It seems applix7 has a great many "check out X's wrongdoing" posts to various threads. It seems to just be a (hobby|quest|purpose in life|self-appointed duty) of (his|hers) to point out these things.
I'm sure it helps to have people keep tabs on big companies. Sun's about the least of my worries when it comes to companies misbehaving, though.
Hey, speaking of Sun and different lines of chips, what about the clockless chip I used to hear about? Is that still in development, or has it been canned?
Re:It's like nothing we've seen .. since Linux
on
A New Kind of OS
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· Score: 1
Gee, Wally, and I thought I saw a cell phone that let you change the ring sound. I musta been daydreaming again. Oh well. Wanna play catch?
Well, it is InfoWorld. The computer news magazine so well-liked and valuable that they give away free subscriptions if your application says you influence what brand of printer your boss's boss might buy.
My mother was one of the people who assembled the heaters for the O-rings on Challenger. The government investigators asked a lot of questions at her place of work. The engineers there very quickly pointed out to them that the shuttle was flown well outside the specs for which the heaters had been designed. They had been designed for specs more stringent than for what they had been commissioned, just to give some extra padding room for error.
Let me restate what that means. The shuttle, to save some dollars associated with delaying the launch, was flown well outside the specs for the components given to the engineers at the subcontractors who made those components. And with those tens of thousands of dollars as a goal, they gambled the billions invested into the shuttle program, the PR they had put into the teacher in space idea, and the lives of six astronauts and a public school teacher. They lost.
I bet it's not as common as it was in 1985. I'm not surprised that a government that had the support of a nation for a space program that was going well but went and blew it all for some financial savings would do the same on some Coast Guard patrol boats. I'm not surprised at all. When was the last time you saw an elementary school playground full of kids in Young Astronauts t-shirts watching a model rocket go up in the air?
They exist, sure. There's generally not as many holes in other OSes as in Windows, and the holes in other OSes tend to open the system up to less abuse. The number of systems in the installed base makes no difference in either of these metrics, no matter what MS FUD you've heard.
MS is doing better, and certain Linux distros have a long way to go. Rather than hating people over their choice of OS, maybe we should all hope for the day when even the worst OS is difficult to umo umopap!sdn and rightside up. Then maybe people will focus more on Rails or wireless drivers or something as an attack vector instead.
That may be true. From what I understood, it was always IBM's plan to license an OS instead of developing one in order to get the hardware to market quickly. They were perfectly willing to license instead of buy because buying might be a longer time to market and they'd have to take on future development, et cetera. I was always under the impression, though, that they could have done an exclusive license and didn't. Perhaps the antitrust issue was the reason for that. Perhaps IBM had the clone market in mind all along. I'm not sure anyone outside IBM's management at the time will ever know deinitively what combination of factors went into that decision.
That's entirely true in the short term and a very good point.
Eventually routes which run past the U.S. instead of through it would be built and configured. That would be good for the rest of the world and bad for the U.S. telcos (and U.S. government spooks, presumably). If it's bad for the bottom line of greedy, shortsighted telcos, it may have a snowball effect of more negative consequences on the customers of those telcos.
I think the Tandy Color Computer 3 did as much or more to put a computer in every home as Windows did to put a computer on every office desk. The Commodore 64 and Amiga systems did about as much, too. They all did more than DOS. The main difference in MS-DOS and MS-Windows is that DOS rode the coat-tails of IBM, and Windows rode the coat-tails of DOS. OS/2 was far better than Windows 3.1, but Windows 95 (and MS's practice of forcing white-box vendors to pay for Windows for every computer they sold if they wanted to sell Windows preinstalled on any of them) killed OS/2.
Windows has been far more projected onto the world by Microsoft's shrewd business moves than by any inherent quality of the software. At one time, the saying that noone ever got fired for buying IBM was almost universally true. When Gates convinced IBM to use MS-DOS as the exclusive preloaded OS on the original PC but to allow him to license it to anyone else, he laid the foundation for his multi-billion dollar wealth. The rest is just building on that.
IBM then laid a foundation of its own by allowing its hardware to become a defacto standard for compatible clones. This helped IBM's image and did them some good by getting more people developing for their market. It did MS much more good, because the clone hardware was being used with their software. While IBM was building a social empire through influence, MS was building a financial empire through actual sales.
People eventually bought Windows PCs for home use because that's what they were using at work, and it's what was in the stores. People could buy PCs compatible with the IBM gold standard for a silver-level price, and run the same software. This lead to more development for the platform, which in turn lead to more clones and more Windows sales. Vendors of other models of course had a choice to make, and most of them started selling IBM or IBM clone machines in place of or in addition to their own machines. Commodore and Apple both had software and even hardware solutions to let people use the files and even the software of this IBM/MS platform on their otherwise incompatible platforms. And so it grew even more. OS/2 was DOS software compatible, and that made DOS grow more. Then it was Windows software compatible, and it made Windows grow even more. Then Windows changed, and OS/2 wasn't compatible with software designed specifically for Windows 95. Some still consider this a bit of a dirty trick, because IBM was using the cross-licensing arrangement with MS to make OS/2 as compatible with Windows as they could. MS used the same arrangement to pretty much let the air out of OS/2.
People for years wrote and sold software to make up for shortcomings of DOS and Windows. Norton, McAfee, DesqView, Novell, Artisoft, and thousands of other companies and individual software developers made their livings making utility programs, file managers, security software, multitasking systems, window managers, network stacks, programming suites, file and disk compression, and a multitude of other add-ons to make up for what DOS and Windows lacked compared to other operating systems available at the same time. Microsoft keeps adding functionality to the OS now and saying it's necessary to compete, but it wasn't back in the day. Back in the day you paid a little for an OS license from MS, then paid far more than the cost of a more complete OS to set it up they way you needed or wanted it to work. Much of that other money went to third parties. Now MS is bringing most of those functions into one box, and is doing a decent but not spectacular job of making it all work.
The key to Windows as a widely used platform is still in the snowball effect of the original IBM PC and the early years of the clones, then the ISV support, then the compatibility efforts of other platform vendors, then more ISV support. These can still be attributed to stellar business acumen paired with mediocre software development. I'm not saying that there aren't brilliant developers at MS. I'm certain there are. Their
Inside the US, though, the customers of large US telecom companies may be firewalled off from the service by the very people they are paying for Net access. If not that, they may be slowdd to a trickle of traffic.
If I was paying for access to "The Internet", and my service provider wasn't giving me access to everything I could legally access, then I'd be getting ripped off, wouldn't I?
So for the rest of the world US net neutrality laws don't matter so much. For those of us in the US, they matter a great deal, even when the traffic starts overseas.
Type A/Type B are connectors. I'm talking about the host functionality versus the device functionality. I may be mistaken, but I was under the impression that the PSP was designed to be a USB device. I have looked and looked, and that seems to be the consensus everywhere any search takes me.
There are certain drives and such that have firmware to make them act as USB hosts, which would allow the PSP to be the device end for those. I haven't seen a keyboard yet that acts as a USB host to make a device interoperate with it.
I think you've misunderstood sensibility for anger. I'm not angry, and I'm not raging at Sony.
If a dog pissed on a tree last week, and the week before, then starts heading toward that tree, wouldn't you expect the dog to piss on the tree? It only makes sense that if they have a history of locking in their customers and delivering lackluster content selection themselves, people should expect that future products will feature lock-in and lackluster content selection. With Sony, bringing out great systems and then underdelivering on content selection is a pattern.
Why the hell should I buy something when I have substantial reason to believe that it will have two traits, lock-in and poor selection, that I have hated about their products in the past?
If it's from Sony, it seems it's all about screwing the customer to make a buck. Why should I hand over money because it says "Sony" on the front of a box? If there's anything comparable that doesn't have such a narrow-minded, openly hostile (remember rootkits? not just on music CDs but on the PSP demo CD that came with PSP-branded Memory Stick Pro Duo flash sticks?) corporation. Nintendo's cheaper for game consoles, so if I want vendor lock-in there, I'll buy from them. I won't pay a premium for computing power and nice development kits that they try their best to keep you from using how you want. Almost anyone else is cheaper for PCs. Many companies offer cheaper (and often better) audio and video components. There's no value proposition in the Sony name any longer. Why should I waste money on the name?
See? I'm not angry. I'm disappointed in Sony, and disappointed in their products. I don't want to pay a premium to be disappointed again. I should've bought a GP2X in the first place, I guess. Buying a PSP then a GP2X is hard to justify even to myself, let alone to my wife. Thing is, Sony has the great reputation, and early on the PSP was able to play homebrewed games and run homebrewed apps really well and pretty easily. Then Sony started trying to crush the homebrew scene for it. I should've learned before the PSP. I have learned now.
Outside of greed and lack of vision, there's no reason the PSP and mylo should be separate products. They are both WiFi capable, both have a small form factor, and both have a strong software development platform for them. If the PSP had been made with the slide-out keyboard (or had even been given a USB host capability so an external keyboard could be hooked up) the major hardware difference that matters would have been gone or greatly reduced. If they had allowed the strong home-brew community to keep functioning instead of constantly making things harder for homebrew developers with each firmware update, most of the software to do all of this would have been written for them.
It's probably plans to release mylo that prompted the crackdown on homebrew games and apps for the PSP. Now that there's little of the PSP's original promise left fulfilled, it's a struggling product. Now they want those of us who laid out $250 for the PSP to repeat the cycle with mylo at $350. I say tough shit, Sony. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
I still have a working Betamax VCR, still have a Sony Walkman somewhere, and regularly use my Sony CD boombox from the late 1980s when I'm in the kitchen or the back yard. The Walkman and the CD boombox they got right -- they were interoperable and I could play homebrewed content on them. At least the Betamax I could get blanks for and it would take homebrewed content. I never bought a PS or PS2 but I'd been considering a PS3 or maybe a PS2 for now. At least with the PS2 they paid lip service to homebrew. It was never the homebrew system the Atari 2600 or the Sega Dreamcast were (and heck, still are). Sony says the PS3 will be able to replace a PC. If they think my desktop will be locked in to their vicious vendor lock-in and Sony's planned upgrade cycle, they are sorely mistaken. I'm not dropping that kind of money on another closed hunk of Sony crap.
There will be no mylo and no PS3 in my home unless Sony fixes their "dumb consumer" thinking. I want my purchases to serve my needs and wants, not just theirs. I'll not buy another Sony product until they fix themselves. Right now, Sony is broken and so are all of their products.
Actually, it boiled down to a change in the driver for his SCSI drive controller. The final RC installed just fine both fresh as the initial OS and as an upgrade under all his testing. The retail copy trashed the drive under any circumstances until he got a driver from the hardware manufacturer.
I have no mod points today, but MS does open betas and release candidiates too. I still remember, in fact, when the "final" release candidate for Windows98 worked perfectly with my friend's hardware, then the retail version trashed the contents of his hard drive every time he tried to install it.
I was never under the illusion that there was a deep tactical system. It's attack, cast, use item, or run away. That's still enough that it was fun. Dragon Warrior 2 was indeed a different level of game. So is Genghis Khan, which is very much fun but I have problems palying it just here-and-there. GK's more of an all-weekend game. FF I can play for ten minutes and save, then come back to days later.
I'm certain you are right about mainframe apps. Unfortunately, this also tends to happen even with currently developed programs on micros when people don't stop to think about where a program might get used.
Wow. Software development for a particular group of OS distributions is complex. What news.
Come on, if anyone's a software developer instead of a fanboy who does copy-and-paste until something compiles then they know how to manage complexity. Software development is the management of complexity, after all. You take a big problem and break it into tiny steps a computer can perform one after another. In many cases you even figure out what things in that set of steps don't depend upon each other and break the steps into multiple threads or multiple processes, sometimes on multiple machines.
The APIs in common for Suse, RedHat, Gentoo and Ubuntu are in my experience much easier to find and stick to than those that Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Windows XP have in common. But then again, I do most of my software development on Linux. When I do it on Windows, I tend to use libraries to make it look more like Linux so I don't have to write to Windows APIs directly. I would suppose that if I was a Windows software developer, I'd find Windows more familiar and try to make Linux feel more like Windows. I'd probably write to Wine if I was coming from Windows and wanted stuff to run both places, just like I write to tk, SDL, or OpenGL now to get stuff to run on both. Where's the news?
What do you mean, low standards? I still play Final Fantasy on my jNES installation. One day I'm going to make it past 10th level with four white mages!
The game still rocks. By making the graphics cartoonish instead of fake realism, they seem the same quality today -- cartoonish and representative. It's not FPS, after all. It's four guys waddling forward, doing the Atlanta Braves fans' chop-chop motion, and waddling backward in turn. Once in a while they slump over, fall down, or turn to stone. That's it. That's all there is. It's not realistic, and that's not a bad thing. That's the very beauty of it.
The game designers didn't try to make the graphics the whole point, so they just act as a cute little representation of what's going on, and you can have your fun by actually playing the game. I still play chess. On a board. With pieces that don't dance, talk, or slash at each other. It's a game. I have fun. The pieces are doing their jobs.
I'm not saying there's no room for flashy, realistic-looking games. The wow factor, the instant immersion, and the realistic physical simulations can be a lot of fun. Not all games have to do that to be fun, though. Tradewars and Freelancer are both fun. Nethack and Bard's Tale are both fun. Nethack, in my book, is more fun than Diablo. Genghis Khan, Defender of the Crown, Starcraft, Castles II, Stronghold, Total Annihilation, Warcraft 1 and 2, Conquer!, and the Civilization series are all fun. Heck, sometimes I still play Combat for the 2600 or the original Pitfall. People are playing PacMan and Breakout on their phones.
Some games are fun. Some are not. Some age well. Some do not. In the end, there's one thing that separates a classic game that ages well from other games that age poorly -- the overall playing experience.
An ad-supported Linux distro could simply mean ads on the download site and the installer. Since there's no cost to get the initial code, only to modify it and to distribute it (servers, bandwidth, things of that sort) then you could support a small team of developers doing changes to your specifications without invasive ads during day-to-day operation. I agree that noone should ever be so silly as to use a Linux distro with banner ads on the screen. Maybe a small strip of text ads on the X desktop above the taskbar that stays behind any windows you open if it's a particularly nice distro and still free or dirt cheap to acquire. Maybe even an MOTD with an ad and a fortune when you start a new shell instance wouldn't be horrible. Anything more invasive than that, and it'd just be entirely out of the question no matter how good a distro or how cheap it is.
Also, don't forget that if you "pirate" Windows now, it's just copyright infringment. If you crack it not to show ads, then you're not just using one fixed-fee copy without a license. You're actively depriving MS of ad revenue on a daily basis. There's probably some obscure law that in some way they can get you in more trouble for that, or that the courts will take more seriously.
If you want a formattable date function, you can write it your damn self! This isn't a dig against people with other date formats. It's a way to point out a smallish programming project someone of middling skill can do to help a project that's open to broad collaboration.
One argument people always give against Free Software and Open Source software is that not everyone can code, and that not all coders can code well enough to do what every app takes. Chances are, though, that if an Open Source program suits your needs well enough except for one small but important feature you can probably find someone who will add the feature for you. If you can't do it, a friend might do it for free or someone might do it for very little money since it's not a major project. They can't do that nearly as well or as easily if they don't have access to the code.
Instead of paying a bunch to get a clone of a closed-source program with an added feature or having to have an add-on program that fixes details like this, you can pay once and use it in-house. If you release it back into the world, then more people can use it. If the project maintainers include it in new releases, then you've scratched your own itch and made the project better.
I know it may seem a stretch to go from talking about dates to talking about how software handles dates to talking about Open Source, but this is still/. right?
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It seems applix7 has a great many "check out X's wrongdoing" posts to various threads. It seems to just be a (hobby|quest|purpose in life|self-appointed duty) of (his|hers) to point out these things.
I'm sure it helps to have people keep tabs on big companies. Sun's about the least of my worries when it comes to companies misbehaving, though.
Hey, speaking of Sun and different lines of chips, what about the clockless chip I used to hear about? Is that still in development, or has it been canned?
Gee, Wally, and I thought I saw a cell phone that let you change the ring sound. I musta been daydreaming again. Oh well. Wanna play catch?
-- the Beav
Well, it is InfoWorld. The computer news magazine so well-liked and valuable that they give away free subscriptions if your application says you influence what brand of printer your boss's boss might buy.
My mother was one of the people who assembled the heaters for the O-rings on Challenger. The government investigators asked a lot of questions at her place of work. The engineers there very quickly pointed out to them that the shuttle was flown well outside the specs for which the heaters had been designed. They had been designed for specs more stringent than for what they had been commissioned, just to give some extra padding room for error.
Let me restate what that means. The shuttle, to save some dollars associated with delaying the launch, was flown well outside the specs for the components given to the engineers at the subcontractors who made those components. And with those tens of thousands of dollars as a goal, they gambled the billions invested into the shuttle program, the PR they had put into the teacher in space idea, and the lives of six astronauts and a public school teacher. They lost.
I bet it's not as common as it was in 1985. I'm not surprised that a government that had the support of a nation for a space program that was going well but went and blew it all for some financial savings would do the same on some Coast Guard patrol boats. I'm not surprised at all. When was the last time you saw an elementary school playground full of kids in Young Astronauts t-shirts watching a model rocket go up in the air?
To be fair, it's $2000 to play several $60 games, and then run a free IM client to talk about how cool it all is.
Oooh, it's Leopard boy... and the Decepticons.
Where do you play roulette that they allow bets after the wheel is spinning? I want to play there.
They exist, sure. There's generally not as many holes in other OSes as in Windows, and the holes in other OSes tend to open the system up to less abuse. The number of systems in the installed base makes no difference in either of these metrics, no matter what MS FUD you've heard.
MS is doing better, and certain Linux distros have a long way to go. Rather than hating people over their choice of OS, maybe we should all hope for the day when even the worst OS is difficult to umo umopap!sdn and rightside up. Then maybe people will focus more on Rails or wireless drivers or something as an attack vector instead.
That may be true. From what I understood, it was always IBM's plan to license an OS instead of developing one in order to get the hardware to market quickly. They were perfectly willing to license instead of buy because buying might be a longer time to market and they'd have to take on future development, et cetera. I was always under the impression, though, that they could have done an exclusive license and didn't. Perhaps the antitrust issue was the reason for that. Perhaps IBM had the clone market in mind all along. I'm not sure anyone outside IBM's management at the time will ever know deinitively what combination of factors went into that decision.
That's entirely true in the short term and a very good point.
Eventually routes which run past the U.S. instead of through it would be built and configured. That would be good for the rest of the world and bad for the U.S. telcos (and U.S. government spooks, presumably). If it's bad for the bottom line of greedy, shortsighted telcos, it may have a snowball effect of more negative consequences on the customers of those telcos.
I think the Tandy Color Computer 3 did as much or more to put a computer in every home as Windows did to put a computer on every office desk. The Commodore 64 and Amiga systems did about as much, too. They all did more than DOS. The main difference in MS-DOS and MS-Windows is that DOS rode the coat-tails of IBM, and Windows rode the coat-tails of DOS. OS/2 was far better than Windows 3.1, but Windows 95 (and MS's practice of forcing white-box vendors to pay for Windows for every computer they sold if they wanted to sell Windows preinstalled on any of them) killed OS/2.
Windows has been far more projected onto the world by Microsoft's shrewd business moves than by any inherent quality of the software. At one time, the saying that noone ever got fired for buying IBM was almost universally true. When Gates convinced IBM to use MS-DOS as the exclusive preloaded OS on the original PC but to allow him to license it to anyone else, he laid the foundation for his multi-billion dollar wealth. The rest is just building on that.
IBM then laid a foundation of its own by allowing its hardware to become a defacto standard for compatible clones. This helped IBM's image and did them some good by getting more people developing for their market. It did MS much more good, because the clone hardware was being used with their software. While IBM was building a social empire through influence, MS was building a financial empire through actual sales.
People eventually bought Windows PCs for home use because that's what they were using at work, and it's what was in the stores. People could buy PCs compatible with the IBM gold standard for a silver-level price, and run the same software. This lead to more development for the platform, which in turn lead to more clones and more Windows sales. Vendors of other models of course had a choice to make, and most of them started selling IBM or IBM clone machines in place of or in addition to their own machines. Commodore and Apple both had software and even hardware solutions to let people use the files and even the software of this IBM/MS platform on their otherwise incompatible platforms. And so it grew even more. OS/2 was DOS software compatible, and that made DOS grow more. Then it was Windows software compatible, and it made Windows grow even more. Then Windows changed, and OS/2 wasn't compatible with software designed specifically for Windows 95. Some still consider this a bit of a dirty trick, because IBM was using the cross-licensing arrangement with MS to make OS/2 as compatible with Windows as they could. MS used the same arrangement to pretty much let the air out of OS/2.
People for years wrote and sold software to make up for shortcomings of DOS and Windows. Norton, McAfee, DesqView, Novell, Artisoft, and thousands of other companies and individual software developers made their livings making utility programs, file managers, security software, multitasking systems, window managers, network stacks, programming suites, file and disk compression, and a multitude of other add-ons to make up for what DOS and Windows lacked compared to other operating systems available at the same time. Microsoft keeps adding functionality to the OS now and saying it's necessary to compete, but it wasn't back in the day. Back in the day you paid a little for an OS license from MS, then paid far more than the cost of a more complete OS to set it up they way you needed or wanted it to work. Much of that other money went to third parties. Now MS is bringing most of those functions into one box, and is doing a decent but not spectacular job of making it all work.
The key to Windows as a widely used platform is still in the snowball effect of the original IBM PC and the early years of the clones, then the ISV support, then the compatibility efforts of other platform vendors, then more ISV support. These can still be attributed to stellar business acumen paired with mediocre software development. I'm not saying that there aren't brilliant developers at MS. I'm certain there are. Their
Not outside the US, no.
Inside the US, though, the customers of large US telecom companies may be firewalled off from the service by the very people they are paying for Net access. If not that, they may be slowdd to a trickle of traffic.
If I was paying for access to "The Internet", and my service provider wasn't giving me access to everything I could legally access, then I'd be getting ripped off, wouldn't I?
So for the rest of the world US net neutrality laws don't matter so much. For those of us in the US, they matter a great deal, even when the traffic starts overseas.
If you're going to convince people you're all about security, you don't do "port23". You do "port22".
If anyone's confused, take a look at /etc/services on your local *nix. Failing that, take a look at the IANA assigned port numbers reference.
...and I could have sworn that most bears live in the wild.
Type A/Type B are connectors. I'm talking about the host functionality versus the device functionality. I may be mistaken, but I was under the impression that the PSP was designed to be a USB device. I have looked and looked, and that seems to be the consensus everywhere any search takes me.
There are certain drives and such that have firmware to make them act as USB hosts, which would allow the PSP to be the device end for those. I haven't seen a keyboard yet that acts as a USB host to make a device interoperate with it.
I think you've misunderstood sensibility for anger. I'm not angry, and I'm not raging at Sony.
If a dog pissed on a tree last week, and the week before, then starts heading toward that tree, wouldn't you expect the dog to piss on the tree? It only makes sense that if they have a history of locking in their customers and delivering lackluster content selection themselves, people should expect that future products will feature lock-in and lackluster content selection. With Sony, bringing out great systems and then underdelivering on content selection is a pattern.
Why the hell should I buy something when I have substantial reason to believe that it will have two traits, lock-in and poor selection, that I have hated about their products in the past?
If it's from Sony, it seems it's all about screwing the customer to make a buck. Why should I hand over money because it says "Sony" on the front of a box? If there's anything comparable that doesn't have such a narrow-minded, openly hostile (remember rootkits? not just on music CDs but on the PSP demo CD that came with PSP-branded Memory Stick Pro Duo flash sticks?) corporation. Nintendo's cheaper for game consoles, so if I want vendor lock-in there, I'll buy from them. I won't pay a premium for computing power and nice development kits that they try their best to keep you from using how you want. Almost anyone else is cheaper for PCs. Many companies offer cheaper (and often better) audio and video components. There's no value proposition in the Sony name any longer. Why should I waste money on the name?
See? I'm not angry. I'm disappointed in Sony, and disappointed in their products. I don't want to pay a premium to be disappointed again. I should've bought a GP2X in the first place, I guess. Buying a PSP then a GP2X is hard to justify even to myself, let alone to my wife. Thing is, Sony has the great reputation, and early on the PSP was able to play homebrewed games and run homebrewed apps really well and pretty easily. Then Sony started trying to crush the homebrew scene for it. I should've learned before the PSP. I have learned now.
Outside of greed and lack of vision, there's no reason the PSP and mylo should be separate products. They are both WiFi capable, both have a small form factor, and both have a strong software development platform for them. If the PSP had been made with the slide-out keyboard (or had even been given a USB host capability so an external keyboard could be hooked up) the major hardware difference that matters would have been gone or greatly reduced. If they had allowed the strong home-brew community to keep functioning instead of constantly making things harder for homebrew developers with each firmware update, most of the software to do all of this would have been written for them.
It's probably plans to release mylo that prompted the crackdown on homebrew games and apps for the PSP. Now that there's little of the PSP's original promise left fulfilled, it's a struggling product. Now they want those of us who laid out $250 for the PSP to repeat the cycle with mylo at $350. I say tough shit, Sony. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
I still have a working Betamax VCR, still have a Sony Walkman somewhere, and regularly use my Sony CD boombox from the late 1980s when I'm in the kitchen or the back yard. The Walkman and the CD boombox they got right -- they were interoperable and I could play homebrewed content on them. At least the Betamax I could get blanks for and it would take homebrewed content. I never bought a PS or PS2 but I'd been considering a PS3 or maybe a PS2 for now. At least with the PS2 they paid lip service to homebrew. It was never the homebrew system the Atari 2600 or the Sega Dreamcast were (and heck, still are). Sony says the PS3 will be able to replace a PC. If they think my desktop will be locked in to their vicious vendor lock-in and Sony's planned upgrade cycle, they are sorely mistaken. I'm not dropping that kind of money on another closed hunk of Sony crap.
There will be no mylo and no PS3 in my home unless Sony fixes their "dumb consumer" thinking. I want my purchases to serve my needs and wants, not just theirs. I'll not buy another Sony product until they fix themselves. Right now, Sony is broken and so are all of their products.
Actually, it boiled down to a change in the driver for his SCSI drive controller. The final RC installed just fine both fresh as the initial OS and as an upgrade under all his testing. The retail copy trashed the drive under any circumstances until he got a driver from the hardware manufacturer.
I have no mod points today, but MS does open betas and release candidiates too. I still remember, in fact, when the "final" release candidate for Windows98 worked perfectly with my friend's hardware, then the retail version trashed the contents of his hard drive every time he tried to install it.
QED. Do I get a cookie?
I was never under the illusion that there was a deep tactical system. It's attack, cast, use item, or run away. That's still enough that it was fun. Dragon Warrior 2 was indeed a different level of game. So is Genghis Khan, which is very much fun but I have problems palying it just here-and-there. GK's more of an all-weekend game. FF I can play for ten minutes and save, then come back to days later.
I'm certain you are right about mainframe apps. Unfortunately, this also tends to happen even with currently developed programs on micros when people don't stop to think about where a program might get used.
Wow. Software development for a particular group of OS distributions is complex. What news.
Come on, if anyone's a software developer instead of a fanboy who does copy-and-paste until something compiles then they know how to manage complexity. Software development is the management of complexity, after all. You take a big problem and break it into tiny steps a computer can perform one after another. In many cases you even figure out what things in that set of steps don't depend upon each other and break the steps into multiple threads or multiple processes, sometimes on multiple machines.
The APIs in common for Suse, RedHat, Gentoo and Ubuntu are in my experience much easier to find and stick to than those that Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Windows XP have in common. But then again, I do most of my software development on Linux. When I do it on Windows, I tend to use libraries to make it look more like Linux so I don't have to write to Windows APIs directly. I would suppose that if I was a Windows software developer, I'd find Windows more familiar and try to make Linux feel more like Windows. I'd probably write to Wine if I was coming from Windows and wanted stuff to run both places, just like I write to tk, SDL, or OpenGL now to get stuff to run on both. Where's the news?
What do you mean, low standards? I still play Final Fantasy on my jNES installation. One day I'm going to make it past 10th level with four white mages!
The game still rocks. By making the graphics cartoonish instead of fake realism, they seem the same quality today -- cartoonish and representative. It's not FPS, after all. It's four guys waddling forward, doing the Atlanta Braves fans' chop-chop motion, and waddling backward in turn. Once in a while they slump over, fall down, or turn to stone. That's it. That's all there is. It's not realistic, and that's not a bad thing. That's the very beauty of it.
The game designers didn't try to make the graphics the whole point, so they just act as a cute little representation of what's going on, and you can have your fun by actually playing the game. I still play chess. On a board. With pieces that don't dance, talk, or slash at each other. It's a game. I have fun. The pieces are doing their jobs.
I'm not saying there's no room for flashy, realistic-looking games. The wow factor, the instant immersion, and the realistic physical simulations can be a lot of fun. Not all games have to do that to be fun, though. Tradewars and Freelancer are both fun. Nethack and Bard's Tale are both fun. Nethack, in my book, is more fun than Diablo. Genghis Khan, Defender of the Crown, Starcraft, Castles II, Stronghold, Total Annihilation, Warcraft 1 and 2, Conquer!, and the Civilization series are all fun. Heck, sometimes I still play Combat for the 2600 or the original Pitfall. People are playing PacMan and Breakout on their phones.
Some games are fun. Some are not. Some age well. Some do not. In the end, there's one thing that separates a classic game that ages well from other games that age poorly -- the overall playing experience.
An ad-supported Linux distro could simply mean ads on the download site and the installer. Since there's no cost to get the initial code, only to modify it and to distribute it (servers, bandwidth, things of that sort) then you could support a small team of developers doing changes to your specifications without invasive ads during day-to-day operation. I agree that noone should ever be so silly as to use a Linux distro with banner ads on the screen. Maybe a small strip of text ads on the X desktop above the taskbar that stays behind any windows you open if it's a particularly nice distro and still free or dirt cheap to acquire. Maybe even an MOTD with an ad and a fortune when you start a new shell instance wouldn't be horrible. Anything more invasive than that, and it'd just be entirely out of the question no matter how good a distro or how cheap it is.
Also, don't forget that if you "pirate" Windows now, it's just copyright infringment. If you crack it not to show ads, then you're not just using one fixed-fee copy without a license. You're actively depriving MS of ad revenue on a daily basis. There's probably some obscure law that in some way they can get you in more trouble for that, or that the courts will take more seriously.
If you want a formattable date function, you can write it your damn self! This isn't a dig against people with other date formats. It's a way to point out a smallish programming project someone of middling skill can do to help a project that's open to broad collaboration.
/. right?
One argument people always give against Free Software and Open Source software is that not everyone can code, and that not all coders can code well enough to do what every app takes. Chances are, though, that if an Open Source program suits your needs well enough except for one small but important feature you can probably find someone who will add the feature for you. If you can't do it, a friend might do it for free or someone might do it for very little money since it's not a major project. They can't do that nearly as well or as easily if they don't have access to the code.
Instead of paying a bunch to get a clone of a closed-source program with an added feature or having to have an add-on program that fixes details like this, you can pay once and use it in-house. If you release it back into the world, then more people can use it. If the project maintainers include it in new releases, then you've scratched your own itch and made the project better.
I know it may seem a stretch to go from talking about dates to talking about how software handles dates to talking about Open Source, but this is still