A lot of games "hit the metal" to take advantage of the amazing custom chips, but if you were writing an application there was a complete API to use. I played with coding using Intuiition (the GUI API) as a kid and was later amazed to find out how badly Win32 compared with it when I had to work with that on a professional basis many years later.
The Amiga was a brilliant machine which is why it was the home computer of the late 80s/early 90s in Europe, despite Commodore's complete ineptitude. Sigh.
Originally, IBM's engineers had wanted to use the much nicer Motorola 68000, but some of the business types at IBM had a deal with Intel so they went with the 8088 instead. I see no reason why things couldn't have developed differently with the 68k series being used instead of the x86 - the platform could still be open and other companies would still clone the 68k...
It's like this to a greater or lesser extent in all the member states of the EU. In Europe we need to figure out how to integrate our muslim populations properly, yet Blair insists on allowing the muslims and other ethnic minorities to create their own "faith schools" which segregates people at exactly the time when they should be mixing. Genious!
If you're that worried you can always leave the US. Personally I've lived in many countries and right now I can't see any reason why anyone would want to live in the USA - there are many countries that are more democratic and value the rights of the individual more.
Either that or you could just stick it out until Bush leaves office in 1.5 yeras time. I mean - it's unlikely to get any worse right?
"Of course, there are also numerous readers from supposedly democratic Western nations like Sweden, France, England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Italy, Spain, and so forth."
You're trolling presumably: recent American elections are not much to boast about, and your first-past-the-post electoral system prevents any real choice outside the Democratic and Republican parties.
Hmm. I agree with you about C++/CLI, and I remember how bad standards compliance used to be in earlier versions of Visual C++, but more recent versions of Microsoft's C compiler (since Visual C++ 7) are amongst the most complete compilers as far as standards support goes (couldn't find an authoritative link - sorry). IIRC, MS even hired one of the STL guys to help them in this regard.
"The term Harvard architecture originally referred to computer architectures that used physically separate storage and signal pathways for their instructions and data (in contrast to the von Neumann architecture)."
"Modern high performance CPU chip designs incorporate aspects of both Harvard and von Neumann architecture."
(my emphasis added)
Googling for "Harvard architecture" PowerPC also seems to suggest that PowerPC chips may use some aspect of the Harvard architecture...
I'm planning to buy one of these, but I can't be the only person who thinks Wii will be pronounced in the same way as "wee". "Wee" is slang for urine in the UK, and possibly in other non-US English speaking countries...
IIRC they still have a patent on the original cross shaped D-pad, which is why the Playstation has its 4 semi-seperate direction buttons and the XBox has the round one. I've only ever owned 2 consoles, the CD32 and the PC Engine and I'm going to be buying a Revolution to support the underdog and the only real remaining innovator in the console business.
I live in a constitutional monarchy, but it is also a democracy. Just like the US, the people of Belarus have a republic. The difference is that theirs is in fact a dictatorship.
Instead of calling Association football "soccer", why don't we call American football "mercer"? It makes just as much sense, perhaps more so given that everyone outside the US calls the game where you kick the ball using your feet "football"...
Also, if you'd read the article you linked to you would have read that it's the confused americans who started calling it soccer:
originally called the U.S. Football Association, and was formed in 1913 by the merger of the American Football Association and the American Amateur Football Association. The word "soccer" was added to the name in 1945, making it the U.S. Soccer Football Association, and it did not drop the word "football" until 1974, when it assumed its current name.
"The vision of MFC: Let's saddle people with the extra intellectual mass of C++, but ignore the language's most powerful features; instead we'll fill in the gaps with a bunch of C preprocessor macros. Then we'll throw in a bunch of wizards to encourage people to automatically generate spaghetti boilerplate by the megabyte."
LOL - spot on! You can really see that MFC was made by people who didn't really get C++, but I suppose that's partially excusable since it was developed back at a time when the language was still relatively new and many coders frowned upon OO.
I've been playing a bit with Ultimate++ recently, and I think that it really shows how well a GUI toolkit can be written in C++. Check out these nice comparisons with Qt, Java/Swing and wxWidgets
I agree completely - Freshmeat is for announcing new FOSS software while SourceForge is simply for hosting FOSS projects. There are many projects that are announced on Freshmeat but are hosted independently, so Freshmeat is the best place to look for interesting projects.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of games "hit the metal" to take advantage of the amazing custom chips, but if you were writing an application there was a complete API to use. I played with coding using Intuiition (the GUI API) as a kid and was later amazed to find out how badly Win32 compared with it when I had to work with that on a professional basis many years later.
The Amiga was a brilliant machine which is why it was the home computer of the late 80s/early 90s in Europe, despite Commodore's complete ineptitude. Sigh.
Originally, IBM's engineers had wanted to use the much nicer Motorola 68000, but some of the business types at IBM had a deal with Intel so they went with the 8088 instead. I see no reason why things couldn't have developed differently with the 68k series being used instead of the x86 - the platform could still be open and other companies would still clone the 68k...
It's like this to a greater or lesser extent in all the member states of the EU. In Europe we need to figure out how to integrate our muslim populations properly, yet Blair insists on allowing the muslims and other ethnic minorities to create their own "faith schools" which segregates people at exactly the time when they should be mixing. Genious!
Anyone know if there's a Java implementation of "structural regular expressions" as seen in the Sam editor on Plan 9?
If you're that worried you can always leave the US. Personally I've lived in many countries and right now I can't see any reason why anyone would want to live in the USA - there are many countries that are more democratic and value the rights of the individual more.
Either that or you could just stick it out until Bush leaves office in 1.5 yeras time. I mean - it's unlikely to get any worse right?
"Of course, there are also numerous readers from supposedly democratic Western nations like Sweden, France, England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Italy, Spain, and so forth."
You're trolling presumably: recent American elections are not much to boast about, and your first-past-the-post electoral system prevents any real choice outside the Democratic and Republican parties.
A Windows 95/NT version of Sam, currently distributed in binary form only, is available from ftp://netlib.bell-labs.com/netlib/research/sam.exe
"If someone could figure out how to do one handed typing"...
How about the BAT keyboard, CyKey or other chorded keyboards?
Ahh yes, gcc.
where
x ? : y
is equivalent to
x ? x : y
Handy, yes. Standard, no.
Hmm. I agree with you about C++/CLI, and I remember how bad standards compliance used to be in earlier versions of Visual C++, but more recent versions of Microsoft's C compiler (since Visual C++ 7) are amongst the most complete compilers as far as standards support goes (couldn't find an authoritative link - sorry). IIRC, MS even hired one of the STL guys to help them in this regard.
Remember the Unix wars fiasco?
"the PowerPC architecture will be out of the personal computer market"
I know it's hardly mainstream, but were you aware of existance of the the Open Desktop Workstation?
From the same Wikipedia page you linked to:
"The term Harvard architecture originally referred to computer architectures that used physically separate storage and signal pathways for their instructions and data (in contrast to the von Neumann architecture)."
"Modern high performance CPU chip designs incorporate aspects of both Harvard and von Neumann architecture."
(my emphasis added)
Googling for "Harvard architecture" PowerPC also seems to suggest that PowerPC chips may use some aspect of the Harvard architecture...
I'm planning to buy one of these, but I can't be the only person who thinks Wii will be pronounced in the same way as "wee". "Wee" is slang for urine in the UK, and possibly in other non-US English speaking countries...
IIRC they still have a patent on the original cross shaped D-pad, which is why the Playstation has its 4 semi-seperate direction buttons and the XBox has the round one. I've only ever owned 2 consoles, the CD32 and the PC Engine and I'm going to be buying a Revolution to support the underdog and the only real remaining innovator in the console business.
I live in a constitutional monarchy, but it is also a democracy. Just like the US, the people of Belarus have a republic. The difference is that theirs is in fact a dictatorship.
I have a feeling that too many slashdotters base their knowledge of this field on the game Civilization's forms of government.
Instead of calling Association football "soccer", why don't we call American football "mercer"? It makes just as much sense, perhaps more so given that everyone outside the US calls the game where you kick the ball using your feet "football"...
Also, if you'd read the article you linked to you would have read that it's the confused americans who started calling it soccer:
originally called the U.S. Football Association, and was formed in 1913 by the merger of the American Football Association and the American Amateur Football Association. The word "soccer" was added to the name in 1945, making it the U.S. Soccer Football Association, and it did not drop the word "football" until 1974, when it assumed its current name.
You do know that the UK is part of the EU, don't you?
"there is only one special relationship in Washington, and that is with Israel" - one of Blair's advisers as quoted in "The Accidental American"
"The vision of MFC: Let's saddle people with the extra intellectual mass of C++, but ignore the language's most powerful features; instead we'll fill in the gaps with a bunch of C preprocessor macros. Then we'll throw in a bunch of wizards to encourage people to automatically generate spaghetti boilerplate by the megabyte."
LOL - spot on! You can really see that MFC was made by people who didn't really get C++, but I suppose that's partially excusable since it was developed back at a time when the language was still relatively new and many coders frowned upon OO.
I've been playing a bit with Ultimate++ recently, and I think that it really shows how well a GUI toolkit can be written in C++. Check out these nice comparisons with Qt, Java/Swing and wxWidgets
I agree completely - Freshmeat is for announcing new FOSS software while SourceForge is simply for hosting FOSS projects. There are many projects that are announced on Freshmeat but are hosted independently, so Freshmeat is the best place to look for interesting projects.
RTFA!
Fossil Frank Gehry Watch
Mr.Gadget 1GB USB 2.0 Executive Watch
Time Tags are pretty cool in that they just clip to your sleeve. Mind you, don't most geeks just use their mobile phones nowadays?
But some (all?) EFI implementations can emulate a BIOS (like the Gateway Media Center) so this may be a moot point...
You should read this. He argues the same points extremely well...