This (and a few other suggestions) suggest you don't subscribe to the Unix tool design philosopy: simple tools that do one thing well.
Sorry to break it to you, but this philosophy died a long time ago. Now we have Emacs, Perl, Python Ruby, FireFox, and so on. Core tools that you use all the time can have a bit of complexity behind them that help you get your work done.
>And shell scripting languages are irrelevant these days,
ERR_BULLSHIT_FACTOR_OVERLOAD
Nonsense! Why does every shell need it's own custom language when there are already so many standard scripting languages to choose from?
I know you want to believe that, but honestly, Windows XP (both Home and Professional) has been reliable for me. No random weirdness. No crashes.
But then again I had massive video-related problems with the last Linux installation I used (most likely it was a video driver problem). Should I be trash-talking Linux?
The anti-intellectualism here on Slashdot is extraordinary. I must admit to being rather surprised whenever I see comments like "PhD's dont know nothin"
Honestly, this is because most people get PhDs, or at least go to graduate school, without any kind of real-world experience. So you get people who think that Haskell is the ultimate language ever and are completely puzzled about why people aren't writing desktop applications and video games with it. This is mostly because they only write toy programs and certain filter-like parsing programs (e.g., compilers), and they've never written anything substantial.
(I'm not knocking Haskell, BTW. Great little language. But were I paid a million dollars to bang out a commercial application, Haskell would not be near the top of my list.)
I'm a die hard command line user, yes. I have no delusions about it always being better than a GUI--I use both--but I do a significant amount of work from the command line.
What's peculiar to me is how crusty and stale most command line environments have become. Most UNIX users swear by bash, which isn't even as nice as 4NT for Windows. Feels like there's a lot of room for improvement here. For example, how about capturing all of the output per command, then quickly allowing you to scroll through a list of previous commands and jump to its output? Or getting away from overly static command line windows and instead having something like a simple text editor, where you can move around in a "document" and press Enter at any time, with the output always appearing below it (some language interpreters work like this). And shell scripting languages are irrelevant these days, so a shell doesn't need to be bulked up with such commands. Just use Perl or Python (or whatever) for that sort of thing.
Note again, I'm not trashing the command line. I'd simply like to see it move forward.
They're usually focused on a specific area that the author is interested in. Joel on Sofware, for example. Or Dan Bricklin's blog. Or the various Microsoft blogs by people working on.net. Or the Lambda programming languages weblog. Or any of the popular writers and musicians who have weblogs.
This is what people read. Not teenybopper angst and love lore.
Squeak is a fairly popular approach at the moment. I don't know of any schools that use it directly, but I've run into free camps that promote it. Squeak is a platform-independent Smalltalk, but when teachers say "Squeak" they mean the e-toys framework for building little interactive applets. IMO it's an interesting little system, but fairly awkward to pick up.
For older kids, the game-oriented BASICs give quick results--things like Blitz Basic, Pure Basic, and Dark Basic. Almost certainly you want to steer kids away from stuff from the dark ages, like the Linux command line, makefiles, gcc, etc. I know, I know, lots of geeky types are going to hate that suggestion. But stop, take a step back, and just see the reactions you get to that stuff. It's not that it's unusable, just that it feels so awkward and out of place in the modern world. Show someone DrScheme, for example, and then show someone Emacs and makefiles. Your student will be horrified at the latter two.
Think about it...what does FireFox offer that's over and above IE in terms of usability:
1. Security. 2. Tabbed browsing. 3. Popup blocking. 4. Various little things, like a better Options dialog and nicer text searching.
Now let's look at this from the point of view of a multi-billion dollar sofware development house that already has an existing and popular browser (i.e. Microsoft):
1. The big security problem is allowing ActiveX controls. You can already fix this by raising your security level to High. Microsoft can make this the default in ten seconds of developer time.
2. Tabbed browsing is nice, but how long would it take to add to IE? A week? A month? Microsoft could do this in a hearbeat, and likely already has internally.
3. Popup blocking is something that Microsoft added as part of XP Service Pack 2.
4. Again, as with #2, these would be doddles for Microsoft to add.
Now what's more likely here is that Microsoft is thinking big and has something up its sleeve that the FireFox guys aren't even considering. The worry, for those people who insist upon viewing this as a battle, is that FireFox is going to look like an improved and polished version of IE, and the next IE is going to be leap beyond it.
Commodore released some games for the C64 early on, but very few overall and certainly none of the big classics people are remembering. Just because someone owns the Commodore name doesn't mean they can re-release games owned by Electronic Arts and many other companies.
In this case, a 32-bit counter would have prevented the crash, but really, how many coders check for overflow in their 32-bit counters? In long running systems, you *have* to. And it's easier to overflow a 32-bit counter than you think; it depends how often it gets incremented (that is, what is being counted).
In languages with graceful promotion from integer to bignum, this is a non-issue. Not for most languages, however. (And lest anyone think I'm oversimplifying here, such promotion is not so simple, in that bignums take a variable amount of memory. To handle this truly transparently you need some form of automatic memory management, which is a no-no for many embedded systems.)
I see lots of comments claiming it wasn't revolutionary. In reality, no, the Mac wasn't the first system with a GUI. That would be Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad application from the 1960s. And we all know about the Alto. But at the time, back in 1984, the Mac was an atomic bomb dropped on the computer world. People used 8-bit computers like the Atari 800, Apple II, and Commodore 64. People used IBM PCs and clones, back when all popular PC software was written for text-mode MS-DOS. So then here comes the Macintosh with:
1. A 32-bit (internally; it had a 16-bit bus) microprocessor. 2. Bitmapped graphics *only*. No text mode. The visual difference was huge. 3. High-resolution graphics: 512x384, compared with the roughly 320x200 graphics of the 8-bit home computers. (Note that you could get better graphics for the PC, but as an expensive add-on.) 4. Applications geared toward using bitmapped displays, like MacPaint (which was stunning at the time) and MacWrite. 5. Lots of other little things taken for granted: the mouse, the desktop metaphor, shutdown and disk ejection controlled by the system, digitized sound, icons representing applications.
All in all, this was quite a shock to the average person who didn't know about the research going on elsewhere.
This conversation is getting stupid... The 64-bit CPUs have an improved architecture. What the hell difference does it make if one single specific feature is a speed improvement or not?
Let's say that Toyota develops a new car that gets 100 miles per gallon. In that same model, they put in some impressively comfortable seats, the likes of which have never been seen before. Would you really talk about the amazing performance those seats give you?
The point is that AMD could have put all the architectural improvements from their 64-bit CPUs and put them in their 32-bit processor line. The bitness is irrelevant. You don't magically get speedups from 64-bitness. In fact, you get a slowdown,
But all else HASN'T remained the same. The AMD64s have more registers, built-in memory controller, and plenty of other improvements that make it significantly faster than 32-bit x86 processors.
And the 64-bit aspect of it is irrelevant in that case. It's faster because it's a better CPU, not because it is 64-bit. 64-bit is good, yes, but not because it is inherently faster.
The jump from the 6502 to the 68000 (a scant four years apart), was a huge one. Ditto for many of the x86 generations. But performance has leveled off quite obviously in the last few years. The difference between a 3GHz P4 and a 3.6GHz P4 is fairly small, as both tend to be memory bound for real-world applications. And at the same time the power consumption for the 3.6GHz has increased more than the performance.
So what's going to be the next big leap for desktops and notebooks? 64-bit processors are here, yes, but all else remaining the same these run *slower* than 32-bit processors, because the cache effects of 64-bit pointers more than offsets the ability to do 64-bit integer math (note that the x86 FPU has been 80-bit since its inception). Dual core is nice...but it's only a win for multithreaded applications or when you're running multiple applications at the same time. Even then, the effect of multiple threads sharing a cache can result in lower performance than many people expect.
Surely someone is going to set the PC world on its ear with a massive performance leap that doesn't require 1000 watt power supplies?
The Pentium MMX, II and III were just beefed up iterations of the original Pentium (increased bus and clock speeds, smaller and smaller dye sizes, more extensions such as SSE, MMX, etc).
Not true. The jump to the PII was a big one. The Pentium had dual integer execution units, and it was a big deal to manually reorder code in order to keep both units working. The PII was where cycle counting lost all meaning, as it included out of order execution, a huge bank of internal behind-the-scenes registers, register renaming--the works. That was the first of the super-complex modern processors in the x86 family tree.
I'd like to know why you consider the P4 to be the most innovative of the Pentium line since the original?
Or perhaps geeks helping family and friends will set up linux distros instead and head over to sourceforge, just to name one good place for solid gpl stuff.
Of course, what most friends and family want to do is play Battlefield 1942, The Sims, Half-Life 2, and use applications like Photoshop (and The GIMP is not an honest alternative--sorry), Illustrator, and iTunes.
A little note about gvim: It doesn't adhere to the Windows standard of not writing files to the "program files" directory, so you need an administrator account to use it if you select the default install location (and it gets killed by the OS, so it looks like a virus). Install it elsewhere, like c:\vim or "c:\other program files\vim".
Marathon was a good game, but not moreso than many other heavily DOOM-inspired games. The difference is that Marathon was released for the Mac *before* DOOM was ported to the Mac. Lots of other games in the same vein hit the PC around the same time, but they were lost admid all the other similar games. Marathon 2 was a huge flop when released for the PC.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not calling Marathon *awful*, just more derivative than not. (And, yes, I've played both Marathon and DOOM.)
I might just be nostalgic but does it seem that the toys from back then were more tactile and creative?
Nah, you're just being nostalgic. There were *TONS* of crappy toys in the 1970s and 1980s. Just as much embarrassing and poorly constructed stuff as there is today. The classics endure, though: Lego, other building kits, etc. One of the big differences is that the majority of toys today are based on licensed properties. This was much less common in the 1970s. Sure, some were (Batman action figures, Star Wars, Space 1999, etc.), but the 1980s started the practice of popular TV shows and toys being designed together.
This is meant to be a light to middleweight photo and image editing program. Both Photoshop and The GIMP are intended to be do-everything monsters. As such, the competition is all the other lightweight photo editors out there, like PaintShop Pro and the various packages that come with most digital cameras.
Scott has managed to weasel his way into being the industry advocate for Webcomics. I'm not quite sure how that happened, but he's now the point-of-contact for the press. Sucks, don'it?
I would argue that Scott is by far best known for his book "Understanding Comics." His own comic ventures are obscure and unknown.
Scott has also turned into the advocate for the independent artist/developer of any kind of media. He wrote a column for Computer Gaming World, which was essentially "Understanding Comics" applied to games. But he came across as naive, I think.
Actually, most people *are* fed-up with Internet Explorer. It might be allowing pop-ups once a minute, or not displaying certain websites correctly (most often https), or just behaving slowly.
I agree about popups (which is why there's a big market for pop up blockers, including Microsoft's own), but not about the other points. I have never seen IE "behave slowly," and I routinely use both IE and Firefox. I have also had much more trouble with sites being displayed incorrectly with FF than with IE. Usually this is because a site relies on an ActiveX control or a popup. Bad design yes, but still common. Real sites do this, not just clueless newbie-run companies.
Most people are *not* fed-up with Internet Explorer. There's nothing significantly wrong with it, except that it is full of security holes. Most people don't know about the security holes, however, and Microsoft does indeed patch them. The big downside to FireFox is that all of a sudden you can't use a whole bunch of sites that rely on ActiveX controls. Well, plus slashdot.org *still* doesn't render reliably with FireFox (I usually have to hit reload several times, or else the stories aren't visible).
Operating systems are irrelevant and have been for a long time now. Linux vs. Windows is irrelevant, unless you're a fanatic. Two things matter: the user environment (Explorer under Windows; KDE or whatever for Linux) and the applications. Sure, the OS enables these things, but every major OS out there provides essentially the same features. Yes, some people will bring up security issues, but the biggest security hole under Windows is easily blocked simply by using a different browser (or by ratcheting up the security level in IE). From a programming point of view, just about any sane, modern programmer is going to use something clean and simple like Python (or even Java, much as it makes me cringe), and from the Python programmer's point of view Windows and UNIXalikes are the same.
Are you referring to the GPU shader-accelerated version of TinyPTC?
No. I can't find any information on real code for such a thing.
The webpage itself states that the current version uses software blitting (and runs on a bunch of platforms) with optional MMX optimizations, which would make TinyPTC as fast as worst-case blitting in SDL.
TinyPTC gives you a fixed format frame buffer and a call to convert and copy it to the screen. That's all. So if you want to do software blitting (which is what the original linked article was about), then TinyPTC is perfect--for Windows.
SDL is fine if you want to be sloppy and don't care about frame buffer formats and let things get converted internally behind your back in undocumented ways. If you want to write something in a rock solid way to work across all video cards, then TinyPTC is a better choice.
Slashdot Mirror
This (and a few other suggestions) suggest you don't subscribe to the Unix tool design philosopy: simple tools that do one thing well.
Sorry to break it to you, but this philosophy died a long time ago. Now we have Emacs, Perl, Python Ruby, FireFox, and so on. Core tools that you use all the time can have a bit of complexity behind them that help you get your work done.
>And shell scripting languages are irrelevant these days,
ERR_BULLSHIT_FACTOR_OVERLOAD
Nonsense! Why does every shell need it's own custom language when there are already so many standard scripting languages to choose from?
the fact that Windows is a buggy piece of shit
I know you want to believe that, but honestly, Windows XP (both Home and Professional) has been reliable for me. No random weirdness. No crashes.
But then again I had massive video-related problems with the last Linux installation I used (most likely it was a video driver problem). Should I be trash-talking Linux?
The anti-intellectualism here on Slashdot is extraordinary. I must admit to being rather surprised whenever I see comments like "PhD's dont know nothin"
Honestly, this is because most people get PhDs, or at least go to graduate school, without any kind of real-world experience. So you get people who think that Haskell is the ultimate language ever and are completely puzzled about why people aren't writing desktop applications and video games with it. This is mostly because they only write toy programs and certain filter-like parsing programs (e.g., compilers), and they've never written anything substantial.
(I'm not knocking Haskell, BTW. Great little language. But were I paid a million dollars to bang out a commercial application, Haskell would not be near the top of my list.)
I'm a die hard command line user, yes. I have no delusions about it always being better than a GUI--I use both--but I do a significant amount of work from the command line.
What's peculiar to me is how crusty and stale most command line environments have become. Most UNIX users swear by bash, which isn't even as nice as 4NT for Windows. Feels like there's a lot of room for improvement here. For example, how about capturing all of the output per command, then quickly allowing you to scroll through a list of previous commands and jump to its output? Or getting away from overly static command line windows and instead having something like a simple text editor, where you can move around in a "document" and press Enter at any time, with the output always appearing below it (some language interpreters work like this). And shell scripting languages are irrelevant these days, so a shell doesn't need to be bulked up with such commands. Just use Perl or Python (or whatever) for that sort of thing.
Note again, I'm not trashing the command line. I'd simply like to see it move forward.
They're usually focused on a specific area that the author is interested in. Joel on Sofware, for example. Or Dan Bricklin's blog. Or the various Microsoft blogs by people working on .net. Or the Lambda programming languages weblog. Or any of the popular writers and musicians who have weblogs.
This is what people read. Not teenybopper angst and love lore.
Squeak is a fairly popular approach at the moment. I don't know of any schools that use it directly, but I've run into free camps that promote it. Squeak is a platform-independent Smalltalk, but when teachers say "Squeak" they mean the e-toys framework for building little interactive applets. IMO it's an interesting little system, but fairly awkward to pick up.
For older kids, the game-oriented BASICs give quick results--things like Blitz Basic, Pure Basic, and Dark Basic. Almost certainly you want to steer kids away from stuff from the dark ages, like the Linux command line, makefiles, gcc, etc. I know, I know, lots of geeky types are going to hate that suggestion. But stop, take a step back, and just see the reactions you get to that stuff. It's not that it's unusable, just that it feels so awkward and out of place in the modern world. Show someone DrScheme, for example, and then show someone Emacs and makefiles. Your student will be horrified at the latter two.
"New wikis on various subjects have already emerged..."
Hello? Welcome to 2001.
Think about it...what does FireFox offer that's over and above IE in terms of usability:
1. Security.
2. Tabbed browsing.
3. Popup blocking.
4. Various little things, like a better Options dialog and nicer text searching.
Now let's look at this from the point of view of a multi-billion dollar sofware development house that already has an existing and popular browser (i.e. Microsoft):
1. The big security problem is allowing ActiveX controls. You can already fix this by raising your security level to High. Microsoft can make this the default in ten seconds of developer time.
2. Tabbed browsing is nice, but how long would it take to add to IE? A week? A month? Microsoft could do this in a hearbeat, and likely already has internally.
3. Popup blocking is something that Microsoft added as part of XP Service Pack 2.
4. Again, as with #2, these would be doddles for Microsoft to add.
Now what's more likely here is that Microsoft is thinking big and has something up its sleeve that the FireFox guys aren't even considering. The worry, for those people who insist upon viewing this as a battle, is that FireFox is going to look like an improved and polished version of IE, and the next IE is going to be leap beyond it.
Commodore released some games for the C64 early on, but very few overall and certainly none of the big classics people are remembering. Just because someone owns the Commodore name doesn't mean they can re-release games owned by Electronic Arts and many other companies.
In this case, a 32-bit counter would have prevented the crash, but really, how many coders check for overflow in their 32-bit counters? In long running systems, you *have* to. And it's easier to overflow a 32-bit counter than you think; it depends how often it gets incremented (that is, what is being counted).
In languages with graceful promotion from integer to bignum, this is a non-issue. Not for most languages, however. (And lest anyone think I'm oversimplifying here, such promotion is not so simple, in that bignums take a variable amount of memory. To handle this truly transparently you need some form of automatic memory management, which is a no-no for many embedded systems.)
I see lots of comments claiming it wasn't revolutionary. In reality, no, the Mac wasn't the first system with a GUI. That would be Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad application from the 1960s. And we all know about the Alto. But at the time, back in 1984, the Mac was an atomic bomb dropped on the computer world. People used 8-bit computers like the Atari 800, Apple II, and Commodore 64. People used IBM PCs and clones, back when all popular PC software was written for text-mode MS-DOS. So then here comes the Macintosh with:
1. A 32-bit (internally; it had a 16-bit bus) microprocessor.
2. Bitmapped graphics *only*. No text mode. The visual difference was huge.
3. High-resolution graphics: 512x384, compared with the roughly 320x200 graphics of the 8-bit home computers. (Note that you could get better graphics for the PC, but as an expensive add-on.)
4. Applications geared toward using bitmapped displays, like MacPaint (which was stunning at the time) and MacWrite.
5. Lots of other little things taken for granted: the mouse, the desktop metaphor, shutdown and disk ejection controlled by the system, digitized sound, icons representing applications.
All in all, this was quite a shock to the average person who didn't know about the research going on elsewhere.
This conversation is getting stupid... The 64-bit CPUs have an improved architecture. What the hell difference does it make if one single specific feature is a speed improvement or not?
Let's say that Toyota develops a new car that gets 100 miles per gallon. In that same model, they put in some impressively comfortable seats, the likes of which have never been seen before. Would you really talk about the amazing performance those seats give you?
The point is that AMD could have put all the architectural improvements from their 64-bit CPUs and put them in their 32-bit processor line. The bitness is irrelevant. You don't magically get speedups from 64-bitness. In fact, you get a slowdown,
But all else HASN'T remained the same. The AMD64s have more registers, built-in memory controller, and plenty of other improvements that make it significantly faster than 32-bit x86 processors.
And the 64-bit aspect of it is irrelevant in that case. It's faster because it's a better CPU, not because it is 64-bit. 64-bit is good, yes, but not because it is inherently faster.
The jump from the 6502 to the 68000 (a scant four years apart), was a huge one. Ditto for many of the x86 generations. But performance has leveled off quite obviously in the last few years. The difference between a 3GHz P4 and a 3.6GHz P4 is fairly small, as both tend to be memory bound for real-world applications. And at the same time the power consumption for the 3.6GHz has increased more than the performance.
So what's going to be the next big leap for desktops and notebooks? 64-bit processors are here, yes, but all else remaining the same these run *slower* than 32-bit processors, because the cache effects of 64-bit pointers more than offsets the ability to do 64-bit integer math (note that the x86 FPU has been 80-bit since its inception). Dual core is nice...but it's only a win for multithreaded applications or when you're running multiple applications at the same time. Even then, the effect of multiple threads sharing a cache can result in lower performance than many people expect.
Surely someone is going to set the PC world on its ear with a massive performance leap that doesn't require 1000 watt power supplies?
The Pentium MMX, II and III were just beefed up iterations of the original Pentium (increased bus and clock speeds, smaller and smaller dye sizes, more extensions such as SSE, MMX, etc).
Not true. The jump to the PII was a big one. The Pentium had dual integer execution units, and it was a big deal to manually reorder code in order to keep both units working. The PII was where cycle counting lost all meaning, as it included out of order execution, a huge bank of internal behind-the-scenes registers, register renaming--the works. That was the first of the super-complex modern processors in the x86 family tree.
I'd like to know why you consider the P4 to be the most innovative of the Pentium line since the original?
Or perhaps geeks helping family and friends will set up linux distros instead and head over to sourceforge, just to name one good place for solid gpl stuff.
Of course, what most friends and family want to do is play Battlefield 1942, The Sims, Half-Life 2, and use applications like Photoshop (and The GIMP is not an honest alternative--sorry), Illustrator, and iTunes.
Or, perhaps gvim [vim.org] under windows?
A little note about gvim: It doesn't adhere to the Windows standard of not writing files to the "program files" directory, so you need an administrator account to use it if you select the default install location (and it gets killed by the OS, so it looks like a virus). Install it elsewhere, like c:\vim or "c:\other program files\vim".
Marathon was a good game, but not moreso than many other heavily DOOM-inspired games. The difference is that Marathon was released for the Mac *before* DOOM was ported to the Mac. Lots of other games in the same vein hit the PC around the same time, but they were lost admid all the other similar games. Marathon 2 was a huge flop when released for the PC.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not calling Marathon *awful*, just more derivative than not. (And, yes, I've played both Marathon and DOOM.)
I might just be nostalgic but does it seem that the toys from back then were more tactile and creative?
Nah, you're just being nostalgic. There were *TONS* of crappy toys in the 1970s and 1980s. Just as much embarrassing and poorly constructed stuff as there is today. The classics endure, though: Lego, other building kits, etc. One of the big differences is that the majority of toys today are based on licensed properties. This was much less common in the 1970s. Sure, some were (Batman action figures, Star Wars, Space 1999, etc.), but the 1980s started the practice of popular TV shows and toys being designed together.
This is meant to be a light to middleweight photo and image editing program. Both Photoshop and The GIMP are intended to be do-everything monsters. As such, the competition is all the other lightweight photo editors out there, like PaintShop Pro and the various packages that come with most digital cameras.
Scott has managed to weasel his way into being the industry advocate for Webcomics. I'm not quite sure how that happened, but he's now the point-of-contact for the press. Sucks, don'it?
I would argue that Scott is by far best known for his book "Understanding Comics." His own comic ventures are obscure and unknown.
Scott has also turned into the advocate for the independent artist/developer of any kind of media. He wrote a column for Computer Gaming World, which was essentially "Understanding Comics" applied to games. But he came across as naive, I think.
Actually, most people *are* fed-up with Internet Explorer. It might be allowing pop-ups once a minute, or not displaying certain websites correctly (most often https), or just behaving slowly.
I agree about popups (which is why there's a big market for pop up blockers, including Microsoft's own), but not about the other points. I have never seen IE "behave slowly," and I routinely use both IE and Firefox. I have also had much more trouble with sites being displayed incorrectly with FF than with IE. Usually this is because a site relies on an ActiveX control or a popup. Bad design yes, but still common. Real sites do this, not just clueless newbie-run companies.
Most people are *not* fed-up with Internet Explorer. There's nothing significantly wrong with it, except that it is full of security holes. Most people don't know about the security holes, however, and Microsoft does indeed patch them. The big downside to FireFox is that all of a sudden you can't use a whole bunch of sites that rely on ActiveX controls. Well, plus slashdot.org *still* doesn't render reliably with FireFox (I usually have to hit reload several times, or else the stories aren't visible).
Operating systems are irrelevant and have been for a long time now. Linux vs. Windows is irrelevant, unless you're a fanatic. Two things matter: the user environment (Explorer under Windows; KDE or whatever for Linux) and the applications. Sure, the OS enables these things, but every major OS out there provides essentially the same features. Yes, some people will bring up security issues, but the biggest security hole under Windows is easily blocked simply by using a different browser (or by ratcheting up the security level in IE). From a programming point of view, just about any sane, modern programmer is going to use something clean and simple like Python (or even Java, much as it makes me cringe), and from the Python programmer's point of view Windows and UNIXalikes are the same.
Are you referring to the GPU shader-accelerated version of TinyPTC?
No. I can't find any information on real code for such a thing.
The webpage itself states that the current version uses software blitting (and runs on a bunch of platforms) with optional MMX optimizations, which would make TinyPTC as fast as worst-case blitting in SDL.
TinyPTC gives you a fixed format frame buffer and a call to convert and copy it to the screen. That's all. So if you want to do software blitting (which is what the original linked article was about), then TinyPTC is perfect--for Windows.
SDL is fine if you want to be sloppy and don't care about frame buffer formats and let things get converted internally behind your back in undocumented ways. If you want to write something in a rock solid way to work across all video cards, then TinyPTC is a better choice.