I grew up in middle class, did not have mommy and daddy pay for college (which I never really finished), joined the military for little pay, raised a family of five, got out and busted my hump studying independently to earn the pay I have. If I ever make it further up the pay scale, I'll be damned if I'm gonna let some cry-baby say "I deserve some of your pay, because I'm not willing to work as hard as you do to earn it." Take two jobs if you have to. Study night and day if you have to. I did.
Good for you. But I bet here you'll get a load of sneering comments from far richer people who became 'socialists' after skimming through Noam Chomsky and seeing a Moore film or two. The ironic thing is Chomsky for all his faults would be horrified by people like them that shout down anyone that disagrees with their world view.
I notice he usually seems to humiliate African American conservatives like Alan Keyes and Clarence Thomas far more than white ones. Guess us black people are ok only so long as we support the Democrats, otherwise it's a lynchin', right. Still I guess the Republican party freed the slaves back when most southern Democrats were KKK sympathizers and some things never change.
Actually, there seems to be a strong strand of racism and sexism running through the rabid left. Look at the sort of comments Michelle Malkin has to put up with on her blog. I think the Republicans should nominate Condoleeza Rice as their Presidential candidate actually. A gay black woman should be able to beat Hilary or that puppet Obama.
AMD and Intel have cross-licensing deals that handle the instructions that each company creates... these deals go way back to the mists of x86 time. So, for AMD to implement SSEn there is no legal problem. Ditto for the reverse.
There is a diffrence. AMD has to pay to license Intel patents...
A source familiar with the deal said it is essentially similar to the last one, which calls for Intel to receive royalties from AMD. Intel has patents covering aspects of the x86 instruction set used in processors for Windows-based PCs.
...but Intel doesn't have to pay to license AMD ones.
The lawsuits started in 1987. Rich Lovgren, former assistant general counsel for AMD, recalled that AMD founder Jerry Sanders sat through "every second" of one of the trials. "There were certainly bridges that were burned," he said.
Under the terms of the settlement, both companies gained free access to each other's patents in a cross-licensing agreement. AMD agreed to pay Intel royalties for making chips based on the x86 architecture, said Mulloy, who worked for AMD when the settlement was drafted. Royalties, he added, only go one way. AMD does get to collect royalties from Intel for any patents Intel might adopt.
AMD also agreed not to make any clones of Intel chips, but nothing bars Intel from doing a clone of an AMD chip, Mulloy added.
So everything AMD invents can be adopted by Intel for free. But AMD has to pay license fees to Intel. Pretty indefensible really, since Intel has a much larger market share, and much higher proft margins.
Couldn't you use explosives to fragment the missile though? It seems like if the closing velocity is so high, you don't need the whole missile to impact to get a kill. So if you blew it to bits prior to impact you'd have a cloud of shrapnel travelling at the same speed. The cloud could be pretty big too. I can imagine a missile made out of mostly tungsten spheres but with explosive mixed in that exploded prior to impact that turns into a hundred meter wide cloud of projectiles, all of which could penetrate any conceivable armour.
Ok for a satellite in free orbit you could do hit to kill, but what happens if the satellites start to maneuver to avoid anti satellite missiles? That seems like the obvious counter measure - just fire a few compressed air jets to make the satellite move unpredictably when anti satellite weapons are incoming. And for missiles are presumably not completely ballistic due to maneuvering jets and deploy mutiple guided warheads a shotgun gun approach seems much more likely to work.
I like the moderation system for the most part but it does allow for a sort of cowardice that wavers between craven and pathetic. If someone says something you disagree with, say something back, don't just mod him down. That's no different from Bill O'Reilly cutting a guest's mike when he's at a loss for words. Weak.
The moderators have a hell of a job to do, and for the most part they do it with skill and a sense of humour. I salute them!
I think with this and with clever hacks in the OS, you can fix most bugs. So probably there's a lot of person to person communication between processor manufacturers, Bios writers and OS vendors and the net result is that it all seems like it works. Of course if you're an obnoxious vendor of a not too commercially important OS, you're probably excluded from this, which is why Theo is upset.
Get a grip dude, all the smarts in the world can't protect you from big dumb guy who means you serious harm and is too stupid to understand the consequences of attacking you.
It reminds me of deterrence theory actually. If you have an opponent who is rational, it is possible to deter them. For example I'd never attack anyone since I don't want to go to prison, lose my job and so on. Probably most of the world is like that - they are like the Soviet Union or America in the Cold War. It's not that they are good it's just that they know if they are too bad then terrible things will happen to them.
But there are a few very stupid people around who'll break a glass over your head whilst drunk and then wonder why the police arrive to arrest them the next morning. These are like a sort of nightmare rogue state because they basically don't understand the consequences of their actions. Like Saddam did't in the first Gulf War for example. They basically end up in prison, just like Saddam eventually did because they can't forsee it.
Now the problem is that if you're smart and in prison you're surrounded by these people - people who are essentially too dumb to be deterrable opponents.
But we can tell it's not consenual BDSM because she complained about it to the police. Then it ends up in court. It seem to me like Hans can then either deny it happened, or say it was self defense or claim it was BDSM. Or he can admit he's guilty.
What he actually did was to send them a long rant about the culture of manhood, appropriate violence and so on. Now if I were on a jury I'd conclude that he was a wife beater and should be locked up, deprived of custody and so on. And from his point of view it was seriously stupid to have sent that document. Any decent lawyer would have told him it was better to say nothing than send it.
I just don't get it frankly. Lots of dumber people than him would understand this. The guy sounds like a clever psychopath to be honest. He's used to being able to do whatever the hell he feels like and dazzle people and himself with his superior intellect by saying things they don't understand. Now the non commercial software and academic worlds are like that which is why I avoid them, but the real world just isn't. You can't screw people over and weasel out of it.
Reiser delves into this "culture of manhood" in a 32-page filing he submits to the court after Nina accuses him of hurting her. In it, he explains the difference between appropriate and inappropriate violence.
Nina accuse him of hurting her and he starts to lecture the court on how some violence appropriate. If I were in a jury and someone did that I'd vote to lock them up.
An article on a popular magazine with "if( node->parent == NULL) printk("parent not found")" isn't what you want.
I really hated the code comments. Wired quote bits of code as if it's either poetic or the esoteric writings of a genius when actually it's not too hard to understand.
Wow that looks really nasty. People like Hans should be put in some kind of protected custody in prison I think. Whether or not he's a murderer he certainly can't look after himself in jail.
Yeah but you can see why people get the wrong idea about Hans
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-07 /ff_hansreiser?currentPage=5 Reiser delves into this "culture of manhood" in a 32-page filing he submits to the court after Nina accuses him of hurting her. In it, he explains the difference between appropriate and inappropriate violence. Grand Theft Auto, for instance, demonstrates inappropriate violence because players can get away with killing innocent people. "Many other computer games heavily penalize shooting the wrong person, and I prefer those," Reiser says.
Incidentally I found a remarkably candid article about DirectX
http://www.shacknews.com/extras/2007/032907_alexst john1_2.x Alex St JohnI actually attribute my reasons for being successful there to listening carefully to the game developers. My strategy was very simple--I go to them and ask, "What kind of crack would you get addicted to?" They'd tell me, and I'd go back to Microsoft and say, "If we make this crack, those developers will buy it." Very simple. Direct X was essentially the crack they asked me to make. That's the way you hook somebody--ask them what they'll pay money for, then go make it.
Fair enough.
What's remarkable is the other quotes :
Alex St John: You'll never hear this from anybody else because they probably don't know. The original codename for Direct X was "the Manhattan Project," because strategically it was an effort to displace Japanese game consoles with PCs and ultimately the Xbox. We called it "The Manhattan Project" because that was the codename for the program developing the nuclear bomb. We had a glowing radiation logo for the prototype for Direct X, and of course as soon as that got out and the press covered it, it caused a scandal. Microsoft PR said, "You have got to change that. You cannot be using a radiation symbol and calling this thing 'The Manhattan Project'." So we renamed it Direct X but we said, "Everybody loves the radiation symbol, so what we'll do is add legs to it to make it an 'X'." There are probably 3 people in the entire world that know how that came about. Microsoft was very funny when the Xbox launch, they said, "Oh, well, some artist made the green thing, and we thought it was cool," and I just said, "Oh stop, that was the color scheme for the Direct X logo from the very beginning."
Clearly not a man afraid of saying the wrong thing in an interview.
Here's what he said about Vista for gaming.
Alex St JohnI don't think Microsoft did anything to help the PC as a gaming platform with Vista, and that's a tremendous frustration because I take it very personally. If I would've been there, I would have made much more aggressive efforts to make sure Vista stayed out of the way of games. What you see with Microsoft is, without people at Microsoft who realize that the operating system does not add value to gaming, it gets in the way, they think they can add more value by adding in more shit that only gets in the way of making a good game. Unfortunately, Vista does that. Microsoft added more shit that impedes game development. It's certainly possible to make great games in Vista, it's just more of a pain in the ass than it needs to be. I think Vista is a missed opportunity for Microsoft to have done a better job in supporting PC gaming.
Ouch. And about Microsoft's culture
Alex St JohnI came in to do my presentation, and I got about three slides into it before I was interrupted by one of the executives saying, "This is all great stuff, you have a perfect plan. Developers who are reasonable should all support it, but what do you do if none of this works." "What do you mean?" "What if in spite of your best efforts, your best arguments, you best relationships, you can't get them to support them. How do you force the industry to support Microsoft anyway?" "Force them? Well, I don't know." "Come back when you have a plan that answers that question."
That perplexed me for a long time. I'm thinking, "What the hell does he mean, force them? I can't hold a gun to their head, so how do I put all these companies in a position where, regardless of what they see is in their best interest, they have to adopt your technology?" That experience had a major impact on my thinking. I realized that a major part of my job was to figure out how to use technology control to create economic force, or leverage, such that money and business flowed in Microsoft's direction, and people had to go [to them]. That, ultimately, is when I became a "Microsoft guy," when I got that concept.
He needs some cool tunes Not just any will suffice But they didn't have Ice Cube So he bought Vanilla Ice Now cruising in his Pinto, he sees homies as he pass But if he looks twice They're gonna kick his lily ass
Sounds kinda racist to me...
The song is about a white guy who wants to be black - women say he's pretty fly for a white guy. Ironically when he buys his music he has to settle for white rapper Vanilla Ice instead of his preferred black rapper Ice Cube. So if anything it's saying that white people are stupid and annoying when they try to imitate black people. It's not really racist against anybody.
I think DirectX is more tuned to its target audience.
If you look at how games worked in Dos, they basically needed these functions
1) Set the graphics mode 2) BitBlt (for 2D) 3) Draw a list of polygons (for 3D)
Since every game had its own engine, this was the only layer which they could agree on. Most games used Vesa to set the mode and had software handlers for BitBlt and DrawPolygons.
Early 3d cards provided all these but there was no standard for the register interface. DirectX was a thin wrapper over a device driver standard which provided all three. So when you port your game to Windows you could use acceleration of all three on a decent card. Presumably they spent time talking to the graphics card companies and game companies and invented something which was what both wanted. There was some Windows magic too, basically creating a window and getting hold of the COM interfaces that DirectX is based on, but that could be cut and pasted from the samples that came with the free DirectX SDK.
I read that it still took a while to get right - e.g. the initial vertex standard for DrawPolygon had terrible cache behaviour so they hired a games programmer to design a new one. There were other modes where you could pass a whole scene and let DirectX render it but almost no games used them. The initial DirectX forced people to build execute buffers by hand - basically tables of things to be drawn. But the end result is that you could take a Dos game engine, port it to Windows and have it run a lot faster on all modern cards very quickly.
At the launch of OS/2 Warp in 1994, Patrick Stewart was to be the Master of Ceremonies; however Kate Mulgrew of the then-upcoming series Star Trek: Voyager was substituted at the last minute
He needs some cool tunes Not just any will suffice But they didn't have Ice Cube So he bought Vanilla Ice Now cruising in his Pinto, he sees homies as he pass But if he looks twice They're gonna kick his lily ass
3: You know it's going to cost billions. Frankly, it's almost certainly going to cost trillions to build. That money isn't in place, but then a space elevator isn't going to be feasible for decades. If you think taxation should pay for it you can fuck right off, this elevator is something you want, I couldn't care less.
If it gets built it will probably get built by the US DOD, or a consortium of national space agencies. Or a mixture of both. Which means for better of for worse people won't have to vote on it directly. Well I guess Congress would, but it will attached to some absurdly porky budget bill. So the cash will be stolen from the George W Bush memorial highway and the Donald Rumsfeld aircraft carrier. Plus I bet if it were technically feasible (which it isn't at the moment), there'd be some kind of space race type phenomenon with China vs the US and allies and the US would want to beat the bad buys to completion and make sure the pork went to US companies.
Don't get me wrong I like the idea of colonising the solar system because it stops us being wiped out by an asteroid or (more likely) a major war. But I'm suspicious of people using Malthusian arguments to push their pet project. And it seems like the technology for colonising the solar system just isn't really there yet.
I once did some work on a website back in the IE 3.0 / NS 3.0 days. Basically both browsers implemented Javascript in theory but in practice they each had their own object model. So you ended up with conditionals all over the place. CSS was supported a bit by the upcoming 4.x browsers, but we couldn't rely on users using them.
So we ended up with a mixture of sever side code, tables, gifs, javascript onmouseover handlers and the like. Which wasn't elegant but it worked, even on the severly limited IE 3.0. That site would probably work fine on all modern browsers too, except that the company got bought and sold to the point where it changed into something else completely.
That and keeping MSHTML.dll around is a bit different than building an OS around an application designed to compete with a smaller company.
So you're saying that Explorer.exe can't use HTML? Or that if it does the html component can only be used in Explorer? Or that Windows can include MSHTML.DLL but not Iexplorer.exe? Incidentally as far as I can tell third party applications literally embed Internet Explorer, not MSHTML.exe, which is why it's so hard to remove it. It's not like the edit control where third party applications depend on the EDIT class, not the whole of Notepad.
If Office were provided for free then Wordperfect would have had a right to bitch. Notepad is a thoroughly simplistic tool.
What about Wordpad and the RichEdit control? Is that near enough to Wordperfect's functionality that Microsoft should have been prevented from bundling it? What if they'd gradually added features until it looked like Wordperfect - should that be illegal?
And how about multimedia codecs? Should be illegal for Microsoft to specify an API for codecs? What about if they bundle a toy application that demonstrates how to use the API? What about if they include MediaPlayer which started off as a toy application and got gradually enhanced. Ironically I actually use MediaPlayer Classic which removed all the enhancements and reverts it to a toy application that just knows how to host codecs.
As far as I know in the EU Microsoft have been forced to provide a very of Windows where the MediaPlayer executable is not bundled but presumably the API is supported and Microsoft codecs are supported, because RealNetworks demanded it.
Incidentally, if anti trust law forces them to do this, is ok for them to provide Media Player as a free download? What happens if there is an icon in the start menu and it installs on demand when people try to use it? Is that ok too?. How user unfriendly do they have to make it to use the Microsoft application in your opinion?
Seems like it's not as clear cut as you think doesn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
More like free as in single.
I grew up in middle class, did not have mommy and daddy pay for college (which I never really finished), joined the military for little pay, raised a family of five, got out and busted my hump studying independently to earn the pay I have. If I ever make it further up the pay scale, I'll be damned if I'm gonna let some cry-baby say "I deserve some of your pay, because I'm not willing to work as hard as you do to earn it." Take two jobs if you have to. Study night and day if you have to. I did.
Good for you. But I bet here you'll get a load of sneering comments from far richer people who became 'socialists' after skimming through Noam Chomsky and seeing a Moore film or two. The ironic thing is Chomsky for all his faults would be horrified by people like them that shout down anyone that disagrees with their world view.
I notice he usually seems to humiliate African American conservatives like Alan Keyes and Clarence Thomas far more than white ones. Guess us black people are ok only so long as we support the Democrats, otherwise it's a lynchin', right. Still I guess the Republican party freed the slaves back when most southern Democrats were KKK sympathizers and some things never change.
Actually, there seems to be a strong strand of racism and sexism running through the rabid left. Look at the sort of comments Michelle Malkin has to put up with on her blog. I think the Republicans should nominate Condoleeza Rice as their Presidential candidate actually. A gay black woman should be able to beat Hilary or that puppet Obama.
I think that's a misprint. It should be "AMD doesn't get to collect royalties from Intel for any patents Intel might adopt."
There is a diffrence. AMD has to pay to license Intel patents...
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-257059.html
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1000000091,391
So everything AMD invents can be adopted by Intel for free. But AMD has to pay license fees to Intel. Pretty indefensible really, since Intel has a much larger market share, and much higher proft margins.
Couldn't you use explosives to fragment the missile though? It seems like if the closing velocity is so high, you don't need the whole missile to impact to get a kill. So if you blew it to bits prior to impact you'd have a cloud of shrapnel travelling at the same speed. The cloud could be pretty big too. I can imagine a missile made out of mostly tungsten spheres but with explosive mixed in that exploded prior to impact that turns into a hundred meter wide cloud of projectiles, all of which could penetrate any conceivable armour.
Ok for a satellite in free orbit you could do hit to kill, but what happens if the satellites start to maneuver to avoid anti satellite missiles? That seems like the obvious counter measure - just fire a few compressed air jets to make the satellite move unpredictably when anti satellite weapons are incoming. And for missiles are presumably not completely ballistic due to maneuvering jets and deploy mutiple guided warheads a shotgun gun approach seems much more likely to work.
I like the moderation system for the most part but it does allow for a sort of cowardice that wavers between craven and pathetic. If someone says something you disagree with, say something back, don't just mod him down. That's no different from Bill O'Reilly cutting a guest's mike when he's at a loss for words. Weak.
The moderators have a hell of a job to do, and for the most part they do it with skill and a sense of humour. I salute them!
Modern processors have some ram for microcode updates
http://www.enlight.ru/docs/cpu/INFO/mcupdate.htm
I think with this and with clever hacks in the OS, you can fix most bugs. So probably there's a lot of person to person communication between processor manufacturers, Bios writers and OS vendors and the net result is that it all seems like it works. Of course if you're an obnoxious vendor of a not too commercially important OS, you're probably excluded from this, which is why Theo is upset.
GPL v3 + iPhone in one day = collective nerdgasm?
They seem kind of like opposites though. With a bit of luck they will annihilate each other in a burst of gamma rays.
"People ready" business reminds of those Intel graphics chips which can't actually run Aero despite being marketed as "Vista Ready".
n tel-915-graphics-dont-have-a-wddm-driver-for-vista /
http://www.tinyscreenfuls.com/2007/04/video-why-i
Get a grip dude, all the smarts in the world can't protect you from big dumb guy who means you serious harm and is too stupid to understand the consequences of attacking you.
It reminds me of deterrence theory actually. If you have an opponent who is rational, it is possible to deter them. For example I'd never attack anyone since I don't want to go to prison, lose my job and so on. Probably most of the world is like that - they are like the Soviet Union or America in the Cold War. It's not that they are good it's just that they know if they are too bad then terrible things will happen to them.
But there are a few very stupid people around who'll break a glass over your head whilst drunk and then wonder why the police arrive to arrest them the next morning. These are like a sort of nightmare rogue state because they basically don't understand the consequences of their actions. Like Saddam did't in the first Gulf War for example. They basically end up in prison, just like Saddam eventually did because they can't forsee it.
Now the problem is that if you're smart and in prison you're surrounded by these people - people who are essentially too dumb to be deterrable opponents.
But we can tell it's not consenual BDSM because she complained about it to the police. Then it ends up in court. It seem to me like Hans can then either deny it happened, or say it was self defense or claim it was BDSM. Or he can admit he's guilty.
What he actually did was to send them a long rant about the culture of manhood, appropriate violence and so on. Now if I were on a jury I'd conclude that he was a wife beater and should be locked up, deprived of custody and so on. And from his point of view it was seriously stupid to have sent that document. Any decent lawyer would have told him it was better to say nothing than send it.
I just don't get it frankly. Lots of dumber people than him would understand this. The guy sounds like a clever psychopath to be honest. He's used to being able to do whatever the hell he feels like and dazzle people and himself with his superior intellect by saying things they don't understand. Now the non commercial software and academic worlds are like that which is why I avoid them, but the real world just isn't. You can't screw people over and weasel out of it.
Hmm, lets bold it for emphasis
Reiser delves into this "culture of manhood" in a 32-page filing he submits to the court after Nina accuses him of hurting her. In it, he explains the difference between appropriate and inappropriate violence.
Nina accuse him of hurting her and he starts to lecture the court on how some violence appropriate. If I were in a jury and someone did that I'd vote to lock them up.
An article on a popular magazine with "if( node->parent == NULL) printk("parent not found")" isn't what you want.
I really hated the code comments. Wired quote bits of code as if it's either poetic or the esoteric writings of a genius when actually it's not too hard to understand.
Wow that looks really nasty. People like Hans should be put in some kind of protected custody in prison I think. Whether or not he's a murderer he certainly can't look after himself in jail.
Yeah but you can see why people get the wrong idea about Hans
7 /ff_hansreiser?currentPage=5
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-0
Reiser delves into this "culture of manhood" in a 32-page filing he submits to the court after Nina accuses him of hurting her. In it, he explains the difference between appropriate and inappropriate violence. Grand Theft Auto, for instance, demonstrates inappropriate violence because players can get away with killing innocent people. "Many other computer games heavily penalize shooting the wrong person, and I prefer those," Reiser says.
Incidentally I found a remarkably candid article about DirectX
t john1_2.x
http://www.shacknews.com/extras/2007/032907_alexs
Alex St John I actually attribute my reasons for being successful there to listening carefully to the game developers. My strategy was very simple--I go to them and ask, "What kind of crack would you get addicted to?" They'd tell me, and I'd go back to Microsoft and say, "If we make this crack, those developers will buy it." Very simple. Direct X was essentially the crack they asked me to make. That's the way you hook somebody--ask them what they'll pay money for, then go make it.
Fair enough.
What's remarkable is the other quotes :
Alex St John: You'll never hear this from anybody else because they probably don't know. The original codename for Direct X was "the Manhattan Project," because strategically it was an effort to displace Japanese game consoles with PCs and ultimately the Xbox. We called it "The Manhattan Project" because that was the codename for the program developing the nuclear bomb. We had a glowing radiation logo for the prototype for Direct X, and of course as soon as that got out and the press covered it, it caused a scandal. Microsoft PR said, "You have got to change that. You cannot be using a radiation symbol and calling this thing 'The Manhattan Project'." So we renamed it Direct X but we said, "Everybody loves the radiation symbol, so what we'll do is add legs to it to make it an 'X'." There are probably 3 people in the entire world that know how that came about. Microsoft was very funny when the Xbox launch, they said, "Oh, well, some artist made the green thing, and we thought it was cool," and I just said, "Oh stop, that was the color scheme for the Direct X logo from the very beginning."
Clearly not a man afraid of saying the wrong thing in an interview.
Here's what he said about Vista for gaming.
Alex St John I don't think Microsoft did anything to help the PC as a gaming platform with Vista, and that's a tremendous frustration because I take it very personally. If I would've been there, I would have made much more aggressive efforts to make sure Vista stayed out of the way of games. What you see with Microsoft is, without people at Microsoft who realize that the operating system does not add value to gaming, it gets in the way, they think they can add more value by adding in more shit that only gets in the way of making a good game. Unfortunately, Vista does that. Microsoft added more shit that impedes game development. It's certainly possible to make great games in Vista, it's just more of a pain in the ass than it needs to be. I think Vista is a missed opportunity for Microsoft to have done a better job in supporting PC gaming.
Ouch. And about Microsoft's culture
Alex St John I came in to do my presentation, and I got about three slides into it before I was interrupted by one of the executives saying, "This is all great stuff, you have a perfect plan. Developers who are reasonable should all support it, but what do you do if none of this works." "What do you mean?" "What if in spite of your best efforts, your best arguments, you best relationships, you can't get them to support them. How do you force the industry to support Microsoft anyway?" "Force them? Well, I don't know." "Come back when you have a plan that answers that question."
That perplexed me for a long time. I'm thinking, "What the hell does he mean, force them? I can't hold a gun to their head, so how do I put all these companies in a position where, regardless of what they see is in their best interest, they have to adopt your technology?" That experience had a major impact on my thinking. I realized that a major part of my job was to figure out how to use technology control to create economic force, or leverage, such that money and business flowed in Microsoft's direction, and people had to go [to them]. That, ultimately, is when I became a "Microsoft guy," when I got that concept.
The song is about a white guy who wants to be black - women say he's pretty fly for a white guy. Ironically when he buys his music he has to settle for white rapper Vanilla Ice instead of his preferred black rapper Ice Cube. So if anything it's saying that white people are stupid and annoying when they try to imitate black people. It's not really racist against anybody.
I think DirectX is more tuned to its target audience.
If you look at how games worked in Dos, they basically needed these functions
1) Set the graphics mode
2) BitBlt (for 2D)
3) Draw a list of polygons (for 3D)
Since every game had its own engine, this was the only layer which they could agree on. Most games used Vesa to set the mode and had software handlers for BitBlt and DrawPolygons.
Early 3d cards provided all these but there was no standard for the register interface. DirectX was a thin wrapper over a device driver standard which provided all three. So when you port your game to Windows you could use acceleration of all three on a decent card. Presumably they spent time talking to the graphics card companies and game companies and invented something which was what both wanted. There was some Windows magic too, basically creating a window and getting hold of the COM interfaces that DirectX is based on, but that could be cut and pasted from the samples that came with the free DirectX SDK.
I read that it still took a while to get right - e.g. the initial vertex standard for DrawPolygon had terrible cache behaviour so they hired a games programmer to design a new one. There were other modes where you could pass a whole scene and let DirectX render it but almost no games used them. The initial DirectX forced people to build execute buffers by hand - basically tables of things to be drawn. But the end result is that you could take a Dos game engine, port it to Windows and have it run a lot faster on all modern cards very quickly.
Initially OS/2 included Windows (literally) but later versions could used a separate install.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2#Windows_3.x_com
Incidentally this
Reminds me of this
http://www.offspring.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/Offsp
3: You know it's going to cost billions. Frankly, it's almost certainly going to cost trillions to build. That money isn't in place, but then a space elevator isn't going to be feasible for decades. If you think taxation should pay for it you can fuck right off, this elevator is something you want, I couldn't care less.
If it gets built it will probably get built by the US DOD, or a consortium of national space agencies. Or a mixture of both. Which means for better of for worse people won't have to vote on it directly. Well I guess Congress would, but it will attached to some absurdly porky budget bill. So the cash will be stolen from the George W Bush memorial highway and the Donald Rumsfeld aircraft carrier. Plus I bet if it were technically feasible (which it isn't at the moment), there'd be some kind of space race type phenomenon with China vs the US and allies and the US would want to beat the bad buys to completion and make sure the pork went to US companies.
Won't the population level off at some point?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_population
Don't get me wrong I like the idea of colonising the solar system because it stops us being wiped out by an asteroid or (more likely) a major war. But I'm suspicious of people using Malthusian arguments to push their pet project. And it seems like the technology for colonising the solar system just isn't really there yet.
I once did some work on a website back in the IE 3.0 / NS 3.0 days. Basically both browsers implemented Javascript in theory but in practice they each had their own object model. So you ended up with conditionals all over the place. CSS was supported a bit by the upcoming 4.x browsers, but we couldn't rely on users using them.
So we ended up with a mixture of sever side code, tables, gifs, javascript onmouseover handlers and the like. Which wasn't elegant but it worked, even on the severly limited IE 3.0. That site would probably work fine on all modern browsers too, except that the company got bought and sold to the point where it changed into something else completely.
It's extremely clear cut, you're just mildly psychotic.
If it's so clear cut, why haven't you answered the questions in my post? I'm genuinely curious as to where you stand on each one.
That and keeping MSHTML.dll around is a bit different than building an OS around an application designed to compete with a smaller company.
So you're saying that Explorer.exe can't use HTML? Or that if it does the html component can only be used in Explorer? Or that Windows can include MSHTML.DLL but not Iexplorer.exe? Incidentally as far as I can tell third party applications literally embed Internet Explorer, not MSHTML.exe, which is why it's so hard to remove it. It's not like the edit control where third party applications depend on the EDIT class, not the whole of Notepad.
If Office were provided for free then Wordperfect would have had a right to bitch. Notepad is a thoroughly simplistic tool.
What about Wordpad and the RichEdit control? Is that near enough to Wordperfect's functionality that Microsoft should have been prevented from bundling it? What if they'd gradually added features until it looked like Wordperfect - should that be illegal?
And how about multimedia codecs? Should be illegal for Microsoft to specify an API for codecs? What about if they bundle a toy application that demonstrates how to use the API? What about if they include MediaPlayer which started off as a toy application and got gradually enhanced. Ironically I actually use MediaPlayer Classic which removed all the enhancements and reverts it to a toy application that just knows how to host codecs.
As far as I know in the EU Microsoft have been forced to provide a very of Windows where the MediaPlayer executable is not bundled but presumably the API is supported and Microsoft codecs are supported, because RealNetworks demanded it.
Incidentally, if anti trust law forces them to do this, is ok for them to provide Media Player as a free download? What happens if there is an icon in the start menu and it installs on demand when people try to use it? Is that ok too?. How user unfriendly do they have to make it to use the Microsoft application in your opinion?
Seems like it's not as clear cut as you think doesn't it?