[No sarcasm below, even if implied by posting style and mimicry of previous poster] I dunno if it's just me, but after a while these attempts to make RPG type games look "modern" just get boring for me. I think I'll just stick to NetHack 3.3.0 (tho I do hope they release the 'next version' in which everything is 'fixed' soon). Games are much more fun with an RNG running things and controlling the appearance of the whole bloody game universe. That and NH is much more flexible when it comes to game mods (assuming you don't mind trudging through a huge wad of K&R C). There are dungeon and level compilers out (part of the source build actually)... The C programming language is a derivative of BCPL, another programming language, with a number of special evil memory allocation calls that allow interaction with... the C compiler. Most standard C code should successfully compile (ha!) and run in the game.
But I certainly build my own code to a very tight specification which I think out in painful detail ahead of time, even if I never actually write it down. Before my current project goes out the door, I'm making sure all comments are crystal-clear and sufficient to count as *documentation*; and I'm also putting in a separate file with suggestions on how to make modifications so as to be consistent with how I've implemented everything to date.
1) Keep doing what I've always been doing; which is to say, using a free ISP to download open-source/shareware type software off the 'net, never have to pay for any of that, keep all of my data on my own HD, be able to get at my own apps and applications whenever I like, etc. OR:
2) Use M$'s 'services', pay to use my apps on-line, have all my data in the hands of M$'s servers, let M$ know exactly what I'm doing app-wise, be shut out from my own IP [Intellectual Property in this case, not Internet Protocol addy;)] if the M$ server goes down, leave all of my data vulnerable to VBScript worms and the like, and on top of it all be forced to work with already-bad M$ apps, using a Web interface.
Turn on a Mac Classic and hold down Command-Option-X-O (the original name for the computer while in development in Japan was Mac XO, or possibly Mac OX, as I understand it). The computer boots, not from a floppy or the HD, but from a copy of System 6.0.3 stored in ROM (they gave this model of computer a larger ROM than the ROM routines required at the time; the same size as the ones in the Mac II, IIRC). The system folder which is booted from also contains invisible, empty folders (visible with a tool such as MacTools 6.2, which I happened to have) with the names of several of the people who worked on the project. On the SE (I think) the extra space in ROM contains a slide show of B&W, dithered, scanned images of people who worked on *that* computer. But getting at that required dropping into MacsBug AFAIK. I heard about these two on a great site listing some early Mac easter eggs, but it's probably dead now, and I don't have the URL anymore anyway:(
YES! I'm one of them! We desperately need good colour support and colour QuickDraw/whatever's-replacing-it tools! When I first started developing Web pages, my experience with generally creating interactive Stuff(TM) on computers (whether programming, scripting, whatever) was mostly with Hypercard. I lamented that HTML should be more programming-language like (actually, I meant it should be more scripting-language like), and specifically more like Hypercard - where you can create your own controls (i.e. fields) and put them wherever you like in the window, and have those scroll, but you wouldn't necessarily have to have the whole window scroll to display all your text - you could make a pretty border, for example, without kludging around with a bunch of frames and getting the images to line up at the frame borders. Plus the scripting would be an integrated solution to "programming", instead of having CGIs or JS or (coffcoff) ASP or whatever else sitting on top of the HTML. Even before I ever experienced Hypercard, in my first days of learning to program (in BASIC), I independantly conceived of something like Hypercard. Except the language driving it was more similar to Basic; instead of "cards" I called them "screens"; and it was based on a 24x80, character based environment where any graphics would require you to implement your own tiles (because this was all I knew back then; didn't have my first Mac yet). IMO QuickTime is not the best model for animated graphics in Hypercard stacks (which seems to be what they're pushing for HyperCard 3.0); I'd prefer something more like Flash - for the sake of efficiency. Full motion video is not a HyperCard Thing(TM) IMO; HyperCard animations will probably be more cartoon-like on average, since that's what's useful for the sort of games that private individuals (such as myself) are capable of producing.
comp.sys.mac.hypercard - HyperCard Lives!!! (dammit, can't link to an nntp:// site apparently...)
I will agree with the basis of this argument. One thing Windows has going for it is continuity. For example, You can be in one application, highlight some text, and hit CTRL+C. Then you can click over to another application, place your cursor, and hit CTRL+V - and vice versa. Plus, all Windows applications look the same, and on their most basic level they function the same. That's one thing the GUIs on Linux and the like severely lack: A unified, CONSISTENT interface. The "continuity" of Windows is *nothing* compared to that of MacOS. Simple, it-really-happened-to-me example of non-continuity on Windows: I'm trying to figure out how the hell to produce a (TM) symbol in paint text with Paint Shop Pro. I get frustrated with trying to figure out the key sequence, so I start up Word (with the PSP dialog box still waiting), go to Insert->Symbol, paste a (TM) symbol into a blank document, select and copy it, paste into the PSP dialog. Do I get a (TM) symbol? No. Of course not. I get capital-O-umlaut. On a Mac, I would have known the keyboard shortcut immediately: it's option-2. (I'm typing this from a Mac; the reason I'm not using actual (TM) symbols is in an effort to be friendly to other character maps - US-ASCII != ISO-####-#, after all.) It would have been the same *no matter what app* I had been using (unless perhaps I used the control panels to change my keyboard layout). Moreover, if I happened to forget the code, I could just fire up Key Caps (which is *always* under the Apple Menu, easily accessed at any time - getting an equivalent on Windows requires me to type in the app's name in the RUN line as far as I can figure out) and check it. THAT is "continuity".
Granted, you can DoS it by pulling down a menu and walking away Not quite true. You would have to stay at the terminal holding down the mouse button. Menus do stick open under new versions of the OS, and do bring things to a halt, but stuck-open menus automatically close themselves after a 15 second delay (MacOS 8.6; I just timed this). I know for a fact that there are Mac users... who are quite leery of OS X. True; I'm one of them. They've just gone too dang far with the eye candy IMO this time. The BSD type stuff is a Good Idea, as is the Dock I've heard about, but all the visual effects reported to me strongly suggest that Jobs is in acid trip mode again. The iris zoom rectangles for opening windows are damn nice as it is; why do they have to change them to some weird rotating thing?
It's been demonstrated many times in the past that your average consumer will go for low price over high performance. If Apple ported Mac OS X to Intel, you can kiss their PPC machine sales goodbye. People would install the system on $500 PCs and say to heck with a $1000 iMac in spite of the nice color. But they won't go for low price if it provides no performance. Hear me out here. Say Apple ports the OS in a way which assumes that every part of the Intel box in question conforms rigidly to trusted industry standards. Consumers would rapidly discover that those $500 bargain-basement PCs made from parts manufactured God-knows-where and slapped together by Big Al(TM) would crash and burn. They'd (hopefully) develop a new appreciation of quality. Additionally, by allowing Intel users access to a superior OS, Motorola would be forced to compete more fiercely in the CPU market, bringing the price of traditional Mac boxen down. Of course, there wouldn't be anything stopping Apple (AFAIK) from assembling Intel-based boxen, either... I think Apple's best chance for domination is to reinstate the Yellow Box (now Cocoa) APIs for Windows. What about all the other API-type thingies they're playing with (like Carbon)? Would those work too?...I'm not sure this one would work out all this well. Mac-looking apps just wouldn't Feel Right(TM) in a Windows OS environment and vice-versa. There are these subtleties about the look and feel of each OS you know - though most Linux advocates I speak to don't have a full appreciation of this, they seem to think Enlightenment will take care of everything. (DISCLAIMER: I am a Mac-type who has been using 'nixen of various sorts for a couple years now, out of necessity, and found them to be Not That Bad(TM) overall. But I still stick with MacOS at home because it has always Just Worked(TM) for me.) Customizing the widgets in a window's title bar is nice, to be sure, but that does not itself make a GUI Experience(TM).
Jeez, this is my 15th post and none have been moderated at all yet, and I see these two one-liners in a row (pointing out what would seem to be painfully obvious facts anyway) get a 5 each. What strings do I have to pull around here???
For a good example, you can take a look at the numerous companies who produce so called "hole-less" security systems, and then hide behind IP rights to protect their source code from scrutiny. These companies maintain that since their "source code" is under lock and key, it is inherantly more secure than "open sourced" security. Rubbish. What is "rubbish" about the belief that, by letting people read the source code of your security systems, they would figure out how to break into them? The world as a whole is not so benevolent as the pro-open-source, none-of-this-has-any-financial-value types would try to have us believe. Certainly, finding a security hole (assuming the company missed it themselves) opens up the possibility of it being patched, but it also opens the possibility of it being exploited. I'm willing to wager that the techno-savvy No-Goodniks(TM) on the planet still outnumber Benevolent Hackers(TM).
Unless the CPU in *your* box(en) is/are made by some company other than "those already bloated corporate behemoths", I really don't see that you have a point. The way I see it is this: Transmeta opens whatever info is relevant. Intel, AMD, Motorola, Cyrix (are they still around?) each go look at the info at their leisure. Everyone's chip design improves, assuming they make good use of the technology. OS manufacturers look at the info and write stuff to take advantage of the code morphing (or else die from failure to produce a "modern" OS). Millions of consumers go out and buy computer systems which use this technology without even realizing there's anything "special" about it, whereas as it stands only uebergeeks (like Slashdot posters such as ourselves) would be at all likely to get Transmeta products as it stands. Where is the lack of benefit to the consumer? Seriously, your response sounds to me much like "If I wouldn't be able to work on the design if they opened it, noone ought to be, i.e. it should remain closed."
While M$ is taking its time squirming in the courts trying to weasel their way out of the breakup (and they probably will, from what I know of the psychology of M$ higher-ups - the way they've acted in the past, you know), we need to seize the opportunity to prepare a plan of action so that the ruling can be effective and fair competition can indeed be restored to the computer/OS/software marketplace. This is what I see as being necessary, or at least highly recommended, though it will require cooperation from some other big companies that I suspect will be reluctant:
HARDWARE: Apple needs to bring back the clones, in a sense - except this time around, instead of allowing the clone makers licenses to MacOS, the competing companies would use the hardware from Motorola (or even IBM's versions of the chips) and come with PPCLinux only, plus bundled apps. I expect this will hurt Apple in the short run... Motorola needs to get a lot more people working for them; they're lagging behind in chip development at the moment and the plan I'm putting out here will increase their demand dramatically. Sun also needs to get off their ass and produce a consumer line of SPARC-driven or similar PCs, running whatever.*[iu]x is appropriate. This may not seem like a logical choice of action to take suddenly - but - by having a flood of SPARC and Motorola-based hardware setups on the market, plus the influence of AMD (it's probably too late for Cyrix to help out; Amiga is still dying from what I understand, though anything they can contribute would be good as well), we can completely shake Intel's position in the market and thereby the paradigm of "Wintel uber alles". IMO we cannot have adequate competition in software without adequate competition in hardware.
SOFTWARE: To compensate Apple for their contribution, the Linux hackers out there need to make really good Enlightenment/whatever other schemes to emulate the MacOS appearance. I've heard and seen some nice looking stuff, but there are subtleties of MacOS that I rarely see any other OS developers pick up on. Once this is done, more interest will be taken in MacOS, and eventually in other less known OSes - I hope. Similarly, work on WINE needs to be scaled down - those who are working on it should make their protest now, to ensure that any required open-sourcing of Windows-related stuff actually happens. Once the non-intel/AMD chips gain in popularity, M$ will be struggling to produce good ports for the other hardware platforms; have the WINE people offer to do a proper job of it (likely, even better than M$ would have done) on our terms. To demonstrate that we're not like the Bad Guys(TM), software packages coming with different distributions of Linux need to be customizable. It is not enough to allow people to pick a distribution, since the charges levied by the various distros vary and consumers may feel shut out from the apps they want by unwillingness to pay "that much" for what is supposed to be a free OS. Of course, such an attitude would be entirely an illusion, since you can get the software anyway - but - consumer confidence is a Big Issue here, and you improve on that by giving people what they want up front. Each distro should provide at least two options for each main type of app they choose to bundle with the Linux kernel (or just toss 'em all in, as seems to be current practice; but I find this is initially a waste of the user's HD space, and tends to piss them off - at least, it sure pissed *me* off trying to remove IE and OE from my Mac when I got it). The general public (here I mean "everyone in the general public who is conceivably capable of coding something useful") needs to be made aware of the open standards on which everything is based. Not just things like Linux TCP/IP stack workings; I mean file formats like.BMP,.JPG,.RTF, etc. (.GIF is evil, we should do something about CompuServe while we're at all of this) - various internet protocols - every standard for anything related to computing which is not proprietary to M$, must be known. It is not enough to make available; this has been accomplished (witness several mirrors of RFC archives etc.) with little effect. People won't go out of their way to read about a standard, non-M$ solution for something as long as M$ can provide them with a ready-made development tool. Standards need to be publicized, and people need to be made aware of why Windows is not necessarily the best app development platform, even if you're writing Windows apps. (This opening of information may well serve to improve overall Usenet etiquette, if we're lucky.)
But none of this will happen, of course. I'm just dreaming.
In the end it will likely come down to marketing dollars because at this point I don't think anything can amaze me, just like 2, 3, 5, 10 GHz does not impress me anymore. I am still in awe of Tekken 3 on PSX and Sould Calibur (?) on Dreamcast. But if there is any company with the resources to go head to head with MS, it's Sony (unlike poor Nintendo and Sega). If nothing else, this should be an interesting battle. YES! These games rule! It's Soul Calibur BTW (no 'd') and it's supposed to be out on PSX2 as I understand it (the original game, Soul Edge(?), was available on PSX). There's only one thing that sucks about the Soul Calibur graphics, and that is the wind effects (this may be different on the console system; I've played in arcades): the game designers decided to have certain things (like loose articles of clothing) flap about in the wind, and they did a horrible job of that - the object in question appears to cycle between approximately 2 different positions. However, everything else is incredibly well done.
...Then again, my threshold is 2, so maybe someone else has made the pun and I didn't notice, and the moderators thought it was really bad. But I think it's funny, so I'm posting it. Could this be the first evidence that the universe... wait for it... prefers C++ to C?
I agree with you that "it's the public's fault for playing with computers and relying on them so much without knowing what the hell they are doing with them". But I blame M$ for facilitating this behaviour. I know that the average "user" is pretty dumb and requires having things made easy for them.
BUT M$ has IMO done a horrible job of it; they and the other major commercial software manufacturers should have made more of an effort to meet users half-way. That is to say, enhance the computing experience *in a way which makes users realize what the technology is all about*. Honestly, I can't believe some of those tech support stories; and I'm convinced most of the sadder cases could have been prevented by better computer education.
We *should* be having remedial computer courses which illustrate the metaphors that programmers had in mind when they designed UIs, explain why things are the way they are, etc. - that is, which teach some basic hack sense to those which are deficient therein. What we *do* have are courses like "Learn to use M$ Word". People walk out of these courses not having learned anything about GUI consistency (pardon the pun), nor any basis on which to decide that M$ software sucks (granted not *everyone* would come to that conclusion even given proper education; #include here), nor anything which would help them if they had to (God forbid!) use another app to do the same thing, or another app from the Office suite. Just for an example.
I've seen people who, as a direct result of how the software and technology is marketed (especially with the "web integration" of "modern" OSes), fell under the false impression that "Yahoo" and "Altavista" were application programs on their desktop (some investigation on my part showed that these were in fact stripped-down versions of Netscape, actually identical to each other except for the home page on which they started). It's sickening, really.
Slashdot Mirror
[No sarcasm below, even if implied by posting style and mimicry of previous poster] ... the C compiler. Most standard C code should successfully compile (ha!) and run in the game.
I dunno if it's just me, but after a while these attempts to make RPG type games look "modern" just get boring for me. I think I'll just stick to NetHack 3.3.0 (tho I do hope they release the 'next version' in which everything is 'fixed' soon). Games are much more fun with an RNG running things and controlling the appearance of the whole bloody game universe. That and NH is much more flexible when it comes to game mods (assuming you don't mind trudging through a huge wad of K&R C). There are dungeon and level compilers out (part of the source build actually)...
The C programming language is a derivative of BCPL, another programming language, with a number of special evil memory allocation calls that allow interaction with
...Except that the first was OC-1.
If Linux is replacing the Sun down at Weather.com, does that mean Windows will be replacing the storm clouds? ;)
But I certainly build my own code to a very tight specification which I think out in painful detail ahead of time, even if I never actually write it down. Before my current project goes out the door, I'm making sure all comments are crystal-clear and sufficient to count as *documentation*; and I'm also putting in a separate file with suggestions on how to make modifications so as to be consistent with how I've implemented everything to date.
I can:
;)] if the M$ server goes down, leave all of my data vulnerable to VBScript worms and the like, and on top of it all be forced to work with already-bad M$ apps, using a Web interface.
1) Keep doing what I've always been doing; which is to say, using a free ISP to download open-source/shareware type software off the 'net, never have to pay for any of that, keep all of my data on my own HD, be able to get at my own apps and applications whenever I like, etc. OR:
2) Use M$'s 'services', pay to use my apps on-line, have all my data in the hands of M$'s servers, let M$ know exactly what I'm doing app-wise, be shut out from my own IP [Intellectual Property in this case, not Internet Protocol addy
I'd say this one is a no-brainer.
'Nuff said. (Why hasn't anyone else thought of this? Or did I just miss it with my threshold of 2?)
Turn on a Mac Classic and hold down Command-Option-X-O (the original name for the computer while in development in Japan was Mac XO, or possibly Mac OX, as I understand it). The computer boots, not from a floppy or the HD, but from a copy of System 6.0.3 stored in ROM (they gave this model of computer a larger ROM than the ROM routines required at the time; the same size as the ones in the Mac II, IIRC). The system folder which is booted from also contains invisible, empty folders (visible with a tool such as MacTools 6.2, which I happened to have) with the names of several of the people who worked on the project. :(
On the SE (I think) the extra space in ROM contains a slide show of B&W, dithered, scanned images of people who worked on *that* computer. But getting at that required dropping into MacsBug AFAIK.
I heard about these two on a great site listing some early Mac easter eggs, but it's probably dead now, and I don't have the URL anymore anyway
YES! I'm one of them! We desperately need good colour support and colour QuickDraw/whatever's-replacing-it tools! When I first started developing Web pages, my experience with generally creating interactive Stuff(TM) on computers (whether programming, scripting, whatever) was mostly with Hypercard.
I lamented that HTML should be more programming-language like (actually, I meant it should be more scripting-language like), and specifically more like Hypercard - where you can create your own controls (i.e. fields) and put them wherever you like in the window, and have those scroll, but you wouldn't necessarily have to have the whole window scroll to display all your text - you could make a pretty border, for example, without kludging around with a bunch of frames and getting the images to line up at the frame borders. Plus the scripting would be an integrated solution to "programming", instead of having CGIs or JS or (coffcoff) ASP or whatever else sitting on top of the HTML.
Even before I ever experienced Hypercard, in my first days of learning to program (in BASIC), I independantly conceived of something like Hypercard. Except the language driving it was more similar to Basic; instead of "cards" I called them "screens"; and it was based on a 24x80, character based environment where any graphics would require you to implement your own tiles (because this was all I knew back then; didn't have my first Mac yet).
IMO QuickTime is not the best model for animated graphics in Hypercard stacks (which seems to be what they're pushing for HyperCard 3.0); I'd prefer something more like Flash - for the sake of efficiency. Full motion video is not a HyperCard Thing(TM) IMO; HyperCard animations will probably be more cartoon-like on average, since that's what's useful for the sort of games that private individuals (such as myself) are capable of producing.
comp.sys.mac.hypercard - HyperCard Lives!!!
(dammit, can't link to an nntp:// site apparently...)
I will agree with the basis of this argument. One thing Windows has going for it is continuity. For example, You can be in one application, highlight some text, and hit CTRL+C. Then you can click over to another application, place your cursor, and hit CTRL+V - and vice versa. Plus, all Windows applications look the same, and on their most basic level they function the same. That's one thing the GUIs on Linux and the like severely lack: A unified, CONSISTENT interface.
The "continuity" of Windows is *nothing* compared to that of MacOS.
Simple, it-really-happened-to-me example of non-continuity on Windows: I'm trying to figure out how the hell to produce a (TM) symbol in paint text with Paint Shop Pro. I get frustrated with trying to figure out the key sequence, so I start up Word (with the PSP dialog box still waiting), go to Insert->Symbol, paste a (TM) symbol into a blank document, select and copy it, paste into the PSP dialog.
Do I get a (TM) symbol? No. Of course not. I get capital-O-umlaut.
On a Mac, I would have known the keyboard shortcut immediately: it's option-2. (I'm typing this from a Mac; the reason I'm not using actual (TM) symbols is in an effort to be friendly to other character maps - US-ASCII != ISO-####-#, after all.) It would have been the same *no matter what app* I had been using (unless perhaps I used the control panels to change my keyboard layout).
Moreover, if I happened to forget the code, I could just fire up Key Caps (which is *always* under the Apple Menu, easily accessed at any time - getting an equivalent on Windows requires me to type in the app's name in the RUN line as far as I can figure out) and check it. THAT is "continuity".
Granted, you can DoS it by pulling down a menu and walking away ... who are quite leery of OS X.
Not quite true. You would have to stay at the terminal holding down the mouse button. Menus do stick open under new versions of the OS, and do bring things to a halt, but stuck-open menus automatically close themselves after a 15 second delay (MacOS 8.6; I just timed this).
I know for a fact that there are Mac users
True; I'm one of them. They've just gone too dang far with the eye candy IMO this time. The BSD type stuff is a Good Idea, as is the Dock I've heard about, but all the visual effects reported to me strongly suggest that Jobs is in acid trip mode again. The iris zoom rectangles for opening windows are damn nice as it is; why do they have to change them to some weird rotating thing?
It's been demonstrated many times in the past that your average consumer will go for low price over high performance. If Apple ported Mac OS X to Intel, you can kiss their PPC machine sales goodbye. People would install the system on $500 PCs and say to heck with a $1000 iMac in spite of the nice color. ...I'm not sure this one would work out all this well. Mac-looking apps just wouldn't Feel Right(TM) in a Windows OS environment and vice-versa. There are these subtleties about the look and feel of each OS you know - though most Linux advocates I speak to don't have a full appreciation of this, they seem to think Enlightenment will take care of everything. (DISCLAIMER: I am a Mac-type who has been using 'nixen of various sorts for a couple years now, out of necessity, and found them to be Not That Bad(TM) overall. But I still stick with MacOS at home because it has always Just Worked(TM) for me.) Customizing the widgets in a window's title bar is nice, to be sure, but that does not itself make a GUI Experience(TM).
But they won't go for low price if it provides no performance. Hear me out here. Say Apple ports the OS in a way which assumes that every part of the Intel box in question conforms rigidly to trusted industry standards. Consumers would rapidly discover that those $500 bargain-basement PCs made from parts manufactured God-knows-where and slapped together by Big Al(TM) would crash and burn. They'd (hopefully) develop a new appreciation of quality. Additionally, by allowing Intel users access to a superior OS, Motorola would be forced to compete more fiercely in the CPU market, bringing the price of traditional Mac boxen down.
Of course, there wouldn't be anything stopping Apple (AFAIK) from assembling Intel-based boxen, either...
I think Apple's best chance for domination is to reinstate the Yellow Box (now Cocoa) APIs for Windows.
What about all the other API-type thingies they're playing with (like Carbon)? Would those work too?
Jeez, this is my 15th post and none have been moderated at all yet, and I see these two one-liners in a row (pointing out what would seem to be painfully obvious facts anyway) get a 5 each. What strings do I have to pull around here???
For a good example, you can take a look at the numerous companies who produce so called "hole-less" security systems, and then hide behind IP rights to protect their source code from scrutiny. These companies maintain that since their "source code" is under lock and key, it is inherantly more secure than "open sourced" security. Rubbish.
What is "rubbish" about the belief that, by letting people read the source code of your security systems, they would figure out how to break into them?
The world as a whole is not so benevolent as the pro-open-source, none-of-this-has-any-financial-value types would try to have us believe. Certainly, finding a security hole (assuming the company missed it themselves) opens up the possibility of it being patched, but it also opens the possibility of it being exploited. I'm willing to wager that the techno-savvy No-Goodniks(TM) on the planet still outnumber Benevolent Hackers(TM).
Unless the CPU in *your* box(en) is/are made by some company other than "those already bloated corporate behemoths", I really don't see that you have a point.
The way I see it is this: Transmeta opens whatever info is relevant. Intel, AMD, Motorola, Cyrix (are they still around?) each go look at the info at their leisure. Everyone's chip design improves, assuming they make good use of the technology. OS manufacturers look at the info and write stuff to take advantage of the code morphing (or else die from failure to produce a "modern" OS). Millions of consumers go out and buy computer systems which use this technology without even realizing there's anything "special" about it, whereas as it stands only uebergeeks (like Slashdot posters such as ourselves) would be at all likely to get Transmeta products as it stands.
Where is the lack of benefit to the consumer? Seriously, your response sounds to me much like "If I wouldn't be able to work on the design if they opened it, noone ought to be, i.e. it should remain closed."
While M$ is taking its time squirming in the courts trying to weasel their way out of the breakup (and they probably will, from what I know of the psychology of M$ higher-ups - the way they've acted in the past, you know), we need to seize the opportunity to prepare a plan of action so that the ruling can be effective and fair competition can indeed be restored to the computer/OS/software marketplace. This is what I see as being necessary, or at least highly recommended, though it will require cooperation from some other big companies that I suspect will be reluctant:
.*[iu]x is appropriate. This may not seem like a logical choice of action to take suddenly - but - by having a flood of SPARC and Motorola-based hardware setups on the market, plus the influence of AMD (it's probably too late for Cyrix to help out; Amiga is still dying from what I understand, though anything they can contribute would be good as well), we can completely shake Intel's position in the market and thereby the paradigm of "Wintel uber alles". IMO we cannot have adequate competition in software without adequate competition in hardware.
.BMP, .JPG, .RTF, etc. (.GIF is evil, we should do something about CompuServe while we're at all of this) - various internet protocols - every standard for anything related to computing which is not proprietary to M$, must be known. It is not enough to make available; this has been accomplished (witness several mirrors of RFC archives etc.) with little effect. People won't go out of their way to read about a standard, non-M$ solution for something as long as M$ can provide them with a ready-made development tool. Standards need to be publicized, and people need to be made aware of why Windows is not necessarily the best app development platform, even if you're writing Windows apps. (This opening of information may well serve to improve overall Usenet etiquette, if we're lucky.)
HARDWARE:
Apple needs to bring back the clones, in a sense - except this time around, instead of allowing the clone makers licenses to MacOS, the competing companies would use the hardware from Motorola (or even IBM's versions of the chips) and come with PPCLinux only, plus bundled apps. I expect this will hurt Apple in the short run...
Motorola needs to get a lot more people working for them; they're lagging behind in chip development at the moment and the plan I'm putting out here will increase their demand dramatically.
Sun also needs to get off their ass and produce a consumer line of SPARC-driven or similar PCs, running whatever
SOFTWARE:
To compensate Apple for their contribution, the Linux hackers out there need to make really good Enlightenment/whatever other schemes to emulate the MacOS appearance. I've heard and seen some nice looking stuff, but there are subtleties of MacOS that I rarely see any other OS developers pick up on. Once this is done, more interest will be taken in MacOS, and eventually in other less known OSes - I hope.
Similarly, work on WINE needs to be scaled down - those who are working on it should make their protest now, to ensure that any required open-sourcing of Windows-related stuff actually happens. Once the non-intel/AMD chips gain in popularity, M$ will be struggling to produce good ports for the other hardware platforms; have the WINE people offer to do a proper job of it (likely, even better than M$ would have done) on our terms.
To demonstrate that we're not like the Bad Guys(TM), software packages coming with different distributions of Linux need to be customizable. It is not enough to allow people to pick a distribution, since the charges levied by the various distros vary and consumers may feel shut out from the apps they want by unwillingness to pay "that much" for what is supposed to be a free OS. Of course, such an attitude would be entirely an illusion, since you can get the software anyway - but - consumer confidence is a Big Issue here, and you improve on that by giving people what they want up front. Each distro should provide at least two options for each main type of app they choose to bundle with the Linux kernel (or just toss 'em all in, as seems to be current practice; but I find this is initially a waste of the user's HD space, and tends to piss them off - at least, it sure pissed *me* off trying to remove IE and OE from my Mac when I got it).
The general public (here I mean "everyone in the general public who is conceivably capable of coding something useful") needs to be made aware of the open standards on which everything is based. Not just things like Linux TCP/IP stack workings; I mean file formats like
But none of this will happen, of course. I'm just dreaming.
In the end it will likely come down to marketing dollars because at this point I don't think anything can amaze me, just like 2, 3, 5, 10 GHz does not impress me anymore. I am still in awe of Tekken 3 on PSX and Sould Calibur (?) on Dreamcast. But if there is any company with the resources to go head to head with MS, it's Sony (unlike poor Nintendo and Sega). If nothing else, this should be an interesting battle.
YES! These games rule! It's Soul Calibur BTW (no 'd') and it's supposed to be out on PSX2 as I understand it (the original game, Soul Edge(?), was available on PSX). There's only one thing that sucks about the Soul Calibur graphics, and that is the wind effects (this may be different on the console system; I've played in arcades): the game designers decided to have certain things (like loose articles of clothing) flap about in the wind, and they did a horrible job of that - the object in question appears to cycle between approximately 2 different positions. However, everything else is incredibly well done.
...Then again, my threshold is 2, so maybe someone else has made the pun and I didn't notice, and the moderators thought it was really bad.
But I think it's funny, so I'm posting it.
Could this be the first evidence that the universe... wait for it... prefers C++ to C?
I agree with you that "it's the public's fault for playing with computers and relying on them so much without knowing what the hell they are doing with them". But I blame M$ for facilitating this behaviour. I know that the average "user" is pretty dumb and requires having things made easy for them.
BUT M$ has IMO done a horrible job of it; they and the other major commercial software manufacturers should have made more of an effort to meet users half-way. That is to say, enhance the computing experience *in a way which makes users realize what the technology is all about*. Honestly, I can't believe some of those tech support stories; and I'm convinced most of the sadder cases could have been prevented by better computer education.
We *should* be having remedial computer courses which illustrate the metaphors that programmers had in mind when they designed UIs, explain why things are the way they are, etc. - that is, which teach some basic hack sense to those which are deficient therein. What we *do* have are courses like "Learn to use M$ Word". People walk out of these courses not having learned anything about GUI consistency (pardon the pun), nor any basis on which to decide that M$ software sucks (granted not *everyone* would come to that conclusion even given proper education; #include here), nor anything which would help them if they had to (God forbid!) use another app to do the same thing, or another app from the Office suite. Just for an example.
I've seen people who, as a direct result of how the software and technology is marketed (especially with the "web integration" of "modern" OSes), fell under the false impression that "Yahoo" and "Altavista" were application programs on their desktop (some investigation on my part showed that these were in fact stripped-down versions of Netscape, actually identical to each other except for the home page on which they started). It's sickening, really.
Zahlman, aka namlhaZ
zahlman at freewwweb dot com