Oops. I made a broken link. But that's probably ok, since the website of the provider does not look to be there.
:-O
The brochure says "... or log on to egreenfield.com." I guess if people want they could just try the 800 number, but it doesn't give one a warm fuzzy feeling when the ISP's website is still a squatter's page. Eeek! and a scary subject at that. (Man am I glad I didn't link it right)
Well, we were just looking at a new development here in Orange County. There are quite a few houses, and they go from the 300's up through the 600's (decent homes for those prices in this area). The development looks just like most others in the county, and is near to a new shopping center (that we now frequent).
All the homes feature Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH). Basic "free" service looks to be 3,000 Kbps, with "Expanded Service" upwards of 31,000 Kbps. The service is being provided by Greenfield Communications (no, I am not associated with the housing development nor tGreenfield).
One of the areas/subdivisions/whatever in it just opened phase 7 yesterday, and it's already sold out. Just in case others were wondering if these units were moving.
also I believe that that part of the architecture
was incorporated into the original 68k chips.Could be wrong though?
Actually, you're confusing a few there. The 6502 was from MOS Technologies. The 6800 series, on the other hand, was from Motorola. That is the line that was the little brother to the 68k series.
MOS Technolgies was mainly former Motorola people from the 68k group, so it looked a little similar. However after the problems with their 6501, they did stay different enough.
And the 6809 ended up being a very nice microprocessor, with fewer of the 6502 limitations (16-bit addressing, two stack pointers, more generic opcodes with fewer register limitations), and being closer to the 68k in use. That is, going from the 6809 to the 68000 was much easier than from the 6502 to the 68000.
What I've found is that the white background of the color PDA makes for very nice reading. And the Mobipocket reader even does a touch of smoothing. In all, it's pretty much like reading a story in a magazine, with text running about the width of a standard magazine column
Another thing is that I've found it comes in quite handy of late when the kids wanted me to stay in their rooms a bit as they go to sleep. Just bring it on in and read while their lights are off and the drop into slumberland.
Oh, and since buying the hardcover book, I'm now up to the 5th Harrington book on it.
1) unless the macs are relatively recent, they can't run os x.
Well... considering that the original iMac is from 1998, and can run OS X with only a $17 ram upgrade, I'd say that's not too bad. It's nowhere near the cost of getting PC hardware up to running the latest version of MS Windows.
2) unless they already have a mac with os x, they won't want to learn it.
Unlike many other OS's, there's not a lot to learn. The apps pretty much run as-is, and the OS itself is simpler if anything. And this comes, among other things, from first-hand experience with upgrading grandparents from OS 9.
plus, it will require upgrading/changing the servers, etc. PITA.
Have you actually looked into this? Jaguar has support for "old-school" services, plus all the newer ones like nice Windows networking. Rendezvoussimplifies things, and Jaguar includes other nic such as USB printer sharing.
I hate to break it to you, but OS X is so slow on the G3 that you might as well not bother.
Not at all. Time to drop your FUD. I just recently aquired a used 400 Mhz G3 PowerBook with 256MB RAM, and things are running on it quite well. iTunes, iCal, Mozilla, AOL, etc all at once. I've even been doing a lot of remote work with OroborOSX running apps from my Linux box remotely, including Mozilla and full-bore developer stuff.
(I'm quite interested in looking into Rendezvous also, given that it's a Zeroconf implementation.)
No, Windows does not use an 8-bit character set. It's far more complex than that, and I (who happen to have mostly the same problem) personally blame it on the laziness of English-native programmers.
Effectively, yes. Windows does use an 8-bit character set for average consumers. If you code your apps to use 16-bit Unicode characters, they will only run on an NT-based version, and not at all on Win95/98/98se/ME... (Remember, there is not really a CreateWindow function in win32, just a macro that will resolve to either CreateWindowA or CreateWindowW )
One of the problems is the evil TCHAR that MS and MFC pushes on unknowing developers. They themselves do not use either, but instead had their own proprietary means. Recently, however, they did go and publish these libraries as a standard extension... (IIRC, this could be one of those "hidden API" things that the Office team created out of need)
The main problem usually comes in with the mix of controls, protocols, and approaches that people take.
(However, programmer laziness is a lot of the cause of the problems you encounter)
I believe this was because it was a Java application (CD came with Sun's JVM).
...
It looks like, and from other peoples comments here, that Openoffice is a Java/C++ jumbalia.
Then your beliefs are wrong. If you wish to check things out you can go and get the source. Java is not used for the suite (and was not for StarOffice either), but instead is merely hooked up in case you want to show Java applets in the browser, or to have an API so that you can write Java programs that interface with OpenOffice.
but you cannot install OpenOffice.org onto Linux or Windoze without Java on your system.
No. You'd don't need Java to run. It's only used for the integrated browser and the Java API to access OpenOffice stuff. Last time I installed it was optional on both Linux and Windows.
If that were to happen, the developer would have to purchase Kylix 3 anyways, and would simultaneously purchase the right to distribute stuff without it being GPL,
Right.
even if it were dependant on QT.
No. Not according to all the TrollTech info. Unless Borland has some new clause in their Qt packaging. You wouldn't happen to have the relevent sections of Borland's license, would you? (They don't seem to have it up separately)
Maybe, maybe not. However, for purchasers of Kylix things seem safe.
the license to use it in a commercial app is covered when you buy the Borland tool
As long as it does cover this properly, then it's a good thing. But... one just has to be careful to start by buying it, and not using a free version for things that might ever want to branch commercially.
It seems like the Qt license itself: pay up front and there are no problems.
Huh? How is Troll Tech evil? People wanted QT under the GPL, and lo and behold, they released it under the GPL. Seems like a nice bunch of folks to me.
Not quite. People really wanted it under the LGPL or BSD licenses, just like GTK+, FLTK, FOX, wxWindows, etc.
One of the problems (unless you follow Stallman's manifesto) is that although the Free version is free for open-source, their commercial licenses are structured so that if at any point in time your software project is touched by a free (free, non-commercial, acedemic, etc) version of Qt, you may never at any later time buy a commercial license and release your software commercially.
It does not become "port from Windows to Unix" instead. Porting to X11 and porting to the MacOS X gui are not the same.
Ahhh. But we were speaking of 3D Rendering software (Assumed to include modeling and animation). In that case, the choice is simplified because Mac OS X uses OpenGL, as does SGI, Solaris, Linux, etc. "Porting to OpenGL" can be very close to "Porting to Mesa"
Perhaps I should have said more of "Port from Direct3D to OpenGL". Hmmm... but in that case... OpenGL is an option on Windows also, so it could go with "Develop for Windows only, or develop for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux..."
Where the OSes differ with regard to porting (having to change source code, rather than simply recompiling) is mainly in the user interface.
Yes. However, when an application is ported (or developed initially for cross-platform) cleanly, the functionality and UI are abstracted in a better way. Platform specifics are minimized, and shared common code is maximized. Then going to another platform is simplified.
However, there's another issue. The vast majority of games out there don't rely heavily on the native UI widgets. Most gamers like their own UI. If you're doing a game on OpenGL anyway...
What we need is more people who know how to market Linux to software companies so that the damned applications will get developed. This is not a technical problem, it's a business problem: there are too few desktop Linux users, thus a relatively small business imperative for software companies to incur the overhead of porting applications.
Well, for some things, but not others. On the 3D front, most of the heavy-hitters are there now (SOFTIMAGE, Maya, etc). And Mac OS X is getting support too. That's where things might have changed. The now oft-heard argument where porting from Windows to Linux is costly for a company and buys little market, but where porting to OS X can share much of a port effort with Linux. Suddenly it changes to "port from Windows to Unix" instead and starts to look better.
Now, on to Qt -- it is a C++ API, it is clean, very portable and very easy to use. It used to cost money for a development license for anything on windows, but it no longer does. See the Windows non-commercial edition
While it is true that you can get a version of Qt to play with without having to shell out any $$$, there is a catch. If you at any point in time touch your project with any one of their 'no-cost' versions (Non-commercial windows, Free Edition, Academic, etc. ) you can never at any later time buy a commercial Qt license and use your project commercially. As Trolltech says:
A non-commercial setting means that you must not use the package in the course of your employment or whilst engaged in activities that will be compensated. A non-commercial application is an application that cannot be sold, leased, rented or otherwise distributed for recompense.
So... that first sentence especially might be something to consider. However, if you want to pay for developer seats up front (it's a per-developer licensing scheme, IIRC), there's not a problem. Or if you only ever want to do Open Source work while your're not getting paid to develop. Otherwise, check with a lawyer.
When I clicked on the pov-ray link there was only one comment and it was already slashdotted...
It got hammered and was down briefly. But the maintainer redid the server to use more of the memory on the box and got it back up pretty quickly. I saw it, and that it was down. Within half-an-hour of that it was back.(He mentioned it was unstable with all the RAM enabled, but unstable is better than just plain not there)
Also, Spielberg would surely feel the need to inject his personal vision into the SW universe. Remember watching AI? Kubrick's parts and Spielberg's parts contrasted badly with each other, especially the ending.
Perhaps not. My friends and I were discussing this not too long ago. In regards to doing Minority Report, Spielberg made some comments about how he realized that injecting his take of things into AI interferred with things (and especially the ending). And how he realized he made a mistake and was going to try not to do that with the new film. What made it a little amusing for me is that we were talking about how that pointed out the difference between Spielberg and Lucas as filmakers and directors, and especially the willingness to take good criticism and to grow, and the importance of putting the material before ego. And also specifically comparing his works to Lucas' Star Wars films (those he directed, not the others)
Spielberg falls into that category of directors that invariably set sci-fi pictures in bleak, greyscale worlds that try to sell us on how fucked we are in fifty or so years. I think you can have troubling elements in sci-fi movies, but how about a sci-fi flick that reaches for the better qualities of human nature. This is what I think has made Star Trek attractive to its fans for so long.
Actually...if you look at his history, Spielberg had been known far less for that "bleak greyscale" thing.
Close Encounters (childlike awe, amazing tour-guide aliens, etc.)
1941 (I'm a bug!)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (Color! Action! Adventure!...)
ET (that one for sure)
Gremlins (technicolor and raucous)
"Amazing Stories: The Mission" (wow. Talk about better qualities and triumph of human imagination)
"Amazing Stories: Ghost Train"
Hook (Bleak??? Grey??? Not!)
Jurassic Park (A little edgy, but not bleak nor grey, just look at that purdy Unix ui)
It's only been these last two really (at least as far as his sci-fi goes). And AI was Spielberg completing Stanley Kubrick's work. Perhaps you got the two confused?
My experience has shown that the number one way to find defects is code reviews performed by other developers who can read the code and also understand the intended functionality. This will catch 90% of all defects before they are even released to QA.
Overally, good testing catches perhaps 63% of all defects. Code inspections alone catch about 63%. Combined on a project, they catch about 95+% of all defects. That's the key. (My copy of Code Complete is at the office and I'm still at home, but that has the exact numbers and study).
And remember, a good testing regiment will include all kinds of testing. Unit tests and integration tests are both needed (Usually it's only the latter that happens in QA). And it's quite handy to have started the unit tests before you start coding the units.
Slashdot Mirror
Oops. I made a broken link. But that's probably ok, since the website of the provider does not look to be there.
:-O
The brochure says "... or log on to egreenfield.com." I guess if people want they could just try the 800 number, but it doesn't give one a warm fuzzy feeling when the ISP's website is still a squatter's page. Eeek! and a scary subject at that. (Man am I glad I didn't link it right)
Well, we were just looking at a new development here in Orange County. There are quite a few houses, and they go from the 300's up through the 600's (decent homes for those prices in this area). The development looks just like most others in the county, and is near to a new shopping center (that we now frequent).
All the homes feature Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH). Basic "free" service looks to be 3,000 Kbps, with "Expanded Service" upwards of 31,000 Kbps. The service is being provided by Greenfield Communications (no, I am not associated with the housing development nor tGreenfield).
One of the areas/subdivisions/whatever in it just opened phase 7 yesterday, and it's already sold out. Just in case others were wondering if these units were moving.
Actually, you're confusing a few there. The 6502 was from MOS Technologies. The 6800 series, on the other hand, was from Motorola. That is the line that was the little brother to the 68k series.
MOS Technolgies was mainly former Motorola people from the 68k group, so it looked a little similar. However after the problems with their 6501, they did stay different enough.
And the 6809 ended up being a very nice microprocessor, with fewer of the 6502 limitations (16-bit addressing, two stack pointers, more generic opcodes with fewer register limitations), and being closer to the 68k in use. That is, going from the 6809 to the 68000 was much easier than from the 6502 to the 68000.
Why, just use Google and see what you can find.
What I've found is that the white background of the color PDA makes for very nice reading. And the Mobipocket reader even does a touch of smoothing. In all, it's pretty much like reading a story in a magazine, with text running about the width of a standard magazine column
Another thing is that I've found it comes in quite handy of late when the kids wanted me to stay in their rooms a bit as they go to sleep. Just bring it on in and read while their lights are off and the drop into slumberland.
Oh, and since buying the hardcover book, I'm now up to the 5th Harrington book on it.
OK. So the previous story included the project name, and this one does not. *sigh*
Well... considering that the original iMac is from 1998, and can run OS X with only a $17 ram upgrade, I'd say that's not too bad. It's nowhere near the cost of getting PC hardware up to running the latest version of MS Windows.
Unlike many other OS's, there's not a lot to learn. The apps pretty much run as-is, and the OS itself is simpler if anything. And this comes, among other things, from first-hand experience with upgrading grandparents from OS 9.
Have you actually looked into this? Jaguar has support for "old-school" services, plus all the newer ones like nice Windows networking. Rendezvous simplifies things, and Jaguar includes other nic such as USB printer sharing.
Not at all. Time to drop your FUD. I just recently aquired a used 400 Mhz G3 PowerBook with 256MB RAM, and things are running on it quite well. iTunes, iCal, Mozilla, AOL, etc all at once. I've even been doing a lot of remote work with OroborOSX running apps from my Linux box remotely, including Mozilla and full-bore developer stuff.
(I'm quite interested in looking into Rendezvous also, given that it's a Zeroconf implementation.)
Effectively, yes. Windows does use an 8-bit character set for average consumers. If you code your apps to use 16-bit Unicode characters, they will only run on an NT-based version, and not at all on Win95/98/98se/ME... (Remember, there is not really a CreateWindow function in win32, just a macro that will resolve to either CreateWindowA or CreateWindowW )
One of the problems is the evil TCHAR that MS and MFC pushes on unknowing developers. They themselves do not use either, but instead had their own proprietary means. Recently, however, they did go and publish these libraries as a standard extension... (IIRC, this could be one of those "hidden API" things that the Office team created out of need)
The main problem usually comes in with the mix of controls, protocols, and approaches that people take.
(However, programmer laziness is a lot of the cause of the problems you encounter)
No, no, no. It's "guh-nooo". Just check track 5 of ASIN: B00000I8A3
Then your beliefs are wrong. If you wish to check things out you can go and get the source. Java is not used for the suite (and was not for StarOffice either), but instead is merely hooked up in case you want to show Java applets in the browser, or to have an API so that you can write Java programs that interface with OpenOffice.
No. You'd don't need Java to run. It's only used for the integrated browser and the Java API to access OpenOffice stuff. Last time I installed it was optional on both Linux and Windows.
Right.
No. Not according to all the TrollTech info. Unless Borland has some new clause in their Qt packaging. You wouldn't happen to have the relevent sections of Borland's license, would you? (They don't seem to have it up separately)
Maybe, maybe not. However, for purchasers of Kylix things seem safe.
As long as it does cover this properly, then it's a good thing. But... one just has to be careful to start by buying it, and not using a free version for things that might ever want to branch commercially.
It seems like the Qt license itself: pay up front and there are no problems.
Not quite. People really wanted it under the LGPL or BSD licenses, just like GTK+, FLTK, FOX, wxWindows, etc.
One of the problems (unless you follow Stallman's manifesto) is that although the Free version is free for open-source, their commercial licenses are structured so that if at any point in time your software project is touched by a free (free, non-commercial, acedemic, etc) version of Qt, you may never at any later time buy a commercial license and release your software commercially.
Ahhh. But we were speaking of 3D Rendering software (Assumed to include modeling and animation). In that case, the choice is simplified because Mac OS X uses OpenGL, as does SGI, Solaris, Linux, etc. "Porting to OpenGL" can be very close to "Porting to Mesa"
Perhaps I should have said more of "Port from Direct3D to OpenGL". Hmmm... but in that case... OpenGL is an option on Windows also, so it could go with "Develop for Windows only, or develop for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux..."
Yes. However, when an application is ported (or developed initially for cross-platform) cleanly, the functionality and UI are abstracted in a better way. Platform specifics are minimized, and shared common code is maximized. Then going to another platform is simplified.
However, there's another issue. The vast majority of games out there don't rely heavily on the native UI widgets. Most gamers like their own UI. If you're doing a game on OpenGL anyway...
Well, for some things, but not others. On the 3D front, most of the heavy-hitters are there now (SOFTIMAGE, Maya, etc). And Mac OS X is getting support too. That's where things might have changed. The now oft-heard argument where porting from Windows to Linux is costly for a company and buys little market, but where porting to OS X can share much of a port effort with Linux. Suddenly it changes to "port from Windows to Unix" instead and starts to look better.
While it is true that you can get a version of Qt to play with without having to shell out any $$$, there is a catch. If you at any point in time touch your project with any one of their 'no-cost' versions (Non-commercial windows, Free Edition, Academic, etc. ) you can never at any later time buy a commercial Qt license and use your project commercially. As Trolltech says:
So... that first sentence especially might be something to consider. However, if you want to pay for developer seats up front (it's a per-developer licensing scheme, IIRC), there's not a problem. Or if you only ever want to do Open Source work while your're not getting paid to develop. Otherwise, check with a lawyer.
And there's a channel #povray on EFnet. It's a little slow nowadays, but is picking up a little.
It got hammered and was down briefly. But the maintainer redid the server to use more of the memory on the box and got it back up pretty quickly. I saw it, and that it was down. Within half-an-hour of that it was back.(He mentioned it was unstable with all the RAM enabled, but unstable is better than just plain not there)
Again, it has already been pointed out that the restriction on generated artwork is just if you use some of the demo scenes.
Perhaps not. My friends and I were discussing this not too long ago. In regards to doing Minority Report, Spielberg made some comments about how he realized that injecting his take of things into AI interferred with things (and especially the ending). And how he realized he made a mistake and was going to try not to do that with the new film. What made it a little amusing for me is that we were talking about how that pointed out the difference between Spielberg and Lucas as filmakers and directors, and especially the willingness to take good criticism and to grow, and the importance of putting the material before ego. And also specifically comparing his works to Lucas' Star Wars films (those he directed, not the others)
Man. I hate it when I accidentally delete a link after checking and before posting.
Spielberg's history is actually here
Actually...if you look at his history, Spielberg had been known far less for that "bleak greyscale" thing.
It's only been these last two really (at least as far as his sci-fi goes). And AI was Spielberg completing Stanley Kubrick's work. Perhaps you got the two confused?
Overally, good testing catches perhaps 63% of all defects. Code inspections alone catch about 63%. Combined on a project, they catch about 95+% of all defects. That's the key. (My copy of Code Complete is at the office and I'm still at home, but that has the exact numbers and study).
And remember, a good testing regiment will include all kinds of testing. Unit tests and integration tests are both needed (Usually it's only the latter that happens in QA). And it's quite handy to have started the unit tests before you start coding the units.