Uhh, actually, yes, folks like MacSoft get the source from someone like Big Huge Games and ports it (or outsources the port, as was done for Neverwinter Nights. It was actually ported by the fine folks at OmniGroup). In most cases, these ports aren't hard because game companies like using libraries, and once you port the library, all games using that library become that much easier. Some libraries (such as those from RAD) are already cross platform, which simplifies it even more.
Perhaps this will help:
darwin/powerpc azaka$ file Age\ of\ Mythology
Age of Mythology: header for PowerPC PEF executable
darwin/powerpc azaka$ file Rise\ of\ Nations\ Gold.app/Contents/MacOS/Rise\ of\ Nations\ Gold
Rise of Nations Gold.app/Contents/MacOS/Rise of Nations Gold: Mach-O executable ppc
Does that help prove to you that these games are native?
The bad news is that Destineer's MacSoft studios and Aspyr's Mac division either seem to be dead or concentrating on, well, producing crap... and who knows what is up with Feral's port of Fable.
Solaris 8 never officially shipped with ssh. If you have a Sun-branded ssh on Solaris 8, it was installed from something other than the official Solaris install media. It should also be pointed out that Solaris 8 is ancient stuff. Perhaps its time to upgrade the OS to a version made in this decade?
In this document, they talk about leaking information to "Spencer or Cringely" to continue the smear campaign against Digital Research. The referenced Cringely is likely Robert X. Cringely (and confirms a lot of what I've suspected about that particular column anyway). But who is Spencer?
Basically, your card is tied to a session. When you pull your card out and go to a different client, the server locates where your session is at and reconnects you. Now globalize this: if all of the servers worldwide have access to the session information, then all servers are now capable of redirecting you back to your home session.
In other words, you're at your desk in the UK. You pull your card and hop on a plane to Singapore. You put your card in. The server in Singapore does a lookup to locate your session in the UK. It now reconnects (after an authentication) you to your session back in the UK. All of your apps that you were running previously are woken from hibernation and you're back in business.
One of the big gotchas about this type of setup is that your infrastructure MUST be globalized. This means things like printers need to be accessible from any location on the network!
This is very different than a roaming profile; there is only one session, ever. (Unless you override of course)
This is the reason I'm actually leaving my current job, a stealth startup that will likely be successful given recent buzz on the InterWebTube. My coworker has such a God complex that he even treats his peers this way. If you prove that he's wrong or he doesn't get his way, he'll actually throw a temper tantrum to the point that he'll leave the building. Management appears to be unable or unwilling to do anything about it, to the point that I was told that they hired me because "they could talk to me".
We played a lot of Chu Chu Rocket, Ooga Booga, and Powerstone 1 and 2. I really wish Sega would release these on a newer platform if only so we don't have to keep lugging out the DC to play 'em. Especially Chu Chu Rocket, as it tended to get the 'non-gamers' in our group involved since it was simple and had great play mechanics for beginners.
Well, Downtown Tower in Belleville (as well as Zarconian Master's BBS in Worcester, MA... can't remember the name of it) used to run a slightly "less enhanced" version of my source code. So even if you didn't call my specific board, you probably called its evil twin.:)
I seem to recall that Phil went to a completely new source base after I stopped running WWIV though.
Actually, WWIV did support offline messages if the sysop had the proper bits installed. I know my WWIV board did. The lack of threading was one of the reasons why I moved to DLG Pro. [Although, my system was almost heavily, heavily modified from stock. I published quite a few of my source mods and other bits, so that's probably where you saw it from.]
In the area where I brought up Ethereal Realms--Carbondale, IL--was surrounded by RBBS, Wildcat!, RA, and a ton of other different types of BBSes (I had the first WWIV system there). Wildcat! was definitely one of the better ones, from what I remember. But I admit I didn't spend a lot of time on them because of them were pay boards, plus my own BBS was crazy busy (probably because I was one of the few [only?] free board for a good year). It wasn't unusual for a friend of mine to come over just to make sure he got his Global War turns in.
I'm sure I'm giving up what would be a great social app by posting this:), but it would be nice if there was a site where former users could reconnect with other users from a given BBS. As a former sysop myself (Ethereal Realms when I ran WWIV and Mental Vortex when I ran DLG Pro), it would be neat being able to connect with some of my old sysop pals from WWIVlink, WWIVnet, and Fidonet.
Maybe some sort of combo discussion and directory service?
Deploying Kerberos is likely easier than managing LDAP-over-SSL, if you take into consideration the problems around maintaining the certs. [No, cert maintenance isn't difficult, but the tools are essentially "built in" to Kerberos rather than being a manual process if you're using, say, OpenSSL as your RA.]
Plus, Kerberos gets you SSO and the ability to secure NFS, which using LDAP doesn't.
... except, in the specific case of automount maps, everyone seems to be doing it slightly different. Certain distributions of Linux and older versions of Solaris, for example, tend to require that the automount map have a nisobject object class in addtion to the automount object class. Then you get to Mac OS X. It was bad enough that Apple opted to essentially move the broken NetInfo mounts directory into its equivalent ou=mounts in LDAP. If you want them mounted with AFP, you get the added bonus having to make sure the entries are in a XML format.
This is one place where some agreement amongst vendors would be a good thing. Luckily, they do seem to be converging, but this is definitely an area where enterprise folks need to be on the lookout.
It isn't too surprising that there aren't zfs-specific commands for mount, newfs, fsck, etc., given that all that work is done by the zfs, zpool, and other commands under Solaris.
I'm sorry, I keep hearing this, but really, how many places are there in which WalMart is absolutely the ONLY store? I've never seen a place like that. I mean, I'm sure they exist, but I'm equally sure they are few and far between, and insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
I've always heard that this was part of Sam Walton's plan: sell to the consumers who didn't have a major department store nearby. By saturating the market, you can undercut your competitors because you can buy in bulk and they can't. You have a (theoretically) more impressive store front AND cheaper prices to boot. As soon as the small stores close, you've got the area by the balls.
An example might show how this works:
Enter in 52241 Iowa City, IA on http://www.walmart.com/. Now compare that listing to say Target. Target has 3 stores. Wal*Mart has 10. Notice the locations of those stores in correlation to the population.
Here, let's do my hometown: 62298. Waterloo, IL. Or go farther south: 62233 Chester, IL. Now we're talking literally hours of driving to get to a Target. Don't like Target? Try Best Buy, Circuit City, or EB. It all looks pretty much the same.
I agree that Wal*Mart can sell whatever it wants to sell. My point was that what Wal*Mart does really does matter in the big scheme of things.
The problem is that there are many parts of the country where Wal*Mart is the only local retailer. The mom and pop shops were driven out a long time ago. You're not going to get a Target or whatever in a city with a population of ~9000.
On the plus side, Internet shopping has really taken off in small-town America. So hopefully it will become increasingly irrelevant what Wal*Mart does.
How the hell is Apple going to make sure Windows works on their hardware? Honest question.
Even from the summary, Apple is already providing drivers for Windows as part of Boot Camp...so they must be doing some sort of qualification already.
I was looking at it from a different viewpoint, though. Why spend the time building support for APIs that are guaranteed to change with little-to-no warning (just ask IBM!) when you can leverage off of the open source community to provide you with a virtualization layer that not only supports one OS but supports other OSes as well? This gets you in the door with power users and also ensures that users who do want to use Windows will also have access--and a much easier time switching--to the Mac OS side of the platform due to it all running concurrently.
From a cost perspective, you basically move the engineering resources tied to Boot Camp over to Xen. So whether you're talking about "little s" support (does it run?) to "big s" Support (does it run well with the full backing of Apple), it is all do-able. [Would Apple support anything beyond the current version of Windows in a big s model? Probably not, especially given Apple's track record of supporting their own legacy products. Would Apple support anything else besides Windows? Again, unlikely, but they know those folks are fairly self reliant already.]
This is all very good advice, and I thank you for posting it. I was laid off a few weeks ago from [insert big company name here], and I am currently going through the resume editing process.
You know, I really have to wonder why Apple doesn't do what Cringely suggests here: perfectly transparent XP emulation, on OS X.
... because efforts are probably better spent on adding support for something like Xen. Why bother supporting one OS when you can support many? Besides, users have already shown via the purchasing of Soft PC, Virtual PC, Parallels, etc, that they are willing to use "OS in a window"-type software.
Indeed. Their definition of what constitutes a social networking site was a little broad for my tastes.
I was also surprised that http://www.linkedin.com/ wasn't mentioned, since that seems to be the more 'adult' version of MySpace. Practically everyone I know via employment has a LinkedIn account.
By using ZFS snapshots, you can get the same capability though. Put other drive in another pool, create a snapshot, then use zfs send/receive to copy it. Plus, using a pipe, you can do this across machines.
Wouldn't better advice to be to vote with their dollars: Stop buying Apple gear for enterprise usage? Apple doesn't appear to be very forthcoming to help them run their business. Why should they continue to use them? There are plenty of other vendors that will be more than happy to share roadmaps and information and get them going. Heck, Sun and the various Linux vendors share the source of large portions of their products, even in a pre-release state. How can Apple seriously complete against that?
Slashdot Mirror
Uhh, actually, yes, folks like MacSoft get the source from someone like Big Huge Games and ports it (or outsources the port, as was done for Neverwinter Nights. It was actually ported by the fine folks at OmniGroup). In most cases, these ports aren't hard because game companies like using libraries, and once you port the library, all games using that library become that much easier. Some libraries (such as those from RAD) are already cross platform, which simplifies it even more.
Perhaps this will help:
darwin/powerpc azaka$ file Age\ of\ Mythology
Age of Mythology: header for PowerPC PEF executable
darwin/powerpc azaka$ file Rise\ of\ Nations\ Gold.app/Contents/MacOS/Rise\ of\ Nations\ Gold
Rise of Nations Gold.app/Contents/MacOS/Rise of Nations Gold: Mach-O executable ppc
Does that help prove to you that these games are native?
- Age of Empires II
- Age of Mythology (which, interestingly enough, I just played a game of this morning...)
- Age of Empires III
- Rise of Nations
The bad news is that Destineer's MacSoft studios and Aspyr's Mac division either seem to be dead or concentrating on, well, producing crap... and who knows what is up with Feral's port of Fable.Solaris 8 never officially shipped with ssh. If you have a Sun-branded ssh on Solaris 8, it was installed from something other than the official Solaris install media. It should also be pointed out that Solaris 8 is ancient stuff. Perhaps its time to upgrade the OS to a version made in this decade?
Cubia doesn't appear to support Unicode properly. For example, instead of Björk it has BjÃrk. That's a pretty significant flaw.
In this document, they talk about leaking information to "Spencer or Cringely" to continue the smear campaign against Digital Research. The referenced Cringely is likely Robert X. Cringely (and confirms a lot of what I've suspected about that particular column anyway). But who is Spencer?
There's no "copying" involved.
Basically, your card is tied to a session. When you pull your card out and go to a different client, the server locates where your session is at and reconnects you. Now globalize this: if all of the servers worldwide have access to the session information, then all servers are now capable of redirecting you back to your home session.
In other words, you're at your desk in the UK. You pull your card and hop on a plane to Singapore. You put your card in. The server in Singapore does a lookup to locate your session in the UK. It now reconnects (after an authentication) you to your session back in the UK. All of your apps that you were running previously are woken from hibernation and you're back in business.
One of the big gotchas about this type of setup is that your infrastructure MUST be globalized. This means things like printers need to be accessible from any location on the network!
This is very different than a roaming profile; there is only one session, ever. (Unless you override of course)
This is the reason I'm actually leaving my current job, a stealth startup that will likely be successful given recent buzz on the InterWebTube. My coworker has such a God complex that he even treats his peers this way. If you prove that he's wrong or he doesn't get his way, he'll actually throw a temper tantrum to the point that he'll leave the building. Management appears to be unable or unwilling to do anything about it, to the point that I was told that they hired me because "they could talk to me".
We played a lot of Chu Chu Rocket, Ooga Booga, and Powerstone 1 and 2. I really wish Sega would release these on a newer platform if only so we don't have to keep lugging out the DC to play 'em. Especially Chu Chu Rocket, as it tended to get the 'non-gamers' in our group involved since it was simple and had great play mechanics for beginners.
... except Google Video does provide a revenue stream for content holders, thanks to that Buy button.
I seem to recall that Phil went to a completely new source base after I stopped running WWIV though.
Actually, WWIV did support offline messages if the sysop had the proper bits installed. I know my WWIV board did. The lack of threading was one of the reasons why I moved to DLG Pro. [Although, my system was almost heavily, heavily modified from stock. I published quite a few of my source mods and other bits, so that's probably where you saw it from.]
In the area where I brought up Ethereal Realms--Carbondale, IL--was surrounded by RBBS, Wildcat!, RA, and a ton of other different types of BBSes (I had the first WWIV system there). Wildcat! was definitely one of the better ones, from what I remember. But I admit I didn't spend a lot of time on them because of them were pay boards, plus my own BBS was crazy busy (probably because I was one of the few [only?] free board for a good year). It wasn't unusual for a friend of mine to come over just to make sure he got his Global War turns in.
Maybe some sort of combo discussion and directory service?
Deploying Kerberos is likely easier than managing LDAP-over-SSL, if you take into consideration the problems around maintaining the certs. [No, cert maintenance isn't difficult, but the tools are essentially "built in" to Kerberos rather than being a manual process if you're using, say, OpenSSL as your RA.]
Plus, Kerberos gets you SSO and the ability to secure NFS, which using LDAP doesn't.
... except, in the specific case of automount maps, everyone seems to be doing it slightly different. Certain distributions of Linux and older versions of Solaris, for example, tend to require that the automount map have a nisobject object class in addtion to the automount object class. Then you get to Mac OS X. It was bad enough that Apple opted to essentially move the broken NetInfo mounts directory into its equivalent ou=mounts in LDAP. If you want them mounted with AFP, you get the added bonus having to make sure the entries are in a XML format.
This is one place where some agreement amongst vendors would be a good thing. Luckily, they do seem to be converging, but this is definitely an area where enterprise folks need to be on the lookout.
It isn't too surprising that there aren't zfs-specific commands for mount, newfs, fsck, etc., given that all that work is done by the zfs, zpool, and other commands under Solaris.
I've always heard that this was part of Sam Walton's plan: sell to the consumers who didn't have a major department store nearby. By saturating the market, you can undercut your competitors because you can buy in bulk and they can't. You have a (theoretically) more impressive store front AND cheaper prices to boot. As soon as the small stores close, you've got the area by the balls.
An example might show how this works:
Enter in 52241 Iowa City, IA on http://www.walmart.com/. Now compare that listing to say Target. Target has 3 stores. Wal*Mart has 10. Notice the locations of those stores in correlation to the population.
Here, let's do my hometown: 62298. Waterloo, IL. Or go farther south: 62233 Chester, IL. Now we're talking literally hours of driving to get to a Target. Don't like Target? Try Best Buy, Circuit City, or EB. It all looks pretty much the same.
I agree that Wal*Mart can sell whatever it wants to sell. My point was that what Wal*Mart does really does matter in the big scheme of things.
On the plus side, Internet shopping has really taken off in small-town America. So hopefully it will become increasingly irrelevant what Wal*Mart does.
Even from the summary, Apple is already providing drivers for Windows as part of Boot Camp...so they must be doing some sort of qualification already.
I was looking at it from a different viewpoint, though. Why spend the time building support for APIs that are guaranteed to change with little-to-no warning (just ask IBM!) when you can leverage off of the open source community to provide you with a virtualization layer that not only supports one OS but supports other OSes as well? This gets you in the door with power users and also ensures that users who do want to use Windows will also have access--and a much easier time switching--to the Mac OS side of the platform due to it all running concurrently.
From a cost perspective, you basically move the engineering resources tied to Boot Camp over to Xen. So whether you're talking about "little s" support (does it run?) to "big s" Support (does it run well with the full backing of Apple), it is all do-able. [Would Apple support anything beyond the current version of Windows in a big s model? Probably not, especially given Apple's track record of supporting their own legacy products. Would Apple support anything else besides Windows? Again, unlikely, but they know those folks are fairly self reliant already.]
This is all very good advice, and I thank you for posting it. I was laid off a few weeks ago from [insert big company name here], and I am currently going through the resume editing process.
Indeed. Their definition of what constitutes a social networking site was a little broad for my tastes.
I was also surprised that http://www.linkedin.com/ wasn't mentioned, since that seems to be the more 'adult' version of MySpace. Practically everyone I know via employment has a LinkedIn account.
By using ZFS snapshots, you can get the same capability though. Put other drive in another pool, create a snapshot, then use zfs send/receive to copy it. Plus, using a pipe, you can do this across machines.
(formerly 1@16850)
These guys just can't win...
Wouldn't better advice to be to vote with their dollars: Stop buying Apple gear for enterprise usage? Apple doesn't appear to be very forthcoming to help them run their business. Why should they continue to use them? There are plenty of other vendors that will be more than happy to share roadmaps and information and get them going. Heck, Sun and the various Linux vendors share the source of large portions of their products, even in a pre-release state. How can Apple seriously complete against that?