> Nope. The founder of WordPerfect wrote a history of the company which is available online. At no point did he ever trust Microsoft or Bill Gates, nor did he believe that "OS/2 was the future"
Well, according to that history he is 1. not the founder of WP, and 2. he did want OS/2 to become the future and not Windows. You are right that he did not believe in what MS was saying, but for example in the partwhere he talks about the secret meeting with IBM, he says he hoped and really wanted to believe that it was the future.
He is also pretty clear about them simply having missed the boat with regards to WIndows 3.0 and started development too late. On the other hand, their windows version seems to have been announced even before win3.0 was released.
> My take is that WordPerfect was the king of DOS assembly programming and was always on top of the heap because of the sheer amount of functionality they could cram into 640K.
There is definitely some truth in that.
> They simply had no clue how or desire to engineer a product for a more modern environment. (The terrible WP releases for Windows and OS/2 were also written in ASM.) They were hoping these GUIs were just a flash in the pan and everyone would go back to using DOS.
Well, they did develop a graphical version of WP 4 for the Amiga platform, which was a quite usable product also (imho the only GUI based version of WP before around WP 10 that is usable at all) . So I doubt they had no clue. It could quite be a factor in them not being enthousiastic about GUIs tho (while very usable, WP on the Amiga was not very succesfull commercially, just like the Amiga was not very succesfull outside of some niches it had filled)
By the time Windows 3.1 arrived, it was quite clear what was happening, if they really still believed it was a flash in the pan, they were simply completely blind.
> i dont even use it for PIM functions at all, so for me there is absoultly no need to get a palm.
Well, good argument, and good reason to not go for a palm. PIM is what the device is about, everything else is a bonus. A PPC seems to aim a lot more at what you seem to want from a palmtop/pocket device.
I've had a 505 myself as well, and have been pretty happy with it, but my expectations were quite different then yours. I did use it a lot together with a bluetooth card and gprs phone for webbrowsing and email, but I never expected serious multimedia from it (eventho I did get ti to play movies, but audio is nogo)
What it did have over the PPC devices at the time were battery life and weight.
At any rate, PalmOS 5 allows one to get around many of the limitations found in oder versions, and runs on much more powerfull hardware. That said, it is a hybrid system, and has some quircks and uncleanness that remind me of macos 8 and 9 in many ways.
I walk around wiht a zire at the moment. Its mostly used for gathering and organizing information, from appointments and a cashbook to pictures (has a built-in camera) and notes, mail, manuals etc. The only game I ever seem to play on it is a remake of Lemmings. For the rest it doubles as mp3 and movie player for on the road (get some 14 hours of music or 4-5 hours of movie playback from it). That said, PIM is its main function still, and actually the only thing it is really good at.
That is true untill shortly after they had released 3.0
I have never seen or used Windows 1.x based applications.
There were a few non MS applications that ran on Windows 2.x versions, seem to remember some DTP application (Ventura Pagesetter or something?) that included a version of WIndows 2.x in its package, but no general purpose office software.
At the time WP did have a graphical version of their product (WP 4.2) running the Amiga platform (also a pretty usable product).
The flipside of this is that during this time, MS was telling developers that OS/2 was the thing, and hat Windows was indeed more a toy and a quick fix for those that really needed a GUI. Many developers did not see much of a point in developing for windows when a usable version of OS/2 seemed around the corner.
OS/2 1.1 appeared in 1989 or thereabout, and had Presentation Manager with an API that was supposed to make porting between Windows and OS/2 relatively easy (tho I never saw how, there is as much resemblence between the 2 as you'd expect from both being apis for displaying windows and window content, but there it also ends)
Looking back at that time (I was involved in OS/2 as IBM employee at the time) it seems to me that MS was mostly collecting experience with the technology and was already set on parting with IBM and OS/2 once they had the technology and experience they needed.
When they thought their codebase was good enough to buiild a usable desktop on, they relesed 3.0 Looks liek they were right, and it seems peopel were a lot more comfortable installing it on top of DOS then with switching to a new operating system (OS/2).
Also, unlike the earlier 2.x versions, it seemed like everyone had a copy of it or had gotten it installed (piracy seems to have been quite a factor in the succes of Windows 3.0 outside the bsuiness sector)
It included a lot of (at times usefull) applets, and was graphically appealing, especially to the standards of that time.
By the time of Windows 3.1 it was pretty clear where the desktop market had gone, and by that time there was little problem in finding developers that wanted to build Windows applications.
Windows 3.11 was a quick fix to get networking and optional and rather limited 32bit support (win32s)
An interesting sidestory is this win32s specification. At the time, MS and IBM had cross-licensed quite a bit of eachothers sourcecode, and as a result, IBM was able to include a slightly modified version of windows 3.0 and later 3.1 with their OS/2 product. This included win32s support. What followed seems like a cat and mouse game with regards to win32s versions.
When IBM included win32s support, MS changed the api a little bit and released a new version. After a little while, IBM would catch up and have support for this new version. Within days MS would find a trivial excuse for changing the win32s api again. This happened some 8 or so times from what I remember. They'd change the evrsion they included with their sdk, and many applications would be linked against a newer version of the library with a slightly different interface, hence incompatible with the win32s version that OS/2 would support. Applications would include the appropriate win32s library but that one was not compatible with OS/2s memory management.
At any rate, the message is that changing or hiding specifications is quite part of the game MS plays.
Money is the main motivator for Novell, so they are neither the good or the bad guys, they are a potentially usefull ally to others who are into open source software to make money, and to the open source community (whatever that may be)
And as can be seen, they can also be a pain in the ass if they happen to have an issue with you and think they can get some money out of it.
> In my experience though hardware (especially memory) and bandwidth come before a superoptimized software front-end & database.
Both are important, but I don't think they come before a well optimized front-end and database.
It is really simple. The less time your application needs before it can give an answer the lower your concurrency problems will be.
This will result in needing both less bandwidth (marginally) and smaller hardware.
A 'trick' I often employ is using caching in the front-end server. This means that every dynamic page is sent with cache control info, and will be cached at the frontend if appropriate. That way I don't haev to make 'statistics of the week' or whatever pages static, they will just be cached for the appropriate amount of time. It also means having a bit more memory in the frontend server, but it saves a lot of load on the backend.
You need as much bandwidth and memory as your application demands, and then a bit. But what your application demands is largely depending on how well it is optimized.
> POINT No.3 PPC is always ahead in hardware performance (I know that's not free, the point is that the OS is ahead in running on more roboust hardware).
Uh no, it means that PPC needs bigger hardware to work. Being faster does not make hardware more robust in any way (and often does the opposite when you are at the cutting edge of performance)
> POINT No.1: Almost all apps I use to have in PPC I've them now in Palm. Man... it's sad... the difference is huge in aspects such as graphical presentation, switching between apps, theme handling. I conclude that the OS is not really a multi-tasking environment.
Well, while you can argue that it should be (I'd agree also), PalmOS is not multitasking really. If you look at the hacks you need for something like a mediaplayer that runs in the background, it becomes very obvious. That said, you can develop applications that continue running in the background without ANY change to PalmOS. (for example, the RealOne player for PalmOS does that pretty well)
The graphical user interface? well, PPC does more beautiful presentation in quite a few cases, but honestly, I am not waiting for more beautiful, I am waiting for more usable, and so far PPC has not been evry convincing in that its 'beauty' in presentation actually results in better usability. It does use more cpu power and memory however. But then, this may be important to you, I can't judge that, but I rather have small simple and fast instead of beautifull.
> POINT No.2: The filesystem. That approach of everything being a pdb man... my grandmother would have changed that since v3 of the OS!!!! On the other side PPC uses a simple FAT filesystem,
For internal memory, PalmOS uses.pdb files. There are technical reasons for that, and they have a lot to do with PalmOS 4 and below, and little with PalmOS 5 and up. Since PalmOS 4 (or maybe even 3.5) PalmOS supports FAT (but only when used on an expansion card) From your comment I gather that you do not know why PalmOS is using the pdb format, but untill 5.x, it would have been impossible to replace it with a fat filesystem (you could replace it, but you'd end up with something very similar to.pdb format). This has a lot to do with how memory management works on PalmOS when running on a dragonball cpu (which has no mmu or anythign like it)
> any kid could upload an mp3 to the handheld. It's not that easy when you have to convert everything to a pdb format!!! POINT No.3 PPC is always ahead in hardware performance (I know that's not free, the point is that the OS is ahead in running on more roboust hardware).
If I want to copy an mp3 file to my palmtop (something which I do almost every day), I copy it to a memory card instead and stick that in my palmtop. No conversion required. Same applies for pictures and movies.
At any rate, just reread the post you replied to. I never said that PPC was not ahead of PalmOS, but I did say that you were clueless with regards to Sony and rewriting it almost entirely. For the functionality they offer they may have rewritten small parts here and there, but they can do most things without changing the OS at all (that wasn't true for PalmOS 4.x and below)
MS is ahead of Palm with regards to their OS, and since most people stick to builtin applications, it is not too helpfull for Palm that there are many more Palm apps available.
> Even with the new treo. MS is 1000 years ahead in the OS. I mean the OS sucks!!! Sony did a great job with their clie handhelds, I'm sure they had to rewrite the hole OS!!! If I'd be the owner of PalmOne, I'd try to make a mixture with embedded linux to improve their poor OS.
I'm sure the underlying sentiment is somewhat correct, but eh.. I am pretty sure that Sony did not rewruite the entire OS. Have you ever developed a Palm application or bvetter still, a hack for the OS? Because the impression you give is one of not knowing what you are talking about here.
> I dunno... blackdown is required by the OpenOffice ebuild. If one of the biggest cross-platform office products requires blackdown, I would say that blackdown is not being ignored.
1. You can build OpenOffice without JAVA, you just have to tell it about that (don't know about the ebuild, but with the FreeBSD ports collection you definitely can configure this) 2. When building with JAVA, OpenOffice doesn't require blackdown, it requires a working jre (Sun, IBM, Blackdown, doesn't matter)
Please read back the discussion, the post that started it was ignoring ANY alternative for SUN when it comes to JAVA.
> You also have forgotten that though MS has the "head start" in the System.Windows namespace, Mono has GTK#, which satisfies GUI/widget needs. Hell, that's even cross-platform. Mono also has more in the way of database connectivity, and Novell has contributed quite a bit to the Mono stack.
Uh, wether that is true or not is simply completely irrelevant for the argument we were having. It is not about if mono is better (better then what anyway) or more complete or whatever, the argument was that there is only 1 provider of JAVA technology, and 2 of C#, which by your own account is not true..
> Country X may have the level set at $20k/yr, while Country Y may have it set at $5k/yr for example
Of course, but the cost of living also differs between countries.
> It is accurate to say "among the highest living standards in the world" and not "the highest." 1st place in that contest, I believe, resides with the U.S... but since standard of living is such a subjective measurement, it again is futile to make direct and generalized comparisions. The only thing we can say is the ave citizen in the U.S. has more total wealth (including property) than the average citizen of any other major country. Note: this says nothing for how happy, content, etc... the lives of those wealthy people actualy are)
Oh, it is all pretty subjective, and the nuances as you note them are absolutely correct, but the argument still suggests that there are succesfull societies that are (partially) based on a socialist system, which was the point of my post.
Yep, if you intend to run a local X server then Irix is basicly the only way to go on that hardware. Tho I did get X to work locally on Linux, its slow and buggy. I only really need remote access to the machine, and xfree with xdm/kdm/whatever works fine of course when used remotely.
Its too bad because I agree that they used to make pretty cool stuff, and it is amazing how well a now over 10 years old Indy performs still (with r5k 180mhz cpu upgrade), and that was only an entry level workstation, and Irix had some pretty interesting features (oh, and I am rather fond of xfs, but thats available with Linux as well now of course)
Bein a student, your goal should be understanding things.
When you click together an application in Visual studio, that may be nice for verifying an understandign that you already got, but it is not going to give you much understanding in itself, unlike writing the same program by hand.
So, for you as student, writing by hand is a lot more effective in many cases because it actually helps accomplishing the goal.
> They don't owe you anything. They made great games and you got to play them as long as you wanted on your NES. If anything, you owe them more gratitude for making wonderful things. And if you don't like the price... just don't fucking buy it.
They do not owe me anythign directly, but they do owe something to society in general.
Law makers seem to have forgotten this, but putting it into the public domain after a set period of time (waaaay too long nowadays) is something that a publisher owes to society in exchange for the limited time monopoly on distribution that they get (normally called copyright, eventho that term is not entirely correct imho)
> and if a CD drive went out, you'd sure wished you bought the contract), and a double buttload to upgrade.
Well, sicne those were oem Toshiba 3x01 scsi drive, you coudl surely replace them without paying the insane price SGI wants for them. Alternatively, IBM's 2x and 4x scsi cd drives that were used for their PS/2 machines also work on SGI hardware.
(for those who wonder, yes, those are just standard scsi cd drives, and in theory an SGI machien will also work with other drives, but if you want to be able to boot a cd for installation, only a very few specific cd drives will work, basicly the toschiba 3x01 series and some but not all oem versions of it)
Reminds me.. I called them some 2 years ago to see if there would be any possibility to buy an Irix 6.5 license for a somewhat normal price as a hobbyist. The best offer they could make me was selling the full verison for the price of the upgrade version, which was at 1200 euro at that moment.
Its too bad, I have been a big fan of their MIPS based hardware, and when you went shopping for it, it wasn't that absurdly expensive, just don't bother to ask SGI directly. (note, I haven't dealt with them in 2 years, but the company looks like it underwent quite some changes, so this all may no longer be true)
It has a bit much of a simulator approach to the driving, but definitely a cool game (and one of the reasons for me to keep a ds machine around still) given you have a real good (analog) joystick or steering wheel (joypad wont do usually)
Slashdot Mirror
> I find it surprising that you'd preface a serious point with a cutesy laugh like that.
Hmm yeah, finding something funny and then giving a serious reply to it is a bad thing to do, and impossible to understand indeed.
(if you really want to know what I found funny, read at -1)
PS/2 with a ppro?
The last I heard was PS/2 XP machines with a pentium 60 (model 90 and 95 XP, and I guess there was a model 76/77 also)
After that they dropped the PS/2 line.
Also, I can see a ppro running at 66mhz, but I never saw Intel advertise one, 200 and 233mhz was more like it.
So... my guess is that you saw a pentium machine, not a pentium pro machine.
> Nope. The founder of WordPerfect wrote a history of the company which is available online. At no point did he ever trust Microsoft or Bill Gates, nor did he believe that "OS/2 was the future"
Well, according to that history he is 1. not the founder of WP, and 2. he did want OS/2 to become the future and not Windows. You are right that he did not believe in what MS was saying, but for example in the partwhere he talks about the secret meeting with IBM, he says he hoped and really wanted to believe that it was the future.
He is also pretty clear about them simply having missed the boat with regards to WIndows 3.0 and started development too late. On the other hand, their windows version seems to have been announced even before win3.0 was released.
> My take is that WordPerfect was the king of DOS assembly programming and was always on top of the heap because of the sheer amount of functionality they could cram into 640K.
There is definitely some truth in that.
> They simply had no clue how or desire to engineer a product for a more modern environment. (The terrible WP releases for Windows and OS/2 were also written in ASM.) They were hoping these GUIs were just a flash in the pan and everyone would go back to using DOS.
Well, they did develop a graphical version of WP 4 for the Amiga platform, which was a quite usable product also (imho the only GUI based version of WP before around WP 10 that is usable at all) . So I doubt they had no clue. It could quite be a factor in them not being enthousiastic about GUIs tho (while very usable, WP on the Amiga was not very succesfull commercially, just like the Amiga was not very succesfull outside of some niches it had filled)
By the time Windows 3.1 arrived, it was quite clear what was happening, if they really still believed it was a flash in the pan, they were simply completely blind.
> i dont even use it for PIM functions at all, so for me there is absoultly no need to get a palm.
Well, good argument, and good reason to not go for a palm. PIM is what the device is about, everything else is a bonus. A PPC seems to aim a lot more at what you seem to want from a palmtop/pocket device.
I've had a 505 myself as well, and have been pretty happy with it, but my expectations were quite different then yours. I did use it a lot together with a bluetooth card and gprs phone for webbrowsing and email, but I never expected serious multimedia from it (eventho I did get ti to play movies, but audio is nogo)
What it did have over the PPC devices at the time were battery life and weight.
At any rate, PalmOS 5 allows one to get around many of the limitations found in oder versions, and runs on much more powerfull hardware. That said, it is a hybrid system, and has some quircks and uncleanness that remind me of macos 8 and 9 in many ways.
I walk around wiht a zire at the moment. Its mostly used for gathering and organizing information, from appointments and a cashbook to pictures (has a built-in camera) and notes, mail, manuals etc. The only game I ever seem to play on it is a remake of Lemmings. For the rest it doubles as mp3 and movie player for on the road (get some 14 hours of music or 4-5 hours of movie playback from it). That said, PIM is its main function still, and actually the only thing it is really good at.
That is true untill shortly after they had released 3.0
I have never seen or used Windows 1.x based applications.
There were a few non MS applications that ran on Windows 2.x versions, seem to remember some DTP application (Ventura Pagesetter or something?) that included a version of WIndows 2.x in its package, but no general purpose office software.
At the time WP did have a graphical version of their product (WP 4.2) running the Amiga platform (also a pretty usable product).
The flipside of this is that during this time, MS was telling developers that OS/2 was the thing, and hat Windows was indeed more a toy and a quick fix for those that really needed a GUI. Many developers did not see much of a point in developing for windows when a usable version of OS/2 seemed around the corner.
OS/2 1.1 appeared in 1989 or thereabout, and had Presentation Manager with an API that was supposed to make porting between Windows and OS/2 relatively easy (tho I never saw how, there is as much resemblence between the 2 as you'd expect from both being apis for displaying windows and window content, but there it also ends)
Looking back at that time (I was involved in OS/2 as IBM employee at the time) it seems to me that MS was mostly collecting experience with the technology and was already set on parting with IBM and OS/2 once they had the technology and experience they needed.
When they thought their codebase was good enough to buiild a usable desktop on, they relesed 3.0
Looks liek they were right, and it seems peopel were a lot more comfortable installing it on top of DOS then with switching to a new operating system (OS/2).
Also, unlike the earlier 2.x versions, it seemed like everyone had a copy of it or had gotten it installed (piracy seems to have been quite a factor in the succes of Windows 3.0 outside the bsuiness sector)
It included a lot of (at times usefull) applets, and was graphically appealing, especially to the standards of that time.
By the time of Windows 3.1 it was pretty clear where the desktop market had gone, and by that time there was little problem in finding developers that wanted to build Windows applications.
Windows 3.11 was a quick fix to get networking and optional and rather limited 32bit support (win32s)
An interesting sidestory is this win32s specification. At the time, MS and IBM had cross-licensed quite a bit of eachothers sourcecode, and as a result, IBM was able to include a slightly modified version of windows 3.0 and later 3.1 with their OS/2 product. This included win32s support. What followed seems like a cat and mouse game with regards to win32s versions.
When IBM included win32s support, MS changed the api a little bit and released a new version. After a little while, IBM would catch up and have support for this new version. Within days MS would find a trivial excuse for changing the win32s api again. This happened some 8 or so times from what I remember. They'd change the evrsion they included with their sdk, and many applications would be linked against a newer version of the library with a slightly different interface, hence incompatible with the win32s version that OS/2 would support. Applications would include the appropriate win32s library but that one was not compatible with OS/2s memory management.
At any rate, the message is that changing or hiding specifications is quite part of the game MS plays.
> one really has to wonder exactly how IBM managed to fuck themselves.
In the same way that WP got screwed over. They tought they could trust MS to actually do what they were saying.
Hehe.
Money is the main motivator for Novell, so they are neither the good or the bad guys, they are a potentially usefull ally to others who are into open source software to make money, and to the open source community (whatever that may be)
And as can be seen, they can also be a pain in the ass if they happen to have an issue with you and think they can get some money out of it.
Well yes, but that doesn't make it a white laser still. You are right of course that you can make white light that way fo course.
A laser beam contains coherent lightwaves of a single frequency. I would like to know how you propose to make white light with that :)
Regardless, I think you are right that it will be a while ebfore we see a practical and anywhere enar affordable colour version of it.
> In my experience though hardware (especially memory) and bandwidth come before a superoptimized software front-end & database.
Both are important, but I don't think they come before a well optimized front-end and database.
It is really simple. The less time your application needs before it can give an answer the lower your concurrency problems will be.
This will result in needing both less bandwidth (marginally) and smaller hardware.
A 'trick' I often employ is using caching in the front-end server. This means that every dynamic page is sent with cache control info, and will be cached at the frontend if appropriate. That way I don't haev to make 'statistics of the week' or whatever pages static, they will just be cached for the appropriate amount of time. It also means having a bit more memory in the frontend server, but it saves a lot of load on the backend.
You need as much bandwidth and memory as your application demands, and then a bit. But what your application demands is largely depending on how well it is optimized.
Hehehe :) good morning :)
Hmm... replying to the wrong post there I guess?
Oh, and I forgot one thing..
> POINT No.3 PPC is always ahead in hardware performance (I know that's not free, the point is that the OS is ahead in running on more roboust hardware).
Uh no, it means that PPC needs bigger hardware to work. Being faster does not make hardware more robust in any way (and often does the opposite when you are at the cutting edge of performance)
> POINT No.1: Almost all apps I use to have in PPC I've them now in Palm. Man... it's sad... the difference is huge in aspects such as graphical presentation, switching between apps, theme handling. I conclude that the OS is not really a multi-tasking environment.
.pdb files. There are technical reasons for that, and they have a lot to do with PalmOS 4 and below, and little with PalmOS 5 and up. Since PalmOS 4 (or maybe even 3.5) PalmOS supports FAT (but only when used on an expansion card) From your comment I gather that you do not know why PalmOS is using the pdb format, but untill 5.x, it would have been impossible to replace it with a fat filesystem (you could replace it, but you'd end up with something very similar to .pdb format). This has a lot to do with how memory management works on PalmOS when running on a dragonball cpu (which has no mmu or anythign like it)
Well, while you can argue that it should be (I'd agree also), PalmOS is not multitasking really. If you look at the hacks you need for something like a mediaplayer that runs in the background, it becomes very obvious. That said, you can develop applications that continue running in the background without ANY change to PalmOS. (for example, the RealOne player for PalmOS does that pretty well)
The graphical user interface? well, PPC does more beautiful presentation in quite a few cases, but honestly, I am not waiting for more beautiful, I am waiting for more usable, and so far PPC has not been evry convincing in that its 'beauty' in presentation actually results in better usability. It does use more cpu power and memory however. But then, this may be important to you, I can't judge that, but I rather have small simple and fast instead of beautifull.
> POINT No.2: The filesystem. That approach of everything being a pdb man... my grandmother would have changed that since v3 of the OS!!!! On the other side PPC uses a simple FAT filesystem,
For internal memory, PalmOS uses
> any kid could upload an mp3 to the handheld. It's not that easy when you have to convert everything to a pdb format!!! POINT No.3 PPC is always ahead in hardware performance (I know that's not free, the point is that the OS is ahead in running on more roboust hardware).
If I want to copy an mp3 file to my palmtop (something which I do almost every day), I copy it to a memory card instead and stick that in my palmtop. No conversion required. Same applies for pictures and movies.
At any rate, just reread the post you replied to. I never said that PPC was not ahead of PalmOS, but I did say that you were clueless with regards to Sony and rewriting it almost entirely. For the functionality they offer they may have rewritten small parts here and there, but they can do most things without changing the OS at all (that wasn't true for PalmOS 4.x and below)
MS is ahead of Palm with regards to their OS, and since most people stick to builtin applications, it is not too helpfull for Palm that there are many more Palm apps available.
> Even with the new treo. MS is 1000 years ahead in the OS. I mean the OS sucks!!! Sony did a great job with their clie handhelds, I'm sure they had to rewrite the hole OS!!! If I'd be the owner of PalmOne, I'd try to make a mixture with embedded linux to improve their poor OS.
I'm sure the underlying sentiment is somewhat correct, but eh.. I am pretty sure that Sony did not rewruite the entire OS. Have you ever developed a Palm application or bvetter still, a hack for the OS? Because the impression you give is one of not knowing what you are talking about here.
> I dunno... blackdown is required by the OpenOffice ebuild. If one of the biggest cross-platform office products requires blackdown, I would say that blackdown is not being ignored.
1. You can build OpenOffice without JAVA, you just have to tell it about that (don't know about the ebuild, but with the FreeBSD ports collection you definitely can configure this)
2. When building with JAVA, OpenOffice doesn't require blackdown, it requires a working jre (Sun, IBM, Blackdown, doesn't matter)
Please read back the discussion, the post that started it was ignoring ANY alternative for SUN when it comes to JAVA.
> You also have forgotten that though MS has the "head start" in the System.Windows namespace, Mono has GTK#, which satisfies GUI/widget needs. Hell, that's even cross-platform. Mono also has more in the way of database connectivity, and Novell has contributed quite a bit to the Mono stack.
Uh, wether that is true or not is simply completely irrelevant for the argument we were having. It is not about if mono is better (better then what anyway) or more complete or whatever, the argument was that there is only 1 provider of JAVA technology, and 2 of C#, which by your own account is not true..
Please go read the entire discussion.
> Country X may have the level set at $20k/yr, while Country Y may have it set at $5k/yr for example
Of course, but the cost of living also differs between countries.
> It is accurate to say "among the highest living standards in the world" and not "the highest." 1st place in that contest, I believe, resides with the U.S... but since standard of living is such a subjective measurement, it again is futile to make direct and generalized comparisions. The only thing we can say is the ave citizen in the U.S. has more total wealth (including property) than the average citizen of any other major country. Note: this says nothing for how happy, content, etc... the lives of those wealthy people actualy are)
Oh, it is all pretty subjective, and the nuances as you note them are absolutely correct, but the argument still suggests that there are succesfull societies that are (partially) based on a socialist system, which was the point of my post.
Yep, if you intend to run a local X server then Irix is basicly the only way to go on that hardware. Tho I did get X to work locally on Linux, its slow and buggy. I only really need remote access to the machine, and xfree with xdm/kdm/whatever works fine of course when used remotely.
Its too bad because I agree that they used to make pretty cool stuff, and it is amazing how well a now over 10 years old Indy performs still (with r5k 180mhz cpu upgrade), and that was only an entry level workstation, and Irix had some pretty interesting features (oh, and I am rather fond of xfs, but thats available with Linux as well now of course)
Heh, I just switched to Linux on that machine.
One word: Ada
Bein a student, your goal should be understanding things.
When you click together an application in Visual studio, that may be nice for verifying an understandign that you already got, but it is not going to give you much understanding in itself, unlike writing the same program by hand.
So, for you as student, writing by hand is a lot more effective in many cases because it actually helps accomplishing the goal.
> They don't owe you anything. They made great games and you got to play them as long as you wanted on your NES. If anything, you owe them more gratitude for making wonderful things. And if you don't like the price... just don't fucking buy it.
They do not owe me anythign directly, but they do owe something to society in general.
Law makers seem to have forgotten this, but putting it into the public domain after a set period of time (waaaay too long nowadays) is something that a publisher owes to society in exchange for the limited time monopoly on distribution that they get (normally called copyright, eventho that term is not entirely correct imho)
> and if a CD drive went out, you'd sure wished you bought the contract), and a double buttload to upgrade.
Well, sicne those were oem Toshiba 3x01 scsi drive, you coudl surely replace them without paying the insane price SGI wants for them. Alternatively, IBM's 2x and 4x scsi cd drives that were used for their PS/2 machines also work on SGI hardware.
(for those who wonder, yes, those are just standard scsi cd drives, and in theory an SGI machien will also work with other drives, but if you want to be able to boot a cd for installation, only a very few specific cd drives will work, basicly the toschiba 3x01 series and some but not all oem versions of it)
Reminds me.. I called them some 2 years ago to see if there would be any possibility to buy an Irix 6.5 license for a somewhat normal price as a hobbyist. The best offer they could make me was selling the full verison for the price of the upgrade version, which was at 1200 euro at that moment.
Its too bad, I have been a big fan of their MIPS based hardware, and when you went shopping for it, it wasn't that absurdly expensive, just don't bother to ask SGI directly.
(note, I haven't dealt with them in 2 years, but the company looks like it underwent quite some changes, so this all may no longer be true)
It has a bit much of a simulator approach to the driving, but definitely a cool game (and one of the reasons for me to keep a ds machine around still) given you have a real good (analog) joystick or steering wheel (joypad wont do usually)