GHC was not developed at Microsoft Research. The "G" stands for "Glascow." Some of the people who worked on the compiler later went to Microsoft Research. The software was developed prior to this, though, so Microsoft doesn't own the rights.
Lots of knee-jerk reactions and no sense. Take this from someone with his own business:
1. If you're in business, you have to pay Sales Tax on things you purchase for your business. If you buy something from out of state, you pay Use Tax in most states. This only applies to things you purchase for business (software, office supplies, furniture) and not the things you sell.
2. When you sell something, you have to charge sales tax to people who live in the same state as you. Technically, you don't have to charge them sales tax; you can pay it yourself if you want to (to make things less confusing for customers). Lots of craft fair booths and such do this.
For a long time--going back 20 years or more--the idea of collecting sales tax from out of state customers, depending on the state they live in, occasionally comes up and is dismissed. This would be a paperwork nightmare, because small business owners would have to pay taxes to fifty different state governments.
Right now, the internet is handled the same as mail order. So the original poster should have known that he had to pay use tax. The internet has nothing to do with his case; he should have known better.
You know, I've always been down on the people who are down on Jon Katz. I always thought they were being too whiny, too negative. But in all honesty, this piece could have been written by a program designed to generate articles Jon Katz-like fashion. It's such a complete parody of his writing style and attempts to make pop culture and mainstream events seem underground and hip.
Talk about _hard_. I mean really. He has a job/occupation much like the president's. He's a public speaker, writer, programmer, etc.,
No, let's be realistic here. He gives speeches occasionally. He writes essays occasionally. He tinkers with programming projects here and there. Compare that to someone with a full-time programming job that spends 8-12 hours a day banging out code with the pressure of deadlines. Or someone trying to start his own business who doesn't have millions in stock.
I'm not putting down ESR at all, just pointing out that what he's doing is not tremendously difficult. I admire his writing, and I think more than occasional travel would be draining, but in general he can spend his time as he likes.
ESR has a lot going on these days doesn't he? Anyone wonder when this guy takes a break?
Realistically, he doesn't have a job or go to school. His full-time job is doing some Linux and Open Source advocacy here and there. Talk about *easy*!
First, how many movies that are shown in theaters were screened on the web first? That's like playing a brand new CD on the radio before it's released, so people can tape it.
Second, let's stop the polemic about indie filmmakers and the like. There's a pervasive attitude among Linux people that indies are better than the Big Guys (tm), but so far it has been a complete failure, at least on the open source front. How many indie games have shown even the remotest sign of creativity? 99% of them would have been panned had they been released for the Commodore 64 in 1987. Sites like the Linux Game Tome are testaments to this.
So far, we haven't seen any evidence that indie web film is a different story. We've seen zillions of version of the Wazzzup! commercial, and even most of those were botched. We're a long way away from getting anything independent that's going to compete with Hollywood. And if we did get something great, then academy awards won't be an issue. Just that something great has appeared will be enough.
I for one would rather be involved in the embedded Linux effort.
If you knew anything about embedded programming, you wouldn't want Linux to be an embedded OS. You don't really want an embedded system with the "unlimited resources" attitude of UNIX. That's not to say Linux is bad, just that it is out of place for embedded systems work.
Emacs in nice in some ways, but it's a dated dog in others. IDEs from Microsoft, Borland, and Metrowerks are annoying in different ways, but make so many things *sweet* (the Microsoft's being the worst of the three, because they insist that MDI programs are good). Similarly, Makefiles are nice sometimes, but once you've lived without them then you wonder why you went through all the trouble in the first place. Of course, you can use Makefiles with Windows compilers as well. The three big compiler companies all ship command line tools, so heck, you could even use Emacs under Windows if you want.
Corel Draw is very, very nice. It's not just a filter-based photo editor, but a suite of programs: an object-based drawing program, a bitmap-based paint program, a simple 3D modeler for doing 3D fonts and such, some utilities to assist with scanning, and a *large* collection of clip art and fonts.
Both the draw and paint packages are well done. The latter is right up there with Photoshop, IMO, but the interface is less cluttered. The whole suite is effectively Photoshop + Illustrator for half the price. This is well worth the $$$ for graphic artists.
Oh, stop it already. Your rant comes down to "BeOS is easy to use and we don't want Linux to be easy to use, because easy to use systems are for FaGz, and Linux is for E/_/t3 ha>0rz.
Maybe, just maybe, Linux isn't all that easy to use for some intelligent tech-heads, too.
Bungie is a funny company. Their early stuff was unremarkable (pre-Marathon), as is true of most companies. Then Marathon came along, which for all intents and purposes was a DOOM clone. Mac people *hate* this, because Marathon hit the Mac before DOOM was ported, though it was released after DOOM was out for the PC. And they're quick to point out certain features, like the ability to look up and look down). But it's still very much like DOOM, and even Jason Jones has said that they were heavily influenced by that game.
Myth was good. Bungie needed to go off in another direction and this was it. Myth II was more of the same, but it was marred by a severe installation bug that could trash your hard drive.
Since then, Oni has been a big disappointment. It was announced, the release was impending, then it disappeared for a year (very little was seen of it between E3 1999 and E3 2000). Now it's a PlayStation 2 game more than a PC game, and it looks, um, really bad. The frame rate at E3 was embarrassingly poor, and the game is looking very dated.
Halo is a funny game. The "no gameplay" trailers have gotten fanboys drooling, but the reasons why are elusive. Halo isn't particularly high poly--a barren landscape with no landmarks--and there doesn't seem to be a whole lot to shout about, except a distinctive art style (reflective black soliders running under a pink sky). The E3 trailer had all sorts of jumping between scenes that made it obvious that it wasn't actual gameplay. And still there's talk about how it's the ultimate next gen game. Puzzling.
So Bungie started by cloning the best company around, and they ended up creating the highly innovative and playable Myth, but now they've gone off and become yet another all-hype game company that can't help but disappoint. Could Messiah and Daikatana have done anything but disappoint after all that time? And Myth is on the same road.
People have access to the Internet, but the value of that is debatable. Doing searches on various topics shows this. You tend to gets lots of hits for:
* porn * anything pop culture related (movies, young actresses, pop music, TV shows, video games) * anything geek related (Linux, programming, MP3s, freedom of software) * special interest hobbyists (users of old computers, gardeners, model rocket builders, etc.) * Intentionally weird stuff (scans of housecats, pop tart experiments, marshmallow bunny torture). * The same news you see in papers and on TV. * Corporate marketing fluff.
What you don't find is most of what's in any library. It's very easy to come up with an important topic that turns up very little web action. This always bothers me when I see students using the web for research.
I don't understand the point of designing a game console with Linux in it. First, we're really just talking about the Linux kernel and a few custom drivers. Don't misinterpret "Linux" to mean "flip a switch and there I am in an xterm."
That said, consoles tend to be very light on the OS needs. They don't need to multitask applications. They don't need pipes. They make very little use of a filesystem other than to slurp in entire files. There's no need for a generic device driver system. They don't need virtual memory. And so on. So overall, putting Linux (or BSD or Hurd or whatever) in a console doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And even if the engineers decided "you know, if we use Linux then we could save ourselves the trouble of writing some low level stuff" then that's *not* any kind of reason to think of this as a "Linux-based console." The PlayStation 2 has a Sony-written OS kernel inside of it, but does anyone care? No, because it is irrelevant to consumers.
With the draw of the web being free information, banner ads stand out like a sore thumb. Not because we're all cheapskates, but because really stupid and obvious marketing ploys are out of place. A cute chick with a flashing "HOT" next to her. Punch the monkey. Fake polls ("Do you hate spam? Vote now!"). It's all so *dumb*, in the same way that most spam is (Make money fast! Lose weight overnight!). Attempts by people to promote their web sites in sly ways--"Hey everyone, I just stumbled across this awesome new site!"--are equally brain dead. Advertising has always been like this, but it's just never been so obvious against a contrasting background as it is on the web.
Re:x86 is popular to hate, but not that bad really
on
Is The x86 Obsolete?
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· Score: 2
What makes the x86 a major proctalgia is the nonorthogonality it inherits from the 4004 et al.; nearly every register is "magic" in some way, i.e. there's some instruction that requires an operand to be in that register
This was true in the days of 16-bit code, but has never been for 32-bit x86 code. You can use any register for any addressing mode or operation. In the 16-bit days you had to use either bx, si, or di for memory addressing, for example, which was horrible.
Re:x86 is popular to hate, but not that bad really
on
Is The x86 Obsolete?
·
· Score: 2
Well, it wouldn't be progress, if your assertions were accurate. I'm not sure about any other RISC architecture, but I can sure as heck say that the Sparc architecture does not have this particular limitation. On a sparc, you almost never need to save your registers, and you almost never need to save your stack pointer.
Ah, true, I was thinking in terms of the RISC CPUs that have gotten widely used in consumer hardware, like the SHx (in the Sega Saturn & Dreamcast), MIPS (in some CE devices and Sony's game machines), and the PPC (Mac, of course). None of these chips have the register window features of the SPARC, so quite a huge amount of code gets generated for subroutine entry and exit--up to 20% or more of the total code in a project, in many cases.
What's wrong with this picture is that writing very small subroutines has become the accepted norm--and rightly so--but most hardware is not designed for that style of programming. Increased emphasis on inlining has been the result, but it sure would be nicer to just have single cycle subroutine calls without needed overhead. The SPARC method sounds good.
Re:Function calls, Code bloat, other reasonable my
on
Is The x86 Obsolete?
·
· Score: 2
However, you do _not_ have to save all 32 registers, unless you use all 32. You only have to save the ones you are going to use.
I never said that. I said 15 or more. On the PPC, 15 is about the max. In general, though, there's about 15-20 instructions of overhead in a non-trivia, non-leaf subroutine (in C), but it can be twice that.
You need to stop and think about what "complex" means. A CALL instruction is not complex. Heck, it was standard on 8-bit processors with less than 10,000 transistors. Complex instructions are some of the crazy things done in hardware on the VAX and IBM 360. If a CALL instruction is considered too complex to implement efficiently in hardware, then we shouldn't even both with things like texture mappers or floating point math. The bottom line is that RISC has gone over the top, making things more simplistic than we really want.
x86 is popular to hate, but not that bad really
on
Is The x86 Obsolete?
·
· Score: 4
I've programmed a variety of modern chips at a low level--MIPS, PPC, x86, SHx--and there's more to be said for the x86 than many people realize. For example, on a RISC chip, the subroutine call overhead can be stifling. Yes, it only takes a cycle or two to make the call, but then there's no hardware stack, so the return address has to be saved manually (usually two instructions to save it and two to restore) except for leaf functions. And then you may have to save 15 or more registers, at one instruction per, and restore them at the end of the routine. This all comes down to 20-40 instructions of overhead per subroutine. Is that progress? On the x86, subroutine calls are much faster and cleaner.
Also realize that all of these instructions are fixed at 32-bits on most chips. That's 32-bits to copy a register, 32-bits for a return, etc. This may simplify the hardware, but at the expense of bloat. So you need a bigger instruction cache.
Is the x86 perfect? No. If you look at an x86 reference, you'll find that over 50% of the instructions are either (1) really old things that mattered in the 1970s but not any more, like daa; (2) instructions from the 8086 and 80286 that run poorly on more recent chips, like lods and leave; (3) along the same lines, instructions for managing segment registers and other 16-bit relics; (4) MMX or Katmai related; (5) specialized instructions that we could easily live without, like the set family. If you take all of this out, you pretty much have a RISC chip. And you'd still be compatible with 95% of the code that runs on the Pentium II and III. I expect we'll be seeing this kind of thing soom from either Intel or AMD.
Re:What we really need is...
on
Linux BIOS
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· Score: 2
Yep, but those BIOSs where not open source.
You could get a listing of the Atari ROM OS from Atari in the Technical Reference Notes. A full, commented source listing. Neat! You could also get the full source to Atari DOS, with lots of commentary, in the book "Inside Atari DOS" (only $12.95).
Um, the screenshots prove that the game is in real-time? Apparently the original was in real-time too, because it looked exactly the same in screenshots.
Apparently a nice and stable Linux distribution is innovation. Hmmm...maybe I agree with that.
Re:What we really need is...
on
Linux BIOS
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· Score: 2
a QBasic BIOS
Ah, a yung 'un:) The original IBM PC had BASIC in ROM. Turn on the machine without a hard drive and without a disk in the floppy drive and you received a BASIC prompt. The Commodore 64, Apple II, and later Atari machines (XL and XE models) were the same way, dating back to the seventies in the case of the Apple.
This was bound to happen some time. There is an inherent conflict within every linux lover - they want to see it succeed commercially but they don't wan't it to go commercial.
That comment should get moderated up.
There are some good people working at Corel, and Corel has had to support a large customer base. To them, KDE looks like a well-intentioned class project that needs someone to come in and crack the whip. Most garage bands could use a producer when they record, though they'll insist their own artistic judgement is good enough. But it usually isn't, which is why producers exist in the first place.
Corel is making comments that push KDE toward being tighter and more polished. The KDE developers would rather play at being midnight developers, in the same way that junior high kids like to play at starting their own virtual game companies (by designing logos and websites and making announcements about engine features). KDE is on the right track, but it's still crusty. It needs some help from people who aren't blind zealots.
My favorite Egg was the +30 lives for Konami's Contra on the NES. It was something like, up-up-down-down-left-right-A-B-start. Although not open source, it helped to pass an otherwise impossible game.
Slashdot Mirror
GHC was not developed at Microsoft Research. The "G" stands for "Glascow." Some of the people who worked on the compiler later went to Microsoft Research. The software was developed prior to this, though, so Microsoft doesn't own the rights.
Lots of knee-jerk reactions and no sense. Take this from someone with his own business:
1. If you're in business, you have to pay Sales Tax on things you purchase for your business. If you buy something from out of state, you pay Use Tax in most states. This only applies to things you purchase for business (software, office supplies, furniture) and not the things you sell.
2. When you sell something, you have to charge sales tax to people who live in the same state as you. Technically, you don't have to charge them sales tax; you can pay it yourself if you want to (to make things less confusing for customers). Lots of craft fair booths and such do this.
For a long time--going back 20 years or more--the idea of collecting sales tax from out of state customers, depending on the state they live in, occasionally comes up and is dismissed. This would be a paperwork nightmare, because small business owners would have to pay taxes to fifty different state governments.
Right now, the internet is handled the same as mail order. So the original poster should have known that he had to pay use tax. The internet has nothing to do with his case; he should have known better.
You know, I've always been down on the people who are down on Jon Katz. I always thought they were being too whiny, too negative. But in all honesty, this piece could have been written by a program designed to generate articles Jon Katz-like fashion. It's such a complete parody of his writing style and attempts to make pop culture and mainstream events seem underground and hip.
Talk about _hard_. I mean really. He has a job/occupation much like the president's. He's a public speaker, writer, programmer, etc.,
No, let's be realistic here. He gives speeches occasionally. He writes essays occasionally. He tinkers with programming projects here and there. Compare that to someone with a full-time programming job that spends 8-12 hours a day banging out code with the pressure of deadlines. Or someone trying to start his own business who doesn't have millions in stock.
I'm not putting down ESR at all, just pointing out that what he's doing is not tremendously difficult. I admire his writing, and I think more than occasional travel would be draining, but in general he can spend his time as he likes.
ESR has a lot going on these days doesn't he? Anyone wonder when this guy takes a break?
Realistically, he doesn't have a job or go to school. His full-time job is doing some Linux and Open Source advocacy here and there. Talk about *easy*!
First, how many movies that are shown in theaters were screened on the web first? That's like playing a brand new CD on the radio before it's released, so people can tape it.
Second, let's stop the polemic about indie filmmakers and the like. There's a pervasive attitude among Linux people that indies are better than the Big Guys (tm), but so far it has been a complete failure, at least on the open source front. How many indie games have shown even the remotest sign of creativity? 99% of them would have been panned had they been released for the Commodore 64 in 1987. Sites like the Linux Game Tome are testaments to this.
So far, we haven't seen any evidence that indie web film is a different story. We've seen zillions of version of the Wazzzup! commercial, and even most of those were botched. We're a long way away from getting anything independent that's going to compete with Hollywood. And if we did get something great, then academy awards won't be an issue. Just that something great has appeared will be enough.
I for one would rather be involved in the embedded Linux effort.
If you knew anything about embedded programming, you wouldn't want Linux to be an embedded OS. You don't really want an embedded system with the "unlimited resources" attitude of UNIX. That's not to say Linux is bad, just that it is out of place for embedded systems work.
Emacs in nice in some ways, but it's a dated dog in others. IDEs from Microsoft, Borland, and Metrowerks are annoying in different ways, but make so many things *sweet* (the Microsoft's being the worst of the three, because they insist that MDI programs are good). Similarly, Makefiles are nice sometimes, but once you've lived without them then you wonder why you went through all the trouble in the first place. Of course, you can use Makefiles with Windows compilers as well. The three big compiler companies all ship command line tools, so heck, you could even use Emacs under Windows if you want.
There's no clear answer yet.
Corel Draw is very, very nice. It's not just a filter-based photo editor, but a suite of programs: an object-based drawing program, a bitmap-based paint program, a simple 3D modeler for doing 3D fonts and such, some utilities to assist with scanning, and a *large* collection of clip art and fonts.
Both the draw and paint packages are well done. The latter is right up there with Photoshop, IMO, but the interface is less cluttered. The whole suite is effectively Photoshop + Illustrator for half the price. This is well worth the $$$ for graphic artists.
Oh, stop it already. Your rant comes down to "BeOS is easy to use and we don't want Linux to be easy to use, because easy to use systems are for FaGz, and Linux is for E/_/t3 ha>0rz.
Maybe, just maybe, Linux isn't all that easy to use for some intelligent tech-heads, too.
Bungie is a funny company. Their early stuff was unremarkable (pre-Marathon), as is true of most companies. Then Marathon came along, which for all intents and purposes was a DOOM clone. Mac people *hate* this, because Marathon hit the Mac before DOOM was ported, though it was released after DOOM was out for the PC. And they're quick to point out certain features, like the ability to look up and look down). But it's still very much like DOOM, and even Jason Jones has said that they were heavily influenced by that game.
Myth was good. Bungie needed to go off in another direction and this was it. Myth II was more of the same, but it was marred by a severe installation bug that could trash your hard drive.
Since then, Oni has been a big disappointment. It was announced, the release was impending, then it disappeared for a year (very little was seen of it between E3 1999 and E3 2000). Now it's a PlayStation 2 game more than a PC game, and it looks, um, really bad. The frame rate at E3 was embarrassingly poor, and the game is looking very dated.
Halo is a funny game. The "no gameplay" trailers have gotten fanboys drooling, but the reasons why are elusive. Halo isn't particularly high poly--a barren landscape with no landmarks--and there doesn't seem to be a whole lot to shout about, except a distinctive art style (reflective black soliders running under a pink sky). The E3 trailer had all sorts of jumping between scenes that made it obvious that it wasn't actual gameplay. And still there's talk about how it's the ultimate next gen game. Puzzling.
So Bungie started by cloning the best company around, and they ended up creating the highly innovative and playable Myth, but now they've gone off and become yet another all-hype game company that can't help but disappoint. Could Messiah and Daikatana have done anything but disappoint after all that time? And Myth is on the same road.
People have access to the Internet, but the value of that is debatable. Doing searches on various topics shows this. You tend to gets lots of hits for:
* porn
* anything pop culture related (movies, young actresses, pop music, TV shows, video games)
* anything geek related (Linux, programming, MP3s, freedom of software)
* special interest hobbyists (users of old computers, gardeners, model rocket builders, etc.)
* Intentionally weird stuff (scans of housecats, pop tart experiments, marshmallow bunny torture).
* The same news you see in papers and on TV.
* Corporate marketing fluff.
What you don't find is most of what's in any library. It's very easy to come up with an important topic that turns up very little web action. This always bothers me when I see students using the web for research.
I don't understand the point of designing a game console with Linux in it. First, we're really just talking about the Linux kernel and a few custom drivers. Don't misinterpret "Linux" to mean "flip a switch and there I am in an xterm."
That said, consoles tend to be very light on the OS needs. They don't need to multitask applications. They don't need pipes. They make very little use of a filesystem other than to slurp in entire files. There's no need for a generic device driver system. They don't need virtual memory. And so on. So overall, putting Linux (or BSD or Hurd or whatever) in a console doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And even if the engineers decided "you know, if we use Linux then we could save ourselves the trouble of writing some low level stuff" then that's *not* any kind of reason to think of this as a "Linux-based console." The PlayStation 2 has a Sony-written OS kernel inside of it, but does anyone care? No, because it is irrelevant to consumers.
With the draw of the web being free information, banner ads stand out like a sore thumb. Not because we're all cheapskates, but because really stupid and obvious marketing ploys are out of place. A cute chick with a flashing "HOT" next to her. Punch the monkey. Fake polls ("Do you hate spam? Vote now!"). It's all so *dumb*, in the same way that most spam is (Make money fast! Lose weight overnight!). Attempts by people to promote their web sites in sly ways--"Hey everyone, I just stumbled across this awesome new site!"--are equally brain dead. Advertising has always been like this, but it's just never been so obvious against a contrasting background as it is on the web.
What makes the x86 a major proctalgia is the nonorthogonality it inherits from the 4004 et al.; nearly every register is "magic" in some way, i.e. there's some instruction that requires an operand to be in that register
This was true in the days of 16-bit code, but has never been for 32-bit x86 code. You can use any register for any addressing mode or operation. In the 16-bit days you had to use either bx, si, or di for memory addressing, for example, which was horrible.
Well, it wouldn't be progress, if your assertions were accurate. I'm not sure about any other RISC architecture, but I can sure as heck say that the Sparc architecture does not have this particular limitation. On a sparc, you almost never need to save your registers, and you almost never need to save your stack pointer.
Ah, true, I was thinking in terms of the RISC CPUs that have gotten widely used in consumer hardware, like the SHx (in the Sega Saturn & Dreamcast), MIPS (in some CE devices and Sony's game machines), and the PPC (Mac, of course). None of these chips have the register window features of the SPARC, so quite a huge amount of code gets generated for subroutine entry and exit--up to 20% or more of the total code in a project, in many cases.
What's wrong with this picture is that writing very small subroutines has become the accepted norm--and rightly so--but most hardware is not designed for that style of programming. Increased emphasis on inlining has been the result, but it sure would be nicer to just have single cycle subroutine calls without needed overhead. The SPARC method sounds good.
However, you do _not_ have to save all 32 registers, unless you use all 32. You only have to save the ones you are going to use.
I never said that. I said 15 or more. On the PPC, 15 is about the max. In general, though, there's about 15-20 instructions of overhead in a non-trivia, non-leaf subroutine (in C), but it can be twice that.
You need to stop and think about what "complex" means. A CALL instruction is not complex. Heck, it was standard on 8-bit processors with less than 10,000 transistors. Complex instructions are some of the crazy things done in hardware on the VAX and IBM 360. If a CALL instruction is considered too complex to implement efficiently in hardware, then we shouldn't even both with things like texture mappers or floating point math. The bottom line is that RISC has gone over the top, making things more simplistic than we really want.
I've programmed a variety of modern chips at a low level--MIPS, PPC, x86, SHx--and there's more to be said for the x86 than many people realize. For example, on a RISC chip, the subroutine call overhead can be stifling. Yes, it only takes a cycle or two to make the call, but then there's no hardware stack, so the return address has to be saved manually (usually two instructions to save it and two to restore) except for leaf functions. And then you may have to save 15 or more registers, at one instruction per, and restore them at the end of the routine. This all comes down to 20-40 instructions of overhead per subroutine. Is that progress? On the x86, subroutine calls are much faster and cleaner.
Also realize that all of these instructions are fixed at 32-bits on most chips. That's 32-bits to copy a register, 32-bits for a return, etc. This may simplify the hardware, but at the expense of bloat. So you need a bigger instruction cache.
Is the x86 perfect? No. If you look at an x86 reference, you'll find that over 50% of the instructions are either (1) really old things that mattered in the 1970s but not any more, like daa; (2) instructions from the 8086 and 80286 that run poorly on more recent chips, like lods and leave; (3) along the same lines, instructions for managing segment registers and other 16-bit relics; (4) MMX or Katmai related; (5) specialized instructions that we could easily live without, like the set family. If you take all of this out, you pretty much have a RISC chip. And you'd still be compatible with 95% of the code that runs on the Pentium II and III. I expect we'll be seeing this kind of thing soom from either Intel or AMD.
Yep, but those BIOSs where not open source.
You could get a listing of the Atari ROM OS from Atari in the Technical Reference Notes. A full, commented source listing. Neat! You could also get the full source to Atari DOS, with lots of commentary, in the book "Inside Atari DOS" (only $12.95).
at what point does all this "K" naming stuff stop being cute, and start being annoying? I'm starting to dislike all these "Krappy" names.
Amen to that. The misplaced Ks sound very B-movie cheesy: Komputronix, Mortal Kombat, The Komplete Guide to Hi-larious Practikal Jokes.
Um, the screenshots prove that the game is in real-time? Apparently the original was in real-time too, because it looked exactly the same in screenshots.
From the review:
Mandrake has once again innovated in every sense.
Apparently a nice and stable Linux distribution is innovation. Hmmm...maybe I agree with that.
a QBasic BIOS
:) The original IBM PC had BASIC in ROM. Turn on the machine without a hard drive and without a disk in the floppy drive and you received a BASIC prompt. The Commodore 64, Apple II, and later Atari machines (XL and XE models) were the same way, dating back to the seventies in the case of the Apple.
Ah, a yung 'un
This was bound to happen some time. There is an inherent conflict within every linux lover - they want to see it succeed commercially but they don't wan't it to go commercial.
That comment should get moderated up.
There are some good people working at Corel, and Corel has had to support a large customer base. To them, KDE looks like a well-intentioned class project that needs someone to come in and crack the whip. Most garage bands could use a producer when they record, though they'll insist their own artistic judgement is good enough. But it usually isn't, which is why producers exist in the first place.
Corel is making comments that push KDE toward being tighter and more polished. The KDE developers would rather play at being midnight developers, in the same way that junior high kids like to play at starting their own virtual game companies (by designing logos and websites and making announcements about engine features). KDE is on the right track, but it's still crusty. It needs some help from people who aren't blind zealots.
My favorite Egg was the +30 lives for Konami's Contra on the NES. It was something like, up-up-down-down-left-right-A-B-start. Although not open source, it helped to pass an otherwise impossible game.
Of course that's a cheat, not an easter egg.