Re:In the land of empty tanks
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 1
Of course I do.
But dependence on things that take less energy is, given the gloom & doom, BETTER than dependence on things that take more.
In principle, a community can grow its own veggies. A community is more likely to be able to grow a sufficient amount of food if it's vegetable than meat.
So don't patronize me.
Re:In the land of empty tanks
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 1
If all you eat is meat, then yes.
Some people, myself included, are of that rare group called *omnivores*, meaning we are able to eat vegetables as well as meat.
I can walk and ride my bike just as well after eating a salad as a hamburger. In fact, better, since the hamburger leaves me all bloaty and crampy.
Re:In the land of empty tanks
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Yes, however, when the oil is out, my 10 year old cannondale will still work. I don't need to buy a new one, because I take care of it. Yes, lubrication will be an issue, but presumably when the oil runs out new synthetics ( corn based? I don't know, I'm not a chemical engineer ) will take the place of oil for lubricative purposes.
The real problem here is not that cars will be fucked -- which they will be if they still run on petroleum -- it's that most people live WAY too far from work and from markets/shops/etc.
I walk to work and do most of my shopping on foot or bike. If worst comes to worst, I can do it all by foot: because I live *in* a city and the things I need are convenient.
If we don't have alternative fuel sources when the shit hits the fan, I predict the suburbs/exurbs will become 21st century ghost towns.
I live in DC, and I walk ( ~2miles ) or ride my bike to work every day. My 12" Powerbook, in this situation, is *much* more portable than my old encyclopedia-like ThinkPad, which (between it and its powerplug and extra betteries) weighed at least ten pounds.
Portability is moot if you drive everywhere. But if you walk or ride your bike or take the train ( like most people in the world, outside of the US ) a few pounds makes all the difference.
Actually, I believe you're thinking of Popular Mechanics.
I have a set of books published by Popular Mechanics from the 1920's called "The Boy Mechanic" that go over how to make damn nearly anything that could be made back in the 20's and they're amazing. Popular Mechanics *used* to be about how to make and understand contemporary technology.
Now, it's a military-tech & muscle-car porn mag.
As Kurt Vonnegut said ( I apologize for misquote ) "Cosmopolitan used to be a XYZ ( valid cultural magazine? ), now it's a sex manual"
Magazines follow the times, because they want to stay in business; and the times today, they are *stupid*.
Yes. Like me. My g4 quicksilver and my 1st gen PB 12" *both* have the GF4MX cards. Well, I guess I'll be outside bicycling this summer, unlike you cool people with fast non-beleagured PCs and top-notch graphics cards.
Regardless, I gave up 1st person shooters by and large back in '97 when I started having quake-themed nightmares.
Not at all. I don't expect or desire western culture to change ( well, I do, but regarding more important problems than this triviality). Though I concede your point about the far east.
What I would like is a culture where products and other goods aren't so welded shut -- a situation in which we're encouraged to modify what we own and not be fearful that we'll void our warrantees.
I'd like a culture where as a people we're creative and enterprising enough to take our things and make them truly our own. And it does happen. But not very much.
But instead, we have a culture where we're generally too damn lazy and prefer, instead, to buy something "unique" from a manufacturer.
By the way, I do think those enamel kitchen-aid devices are slick. I also happen to like the PT Cruiser, though I wouldn't own one. So I admit it, I am rife with contradictions.
I don't mean to sound like an ass, but, it seems the great overarching movement of western culture has been to make available the image of "uniqueness" to anybody willing to pay for it. And I'm not talking about paying more for quality -- that's commendable ( disclaimer, I own an Apple laptop ). I'm talking about paying someone for a product that's meant to look "custom".
Well, I could be wrong, but a few years ago I said: "I don't think anybody will buy a Chrysler PT Cruiser. The kind of person who wants something like that will make one ( e.g., like a hot-rod ) from an old panel truck."
Can anybody tell me if FileVault is solid yet? I recall disasters on 10.3.0...
I gather there's no data loss any longer -- however, I still hear reports of periodic loss of app settings and the like.
Can anybody tell me their experiences? Is it worth taking the plunge? I like the idea -- if anything because it would make homedir backups to my iPod quite painless.
I'll wager this sort of eye-for-an-eye, zero sum logic is endemic to human thinking altogether.
Human history is chock-full of one culture declaring another ( largely similar ) culture to be at odds with their god/economics/what-have-you and proceeding to at least try to wipe the other out.
Think: crusades. Think: cold-war. Think: carthago delenda est.
The zero-sum is not exactly new. The difference is now we're dealing as much with corporate entities as with foreign cultures.
This is completely irrelevant; but about a year or so ago I was invited to a women-in-film "gala" thing. I'm a graphic designer, and I work with people who do lots of video, as in filming, editing, post-processing, etc. They invited me, since I'm so damn cool, or good looking, or something. I went, because I knew there would be hot chicks there.
So, I'm at the gala ( which was in a swinging hotel in Georgetown, DC -- no problem, I live within walking distance ), and I have to take a leak. When I'm at the urinal who walks up besides me than Jack Valenti himself, also needing to piss.
Now, say what you will about Jack Valenti being a good lobbyist, or an out-of-touch asshole, or a shill for big money -- Jack Valenti is NOT a tall man.
I'm not a tall man either. I'm 5' 11". But Valenti, he was like, tops, up to my belly button. Think "bite-sized". I've never seen such a short man with such power. He's like some sort of crazy media-mogul Napoleon.
Any chance apple's Objective-C++ patches will *ever* be integrated into mainstream GCC?
I simply could *not* get my development work done ( at least, not gracefully ) without Objective-C++, and that's a bit hampering considering I'm a believer in The Right Tool for the Right Job.
Some things are better written in C++ and some things are better written in Objective-C. Sometimes both will be needed for one project, and if i have to write vanilla C glue between them I'll be rather unhappy. Sure, C glue-code works, but you tend to lose polymorphism, and you end up with a bunch of typedef'd pointer types, which while acceptable, give me vietnam-style flashbacks to GTK programming, and I don't like that.
I love developing on Mac OS X, mainly because I love Cocoa. I'd love to be able to port my work to GNU Step, but without Objective-C++ it's simply not going to happen.
Well, as an amateur, spending my evenings and weekends over the last two years trying to develop a robot ( my first one was a disaster, but my current one has much promise ), whenever I talk to someone about it the first question they ask is "you mean like in battlebots?"
My response is always "I'm not making it for fighting, and if I did, it would get its shiny aluminum ass stomped" ( my robots are legged, and therefore somewhat slow ).
So... they think for a few seconds and ask "will it bring you beer?"
"Maybe someday" I respond.
It's kind of depressing. Here I am trying to make something interesting -- I'm doing private research into behavioral / automata brain design. I firmly believe I can make something as agile and graceful as a cat, or at the very least a retarded cat. But so far I haven't delved into image processing or even goal oriented behavior except for "follow the heat signature". But I think it's wonderful stuff anyway.
Yet people only care about wether its a battlebot or a beerbot.
Also, note that apps which are formally applescript supported export a "Dictionary" which allows you to see the applescript "API" ( grammer would be a better term ).
That, alone, makes applescript really f*cking fantastic.
Well, I downloaded the source and examined it and I can tell you how to turn the transparent window back on.
Comment out lines 741 through 744 of MBCController.mm -- funny, you've gotta love Objective-C++ -- half my work's in it too. You listening apple? Hire me;)
I found these pretty quickly -- particularly since the menu item *is* in the nib file, that meant I could just run a search for [someMenu removeItem: ] and whammo, there it was. You can thank me later.
Above those lines is a call to getenv() looking up the string "MBC_DEBUG" so I gather you could simply set the parameter in your.profile, but I'm not certain how those parameters affect Gui apps. Quick run to the terminal and running Chess.app from there had no effect, but then, perhaps I'd have to log out and back in.
Anyway, the above instructions will return the command-F floating window effect.
Try to use it... then you'll understand why apple took it out. It's sad, because from a performance standpoint it's *fine*, the trouble is there's no way to drag or resize the window!
You know, that reminds me of something. years ago, when I was first learning graphical DOS-mode programming ( I'd up to then been only on Macs ) I decided to take an afternoon to write Pong in C, since I'd just figured out how to get mouse positions from the interrupts.
So, I spent a couple hours and got something working -- in fact it was kind of cool because the ball would spawn new ones as time went on, getting progressively harder and faster, which was cool.
I'd written it in C, on my math-coprocessor enabled 486, and it ran just fine. I was amused, so I gave it to a friend, who had this *amazing* tiny HP laptop ( circa, I believe, 1995 or so ) with a nothing 286 or so processor ( on the othe rhand, it was less than a pound and ran off little batteries ). The program, needless to say, barely ran.
Now, I was just a kid ( teen ), and I didn't really understand, since I was still pretty new to code optimization. I'd had *good* highschool classes that taught me six ways to sunday how to optimize an algorithm, but nothing about actual hardware stuff. What I hadn't realized at the time was my code was using floating point math to position the "balls" and that required at the time a math coprocessor ( I guess ). Even though my blitting code was all fast integerial VGA framebuffer kind of stuff, the 20 lines of positioning code was enough to bring the HP to its knees since it had to emulate floating point math.
This was one of my first lessons in writing fast code -- I rewrote it using long integers to do bit shifted floating point arithmetic. Suffice to say, it hauled ass on the HP when I was done.
The sad thing is that this all worked just fine on minimal hardware back in the 70's. I learned great respect for low level programmers, then.
I still believe in algorithmic optimization above all, but now and then, when I profile my code ( Apple's Shark is your friend ) I'll find some boneheaded ( I blame only myself ) use of stl's array index operator that's eating up 75% of cpu cycles in some inner loop.
I just want to put my 2c out and say I've been working on macs since... maybe 1989 -- that was when I was in high school and first learned pascal and c programming on an ancient ( at the time even ) Mac Classic, with about 492 (?) k of ram.
I remember writing a Tron game with friends in my highschool cs class where, since the mac didn't have the CPU to do collision detection via line-to-line intersections in real time and not enough memory to make a bitfield for testing, we ended up using the screen memory itself for collision detection. The game rocked, actually.
Since I'm a professional graphic designer by day, I've *always* been on mac, except for a short detour from 2001 to 2003 when my boss insisted I work on a PC... Thank god I got out of that one.
I have to say, nonetheless, that while the migration to OS X was painful, ultimately, it's been good.
I agree, whole heartedly. Having migrated from windows to beos to linux and finally settling down to macOS X last year, I had a lot of porting to do, since still I'm using some code/apps I wrote 7 years ago for windows. In the beginning I also believed in cross-platform toolkits and when I was on linux, Qt was king.
But when I came to mac I realized these toolkits are skin deep only, and you're absolutely right: on mac, at least, there's so much more than the appearance. There's *RICH* MVC, there's services, there's the elegant document model, and so on. When you write a program for Mac, you're writing a component for the whole system, really. It *has* to integrate or else it's a wallflower.
Fortunately, all my code, even the complex gui programs ( particularly my white-whale robotics work ) is standard & portable c++; the GUI is just a wrapper for the internals. That way I can write a fully native gui, taking advantage of what Cocoa has to offer ( thank god, btw, for Objective-C++ ) and my core code, all 25kloc worth, is unchanged.
What I'm getting at is that for a lot of situations it makes sense to write a core model in portable c or c++ and then write a fully native gui to wrap it.
There are places this approach won't work... I imagine programs like flash which have such a rich interface between the document model and the interface would probably be hard to make a clean separation for, but since both windows and mac versions exists it obviously doesn't stop Macromedia.
Seems to me this is not of the too-little-too-late, but rather the too-much-wrong-purpose category.
What do most of us use our iPods for? I can only speak for myself and the other 100 quintillion urban elite 20 somethings who wear it and listen to whatever while walking to work, walking to the market, jogging, working out at the gym.
What I do *not* do is sit down and stare at my iPod for 2 hours. I do something else, whatever it may be, and the iPod provides musical accompaniment.
And, for a little rant: What I do not need in my life is more time in front of the tube. I allow myself one hour for simpsons and maybe seinfeld... that's enough slack-jawed passive absorption of mass culture & advertising for me. If I need something to keep me fully occupied on the metro or on a sunny afternoon, I read a f*cking book.
First, I want to make it clear I'm a hobbyist developer... not a professional.
So, after reading largely good comments about this update I installed it on my laptop, my development machine. I'm developing a simulation framework for development/testing of behavioral AI agents. The simulator uses the ODE physics engine for dynamics and OpenGL for visualization. Ho hum. Only 10'000 CS students have done the same thing. But this one is mine.
I'll be the first to admit I'm not a professional OpenGL programmer. I'd never written a line before June 2003, but I did the Right Thing and bought the _Red Book_ and went through it from nape to nuts. I also made the requisite vists to NeHE and gamasutra for performance tips.
Anyway, until I installed 10.3.3 my opengl code amounted for a whopping 5 to 10 % of my program's running processor time. In other words, no problem. The physics engine took up another 10 to 30% and that left *plenty* for the separately threaded AI logic. It worked beautifully on my rev A PB 12" -- most of my simulations ran at 100% "simulation/real" time. Which is to say, I set a fixed simulation timestep to 0.05 seconds, allowing for opengl @ 20fps and 20 synchronized physics steps per second. Enough to be "smooth" but not so much as to take away too much processing time from the AI. This on average left 2 or so millis per frame for AI logic, if you want to think of it in a single threaded way.
Immediately ater installing 10.3.3 my average performance dropped to 35% to 50% "real" time. Meaning my average simulation timestep was taking not 0.05 seconds but at least 0.1 or more. No good.
I sharked it ( http://developer.apple.com/tools/shark_optimize.ht ml ) and found that OpenGL's the culprit. There's nothing I can do about it! At least not that I know of. My OpenGL code's not the best in the world, but it's simple and fast and caches all geometry in display lists and so on and so forth. I spent a fair amount of time profiling and optimizing already.
I'm so frustrated... I used to be able to run my simulations in real time but now I can only site and watch it crawl ( and listen as my PB's fan kicks in ). Considering it often takes several minutes observation to determine if a new behavior has improved or ruined an agent's performance, it's quite a pain to have to wait at least twice as long.
Let's just hope that this is a dorked driver, and apple releases an update. & perhaps, I can somehow dig up the 10.3.2 opengl drivers somehow.
Oh well. Since I love cocoa programming, and since I love my PB, and since I drank Steve's Kool-Aid long ago, I still love apple.
What would love be if the object of your affection didn't disappoint you now and then?
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Of course I do. But dependence on things that take less energy is, given the gloom & doom, BETTER than dependence on things that take more. In principle, a community can grow its own veggies. A community is more likely to be able to grow a sufficient amount of food if it's vegetable than meat. So don't patronize me.
If all you eat is meat, then yes.
Some people, myself included, are of that rare group called *omnivores*, meaning we are able to eat vegetables as well as meat.
I can walk and ride my bike just as well after eating a salad as a hamburger. In fact, better, since the hamburger leaves me all bloaty and crampy.
Yes, however, when the oil is out, my 10 year old cannondale will still work. I don't need to buy a new one, because I take care of it. Yes, lubrication will be an issue, but presumably when the oil runs out new synthetics ( corn based? I don't know, I'm not a chemical engineer ) will take the place of oil for lubricative purposes.
The real problem here is not that cars will be fucked -- which they will be if they still run on petroleum -- it's that most people live WAY too far from work and from markets/shops/etc.
I walk to work and do most of my shopping on foot or bike. If worst comes to worst, I can do it all by foot: because I live *in* a city and the things I need are convenient.
If we don't have alternative fuel sources when the shit hits the fan, I predict the suburbs/exurbs will become 21st century ghost towns.
That depends on how you get around.
I live in DC, and I walk ( ~2miles ) or ride my bike to work every day. My 12" Powerbook, in this situation, is *much* more portable than my old encyclopedia-like ThinkPad, which (between it and its powerplug and extra betteries) weighed at least ten pounds.
Portability is moot if you drive everywhere. But if you walk or ride your bike or take the train ( like most people in the world, outside of the US ) a few pounds makes all the difference.
Actually, I believe you're thinking of Popular Mechanics.
I have a set of books published by Popular Mechanics from the 1920's called "The Boy Mechanic" that go over how to make damn nearly anything that could be made back in the 20's and they're amazing. Popular Mechanics *used* to be about how to make and understand contemporary technology.
Now, it's a military-tech & muscle-car porn mag.
As Kurt Vonnegut said ( I apologize for misquote ) "Cosmopolitan used to be a XYZ ( valid cultural magazine? ), now it's a sex manual"
Magazines follow the times, because they want to stay in business; and the times today, they are *stupid*.
It seems to me that as long as we can backup our materials, which is completely possible with present-day hardware and software, the issue is moot.
And, I'll wager there'll be quite a market in a decade or so for old ( but high quality ) analog media devices.
Yes. Like me. My g4 quicksilver and my 1st gen PB 12" *both* have the GF4MX cards. Well, I guess I'll be outside bicycling this summer, unlike you cool people with fast non-beleagured PCs and top-notch graphics cards.
Regardless, I gave up 1st person shooters by and large back in '97 when I started having quake-themed nightmares.
Not at all. I don't expect or desire western culture to change ( well, I do, but regarding more important problems than this triviality). Though I concede your point about the far east.
What I would like is a culture where products and other goods aren't so welded shut -- a situation in which we're encouraged to modify what we own and not be fearful that we'll void our warrantees.
I'd like a culture where as a people we're creative and enterprising enough to take our things and make them truly our own. And it does happen. But not very much.
But instead, we have a culture where we're generally too damn lazy and prefer, instead, to buy something "unique" from a manufacturer.
By the way, I do think those enamel kitchen-aid devices are slick. I also happen to like the PT Cruiser, though I wouldn't own one. So I admit it, I am rife with contradictions.
I don't mean to sound like an ass, but, it seems the great overarching movement of western culture has been to make available the image of "uniqueness" to anybody willing to pay for it. And I'm not talking about paying more for quality -- that's commendable ( disclaimer, I own an Apple laptop ). I'm talking about paying someone for a product that's meant to look "custom".
Well, I could be wrong, but a few years ago I said: "I don't think anybody will buy a Chrysler PT Cruiser. The kind of person who wants something like that will make one ( e.g., like a hot-rod ) from an old panel truck."
Boy, was I wrong.
Can anybody tell me if FileVault is solid yet? I recall disasters on 10.3.0...
I gather there's no data loss any longer -- however, I still hear reports of periodic loss of app settings and the like.
Can anybody tell me their experiences? Is it worth taking the plunge? I like the idea -- if anything because it would make homedir backups to my iPod quite painless.
I'll wager this sort of eye-for-an-eye, zero sum logic is endemic to human thinking altogether.
Human history is chock-full of one culture declaring another ( largely similar ) culture to be at odds with their god/economics/what-have-you and proceeding to at least try to wipe the other out.
Think: crusades. Think: cold-war. Think: carthago delenda est.
The zero-sum is not exactly new. The difference is now we're dealing as much with corporate entities as with foreign cultures.
This is completely irrelevant; but about a year or so ago I was invited to a women-in-film "gala" thing. I'm a graphic designer, and I work with people who do lots of video, as in filming, editing, post-processing, etc. They invited me, since I'm so damn cool, or good looking, or something. I went, because I knew there would be hot chicks there.
So, I'm at the gala ( which was in a swinging hotel in Georgetown, DC -- no problem, I live within walking distance ), and I have to take a leak. When I'm at the urinal who walks up besides me than Jack Valenti himself, also needing to piss.
Now, say what you will about Jack Valenti being a good lobbyist, or an out-of-touch asshole, or a shill for big money -- Jack Valenti is NOT a tall man.
I'm not a tall man either. I'm 5' 11". But Valenti, he was like, tops, up to my belly button. Think "bite-sized". I've never seen such a short man with such power. He's like some sort of crazy media-mogul Napoleon.
That's all. I just thought I'd share.
Notice however, that in the grand style of old: it even includes a mail reader.
Any chance apple's Objective-C++ patches will *ever* be integrated into mainstream GCC?
I simply could *not* get my development work done ( at least, not gracefully ) without Objective-C++, and that's a bit hampering considering I'm a believer in The Right Tool for the Right Job.
Some things are better written in C++ and some things are better written in Objective-C. Sometimes both will be needed for one project, and if i have to write vanilla C glue between them I'll be rather unhappy. Sure, C glue-code works, but you tend to lose polymorphism, and you end up with a bunch of typedef'd pointer types, which while acceptable, give me vietnam-style flashbacks to GTK programming, and I don't like that.
I love developing on Mac OS X, mainly because I love Cocoa. I'd love to be able to port my work to GNU Step, but without Objective-C++ it's simply not going to happen.
Well, as an amateur, spending my evenings and weekends over the last two years trying to develop a robot ( my first one was a disaster, but my current one has much promise ), whenever I talk to someone about it the first question they ask is "you mean like in battlebots?"
My response is always "I'm not making it for fighting, and if I did, it would get its shiny aluminum ass stomped" ( my robots are legged, and therefore somewhat slow ).
So... they think for a few seconds and ask "will it bring you beer?"
"Maybe someday" I respond.
It's kind of depressing. Here I am trying to make something interesting -- I'm doing private research into behavioral / automata brain design. I firmly believe I can make something as agile and graceful as a cat, or at the very least a retarded cat. But so far I haven't delved into image processing or even goal oriented behavior except for "follow the heat signature". But I think it's wonderful stuff anyway.
Yet people only care about wether its a battlebot or a beerbot.
Fie on them all.
Also, note that apps which are formally applescript supported export a "Dictionary" which allows you to see the applescript "API" ( grammer would be a better term ).
That, alone, makes applescript really f*cking fantastic.
I'm disappointed at the lack of standard-texas-units for the meteor diameter.
Or, for that matter, the standard volkswagon-bug unit.
Funny. The set command didn't stick for me so I had to do the commenting-out trick.
Well, I downloaded the source and examined it and I can tell you how to turn the transparent window back on.
;)
.profile, but I'm not certain how those parameters affect Gui apps. Quick run to the terminal and running Chess.app from there had no effect, but then, perhaps I'd have to log out and back in.
Comment out lines 741 through 744 of MBCController.mm -- funny, you've gotta love Objective-C++ -- half my work's in it too. You listening apple? Hire me
Specifically:
[[fFloatingMenuItem menu] removeItem:fFloatingMenuItem];
[[fFloatingView window] release];
fFloatingMenuItem = nil;
fFloatingView = nil;
I found these pretty quickly -- particularly since the menu item *is* in the nib file, that meant I could just run a search for [someMenu removeItem: ] and whammo, there it was. You can thank me later.
Above those lines is a call to getenv() looking up the string "MBC_DEBUG" so I gather you could simply set the parameter in your
Anyway, the above instructions will return the command-F floating window effect.
Try to use it... then you'll understand why apple took it out. It's sad, because from a performance standpoint it's *fine*, the trouble is there's no way to drag or resize the window!
You know, that reminds me of something. years ago, when I was first learning graphical DOS-mode programming ( I'd up to then been only on Macs ) I decided to take an afternoon to write Pong in C, since I'd just figured out how to get mouse positions from the interrupts.
So, I spent a couple hours and got something working -- in fact it was kind of cool because the ball would spawn new ones as time went on, getting progressively harder and faster, which was cool.
I'd written it in C, on my math-coprocessor enabled 486, and it ran just fine. I was amused, so I gave it to a friend, who had this *amazing* tiny HP laptop ( circa, I believe, 1995 or so ) with a nothing 286 or so processor ( on the othe rhand, it was less than a pound and ran off little batteries ). The program, needless to say, barely ran.
Now, I was just a kid ( teen ), and I didn't really understand, since I was still pretty new to code optimization. I'd had *good* highschool classes that taught me six ways to sunday how to optimize an algorithm, but nothing about actual hardware stuff. What I hadn't realized at the time was my code was using floating point math to position the "balls" and that required at the time a math coprocessor ( I guess ). Even though my blitting code was all fast integerial VGA framebuffer kind of stuff, the 20 lines of positioning code was enough to bring the HP to its knees since it had to emulate floating point math.
This was one of my first lessons in writing fast code -- I rewrote it using long integers to do bit shifted floating point arithmetic. Suffice to say, it hauled ass on the HP when I was done.
The sad thing is that this all worked just fine on minimal hardware back in the 70's. I learned great respect for low level programmers, then.
I still believe in algorithmic optimization above all, but now and then, when I profile my code ( Apple's Shark is your friend ) I'll find some boneheaded ( I blame only myself ) use of stl's array index operator that's eating up 75% of cpu cycles in some inner loop.
I just want to put my 2c out and say I've been working on macs since... maybe 1989 -- that was when I was in high school and first learned pascal and c programming on an ancient ( at the time even ) Mac Classic, with about 492 (?) k of ram.
I remember writing a Tron game with friends in my highschool cs class where, since the mac didn't have the CPU to do collision detection via line-to-line intersections in real time and not enough memory to make a bitfield for testing, we ended up using the screen memory itself for collision detection. The game rocked, actually.
Since I'm a professional graphic designer by day, I've *always* been on mac, except for a short detour from 2001 to 2003 when my boss insisted I work on a PC... Thank god I got out of that one.
I have to say, nonetheless, that while the migration to OS X was painful, ultimately, it's been good.
Happy birthday! And many more beleaguered years!
I agree, whole heartedly. Having migrated from windows to beos to linux and finally settling down to macOS X last year, I had a lot of porting to do, since still I'm using some code/apps I wrote 7 years ago for windows. In the beginning I also believed in cross-platform toolkits and when I was on linux, Qt was king.
But when I came to mac I realized these toolkits are skin deep only, and you're absolutely right: on mac, at least, there's so much more than the appearance. There's *RICH* MVC, there's services, there's the elegant document model, and so on. When you write a program for Mac, you're writing a component for the whole system, really. It *has* to integrate or else it's a wallflower.
Fortunately, all my code, even the complex gui programs ( particularly my white-whale robotics work ) is standard & portable c++; the GUI is just a wrapper for the internals. That way I can write a fully native gui, taking advantage of what Cocoa has to offer ( thank god, btw, for Objective-C++ ) and my core code, all 25kloc worth, is unchanged.
What I'm getting at is that for a lot of situations it makes sense to write a core model in portable c or c++ and then write a fully native gui to wrap it.
There are places this approach won't work... I imagine programs like flash which have such a rich interface between the document model and the interface would probably be hard to make a clean separation for, but since both windows and mac versions exists it obviously doesn't stop Macromedia.
Anyway, that's just my 2c.
Seems to me this is not of the too-little-too-late, but rather the too-much-wrong-purpose category.
What do most of us use our iPods for? I can only speak for myself and the other 100 quintillion urban elite 20 somethings who wear it and listen to whatever while walking to work, walking to the market, jogging, working out at the gym.
What I do *not* do is sit down and stare at my iPod for 2 hours. I do something else, whatever it may be, and the iPod provides musical accompaniment.
And, for a little rant:
What I do not need in my life is more time in front of the tube. I allow myself one hour for simpsons and maybe seinfeld... that's enough slack-jawed passive absorption of mass culture & advertising for me. If I need something to keep me fully occupied on the metro or on a sunny afternoon, I read a f*cking book.
Good idea. Thanks!
:/
I have the feeling, btw, that this is a matter of Apple choosing correctness over speed
First, I want to make it clear I'm a hobbyist developer... not a professional.
t ml ) and found that OpenGL's the culprit. There's nothing I can do about it! At least not that I know of. My OpenGL code's not the best in the world, but it's simple and fast and caches all geometry in display lists and so on and so forth. I spent a fair amount of time profiling and optimizing already.
So, after reading largely good comments about this update I installed it on my laptop, my development machine. I'm developing a simulation framework for development/testing of behavioral AI agents. The simulator uses the ODE physics engine for dynamics and OpenGL for visualization. Ho hum. Only 10'000 CS students have done the same thing. But this one is mine.
I'll be the first to admit I'm not a professional OpenGL programmer. I'd never written a line before June 2003, but I did the Right Thing and bought the _Red Book_ and went through it from nape to nuts. I also made the requisite vists to NeHE and gamasutra for performance tips.
Anyway, until I installed 10.3.3 my opengl code amounted for a whopping 5 to 10 % of my program's running processor time. In other words, no problem. The physics engine took up another 10 to 30% and that left *plenty* for the separately threaded AI logic. It worked beautifully on my rev A PB 12" -- most of my simulations ran at 100% "simulation/real" time. Which is to say, I set a fixed simulation timestep to 0.05 seconds, allowing for opengl @ 20fps and 20 synchronized physics steps per second. Enough to be "smooth" but not so much as to take away too much processing time from the AI. This on average left 2 or so millis per frame for AI logic, if you want to think of it in a single threaded way.
Immediately ater installing 10.3.3 my average performance dropped to 35% to 50% "real" time. Meaning my average simulation timestep was taking not 0.05 seconds but at least 0.1 or more. No good.
I sharked it ( http://developer.apple.com/tools/shark_optimize.h
I'm so frustrated... I used to be able to run my simulations in real time but now I can only site and watch it crawl ( and listen as my PB's fan kicks in ). Considering it often takes several minutes observation to determine if a new behavior has improved or ruined an agent's performance, it's quite a pain to have to wait at least twice as long.
Let's just hope that this is a dorked driver, and apple releases an update. & perhaps, I can somehow dig up the 10.3.2 opengl drivers somehow.
Oh well. Since I love cocoa programming, and since I love my PB, and since I drank Steve's Kool-Aid long ago, I still love apple.
What would love be if the object of your affection didn't disappoint you now and then?