I'm sorry, but "positional audio" is not something you need to create a great game; even in current Windows games, it's an option. Windows became the preferred platform for game writers long before DirectX even existed, simply because Windows is the most widely used.
SDL has all the functionality you need to make many great games. And if you don't like SDL, there are plenty of other gaming libraries.
Yeah, a more interesting discussion would be: "Why does Linux still suck?"
That is a valid question. But valid as it is, it comes down to that all operating systems suck; Linux just sucks a lot less than Windows, and it also sucks less money and time out of you. And that's a good thing.
it's that confounded 3% that Microsoft has been able to exploit in the marketplace
The Mac has other problems that keep it from catching on: you get less bang for the buck, there is much less hardware available, and there is much less choice in terms of form factors.
Creatives, home users, and students (the Mac's historical user base) have not had the financial or political clout to compete with the technological preferences many IT organizations have.
And even among "creatives, home users, and students" the vast majority run Windows.
The solution to the problem of Microsoft and OEMs giving bogus prices is to let people trade in Windows licenses, even those installed by OEMs. If you get a full version of Windows for your computer, you should be able to sell a full version of Windows to the highest bidder on E-bay. No "refund" or arbitrary pricing needed.
An Xbox isn't a "Windows machine", it's an embedded system that happens to have a Windows kernel. It doesn't run Windows applications, get Windows viruses, or require Windows administration. It's the kind of machine Microsoft can handle: you reboot it and it's back to the original state.
The site is indicative of what's happening with Java numerics as a whole: it's dead. It's not that Java isn't fast enough--it is--it's that the language sucks for actually writing numerical code. Writing numerical code in Java is like doing trigonometric calculations in Roman numerals.
You may generate Java byte code all you want; that doesn't qualify you to comment on other languages, including what aspects of Java are unusual or unique. And, in fact, you got it wrong.
Lots of languages guarantee runtime safety using all sorts of mechanisms.
This is what really distinguishes Java from other languages. The Java verifier is a sort of theorum prover that examines the byte-code and can guarantee that it does not violate certain rules such as forging the type of a reference or under/over-flowing the stack
You arae kidding, right? Do you seriously believe Java is the first or only language to guarantee runtime safety? Safe languages are the rule, not the exception.
To support C/C++ semantics (ad-hoc pointers) you'd have to throw all that out the window and I assume that's what he's talking about.
C# distinguishes safe and unsafe code. C#'s safe code is as safe as "pure" Java code. You can think of C#'s unsafe code (or its equivalent in C/C++) as code linked in through the JNI interface, except that C#'s unsafe code has far better error checking and integration with the C# language than anything invoked through JNI.
Altogether, C#'s "unsafe" construct results in safer and more portable code than the Java equivalent, native code linked in through JNI.
Pat Niemeyer, Author of Learning Java, O'Reilly & Associates and the BeanShell Java Scripting language.
Well, then I suggest you learn some languages other than Java before making such ridiculous statements.
.NET has two kinds of code: safe and unsafe. Safe code makes the same guarantees as "pure" Java. Unsafe code makes the same guarantees as C, i.e., none. Of course, Java has the same constructs: it also has safe code and unsafe code. Java's unsafe code happens to be written in C/C++, however, which has lots of disadvantages compared to C#'s unsafe construct or C/C++ compiled to a CLR backend.
Gosling isn't the smartest guy around when it comes to programming languages, but even he understands this much. So, we have to conclude that his misrepresentation of the situation is deliberate FUD.
Microkernels aren't actually new. Actually using them for a Unix system might be
No, Microkernels aren't new. But creating a microkernel that is widely used would be something new, and creating a microkernel that runs Linux executables would be, too.
OS X's kernel probably shouldn't be considered a microkernel at this point (it's been modified too much from the original) The Amiga kernel probably has been the most widely used commercial microkernel to date and a brilliant piece of software.
The Windows NT kernel was very advance. It has departed slightly from its microkernel roots in recent versions, but still has a number of nice features
Yes, it has features. Lots of them. That's what makes it such a lousy design. KISS
If the embedded data rate is low enough, it's completely impossible to detect even if it was constructed using simple steganographic techniques.
Governments, companies, and everybody else simply have to get used to the fact that if anybody cares, they can hide and transmit information to anyone. I'm not sure that's a good thing--it also interferes with things like whistleblowing--but it's just the way it is.
Yes, the BSA is making sure copyrights are respected, and that indirectly helps the open source licenses. But the BSA has been hostile to open source, and the more open source catches on, the more power the BSA loses.
The Dilbert cartoon does make one wonder about Scott Adam's attitudes towards issues of copyrights and freedom, and that is a justifiable reason to criticize him if it is true. That he indirectly and accidentally may or may not have a short-term positive effect on open source licenses doesn't matter.
It's good that BSD is out there, but its architecture is close to that of Linux, so it is running into the same limitations. We need more diversity in architectures and approaches when it comes to kernels, and the Hurd provides that.
So why not have the people working on Hurd work on something new
They are working on something new: a true microkernel. They are making it backwards compatible so that people can easily use it.
Competition can also hurt, by splitting up the resources into many small parts...
But since nobody knows ahead of time which part is the right one, we have to bear that cost. Microsoft and the Soviet Union believed that they were smart enough to predict everything. The Soviet Union also blossomed initially because in the short term, focusing your resources really does make things more efficient. In the long term it didn't work. And you are seeing the same thing beginning to happen with Longhorn at MS.
We need more projects like Hurd: in the long run, only diversity survives.
Mach was still an active CMU project when the Hurd glacier began its very slow creep from the peaks of lofty idealism towards the throng of onlookers waiting patiently for the free unix kernel they always craved to reach them.
Well, its pace is matched then by the very slow creep of systems like Linux (and OS X and Windows) towards some semblance of coherent design and implementation.
You see, when you implement a system, you have two choices: you can do a shoddy and cheap job initially and fix things up later (Linux, Macintosh, Windows) but grab lots of market share, or you can try to do it right and not get a lot of market share.
Of course things are not black and white: some quick and dirty jobs (Linux, NeXT) are not quite as shoddy as others (Macintosh OS 1-9, Windows 3.1). And some people just can't design a decent system even if you give them nearly infinite resources and time (like the Windows NT kernel).
I'm glad efforts like L4Ka exist. The Linux kernel is not infinitely extensible, and we will need something to replace it eventually. Whether it's this or something else, I don't know. But you shouldn't sneer at it.
Sun is afraid of the PR consequences of their relationship with Microsoft, that's why they are trying to downplay it.
Their agreement has had significant consequences, and Sun's behavior towards open source (e.g., Schwartz's rantings, their fake patent grant, their Java efforts, their attempt to position Solaris against Linux, etc.) show that Sun is not an unequivocal supporter of free software or open source software.
They did not find "the" dark matter that was missing, they found dark ordinary matter that accounted for ordinary matter they expected to be there but that they couldn't find before.
Your enthusiasm is admirable, but let's get back to the facts. Where is the evidence for your assertions of mass-conversions to OS X, for demonstrable superiority of its kernel?
The way it looks to me, Apple has a few percent market share at this point and I haven't seen any evidence that people are switching to it in droves, least of all Linux or UNIX users. And I don't know of anybody who switches to OS X because of the kernel, and it is hard to see what kind of compelling, tangible advantages it has over the Linux kernel.
As I understand it, MacOS X's microkernel is also based on the Mach microkernel...
It is, but it's unclear whether OS X's version of Mach is still much of a microkernel.
would it make any sense for Apple to look at L4?
Well, ask yourself this question: given Apple's limited resources, where do they get the most return on their investment of time and effort? Probably the UI and consumer products (eg iPod).
OSS can afford to explore those kinds of technologies because there are so many OSS developers, but Apple has to focus.
A commercial company might take old code, given it a new name, and shipped it as a brand new thing. But GNU starts a brand-new, hot project based on better microkernel architecture and they use for it a name that people already associate with failure.
The L4Ka-based kernel is a new project that sounds like it has a lot of promise and may address problems that both Linux and commercial kernels have with modularity and extensibility. This new kernel should get a snazzy new name to get that message across.
That's total bullshit. Computer passwords have a long tradition and they work extremely well, in particular together with simple mechanisms that disable the account after a few tries. If you have many passwords, keep them in an electronic wallet.
The biggest problem with passwords is that companies don't use secure network communications, but that's a problem in general. If we made all TCP streams encrypted by default, then that problem would go away.
As for banks, their password and card security is usually a lot weaker than that of even regular computer systems. It's not that those passwords don't get out, it's that the costs of the frequent fraud that occurs is just passed on to other users of the system.
it's not a "weblog", it's advertising and news releases. It may be a "weblog" in the narrow, technical sense, but the term is understood to mean something more like "online personal diary" with some technical features.
And company-sponsored "weblogs" really aren't "weblogs" either: they aren't personal because people know full well what is expected of them.
Let's not let companies steal the term "weblog" for advertising purposes.
I agree about the importance of support, bug tracking, etc. for software quality and value. In fact, I think much of the commercial value of something like Windows, Java, and OS X comes from the feedback and bug reports from users, which are essentially multi-billion dollar donations to those companies every year. That makes it important for people to use and report bugs in open source software, and it also means that it is in everybody's interest to do so.
But it's unquestionably true that your assertion that GNUStep doesn't support network transparency,
Network transparency requires, not only, being able to draw over the network, but also requires features for applications to work correctly across the network and on distributed machines that don't share disks. That requires APIs and conventions. X11 has those, GNUStep doesn't, even GNUStep applications running under X11, unless they actually use X11 conventions.
"And today, something like Mono/Gnome/X11 is just a technically better platform than Objective-C/GNUStep/DPS in my opinion."
We're not talking about today, we're talking about the situation over the last decade. Gnome is mature. GNUStep, thanks to the lack of development, isn't. Had the choosen path been different five-ten years ago, the reverse would be true.
And Objective-C/GNUStep/DPS is a nonsense that nobody's promoting. GNUStep runs over X11, it supports DPS but doesn't, itself, rely upon it. The primary development platform is Objective C but bindings for Java and Ruby are mainstream and others would have been developed had the project had the same level of resources that were thrown at GNOME.
GNUStep is written in Objective-C, no matter what you bind it to. As long as ther is a line of Objective-C in my toolkit, it is broken as far as I'm concerned. I do want a dynamic language, but I don't want Objective-C, which is thoroughly obsolete and unfixable. And while I want one dynamic language, I don't want two dynamic languages, in particular one as poorly constructed as Objective-C. You can't fix GNUStep by binding it to Java or Python. That's also the problem with Apple Cocoa and their Java bindings (of course, another problem with Java bindings is that Java is neither open source, nor does Apple even control it). (The "it doesn't depend on DPS" is also bullshit--DPS is where all the development happens.)
I'm sorry, but I don't have access to that parallel universe. How GNUStep could possibly result in the death of these choices is beyond me. If you can come up with an explanation, by all means do. The only one I can think of is that GNUStep would be so good, all other choices would wither and die, which to me seems highly unlikely.
I have no idea what you are talking about with "parallel universes". You seem to be arguing with yourself about an analogy that I never got.
GNUStep is effectively dead, deal with it. It failed to catch on because it took way to long to develop it. Given that NeWS, NeXTStep and GNUStep were all failures, one might also suppose that there is a fundamental flaw with the approach. And I predict that Apple will either dump Cocoa and Objective-C, or radically rewrite it, or go out of business. The platform has no future because it isn't a good design in 2005, if it ever was.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, but "positional audio" is not something you need to create a great game; even in current Windows games, it's an option. Windows became the preferred platform for game writers long before DirectX even existed, simply because Windows is the most widely used.
SDL has all the functionality you need to make many great games. And if you don't like SDL, there are plenty of other gaming libraries.
Yeah, a more interesting discussion would be: "Why does Linux still suck?"
That is a valid question. But valid as it is, it comes down to that all operating systems suck; Linux just sucks a lot less than Windows, and it also sucks less money and time out of you. And that's a good thing.
it's that confounded 3% that Microsoft has been able to exploit in the marketplace
The Mac has other problems that keep it from catching on: you get less bang for the buck, there is much less hardware available, and there is much less choice in terms of form factors.
Creatives, home users, and students (the Mac's historical user base) have not had the financial or political clout to compete with the technological preferences many IT organizations have.
And even among "creatives, home users, and students" the vast majority run Windows.
The solution to the problem of Microsoft and OEMs giving bogus prices is to let people trade in Windows licenses, even those installed by OEMs. If you get a full version of Windows for your computer, you should be able to sell a full version of Windows to the highest bidder on E-bay. No "refund" or arbitrary pricing needed.
An Xbox isn't a "Windows machine", it's an embedded system that happens to have a Windows kernel. It doesn't run Windows applications, get Windows viruses, or require Windows administration. It's the kind of machine Microsoft can handle: you reboot it and it's back to the original state.
The site is indicative of what's happening with Java numerics as a whole: it's dead. It's not that Java isn't fast enough--it is--it's that the language sucks for actually writing numerical code. Writing numerical code in Java is like doing trigonometric calculations in Roman numerals.
You may generate Java byte code all you want; that doesn't qualify you to comment on other languages, including what aspects of Java are unusual or unique. And, in fact, you got it wrong.
Lots of languages guarantee runtime safety using all sorts of mechanisms.
This is what really distinguishes Java from other languages. The Java verifier is a sort of theorum prover that examines the byte-code and can guarantee that it does not violate certain rules such as forging the type of a reference or under/over-flowing the stack
You arae kidding, right? Do you seriously believe Java is the first or only language to guarantee runtime safety? Safe languages are the rule, not the exception.
To support C/C++ semantics (ad-hoc pointers) you'd have to throw all that out the window and I assume that's what he's talking about.
C# distinguishes safe and unsafe code. C#'s safe code is as safe as "pure" Java code. You can think of C#'s unsafe code (or its equivalent in C/C++) as code linked in through the JNI interface, except that C#'s unsafe code has far better error checking and integration with the C# language than anything invoked through JNI.
Altogether, C#'s "unsafe" construct results in safer and more portable code than the Java equivalent, native code linked in through JNI.
Pat Niemeyer, Author of Learning Java, O'Reilly & Associates and the BeanShell Java Scripting language.
Well, then I suggest you learn some languages other than Java before making such ridiculous statements.
.NET has two kinds of code: safe and unsafe. Safe code makes the same guarantees as "pure" Java. Unsafe code makes the same guarantees as C, i.e., none. Of course, Java has the same constructs: it also has safe code and unsafe code. Java's unsafe code happens to be written in C/C++, however, which has lots of disadvantages compared to C#'s unsafe construct or C/C++ compiled to a CLR backend.
Gosling isn't the smartest guy around when it comes to programming languages, but even he understands this much. So, we have to conclude that his misrepresentation of the situation is deliberate FUD.
Microkernels aren't actually new. Actually using them for a Unix system might be
No, Microkernels aren't new. But creating a microkernel that is widely used would be something new, and creating a microkernel that runs Linux executables would be, too.
OS X's kernel probably shouldn't be considered a microkernel at this point (it's been modified too much from the original) The Amiga kernel probably has been the most widely used commercial microkernel to date and a brilliant piece of software.
The Windows NT kernel was very advance. It has departed slightly from its microkernel roots in recent versions, but still has a number of nice features
Yes, it has features. Lots of them. That's what makes it such a lousy design. KISS
If the embedded data rate is low enough, it's completely impossible to detect even if it was constructed using simple steganographic techniques.
Governments, companies, and everybody else simply have to get used to the fact that if anybody cares, they can hide and transmit information to anyone. I'm not sure that's a good thing--it also interferes with things like whistleblowing--but it's just the way it is.
Yes, the BSA is making sure copyrights are respected, and that indirectly helps the open source licenses. But the BSA has been hostile to open source, and the more open source catches on, the more power the BSA loses.
The Dilbert cartoon does make one wonder about Scott Adam's attitudes towards issues of copyrights and freedom, and that is a justifiable reason to criticize him if it is true. That he indirectly and accidentally may or may not have a short-term positive effect on open source licenses doesn't matter.
It's good that BSD is out there, but its architecture is close to that of Linux, so it is running into the same limitations. We need more diversity in architectures and approaches when it comes to kernels, and the Hurd provides that.
So why not have the people working on Hurd work on something new
...
They are working on something new: a true microkernel. They are making it backwards compatible so that people can easily use it.
Competition can also hurt, by splitting up the resources into many small parts
But since nobody knows ahead of time which part is the right one, we have to bear that cost. Microsoft and the Soviet Union believed that they were smart enough to predict everything. The Soviet Union also blossomed initially because in the short term, focusing your resources really does make things more efficient. In the long term it didn't work. And you are seeing the same thing beginning to happen with Longhorn at MS.
We need more projects like Hurd: in the long run, only diversity survives.
Mach was still an active CMU project when the Hurd glacier began its very slow creep from the peaks of lofty idealism towards the throng of onlookers waiting patiently for the free unix kernel they always craved to reach them.
Well, its pace is matched then by the very slow creep of systems like Linux (and OS X and Windows) towards some semblance of coherent design and implementation.
You see, when you implement a system, you have two choices: you can do a shoddy and cheap job initially and fix things up later (Linux, Macintosh, Windows) but grab lots of market share, or you can try to do it right and not get a lot of market share.
Of course things are not black and white: some quick and dirty jobs (Linux, NeXT) are not quite as shoddy as others (Macintosh OS 1-9, Windows 3.1). And some people just can't design a decent system even if you give them nearly infinite resources and time (like the Windows NT kernel).
I'm glad efforts like L4Ka exist. The Linux kernel is not infinitely extensible, and we will need something to replace it eventually. Whether it's this or something else, I don't know. But you shouldn't sneer at it.
Sun is afraid of the PR consequences of their relationship with Microsoft, that's why they are trying to downplay it.
Their agreement has had significant consequences, and Sun's behavior towards open source (e.g., Schwartz's rantings, their fake patent grant, their Java efforts, their attempt to position Solaris against Linux, etc.) show that Sun is not an unequivocal supporter of free software or open source software.
They did not find "the" dark matter that was missing, they found dark ordinary matter that accounted for ordinary matter they expected to be there but that they couldn't find before.
Your enthusiasm is admirable, but let's get back to the facts. Where is the evidence for your assertions of mass-conversions to OS X, for demonstrable superiority of its kernel?
The way it looks to me, Apple has a few percent market share at this point and I haven't seen any evidence that people are switching to it in droves, least of all Linux or UNIX users. And I don't know of anybody who switches to OS X because of the kernel, and it is hard to see what kind of compelling, tangible advantages it has over the Linux kernel.
As I understand it, MacOS X's microkernel is also based on the Mach microkernel...
It is, but it's unclear whether OS X's version of Mach is still much of a microkernel.
would it make any sense for Apple to look at L4?
Well, ask yourself this question: given Apple's limited resources, where do they get the most return on their investment of time and effort? Probably the UI and consumer products (eg iPod).
OSS can afford to explore those kinds of technologies because there are so many OSS developers, but Apple has to focus.
A commercial company might take old code, given it a new name, and shipped it as a brand new thing. But GNU starts a brand-new, hot project based on better microkernel architecture and they use for it a name that people already associate with failure.
The L4Ka-based kernel is a new project that sounds like it has a lot of promise and may address problems that both Linux and commercial kernels have with modularity and extensibility. This new kernel should get a snazzy new name to get that message across.
That's total bullshit. Computer passwords have a long tradition and they work extremely well, in particular together with simple mechanisms that disable the account after a few tries. If you have many passwords, keep them in an electronic wallet.
The biggest problem with passwords is that companies don't use secure network communications, but that's a problem in general. If we made all TCP streams encrypted by default, then that problem would go away.
As for banks, their password and card security is usually a lot weaker than that of even regular computer systems. It's not that those passwords don't get out, it's that the costs of the frequent fraud that occurs is just passed on to other users of the system.
it's not a "weblog", it's advertising and news releases. It may be a "weblog" in the narrow, technical sense, but the term is understood to mean something more like "online personal diary" with some technical features.
And company-sponsored "weblogs" really aren't "weblogs" either: they aren't personal because people know full well what is expected of them.
Let's not let companies steal the term "weblog" for advertising purposes.
I agree about the importance of support, bug tracking, etc. for software quality and value. In fact, I think much of the commercial value of something like Windows, Java, and OS X comes from the feedback and bug reports from users, which are essentially multi-billion dollar donations to those companies every year. That makes it important for people to use and report bugs in open source software, and it also means that it is in everybody's interest to do so.
But it's unquestionably true that your assertion that GNUStep doesn't support network transparency,
Network transparency requires, not only, being able to draw over the network, but also requires features for applications to work correctly across the network and on distributed machines that don't share disks. That requires APIs and conventions. X11 has those, GNUStep doesn't, even GNUStep applications running under X11, unless they actually use X11 conventions.
"And today, something like Mono/Gnome/X11 is just a technically better platform than Objective-C/GNUStep/DPS in my opinion."
We're not talking about today, we're talking about the situation over the last decade. Gnome is mature. GNUStep, thanks to the lack of development, isn't. Had the choosen path been different five-ten years ago, the reverse would be true.
And Objective-C/GNUStep/DPS is a nonsense that nobody's promoting. GNUStep runs over X11, it supports DPS but doesn't, itself, rely upon it. The primary development platform is Objective C but bindings for Java and Ruby are mainstream and others would have been developed had the project had the same level of resources that were thrown at GNOME.
GNUStep is written in Objective-C, no matter what you bind it to. As long as ther is a line of Objective-C in my toolkit, it is broken as far as I'm concerned. I do want a dynamic language, but I don't want Objective-C, which is thoroughly obsolete and unfixable. And while I want one dynamic language, I don't want two dynamic languages, in particular one as poorly constructed as Objective-C. You can't fix GNUStep by binding it to Java or Python. That's also the problem with Apple Cocoa and their Java bindings (of course, another problem with Java bindings is that Java is neither open source, nor does Apple even control it). (The "it doesn't depend on DPS" is also bullshit--DPS is where all the development happens.)
I'm sorry, but I don't have access to that parallel universe. How GNUStep could possibly result in the death of these choices is beyond me. If you can come up with an explanation, by all means do. The only one I can think of is that GNUStep would be so good, all other choices would wither and die, which to me seems highly unlikely.
I have no idea what you are talking about with "parallel universes". You seem to be arguing with yourself about an analogy that I never got.
GNUStep is effectively dead, deal with it. It failed to catch on because it took way to long to develop it. Given that NeWS, NeXTStep and GNUStep were all failures, one might also suppose that there is a fundamental flaw with the approach. And I predict that Apple will either dump Cocoa and Objective-C, or radically rewrite it, or go out of business. The platform has no future because it isn't a good design in 2005, if it ever was.