The value of their property is two-fold though - one way being the intrinsic value of the technology, in the improvement of the human way-of-life. The other is the value from the rights to restrict peoples usage of a technology based on current intellectual property laws.
If someone copies my setup (NOT my personal files, but the way my machine is configured) - have I lost anything? No, my machine still works just as well. But as soon as you start trying to formulate an industry around protecting the particular setup, even getting the government to restrict other people's ability to independantly develop the same setup, problems develop quickly.
Same with other forms of IP. The thing is that in today's age, it is *impossible* to protect most forms of intellectual property yourself, so the government plays a big role. And companies exploit this to claim so much of their daily process as intellectual property that the common good suffers.
except that the cable has a controller in it which controls everything, exposing each computer to the other as a slave device.
<ot>
Things like cable extenders are waaay out of spec, but the thing that really pisses me off is when they have gold-plated USB connectors and cables meant to 'exceed the spec' and then sell them for $40 marketing to people who want good sound quality from their USB speakers. USB systems (current 1.1 spec) usually average a bus error per week assuming all cables and devices are to spec - and it is completely digital. Whats a gold plated connector to do in a digital system with practically no error?
Pisses me off to see people ripping off consumers for being undereducated like that. USB cables should cost ~ $7 max. But slap some gold plating on the connector and sell it for $40.
It would require quite a bit of work - the current Transmeta chips have no concept of SMP, but also have the frontside bus and SDRAM controllers on-chip (basically, because their chip was so small they decided to just stuff it in there)
Re:The Author Doesn't Know What An OS is...
on
Is UNIX An OS?
·
· Score: 2
the windowing system is a program itself - programs which use the windowing systems are simply dependant on it (by this definition).
I think this definition is correct, that what people are arguing about is whether or not "Operating System" has grown in definition to encompass all the libraries distributed with the system.
don't forget about the $1 Mil deposit required. If your player results in CSS being cracked, you kiss it goodbye. Also you are given a player key, which you can also lose if your player becomes hacked (ie if they can turn off Macrovision), making all your customers only able to play previous DVDs.
The MAJC chip is not a java processor though - it was designed with emulating java in mind (things like lightning-quick thread switch in the case of a block).
While a java interpreter will be simpler for a platform based on the MAJC, it won't be native code to the chip - this isn't picoJava
How are you supposed to sell a game when the underlying system does not have any sort of dumb-user-interface for input devices (no way to set up mice except for editing arcane and underdocumented text files, no way to set up joysticks without downloading compiling and installing several programs which aren't readily apparent). Let alone this is an OpenGL game, and at the time only two cards were even supportable (let alone you would have to compile your own version of XFree 4.0 to get one of those supported cards working).
I would think if you want to promote a game, it should be less *work* to get it running. Perhaps if the game was possible for someone to set-up without a compiler, it would sell more copies.
Even the people I know who play on linux bought the windows version - it came out first and they knew it would work, without them learning how the guts of XFree86 work.
OOD is incredibly useful, but there are several types of projects which it fails for:
- projects which are one-shot, or which there is no interest in maintaining. For these, why do design at all? if it works enough for you to use, and you don't have to worry about adding features or fixing bugs other people have, just finish the damn thing and go home. Perl is great for this.
- projects in which the customer has no clue what they want. I've been using design principles for a while, my current customer has no earthly clue what they want, but definately hope that I can completely change everything around at the last minute when I show them a working program based on my own ideas of how it should be designed. They literally won't pay me to do design specs. The code is rapidly approaching 100k lines, and I have no idea how the massive 1 ton block of spaghetti will be maintained in the future. There are parts of an old program with 25-page-long routines pasted in, and I have been told if I edit those routines I will be fired on the spot.
- single-developer projects (or even two/three developer projects) don't really need OOD and documentation as much as team or multiple-team projects. It can still hit you hard right around 40-60k lines (depending just how good you are), when you realize that you don't remember how the whole thing works anymore. After about 80k lines, you will spend more time communicating how things work and bringing new developers up to speed than you will coding - basically you aren't done with the program and already you are maintaining it.
If you are writing small,simple pieces of software, OOD is a joke. The reason isn't that OOD doesn't scale down, it is because the problem is so simple you designed it in your head. The end product is so simple that you can look at it for five minutes and understand what is going on. But as soon as you can't think about all the issues someone will face in the project by looking at the problem, as soon as you can't be sure what steps to take to get from A to B, you need OOD.
Well good - once they raise the price to $28/disk and artists realize they are still only making a quarter per sale, maybe they'll be much more willing to try out online distribution.
I will not cry for the RIAA any more than I did for the dinosaurs - their time is up.
Unfortunately you have to leave protected mode to start Be (you are, after all, booting another operating system). Win ME no longer allows programs to enter real mode, nor does it allow booting to a command prompt. Basically a linux-over-windows/be-over-windows/*-over-windows install simply cannot work now.
Actually, the GeForce problem wasn't a driver issue at all, it was a power issue - the board eats power like no tomorrow. I suppose if you really wanted to blame someone you could blame AMD because their processor consumed more power, leaving less for peripherals like the vid card - but it was really a problem with the board and power supply.
All new drivers did is lower the bus speed the card operated at, so that it required less power.
I would seriously doubt things are non-user-friendly because of services-oriented marketing... they are non-user-friendly because that is what the authors want. UI's are like bandpass filters, and you can't get both the lows ("My First Computer"-type intuition of interface, point-and-drool) and the highs (being able to do practically anything you want with a piece of software with a single command line) with one pass.
So, being that the developers who wrote the software, who know the thing inside and out, who wrote it because they want to do EVERYTHING they can with their software _also_ write the user interface, guess which end they will shoot for?
Part of the coolness behind Mac OSX is that it would bring in developers who are much more concerned about exposing functionality to a user in a point-and-drool, intuitive way than making you able to do a single-line, search-and-replace of all files in a directory. They are taking years of extremely powerful code and figuring out how much of that power they can present to the user without the newbie's head exploding.
Should be quite fun to watch (MacOSX, not neccessarily the newbie's head exploding, although that could be cool too)
I personally have about 12 ICQ accounts by now - I generate a new one whenever their servers deadlock about my account for 12 hours because I'm logged out/on too often. My girlfriend had five accounts last time I checked, most of my friends have at least three. My mom has two, my grandmother has two.
As a matter of fact, I don't know anyone personally who has just _1_ ICQ account. Probably since if you have to reinstall ICQ you are screwed anyways - you don't have any of your contacts since ICQ is a client-based trust protocol, althought they can see you. At least with a new account you: -don't have to remember a password -don't have old people you removed from your list still seeing your presence online (and IP address).
As far as AOL submitting their open architecture design, it was horribly incomplete and more importantly - not implemented. AOL has had exactly zero percent participation in the IETF process, and basically submitted a quick draft proposal to help their Time-Warner merger case with the FCC. It met (by my estimates) about 50% of the IETF working group's requirements for a protocol, and would never be supported anyways because it only describes inter-server communication; no client communication.
Yes, but the statement from Time-Warner could be compared to saying that if they stopped the PGA tour, people would stop playing golf, or if they stopped tennis tournaments people would stop playing tennis. Some would stop playing these sports if they could no longer make a living off of it, but they won't die, we won't go into a recreational dark ages.
But even more than that, at least in my opinion the desire to create is what makes someone an artist - not their past creations, not their marketability or their worth in dollars. If someone loses the desire to create because they aren't getting paid, maybe they were never true artists in the first place.
Does this scare anyone else? Microsoft is releasing a console. Think about consoles.. have you ever played Super Mario Brothers 3.11? How about Tetris 98 SP2?
Micorosft is using off-the-shelf parts and modifying existing code to speed their way to market as well, which (as another poster pointed out) indicates they will probably reuse most of the existing windows and driver code as well in their new architecture, which will most probably lead to instability.
The company who can't release a decent product until 3.0 is releasing a console, something that can never be upgraded. Nobody has ever released a service pack for a console game, the only thing you can do is recall, and even then you hold out until your customers sue you.
I'll stick with a console by a company that has some experience, such as the Sega Dreamcast or the Sony PS2. Even Nintendo's vapour Dolphin platform sounds more appealing, and to be perfectly honest I hate Nintendo more than I have ever disliked Microsoft.
To all the companies basing their future generation games around the XBox - good luck! You better make your code portable with at least Windows.
The other reason code is usually not compiled like this is the dynamic nature of java - you cannot always be guaranteed that the classes a program uses are being allocated statically (i.e. that they aren't passing the class name as a string to the class loader to start them).
I personally have made many simple factories which return random objects supporting a certain interface, which were created solely by a name lookup in a hash table.
For instances like this, you really hurt trying to use a binary code compiler. Under some circumstances you can gather up all the code and say 'ok, you *will* be using all of this, so compile it.', in others you simply do not know what the classes you are executing are until runtime. For this reason a native binary compiler can never be fully java compliant, unless it also runs java code as well.
Because IRC is about the worst-designed protocol ever, and scales horrible. It also has no built in security, and lacks user accounts (meaning you can't tell if your friends are online unless they join a predetermined channel, or always keep their same nick.
Ever wonder why a network of 40+ efnet servers only handles a load of about 46k users?
Don't forget that they will each need to bring their own, personal player and display it on their own television - be sure to have them bring that to the gathering as well. Also, be very careful that the guests are watching their own television, and not letting their eyes wander to Joe's 50".
It would be very difficult writing a linux port to the transmeta chip, considering they refuse to give out instruction set details. The emulation of x86 is actually a hardware abstraction layer, the difference between the 300-400MHz chips coming out now and the 700MHz chips coming out later this year is not simply the clockspeed, or a few added instructions - there is a completely different architecture, requiring a different emulation layer but yeilding the same result - perfect execution of x86 code.
Slashdot Mirror
One-click:
"Hey Joe, put this on my tab"
Priceline:
"Hey Mr. Dealer, I'll buy that blue chevy from you *right now* for $14,000. I have the check right here, all you have to do is say yes."
The value of their property is two-fold though - one way being the intrinsic value of the technology, in the improvement of the human way-of-life. The other is the value from the rights to restrict peoples usage of a technology based on current intellectual property laws. If someone copies my setup (NOT my personal files, but the way my machine is configured) - have I lost anything? No, my machine still works just as well. But as soon as you start trying to formulate an industry around protecting the particular setup, even getting the government to restrict other people's ability to independantly develop the same setup, problems develop quickly. Same with other forms of IP. The thing is that in today's age, it is *impossible* to protect most forms of intellectual property yourself, so the government plays a big role. And companies exploit this to claim so much of their daily process as intellectual property that the common good suffers.
except that the cable has a controller in it which controls everything, exposing each computer to the other as a slave device.
<ot>
Things like cable extenders are waaay out of spec, but the thing that really pisses me off is when they have gold-plated USB connectors and cables meant to 'exceed the spec' and then sell them for $40 marketing to people who want good sound quality from their USB speakers. USB systems (current 1.1 spec) usually average a bus error per week assuming all cables and devices are to spec - and it is completely digital. Whats a gold plated connector to do in a digital system with practically no error?
Pisses me off to see people ripping off consumers for being undereducated like that. USB cables should cost ~ $7 max. But slap some gold plating on the connector and sell it for $40.
It would require quite a bit of work - the current Transmeta chips have no concept of SMP, but also have the frontside bus and SDRAM controllers on-chip (basically, because their chip was so small they decided to just stuff it in there)
the windowing system is a program itself - programs which use the windowing systems are simply dependant on it (by this definition).
I think this definition is correct, that what people are arguing about is whether or not "Operating System" has grown in definition to encompass all the libraries distributed with the system.
don't forget about the $1 Mil deposit required. If your player results in CSS being cracked, you kiss it goodbye. Also you are given a player key, which you can also lose if your player becomes hacked (ie if they can turn off Macrovision), making all your customers only able to play previous DVDs.
The MAJC chip is not a java processor though - it was designed with emulating java in mind (things like lightning-quick thread switch in the case of a block).
While a java interpreter will be simpler for a platform based on the MAJC, it won't be native code to the chip - this isn't picoJava
How are you supposed to sell a game when the underlying system does not have any sort of dumb-user-interface for input devices (no way to set up mice except for editing arcane and underdocumented text files, no way to set up joysticks without downloading compiling and installing several programs which aren't readily apparent). Let alone this is an OpenGL game, and at the time only two cards were even supportable (let alone you would have to compile your own version of XFree 4.0 to get one of those supported cards working).
I would think if you want to promote a game, it should be less *work* to get it running. Perhaps if the game was possible for someone to set-up without a compiler, it would sell more copies.
Even the people I know who play on linux bought the windows version - it came out first and they knew it would work, without them learning how the guts of XFree86 work.
OOD is incredibly useful, but there are several types of projects which it fails for:
- projects which are one-shot, or which there is no interest in maintaining. For these, why do design at all? if it works enough for you to use, and you don't have to worry about adding features or fixing bugs other people have, just finish the damn thing and go home. Perl is great for this.
- projects in which the customer has no clue what they want. I've been using design principles for a while, my current customer has no earthly clue what they want, but definately hope that I can completely change everything around at the last minute when I show them a working program based on my own ideas of how it should be designed. They literally won't pay me to do design specs. The code is rapidly approaching 100k lines, and I have no idea how the massive 1 ton block of spaghetti will be maintained in the future. There are parts of an old program with 25-page-long routines pasted in, and I have been told if I edit those routines I will be fired on the spot.
- single-developer projects (or even two/three developer projects) don't really need OOD and documentation as much as team or multiple-team projects. It can still hit you hard right around 40-60k lines (depending just how good you are), when you realize that you don't remember how the whole thing works anymore. After about 80k lines, you will spend more time communicating how things work and bringing new developers up to speed than you will coding - basically you aren't done with the program and already you are maintaining it.
If you are writing small,simple pieces of software, OOD is a joke. The reason isn't that OOD doesn't scale down, it is because the problem is so simple you designed it in your head. The end product is so simple that you can look at it for five minutes and understand what is going on. But as soon as you can't think about all the issues someone will face in the project by looking at the problem, as soon as you can't be sure what steps to take to get from A to B, you need OOD.
Well good - once they raise the price to $28/disk and artists realize they are still only making a quarter per sale, maybe they'll be much more willing to try out online distribution.
I will not cry for the RIAA any more than I did for the dinosaurs - their time is up.
Unfortunately you have to leave protected mode to start Be (you are, after all, booting another operating system). Win ME no longer allows programs to enter real mode, nor does it allow booting to a command prompt. Basically a linux-over-windows/be-over-windows/*-over-windows install simply cannot work now.
Actually, the GeForce problem wasn't a driver issue at all, it was a power issue - the board eats power like no tomorrow. I suppose if you really wanted to blame someone you could blame AMD because their processor consumed more power, leaving less for peripherals like the vid card - but it was really a problem with the board and power supply.
All new drivers did is lower the bus speed the card operated at, so that it required less power.
I would seriously doubt things are non-user-friendly because of services-oriented marketing... they are non-user-friendly because that is what the authors want. UI's are like bandpass filters, and you can't get both the lows ("My First Computer"-type intuition of interface, point-and-drool) and the highs (being able to do practically anything you want with a piece of software with a single command line) with one pass.
So, being that the developers who wrote the software, who know the thing inside and out, who wrote it because they want to do EVERYTHING they can with their software _also_ write the user interface, guess which end they will shoot for?
Part of the coolness behind Mac OSX is that it would bring in developers who are much more concerned about exposing functionality to a user in a point-and-drool, intuitive way than making you able to do a single-line, search-and-replace of all files in a directory. They are taking years of extremely powerful code and figuring out how much of that power they can present to the user without the newbie's head exploding.
Should be quite fun to watch (MacOSX, not neccessarily the newbie's head exploding, although that could be cool too)
I personally have about 12 ICQ accounts by now - I generate a new one whenever their servers deadlock about my account for 12 hours because I'm logged out/on too often. My girlfriend had five accounts last time I checked, most of my friends have at least three. My mom has two, my grandmother has two.
As a matter of fact, I don't know anyone personally who has just _1_ ICQ account. Probably since if you have to reinstall ICQ you are screwed anyways - you don't have any of your contacts since ICQ is a client-based trust protocol, althought they can see you. At least with a new account you:
-don't have to remember a password
-don't have old people you removed from your list still seeing your presence online (and IP address).
As far as AOL submitting their open architecture design, it was horribly incomplete and more importantly - not implemented. AOL has had exactly zero percent participation in the IETF process, and basically submitted a quick draft proposal to help their Time-Warner merger case with the FCC. It met (by my estimates) about 50% of the IETF working group's requirements for a protocol, and would never be supported anyways because it only describes inter-server communication; no client communication.
Yes, but the statement from Time-Warner could be compared to saying that if they stopped the PGA tour, people would stop playing golf, or if they stopped tennis tournaments people would stop playing tennis. Some would stop playing these sports if they could no longer make a living off of it, but they won't die, we won't go into a recreational dark ages.
But even more than that, at least in my opinion the desire to create is what makes someone an artist - not their past creations, not their marketability or their worth in dollars. If someone loses the desire to create because they aren't getting paid, maybe they were never true artists in the first place.
it would be difficult, as DirectX is built on top of COM.
Does this scare anyone else? Microsoft is releasing a console. Think about consoles.. have you ever played Super Mario Brothers 3.11? How about Tetris 98 SP2?
Micorosft is using off-the-shelf parts and modifying existing code to speed their way to market as well, which (as another poster pointed out) indicates they will probably reuse most of the existing windows and driver code as well in their new architecture, which will most probably lead to instability.
The company who can't release a decent product until 3.0 is releasing a console, something that can never be upgraded. Nobody has ever released a service pack for a console game, the only thing you can do is recall, and even then you hold out until your customers sue you.
I'll stick with a console by a company that has some experience, such as the Sega Dreamcast or the Sony PS2. Even Nintendo's vapour Dolphin platform sounds more appealing, and to be perfectly honest I hate Nintendo more than I have ever disliked Microsoft.
To all the companies basing their future generation games around the XBox - good luck! You better make your code portable with at least Windows.
I used it for three hours until it decided it would corrupt the hard disk and destroyed a bunch of nice data. I guess mileage varies.
The machine never crashed in the two years I ran NT4 on it though, and hasn't crashed again since I put NT4 back on it.
Dude, that isn't Pure Java!
you don't hard-code DOS file paths, sheesh
The other reason code is usually not compiled like this is the dynamic nature of java - you cannot always be guaranteed that the classes a program uses are being allocated statically (i.e. that they aren't passing the class name as a string to the class loader to start them).
I personally have made many simple factories which return random objects supporting a certain interface, which were created solely by a name lookup in a hash table.
For instances like this, you really hurt trying to use a binary code compiler. Under some circumstances you can gather up all the code and say 'ok, you *will* be using all of this, so compile it.', in others you simply do not know what the classes you are executing are until runtime. For this reason a native binary compiler can never be fully java compliant, unless it also runs java code as well.
Because IRC is about the worst-designed protocol ever, and scales horrible. It also has no built in security, and lacks user accounts (meaning you can't tell if your friends are online unless they join a predetermined channel, or always keep their same nick.
Ever wonder why a network of 40+ efnet servers only handles a load of about 46k users?
Don't forget that they will each need to bring their own, personal player and display it on their own television - be sure to have them bring that to the gathering as well. Also, be very careful that the guests are watching their own television, and not letting their eyes wander to Joe's 50".
cool, so I can write C programs in Squeak?
Intelligent haiku??
DUDE, I have had one of these
for months, no - YEARS now
It would be very difficult writing a linux port to the transmeta chip, considering they refuse to give out instruction set details. The emulation of x86 is actually a hardware abstraction layer, the difference between the 300-400MHz chips coming out now and the 700MHz chips coming out later this year is not simply the clockspeed, or a few added instructions - there is a completely different architecture, requiring a different emulation layer but yeilding the same result - perfect execution of x86 code.