I much prefer the nethack interface to the commercial equivalents. I find the graphical monsters ridiculous and the mouse-based interfaces laborious and tedious.
Yes, it will take him 8h to learn how to use the game, and that's just fine. It takes a lot longer to learn how to play chess.
I just used the term Firewire because it would be most familiar to Mac users. The technology of fast serial busses was not invented by Apple, and Firewire only became really successful after companies like Sony started adopting it in their products. As is often the case, however, Apple did pretty good engineering and marketing using existing technologies; hence, you think of Firewire as an "Apple innovation" when it is really an expression of industry-wide trends.
The statement of your question gives no information about why you are so interested in 'free' games.
I can imagine plenty of reasons:
Free, open source games are generally developed by a larger community over many years, leading to more balanced, bug-free, and interesting game play.
Free games often predate their commercial counterparts, and he may be interested in the history of these games. In many cases, people currently believe that entire genres were invented by commercial developers when they really just produced commercial variants of game types that had been available for years as free or open source games on UNIX.
The user interface on free games is generally much more effective and reconfigurable than on commercial games. Where commercial games have you hunt with your mouse through endless menus or make you sit through boring animations, free games often feature instantaneous updates and a full complement of keyboard bindings.
He can change free, open source games to do what he likes or look at how they are implemented.
Please! when have YOU ever experienced this for yourself...
Yes: radio interference from unshielded computers is a clear problem, in particular for AM, but also for FM.
or can you supply a CREDIBLE source that will substantiate your claim?
Look at your FCC regulations or most computers you buy in the store: they are all shielded, and they all come with statements to that effect in their instruction manuals. Even the transparent iMac has a carefully constructed metal shield inside around the CPU. Many devices use conductive plastic, which is quite a bit more expensive than regular plastic. Do you really think that the industry would waste money on shielding if it wasn't needed?
The person that did this project is yours truly...an MSEE with 20 years work experience!
So? Having an MSEE degree doesn't give you license to operate RF sources. There are other certifications for that, and in order to earn those, you would actually have to learn something about RF safety and interference. Those are not subjects usually covered in MSEE degrees, even good ones.
The mere fact that the computer is contained within a house will prevent any interference of the type you are talking about.
Typical US homes do not provide shielding for most parts of the radio spectrum that an unshielded computer interferes with.
Even if your home is spacious enough and shielded enough, or if your neighbors just don't care, you are setting a bad example by bragging about your system on the web.
Life may appear very quickly (in geological terms) on new planets, either de novo or seeded from space. So, that part is pretty plausible.
Earth's surface was probably destroyed one or more times after its formation, so it is also quite plausible that the oldest life on Mars is older than anything we find on earth.
The reason windows 95 runs on current hardware is that there has been no innovation in PC hardware.
PC hardware today ships with USB2, FireWire, AGP, much improved disk controllers, 100Mb and Gigabit Ethernet, graphics accelerators, new power management hardware, accelerated audio hardware, and lots of other stuff. Windows 95 knows nothing about most of these.
The reason why you may be able to install Windows 95 on new PC hardware is because, for better or for worse, a lot of that hardware has backwards compatibility modes and because Microsoft does, in fact, support their software for many years beyond when it is discontinued.
Apple evidently doesn't worry as much about backwards compatibility in their hardware. That may be fine, too, for Apple's market. I am glad to see Mac OS 9 go, which was an antiquated and unreliable system that should have been retired a decade ago, and it's the first thing I removed from my OSX-based Mac.
But your assertion that the PC hasn't innovated except for faster clock speeds is just completely off the mark. Quite to the contrary, a lot of the PC innovations have been picked up by Apple--much of the Macintosh platform is now a well-designed, high-end PC that happens to have a PowerPC for its processor. As a Mac user myself, I often feel that one of the worst things about the Mac is the large number of zealous but uninformed users that hang on to it.
First, the horror of Nazi Germany was the industrial-scale murder of millions of members of minorities (not only Jews) by a modern, generally educated Western society that started out as a democracy but hit economic hard times and had an overinflated national ego. This should be a warning to any nation that thinks "it can't happen here".
Otherwise, Nazi Germany was hardly unique. Let's not even get into historical or more recent genocides and mass murders. Just in terms of discrimination, Jews, blacks, communists, gypsies, and homosexuals have been strongly discriminated against in many countries, and still are today--in fact, while anti-semitism is currently unpopular in the US, many Americans evidently still think there is nothing wrong with discriminating against these other groups.
Genetic discrimination in Western nations will most likely not be like Nazi Germany but rather like the caste system in India or racial discrimination and profiling in the US--insidiously destructive but only indirectly lethal. If you have the wrong genes, you won't get health insurance, you won't be able to get many jobs, and people may not be willing to invest much in your education. Why should a private health insurance take on someone they have a good chance of losing money on? Why should a foundation give an educational scholarship to someone who has a 30% chance of dying before age 45 when there is a nearly equally qualified applicant that has no such risk?
Genetically engineered foods are Western luxury items--tomatoes that stay fresh forever, blemish-free fruits, fortified this-and-that. Genetic engineering does nothing to address fundamental issues of poverty and hunger in the world; if anything, it makes things worse because it increases the investments farmers need to make and their dependence on imports paid for in dollars for their production. In fact, we have already raised agrigultural productivity tremendously but not achieved any significant reductions in world hunger. When hunger is reduced, it's because countries address their political and social problems.
I don't know enough about this situation to be able to say whether this is a reasonable decision in the short term or whether it will condemn millions of people to starvation. If it's the latter, I think we are morally obligated to donate food products, not give these people loans.
In the long term, one way or another, poor nations must eliminate their dependency on food imports. They need to address their internal social and political problems, they must work on infrastructure, commerce, and population planning. And they need to develop crops domestically that work well within their countries.
Wait - it plays all this and makes your PDA a mini-entertainment center, and youre not willing to pay as much as a tank of gas? Give me a fucking break - some people take this open source thing way too far.
The question is not who is willing to pay for it, the question is why this matters to anybody on Slashdot. There are plenty of proprietary DivX players around. What difference does one more make? Why is this news?
Maybe Slashdot should let people filter out announcements of non-free software--I'm really not interested.
The window system is also released under the GPL, but it is still proprietary, in that its development is currently driven by a commercial company.
Nope again. The Zaurus 5500 is a US/EU product.
The Linux-based Zaurus line is primarily used in Asia; US and European usage is miniscule.
My point remains: the release of a proprietary app for a proprietary handheld is of little interest to me or other people in the open source community.
Of course, the usual KDE and Zaurus zealots will also mod this message down to oblivion. Go ahead, live out your little power trips. I have lots of karma.
So, a company releases a proprietary DivX player for a proprietary window system running on hardware that's mostly used in Japan. I'm sorry, but I can't really get all that excited about that.
Huh? X servers have talked to the hardware directly forever: the framebuffer and control registers are mapped into the X server process's address space, and it pokes around in there. There didn't even use to be any kernel API for doing anything with the frame buffer.
That still provides a big degree of isolation and runtime safety. While the X server could conceivably mess up the machine by doing something stupid with graphics card registers, that's rare. Most X server crashes are harmless if it runs in a separate process; they would much more likely take down the system if it was in the kernel.
I use a UNIX system running X11, and every app does things its own way. It's enough to drive a man nuts.
Well, if you deliberately mix applications from different UNIX desktops, they are going to be inconsistent. That's your choice. If it bothers you, stick with all KDE or all Gnome or all Motif. Most people don't seem to have a real problem with this in practice. Note that cut-and-paste, drag-and-drop, selections, and window management--the stuff that really matters--is consistent among applications.
Not to mention that certain things would be very difficult, such as using the system-wide menu bar, working with all the compositing, blending, and antialising the OS offers, and things like that.
That's up to the toolkits: toolkits need to be adapted to handle those things, whether or not the backend is based on X11. And they will be. But there is overall a lot less work if the backend is based on Quartz, so there is more time for those details.
Apple did not single-handedly invent handwriting recognition (the techniques they used are very similar to those used by speech recognition and other handwriting recognition research), but they had the vision and foresight to be the first to try and build it into actual devices. You can find Larry's papers here.
The sad thing is that, today, Apple isn't doing much of that sort of research and development anymore. As far as I can tell, Apple's ATG (Advanced Technology Group) doesn't exist anymore. Most of the people who used to do this kind of research have moved on to other jobs. Microsoft Research is much larger and much more visible in the scientific community than whatever remnants of research may remain at Apple. But Microsoft still produces lousy products despite the large amounts of money they invest in research.
I think in the long run, Apple needs to invest heavily in research anymore or they'll be in trouble. And Microsoft needs to figure out how to take research results and put them into their software more successfully; unlike, say, IBM, Microsoft did not start out as an innovation-driven company, and probably lack the mechanisms for moving research results into products.
The last thing Sun needs is another proprietary desktop. They tried that before several times and it failed miserably. Their customers are X11 users through-and-through; the ones that aren't have already moved to other platforms.
If Sun wants to do something for their desktop, they should develop a Java-based desktop to prove that Java is suitable for client applications. So far--no go.
X11 is low footprint. X11 is smaller, for example, than a comparable Qt/Embedded environment. X11 is also very efficient: as others have pointed out, too: it was designed for machines less powerful than your PDA. The X11 protocol was hand-designed, unlike the RPC and distributed object protocols in vogue now, which have better tool support but bigger overhead as well. And X11 has been widely used in embedded systems over the years.
I think the reason why people think that X11 is big and resource intensive is because it scales up: if you allow it to (and most desktop installations do), it will take advantage of lots of memory and have all sorts of optional packages installed. Most likely your desktop X11 server includes various compression, image, 3D, and video functionality.
And X11 brings a lot of really useful features to the table. The fact that both client and server are user processes and are separate means that X11-based systems are very robust. The fact that window management and input methods are separate means that developers can really explore different options and pick the best for their device. For example, ]any handwriting input method developed for one X11-based handheld will work on almost any other, even if the user interfaces and toolkits are otherwise completely different. X11 is well-modularized.
The remote display capabilities are enormously useful for debugging. For example, you can prototype and debug your application on your desktop and just display on the handheld, in order to see how the UI works on a small screen. Or, you can have applications and development tools on the handheld pop up windows on the desktop.
If Apple did what you're proposing, then MacOS X would descend into UI inconsistency hell and be indistinguishable from any other UNIX. You really think that somebody who's too lazy to use Quartz will still make all of his X11 code conform to Apple's UI guidelines? That's funny! Tell me another one!
It's naive to think that by not making X11 available, Apple will force people to write Cocoa-native applications. Instead, either people won't bother porting at all, or they will put Cocoa backends on their toolkits. That won't make the applications look or feel any more native (such backends will usually not even use Cocoa widgets), it just takes time away from trying to make the applications work better on Macintosh.
Besides, it's a myth that Mac or Windows are particularly consistent. Many applications on either platform are already written using cross-platform toolkits, and the vast majority of applications are written by people who don't know and don't care about the UI guideliens.
OpenOffice basically runs on OSX. But it isn't usable by the masses because it requires an X11 server, and installing that is beyond the abilities of most users because it doesn't ship with the Mac.
There is no technical reason why OSX couldn't support, in addition to Carbon and Cococa, access to the graphics system through the X11 protocol. The amount of code required on Apple's side would be small (a few hundred kbytes of binary), and users would not be able to tell whether an application talks to Quartz through Carbon or the X11 protocol.
Of course, efforts like OpenOffice would still have to work on implementing Apple GUI guidelines, but they would have to do that even if they use native widgets.
Many of Apple's new users picked the Mac because it is UNIX; Apple should support graphical UNIX applications fully and out of the box rather than insisting that other people spend large amounts of time unnecessarily on ports.
Personal communication devices always allowed people to communicate easily and to coordinate their plans at the spur of the moment. As PCDs became widespread, they allowed their owners to converge rapidly in large groups, for purposes social or political.
This must be in some alternate reality. In real life, "PCDs" are marred by lousy user interfaces, tiny keyboards, short battery lives, miniscule screens, low resolution, limited range, and incompatibilities.
Interestingly , though, the real value apple's added is in the UI and the applications and all that.
I disagree. The real value Apple added is the brand name and the bundling: people can go out an buy a Macintosh and get compatible hardware; with Linux, there simply is no standard end-user configuration, and that makes it really hard for Linux in the consumer market.
Purely in terms of software quality and usability, I have observed no big differences between Mac OSX and properly set-up Linux machines running KDE for "naive" users, either at home or in the office. And there is more software for Linux than for OSX, even if you just look at software of interest to non-expert users.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it will take him 8h to learn how to use the game, and that's just fine. It takes a lot longer to learn how to play chess.
I just used the term Firewire because it would be most familiar to Mac users. The technology of fast serial busses was not invented by Apple, and Firewire only became really successful after companies like Sony started adopting it in their products. As is often the case, however, Apple did pretty good engineering and marketing using existing technologies; hence, you think of Firewire as an "Apple innovation" when it is really an expression of industry-wide trends.
I can imagine plenty of reasons:
Of particular note is "empire", a multiplayer Civilization-type game originally from the 1970's (!), complete with nuclear war at the end.
Well, it's good that it isn't something worse. But droplets of dirty paraffin floating through the air might very well still constitute a health risk.
Yes: radio interference from unshielded computers is a clear problem, in particular for AM, but also for FM.
or can you supply a CREDIBLE source that will substantiate your claim?
Look at your FCC regulations or most computers you buy in the store: they are all shielded, and they all come with statements to that effect in their instruction manuals. Even the transparent iMac has a carefully constructed metal shield inside around the CPU. Many devices use conductive plastic, which is quite a bit more expensive than regular plastic. Do you really think that the industry would waste money on shielding if it wasn't needed?
The person that did this project is yours truly...an MSEE with 20 years work experience!
So? Having an MSEE degree doesn't give you license to operate RF sources. There are other certifications for that, and in order to earn those, you would actually have to learn something about RF safety and interference. Those are not subjects usually covered in MSEE degrees, even good ones.
The mere fact that the computer is contained within a house will prevent any interference of the type you are talking about.
Typical US homes do not provide shielding for most parts of the radio spectrum that an unshielded computer interferes with.
Even if your home is spacious enough and shielded enough, or if your neighbors just don't care, you are setting a bad example by bragging about your system on the web.
Who is rude now?
Still you.
Earth's surface was probably destroyed one or more times after its formation, so it is also quite plausible that the oldest life on Mars is older than anything we find on earth.
Huh? I responded to a direct quote from you; your claim that "there has been no innovation in PC hardware" is completely bogus.
PC hardware today ships with USB2, FireWire, AGP, much improved disk controllers, 100Mb and Gigabit Ethernet, graphics accelerators, new power management hardware, accelerated audio hardware, and lots of other stuff. Windows 95 knows nothing about most of these.
The reason why you may be able to install Windows 95 on new PC hardware is because, for better or for worse, a lot of that hardware has backwards compatibility modes and because Microsoft does, in fact, support their software for many years beyond when it is discontinued.
Apple evidently doesn't worry as much about backwards compatibility in their hardware. That may be fine, too, for Apple's market. I am glad to see Mac OS 9 go, which was an antiquated and unreliable system that should have been retired a decade ago, and it's the first thing I removed from my OSX-based Mac.
But your assertion that the PC hasn't innovated except for faster clock speeds is just completely off the mark. Quite to the contrary, a lot of the PC innovations have been picked up by Apple--much of the Macintosh platform is now a well-designed, high-end PC that happens to have a PowerPC for its processor. As a Mac user myself, I often feel that one of the worst things about the Mac is the large number of zealous but uninformed users that hang on to it.
First, the horror of Nazi Germany was the industrial-scale murder of millions of members of minorities (not only Jews) by a modern, generally educated Western society that started out as a democracy but hit economic hard times and had an overinflated national ego. This should be a warning to any nation that thinks "it can't happen here".
Otherwise, Nazi Germany was hardly unique. Let's not even get into historical or more recent genocides and mass murders. Just in terms of discrimination, Jews, blacks, communists, gypsies, and homosexuals have been strongly discriminated against in many countries, and still are today--in fact, while anti-semitism is currently unpopular in the US, many Americans evidently still think there is nothing wrong with discriminating against these other groups.
Genetic discrimination in Western nations will most likely not be like Nazi Germany but rather like the caste system in India or racial discrimination and profiling in the US--insidiously destructive but only indirectly lethal. If you have the wrong genes, you won't get health insurance, you won't be able to get many jobs, and people may not be willing to invest much in your education. Why should a private health insurance take on someone they have a good chance of losing money on? Why should a foundation give an educational scholarship to someone who has a 30% chance of dying before age 45 when there is a nearly equally qualified applicant that has no such risk?
You mean like disrupting radio communications of fire, police, medical equipment, and amateur radio operators in your vicinity?
Unshielded computer cases show that the person building it either has no clue about electronics or doesn't give a damn about the people around him.
I don't know enough about this situation to be able to say whether this is a reasonable decision in the short term or whether it will condemn millions of people to starvation. If it's the latter, I think we are morally obligated to donate food products, not give these people loans.
In the long term, one way or another, poor nations must eliminate their dependency on food imports. They need to address their internal social and political problems, they must work on infrastructure, commerce, and population planning. And they need to develop crops domestically that work well within their countries.
The question is not who is willing to pay for it, the question is why this matters to anybody on Slashdot. There are plenty of proprietary DivX players around. What difference does one more make? Why is this news?
Maybe Slashdot should let people filter out announcements of non-free software--I'm really not interested.
The window system is also released under the GPL, but it is still proprietary, in that its development is currently driven by a commercial company.
Nope again. The Zaurus 5500 is a US/EU product.
The Linux-based Zaurus line is primarily used in Asia; US and European usage is miniscule.
My point remains: the release of a proprietary app for a proprietary handheld is of little interest to me or other people in the open source community.
Of course, the usual KDE and Zaurus zealots will also mod this message down to oblivion. Go ahead, live out your little power trips. I have lots of karma.
So, a company releases a proprietary DivX player for a proprietary window system running on hardware that's mostly used in Japan. I'm sorry, but I can't really get all that excited about that.
That still provides a big degree of isolation and runtime safety. While the X server could conceivably mess up the machine by doing something stupid with graphics card registers, that's rare. Most X server crashes are harmless if it runs in a separate process; they would much more likely take down the system if it was in the kernel.
Well, if you deliberately mix applications from different UNIX desktops, they are going to be inconsistent. That's your choice. If it bothers you, stick with all KDE or all Gnome or all Motif. Most people don't seem to have a real problem with this in practice. Note that cut-and-paste, drag-and-drop, selections, and window management--the stuff that really matters--is consistent among applications.
Not to mention that certain things would be very difficult, such as using the system-wide menu bar, working with all the compositing, blending, and antialising the OS offers, and things like that.
That's up to the toolkits: toolkits need to be adapted to handle those things, whether or not the backend is based on X11. And they will be. But there is overall a lot less work if the backend is based on Quartz, so there is more time for those details.
No, I'm including those in the comparison. There are plenty of small toolkits for X11.
The sad thing is that, today, Apple isn't doing much of that sort of research and development anymore. As far as I can tell, Apple's ATG (Advanced Technology Group) doesn't exist anymore. Most of the people who used to do this kind of research have moved on to other jobs. Microsoft Research is much larger and much more visible in the scientific community than whatever remnants of research may remain at Apple. But Microsoft still produces lousy products despite the large amounts of money they invest in research.
I think in the long run, Apple needs to invest heavily in research anymore or they'll be in trouble. And Microsoft needs to figure out how to take research results and put them into their software more successfully; unlike, say, IBM, Microsoft did not start out as an innovation-driven company, and probably lack the mechanisms for moving research results into products.
If Sun wants to do something for their desktop, they should develop a Java-based desktop to prove that Java is suitable for client applications. So far--no go.
I think the reason why people think that X11 is big and resource intensive is because it scales up: if you allow it to (and most desktop installations do), it will take advantage of lots of memory and have all sorts of optional packages installed. Most likely your desktop X11 server includes various compression, image, 3D, and video functionality.
And X11 brings a lot of really useful features to the table. The fact that both client and server are user processes and are separate means that X11-based systems are very robust. The fact that window management and input methods are separate means that developers can really explore different options and pick the best for their device. For example, ]any handwriting input method developed for one X11-based handheld will work on almost any other, even if the user interfaces and toolkits are otherwise completely different. X11 is well-modularized.
The remote display capabilities are enormously useful for debugging. For example, you can prototype and debug your application on your desktop and just display on the handheld, in order to see how the UI works on a small screen. Or, you can have applications and development tools on the handheld pop up windows on the desktop.
It's naive to think that by not making X11 available, Apple will force people to write Cocoa-native applications. Instead, either people won't bother porting at all, or they will put Cocoa backends on their toolkits. That won't make the applications look or feel any more native (such backends will usually not even use Cocoa widgets), it just takes time away from trying to make the applications work better on Macintosh.
Besides, it's a myth that Mac or Windows are particularly consistent. Many applications on either platform are already written using cross-platform toolkits, and the vast majority of applications are written by people who don't know and don't care about the UI guideliens.
There is no technical reason why OSX couldn't support, in addition to Carbon and Cococa, access to the graphics system through the X11 protocol. The amount of code required on Apple's side would be small (a few hundred kbytes of binary), and users would not be able to tell whether an application talks to Quartz through Carbon or the X11 protocol.
Of course, efforts like OpenOffice would still have to work on implementing Apple GUI guidelines, but they would have to do that even if they use native widgets.
Many of Apple's new users picked the Mac because it is UNIX; Apple should support graphical UNIX applications fully and out of the box rather than insisting that other people spend large amounts of time unnecessarily on ports.
This must be in some alternate reality. In real life, "PCDs" are marred by lousy user interfaces, tiny keyboards, short battery lives, miniscule screens, low resolution, limited range, and incompatibilities.
I disagree. The real value Apple added is the brand name and the bundling: people can go out an buy a Macintosh and get compatible hardware; with Linux, there simply is no standard end-user configuration, and that makes it really hard for Linux in the consumer market.
Purely in terms of software quality and usability, I have observed no big differences between Mac OSX and properly set-up Linux machines running KDE for "naive" users, either at home or in the office. And there is more software for Linux than for OSX, even if you just look at software of interest to non-expert users.