I do some consulting/pc maintenance for a small company that still runs their machines on Win95 and uses Office95 for their work, and the combo still runs fine. The majority of their "business" apps are web based, and Firefox runs fine on it, and as far as anyone is concerned, as long as the document comes off the printer correctly, no one cares what program created it.
It's interesting to go there; it's like time has stood still since 1995 and you realize that "good enough" can go back pretty darn far.
I can't RTFA because of web error, but while I haven't tried Vista's idea of symlinks, I have used junctions, which were introduced in Win2000. To me, symlinks are one of the best features of Unix and on my Mac and Linux machines, I use them quite extensively. On Windows, while the junction API was available, no Microsoft-specific tools made use of them (that I could find), and resorted to a freeware program that implemented the junction api.
Whoa, big mistake. Junctions *do* work, but, and I think this is why Microsoft didn't promote or encourage their use, none of their other tools support them. In other words, doing a search of a drive that has junctions can lead to infinite recursion depending on how the junction is created. No Windows tools understand the "Don't follow symlinks" command that Unix tools have, and I had a few programs even crash whenever I tried to save to a junctioned-folder (Visual Studio was guaranteed to crash on me).
It's really simple. If you think that politics and all its repercussions will have absolutely, positively, *no* effect on you at all, don't bother. If even one tiny insignificant aspect touches your life, then it's your *duty*, regardless of country, to be informed and make sure that you're heard.
Only then will you be able to put the "Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos" bumper sticker on your car without guilt.
I think the Mac really is the "Google PC" that has been rumored. The key thing is that I'll bet it will be more a symbiotic partnership instead of a re-badged Mac; the next version of OSX could ship with the entire suite of available Google Mac apps, Google says that the Mac works best for their software, maybe new apps and features that are not available on the Windows version, etc. I could also imagine.Mac taking on a more "Google" hue, with docs written in Writely or whatever available for sync on.Mac.
Even though their stuff is essentially web-based, Google still needs a delivery platform. As others have suggested, it's possible that the killer-apps of the future will be both on-and-offline and thus having both Apple and Google working on both sides of the equation, together they will provide enough benefit to take on Microsoft, who has proven time and again that they want the playground for themselves, alone.
If a Google/Apple partnership works out, they have a very real potential of hitting at both of Microsoft's profitable products: Windows and Office, upon which the MS empire rests.
Nethack has been one of my favorite games throughout the years, though I've come to realize that I've had more fun getting it to work on obscure hardware than playing the actual game (in the 18 years I've played it, I've only ascended once).
Nethack is one interesting in that they don't provide a config file that presumably would make compiling simple (and less of a challenge), so when building it on anything, you have to figure out what features your flavor of Unix has and set the #defines in the.h file appropriately.
In the 18 years, I've compiled it on an original NeXT cube, a Playstation2 running Linux, a Vax running Ultrix (didn't like the BSD flavor, nor the SYS V..was weird blend), a Cray2 and a Convex something-or-other.
The only problem was that the Convex used an accounting system to track usage, and between compiling and playing, I ended up being "charged" around $1000 in cpu time.
Good times.
Re:Say what about the Dreamcast?!
on
Consoles M.I.A.
·
· Score: 1
No, Sega Rally 2 was a WinCE game in the US; that was the only game I had for the Dreamcast that actually crashed on me, causing the console to reboot. I broke a controller because I had been struggling with an ice track for sooo long, and when I thought I had beaten it, suddenly I was looking at the DC spiral screen.
I bought a *lot* of DC games and I think that, and maybe Crazy Taxi, were the only games that used WinCE. I remember also MSDN had, for awhile, a lot of info on using DirectX with WinCE specifically for the Dreamcast...they even had, in the docs, a pic of a red DC(!).
Ew. Oracle without a DBA? That's just asking for trouble.
I agree with you, but I've seen a number of small shops that buy Oracle because some specialized software they really need uses it. They typically follow the software developer's specs to the letter, buying slightly-above minimum specs, get a consultant (ahem) to install Oracle and then the app, then throw the box in a closet. They completely forget about it, not caring a whit about performance or tuning because it "does what they need it to do" and that's good enough.
They take the same approach for their email server, file server, etc....I end up doing backups and little else because so much of the software is esentially self-tuning and self-healing. Not *always*, but enough times that I rarely have to go to the sites except to say hi and get free coffee.
I can see Oracle delivering an appliance a la Google, whereby your $40k db license includes a 1U box that slides into the rack, and through the web page you start creating databases. Add scalability by getting another box (discount after 5). Throw in a second nic that would be SAN ready and you've got a no-muss, no fuss database platform.
I think, though, the real key to something like this, and make its appeal greater is if Oracle supported the box themselves, remotely. Let *them* deal with patches, upgrades, etc., and they work with you to schedule downtime. The box is esentially hands-off except for the database itself, but for a lot of smaller shops, or shops where they don't want to invest in dba cost, I could see this being a rather attractive offer.
Also, it wouldn't compete with the db on other platforms, because what you're getting is convience and piece of mind.
Heh, that's funny, in my school it was called "high water". The "it" kids would yell, more or less in unison, "HIGH WATER!" which was the call to run. We did it on a big concrete parking lot, so there was a lot of running and pushing with all that momentum behind it. Lots of falls to the ground, some tears, but good times and fond memories...I don't know of anyone who ended up getting walked to the nurse who wasn't out playing it again the next day.
I have to concur..I too have developed on Lotus Notes (starting with version 3) and have a friend who was a Notes-only developer; Notes is, at the end of the day, a pretty awful product. It doesn't know if it wants to be a database, document repository, email system, self-hosting app server, etc. Maybe it was ground-breaking in its day as the one-stop shop for all things networked, but it reminded me of an enterprise-level Microsoft Works or Lotus Symphony on acid; at least in Works you knew the limitations...in Notes you couldn't even *find* things you needed in the menus.
I've heard Ray Ozzie speak and he reminds me a lot of Ted Nelson, of Xandau fame; lots of big ideas and grand concepts that smash into the wall of practability and useability.
There isn't a single game that has done for me what the original did. We Love Katamari was ho hum after the original (which I still play). UT2K3 was nowhere near as much fun as the original Unreal Tournament. Project Gotham Racing 2 was "eh" after the original, and I don't have a 360 so I haven't had the pleasure of PGR3. And who thought San Andreas was so much better than Vice City, or even the "original" GTA3.
Sure maybe the control schemes are the same but the fact is that nothing grabs you like an original concept that works, so much so that a sequel is really just a warmed-over rehash of the same material to squeeze every last drop of $$$ from the player.
Meanwhile, real "sequels" get short shrift: I got through both Shenmue and Shenmue 2 they leave you wanting more, but at this point more will never come.
...the white model. The happy couple are frollicking in... the east river of New York City. That's the Manhattan bridge in the background, and they're esentially right below and slightly west of the Brooklyn Bridge.
I have walked/jogged/biked/fled from that area thousands of times and it is *not* anywhere you want to put your feet in the water...the water itself is unbelievably polluted, and unless the pic is doctored, or somebody spent a month cleaning up the area, the dude is walking on broken glass, rusted everything, and stuff that can't be identified, and maybe that's for the best.
I'm not sure what to message to take from the pic: "Take a life threatening chance: buy a Zune!" comes to mind.
As a parent, I was thinking pretty much the same thing that the author did, and have come to the conclusion that Ruby is the way to go; it's fully object-oriented, but doesn't impose such rigorous requirements like Java, it's easy (really really easy), comes built in on my OSX machine, and with irb (the interactive ruby interpreter), I can show my daughters the results in real time. When the program gets bigger than 10 lines, we switch to an editor and write the programs out that way. Simple and straightforward, but with limitless possibilties.
I looked into Squeak, which is Smalltalk with a kid-friendly feel, but it felt to me (and to them) like being thrown into a candy store and told to take anything and everything; they spent too much time clicking on things just to see what they did or what happened next and didn't get anything done.
Ultimately I want my kids to understand what's going on behind the curtain, and getting them to understand how "programming" works in general is a good way to go. But more than just showing them that you can write a program to print a Fibernacci sequence is to get them to understand that a computer can do *anything* if you tell it to if you spend the time to figure it out.
I'm all for cutting-edge design and pushing the envelope with visual metaphors, but the ribbon concept feels too much like a brainstorm of what can be done to make this version of office more sellable than any previous version. I admit that I like the concept and have played with the beta, but ribbons alone doesn't make it worth it to me to upgrade from office 2000 (which I've come to appreciate the sort of lean-n-mean look you can give it).
In essence, they're stuck: it's still a word processor, spreadsheet, and slide creator. Today's fancy computerized presses are still just variations on Gutenberg's idea; without a total re-think of writing, communication, calculation (which is pretty much beyond *my* grasp), future versions of office will be more-of-the-same forever, which means I don't feel any need to upgrade, and thus MS loses a customer.
Of course, I don't expect MS to come up with any major revolutionary products...they would alienate the business customer too much (which even the ribbon idea is apparently doing).
Strange as it seems, but there was a time when UNIVAC was in the same boat as Google, Xerox, Kleenex, etc.; you didn't say a computer was going to help streamline your business, you said that a UNIVAC was going to help you streamline your business, even though you probably still bought from IBM.
At the end of the day, you still have to remain a viable business lest time wash away every aspect of your existence, entrenched meme or not.
I don't think it's Steve Jobs per se, but the fact is, and it's not limited to Apple or Microsoft, but innovation is clearly slowing down. Virtual desktops are a great addition to OSX, but as (many) others have pointed out, Unix has had it for years and you can get similar functionality from other products. Time Machine is a great idea, as is the VMS versioned file system.
It's come down to new takes on old ideas; everything that has been toted as a new feature in OSX (and Vista) can be found in some other product or OS. While OSX's great strength is its Unix roots, Unix itself has been around literally my entire life. Not much innovation there.
I'm not saying Unix isn't an awesome OS, its longevity is a testiment to this fact, but complacency has certainly set in across the research spectrum, AFAIK; where are the truly groundbreaking ideas in interfaces, storage, etc.? Why has nothing that has been put forth been greeted with anything more than a ho-hum? Can we not find something better than the desktop metaphor to organize everything by? Is there nothing better?
New ideas seems to be a well on the verge of running dry and no one cares enough to notice. Until somebody comes along with some truly ground-breaking stuff, I see Microsoft's and Apple's OS offerings getting thinner and thinner from version to version; just not enough meat to hang on the old bones.
And while I'm ranting, Linux provides the *perfect* platform for people to go nuts on...it's completely open, anyone can use it and work with it...no one has an excuse not to use it for developing the next great leap in computer technology. The banquet is all set, but who is coming to dinner? Why do we have these pointless KDE-vs-Gnome, Reiser4-vs-everybody, distro-vs-distro holy wars?
I wish there was *more* information. It might not be your cup of tea, but there are those folks who like the history of computers and operating systems as much as others are interested in the American civil war, WWII, dinosaurs, whatever.
This is a great idea in the same way that Citrix, Terminal Server, and X in general is a good idea: you need next to nothing to run big, complex, perhaps very expensive software. This site doesn't have any of that, trying instead to replicate a typical desktop, but the idea is a great one and one I"m sure we'll see a lot more in the future. While X is defacto free but can't be run through a browser, Citrix and Termnial Server (both of which do have browser versions), cost a lot of money in liceneses, etc.
Yes, technically it isn't an OS and it's performance isn't all that great, but they're not exactly promising anything; this makes for a good proof of conceptm and I wouldn't be surprised if somebody like SalesForce takes the idea and runs with it; I think we'll probably see *real* web-based desktops within ten years (where the apps are full enough featured and fast) and don't need activex or java.
Pirating is bad, regardless of the platform. What offends me is that a sense of mutual distrust has been established; MS doesn't trust me so they're going to check every so often on the off chance that suddenly my legit copy of windows isn't, and I can't trust MS because I have little to no idea, as an end user, what they're doing to spy on me or my activities.
Apple's approach is different; you can't run OSX on vanilla hardware, so you don't even get the chance. Once OSX is up and running, though, you're basically left alone because the presumption is that you're using OSX on an Apple machine and that doesn't need to be "investigated" further.
Microsoft has esentially brought to the computing world the "random search and siezure" attitude of a number of governments with one difference: governments can only reach a small segment of the population at any given time (the "funny-lookin'" etc.) but MS can literally search *everyone* using Windows, whenever they please.
If you're developing for the Mac, or simply developing on the Mac, you'll eventually want to use some sort of source control. CVS comes on the machine by default, and you can get MacCVS, but lately I've been using Subversion and find it to be a great program, even if the gui tools are a little raw.
They're all coded in straight C with assembly where appropriate. I read somewhere that part of the graphics engine in Win2000 was written in C++, but I can't find any claim to back that up.
Apart from BeOS and OS/400, which were written in pure C++, I believe most operating systems are written in C...as difficult it is to write and debug an operating system in any language, adding a more complex language to the mix will make it that more difficult to track down bugs; I don't think it's explicitly mentioned in Brook's Mythical Man Month, but OS/360 was written in PL/I and that was apparently a very heavyweight language, which added to the complexity and difficulty in getting it out the door.
This is the *one* thing (really, only thing) that I like about VMS...every file is automatically versioned. I create a foo.c, it gets saved as foo.c;1. I edit it, save it, then there's a foo.c;2. I can always go back and look at foo.c;1 if I want and diff the two. What's also really slick is that you don't have to specify the version number... it always assumes you want the current version, but if you do edit foo.c;1 again, and save it, then it becomes foo.c;3 (because there is already a foo.c;2).
If any other operating system (preferably a Unix-based one)'s filesystem implemented this, I'd be in hog heaven. Reiser is supposed to have the concept of plugins, and I even took a look at the docs, but fs hacking is way out of my league.
You don't get *true* version control, of course...comments, checkouts, properties, etc., but just knowing that you can have an uh-oh moment and go back one or two versions is a real life saver.
I was a big Soul Calibur fan and, while it was still popular in the arcades, the Dreamcast comes out and there's this perfect port of it...I was literally stunned at the prospect of being able to play *exactly* what I had in the arcade at home. Same with Crazy Taxi, House of the Dead, Sega Rally 2, etc. I was able to directly translate slogging through all of SR2 on the DC to wowing people at a fancy arcade in Time Square.
The Dreamcast was the machine you wanted...it had all of Sega's great games (I know, SC was Namco) and could play them extremely well. But sadly, arcades were already disappearing and people assumed that anything by Nintendo was a toy, Sega was crap, and Sony was where all the cool kids were. Real shame...I still have my DC and it still plays and those games are *still* a lot of fun, even if I can't find an arcade to show off my mad skillz anymore. Ah well, thanks for the memories, Sega!
Slashdot Mirror
I do some consulting/pc maintenance for a small company that still runs their machines on Win95 and uses Office95 for their work, and the combo still runs fine. The majority of their "business" apps are web based, and Firefox runs fine on it, and as far as anyone is concerned, as long as the document comes off the printer correctly, no one cares what program created it.
It's interesting to go there; it's like time has stood still since 1995 and you realize that "good enough" can go back pretty darn far.
I can't RTFA because of web error, but while I haven't tried Vista's idea of symlinks, I have used junctions, which were introduced in Win2000. To me, symlinks are one of the best features of Unix and on my Mac and Linux machines, I use them quite extensively. On Windows, while the junction API was available, no Microsoft-specific tools made use of them (that I could find), and resorted to a freeware program that implemented the junction api.
Whoa, big mistake. Junctions *do* work, but, and I think this is why Microsoft didn't promote or encourage their use, none of their other tools support them. In other words, doing a search of a drive that has junctions can lead to infinite recursion depending on how the junction is created. No Windows tools understand the "Don't follow symlinks" command that Unix tools have, and I had a few programs even crash whenever I tried to save to a junctioned-folder (Visual Studio was guaranteed to crash on me).
It's really simple. If you think that politics and all its repercussions will have absolutely, positively, *no* effect on you at all, don't bother. If even one tiny insignificant aspect touches your life, then it's your *duty*, regardless of country, to be informed and make sure that you're heard.
Only then will you be able to put the "Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos" bumper sticker on your car without guilt.
I think the Mac really is the "Google PC" that has been rumored. The key thing is that I'll bet it will be more a symbiotic partnership instead of a re-badged Mac; the next version of OSX could ship with the entire suite of available Google Mac apps, Google says that the Mac works best for their software, maybe new apps and features that are not available on the Windows version, etc. I could also imagine .Mac taking on a more "Google" hue, with docs written in Writely or whatever available for sync on .Mac.
Even though their stuff is essentially web-based, Google still needs a delivery platform. As others have suggested, it's possible that the killer-apps of the future will be both on-and-offline and thus having both Apple and Google working on both sides of the equation, together they will provide enough benefit to take on Microsoft, who has proven time and again that they want the playground for themselves, alone.
If a Google/Apple partnership works out, they have a very real potential of hitting at both of Microsoft's profitable products: Windows and Office, upon which the MS empire rests.
Nethack has been one of my favorite games throughout the years, though I've come to realize that I've had more fun getting it to work on obscure hardware than playing the actual game (in the 18 years I've played it, I've only ascended once).
.h file appropriately.
Nethack is one interesting in that they don't provide a config file that presumably would make compiling simple (and less of a challenge), so when building it on anything, you have to figure out what features your flavor of Unix has and set the #defines in the
In the 18 years, I've compiled it on an original NeXT cube, a Playstation2 running Linux, a Vax running Ultrix (didn't like the BSD flavor, nor the SYS V..was weird blend), a Cray2 and a Convex something-or-other.
The only problem was that the Convex used an accounting system to track usage, and between compiling and playing, I ended up being "charged" around $1000 in cpu time.
Good times.
No, Sega Rally 2 was a WinCE game in the US; that was the only game I had for the Dreamcast that actually crashed on me, causing the console to reboot. I broke a controller because I had been struggling with an ice track for sooo long, and when I thought I had beaten it, suddenly I was looking at the DC spiral screen.
I bought a *lot* of DC games and I think that, and maybe Crazy Taxi, were the only games that used WinCE. I remember also MSDN had, for awhile, a lot of info on using DirectX with WinCE specifically for the Dreamcast...they even had, in the docs, a pic of a red DC(!).
Ew. Oracle without a DBA? That's just asking for trouble.
I agree with you, but I've seen a number of small shops that buy Oracle because some specialized software they really need uses it. They typically follow the software developer's specs to the letter, buying slightly-above minimum specs, get a consultant (ahem) to install Oracle and then the app, then throw the box in a closet. They completely forget about it, not caring a whit about performance or tuning because it "does what they need it to do" and that's good enough.
They take the same approach for their email server, file server, etc....I end up doing backups and little else because so much of the software is esentially self-tuning and self-healing. Not *always*, but enough times that I rarely have to go to the sites except to say hi and get free coffee.
I can see Oracle delivering an appliance a la Google, whereby your $40k db license includes a 1U box that slides into the rack, and through the web page you start creating databases. Add scalability by getting another box (discount after 5). Throw in a second nic that would be SAN ready and you've got a no-muss, no fuss database platform.
I think, though, the real key to something like this, and make its appeal greater is if Oracle supported the box themselves, remotely. Let *them* deal with patches, upgrades, etc., and they work with you to schedule downtime. The box is esentially hands-off except for the database itself, but for a lot of smaller shops, or shops where they don't want to invest in dba cost, I could see this being a rather attractive offer.
Also, it wouldn't compete with the db on other platforms, because what you're getting is convience and piece of mind.
Heh, that's funny, in my school it was called "high water". The "it" kids would yell, more or less in unison, "HIGH WATER!" which was the call to run. We did it on a big concrete parking lot, so there was a lot of running and pushing with all that momentum behind it. Lots of falls to the ground, some tears, but good times and fond memories...I don't know of anyone who ended up getting walked to the nurse who wasn't out playing it again the next day.
I have to concur..I too have developed on Lotus Notes (starting with version 3) and have a friend who was a Notes-only developer; Notes is, at the end of the day, a pretty awful product. It doesn't know if it wants to be a database, document repository, email system, self-hosting app server, etc. Maybe it was ground-breaking in its day as the one-stop shop for all things networked, but it reminded me of an enterprise-level Microsoft Works or Lotus Symphony on acid; at least in Works you knew the limitations...in Notes you couldn't even *find* things you needed in the menus.
The interface was also so bad that it warrants its own page in the interface hall of shame.
I've heard Ray Ozzie speak and he reminds me a lot of Ted Nelson, of Xandau fame; lots of big ideas and grand concepts that smash into the wall of practability and useability.
There isn't a single game that has done for me what the original did. We Love Katamari was ho hum after the original (which I still play). UT2K3 was nowhere near as much fun as the original Unreal Tournament. Project Gotham Racing 2 was "eh" after the original, and I don't have a 360 so I haven't had the pleasure of PGR3. And who thought San Andreas was so much better than Vice City, or even the "original" GTA3.
Sure maybe the control schemes are the same but the fact is that nothing grabs you like an original concept that works, so much so that a sequel is really just a warmed-over rehash of the same material to squeeze every last drop of $$$ from the player.
Meanwhile, real "sequels" get short shrift: I got through both Shenmue and Shenmue 2 they leave you wanting more, but at this point more will never come.
...the white model. The happy couple are frollicking in ... the east river of New York City. That's the Manhattan bridge in the background, and they're esentially right below and slightly west of the Brooklyn Bridge.
I have walked/jogged/biked/fled from that area thousands of times and it is *not* anywhere you want to put your feet in the water...the water itself is unbelievably polluted, and unless the pic is doctored, or somebody spent a month cleaning up the area, the dude is walking on broken glass, rusted everything, and stuff that can't be identified, and maybe that's for the best.
I'm not sure what to message to take from the pic: "Take a life threatening chance: buy a Zune!" comes to mind.
As a parent, I was thinking pretty much the same thing that the author did, and have come to the conclusion that Ruby is the way to go; it's fully object-oriented, but doesn't impose such rigorous requirements like Java, it's easy (really really easy), comes built in on my OSX machine, and with irb (the interactive ruby interpreter), I can show my daughters the results in real time. When the program gets bigger than 10 lines, we switch to an editor and write the programs out that way. Simple and straightforward, but with limitless possibilties.
I looked into Squeak, which is Smalltalk with a kid-friendly feel, but it felt to me (and to them) like being thrown into a candy store and told to take anything and everything; they spent too much time clicking on things just to see what they did or what happened next and didn't get anything done.
Ultimately I want my kids to understand what's going on behind the curtain, and getting them to understand how "programming" works in general is a good way to go. But more than just showing them that you can write a program to print a Fibernacci sequence is to get them to understand that a computer can do *anything* if you tell it to if you spend the time to figure it out.
I'm all for cutting-edge design and pushing the envelope with visual metaphors, but the ribbon concept feels too much like a brainstorm of what can be done to make this version of office more sellable than any previous version. I admit that I like the concept and have played with the beta, but ribbons alone doesn't make it worth it to me to upgrade from office 2000 (which I've come to appreciate the sort of lean-n-mean look you can give it).
In essence, they're stuck: it's still a word processor, spreadsheet, and slide creator. Today's fancy computerized presses are still just variations on Gutenberg's idea; without a total re-think of writing, communication, calculation (which is pretty much beyond *my* grasp), future versions of office will be more-of-the-same forever, which means I don't feel any need to upgrade, and thus MS loses a customer.
Of course, I don't expect MS to come up with any major revolutionary products...they would alienate the business customer too much (which even the ribbon idea is apparently doing).
Strange as it seems, but there was a time when UNIVAC was in the same boat as Google, Xerox, Kleenex, etc.; you didn't say a computer was going to help streamline your business, you said that a UNIVAC was going to help you streamline your business, even though you probably still bought from IBM.
At the end of the day, you still have to remain a viable business lest time wash away every aspect of your existence, entrenched meme or not.
I don't think it's Steve Jobs per se, but the fact is, and it's not limited to Apple or Microsoft, but innovation is clearly slowing down. Virtual desktops are a great addition to OSX, but as (many) others have pointed out, Unix has had it for years and you can get similar functionality from other products. Time Machine is a great idea, as is the VMS versioned file system.
It's come down to new takes on old ideas; everything that has been toted as a new feature in OSX (and Vista) can be found in some other product or OS. While OSX's great strength is its Unix roots, Unix itself has been around literally my entire life. Not much innovation there.
I'm not saying Unix isn't an awesome OS, its longevity is a testiment to this fact, but complacency has certainly set in across the research spectrum, AFAIK; where are the truly groundbreaking ideas in interfaces, storage, etc.? Why has nothing that has been put forth been greeted with anything more than a ho-hum? Can we not find something better than the desktop metaphor to organize everything by? Is there nothing better?
New ideas seems to be a well on the verge of running dry and no one cares enough to notice. Until somebody comes along with some truly ground-breaking stuff, I see Microsoft's and Apple's OS offerings getting thinner and thinner from version to version; just not enough meat to hang on the old bones.
And while I'm ranting, Linux provides the *perfect* platform for people to go nuts on...it's completely open, anyone can use it and work with it...no one has an excuse not to use it for developing the next great leap in computer technology. The banquet is all set, but who is coming to dinner? Why do we have these pointless KDE-vs-Gnome, Reiser4-vs-everybody, distro-vs-distro holy wars?
I wish there was *more* information. It might not be your cup of tea, but there are those folks who like the history of computers and operating systems as much as others are interested in the American civil war, WWII, dinosaurs, whatever.
One person's curio is another person's obsession.
This is a great idea in the same way that Citrix, Terminal Server, and X in general is a good idea: you need next to nothing to run big, complex, perhaps very expensive software. This site doesn't have any of that, trying instead to replicate a typical desktop, but the idea is a great one and one I"m sure we'll see a lot more in the future. While X is defacto free but can't be run through a browser, Citrix and Termnial Server (both of which do have browser versions), cost a lot of money in liceneses, etc.
Yes, technically it isn't an OS and it's performance isn't all that great, but they're not exactly promising anything; this makes for a good proof of conceptm and I wouldn't be surprised if somebody like SalesForce takes the idea and runs with it; I think we'll probably see *real* web-based desktops within ten years (where the apps are full enough featured and fast) and don't need activex or java.
Pirating is bad, regardless of the platform. What offends me is that a sense of mutual distrust has been established; MS doesn't trust me so they're going to check every so often on the off chance that suddenly my legit copy of windows isn't, and I can't trust MS because I have little to no idea, as an end user, what they're doing to spy on me or my activities.
Apple's approach is different; you can't run OSX on vanilla hardware, so you don't even get the chance. Once OSX is up and running, though, you're basically left alone because the presumption is that you're using OSX on an Apple machine and that doesn't need to be "investigated" further.
Microsoft has esentially brought to the computing world the "random search and siezure" attitude of a number of governments with one difference: governments can only reach a small segment of the population at any given time (the "funny-lookin'" etc.) but MS can literally search *everyone* using Windows, whenever they please.
If you're developing for the Mac, or simply developing on the Mac, you'll eventually want to use some sort of source control. CVS comes on the machine by default, and you can get MacCVS, but lately I've been using Subversion and find it to be a great program, even if the gui tools are a little raw.
/ 24158 There are others, but they all have their various quirks that have kept me coming back to svnX.
My favorite right now on the Mac is svnX: http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx
If anyone knows of a better Subversion tool on the Mac (on Windows I use TortoiseSVN and it's great) I'd love to know what it is.
Hmm...seems to be a problem with the URL tag...remove the trailing slash that was not added by me from the URL and it will go to the right page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLI
Perhaps, but I'm guessing the other part was PL/I: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLI/
They're all coded in straight C with assembly where appropriate. I read somewhere that part of the graphics engine in Win2000 was written in C++, but I can't find any claim to back that up.
Apart from BeOS and OS/400, which were written in pure C++, I believe most operating systems are written in C...as difficult it is to write and debug an operating system in any language, adding a more complex language to the mix will make it that more difficult to track down bugs; I don't think it's explicitly mentioned in Brook's Mythical Man Month, but OS/360 was written in PL/I and that was apparently a very heavyweight language, which added to the complexity and difficulty in getting it out the door.
This is the *one* thing (really, only thing) that I like about VMS...every file is automatically versioned. I create a foo.c, it gets saved as foo.c;1. I edit it, save it, then there's a foo.c;2. I can always go back and look at foo.c;1 if I want and diff the two. What's also really slick is that you don't have to specify the version number ... it always assumes you want the current version, but if you do edit foo.c;1 again, and save it, then it becomes foo.c;3 (because there is already a foo.c;2).
If any other operating system (preferably a Unix-based one)'s filesystem implemented this, I'd be in hog heaven. Reiser is supposed to have the concept of plugins, and I even took a look at the docs, but fs hacking is way out of my league.
You don't get *true* version control, of course...comments, checkouts, properties, etc., but just knowing that you can have an uh-oh moment and go back one or two versions is a real life saver.
I was a big Soul Calibur fan and, while it was still popular in the arcades, the Dreamcast comes out and there's this perfect port of it...I was literally stunned at the prospect of being able to play *exactly* what I had in the arcade at home. Same with Crazy Taxi, House of the Dead, Sega Rally 2, etc. I was able to directly translate slogging through all of SR2 on the DC to wowing people at a fancy arcade in Time Square.
The Dreamcast was the machine you wanted...it had all of Sega's great games (I know, SC was Namco) and could play them extremely well. But sadly, arcades were already disappearing and people assumed that anything by Nintendo was a toy, Sega was crap, and Sony was where all the cool kids were. Real shame...I still have my DC and it still plays and those games are *still* a lot of fun, even if I can't find an arcade to show off my mad skillz anymore. Ah well, thanks for the memories, Sega!