Commentary on all this vs LithTech (USD250,000 I understand), UnrealEngine (USD Loads), and Quake 3 engine (I dread to think how much) would be appreciated.
MarioKarts was the best game ever. Not the shite N64 version, the original - with bananas, mushrooms, red and green turtles, go faster stripes, hop buttons, jump bars, cunningly hidden shortcuts, flat everything - dammit man, the ghost track!!!. By far the best. God we lost hours, nay months to this.
That's it, I'm jacking in work to write an open source MarioKarts.
I've been in th is discussion about Linux vs FreeBSD firewalls on comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc - basically I've been using FreeBSD for assorted network torture, and had been looking at how Linux does firewalls, and they're completely different.
The eventual conclusion was that the FreeBSD 'single chain' model was more powerful than the linux model (especially with the tee ports in 4.0), and that Linux has this killer hole in the masquerading stuff. But someone did point out that a lot of this was changing under 2.4.
Any news? Any sign of tee ports (a divert port that then drops its' output back into the firewall chain)?
Could someone please correct the flaws in my thinking? [snip] MS making it virtually impossible to write decent software for their OS without shelling out huge amounts of money to them?
Certainly. Mr Borland would like a word with you, even if you insist on using The J word. Even one of Mr Stallman's followers could help you out if you promise not to grass them up.
Nothing you can do about the price of the target platform though.
Would opening the windows source work? No, of course not. Remember what happened when Netscape opened their source? Frenetic downloading for two days then the almost audible sighs of disappointment when it became aparrent that it was quite a complex piece of kit after all, and you weren't going to be able to hack it into shape in an afternoon. This would be way worse.
What would we do with - probably 600 meg - of patchily developed *windows* source code? Apart from grep for four letter words? Or go looking for remenants of the microsoft network code (grep "blackbird")? Who here has the clobber to even build such a thing at home, let alone develop on it.
Basically, it wouldn't work. It'd be a shitfight.
Open the API's? Yes, definately. Force all data transmission and storage protocols to be published for all to see, by law, for all products (not just MS ones)? Now you're talking. You would level the playing field once and for all, and furthermore prevent anyone else from pulling the same stunt in the future - Sun want a monopoly too, what do you thing the J-word is all about? But that's a different rant.
Linux, kick-arse development? What *are* you talking about? Windows has fantastic development tools: I've recently been playing with FreeBSD devlopment, and getting paid for Windows stuff. Going back to Visual C++ feels like the most productive thing on earth - Dereference a pointer, and up comes a list of the methods you can call and public members. Call an API function, and you get a tool tip to hand hold you through all those parameters. Even call across a COM boundary and get tab completion - seen that done with CORBA recently? I didn't think so. Can't remeber what the return codes mean? Press F1 and you'll get a nice concise page on what the function does. And, yes, the Win32 API is a piece of clouded thought like you can't imagine, and MFC is ten times worse - but they're getting better: ATL is really quite powerful, and the OLEDB classes and MSDE between them make an excellent back end.
It just costs *so* *fucking* *MUCH*!.
And you've got donkey's all chance of porting it to a stable platform.
Says he, donning his flameproof suit. And yes, I'll get to KDevelop soon, but right now I'm busy with ddd - which I thought was quite good till I got Visual C back.
OpenBSD has traditionally differentiated itself by being way ahead on the security front. Hell, look at their cryptography pages - "because we can". And a damn good reason for doing something that is too. But, the world is changing now: FreeBSD has just sprouted a serious number of security enhancements, and the "because we can" argument is starting to look watered down.
So, maybe we can add to some of that "BSDi are integrating their code" good feeling by starting to patch things up with Theo and the OpenBSD crowd. Note that it's important to not underestimate the quality of work that has gone into OpenBSD - you're not going to buffer overrun that bastard, believe you me.
And please, no FreeBSD RULEZ! OpenBSD SUX! crap (or vice versa). It just seems like a great opportunity to make three great server OS's (BSDi, FreeBSD, OpenBSD) into one absurdly great server OS.
I saw a similar post on usenet, probably alt.peeves ages and ages ago about dejanews and worry about it storing the history of our lives. Me, I'm more interested in hiding some newbie limpings with MFC (I was young), but this poster had a much more valid point:
What if, at some future time, world feeling should turn against - say - industrial music, in such the same was as it has been known to against other beliefs, being Jewish for example. Once I have been tracked down and hauled up infront of the powers that be, will the prosecution be using my Usenet posts as evidence against me?
Maybe a slightly extreme example, but it does illustrate a point.
Must go, documentation beckons. Dave:)
Re:nothing new - and not particularly impressed.
on
QNX OS on a floppy
·
· Score: 1
I've heard this from a few people, how unimpressed they are with QNX. How so?
Something that's been rumbling in my head for a little while. Where do we draw the line between real C++ and pseudo-C++?
For instance, if I write something using MFC (CMapStringToPtr or the less disgusing CMap template) then, well, it isn't real C++ is it? I won't be able to compile it anywhere else. I'll be stuck with that god awful library.
So you start using STL, beacause it's ANSI'd and open and designed by adults who knew what they are doing. You go looking for (and find) a convenient map template and in the process notice templates for near as dammit everything else! Strings, memory allocation, streams, the whole enchelada.
So, to be *real* C++, should I only be using the stl library, doing #include "string" and only stretching as far as #include "cstdio" when I feel a nasty hack urge coming on? Can I say goodbye to the happy days of getting a char* to the first byte and bouncing along the string until it dereferences to zero? Do I, in short, have to clean my act up?
And to what extent do other major C++ projects do this, especially given the relative newness (in terms of C++ standardisation) of the STL?
Dave:)
(offtopic note) MFC is horrible. Immense kudos to the ATL team for a fine piece of work.
I know they should be angle brackets, couldn't remember the HTML to make the browser not think they were tags. At least I previewed.
Oh, arms sales _within_ the US. And the bet is only open via phone ("please ask for a supervisor").
Still could be worth a tenner, seems pretty badly worded to me, they should've gone for "up 50% over last years' sales". There's also a dodgy looking "YES -200/1" as opposed to the others with "YES +1000/1" or similar. Gives the impression there's something I don't know going on. Apart from the obvious.
We're going to get sheets and sheets of "told you so" messages, some of which will carry the "powerlines as an antenna" analogy.
Fair enough, it all went shed shaped, but you have to give them credit for looking beyond the end of their noses. Consider for a second the following bits of conventional wisdom:
* In a few years we may have computers that can perform tens of thousands of calculations, per second !!! (excited and drooling scientists circa 1960).
* Nuclear power will be too cheap to meter (other excited and drooling scientists circa 1960).
* A free operating system will never be as good as a proprietary one (drooling Microsoft executives circa 1995).
* Many millions of computers, worldwide, will all be connected to the same network.
So we have some vast understatements, some over simplifications and one blatantly incorrect. But in amongst this company "we think we can get half a dozen Mbit/s down power lines" isn't that an outrageous a claim.
And the prize, had they made it work? Dead telcos. 80% of their business anyway. A nearly immeasurably large quantity of income for the next god-knows-how-long.
Nice try. Back to shining lasers from one rooftop to the next.
Interesting that most users are happy to pay for a development environment. Money well spent in my opinion.
There's also going to be a big bunfight on the relative merits of Delphi v C++Builder. Having written applications, (for not much more than beer money) in both, let me chip in my 2p's worth. C++ is by far the vastly superior language, make no mistake. Used properly C++ is extremely maintenance friendly and syntactically sweet to the point where you nearly call a dentist. But with the wrong libraries (particularly MFC) it's just a complete pain. VCL is one of those wrong libraries. It is just *so* designed around object pascal that using it in C++ with the yukky CBuilder hack arounds almost defeats the purpose entirely.
I have no doubt that in all but the most extreme cases the object Pascal optimiser will make it good-as-dammit as fast as C++. VCL is a beautifully designed class library and the questions Borland were asking (which back end would you like to use, given that BDE is awful) give the impression that they're quite willing to put the work in to ensure it gets ported to Linux as well as it ought to be.
The Windows 'community' shunned Delphi ages ago, when the PHB's were FUD'ed into using Visual Basic and anyone (read most) who wanted to pay their bills went with them. Great loss, believe you me.
Get yourselves a Win32 box from somewhere and a copy of Delphi 2 off the front of a Magazine. Have a go. It is good, you will enjoy it, and when you discover you can put not insignificant apps together in a week (with sufficient focus) then the need for LinuxDelphi will become aparrent.
I feel like one of us is vaguely missing the point...
Surely the idea with clusters (and SMP, for that matter) is to use truckloads of cheap stuff to get a better result than one big expensive thing. Presumably 1024 P2-450's (or G3's) would prove to be cheaper than 128 Quad Xeon's and a damn slight faster into the deal. Probably cheaper than a T3E too.
Anyone feel like doing the sums? You may assume a BOOTP server obviating the need for 1024 hard drives, if you want.
"The reality of the software business today is that if you find something that can make you ridiculously rich, then that's something Microsoft is going to want to take from you"
The facts run as thus: I love making great bits of technology. Some people love plugging them together and think that's the same thing, but it's not. I love making things. I don't particularly like business, I really don't like marketing and I really really don't like crap like trade shows, or having to get sales reps together, or any of that.
So, if I make something worthwhile, "Tasty" for want of a better word, get it up and going in a basic form and make sure Microsoft know about it, are they going to arrive with an extra long cheque book (to take all those zeroes) and put their almightily big marketing department on to it because they have to make it sell.
Or have firefly just proven that Microsoft are happy to buy something purely to stop anyone else from having it?
Hmmmm.
BTW, offtopic - I'm an NT developer about to have a serious look at RH6 & Metroworks. I think you're winning.
Excellent smoke coming from servers all over Europe. Much to my dismay, http://www.eumetsat.de/ wavered then died. And according to http://www.theregister.co.uk/, bbc.co.uk maxed out its' bandwidth and eclipse99.co.uk was eaten by the gods.
I headed off to the park to watch the foreseen confusion with wildlife. Confused coots? panic'ing swans? They just wanted to know what all these people were doing there and why it was so cold.
Good pictures off Eumetsat when they bring it back up.
That encryption algorithm developed by a sixteen year old irish schoolgirl? I remember a big stink being kicked up about this 8/9 months ago, then nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
>Resolves, but to a foriegn language site...
:)
Exactly. EXACTLY. Cyrix's domain registration has been done away with by someone who wants you to visit a resort in Argentina.
I am NOT the only person to have noticed this!!!
Dave
Jeez, people are tripping over themselves to give the things away. You wouldn't want be relying on this to pay the rent, would you?
:)
Obligatory Crystal Space link.
Commentary on all this vs LithTech (USD250,000 I understand), UnrealEngine (USD Loads), and Quake 3 engine (I dread to think how much) would be appreciated.
Oh! And another. So many engines, so little time.
Dave
BTW, this got rejected - is Cyrix's website still broken?
MarioKarts was the best game ever. Not the shite N64 version, the original - with bananas, mushrooms, red and green turtles, go faster stripes, hop buttons, jump bars, cunningly hidden shortcuts, flat everything - dammit man, the ghost track!!!. By far the best. God we lost hours, nay months to this.
:)
That's it, I'm jacking in work to write an open source MarioKarts.
Dave
I've been in th is discussion about Linux vs FreeBSD firewalls on comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc - basically I've been using FreeBSD for assorted network torture, and had been looking at how Linux does firewalls, and they're completely different.
:)
The eventual conclusion was that the FreeBSD 'single chain' model was more powerful than the linux model (especially with the tee ports in 4.0), and that Linux has this killer hole in the masquerading stuff. But someone did point out that a lot of this was changing under 2.4.
Any news? Any sign of tee ports (a divert port that then drops its' output back into the firewall chain)?
Dave
Could someone please correct the flaws in my thinking? [snip] MS making it virtually impossible to write decent software for their OS without shelling out huge amounts of money to them?
:)
Certainly. Mr Borland would like a word with you, even if you insist on using The J word. Even one of Mr Stallman's followers could help you out if you promise not to grass them up.
Nothing you can do about the price of the target platform though.
Dave
Would opening the windows source work? No, of course not. Remember what happened when Netscape opened their source? Frenetic downloading for two days then the almost audible sighs of disappointment when it became aparrent that it was quite a complex piece of kit after all, and you weren't going to be able to hack it into shape in an afternoon. This would be way worse.
:)
What would we do with - probably 600 meg - of patchily developed *windows* source code? Apart from grep for four letter words? Or go looking for remenants of the microsoft network code (grep "blackbird")? Who here has the clobber to even build such a thing at home, let alone develop on it.
Basically, it wouldn't work. It'd be a shitfight.
Open the API's? Yes, definately. Force all data transmission and storage protocols to be published for all to see, by law, for all products (not just MS ones)? Now you're talking. You would level the playing field once and for all, and furthermore prevent anyone else from pulling the same stunt in the future - Sun want a monopoly too, what do you thing the J-word is all about? But that's a different rant.
Dave
Linux, kick-arse development? What *are* you talking about? Windows has fantastic development tools: I've recently been playing with FreeBSD devlopment, and getting paid for Windows stuff. Going back to Visual C++ feels like the most productive thing on earth - Dereference a pointer, and up comes a list of the methods you can call and public members. Call an API function, and you get a tool tip to hand hold you through all those parameters. Even call across a COM boundary and get tab completion - seen that done with CORBA recently? I didn't think so. Can't remeber what the return codes mean? Press F1 and you'll get a nice concise page on what the function does. And, yes, the Win32 API is a piece of clouded thought like you can't imagine, and MFC is ten times worse - but they're getting better: ATL is really quite powerful, and the OLEDB classes and MSDE between them make an excellent back end.
:)
It just costs *so* *fucking* *MUCH*!.
And you've got donkey's all chance of porting it to a stable platform.
Says he, donning his flameproof suit. And yes, I'll get to KDevelop soon, but right now I'm busy with ddd - which I thought was quite good till I got Visual C back.
Dave
You'd like Steve McConnell's book on this, "after the gold rush". Get it from a library since it's a read once thing.
:)
Dave
OpenBSD has traditionally differentiated itself by being way ahead on the security front. Hell, look at their cryptography pages - "because we can". And a damn good reason for doing something that is too. But, the world is changing now: FreeBSD has just sprouted a serious number of security enhancements, and the "because we can" argument is starting to look watered down.
:)
So, maybe we can add to some of that "BSDi are integrating their code" good feeling by starting to patch things up with Theo and the OpenBSD crowd. Note that it's important to not underestimate the quality of work that has gone into OpenBSD - you're not going to buffer overrun that bastard, believe you me.
And please, no FreeBSD RULEZ! OpenBSD SUX! crap (or vice versa). It just seems like a great opportunity to make three great server OS's (BSDi, FreeBSD, OpenBSD) into one absurdly great server OS.
Dave
I only got as far as "solely for non-commercial" and stopped reading. That's not very BSD, issit? Not very GPL either.
:)
Dave
What server do linuxone run?
e .net
:)
http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.linuxon
RedHat. Says it all, really.
Dave
I saw a similar post on usenet, probably alt.peeves ages and ages ago about dejanews and worry about it storing the history of our lives. Me, I'm more interested in hiding some newbie limpings with MFC (I was young), but this poster had a much more valid point:
:)
What if, at some future time, world feeling should turn against - say - industrial music, in such the same was as it has been known to against other beliefs, being Jewish for example. Once I have been tracked down and hauled up infront of the powers that be, will the prosecution be using my Usenet posts as evidence against me?
Maybe a slightly extreme example, but it does illustrate a point.
Must go, documentation beckons.
Dave
I've heard this from a few people, how unimpressed they are with QNX. How so?
:)
Dave
So, why exactly would I want to code for one of these instead of:
:)
Alpha on Linux/FreeBSD/Tru64.
Merced on Linux/Win64.
Sparc3, just because a list is too short with two.
Dunno. Especially when you consider the Alpha and Athlon are in a kinda symbiotic relationship wrt sharing EV6.
Anyway, all this next generation stuff is a bit up in the air. Just use the T-word.
Dave
Something that's been rumbling in my head for a little while. Where do we draw the line between real C++ and pseudo-C++?
:)
For instance, if I write something using MFC (CMapStringToPtr or the less disgusing CMap template) then, well, it isn't real C++ is it? I won't be able to compile it anywhere else. I'll be stuck with that god awful library.
So you start using STL, beacause it's ANSI'd and open and designed by adults who knew what they are doing. You go looking for (and find) a convenient map template and in the process notice templates for near as dammit everything else! Strings, memory allocation, streams, the whole enchelada.
So, to be *real* C++, should I only be using the stl library, doing #include "string" and only stretching as far as #include "cstdio" when I feel a nasty hack urge coming on? Can I say goodbye to the happy days of getting a char* to the first byte and bouncing along the string until it dereferences to zero? Do I, in short, have to clean my act up?
And to what extent do other major C++ projects do this, especially given the relative newness (in terms of C++ standardisation) of the STL?
Dave
(offtopic note) MFC is horrible. Immense kudos to the ATL team for a fine piece of work.
I know they should be angle brackets, couldn't remember the HTML to make the browser not think they were tags. At least I previewed.
Oh, arms sales _within_ the US. And the bet is only open via phone ("please ask for a supervisor").
:)
Still could be worth a tenner, seems pretty badly worded to me, they should've gone for "up 50% over last years' sales". There's also a dodgy looking "YES -200/1" as opposed to the others with "YES +1000/1" or similar. Gives the impression there's something I don't know going on. Apart from the obvious.
Dammit!
Dave
I was about to post this. 200-1, when we have Kosovo, East Timor.. seems a pretty safe bet to me. Where's Mr Visa?
:)
Dave
And what, exactly, do you think Windows CE is all about.
:)
While I'm at it, Viva Psion7.
Dave
We're going to get sheets and sheets of "told you so" messages, some of which will carry the "powerlines as an antenna" analogy.
:)
Fair enough, it all went shed shaped, but you have to give them credit for looking beyond the end of their noses. Consider for a second the following bits of conventional wisdom:
* In a few years we may have computers that can perform tens of thousands of calculations, per second !!! (excited and drooling scientists circa 1960).
* Nuclear power will be too cheap to meter (other excited and drooling scientists circa 1960).
* A free operating system will never be as good as a proprietary one (drooling Microsoft executives circa 1995).
* Many millions of computers, worldwide, will all be connected to the same network.
So we have some vast understatements, some over simplifications and one blatantly incorrect. But in amongst this company "we think we can get half a dozen Mbit/s down power lines" isn't that an outrageous a claim.
And the prize, had they made it work? Dead telcos. 80% of their business anyway. A nearly immeasurably large quantity of income for the next god-knows-how-long.
Nice try. Back to shining lasers from one rooftop to the next.
Dave
Interesting that most users are happy to pay for a development environment. Money well spent in my opinion.
:)
There's also going to be a big bunfight on the relative merits of Delphi v C++Builder. Having written applications, (for not much more than beer money) in both, let me chip in my 2p's worth. C++ is by far the vastly superior language, make no mistake. Used properly C++ is extremely maintenance friendly and syntactically sweet to the point where you nearly call a dentist. But with the wrong libraries (particularly MFC) it's just a complete pain. VCL is one of those wrong libraries. It is just *so* designed around object pascal that using it in C++ with the yukky CBuilder hack arounds almost defeats the purpose entirely.
I have no doubt that in all but the most extreme cases the object Pascal optimiser will make it good-as-dammit as fast as C++. VCL is a beautifully designed class library and the questions Borland were asking (which back end would you like to use, given that BDE is awful) give the impression that they're quite willing to put the work in to ensure it gets ported to Linux as well as it ought to be.
The Windows 'community' shunned Delphi ages ago, when the PHB's were FUD'ed into using Visual Basic and anyone (read most) who wanted to pay their bills went with them. Great loss, believe you me.
Get yourselves a Win32 box from somewhere and a copy of Delphi 2 off the front of a Magazine. Have a go. It is good, you will enjoy it, and when you discover you can put not insignificant apps together in a week (with sufficient focus) then the need for LinuxDelphi will become aparrent.
Dave
Where are my moderator points when I need them. Moderate up dammit!
:)
Dave
I feel like one of us is vaguely missing the point...
Surely the idea with clusters (and SMP, for that matter) is to use truckloads of cheap stuff to get a better result than one big expensive thing. Presumably 1024 P2-450's (or G3's) would prove to be cheaper than 128 Quad Xeon's and a damn slight faster into the deal. Probably cheaper than a T3E too.
Anyone feel like doing the sums? You may assume a BOOTP server obviating the need for 1024 hard drives, if you want.
Dave
And I quote:
"The reality of the software business today is that if you find something that can make you ridiculously rich, then that's something Microsoft is going to want to take from you"
The facts run as thus: I love making great bits of technology. Some people love plugging them together and think that's the same thing, but it's not. I love making things. I don't particularly like business, I really don't like marketing and I really really don't like crap like trade shows, or having to get sales reps together, or any of that.
So, if I make something worthwhile, "Tasty" for want of a better word, get it up and going in a basic form and make sure Microsoft know about it, are they going to arrive with an extra long cheque book (to take all those zeroes) and put their almightily big marketing department on to it because they have to make it sell.
Or have firefly just proven that Microsoft are happy to buy something purely to stop anyone else from having it?
Hmmmm.
BTW, offtopic - I'm an NT developer about to have a serious look at RH6 & Metroworks. I think you're winning.
Dave
Excellent smoke coming from servers all over Europe. Much to my dismay, http://www.eumetsat.de/ wavered then died. And according to http://www.theregister.co.uk/, bbc.co.uk maxed out its' bandwidth and eclipse99.co.uk was eaten by the gods.
:)
I headed off to the park to watch the foreseen confusion with wildlife. Confused coots? panic'ing swans? They just wanted to know what all these people were doing there and why it was so cold.
Good pictures off Eumetsat when they bring it back up.
Dave
That encryption algorithm developed by a sixteen year old irish schoolgirl? I remember a big stink being kicked up about this 8/9 months ago, then nothing.
Any ideas?