My first computer was a wonderful piece at the time, vastly superior to the more or less contemporary more popular VIC-20, Commodore-64 and Spectrum.
It was a Philips VG-8000, a machine manufactured by Philips that was compliant with the MSX standard, a standard designed by the japanese ASCII corporation in collaboration with Microsoft for home computers.
Microsoft wrote the BASIC interpreter for it (we are speaking of about 1982-1983), and it was _very_ similar to other BASICs like gwbasic, QBasic and QuickBasic.
Countrary to the C-64, for example, which required a lot of low level functions like peek and poke to access interesting functionality, the MSX BASIC had a very good (but slow) high level graphics API, accessible with functions like circle, paint, pset, draw, line, with a syntax more or less identical to the one QBasic programmers probably remember. Below, it had an easy to understand architecture, with memory mapped video memory if I remember correctly, and some special memory to hold sprite data. Sprite functions were also really easy to access from BASIC, and the same functionality remained in the later GW-BASIC (on PC), while it was dropped from QBASIC IIRC.
It was very useful for small kids (like me), who could learn useful and fun programming without much effort.
Kudos to Kazuhiro "Kay" Nishi for the architecture, and possibly Bill Gates himself for MSX BASIC. Microsoft is great at writing BASIC interpreters, why didn't they stick to it?
> what strategies should a developer take to insure that the resulting program is as > crash-free as possible?
Well, if you ask you're not sure, and if you're not sure, why don't you hire a very experienced developer and pay him damn well?
Let me see, where could you find one? Oh, you're lucky! Here I am:)
Seriously, an architecture that behaves as you describe is possible. Also, each abstract 'computation unit' should be implemented with easy to read, single purpose functions, whose logic can be formally checked.
Re:how about other toolkits?
on
Why Use GTK+?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
> How does GTK+ compare to Tk and and WxWidgets?
GTK is more powerful (you can tweak widgets more), but it's bigger and more painful to program. You can do the most complicated things, but easy things are longer to achieve. To the random user, a well built GTK interface looks decent.
With Tk you have a much simpler API, where the common operations are much easier to perform. However some things you can do in GTK are almost impossibile to perform on tk (things the average programmer seldom needs though). To the random user, tk looks horrible. To me it looks perfectly ok, so I really do not understand what hurts people's eyes.
I have played with wxWidgets, but I leave the comparison to someone else.
GTK, the good and the bad
on
Why Use GTK+?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I like GTK and use it both with C and with python (pygtk). I also used other toolkits, like tk, wxwindows, QT, java swing.
I like the native C API + language bindings for every taste, so I can program GTK at the abstraction level I want. I like the pango markup. Also interface prototyping is fast enough (though not as fast as with tk) [...]
Among the few things I do _not_ like are the new GtkTreeView, which is very general and powerful, but it makes doing very simple things too complicated, and the terrible new gtkFileChooserDialog.
However, I can still avoid those using some deprecated widgets (for now).
> Hexus checks out Crossfire using an X850 Crossfire setup, > Hexus also examines how Crossfire works, how easy it is to setup
Strange, I checked out crossfire: http://crossfire.real-time.com/ without any dedicated setup, and it was fine; the source package is autoconf based, and there are lots of binary packages available too.
You are not the only one. I got teleported to page 2 or page 1 on many occasions. It is their fault. As test, I went again through all pages using next until page 9. Then, I noticed the link to next contains ?page=2 instead of ?page=10, and sends me back. Page 11 shows the same problem. Then I go back to page 9, and the link appears correct now (?page=10). Either they suffer from a very random bug, or they are just laughing at our efforts to read the damn thing.
This brings us on to the question of trading information. The AI would be programmed with a long list of items of information, together a brief summary of what each involves and how much it is 'worth'. The aliens could then supply a similar list and the AI could trade item for item. When a trade is agreed, the AI releases the item, while the aliens convince the AI that they have transmitted their item to Earth.
Then the article presents two objections which are just one: reverse engineering. All the proposed solutions in the article (self-modification, autocheck - self destruction,...) have been tried in vain here, why should they work there?
He who has the code and the data has the full power.
There's a remake project for WC game "Privateer". Seems open source.
Wing commander 1-3 have been remade (but long ago) by Origin into the Wing Commander - Kilrathi Saga product. Seems they did not much more than slow down the game for less ancient machines though.
real article, appeared on an Italian magazine
on
Who Wrote Linux?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
This article has really appeared on an Italian well known magazine. Clarence discovered this pearl and saved this marvellous article from oblivion. It explains not only who wrote Linux, but everything about a nasty cult called "Open World" and its terrorist activities.
I had a very good laugh reading this.
http://www.clarence.com/contents/tecnologia/penne/ panerai/articolo.html
(warning: basic Italian knowledge needed)
Slashdot Mirror
My first computer was a wonderful piece at the time, vastly superior to the more or less contemporary more popular VIC-20, Commodore-64 and Spectrum.
It was a Philips VG-8000, a machine manufactured by Philips that was compliant with the MSX standard, a standard designed by the japanese ASCII corporation in collaboration with Microsoft for home computers.
Microsoft wrote the BASIC interpreter for it (we are speaking of about 1982-1983), and it was _very_ similar to other BASICs like gwbasic, QBasic and QuickBasic.
Countrary to the C-64, for example, which required a lot of low level functions like peek and poke to access interesting functionality, the MSX BASIC had a very good (but slow) high level graphics API, accessible with functions like circle, paint, pset, draw, line, with a syntax more or less identical to the one QBasic programmers probably remember.
Below, it had an easy to understand architecture, with memory mapped video memory if I remember correctly, and some special memory to hold sprite data. Sprite functions were also really easy to access from BASIC, and the same functionality remained in the later GW-BASIC (on PC), while it was dropped from QBASIC IIRC.
It was very useful for small kids (like me), who could learn useful and fun programming without much effort.
Kudos to Kazuhiro "Kay" Nishi for the architecture, and possibly Bill Gates himself for MSX BASIC. Microsoft is great at writing BASIC interpreters, why didn't they stick to it?
> what strategies should a developer take to insure that the resulting program is as
:)
> crash-free as possible?
Well, if you ask you're not sure, and if you're not sure, why don't you hire a very
experienced developer and pay him damn well?
Let me see, where could you find one? Oh, you're lucky! Here I am
Seriously, an architecture that behaves as you describe is possible. Also, each abstract 'computation unit' should be implemented with easy to read, single purpose functions, whose logic can be formally checked.
> How does GTK+ compare to Tk and and WxWidgets?
GTK is more powerful (you can tweak widgets more), but it's bigger and more painful to program. You can do the most complicated things, but easy things are longer to achieve. To the random user, a well built GTK interface looks decent.
With Tk you have a much simpler API, where the common operations are much easier to perform. However some things you can do in GTK are almost impossibile to perform on tk (things the average programmer seldom needs though). To the random user, tk looks horrible. To me it looks perfectly ok, so I really do not understand what hurts people's eyes.
I have played with wxWidgets, but I leave the comparison to someone else.
I like GTK and use it both with C and with python (pygtk).
I also used other toolkits, like tk, wxwindows, QT, java swing.
I like the native C API + language bindings for every taste, so I can
program GTK at the abstraction level I want. I like the pango markup. Also interface prototyping is fast enough (though not as fast as with tk) [...]
Among the few things I do _not_ like are the new GtkTreeView, which is very general and powerful, but it makes doing very simple things too complicated, and the terrible new gtkFileChooserDialog.
However, I can still avoid those using some deprecated widgets (for now).
I went to their site, but there is nothing to see,
since I do not have (or want) a Flash plugin.
So, nothing for me to see there, I move along.
> Hexus checks out Crossfire using an X850 Crossfire setup,
> Hexus also examines how Crossfire works, how easy it is to setup
Strange, I checked out crossfire: http://crossfire.real-time.com/ without any dedicated setup, and it was fine; the source package is autoconf based, and there are lots of binary packages available too.
You are not the only one. I got teleported to page 2 or page 1 on many occasions.
It is their fault.
As test, I went again through all pages using next until page 9. Then, I noticed the link to next contains ?page=2 instead of ?page=10, and sends me back.
Page 11 shows the same problem. Then I go back to page 9, and the link appears correct now (?page=10).
Either they suffer from a very random bug, or they are just laughing at our efforts to read the damn thing.
He who has the code and the data has the full power.
The source is available in sf CVS. See here for instructions.
However, a source release is not available, not in their home page, not on sf.
Also, the project is not completely Open Source. Part is covered by the GPL and part by a proprietary license of some sort.
See their explanation.
There's a remake project for WC game "Privateer". Seems open source.
Wing commander 1-3 have been remade (but long ago) by Origin into the Wing Commander - Kilrathi Saga product. Seems they did not much more than slow down the game for less ancient machines though.
This has been discussed two months ago here, no?
sorry, a %20 made his way in the URL. Here is the correct link:
/ panerai/articolo.html
http://www.clarence.com/contents/tecnologia/penne
This article has really appeared on an Italian well known magazine. Clarence discovered this pearl and saved this marvellous article from oblivion. It explains not only who wrote Linux, but everything about a nasty cult called "Open World" and its terrorist activities. I had a very good laugh reading this. http://www.clarence.com/contents/tecnologia/penne/ panerai/articolo.html
(warning: basic Italian knowledge needed)
>Will the computers play more interesting chess than their human counterparts?"
#define PACMAN "ProgrammerAlgoristChessmasterMAN"
I think it becomes a game of PACMAN against other PACMAN, so I always see this as human vs human.
The games are interesting, not because they are "played" by the machines, but because they are indirectly played by the programmers.