I was talking mainly about backend code on proper computers
And I was talking about frontend code on proper computers. You'll have trouble building an application using X Athena Widgets for a non-*n?x target, one using Win32 for a non-Windows target, or one using Cocoa for a non-macOS target. If Qt papers over these differences and isn't considered bloat, that's solved. But the difficulty of testing an application for a platform you don't own remains, particularly if you don't yet have enough capital to set up an in-house testing lab.
Microsoft hasn't quite decided if they want to be Apple or Google yet, they got the store-only S versions and the open versions.
Windows 10 S used to be a separate SKU, with a $50 paywall to upgrade to Windows 10 Pro. The structure has since changed to match Apple's on the Mac or Google's on Android: a PC can be put in or out of "S Mode", just as Gatekeeper on a Mac can be put in or out of "App Store only" mode or an Android phone can be put in or out of "Unknown sources off" mode.
I may not care that much to be part of the PC master race when the PS5/XB2 rolls around.
Let me know if PlayStation 5 and Xbox One's successor support community-built mods, whether for gameplay quality-of-life issues or for extending replay value. If popular shooters based on id Tech 2 (Quake and Half-Life) didn't have mod support, there wouldn't be a Team Fortress or Counter-Strike. Nor would there be DotA if Blizzard's Warcraft III weren't moddable. Console games expressly designed for moddability (LittleBigPlanet series, WarioWare DIY) tend to be few and far between.
for us nerds there's always Linux
Provided you can continue to find compatible hardware at a non-extortionate price. Some PCs continue to have serious compatibility problems (search the web for debian on asus t100ta for one example). PC manufacturers used to make low-cost Linux-compatible compact laptops but withdrew them in 2012 to pursue the higher-margin tablet market. Laptops sold for purpose, such as those by System76, tend to cost a lot more than the Windows laptops that one can find in Walmart or Best Buy, and a prospective buyer has no chance to try the screen, keyboard, and touchpad before buying one. It might become a bit easier once all new Chromebooks support Crostini (GNU in a container).
Microsoft is not *allowing* other browsers (not based on the "edge" engine).
I thought that was true only of Windows Store, and the big difference between Microsoft's strategies with Windows 10 on ARM and Windows RT (Windows 8 on ARM) was that Microsoft was allowing users to install applications from outside the Store.
Why isn't that a case of "feed it to the right (cross) compiler toolchain and done"?
Chromium (and hence Google Chrome) includes a dynamic recompiler for JavaScript and WebAssembly code. If you have a dynamic recompiler that generates x86-64 code, recompiling it for AArch64 will generate a dynamic cross-compiler that still generates x86-64 code, which isn't quite as useful.
Memory protection, register use, and other application binary interface (ABI) aspects work differently in different operating systems for the same instruction set. Thus dynamic recompilation engines need to be tuned to each ABI, which in practice means each (instruction set, operating system) pair.
In addition, I suspect that ARM devices are more likely than x86-64 devices to ship in S Mode, which bans all browsers other than Edge and other EdgeHTML wrappers. Though Microsoft has since stopped enforcing a paywall for turning S Mode off, the situation could still prove confusing to users of ARM-powered PCs.
[For requiring photo ID to vote,] Does that make Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands (and many others) racist hell-holes?
That depends on a bunch of things. I suspect Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands do better than the United States on at least some of these factors:
- Whether these countries have functioning public transit systems to let citizens travel obtain ID and register to vote. The United States has the motor-voter law, allowing citizens to register when they obtain ID. But they must show up in person at a local branch of the state's Bureau of Motor Vehicles, and much of the USA has dysfunctional or nonexistent public transit. - How much money the ID authority charges for ID. - How easy it is for a citizen, particularly a poor citizen who lives in a region (state, province, Land, etc.) other than his or her birth region, to obtain the necessary documents to prove his or her identity to the ID authority. Someone who lives hundreds of miles (hundreds of kilometres) away from the county of birth might find it hard to get a duplicate birth certificate. The U.S. REAL ID Act requires someone who has changed names to produce certified copies of all marriage licenses to show a chain of name changes, which makes it more difficult for multiply divorced women to obtain ID. And unless you have a postpaid utility bill or line of credit in your name, you can't so easily prove state residency. - How easy it is to get time off from an employer to obtain ID and vote. Many U.S. states have no option to vote early or by mail unless the voter can prove being out of state on Election Day. Workers in low-end jobs often live paycheck to paycheck, with little or no paid leave, and fear being fired for "not being a team player" if they request time off for anything other than a verifiable medical emergency or any other legally protected reason.
Google Search for gop racist policy turned up at least three things. If these aren't enough, I can dig deeper.
First, Republicans favor voter photo ID laws, particularly in environments where the median black or Latino is far less likely to drive or have some other convenient means to travel to the local Bureau of Motor Vehicles branch to obtain an adequate ID. This is despite lack of verifiable evidence that voter fraud is more than negligible.
Second, Republicans are also fairly aggressive at redistricting to manufacture a majority in state legislatures and the House of Representatives. These lines have often been drawn in ways that dilute the vote of majority-minority neighborhoods.
Most *progams* only run on one architecture anyway but perhaps you've not heard of compile time options in code that allow you to use the same source code for multiple platforms.
If you have designed your application with a model-view-controller paradigm, you can reuse the model layer across multiple platforms. However, you cannot so easily reuse view code across Win32, Cocoa, X11, Android, and Chrome OS DOM platforms without a multi-platform framework such as Qt, and I assume Qt is one of the "frameworks that suck up huge volumes of memory" that you mention. And even if you cross-compile your application to a platform that you don't have, it's a bit harder to cross-test the responsiveness of a GUI application, such as to test the macOS and iOS ports of your application without owning a Mac and an iPhone or iPad.
As for games: grow up already. (sorry for that blunt comment)
How is someone employed as video game programmer (such as myself) expected to reply to this?
Well programming games is a different matter than playing them, I don't see a conflict here.
I asked because it sounds like you're calling our customers immature. Did I miss something?
I hope for you that you don't take your work home with you (o;
I work from home as a video game programmer but do not speak for my employer.
Sorry I can't say anything about streaming. I always thought that was either browser-based or using a dedicated device.
Web applications for streaming have to download a proprietary binary-only CDM into the browser's Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) sandbox. As I understand EME, each work has to be encrypted for the specific CDM through which it will be played, and not all CDMs are available for all browsers on all operating systems.
And if I don't give my Virtual Box internet access, I don't see how security is a problem anyway.
Let's say you are using a VM to contain a game, the browser approved by your streaming provider, or tax software in your VM. In order to play online, stream a movie, or e-file your tax return, you'll need to give your VM Internet access. Even if you are printing and mailing paper tax forms with a postal money order for the amount due as a substitute for e-filing, you'll still need to give your VM enough LAN access to connect to your network printer.
What about video calls from grandparents to kids and vice versa?
Back when the warez scene was distributing standard-definition movies using H.263-derived codecs (DivX or Xvid for downloads and Sorenson Spark for streams), the standard was a 90 minute movie in 700 MiB. That's about 1 Mbps. Modern codecs (H.264, VP8, AV1) can transmit SD video at comparable quality with even lower bitrates than that.
Family vacation uploads?
Backups can happen overnight. In fact, some metered ISPs don't run the meter overnight in order to encourage subscribers to shift usage to less congested hours.
Local sports (i.e. high school)?
The school corporation would buy for each high school a business class connection with sufficient upstream.
Instead of using lots of scripting languages and VM with frameworks that suck up huge volumes of memory and are so poorly written they require large amounts of CPU time to do very little, perhaps there should be a return to an emphasis on more effcient compiled languages that only use what resources they need at any given time.
With VMs:
Start $APP Now
Without VMs:
We're Sorry! $APP is not yet available for $PLATFORM. We apologize for the inconvenience. [System Requirements] To purchase a device that runs $APP: [Shop PCs] [Shop Mobile] To be notified when preorders for $APP on $PLATFORM become available: [Join $APP Ports Mailing List]
In an environment with "more efficient compiled languages" replacing VMs and big frameworks such as React or Qt, how would you recommend to bridge platform gaps?
places that don't have public transport or nice men driving Ubers
I'd rather use a ride sharing service.
Viol8's comment was referring to places where the Uber ride sharing service is not available. Or is Lyft in a lot of areas where Uber isn't? What am I missing?
it is far cheaper to just upgrade to a supported machine than it is to spend my time (or money employing somebody) to keep the operating system up to date for old hardware.
If you are distributing copies of an application to the public, and most of the public lack bleeding edge hardware, it can prove less expensive to distribute a version of the application designed for what the public owns than to distribute the new hardware along with each copy of the application. Case in point: PlayStation games still came out after the PlayStation 2 was released, and PlayStation 2 games still came out after the PlayStation 3 was released.
As for games: grow up already. (sorry for that blunt comment)
How is someone employed as video game programmer (such as myself) expected to reply to this?
Players for rented movies? I have no idea what kind of movies you rent that require a special player.
I can think of Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, and Google Play. With the death of Blockbuster,* streaming is the only rental left for movies recommended by your friends or by a reviewer that are too old for Redbox and which your local public library happens not to carry.
Last time I rented a movie it was on DVD and there are players for that (e.g. mpv, xine, vlc).
How well do these play Blu-ray Disc? Or are they for DVD only?
income tax: if you *really* need that and there's no web-based service
I think MacOS ships with some scripts that require that older version of Python, so it's really there to support the system, not user development.
Then it's an implementation detail of macOS, much as msvcrt.dll is on Windows. In any case, it weakens the claim that Apple ships an environment for running downloadable applications written in mainstream Python.
I still don't get why they didn't make the Python 3 interpreter backward-compatible with a switch at the top of the script.
Currently #!/usr/bin/env python launches the legacy (Python 2) interpreter if installed, and #!/usr/bin/env python3 launches the modern Python interpreter if installed. On Windows, the.py extension is associated with py.exe, a short program that reads the shebang line and execs the appropriate interpreter as defined in PEP 397.
I stand corrected: one can obtain recent Python for macOS the same way one obtains Python for Windows. However, that still doesn't mean developers can count on recent Python being shipped with macOS.
For all intensive purposes, the Ninth Circuit is no different from other circuits. While an extensive property, such as mass or number of rulings reversed per year, varies with an entity's size, an "intensive" property, such as density or fraction of rulings reversed, can be compared between smaller and larger entities.
Last I checked, the percentage of the Ninth Circuit's rulings that the Supreme Court reviews and ultimately reverses isn't that far out of line with other circuits. It's just that you hear about the Ninth so often because of its larger population.
"I'm not putting together a living room PC rig just for one game, and I'm not lugging my desktop between rooms or stringing destructive ground-loop-ridden HDMI cables around the house so I can play a game on my PC on my [big TV] in my living room." --adolf
"Nobody wants to attach their PC to their TV" --kamapuaa
"Who wants a computer in their living room?" --avandesande
BlueTooth, like many wireless controllers already are, and that work on mobile devices today.
Until Google changes Android's Bluetooth stack, causing it to cease to work with the controllers you own. For example, changes in Android 4.2 made the "Wiimote Controller" app stop working with "No route to host" error.
Slashdot Mirror
I was talking mainly about backend code on proper computers
And I was talking about frontend code on proper computers. You'll have trouble building an application using X Athena Widgets for a non-*n?x target, one using Win32 for a non-Windows target, or one using Cocoa for a non-macOS target. If Qt papers over these differences and isn't considered bloat, that's solved. But the difficulty of testing an application for a platform you don't own remains, particularly if you don't yet have enough capital to set up an in-house testing lab.
I wouldn't have thought too much of that [dynamic recompiler] code was OS specific.
A JIT engine needs to integrate more deeply with the memory management habits of an operating system than most other code. See my other reply.
Microsoft hasn't quite decided if they want to be Apple or Google yet, they got the store-only S versions and the open versions.
Windows 10 S used to be a separate SKU, with a $50 paywall to upgrade to Windows 10 Pro. The structure has since changed to match Apple's on the Mac or Google's on Android: a PC can be put in or out of "S Mode", just as Gatekeeper on a Mac can be put in or out of "App Store only" mode or an Android phone can be put in or out of "Unknown sources off" mode.
I may not care that much to be part of the PC master race when the PS5/XB2 rolls around.
Let me know if PlayStation 5 and Xbox One's successor support community-built mods, whether for gameplay quality-of-life issues or for extending replay value. If popular shooters based on id Tech 2 (Quake and Half-Life) didn't have mod support, there wouldn't be a Team Fortress or Counter-Strike. Nor would there be DotA if Blizzard's Warcraft III weren't moddable. Console games expressly designed for moddability (LittleBigPlanet series, WarioWare DIY) tend to be few and far between.
for us nerds there's always Linux
Provided you can continue to find compatible hardware at a non-extortionate price. Some PCs continue to have serious compatibility problems (search the web for debian on asus t100ta for one example). PC manufacturers used to make low-cost Linux-compatible compact laptops but withdrew them in 2012 to pursue the higher-margin tablet market. Laptops sold for purpose, such as those by System76, tend to cost a lot more than the Windows laptops that one can find in Walmart or Best Buy, and a prospective buyer has no chance to try the screen, keyboard, and touchpad before buying one. It might become a bit easier once all new Chromebooks support Crostini (GNU in a container).
Microsoft is not *allowing* other browsers (not based on the "edge" engine).
I thought that was true only of Windows Store, and the big difference between Microsoft's strategies with Windows 10 on ARM and Windows RT (Windows 8 on ARM) was that Microsoft was allowing users to install applications from outside the Store.
Why isn't that a case of "feed it to the right (cross) compiler toolchain and done"?
Chromium (and hence Google Chrome) includes a dynamic recompiler for JavaScript and WebAssembly code. If you have a dynamic recompiler that generates x86-64 code, recompiling it for AArch64 will generate a dynamic cross-compiler that still generates x86-64 code, which isn't quite as useful.
Memory protection, register use, and other application binary interface (ABI) aspects work differently in different operating systems for the same instruction set. Thus dynamic recompilation engines need to be tuned to each ABI, which in practice means each (instruction set, operating system) pair.
In addition, I suspect that ARM devices are more likely than x86-64 devices to ship in S Mode, which bans all browsers other than Edge and other EdgeHTML wrappers. Though Microsoft has since stopped enforcing a paywall for turning S Mode off, the situation could still prove confusing to users of ARM-powered PCs.
In a functioning one-party republic, citizens can still primary out an underperforming governor or state representative.
[For requiring photo ID to vote,] Does that make Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands (and many others) racist hell-holes?
That depends on a bunch of things. I suspect Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands do better than the United States on at least some of these factors:
- Whether these countries have functioning public transit systems to let citizens travel obtain ID and register to vote. The United States has the motor-voter law, allowing citizens to register when they obtain ID. But they must show up in person at a local branch of the state's Bureau of Motor Vehicles, and much of the USA has dysfunctional or nonexistent public transit.
- How much money the ID authority charges for ID.
- How easy it is for a citizen, particularly a poor citizen who lives in a region (state, province, Land, etc.) other than his or her birth region, to obtain the necessary documents to prove his or her identity to the ID authority. Someone who lives hundreds of miles (hundreds of kilometres) away from the county of birth might find it hard to get a duplicate birth certificate. The U.S. REAL ID Act requires someone who has changed names to produce certified copies of all marriage licenses to show a chain of name changes, which makes it more difficult for multiply divorced women to obtain ID. And unless you have a postpaid utility bill or line of credit in your name, you can't so easily prove state residency.
- How easy it is to get time off from an employer to obtain ID and vote. Many U.S. states have no option to vote early or by mail unless the voter can prove being out of state on Election Day. Workers in low-end jobs often live paycheck to paycheck, with little or no paid leave, and fear being fired for "not being a team player" if they request time off for anything other than a verifiable medical emergency or any other legally protected reason.
Google Search for gop racist policy turned up at least three things. If these aren't enough, I can dig deeper.
First, Republicans favor voter photo ID laws, particularly in environments where the median black or Latino is far less likely to drive or have some other convenient means to travel to the local Bureau of Motor Vehicles branch to obtain an adequate ID. This is despite lack of verifiable evidence that voter fraud is more than negligible.
Second, Republicans are also fairly aggressive at redistricting to manufacture a majority in state legislatures and the House of Representatives. These lines have often been drawn in ways that dilute the vote of majority-minority neighborhoods.
Third, Republicans have been using race-baiting dog whistles used by Lee Atwater and others to win votes.
Most *progams* only run on one architecture anyway but perhaps you've not heard of compile time options in code that allow you to use the same source code for multiple platforms.
If you have designed your application with a model-view-controller paradigm, you can reuse the model layer across multiple platforms. However, you cannot so easily reuse view code across Win32, Cocoa, X11, Android, and Chrome OS DOM platforms without a multi-platform framework such as Qt, and I assume Qt is one of the "frameworks that suck up huge volumes of memory" that you mention. And even if you cross-compile your application to a platform that you don't have, it's a bit harder to cross-test the responsiveness of a GUI application, such as to test the macOS and iOS ports of your application without owning a Mac and an iPhone or iPad.
As for games: grow up already. (sorry for that blunt comment)
How is someone employed as video game programmer (such as myself) expected to reply to this?
Well programming games is a different matter than playing them, I don't see a conflict here.
I asked because it sounds like you're calling our customers immature. Did I miss something?
I hope for you that you don't take your work home with you (o;
I work from home as a video game programmer but do not speak for my employer.
Sorry I can't say anything about streaming. I always thought that was either browser-based or using a dedicated device.
Web applications for streaming have to download a proprietary binary-only CDM into the browser's Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) sandbox. As I understand EME, each work has to be encrypted for the specific CDM through which it will be played, and not all CDMs are available for all browsers on all operating systems.
And if I don't give my Virtual Box internet access, I don't see how security is a problem anyway.
Let's say you are using a VM to contain a game, the browser approved by your streaming provider, or tax software in your VM. In order to play online, stream a movie, or e-file your tax return, you'll need to give your VM Internet access. Even if you are printing and mailing paper tax forms with a postal money order for the amount due as a substitute for e-filing, you'll still need to give your VM enough LAN access to connect to your network printer.
What about video calls from grandparents to kids and vice versa?
Back when the warez scene was distributing standard-definition movies using H.263-derived codecs (DivX or Xvid for downloads and Sorenson Spark for streams), the standard was a 90 minute movie in 700 MiB. That's about 1 Mbps. Modern codecs (H.264, VP8, AV1) can transmit SD video at comparable quality with even lower bitrates than that.
Family vacation uploads?
Backups can happen overnight. In fact, some metered ISPs don't run the meter overnight in order to encourage subscribers to shift usage to less congested hours.
Local sports (i.e. high school)?
The school corporation would buy for each high school a business class connection with sufficient upstream.
Instead of using lots of scripting languages and VM with frameworks that suck up huge volumes of memory and are so poorly written they require large amounts of CPU time to do very little, perhaps there should be a return to an emphasis on more effcient compiled languages that only use what resources they need at any given time.
With VMs:
Without VMs:
In an environment with "more efficient compiled languages" replacing VMs and big frameworks such as React or Qt, how would you recommend to bridge platform gaps?
places that don't have public transport or nice men driving Ubers
I'd rather use a ride sharing service.
Viol8's comment was referring to places where the Uber ride sharing service is not available. Or is Lyft in a lot of areas where Uber isn't? What am I missing?
If you work remotely, could you work remotely from a different city with a better ISP?
Are Charter and Comcast noticeably worse than satellite ISPs?
In the context of an article about a ruling by a Yank court, "First Amendment" means what the Yanks think it means.
it is far cheaper to just upgrade to a supported machine than it is to spend my time (or money employing somebody) to keep the operating system up to date for old hardware.
If you are distributing copies of an application to the public, and most of the public lack bleeding edge hardware, it can prove less expensive to distribute a version of the application designed for what the public owns than to distribute the new hardware along with each copy of the application. Case in point: PlayStation games still came out after the PlayStation 2 was released, and PlayStation 2 games still came out after the PlayStation 3 was released.
As for games: grow up already. (sorry for that blunt comment)
How is someone employed as video game programmer (such as myself) expected to reply to this?
Players for rented movies? I have no idea what kind of movies you rent that require a special player.
I can think of Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, and Google Play. With the death of Blockbuster,* streaming is the only rental left for movies recommended by your friends or by a reviewer that are too old for Redbox and which your local public library happens not to carry.
Last time I rented a movie it was on DVD and there are players for that (e.g. mpv, xine, vlc).
How well do these play Blu-ray Disc? Or are they for DVD only?
income tax: if you *really* need that and there's no web-based service
The web-based services use proprietary JavaScript and service as a software substitute.
you can keep a virtualized Windows 7 VM around
That will work for 14 more months. What should one buy 14 months later once extended support (that is, security updates) for Windows 7 ends?
* Apart from one Blockbuster store in Oregon, which I presume is operated to keep the trademark registration alive.
I think MacOS ships with some scripts that require that older version of Python, so it's really there to support the system, not user development.
Then it's an implementation detail of macOS, much as msvcrt.dll is on Windows. In any case, it weakens the claim that Apple ships an environment for running downloadable applications written in mainstream Python.
I still don't get why they didn't make the Python 3 interpreter backward-compatible with a switch at the top of the script.
Currently #!/usr/bin/env python launches the legacy (Python 2) interpreter if installed, and #!/usr/bin/env python3 launches the modern Python interpreter if installed. On Windows, the .py extension is associated with py.exe, a short program that reads the shebang line and execs the appropriate interpreter as defined in PEP 397.
> Python.org installer packages for macOS
I stand corrected: one can obtain recent Python for macOS the same way one obtains Python for Windows. However, that still doesn't mean developers can count on recent Python being shipped with macOS.
For all intensive purposes, the Ninth Circuit is no different from other circuits. While an extensive property, such as mass or number of rulings reversed per year, varies with an entity's size, an "intensive" property, such as density or fraction of rulings reversed, can be compared between smaller and larger entities.
Last I checked, the percentage of the Ninth Circuit's rulings that the Supreme Court reviews and ultimately reverses isn't that far out of line with other circuits. It's just that you hear about the Ninth so often because of its larger population.
TV is to close to the computer, so I ran an HDMI cable.
Not everybody's living quarters are arranged that way. For many, perhaps most, the desktop PC and the television are in separate rooms.
BlueTooth, like many wireless controllers already are, and that work on mobile devices today.
Until Google changes Android's Bluetooth stack, causing it to cease to work with the controllers you own. For example, changes in Android 4.2 made the "Wiimote Controller" app stop working with "No route to host" error.
The iPad absolutely is a computer, and like any computer can do anything you are capable of making it do.
So how Is it not true of any iPad, pro or otherwise?
Unless you jailbreak it or buy a Mac with which to install apps through Xcode, "anything you are capable of making it do" isn't much.