I blame Doom for the death of the Amiga. Doom was the killer app for the "PC as home computer", and due to the Amiga's planar bitmap based graphics architecture which was amazing for 2D, but crap for 3D, the Amiga just couldn't compete...
I'm another ex-Amigan who like so many others who have posted here, miss it dearly:(
"One of the most memorable effects was using the 'blitter' chip to render horizontal lines ('raster' bars) in place of a single colour, so you could, for instance, replace the screen's black palette colour with a nice rainbow."
Sorry to be picky, but the effect you're talking about used the copper, not the blitter, and was called "copper bars". This effect was done by changing the colour value for a colour in the palette on each line.
The copper wasn't just limited to changing colour values however (changing resolution (mode) or the address from which the graphics were being fetched for instance), and it could do more than just change things on each vertical line. Copper instructions on OCS machines happened every 4 low-res pixels horizontally, and every 2 low-res pixels horizontally on AGA machines. Due to the planar nature of the Amiga's graphical system, changing the value of a pixel in a 256 colour bitmap meant changing 8 seperate bits (1 per plane) rather than 1 contiguous byte on a "chunky" pixel based system (byte/word per pixel). As a result 3D games on AGA Amigas used the copper to render 3D scenes (see an example here).
I remember writing a street fighter 2 style parallax floor scroll for the Amiga using the copper (the chip in the Amiga that did display list style stuff). Ahh, those were the days - bare metal programming was so much fun... I've never felt like I really controlled a computer as much since...
Just thought I'd point out that protestant christians take the whole "graven image" thing very seriously too - eg the bare cross instead of a crucifix...
I'll quote from a discussion that was linked to from a recent post on/.
The Unix programmer will create a command-line or text-driven core and occasionally, as an afterthought, build a GUI which drives that core. This way the main operations of the application will be available to other programmers who can invoke the program on the command line and read the results as text. The Windows programmer will tend to start with a GUI, and occasionally, as an afterthought, add a scripting language which can automate the operation of the GUI interface.
Oh, I assure you I do know something about Linux. I know that KDE and GNOME can be replaced by other desktop environments, but I also know that for instance Red Hat prefers to use GNOME while SuSE prefers KDE. This is one of the main things that differentiates these two distros and so, if you ask for help with Red Hat, people will assume that you're using the RedHat/GNOME/GNU/Linux stack rather than the RedHat/KDE/GNU/Linux stack. Apart from this Elive thing I don't know of any distro that prefers Enlightenment.
IMHO, GNOME and KDE are totally bloated and have not really understood the UNIX philosophy. They're also desktop environents rather than stand alone window managers (although I believe E17 will incorporate a file manager (correct me if I'm wrong)). Enlightenment also has a lot of swishy graphical effects which will appeal to people who like that sort of thing.
...I've been looking for an Enlightenment based distro for some time. Does anyone know of any others, and can this be installed on a hard drive like normal distros?
C++ does have it's faults, but OO is a good fit for user interface coding and C++ is certainly more efficient than any other OO language. A lot of less experienced programmers seem to make the mistake of applying every OO paradigm at every given opportunity, but this is hardly C++s fault.
Pollution was terrible in Europe during the industrial revolution but they haven't designed their cities to have suburban sprawl. There are working alternatives to the American model and I don't think anyone wants to emulate the US at a time when oil is only going up in price...
Just because they are starting to buy cars it doesn't mean that they have to follow the US suburban sprawl urban development route. I believe that the US is the only developed country where the town planners have been so extravagant - in most places in Europe for instance it's possible to walk to the nearest store in < 10 minutes.
From Desktop to Grid, the ODW (Open Desktop Workstation) is designed to assume its position and fulfill the missing link of the first true PowerPC Linux Development and Desktop System. The fully configured machine comes bundled with a variety of tools and applications that make the platform the perfect partner for any serious embedded system development based on Linux.
The Open Desktop Workstation is the only GNU/Linux PowerPC solution available on the market today that is endorsed by IBM and Freescale Semiconductor.
I've read your post a couple of times and I'm still not sure I understand what you're disagreeing with me about. The idea of grouping pupils according to ability (whether it's by school or by stream) should allow everyone to move at the pace that suits them best. I believe the more fine grained this selection is the better.
All schools in the UK attempt to teach a solid foundation (and I never said otherwise) and the grammar/top stream students often learn much more.
Re:Trade schools for the morons
on
Improving Education?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
This is what happens in the UK with the old Grammar/Secondary Modern division. Those of us who went to grammar school leave education unused to dealing with 90% of the supposedly less intelligent population, while the other kids are effectively told that they don't amount to much intelligence wise.
Streaming is a better system as kids do not have uniform ability across all subjects. It is quite possible to be great at maths but only average or worse at English and vice versa.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't they introduce 24 hour licencing in Ireland too, only to change it back to being even more restrictive after having problems?
I blame Doom for the death of the Amiga. Doom was the killer app for the "PC as home computer", and due to the Amiga's planar bitmap based graphics architecture which was amazing for 2D, but crap for 3D, the Amiga just couldn't compete...
:(
I'm another ex-Amigan who like so many others who have posted here, miss it dearly
"One of the most memorable effects was using the 'blitter' chip to render horizontal lines ('raster' bars) in place of a single colour, so you could, for instance, replace the screen's black palette colour with a nice rainbow."
Sorry to be picky, but the effect you're talking about used the copper, not the blitter, and was called "copper bars". This effect was done by changing the colour value for a colour in the palette on each line.
The copper wasn't just limited to changing colour values however (changing resolution (mode) or the address from which the graphics were being fetched for instance), and it could do more than just change things on each vertical line. Copper instructions on OCS machines happened every 4 low-res pixels horizontally, and every 2 low-res pixels horizontally on AGA machines. Due to the planar nature of the Amiga's graphical system, changing the value of a pixel in a 256 colour bitmap meant changing 8 seperate bits (1 per plane) rather than 1 contiguous byte on a "chunky" pixel based system (byte/word per pixel). As a result 3D games on AGA Amigas used the copper to render 3D scenes (see an example here).
"OS X blows the doors off what Amiga wanted to be."
Except without the fun custom chips. When OS X runs on a Playstation we'll have something comparable...
Replying to my own post, but I think the guy who posted before me is right.
Swap "X% of employees were running Mac OS X" to "X% of companies had one or more employees running Mac OS X" and it makes much more sense...
Why does the share of employees running Mac OS X increase as the company gets bigger?
IBM says "this is what we want, now get on with making it for us".
I remember writing a street fighter 2 style parallax floor scroll for the Amiga using the copper (the chip in the Amiga that did display list style stuff). Ahh, those were the days - bare metal programming was so much fun... I've never felt like I really controlled a computer as much since...
Just thought I'd point out that protestant christians take the whole "graven image" thing very seriously too - eg the bare cross instead of a crucifix...
This was the best link I could find quickly.
/.
I'll quote from a discussion that was linked to from a recent post on
The Unix programmer will create a command-line or text-driven core and occasionally, as an afterthought, build a GUI which drives that core. This way the main operations of the application will be available to other programmers who can invoke the program on the command line and read the results as text. The Windows programmer will tend to start with a GUI, and occasionally, as an afterthought, add a scripting language which can automate the operation of the GUI interface.
Oh, I assure you I do know something about Linux. I know that KDE and GNOME can be replaced by other desktop environments, but I also know that for instance Red Hat prefers to use GNOME while SuSE prefers KDE. This is one of the main things that differentiates these two distros and so, if you ask for help with Red Hat, people will assume that you're using the RedHat/GNOME/GNU/Linux stack rather than the RedHat/KDE/GNU/Linux stack. Apart from this Elive thing I don't know of any distro that prefers Enlightenment.
Windows: C#, VBA
Unix: C, Perl
Mainframe: COBOL, PL/1
What I mean is that some distros are KDE based and some are GNOME based but none that I know of apart from this one are based on Enlightenment...
IMHO, GNOME and KDE are totally bloated and have not really understood the UNIX philosophy. They're also desktop environents rather than stand alone window managers (although I believe E17 will incorporate a file manager (correct me if I'm wrong)). Enlightenment also has a lot of swishy graphical effects which will appeal to people who like that sort of thing.
...I've been looking for an Enlightenment based distro for some time. Does anyone know of any others, and can this be installed on a hard drive like normal distros?
"C++-based bloat"
C++ does have it's faults, but OO is a good fit for user interface coding and C++ is certainly more efficient than any other OO language. A lot of less experienced programmers seem to make the mistake of applying every OO paradigm at every given opportunity, but this is hardly C++s fault.
Thanks - but where's the 2nd page?
Pollution was terrible in Europe during the industrial revolution but they haven't designed their cities to have suburban sprawl. There are working alternatives to the American model and I don't think anyone wants to emulate the US at a time when oil is only going up in price...
It was down before anyone posted any comments and even before MirrorDot had a chance to cache it.
I wonder if their webmaster could have taken it down deliberately?
Just because they are starting to buy cars it doesn't mean that they have to follow the US suburban sprawl urban development route. I believe that the US is the only developed country where the town planners have been so extravagant - in most places in Europe for instance it's possible to walk to the nearest store in < 10 minutes.
I'm not sure China can be classified as being communist anymore...
Maybe he meant to say that "property is theft". I don't know what that's got to do with anything though...
This might be interesting to you:
From Desktop to Grid, the ODW (Open Desktop Workstation) is designed to assume its position and fulfill the missing link of the first true PowerPC Linux Development and Desktop System. The fully configured machine comes bundled with a variety of tools and applications that make the platform the perfect partner for any serious embedded system development based on Linux.
The Open Desktop Workstation is the only GNU/Linux PowerPC solution available on the market today that is endorsed by IBM and Freescale Semiconductor.
I've read your post a couple of times and I'm still not sure I understand what you're disagreeing with me about. The idea of grouping pupils according to ability (whether it's by school or by stream) should allow everyone to move at the pace that suits them best. I believe the more fine grained this selection is the better.
All schools in the UK attempt to teach a solid foundation (and I never said otherwise) and the grammar/top stream students often learn much more.
This is what happens in the UK with the old Grammar/Secondary Modern division. Those of us who went to grammar school leave education unused to dealing with 90% of the supposedly less intelligent population, while the other kids are effectively told that they don't amount to much intelligence wise.
Streaming is a better system as kids do not have uniform ability across all subjects. It is quite possible to be great at maths but only average or worse at English and vice versa.