You know, it's becoming really tedious to here about these people who can't take personal responsibility for their actions. Whenever someone does something stupid these days, they're looking for someone else to sue. It's like the person who keeps calling the computer helpdesk with the same dumb problem every day - the first few times it's funny, then it becomes wearisome, and finally you reach the desensitised stage where you don't care anymore. The real pity is that more of these obviously dumb lawsuits didn't get thrown out earlier, which might have discouraged every man and his dog from jumping on the bandwagon.
I think it's getting to the point where dumb lawsuits (net-related or not) aren't really newsworthy for slashdot.
They could have included more architecture independent classes. For example, when I downloaded IBM's JDK 1.1.8, it didn't come with the Swing set, which I had to download separately from Sun (around 11MB).
To add to the VMware vs Freemware debate, here's an interesting quote from Keith Lawton, Freemware founder and bochs developer (from an interview on linux.com) :
I take exception to people thinking that FreeMWare is riding on the backs of VMWare for two reasons. The first being that the Bochs team has talked about this well before VMWare formed their company. The second is that long ago, I received a request from people at Stanford to use Bochs for free for "educational" use. Given that I like to help out educational causes, I of course obliged. Check out where VMWare got its start. Enough said.
Without knowing the circumstances and amount of truth behind that statement I can't really comment further. What I can say is, I have used bochs before (for an OS design assignment) and while slow and difficult to configure, it is quite versatile and usable - Windows 3.1 runs usably under Alpha, for example. But I wonder how much of bochs is directly applicable to the problem of virtualisation?
I'm not sure if we're on the same wavelength, but to shed more light if we are:
It was pretty well known that "Wild" Bill Stealey, Microprose prez, held a desk job in the Air Force while thoroughly endorsing his company's sim in the computer press.
I think the publicity around Carmack comes from the impression that he has a hand in almost every area of development of id's games. Most of the games you mention come across as team collaborations.
I can only answer a few of your questions, and guess at the others - for 1 and 2, the work was done by a programming team. There was an excellent article covering the development of Descent 3, with some details about D1/2, at GamaSutra
3. I don't know much about Slave Zero.
A team from Atari programmed that engine, but perhaps more remarkable were the Atari ST/Amiga ports, which used the same processor (68000), albeit only one of them. These ports were done by a German fellow (Juergen Dietrich?) in a short space of time, and ran remarkably similarly to the original. An urban legend floating around says the same guy had ported the Star Wars coin-op to these 16-bit platforms from memory!
Number 5 is easy - Geoff Crammond of course! He had also programmed the classic "Revs" on the C64, and went on to program F1 Grand Prix for Microprose, along with it's sequel. Not sure about the game "Stunts" though.
I assume #6 were team collaborations at EA, Sega, Namco and Atari. Could you enlighten me?
Iwin have been floating around Amiga circles for the last few months promising Amiga clones that have *never* turned up. A short history:
Pictures from their website (including a *ahem* saucy lady) were found to be nabbed from another website
They put up supposed "binary patches" to some of their already released software. On examination, these turned out to be PaintShop Pro undo files.
While they claim to be a large company, it was found that all their web pages were done by one Martin Steinbach, who happens to be their President!
Shortly after this revelation, his name was removed from the META tags
They said they were negotiating for the rights to Commodore's brand name with Tulip, a claim refuted by Tulip.
They then said they were sold to some German company...
...before resurfacing following a salvage effort by some "former employees"
Speaking of former employees, Martin Steinbach's former employer (whose company appears on the "business partners" section of the Iwin site) was contacted - he said he had dealings with MS, and recommended nobody else do the same.
Finally, if you're not convinced, here's a post from Matthias Ettrich on comp.sys.amiga.misc describing the Iwin press conference held to announce their Amiga product line:
This morning, I attended the Iwin press conference in Unterhaching.
Although in theory, 23 people should have come (there was room for 30, and according to [1], "7 places are still available"), there were only *three* guests (and I hadn't even bothered to apply for an invitation), the other two being from http://www.amiga-news.de/ (a more detailed report should appear there tonight).
Martin Steinbach arrived with nothing but ten copies of the Iwin "press kit", consisting of printouts of the PDF files we already know (product specs and the five-year roadmap), plus two sample ads ("Would you like this to be your new girlfriend? - Everything you were dreaming fo for such a long time" and "High end computing for game-console prices! Las amigas vuelven en casa..."). There was no video (as promised on [1]: "Iwin - an introduction") and no "Iwin Insurance 1.0" or "Iwin VideoStore" presentations.
We had a three-hour talk with Martin. Unfortunately, he failed to give a single convincing answer during that time. He claimed that the Iwin custom chips were basically UAE source code cast in silicon and that the sample chip design and production was done mostly for free by their hardware partners. He tried to explain the fact that he is a Merant employee with tax reasons (about the photos posted at compcity.nl, he claimed that some of them showed the Merant office, while the others showed the actual Iwin office, and the Merant pictures "should not have been published"). Regarding Tulip and the "Commodore" name, he stated that the price doubled from 18 to 36 million (he didn't specify a currency - I believe he meant Austrian Schillings, as he is from Austria) after an interview was published early. He said that "black boxes" will be shown during the Indianapolis show on the upcoming weekend, but made conflicting statements about the meaning of "black box" (just empty boxes vs. working beta hardware) and that they would not attend HEW due to problems with AInc. Germany. Regarding the fake files in the download section, he refused to give an answer and told me to ask Rue Ann instead.
The Holiday Inn lunch buffet was okay. Of course, most of the seats remained unused.:-)
I left with lots of promises (he wants to send me the missing video, a *working* PowerSE demo CD and tons of info material) and the uneasy feeling of having been lied to for three hours in a row.
It basically looks like he's an attention starved underachiever trying to get as much attention on his hoax as he can. In that sense, it looks like he's succeeded.
You're thinking of Taiwan/South Korea. Japan actually has a very healthy consumer economy of software, probably due to the fact that a large proportion of the population works in the IT field.
Here's a reply that kept the IDG lawyers away from a similar "infringement". And to everyone squirming to tone the letter down - I strongly suggest you read this.
You're wrong about that.. The original AmigaDOS command set was written in BCPL by Metacomco, and continued up to and including 1.3. After that, pressure from the ARP project resulted in the command set being written in C.
This is the COMMAND-SET we're talking about - programs like copy, rename etc. Not the OS, which was based on C from the beginning, and initially developed on SUN workstations.
``When you find the remains of the animal and you can touch them and even you can smell them when you use a hair dryer to melt the permafrost,'' - Dick Mol, discoverer of a frozen hairy mammoth.
They should make the weapons different types of termination signals. SIGHUP sometimes won't do the trick for netscape, you have to switch to the BFG of signals, SIGTERM.
Sorry, a television advertisement isn't the best reference when comparing the merits of processor architectures.
It would be naive to think that a single metric measures the net quality of a processor. For example, the G4 may well execute more instructions per second than a P3 (boosting it's MIPS figure), but if it takes 4 instructions to do the same job as 1 P3 instruction it obviously isn't performing as well. AltiVec may be an incredibly fast processor extension, but how many applications directly use and benefit from it _right now_?
Odd coupling (warning: book spoiler)
on
Snow Crash
·
· Score: 1
Did anyone else think it was strange how YT (mmmm...) and Raven paired up? I mean, she didn't recognize him as the ultraviolent guy she was trailing from the grunge concert? I thought that was stretching the credibility a fair bit, more so than the parentage thing and bits of the ending.
I've been thinking about this a lot. I believe it isn't a great idea to code to music that is new to you, because it distracts from the thinking process. You want music that relaxes and focuses you, but is engaging too. In my experience, that means music that you are familiar with (ie have listened to on many occasions) that isn't too in-your-face.
Having said that, my best coding recently has been done with:
Massive Attack (last two albums)
Leftfield (last album)
Talvin Singh - OK
DJ Shadow - Endtroducing
Those artists really stand out, but of course they change over time.
- The command is gzip, not gzup. - Using tar zxvf will unzip the file in one go. There's *many* archive GUI's available. - DVD support is coming, but isn't of that great importance at this early-adopter stage. - Configuring hardware is not that hard if you put a little effort in reading the manuals, but... -...since you find man pages (IMO, the most concise and comprehensive documentation available) difficult to read(!), I guess you're better off with that Windows box.
And hey, enjoy Half-Life and AOL. They're no-brainers.
Agreed, Anand is too verbose and tends to ramble about barely related stuff. He needs to be more concise. But go easy on the kid - he's only 16 or something (check out the about section if you don't believe me!)
I think the main complaint is an absence of parity between the two platforms. On one hand, NT had the five service packs applied, which are IMHO fraught with more difficulties to install than rpm'ing 21 patches. MS's service packs are renown for breaking other things from previous packs, and are usually released a long time after the bugs they fix are identified.
I really wouldn't have a problem with this at all, if ZDNet hadn't made the blanket conclusion that NT was easier to secure. That's an overwhelmingly ignorant statement to make.
Slashdot Mirror
My mistake for being suckered into this, I can see now that it is an impostor :(
Pretty stupid tho'
Daniel.
ER has one of (if not the) highest karmas on Slashdot. He must be deliberately trying to lower his Karma for some reason...I wonder why.
Daniel.
You know, it's becoming really tedious to here about these people who can't take personal responsibility for their actions. Whenever someone does something stupid these days, they're looking for someone else to sue. It's like the person who keeps calling the computer helpdesk with the same dumb problem every day - the first few times it's funny, then it becomes wearisome, and finally you reach the desensitised stage where you don't care anymore. The real pity is that more of these obviously dumb lawsuits didn't get thrown out earlier, which might have discouraged every man and his dog from jumping on the bandwagon.
I think it's getting to the point where dumb lawsuits (net-related or not) aren't really newsworthy for slashdot.
Daniel.
They could have included more architecture independent classes. For example, when I downloaded IBM's JDK 1.1.8, it didn't come with the Swing set, which I had to download separately from Sun (around 11MB).
Daniel.
Without knowing the circumstances and amount of truth behind that statement I can't really comment further. What I can say is, I have used bochs before (for an OS design assignment) and while slow and difficult to configure, it is quite versatile and usable - Windows 3.1 runs usably under Alpha, for example. But I wonder how much of bochs is directly applicable to the problem of virtualisation?
Daniel.
I'm not sure if we're on the same wavelength, but to shed more light if we are:
It was pretty well known that "Wild" Bill Stealey, Microprose prez, held a desk job in the Air Force while thoroughly endorsing his company's sim in the computer press.
Daniel.
Magnetic Fields (Shaun Southern's game development studio) do the popular Rally Championship series. The latest one is due this Christmas.
Daniel.
I can only answer a few of your questions, and guess at the others - for 1 and 2, the work was done by a programming team. There was an excellent article covering the development of Descent 3, with some details about D1/2, at GamaSutra
3. I don't know much about Slave Zero.
A team from Atari programmed that engine, but perhaps more remarkable were the Atari ST/Amiga ports, which used the same processor (68000), albeit only one of them. These ports were done by a German fellow (Juergen Dietrich?) in a short space of time, and ran remarkably similarly to the original. An urban legend floating around says the same guy had ported the Star Wars coin-op to these 16-bit platforms from memory!
Number 5 is easy - Geoff Crammond of course! He had also programmed the classic "Revs" on the C64, and went on to program F1 Grand Prix for Microprose, along with it's sequel. Not sure about the game "Stunts" though.
I assume #6 were team collaborations at EA, Sega, Namco and Atari. Could you enlighten me?
Daniel.
Speaking of former employees, Martin Steinbach's former employer (whose company appears on the "business partners" section of the Iwin site) was contacted - he said he had dealings with MS, and recommended nobody else do the same.
Finally, if you're not convinced, here's a post from Matthias Ettrich on comp.sys.amiga.misc describing the Iwin press conference held to announce their Amiga product line:
This morning, I attended the Iwin press conference in Unterhaching.
Although in theory, 23 people should have come (there was room for 30, and according to [1], "7 places are still available"), there were only *three* guests (and I hadn't even bothered to apply for an invitation), the other two being from http://www.amiga-news.de/ (a more detailed report should appear there tonight).
Martin Steinbach arrived with nothing but ten copies of the Iwin "press kit", consisting of printouts of the PDF files we already know (product specs and the five-year roadmap), plus two sample ads ("Would you like this to be your new girlfriend? - Everything you were dreaming fo for such a long time" and "High end computing for game-console prices! Las amigas vuelven en casa..."). There was no video (as promised on [1]: "Iwin - an introduction") and no "Iwin Insurance 1.0" or "Iwin VideoStore" presentations.
We had a three-hour talk with Martin. Unfortunately, he failed to give a single convincing answer during that time. He claimed that the Iwin custom chips were basically UAE source code cast in silicon and that the sample chip design and production was done mostly for free by their hardware partners. He tried to explain the fact that he is a Merant employee with tax reasons (about the photos posted at compcity.nl, he claimed that some of them showed the Merant office, while the others showed the actual Iwin office, and the Merant pictures "should not have been published"). Regarding Tulip and the "Commodore" name, he stated that the price doubled from 18 to 36 million (he didn't specify a currency - I believe he meant Austrian Schillings, as he is from Austria) after an interview was published early. He said that "black boxes" will be shown during the Indianapolis show on the upcoming weekend, but made conflicting statements about the meaning of "black box" (just empty boxes vs. working beta hardware) and that they would not attend HEW due to problems with AInc. Germany. Regarding the fake files in the download section, he refused to give an answer and told me to ask Rue Ann instead.
The Holiday Inn lunch buffet was okay. Of course, most of the seats remained unused. :-)
I left with lots of promises (he wants to send me the missing video, a *working* PowerSE demo CD and tons of info material) and the uneasy feeling of having been lied to for three hours in a row.
It basically looks like he's an attention starved underachiever trying to get as much attention on his hoax as he can. In that sense, it looks like he's succeeded.
Daniel.
Yes it does - in the exact same way that Red Hat's offering did. It really churns my stomach.
You're thinking of Taiwan/South Korea. Japan actually has a very healthy consumer economy of software, probably due to the fact that a large proportion of the population works in the IT field.
Daniel.
Daniel.
You're wrong about that.. The original AmigaDOS command set was written in BCPL by Metacomco, and continued up to and including 1.3. After that, pressure from the ARP project resulted in the command set being written in C.
This is the COMMAND-SET we're talking about - programs like copy, rename etc. Not the OS, which was based on C from the beginning, and initially developed on SUN workstations.
That quote's going straight to my mail sig:
``When you find the remains of the animal and you can touch them and even you can smell them when you use a hair dryer to melt the permafrost,'' - Dick Mol, discoverer of a frozen hairy mammoth.
They should make the weapons different types of termination signals. SIGHUP sometimes won't do the trick for netscape, you have to switch to the BFG of signals, SIGTERM.
Sorry, a television advertisement isn't the best reference when comparing the merits of processor architectures.
It would be naive to think that a single metric measures the net quality of a processor. For example, the G4 may well execute more instructions per second than a P3 (boosting it's MIPS figure), but if it takes 4 instructions to do the same job as 1 P3 instruction it obviously isn't performing as well. AltiVec may be an incredibly fast processor extension, but how many applications directly use and benefit from it _right now_?
Did anyone else think it was strange how YT (mmmm...) and Raven paired up? I mean, she didn't recognize him as the ultraviolent guy she was trailing from the grunge concert? I thought that was stretching the credibility a fair bit, more so than the parentage thing and bits of the ending.
yeah man, wait till install Linux and set up my Beowulf cluster of these puppies...
:)
(Forgive me- I'm joking, I haven't slept for 2 days
is here
I've been thinking about this a lot. I believe it isn't a great idea to code to music that is new to you, because it distracts from the thinking process. You want music that relaxes and focuses you, but is engaging too. In my experience, that means music that you are familiar with (ie have listened to on many occasions) that isn't too in-your-face.
Having said that, my best coding recently has been done with:
Those artists really stand out, but of course they change over time.
I believe Cygnus' debugger interface is open source too:
:)
http://sourceware.cygnus.com/insight/
It looks very nice, though it's probably less mature than DDD. I might try it today
As a side note, I just wish there was a debugger with a smaller footprint, preferably not based on Motif.
Daniel.
A few points:
...since you find man pages (IMO, the most concise and comprehensive documentation available) difficult to read(!), I guess you're better off with that Windows box.
- The command is gzip, not gzup.
- Using tar zxvf will unzip the file in one go. There's *many* archive GUI's available.
- DVD support is coming, but isn't of that great importance at this early-adopter stage.
- Configuring hardware is not that hard if you put a little effort in reading the manuals, but...
-
And hey, enjoy Half-Life and AOL. They're no-brainers.
Agreed, Anand is too verbose and tends to ramble about barely related stuff. He needs to be more concise. But go easy on the kid - he's only 16 or something (check out the about section if you don't believe me!)
Daniel.
For linux demos, another site to check out is:
http://linux.scene.org
There's some 4K demos there, some quite nice.
I think the main complaint is an absence of parity between the two platforms. On one hand, NT had the five service packs applied, which are IMHO fraught with more difficulties to install than rpm'ing 21 patches. MS's service packs are renown for breaking other things from previous packs, and are usually released a long time after the bugs they fix are identified.
I really wouldn't have a problem with this at all, if ZDNet hadn't made the blanket conclusion that NT was easier to secure. That's an overwhelmingly ignorant statement to make.