causing confusion (as in the UNIX wars of the past). But when you have different solutions for different problems, yet everyone is moving forward together overall, it should be manageable. Indeed, it should be helpful, for it maximizes the solution for each platform.
The biggest potential problem of forking an OS is binary and API incompatibility. The reason most people use computers is to run specific applications. I want to be able to walk into my local CompUSA/log on to Egghead and get a copy of application X and run it on my computer. I don't really care what the OS is, as long as it runs application X.
If I've got Linux on my system, I'd like all applications that run on Linux to run on my system. The more forks that introduce binary or API incompatibilites, the less chance I have of being able to run the apps I want, and the more reason I have for removing Linux from my computer.
If Linux wants to be a mainstream desktop OS, it needs to make sure it doesn't fork too much. That was a big part of the reason desktop UNIX failed to take off in the late 80's/early 90's.
If they fork all it would cause is a temporary fork. It will be incorporated back into the kernel any how if it is any good. If it is not good people will not use it. If they want to fork let them.
No, you're missing the point. They would need to fork because the memory mangement techniques for "Big Iron" machines are fundamentally different from low end home machines. You need to use different techniques on machines that are so different, so they won't get incorporated back into a single kernel. You will get (for some reasonably long timeframe) two different kernels as a result of this.
Now, whether that's a bad thing or not is a different question.
I don't think adventure games are dead - as far as I know Ultima Online is doing great with thousands of people paying them ten bucks a month to play.
I haven't played Ultima Online so I could be wrong, but I wouldn't describe UO as an adventure game, certainly not in the sense that Old Man Murray usedt. UO is a descendent of games like Moria, rather than true text adventure games like Zork.
The reason apple doesn't port their OS is because that would kill their main source of revenue: hardware sales. Technically there's no reason why we can't run Mac OS on a PC (just like why there's no technical reason why we can't run windows 2000 on a G4). So the reasons why we can't do that anyway are of political/economical nature.
This is not true. In theory any hardware can run any software. In practice its much more complex than that. On problem is endianness - Intel and Motorola processors store bits in different orders in memory. Unfortunately traditional Mac OS has thousands of hardcoded assumptions about the endianness of its processor. Changing these in a consistent fashion is a huge task, and even if you got it all right, it would introduce incompatabilities with existing software. This is just one example of the sort of problem you'll face porting Mac OS to different hardware.
The bottom line is that porting an OS and maintaining binary compatibility with applications is prohibitively expensive (thus the failure of the Star Trek project). This is genuinely a technical barrier.
None of this applies to Mac OS X, which is designed from the ground up to be portable between platforms. In that case the reasons Apple won't port it are commercial, not technical.
What's even more interesting is that the alternate theme is not Apple's previous "Platinum" theme but a new one. As Platinum is already supported under Aqua in "Classic" applications this means that there will now be three different UI's shipping - Platinum under Classic, the default "lickable" under Aqua and it's alternate "Graphite".
I think you're reading more into this than is really there. Choosing the graphite look just changes the Aqua widgets to monochrome. For example, the three standard window title bar widgets (close window, minimize window and zoom window) are now all the same graphite gray color, rather then being red, yellow and green.
This is simply Aqua with a more muted color scheme. It is not a separate UI at all.
Is MSFT going to stop improving PC APIs all of a sudden when Xbox comes out? Are card makers going to stop improving their video cards? No? Well then. How long are the platforms ACTUALLY going to remain compatible?
Six months at most is what he gives it, which sounds not unreasonable. That means your window for doing combined Xbox/PC development is one year, at the outside, starting right about now.
But does it matter if the X-Box and regular PC APIs start to diverge six months out?
Probably not.
The divergence at the API level should be small and manageable. A lot of hardware divergence can be hidden beneath the APIs - most 3D games are written to the Direct3D API, not to the hardware spec of the video card, so you can change your video card and expect your software to run and take advantage of the improved performance of your new hardware.
It will be a long time for the APIs to diverge enough to make porting from Windows to the XBox anywhere near as much work as porting from Windows to (say) the PS2. As long as it is less work to port to the XBox it has an advantage. By the time the APIs were so diverged that there was no advantage, XBox2 will be out, synched up to the then current Windows APIs.
A common ancestry is a lot better from a developer's point of view than no commonality at all.
Re:No console competes with the genre of games for
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Salon on the XBox
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· Score: 1
No console can really compete with the games for a PC. Plots for console games are normally shallow, with limited forms of input (no keyboard/mouse), and with high speed Internet not available on console boxes, there simply are not the quality indepth and massively multiplayer games for consoles that make PC games so popular
True, but imagine how easy it is to fix these current limitations. Adding a keyboard and an ethernet port to something like the X-Box would be trivial for Microsoft. If they decide to do it, there would be no reason that developers couldn't build complex-input multi-player games at least as easily for the X-Box as for a "real" PC.
According this this abstract of a paper in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, EDVAC had a recognizable operating system in 1952/53. I suspect this would qualify as the first OS...
This seems to be another example of the focus of the computing industry: create better and better hardware but use it to run software which hasn't really changed much in the last decade.
People are always making this sort of claim, yet no-one ever provides any evidence to back it up. I thoroughly disagree with your assertion. I say that software has changed a lot in the last decade.
Ten years ago, apps were small, slow, and lacked features. I couldn't do real-time video editing in software, heck I couldn't even playback video in software. Nothing as complex as a web browser existed ten years ago. I didn't have applications like Photoshop or Gimp that allow me to perform very sophisticated image manuipulation.
Try running some 10 year old software on today's hardware. It runs faster, but it feels archaic, feature-less and flat compared with modern software.
And that's just looking at the outside of the software. If you look at the code, its also changed radically, with the introduction of object-oriented programming and large-scale software engineering.
Just seems to be another excuse to create sloppy programs/bloatware.
What you call bloatware, other people refer to as fast, stable, feature-rich software. Of course there are bad applications out there, just as there were ten years ago or twenty years ago. But there are also whole classes of application that just weren't possible a decade ago, not just because the hardware has improved, but also because we understand how to build large-scale software like never before.
true.. but the taxes they pay to a foreign government are US tax deductible.
[at least as for as the corporate income tax goes, I assume it's the same for individuals]
-next time tell the whole story
Well, this is partially true - the US has bi-lateral tax agreements for some countries, where the local individual tax payments are tax-deductable with the US, but this is not universally true.
The New York Times (free registration required) is reporting here that a man has been convicted for operating an internet gambling business that took bets from Americans. I would never have predicted this outcome, since he estabished the business in Antigua (where it's legal) and was himself out of the country when the bets were taken. If he weren't an American citizen, I don't believe he could have been prosecuted. I find this ruling disturbing, since it implies that one can be prosecuted according to the laws of one's home country, even if one's activities are legal where they take place. I'm hoping this ruling is overturned, as it's completely wrong, IMO. Using this logic, some despotic regime would be within its rights to prosecute its citizens for criticizing it while in the U.S.
Well, there are presidents of a sort for this. There are extradition treaties between the US and many foreign countries that allow prosecution of some crimes committed by US citizens overseas. Also, did you know the US is one of only two countries in the world that requires its citizens whoe live abroad to pay US taxes as well as the taxes of the country they live in? The other country that does this? Libya...
"Suck has a great commentary today about the back-handed, back-stabbing nature of the software industry. The for-profit software industry, that is, of course... What kind of light does this sort of business ethic (or lack thereof) shine on the open-source community, and Free vs. free software?
Suck has a bunch of allegations so weak even it doesn't try to justify them. Come on, Suck's article said exactly nothing. It claims some industry executives do bad things. It doesn't cite a single example, beyond Ellison's famed dumpster-diving. And interestingly, that was nothing to do with software development, it was related to the Microsoft anti-trust matter. Its not like Ellison was actually stealing source code...
To be fair to Suck, their piece was humor. Its a shame to see Slashdot report this like everything they said was well-grounded factual reporting. Even Suck didn't pretend that.
Of course, I've worked in the industry long enough to know that unsavory things happen. Good and noble things also happen. Most of the time what goes on is just plain hard work, neither particularly good nor particularly bad. Welcome to the world of human beings, where people sometimes do good things and sometimes do bad things.
Thats not scary... You're simply capturing words or options, optionally between quotes while allowing for quote escaping, using \".
Try doing that in one line with any other language and still make it as efficient as a Perl regex...
But he didn't claimed it wasn't efficient. He claimed that it was obfuscated. Note that efficient in terms of the number of characters of code it takes to express a function is not the same thing as the runtime efficiency of the function. Also note that compact syntax tends to make things more obscure, rather than less. Also note that efficiency of writing is not the same (and in fact is often reciprocal to) efficiency of reading. Just some thoughts.
It's annoying to see XYZ for Linux! when it's really Linux/x86. Years ago, people came up with the word Wintel to describe Windows on Intel. Perhaps we should coin Linux86 to describe Linux on x86 so people understand what platform of Linux you're talking about. Remember - you heard it here first!
Surely it should be Lintel. After all, a lintel is that piece of architecture that goes above your Windows.
The 3D Action Planet and PlanetQuake write-ups are the same, but they are much better than the original link from Slashdot. Thanks for posting these. Its particularly useful to see the "two weeks" and multiplayer issues more clearly spelt out.
Slashdot Mirror
I know conclude that despite all of CmdrTaco's talk about anime and such, he is clearly a sci-fi poser. Lexx is the bottom of the barrel, below even all those bad Mark Hamill movies (which at least have the fact that they document the plummeting career of a scifi beloved going for them).
Lexx is crap. Not Andromeda crap (i.e. sketchy scifi/science) which is still fun. Lexx is crap-crap. Utterly iredeemable. It is the TV equivalent of Battlefield Earth.
Why was this inane comment moderated informative? The only thing the poster said was "Lexx is crap". That tells us nothing. For this to be informative, tell us why you think Lexx is crap; that would (possibly) be informative, or at least interesting. Are the characters unbelieveable? Do the plots have internal or external consistency? Is the writing poor? Are the sets so badly constructed that they wobble when an actor walks by?
And some examples to back up your claims would be good.
But just saying "Lexx is crap" is worthless. It is certainly not informative.
Give me one example when a paper-equivalent to PDAs is not better than any given PDA.
I used to use a "paper PDA". Every time someone's contact details changed, I had to re-write their entry. The address book quickly became a nasty mess.
My paper PDA didn't have an alarm.
My paper PDA doesn't include a phone that is synced to my address book. So on my paper PDA I can't tap on a person's name to call them and speak to them.
Every year I had to copy the annual reminders from my old paper PDA into the new one (mainly family birthdays I should remember). Man, I hated that New Year ritual.
Oh, if you find an example, tell me how much you are willing to pay for that feature.
I paid around$500 for these features, and I am very happy with that, thank you.
You're assuming that higher-level code is all written in PowerPC assembly language. I don't think that is the case. I would expect that most of the OS X code is written in C, C++, or Objective C (the object-oriented dialect of C used on NeXTstep).
Actually, I'm not assuming that Mac OS X is written in PPC assembly language. I worked for Apple as a senior software engineer for four years, up through the Mac OS X beta. I spent a lot of time working on the internals of Mac OS X. Porting an OS written in C/C++ is not a case of recompiling for a new instruction set. It would be a significant amount of work to bring the upper software layers of Mac OS X up on Intel.
The biggest technical challenges would probably be the Classic environment (which has to run PowerPC and 68K machine code), device support for the millions of different PC I/O configurations, and reoptimization of low-level code that takes advantage of AltiVec.
Classic would be a major challenge. Not only the technical issues of running a PowerPC emulator on Intel, but also the usability issue that emulation brings - namely your emulated Classic apps would run very, very slowly on Intel.
But the real reasons you won't see OS X on x86 are business reasons. Apple thinks of themselves as a hardware company -- they weren't willing to tolerate even limited competition from authorized cloners, and so they certainly wouldn't want to have to compete for hardware sales in the x86 world. And Office gives Microsoft a lot of hold over Apple, even if using one monopoly to maintain or extend another is supposed to be against the law.
I agree, the major reasons for not porting Mac OS X to Intel are business-related, not technical. The technical reasons are huge however. To re-iterate what you said, Apple is a company that does around $8 billion a year in revenue. Of this about 95% is from hardware. So the first year that Apple transitions from being a hardware company to being a software company, its revenues drop from $8 billion to $400 million. Its hard to see how any company could justify that kind of decision. Can you imagine how their shareholders would react?
Personally I don't think Microsoft has much hold over Apple. That's just a red herring as far as I can see. Its the revenue drop they couldn't stomach.
With the x86 release of Darwin a complete OS X release for the x86 platform wouldn't be far away
Sadly Darwin is a tiny part of the effort required to bring Mac OS X to x86. Above this sit many layers of software, including Quartz, Carbon, Aqua, Classic, Cocoa, QuickTime, Java... Don't forget, Apple has had a team of up to 500 engineers working on Mac OS X for PPC for the last three years or so. Of that effort, only a tiny subset has been dedicated to bringing up Darwin.
I'd guess that you'd be looking at several hundred man years of effort to get the rest of Mac OS X ported to Intel, particularly if you want it to run on a decent spread of hardware. I wouldn't hold your breath...
It takes about 30 seconds in Office 2000:
Unfortunately, this is completely the wrong measure of how long this operation takes. What you have measured is the length of time it takes in Office 2000 once you know how to do it.
The real problem is if you don't know the magic sequence of operations and you spend time looking in the tools section (is it Customize or Options?) then clicking on various confusing tabs and other options looking for the bit that turns off that damned paperclip.
Damn media. Ok, I read the article. All it really shows me is that AOL users are easily duped. Other than being yet another example of how easily script kiddies can work, was there anything informative about that article? I think not.
It may not have been informative for you or most other Slashdot readers, but it wasn't aimed at you. If you notice, the article was posted on MSNBC News, not on Slashdot. It wasn't aimed at informing people who already know about this problem, it was aimed at informing the vast majority of Internet users who aren't aware of this kind of activity.
Sometimes its easy to forget that 99.9% of Internet users have never even heard of Slashdot and don't have the same background and interest in technical matters that Slashdot readers have.
Didn't Michaelangelo have the idea if not the plans for a mechanical adding machine?
Yes, but an adding machine is not necessarily a computer. There were many mechanical and electro-mechanical calculators available before the first electronic computers. IBM had a flourishing business making such beasts long before WWII.
I know the idea isn't anywhere near new. What it really comes down to is how we classify the word "computer".
There is a precise and definitive answer to this question. Alan Turing's famous paper "On Computable Numbers" proposes the logical foundation for all computing machines. Take a look at this page on Andrew Hodges' web site. If you want to dive in to it, buy Hodges' excellent biography of Turing. Another great source of information on the mathematical basis for all computation is Douglas Hofstader's tour de force book "Godel, Escher and Bach". If you really want to understand computers you have to understand Turing's work.
The first computer was designed by Charles Babbage in 1882.
Babbages analytical engine is not a true computer, in the modern sense. It isn't fully programmable because it it not Turing-compatible. There is a large set of programs that you can run on your Intel box that the analytical engine couldn't compute.
Although he never built one, a unviersty did from his original 1822 designs in the early 90's and it DOES work.
I believe you are thinking of the Science Museum in London, which built a replica of Babbage's difference engine. Thhe difference engine is a much simpler machine that is a sophisticated mechanical calculator. It is certainly not a computer. The Science Museum are considering building a replica of the analytical engine, but haven't started work onit yet.
First, it isn't digital,
No it was digital, that's rather the point. Did you mean something else?
That aside, this is an outstanding idea. I know (and work) with many people trapped in H1-B hell. Even worse off are the poor individuals who are brave enough to try and make it through the tangle of the immigration beauracracy to try and become citizens... that takes 4-5 years, nowadays; and if you change employers, then you need to go back to square one and start from the beginning.
Bring me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses... and I will shaft them any way I can.
Actually its even worse than that. You first have to gain permanent residence status (aka a Green Card). This took me three years. After that, its a minimum of 5 year before you can even take the citizenship exam. While you are applying for your Green Card, you cannot change employer. If you do, you have to restart your Green Card application from scratch. You cannot start a Green Card application for at least 1 year after entering the US on an H1B visa. Your H1B visa is only valid for 6 years, so you have a fairly short window of opportunity to get a Green Card before your H1B runs out and you are thrown out of the US.
It sounds inevitable that a Big Iron fork will occur, and as Linus says above, this is not necessarily a bad thing. The problem comes when you have competing factions trying to do the same thing and causing confusion (as in the UNIX wars of the past). But when you have different solutions for different problems, yet everyone is moving forward together overall, it should be manageable. Indeed, it should be helpful, for it maximizes the solution for each platform.
The biggest potential problem of forking an OS is binary and API incompatibility. The reason most people use computers is to run specific applications. I want to be able to walk into my local CompUSA/log on to Egghead and get a copy of application X and run it on my computer. I don't really care what the OS is, as long as it runs application X.
If I've got Linux on my system, I'd like all applications that run on Linux to run on my system. The more forks that introduce binary or API incompatibilites, the less chance I have of being able to run the apps I want, and the more reason I have for removing Linux from my computer.
If Linux wants to be a mainstream desktop OS, it needs to make sure it doesn't fork too much. That was a big part of the reason desktop UNIX failed to take off in the late 80's/early 90's.
If they fork all it would cause is a temporary fork. It will be incorporated back into the kernel any how if it is any good. If it is not good people will not use it. If they want to fork let them.
No, you're missing the point. They would need to fork because the memory mangement techniques for "Big Iron" machines are fundamentally different from low end home machines. You need to use different techniques on machines that are so different, so they won't get incorporated back into a single kernel. You will get (for some reasonably long timeframe) two different kernels as a result of this.
Now, whether that's a bad thing or not is a different question.
I don't think adventure games are dead - as far as I know Ultima Online is doing great with thousands of people paying them ten bucks a month to play.
I haven't played Ultima Online so I could be wrong, but I wouldn't describe UO as an adventure game, certainly not in the sense that Old Man Murray usedt. UO is a descendent of games like Moria, rather than true text adventure games like Zork.
The reason apple doesn't port their OS is because that would kill their main source of revenue: hardware sales. Technically there's no reason why we can't run Mac OS on a PC (just like why there's no technical reason why we can't run windows 2000 on a G4). So the reasons why we can't do that anyway are of political/economical nature.
This is not true. In theory any hardware can run any software. In practice its much more complex than that. On problem is endianness - Intel and Motorola processors store bits in different orders in memory. Unfortunately traditional Mac OS has thousands of hardcoded assumptions about the endianness of its processor. Changing these in a consistent fashion is a huge task, and even if you got it all right, it would introduce incompatabilities with existing software. This is just one example of the sort of problem you'll face porting Mac OS to different hardware.
The bottom line is that porting an OS and maintaining binary compatibility with applications is prohibitively expensive (thus the failure of the Star Trek project). This is genuinely a technical barrier.
None of this applies to Mac OS X, which is designed from the ground up to be portable between platforms. In that case the reasons Apple won't port it are commercial, not technical.
What's even more interesting is that the alternate theme is not Apple's previous "Platinum" theme but a new one. As Platinum is already supported under Aqua in "Classic" applications this means that there will now be three different UI's shipping - Platinum under Classic, the default "lickable" under Aqua and it's alternate "Graphite".
I think you're reading more into this than is really there. Choosing the graphite look just changes the Aqua widgets to monochrome. For example, the three standard window title bar widgets (close window, minimize window and zoom window) are now all the same graphite gray color, rather then being red, yellow and green.
This is simply Aqua with a more muted color scheme. It is not a separate UI at all.
Is MSFT going to stop improving PC APIs all of a sudden when Xbox comes out? Are card makers going to stop improving their video cards? No? Well then. How long are the platforms ACTUALLY going to remain compatible?
Six months at most is what he gives it, which sounds not unreasonable. That means your window for doing combined Xbox/PC development is one year, at the outside, starting right about now.
But does it matter if the X-Box and regular PC APIs start to diverge six months out?
Probably not.
The divergence at the API level should be small and manageable. A lot of hardware divergence can be hidden beneath the APIs - most 3D games are written to the Direct3D API, not to the hardware spec of the video card, so you can change your video card and expect your software to run and take advantage of the improved performance of your new hardware.
It will be a long time for the APIs to diverge enough to make porting from Windows to the XBox anywhere near as much work as porting from Windows to (say) the PS2. As long as it is less work to port to the XBox it has an advantage. By the time the APIs were so diverged that there was no advantage, XBox2 will be out, synched up to the then current Windows APIs.
A common ancestry is a lot better from a developer's point of view than no commonality at all.
No console can really compete with the games for a PC. Plots for console games are normally shallow, with limited forms of input (no keyboard/mouse), and with high speed Internet not available on console boxes, there simply are not the quality indepth and massively multiplayer games for consoles that make PC games so popular
True, but imagine how easy it is to fix these current limitations. Adding a keyboard and an ethernet port to something like the X-Box would be trivial for Microsoft. If they decide to do it, there would be no reason that developers couldn't build complex-input multi-player games at least as easily for the X-Box as for a "real" PC.
According this this abstract of a paper in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, EDVAC had a recognizable operating system in 1952/53. I suspect this would qualify as the first OS...
This seems to be another example of the focus of the computing industry: create better and better hardware but use it to run software which hasn't really changed much in the last decade.
People are always making this sort of claim, yet no-one ever provides any evidence to back it up. I thoroughly disagree with your assertion. I say that software has changed a lot in the last decade.
Ten years ago, apps were small, slow, and lacked features. I couldn't do real-time video editing in software, heck I couldn't even playback video in software. Nothing as complex as a web browser existed ten years ago. I didn't have applications like Photoshop or Gimp that allow me to perform very sophisticated image manuipulation.
Try running some 10 year old software on today's hardware. It runs faster, but it feels archaic, feature-less and flat compared with modern software.
And that's just looking at the outside of the software. If you look at the code, its also changed radically, with the introduction of object-oriented programming and large-scale software engineering.
Just seems to be another excuse to create sloppy programs/bloatware.
What you call bloatware, other people refer to as fast, stable, feature-rich software. Of course there are bad applications out there, just as there were ten years ago or twenty years ago. But there are also whole classes of application that just weren't possible a decade ago, not just because the hardware has improved, but also because we understand how to build large-scale software like never before.
true.. but the taxes they pay to a foreign government are US tax deductible.
[at least as for as the corporate income tax goes, I assume it's the same for individuals] -next time tell the whole story
Well, this is partially true - the US has bi-lateral tax agreements for some countries, where the local individual tax payments are tax-deductable with the US, but this is not universally true.
The New York Times (free registration required) is reporting here that a man has been convicted for operating an internet gambling business that took bets from Americans. I would never have predicted this outcome, since he estabished the business in Antigua (where it's legal) and was himself out of the country when the bets were taken. If he weren't an American citizen, I don't believe he could have been prosecuted. I find this ruling disturbing, since it implies that one can be prosecuted according to the laws of one's home country, even if one's activities are legal where they take place. I'm hoping this ruling is overturned, as it's completely wrong, IMO. Using this logic, some despotic regime would be within its rights to prosecute its citizens for criticizing it while in the U.S.
Well, there are presidents of a sort for this. There are extradition treaties between the US and many foreign countries that allow prosecution of some crimes committed by US citizens overseas. Also, did you know the US is one of only two countries in the world that requires its citizens whoe live abroad to pay US taxes as well as the taxes of the country they live in? The other country that does this? Libya...
"Suck has a great commentary today about the back-handed, back-stabbing nature of the software industry. The for-profit software industry, that is, of course... What kind of light does this sort of business ethic (or lack thereof) shine on the open-source community, and Free vs. free software?
Suck has a bunch of allegations so weak even it doesn't try to justify them. Come on, Suck's article said exactly nothing. It claims some industry executives do bad things. It doesn't cite a single example, beyond Ellison's famed dumpster-diving. And interestingly, that was nothing to do with software development, it was related to the Microsoft anti-trust matter. Its not like Ellison was actually stealing source code...
To be fair to Suck, their piece was humor. Its a shame to see Slashdot report this like everything they said was well-grounded factual reporting. Even Suck didn't pretend that.
Of course, I've worked in the industry long enough to know that unsavory things happen. Good and noble things also happen. Most of the time what goes on is just plain hard work, neither particularly good nor particularly bad. Welcome to the world of human beings, where people sometimes do good things and sometimes do bad things.
Thats not scary... You're simply capturing words or options, optionally between quotes while allowing for quote escaping, using \".
Try doing that in one line with any other language and still make it as efficient as a Perl regex...
But he didn't claimed it wasn't efficient. He claimed that it was obfuscated. Note that efficient in terms of the number of characters of code it takes to express a function is not the same thing as the runtime efficiency of the function. Also note that compact syntax tends to make things more obscure, rather than less. Also note that efficiency of writing is not the same (and in fact is often reciprocal to) efficiency of reading. Just some thoughts.
It's annoying to see XYZ for Linux! when it's really Linux/x86. Years ago, people came up with the word Wintel to describe Windows on Intel. Perhaps we should coin Linux86 to describe Linux on x86 so people understand what platform of Linux you're talking about. Remember - you heard it here first!
Surely it should be Lintel. After all, a lintel is that piece of architecture that goes above your Windows.
The 3D Action Planet and PlanetQuake write-ups are the same, but they are much better than the original link from Slashdot. Thanks for posting these. Its particularly useful to see the "two weeks" and multiplayer issues more clearly spelt out.