Religion is not bad when religions are not corrupted. Take Christian and Muslim faiths for example (not discounting other religions, but these are the ones that most people know about). If someone really does make an effort to follow their religion they will really be a good person...not just spiritually but in society as well. People don't like murderers, theives and cheaters anyway, so it hurts no one for them to hold the same belief to a higher power.
It's not their God who tells them to go massacre people in his name, it is just a man who twists words enough that people will fight his battles for him. No where in the Bible does it say that people should attack other faiths, or that TV is evil etc., but corrupt leaders will try to subvert people with these claims.
It is always up to people to decide weather they believe their God would tell them to do that or not. That is the line between being a mindless follower in a religion like Scientology, or actually acheiving what you believe is the right path.
If people would actually hack at Windows as much as they hack at Linux, Windows would never "blow up". I run Windows 95OSR2. It never crashes and runs nice and quick.Why? Because I actually manage my DLL's, VXD's and registry to the point that I do not have such problems.
I have never seen a Linux user just install a program that they have downloaded off some wayward site without checking it, yet I see the same people just grab the latest version of whatever and install it into Windows. These people have full system trays with the most useless things and several files loading at boot that they'll never use. Then they complain because Windows is slow and buggy. The same user will also spend hours working on a config file in/etc but will never use Regedit in their life.
I like Linux and Windows for their individual strengths, and I don't have a huge problem with either. This has become sort of a rant, but I think both are fine in their own way once you actually learn to use them both to the proper extent.
When you jump into Protected Mode, all BIOS calls, interrupts etc. are disabled until you set up traps/paths for them. Bare metal or not, it is part of the i386 design that allows this, and the BIOS cannot function without the support of the processor. If the processor says "no", then it doesn't matter what anything else on the board says, because its not going to happen. Even a "spy" PCI card would not work under Windows if Windows did not know it should open a data path for it. That is the power of PM.
Is programming for Windows actually coding in C++?
Funny you should bring it up, I remember when VisualC came out for Mac System 7.5. There was no advantage to it, since any of the "visual" features (form builder, class wizard) etc. required you use Microsoft's libraries (so Universal Interfaces was out of the picture). I think Visual BASIC was ported as well with the same result. Needless to say, the Mac development market is still held by Codewarrior and Apple'sMPW.
Actually, the ability to pass COM objects over port 80 has been available for a while. Microsoft implemented it on purpose to avoid issues with firewalling (not stateful FW's mind you, just the standard IPCHAINS style that allow any traffic over 80).
They probably will. After using MS products under the MacOS I have seen the damage MS can do with something as simple as Office or Frontpage. They install hundreds of files (including extensions) everywhere, can't be "uninstalled" by being dragged to the trash, and usually are not as stable as most other apps. They also usually are plagued with bugs after every system upgrade, though any other app from around 1985 seems to run fine. I think MS definately does it on purpose to make their Windows line look better.
Hmm I'd sure like to see some anti-Microsoft FUD from Microsoft:)
Actually, my boss pointed out an ad in one of his tech magazines recently. It was an ad my Microsoft with a big picture of a blue screen of death. Basically, the point of the ad was telling people that Windows 98 was too unstable and Windows 2000 would solve your crashing problems. We all had quite a good laugh at Microsoft cutting down their own product line to try and push one that was just as bad. I wish I could remember the name of the mag, it was a pretty funny add.
You forget that the MacOS supported 68k until System 7.6. Also, all of the MacOS 1.0 SDK s still available to developers. For exapmple the 'NewWindow' C function, which renders "classic" windows in black and white is actually still available even under under OSX. It shouldn't be supported but because old programs use it, it still is. Apple has a great record of supporting old sofware as far as their OS is concerned. Could you run Warcraft I under Windows ME? Probably not, but under OSX it is possible.
But honestly, did you really think that Napster had a workable business model?
Have you ever heard of Hotline? Basically, they created a client/server suite for the Mac that ended up being really great for transferring files. So good in fact, that all of the software pirates on the Mac started using it (most say that is what they intended). Instead of curbing the piracy attempts right away, they waited until the distribution of their product became very high among the Mac underground. Then, when it started to look profitable, they told the pirates to stop using their software beacuse they wouldn't tolerate it, and released new versions of their software.
Now, we have a product that is well established because of piracy and is now legal and making money. Not a bad business model...
No kidding! When I called HP to find out how much some little plastic rails for mounting drives would cost, the quote came around $100. For little strips of plastic with holes in them!.
Needless to say, I found some plastic drive rails on a on Compaq PC that fit just fine...
The only time the CPU could actually run your game code was in the vertical retrace interval which meant only about 20% of the CPU
Origional Nintendo's worked in the same way as the Atari 2600. All code had to be executed during VSYNC (when the drawing gun was moving back to the top of the screen). The only reason things ran faster was the interface that Nintendo had developed for sprites, backgrounding etc. allowed you to store a lot of imagemaps in the Nintendo's RAM and call them back quickly (though you could include VRAM on your cardridge if required).
Amazingly, the 16-bit Sega Genesis had far faster technology and was outsold by the 8-bit Nintendo, due to the popularity of the system and the large amount of titles available for it. Seems sort of like the x86 vs. Sparc situation we have here now. In my opinion, the Sparc platform is great, but people with always think that x86 is superior because there's games for it and high MHz ratings...
Forget Microsoft Linux, XENIX is the solution that Microsoft is going to try to bring back! I still find it amazing that most Microsoft products (QuickC for example) up to the mid-nineties still supported their dead operating system.
Creative soundcards aren't good, they're good enough. Without competition there really isn't any way to judge 'better' or 'worse'.
There are plenty of other sound card manufacturers out there. Look at AOpen, Crystal and Analog Devices. They all make sound cards, but why are they not leading the market? Because Creative cards are just plain better.
I have never had problems installing a Creative card. Plus, they are still improving their cards (even when they don't have to). The new series of Live cards prove this. They are amazingly above their old Live series and the competition. I have tried the other cards, and my judgement is that Creative leads the market because their products are insanely superior to the competition. Besides...how much more can one add on to a sound card???
The copy of AIX I have here from 1992 had a package management facility.
That's true. I remember AT&T's UNIX SysVr4 also had a limited package manager called sysadm. That was the whole point of/install and/opt directories on those systems. I don't know how old that release is but its probably at least a decade old.
Actually, I think OS X will eventually run just fine on most Macs (in some time of course). When Apple first brought out the Carbon SDK with all of its extra windows and effects (such as the translucent window dragging), it was quite slow on many non-G3 computers.
However, after trying their new 1.2 SDK, it can render everything speedily, even on my 120Mhz PPC 601 machine. Also, Apple has already supported the idea of moving Darwin to older Macs as well. I think in time we may see a lightweight OS X for older PowerMacs in the near future, perhaps not running Aqua itself, but something similar.
I think PowerPC Linux will be great for users who want/need to run Linux, but Apple's software will still find some way to dominate Apple's machines.
Thats true. I was upgrading Netscape from 3.0 to 4.76 on a realative's computer a few months ago. My download timed out several times (forcing me to get SmartDownload so I could resume). Then, when it was done, it turned out his small hard disk didn't have enough space for the installer, InstallShield's unpacking process, and the final product. What a pain! If it wasn't for the continual javascript errors and the poor rendering of modern pages, I would have let it be and saved about five hours of time!
You should not rely on the compiler/interpreter to do your bounds checking anyway, because it is just not reliable. You never know where the bounds checking ends. Take BASIC for example which performs bounds checking. An INPUT statement is checked, but an INPUT# statement turns out not to be checked. That means that if you rely on BASIC's natural bounds checking, your programs will still be vulnerable when you copy data from a device or file.
I agree, it seems that scientists get too carried away with what can be done before they consider if it should be done. The side effects are never considered because they really don't care.
Another great acheivement that comes to mind is killer bees...that really worked out well didn't it?
Microsoft has a myriad of API's in Windows that they keep to themselves. This gives them a serious upperhand over other software developers and it's unfair because they are a monopoly.
I would have to agree with you there. One of the primary reasons that Internet Explorer is so "fast" is because it uses hidden functions that can work at almost the kernel level. Netscape and other browser developers have never been able to compete for just that reason. That is why IE kills Netscape 4.x on Windows but not on the Mac, because Netscape is able to access the full potential of the MacOS's capabilities. ust watch Wintop when you use IE and when you use something like Opera. What does the second listed task (kernel32) do under IE that it doesn't under others?
No kidding, when Corel Linux 1.0 came out it wasn't even based on a STABLE version of Debian. It was also very full of security holes. The only things that I did like about it was the low memory consumption of their KDE desktop (at the time default installs of OpenLinux and Mandrake would swap like mad under with less than 32MB of RAM). I also liked the really simple interface (ie. I could give my parents Corel Linux, and they could actually configure it). Of course, this was back when it first came out...
The problem is that files are too scattered in most OS's and uninstallers can't keep track of them all. Take Windows for example, every program installs some DLL into your Windows system directory, adds a bunch of registry keys etc. and in the end it is impossible to keep track of every little component. It might not be safe to remove that DLL or registry key because something else might use it. Installshield was supposed to help with this, but it cannot keep track of what everything needs and doesn't need, and what was added since install, so it failed.
The same thing happens in Linux, when you add configuration files, modules etc. that aren't in the uninstall script. Your package manager gets all screwed up because it doesn't know why things aren't going smoothly; it removed all that it was told to.
Personally, I like the MacOS approach, where everything that the app needs is in one folder, and you can just drag it to the trash when you are done. The only exception is usually Microsoft products which install files everywhere and thus require an uninstaller to be removed, but it still works. I think its mostly due to the filesystem accounting which HFS does.
I have a three button Mac mouse, and the other two buttons are not useful at all. One gives you contextual menus without holding down CONTROL and the other allows you to create group selection boxes. There's just no point to three buttons when the whole system only requires on for everything.
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Religion is not bad when religions are not corrupted. Take Christian and Muslim faiths for example (not discounting other religions, but these are the ones that most people know about). If someone really does make an effort to follow their religion they will really be a good person...not just spiritually but in society as well. People don't like murderers, theives and cheaters anyway, so it hurts no one for them to hold the same belief to a higher power.
It's not their God who tells them to go massacre people in his name, it is just a man who twists words enough that people will fight his battles for him. No where in the Bible does it say that people should attack other faiths, or that TV is evil etc., but corrupt leaders will try to subvert people with these claims.
It is always up to people to decide weather they believe their God would tell them to do that or not. That is the line between being a mindless follower in a religion like Scientology, or actually acheiving what you believe is the right path.
Just my two cents...
If people would actually hack at Windows as much as they hack at Linux, Windows would never "blow up". I run Windows 95OSR2. It never crashes and runs nice and quick.Why? Because I actually manage my DLL's, VXD's and registry to the point that I do not have such problems.
I have never seen a Linux user just install a program that they have downloaded off some wayward site without checking it, yet I see the same people just grab the latest version of whatever and install it into Windows. These people have full system trays with the most useless things and several files loading at boot that they'll never use. Then they complain because Windows is slow and buggy. The same user will also spend hours working on a config file in /etc but will never use Regedit in their life.
I like Linux and Windows for their individual strengths, and I don't have a huge problem with either. This has become sort of a rant, but I think both are fine in their own way once you actually learn to use them both to the proper extent.
When you jump into Protected Mode, all BIOS calls, interrupts etc. are disabled until you set up traps/paths for them. Bare metal or not, it is part of the i386 design that allows this, and the BIOS cannot function without the support of the processor. If the processor says "no", then it doesn't matter what anything else on the board says, because its not going to happen. Even a "spy" PCI card would not work under Windows if Windows did not know it should open a data path for it. That is the power of PM.
Is programming for Windows actually coding in C++?
Funny you should bring it up, I remember when VisualC came out for Mac System 7.5. There was no advantage to it, since any of the "visual" features (form builder, class wizard) etc. required you use Microsoft's libraries (so Universal Interfaces was out of the picture). I think Visual BASIC was ported as well with the same result. Needless to say, the Mac development market is still held by Codewarrior and Apple'sMPW.
Actually, the ability to pass COM objects over port 80 has been available for a while. Microsoft implemented it on purpose to avoid issues with firewalling (not stateful FW's mind you, just the standard IPCHAINS style that allow any traffic over 80).
They probably will. After using MS products under the MacOS I have seen the damage MS can do with something as simple as Office or Frontpage. They install hundreds of files (including extensions) everywhere, can't be "uninstalled" by being dragged to the trash, and usually are not as stable as most other apps. They also usually are plagued with bugs after every system upgrade, though any other app from around 1985 seems to run fine. I think MS definately does it on purpose to make their Windows line look better.
Hmm I'd sure like to see some anti-Microsoft FUD from Microsoft :)
Actually, my boss pointed out an ad in one of his tech magazines recently. It was an ad my Microsoft with a big picture of a blue screen of death. Basically, the point of the ad was telling people that Windows 98 was too unstable and Windows 2000 would solve your crashing problems. We all had quite a good laugh at Microsoft cutting down their own product line to try and push one that was just as bad. I wish I could remember the name of the mag, it was a pretty funny add.
You forget that the MacOS supported 68k until System 7.6. Also, all of the MacOS 1.0 SDK s still available to developers. For exapmple the 'NewWindow' C function, which renders "classic" windows in black and white is actually still available even under under OSX. It shouldn't be supported but because old programs use it, it still is. Apple has a great record of supporting old sofware as far as their OS is concerned. Could you run Warcraft I under Windows ME? Probably not, but under OSX it is possible.
But honestly, did you really think that Napster had a workable business model?
Have you ever heard of Hotline? Basically, they created a client/server suite for the Mac that ended up being really great for transferring files. So good in fact, that all of the software pirates on the Mac started using it (most say that is what they intended). Instead of curbing the piracy attempts right away, they waited until the distribution of their product became very high among the Mac underground. Then, when it started to look profitable, they told the pirates to stop using their software beacuse they wouldn't tolerate it, and released new versions of their software.
Now, we have a product that is well established because of piracy and is now legal and making money. Not a bad business model...
No kidding! When I called HP to find out how much some little plastic rails for mounting drives would cost, the quote came around $100. For little strips of plastic with holes in them!.
Needless to say, I found some plastic drive rails on a on Compaq PC that fit just fine...The only time the CPU could actually run your game code was in the vertical retrace interval which meant only about 20% of the CPU
Origional Nintendo's worked in the same way as the Atari 2600. All code had to be executed during VSYNC (when the drawing gun was moving back to the top of the screen). The only reason things ran faster was the interface that Nintendo had developed for sprites, backgrounding etc. allowed you to store a lot of imagemaps in the Nintendo's RAM and call them back quickly (though you could include VRAM on your cardridge if required).
Amazingly, the 16-bit Sega Genesis had far faster technology and was outsold by the 8-bit Nintendo, due to the popularity of the system and the large amount of titles available for it. Seems sort of like the x86 vs. Sparc situation we have here now. In my opinion, the Sparc platform is great, but people with always think that x86 is superior because there's games for it and high MHz ratings...
You think that was bad, try playing against the Pacman ghosts in the bonus levels of the Mac version!
It also seems to be forgotten that there already was a sequel to Wolfenstein 3D, titled "Spear of Destiny".
Forget Microsoft Linux, XENIX is the solution that Microsoft is going to try to bring back! I still find it amazing that most Microsoft products (QuickC for example) up to the mid-nineties still supported their dead operating system.
Creative soundcards aren't good, they're good enough. Without competition there really isn't any way to judge 'better' or 'worse'.
There are plenty of other sound card manufacturers out there. Look at AOpen, Crystal and Analog Devices. They all make sound cards, but why are they not leading the market? Because Creative cards are just plain better.
I have never had problems installing a Creative card. Plus, they are still improving their cards (even when they don't have to). The new series of Live cards prove this. They are amazingly above their old Live series and the competition. I have tried the other cards, and my judgement is that Creative leads the market because their products are insanely superior to the competition. Besides...how much more can one add on to a sound card???
The copy of AIX I have here from 1992 had a package management facility.
That's true. I remember AT&T's UNIX SysVr4 also had a limited package manager called sysadm. That was the whole point of /install and /opt directories on those systems. I don't know how old that release is but its probably at least a decade old.
Actually, I think OS X will eventually run just fine on most Macs (in some time of course). When Apple first brought out the Carbon SDK with all of its extra windows and effects (such as the translucent window dragging), it was quite slow on many non-G3 computers.
However, after trying their new 1.2 SDK, it can render everything speedily, even on my 120Mhz PPC 601 machine. Also, Apple has already supported the idea of moving Darwin to older Macs as well. I think in time we may see a lightweight OS X for older PowerMacs in the near future, perhaps not running Aqua itself, but something similar.
I think PowerPC Linux will be great for users who want/need to run Linux, but Apple's software will still find some way to dominate Apple's machines.
Thats true. I was upgrading Netscape from 3.0 to 4.76 on a realative's computer a few months ago. My download timed out several times (forcing me to get SmartDownload so I could resume). Then, when it was done, it turned out his small hard disk didn't have enough space for the installer, InstallShield's unpacking process, and the final product. What a pain! If it wasn't for the continual javascript errors and the poor rendering of modern pages, I would have let it be and saved about five hours of time!
You should not rely on the compiler/interpreter to do your bounds checking anyway, because it is just not reliable. You never know where the bounds checking ends. Take BASIC for example which performs bounds checking. An INPUT statement is checked, but an INPUT# statement turns out not to be checked. That means that if you rely on BASIC's natural bounds checking, your programs will still be vulnerable when you copy data from a device or file.
I agree, it seems that scientists get too carried away with what can be done before they consider if it should be done. The side effects are never considered because they really don't care.
Another great acheivement that comes to mind is killer bees...that really worked out well didn't it?
Two lines:
PRINT "Hello World"
END
Microsoft has a myriad of API's in Windows that they keep to themselves. This gives them a serious upperhand over other software developers and it's unfair because they are a monopoly.
I would have to agree with you there. One of the primary reasons that Internet Explorer is so "fast" is because it uses hidden functions that can work at almost the kernel level. Netscape and other browser developers have never been able to compete for just that reason. That is why IE kills Netscape 4.x on Windows but not on the Mac, because Netscape is able to access the full potential of the MacOS's capabilities. ust watch Wintop when you use IE and when you use something like Opera. What does the second listed task (kernel32) do under IE that it doesn't under others?
No kidding, when Corel Linux 1.0 came out it wasn't even based on a STABLE version of Debian. It was also very full of security holes. The only things that I did like about it was the low memory consumption of their KDE desktop (at the time default installs of OpenLinux and Mandrake would swap like mad under with less than 32MB of RAM). I also liked the really simple interface (ie. I could give my parents Corel Linux, and they could actually configure it). Of course, this was back when it first came out...
The problem is that files are too scattered in most OS's and uninstallers can't keep track of them all. Take Windows for example, every program installs some DLL into your Windows system directory, adds a bunch of registry keys etc. and in the end it is impossible to keep track of every little component. It might not be safe to remove that DLL or registry key because something else might use it. Installshield was supposed to help with this, but it cannot keep track of what everything needs and doesn't need, and what was added since install, so it failed.
The same thing happens in Linux, when you add configuration files, modules etc. that aren't in the uninstall script. Your package manager gets all screwed up because it doesn't know why things aren't going smoothly; it removed all that it was told to.
Personally, I like the MacOS approach, where everything that the app needs is in one folder, and you can just drag it to the trash when you are done. The only exception is usually Microsoft products which install files everywhere and thus require an uninstaller to be removed, but it still works. I think its mostly due to the filesystem accounting which HFS does.
I have a three button Mac mouse, and the other two buttons are not useful at all. One gives you contextual menus without holding down CONTROL and the other allows you to create group selection boxes. There's just no point to three buttons when the whole system only requires on for everything.