It's not a fair comparison -- DirectX is a whole gaming API and OpenGL is just for graphics.
What we need is a nice complete open-source set of libraries for writing games. Unfortunately I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon (SDL is a good framework, but it doesn't cover everything.)
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20010816. html
Cringely predicted a whole two years back that Microsoft would do exactly that. Get rid of Java. Link the media player and ActiveX directly into the browser. And use Eolas as an excuse.
Those companies (including Pressplay, Rhapsody, Listen, etc.) are delivering to consumers high quality music online in a format and form that consumers have demanded. Those companies are harnessing many of the productive technologies that have been developed in the last decade.
Hey! What about Apple's Music Store? "Etc"!?! Sounds like they don't like Apple's pseudo-DRM format.
Yeah... but the people who are truely doing bad things wouldn't submit their screennames to something like that. One again, only the (mostly) innocent get hurt.
In my experience, Mac shareware is on average much much better than Windows shareware. Especially shareware games. I've played a few games that were ported from the Mac to Windows, and rarely are they as good as the Mac version, possibly (probably) due to a poor job of porting.
So I figure, if you're going to port to another platform, do it right.
Re:Michael Moore's Letter to Governor Bush
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 1
"Blaming Bush for the economy is senseless. Anyone who was paying attention could see that the economy was beginning to tank in 1Q 2000, while Clinton was still in office."
Obviously, a large part of the economic decline is due to the bubble of the 1990s. However, I do blame Bush for not even trying to help the economy (his tax cuts definately will not help the economy in the short-term, and it's uncertain to unlikely whether it'll help in the long term either)
""The whole world" with more than a few minor exceptions like the UK, Spain, Australia, etc. Minor, yeah. The UN resolution that might have authorized war had a majority of the Security Council supporting it. It was withdrawn under the threat of a unilateral veto by France. Only in the mind of an unusually arrogant Frenchman does France constitute the "whole world"."
Most people will agree this: if ONLY France had vetoed it, we would still have the support of the world by majority vote. But no, it looked like we weren't going to get enough votes for a majority, so we just blame it on France. We're the arrogant ones. Remember, Germany, China, Russia, and a whole slew of other countries are dead against the war. And of 180+ countries, only 30 or so actually support the U.S.
The key word is "might." Because it looks as if there's a good chance it wouldn't have, and the U.S. didn't even give the vote a chance. Cowards.
"Ah, yes. The French. Oh, please. Could they perhaps be supporting Iraq because of the nuclear reactors they're selling there? Or the French oil company operating there, the biggest in Iraq? Could the French possibly have their own business interests in mind when they oppose this war? Ya think?"
Of course they have business interests in mind. So do we. Does that mean we should go to war because of them? Oh wait, I think we may have just done that. We've already promised reconstruction projects to U.S. companies and U.S. companies only.
We didn't really get much out of that anti-trust suit, but the ability for vendors to bundle non-MS stuff is important here.
Get companies like HP, Dell, E-Machines, etc, to pre-install Mozilla, alongside all of the products they bundle and have to pay for. Maybe even make Mozilla the default browser. Have them bundle Java and OpenOffice while they're at it.
The most important audience is new users. All the computers at my school have both IE and Netscape, and most of the students and teachers just open whichever one they're familiar with.
If I leave a Netscape or Mozilla window open on a shared computer, my friends continue using that window to open some other page. When the window is eventually closed, my friends will always open IE to start surfing. They don't think there's a big difference between the two, but they'll always click on the IE logo.
I suspect that if a new user were presented with Mozilla first, they wouldn't bother to download IE . Microsoft is well aware of that, which is what started the whole Windows/IE bundling thing.
Try to get computing magazines and games to bundle Mozilla.
The one thing annoying about Mozilla is that it's terribly slow on my older machines (400mhz and less), but any new computer is more than capable of running Mozilla as fast or faster than IE.
I'm 17, and the earliest thing I remember is the Loma Prieta (California) earthquake in 1989 (almost 4 years old at the time). I also remember playing on a Macintosh (Plus?) sometime before 1990, but I can't remember when.
What happened to the stories of spammers' costs increasing?
Since, according to the article, spam is going global, even if we ban it in the U.S., people in other countries might get into the spam business. Instead of American spammers bouncing spam off servers in faraway countries, we'll see people in second and third-world countries spamming for [insert ridiculously cheap wage in USD equiv].
I think the best solution is to tell the governments in those countries to fix their servers (or be held partially accountable?) Is real-time blackholing still a bad thing (strong-arm tactics against legit businesses, etc)?
The article has quite an emphasis on companies being able to customize the appearance of the software UI. I'm not a smartphone user, but I don't think the screen appearance has nearly as much glamour/show-off appeal as chic faceplates and such.
My opinion is that Opera's supposed smart "massaging," also mentioned in the article, will be hailed as easier to use than Microsoft's Pocket IE, and thus play a larger end-user role than vendor customizing.
Although, it is nice to see vendors say that the Windows UI is bland, ubiquitous, and doesn't possess the uniqueness that Nokia et al. want.
Business deals and positive/negative corporate assocations usually trump user comments and design staff, IMO, but not always.
Air travel is really expensive, and barring any major improvements in aeronautics or cutthroat competition, it's not going to get that much cheaper.
Especially, you don't want to pay a lot if you have to travel from San Fransisco to Los Angeles every day for work, or home from college every week.
Plus, our airports (especially SFO) are busy enough as it is. Not to mention pollution and fuel consumption. California is growing, and in 18 years (estimated completion) the problem is going to be much much worse.
Well, actually, it seems that almost all desktop apps for Linux are written using GTK or Qt. Although PicoGUI is supposed to provide its own widgets and such, a Qt/PicoGUI and GTK/PicoGUI would ease the transition and make a lot of apps available under PicoGUI.
I haven't really tried it, but check out the banner-ad blocking project on MozDev. And banner filtering systems are bad for sites that rely on income from advertising. Plus, it's pretty easy to ignore banner ads (as opposed to popups, which are quite in-your-face; for these, you have a good reason to block them)
It seems to be up now. I downloaded the.tar.bzip2 and extracted it. There's a license, a readme, and 51 source files in various directories, that maps onto the mozilla source distribution.
Since I'm not familiar with the Windows API, I'm not sure how it works.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember the old days when some Performas came with additional x86 chips and you could switch between Mac/Windows?
There's no big coverup here. Worst that happens is a few Republican staffers get canned, end of story, no linking to the President. Media ignores it.
Serel does this too, for RedHat and Debian. It actually works; it's not just a proof-of-concept, although it does have a number of bugs.
It's not a fair comparison -- DirectX is a whole gaming API and OpenGL is just for graphics.
What we need is a nice complete open-source set of libraries for writing games. Unfortunately I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon (SDL is a good framework, but it doesn't cover everything.)
The Pulpit, Auguest 2001
Hey, and it's August again, a little over two years later!
Well, more importantly that Microsoft was going to try to kill Java and embed a media player in the browser.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20010816. html
Cringely predicted a whole two years back that Microsoft would do exactly that. Get rid of Java. Link the media player and ActiveX directly into the browser. And use Eolas as an excuse.
Those companies (including Pressplay, Rhapsody, Listen, etc.) are delivering to consumers high quality music online in a format and form that consumers have demanded. Those companies are harnessing many of the productive technologies that have been developed in the last decade. Hey! What about Apple's Music Store? "Etc"!?! Sounds like they don't like Apple's pseudo-DRM format.
I believe Red Hat gives the console user access to devices like sound and module when you log in.
Yeah ... but the people who are truely doing bad things wouldn't submit their screennames to something like that. One again, only the (mostly) innocent get hurt.
In my experience, Mac shareware is on average much much better than Windows shareware. Especially shareware games. I've played a few games that were ported from the Mac to Windows, and rarely are they as good as the Mac version, possibly (probably) due to a poor job of porting.
So I figure, if you're going to port to another platform, do it right.
"Blaming Bush for the economy is senseless. Anyone who was paying attention could see that the economy was beginning to tank in 1Q 2000, while Clinton was still in office."
Obviously, a large part of the economic decline is due to the bubble of the 1990s. However, I do blame Bush for not even trying to help the economy (his tax cuts definately will not help the economy in the short-term, and it's uncertain to unlikely whether it'll help in the long term either)
""The whole world" with more than a few minor exceptions like the UK, Spain, Australia, etc. Minor, yeah. The UN resolution that might have authorized war had a majority of the Security Council supporting it. It was withdrawn under the threat of a unilateral veto by France. Only in the mind of an unusually arrogant Frenchman does France constitute the "whole world"."
Most people will agree this: if ONLY France had vetoed it, we would still have the support of the world by majority vote. But no, it looked like we weren't going to get enough votes for a majority, so we just blame it on France. We're the arrogant ones. Remember, Germany, China, Russia, and a whole slew of other countries are dead against the war. And of 180+ countries, only 30 or so actually support the U.S.
The key word is "might." Because it looks as if there's a good chance it wouldn't have, and the U.S. didn't even give the vote a chance. Cowards.
"Ah, yes. The French. Oh, please. Could they perhaps be supporting Iraq because of the nuclear reactors they're selling there? Or the French oil company operating there, the biggest in Iraq? Could the French possibly have their own business interests in mind when they oppose this war? Ya think?"
Of course they have business interests in mind. So do we. Does that mean we should go to war because of them? Oh wait, I think we may have just done that. We've already promised reconstruction projects to U.S. companies and U.S. companies only.
Heh, distributed.net spent years brute-forcing RC5-64 for ... $10000 total. With only $2000 going to actual participants.
I think Hormel said that it's OK to use spam to refer to unsolicited email, but not SPAM (all caps), which refers to the canned food product.
I don't know about the legal status of it though. Probably just a courtesy.
We didn't really get much out of that anti-trust suit, but the ability for vendors to bundle non-MS stuff is important here.
Get companies like HP, Dell, E-Machines, etc, to pre-install Mozilla, alongside all of the products they bundle and have to pay for. Maybe even make Mozilla the default browser. Have them bundle Java and OpenOffice while they're at it.
The most important audience is new users. All the computers at my school have both IE and Netscape, and most of the students and teachers just open whichever one they're familiar with.
If I leave a Netscape or Mozilla window open on a shared computer, my friends continue using that window to open some other page. When the window is eventually closed, my friends will always open IE to start surfing. They don't think there's a big difference between the two, but they'll always click on the IE logo.
I suspect that if a new user were presented with Mozilla first, they wouldn't bother to download IE . Microsoft is well aware of that, which is what started the whole Windows/IE bundling thing.
Try to get computing magazines and games to bundle Mozilla.
The one thing annoying about Mozilla is that it's terribly slow on my older machines (400mhz and less), but any new computer is more than capable of running Mozilla as fast or faster than IE.
I'm 17, and the earliest thing I remember is the Loma Prieta (California) earthquake in 1989 (almost 4 years old at the time). I also remember playing on a Macintosh (Plus?) sometime before 1990, but I can't remember when.
Is there any way to stop corporations from patenting it, without patenting it yourself?
How about without a working implementation?
What happened to the stories of spammers' costs increasing?
Since, according to the article, spam is going global, even if we ban it in the U.S., people in other countries might get into the spam business. Instead of American spammers bouncing spam off servers in faraway countries, we'll see people in second and third-world countries spamming for [insert ridiculously cheap wage in USD equiv].
I think the best solution is to tell the governments in those countries to fix their servers (or be held partially accountable?) Is real-time blackholing still a bad thing (strong-arm tactics against legit businesses, etc)?
You'd better have a hard drive hooked up to store all that ... or maybe stream it off the Internet?
The article has quite an emphasis on companies being able to customize the appearance of the software UI. I'm not a smartphone user, but I don't think the screen appearance has nearly as much glamour/show-off appeal as chic faceplates and such.
My opinion is that Opera's supposed smart "massaging," also mentioned in the article, will be hailed as easier to use than Microsoft's Pocket IE, and thus play a larger end-user role than vendor customizing.
Although, it is nice to see vendors say that the Windows UI is bland, ubiquitous, and doesn't possess the uniqueness that Nokia et al. want.
Business deals and positive/negative corporate assocations usually trump user comments and design staff, IMO, but not always.
Air travel is really expensive, and barring any major improvements in aeronautics or cutthroat competition, it's not going to get that much cheaper.
Especially, you don't want to pay a lot if you have to travel from San Fransisco to Los Angeles every day for work, or home from college every week.
Plus, our airports (especially SFO) are busy enough as it is. Not to mention pollution and fuel consumption. California is growing, and in 18 years (estimated completion) the problem is going to be much much worse.
It doesn't really put aside $10 billion; it just puts it on the 2004 ballot. And unfortunately, the completion date is somewhere close to 2020.
It'll be really cool, although I'll be well out of college by the time it's ready.
Well, actually, it seems that almost all desktop apps for Linux are written using GTK or Qt. Although PicoGUI is supposed to provide its own widgets and such, a Qt/PicoGUI and GTK/PicoGUI would ease the transition and make a lot of apps available under PicoGUI.
I haven't really tried it, but check out the banner-ad blocking project on MozDev. And banner filtering systems are bad for sites that rely on income from advertising. Plus, it's pretty easy to ignore banner ads (as opposed to popups, which are quite in-your-face; for these, you have a good reason to block them)
I'm wondering: how did life survive the other dozens of other times the pole flipped?
What can humans do, besides burrowing or mutating?
Suddenly, global warming (the artificially-induced kind) doesn't seem like that big of a long-term threat.
It seems to be up now. I downloaded the .tar.bzip2 and extracted it. There's a license, a readme, and 51 source files in various directories, that maps onto the mozilla source distribution.
Since I'm not familiar with the Windows API, I'm not sure how it works.