I'm so sick of hearing about this bloody Steve Jobs guy; I wish he'd just die.
Seriously, he was just a man. Sure, a stylish dresser and a very capable peddler of mediocre products that purchasers never truly owned, but still just a man.
My younger son uses an old P4 hand me down and doesn't have any problems with the (numerous) flash and Java laden sites he enjoys. Perhaps "ur doin it wrong lol" or whatever the kids are saying these days.
I hope the game is better than the TV series. I tried to follow that for awhile but finally gave up in disgust. An R rated soap opera, the only connection to sword and sorcery being that the characters do medieval cosplay while they go on and on about nothing in particular. Every character is an absolute dick with the possible exception of Sean Bean's character and the younger daughter. The rest desperately need to die violently and it's frustrating to see them still breathing at the end of the episode.
Life is too short for mediocre television, and it was that in spades. That doesn't mean A Song of Ice and Fire is bad, just that the implementation is General Hospital with leather jerkins and occasional nudity.
Not that I'm opinionated or anything.
Have you read the books? I'd guess not, since ASOIAF is not sword & sorcery. Yes there's a bit of magic in it, and it permeates the world, but it's thus far not been a big factor in the story. It's a story about people and all the horrific ways they die.
I thought I was alone in thinking of it as a soap. When I try to explain what ASOIAF is to others, I describe it as a realistic, medieval soap opera (for men)*.
*Not implying that women cannot read/watch/enjoy it, just that it doesn't have much of the drivel that a man associates with a soap opera.
My Magic-User was using scrolls, sometimes stolen from an elderly person, back in the 80's. I should dust off his character record and have him sue Bethesda.
I don't know the fine details, and the summary seems somewhat inflammatory, but it looks like Bethesda's making a mistake here. Not a big enough one (thus far) to dissuade me from still wanting Skyrim, but they've got another month to do so.
I rather wish they had spent more time coming up with a better, and more sanely priced collector's edition, however.
Padme Amidala going at with Seven of Nine and Uhura (the Zoe Saldana one) in a Bacta tank filled up to the reams with jell-o shots. That will be teh match to watch.
For whatever reason, I couldn't stand Brooks' delivery. He may be a terrific actor, but I hated the Sisko character because of the way he delivered his lines.
I have been using a D-Link DIR-615, wireless N single channel router for a few years now, and have never experiences any problems with it. That includes torrenting while up to three others are browsing/gaming and another is playing on XBOX Live. Granted I'm not running on a 100 Mbps line, but it works just fine.
Modern Slackware is still a reasonable choice for older hardware all the way down to Pentium Pros. It may require a bit more effort to maintain than any of the *buntus, but generally when something breaks on a Slackware machine, it's your fault and not a maintainer's.
GP is correct. The Voodoo3 was the first 3DFX card that supported both 2D and 3D, the prior boards required a separate 2D card. I still have an old PCI Voodoo3 2000 card or two kicking around. And a Voodoo1 or 2 somewhere that I got in a "box o' junk" that every computer nerd receives eventually.
Yes and no. While only a rooted device can be compromised in the traditional sense, with the appropriate permissions an app can still do damage. Voice recording, using the network to send private data, keystroke logging via the input method. There's lots than can be done "unprivileged".
Every time I update my Galaxy S, I have to figure out how to root the bugger just so I can remove all the extra crap Bell puts on it, as well as most of the Samsung stuff.
And as a long time Linux user, I find it irrationally offensive that I need to jump through hoops finding a root method that works just so I can remount a partition read/write to delete all the junk. Why do they insist on bundling a for-pay GPS nav app when it comes with Google Maps?
I still love my phone, though. I just wish they'd lose the lock-it-down mindset and start treating it like a portable computer.
Newer programmers are less adept at identifying hardware constraints and errors, developing thorough specifications before coding,
Possibly because there are less hardware constraints (and errors) than there were a scant few years ago? Logic? Nah!
and low-level skills like programming in assembly language.
People don't need assembly language any more. 15 years ago we were all bypassing the BIOS to write to the display, opening COM ports to communicate with modems, using INT 33h to handle the mouse, and basically doing everything ourselves. Windows, Linux, Apple, everyone, have obviated the need for such low-level tricks. While I agree that it is certainly useful to understand what instructions a compiler might translate a particular LoC into, as well as a basic grasp of the underlying architecture and its instruction set, these days computers are "fast enough" that such knowledge is hardly used any more.
There's a reason high-level languages were invented, and their performance is "good enough" on modern hardware. Even modern operating systems are largely written in HLLs, with only a bit of glue assembler to get the ball rolling or handle the most time-sensitive/intricate tasks.
For instance, Web developers who cut their teeth in the days of 14.4 Kbps modems have a leg up in writing apps for laggy wireless networks.
I'm not sure what timeline this fella originated from, but back in the good ol' days of the 14.4 modems, BBS' were more prevalent than consumer Internet connections; and even then, most "Web developer"'s of that era either used some shitty program that produced terrible HTML (and subsequently ran it through htmltidy if they had any clue at all), or "developed" their web pages entirely by hand. I fail to see how some guy who barfed up an HTML page and uploaded it via a modem has any advantage over one who never did it on anything but a highspeed connection.
While the article itself is an interesting read, particularly with those who are fascinated by the Days of Computers Past, the summary is stupid and almost convinced me to not RTFA.
Who is being the bad guy again? Oh of course, Google for being less evil. What people forget about Googles "Don't be evil" slogan is that doesn't say "Be good" it just means don't be as evil as the rest... and in American Business, that is a pretty low standard.
This gave me a much needed chuckle - thank you. I'm halfway tempted to steal that for my.sig.
The analogy is flawed, they can't compare Android to IE. IE was shipped with WinOS. WinOS was the more or less the only used OS out there ( I mean for the general population) , that's why it was anti-competitive to give for free ( or why it was anti-competitive by MS ).
The other important difference, which you didn't mention, is that Android is open source, while Internet Explorer was/is not. I like to think this is not insignificant.
I don't care what the previews say, good or bad, my copy is reserved and my kids have ordered theirs too. Daggerfall, Morrowind and Oblivion have all kept me entertained for hundreds of hours, and I doubt Skyrim will be any different.
Same here. Although if not for the frequent crashes those hundreds of hours might have been dozens of hours instead. Having to restart the game because it crashed yet again is hardly entertaining.
Bethesda makes fun games. Bethesda also makes very buggy games. I can only hope Skyrim is better.
I also really wish they'd take the time to remake some of the older games. Morrowind was massive and there was just so much to do, but frequently borked when attempting to do the most trivial of things (such as equipping a pauldron!). I never managed to beat it, due to all the bugs.
Incidentally, Steam has their QuakeCon Pack 2011 up for sale for $70.00. It includes the entire Quake and Doom series, Fallout 3 GOTY & New Vegas (with the 3 currently available DLCs), as well as Morrowind and Oblivion and a bunch of other titles. It's a real steal.
I think you are confusing the fact that it was impossible to change any character on the screen other than the one under the cursor. Yes it might make sense to have a different call that moved the blinking cursor indicator, but that was not done. You had to move the "cursor" to change where the other bios call updated the sceen. Therefore unless your gui worked by changing only a single character on the screen, which happened to be exactly where you wanted the blinking cursor, you had to use this move-cursor call if you wanted any changes.
The function I referenced did in fact take a coordinate pair in the DX register, implying (I say implying because I have not the facilities to craft a suitable test given my operating system) it would write to where the programmer specified, not to the current cursor position. See here. Had to Google for that, having misplaced by copy of the book - ahh, Ralf Brown's Interrupt List... that takes me back.
I'm not sure about the 0x13 bios call, there was a reason nobody (including that DOS write-string call) used it. I think it may have ignored the cursor position? The only working way to use the BIOS to update the screen with any ability to position the cursor was to call set-cursor-postion and write-character alternately for every single screen location on the screen. Obviously no sane programmer did this on a 5Mhz machine.
Lots of insane programmers did, however, use it. It was "official", therefore it must have been the proper thing to use. Microsoft discouraged programmers from using tricks to make things work better.
I would say this is true. You can see what IBM *did* design in the IBM-PC. For instance the totally useless "bios" calls.
The best example was the official way to put a character on the screen. I'm sure IBM asked Microsoft what BASIC needed to do, and they probably said "put a character at the cursor, and some way to move the cursor around". IBM then dutifully implemented the BIOS with TWO calls, one that placed a character at the cursor and did not move it, and another that moved the cursor. Unbelievable. If you took the stupidest programmer in the world, you might expect that they would make an api that took one call per character. IBM managed to make it take two!, thus proving they were stupider than the stupidest programmer I can imagine!
(in case you are wondering, any mildly intelligent programmer, even with the incredibly limited resources of the IBM PC and a 1 or 2K bios, would have easily made an api that took a pointer and a length of characters and put them on the screen. They may have even interpreted return/line feed and even escape sequences. The history of the PC and clones may have been far different, because programs for the PC would not have bypassed the bios as much to update the screen. Early attempts at multitasking and windowing would have been much more likely to work. Microsoft would likely have been faced with a lot more competition long before Windows came out).
INT 0x10 / AH = 0x13 - write string.
The string, pointed to by ES:BP, can optionally contain attributes.
DOS also provided 0x21/9 to print a string terminated with $, but you're talking about the BIOS, so that's moot.
Not moving the cursor after every text write actually made more sense - consider a program that used a text mode "GUI" to present its data. The drawing routine could just blow through, displaying the interface WITHOUT the overhead (however little, but consider the speed of the computers back in these days, when every ounce of performance counted) of moving the cursor. Finally, when input was expected, the cursor could be positioned at the right "GUI" element to make apparent it was waiting for something. Of course, most programs bypassed the BIOS for all but the simplest of tasks, writing directly to the display memory. But even then, a separate "move cursor here" function was a necessity.
Sure there's lots to bitch about wrt to the original PC, its BIOS and DOS, but this wasn't one of them (IMHO).
In Britain I think we'd normally say "I'm having a house built", or "We've had a new fence put up" or "The garage was re-roofed", though the "I built" way is not uncommon. I think it depends on what follows -- "We've had a new fence put up" will probably continue with a complaint about how expensive/slow/unsatisfactory the process or result was:-)
Same here in Canada, although we did re-roof our house. Well, my father did. The heights where a bit too much for me. Going up was easy enough, but once I got up there I realized that should my fat ass slip or lose my balance, it was a long way down.
MSFT rips off Java and creates a "kinda sorta Java" which they will use their large base to snatch control away from Java? BOOO. Google rips off Java and creates a "kinda sorta Java" which they will use their large base to snatch control away from Java? YAAY!
You should have gone with a more appropriate nick along the lines of hairyfootinmouth.
Google didn't "rip off" Java any more than C++ ripped off C, and the Dalvik VM is not competing with Oracle's Java. Oracle is claiming patent and copyright infringement. And Microsoft took Java and wanted to change it in ways that made it incompatible with the "real" Java, using their monopolistic hold on the PC operating system arena to ensure their dominance. You are comparing apples to orangutans.
Judging from the ignorance and idiocy of your post, it looks like you were simply trying to take a few jabs at Android users or looking for an excuse to use the word "fanboi" a couple times for no apparent good reason. It's also ironic that you belittle Google "fanbois" yet have a GMail address.
I feel like such an old fart. My first recollections of messing with the Linux kernel are of answering endless lines of Y/N questions (no menuconfig), modules were still more or less experimental, and ELF hadn't quite replaced COFF. Early Slackware (which has consistently remained my distribution of choice for about 15 years) on a 486 DX2/66 with 16MB of RAM.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm so sick of hearing about this bloody Steve Jobs guy; I wish he'd just die.
Seriously, he was just a man. Sure, a stylish dresser and a very capable peddler of mediocre products that purchasers never truly owned, but still just a man.
My younger son uses an old P4 hand me down and doesn't have any problems with the (numerous) flash and Java laden sites he enjoys. Perhaps "ur doin it wrong lol" or whatever the kids are saying these days.
I hope the game is better than the TV series. I tried to follow that for awhile but finally gave up in disgust. An R rated soap opera, the only connection to sword and sorcery being that the characters do medieval cosplay while they go on and on about nothing in particular. Every character is an absolute dick with the possible exception of Sean Bean's character and the younger daughter. The rest desperately need to die violently and it's frustrating to see them still breathing at the end of the episode.
Life is too short for mediocre television, and it was that in spades. That doesn't mean A Song of Ice and Fire is bad, just that the implementation is General Hospital with leather jerkins and occasional nudity.
Not that I'm opinionated or anything.
Have you read the books? I'd guess not, since ASOIAF is not sword & sorcery. Yes there's a bit of magic in it, and it permeates the world, but it's thus far not been a big factor in the story. It's a story about people and all the horrific ways they die.
GoT has invented dark fantasy soap.
I thought I was alone in thinking of it as a soap. When I try to explain what ASOIAF is to others, I describe it as a realistic, medieval soap opera (for men)*.
*Not implying that women cannot read/watch/enjoy it, just that it doesn't have much of the drivel that a man associates with a soap opera.
My Magic-User was using scrolls, sometimes stolen from an elderly person, back in the 80's. I should dust off his character record and have him sue Bethesda.
I don't know the fine details, and the summary seems somewhat inflammatory, but it looks like Bethesda's making a mistake here. Not a big enough one (thus far) to dissuade me from still wanting Skyrim, but they've got another month to do so.
I rather wish they had spent more time coming up with a better, and more sanely priced collector's edition, however.
Padme Amidala going at with Seven of Nine and Uhura (the Zoe Saldana one) in a Bacta tank filled up to the reams with jell-o shots. That will be teh match to watch.
Hell, even Nichelle Nichols' Uhura, in her prime.
Sisko: Better than all of the above.
For whatever reason, I couldn't stand Brooks' delivery. He may be a terrific actor, but I hated the Sisko character because of the way he delivered his lines.
Kirk all the way.
I have been using a D-Link DIR-615, wireless N single channel router for a few years now, and have never experiences any problems with it. That includes torrenting while up to three others are browsing/gaming and another is playing on XBOX Live. Granted I'm not running on a 100 Mbps line, but it works just fine.
Not running the latest software? Doom 3 running on a Voodoo 2 ;)
I'm calling shenanigans on that link. There's no way that game is really Doom3.
This is what a Doom 3 screenshot looks like!
Modern Slackware is still a reasonable choice for older hardware all the way down to Pentium Pros. It may require a bit more effort to maintain than any of the *buntus, but generally when something breaks on a Slackware machine, it's your fault and not a maintainer's.
GP is correct. The Voodoo3 was the first 3DFX card that supported both 2D and 3D, the prior boards required a separate 2D card. I still have an old PCI Voodoo3 2000 card or two kicking around. And a Voodoo1 or 2 somewhere that I got in a "box o' junk" that every computer nerd receives eventually.
Yes and no. While only a rooted device can be compromised in the traditional sense, with the appropriate permissions an app can still do damage. Voice recording, using the network to send private data, keystroke logging via the input method. There's lots than can be done "unprivileged".
Every time I update my Galaxy S, I have to figure out how to root the bugger just so I can remove all the extra crap Bell puts on it, as well as most of the Samsung stuff.
And as a long time Linux user, I find it irrationally offensive that I need to jump through hoops finding a root method that works just so I can remount a partition read/write to delete all the junk. Why do they insist on bundling a for-pay GPS nav app when it comes with Google Maps?
I still love my phone, though. I just wish they'd lose the lock-it-down mindset and start treating it like a portable computer.
Newer programmers are less adept at identifying hardware constraints and errors, developing thorough specifications before coding,
Possibly because there are less hardware constraints (and errors) than there were a scant few years ago? Logic? Nah!
and low-level skills like programming in assembly language.
People don't need assembly language any more. 15 years ago we were all bypassing the BIOS to write to the display, opening COM ports to communicate with modems, using INT 33h to handle the mouse, and basically doing everything ourselves. Windows, Linux, Apple, everyone, have obviated the need for such low-level tricks. While I agree that it is certainly useful to understand what instructions a compiler might translate a particular LoC into, as well as a basic grasp of the underlying architecture and its instruction set, these days computers are "fast enough" that such knowledge is hardly used any more.
There's a reason high-level languages were invented, and their performance is "good enough" on modern hardware. Even modern operating systems are largely written in HLLs, with only a bit of glue assembler to get the ball rolling or handle the most time-sensitive/intricate tasks.
For instance, Web developers who cut their teeth in the days of 14.4 Kbps modems have a leg up in writing apps for laggy wireless networks.
I'm not sure what timeline this fella originated from, but back in the good ol' days of the 14.4 modems, BBS' were more prevalent than consumer Internet connections; and even then, most "Web developer"'s of that era either used some shitty program that produced terrible HTML (and subsequently ran it through htmltidy if they had any clue at all), or "developed" their web pages entirely by hand. I fail to see how some guy who barfed up an HTML page and uploaded it via a modem has any advantage over one who never did it on anything but a highspeed connection.
While the article itself is an interesting read, particularly with those who are fascinated by the Days of Computers Past, the summary is stupid and almost convinced me to not RTFA.
Who is being the bad guy again? Oh of course, Google for being less evil. What people forget about Googles "Don't be evil" slogan is that doesn't say "Be good" it just means don't be as evil as the rest... and in American Business, that is a pretty low standard.
This gave me a much needed chuckle - thank you. I'm halfway tempted to steal that for my .sig.
The analogy is flawed, they can't compare Android to IE. IE was shipped with WinOS. WinOS was the more or less the only used OS out there ( I mean for the general population) , that's why it was anti-competitive to give for free ( or why it was anti-competitive by MS ).
The other important difference, which you didn't mention, is that Android is open source, while Internet Explorer was/is not. I like to think this is not insignificant.
I don't care what the previews say, good or bad, my copy is reserved and my kids have ordered theirs too. Daggerfall, Morrowind and Oblivion have all kept me entertained for hundreds of hours, and I doubt Skyrim will be any different.
Same here. Although if not for the frequent crashes those hundreds of hours might have been dozens of hours instead. Having to restart the game because it crashed yet again is hardly entertaining.
Bethesda makes fun games. Bethesda also makes very buggy games. I can only hope Skyrim is better.
I also really wish they'd take the time to remake some of the older games. Morrowind was massive and there was just so much to do, but frequently borked when attempting to do the most trivial of things (such as equipping a pauldron!). I never managed to beat it, due to all the bugs.
Incidentally, Steam has their QuakeCon Pack 2011 up for sale for $70.00. It includes the entire Quake and Doom series, Fallout 3 GOTY & New Vegas (with the 3 currently available DLCs), as well as Morrowind and Oblivion and a bunch of other titles. It's a real steal.
Smarter by ego, not by definiton.
I'm smarterer, thank you very much!
I think you are confusing the fact that it was impossible to change any character on the screen other than the one under the cursor. Yes it might make sense to have a different call that moved the blinking cursor indicator, but that was not done. You had to move the "cursor" to change where the other bios call updated the sceen. Therefore unless your gui worked by changing only a single character on the screen, which happened to be exactly where you wanted the blinking cursor, you had to use this move-cursor call if you wanted any changes.
The function I referenced did in fact take a coordinate pair in the DX register, implying (I say implying because I have not the facilities to craft a suitable test given my operating system) it would write to where the programmer specified, not to the current cursor position. See here. Had to Google for that, having misplaced by copy of the book - ahh, Ralf Brown's Interrupt List... that takes me back.
I'm not sure about the 0x13 bios call, there was a reason nobody (including that DOS write-string call) used it. I think it may have ignored the cursor position? The only working way to use the BIOS to update the screen with any ability to position the cursor was to call set-cursor-postion and write-character alternately for every single screen location on the screen. Obviously no sane programmer did this on a 5Mhz machine.
Lots of insane programmers did, however, use it. It was "official", therefore it must have been the proper thing to use. Microsoft discouraged programmers from using tricks to make things work better.
I would say this is true. You can see what IBM *did* design in the IBM-PC. For instance the totally useless "bios" calls.
The best example was the official way to put a character on the screen. I'm sure IBM asked Microsoft what BASIC needed to do, and they probably said "put a character at the cursor, and some way to move the cursor around". IBM then dutifully implemented the BIOS with TWO calls, one that placed a character at the cursor and did not move it, and another that moved the cursor. Unbelievable. If you took the stupidest programmer in the world, you might expect that they would make an api that took one call per character. IBM managed to make it take two!, thus proving they were stupider than the stupidest programmer I can imagine!
(in case you are wondering, any mildly intelligent programmer, even with the incredibly limited resources of the IBM PC and a 1 or 2K bios, would have easily made an api that took a pointer and a length of characters and put them on the screen. They may have even interpreted return/line feed and even escape sequences. The history of the PC and clones may have been far different, because programs for the PC would not have bypassed the bios as much to update the screen. Early attempts at multitasking and windowing would have been much more likely to work. Microsoft would likely have been faced with a lot more competition long before Windows came out).
INT 0x10 / AH = 0x13 - write string.
The string, pointed to by ES:BP, can optionally contain attributes.
DOS also provided 0x21/9 to print a string terminated with $, but you're talking about the BIOS, so that's moot.
Not moving the cursor after every text write actually made more sense - consider a program that used a text mode "GUI" to present its data. The drawing routine could just blow through, displaying the interface WITHOUT the overhead (however little, but consider the speed of the computers back in these days, when every ounce of performance counted) of moving the cursor. Finally, when input was expected, the cursor could be positioned at the right "GUI" element to make apparent it was waiting for something. Of course, most programs bypassed the BIOS for all but the simplest of tasks, writing directly to the display memory. But even then, a separate "move cursor here" function was a necessity.
Sure there's lots to bitch about wrt to the original PC, its BIOS and DOS, but this wasn't one of them (IMHO).
... what a modern DOS should look like in 2011.
A corpse?
I kid. I appreciate the work all those involved in the FreeDOS project put in to it.
In Britain I think we'd normally say "I'm having a house built", or "We've had a new fence put up" or "The garage was re-roofed", though the "I built" way is not uncommon. I think it depends on what follows -- "We've had a new fence put up" will probably continue with a complaint about how expensive/slow/unsatisfactory the process or result was :-)
Same here in Canada, although we did re-roof our house. Well, my father did. The heights where a bit too much for me. Going up was easy enough, but once I got up there I realized that should my fat ass slip or lose my balance, it was a long way down.
"Gravity is a harsh mistress." -- The Tick.
100% crap. MSFT was trying to co-opt the entire language by using their monopoly clout. Google just forked.
Dalvik is purportedly a clean-room implementation of a Java interpreter, not a fork of existing code.
MSFT rips off Java and creates a "kinda sorta Java" which they will use their large base to snatch control away from Java? BOOO. Google rips off Java and creates a "kinda sorta Java" which they will use their large base to snatch control away from Java? YAAY!
You should have gone with a more appropriate nick along the lines of hairyfootinmouth.
Google didn't "rip off" Java any more than C++ ripped off C, and the Dalvik VM is not competing with Oracle's Java. Oracle is claiming patent and copyright infringement. And Microsoft took Java and wanted to change it in ways that made it incompatible with the "real" Java, using their monopolistic hold on the PC operating system arena to ensure their dominance. You are comparing apples to orangutans.
Judging from the ignorance and idiocy of your post, it looks like you were simply trying to take a few jabs at Android users or looking for an excuse to use the word "fanboi" a couple times for no apparent good reason. It's also ironic that you belittle Google "fanbois" yet have a GMail address.
But IMHO being a douche is being a douche...
Pot, meet kettle.
I feel like such an old fart. My first recollections of messing with the Linux kernel are of answering endless lines of Y/N questions (no menuconfig), modules were still more or less experimental, and ELF hadn't quite replaced COFF. Early Slackware (which has consistently remained my distribution of choice for about 15 years) on a 486 DX2/66 with 16MB of RAM.
Now get off my lawn you young whippersnappers!