There are different tools available for each platform. Many are available for just one but not the other; in most cases I think that the UNIX tools are more powerful and more flexible in the long run, but it takes at least a year or two of using them before that becomes clear. So I won't bother to cover these, because it's not going to convince anyone except those already "in the know".
Instead I'm going to ask what your application is. I have used both Windows and Linux to develop commercial games for many years. In this area, Linux has a clear superiority, largely because games are such unstable beasts. One can develop a 'typical' user app on Windows without needing to reboot but perhaps once or twice a day, which is perfectly workable. Doing games, I have found that up to 50 (yes, really, I have counted) reboots a day are necessary. At one place I worked I had two computers so that I could work while the other one rebooted, just so that I wouldn't loose so much productivity. (A lot of the blame here lies with DirectX - if you are developing OpenGL on NT 3.5 or 4.0 this is much less of an issue. I have heard that Windows 2000 is similarly usable.) FWIW, writing cross-platform game code is quite easy these days. Most of the games I have worked on in the last three years have run, and been developed, on both Windows and Linux, but have a completely different release target (including Dreamcast, PSX2, and an arcade game).
Another application I have tackled professionaly is enterprise-level servers. Here is an area where UNIX development is a clear win; there are thousands of small server-oriented tools at your disposal that cut your workload by an order of magnitude. TCP wrappers are absolutely *wonderful*, for example - I spent over a week writing code for NT that is entirely handled by TCP wrappers on UNIX. Other major headaches on NT, such as the poor multiprocessor support (running lots of threads pegs CPU #1 at 100%, while CPU #2 hovers just below 30%) and the slow filesystem (perhaps it's the SCSI drivers that are slow, I dunno) make it almost unusable not only as a *target* for high-end servers, but also as a development platform.
When it comes to 'typical' end-user apps, like ICQ clients, word processors, or spreadsheets - I think the difference between the two platforms comes down to personal preference. The tools available on both are perfectly sufficient for this kind of development work, although each developer is likely to have their own preferences. UI stuff is about the same - writing down-to-the-metal WIN32 code is just as horrible as writing down-to-the-metal X (or even Motif) code. All sane developers use encaspulation (either their own company's classes, or a 3rd party library such as Qt) to hide the ugly implemention details anyways. So in this case, any convincing that you do will be purely an "expand your geek power!" type of argument, rather than a practical double-your-productivity kind of argument.
I agree with most of this, although I find the figure of 50% to be dubious. Can you give us some links to these studies you refer to?
Secondly, the last bit - that it's entirely random that large breasts are considered a desirable trait in a female - is not true. Large breasts indicate a well-fed, healthy woman who will be able to provide potentital children with plenty of breast milk. Like most physical traits, modern society has exagerated this effect, but it is still grounded in evolution.
To address the larger point, however: I am definitely in agreement that we have "defeated" evolution, for the the time being. This has, however, only been the case for maybe about a century. In order for it to have ANY sort of long-term signifigance to our race, especially given our long lifespans, it will need to continue for another million years or so. At that point we can start to ponder the effects of mankind's effects on its own evolution.
Pets, on the other hand, are a different story: man has created a whole new set of desirable traits in animals, and is rapidly breeding the 'old' desirable traits out of existence.
I watched a LOT of Anime in college, mostly through the anime club at UC San Diego (which got some really nice stuff from time to time). I came to the conclusion that there is an even higher level of signal-to-noise in anime as there is in other forms of entertainment (live action movies, music, etc).
Ninja Scroll is, in my opinion, easily the best anime ever created. Besides the fact that it avoids most of the trite anime-isms that I can't stand (cute schoolgirls, giant robots, psycic powers), it's actually a semi-intelligent story with interesting (and believable) characters, but without sacrificing the over-the-top nature that makes anime what it is. Plus cinematics and action sequences worthy of John Woo. (I never get tired of watching the opening sequence.) And, of course, I consider its close ties to the Samurai Showdown series (my favorite fighting game of all time) to be a definite plus.
The only other bit of anime that even approaches NS is Macross 2. It's slightly less interesting to me because of its futuristic setting, but the characters, story, and art are all very high-quality - almost up to snuff with a Hollywood film.
Before anyone mentions them: yes, I have seen all the other films that anime fans often put into the "masterpiece" category, and I was unimpressed by them. Wings of Homenaise (sp?) had a very cool theme, but the story was pointless and the movie itself mostly pretty boring. Ghost in the Shell had some nice bits but was also mostly pointless, getting lost in the shallow and melodramatic metaphysics that anime often wanders into. It did have a few nice scenes, though.
Most series I find to be childish to the point of being unwatchable (which I guess is okay, because they are targeted at children). This includes Tenchi, Ranma, Dragonball Z... Maison Ikkoku was a mildly entertaining soap opera, but drew out much too long.
Although not in the same category as these two, I also like Nassica: Vallye of the Winds, Battle Angel, Vampire Hunter D, Golgo 13, Riding Bean, and Gunsmith Cats. Not quite anime but still very good are Laputa: Castle in the Sky and Porco Rosso (both made by the same fellow who did Nassica, I believe).
There are quite a few flicks with art that I like and so I found watching more of them than I planned: Video Girl Ai and DNA come to mind.
Classic Sci-Fi - all it's cracked up to be?
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Fahrenheit 451
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I've read this and many of Bradbury's other works. Ditto for old Asimov, and if you really want to get ancient, Jules Verne. This stuff was groundbreaking at the time, and these guys have incredible imaginations to be able to come up with all of this.
But honestly - they pale in comparisson to today's sci-fi masterworks such as Cryptonimicon (or anything by Stephenson), the Hyperion books, Vernor Vinge's stuff, and so forth. Scifi fans always seem to think of the older, classic material as "required" reading. I don't really agree. It's certainly very interesting to go back and take a look at the roots of the genre, but as literature they hardly hold a candle to the works available today.
There is one exception, although it's not sci-fi, it's fantasy: Tolkien. His stuff remains the best fantasy even written, despite being close to a century old, and I doubt that will ever change.
I began listening to Metallica when I was given a tape containing No Life Till Leather (and, on the reverse side, a live recording from a bar in SF). I loved the music; I gained respect for you as people and as artists as I watched you deal with issues that affected the band: Dave leaving, uncooperative record labels, the tragedy with Cliff. Metallica survived all of these and in fact came out stronger each time. It seemed to me that was because you had your priorities straight: the music comes first. You did whatever was necessary to create that music, and share it with people like myself. I know that you had a signifigant impact on my (young) life; my style as a drummer was very influenced by Lars', for example. I stopped following your career after And Justice For All, but I knew you had achieved a certain level of commercial success. And that's fine; I suppose you deserve it. But now I see this come out of the blue. My question, then, is this:
What would those long-haired kids from the Bay say if they could see your response to this issue? They had one dream: to create music, and share it with whomever would listen. Money wasn't the issue; otherwise I doubt that they (you) would have wanted to name their first album "Fuck 'Em All".
I don't blame you for "growing up", and no one expects you to be the same person you were at 17 or 25. But the thing I respected about you then was your purity of vision. Where is that now? Or am I mistaken, and is there a higher purpose to this campaign, one which truely affects the quality of music that you, and other artists, produce?
There ARE good (recent!) arcade games out there, it's just hard to find them. Here's a few in the arcade that I go to here in LA (the Pak Mann arcade): - Crazy Taxi - Battle Balls - that sniper game and its sequel (forget what they are called) - Strider 2 - Tokyo Wars - Power Stone - Virtual ON - Puzzle Fighter II - Time Crisis II - Savage Quest (well, I'm a little partial to this one, since I worked on it) and hey, don't forget about pinball: - Monster Mash - any pinball 2000 game (Revenge from Mars, Star Wars: Episode I) Unfortunately some of the best games never actually come out in consumer arcades - you can only play them at the shows. Two years ago at ASI I played: - Samurai Showdown 3D/64/5 (they hadn't figured out what to call it yet) - Magic: The Gathering (yes, an arcade game version) - The Annoying Maze Game The last two were some of the most unique arcade games I've ever played - which is probably why they never made it anywhere.
PII's pretty much smoked the hell out of the K6-2. At the time, the K6-2 was mainly just a low-cost alternative. Along came the K6-3, however, and that all changed. (Unfortunately, the K6-3 seems to have slipped between the cracks, and is somewhat hard to find these days.) On an identical system I had both a PII-450 and a K6-3 400 (of which, I might add, the second cost about 1/3rd of the first). For floating point, the PII was certainly more impressive - Quake ran at a signifigantly higher framerate. But for most everything else, from running Netscape to compiling the kernel, the K6-3 pretty much rocked the PII!
So the K6-3 is now my server processor. My website, my mud, and in fact any non-FPE duties I delegate to those nice-n-cheap K6-3's. (You can get a K6-3/400 for $80 now, and there are 475 and 500 mhz versions on the way.)
If you have signifigant floating point operations, then the PII smokes anything in the K6 series.
On the higher end, the PIII is not much more than the PII - just higher clockrates and some FP enhancements. Coppermine gives it a nice speedy bus throughput, so certainly I would say that a PIII/copermine/SMP system would certainly make a very nice server - not cheap, but still cheaper than the equivilent in, say, Alpha processors.
The Athalon, on the other hand, destroys the PIII when it comes to floating point performance. Anything that relies on raw FP performance, such as ray-tracing or other 3D rendering, will show the vast superiority of the Athalon. For other tasks I believe that the Athalon and the PIII (w/ copermine, anyhow) are more or less equivilent.
However - and here's my big complaint - there's still no SMP Athalon! That really, really sucks. Considering that the Athalon is down to $1 a mhz for the mid-range speeds (eg, 700mhz or so), it's almost a crime that there's no SMP motherboard available. A two or four processor Athalon system costing less than $2000 could probably do the same amount of rendering as a $10,000+ Alpha system. It's a REAL shame.
Although this article was amusing, it was inaccurate or just plain wrong on almost every single point. I don't think there's much point in doing a point-by-point rebutal; obviously the author had absolutely NO idea about any of the subjects covered in the article, so why bother?
And I don't think it was funded by Microsoft. They are smart enough to actually find *real* flaws (however small) in the targets of their propaganda and then write about them with a reasonable level of grammar. This article looked more like a five-year-old got ahold of a computer on a bad day. (Actually, I guess that's being a little harsh on five-year-olds...)
My favorite part was the bit about "as many as one million" users of Solaris and Linux, put together. *giggle*
> A fairly interesting insite into why hackers are > so powerful. Now only do they think they can fix > things...in many instances they actually do.
This, perhaps, is what I like best about hackers. Most people in today's world have the attitude that most things they encounter in their life are closed boxes. Your choice is a binary one: you take the closed box and use it as-is, or you reject it. A hacker is someone who wants things to be *right*, and isn't afraid to try to change something to make it better. Moreover, they want to do it themselves, right now.
I often tell my girlfriend that she's a hacker. She thinks this is funny, because she's certainly not a programmer. But if the switch on her lamp stops working, she breaks out a screwdriver and opens it up. "Do you know how to fix lamps?" I ask. "No," she says, "but it can't be that complicated, can it?"
This sort of methodolgy works for *anything* in your life. And JWZ is proving that with his political actions. All it takes to change something in this world is for one person (or in some cases, a few people) to stand up and say, "I don't like my choices in this area. I'm going to make my own, and do it the way I think is best." Not only does this benefit you, but it benefits others that agree with you. (Just ask Linus about that one!)
I'd say there's a simple solution to this problem. Start a new gaming magazine which is geared towards a different kind of audience. It could step in and capture the parts of the gaming market that all other gaming mags are ignoring, and that refers to more than just women. I know that I stopped reading game magazines some years ago for much the same reasons that this article describes: all of the articles and especially the ads seem geared towards explositions, gore, sex, or any other quick attention-grabber, carefully avoiding any use of sophistication or subtlety. (If you don't think that advertising can be sophisticated or subtle, think of iMac, Infinity, or Volkswagon Bettle capagins.)
Another amusing over-the-top gaming ad ancedote: my girlfriend and I attended CGDC last year. Microsoft poored some serious money into advertising there; you couldn't look in any direction without seeing a Microsoft-funded ad. Anyways, one of the advertising sets was a series of banners mounted in one of the halls connecting two of the largest rooms; all of them featured the words "Bring It On!" along with some sort of "extreme" picture, like a guy's head on fire or something. One of them was a picture of...sperm. Needless to say, we were laughing so hard we almost hurt ourselves. Of course, I suppose the sad thing is that this sort of advertising must be working on *someone*, or else it wouldn't be so prevelant...
Agreed that Toy Story 2 was brilliant - perhaps even better than the first. And I don't even like cutesy kids' movies.
Dogma was a huge disappointment. I have followed all of Kevin Smith's work since Clerks. Dogma wasn't a *bad* movie, but at this point I expect Kevin Smith to do much better than that. Could it be that he's jointed the 'Matt Groening' category of gifted people, meaning that he's all out of good ideas and funny jokes?
Also in theaters: the new James Bond. Don't go to see it expecting anything more than a remake of the last twenty or so Bond movies. But in this capacity, it's very good (just like the other three Brosnan bond flicks). It's highly entertaining, and recommended if you like Bond at all.
There is no shortage of character-based Rogue-like games for Linux (or other UNIX). My personal favorite is Angband, which you can get here:
http://www.phial.com/angband/
However, there are plenty of others, including Nethack, Moria, and Omega. (Not to mention all the Angband variations!) I once got a copy of the original Rogue, but I don't seem to have it around any more - I'm sure someone on rec.games.roguelike.misc would know.
And for what it's worth, those of you that haven't played these games (Angband in particular) - give it a try. Angband has consumed more time than all the commercial games I've ever played put together, and that's saying quite a bit.
Linux is actually a good choice because it's so configurable. The things that the "average" user will have problems with (for example, downloading and installing new software from the internet) will probably not be an issue for him. He'll probably have two or three apps that he uses all the time, and he won't be interested in downloading the latest game demo or anything like that. And best of all, if he's having problems and needs an upgrade to one of his apps, you can easily telnet in and do it on the spot.
I recommend Afterstep 1.0 (nice, big, visible buttons) set up with three or four colorful icons for his favorite apps. Maybe the telephone icon for PPP-connect, the pen/paper for the word processor, and the netscape icon for netscape. (Don't forget to turn off Java; without Java on, netscape 4.5+ is actually quite stable.)
You should probably get rid of the "quit X-windows" button, as well as the desktop menu that comes up when you right-click.
It seems like I've read a million sci-fi books that consider genetic modification to be such a huge moral dilema, something that will have this huge impact on our society, and probably a negative one. Although this is a possibility, I don't see it as the certainty that most people now seem to (probably thanks to science fiction).
I mean - if 100 years ago someone had asked Jules Verne or JR Tolkien to write a story about what it would be like to live in a world where we could cure almost any disease, people lived in excess of 80 or 90 years, 99.999% of our children lived until adulthood, people could modify the way that they look at will (breast implants, advanced weight training equipment, facelifts, contact lenses, steroids, sex change surgery, skin hue lightening, hair dye, piercings, tattoos...), people could have sex whenever they chose without causing pregnancy, etc etc etc - don't you think they would have predicted many terrible moral problems and a degredadation of society as a whole? In some cases they would be right, but as a whole I think our society has improved a lot thanks to the benefits of technology and modern medicine. And I don't think that culling out genetic diseases or even choosing to make our children more attractive or taller or smarter is really any different.
Perhaps in the very long term we will get to the point where we can mold genetics any way we want, and crazy parents will sculpt monsters for themselves ("I want my kid to have five arms and tentacles for hair!"), but for a long time I suspect we will be limited to fixing specific problems (genetic defects) or vague changes (making them favor their mother more than their fater for looks, or be a certain gender). Honestly I fail to see how this stuff could cause the sorts of problems suggested by Gataca.
I'm very glad to hear this, especially after reading that interview with Theo that was posted a few weeks back. I have a lot of experience with Linux and FreeBSD and have been happy with them and had no need to switch to something else, but what I read in that interview made me want to locate a spare box to give OpenBSD a try.
As we all know, a strong leader with unflagging devotion to the project and a good sense of perspective (eg, don't take themselves too seriously) is perhaps the most important thing for its long-term success.
This piece is surprisingly FUD-free, honestly. It chooses a few of Linux's remaining weak spots and attacks them with an incredible fervor. Compare this to earlier pieces from Microsoft's website which were, in most cases, completely fact-free. At least one can say that at least they've done some research this time around.
The only *problem* with the article is that it focuses on a few pretty minor issues and fails to recognize the strengths. For example: yes, x86/Linux only (!) supports 2 gigs of RAM out of the box, and requires a patch to support the 4 gigs that NT does. On the other hand, any 64-bit platform supports enough RAM to choke a horse. This was by design; Linus knew that 64-bit would be here long before most folks would want more than 2 gigs of RAM in their machines.
Secondly, and I think more embarassingly, this article is mud-slinging. Regardless of its accuracy, putting articles on your website that denounce your competitors is just as bad a reflection on a business as it is on a politician. If I go to a company's website, I want to hear why *their* product is good, not why they think someone else's sucks. (As I recall, they ran a similar piece on Solaris a while back...wasn't that the one where they claimed that the OS had a "fatal flaw" that would cause it to lock up if you started randomly yanking CPUs out of a running system?)
If you're reading Neal's books for the story, you might as well give up now. That's not the point. He crafts a story which serves little purpose except to illustrate a complex and incredibly interesting world that he has dreamed up. I think that the Diamond Age was probably the most 'guilty' of this, since the setting for the book was the most unique. Cryptonomicon, even though it is set in 'real' times (eg the present and the past), describes a world of cryptography and wartime intrigue that is mostly in Neal's head. (Actually, Crypto probably has a more interesting story and characters than any of the others.) Snow Crash still remains my favorite simply because of being so easy to read. I think I read it in two days because I just couldn't put it down. But they are all excellent: Stephenson is radidly becoming one of my favorite authors. Everything he writes is excellent.
Possibly the best part of his writing style is the almost Hitchhiker's Guide-style dry witicisms. My girlfriend always asked me, "Is that a funny book?" when I was reading Cryptonomicon. And I'd say, 'no, not really'...but of course I burst out laughing every so often as I read it, so I guess that it is.
Okay, there's now five or ten pretty nice IDEs for Linux. (Code Warrior, Code Fusion, KDevelop, CForge...)
There are some extremely good visual debuggers. (ddd, kdbg, Code Medic...)
But...it's all pointless without integrated debugging! I'm sorry, I find the lack of this feature to be a major detriment to these products, and to OSS/free software in general. Ten years ago I was running QuickC on my 286-12 running DOS, and *it* had an integrated debugger.
I have several co-workers now who have installed Linux to check it out, and have been very happy with the power and stability it offers, but - in a nutshell - they won't work without the development environment they are used to, and that means an integrated debugger.
Myself, I find it too annoying to deal with loading up a seperate (graphical) debugger, especially while running an already screen-space-hogging IDE. I continue to use vim+make+gdb.
Yes, I know - I should stop bitching and just code it. Still, it's a big job, and I'm torn whether I should try to add interactive debugging to something like KDevelop (certainly a big job) or simply add some source-editing features to DDD (a smaller job, but less impressive when finished).
I was hoping that Code Fusion would finally contain an integrated debugger, since it's not just a port of an existing IDE. I see now that our only hope is the 'Pro' version of Code Warrior.
Here in San Diego we have Balboa Park, which is divided into two main areas - North Park and South Park. Unfortunately North Park is the bigger of the two - a couple of my friends live there, and I drive past the huge neon "NORTH PARK" sign every weekend. I don't think there is such a sign for South Park, alas.
Anyone have any thoughts about how fast these systems could turn out to be? I spent quite a while researching the Alpha, hoping for an SMP alpha box, but realized that the price/performance is completely out of whack unless you're planning on building a rendering farm. I was basically planning on waiting for SMP K7 motherboards, but if the G4 is as good (or better) then I'd rather go that route and free myself from x86 tyrany once and for all. For example, if the extra 4 CPUs *are* on a PCI card, rather than the motherboard itself, will that cause bandwidth limitations? Does Linux even support PPC SMP as of yet?
By the way, the reason that Quake was slower was because Mesa was not as optimized as the 3Dfx miniGL drivers for Windows. They focus more on correctness and completeness than speed.
However, Mesa 3.1 is going to be MUCH faster, mostly due to heavy optimization work done by Keith W. and some others. I haven't tested Quake, but my own applications saw a speedup of 50%, and sometimes more. Keith reports that on both the Banshee and the Voodoo 2, Quake 2 timedemos are 10-15% *faster* than the running on 3Dfx's miniGL in Windows. Plus Mesa is a real OpenGL implementation, with all the bells and whistles! I imagine that even Windows users will want to start using 3Dfx/Mesa with the release of this new version.
Don't quote me on those numbers, go look for Keith's timedemo posts on the Mesa-dev mailing list (www.mesa3d.org is the site). And Mesa 3.1 beta 2 is quite stable from what I've seen - download it and try it for yourself. I've been using it for Q3Test and it's quite speedy, certainly just as good as my Windows-using co-workers.
This is why I love open source/free software. In the time it takes you to say, " isn't as good as it could be", it's already better. In the meantime, 3Dfx has been working on their OpenGL driver for going on three years now and still have yet to make a "real" release.
Let me summarize my personal experience, which is not that extensive, but should give you an idea.
I've got three systems at my house. One is my firewall (as well as web/ftp/email server). Another is a Sparc 5 w/ Solaris 7 (mostly for old time's sake). The third is my desktop machine with Linux 2.2. I use Linux 2.2 on my desktop work machine as well, and an O2 w/ IRIX 6.5 as my server.
For starters, both Solaris and IRIX, despite being recent versions, feel VERY dated and clunky after you're used to all the nicety of a "modern" UNIX system (which means one of the free UNIXs, as discussed in the article). I like 'em both, but their day is past, except for a few specific strengths (I think Solaris can still support more simutaneous users than either *BSD or Linux, and certainly its SMP is much better).
FreeBSD still feels a little bit clunky to me, honestly. I do have an older version (it's getting on a year old now), but compared to the Linuxs from the same time period (RH 5.2, etc), it just isn't as slick. It's hard to pin down what it is, exactly: a slightly old version of 'tar' that doesn't have the "x" command line option; no bzip2 out of the box; the "route" command is more convulted.
On the other hand, FreeBSD does seem a little snappier on network response (as a server, I mean). That's the main reason I chose it. The second reason was that the Linux 2.0 kernel had incomplete firewall support at the time that was plagued with a few nasty slowdown problems. FreeBSD worked like a champ right out of the box. It was much more secure, too - which is inconvenient on a desktop protected by a firewall where security isn't a big issue, but for something that is accessable to the outside world it's very important.
In the meantime, the desktop stuff for Linux is going through the rough. Everything from KDE to WINE to the Gimp are developed on Linux first, and ported later. You'll get the best and brightest on Linux. 3D drivers like the G200/400, the 3Dfx, and nVidia's stuff can be made to work on x86/BSD, but it's a LOT easier to set it up on Linux, because that's what they were all developed for. Binary-only games like Quake [1|2|3Test] and Civilization can certainly be made to work on FreeBSD, but it's nice to be able to just pop in the CD and have it work. I'm hacker, but I want to hack stuff that's interesting and rewarding. Getting binaries designed to run on another system to work on mine is not on that list.
Finally, there's the old BSD vs. System V thing. My first UNIX was SCO, and after that it was Solaris. I was never very fond of commercial BSDs, and that continues into the free BSDs. Of course, I know plenty of people who feel the other way around - that's a totally subjective thing, and there's no "best" choice. It's whatever you happen to like.
Here's my recommendation: if you want to increase your geek prowess and have some spare time and some spare disk space, grab an OS that you don't already have. Install it, mess with it. Figure out the differences. Who knows, you might like it better. But then again, maybe not. I like FreeBSD a whole lot, and I don't ever plan to replace it on my firewall. If I upgrade the machine, I'll probably grab the latest version and put in on there. But Linux is still my choice for day-to-day work.
Since I code C++ on Linux all day long at work, naturally I have a strong interest in good development tools. When I first got started doing Linux programming professionally, I looked at all the tools availible.
When it comes to IDEs, there's only one good reason, in my mind, to use them: the integrated debugger. Being able to set breakpoints with a single keystroke, run the software, and then when you find the bug modifiy the code right in the same window is wonderful. Compare this to gdb (and this includes DDD, wonderful as it is), where you have to have your source editor up in a seperate window, and changes you make aren't instantaneous. It's also hard to preserve breakpoints across sessions.
So far, I've tried every IDE that's come out for Linux. That includes Code Warrior, Code Forge, Visual Slickedit, Xemacs, and some others. None have an integrated debugger! What's the point? Project management is the only other major feature these provide, and to someone handy with makefiles that's not really all that desirable.
So, I continue to use vim+gmake+egcs+gdb for all my work. This is fine, although the debugging does still leave something to be desired. I think an ideal solution would be either to build a very simple debugger front-end into vim (which should probably be a seperate project, to avoid emacs-like bloat in the editor core) which would allow you to set breakpoints and let it run.
Alternatively, DDD is *very* nice, and with a few interface tweaks (such as customatizable hotkeys for menu commmands - too bad it's not written with GTK) and the abililty to modify text on-the-fly, it could be everything I've ever wanted.
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There are different tools available for each platform. Many are available for just one but not the other; in most cases I think that the UNIX tools are more powerful and more flexible in the long run, but it takes at least a year or two of using them before that becomes clear. So I won't bother to cover these, because it's not going to convince anyone except those already "in the know".
Instead I'm going to ask what your application is. I have used both Windows and Linux to develop commercial games for many years. In this area, Linux has a clear superiority, largely because games are such unstable beasts. One can develop a 'typical' user app on Windows without needing to reboot but perhaps once or twice a day, which is perfectly workable. Doing games, I have found that up to 50 (yes, really, I have counted) reboots a day are necessary. At one place I worked I had two computers so that I could work while the other one rebooted, just so that I wouldn't loose so much productivity. (A lot of the blame here lies with DirectX - if you are developing OpenGL on NT 3.5 or 4.0 this is much less of an issue. I have heard that Windows 2000 is similarly usable.) FWIW, writing cross-platform game code is quite easy these days. Most of the games I have worked on in the last three years have run, and been developed, on both Windows and Linux, but have a completely different release target (including Dreamcast, PSX2, and an arcade game).
Another application I have tackled professionaly is enterprise-level servers. Here is an area where UNIX development is a clear win; there are thousands of small server-oriented tools at your disposal that cut your workload by an order of magnitude. TCP wrappers are absolutely *wonderful*, for example - I spent over a week writing code for NT that is entirely handled by TCP wrappers on UNIX. Other major headaches on NT, such as the poor multiprocessor support (running lots of threads pegs CPU #1 at 100%, while CPU #2 hovers just below 30%) and the slow filesystem (perhaps it's the SCSI drivers that are slow, I dunno) make it almost unusable not only as a *target* for high-end servers, but also as a development platform.
When it comes to 'typical' end-user apps, like ICQ clients, word processors, or spreadsheets - I think the difference between the two platforms comes down to personal preference. The tools available on both are perfectly sufficient for this kind of development work, although each developer is likely to have their own preferences.
UI stuff is about the same - writing down-to-the-metal WIN32 code is just as horrible as writing down-to-the-metal X (or even Motif) code. All sane developers use encaspulation (either their own company's classes, or a 3rd party library such as Qt) to hide the ugly implemention details anyways. So in this case, any convincing that you do will be purely an "expand your geek power!" type of argument, rather than a practical double-your-productivity kind of argument.
I agree with most of this, although I find the figure of 50% to be dubious. Can you give us some links to these studies you refer to?
Secondly, the last bit - that it's entirely random that large breasts are considered a desirable trait in a female - is not true. Large breasts indicate a well-fed, healthy woman who will be able to provide potentital children with plenty of breast milk. Like most physical traits, modern society has exagerated this effect, but it is still grounded in evolution.
To address the larger point, however: I am definitely in agreement that we have "defeated" evolution, for the the time being. This has, however, only been the case for maybe about a century. In order for it to have ANY sort of long-term signifigance to our race, especially given our long lifespans, it will need to continue for another million years or so. At that point we can start to ponder the effects of mankind's effects on its own evolution.
Pets, on the other hand, are a different story: man has created a whole new set of desirable traits in animals, and is rapidly breeding the 'old' desirable traits out of existence.
I watched a LOT of Anime in college, mostly through the anime club at UC San Diego (which got some really nice stuff from time to time). I came to the conclusion that there is an even higher level of signal-to-noise in anime as there is in other forms of entertainment (live action movies, music, etc).
Ninja Scroll is, in my opinion, easily the best anime ever created. Besides the fact that it avoids most of the trite anime-isms that I can't stand (cute schoolgirls, giant robots, psycic powers), it's actually a semi-intelligent story with interesting (and believable) characters, but without sacrificing the over-the-top nature that makes anime what it is. Plus cinematics and action sequences worthy of John Woo. (I never get tired of watching the opening sequence.) And, of course, I consider its close ties to the Samurai Showdown series (my favorite fighting game of all time) to be a definite plus.
The only other bit of anime that even approaches NS is Macross 2. It's slightly less interesting to me because of its futuristic setting, but the characters, story, and art are all very high-quality - almost up to snuff with a Hollywood film.
Before anyone mentions them: yes, I have seen all the other films that anime fans often put into the "masterpiece" category, and I was unimpressed by them. Wings of Homenaise (sp?) had a very cool theme, but the story was pointless and the movie itself mostly pretty boring. Ghost in the Shell had some nice bits but was also mostly pointless, getting lost in the shallow and melodramatic metaphysics that anime often wanders into. It did have a few nice scenes, though.
Most series I find to be childish to the point of being unwatchable (which I guess is okay, because they are targeted at children). This includes Tenchi, Ranma, Dragonball Z... Maison Ikkoku was a mildly entertaining soap opera, but drew out much too long.
Although not in the same category as these two, I also like Nassica: Vallye of the Winds, Battle Angel, Vampire Hunter D, Golgo 13, Riding Bean, and Gunsmith Cats. Not quite anime but still very good are Laputa: Castle in the Sky and Porco Rosso (both made by the same fellow who did Nassica, I believe).
There are quite a few flicks with art that I like and so I found watching more of them than I planned: Video Girl Ai and DNA come to mind.
I've read this and many of Bradbury's other works. Ditto for old Asimov, and if you really want to get ancient, Jules Verne. This stuff was groundbreaking at the time, and these guys have incredible imaginations to be able to come up with all of this.
But honestly - they pale in comparisson to today's sci-fi masterworks such as Cryptonimicon (or anything by Stephenson), the Hyperion books, Vernor Vinge's stuff, and so forth. Scifi fans always seem to think of the older, classic material as "required" reading. I don't really agree. It's certainly very interesting to go back and take a look at the roots of the genre, but as literature they hardly hold a candle to the works available today.
There is one exception, although it's not sci-fi, it's fantasy: Tolkien. His stuff remains the best fantasy even written, despite being close to a century old, and I doubt that will ever change.
I began listening to Metallica when I was given a tape containing No Life Till Leather (and, on the reverse side, a live recording from a bar in SF). I loved the music; I gained respect for you as people and as artists as I watched you deal with issues that affected the band: Dave leaving, uncooperative record labels, the tragedy with Cliff. Metallica survived all of these and in fact came out stronger each time. It seemed to me that was because you had your priorities straight: the music comes first. You did whatever was necessary to create that music, and share it with people like myself. I know that you had a signifigant impact on my (young) life; my style as a drummer was very influenced by Lars', for example.
I stopped following your career after And Justice For All, but I knew you had achieved a certain level of commercial success. And that's fine; I suppose you deserve it. But now I see this come out of the blue. My question, then, is this:
What would those long-haired kids from the Bay say if they could see your response to this issue? They had one dream: to create music, and share it with whomever would listen. Money wasn't the issue; otherwise I doubt that they (you) would have wanted to name their first album "Fuck 'Em All".
I don't blame you for "growing up", and no one expects you to be the same person you were at 17 or 25. But the thing I respected about you then was your purity of vision. Where is that now?
Or am I mistaken, and is there a higher purpose to this campaign, one which truely affects the quality of music that you, and other artists, produce?
There ARE good (recent!) arcade games out there, it's just hard to find them. Here's a few in the arcade that I go to here in LA (the Pak Mann arcade): - Crazy Taxi - Battle Balls - that sniper game and its sequel (forget what they are called) - Strider 2 - Tokyo Wars - Power Stone - Virtual ON - Puzzle Fighter II - Time Crisis II - Savage Quest (well, I'm a little partial to this one, since I worked on it) and hey, don't forget about pinball: - Monster Mash - any pinball 2000 game (Revenge from Mars, Star Wars: Episode I) Unfortunately some of the best games never actually come out in consumer arcades - you can only play them at the shows. Two years ago at ASI I played: - Samurai Showdown 3D/64/5 (they hadn't figured out what to call it yet) - Magic: The Gathering (yes, an arcade game version) - The Annoying Maze Game The last two were some of the most unique arcade games I've ever played - which is probably why they never made it anywhere.
PII's pretty much smoked the hell out of the K6-2. At the time, the K6-2 was mainly just a low-cost alternative. Along came the K6-3, however, and that all changed. (Unfortunately, the K6-3 seems to have slipped between the cracks, and is somewhat hard to find these days.) On an identical system I had both a PII-450 and a K6-3 400 (of which, I might add, the second cost about 1/3rd of the first). For floating point, the PII was certainly more impressive - Quake ran at a signifigantly higher framerate. But for most everything else, from running Netscape to compiling the kernel, the K6-3 pretty much rocked the PII!
So the K6-3 is now my server processor. My website, my mud, and in fact any non-FPE duties I delegate to those nice-n-cheap K6-3's. (You can get a K6-3/400 for $80 now, and there are 475 and 500 mhz versions on the way.)
If you have signifigant floating point operations, then the PII smokes anything in the K6 series.
On the higher end, the PIII is not much more than the PII - just higher clockrates and some FP enhancements. Coppermine gives it a nice speedy bus throughput, so certainly I would say that a PIII/copermine/SMP system would certainly make a very nice server - not cheap, but still cheaper than the equivilent in, say, Alpha processors.
The Athalon, on the other hand, destroys the PIII when it comes to floating point performance. Anything that relies on raw FP performance, such as ray-tracing or other 3D rendering, will show the vast superiority of the Athalon. For other tasks I believe that the Athalon and the PIII (w/ copermine, anyhow) are more or less equivilent.
However - and here's my big complaint - there's still no SMP Athalon! That really, really sucks. Considering that the Athalon is down to $1 a mhz for the mid-range speeds (eg, 700mhz or so), it's almost a crime that there's no SMP motherboard available. A two or four processor Athalon system costing less than $2000 could probably do the same amount of rendering as a $10,000+ Alpha system. It's a REAL shame.
Although this article was amusing, it was inaccurate or just plain wrong on almost every single point. I don't think there's much point in doing a point-by-point rebutal; obviously the author had absolutely NO idea about any of the subjects covered in the article, so why bother?
And I don't think it was funded by Microsoft. They are smart enough to actually find *real* flaws (however small) in the targets of their propaganda and then write about them with a reasonable level of grammar. This article looked more like a five-year-old got ahold of a computer on a bad day. (Actually, I guess that's being a little harsh on five-year-olds...)
My favorite part was the bit about "as many as one million" users of Solaris and Linux, put together. *giggle*
> A fairly interesting insite into why hackers are
> so powerful. Now only do they think they can fix
> things...in many instances they actually do.
This, perhaps, is what I like best about hackers. Most people in today's world have the attitude that most things they encounter in their life are closed boxes. Your choice is a binary one: you take the closed box and use it as-is, or you reject it. A hacker is someone who wants things to be *right*, and isn't afraid to try to change something to make it better. Moreover, they want to do it themselves, right now.
I often tell my girlfriend that she's a hacker. She thinks this is funny, because she's certainly not a programmer. But if the switch on her lamp stops working, she breaks out a screwdriver and opens it up. "Do you know how to fix lamps?" I ask. "No," she says, "but it can't be that complicated, can it?"
This sort of methodolgy works for *anything* in your life. And JWZ is proving that with his political actions. All it takes to change something in this world is for one person (or in some cases, a few people) to stand up and say, "I don't like my choices in this area. I'm going to make my own, and do it the way I think is best." Not only does this benefit you, but it benefits others that agree with you. (Just ask Linus about that one!)
Here's one better: my friend works for a computer company that's giving it's employees *cars*.
http://www.interwoven.com/company/careers/bmwz3
I'd say there's a simple solution to this problem. Start a new gaming magazine which is geared towards a different kind of audience. It could step in and capture the parts of the gaming market that all other gaming mags are ignoring, and that refers to more than just women. I know that I stopped reading game magazines some years ago for much the same reasons that this article describes: all of the articles and especially the ads seem geared towards explositions, gore, sex, or any other quick attention-grabber, carefully avoiding any use of sophistication or subtlety. (If you don't think that advertising can be sophisticated or subtle, think of iMac, Infinity, or Volkswagon Bettle capagins.)
Another amusing over-the-top gaming ad ancedote: my girlfriend and I attended CGDC last year. Microsoft poored some serious money into advertising there; you couldn't look in any direction without seeing a Microsoft-funded ad. Anyways, one of the advertising sets was a series of banners mounted in one of the halls connecting two of the largest rooms; all of them featured the words "Bring It On!" along with some sort of "extreme" picture, like a guy's head on fire or something. One of them was a picture of...sperm. Needless to say, we were laughing so hard we almost hurt ourselves. Of course, I suppose the sad thing is that this sort of advertising must be working on *someone*, or else it wouldn't be so prevelant...
Agreed that Toy Story 2 was brilliant - perhaps even better than the first. And I don't even like cutesy kids' movies.
Dogma was a huge disappointment. I have followed all of Kevin Smith's work since Clerks. Dogma wasn't a *bad* movie, but at this point I expect Kevin Smith to do much better than that. Could it be that he's jointed the 'Matt Groening' category of gifted people, meaning that he's all out of good ideas and funny jokes?
Also in theaters: the new James Bond. Don't go to see it expecting anything more than a remake of the last twenty or so Bond movies. But in this capacity, it's very good (just like the other three Brosnan bond flicks). It's highly entertaining, and recommended if you like Bond at all.
What I want to know is: WHERE THE HELL ARE THE ATHALON SMP MOTHERBOARDS?!
*grumble*
There is no shortage of character-based Rogue-like games for Linux (or other UNIX). My personal favorite is Angband, which you can get here:
http://www.phial.com/angband/
However, there are plenty of others, including Nethack, Moria, and Omega. (Not to mention all the Angband variations!) I once got a copy of the original Rogue, but I don't seem to have it around any more - I'm sure someone on rec.games.roguelike.misc would know.
And for what it's worth, those of you that haven't played these games (Angband in particular) - give it a try. Angband has consumed more time than all the commercial games I've ever played put together, and that's saying quite a bit.
Linux is actually a good choice because it's so configurable. The things that the "average" user will have problems with (for example, downloading and installing new software from the internet) will probably not be an issue for him. He'll probably have two or three apps that he uses all the time, and he won't be interested in downloading the latest game demo or anything like that. And best of all, if he's having problems and needs an upgrade to one of his apps, you can easily telnet in and do it on the spot.
I recommend Afterstep 1.0 (nice, big, visible buttons) set up with three or four colorful icons for his favorite apps. Maybe the telephone icon for PPP-connect, the pen/paper for the word processor, and the netscape icon for netscape. (Don't forget to turn off Java; without Java on, netscape 4.5+ is actually quite stable.)
You should probably get rid of the "quit X-windows" button, as well as the desktop menu that comes up when you right-click.
It seems like I've read a million sci-fi books that consider genetic modification to be such a huge moral dilema, something that will have this huge impact on our society, and probably a negative one. Although this is a possibility, I don't see it as the certainty that most people now seem to (probably thanks to science fiction).
I mean - if 100 years ago someone had asked Jules Verne or JR Tolkien to write a story about what it would be like to live in a world where we could cure almost any disease, people lived in excess of 80 or 90 years, 99.999% of our children lived until adulthood, people could modify the way that they look at will (breast implants, advanced weight training equipment, facelifts, contact lenses, steroids, sex change surgery, skin hue lightening, hair dye, piercings, tattoos...), people could have sex whenever they chose without causing pregnancy, etc etc etc - don't you think they would have predicted many terrible moral problems and a degredadation of society as a whole? In some cases they would be right, but as a whole I think our society has improved a lot thanks to the benefits of technology and modern medicine. And I don't think that culling out genetic diseases or even choosing to make our children more attractive or taller or smarter is really any different.
Perhaps in the very long term we will get to the point where we can mold genetics any way we want, and crazy parents will sculpt monsters for themselves ("I want my kid to have five arms and tentacles for hair!"), but for a long time I suspect we will be limited to fixing specific problems (genetic defects) or vague changes (making them favor their mother more than their fater for looks, or be a certain gender). Honestly I fail to see how this stuff could cause the sorts of problems suggested by Gataca.
I'm very glad to hear this, especially after reading that interview with Theo that was posted a few weeks back. I have a lot of experience with Linux and FreeBSD and have been happy with them and had no need to switch to something else, but what I read in that interview made me want to locate a spare box to give OpenBSD a try.
As we all know, a strong leader with unflagging devotion to the project and a good sense of perspective (eg, don't take themselves too seriously) is perhaps the most important thing for its long-term success.
Three cheers for OpenBSD!
This piece is surprisingly FUD-free, honestly. It chooses a few of Linux's remaining weak spots and attacks them with an incredible fervor. Compare this to earlier pieces from Microsoft's website which were, in most cases, completely fact-free. At least one can say that at least they've done some research this time around.
The only *problem* with the article is that it focuses on a few pretty minor issues and fails to recognize the strengths. For example: yes, x86/Linux only (!) supports 2 gigs of RAM out of the box, and requires a patch to support the 4 gigs that NT does. On the other hand, any 64-bit platform supports enough RAM to choke a horse. This was by design; Linus knew that 64-bit would be here long before most folks would want more than 2 gigs of RAM in their machines.
Secondly, and I think more embarassingly, this article is mud-slinging. Regardless of its accuracy, putting articles on your website that denounce your competitors is just as bad a reflection on a business as it is on a politician. If I go to a company's website, I want to hear why *their* product is good, not why they think someone else's sucks. (As I recall, they ran a similar piece on Solaris a while back...wasn't that the one where they claimed that the OS had a "fatal flaw" that would cause it to lock up if you started randomly yanking CPUs out of a running system?)
If you're reading Neal's books for the story, you might as well give up now. That's not the point. He crafts a story which serves little purpose except to illustrate a complex and incredibly interesting world that he has dreamed up. I think that the Diamond Age was probably the most 'guilty' of this, since the setting for the book was the most unique. Cryptonomicon, even though it is set in 'real' times (eg the present and the past), describes a world of cryptography and wartime intrigue that is mostly in Neal's head. (Actually, Crypto probably has a more interesting story and characters than any of the others.)
Snow Crash still remains my favorite simply because of being so easy to read. I think I read it in two days because I just couldn't put it down. But they are all excellent: Stephenson is radidly becoming one of my favorite authors. Everything he writes is excellent.
Possibly the best part of his writing style is the almost Hitchhiker's Guide-style dry witicisms. My girlfriend always asked me, "Is that a funny book?" when I was reading Cryptonomicon. And I'd say, 'no, not really'...but of course I burst out laughing every so often as I read it, so I guess that it is.
*sigh*
Okay, there's now five or ten pretty nice IDEs for Linux. (Code Warrior, Code Fusion, KDevelop, CForge...)
There are some extremely good visual debuggers. (ddd, kdbg, Code Medic...)
But...it's all pointless without integrated debugging! I'm sorry, I find the lack of this feature to be a major detriment to these products, and to OSS/free software in general. Ten years ago I was running QuickC on my 286-12 running DOS, and *it* had an integrated debugger.
I have several co-workers now who have installed Linux to check it out, and have been very happy with the power and stability it offers, but - in a nutshell - they won't work without the development environment they are used to, and that means an integrated debugger.
Myself, I find it too annoying to deal with loading up a seperate (graphical) debugger, especially while running an already screen-space-hogging IDE. I continue to use vim+make+gdb.
Yes, I know - I should stop bitching and just code it. Still, it's a big job, and I'm torn whether I should try to add interactive debugging to something like KDevelop (certainly a big job) or simply add some source-editing features to DDD (a smaller job, but less impressive when finished).
I was hoping that Code Fusion would finally contain an integrated debugger, since it's not just a port of an existing IDE. I see now that our only hope is the 'Pro' version of Code Warrior.
Here in San Diego we have Balboa Park, which is divided into two main areas - North Park and South Park. Unfortunately North Park is the bigger of the two - a couple of my friends live there, and I drive past the huge neon "NORTH PARK" sign every weekend. I don't think there is such a sign for South Park, alas.
Anyone have any thoughts about how fast these systems could turn out to be? I spent quite a while researching the Alpha, hoping for an SMP alpha box, but realized that the price/performance is completely out of whack unless you're planning on building a rendering farm.
I was basically planning on waiting for SMP K7 motherboards, but if the G4 is as good (or better) then I'd rather go that route and free myself from x86 tyrany once and for all.
For example, if the extra 4 CPUs *are* on a PCI card, rather than the motherboard itself, will that cause bandwidth limitations?
Does Linux even support PPC SMP as of yet?
By the way, the reason that Quake was slower was because Mesa was not as optimized as the 3Dfx miniGL drivers for Windows. They focus more on correctness and completeness than speed.
However, Mesa 3.1 is going to be MUCH faster, mostly due to heavy optimization work done by Keith W. and some others. I haven't tested Quake, but my own applications saw a speedup of 50%, and sometimes more. Keith reports that on both the Banshee and the Voodoo 2, Quake 2 timedemos are 10-15% *faster* than the running on 3Dfx's miniGL in Windows. Plus Mesa is a real OpenGL implementation, with all the bells and whistles!
I imagine that even Windows users will want to start using 3Dfx/Mesa with the release of this new version.
Don't quote me on those numbers, go look for Keith's timedemo posts on the Mesa-dev mailing list (www.mesa3d.org is the site). And Mesa 3.1 beta 2 is quite stable from what I've seen - download it and try it for yourself. I've been using it for Q3Test and it's quite speedy, certainly just as good as my Windows-using co-workers.
This is why I love open source/free software. In the time it takes you to say, " isn't as good as it could be", it's already better. In the meantime, 3Dfx has been working on their OpenGL driver for going on three years now and still have yet to make a "real" release.
Let me summarize my personal experience, which is not that extensive, but should give you an idea.
I've got three systems at my house. One is my firewall (as well as web/ftp/email server). Another is a Sparc 5 w/ Solaris 7 (mostly for old time's sake). The third is my desktop machine with Linux 2.2. I use Linux 2.2 on my desktop work machine as well, and an O2 w/ IRIX 6.5 as my server.
For starters, both Solaris and IRIX, despite being recent versions, feel VERY dated and clunky after you're used to all the nicety of a "modern" UNIX system (which means one of the free UNIXs, as discussed in the article). I like 'em both, but their day is past, except for a few specific strengths (I think Solaris can still support more simutaneous users than either *BSD or Linux, and certainly its SMP is much better).
FreeBSD still feels a little bit clunky to me, honestly. I do have an older version (it's getting on a year old now), but compared to the Linuxs from the same time period (RH 5.2, etc), it just isn't as slick. It's hard to pin down what it is, exactly: a slightly old version of 'tar' that doesn't have the "x" command line option; no bzip2 out of the box; the "route" command is more convulted.
On the other hand, FreeBSD does seem a little snappier on network response (as a server, I mean). That's the main reason I chose it. The second reason was that the Linux 2.0 kernel had incomplete firewall support at the time that was plagued with a few nasty slowdown problems. FreeBSD worked like a champ right out of the box. It was much more secure, too - which is inconvenient on a desktop protected by a firewall where security isn't a big issue, but for something that is accessable to the outside world it's very important.
In the meantime, the desktop stuff for Linux is going through the rough. Everything from KDE to WINE to the Gimp are developed on Linux first, and ported later. You'll get the best and brightest on Linux. 3D drivers like the G200/400, the 3Dfx, and nVidia's stuff can be made to work on x86/BSD, but it's a LOT easier to set it up on Linux, because that's what they were all developed for. Binary-only games like Quake [1|2|3Test] and Civilization can certainly be made to work on FreeBSD, but it's nice to be able to just pop in the CD and have it work. I'm hacker, but I want to hack stuff that's interesting and rewarding. Getting binaries designed to run on another system to work on mine is not on that list.
Finally, there's the old BSD vs. System V thing. My first UNIX was SCO, and after that it was Solaris. I was never very fond of commercial BSDs, and that continues into the free BSDs. Of course, I know plenty of people who feel the other way around - that's a totally subjective thing, and there's no "best" choice. It's whatever you happen to like.
Here's my recommendation: if you want to increase your geek prowess and have some spare time and some spare disk space, grab an OS that you don't already have. Install it, mess with it. Figure out the differences. Who knows, you might like it better. But then again, maybe not. I like FreeBSD a whole lot, and I don't ever plan to replace it on my firewall. If I upgrade the machine, I'll probably grab the latest version and put in on there. But Linux is still my choice for day-to-day work.
Since I code C++ on Linux all day long at work, naturally I have a strong interest in good development tools. When I first got started doing Linux programming professionally, I looked at all the tools availible.
When it comes to IDEs, there's only one good reason, in my mind, to use them: the integrated debugger. Being able to set breakpoints with a single keystroke, run the software, and then when you find the bug modifiy the code right in the same window is wonderful. Compare this to gdb (and this includes DDD, wonderful as it is), where you have to have your source editor up in a seperate window, and changes you make aren't instantaneous. It's also hard to preserve breakpoints across sessions.
So far, I've tried every IDE that's come out for Linux. That includes Code Warrior, Code Forge, Visual Slickedit, Xemacs, and some others. None have an integrated debugger! What's the point? Project management is the only other major feature these provide, and to someone handy with makefiles that's not really all that desirable.
So, I continue to use vim+gmake+egcs+gdb for all my work. This is fine, although the debugging does still leave something to be desired. I think an ideal solution would be either to build a very simple debugger front-end into vim (which should probably be a seperate project, to avoid emacs-like bloat in the editor core) which would allow you to set breakpoints and let it run.
Alternatively, DDD is *very* nice, and with a few interface tweaks (such as customatizable hotkeys for menu commmands - too bad it's not written with GTK) and the abililty to modify text on-the-fly, it could be everything I've ever wanted.