Re:How many people actually use Borland C++?
on
Borland C++ For Linux
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· Score: 2, Informative
I used C++ Builder while I was working on game tools under win32 at LucasArts. Builder is amazing! I was a very competent programmer with NO win32 GUI experience. I needed artist-friendly game tools up *yesterday*... I flopped around with Microsoft's crappy GUI code-generating tools for a week and was tearing my hair out. Then I cracked open C++ Builder and had a working first cut of my tools in about a day!
C++ Builder is almost entirely visual... You lay out your GUI, then fill in the C++ bits for events that are important to you. You could have working stuff up in seconds, then revamp the interface several times without changing a line of your C++ code. All of this while still providing you full access to the native API should you wish to do something their GUI code doesn't do normally. Large corporations eat this up... Programmer time is best spent on functionality, not GUIs. Builder enforces Model/View/Controller programming, which IMHO is the way all GUI programming (and web programming) should be done.
Glade and friends on Linux are plainly inspired by Delphi and C++ Builder. I think Glade is great and getting better, but it doesn't compare to the polish and ease of Builder. I now provide command-line Linux tools to PS2 game developers, but would like to provide GUI versions of some. I'd like to do it in Qt so I can also support guys programming under windows, but I just don't have the time to go learn it. The GTK+ port to windows just isn't stable enough to trust, and requires cygwin underneath. But if C++ Builder existed for Linux, I'd be using it daily, as would my entire staff, and not looking back.
This is one case where a commercial development package under Linux is completely worth it because it is *that* far ahead of the open source tools that are available. Let that inspire you to improve Glade and the GTK win32 port.
Borland is making a good move because as their customers look to reduce their dependency on Microsoft, Borland makes the transition easier and tags along with them into the new space. Good luck Borland! You're doing everything right.
That's pretty much all there is to say about it. Your PS2 won't boot CD-R's unless you chip it, but really that's not necessary if you run PS2Linux and just put your software on the box over your network. The libs/drivers that come with PS2Linux give you pretty low-level access to everything but the IOP, so you can take good advantage of the hardware without too much trouble. No point in breaking your PS2 or your fingers when PS2Linux is on the way...
Sorry, no. First of all, you would be hard pressed to publish a game for the PS2 without going through Sony. PS2Linux doesn't change this... You can't just dupe a copy and boot it up. Sony presses the discs. You want to write a game using PS2Linux and then sell it? Fine, but the person who plays it will have already paid Sony for their PS2Linux disc, and will have to download your game to play it. Good luck getting it on a shelf.
Sony is obviously very carefully releasing the port, and I think it's time that people treat this as what it is: A great way to make programming the PS2 accessible to hobbyists without destroying their PS2 game market. They build cred, they open up the system a bit, but they keep their core business. Sony's done Linux, game, and demo hackers a big favor, and we should recognize that they did this in spite of the fact that people will try to rip them off... So we should concentrate more on doing cool things with it than on dancing on Sony's grave.
The five-year contract between the two companies that guaranteed AOL prominent placing on Microsoft's Windows operating system in exchange for exclusive support for Internet Explorer on AOL's online service expired in January.
In other words, the story as posted to Slashdot skews the perception AWAY from the actual events. The deal is to put the AOL installer on the XP install disc... Nothing more. AOL can use Komodo/Gecko in their next revision, but it's not ready in time for XP's launch, so they're using their current installer. We should still expect to see Komodo in the future, and the article says absolutely nothing to indicate otherwise.
Alter argued that the DeCSS case was similar -- the intent of distributing DeCSS is to promote violations of copyright law, therefore the speech part of such distribution can be ignored by the courts and the courts can focus on regulating actions without concerning themselves about speech issues.
The link itself is an act of expression. Linking to DeCSS is not intended to promote copyright infringment, but to promote the fight for free speech. What they're linking to is less important than their reason for doing it. If you stop them from linking based solely on the target, you're stomping on freedom of expression and potentially the press.
What if someone developed a program that could shut off the navigation system in commercial airplanes? What if someone developed a program that could shut off smoke detectors in public buildings? Surely, he said, the government could ban the publication of programs which were a threat to people's lives.
If I figure out how to do either of these things, there is no law whatsoever that would prevent me from telling another person how to do it, from talking with them about it, or even saying I'm going to do it. I break the law when I commit the act, not when I think about it. The government currently does not ban the dissemination of information that could be a threat to people's lives. There have been books describing how to make bombs since years before the internet was mainstream. While they aren't popular in bookstores, you cannot be convicted of a crime for writing or selling them... Nor can you be charged for telling someone how to get them.
Everyone needs to keep in mind that this particular case is not about whether you should have the right to property, but whether you should have the right to speak. You can argue all you want about fair use and backups and piracy, and that's exactly what the RIAA and MPAA want... to make this case a property issue. Property rights are easy to defend. Focus instead on the thing that they absolutely cannot be justified in doing: controlling and restricting the free flow of ideas. Forget about DeCSS itself, and recognize that this is a case restricting communication, which is indefensible.
http://www.ebworld.com shipped me one in 2 days, and that's only because I didn't spring for overnight shipping. The guy on the phone said they had plenty in stock.
Uh, wrong. Both Japan and the US use NTSC for their television standard. It's Europe that uses PAL and requires different output format. The difference between the Japanese and American PS2 is whether the broadband adapter is an external or internal device. The American version (with internal expansion bay) is now being sold in Japan as well because it costs less to produce.
What, it wasn't obvious enough from the beginning that the Indrema team didn't have anything? Now we have a couple of high school students claiming they'll have a $350 prototype available in the fall that's as far along as Indrema was? Well yeah, I guess that's true if you consider that Indrema never actually produced anything.
I love Linux: I've run it for years, I've hacked it for years, I evangelize it to everyone I can, and use it to solve problems many and sundry. However, making high-profile vaporware announcements hoping to capitalize on Linux hype only hurts everyone when it doesn't work out. (Witness Indrema.) I implore the TuxBox guys: It's *already* gone far enough. Let everyone down easy, and save us all months of bullshit. Concentrate on porting Linux to an existing console.
Re:Sony hasn't (yet) sold 10 million PS2 units!
on
No X Box for Xmas?
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· Score: 1
I'm not responding to anything but your incorrect number: Sony's now shipped 85 million PS1s worldwide.
I picked up Lua after reading this article about it in Dr. Dobb's Journal for use in Grim Fandango. (It has since advanced and yet simplified in tremendous ways... The article is about version 2.5, and it's now at version 4.0.) In addition to being a beautifully simple yet expressive language, Lua also has one of the cleanest codebases I've had the fortune to hack around in. The compiler/interpreter are all easily navigable... Comments are sparse, but well-placed and thoughtful; there need not be more because most of the code clearly explains itself. It's all written in straight ANSI C, and is instantly portable to just about everywhere without even any configuration macros. It's extensible in clean, logical ways... and oh yeah, it's BLAZINGLY FAST.
This essay at last crystalizes my unease and mistrust of our government's ability to defend personal freedom and further the human condition in the face of massive lobbying by large corporations for laws that will result only in short-term gains for those companies.
In fact, it inspired me to write to my congressmen. If you care about this issue at all, you should do the same. I summarized my feelings on these issues and gave reference to Gilmore's rant; you can do the same or just quote it at them if you're lazy. You can write to them in a web-based form from the U.S. Congress website... Just use the "Elected Officials" search with your zip code to get a listing of your senators and representatives for your cc list.
Stop bitching about this here and go do something about it right now, dammit! The outcome is in your hands!
It's called Linux Weekly News. Every time an issue comes out the next half hour or so brings me up to date on what's happening all over Linux and Open Source... Despite "Linux" in the title, various issues from the BSDs and such are discussed as well. Wherever appropriate, there are summaries and links off to more specific news pages such as Kernel Traffic, Gnotices, Wine Weekly News, LyX Weekly News, Debian, etc. The edtors are up on EVERYTHING that is happening, and restrain themselves to no-nonsense reporting that is a pleasure to read, with links off to more information if you want it. If you're interested in providing more newsletters like WWN or Kernel Traffic, fine, but make it all fit into LWN. Check it out if you haven't already. (They also run daily newsbits in case weekly isn't frequent enough for you.)
I only had to get about halfway through this desperate, petulant rant before I realized I could stop reading. I'm no fan of Intel's, but I recognize yellow writing when I see it. Two things threw everything else he might have to say into suspicion: First, that Intel and Dell's stock was trading down 50% due strictly to the P4. As we all know, this is not even unusual among tech companies lately. Tech stocks have dropped tremendously, and trying to use Intel's stock performance as a guage of the technical prowess of the P4 is just ludicrous. For example, try this: "AMD's stock price has dropped from a high of 48 1/2 this year to it's current price of 13 7/8, a drop of almost 70%! Obviously their poor technology is hurting them!" No way. Second, he claims the Pentium II was remarketed as the Pentium III to differentiate it from the Celeron-A, and that there was no other difference between the chips than the CPU ID. Utterly false! Game developers will be the first to point out that the P3 introduced the Katmai New Instructions ops, subsequently renamed to SSE (Streaming SIMD Extensions). These instructions are crucial to speeding up 3D vector operations, and they made a huge leap in performance possible. In the time since, transform and lighting code for games has moved on the graphics board, but those without hardware T&L remain competitive by using these instructions in their drivers. Hell, even NVidia boosted the performance of their older boards with these instructions! I'm not saying Intel has anything on AMD since AMD got 3DNow instructions out in the marketplace first, but to say the P2 and P3 were identical is just a load of horseshit. At that point I felt any specific example he threw in would be a case that he himself had trouble with, and not give any indication of where the P4 might help people doing things differently. The chip may have its flaws, but this is the definitely the wrong guy to be dissecting it.
Um, support for that card was added in 4.0.2, which is what this whole discussion is about. Not only that, but NVidia's driver supported that card under 4.0.1.
There is a section in the release notes detailing the fact that Metro Link donated their OS-independent shared library code, which is used in all of the drivers. All of the drivers are portable across OSs, though not architectures. So any x86 based *nix that can use XFree86 can use all of the x86 drivers that exist.
The author of the quote cited has no idea what he's talking about... Polygons get rasterized into video ram, not stored there! They get written/blended into pixels that are already holding other polygons. He further harps on what everyone seems to think is the PS2's major drawback, a smaller amount of VRAM. Well yes, you can store fewer/smaller textures in it at any given time... but the rate to transfer textures into VRAM is something like TEN TIMES the transfer rate for the DC and PCs! People, you can't do an apples to apples comparison between the PS2 and other systems based strictly on the sizes, because the system is put together completely differently. The PS2 is built to move massive amounts of data around without the bus bottlenecks that traditional architectures have had. The complaints about how hard it is to program are unfounded. It is a very different, unfamiliar architecture. However, once you learn the ground rules, it's really no harder to actually program for than any other console. People who are bitching are doing so because they're just a bit too lazy to learn something new... Yet this architecture is much better suited to doing hardcore 3d than a PC architecture has ever been. Don't believe the hype... The word-of-mouth impression is inaccurate, yet repeated from person to person with no firsthand experience. Let it stop with you! I'm an experienced game programmer, but you don't have to believe me; either shut up, or get ahold of one and try coding for it yourself.
The "broadband adapter" for the PS2 isn't just an ethernet connector... It also contains a "sizable" hard drive. You can't get the connectivity without the capacity, so say goodbye to that argument.
Slashdot Mirror
These two are excellent books, but the first book I read by Murakami is still his best, in my opinion: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Joe-Bob gives it five stars... Go check it out!
I used C++ Builder while I was working on game tools under win32 at LucasArts. Builder is amazing! I was a very competent programmer with NO win32 GUI experience. I needed artist-friendly game tools up *yesterday*... I flopped around with Microsoft's crappy GUI code-generating tools for a week and was tearing my hair out. Then I cracked open C++ Builder and had a working first cut of my tools in about a day!
C++ Builder is almost entirely visual... You lay out your GUI, then fill in the C++ bits for events that are important to you. You could have working stuff up in seconds, then revamp the interface several times without changing a line of your C++ code. All of this while still providing you full access to the native API should you wish to do something their GUI code doesn't do normally. Large corporations eat this up... Programmer time is best spent on functionality, not GUIs. Builder enforces Model/View/Controller programming, which IMHO is the way all GUI programming (and web programming) should be done.
Glade and friends on Linux are plainly inspired by Delphi and C++ Builder. I think Glade is great and getting better, but it doesn't compare to the polish and ease of Builder. I now provide command-line Linux tools to PS2 game developers, but would like to provide GUI versions of some. I'd like to do it in Qt so I can also support guys programming under windows, but I just don't have the time to go learn it. The GTK+ port to windows just isn't stable enough to trust, and requires cygwin underneath. But if C++ Builder existed for Linux, I'd be using it daily, as would my entire staff, and not looking back.
This is one case where a commercial development package under Linux is completely worth it because it is *that* far ahead of the open source tools that are available. Let that inspire you to improve Glade and the GTK win32 port.
Borland is making a good move because as their customers look to reduce their dependency on Microsoft, Borland makes the transition easier and tags along with them into the new space. Good luck Borland! You're doing everything right.
The bootloader is on the disc, but you're perfectly free to recompile your kernel and yes, source is included.
That's pretty much all there is to say about it. Your PS2 won't boot CD-R's unless you chip it, but really that's not necessary if you run PS2Linux and just put your software on the box over your network. The libs/drivers that come with PS2Linux give you pretty low-level access to everything but the IOP, so you can take good advantage of the hardware without too much trouble. No point in breaking your PS2 or your fingers when PS2Linux is on the way...
One Who Knows
I recommend Grim Fandango and The Secret of Monkey Island.
Sorry, no. First of all, you would be hard pressed to publish a game for the PS2 without going through Sony. PS2Linux doesn't change this... You can't just dupe a copy and boot it up. Sony presses the discs. You want to write a game using PS2Linux and then sell it? Fine, but the person who plays it will have already paid Sony for their PS2Linux disc, and will have to download your game to play it. Good luck getting it on a shelf.
Sony is obviously very carefully releasing the port, and I think it's time that people treat this as what it is: A great way to make programming the PS2 accessible to hobbyists without destroying their PS2 game market. They build cred, they open up the system a bit, but they keep their core business. Sony's done Linux, game, and demo hackers a big favor, and we should recognize that they did this in spite of the fact that people will try to rip them off... So we should concentrate more on doing cool things with it than on dancing on Sony's grave.
The five-year contract between the two companies that guaranteed AOL prominent placing on Microsoft's Windows operating system in exchange for exclusive support for Internet Explorer on AOL's online service expired in January.
In other words, the story as posted to Slashdot skews the perception AWAY from the actual events. The deal is to put the AOL installer on the XP install disc... Nothing more. AOL can use Komodo/Gecko in their next revision, but it's not ready in time for XP's launch, so they're using their current installer. We should still expect to see Komodo in the future, and the article says absolutely nothing to indicate otherwise.
Give me a fucking break.
The link itself is an act of expression. Linking to DeCSS is not intended to promote copyright infringment, but to promote the fight for free speech. What they're linking to is less important than their reason for doing it. If you stop them from linking based solely on the target, you're stomping on freedom of expression and potentially the press.
What if someone developed a program that could shut off the navigation system in commercial airplanes? What if someone developed a program that could shut off smoke detectors in public buildings? Surely, he said, the government could ban the publication of programs which were a threat to people's lives.
If I figure out how to do either of these things, there is no law whatsoever that would prevent me from telling another person how to do it, from talking with them about it, or even saying I'm going to do it. I break the law when I commit the act, not when I think about it. The government currently does not ban the dissemination of information that could be a threat to people's lives. There have been books describing how to make bombs since years before the internet was mainstream. While they aren't popular in bookstores, you cannot be convicted of a crime for writing or selling them... Nor can you be charged for telling someone how to get them.
Everyone needs to keep in mind that this particular case is not about whether you should have the right to property, but whether you should have the right to speak. You can argue all you want about fair use and backups and piracy, and that's exactly what the RIAA and MPAA want... to make this case a property issue. Property rights are easy to defend. Focus instead on the thing that they absolutely cannot be justified in doing: controlling and restricting the free flow of ideas. Forget about DeCSS itself, and recognize that this is a case restricting communication, which is indefensible.
http://www.ebworld.com shipped me one in 2 days, and that's only because I didn't spring for overnight shipping. The guy on the phone said they had plenty in stock.
Sony devkits are $10k, not $50k-$100k...
Uh, wrong. Both Japan and the US use NTSC for their television standard. It's Europe that uses PAL and requires different output format. The difference between the Japanese and American PS2 is whether the broadband adapter is an external or internal device. The American version (with internal expansion bay) is now being sold in Japan as well because it costs less to produce.
What, it wasn't obvious enough from the beginning that the Indrema team didn't have anything? Now we have a couple of high school students claiming they'll have a $350 prototype available in the fall that's as far along as Indrema was? Well yeah, I guess that's true if you consider that Indrema never actually produced anything.
I love Linux: I've run it for years, I've hacked it for years, I evangelize it to everyone I can, and use it to solve problems many and sundry. However, making high-profile vaporware announcements hoping to capitalize on Linux hype only hurts everyone when it doesn't work out. (Witness Indrema.) I implore the TuxBox guys: It's *already* gone far enough. Let everyone down easy, and save us all months of bullshit. Concentrate on porting Linux to an existing console.
I'm not responding to anything but your incorrect number: Sony's now shipped 85 million PS1s worldwide.
This is easily the best use of multimedia I've ever seen.
m au s
http://www.voyagerco.com/cdrom/catalogpage.cgi?
The website claims that it already works fairly well with Wine without even a recompile...
I picked up Lua after reading this article about it in Dr. Dobb's Journal for use in Grim Fandango. (It has since advanced and yet simplified in tremendous ways... The article is about version 2.5, and it's now at version 4.0.) In addition to being a beautifully simple yet expressive language, Lua also has one of the cleanest codebases I've had the fortune to hack around in. The compiler/interpreter are all easily navigable... Comments are sparse, but well-placed and thoughtful; there need not be more because most of the code clearly explains itself. It's all written in straight ANSI C, and is instantly portable to just about everywhere without even any configuration macros. It's extensible in clean, logical ways... and oh yeah, it's BLAZINGLY FAST.
This essay at last crystalizes my unease and mistrust of our government's ability to defend personal freedom and further the human condition in the face of massive lobbying by large corporations for laws that will result only in short-term gains for those companies.
In fact, it inspired me to write to my congressmen. If you care about this issue at all, you should do the same. I summarized my feelings on these issues and gave reference to Gilmore's rant; you can do the same or just quote it at them if you're lazy. You can write to them in a web-based form from the U.S. Congress website... Just use the "Elected Officials" search with your zip code to get a listing of your senators and representatives for your cc list.
Stop bitching about this here and go do something about it right now, dammit! The outcome is in your hands!
It's called Linux Weekly News. Every time an issue comes out the next half hour or so brings me up to date on what's happening all over Linux and Open Source... Despite "Linux" in the title, various issues from the BSDs and such are discussed as well. Wherever appropriate, there are summaries and links off to more specific news pages such as Kernel Traffic, Gnotices, Wine Weekly News, LyX Weekly News, Debian, etc. The edtors are up on EVERYTHING that is happening, and restrain themselves to no-nonsense reporting that is a pleasure to read, with links off to more information if you want it. If you're interested in providing more newsletters like WWN or Kernel Traffic, fine, but make it all fit into LWN. Check it out if you haven't already. (They also run daily newsbits in case weekly isn't frequent enough for you.)
I only had to get about halfway through this desperate, petulant rant before I realized I could stop reading. I'm no fan of Intel's, but I recognize yellow writing when I see it. Two things threw everything else he might have to say into suspicion: First, that Intel and Dell's stock was trading down 50% due strictly to the P4. As we all know, this is not even unusual among tech companies lately. Tech stocks have dropped tremendously, and trying to use Intel's stock performance as a guage of the technical prowess of the P4 is just ludicrous. For example, try this: "AMD's stock price has dropped from a high of 48 1/2 this year to it's current price of 13 7/8, a drop of almost 70%! Obviously their poor technology is hurting them!" No way. Second, he claims the Pentium II was remarketed as the Pentium III to differentiate it from the Celeron-A, and that there was no other difference between the chips than the CPU ID. Utterly false! Game developers will be the first to point out that the P3 introduced the Katmai New Instructions ops, subsequently renamed to SSE (Streaming SIMD Extensions). These instructions are crucial to speeding up 3D vector operations, and they made a huge leap in performance possible. In the time since, transform and lighting code for games has moved on the graphics board, but those without hardware T&L remain competitive by using these instructions in their drivers. Hell, even NVidia boosted the performance of their older boards with these instructions! I'm not saying Intel has anything on AMD since AMD got 3DNow instructions out in the marketplace first, but to say the P2 and P3 were identical is just a load of horseshit. At that point I felt any specific example he threw in would be a case that he himself had trouble with, and not give any indication of where the P4 might help people doing things differently. The chip may have its flaws, but this is the definitely the wrong guy to be dissecting it.
Um, support for that card was added in 4.0.2, which is what this whole discussion is about. Not only that, but NVidia's driver supported that card under 4.0.1.
There is a section in the release notes detailing the fact that Metro Link donated their OS-independent shared library code, which is used in all of the drivers. All of the drivers are portable across OSs, though not architectures. So any x86 based *nix that can use XFree86 can use all of the x86 drivers that exist.
Whoops, my comment was intended as a reply to the article in general, not this person's comment. My apologies for the confusion.
The author of the quote cited has no idea what he's talking about... Polygons get rasterized into video ram, not stored there! They get written/blended into pixels that are already holding other polygons. He further harps on what everyone seems to think is the PS2's major drawback, a smaller amount of VRAM. Well yes, you can store fewer/smaller textures in it at any given time... but the rate to transfer textures into VRAM is something like TEN TIMES the transfer rate for the DC and PCs! People, you can't do an apples to apples comparison between the PS2 and other systems based strictly on the sizes, because the system is put together completely differently. The PS2 is built to move massive amounts of data around without the bus bottlenecks that traditional architectures have had. The complaints about how hard it is to program are unfounded. It is a very different, unfamiliar architecture. However, once you learn the ground rules, it's really no harder to actually program for than any other console. People who are bitching are doing so because they're just a bit too lazy to learn something new... Yet this architecture is much better suited to doing hardcore 3d than a PC architecture has ever been. Don't believe the hype... The word-of-mouth impression is inaccurate, yet repeated from person to person with no firsthand experience. Let it stop with you! I'm an experienced game programmer, but you don't have to believe me; either shut up, or get ahold of one and try coding for it yourself.
The "broadband adapter" for the PS2 isn't just an ethernet connector... It also contains a "sizable" hard drive. You can't get the connectivity without the capacity, so say goodbye to that argument.