On the desktop I agree with you, but in the server room I do not. The cost difference between 20 racks of P4's and 10 Origin2000's is extraordinary (in the millions), whereas the difference between a dozen Wintel workstations and a dozen Octane2's is not (in the tens of thousands). On top of this, the rendering performed by the servers does not require much human interaction and the software is probably the same on both types of hardware. Not so for workstations.
If you want to know EFF's political agenda, head on over to their web site, and you can find out in detail.
I personally donated some cash because I am a Canadian citizen. I can't "write my congressman" because I'm not a citizen in the country where lobbyists working for commercial entities are trying to limit my rights! So the best I can do is lend monetary support to a group that can do a much better job of fighting them than I can. God knows I've lent enough "monetary support" to the bad guys...
There's nothing like blurting out religious metaphors about home theater enthusiasts to score a little karma! You know our geek community is getting bad when there are sociology majors trolling in our forums.
You're a very poetic troll indeed, but a troll is a troll and it's unfortunate you weren't moderated as such.
People just want to replicate the movie experience at home, nothing more, nothing less. It's a money pit, a dubious one at that, but what hobby isn't?
Note: I am not a game programmer, but I am a programmer with some very basic knowledge about game design.
what would be the best way to start on a project like this, say 3d enigine, from a beginners level?
Use a really high level graphics API, so that all the gritty details are hidden from you. OpenGL is IMHO very low level in this context. SGI's Open Inventor sounds about right, but there's probably better API's out there for games.
any one care to share how they got started on game programming? what would be the best plan of attack? or is it just a matter of sitting down with a C++ book, then a visual C++ book (or could anyone tell me what other avenues i might look at with regards to IDE, including under linux), then a game programming book etc etc???
I suggest that before you start getting into game programming, start with seperately writing little programs to tinker with different aspects of game programming, like writing a screensaver (mostly graphics work, you can throw in a little AI, but there is no user interaction so it makes it much easier for you). Once you know your favorite language's syntax in and out, and you know how to attack/avoid the typical design problems you will no doubt encounter in game design, you can start thinking about design a game/engine.
You're on the right track in terms of reading books. But it is definately not a matter of getting a C++ book, then getting a video game book, and going at it. Designing games involves a lot of things other than drawing graphics. You will need to be familiar with physics, human perception, collision detection, artificial intelligence, and many other things. For most people, this (at least!) means having taken a major in CS and/or CE and/or EE and/or Math (pick one). A game programming book will summarize some of these topics, but unless you dive head first into, for example, AI, your understanding of it will be very shallow.
and are there specific websites, examples, source code that i should be checking out???
I believe the Quake2 source has been released. Download it and read it. I'd recommend you start by hacking the code to add in your own features to the game as a first step to understanding it. Run it through a debugger to get a feel for how the game works (I have a feeling debugging quake2 in gdb or ddd would be extremely painful -- try to get your hands on Microsoft's Visual C++ debugger, it blows away anything on Linux and even Workshop on Solaris).
ive wanted to do game programming for ages, but ive never pulled my finger out and sat down and got into it, but now that the new version of the stupid accounting software i code at work has gone gold, i wanna clear my brain of VB and get down and dirty into some serious (and entertaining) coding... any useful advice would be most welcome...
Game programming is really, really hard. Much harder than you think. However, I hope I haven't discouraged you. If you feel motivated to do it, then don't let anyone stop you! Just know that it will take an insane amount of hard work and study (I'm talking on the order of years, not days, weeks or months) to get even a mediocre game or game engine out the door.:)
Like many others here, I have an interest in computer science. These are my favorite books having to do with CS:
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs: If you want to be a software developer, read this book. If you're smart and motivated you won't need a CS professor to guide you through it. If you want to be a low level code monkey for the rest of your life, go read any C++ or Java book and go to technical school.
Introduction to the Theory of Computation: Wrap your head around the Halting problem. Find out why Alan Turing was one of the greatest minds in humanity's history. Blow your mind.
Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice In C: Want to be the future John Carmack? Good for you. Now read this book or you won't stand a chance:) Less theoretical than the above, but I just love this book. For some reason it reminds me of the early 90's when Jurassic Park came out and SGI's were amazing. It has that kind of excited vibe about the potential of computer graphics.
Artifical Intelligence: A Modern Approach: This book and my AI professor really sparked my interest in AI. I cannot praise this book (and professor:) )enough. Simply one of the most interesting and well written CS books out there, with that perfect mix of theory and practice.
Introductory Techniques for 3-D Computer Vision: This tiny, yet $90.00 book is packed with information. I can't think of a more concise introduction to the field of computer vision, although admittedly this is the only book on the topic I've studied.:) You'll find lot of really interesting, cutting edge stuff here. Generate height maps from stereo pairs and shit. Cool!
Again, no need to be a CS major to understand any of the above, but you'll have to be smart to do so. I'm personally not very smart, so I had to go the CS major route. If you're not smart and you don't want to and/or can't take courses, I'll refer you to the title of this slashdot story.:)
Otherwise there is simply no economic incentive to hire competent programmers and do rigourous testing.
Unless you've illegally established a monopoly, hiring competent programmers and doing rigorous testing is absolutely essential to the completion of a software project within reasonable time and having it become an economical success. Good software doesn't write itself. Period.
Any performance issues with OSX probably have more to do with admittedly slow Apple hardware combined with the Aqua rendering layer. I used to run OpenStep on a pentium and it was as performant as any other UNIX on Intel hardware.
MACH is hardly flawed. Last I checked, NeXTStep, OpenStep, as well as that obscure new operating system you may have heard of, MacOS X, are all based on a MACH microkernel.
I always thought MACH was THE microkernel. Either elaborate and convince me, or put down the crack pipe;)
Your points would all be valid if Linux was primarily a desktop OS, like MacOS 9 or Windows 9x.
The truth is, not many people aside from enthusiasts, students, software developers or sysadmins use Linux on the desktop. I personally always used to develop software on Linux since 1996. I recently switched to using Windows XP with Cygwin, using XEmacs/Win and the MSVC++ 6.0 debugger as my development environment. (IMHO!!) It beats using XEmacs and ddd (or gdb) hands down.
All that aside, walk into any server room and you'll see Linux _everywhere_. Admins can set up servers to their heart's content without having to worry about getting audited for it. Most IT managers by now have realized the TCO advantage of going with Linux/*BSD, and if they don't go Linux/*BSD its because general cluelessness (this is a major problem among IT managers) of political reasons.
For smaller shops going for a Dell or IBM Linux server is almost a no-brainer. For bigger Sun Enterprise-using shops, they're phasing out their older servers with these shiny Dell and IBM rackmounts as well. While Sunfire servers are still pretty much unmatched, IBM's Linux on Big Iron hardware must be scaring the shit out of Sun.
All this is just the tip of the iceberg, in my opinion. I haven't even mentioned how fast Linux servers are quietly eroding MS Exchange and MS file/print serving marketshare.
So, yes, Linux is years behind in terms of desktop useability... but the truth is not many people really care. The server market is where the real money is at, anyway.
OSX uses pdf technology to display. You're mixing things up with NeXT/OpenStep:)
(they said that pdf isn't a complete programming language, and more of a powerful rendering layer, so its more optimized and maybe a little less powerful than display postscript).
God I'm so tired of these posts. They're happening so much now I'd call them karma whores.
We're not all hypocrites. I could give a fuck about digital rights. i like dvd's, video games, porn, comics, unix, scifi and fantasy. So do many other people on this site, so don't try to pigeonhole us as also being hippies and donating all our disposable income to the EFF, 'cause you couldn't be farther from the truth.
Its "News for nerds", not "News for Flag Waving Hippie Commie Hypocrites", so get off your high horse!
This may or may not be an option for your lab setting, but using X terminals as a thin client solution is a very cost effective solution.
You don't even need to modify your current machines, if you want to demo/test this solution. Make a bootdisk with a Linux kernel and a barebones X server (I know these will fit on a floppy because I've seen it done). Put one of these floppies in each workstation. Setup a fast machine with lots of RAM with a UNIX of your choice which will be the server that hosts all of your X clients (in other words, applications).
This solution is used in a lot of places, and X is one of the most mature, well documented, stable, inexpensive, [insert warm-fuzzies inducing adjective] thin client solutions out there.
Read between the lines, this article is mostly anti-IBM FUD. It was written by Sun, so I'm not exactly surprised.
And Linux isn't designed to run in a virtual machine; implementation decisions that make sense on PC hardware don't fit well in a virtual machine(4). This is Linux. It's designed for Intel. It's not tuned for the mainframe hardware in which it's running.
First, let's check what his "(4)" reference points to:
(4) For example: Filling all available RAM with file buffers is great in a real machine (as it speeds I/O via caching with otherwise-wasted storage), but in a virtual machine doing that is bad (as it inflates the working set of the Linux guest, which is competing for real storage with many other Linuxes-leading to paging/swapping).
Uhh, I have never seen a VM implementation that did not give a RAM limit. So this guy is basically saying that a memory leak on one of your VM's will take down the entire mainframe. Somehow I doubt IBM's mainframe R&D staff would do this... unless IBM mainframe R&D is actually a computer camp for children with down syndrome.
Often the difference in Intel versus mainframe applications makes porting difficult(10)
(10) Intel uses something known as little endian; a mainframe uses something different. This is significant for certain applications and makes the port difficult.
I challenge anyone out there to name any significant piece of UNIX software that doesn't have a big-endian port... uhh basically they don't exist, because many of the commercial UNIX systems out there exist on top of big-endian hardware.
Just the way he phrased that last bit about endianness convinces me that this guy doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. I can't really know for sure though, since most of the stuff he talks about is beyond me. But, based on those few things he mentions that I'm familiar with, I'd say he's a typical manager who is loosely and incorrectly paraphrasing what some Enterprise developer told him, and decided to make a marketing advantage out of it.
One good hint about the word Atari is what Nolan Buschnell called his newer video game company after leaving Atari. He called it "Sente", which in Japanese means "checkmate" in Go.
- The PacMan character shape was derived from the game designer looking at a pizza he ordered after eating one slice of it.
- Pac Man was originally called "Puck Man" in Japan, but worried that american adolescents would deface the cabinets, replacing the 'P' with an 'F' to spell "Fuck Man", they changed the name.
- Both Steve Jobs and The Woz used to work at Atari in its early years. Atari founder Nolan Buschnell (also the founder of Chuck E Cheese) was hesitant about hiring Steve Jobs because he literally smelled bad and looked like a "20 year old ho chi minh". It turned out that almost everything Jobs took credit for at Atari was stuff that Woz actually did, which leads me to...
- Atari gave Jobs the task of changing the design of one of their games (I forget which) to use less chips. Jobs then handed this task over to Woz. Jobs was promised a substantial bonus for every chip removed from the design, and he promised Woz half of this bonus. Woz's design was brilliant and removed something like 75 chips, which led to a bonus of something like 50 grand. Jobs gave Woz 500 bucks and told him that was half the total bonus. By fucking over his best friend, Jobs now had some capital to go and start Apple.
-The name "Donkey Kong" came from the Japanese designer (Miyamoto? I forget) trying to translate "Stubborn Gorrilla". He looked up "Stubborn" and saw "Donkey" as part of the translation and went with it.
-Magnavox designed the first video game console, the "Odyssey".
-"Atari" means "check" in the context of the japanese game Go.
-The company Namco got its big start by the illegal bootlegging of Atari arcade machines for the Japanese market.
-Space Invaders was such a hit in Japan that it caused a national coin shortage.
-The company name "COLECO" stands for "Colorado Leather Company". They also invented Cabbage Patch Kids.
Now, it is possible there's some factual errors above (don't have the book on me right now so I'm working on memory), so feel free to correct me!
(RANT)All that said, people, please go and support your local arcades. The arcade industry is DYING and it seems that nothing is being done because home video games are being so damn successful. I truly miss the days when arcade developers had significant R&D budgets and were capable of releasing arcade games that looked and played far better than anything you could play at home. I miss the days when I'd think how great it would be to be able to play those games at home. It just saddens me that 2d arcade style games are dying as a genre, and people keep unfairly comparing them to their 3d counterparts. and I don't care what you say, games like Metal Slug, Street Fighter 3, and Last Blade 2 have _FAR_ better graphics than any 3d first person shooter!!!!(/RANT)
And one more thing... MAME on a fast PC with an X-Arcade = the best video game console out there!
Calling Microsoft Windows "functionally on par" to Linux is like calling a shiny new battleship functionally on par to a piss-stained, shit-smeared canoe:)
Even after watchin T2 the first time, I noticed the sequel-opportunity. Notice how, at one point, Arnold gets his robotic arm ripped off by a big gear in a factory. Also notice that later on, when he's saying bye-bye, going into the molten metal pool, he doesn't have that lost arm with him.
So, what happened in the original Terminator for the sequel to happen? Uh, the robot lost its arm in a factory, which was later on found by computer scientists and used to create the AI that would end up fucking humanity's shit up. Sound familiar?
While this book may be the inverse (or reverse?) of what you're looking for, it is extremely interesting, and will surely help you a lot from a research standpoint for your project. It is basically a detailed description of every technical aspect of the ST:TNG universe, which includes many convergences between science fact and science fiction.
Also don't forget to note the name of the first space shuttle ever: The Enterprise.
Re:Does it run on windows yet?
on
KDE 3.0 Screenshots
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· Score: 3, Informative
I'm sure with the slightest bit of coding skill and a bunch of patience, Qt and KDE would compile under the Cygwin/XFree86 environment.
I tried the Cygwin/XFree86 thing on my girlfriend's Windows box, and was quickly up and running with a full-screen X Window session, so I could VPN to work and export my XEmacs client from my workstation to the Windows box's display.
I haven't tried compiling anything with it, but the UNIX compatibility headers are all there as well as GCC. All the X headers also seemed to come with the cygwin XFree86 distribution.
Check out this user's guide for an excellent step-by-step document (with pictures!) of how to get the Cygwin/XFree86 environment running. After that just try to run configure then make in the QT source tree and see what happens:)
I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft's hardware partners/clients (at the very least every major PC maker out there), at least indirectly pressured Microsoft to encumber the operating system. Doing this would give consumers the justification they need to get back into the market and buy a new PC.
I remember hearing from several news sources that PC market sales are down about 11%... I wonder if this value has any correlation to this 11% performance hit. (i know, i know, taking the term "reaching" to new lows:))
While I have no intention of purchasing Windows XP, I hope that it increases consumer spending in general. While consumer spending is crap lately, especially after September 11th, the NASDAQ index is going up almost everyday. Windows XP sales (and subsequent PC purchasing due to its system requirements), could boost consumer spending and be a small step to ending this recession.
In the end, I don't think XP's slowdown is very evil. This is what happens when you have a massive codebase, and you have to keep some level of backward-compatibility in mind. Just look at MacOS X, a great OS but significantly slower than previous iterations of MacOS. The same could be said for the popular desktop environments available on UNIX.
sorry, that looks nothing like my OSX desktop. it looks like a badly hacked together cut-and-paste frankenstein collage of the GUI being imitated. i'm also betting that the desktop doesn't *feel* anything like an OSX desktop.
i have to use a linux desktop at work, but at least i don't try to fake better GUI's. mwm, several xterms, xemacs, ddd and netscape 4 gets the job done for me. it is ugly as all hell but at least its honest:).
there's still a lot of work to be done on UNIX's desktop UI's. while the functionality is there, there is a total lack of emphasis on look and feel. adding the ability to use shaped pixmaps instead of hardcoded widgets is not the answer. new button textures won't change the fact that things like konqueror's toolbar are brutally ugly. as a coding community, we tend to add bells and whistles before stopping, and just trying to concentrate on refining the user experience for a good while. i'm personally worried that the "UNIX philosophy" is incompatible for the increased refinement of the user experience (or some would argue that it is refined in other ways:)).
There have been many good questions addressing the possible implications of RAND, but I'd like to step back and ask the following:
Why and how did the W3C come upon the idea to implement RAND? What are the benefits to the W3C for having such a standards mechanism? Are these benefits the cause for the RAND proposal being essentially fast-tracked through your organisation? What individuals/organisations/corporations proposed said mechanism to the W3C?
Slashdot Mirror
On the desktop I agree with you, but in the server room I do not. The cost difference between 20 racks of P4's and 10 Origin2000's is extraordinary (in the millions), whereas the difference between a dozen Wintel workstations and a dozen Octane2's is not (in the tens of thousands). On top of this, the rendering performed by the servers does not require much human interaction and the software is probably the same on both types of hardware. Not so for workstations.
If you want to know EFF's political agenda, head on over to their web site, and you can find out in detail.
...
I personally donated some cash because I am a Canadian citizen. I can't "write my congressman" because I'm not a citizen in the country where lobbyists working for commercial entities are trying to limit my rights! So the best I can do is lend monetary support to a group that can do a much better job of fighting them than I can. God knows I've lent enough "monetary support" to the bad guys
There's nothing like blurting out religious metaphors about home theater enthusiasts to score a little karma! You know our geek community is getting bad when there are sociology majors trolling in our forums.
You're a very poetic troll indeed, but a troll is a troll and it's unfortunate you weren't moderated as such.
People just want to replicate the movie experience at home, nothing more, nothing less. It's a money pit, a dubious one at that, but what hobby isn't?
Cheers.
Note: I am not a game programmer, but I am a programmer with some very basic knowledge about game design.
... any useful advice would be most welcome ...
:)
what would be the best way to start on a project like this, say 3d enigine, from a beginners level?
Use a really high level graphics API, so that all the gritty details are hidden from you. OpenGL is IMHO very low level in this context. SGI's Open Inventor sounds about right, but there's probably better API's out there for games.
any one care to share how they got started on game programming? what would be the best plan of attack? or is it just a matter of sitting down with a C++ book, then a visual C++ book (or could anyone tell me what other avenues i might look at with regards to IDE, including under linux), then a game programming book etc etc???
I suggest that before you start getting into game programming, start with seperately writing little programs to tinker with different aspects of game programming, like writing a screensaver (mostly graphics work, you can throw in a little AI, but there is no user interaction so it makes it much easier for you). Once you know your favorite language's syntax in and out, and you know how to attack/avoid the typical design problems you will no doubt encounter in game design, you can start thinking about design a game/engine.
You're on the right track in terms of reading books. But it is definately not a matter of getting a C++ book, then getting a video game book, and going at it. Designing games involves a lot of things other than drawing graphics. You will need to be familiar with physics, human perception, collision detection, artificial intelligence, and many other things. For most people, this (at least!) means having taken a major in CS and/or CE and/or EE and/or Math (pick one). A game programming book will summarize some of these topics, but unless you dive head first into, for example, AI, your understanding of it will be very shallow.
and are there specific websites, examples, source code that i should be checking out???
I believe the Quake2 source has been released. Download it and read it. I'd recommend you start by hacking the code to add in your own features to the game as a first step to understanding it. Run it through a debugger to get a feel for how the game works (I have a feeling debugging quake2 in gdb or ddd would be extremely painful -- try to get your hands on Microsoft's Visual C++ debugger, it blows away anything on Linux and even Workshop on Solaris).
ive wanted to do game programming for ages, but ive never pulled my finger out and sat down and got into it, but now that the new version of the stupid accounting software i code at work has gone gold, i wanna clear my brain of VB and get down and dirty into some serious (and entertaining) coding
Game programming is really, really hard. Much harder than you think. However, I hope I haven't discouraged you. If you feel motivated to do it, then don't let anyone stop you! Just know that it will take an insane amount of hard work and study (I'm talking on the order of years, not days, weeks or months) to get even a mediocre game or game engine out the door.
Good luck,
-Mani
Like many others here, I have an interest in computer science. These are my favorite books having to do with CS:
:) Less theoretical than the above, but I just love this book. For some reason it reminds me of the early 90's when Jurassic Park came out and SGI's were amazing. It has that kind of excited vibe about the potential of computer graphics.
:) )enough. Simply one of the most interesting and well written CS books out there, with that perfect mix of theory and practice.
:) You'll find lot of really interesting, cutting edge stuff here. Generate height maps from stereo pairs and shit. Cool!
:)
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs: If you want to be a software developer, read this book. If you're smart and motivated you won't need a CS professor to guide you through it. If you want to be a low level code monkey for the rest of your life, go read any C++ or Java book and go to technical school.
Introduction to Algorithms: find out what all those data structure API's you use are actually doing!
Introduction to the Theory of Computation: Wrap your head around the Halting problem. Find out why Alan Turing was one of the greatest minds in humanity's history. Blow your mind.
Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice In C: Want to be the future John Carmack? Good for you. Now read this book or you won't stand a chance
Artifical Intelligence: A Modern Approach: This book and my AI professor really sparked my interest in AI. I cannot praise this book (and professor
Introductory Techniques for 3-D Computer Vision: This tiny, yet $90.00 book is packed with information. I can't think of a more concise introduction to the field of computer vision, although admittedly this is the only book on the topic I've studied.
Again, no need to be a CS major to understand any of the above, but you'll have to be smart to do so. I'm personally not very smart, so I had to go the CS major route. If you're not smart and you don't want to and/or can't take courses, I'll refer you to the title of this slashdot story.
Otherwise there is simply no economic incentive to hire competent programmers and do rigourous testing.
Unless you've illegally established a monopoly, hiring competent programmers and doing rigorous testing is absolutely essential to the completion of a software project within reasonable time and having it become an economical success. Good software doesn't write itself. Period.
Any performance issues with OSX probably have more to do with admittedly slow Apple hardware combined with the Aqua rendering layer. I used to run OpenStep on a pentium and it was as performant as any other UNIX on Intel hardware.
MACH is hardly flawed. Last I checked, NeXTStep, OpenStep, as well as that obscure new operating system you may have heard of, MacOS X, are all based on a MACH microkernel.
;)
I always thought MACH was THE microkernel. Either elaborate and convince me, or put down the crack pipe
What the hell kind of code is that?!?!? Has management or marketing started posting on slashdot???
Your points would all be valid if Linux was primarily a desktop OS, like MacOS 9 or Windows 9x.
... but the truth is not many people really care. The server market is where the real money is at, anyway.
The truth is, not many people aside from enthusiasts, students, software developers or sysadmins use Linux on the desktop. I personally always used to develop software on Linux since 1996. I recently switched to using Windows XP with Cygwin, using XEmacs/Win and the MSVC++ 6.0 debugger as my development environment. (IMHO!!) It beats using XEmacs and ddd (or gdb) hands down.
All that aside, walk into any server room and you'll see Linux _everywhere_. Admins can set up servers to their heart's content without having to worry about getting audited for it. Most IT managers by now have realized the TCO advantage of going with Linux/*BSD, and if they don't go Linux/*BSD its because general cluelessness (this is a major problem among IT managers) of political reasons.
For smaller shops going for a Dell or IBM Linux server is almost a no-brainer. For bigger Sun Enterprise-using shops, they're phasing out their older servers with these shiny Dell and IBM rackmounts as well. While Sunfire servers are still pretty much unmatched, IBM's Linux on Big Iron hardware must be scaring the shit out of Sun.
All this is just the tip of the iceberg, in my opinion. I haven't even mentioned how fast Linux servers are quietly eroding MS Exchange and MS file/print serving marketshare.
So, yes, Linux is years behind in terms of desktop useability
OSX uses pdf technology to display. You're mixing things up with NeXT/OpenStep :)
(they said that pdf isn't a complete programming language, and more of a powerful rendering layer, so its more optimized and maybe a little less powerful than display postscript).
God I'm so tired of these posts. They're happening so much now I'd call them karma whores.
We're not all hypocrites. I could give a fuck about digital rights. i like dvd's, video games, porn, comics, unix, scifi and fantasy. So do many other people on this site, so don't try to pigeonhole us as also being hippies and donating all our disposable income to the EFF, 'cause you couldn't be farther from the truth.
Its "News for nerds", not "News for Flag Waving Hippie Commie Hypocrites", so get off your high horse!
This may or may not be an option for your lab setting, but using X terminals as a thin client solution is a very cost effective solution.
You don't even need to modify your current machines, if you want to demo/test this solution. Make a bootdisk with a Linux kernel and a barebones X server (I know these will fit on a floppy because I've seen it done). Put one of these floppies in each workstation. Setup a fast machine with lots of RAM with a UNIX of your choice which will be the server that hosts all of your X clients (in other words, applications).
This solution is used in a lot of places, and X is one of the most mature, well documented, stable, inexpensive, [insert warm-fuzzies inducing adjective] thin client solutions out there.
Read between the lines, this article is mostly anti-IBM FUD. It was written by Sun, so I'm not exactly surprised.
... unless IBM mainframe R&D is actually a computer camp for children with down syndrome.
... uhh basically they don't exist, because many of the commercial UNIX systems out there exist on top of big-endian hardware.
And Linux isn't designed to run in a virtual machine; implementation decisions that make sense on PC hardware don't fit well in a virtual machine(4). This is Linux. It's designed for Intel. It's not tuned for the mainframe hardware in which it's running.
First, let's check what his "(4)" reference points to:
(4) For example: Filling all available RAM with file buffers is great in a real machine (as it speeds I/O via caching with otherwise-wasted storage), but in a virtual machine doing that is bad (as it inflates the working set of the Linux guest, which is competing for real storage with many other Linuxes-leading to paging/swapping).
Uhh, I have never seen a VM implementation that did not give a RAM limit. So this guy is basically saying that a memory leak on one of your VM's will take down the entire mainframe. Somehow I doubt IBM's mainframe R&D staff would do this
Often the difference in Intel versus mainframe applications makes porting difficult(10)
(10) Intel uses something known as little endian; a mainframe uses something different. This is significant for certain applications and makes the port difficult.
I challenge anyone out there to name any significant piece of UNIX software that doesn't have a big-endian port
Just the way he phrased that last bit about endianness convinces me that this guy doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. I can't really know for sure though, since most of the stuff he talks about is beyond me. But, based on those few things he mentions that I'm familiar with, I'd say he's a typical manager who is loosely and incorrectly paraphrasing what some Enterprise developer told him, and decided to make a marketing advantage out of it.
Read between the lines!!
MOD PARENT *UP*!
One good hint about the word Atari is what Nolan Buschnell called his newer video game company after leaving Atari. He called it "Sente", which in Japanese means "checkmate" in Go.
Here's some random video game trivia I picked up for the incredible book The Ultimate History of Video Games to celebrate this good news!
...
... MAME on a fast PC with an X-Arcade = the best video game console out there!
- The PacMan character shape was derived from the game designer looking at a pizza he ordered after eating one slice of it.
- Pac Man was originally called "Puck Man" in Japan, but worried that american adolescents would deface the cabinets, replacing the 'P' with an 'F' to spell "Fuck Man", they changed the name.
- Both Steve Jobs and The Woz used to work at Atari in its early years. Atari founder Nolan Buschnell (also the founder of Chuck E Cheese) was hesitant about hiring Steve Jobs because he literally smelled bad and looked like a "20 year old ho chi minh". It turned out that almost everything Jobs took credit for at Atari was stuff that Woz actually did, which leads me to
- Atari gave Jobs the task of changing the design of one of their games (I forget which) to use less chips. Jobs then handed this task over to Woz. Jobs was promised a substantial bonus for every chip removed from the design, and he promised Woz half of this bonus. Woz's design was brilliant and removed something like 75 chips, which led to a bonus of something like 50 grand. Jobs gave Woz 500 bucks and told him that was half the total bonus. By fucking over his best friend, Jobs now had some capital to go and start Apple.
-The name "Donkey Kong" came from the Japanese designer (Miyamoto? I forget) trying to translate "Stubborn Gorrilla". He looked up "Stubborn" and saw "Donkey" as part of the translation and went with it.
-Magnavox designed the first video game console, the "Odyssey".
-"Atari" means "check" in the context of the japanese game Go.
-The company Namco got its big start by the illegal bootlegging of Atari arcade machines for the Japanese market.
-Space Invaders was such a hit in Japan that it caused a national coin shortage.
-The company name "COLECO" stands for "Colorado Leather Company". They also invented Cabbage Patch Kids.
Now, it is possible there's some factual errors above (don't have the book on me right now so I'm working on memory), so feel free to correct me!
(RANT)All that said, people, please go and support your local arcades. The arcade industry is DYING and it seems that nothing is being done because home video games are being so damn successful. I truly miss the days when arcade developers had significant R&D budgets and were capable of releasing arcade games that looked and played far better than anything you could play at home. I miss the days when I'd think how great it would be to be able to play those games at home. It just saddens me that 2d arcade style games are dying as a genre, and people keep unfairly comparing them to their 3d counterparts. and I don't care what you say, games like Metal Slug, Street Fighter 3, and Last Blade 2 have _FAR_ better graphics than any 3d first person shooter!!!!(/RANT)
And one more thing
Calling Microsoft Windows "functionally on par" to Linux is like calling a shiny new battleship functionally on par to a piss-stained, shit-smeared canoe :)
Even after watchin T2 the first time, I noticed the sequel-opportunity. Notice how, at one point, Arnold gets his robotic arm ripped off by a big gear in a factory. Also notice that later on, when he's saying bye-bye, going into the molten metal pool, he doesn't have that lost arm with him.
So, what happened in the original Terminator for the sequel to happen? Uh, the robot lost its arm in a factory, which was later on found by computer scientists and used to create the AI that would end up fucking humanity's shit up. Sound familiar?
Star Trek : The Next Generation Technical Manual
While this book may be the inverse (or reverse?) of what you're looking for, it is extremely interesting, and will surely help you a lot from a research standpoint for your project. It is basically a detailed description of every technical aspect of the ST:TNG universe, which includes many convergences between science fact and science fiction.
Also don't forget to note the name of the first space shuttle ever: The Enterprise.
I'm sure with the slightest bit of coding skill and a bunch of patience, Qt and KDE would compile under the Cygwin/XFree86 environment.
:)
I tried the Cygwin/XFree86 thing on my girlfriend's Windows box, and was quickly up and running with a full-screen X Window session, so I could VPN to work and export my XEmacs client from my workstation to the Windows box's display.
I haven't tried compiling anything with it, but the UNIX compatibility headers are all there as well as GCC. All the X headers also seemed to come with the cygwin XFree86 distribution.
Check out this user's guide for an excellent step-by-step document (with pictures!) of how to get the Cygwin/XFree86 environment running. After that just try to run configure then make in the QT source tree and see what happens
Good luck!
I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft's hardware partners/clients (at the very least every major PC maker out there), at least indirectly pressured Microsoft to encumber the operating system. Doing this would give consumers the justification they need to get back into the market and buy a new PC.
... I wonder if this value has any correlation to this 11% performance hit. (i know, i know, taking the term "reaching" to new lows :))
I remember hearing from several news sources that PC market sales are down about 11%
While I have no intention of purchasing Windows XP, I hope that it increases consumer spending in general. While consumer spending is crap lately, especially after September 11th, the NASDAQ index is going up almost everyday. Windows XP sales (and subsequent PC purchasing due to its system requirements), could boost consumer spending and be a small step to ending this recession.
In the end, I don't think XP's slowdown is very evil. This is what happens when you have a massive codebase, and you have to keep some level of backward-compatibility in mind. Just look at MacOS X, a great OS but significantly slower than previous iterations of MacOS. The same could be said for the popular desktop environments available on UNIX.
I think a lot of ex-web developers will be running to Compton, begging the gang-bangers to teach them how to pimp and push crack.
sorry, that looks nothing like my OSX desktop. it looks like a badly hacked together cut-and-paste frankenstein collage of the GUI being imitated. i'm also betting that the desktop doesn't *feel* anything like an OSX desktop.
:).
:)).
i have to use a linux desktop at work, but at least i don't try to fake better GUI's. mwm, several xterms, xemacs, ddd and netscape 4 gets the job done for me. it is ugly as all hell but at least its honest
there's still a lot of work to be done on UNIX's desktop UI's. while the functionality is there, there is a total lack of emphasis on look and feel. adding the ability to use shaped pixmaps instead of hardcoded widgets is not the answer. new button textures won't change the fact that things like konqueror's toolbar are brutally ugly. as a coding community, we tend to add bells and whistles before stopping, and just trying to concentrate on refining the user experience for a good while. i'm personally worried that the "UNIX philosophy" is incompatible for the increased refinement of the user experience (or some would argue that it is refined in other ways
bleh, i'm done rambling. opinions, anyone?
There have been many good questions addressing the possible implications of RAND, but I'd like to step back and ask the following:
Why and how did the W3C come upon the idea to implement RAND? What are the benefits to the W3C for having such a standards mechanism? Are these benefits the cause for the RAND proposal being essentially fast-tracked through your organisation? What individuals/organisations/corporations proposed said mechanism to the W3C?
Finally, have you read Alan Cox's opinion on this matter? What is your response?
Thanks in advance,
-Mani.