And they are effectively removing the aspect of XBox that made it cost effective and appealing to developers: easy porting to the PC through common components and CPU architecture.
That might have been the case ten years ago, when most game development still took place in ASM and at so low a level that it fell out of the bottom of the console and burnt a hole in your carpet.
Now, however, that is nonsense. Portability these days is defined by the operating system and API, not the underlying hardware. If Microsoft provide the right interfaces - Win32, DirectX,.Net, or whatever - then games will be very easily ported between x86/Win32 and this new XBox, whatever it's like inside.
This seems to me like Microsofts strategy. It's another year, get another 'major release' out of the door so we can get everyone to chip in another hundred dollars.
Oh, is there more than one Microsoft? The one I know about last charged money for a Windows upgrade two years ago, and won't be demanding any more cash for another two years.
Re:kylix kind of sucks
on
Kylix in Limbo
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
6. pascal sucks again...enaugh said
Oh, you were doing so well until then, and then you turned into a standard troll. Oh well.
The original Pascal was a clunky, limited language, sure. The famous "why Pascal is not my favorite language" covers all that. But Delphi bears about the same relationship to it as perl to sh.
Example: the original Pascal only had fixed-length strings; you had to pad out your strings with spaces to the size of the buffer. And Delphi? Dynamic heap-allocated garbage-collected buzzword-compliant strings. They can even contain null characters, which is one up on C.
And I have yet to find another object system as good as Delphi's, although the VCL lets the side down a bit there, declaring all sorts of things private that should have been protected and the like.
Incidentally, Kylix does offer something over pyqt, pykde, pygtk, and even perl-gtk: speed. Pity about everything else.
Re:I own a copy
on
Kylix in Limbo
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If you like Object Pascal so much, why not use Free Pascal or even GNU Pascal? Both have support for Delphi's language, though there are no fancy IDEs.
Both have support for Delphi? That is simply not true. GNU Pascal doesn't support any of Delphi's nicer features (function overloading, dynamic strings and arrays, even classes). Free Pascal does better, but it looks like it still lacks things like dynamic arrays.
Not to mention, of course, that Delphi's IDE is one of the main reasons anyone uses it.
Delphi is up to version 8, and neither of these alternatives offers the features of Delphi 4. They're getting there, but they aren't acceptible alternatives yet.
No, it doesn't. However, there is a plugin which allows you to open the current page (or a link) in Internet Explorer, from the right-click context menu. So you could easily switch to Firebird for your primary browser, and still view your company's ActiveX pages without any significant extra effort.
Outside the US there are many places where freedom of speech is not available, whether you're human or not.
Considering that in today's USA even those forms of speech which the nation is most proud of tolerating, such as peaceful political protest, can be relegated to "free speech zones" far from the politicians and TV cameras, I'd suggest you drop the first phrase of that sentence.
...successfully navigate yourself to BLAH BLAH Ave. South when you had typed in BLAH BLAH Ave. North. (And..no, those two streets could be miles apart and unconnected!)
You can't even rely on a compass in that case. In Oxford, UK, there are two streets quite close to one another called North Parade and South Parade. Guess which of them is further north?
Your basic argument is that GM is the same thing as selective breeding.
You're wrong.
Consider the glow-in-the-dark mice made by adding jellyfish genes. Are you seriously telling me you could have achieved the same effect by selective breeding?
> by any measure, Intel is a bigger monopoly than MS.
I'm sorry? That's simply not true.
If I look in the ads in any computer magazine, I can find an advert for PCs with Intel processors, and on the next page one for PCs with AMD processors. Sometimes even from the same OEM.
But both sets of PCs are supplied exclusively with Microsoft(r) Windows(r) XP Home Edition.
So what was it they were trying to do in Munich, then, when they offered to sell the city Windows at a lower price than SuSE were charging for Linux? Sure looked to me like they were pricing Windows cheaper than Linux. Of course it didn't help in that case, but the point remains: free_as_in_beer + support_charges != free_as_in_beer.
So, dumping probably will work for them to some extent. If we suppose that Microsoft are on the way down, then it's safe to say that dumping will indeed slow their descent. Assuming no governments unexpectedly develop teeth, that is.
Smaller projects maintained by "less talented" people are probably safe, actually, for the simple reason that the crackers probably haven't heard of them either.:p
OpenSSH, the Linux kernel, and GNU projects like GCC and GPG are all obvious targets for an attack, because it's relatively trivial to modify any of them to provide you with root access to something, and they're all used by important projects. But what's the point inserting a backdoor into Fred's Kewl Editor, which has precisely three users, one of whom is Fred's mum?
And another is to stop trying to be too damned clever for your own good and move your assignment statements out of expressions. To be on the safe side, move into the 21st century by retiring C and switching to a safer modern programming language which doesn't permit this sort of mistake - or, in the case of this topic, this sort of attack.
Which is more important to you - saving one cycle by moving an assignment into an expression, or knowing that your OS is secure?
Possibly for the same reason that the world outside the USA pretty consistently has to wait for months to see American films?
The thing about the Japanese is that they are Japanese. That means they care more about Japan than about America, just like Americans care more about America than about Japan. Deal with it.
> I also understand that Brits seem to have tossed out the whole Nov 5th thing for the more commercial American import of Halloween...
I hadn't heard that Americans celebrated Halloween with massive bonfires and firework displays.
Seems to me that a festival which relies on the sale of vast quantities of expensive fireworks could possibly be described as more commercial than one that relies on the sale of pumpkins, but I might be wrong.;)
One way to do this is to have a description (for each piece of software) of the typical behaviour of that software, and prevent and raise an alert when atypical behaviour is detected.
I can see it now.
Scanning system processes...
Microsoft Word. Typical behaviour: edits documents. Current behaviour: accessing filesystem to edit a document.
Mozilla Firebird. Typical behaviour: browses the web. Current behaviour: making HTTP connections to browse the web.
MSBlastHaxorL33t. Typical behaviour: forwards your credit card number to all your enemies, organises a DDOS on microsoft.com, and then formats your hard disk. Current behaviour: sending emails, requesting microsoft.com every millisecond, and formatting C: in the background.
Some conspiracy theorists claim that Microsoft sells its Hotmail account details to spammers.
Mind you, some conspiracy theorists also claim that the world is ruled by alien lizards, so I think it's fair to take what they say with a pinch of salt.
There are plenty of sustainable energy sources that don't have the problems you mention. Offshore windfarms. Tidal energy. Bovine flatulence. Sticking zinc and copper rods into potatoes.
Slashdot Mirror
And they are effectively removing the aspect of XBox that made it cost effective and appealing to developers: easy porting to the PC through common components and CPU architecture.
.Net, or whatever - then games will be very easily ported between x86/Win32 and this new XBox, whatever it's like inside.
That might have been the case ten years ago, when most game development still took place in ASM and at so low a level that it fell out of the bottom of the console and burnt a hole in your carpet.
Now, however, that is nonsense. Portability these days is defined by the operating system and API, not the underlying hardware. If Microsoft provide the right interfaces - Win32, DirectX,
This seems to me like Microsofts strategy. It's another year, get another 'major release' out of the door so we can get everyone to chip in another hundred dollars.
Oh, is there more than one Microsoft? The one I know about last charged money for a Windows upgrade two years ago, and won't be demanding any more cash for another two years.
6. pascal sucks
again...enaugh said
Oh, you were doing so well until then, and then you turned into a standard troll. Oh well.
The original Pascal was a clunky, limited language, sure. The famous "why Pascal is not my favorite language" covers all that. But Delphi bears about the same relationship to it as perl to sh.
Example: the original Pascal only had fixed-length strings; you had to pad out your strings with spaces to the size of the buffer. And Delphi? Dynamic heap-allocated garbage-collected buzzword-compliant strings. They can even contain null characters, which is one up on C.
And I have yet to find another object system as good as Delphi's, although the VCL lets the side down a bit there, declaring all sorts of things private that should have been protected and the like.
Incidentally, Kylix does offer something over pyqt, pykde, pygtk, and even perl-gtk: speed. Pity about everything else.
If you like Object Pascal so much, why not use Free Pascal or even GNU Pascal? Both have support for Delphi's language, though there are no fancy IDEs.
Both have support for Delphi? That is simply not true. GNU Pascal doesn't support any of Delphi's nicer features (function overloading, dynamic strings and arrays, even classes). Free Pascal does better, but it looks like it still lacks things like dynamic arrays.
Not to mention, of course, that Delphi's IDE is one of the main reasons anyone uses it.
Delphi is up to version 8, and neither of these alternatives offers the features of Delphi 4. They're getting there, but they aren't acceptible alternatives yet.
> Does it do active X yet?
No, it doesn't. However, there is a plugin which allows you to open the current page (or a link) in Internet Explorer, from the right-click context menu. So you could easily switch to Firebird for your primary browser, and still view your company's ActiveX pages without any significant extra effort.
Outside the US there are many places where freedom of speech is not available, whether you're human or not.
Considering that in today's USA even those forms of
speech which the nation is most proud of tolerating, such as peaceful political protest, can be relegated to "free speech zones" far from the politicians and TV cameras, I'd suggest you drop the first phrase of that sentence.
I think "Cif" is the only option. It's also a reverse acronym: Cif Isn't Flash.
...successfully navigate yourself to BLAH BLAH Ave. South when you had typed in BLAH BLAH Ave. North. (And..no, those two streets could be miles apart and unconnected!)
You can't even rely on a compass in that case. In Oxford, UK, there are two streets quite close to one another called North Parade and South Parade. Guess which of them is further north?
And vinyl is not lossless. A newly pressed record might come fairly close, but each time you play it it loses a little data...
Your basic argument is that GM is the same thing as selective breeding.
You're wrong.
Consider the glow-in-the-dark mice made by adding jellyfish genes. Are you seriously telling me you could have achieved the same effect by selective breeding?
> by any measure, Intel is a bigger monopoly than MS.
I'm sorry? That's simply not true.
If I look in the ads in any computer magazine, I can find an advert for PCs with Intel processors, and on the next page one for PCs with AMD processors. Sometimes even from the same OEM.
But both sets of PCs are supplied exclusively with Microsoft(r) Windows(r) XP Home Edition.
...they can't price Windows cheaper than Linux.
So what was it they were trying to do in Munich, then, when they offered to sell the city Windows at a lower price than SuSE were charging for Linux? Sure looked to me like they were pricing Windows cheaper than Linux. Of course it didn't help in that case, but the point remains: free_as_in_beer + support_charges != free_as_in_beer.
So, dumping probably will work for them to some extent. If we suppose that Microsoft are on the way down, then it's safe to say that dumping will indeed slow their descent. Assuming no governments unexpectedly develop teeth, that is.
Smaller projects maintained by "less talented" people are probably safe, actually, for the simple reason that the crackers probably haven't heard of them either. :p
OpenSSH, the Linux kernel, and GNU projects like GCC and GPG are all obvious targets for an attack, because it's relatively trivial to modify any of them to provide you with root access to something, and they're all used by important projects. But what's the point inserting a backdoor into Fred's Kewl Editor, which has precisely three users, one of whom is Fred's mum?
> I've seen people break perfectly good code by replacing a multiply by a power of two with a shift...
Good God, do people still bother doing that? Surely modern compilers are clever enough to compile them both the faster way?
And another is to stop trying to be too damned clever for your own good and move your assignment statements out of expressions. To be on the safe side, move into the 21st century by retiring C and switching to a safer modern programming language which doesn't permit this sort of mistake - or, in the case of this topic, this sort of attack.
Which is more important to you - saving one cycle by moving an assignment into an expression, or knowing that your OS is secure?
> And what if we just haven't discovered the code that got through yet...
1. We know that SCO have been looking very closely at the Linux source code.
2. We also know that none of the Linux boxes which serve major anti-SCO websites have been hacked into.
3. We can deduce therefore that SCO have not found any backdoors in the Linux source code.
While given their general level of (in)competence this doesn't amount to proof that there aren't any, it's probably a fairly safe bet.
...when someone posts a chemical formula and you try to read it as leet-speak.
Possibly for the same reason that the world outside the USA pretty consistently has to wait for months to see American films?
The thing about the Japanese is that they are Japanese. That means they care more about Japan than about America, just like Americans care more about America than about Japan. Deal with it.
> I also understand that Brits seem to have tossed out the whole Nov 5th thing for the more commercial American import of Halloween...
;)
I hadn't heard that Americans celebrated Halloween with massive bonfires and firework displays.
Seems to me that a festival which relies on the sale of vast quantities of expensive fireworks could possibly be described as more commercial than one that relies on the sale of pumpkins, but I might be wrong.
I can see it now.
Some conspiracy theorists claim that Microsoft sells its Hotmail account details to spammers.
Mind you, some conspiracy theorists also claim that the world is ruled by alien lizards, so I think it's fair to take what they say with a pinch of salt.
Ever read the book, "The Silicon Samurai", the cracker in that book was very clever, a master of the art. Still he got caught. Why?
Possibly because it made a better story?
> For example, under many circumstances it can be illegal to listen to military bands.
It isn't here in the UK, but it damn well ought to be. I can't stand brass instruments.
It's easy:
There are plenty of sustainable energy sources that don't have the problems you mention. Offshore windfarms. Tidal energy. Bovine flatulence. Sticking zinc and copper rods into potatoes.