I played CGA solitaire and gin games. I played monochrome adventure games. I was ecstatic about switching to VGA from EGA. My first modem was older than the majority of the current Slashdot readers.
and I've gone from Voodoo2 SLI to TNT2Ultra to GeForce 256SDR to GeForce2GTS, but then I stopped spending so much money. Similarly I spent quite a bit of time on a 14.4 modem (we had modems long before that, but no ISP, the modem was used primarily for school stuff), then the 28.8, then the 33.6, but we got cable by the time 56K became the standard. Every time I get a faster video card I crank the resolution up on the games a little more. Quake2 still looks pretty good at 1600x1200.
This sort of thing doesn't happen anymore, as far as I can tell. Pretty graphics are a given, and sound is no longer optional; nor is it done with beeps or even MIDI.
It doesn't happen for you, that's the difference. I've gone through so many sound cards in the last few years that most people think I'm insane. Now I'm just pissed that Creative Labs is really the only well supported sound card manufacturer when it comes to playing games. Anyone that builds anything better and actively targets gamers gets sued into bankruptcy by them.
I miss the days of waiting for the Next Big Thing or the next Duke Nukem or for the Police Quest III strategy guide to hit the shelves.
Some people have been waiting for the next Duke Nukem since they finished Duke3d, and they're still waiting (and the devs still say they're working on it). A lot of people are waiting for Doom 3, TF2, Unreal 2, Half-Life 2 (which isn't even in development afaik), and so on. Diablo 2, WarCraft 3, NWN, and so on were all waited on by many people.
Personally, I've noticed that my upgrade cycle gets longer and I see less reason to upgrade every time around, and I take a more cynical view on the next big game coming down the pipe every time around. However, I'm not going to fool myself by thinking that other people aren't still having that urge to buy things as soon as they hit the shelves. The rest of us have just gotten used to it and suppressed it;) Or you just realize after a while that you don't finish every game you buy and some games get far more play time than others (hell I've been playing TFC what 3-4 years now?)
Pull out cart, blow on connector, put it in slot. If you didn't it had a good chance of not working at all or the colors would be screwed up, etc.
The fact that you were blowing on them only added to the problem (the moisture attracts more dust). Some of my friends had the exact same problem with their 2600s. The biggest problem I had with my NES was that sometimes the cartridge had to be in just the right place before you pushed it down, and eventually the thing just didn't want to stay down at all.
I was born in 78 and by the time I was 5 or 6 I spent most of my time playing Atari games. We didn't have an NES until around 87, so while I still think of NES games as being classics, the Atari games were definitely classics as well. Donkey Kong, Pac Man, Combat, Cobra, QBert, Pong, Centipede, Missile Command, and all those other games I spent so much time playing when I was a kid. Not to mention all of those Apple II games, and the arcade games (many of which were also Atari or Apple II games).
I don't know if I buy a realtime learning gameplaying system that's good enough on current hardware. Especially one that works out of the box on all games
I don't know if the article's just up and down or what, but the second time I tried to get to it, the thing came up just fine. In any case, it answers your question, because it's being developed for a specific game by the developers of said game, and it's an online RTS game.
would be if you could mod this "AI" into learning not only from the player, but also from the opposite players, and then have a bunch of "AI"'s fight against each other...
There was a Quake2 bot (for single player DM) that did have a setting which allowed it to adjust skill level according to how well you did against it. If you spawned multiple bots with this setting, though, they scaled extremely quickly.
Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it), playing against that bot for a couple of weeks lead to a lot of accusations once I started playing against real players online again.
So the question is, what's the point? If "real life" intruides on my gaming, I simply hit pause and come back to it later.
In the article it specifically states that this is an online real-time strategy game in which the world decays at a rate completely independant of how long you've been playing (in other words, the world decays on the server, not the client). There's no hitting pause, though you could log out of the game, but then the game goes on anyway.
It just seems to me like one of those things that'll make people go "wow!" for the first couple of minutes and then never use again.
I'm wondering whether or not this AI is running on the server or the client myself. It would seem ideal that you could just set the thing to go and log off, but that would take some pretty good servers to manage if there will ever be a lot of players. If it's on the client I have to wonder how much players could take advantage of it to 'enhance' the playing style used by the AI.
and don't forget that it even works on alien navigation and communication systems, even if your host computer has problems communicating with earth-born operating systems.
Overall, everyone I know (myself included) that's given XP a chance has liked it. The things that make it great are the details, and therefore tend to be small items that people don't think about until they go to another OS (even previous versions of Windows) and realise they're not there. Basically I look at it as Win2k with more compatibility and a lot of little feature improvements (like ID3v2 tags and other metadata as sortable columns in detail view, images placed in a folder used on the folder image in thumbnail view (irreplaceable for browsing ripped MP3s), the recently-used-apps column on the new start menu (plus pinned items), etc.).
If anyone wants to port Java application to.Net platform, wouldn't it make more sense to use J#?
The simple answer would be that J# wasn't hyped as much as C#, and overall probably won't be as well supported, and isn't part of an international standard. For the quick & easy switch J# is probably best, but some people may want to learn C#, and if they're already a Java developer than something like this may help them. Personally, I haven't really messed with J# much, but it would be the first place I looked if I wanted to convert Java code, even though I'm fairly familiar with C# and am aware that MS makes tools available to convert existing Java code to C#.
As for all these Frameworks; can any single one of you actually describe, in under 200 words, exactly what the.NET Framework is, what its comprised of, and why I should find it so exciting? It seems to me that even Microsoft arn't clear on this; certainly if they are, they're not doing a very good job of communicating this exciting new technology to me (I don't think I'm the only one, either).
Will anyone take the challenge, I wonder?
That's because of confusion between the.Net Framework and the '.Net vision' that MS is trying to market to consumers, developers, and managers.
To state it as simply as possible: the framework is an API that goes beyond Win32 to try to cover not only the basic client, client-server, and n-tier applications, but also things such as XML, web services, (which is in itself confusing for many people) and smart clients (in other words, it's buzz-word-compliant). Furthermore, it extends the inter-operability of COM, allowing different languages to work together in the same executable/library, as well as across executables/libraries. blah, blah, blah, etc, etc. This is why there's a website with a link to an overview. Though the easiest way is to actually look at the SDK, or the Shared source or Mono implementations, and/or the documentation for those items.
That would only lead to intentionally false moderation from the record labels, or anyone else that simply wanted to screw things up. If they can give out bad files, they can also give out bad votes.
One solution would be to design them with proper shielding and bypass capacitors on all connectors. That costs money, which the manufacturers will never spend unless they are forced to.
Alternatively: One solution would be to design the airplanes with proper shielding, knowing full well that passengers can and will use electronic devices without the crew having any way of finding them. That costs money, which the airlines will never spend unless they are force to.
Let's face it, the average passenger will go ahead and comply, turning off all of these devices. Someone that really wants the plane to go down, however, can carry an easily-concealed device which can pass through security checks with no problems (ie looks like something completely normal, and maybe it actually is), and just interfere with who knows how many airplane systems because the planes aren't designed properly to shield their electronics from the passenger and baggage compartments.
Ah, but will you JUMP [microsoft.com] to C# or use J# [microsoft.com]?
J#, most likely, for most of it, I'll rewrite any sections that have issues (if there are any) in whatever language makes sense for those portions. I've done a lot of work recently in C#, and I really like it, but I don't see the point in changing the language of existing code if I don't have to.
Also, is Mono trying to port all of.NET over, or just C# (and any other ECMA.NET languages)?
They're working on C# and the ECMA CLR (the language runtime) at the moment. They have plans for further work, including some of the portions of the.Net framework that aren't in the ECMA standard. The runtime loads the intermediate language, so working with languages other than C# is simply a matter of compiling to the IL. Mono points to JILC as an example and possible source for Java as a usable language for Mono. In theory I could do all of my development in VS.Net, though, if they get the IL compatible with the majority of MSIL, or at least the needed portions. Hand-tweaking IL doesn't sound like the best use of my time, but isn't something I'm opposed to for performance or compatibility reasons.
Did Netscape really just sit back? What would you do if you had a killer app, so Microsoft spent millions making a better one and bundled it with their monopoly OS? How do you survive?
Well, if you follow the Netscape plan of survival, you bundle as many client-side apps as you can together and ship it (Netscape 4). Then when people start complaining that it's too bloated, you spend a year or two trying to rewrite your code. When you can't get anything done, you open source it. This, of course, leaves everyone looking at the code in shock, so it takes a couple more years.
Now we're on what, Netscape 7, and it's to the point where the open-source version is preferred by most that are even choosing something other than IE or Opera.
it's buggy, slow, it's got all the hallmarks of a Java GUI application (the flickering, the multiple-redraw-even-if-I-don't-need-to),
Perhaps we see why Java isn't popular for consumer-level client applications? Personally, I've seen some fairly decent internal Java apps, but very few of them are actually cross-platform (regardless of what platform they were built on/for), and they do seem to be the rare occasion. In fact, a great many of them were only built because a manager felt that the developers were not taking advantage of this great new technology they kept hearing about, rather than because it was suited for the job at hand.
For those of you not familiar with Smalltalk, it is the grand-father all object oriented languages
Except Simula, which created the idea of the class and heavily influenced the developers of Smalltalk. Then we got C++ (after Smalltalk, of course), and the ease of transition from C to C++ pretty much buried everything else for serious (except in some niches where specialized languages filled the role) object-oriented programming. C++ (and C) survive quite well today despite numerous extensions, precisely because they were turned over to standards bodies, so anyone that wanted their software to be easily ported to multiple platforms could write to the standard and avoid the extensions. The only thing really preventing you from making compile-once-run-anywhere programs in C++ is the difference between the platforms (which is why Java runs on a VM, and why.Net can be boiled down to a VM to make it easier for some people to understand after years of making them understand Java).
Perhaps if Java was as great as Sun believes then a lack of Java in IE would have kept Netscape in the black. Windows XP comes with CD Burning software but Roxio and Ahead stay in business, it comes with a firewall but I wouldn't swear off of ZoneAlarm. Hell, most people can take any browser other than the one they use and find one tiny little thing that keeps them from switching - maybe Java would have kept people off of IE.
Roxio built the CD burning software that's in Windows XP. There are plenty of good reasons to buy real CD burning software for Windows XP, and I'm sure most of them were intentionally built that way buy Roxio. Of course, Microsoft can probably go in there later and make the software competetive with the real thing if they want to. The firewall's kind of in the same boat, with not much in the way of flexibility, but then a lot of commercial software firewalls are the same way.
As for Java, I downloaded Sun's VM last weekend because Microsoft stopped allowing downloads of the MS VM for WinXP (due to this very case). It doesn't work properly with the one or two sites I visit that actually use java (and to think, at least one of these sites went from asp to jsp, and took a massive performance hit doing it). Eventually I found a way to get the MS VM from Windows Update, primarily by installing an older VM that needed a security update.
Of course, my main concern is whether the compatibility problem was due to something Microsoft did (ie did the web page use some MS-specific code), or something actually wrong with the Sun VM I downloaded. I really have no way of knowing since it's not my code. I may never know unless Sun gets their way and breaks that site, meaning that either they'll have to suffer until Sun fixes their VM or the webmasters find the problem in their site's code and fix it.
One thing I do know, if Sun gets their way, I'm moving all of my Java code to.Net, and Ill do what I can to make it mono compatible. Luckily for me, there's not much Java code in my code base, and it's not hard to move it over.
Lastly, Java is far from dead, rocket surgeon. To extend your inane comparison, it's like Michael Skakel being found guilty after the victim walks into the court and says "Hey, uhh, I'm not dead!".
Or even better, if they sentenced him, and, say in a year, she walked in and said that. Then the court drags him out of his cell and sentences him to another 20 years for killing her. Microsoft and Sun already settled this case. Sun just found a new angle from which to attack it after they realized that the settlement wasn't quite what they were looking for (Microsoft says, 'ok, we can't ship our Java, we'll not ship any Java'; Sun says, 'shit, thats worse than them shipping their own Java').
If they advertise iDVD's DVD-burning capabilities as part of the OS (which they do, you can check their OS X site yourself), they should permit hardware developers to add support for their hardware to the software. Once Microsoft has DVD-burning support built into Windows XP, the hardware developers will simply see one more advantage on that side that they won't get on Apple's OS, because they have to compete with Apple.
The best part, though, is that Apple's buying these drives, which sell for less than $350 retail, slapping their brand name on them, and selling them, with the purchase of a system, for $450. So, even if they bought them at the high retail price they'd be making $100 on each drive they sold, and close to $200 per drive if they were getting them at low retail price.
Sure there has. I used to have a special edition of some CD-burning software, I forget what it was called, but it came free with the drive and would only work with that drive.
I had OCR software that came free with a scanner and only worked with that scanner.
Apple's motives here are clean, and correct. Anyone who thinks they're entitled to iDVD without buying the Apple hardware is a flat-out thief.
iDVD isn't distributed with the drives, though, unlike the items you mentioned. iDVD is distributed with OS X, with any Mac you purchase, regardless of whether or not it has an Apple branded DVD-writing drive in it. DVD-burning with iDVD is advertised as a feature of OS X.
The mistake they made, which is what I think he's referring to, was in distributing the software with the operating system, instead of with the drives. The software is distributed with OS X or available from Apple, without having to purchase a DVD writer from Apple. If they had wanted to enforce this restriction, they simply would've only included the software with the hardware, and not shipped it with computers that didn't have the drives, or copies of the OS on shelves.
iDVD is a great FREE tool for CD authoring, better than many EXPENSIVE tools out there. Apple didn't write it just to be nice, they wrote it to sell DVD burners.
and to add another item to the list of things OS X supports: DVD Burning
Their users then hyped this up so much that MS will be adding DVD burning support to Windows XP. Of course, if you buy a DVD writer that supports the OS you normally get software that does the job, but the update to XP will give you baseline support for doing it anyway. Apparently now we find out that Apple only supports using the OS-bundled application with their hardware. Really I don't see a problem with this until they tell other developers that developing support for more hardware is illegal. Making their operating system and software more powerful is against the law. Spending money to support their platform is not allowed. Making iDVD (and OS X) a better, more valuable product is against the rules.
It's the same old story, the DMCA is used to stop the use or development of technology that would compete with that of the original corporation
It's not even about competing with the corporation, it's about extending the corporation's software to support the hardware being sold. It's like MS saying that hardware developers can't offer a patch to allow their CD (or DVD) writers to function with XP's integrated CD burning. The only real difference is that Apple sells DVD-writers and MS does not.
The cpp file could be stored in some flat XML/HTML format as long as each view knows how to display it for each person, is all that matters.
I agree up until that point. There should be no need to change the existing cpp format, the editor should be able to handle this on it's own with the existing un-marked-up text. Maybe it's just me, but I don't get it when the damned thing can be colour-coded, outlined, syntax errors underlined, and on and on, but the editor can't simply strip white space when it saves the file and then add spaces (and/or tabs, breaks, etc) according to user settings when it's loaded. Someone invariably doesn't indent any of their code or is completely inconsistent throughout their code and I end up having to read it. Bleh, maybe I'll just work on it to figure out why it's not already done in VS, considering how many things it already does.
Slashdot Mirror
I played CGA solitaire and gin games. I played monochrome adventure games. I was ecstatic about switching to VGA from EGA. My first modem was older than the majority of the current Slashdot readers.
;) Or you just realize after a while that you don't finish every game you buy and some games get far more play time than others (hell I've been playing TFC what 3-4 years now?)
and I've gone from Voodoo2 SLI to TNT2Ultra to GeForce 256SDR to GeForce2GTS, but then I stopped spending so much money. Similarly I spent quite a bit of time on a 14.4 modem (we had modems long before that, but no ISP, the modem was used primarily for school stuff), then the 28.8, then the 33.6, but we got cable by the time 56K became the standard. Every time I get a faster video card I crank the resolution up on the games a little more. Quake2 still looks pretty good at 1600x1200.
This sort of thing doesn't happen anymore, as far as I can tell. Pretty graphics are a given, and sound is no longer optional; nor is it done with beeps or even MIDI.
It doesn't happen for you, that's the difference. I've gone through so many sound cards in the last few years that most people think I'm insane. Now I'm just pissed that Creative Labs is really the only well supported sound card manufacturer when it comes to playing games. Anyone that builds anything better and actively targets gamers gets sued into bankruptcy by them.
I miss the days of waiting for the Next Big Thing or the next Duke Nukem or for the Police Quest III strategy guide to hit the shelves.
Some people have been waiting for the next Duke Nukem since they finished Duke3d, and they're still waiting (and the devs still say they're working on it). A lot of people are waiting for Doom 3, TF2, Unreal 2, Half-Life 2 (which isn't even in development afaik), and so on. Diablo 2, WarCraft 3, NWN, and so on were all waited on by many people.
Personally, I've noticed that my upgrade cycle gets longer and I see less reason to upgrade every time around, and I take a more cynical view on the next big game coming down the pipe every time around. However, I'm not going to fool myself by thinking that other people aren't still having that urge to buy things as soon as they hit the shelves. The rest of us have just gotten used to it and suppressed it
Pull out cart, blow on connector, put it in slot. If you didn't it had a good chance of not working at all or the colors would be screwed up, etc.
The fact that you were blowing on them only added to the problem (the moisture attracts more dust). Some of my friends had the exact same problem with their 2600s. The biggest problem I had with my NES was that sometimes the cartridge had to be in just the right place before you pushed it down, and eventually the thing just didn't want to stay down at all.
I was born in 78 and by the time I was 5 or 6 I spent most of my time playing Atari games. We didn't have an NES until around 87, so while I still think of NES games as being classics, the Atari games were definitely classics as well. Donkey Kong, Pac Man, Combat, Cobra, QBert, Pong, Centipede, Missile Command, and all those other games I spent so much time playing when I was a kid. Not to mention all of those Apple II games, and the arcade games (many of which were also Atari or Apple II games).
I don't know if I buy a realtime learning gameplaying system that's good enough on current hardware. Especially one that works out of the box on all games
I don't know if the article's just up and down or what, but the second time I tried to get to it, the thing came up just fine. In any case, it answers your question, because it's being developed for a specific game by the developers of said game, and it's an online RTS game.
would be if you could mod this "AI" into learning not only from the player, but also from the opposite players, and then have a bunch of "AI"'s fight against each other...
There was a Quake2 bot (for single player DM) that did have a setting which allowed it to adjust skill level according to how well you did against it. If you spawned multiple bots with this setting, though, they scaled extremely quickly.
Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it), playing against that bot for a couple of weeks lead to a lot of accusations once I started playing against real players online again.
So the question is, what's the point? If "real life" intruides on my gaming, I simply hit pause and come back to it later.
In the article it specifically states that this is an online real-time strategy game in which the world decays at a rate completely independant of how long you've been playing (in other words, the world decays on the server, not the client). There's no hitting pause, though you could log out of the game, but then the game goes on anyway.
It just seems to me like one of those things that'll make people go "wow!" for the first couple of minutes and then never use again.
I'm wondering whether or not this AI is running on the server or the client myself. It would seem ideal that you could just set the thing to go and log off, but that would take some pretty good servers to manage if there will ever be a lot of players. If it's on the client I have to wonder how much players could take advantage of it to 'enhance' the playing style used by the AI.
and don't forget that it even works on alien navigation and communication systems, even if your host computer has problems communicating with earth-born operating systems.
Overall, everyone I know (myself included) that's given XP a chance has liked it. The things that make it great are the details, and therefore tend to be small items that people don't think about until they go to another OS (even previous versions of Windows) and realise they're not there. Basically I look at it as Win2k with more compatibility and a lot of little feature improvements (like ID3v2 tags and other metadata as sortable columns in detail view, images placed in a folder used on the folder image in thumbnail view (irreplaceable for browsing ripped MP3s), the recently-used-apps column on the new start menu (plus pinned items), etc.).
If anyone wants to port Java application to .Net platform, wouldn't it make more sense to use J#?
The simple answer would be that J# wasn't hyped as much as C#, and overall probably won't be as well supported, and isn't part of an international standard. For the quick & easy switch J# is probably best, but some people may want to learn C#, and if they're already a Java developer than something like this may help them. Personally, I haven't really messed with J# much, but it would be the first place I looked if I wanted to convert Java code, even though I'm fairly familiar with C# and am aware that MS makes tools available to convert existing Java code to C#.
As for all these Frameworks; can any single one of you actually describe, in under 200 words, exactly what the .NET Framework is, what its comprised of, and why I should find it so exciting? It seems to me that even Microsoft arn't clear on this; certainly if they are, they're not doing a very good job of communicating this exciting new technology to me (I don't think I'm the only one, either).
.Net Framework and the '.Net vision' that MS is trying to market to consumers, developers, and managers.
Will anyone take the challenge, I wonder?
That's because of confusion between the
To state it as simply as possible: the framework is an API that goes beyond Win32 to try to cover not only the basic client, client-server, and n-tier applications, but also things such as XML, web services, (which is in itself confusing for many people) and smart clients (in other words, it's buzz-word-compliant). Furthermore, it extends the inter-operability of COM, allowing different languages to work together in the same executable/library, as well as across executables/libraries. blah, blah, blah, etc, etc. This is why there's a website with a link to an overview. Though the easiest way is to actually look at the SDK, or the Shared source or Mono implementations, and/or the documentation for those items.
That would only lead to intentionally false moderation from the record labels, or anyone else that simply wanted to screw things up. If they can give out bad files, they can also give out bad votes.
One solution would be to design them with proper shielding and bypass capacitors on all connectors. That costs money, which the manufacturers will never spend unless they are forced to.
Alternatively:
One solution would be to design the airplanes with proper shielding, knowing full well that passengers can and will use electronic devices without the crew having any way of finding them. That costs money, which the airlines will never spend unless they are force to.
Let's face it, the average passenger will go ahead and comply, turning off all of these devices. Someone that really wants the plane to go down, however, can carry an easily-concealed device which can pass through security checks with no problems (ie looks like something completely normal, and maybe it actually is), and just interfere with who knows how many airplane systems because the planes aren't designed properly to shield their electronics from the passenger and baggage compartments.
Damn yanks are polluting the English language. If I hear the word herb pronounced with a silent h again, I'll begin the war myself.
If you want the language back come get it, and stop calling everyone in the US yankees. Those of us outside New England aren't very fond of yanks.
Ah, but will you JUMP [microsoft.com] to C# or use J# [microsoft.com]?
.NET over, or just C# (and any other ECMA .NET languages)?
.Net framework that aren't in the ECMA standard. The runtime loads the intermediate language, so working with languages other than C# is simply a matter of compiling to the IL. Mono points to JILC as an example and possible source for Java as a usable language for Mono. In theory I could do all of my development in VS.Net, though, if they get the IL compatible with the majority of MSIL, or at least the needed portions. Hand-tweaking IL doesn't sound like the best use of my time, but isn't something I'm opposed to for performance or compatibility reasons.
J#, most likely, for most of it, I'll rewrite any sections that have issues (if there are any) in whatever language makes sense for those portions. I've done a lot of work recently in C#, and I really like it, but I don't see the point in changing the language of existing code if I don't have to.
Also, is Mono trying to port all of
They're working on C# and the ECMA CLR (the language runtime) at the moment. They have plans for further work, including some of the portions of the
Did Netscape really just sit back?
What would you do if you had a killer app, so Microsoft spent millions making a better one and bundled it with their monopoly OS? How do you survive?
Well, if you follow the Netscape plan of survival, you bundle as many client-side apps as you can together and ship it (Netscape 4). Then when people start complaining that it's too bloated, you spend a year or two trying to rewrite your code. When you can't get anything done, you open source it. This, of course, leaves everyone looking at the code in shock, so it takes a couple more years.
Now we're on what, Netscape 7, and it's to the point where the open-source version is preferred by most that are even choosing something other than IE or Opera.
it's buggy, slow, it's got all the hallmarks of a Java GUI application (the flickering, the multiple-redraw-even-if-I-don't-need-to),
Perhaps we see why Java isn't popular for consumer-level client applications? Personally, I've seen some fairly decent internal Java apps, but very few of them are actually cross-platform (regardless of what platform they were built on/for), and they do seem to be the rare occasion. In fact, a great many of them were only built because a manager felt that the developers were not taking advantage of this great new technology they kept hearing about, rather than because it was suited for the job at hand.
For those of you not familiar with Smalltalk, it is the grand-father all object oriented languages
.Net can be boiled down to a VM to make it easier for some people to understand after years of making them understand Java).
Except Simula, which created the idea of the class and heavily influenced the developers of Smalltalk. Then we got C++ (after Smalltalk, of course), and the ease of transition from C to C++ pretty much buried everything else for serious (except in some niches where specialized languages filled the role) object-oriented programming. C++ (and C) survive quite well today despite numerous extensions, precisely because they were turned over to standards bodies, so anyone that wanted their software to be easily ported to multiple platforms could write to the standard and avoid the extensions. The only thing really preventing you from making compile-once-run-anywhere programs in C++ is the difference between the platforms (which is why Java runs on a VM, and why
Perhaps if Java was as great as Sun believes then a lack of Java in IE would have kept Netscape in the black. Windows XP comes with CD Burning software but Roxio and Ahead stay in business, it comes with a firewall but I wouldn't swear off of ZoneAlarm. Hell, most people can take any browser other than the one they use and find one tiny little thing that keeps them from switching - maybe Java would have kept people off of IE.
.Net, and Ill do what I can to make it mono compatible. Luckily for me, there's not much Java code in my code base, and it's not hard to move it over.
Roxio built the CD burning software that's in Windows XP. There are plenty of good reasons to buy real CD burning software for Windows XP, and I'm sure most of them were intentionally built that way buy Roxio. Of course, Microsoft can probably go in there later and make the software competetive with the real thing if they want to. The firewall's kind of in the same boat, with not much in the way of flexibility, but then a lot of commercial software firewalls are the same way.
As for Java, I downloaded Sun's VM last weekend because Microsoft stopped allowing downloads of the MS VM for WinXP (due to this very case). It doesn't work properly with the one or two sites I visit that actually use java (and to think, at least one of these sites went from asp to jsp, and took a massive performance hit doing it). Eventually I found a way to get the MS VM from Windows Update, primarily by installing an older VM that needed a security update.
Of course, my main concern is whether the compatibility problem was due to something Microsoft did (ie did the web page use some MS-specific code), or something actually wrong with the Sun VM I downloaded. I really have no way of knowing since it's not my code. I may never know unless Sun gets their way and breaks that site, meaning that either they'll have to suffer until Sun fixes their VM or the webmasters find the problem in their site's code and fix it.
One thing I do know, if Sun gets their way, I'm moving all of my Java code to
Lastly, Java is far from dead, rocket surgeon. To extend your inane comparison, it's like Michael Skakel being found guilty after the victim walks into the court and says "Hey, uhh, I'm not dead!".
Or even better, if they sentenced him, and, say in a year, she walked in and said that. Then the court drags him out of his cell and sentences him to another 20 years for killing her. Microsoft and Sun already settled this case. Sun just found a new angle from which to attack it after they realized that the settlement wasn't quite what they were looking for (Microsoft says, 'ok, we can't ship our Java, we'll not ship any Java'; Sun says, 'shit, thats worse than them shipping their own Java').
If they advertise iDVD's DVD-burning capabilities as part of the OS (which they do, you can check their OS X site yourself), they should permit hardware developers to add support for their hardware to the software. Once Microsoft has DVD-burning support built into Windows XP, the hardware developers will simply see one more advantage on that side that they won't get on Apple's OS, because they have to compete with Apple.
The best part, though, is that Apple's buying these drives, which sell for less than $350 retail, slapping their brand name on them, and selling them, with the purchase of a system, for $450. So, even if they bought them at the high retail price they'd be making $100 on each drive they sold, and close to $200 per drive if they were getting them at low retail price.
Sure there has. I used to have a special edition of some CD-burning software, I forget what it was called, but it came free with the drive and would only work with that drive.
I had OCR software that came free with a scanner and only worked with that scanner.
Apple's motives here are clean, and correct. Anyone who thinks they're entitled to iDVD without buying the Apple hardware is a flat-out thief.
iDVD isn't distributed with the drives, though, unlike the items you mentioned. iDVD is distributed with OS X, with any Mac you purchase, regardless of whether or not it has an Apple branded DVD-writing drive in it. DVD-burning with iDVD is advertised as a feature of OS X.
The mistake they made, which is what I think he's referring to, was in distributing the software with the operating system, instead of with the drives. The software is distributed with OS X or available from Apple, without having to purchase a DVD writer from Apple. If they had wanted to enforce this restriction, they simply would've only included the software with the hardware, and not shipped it with computers that didn't have the drives, or copies of the OS on shelves.
iDVD is a great FREE tool for CD authoring, better than many EXPENSIVE tools out there. Apple didn't write it just to be nice, they wrote it to sell DVD burners.
and to add another item to the list of things OS X supports: DVD Burning
Their users then hyped this up so much that MS will be adding DVD burning support to Windows XP. Of course, if you buy a DVD writer that supports the OS you normally get software that does the job, but the update to XP will give you baseline support for doing it anyway. Apparently now we find out that Apple only supports using the OS-bundled application with their hardware. Really I don't see a problem with this until they tell other developers that developing support for more hardware is illegal. Making their operating system and software more powerful is against the law. Spending money to support their platform is not allowed. Making iDVD (and OS X) a better, more valuable product is against the rules.
It's the same old story, the DMCA is used to stop the use or development of technology that would compete with that of the original corporation
It's not even about competing with the corporation, it's about extending the corporation's software to support the hardware being sold. It's like MS saying that hardware developers can't offer a patch to allow their CD (or DVD) writers to function with XP's integrated CD burning. The only real difference is that Apple sells DVD-writers and MS does not.
The cpp file could be stored in some flat XML/HTML format as long as each view knows how to display it for each person, is all that matters.
I agree up until that point. There should be no need to change the existing cpp format, the editor should be able to handle this on it's own with the existing un-marked-up text. Maybe it's just me, but I don't get it when the damned thing can be colour-coded, outlined, syntax errors underlined, and on and on, but the editor can't simply strip white space when it saves the file and then add spaces (and/or tabs, breaks, etc) according to user settings when it's loaded. Someone invariably doesn't indent any of their code or is completely inconsistent throughout their code and I end up having to read it. Bleh, maybe I'll just work on it to figure out why it's not already done in VS, considering how many things it already does.