Come on. These are the header files for the interfaces. How does he know that they're his? It's like any other interface. The header files to use a Voodoo 3 card in one program are bound to be nearly identical to those in another.
Besides, if he reverse engineered the interface, then shouldn't he be the one who's getting in trouble for distributing header files that resemble those of the manufacturer's?
Come on. This dude's probably like 12. The only definition of "FUDD" he knows begins with Elmer and hunts rabbits. I wonder if he even read the article.
Actually, I do my admin work from whichever box I happen to be sitting at when the work needs to be done, unless I'm within a few feet of the server. I can use WebMin (fair), telnet (bad), ssh (good), etc.
vim can open up the man page for any key word under the cursor, if it exists (not sure of the key sequence, though). It can also find the include or source file where the word under the cursor first occurs (which is usually the function definition, although sometimes it mistakenly finds comments) by pressing ^w, i.
OT: Let me guess? It's a Score:0 post! Apparently I've got on the bad side of the auto moderation system. Must've been that comment I made about RasterMan...
Actually NT has the "at" stuff... equivalent of cron. Oddly enough, my MCSE friend has never heard of it.
Linux has "at" also. I believe it's the UNIX predecessor to the cron daemon. At any rate, IIRC it's very insecure, at least on some systems.
As for GUI vs. CLI, I prefer the CLI for 90% of development work. I came to Linux from Windows, where I used Visual C++ for Windows development and RHIDE for DOS development (DJGPP gcc). I have come to love vim, what with all the pretty colors and all (IMO vim has the best syntax highlighting of any editor. kdevelop is pretty good, but I like vim the best). Makefiles are extremely easy to write (all: \n gcc file.c -o file), and autoconf isn't much harder. I especially like the way I can do "cvs -z3 update" to refresh my source tree. Much faster than navigating through a bunch of menus with the mouse. I use CLI for OpenGL, SDL, framebuffer (libfbx), and CLI development. The only thing I use a graphical IDE for is resource editing, i.e. laying out menus and stuff, but I don't do much standard X11/Windows GUI stuff. I mostly work in OpenGL.
In conclusion, I guess what it all comes down to is how fast you can type more than what application style you're developing. If you suck, GUI is better. If you can type fast (I, for example, can type 140 wpm in a burst, avg. 100+ wpm sustained), the command line is better. Vim rules for fast typists, especially because of its moded interface. If you type slower than 60 or 70 WPM, you need to spend more time away from your mouse and get a typing tutor or something, if you want to be a programmer. I'd hate to code at 40 WPM... I can't stand watching my friend code. He uses an IDE because he types at 50 or so WPM. Whoa! I really strayed from my topic!
... that the entire economy could revolve around a single corporation. The downfall of Microsoft could only help the economy. To suggest that killing (to use the violent terminology geeks are so famous for in the software design world) Microsoft is killing the US economy is downright preposterous. Take, for example, Sony corporation. While based in Japan, its US assets siginificantly exceed those of Microsoft. Microsoft only looks gigantic because Bill Gates happens to be the man who holds the world records for gaining, losing, and posessing the most money. That's only because he owns 30% of Microsoft's stock.
Looks to me like the only REAL gain HP makes is getting a MAJOR competitor out of the way...
Is it so unbelievable that, rather than for its technology, a company will buy another just to eliminate it? How long has Microsoft been doing that? A similar thing happened with nVidia buying 3dfx.
Check out FreeSCI. It runs Sierra games with better-than-original graphics on a multitude of platforms. If it was an AGI game, rather than SCI, check out Sarien.
That is, if you ever see this post, considering how old the article is.
Heh, bah... I ran Windows 95 on a 386-40 with 4MB of RAM. Later it turned into a 486-120 server with 16MB of RAM, running Windows 95 (this was before I knew of Linux, when I thought that netware was the best server ever). But all is well now that my server is a P133 running Linux.
Compiler bloat? What about kernel bloat? I'm not saying that Linux is crap (else why would I be using it so extensively?), just that the kernel is approaching (if not surpassing) bloat status. I may get shot for saying this, but a lot of people are disappointed with the way Linus is handling the kernel -- his making some decisions based on how he believes something should work, rather than on fact in particular. Some say he knows little other than x86, and has done things to some code that ruins it for other architectures. On the positive side, Linus has made an incredible accomplishment in initiating such a widespread interest in Linux, but I still look forward to VSTa. It will be interesting to see where all the free kernels (Linux, VSTa, FreeBSD) are at in 10 years.
Now, to make this posting a little more related to the article, I'll comment on the chess stuff. What algorithm does gnuchess use? Is it just a brute force, search-and-destroy "quantum universe" calculator? i.e. does it calculate every possible move and then choose the best path? How would gnuchess on a very large MOSIX cluster of SMP systems compare to one of these other chess computer competitors?
KDE and Gnome both duplicate most of Windows' key mappings, such as Alt-F4, F1,... These key bindings, however, are unintuitive, and people only like them because they've been used before. Most people coming from Windows could just as easly look at an F1 key and see the word Help right there underneath it, but honestly, it doesn't make a lot of sense. Why not put a Help button on the keyboard?
As far as speed is concerned, twm and blackbox are very fast. I like some of blackbox's themes. The only problems with twm and blackbox is that they use the UNIX style bindings of ALT-F1 through ALT-F4 being used to switch to desktops one through four, which I think is equally as handy as ALT-F4 to close a window. Anyway, what is the window close keyboard shortcut on the Macintosh? It's not Alt-F4.
What of directfb and other candidates for The Next Big Thing? I think directfb is very cool from a graphics perspective, since it uses the full 2D and 3D capabilities of a card, and can fall back to software modes if necessary. It's also independent of X, has a Gtk+ port,... Besides, we all know Rasterman couldn't code his way out of a paper bag... He could sell his code to the Olive Garden as genuine spaghetti.
It is stupid to think that even the entire slashdot community could save a company by buying a few games. Remember Indrema? For some reason they ended up $10mil short. Even if every major development house in the world paid Sony's price for an SDK, and all of the open source developers bought an sdk for $800, they still wouldn't have near enough. It takes a lot more money than we would like to think to run a company, although it helps if you don't try to buy your own manufacturing plant, and instead try to outsource to someone like Phillips or something...
I don't give a rats ass what kind of projector the movie theatre uses and I shouldn't have to care about what OS my games are running on for the same reason.
Really? That's odd... I absolutely refuse to watch a movie that's not on a Binford model 6100 digital film projector with a 15000 lumen bulb, 3500x1500 resolution, and its own 30A circuit breaker... Oh, and the sound system MUST be THX certified... I can't stand all those Tinseltown and whatever theaters that are supposed to have good sound, and I plop down in one of those stadium seats only to find that I can hardly hear anything below 70Hz... I mean come on, I've got a mediocre sound system at home at best, without even a subwoofer, and one of my speakers came from the local thrift store (DI as it is called) for $10, yet I can feel everything down to 35 or so Hz.
Err.. I mean.. Loki!
Think it's impossible? These people did write a commercial quality OS, not a small task compared to writing a commercial quality game. Why would it be any less possible to write a commercial quality game then?
Writing a commercial quality game requires a completely different style of thinking from writing a commercial quality OS. Besides, commercial quality OSes aren't really that high quality -- look what Redmond is throwing over the walls for $1000+... Anyway. Games involve a lot more than just programming and drawing a pretty set of UI icons. There has to be careful play balancing, so that the player can learn the game fast enough not to get stuck forever, as well as so that the levels get progressively harder as the player moves on. There must be dedicated artists. No longer can a "one-man-band" release a commercial quality game in a reasonable timeframe, and still have it at a quality representative of the current market status (how I long for those days of yore in shareware DOS land, when anyone could make and distribute a game... I should've been born a few years earlier). There must be money (to buy the compilation cluster, as well as the three headed graphics workstations with 19" flat panels for the artists). There must be advertising (this may be the second most important part of a game). In the current state of the economy/game market/whatever (in which there is an alienating feature called "money," which many hope will be eliminated by the time we have replicators and whatever), it takes a lot more than any group in the Open Source/Free Software community can muster. The thing that scares me most is that I plan to make video games for a living. Wish me luck.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, I can't believe I did that.
Long live SB16!
this is i_am_nitrogen's old nick that got trashed by unfair moderation
Niche OS?
Very good.
Come on. These are the header files for the interfaces. How does he know that they're his? It's like any other interface. The header files to use a Voodoo 3 card in one program are bound to be nearly identical to those in another.
Besides, if he reverse engineered the interface, then shouldn't he be the one who's getting in trouble for distributing header files that resemble those of the manufacturer's?
Come on. This dude's probably like 12. The only definition of "FUDD" he knows begins with Elmer and hunts rabbits. I wonder if he even read the article.
Actually, I do my admin work from whichever box I happen to be sitting at when the work needs to be done, unless I'm within a few feet of the server. I can use WebMin (fair), telnet (bad), ssh (good), etc.
first ponst?
umm...
it's "post"
and how come you get a Score:1 for an off topic post, but I always get a Score:0 even for the best posts in a thread?
vim can open up the man page for any key word under the cursor, if it exists (not sure of the key sequence, though). It can also find the include or source file where the word under the cursor first occurs (which is usually the function definition, although sometimes it mistakenly finds comments) by pressing ^w, i.
OT: Let me guess? It's a Score:0 post! Apparently I've got on the bad side of the auto moderation system. Must've been that comment I made about RasterMan...
Glade is similar in performance and separation, and is more portable (due to its use of Gtk+).
Linux has "at" also. I believe it's the UNIX predecessor to the cron daemon. At any rate, IIRC it's very insecure, at least on some systems.
As for GUI vs. CLI, I prefer the CLI for 90% of development work. I came to Linux from Windows, where I used Visual C++ for Windows development and RHIDE for DOS development (DJGPP gcc). I have come to love vim, what with all the pretty colors and all (IMO vim has the best syntax highlighting of any editor. kdevelop is pretty good, but I like vim the best). Makefiles are extremely easy to write (all: \n gcc file.c -o file), and autoconf isn't much harder. I especially like the way I can do "cvs -z3 update" to refresh my source tree. Much faster than navigating through a bunch of menus with the mouse. I use CLI for OpenGL, SDL, framebuffer (libfbx), and CLI development. The only thing I use a graphical IDE for is resource editing, i.e. laying out menus and stuff, but I don't do much standard X11/Windows GUI stuff. I mostly work in OpenGL.
In conclusion, I guess what it all comes down to is how fast you can type more than what application style you're developing. If you suck, GUI is better. If you can type fast (I, for example, can type 140 wpm in a burst, avg. 100+ wpm sustained), the command line is better. Vim rules for fast typists, especially because of its moded interface. If you type slower than 60 or 70 WPM, you need to spend more time away from your mouse and get a typing tutor or something, if you want to be a programmer. I'd hate to code at 40 WPM... I can't stand watching my friend code. He uses an IDE because he types at 50 or so WPM. Whoa! I really strayed from my topic!
--
experience euphoria
n1tr0g3n's dictionary:
pun-dit: see computer professional, industry expert, end-user.
computer professional: see moron, MCSE, Microsoft Partner, Bill Gates.
... that the entire economy could revolve around a single corporation. The downfall of Microsoft could only help the economy. To suggest that killing (to use the violent terminology geeks are so famous for in the software design world) Microsoft is killing the US economy is downright preposterous. Take, for example, Sony corporation. While based in Japan, its US assets siginificantly exceed those of Microsoft. Microsoft only looks gigantic because Bill Gates happens to be the man who holds the world records for gaining, losing, and posessing the most money. That's only because he owns 30% of Microsoft's stock.
--
euphoria
Is it so unbelievable that, rather than for its technology, a company will buy another just to eliminate it? How long has Microsoft been doing that? A similar thing happened with nVidia buying 3dfx.
Check out FreeSCI. It runs Sierra games with better-than-original graphics on a multitude of platforms. If it was an AGI game, rather than SCI, check out Sarien. That is, if you ever see this post, considering how old the article is.
Heh, bah... I ran Windows 95 on a 386-40 with 4MB of RAM. Later it turned into a 486-120 server with 16MB of RAM, running Windows 95 (this was before I knew of Linux, when I thought that netware was the best server ever). But all is well now that my server is a P133 running Linux.
Compiler bloat? What about kernel bloat? I'm not saying that Linux is crap (else why would I be using it so extensively?), just that the kernel is approaching (if not surpassing) bloat status. I may get shot for saying this, but a lot of people are disappointed with the way Linus is handling the kernel -- his making some decisions based on how he believes something should work, rather than on fact in particular. Some say he knows little other than x86, and has done things to some code that ruins it for other architectures. On the positive side, Linus has made an incredible accomplishment in initiating such a widespread interest in Linux, but I still look forward to VSTa. It will be interesting to see where all the free kernels (Linux, VSTa, FreeBSD) are at in 10 years.
Now, to make this posting a little more related to the article, I'll comment on the chess stuff. What algorithm does gnuchess use? Is it just a brute force, search-and-destroy "quantum universe" calculator? i.e. does it calculate every possible move and then choose the best path? How would gnuchess on a very large MOSIX cluster of SMP systems compare to one of these other chess computer competitors?
KDE and Gnome both duplicate most of Windows' key mappings, such as Alt-F4, F1, ... These key bindings, however, are unintuitive, and people only like them because they've been used before. Most people coming from Windows could just as easly look at an F1 key and see the word Help right there underneath it, but honestly, it doesn't make a lot of sense. Why not put a Help button on the keyboard?
As far as speed is concerned, twm and blackbox are very fast. I like some of blackbox's themes. The only problems with twm and blackbox is that they use the UNIX style bindings of ALT-F1 through ALT-F4 being used to switch to desktops one through four, which I think is equally as handy as ALT-F4 to close a window. Anyway, what is the window close keyboard shortcut on the Macintosh? It's not Alt-F4.
What of directfb and other candidates for The Next Big Thing? I think directfb is very cool from a graphics perspective, since it uses the full 2D and 3D capabilities of a card, and can fall back to software modes if necessary. It's also independent of X, has a Gtk+ port, ... Besides, we all know Rasterman couldn't code his way out of a paper bag... He could sell his code to the Olive Garden as genuine spaghetti.
It is stupid to think that even the entire slashdot community could save a company by buying a few games. Remember Indrema? For some reason they ended up $10mil short. Even if every major development house in the world paid Sony's price for an SDK, and all of the open source developers bought an sdk for $800, they still wouldn't have near enough. It takes a lot more money than we would like to think to run a company, although it helps if you don't try to buy your own manufacturing plant, and instead try to outsource to someone like Phillips or something...
Really? That's odd... I absolutely refuse to watch a movie that's not on a Binford model 6100 digital film projector with a 15000 lumen bulb, 3500x1500 resolution, and its own 30A circuit breaker... Oh, and the sound system MUST be THX certified... I can't stand all those Tinseltown and whatever theaters that are supposed to have good sound, and I plop down in one of those stadium seats only to find that I can hardly hear anything below 70Hz... I mean come on, I've got a mediocre sound system at home at best, without even a subwoofer, and one of my speakers came from the local thrift store (DI as it is called) for $10, yet I can feel everything down to 35 or so Hz. Err.. I mean.. Loki!
Writing a commercial quality game requires a completely different style of thinking from writing a commercial quality OS. Besides, commercial quality OSes aren't really that high quality -- look what Redmond is throwing over the walls for $1000+... Anyway. Games involve a lot more than just programming and drawing a pretty set of UI icons. There has to be careful play balancing, so that the player can learn the game fast enough not to get stuck forever, as well as so that the levels get progressively harder as the player moves on. There must be dedicated artists. No longer can a "one-man-band" release a commercial quality game in a reasonable timeframe, and still have it at a quality representative of the current market status (how I long for those days of yore in shareware DOS land, when anyone could make and distribute a game... I should've been born a few years earlier). There must be money (to buy the compilation cluster, as well as the three headed graphics workstations with 19" flat panels for the artists). There must be advertising (this may be the second most important part of a game). In the current state of the economy/game market/whatever (in which there is an alienating feature called "money," which many hope will be eliminated by the time we have replicators and whatever), it takes a lot more than any group in the Open Source/Free Software community can muster. The thing that scares me most is that I plan to make video games for a living. Wish me luck.