The PS3 was released in 2006, not 2007, and the reason this last generation was shorter for Nintendo was that they were extremely late to the party last time and needed to launch earlier in order to compete.
But the dominant player in any generation usually gets an extra year or more out of their consoles; that's just the way it works and that's why you see Nintendo's product cycle shrinking with each generation up until now. Of course whoever's in last place is going to release a console in 4 or 5 years while the market leader stretches it out further. You replace a floundering console, not a successful one.
What Iwata is really doing is boasting about Nintendo's dominance at the moment.
Assuming they did not modify the games (and I doubt they did) and that they downloaded the games pre-compiled (not source, and I assume they did), then they only have to make known where they downloaded it, so that others may do the same.
Not true. They may have gotten their copy from some web site, but they're performing another distribution by including it on the CD, and according to that same section of the GPL that you quoted, commercial users must either include the source on the same media or include a
written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange.
In other words, if you distribute it via physical media, you have to make the source available via physical media as well. Not that I have any idea whether any of the games Datel included are covered by the GPL or whether they included source....
This happens to me all the time at Best Buy and at the drugstore. I have developed this reflex where I grunt, roll my eyes, and begin walking towards the guard.
Generally they smile sympathetically and wave me through; sometimes they barely look up and just yell "You're OK." Only once, in Wal-Mart on a slow day, have I had to actually open my bag for inspection, and the old woman who apparently doubled as a greeter was very apologetic.
One time last year at Macy's, I inadvertently helped an actual shoplifter out due to my reflex. I grunted exasperatedly and walked over to the nearest employee, who was in the men's wear section. A woman exiting at the same time as me kept walking. The guy said "Go on through, that thing goes off all the time for no reason." I did, and the second time it didn't go off at all... because the actual shoplifter was probably leaving the mall by that time.
The Atari Flashback isn't based on any Atari hardware, but "Famiclone" technology (most similar to the NES) like all those "system in a controller" devices. In fact, just looking at the screenshots , I can't even find one that it'd be possible to render on the 2600 (having done some coding on it myself.) They all have either too many pixels or too many colors per scanline, though obviosuly not too many for NES hardware.
For me, this contest might have actually been more challenging than writing a 2600 game in 24 hours, since I know the 2600 but I'm not familiar with coding for the NES nor with the development tools they were using (which was apparently the Windows program "Game Maker" with a limited set of sound effects and limitations on resolution and colors.)
To be fair, though, the game that won ("Ninja Garden") was the closest of all the games to looking like an actual 2600 game.
Actually, Gambas 1.0 was released back in January; the current stable release is 1.0.4.
In the unstable 1.9 tree there's working support for ODBC, Gtk (in addition to and code compatible with the Qt support), full screen and windowed SDL, perl-compatible regular expressions, a VB form importer (just the form, not the code yet), support for components which themselves are written in Gambas, and a bunch of other awesome stuff. I wouldn't use the unstable tree for production code yet, but the 1.0.x series is quite stable and mature.
Granted I've been porting VB applications to Gambas longer than probably any other American developer, but I have an awful lot of Gambas code in production. Some of it's been deployed for over a year and hasn't broken yet even though I developed it before the release of 1.0.
Speaking for myself, I have IE6 installed under Crossover to see how the web apps I write for clients render under IE. Sure beats dual booting or shelling out for 300 bucks for vmware plus an extra windows license.
I switched to Openoffice long ago and have yet to encounter a document I couldn't deal with, so I don't even have Office installed under Crossover, just IE and assorted random freeware apps and games which are safely quarantined in their own fake_windows directory.
There are lots of choices, really. I wrote a perl script (using Image::Magick) about 5 years ago that did the same thing as this, and the awesome GQView image manager has had visual image matching for nearly as long. On the Windows side, I'm pretty sure ThumbsPlus has a feature like that, and I'm surprised they didn't build it into XP since they were supposed to be all digital-photo-friendly.
I think what fans of RealBasic don't understand is that sooner or later, Gambas (or another free IDE for quickly writing GUI programs, in a high level language, without ever touching a command line) is going to be included in most desktop Linux distributions. RealBasic, being proprietary, will therefore never be "standard equipment" even after they ship an IDE for Linux.
SuSE and Mandrake have already been shipping pre-1.0 versions of Gambas for months now, and it's been in Lindows' "Click'n'Run" forever. People who get Gambas as part of their Linux distro are never going to have to see the 'burning Windows logo', whatever that is.
I was glad to hear of RealBasic's announcement of Linux as a compiler target, and I look forward to their IDE, but Gambas could be more of a return to the days when many people, not just programmers by trade, wrote code because BASIC was "just there". You can cluck at their bad code all you want but they'll still be writing it.
A Gtk+ component has been released for the 1.1 development series, and is making rapidprogress. The goal is to make the Gtk and Qt components as code-compatible as possible...
In fact, a company I worked for 6 years ago got paid seven figures to write a VB prototype of a teller application for one of the five biggest banks in the world. We had the inside track to get the bid on the eventual final version in primarily C++, but then they merged with one of the other top 5 banks and it went up in smoke.
It didn't seem like an exceptional circumstance; I think it happened quite a bit back then if it doesn't now.
Oh, the people who want to troll have already started coming back with "Gambas?! Ha! It doesn't even compile into.NET code!" Which, thankfully, is a lot less compelling an argument than "You don't even have a VB type thing under Linux!"
Even if Linux got a 90% market share you'd still have people explaining why it'll never have a chance against Windows, so it's best not to worry too much about that stuff.
Sure, if you want to do your development on a Windows or Mac box and crosscompile for Linux, and don't mind spending a lot of money, RealBasic is great. Believe it or not, though, there are some pretty sizable shops out there who don't have Macs and whose in-house developers use Linux.
Some of us who use and develop Gambas agree with you. I began work on an MDI IDE for Gambas a year and a half ago, and released actual working code, but the language was such a moving target at that time (version 0.57) that I had to abandon it. I hope to produce one for Gambas 1.0 in the near future, and Benoit plans to add MDI functionality to the IDE in the development series for 2.0.
People who favor.NET and Java who use the word "enterprise" a lot have been dissing Gambas ever since Benoit started writing it, so please forgive my lack of concern over one more. Gambas is not J2EE or VB.NET, but it's something different than VB6 as well.
Nonetheless, you're welcome to join and subsequently influence Gambas development; that's why I got involved, and (for example) the influence of others has resulted in object prevalence being a design goal for the next version after 1.0. To me object prevalence is just another buzzword, so maybe Benoit and the others who contribute to the core of Gambas will be less dismissive of you than I am.
You neglected to follow through to the "See Also" entries. From the Control Groups page linked at the bottom (which is applicable to all classes, but no one's ever asked how to do it with anything but controls before):
myControl = NEW ColumnView(ME) AS "myGroup"
will then cause the handlers named myGroup_Click, et al. to receive the new columnview's events.
Once again, questions like these really belong on gambas-user@lists.sourceforge.net and, with all apologies, an inability to spend more than 30 seconds reading documentation does not make a language not buzzword-compatible.
By default, when your class raises an event its event listener runs (instance of class)_(name of event) which is a method. There are ways to change that.... if you still can't figure it out, please feel free to join the gambas-user list which is quite active and is meant for questions like these.
What exactly makes this any better than glade? Both are free as in speech, but Glade is able to harness the programming power of C.
I think you answered your own question. There are a lot more VB programmers than C programmers out there, and the VB->Gambas learning curve is a lot shorter than the VB->C one.
I'm pretty sure that had there been "GLADE Basic", or "Qt Designer Basic", Gambas never would have reached critical mass and become usable/supportable.... but it turns out most Linux programmers turn their noses up at BASIC (who knew?) and GNOME Basic and KBasic went into hibernation at just about the time Gambas was starting to leave infancy...
Gambas is a recursive acronym in the spirit of GNU... "Gambas Almost Means BASic", apparently. It got a Qt binding first because that happens to be what the author picked in the first place, but a Gtk binding is in progress.
I am glad to see more apps rejecting the Gwhatever/Kwhatever convention too.
Well, there's a facility to convert VB5/6 forms to Gambas already, and while the code is a different BASIC dialect than VB, it really is not difficult to port. Certainly it beats porting to C++, Python or Pascal by a long shot.
Of course, Gambas is not VB6. Forms and the classes containing their business logic are separate, though you can have the IDE hide that fact from the user.
I would also say that anyone currently using C++ and thinking "hey, this is easy enough" is really not the target audience for any kind of BASIC RAD environment. I have to admit that I wish there were something like Gambas only with Perl (and no, Qt Designer and PerlQt don't count... I am the author of one of the more prominent PerlQt projects out there and I quickly reached a point where I had to resort to emacs.)
The existence of MSVC++ never eclipsed VB's popularity, and I see no reason that the glut of C++, Java and even Python environments for Linux should make Gambas unnecessary. It's meant for people who are not doing GUI programming for Linux currently or who find it to be annoyingly arcane, not for people who have "#include" burned into their fingers' muscle memory.
Xbasic has always seemed to me to be a lot closer to older BASIC dialects like Qbasic than to VB. Benoit really wanted to focus on object oriented programming (and removing a lot of the cruft that makes BASIC such a laughing stock... a quixotic pursuit since people who dislike BASIC will probably never give Gambas a try) rather than procedural stuff, if I'm not mistaken.
From the announcement linked in the slashdot submission....
"After a long period of learning acting;-) here is the first release candidate of gambas 1.0! The package is named 0.99.RC1, because the 1.0 version number is always greater than any 0.99.*."
Slashdot Mirror
The PS3 was released in 2006, not 2007, and the reason this last generation was shorter for Nintendo was that they were extremely late to the party last time and needed to launch earlier in order to compete.
But the dominant player in any generation usually gets an extra year or more out of their consoles; that's just the way it works and that's why you see Nintendo's product cycle shrinking with each generation up until now. Of course whoever's in last place is going to release a console in 4 or 5 years while the market leader stretches it out further. You replace a floundering console, not a successful one.
What Iwata is really doing is boasting about Nintendo's dominance at the moment.
Not true. They may have gotten their copy from some web site, but they're performing another distribution by including it on the CD, and according to that same section of the GPL that you quoted, commercial users must either include the source on the same media or include a
In other words, if you distribute it via physical media, you have to make the source available via physical media as well. Not that I have any idea whether any of the games Datel included are covered by the GPL or whether they included source....This happens to me all the time at Best Buy and at the drugstore. I have developed this reflex where I grunt, roll my eyes, and begin walking towards the guard.
Generally they smile sympathetically and wave me through; sometimes they barely look up and just yell "You're OK." Only once, in Wal-Mart on a slow day, have I had to actually open my bag for inspection, and the old woman who apparently doubled as a greeter was very apologetic.
One time last year at Macy's, I inadvertently helped an actual shoplifter out due to my reflex. I grunted exasperatedly and walked over to the nearest employee, who was in the men's wear section. A woman exiting at the same time as me kept walking. The guy said "Go on through, that thing goes off all the time for no reason." I did, and the second time it didn't go off at all... because the actual shoplifter was probably leaving the mall by that time.
The Atari Flashback isn't based on any Atari hardware, but "Famiclone" technology (most similar to the NES) like all those "system in a controller" devices. In fact, just looking at the screenshots , I can't even find one that it'd be possible to render on the 2600 (having done some coding on it myself.) They all have either too many pixels or too many colors per scanline, though obviosuly not too many for NES hardware.
For me, this contest might have actually been more challenging than writing a 2600 game in 24 hours, since I know the 2600 but I'm not familiar with coding for the NES nor with the development tools they were using (which was apparently the Windows program "Game Maker" with a limited set of sound effects and limitations on resolution and colors.)
To be fair, though, the game that won ("Ninja Garden") was the closest of all the games to looking like an actual 2600 game.
Actually, Gambas 1.0 was released back in January; the current stable release is 1.0.4.
In the unstable 1.9 tree there's working support for ODBC, Gtk (in addition to and code compatible with the Qt support), full screen and windowed SDL, perl-compatible regular expressions, a VB form importer (just the form, not the code yet), support for components which themselves are written in Gambas, and a bunch of other awesome stuff. I wouldn't use the unstable tree for production code yet, but the 1.0.x series is quite stable and mature.
Granted I've been porting VB applications to Gambas longer than probably any other American developer, but I have an awful lot of Gambas code in production. Some of it's been deployed for over a year and hasn't broken yet even though I developed it before the release of 1.0.
Speaking for myself, I have IE6 installed under Crossover to see how the web apps I write for clients render under IE. Sure beats dual booting or shelling out for 300 bucks for vmware plus an extra windows license.
I switched to Openoffice long ago and have yet to encounter a document I couldn't deal with, so I don't even have Office installed under Crossover, just IE and assorted random freeware apps and games which are safely quarantined in their own fake_windows directory.
There are lots of choices, really. I wrote a perl script (using Image::Magick) about 5 years ago that did the same thing as this, and the awesome GQView image manager has had visual image matching for nearly as long. On the Windows side, I'm pretty sure ThumbsPlus has a feature like that, and I'm surprised they didn't build it into XP since they were supposed to be all digital-photo-friendly.
I think what fans of RealBasic don't understand is that sooner or later, Gambas (or another free IDE for quickly writing GUI programs, in a high level language, without ever touching a command line) is going to be included in most desktop Linux distributions. RealBasic, being proprietary, will therefore never be "standard equipment" even after they ship an IDE for Linux.
SuSE and Mandrake have already been shipping pre-1.0 versions of Gambas for months now, and it's been in Lindows' "Click'n'Run" forever. People who get Gambas as part of their Linux distro are never going to have to see the 'burning Windows logo', whatever that is.
I was glad to hear of RealBasic's announcement of Linux as a compiler target, and I look forward to their IDE, but Gambas could be more of a return to the days when many people, not just programmers by trade, wrote code because BASIC was "just there". You can cluck at their bad code all you want but they'll still be writing it.
A Gtk+ component has been released for the 1.1 development series, and is making rapid progress. The goal is to make the Gtk and Qt components as code-compatible as possible...
Gambas (the language) actually more resembles VB.NET than VB6, even if the IDE kinda resembles VB4.
In fact, a company I worked for 6 years ago got paid seven figures to write a VB prototype of a teller application for one of the five biggest banks in the world. We had the inside track to get the bid on the eventual final version in primarily C++, but then they merged with one of the other top 5 banks and it went up in smoke.
It didn't seem like an exceptional circumstance; I think it happened quite a bit back then if it doesn't now.
Oh, the people who want to troll have already started coming back with "Gambas?! Ha! It doesn't even compile into .NET code!" Which, thankfully, is a lot less compelling an argument than "You don't even have a VB type thing under Linux!"
Even if Linux got a 90% market share you'd still have people explaining why it'll never have a chance against Windows, so it's best not to worry too much about that stuff.
Sure, if you want to do your development on a Windows or Mac box and crosscompile for Linux, and don't mind spending a lot of money, RealBasic is great. Believe it or not, though, there are some pretty sizable shops out there who don't have Macs and whose in-house developers use Linux.
Some of us who use and develop Gambas agree with you. I began work on an MDI IDE for Gambas a year and a half ago, and released actual working code, but the language was such a moving target at that time (version 0.57) that I had to abandon it. I hope to produce one for Gambas 1.0 in the near future, and Benoit plans to add MDI functionality to the IDE in the development series for 2.0.
People who favor .NET and Java who use the word "enterprise" a lot have been dissing Gambas ever since Benoit started writing it, so please forgive my lack of concern over one more. Gambas is not J2EE or VB.NET, but it's something different than VB6 as well.
Nonetheless, you're welcome to join and subsequently influence Gambas development; that's why I got involved, and (for example) the influence of others has resulted in object prevalence being a design goal for the next version after 1.0. To me object prevalence is just another buzzword, so maybe Benoit and the others who contribute to the core of Gambas will be less dismissive of you than I am.
You neglected to follow through to the "See Also" entries. From the Control Groups page linked at the bottom (which is applicable to all classes, but no one's ever asked how to do it with anything but controls before):
myControl = NEW ColumnView(ME) AS "myGroup"
will then cause the handlers named myGroup_Click, et al. to receive the new columnview's events.
Once again, questions like these really belong on gambas-user@lists.sourceforge.net and, with all apologies, an inability to spend more than 30 seconds reading documentation does not make a language not buzzword-compatible.
Actually, no, by default you would have to write a method named Foo_nameChanged in your listener, so there would be no namespace collisions.
You're right that it should be documented better.... since we use a wiki for documentation, I have just now added some stuff to the EVENT page.
By default, when your class raises an event its event listener runs (instance of class)_(name of event) which is a method. There are ways to change that.... if you still can't figure it out, please feel free to join the gambas-user list which is quite active and is meant for questions like these.
I think you answered your own question. There are a lot more VB programmers than C programmers out there, and the VB->Gambas learning curve is a lot shorter than the VB->C one.
I'm pretty sure that had there been "GLADE Basic", or "Qt Designer Basic", Gambas never would have reached critical mass and become usable/supportable.... but it turns out most Linux programmers turn their noses up at BASIC (who knew?) and GNOME Basic and KBasic went into hibernation at just about the time Gambas was starting to leave infancy...
Gambas is a recursive acronym in the spirit of GNU... "Gambas Almost Means BASic", apparently. It got a Qt binding first because that happens to be what the author picked in the first place, but a Gtk binding is in progress.
I am glad to see more apps rejecting the Gwhatever/Kwhatever convention too.
You may not have seen support for class events, but that doesn't mean it wasn't there.
Well, there's a facility to convert VB5/6 forms to Gambas already, and while the code is a different BASIC dialect than VB, it really is not difficult to port. Certainly it beats porting to C++, Python or Pascal by a long shot.
Of course, Gambas is not VB6. Forms and the classes containing their business logic are separate, though you can have the IDE hide that fact from the user.
I would also say that anyone currently using C++ and thinking "hey, this is easy enough" is really not the target audience for any kind of BASIC RAD environment. I have to admit that I wish there were something like Gambas only with Perl (and no, Qt Designer and PerlQt don't count... I am the author of one of the more prominent PerlQt projects out there and I quickly reached a point where I had to resort to emacs.)
The existence of MSVC++ never eclipsed VB's popularity, and I see no reason that the glut of C++, Java and even Python environments for Linux should make Gambas unnecessary. It's meant for people who are not doing GUI programming for Linux currently or who find it to be annoyingly arcane, not for people who have "#include" burned into their fingers' muscle memory.
Xbasic has always seemed to me to be a lot closer to older BASIC dialects like Qbasic than to VB. Benoit really wanted to focus on object oriented programming (and removing a lot of the cruft that makes BASIC such a laughing stock... a quixotic pursuit since people who dislike BASIC will probably never give Gambas a try) rather than procedural stuff, if I'm not mistaken.
From the announcement linked in the slashdot submission....
;-) here is the first release candidate of gambas 1.0! The package is named 0.99.RC1, because the 1.0 version number is always greater than any 0.99.*."
"After a long period of learning acting