That makes absolutely no sense. Buying a copy of OS X is going to give you a CD full of code compiled for PowerPC, with no way to make any use of it on Intel sort of emulation. Darwin itself already runs on x86 hardware, so clearly the kernel is not the stumbling block.
> The apps which will work will be the ones that only use the BSD core and not the entire Aqua graphics layer where the majority of popular MacOS X application run. But it is conceivable that an emulation of Aqua could be created for NetBSD which could replace X11.
I think you are being short-sighted here. A smarter and more realistic goal would be to get the compatibility with Darwin good enough that you could run Aqua and the rest of the OS X userland on top of NetBSD, without having to rewrite it all yourself.
Why not? Sure "why not". The reason is hardware support (obviously) - trying to support everything in people's computers now would be an almost impossible task (Linux has a hard enough time doing this, imagine every little game developer having to attempt it..). And assuming you COULD manage that half, the major thing would be that you wouldn't work on any new hardware released after the game shipped, unless it tried real real hard to be compatible with older hardware at a low level. In the age of the "legacy free PC", the industry is moving in exactly the opposite direction.
I think we've certainly lost something since the days of Amigas, Atari, and even older PCs (with 99% compatible hardware), where you had basically a fixed hardware platform and to get new features you crammed in extensions (rather than building something totally different and just writing new drivers). I wouldn't argue that either approach is better, but it's certainly lowers the barrier to entry for fun things like fringe operating systems, and, oh, say, games that boot off CD. Ages ago, there were actually a few PC games that booted off disk and bypassed MSDOS entirely.
Now you could agree upon some conventions and standards for drivers, how to arrange things on the disk so your self-booting software could find them, and you'd already be most of the way toward having an operating system. You'd then probably have a pile of CDs with utilities for configuring your hardware, managing files on the disk, etc, etc.. and eventually they'd start getting distributed together, coupled tighter and tighter, until you ended up with something indistinguishable from the operating systems we know today (reminds me somehow of the way business try to merge vertically until they encompass every aspect of their market, just to shave off a few percent of overhead each step of the way).
I think this is pretty much how the industry evolved to start with.
...based on the newest Java technologies.
Oooh, newest java technologies! Seriously, what the fuck, are you trying to sell this to your boss or something?
The last thing we need to deal with is a bunch more kids crowding the job market in ten years..:)
And seriously, with the growing competition frow low wage programmers in India and elsewhere, shouldn't people get back to going to school for "real" jobs?:)
Yes, but not for running applications. Bochs is very useful as a development tool to test operating systems or in general self-booting code that would otherwise have you rebooting your computer every five minutes.
Is it just me, or does no one really seem to care about adopting IPv6? The free software community has done a pretty admirable job implementing IPv6 and modifying things to work with it. If the world switched tomorrow, linux users would probably be the first ones up and running. Meanwhile, people like Microsoft sit on their asses until all the IP addresses run out and a real crisis develops.
So, maybe it will be the Asian countries that finally push IPv6 toward being adopted. OTOH, in countries like China, maybe the government would be happier if 1+ billion people were forced behind NAT and a handful of filtering proxies due to lack of free addresses. =p
You know, I find it pretty interesting how vastly AMD's chips outpace the P4 clock-per-clock.It's widely acknowledged that the P4 gets less done per clock than the P3 did. Some people have said that the P4's memory architecture is a disaster, or that it is pipelined TOO deep, but I've got a sort of conspiracy theory about this. Granted I'm not a computer engineer, and know just enough to hang myself with, but here goes:
I think they've manipulated the design so they can deliberately increase the clock rate for marketing reasons, without getting proportionally more performance out. Basically I suppose they've taken the longest paths through the chip and stuck latches all over the place so that the overall cycle time can be reduced, but operations that used to take one clock cycle now may take two. When 1.8 GHz AMDs can nearly match the speed of a 3 GHz P4, I don't think this is an entirely unplausible theory.
On the other hand, maybe the P4 really just is a pig. There was some discussion on usenet a while back about how it takes upward to 2000 clock cycles to enter and exit an interrupt handler on the P4, something which an old 486 could do in ~45 cycle IIRC (and I don't recall exactly, but I think the Athlon today can do an INT/IRET pair in a few hundred cycles). Curious how in hyper-optimizing these chips for the most common cases of execution, performance of these sorts of periphery operations goes all to hell.
That said, I'm really looking forward to having 64-bits on the desktop. =)
Just by sumitting my buddy list, I've automatically made all my buddies immensely more popular than myself, as they all appear on one buddy list (mine), whereas none of them have uploaded their lists, so I appear on no buddy lists. Funny how that works out.
Yes, the higher end Lexmark Optra printers are great.
We used to use a bunch of Optra S's (1250s, I think) where I used to work, and they happily printed tens of thousands of pages without incident. Ironically, our old Optras were taken out and replaced with a newer model Optra that didn't work nearly well, jamming more frequently, and being somewhat inconsistant about how your text got lined up if you were using a special label stock. I frequently cursed whoever at our corporate office was responsible for removing those old printers.
Recently Lexmark have been branding some really cheap laser printers with the Optra name. These are to be avoided at all costs, as they are built with cheap inkjet-grade components. The Optra T612 is one such model. Ironically, these seem to sell for about the same price on eBay as the much nicer Optra S's that cost five times as much new. Granted, the median page count on an Optra S seems to be 40k pages, but if you look around eBay you see that some of them there have survived to 100k pages, so they're pretty reliable.
I play a lot of Castle Wolfenstein, and there is a thing called WolfTV which is pretty much what you describe. There's also a version available for Q3.
It basically acts as a sort of proxy game server that you connect to, and what you see is relayed from the view of a cameraman who is connected as a spectator to the real server where the match is being played. It's pretty neat, and draws suprising numbers of viewers.
You might describe it as the programming language compiler becoming aware of a pattern, and learning to implement it when told.
And as a (bitter?) Lisp programmer, I'm suspicious of a language that isn't flexible enough to provide an easy way to integrate the pattern into the language without having to use some silly preprocessor or (god forbid) modify the compiler. =)
Funny, this is the exact argument LISP programmers have been making for the last fifteen years.. Python has long been accused of progressively stealing more and more of LISP, but given LISP's current commercial success (or lack thereof) I might argue against also immitating its advocates..;)
[disclaimer: I am not disparaging either LISP or Python, in fact Common Lisp is my favorite language, I'm simply pointing out that I've heard this argument before]
I've read that for McCoy's first season they were using scripts originally written for Colin Baker. I don't remember most of McCoy's stories very well, but I think as a character he really came into his own in his second or third season, and I enjoyed him as the Doctor.
That makes me wonder what happened to Colin Baker, I've never heard the story - did they fire him? did he quit?
I ment that is the reason why LISP was not used. It did not work like the hardware.
Which is a damn shame. I consider this a deficiency of modern hardware really - in the old days there were dedicated LISP machines with CPUs designed for LISP, and they were things of beauty. Most of the 'modern' languages that are coming into vogue - Java, Python, even Perl - have adopted some subset of LISP's most powerful features, particularly garbage collection and dynamic typing (although maybe not in Java's case). The major feature lost today is a tagged memory architecture, where every word in memory has a few bits set aside to say what type of object is stored there. This would go a long way toward efficiently implementing a "scripting" language like Python, and brings a relieving level of sanity to the table in large object oriented systems (as are the fashion today). Lisp's type system is inherently "object-oriented" without making primitive types (such as integers, characters, etc) feel like second-class citizens (as Java does) - everything is an object, just not necessarily an instance of a class.
But yes, as someone who programs in Common LISP, I occasionally lament how far away from the hardware I am programming. But when I get the same code written with a fraction of the time it would take to write in C (or in the same amount of time, but relatively free of bugs), I get over it, and just wish that we could have CPUs that supported a post 1970s programming style rather than spending 50 million transistors squeezing performance out of the horrid x86 ISA.
Lisp compilers these days do an impressive job of rivalling C performance, and the overhead you pay is still worth it for what you get from the environment. After shuddering at the sluggishness of Java applications or that fine example of modern C++ over-engineering, Mozilla, I've no doubt that I can write faster, better software in Common Lisp.
Do we really need to get the roles of all our software tangled and confused like this? Wouldn't life be much simpler if everything was logically divided into seperate applications (browser, mail, news, video players, etc.), rather than gargantuan applications that try to do all of the above, to varying extents?
Anyone think that the "minibrowser" or whatever in WinAmp is the most ridiculous thing you've ever seen?
On a somewhat different, some would argue that excessive use of streaming media and abuse of HTML for really complex designs (strung together with Javascript, with all kinds of animated silliness) is really undesirable. Abusing standards just for a little graphical flair is really a bad thing anyway - it makes it both more difficult for users to view your content (by narrowing the range of browsers that can view it correctly), and makes it difficult for future software to evolve when so much effort must be spent on preserving backward compatibility.
nVidia and 3Dfx the leaders in *open* graphics? This is absurd. Neither company has released anything resembling usable specs for their chips. The 3Dfx Mesa driver is built on top of glide (which is closed), nVidia's OpenGL for the Riva boards (on linux) is open source, but the code is obfuscated, and it is too slow to use for anything except OpenGL screensavers.
Matrox is definately the leader in *open* graphics. They've release comprehensive docs for the G200/G400 chips, and as a result there is a project actively developing an accelerated driver for them, which is already capable of playing Q2/Q3 at a reasonable speed. And the matrox driver is rapidly improving, while nVidia's code has not improved since it was released months ago.
ATI has recently released specs for their chips too, BTW, although nothing has come of it yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is this funny? I certainly do. :)
Or better yet, LISP.
How is there no mention of Guilty Gear X in this thread?
Wow, I'm glad to see I'm not the only person who compares Soul Reaver to Metroid.
That makes absolutely no sense. Buying a copy of OS X is going to give you a CD full of code compiled for PowerPC, with no way to make any use of it on Intel sort of emulation. Darwin itself already runs on x86 hardware, so clearly the kernel is not the stumbling block.
> The apps which will work will be the ones that only use the BSD core and not the entire Aqua graphics layer where the majority of popular MacOS X application run. But it is conceivable that an emulation of Aqua could be created for NetBSD which could replace X11.
I think you are being short-sighted here. A smarter and more realistic goal would be to get the compatibility with Darwin good enough that you could run Aqua and the rest of the OS X userland on top of NetBSD, without having to rewrite it all yourself.
As I understand it, Melie did not seek copyrights outside of France, so you can't really call it piracy to show his films elsewhere.
blah, blah, blah. DOS screamed on my 486. Get over it.
I think this explains the true origins of the Cube.. It was a prototype for these parking garages!
Why not? Sure "why not". The reason is hardware support (obviously) - trying to support everything in people's computers now would be an almost impossible task (Linux has a hard enough time doing this, imagine every little game developer having to attempt it..). And assuming you COULD manage that half, the major thing would be that you wouldn't work on any new hardware released after the game shipped, unless it tried real real hard to be compatible with older hardware at a low level. In the age of the "legacy free PC", the industry is moving in exactly the opposite direction.
I think we've certainly lost something since the days of Amigas, Atari, and even older PCs (with 99% compatible hardware), where you had basically a fixed hardware platform and to get new features you crammed in extensions (rather than building something totally different and just writing new drivers). I wouldn't argue that either approach is better, but it's certainly lowers the barrier to entry for fun things like fringe operating systems, and, oh, say, games that boot off CD. Ages ago, there were actually a few PC games that booted off disk and bypassed MSDOS entirely.
Now you could agree upon some conventions and standards for drivers, how to arrange things on the disk so your self-booting software could find them, and you'd already be most of the way toward having an operating system. You'd then probably have a pile of CDs with utilities for configuring your hardware, managing files on the disk, etc, etc.. and eventually they'd start getting distributed together, coupled tighter and tighter, until you ended up with something indistinguishable from the operating systems we know today (reminds me somehow of the way business try to merge vertically until they encompass every aspect of their market, just to shave off a few percent of overhead each step of the way).
I think this is pretty much how the industry evolved to start with.
...based on the newest Java technologies. Oooh, newest java technologies! Seriously, what the fuck, are you trying to sell this to your boss or something?
The last thing we need to deal with is a bunch more kids crowding the job market in ten years.. :)
:)
And seriously, with the growing competition frow low wage programmers in India and elsewhere, shouldn't people get back to going to school for "real" jobs?
> BTW... Is anyone out there using Bochs?
Yes, but not for running applications. Bochs is very useful as a development tool to test operating systems or in general self-booting code that would otherwise have you rebooting your computer every five minutes.
That's not a bug, it's a feature.
Is it just me, or does no one really seem to care about adopting IPv6? The free software community has done a pretty admirable job implementing IPv6 and modifying things to work with it. If the world switched tomorrow, linux users would probably be the first ones up and running. Meanwhile, people like Microsoft sit on their asses until all the IP addresses run out and a real crisis develops.
So, maybe it will be the Asian countries that finally push IPv6 toward being adopted. OTOH, in countries like China, maybe the government would be happier if 1+ billion people were forced behind NAT and a handful of filtering proxies due to lack of free addresses. =p
You know, I find it pretty interesting how vastly AMD's chips outpace the P4 clock-per-clock.It's widely acknowledged that the P4 gets less done per clock than the P3 did. Some people have said that the P4's memory architecture is a disaster, or that it is pipelined TOO deep, but I've got a sort of conspiracy theory about this. Granted I'm not a computer engineer, and know just enough to hang myself with, but here goes:
I think they've manipulated the design so they can deliberately increase the clock rate for marketing reasons, without getting proportionally more performance out. Basically I suppose they've taken the longest paths through the chip and stuck latches all over the place so that the overall cycle time can be reduced, but operations that used to take one clock cycle now may take two. When 1.8 GHz AMDs can nearly match the speed of a 3 GHz P4, I don't think this is an entirely unplausible theory.
On the other hand, maybe the P4 really just is a pig. There was some discussion on usenet a while back about how it takes upward to 2000 clock cycles to enter and exit an interrupt handler on the P4, something which an old 486 could do in ~45 cycle IIRC (and I don't recall exactly, but I think the Athlon today can do an INT/IRET pair in a few hundred cycles). Curious how in hyper-optimizing these chips for the most common cases of execution, performance of these sorts of periphery operations goes all to hell.
That said, I'm really looking forward to having 64-bits on the desktop. =)
Just by sumitting my buddy list, I've automatically made all my buddies immensely more popular than myself, as they all appear on one buddy list (mine), whereas none of them have uploaded their lists, so I appear on no buddy lists. Funny how that works out.
Yes, the higher end Lexmark Optra printers are great.
We used to use a bunch of Optra S's (1250s, I think) where I used to work, and they happily printed tens of thousands of pages without incident. Ironically, our old Optras were taken out and replaced with a newer model Optra that didn't work nearly well, jamming more frequently, and being somewhat inconsistant about how your text got lined up if you were using a special label stock. I frequently cursed whoever at our corporate office was responsible for removing those old printers.
Recently Lexmark have been branding some really cheap laser printers with the Optra name. These are to be avoided at all costs, as they are built with cheap inkjet-grade components. The Optra T612 is one such model. Ironically, these seem to sell for about the same price on eBay as the much nicer Optra S's that cost five times as much new. Granted, the median page count on an Optra S seems to be 40k pages, but if you look around eBay you see that some of them there have survived to 100k pages, so they're pretty reliable.
I play a lot of Castle Wolfenstein, and there is a thing called WolfTV which is pretty much what you describe. There's also a version available for Q3.
It basically acts as a sort of proxy game server that you connect to, and what you see is relayed from the view of a cameraman who is connected as a spectator to the real server where the match is being played. It's pretty neat, and draws suprising numbers of viewers.
You might describe it as the programming language compiler becoming aware of a pattern, and learning to implement it when told.
And as a (bitter?) Lisp programmer, I'm suspicious of a language that isn't flexible enough to provide an easy way to integrate the pattern into the language without having to use some silly preprocessor or (god forbid) modify the compiler. =)
Funny, this is the exact argument LISP programmers have been making for the last fifteen years.. Python has long been accused of progressively stealing more and more of LISP, but given LISP's current commercial success (or lack thereof) I might argue against also immitating its advocates.. ;)
[disclaimer: I am not disparaging either LISP or Python, in fact Common Lisp is my favorite language, I'm simply pointing out that I've heard this argument before]
I've read that for McCoy's first season they were using scripts originally written for Colin Baker. I don't remember most of McCoy's stories very well, but I think as a character he really came into his own in his second or third season, and I enjoyed him as the Doctor.
That makes me wonder what happened to Colin Baker, I've never heard the story - did they fire him? did he quit?
I ment that is the reason why LISP was not used. It did not work like the hardware.
Which is a damn shame. I consider this a deficiency of modern hardware really - in the old days there were dedicated LISP machines with CPUs designed for LISP, and they were things of beauty. Most of the 'modern' languages that are coming into vogue - Java, Python, even Perl - have adopted some subset of LISP's most powerful features, particularly garbage collection and dynamic typing (although maybe not in Java's case). The major feature lost today is a tagged memory architecture, where every word in memory has a few bits set aside to say what type of object is stored there. This would go a long way toward efficiently implementing a "scripting" language like Python, and brings a relieving level of sanity to the table in large object oriented systems (as are the fashion today). Lisp's type system is inherently "object-oriented" without making primitive types (such as integers, characters, etc) feel like second-class citizens (as Java does) - everything is an object, just not necessarily an instance of a class.
But yes, as someone who programs in Common LISP, I occasionally lament how far away from the hardware I am programming. But when I get the same code written with a fraction of the time it would take to write in C (or in the same amount of time, but relatively free of bugs), I get over it, and just wish that we could have CPUs that supported a post 1970s programming style rather than spending 50 million transistors squeezing performance out of the horrid x86 ISA.
Lisp compilers these days do an impressive job of rivalling C performance, and the overhead you pay is still worth it for what you get from the environment. After shuddering at the sluggishness of Java applications or that fine example of modern C++ over-engineering, Mozilla, I've no doubt that I can write faster, better software in Common Lisp.
Do we really need to get the roles of all our software tangled and confused like this? Wouldn't life be much simpler if everything was logically divided into seperate applications (browser, mail, news, video players, etc.), rather than gargantuan applications that try to do all of the above, to varying extents?
Anyone think that the "minibrowser" or whatever in WinAmp is the most ridiculous thing you've ever seen?
On a somewhat different, some would argue that excessive use of streaming media and abuse of HTML for really complex designs (strung together with Javascript, with all kinds of animated silliness) is really undesirable. Abusing standards just for a little graphical flair is really a bad thing anyway - it makes it both more difficult for users to view your content (by narrowing the range of browsers that can view it correctly), and makes it difficult for future software to evolve when so much effort must be spent on preserving backward compatibility.
Thoughts ?
nVidia and 3Dfx the leaders in *open* graphics? This is absurd. Neither company has released anything resembling usable specs for their chips.
The 3Dfx Mesa driver is built on top of glide (which is closed), nVidia's OpenGL for the Riva boards (on linux) is open source, but the code is obfuscated, and it is too slow to use for anything except OpenGL screensavers.
Matrox is definately the leader in *open* graphics. They've release comprehensive docs for the G200/G400 chips, and as a result there is a project actively developing an accelerated driver for them, which is already capable of playing Q2/Q3 at a reasonable speed. And the matrox driver is rapidly improving, while nVidia's code has not improved since it was released months ago.
ATI has recently released specs for their chips too, BTW, although nothing has come of it yet.