It's a personal endeavor, meant to get me into grad school someday. I'm also building a physical robot ( ~75% finished ) of identical properties, and the AI runtime can just switch over to the physical version when it's ready. The interfaces are all abstracted, and I've written drivers for the serial hardware.
When I consider it to be version 1.0 quality, I'll release the program and the SDKs for free, public use. Probably GPL.
Even though it's really geeky/technical, it's still fun, because my system is capable enough that I can develop self-driving cars, a trebuchet, a single-legged hopper, etc. I never got my simulated segway working, though. But I only spent an evening on it. it was more of a test of simulated gyro feedback.
The catapult is a fun time waster. It throws a ragdoll at a "castle", which falls down, satisfying the child in me.
I also decided to write a Mahjong Solitaire game using ODE to box-stack it. So when you "give up" it's like a simulation of sweeping the tiles off the table. It's absurd.
OK, I googled, and all I got was a lot of Trecky fan sites. To be expected. I also found a real astronomy encyclopedia site and found no reference.
However, I am particularly proud of finding this: http://www.artofeurope.com/misc/ks.htm an erotic star treck fan fiction featuring Roy Orbison.
Choice quote:
"It is most illogical," I say, "to find myself on Jetta IV a Class M planet with Mr. Spock, a famous Vulcan officer, wrapping two most famous men in Terrapinian clingfilm."
I used to run gentoo on x86 (no, I don't care about the optimization, I just liked gentoo's system for controlling daemons and whatnot ) -- overall I ran linux of some sort or another for a few years and was pretty comfortable with it.
I moved to OS X after a linux hardware-incompatibility disaster and by and large I've never looked back. The thing is, I do simulation work in my free time that requires serious opengl and without hardware acceleration I'm SOL. Going mac made sense anyhow, since by day I'm a graphic designer and have always been on Macs, or at least since about '92. Until OS X I didn't consider the Mac to be a valid development platform, and until 10.2 I didn't consider OS X to be a valid system at all for general use )
What I'm curious about is wether live cds for PPC are available. I had heard about a gentoo ppc livecd but I couldn't actually *find* it.
I want to see what's happened in the few years I've been away and I'd like to see the level of hardware support. yes, I know that for my 12" PB support's going to suck, but really I just want to *see*.
Absolutely. A vast number of americans live in or immediately outside cities and do manual labor.
The image of joe sixpack living in the country/woods whatever is inaccurate, particularly since agriculture has been technologically advanced and corporatized.
While I'm a desk slave, my father was a machinist and at other times a boiler welder and carpenter. He is exactly the kind of guy who fixes things himself and would consider being told that he cannot to be a further sign of the eroding of the "american way" and so on and so forth.
As an anecdote, growing up in the early 80's he taught me basic machining skills and things like how to make a steam engine, a stirling engine, how to build electric motors and so on from raw material. His argument was when the soviets invaded, I'd better be able to run off into the country and be able to support a family and defend them -- and manual skills would be necessary if I didn't want to freeze to death or starve.
Now, to the avarage slashdotter this sounds like hillbilly fare. But, my old man grew up in LA and I grew up in Arlington VA, not 3 miles from DC. We're hardly mountain folk.
I nominate Steve Buscemi for gollum. The only trouble is, there would be no need whatsoever for special effects or makeup. He pretty much fits the bill already.
Yes, I'm going to see the movie. I'm fascinated merely because I'm building cheapo robots and studying behavioral AI in my free time. I plan to go to grad school and do serious work, eventually.
But what struck me from the trailer is that you can tell when the robots go bad because they glow red. Well, shit. That takes out some subtlety, doesn't it? "Hey man, stay away from the glowing red robots!" Duh. They must be "set to evil".
Anyway, I wanted to say that, as a guy building robots and with high hope for AI ( albeit realistic expectations ) I had a discussion with a friend recently where I described how a memory leak had brought a simulation to a crawl after about 36 hours. His response: "That memory leak was the range Jesus allocated for the robots to interface with their immortal souls. Kind of like the pineal gland. And you took it from them."
As a relatively new opengl programmer ( writing visualization for robotics simulation ) I have to confess I've seen and fiddled with this program but not had enough information to even understand what's going on.
I should mention that I never wrote a line of opengl before last august, and all that I know came from the Red Book, which doesn't cover shading languages.
So, I'm curious, what shading language is Shader Builder using? Is it a custom language? Is it HLSL? What kind of standards does it follow?
And, what capacity at run time is there to determine what is supported at on a given card?
I know, I should just post to the mac-opengl list at apple, but the people there are friendly only to opengl experts -- unfortunately my focus is AI and as such -- visualization is merely a cool necessity. The few questions I've asked have been replied to, if at all, rather brusquely. They seem only to have discussions with other experts.
I'm stuck in the dead zone, halfway between n00b and guru.
Of course, this is all irrelevant since my little powerbook only has a GF4MX. But someday I expect to buy a new powerbook, and I'd like to experiment with cleaning up my code to use shaders for various stuff like outlining and solid wireframing, which I do extensively right now via multiple passes.
As somebody who's never used, let alone seen a VAX I've got to ask: is it the hardware that's so reliable? Or was it the OS? Or was it some sort of pixie magic or Good Design/Architecture/Whatnot?
I'm curious. You'd think hardware should be better today than ten or twenty years ago. I have no expectations for modern software (at all), but there's no reason a good quality modern server should *mechanically* fail. It should run 100 years, right?
I know, I know, things like power supplies blow all the time and hardisks fail. Is this stuff worse today than ten years ago? WTF!?
Anyway, what made VAXs so damn reliable? I have this image of them being made from cast iron, with quadruply redundant everything, weighing 10 tons, and surviving an atomic holocaust.
Re:Somewhere in the middle
on
Hacking Quartz
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· Score: 2, Insightful
But consider, ( at least in the case of my old DOS VGA graphics ) accidently writing outside the video buffer would bring the computer down. Completely. As in hard-reset.
Nowadays, the OS just brings up a dialog saying "blech! crashed!" or something.
It's a fair trade.
If you want easy prgramming today, you might have to go through a shell of some sort. Squeak might fit the bill [ http://www.squeak.org/ ].
The point is, modern systems are *robust* and as such, there's a higher point of entry. Nothing to see here. Move on.
Just out of curiosity, are you using Objective-C++?
I'm not a professional, so take this all with a grain of salt, but my personal work involves a 30 kloc app linking against about 30 more kloc of C++ libraries I wrote. Now, the app is Cocoa, and is about, say, 50% pure C++, 30% Objective C++ and the rest is Objective-C. The pure C++ compiles reasonably quickly, the pure Objective-C compiles so fast I barely have time to observe -- sometimes it's so fast I accidently hit build twice because I didn't see it happen. The Objective-C++, however, takes so long to compile I can feel my hair grow.
of course, I'm not saying you should avoid objective-c++, but if the build times really bother you that much, and it *is* an objective-c++ issue, you might want to sandbox your c++ with pure C, and then let pure Objective-C call that. I've had to do that a little bit, not due to compile times but because a 3rd party C++ library I use has headers which Objective-C chokes against ( it has #defined "id" datatypes. ).
I want to add something regarding porting software to native mac OS X. Last year I ported a program I've been working on which allows for development of behavioral AI for robots in a relatively nice physics simulated environment. The whole thing isn't that big, about 50 kloc, ( not including the physics engine, which I got from http://ode.sf.net ).
Anyway, when I ported it from Qt/KDE on linux, I decided to go native, and wrote a full cocoa gui.
http://home.earthlink.net/~zakariya/files/TooCom pl ex3.png [the filename refers to my current project to refactor the gui]
Not only was it not hard at all, but the overall design of cocoa makes separation of core logic from presentation relatively easy. My simulation, my core APIs and so on were completely unchanged. All I really did was write some new interface code. In fact, Cocoa made it so damn easy my Gui became richer and and order of magnitude more complete.
My smooth and comfortable experiences doing this make me frustrated when I see shoddily written ports to Mac OS X. Cocoa is like mana from heaven. You get to keep your core C/C++ and just make a binding to the UI. Who can complain about that? Plus you get to use one of the most beautiful procedural languages available ( IMNSHO ) Objective-C.
You know, we all here have a tradition of saying nasty things about Real player...
Well, I want to stand up, stick my neck out, and say "Sorry! You guys seem to have made up for it!"
As a Cocoa programmer who just doesn't understand why big companies don't dive in and *properly* port their software, I'm impressed that Real has written what seems to be a real, honest-to-god cocoa app. The preferences window is a *real* Mac OS X prefs window. The app behaves like a proper document-based app, where the program won't shut down if you close all the files. And so on, and so on; I'm really impressed.
And, while I have no idea what it's like on windows ( I haven't touched a windows box in at least a year ), real player is being quite nice about not stealing your file associations, unlike what I remember a few years ago on Win2K. It doesn't hide anything as far as I can tell, and the default associations are not only few, but reasonable.
Good show, real. I think I'm *finally* going to pay for your product.
As sarcastic as it sounds, it's true. The Desk Accessories weren't *real* apps, just little buggers running in an early 1980's kind of multitasking mode.
http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macinto sh &story=Puzzle.txt&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detai l=medium&search=Desk%20Accessory
So yes, it's a rip off of Konfabulator. But Konfabulator was a rip off of Apple's original. Sort of like how Apple did labels in pre-OS X and Unsanity provided them as an APE module. Then Apple re-integrated them in OS X.
What matters here is it's still an opportunity for 3rd parties to provide a superior alternative to a basic function provided by Apple. Watson is better than Sherlock. xPad is better than stickies. Camino is better than Safari. ( of course, these are all arguable )
Ho hum. I don't really care. But from a usability standpoint it's a *great* idea to have my sticky notes *appear* ( rather than fly away ) when I move my mouse cursor to a certain corner. I like the sound of that, since I use stickies all the time.
My first programming gig was writing device diagnostics for prototype set-top boxes in the mid-nineties. I was still in college, and my programming experience was basically just C -- and on windows and mac machines ( I was a kid ).
The lead programmer could tell I had potential, but knew that the only way I'd be able to do a good job was to work *with* him, since I had to learn VI and learn how to work on an old sparc ( where we crosscompiled for the embedded platform ) he figured the learning curve would be easier if he sat at the keyboard and I went over the algorithms alongside him.
It worked beautifully; we shared responsibility and caught eachother's bugs. After a while as I demonstrated that I was catching up ( read: I learned vi ), we began to take turns as keyboard jockey -- but regardless our combined productivity was much greater than by ourselves.
The comeraderie was great. He was an old-school AT&T programmer and I had a hoot working with him and he had a hoot teaching me how to write *tight* low level code.
The only troublesome part was, since we were developing a precursor to modern video on demand boxes, and it was back in 1995, we had a distinct lack of movie-length mpegs to test against. So we had only _Demolition Man_ and _The Crush_... Which means that for proper testing I must have seen each at least 100 times during my employment there.
Plus we were testing picture in picture and looping stuff for multiple mpeg streams and this meant I sometimes would be watcing demolition man while Alicia Silverstone's stunt-butt scene would loop *forever* in a mini-window.
It drove me mad.
Re:Not to sound like a fanatic... but...
on
Ten Years of BeOS
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· Score: 1
It's called a TYPO. Jackass.
Now, go back into your parent's basement to play FPSs and to bitch and moan on IRC.
Meanwhile, your betters will be outside, doing meaningful things.
Not to sound like a fanatic... but...
on
Ten Years of BeOS
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· Score: 5, Interesting
So, OK, I've read now a dozen smug barbs against BeOS fanatics.
My guess is 99% of you never did anything more than boot it, realize it had no good web browser and then returned to windows/linux/bsd/whathave you.
What I want to say is I spent 4 years using BeOS as my primary platform. Why? Because I don't like using a system I am uncomfortable developing on. [ Yes, I'm talking about you, Win32] BeOS's ease-of-use and user focus were secondary to it's having an API and clarity of development which blew my mind.
I gave it up for linux, when I discovered Qt, and now I'm on Mac OS X, which is from an API standpoint actually better. Amazing.
So, I'm rambling here but the thing is, beOS made it *easy* to write amazing things. Not many systems can claim that, except maybe Cocoa.
Case-in-point: I had a dell laptop with a trackpad. I hated having my insertion point jump around when I typed and brushed the trackpad with my thumb. So I decided to write an input-server plugin to discard those events. How long did it take me to write it? *One* hour. Not because I'm a genius programmer -- I'm not. it was because beOS was a well-designed coherent system with APIs that made sense *across* the board, and excellent documentation from nape to nuts.
Ironically, I'm named after one of my father's personal heros -- a 19th century Imam who fought the russians and kept islam more or less safe in eastern europe ( since the turks had left them to the wolves ).
Trouble is, climates change. Mass-opinion changes. Whatever you pick, eventually it'll turn sour.
But, frankly, I don't want to raise children here. My mother edits a magazine for the school board and the horror stories I hear about the way schools sell the mindshare of youth to big corporations for an extra few bucks is horrifying. Not to mention the average public-educated US kid has no concept of history, geography or mathematics.
Probably I'd be best picking a chinese name... and... no. They'd never fall for it.
For what it's worth, I'm white. I look pretty sketchy though ( e.g., not blond/blue-eyed ), and the UNIX programmer beard doesn't help;)
I'm serious about leaving -- I don't want to raise children in the states; and my personal viewpoints regarding quality of life coincide with yours, I gather. Primarily I care about quality schools and clean/safe city life. I couldn't care less about owning a car or a big suburban house.
As someone raised muslim, with a muslim name ( and one that happens to correspond to that of an at-large chechen terrorist ) I'll wager it's time to get out of this country.
You know, that makes me sad. I'm American, I was born here, so were my parents. My father's been in trouble with the law, long ago, and happens to have the #1 most common Muslim name. Regardless, he, like me, loves this country.
I'm no longer practicing ( read: vehement Atheist ) but if all it takes is having a troublesome name, well, it seems then the tide has finally turned. Perhaps this will be America's crystal night?
I'm at a loss for words.
Re:Do your groceries walk to the city by themselve
on
Out of Gas
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· Score: 1
And a cluestick back to you:
Those who are adaptable, require less energy & materials, and live in or near urban centers will weather the gloom and doom more comfortably than those who live 45 miles from hospitals and markets and the like, and are too fat and out of shape from their sedate lifestyles to adapt.
And duh. Obviously the power grid and mass transit are oil run. I'm not saying there won't be riots & starvation in the city.
And another duh: I DON'T need a computer. I like computers. I use computers. But I won't die without one.
What I'm saying is that some people will be able to adapt better. If the shit really hits the fan, I can ride my bike to the country to pick up meat & vegetables harvested by hand. I already bike 40-some miles in the country every weekend for fun -- I'm ready to do it for food too, should the need arise.
And when the shit hits the fan, you bet your life there will be money in manual labor. I'm healthy, and in shape -- and I do what it takes to stay that way. When trouble hits, I can drop my cushy design job ( or whatever I'm doing ) and become a bricklayer or some other physical job. I'm adaptable. I'm already a capable machinist, I can adapt to other lines of work.
Could you? Or would you just starve to death while making snarky and ill-thought-out remarks?
Slashdot Mirror
It's a personal endeavor, meant to get me into grad school someday. I'm also building a physical robot ( ~75% finished ) of identical properties, and the AI runtime can just switch over to the physical version when it's ready. The interfaces are all abstracted, and I've written drivers for the serial hardware.
When I consider it to be version 1.0 quality, I'll release the program and the SDKs for free, public use. Probably GPL.
Even though it's really geeky/technical, it's still fun, because my system is capable enough that I can develop self-driving cars, a trebuchet, a single-legged hopper, etc. I never got my simulated segway working, though. But I only spent an evening on it. it was more of a test of simulated gyro feedback.
The catapult is a fun time waster. It throws a ragdoll at a "castle", which falls down, satisfying the child in me.
ODE is very commonly used for robotics simulation. Which is, coincidentally, what I'm using it for.
Screenshot
I also decided to write a Mahjong Solitaire game using ODE to box-stack it. So when you "give up" it's like a simulation of sweeping the tiles off the table. It's absurd.
Screenshot
OK, I googled, and all I got was a lot of Trecky fan sites. To be expected. I also found a real astronomy encyclopedia site and found no reference.
However, I am particularly proud of finding this: http://www.artofeurope.com/misc/ks.htm an erotic star treck fan fiction featuring Roy Orbison.
Choice quote:
Clearly, the Internet is the true final frontier.
Is "M class" a real designation, or did you just grow up watching star treck, like me?
I used to run gentoo on x86 (no, I don't care about the optimization, I just liked gentoo's system for controlling daemons and whatnot ) -- overall I ran linux of some sort or another for a few years and was pretty comfortable with it.
I moved to OS X after a linux hardware-incompatibility disaster and by and large I've never looked back. The thing is, I do simulation work in my free time that requires serious opengl and without hardware acceleration I'm SOL. Going mac made sense anyhow, since by day I'm a graphic designer and have always been on Macs, or at least since about '92. Until OS X I didn't consider the Mac to be a valid development platform, and until 10.2 I didn't consider OS X to be a valid system at all for general use )
What I'm curious about is wether live cds for PPC are available. I had heard about a gentoo ppc livecd but I couldn't actually *find* it.
I want to see what's happened in the few years I've been away and I'd like to see the level of hardware support. yes, I know that for my 12" PB support's going to suck, but really I just want to *see*.
Consider this an appeal for nostalgia.
Absolutely. A vast number of americans live in or immediately outside cities and do manual labor.
The image of joe sixpack living in the country/woods whatever is inaccurate, particularly since agriculture has been technologically advanced and corporatized.
While I'm a desk slave, my father was a machinist and at other times a boiler welder and carpenter. He is exactly the kind of guy who fixes things himself and would consider being told that he cannot to be a further sign of the eroding of the "american way" and so on and so forth.
As an anecdote, growing up in the early 80's he taught me basic machining skills and things like how to make a steam engine, a stirling engine, how to build electric motors and so on from raw material. His argument was when the soviets invaded, I'd better be able to run off into the country and be able to support a family and defend them -- and manual skills would be necessary if I didn't want to freeze to death or starve.
Now, to the avarage slashdotter this sounds like hillbilly fare. But, my old man grew up in LA and I grew up in Arlington VA, not 3 miles from DC. We're hardly mountain folk.
Yes.
But that's because most slashdotters are running windows 2000/xp. Hell, I used to run BeOS, then Linux -- but nowadays I'm on a Mac.
I nominate Steve Buscemi for gollum. The only trouble is, there would be no need whatsoever for special effects or makeup. He pretty much fits the bill already.
yes, I've only seen the trailer.
Yes, I'm going to see the movie. I'm fascinated merely because I'm building cheapo robots and studying behavioral AI in my free time. I plan to go to grad school and do serious work, eventually.
But what struck me from the trailer is that you can tell when the robots go bad because they glow red. Well, shit. That takes out some subtlety, doesn't it? "Hey man, stay away from the glowing red robots!" Duh. They must be "set to evil".
Anyway, I wanted to say that, as a guy building robots and with high hope for AI ( albeit realistic expectations ) I had a discussion with a friend recently where I described how a memory leak had brought a simulation to a crawl after about 36 hours. His response: "That memory leak was the range Jesus allocated for the robots to interface with their immortal souls. Kind of like the pineal gland. And you took it from them."
As a relatively new opengl programmer ( writing visualization for robotics simulation ) I have to confess I've seen and fiddled with this program but not had enough information to even understand what's going on.
I should mention that I never wrote a line of opengl before last august, and all that I know came from the Red Book, which doesn't cover shading languages.
So, I'm curious, what shading language is Shader Builder using? Is it a custom language? Is it HLSL? What kind of standards does it follow?
And, what capacity at run time is there to determine what is supported at on a given card?
I know, I should just post to the mac-opengl list at apple, but the people there are friendly only to opengl experts -- unfortunately my focus is AI and as such -- visualization is merely a cool necessity. The few questions I've asked have been replied to, if at all, rather brusquely. They seem only to have discussions with other experts.
I'm stuck in the dead zone, halfway between n00b and guru.
Of course, this is all irrelevant since my little powerbook only has a GF4MX. But someday I expect to buy a new powerbook, and I'd like to experiment with cleaning up my code to use shaders for various stuff like outlining and solid wireframing, which I do extensively right now via multiple passes.
Does it bother anybody else that they've (essentially) taken a vibrator and put razor blades on it?
As somebody who's never used, let alone seen a VAX I've got to ask: is it the hardware that's so reliable? Or was it the OS? Or was it some sort of pixie magic or Good Design/Architecture/Whatnot?
I'm curious. You'd think hardware should be better today than ten or twenty years ago. I have no expectations for modern software (at all), but there's no reason a good quality modern server should *mechanically* fail. It should run 100 years, right?
I know, I know, things like power supplies blow all the time and hardisks fail. Is this stuff worse today than ten years ago? WTF!?
Anyway, what made VAXs so damn reliable? I have this image of them being made from cast iron, with quadruply redundant everything, weighing 10 tons, and surviving an atomic holocaust.
But consider, ( at least in the case of my old DOS VGA graphics ) accidently writing outside the video buffer would bring the computer down. Completely. As in hard-reset.
Nowadays, the OS just brings up a dialog saying "blech! crashed!" or something.
It's a fair trade.
If you want easy prgramming today, you might have to go through a shell of some sort. Squeak might fit the bill [ http://www.squeak.org/ ].
The point is, modern systems are *robust* and as such, there's a higher point of entry. Nothing to see here. Move on.
Just out of curiosity, are you using Objective-C++?
I'm not a professional, so take this all with a grain of salt, but my personal work involves a 30 kloc app linking against about 30 more kloc of C++ libraries I wrote. Now, the app is Cocoa, and is about, say, 50% pure C++, 30% Objective C++ and the rest is Objective-C. The pure C++ compiles reasonably quickly, the pure Objective-C compiles so fast I barely have time to observe -- sometimes it's so fast I accidently hit build twice because I didn't see it happen. The Objective-C++, however, takes so long to compile I can feel my hair grow.
of course, I'm not saying you should avoid objective-c++, but if the build times really bother you that much, and it *is* an objective-c++ issue, you might want to sandbox your c++ with pure C, and then let pure Objective-C call that. I've had to do that a little bit, not due to compile times but because a 3rd party C++ library I use has headers which Objective-C chokes against ( it has #defined "id" datatypes. ).
I want to add something regarding porting software to native mac OS X. Last year I ported a program I've been working on which allows for development of behavioral AI for robots in a relatively nice physics simulated environment. The whole thing isn't that big, about 50 kloc, ( not including the physics engine, which I got from http://ode.sf.net ).
m pl ex3.png
Anyway, when I ported it from Qt/KDE on linux, I decided to go native, and wrote a full cocoa gui.
http://home.earthlink.net/~zakariya/files/TooCo
[the filename refers to my current project to refactor the gui]
Not only was it not hard at all, but the overall design of cocoa makes separation of core logic from presentation relatively easy. My simulation, my core APIs and so on were completely unchanged. All I really did was write some new interface code. In fact, Cocoa made it so damn easy my Gui became richer and and order of magnitude more complete.
My smooth and comfortable experiences doing this make me frustrated when I see shoddily written ports to Mac OS X. Cocoa is like mana from heaven. You get to keep your core C/C++ and just make a binding to the UI. Who can complain about that? Plus you get to use one of the most beautiful procedural languages available ( IMNSHO ) Objective-C.
Anyway, that's just my 2 cents.
You know, we all here have a tradition of saying nasty things about Real player...
Well, I want to stand up, stick my neck out, and say "Sorry! You guys seem to have made up for it!"
As a Cocoa programmer who just doesn't understand why big companies don't dive in and *properly* port their software, I'm impressed that Real has written what seems to be a real, honest-to-god cocoa app. The preferences window is a *real* Mac OS X prefs window. The app behaves like a proper document-based app, where the program won't shut down if you close all the files. And so on, and so on; I'm really impressed.
And, while I have no idea what it's like on windows ( I haven't touched a windows box in at least a year ), real player is being quite nice about not stealing your file associations, unlike what I remember a few years ago on Win2K. It doesn't hide anything as far as I can tell, and the default associations are not only few, but reasonable.
Good show, real. I think I'm *finally* going to pay for your product.
As sarcastic as it sounds, it's true. The Desk Accessories weren't *real* apps, just little buggers running in an early 1980's kind of multitasking mode.
o sh &story=Puzzle.txt&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detai l=medium&search=Desk%20Accessory
http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macint
So yes, it's a rip off of Konfabulator. But Konfabulator was a rip off of Apple's original. Sort of like how Apple did labels in pre-OS X and Unsanity provided them as an APE module. Then Apple re-integrated them in OS X.
What matters here is it's still an opportunity for 3rd parties to provide a superior alternative to a basic function provided by Apple. Watson is better than Sherlock. xPad is better than stickies. Camino is better than Safari. ( of course, these are all arguable )
Ho hum. I don't really care. But from a usability standpoint it's a *great* idea to have my sticky notes *appear* ( rather than fly away ) when I move my mouse cursor to a certain corner. I like the sound of that, since I use stickies all the time.
I'm talking about _The Crush_ playing in a mini window while I watched _Demolition Man_
But then, you could simply have read my comment.
An anecdote about XP...
My first programming gig was writing device diagnostics for prototype set-top boxes in the mid-nineties. I was still in college, and my programming experience was basically just C -- and on windows and mac machines ( I was a kid ).
The lead programmer could tell I had potential, but knew that the only way I'd be able to do a good job was to work *with* him, since I had to learn VI and learn how to work on an old sparc ( where we crosscompiled for the embedded platform ) he figured the learning curve would be easier if he sat at the keyboard and I went over the algorithms alongside him.
It worked beautifully; we shared responsibility and caught eachother's bugs. After a while as I demonstrated that I was catching up ( read: I learned vi ), we began to take turns as keyboard jockey -- but regardless our combined productivity was much greater than by ourselves.
The comeraderie was great. He was an old-school AT&T programmer and I had a hoot working with him and he had a hoot teaching me how to write *tight* low level code.
The only troublesome part was, since we were developing a precursor to modern video on demand boxes, and it was back in 1995, we had a distinct lack of movie-length mpegs to test against. So we had only _Demolition Man_ and _The Crush_... Which means that for proper testing I must have seen each at least 100 times during my employment there.
Plus we were testing picture in picture and looping stuff for multiple mpeg streams and this meant I sometimes would be watcing demolition man while Alicia Silverstone's stunt-butt scene would loop *forever* in a mini-window.
It drove me mad.
It's called a TYPO. Jackass.
Now, go back into your parent's basement to play FPSs and to bitch and moan on IRC.
Meanwhile, your betters will be outside, doing meaningful things.
So, OK, I've read now a dozen smug barbs against BeOS fanatics.
My guess is 99% of you never did anything more than boot it, realize it had no good web browser and then returned to windows/linux/bsd/whathave you.
What I want to say is I spent 4 years using BeOS as my primary platform. Why? Because I don't like using a system I am uncomfortable developing on. [ Yes, I'm talking about you, Win32] BeOS's ease-of-use and user focus were secondary to it's having an API and clarity of development which blew my mind.
I gave it up for linux, when I discovered Qt, and now I'm on Mac OS X, which is from an API standpoint actually better. Amazing.
So, I'm rambling here but the thing is, beOS made it *easy* to write amazing things. Not many systems can claim that, except maybe Cocoa.
Case-in-point: I had a dell laptop with a trackpad. I hated having my insertion point jump around when I typed and brushed the trackpad with my thumb. So I decided to write an input-server plugin to discard those events. How long did it take me to write it? *One* hour. Not because I'm a genius programmer -- I'm not. it was because beOS was a well-designed coherent system with APIs that made sense *across* the board, and excellent documentation from nape to nuts.
My plugin: http://bebits.com/app/1344
Ironically, I'm named after one of my father's personal heros -- a 19th century Imam who fought the russians and kept islam more or less safe in eastern europe ( since the turks had left them to the wolves ).
;)
Trouble is, climates change. Mass-opinion changes. Whatever you pick, eventually it'll turn sour.
But, frankly, I don't want to raise children here. My mother edits a magazine for the school board and the horror stories I hear about the way schools sell the mindshare of youth to big corporations for an extra few bucks is horrifying. Not to mention the average public-educated US kid has no concept of history, geography or mathematics.
Probably I'd be best picking a chinese name... and... no. They'd never fall for it.
For what it's worth, I'm white. I look pretty sketchy though ( e.g., not blond/blue-eyed ), and the UNIX programmer beard doesn't help
Where did you go?
I'm serious about leaving -- I don't want to raise children in the states; and my personal viewpoints regarding quality of life coincide with yours, I gather. Primarily I care about quality schools and clean/safe city life. I couldn't care less about owning a car or a big suburban house.
And, what's involved in ex-patriating?
As someone raised muslim, with a muslim name ( and one that happens to correspond to that of an at-large chechen terrorist ) I'll wager it's time to get out of this country.
You know, that makes me sad. I'm American, I was born here, so were my parents. My father's been in trouble with the law, long ago, and happens to have the #1 most common Muslim name. Regardless, he, like me, loves this country.
I'm no longer practicing ( read: vehement Atheist ) but if all it takes is having a troublesome name, well, it seems then the tide has finally turned. Perhaps this will be America's crystal night?
I'm at a loss for words.
And a cluestick back to you:
Those who are adaptable, require less energy & materials, and live in or near urban centers will weather the gloom and doom more comfortably than those who live 45 miles from hospitals and markets and the like, and are too fat and out of shape from their sedate lifestyles to adapt.
And duh. Obviously the power grid and mass transit are oil run. I'm not saying there won't be riots & starvation in the city.
And another duh: I DON'T need a computer. I like computers. I use computers. But I won't die without one.
What I'm saying is that some people will be able to adapt better. If the shit really hits the fan, I can ride my bike to the country to pick up meat & vegetables harvested by hand. I already bike 40-some miles in the country every weekend for fun -- I'm ready to do it for food too, should the need arise.
And when the shit hits the fan, you bet your life there will be money in manual labor. I'm healthy, and in shape -- and I do what it takes to stay that way. When trouble hits, I can drop my cushy design job ( or whatever I'm doing ) and become a bricklayer or some other physical job. I'm adaptable. I'm already a capable machinist, I can adapt to other lines of work.
Could you? Or would you just starve to death while making snarky and ill-thought-out remarks?