It's worth mentioning that what lies beneath Mac OS X is not Linux. It's BSD, another form of UNIX, the OS family which Linux is a clone of. Though they are very similar, there are a few differences between them in the usage of common command-line tools.
To be even more precise, Darwin (Mac OS X's variant of BSD) is actually a Mach microkernel with a BSD-clone kernel implemented on top of it and BSD and GNU userspace tools running on top of that.
As a long-time user of BBEdit who works with an expert emacs user, I'll have to scoff at that assertion. BBEdit is a wonderful text editor, but I've seen my coworker do some pretty amazing stuff with emacs without having to lift his fingers from the keyboard once. You can open UNIX shells in line with a window with a text file you have open. You can interpret LISP directly from within the editor. You can open and compare two or more files in the same window. Plus, there are a lot more applications with bindings for emacs in the UNIX world than there are made to work with BBEdit in the Mac world.
Personally, for actually editing files, I vastly prefer BBEdit, but emacs is definitely more of a comprehensive tool. All those features are the reason it's so huge and bloated as to have been nicknamed "Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping."
Actually, my mother used to up one of my cats and hugs him while he was upside down until he made a certain sound. She thought the murmured double meow sounded like, "Mama." I thought it sounded like, "Put me down, you crazy bi..."
Never mind.
Re:Instead of sprinkling around duplicate code...
on
Apple Drops Mac OS 9
·
· Score: 1
I'll just point out that this is irrelevant since we're talking about what happens in the code at execution time, when the test-statements would've been executed. Even if you do drag the application's folder around, it's not going to affect which operating system it's currently running under until you quit, reboot, and restart it.
It didn't help that the company had been abusing this machine WAY past its rated specs for years.
Isn't that always the case. I used to work in customer support for a company that wrote middleware for Stratus's fault-tolerant servers. We had two kinds of customers: (a) guys who had 5-50 top of the line servers sharing their load and a fully competent support staff for their operation and (b) the bozos running production and test networks on the same piece of 10-20 year old hardware that was constantly running at 100% CPU utilization and 80-100% memory and swap utilization.
When you're dealing with quarter of a million to multimillion dollar machines, you get a real case of haves and have-nots in IT budgets.
Another factor which may halt the adoption of this chemical as a fuel propellant is the pollution involved. Oxidizing pure nitrogen is bound to get you a lot of nitrogen dioxide (NOx) and other related pollutants. While this might be useful for small explosives, the output from launching a space shuttle off of this fuel might be too much for NASA to consider using even if it does become cheaper than current fuels one day.
On the other hand, the infrequency of launches may be such that the overall emission these pollutants compared to that of traffic in a large city may be negligible. Someone with a better grasp on the exact orders of magnitude here would have to tell you.
Actually, a decent bit of important information about an AVI file is contained at the END of the file. This is a major irritation for downloading DivX encoded files, such as in digital anime fansub circles where the guy you downloaded from isn't that careful about his stuff. You need to run the file through an AVI utility of some sort to fix the missing information, such as NanDub.
Even so, it is true that Windows Media Player can get by without the end information sometimes. Other times, it can't and you have problems.
Re:Instead of sprinkling around duplicate code...
on
Apple Drops Mac OS 9
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Maybe you should look into the Linux kernel for an example of what he's talking about. Rather than have several hardware or OS-dependent if-then statements inside of a single function, you break the function into several copies -- one version for each OS. Then, set a function pointer to the appropriate version for the OS you are running on at program initialization. If you are running under OS 9, point all your function pointers to the functions that use OpenTransport. If you are running under OS X, point all your function pointers to the functions that use sockets.
Since the OS isn't going to change under your program any more than the hardware changes underneath the Linux kernel, there's no reason to be constantly testing the platform. This changes the overhead of all the if-then statements to a single if-then statement, some function pointer initializations at startup, and a jump to a function pointer instead of a fixed constant each time you call the function. If the if-then statements are that much of a problem, you'll trade some minimal code bloat (in the form of the now repeated OS-independent parts of those functions) for much improved execution speed and significantly easier to read code (if done correctly).
A benefit is that it makes it relatively easy to add and drop OS support without having to go through code with a fine-tooth comb. Just delete or add the relevant functions and add/drop that OS from the test at start-up. The only downsides are tracking similar changes between versions and the tendency for code to severely mutate into completely diverse codebases if you don't have good design discipline.
Phage Press is not defunct, or at least it wasn't two years ago when I met Eric Wujcik in person. Rumors had been going around about the death of his company for a couple of years thanks to one of the major catalog companies claiming that it was dead. The truth of the story is that this company had not paid Phage Press for a shipment of the Amber DRPG and its suppliment "Shadow Knight." Since Wujcik was holding off on another shipment until they paid for the first, this distributor told all the stores that were trying to order more that Phage Press was out of business and continued to refuse to pay Wujcik.
Since Wujcik does not have enough money to fight them in court, this rumor persists to this day even though you can still get the game through other channels.
I just wish I could remember which company it was...
Actually, Zelazny's introspective and bemusedly world-weary style of writing is part of the whole fun of reading the stories of Corwin and Merlin. That's a major factor which will be lost when the books are made into a TV series, because few TV series actually focus on a character's internal monolouge. It's those bits of musing that make Corwin's character so strong in the first 5 books. Without that, Corwin will just be a big guy with a sword and a great sense of paranoid cunning.
"The Chronicles of Amber" is my favorite book series, hands-down. I've honestly feared the day that Hollywood or some TV producer finally got their hands on this series, because I have no doubt that they will completely ruin it like they have so many other of my favorites. I just can't stand having everyone's opinion of a book based off of some hack-job movie, like "Starship Troopers."
It's not like it would be hard to do the series right with modern moviemaking technology -- it is just completely unlikely. No good book gets made into a screenplay without something getting screwed. Parts will be cut out and minor scenes and characters will be made much more important, like Irulan in the new "Dune" mini-series. You can expect every sex scene Zelazny puts off to the side to get about 5 good minutes in each episode, while Corwin and Merlin's various solioquys will probably be cut.
I mean, why bother expecting continuity to the letter with the little details when they'll be too busy raping the spirit of the books like they do with everything else.
What frustrated me was that this article was real, so I started thinking some of the other articles were also real but inane. I thought they were trying for something new this year.
Actually, he's referring to this older Slashdot article, which you must've not read.
Now whether this formed in a vacuum or not is a technicality. The scientists shone high level of UV light on a chunk of ice containing ammonia and methyl alchohol at a temperature of 4K and found traces of 3 amino acids had formed. The amino acids themselves formed from the surrounding ice slurry which was in a vacuum, ergo "amino acids are formed in a vacuum."
Most people are used to measuring atomic explosives in terms of kilotons and megatons. Gigatons just don't register the same way mentally even though the number come out the same. It's the same reason that we continue to talk in microns instead of nanometers for microchip wire sizes and in cubic feet instead of cubic yards when dealing with the size of large tanks of liquid. You use a frame of reference people are familiar with.
While not completely fanless, various "BookPC" style systems are very small, very quiet, and very cheap. Just get a Celeron 533 or or a VIA C3 chip, and a heatsink will be good enough for these little systems. That's more than fast enough for most code compiling.
I've used one for about 3 days when I was trying to build a multimedia box for hooking up to a TV before I settled on the higher powered (and louder) Shuttle SV24 system.
I just put together one of these machines myself two weeks ago. Since then, I've had some heating problems and have had to replace a Celeron 1 GHz due to overheating after running a video compression job unattended overnight.
How hot does your system run after about 30 minutes of 100% CPU utilization? What kind of chip do you have in it, and are you using a PCI card in it?
I believe, however, that the only was I know of to do this on both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X (10.1+ only) is to mess with Low Memory like you're probably talking about. I can't be sure, though, since you're misusing terms. Try the above links and see if they help.
Hmmm and we can start removing buttons from everything because it is easier.
Straw man.
JEEZ you are dumb. Imagine trying to use a microwave if you only had a +1 second and -1 second button.
Ad hominem, followed by an ad ridiculoso argument.
The only real reason why there is only one buton on a MAC is because the original ones couldn't handle a two button mouse. Why couldn't they handle a two button mouse? Because when the mac was developed it was rushed..... That is the reason it had only 3 colours, black-white-grey.
3 falsehoods in a row.
The one-button mouse was a HCI decision meant to avoid confusing people. It's very well documented historically for those who actually read instead of making up nonsense. The development wasn't rushed, they just had limited resources to work with to make a more budget-friendly device than the Lisa. Finally, old Mac screens were monochromatic, like the vast majority of monitors in that day and time. They could only hand black or white. Though color monitors were available, but Mac team decided on a black-and-white screen to make it cheaper and to save on system resources. (Video took up 21K of the 128K in the original Mac.)
Real computers like the Amiga and the Atari ST took longer to produce, and had much more flexibility and power. But as Microsoft and Apple has shown us, good products can die and crappy ones can live!
These were later-generation computers that borrowed ideas from the Macintosh and had more resources to work with when the first versions of the OSes were created. The 128K limitation in the first Mac made the engineers make some tough compromises that would become legacy code that later computer designers didn't have to make. It's called progress.
The only thing worse then windows 3.1 is a MAC.
Obviously, you weren't using them both in the days of Win 3.1. The differences in functionality, stability, and power were night and day. The only reason Window won was that the price difference was also night and day.
They were the crappiest peices of crap that I ever had a chance to use. And I have used alot of crap in my life.
You sure seem to spew a lot of it too. (See, I can make ad hominem attacks too!)
The poster of the article in no way emphasized any desire to move to Linux except as a means of getting away from Microsoft. The Macintosh is a viable solution that allows one access to a wide range of multimedia products including several Flash development tools while avoiding the Evil Empire. You can get both Macromedia Flash and Adobe GoLive for the Mac without allowing MS software to touch your system. (...with the exception of IE, which takes all of 5 minutes to delete after you've download OmniWeb or Mozilla.)
One of the effects of global warming is predicted to be a global destabilization of weather systems. More extreme temperatures in both directions are expected as the global average temperature rises.
Thank god someone's finally working on it. I've been itching to do it myself for several years now, but I've just never had the free time to go digging for the documentation and to roll up my sleeves and code it.
Slashdot Mirror
It's worth mentioning that what lies beneath Mac OS X is not Linux. It's BSD, another form of UNIX, the OS family which Linux is a clone of. Though they are very similar, there are a few differences between them in the usage of common command-line tools.
To be even more precise, Darwin (Mac OS X's variant of BSD) is actually a Mach microkernel with a BSD-clone kernel implemented on top of it and BSD and GNU userspace tools running on top of that.
As a long-time user of BBEdit who works with an expert emacs user, I'll have to scoff at that assertion. BBEdit is a wonderful text editor, but I've seen my coworker do some pretty amazing stuff with emacs without having to lift his fingers from the keyboard once. You can open UNIX shells in line with a window with a text file you have open. You can interpret LISP directly from within the editor. You can open and compare two or more files in the same window. Plus, there are a lot more applications with bindings for emacs in the UNIX world than there are made to work with BBEdit in the Mac world.
Personally, for actually editing files, I vastly prefer BBEdit, but emacs is definitely more of a comprehensive tool. All those features are the reason it's so huge and bloated as to have been nicknamed "Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping."
Actually, my mother used to up one of my cats and hugs him while he was upside down until he made a certain sound. She thought the murmured double meow sounded like, "Mama." I thought it sounded like, "Put me down, you crazy bi..."
Never mind.
I'll just point out that this is irrelevant since we're talking about what happens in the code at execution time, when the test-statements would've been executed. Even if you do drag the application's folder around, it's not going to affect which operating system it's currently running under until you quit, reboot, and restart it.
It didn't help that the company had been abusing this machine WAY past its rated specs for years.
Isn't that always the case. I used to work in customer support for a company that wrote middleware for Stratus's fault-tolerant servers. We had two kinds of customers: (a) guys who had 5-50 top of the line servers sharing their load and a fully competent support staff for their operation and (b) the bozos running production and test networks on the same piece of 10-20 year old hardware that was constantly running at 100% CPU utilization and 80-100% memory and swap utilization.
When you're dealing with quarter of a million to multimillion dollar machines, you get a real case of haves and have-nots in IT budgets.
Another factor which may halt the adoption of this chemical as a fuel propellant is the pollution involved. Oxidizing pure nitrogen is bound to get you a lot of nitrogen dioxide (NOx) and other related pollutants. While this might be useful for small explosives, the output from launching a space shuttle off of this fuel might be too much for NASA to consider using even if it does become cheaper than current fuels one day.
On the other hand, the infrequency of launches may be such that the overall emission these pollutants compared to that of traffic in a large city may be negligible. Someone with a better grasp on the exact orders of magnitude here would have to tell you.
Actually, a decent bit of important information about an AVI file is contained at the END of the file. This is a major irritation for downloading DivX encoded files, such as in digital anime fansub circles where the guy you downloaded from isn't that careful about his stuff. You need to run the file through an AVI utility of some sort to fix the missing information, such as NanDub.
Even so, it is true that Windows Media Player can get by without the end information sometimes. Other times, it can't and you have problems.
Maybe you should look into the Linux kernel for an example of what he's talking about. Rather than have several hardware or OS-dependent if-then statements inside of a single function, you break the function into several copies -- one version for each OS. Then, set a function pointer to the appropriate version for the OS you are running on at program initialization. If you are running under OS 9, point all your function pointers to the functions that use OpenTransport. If you are running under OS X, point all your function pointers to the functions that use sockets.
Since the OS isn't going to change under your program any more than the hardware changes underneath the Linux kernel, there's no reason to be constantly testing the platform. This changes the overhead of all the if-then statements to a single if-then statement, some function pointer initializations at startup, and a jump to a function pointer instead of a fixed constant each time you call the function. If the if-then statements are that much of a problem, you'll trade some minimal code bloat (in the form of the now repeated OS-independent parts of those functions) for much improved execution speed and significantly easier to read code (if done correctly).
A benefit is that it makes it relatively easy to add and drop OS support without having to go through code with a fine-tooth comb. Just delete or add the relevant functions and add/drop that OS from the test at start-up. The only downsides are tracking similar changes between versions and the tendency for code to severely mutate into completely diverse codebases if you don't have good design discipline.
Ah, how it makes NASA long for the salad days of their youth.
Phage Press is not defunct, or at least it wasn't two years ago when I met Eric Wujcik in person. Rumors had been going around about the death of his company for a couple of years thanks to one of the major catalog companies claiming that it was dead. The truth of the story is that this company had not paid Phage Press for a shipment of the Amber DRPG and its suppliment "Shadow Knight." Since Wujcik was holding off on another shipment until they paid for the first, this distributor told all the stores that were trying to order more that Phage Press was out of business and continued to refuse to pay Wujcik.
Since Wujcik does not have enough money to fight them in court, this rumor persists to this day even though you can still get the game through other channels.
I just wish I could remember which company it was...
Actually, Zelazny's introspective and bemusedly world-weary style of writing is part of the whole fun of reading the stories of Corwin and Merlin. That's a major factor which will be lost when the books are made into a TV series, because few TV series actually focus on a character's internal monolouge. It's those bits of musing that make Corwin's character so strong in the first 5 books. Without that, Corwin will just be a big guy with a sword and a great sense of paranoid cunning.
"The Chronicles of Amber" is my favorite book series, hands-down. I've honestly feared the day that Hollywood or some TV producer finally got their hands on this series, because I have no doubt that they will completely ruin it like they have so many other of my favorites. I just can't stand having everyone's opinion of a book based off of some hack-job movie, like "Starship Troopers."
It's not like it would be hard to do the series right with modern moviemaking technology -- it is just completely unlikely. No good book gets made into a screenplay without something getting screwed. Parts will be cut out and minor scenes and characters will be made much more important, like Irulan in the new "Dune" mini-series. You can expect every sex scene Zelazny puts off to the side to get about 5 good minutes in each episode, while Corwin and Merlin's various solioquys will probably be cut.
I mean, why bother expecting continuity to the letter with the little details when they'll be too busy raping the spirit of the books like they do with everything else.
What frustrated me was that this article was real, so I started thinking some of the other articles were also real but inane. I thought they were trying for something new this year.
Arrggh.
Actually, he's referring to this older Slashdot article, which you must've not read.
Now whether this formed in a vacuum or not is a technicality. The scientists shone high level of UV light on a chunk of ice containing ammonia and methyl alchohol at a temperature of 4K and found traces of 3 amino acids had formed. The amino acids themselves formed from the surrounding ice slurry which was in a vacuum, ergo "amino acids are formed in a vacuum."
So, does this mean that NASA's going to pay for you to just sit and spin?
Most people are used to measuring atomic explosives in terms of kilotons and megatons. Gigatons just don't register the same way mentally even though the number come out the same. It's the same reason that we continue to talk in microns instead of nanometers for microchip wire sizes and in cubic feet instead of cubic yards when dealing with the size of large tanks of liquid. You use a frame of reference people are familiar with.
While not completely fanless, various "BookPC" style systems are very small, very quiet, and very cheap. Just get a Celeron 533 or or a VIA C3 chip, and a heatsink will be good enough for these little systems. That's more than fast enough for most code compiling.
I've used one for about 3 days when I was trying to build a multimedia box for hooking up to a TV before I settled on the higher powered (and louder) Shuttle SV24 system.
I just put together one of these machines myself two weeks ago. Since then, I've had some heating problems and have had to replace a Celeron 1 GHz due to overheating after running a video compression job unattended overnight.
How hot does your system run after about 30 minutes of 100% CPU utilization? What kind of chip do you have in it, and are you using a PCI card in it?
Damn. That's good. I was proofreading my reply when I got it.
Here are two ways that I'm aware of to do it without touching Low Memory:
Mac OS X Only -- CoreGraphics routines.
Mac OS 9 Only -- Cursor Components SDK.
I believe, however, that the only was I know of to do this on both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X (10.1+ only) is to mess with Low Memory like you're probably talking about. I can't be sure, though, since you're misusing terms. Try the above links and see if they help.
Hmmm and we can start removing buttons from everything because it is easier.
Straw man.
JEEZ you are dumb. Imagine trying to use a microwave if you only had a +1 second and -1 second button.
Ad hominem, followed by an ad ridiculoso argument.
The only real reason why there is only one buton on a MAC is because the original ones couldn't handle a two button mouse. Why couldn't they handle a two button mouse? Because when the mac was developed it was rushed..... That is the reason it had only 3 colours, black-white-grey.
3 falsehoods in a row.
The one-button mouse was a HCI decision meant to avoid confusing people. It's very well documented historically for those who actually read instead of making up nonsense. The development wasn't rushed, they just had limited resources to work with to make a more budget-friendly device than the Lisa. Finally, old Mac screens were monochromatic, like the vast majority of monitors in that day and time. They could only hand black or white. Though color monitors were available, but Mac team decided on a black-and-white screen to make it cheaper and to save on system resources. (Video took up 21K of the 128K in the original Mac.)
Real computers like the Amiga and the Atari ST took longer to produce, and had much more flexibility and power. But as Microsoft and Apple has shown us, good products can die and crappy ones can live!
These were later-generation computers that borrowed ideas from the Macintosh and had more resources to work with when the first versions of the OSes were created. The 128K limitation in the first Mac made the engineers make some tough compromises that would become legacy code that later computer designers didn't have to make. It's called progress.
The only thing worse then windows 3.1 is a MAC.
Obviously, you weren't using them both in the days of Win 3.1. The differences in functionality, stability, and power were night and day. The only reason Window won was that the price difference was also night and day.
They were the crappiest peices of crap that I ever had a chance to use. And I have used alot of crap in my life.
You sure seem to spew a lot of it too. (See, I can make ad hominem attacks too!)
How, exactly, is this off-topic?
The poster of the article in no way emphasized any desire to move to Linux except as a means of getting away from Microsoft. The Macintosh is a viable solution that allows one access to a wide range of multimedia products including several Flash development tools while avoiding the Evil Empire. You can get both Macromedia Flash and Adobe GoLive for the Mac without allowing MS software to touch your system. (...with the exception of IE, which takes all of 5 minutes to delete after you've download OmniWeb or Mozilla.)
Personally, I far prefer "lolo" at evilzug.com, but I'm just more of a class-act.
One of the effects of global warming is predicted to be a global destabilization of weather systems. More extreme temperatures in both directions are expected as the global average temperature rises.
Thank god someone's finally working on it. I've been itching to do it myself for several years now, but I've just never had the free time to go digging for the documentation and to roll up my sleeves and code it.
Good luck on it.