You might as well program in OpenGL. It's WAY easier than DX, and it will run better if your video card is GL-optimised, as most are these days.
On Windows, software OpenGL runs over DirectX anyway, but is about 10% slower. (Well, due to an old report -- don't know if the speed difference has changed now).
I think you have good ideas but lack a bit of COM experience. an ActiveX control is a COM object with a few visual properties, but these days the terms are used interchangeably. COM is designed to encourage developers to docuement their interface, altho it's not compulsory of course.
Most of the documentation for COM is VC++ specific, but it is possible to do it in other environments. I have figured out (eventually) how BCB does it, and I use that.
I'm not too up on how well IE's interface is documented, so I won't comment further. I don't think it has to be a requirement of a documented OS that its components are replaceable though. Otherwise we might see all sorts of Windows distros.
Well, I will talk about VCL because I use that instead of MS Frustration Classes.
Write some multithreaded DirectX MFC applications. Throw a couple other API's like sockets and maybe some COM or DCOM stuff into the mix. I think then you may agree with me that MS documentation is up to shit.
I have a large COM object that is multithreaded and uses sockets, and it works fine. Borland has extensive DirectX support, but I haven't used it before so I won't comment on the matter. I might try it just for you , though. BTW, don't confuse compiler issues with DX - DX is exceptionally complicated and messy and horrid to program, in its own API, from what i have heard. Borland are experts at making tricky interfaces easy, so hopefully they have done something with DX.
Try to create applications with dockable dialogs (arbitrary example here) (CDialogBar) and you'll probably give up.
Eh? TWinControl::Dock*(), couldn't be easier.
I've done Unix/Linux programming as well, and I've found the documentation to be far more complete and consistent than on Windows. Heck, I had to use the Linux sockets man pages recently just to figure out windows sockets programming
Perhaps this is just because you are used to *nix sockets and not Winsock. Once you are familiar with both then it would be fine in each. Personally, I find it easier to spend two minutes slapping a TClientSocket on my app, than spending hours including various files and using unwieldy socket structs and trying to even make one listen socket work well, let alone having my program multithreaded (thats multithreaded, not forking).
What do you mean by "COM API" ? IE is an ActiveX control, and your IE browser is the control with a few buttons and menus slapped onto it.
As with any COM object, you can query it for all available methods and properties -- and use them yourself. (For example, I made a browser in 5 minutes once by putting an IE control on a blank form, and adding an address bar.)
1. Corel (Corel Linux) 2. Corel (Draw, etc. etc.) 3. Not yet...:) 4. Corel (owns Borland)
Why do you not complain about Corel? You can bet your bottom dollar that they will use their influence in one field to affect the others. It is likely that they bought Borland for the sole purpose of porting it to Linux and enhancing their Linux market share. Similarly, their Linux interest means a greater market share for their apps. And so on.
You can bet that Kylix will be for Corel Linux, and run with impairments (if at all) on other distros.
Only because they don't have a market share worth speaking of ! so nobody really minds.
- Apple refuse to ship their hardware with anything other than their own OS. How many other OSs are available for Macs?
- Sun bundle netscape and hotjava with their OS - Sun gives away StarOffice for free in order to gain market share (sound familiar?) - Sun uses its server market dominance to push Java and JINI down people's throats. (Recall how panicked they were when MS thereatened to take this away from them by making J++? )
This is only for starters.
For the record, I do not have a problem with these sort of tactics, it's just a part of business, and ultimately benificial to the consumer. It's unfortunate that it is illegal. What I am saying is that all the companies do it; MS is only copping the flak at the moment because they are the largest.
This may encourage MS to make future versions of Windows POXIS complient, to aid portability, which would make it easier for other developers to cross port their apps.
POXIS? That's a good description of it
I presume you mean POSIX? Windows 2000 is fully POSIX compliant, and Windows NT 4 is POSIX-compliant and Unix-compatible if you install Interix.
(Note that "Unix-compatible" is a very vague term here)
If MS gave Interix away for free with win2k, we might see a large decline in *nix market share. Perhaps the reason they aren't doing this is because it would break anti-competitive agreements they have with the US Govt.
What? Programming in the windows APIs is a joy! It is fun to merely make some function calls and invoke all this power. It is all documnted dozens of times more than any Unix API function.
I know someone who has written Windows GUI applications, using only assembly language.
The existence of C++ wrappers (MFC, VCL) makes it even easier for newbie programmers to break into GUI programming. I use a mixture of both, depending on the suitability of the wrapper.
I would like to officially announce my candidacy for karma whoring by point out that you can log into partners.nytimes.com which doesn't require a login
You are such a stupid fuck with no clue what you are talking about
Wouldn't it be odd to see IE for *NIX? I always said I'd pay to have IE 5.x on my Linux boxen, but I never thought it would happen.
IE5 exists for Slowaris (a UNIX variant, if you hadn't noticed), and it's not odd to see (unless you are used to seeing shit on Sun products of course)
The only diference is that under 9x if you don't turn "browse in seperate process" on then you can loose your whole system.
Inexplicable lameness. The option is actually "Browse in separate process", and it means (very surprisingly, I know) that each browser window has a new process, instead of just being a new thread. If you are using the thread option and crash it, then explorer exits. But wait! It restarts itself and then you are back where you were a minute ago.
For the lamers who complain about their OS having a shell integrated - go and install a new shell instead (eg. LiteStep). Then you won't ever have to use Explorer again.
Insert meaningless.sig here
How appropriate.. meaningless, to match the rest of your post
Duh. Faggots like you just can't wait to get their hands on someone else's property. You are jealous that Microsoft has earned all of its current resources, and you are waiting around like a looter to steal everything . Why don't you actually try and do some work yourself for a change.
What the hell is "OPEN THE WINDOWS APIs" supposed to mean?
Do you mean open-source? If so, why? Why give away all their secrets to the competition? Why aren't you telling Sun and Oracle and Netscape and so on to "open their APIs" ? Sure, it'd be better for you if the windows API were open source, so you could steal it and port it to Linux and then there would actually be some competition. But that isn't how business works.
Do you mean document them? If so, go look at the terabytes worth of documentation on MSDN - all free, and very useful and informative.
What's more, any Windows install has all the DLLs already on it -- and you can just look in it and *see* what functions are available, so it's not as if anything is hidden.
Explorer is to Windows as bash is to Linux. Exactly. Don't be confused by the fact that Windows has a GUI shell and Unix has a CLI one; and don't be confused by the fact that the Windows shell lets you seamlessly view sites over TCP/IP rather than just on your local hard drive. I call that an advantage!
Since IE4, Windows Explorer is the same as Internet Explorer (and "My Computer"); they just have different startup views.
A shell is a basic tool. You don't want an operating system without a shell, and neither do I.
I'd like to see this test repeated with SETI@home or distributed.net etc. also running on each box.
I recall playing Q2 and sometimes noticing that it was a little jerky, and then realizing that I forgot to close SETI@home. So it definitely doesn't make things unplayable - just introduces two tasks that both want full cpu.
It's well and good that you are a windows fan, but I think you should apply some sense and moderation to your posts. You are just as much a FUD zealot for windows as most/. posters are for linux, and it is no good. You give the rest of us tro^H^H^H windows users a bad name.
As much as I hate to say it, TPC is a load of shit. Their top two boxen(*), running MS-SQL, are the latest greatest from Compaq that won't even be on the public market for 6 months. The competition are Alpha boxen from 1998, running Oracle 8i. It's surprising that the Compaq machinen(**) only finished about 30% behind.
(*) I think this is, grammatically speaking, crap, but am trying it out to get a feel for it.
Well, he does use Win2000. I don't think there is a person alive who would say they prefer win9x/nt4 active desktop to be on.
I did it once so that I could have different pics of Britney showing all the time, and be able to move them easily, but after it fucked up every 5 minutes I got sick of it.
I have NT 4.0 and have had it for at least four years. I regularly do the following things, most of them simultaneously:
- Web browse in several windows at once - Read email (with a bloaty client no less (OE)) - ICQ (with desktop floating enabled) - Task manager - SSH 2.0 client (often x2 or x3) - GUI Chess client - GUI IRC client - Winamp
Sometimes, in addition to these, I: - Play Quake 2 over Internet - Compile in C++Builder (which uses 50mb of ram itself)
I used to, in addition to this, do: - SETI@home (before I decided it was lame) - GetRight (before I noticed how poorly coded it was and how much it hung)
I have a Celeron 300 and 96Mb of ram. I note that the total ram usage is sometimes well over 100Mb, but tasks which are idle get their display memory swapped out, and it is only slow when i switch back to a task that I have had minimised for some time (even if it was minimised and still doing stuff).
It's pretty stupid to only save your work once every two days. I like to save mine every 20 seconds or so. Not just as a precaution against OS crashes, I might add -- as a precaution against hardware failures, power cuts, someone tripping over your cords, and so on. These three things I just mentioned have all happened to me, and data loss has been about 5-10 mins worth at most in each case (because of NTFS write cacheing).
Install Win2k, and install Unix-like toolkits and shells and appearance and so on. They will make you feel right at home, and you can ignore or disable all the Windows programs and features which your Linux doesn't have and which you don't like.
Slashdot Mirror
You might as well program in OpenGL. It's WAY easier than DX, and it will run better if your video card is GL-optimised, as most are these days.
On Windows, software OpenGL runs over DirectX anyway, but is about 10% slower.
(Well, due to an old report -- don't know if the speed difference has changed now).
I think you have good ideas but lack a bit of COM experience.
an ActiveX control is a COM object with a few visual properties, but these days the terms are used interchangeably. COM is designed to encourage developers to docuement their interface, altho it's not compulsory of course.
Most of the documentation for COM is VC++ specific, but it is possible to do it in other environments. I have figured out (eventually) how BCB does it, and I use that.
I'm not too up on how well IE's interface is documented, so I won't comment further. I don't think it has to be a requirement of a documented OS that its components are replaceable though.
Otherwise we might see all sorts of Windows distros.
Write some multithreaded DirectX MFC applications. Throw a couple other API's like sockets and maybe some COM or DCOM stuff into the mix. I think then you may agree with me that MS documentation is up to shit.
I have a large COM object that is multithreaded and uses sockets, and it works fine. Borland has extensive DirectX support, but I haven't used it before so I won't comment on the matter. I might try it just for you , though. BTW, don't confuse compiler issues with DX - DX is exceptionally complicated and messy and horrid to program, in its own API, from what i have heard. Borland are experts at making tricky interfaces easy, so hopefully they have done something with DX.
Try to create applications with dockable dialogs (arbitrary example here) (CDialogBar) and you'll probably give up.
Eh? TWinControl::Dock*(), couldn't be easier.
I've done Unix/Linux programming as well, and I've found the documentation to be far more complete and consistent than on Windows. Heck, I had to use the Linux sockets man pages recently just to figure out windows sockets programming
Perhaps this is just because you are used to *nix sockets and not Winsock. Once you are familiar with both then it would be fine in each.
Personally, I find it easier to spend two minutes slapping a TClientSocket on my app, than spending hours including various files and using unwieldy socket structs and trying to even make one listen socket work well, let alone having my program multithreaded (thats multithreaded, not forking).
What do you mean by "COM API" ?
IE is an ActiveX control, and your IE browser is the control with a few buttons and menus slapped onto it.
As with any COM object, you can query it for all available methods and properties -- and use them yourself. (For example, I made a browser in 5 minutes once by putting an IE control on a blank form, and adding an address bar.)
1. Corel (Corel Linux)
2. Corel (Draw, etc. etc.)
3. Not yet...:)
4. Corel (owns Borland)
Why do you not complain about Corel? You can bet your bottom dollar that they will use their influence in one field to affect the others. It is likely that they bought Borland for the sole purpose of porting it to Linux and enhancing their Linux market share. Similarly, their Linux interest means a greater market share for their apps. And so on.
You can bet that Kylix will be for Corel Linux, and run with impairments (if at all) on other distros.
Wake up - this is called business.
Hey, that's clever!
All this time I thought it was just for some entertainment when you were bored.
(mods +5, Insightful)
Only because they don't have a market share worth speaking of ! so nobody really minds.
- Apple refuse to ship their hardware with anything other than their own OS. How many other OSs are available for Macs?
- Sun bundle netscape and hotjava with their OS
- Sun gives away StarOffice for free in order to gain market share (sound familiar?)
- Sun uses its server market dominance to push Java and JINI down people's throats. (Recall how panicked they were when MS thereatened to take this away from them by making J++? )
This is only for starters.
For the record, I do not have a problem with these sort of tactics, it's just a part of business, and ultimately benificial to the consumer. It's unfortunate that it is illegal.
What I am saying is that all the companies do it; MS is only copping the flak at the moment because they are the largest.
This may encourage MS to make future versions of Windows POXIS complient, to aid portability, which would make it easier for other developers to cross port their apps.
POXIS? That's a good description of it
I presume you mean POSIX? Windows 2000 is fully POSIX compliant, and Windows NT 4 is POSIX-compliant and Unix-compatible if you install Interix.
(Note that "Unix-compatible" is a very vague term here)
If MS gave Interix away for free with win2k, we might see a large decline in *nix market share. Perhaps the reason they aren't doing this is because it would break anti-competitive agreements they have with the US Govt.
What?
Programming in the windows APIs is a joy!
It is fun to merely make some function calls and invoke all this power. It is all documnted dozens of times more than any Unix API function.
I know someone who has written Windows GUI applications, using only assembly language.
The existence of C++ wrappers (MFC, VCL) makes it even easier for newbie programmers to break into GUI programming. I use a mixture of both, depending on the suitability of the wrapper.
Perhaps you meant "fewer" pages ?
You've made my day
Wouldn't it be odd to see IE for *NIX? I always said I'd pay to have IE 5.x on my Linux boxen, but I never thought it would happen.
IE5 exists for Slowaris (a UNIX variant, if you hadn't noticed), and it's not odd to see (unless you are used to seeing shit on Sun products of course)
The only diference is that under 9x if you don't turn "browse in seperate process" on then you can loose your whole system.
Inexplicable lameness. The option is actually "Browse in separate process", and it means (very surprisingly, I know) that each browser window has a new process, instead of just being a new thread. If you are using the thread option and crash it, then explorer exits. But wait! It restarts itself and then you are back where you were a minute ago.
For the lamers who complain about their OS having a shell integrated - go and install a new shell instead (eg. LiteStep). Then you won't ever have to use Explorer again.
Insert meaningless .sig here
How appropriate.. meaningless, to match the rest of your post
Duh. Faggots like you just can't wait to get their hands on someone else's property. You are jealous that Microsoft has earned all of its current resources, and you are waiting around like a looter to steal everything . Why don't you actually try and do some work yourself for a change.
What the hell is "OPEN THE WINDOWS APIs" supposed to mean?
Do you mean open-source? If so, why? Why give away all their secrets to the competition? Why aren't you telling Sun and Oracle and Netscape and so on to "open their APIs" ?
Sure, it'd be better for you if the windows API were open source, so you could steal it and port it to Linux and then there would actually be some competition. But that isn't how business works.
Do you mean document them? If so, go look at the terabytes worth of documentation on MSDN - all free, and very useful and informative.
What's more, any Windows install has all the DLLs already on it -- and you can just look in it and *see* what functions are available, so it's not as if anything is hidden.
Explorer is to Windows as bash is to Linux. Exactly. Don't be confused by the fact that Windows has a GUI shell and Unix has a CLI one; and don't be confused by the fact that the Windows shell lets you seamlessly view sites over TCP/IP rather than just on your local hard drive. I call that an advantage!
Since IE4, Windows Explorer is the same as Internet Explorer (and "My Computer"); they just have different startup views.
A shell is a basic tool. You don't want an operating system without a shell, and neither do I.
er
i don't have any files by those names
Have you killed Morgoth?
I'd like to see this test repeated with SETI@home or distributed.net etc. also running on each box.
I recall playing Q2 and sometimes noticing that it was a little jerky, and then realizing that I forgot to close SETI@home.
So it definitely doesn't make things unplayable - just introduces two tasks that both want full cpu.
He's obviously talking about win98, dumbass.
/. posters are for linux, and it is no good. You give the rest of us tro^H^H^H windows users a bad name.
It's well and good that you are a windows fan, but I think you should apply some sense and moderation to your posts. You are just as much a FUD zealot for windows as most
Only because they were comparing it to Win 3.11, the lamest piece of crap in a long time.
Win2k comparisons are being done against Unix and Linux and all the rest that is out there.
As much as I hate to say it, TPC is a load of shit. Their top two boxen(*), running MS-SQL, are the latest greatest from Compaq that won't even be on the public market for 6 months. The competition are Alpha boxen from 1998, running Oracle 8i. It's surprising that the Compaq machinen(**) only finished about 30% behind.
(*) I think this is, grammatically speaking, crap, but am trying it out to get a feel for it.
(**) The next new innovation?
Well, he does use Win2000.
I don't think there is a person alive who would say they prefer win9x/nt4 active desktop to be on.
I did it once so that I could have different pics of Britney showing all the time, and be able to move them easily, but after it fucked up every 5 minutes I got sick of it.
I have NT 4.0 and have had it for at least four years. I regularly do the following things, most of them simultaneously:
- Web browse in several windows at once
- Read email (with a bloaty client no less (OE))
- ICQ (with desktop floating enabled)
- Task manager
- SSH 2.0 client (often x2 or x3)
- GUI Chess client
- GUI IRC client
- Winamp
Sometimes, in addition to these, I:
- Play Quake 2 over Internet
- Compile in C++Builder (which uses 50mb of ram itself)
I used to, in addition to this, do:
- SETI@home (before I decided it was lame)
- GetRight (before I noticed how poorly coded it was and how much it hung)
I have a Celeron 300 and 96Mb of ram. I note that the total ram usage is sometimes well over 100Mb, but tasks which are idle get their display memory swapped out, and it is only slow when i switch back to a task that I have had minimised for some time (even if it was minimised and still doing stuff).
My current uptime is 11wks 4days 36mins 9secs.
It's pretty stupid to only save your work once every two days. I like to save mine every 20 seconds or so. Not just as a precaution against OS crashes, I might add -- as a precaution against hardware failures, power cuts, someone tripping over your cords, and so on. These three things I just mentioned have all happened to me, and data loss has been about 5-10 mins worth at most in each case (because of NTFS write cacheing).
Install Win2k, and install Unix-like toolkits and shells and appearance and so on. They will make you feel right at home, and you can ignore or disable all the Windows programs and features which your Linux doesn't have and which you don't like.