Wasn't there that BOB interface to Windows way back around '96 that had things like this? I seem to remember a "cute" dog that tried to guide you through things.
Why doesn't every just start using a modified GPL that has an explicit caveat that the software can't be used on SCO operating systems? The SCO would be in violation for all the new GPL code they distribute. i.e. Samba 3.1 or whatever.
How many years has Return to Dark Castle been in development? A lot.
Personally I wish the first two Dark Castles were available. Even though they were B&W with primitive graphics, they were great games. For those who never played them they were, for lack of a better description, something like Donkey Kong meets Joust meets a Prince of Persia. Very old school. But I have fond memories of playing it on one of the old all-in-one Mac+ systems with a meg of memory. (Ah that seemed like a lot at the time)
Re:The organization has an obvious slant
on
Joining the ACLU?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Actually many of the attacks on to Patriot bill and other such things have come primarily from the right wing. The Democrats were running scared afraid to say anything until recently. And that was only when the aftermath of the war started to go bad and Howard Dean started making headway in the Presidential field.
Re:Apple has no competition (G5 discussion)
on
G5s Start Shipping
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· Score: 1
I thought all computers used 60 Hz A/C electricity. At least in the US/Canada. So yes, all OSes (outside of mainframes) do use the same petrol.
Now if you were talking about other kinds of parts, then you might have a part. But trying to just drop in a Ford engine into say a Nissan car is no trivial matter. Probably harder than recompiling a Linux program to run on OSX or running a Windows program in VPC.
I'd love to see the supreme court case that gets created when a magazine like Wired or Newsweek publishes said vulnerabilities as an expose on a company.
What good is the anonymous IP address if you used a library or college account? There's still no way to trace it back to a person, unless they had video cameras or the like.
I've sent feedback to Apple many times, as have many others. As I said, I don't know why Apple has not dealt with these issues. Arguably the main reason to use an IDE over a command line tool is ease of the compile/debug cycle. While all these nice features of XCode are very nice, they only deal with speed issues and not basic functionality.
Perhaps the latest versions of XCode have improved the debugging features. To be honest I've not checked up on it the last month. If they have I'll be very happy.
But right now for some tasks you either use Codewarrior, which has its own slew of problems, or develop your basic C++ classes in Visual Studio. The later is really the best option at the moment.
The problem is that on the OSX platform the only other real C++ IDE is Codewarrior. And yes it is expensive. And yes I did buy it. And no it is no where near as good as Visual Studio. While not as bad as PB, it can still be a frustrating experience to use.
Re:The last of the Apple-based OSX machines?
on
G5s Start Shipping
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· Score: 1
The only thing it has in common with Linux is that you build it with gcc.
Well that and probably 90% of the software is the same. Other than where some startup files and configuration files are, most of Linux has is in OSX. (Well, you may have to install Fink and X11.app, but those are free)
Now I suspect you or someone else will get into this whole rant about how Linux is the kernel and not all the stuff on top. However for the vast majority of people Linux is the whole OS and software. Only Linux geeks on Slashdot get so picky about terms.
The point being that most of what Linux has OSX has. There are differences. A few packages aren't ported. And some, such as Wine, can't be ported due to x86 dependences. And you are right, the underlying kernel guts are different. But "phenomenologically" the way most people encounter both, OSX and Linux are fairly close.
The initial versions of the G4 were very nice and very compititive. What happened though was the Motorola, for whatever reason, couldn't get the chip to scale well and couldn't deal with bandwidth. Realistically had Motorola been able to fix the bandwidth limitations of the G4 and get it to scale to 2 GHz it would be very competitive with the 970.
Had Motorola not fallen behind so badly then I think that we'd not be complaining so much (nor needing the horrible wait the last year for the 970).
The problem with the 970 / G5 is that it doesn't really have as many integer processing units. So it really isn't that much faster per clock cycle than the G4. (The benchmarks show this) However the bandwidth and vector units are very impressive. Perhaps the G6 will improve integer performance.
Because for many kinds of programs that doesn't work for finding buts. i.e. you have to get your program into the same state as it was earlier. For things like tracking down decompression errors, encryption errors, btree errors, and so forth, what you describe is next to useless. I admit that fix and continue is extremely usefull. I've been using it in Visual Studio for years. It's about time it came to Project Builder. But it really isn't helpful for many kinds of debugging.
The issue isn't fixing the bug it is finding the bug. Sometimes subtle logic bugs can take many days of iterating through the code to find.
Xcode is very cool. However my problems with Project Builder relate to their very limited debugging tools and not compile speed.
My big problem is that the type of code I deal with often involves very subtle bugs. To fix the bugs I must go though the code in many many steps. PB doesn't retain your watch variables between calls to the debugger. That means when I restart the code to re-examine a process I have to retype in all my variables or else put printf's in the code. Compare this to Visual Studio which has amazingly simple and easy to use watch panes - four of them in fact. It is easy to "drill down" into structs and classes. And most importantly they retain their variables each time I restart the debugger.
I've asked a few people playing around with Xcode and by and large the changes to the actual debugging UI is only superficially changed. I've sent in lots of feedback to Apple but nothing has been done. This is amazing to me as adding something like Visual Studio's debugging panes would not be very hard. I'd be very, very surprised if it would take more than a week of work. But for reasons known only to them, Apple has not done it. And thus I primarily debug in Visual Studio.
I thought Pentiums couldn't SMP. Did you perhaps mean an Athalon or a Xeon?
Also realize that the numbers quoted by Apple last month were for a beta version of their compiler. They and IBM have been updating a custom version of gcc that presumably will be released with Panther (if not before). So initially the comparison is a bit unfair.
The other issue is that most programs on x86 aren't compiled with icc. I'd suspect most are compiled with VS. And under Linux almost all compile with gcc.
I believe the memory manager in Panther is 64-bit aware. The special version of Jaguar (10.2.7) that initially ships with the G5's allows 64-bit applications and thus presumably has some memory issues dealt with. Panther isn't fully 64-bit, but most aspects of the OS don't really need it to be honest. (And neither do most applications)
Except that the native Quark sucks royal ass from everything I've read. So a lot will switch to InDesigned which has a rumored upgrade coming with the new year.
There was a survey at a conference filled with "publishing pros" that said only 17% of them had switched to OSX. I find that hard to believe, but it gets quoted a lot. This may fix that. Honestly I can't understand why anyone would stay with OS9 given its many flaws and weaknesses. But never underestimate the power of inertia. People prefer gradual evolution to change. And OSX is nearly as big a change from OS9 as moving to XP is.
The big issue is that finally Apple has a system with enough data transfer to really be killer on many graphics problems. Expect high end grpahics cards to be out within six months. (Prediction, not knowledge)
Honestly though, if you get a dual G4 then OSX is plenty fast enough. I'm still lusting after the G5's but will probably get a second generation one because my dual 867 still does me so well. One must wonder if this won't aid the switchers who weren't exactly switching in large numbers from XP to OSX. (Well, I did, but that's a different matter - an XP box is still my primary work box with OSX my primary home box. If the development tools were as good as Visual Studio I'd probably switch entirely)
Did anyone else notice that all the columns seemed to be summaries of active discussions in the Ars Forums? Not that this is a bad thing, but there was strong sense of deja vu to the whole thing.
I was kind of hoping for more along the lines of Hannibal's amazing 970 guess work or the insightful analysis of the OSX Finder. There are plenty of other things open to analysis.
I'm hoping for more than Forum summaries that aren't too terribly novel or informative.
How about an analysis of the StartUpItems method of startup scripts and the still present bug that stop commands don't work at shutdown! How about an analysis of the upcoming UI in Panther along the lines of the guesswork Hannibal did to the 970 and was done for OSX as a review? I can name a half dozen such things that I could have written.
The problem with the DARPA project was that it "looked" bad. Personally I think it was a brilliant idea. It is the ultimate distributed analysis and works for the same reason capitalism does. But as cool as it sounded I pretty much knew it would be in trouble.
The problem really isn't Poindexter. All the projects I've heard of sounded very creative and the kind of thinking out of the box they were demanding immediately after 911. The problem is that Poindexter was hopelessly naive regarding the real world conservativism of the American public. (Conservative in the social sense and not the political sense)
Combine that with all his historic enemies due to Iran/Contra and he really should have seen this one coming.
Soundtrack (which technically is part of FCP4 and just also distributed stand alone) admittedly is a fairly unique products. It's main "competitors" do a lot more. Sort of like comparing Premier and Avid.
Premier competed with it on the lower end and Avid Xpress on the high end. Yeah it found a mid range niche that no one one the platform was aiming for. But I'm not sure I'd say it has no competition.
You left out Keynote as well - clearly a PowerPoint killer.
One might also point out Project Builder and Codewarrior - although admittedly Project Builder came from NeXT and thus predated Codewarrior.
Actually the flying monkeys came out of the PowerBooks 'ass' and so were covered under Applecare for me. However after the big flying monkeys scandal they ceased covering it. Of course they didn't cover the cleanup of the office. (You know, monkeys, dung and all - you can imagine what monkeys living in an ass would be like and when they can fly. ..)
The problem with that kind of sarcasm is that it overlooks all the many, many whiners who actually think that way.
That's why I gave up on sarcasm on the net. Whenever you say something you think no one would take seriously you find people do. Then you find out that the reason they take you seriously is because there are people who actually believe such ridiculous nonsense. It's just that somehow I never meet them in regular life. Only on the net.
I'm not sure what to make of this. It almost makes me think that sometimes there really is a significant number of net users who really do rarely go out, have friends, date, or otherwise experience "real life." They are so used to living with Mom who takes care of them (and may still be living with their parents) that they manage to retain these weird beliefs about how everyone owes them, along with the other odd concepts.
The issue isn't whether they'd release changes to the FSF. The issue is what to do with changes that the FSF doesn't want.
It may well be that the changes that IBM and Apple want to do to gcc are such that it would violate the basic model and methadology that gcc is following. At that point IBM can simply stick with Visual Age, accept a flawed compiler, or go with a fork. Apple's in a bit more of a pickle due to not owning Visual Age. There are rumors floating around about a port of Visual Age for OSX. However the problem of obj-C and so forth makes me think that this wouldn't help Apple as much as many think. Also it is in IBM's Linux plans to have a good gcc to make porting easier. So I think both want gcc to be as good as possible.
Even if they make a fork, I think everyone using PPC chips would use the Apple/IBM fork. So, outside of some likely contention with FSF, I don't think this would really cause that many problems. And the benefits definitely outweight the costs. (Assuming FSF doesn't get too pissed)
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Wasn't there that BOB interface to Windows way back around '96 that had things like this? I seem to remember a "cute" dog that tried to guide you through things.
Why doesn't every just start using a modified GPL that has an explicit caveat that the software can't be used on SCO operating systems? The SCO would be in violation for all the new GPL code they distribute. i.e. Samba 3.1 or whatever.
Personally I wish the first two Dark Castles were available. Even though they were B&W with primitive graphics, they were great games. For those who never played them they were, for lack of a better description, something like Donkey Kong meets Joust meets a Prince of Persia. Very old school. But I have fond memories of playing it on one of the old all-in-one Mac+ systems with a meg of memory. (Ah that seemed like a lot at the time)
Now if you were talking about other kinds of parts, then you might have a part. But trying to just drop in a Ford engine into say a Nissan car is no trivial matter. Probably harder than recompiling a Linux program to run on OSX or running a Windows program in VPC.
I'd love to see the supreme court case that gets created when a magazine like Wired or Newsweek publishes said vulnerabilities as an expose on a company.
What good is the anonymous IP address if you used a library or college account? There's still no way to trace it back to a person, unless they had video cameras or the like.
Perhaps the latest versions of XCode have improved the debugging features. To be honest I've not checked up on it the last month. If they have I'll be very happy.
But right now for some tasks you either use Codewarrior, which has its own slew of problems, or develop your basic C++ classes in Visual Studio. The later is really the best option at the moment.
The problem is that on the OSX platform the only other real C++ IDE is Codewarrior. And yes it is expensive. And yes I did buy it. And no it is no where near as good as Visual Studio. While not as bad as PB, it can still be a frustrating experience to use.
Well that and probably 90% of the software is the same. Other than where some startup files and configuration files are, most of Linux has is in OSX. (Well, you may have to install Fink and X11.app, but those are free)
Now I suspect you or someone else will get into this whole rant about how Linux is the kernel and not all the stuff on top. However for the vast majority of people Linux is the whole OS and software. Only Linux geeks on Slashdot get so picky about terms.
The point being that most of what Linux has OSX has. There are differences. A few packages aren't ported. And some, such as Wine, can't be ported due to x86 dependences. And you are right, the underlying kernel guts are different. But "phenomenologically" the way most people encounter both, OSX and Linux are fairly close.
Had Motorola not fallen behind so badly then I think that we'd not be complaining so much (nor needing the horrible wait the last year for the 970).
The problem with the 970 / G5 is that it doesn't really have as many integer processing units. So it really isn't that much faster per clock cycle than the G4. (The benchmarks show this) However the bandwidth and vector units are very impressive. Perhaps the G6 will improve integer performance.
The issue isn't fixing the bug it is finding the bug. Sometimes subtle logic bugs can take many days of iterating through the code to find.
My big problem is that the type of code I deal with often involves very subtle bugs. To fix the bugs I must go though the code in many many steps. PB doesn't retain your watch variables between calls to the debugger. That means when I restart the code to re-examine a process I have to retype in all my variables or else put printf's in the code. Compare this to Visual Studio which has amazingly simple and easy to use watch panes - four of them in fact. It is easy to "drill down" into structs and classes. And most importantly they retain their variables each time I restart the debugger.
I've asked a few people playing around with Xcode and by and large the changes to the actual debugging UI is only superficially changed. I've sent in lots of feedback to Apple but nothing has been done. This is amazing to me as adding something like Visual Studio's debugging panes would not be very hard. I'd be very, very surprised if it would take more than a week of work. But for reasons known only to them, Apple has not done it. And thus I primarily debug in Visual Studio.
Also realize that the numbers quoted by Apple last month were for a beta version of their compiler. They and IBM have been updating a custom version of gcc that presumably will be released with Panther (if not before). So initially the comparison is a bit unfair.
The other issue is that most programs on x86 aren't compiled with icc. I'd suspect most are compiled with VS. And under Linux almost all compile with gcc.
I believe the memory manager in Panther is 64-bit aware. The special version of Jaguar (10.2.7) that initially ships with the G5's allows 64-bit applications and thus presumably has some memory issues dealt with. Panther isn't fully 64-bit, but most aspects of the OS don't really need it to be honest. (And neither do most applications)
There was a survey at a conference filled with "publishing pros" that said only 17% of them had switched to OSX. I find that hard to believe, but it gets quoted a lot. This may fix that. Honestly I can't understand why anyone would stay with OS9 given its many flaws and weaknesses. But never underestimate the power of inertia. People prefer gradual evolution to change. And OSX is nearly as big a change from OS9 as moving to XP is.
The big issue is that finally Apple has a system with enough data transfer to really be killer on many graphics problems. Expect high end grpahics cards to be out within six months. (Prediction, not knowledge)
Honestly though, if you get a dual G4 then OSX is plenty fast enough. I'm still lusting after the G5's but will probably get a second generation one because my dual 867 still does me so well. One must wonder if this won't aid the switchers who weren't exactly switching in large numbers from XP to OSX. (Well, I did, but that's a different matter - an XP box is still my primary work box with OSX my primary home box. If the development tools were as good as Visual Studio I'd probably switch entirely)
I've not used it, but I've heard a lot of people rave about VectorWorks. It looks good, albeit perhaps overkill for simple floorplans.
I was kind of hoping for more along the lines of Hannibal's amazing 970 guess work or the insightful analysis of the OSX Finder. There are plenty of other things open to analysis.
I'm hoping for more than Forum summaries that aren't too terribly novel or informative.
How about an analysis of the StartUpItems method of startup scripts and the still present bug that stop commands don't work at shutdown! How about an analysis of the upcoming UI in Panther along the lines of the guesswork Hannibal did to the 970 and was done for OSX as a review? I can name a half dozen such things that I could have written.
The problem really isn't Poindexter. All the projects I've heard of sounded very creative and the kind of thinking out of the box they were demanding immediately after 911. The problem is that Poindexter was hopelessly naive regarding the real world conservativism of the American public. (Conservative in the social sense and not the political sense)
Combine that with all his historic enemies due to Iran/Contra and he really should have seen this one coming.
Soundtrack (which technically is part of FCP4 and just also distributed stand alone) admittedly is a fairly unique products. It's main "competitors" do a lot more. Sort of like comparing Premier and Avid.
Premier competed with it on the lower end and Avid Xpress on the high end. Yeah it found a mid range niche that no one one the platform was aiming for. But I'm not sure I'd say it has no competition. You left out Keynote as well - clearly a PowerPoint killer. One might also point out Project Builder and Codewarrior - although admittedly Project Builder came from NeXT and thus predated Codewarrior.
Actually the flying monkeys came out of the PowerBooks 'ass' and so were covered under Applecare for me. However after the big flying monkeys scandal they ceased covering it. Of course they didn't cover the cleanup of the office. (You know, monkeys, dung and all - you can imagine what monkeys living in an ass would be like and when they can fly. . .)
That's why I gave up on sarcasm on the net. Whenever you say something you think no one would take seriously you find people do. Then you find out that the reason they take you seriously is because there are people who actually believe such ridiculous nonsense. It's just that somehow I never meet them in regular life. Only on the net.
I'm not sure what to make of this. It almost makes me think that sometimes there really is a significant number of net users who really do rarely go out, have friends, date, or otherwise experience "real life." They are so used to living with Mom who takes care of them (and may still be living with their parents) that they manage to retain these weird beliefs about how everyone owes them, along with the other odd concepts.
The first sentence reads, "Embedding Mozilla" can mean many things." How does that answer his question?
It may well be that the changes that IBM and Apple want to do to gcc are such that it would violate the basic model and methadology that gcc is following. At that point IBM can simply stick with Visual Age, accept a flawed compiler, or go with a fork. Apple's in a bit more of a pickle due to not owning Visual Age. There are rumors floating around about a port of Visual Age for OSX. However the problem of obj-C and so forth makes me think that this wouldn't help Apple as much as many think. Also it is in IBM's Linux plans to have a good gcc to make porting easier. So I think both want gcc to be as good as possible.
Even if they make a fork, I think everyone using PPC chips would use the Apple/IBM fork. So, outside of some likely contention with FSF, I don't think this would really cause that many problems. And the benefits definitely outweight the costs. (Assuming FSF doesn't get too pissed)