I don't understand this guy. He rails in his previous blogs about how bad microsoft is, yet he goes out of his way to emulate microsoft technology. It's mind blowing.
How is that strange or incomprehensible? I see absolutely nothing inconsistent about hating Microsoft's business practices and security record, but liking their programming tools and UI.
I thing you need to stop thinking in black and white and recognise that it's possible for a bad company to come up with a good product.
Although extreme Bible-thumping explicitly Christian games thus far have been rare and poorly-executed, there's no shortage of mainstream games with religious over/undertones, symbolism, or commentary. Deus Ex, Xenogears, and Alpha Centauri come to mind. Can someone name more?
But the classics like Duke Nukem remain licensed (until DK: Forever comes out [read: never]).
A bad example, perhaps. There are plenty of games for which their publishers refuse either to sell people copies or to turn a blind eye to abandonware distribution, but Duke Nukem isn't one of them.
Try the 3D Realms store here; they have all the Duke games, along with most of the other Apogee classics.
we won't (realistically) be able to turn off the garbage collector, which means that we won't be able to write real-time programs, and it'll even be touchy writing programs, such as, oh, audio or video players, that require near real-time performance. (Not to mention the disappointment we all felt with the various java window-widget APIs (AWT, Swing) that looked great but couldn't run fast enough to respond to the mouse.)
Yeah, nice FUD. Java is slow because it's bytecode, not because it's garbage collected. (Incidentally, all the Swing applications I've used recently have been every bit as responsive as I could desire, so it isn't even necessarily slow.)
So why complicate things with garbage collector and tracking down circular references...
BOOM! And you reveal that you don't know what you're talking about. Circular references are irrelevant to any GC scheme more sophisticated than reference counting. They simply have nothing to do with it.
I suggest you read this. Pay particular attention to the bits that explain things like "Modern garbage collectors appear to run as quickly as manual storage allocators (malloc/free or new/delete)," and "for very many applications modern garbage collectors provide pause times that are completely compatible with human interaction. Pause times below 1/10th of a second are often the case," and "Does garbage collection cause my program's execution to pause? Not necessarily.".
Then come back and make some informed comments, instead of spouting nonsense. Thank you.
On Linux, Qt is in the unique position of being seen as one of the native APIs.
Nice funny, but the claim makes sense in context: Qt is unique as compared to other toolkits designed to be cross-platform (Java's Swing, wxWidgets, and the like), which seen as 'foreign' on every platform.
Doubtless Tcl/Tk and GTK advocates would beg to differ, so allow me to make it clear that I'm not making these claims, just interpreting them.
OT: Re:New and Elegant "foreach" ?
on
A Taste of Qt 4
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· Score: 2, Informative
I'm still looking for one with static types.
How about this one? (For the "programmable" bit, see here.)
Firefox has an extension that let's you modify css in a bar on the left-hand side and view the changes in the main pane in real-time.
I haven't played with it enough to gauge how effective it will actually be, but it sure looks cool!
It's damn useful, actually. Now when I go to a site that thinks it's "cool" to have light grey text on a slightly darker grey background, I just have to fire up EditCSS, type
I think, though, that there still is a fundamental difference between media like Passion of the Christ and a violent game . . . in most games the violence either exists for the sake of violence itself (Doom; because its fun to blow up enemies)
Let me tell you a little story.
Once there were some people who, in the course of a foolish experiment, accidentally opened a way for the forces of hell to enter the world. Demons roamed the earth. Then one man came along and fought them. He descended into the very depths of hell, fighting demons all the way, and defeated the lord of all demons before making his escape.
Is that the plot for Doom, or is it the classic Christian stories of the Garden of Eden and the Harrowing of Hell? Why, it could be either! The only major differences between the two are that Christ doesn't use rocket launchers, while the Doom guy doesn't rescue the souls of virtuous Jews.
Now tell me again how violence in video games is different from violence in religious stories?;)
special editions generally imply access to the original production team, pristine studio prints, archieval footage etc., etc. have you seen many public domain titles preserved and documented with such care?
Next time you're in a decent bookshop, I suggest you go into the Shakespeare section.
People devote their entire lives to preserving and documenting important public domain titles. They reasearch the authors' lives with all the resources available to mankind. They scrutinise the oldest and best manuscripts they can lay their hands on. They argue for years over whether a blot of ink represents an authorial correction.
Now imagine a world in which Disney owned exclusive rights to the complete works of Shakespeare. Do you think there'd be the same range, the same depth, of both scholarship and popular writing? Do you think there'd be as many amateur companies performing the plays? Do you think you'd be allowed to use the phrase "like Hamlet without the prince" without being sued for trademark infringement?
That's why perpetual copyrights are a bad thing, and as far as we're concerned current copyrights are as good as perpetual; our descendants might be able to enjoy those same freedoms with the works of modern authors, but we'll be long dead by the time that happens.
I think it's about time there was a re-write of StarCon2 with modern graphics, sound, and a true 3D galaxy.
Not 3D, but high resolution and open source: Star Control: TimeWarp. Looks like it's melee-only at the moment, but it seems to be pretty active.
Alternatively there's The Ur-Quan Masters, which is a more straightforward remake based on the original source code (to the 3DO version), if you just want to play the original on a modern PC.
The problem is that all windows apps which people take for granted as working since 1994 would break unless software (slow) or hardware (bloat) emulation were integrated into the new systems. Windows could be recompiled by MS, but what about Jim the Tech's miricle tool made in '96 and unsupported ever since?
Software emulation speed, for apps that old, would easily be fast enough for most purposes. Consider that much of any Windows application comprises calls to Windows libraries, which would naturally have been recompiled for the new architecture: emulation in this case would probably be as fast as Java or.Net.
And if emulation is really too slow, that indicates that the program is valuable enough for it to be worth paying for a new version.
Remember Monkey Island? Hermann Toothrot frequently turns to the screen and comments on things, and when asked who he's talking to he replies, "the people watching, of course." Then there's the famous "rubber tree" scene poking fun at Sierra adventures. And I'm pretty sure the "that's the second largest monkey head I've ever seen" bit is a reference to the player, too.
The fake "game over" is a pretty common gag in adventure games, actually... I can think of several other (more obscure) titles that feature it.
My favorite mode of travel were the Scrolls of Icarian Flight. It's always fun to jump from Vivec all the way to Dagon Fel, and save the 40 gp for the boat ride.
Icarian Flight is fun, but a bit impractical. To survive the landing, cast a Levitate spell before you hit the ground - for some reason Levitate stops your fall instantly, but the jerk doesn't kill you.
If you want more control over your flight, try donating a potion of levitation at the shrine under the moon next time you're in Vivec - the blessing is Levitate 500 points for 12 hours, which should be enough for any travel you might have in mind.
What's really unfortunate though, is that, after the dust has settled and its all over but the shoutin', the lawyers are very seldom ever held accountable for their actions.
If, say, it turns out that SCO is in fact in league with the devil, and that David Boies joined SCO's cause fully aware of any lies told thus far, "justice" should demand he be punished alongside Darl McBride.
Nonsense. Are you saying that the lawyer who defends a murderer he knows to be guilty should be executed too? Obviously not - our justice system requires that the defense lawyer does his damnedest to get his client off, even if she's clearly as guilty as hell, because that's the only way we can guarantee that someone innocent gets a fair trial even if their lawyer thinks they did it.
Now, you might say that's different, and obviously you weren't referring to criminal trials, and the rules should be different for civil lawsuits, right?
Wrong.
Think about it: consider a hypothetical situation where... oh, let's say Microsoft so everyone knows who to cheer for... where Microsoft really had stolen a bunch of source code from a small company. If a lawyer who lost a case stood a good chance of being accused of knowing the case was wrong and punished for that, then no lawyer would dare go up against Microsoft, since Microsoft's own lawyers would be so likely not only to win, but also to get the little company's lawyer punished. In that situation, our little company would be screwed: who would represent them?
Like it or not, I think you'd be hard pressed to come up with a system that both ensures justice and punishes crooked lawyers.
When I tried to convince a Fortune 500 corporation of the value of deploying this type of security, the answer I received was "But this doesn't protect against SQL injection or Cross Site Scripting!"
By which logic one should never wear a seatbelt when driving, because it doesn't protect against meteorite strikes, dinosaur attacks, or nuclear armageddon...
If you have any NFS mounts or other filesharing between the machines, why bother? And if you don't, you don't resemble any form of real network.
Why should "resembling some form of real network" be particularly desirable?
I back up my important data from Windows to a server on the other side of the country running FreeBSD. It's secure, convenient, and if that and my PC both fail at the same time, well, let's just say I'd probably be more worried about the nuclear fallout than the integrity of my data.
You mean this source code contains a bunch of heavily armed Microsoft developers, who will burst out of it and massacre everyone as soon as it's been pulled into the Linux headquarters?
What's to stop them disobeying (in particular, their Government) the GPL and doing what they like with the code?
Who would be able to prosecute them? Who would care enough?
The chinese government will do with linux what they want. And no-one wants to stop them, because you can't piss of the Chinese Government, as its too big a market for imports and exports.
If they wanted to keep their code to themselves, then they could just as easily use a BSD as a base, where the license expressedly permits people to take the code and do what they like with it without giving anything back to the community.
Instead, they've chosen Linux, with its more restrictive license, and they've announced they'll be honouring that license.
The Chinese are humans with a capacity for logical thought, not aliens or robots. You can be sure they have considered the benefits and disadvantages of the various options - Linux and the GPL, BSD, or Linux and no GPL leading to conflict with the US and EU. I find it hard to believe they've chosen the last.
I want a desktop OS where I can be sure that any application I develop will run on any desktop and look exactly the same on all of them, regardless of what language I develop it in.
Bad luck, you're not getting it.
After all, it isn't even true on Windows; your Windows application will look different on Win2k and WinXP, and that's before we bring Java, Gtk, Qt, and so on into the equation. Heck, it'll even look different on my Win2k box than on most other peoples', because I use large fonts (and that causes problems with a lot of badly written applications, let me tell you).
Even MacOS X has some applications using Aqua and some using that brushed metal widget set. There is no magical "everything looks the same" desktop environment. Sorry about that.
I always wondered why we try so hard to be like something that everyone is switching from. I mean If they don't like the old product, why spend all the resources duplicating it.
The problem is that they do like the old product, and everyone isn't switching from it. You may think Windows is a steaming pile of crap, but to someone who's never used anything else, Windows is how a computer is meant to be.
That's why it makes sense for there to be a Linux that looks and feels like Windows. People might start switching then. And once people get past the "computers run Microsoft" stage, then we can start working on teaching them that computers don't even have to run Windows.
I can't believe they managed to pick ten platformers and not a single Castlevania among them.
It'd have been nice to see a nod to the Commander Keen series, too... very different to anything on a console, and truly remarkable given that the PC of the day still wasn't taken seriously as an arcade platform.
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I don't understand this guy. He rails in his previous blogs about how bad microsoft is, yet he goes out of his way to emulate microsoft technology. It's mind blowing.
How is that strange or incomprehensible? I see absolutely nothing inconsistent about hating Microsoft's business practices and security record, but liking their programming tools and UI.
I thing you need to stop thinking in black and white and recognise that it's possible for a bad company to come up with a good product.
Although extreme Bible-thumping explicitly Christian games thus far have been rare and poorly-executed, there's no shortage of mainstream games with religious over/undertones, symbolism, or commentary. Deus Ex, Xenogears, and Alpha Centauri come to mind. Can someone name more?
Um... Doom?
But the classics like Duke Nukem remain licensed (until DK: Forever comes out [read: never]).
A bad example, perhaps. There are plenty of games for which their publishers refuse either to sell people copies or to turn a blind eye to abandonware distribution, but Duke Nukem isn't one of them.
Try the 3D Realms store here; they have all the Duke games, along with most of the other Apogee classics.
we won't (realistically) be able to turn off the garbage collector, which means that we won't be able to write real-time programs, and it'll even be touchy writing programs, such as, oh, audio or video players, that require near real-time performance. (Not to mention the disappointment we all felt with the various java window-widget APIs (AWT, Swing) that looked great but couldn't run fast enough to respond to the mouse.)
Yeah, nice FUD. Java is slow because it's bytecode, not because it's garbage collected. (Incidentally, all the Swing applications I've used recently have been every bit as responsive as I could desire, so it isn't even necessarily slow.)
So why complicate things with garbage collector and tracking down circular references...
BOOM! And you reveal that you don't know what you're talking about. Circular references are irrelevant to any GC scheme more sophisticated than reference counting. They simply have nothing to do with it.
I suggest you read this. Pay particular attention to the bits that explain things like "Modern garbage collectors appear to run as quickly as manual storage allocators (malloc/free or new/delete)," and "for very many applications modern garbage collectors provide pause times that are completely compatible with human interaction. Pause times below 1/10th of a second are often the case," and "Does garbage collection cause my program's execution to pause? Not necessarily.".
Then come back and make some informed comments, instead of spouting nonsense. Thank you.
What I liked was this:
On Linux, Qt is in the unique position of being seen as one of the native APIs.
Nice funny, but the claim makes sense in context: Qt is unique as compared to other toolkits designed to be cross-platform (Java's Swing, wxWidgets, and the like), which seen as 'foreign' on every platform.
Doubtless Tcl/Tk and GTK advocates would beg to differ, so allow me to make it clear that I'm not making these claims, just interpreting them.
How about this one? (For the "programmable" bit, see here.)
Here's Qt's new 'foreach' construct:Here's the equivalent code in Lisp:And here it is in OCaml:
I haven't played with it enough to gauge how effective it will actually be, but it sure looks cool!
It's damn useful, actually. Now when I go to a site that thinks it's "cool" to have light grey text on a slightly darker grey background, I just have to fire up EditCSS, typeand my browsing becomes bearable again.
I think, though, that there still is a fundamental difference between media like Passion of the Christ and a violent game . . . in most games the violence either exists for the sake of violence itself (Doom; because its fun to blow up enemies)
;)
Let me tell you a little story.
Once there were some people who, in the course of a foolish experiment, accidentally opened a way for the forces of hell to enter the world. Demons roamed the earth. Then one man came along and fought them. He descended into the very depths of hell, fighting demons all the way, and defeated the lord of all demons before making his escape.
Is that the plot for Doom, or is it the classic Christian stories of the Garden of Eden and the Harrowing of Hell? Why, it could be either! The only major differences between the two are that Christ doesn't use rocket launchers, while the Doom guy doesn't rescue the souls of virtuous Jews.
Now tell me again how violence in video games is different from violence in religious stories?
special editions generally imply access to the original production team, pristine studio prints, archieval footage etc., etc. have you seen many public domain titles preserved and documented with such care?
Next time you're in a decent bookshop, I suggest you go into the Shakespeare section.
People devote their entire lives to preserving and documenting important public domain titles. They reasearch the authors' lives with all the resources available to mankind. They scrutinise the oldest and best manuscripts they can lay their hands on. They argue for years over whether a blot of ink represents an authorial correction.
Now imagine a world in which Disney owned exclusive rights to the complete works of Shakespeare. Do you think there'd be the same range, the same depth, of both scholarship and popular writing? Do you think there'd be as many amateur companies performing the plays? Do you think you'd be allowed to use the phrase "like Hamlet without the prince" without being sued for trademark infringement?
That's why perpetual copyrights are a bad thing, and as far as we're concerned current copyrights are as good as perpetual; our descendants might be able to enjoy those same freedoms with the works of modern authors, but we'll be long dead by the time that happens.
I think it's about time there was a re-write of StarCon2 with modern graphics, sound, and a true 3D galaxy.
Not 3D, but high resolution and open source: Star Control: TimeWarp. Looks like it's melee-only at the moment, but it seems to be pretty active.
Alternatively there's The Ur-Quan Masters, which is a more straightforward remake based on the original source code (to the 3DO version), if you just want to play the original on a modern PC.
Last time I checked patches where text files. So what do you mean by a binary patch?
Um, possibly something like this or this or this or this or any of the dozens of other binary diff/patch utilities?
What, you mean you don't write your own interfaces to make things bearable?
(to bring up the obvious - there is no open source clippy)
There isn't?
The problem is that all windows apps which people take for granted as working since 1994 would break unless software (slow) or hardware (bloat) emulation were integrated into the new systems. Windows could be recompiled by MS, but what about Jim the Tech's miricle tool made in '96 and unsupported ever since?
.Net.
Software emulation speed, for apps that old, would easily be fast enough for most purposes. Consider that much of any Windows application comprises calls to Windows libraries, which would naturally have been recompiled for the new architecture: emulation in this case would probably be as fast as Java or
And if emulation is really too slow, that indicates that the program is valuable enough for it to be worth paying for a new version.
Wow... that's a lot of work for something that's GUI exposed. Right click the clock, select Adjust Date/Time, and then move to the Internet Time tab.
Right click clock... check.
Select "Adjust Date/Time"... check.
Move to "Internet Time" tab... oops, it doesn't exist.
It may be GUI exposed in WinXP, but it sure ain't in Win2k. You did notice that his post was talking about both versions, right?
Remember Monkey Island? Hermann Toothrot frequently turns to the screen and comments on things, and when asked who he's talking to he replies, "the people watching, of course." Then there's the famous "rubber tree" scene poking fun at Sierra adventures. And I'm pretty sure the "that's the second largest monkey head I've ever seen" bit is a reference to the player, too.
The fake "game over" is a pretty common gag in adventure games, actually... I can think of several other (more obscure) titles that feature it.
My favorite mode of travel were the Scrolls of Icarian Flight. It's always fun to jump from Vivec all the way to Dagon Fel, and save the 40 gp for the boat ride.
Icarian Flight is fun, but a bit impractical. To survive the landing, cast a Levitate spell before you hit the ground - for some reason Levitate stops your fall instantly, but the jerk doesn't kill you.
If you want more control over your flight, try donating a potion of levitation at the shrine under the moon next time you're in Vivec - the blessing is Levitate 500 points for 12 hours, which should be enough for any travel you might have in mind.
What's really unfortunate though, is that, after the dust has settled and its all over but the shoutin', the lawyers are very seldom ever held accountable for their actions.
If, say, it turns out that SCO is in fact in league with the devil, and that David Boies joined SCO's cause fully aware of any lies told thus far, "justice" should demand he be punished alongside Darl McBride.
Nonsense. Are you saying that the lawyer who defends a murderer he knows to be guilty should be executed too? Obviously not - our justice system requires that the defense lawyer does his damnedest to get his client off, even if she's clearly as guilty as hell, because that's the only way we can guarantee that someone innocent gets a fair trial even if their lawyer thinks they did it.
Now, you might say that's different, and obviously you weren't referring to criminal trials, and the rules should be different for civil lawsuits, right?
Wrong.
Think about it: consider a hypothetical situation where... oh, let's say Microsoft so everyone knows who to cheer for... where Microsoft really had stolen a bunch of source code from a small company. If a lawyer who lost a case stood a good chance of being accused of knowing the case was wrong and punished for that, then no lawyer would dare go up against Microsoft, since Microsoft's own lawyers would be so likely not only to win, but also to get the little company's lawyer punished. In that situation, our little company would be screwed: who would represent them?
Like it or not, I think you'd be hard pressed to come up with a system that both ensures justice and punishes crooked lawyers.
When I tried to convince a Fortune 500 corporation of the value of deploying this type of security, the answer I received was "But this doesn't protect against SQL injection or Cross Site Scripting!"
By which logic one should never wear a seatbelt when driving, because it doesn't protect against meteorite strikes, dinosaur attacks, or nuclear armageddon...
If you have any NFS mounts or other filesharing between the machines, why bother? And if you don't, you don't resemble any form of real network.
Why should "resembling some form of real network" be particularly desirable?
I back up my important data from Windows to a server on the other side of the country running FreeBSD. It's secure, convenient, and if that and my PC both fail at the same time, well, let's just say I'd probably be more worried about the nuclear fallout than the integrity of my data.
Trojan Horse - in its original sense
You mean this source code contains a bunch of heavily armed Microsoft developers, who will burst out of it and massacre everyone as soon as it's been pulled into the Linux headquarters?
Scary stuff.
What's to stop them disobeying (in particular, their Government) the GPL and doing what they like with the code?
Who would be able to prosecute them? Who would care enough?
The chinese government will do with linux what they want. And no-one wants to stop them, because you can't piss of the Chinese Government, as its too big a market for imports and exports.
If they wanted to keep their code to themselves, then they could just as easily use a BSD as a base, where the license expressedly permits people to take the code and do what they like with it without giving anything back to the community.
Instead, they've chosen Linux, with its more restrictive license, and they've announced they'll be honouring that license.
The Chinese are humans with a capacity for logical thought, not aliens or robots. You can be sure they have considered the benefits and disadvantages of the various options - Linux and the GPL, BSD, or Linux and no GPL leading to conflict with the US and EU. I find it hard to believe they've chosen the last.
I want a desktop OS where I can be sure that any application I develop will run on any desktop and look exactly the same on all of them, regardless of what language I develop it in.
Bad luck, you're not getting it.
After all, it isn't even true on Windows; your Windows application will look different on Win2k and WinXP, and that's before we bring Java, Gtk, Qt, and so on into the equation. Heck, it'll even look different on my Win2k box than on most other peoples', because I use large fonts (and that causes problems with a lot of badly written applications, let me tell you).
Even MacOS X has some applications using Aqua and some using that brushed metal widget set. There is no magical "everything looks the same" desktop environment. Sorry about that.
I always wondered why we try so hard to be like something that everyone is switching from. I mean If they don't like the old product, why spend all the resources duplicating it.
The problem is that they do like the old product, and everyone isn't switching from it. You may think Windows is a steaming pile of crap, but to someone who's never used anything else, Windows is how a computer is meant to be.
That's why it makes sense for there to be a Linux that looks and feels like Windows. People might start switching then. And once people get past the "computers run Microsoft" stage, then we can start working on teaching them that computers don't even have to run Windows.
I can't believe they managed to pick ten platformers and not a single Castlevania among them.
It'd have been nice to see a nod to the Commander Keen series, too... very different to anything on a console, and truly remarkable given that the PC of the day still wasn't taken seriously as an arcade platform.