From TFA: "In the same time frame, it has shipped Windows XP Home Edition, Windows XP Professional Edition, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, Windows XP Media Center Edition, Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004, Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 (and 2005 UR2), Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005, Windows XP Home and Professional N Editions, Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (SP2, absolutely a big Windows upgrade), Windows XP Embedded, Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs, and Windows XP Starter Edition"
That's great. Not only are the 64 bit editions very unstable to this day (and shouldn't be counted as "released" until they are), the difference between all of these "releases" of Windows XP is which features were #ifdef'ed out of the pro version, which service pack they shipped with, and which drivers they shipped with. That's not a "release." I don't know anyone that would look at XP Starter Edition and say "Yes! What a great new release! A true engineering marvel!"
Besides, until we really see Vista as a released product, I'm not ready to compare it to the very first version of OSX, much less Leopard. Maybe it'll fall short of what OSX has always been, maybe it'll eclipse Leopard - I'll decide when it's released, but comparing a few tweaks for XP to the OSX releases is hillariously ignorant.
so it's a new thing that deriving your life's worth from your material possessions leaves you lacking in the long run? Don't feel sorry for these people whose stuff was destroyed: at least they have a chance at gaining perspective. Feel sorry for the guy that's still got his XBox and wastes all day, every day on it, or the guy that has a bright shiny car but no sense of personal worth.
Could be really nice having another commercial Windows C++ IDE around. At my workplace we really need an alternative to Visual Studio. In a codebase that's nearly 1,000,000 lines intellisense is insanely slow, completely inaccurate, and honestly just plain annoying. Visual studio randomly crashes, etc.
We're in the process of switching to CMake so people can use Eclipse or whatever IDE they want, but Eclipse's CDT is still a bit too young for my tastes. Perhaps Borland's IDE will provide a welcome reprieve and nice debugging.
Haha. Naw, I haven't been reading/. enough to have that up from here. The reason I said "yet" is because AS 3.0 is slated to have pointers. The reason one needs pointers is for manipulations of data structures required for many algorithms to be efficient. Helping my friend implement a linked-list-esque data structure in actionscript turned out to be a bloody mess, and I'd never even consider doing a tree or heap.
Anyway I never said pointers had anything to do with OOP: I mentioned them in the same paragraph and that's all. Actionscript is object oriented, yes, but lacks a lot of the power of mature object oriented languages. Implementing the bare minimum set of features required to be OO does not a "powerful object oriented language" make. I think they originally intended for actionscript to be a simple procedural scripting language, attempted to turn their old infrastructure into something OO in AS2, and in the upcoming 3 they're going to go back and replace the restrictive older foundations from the early days. That part is completely my conjecture and is likely wrong, but if it's true then AS3 is going to be leaps and bounds above AS2 in speed and stability.
Now I'm not trying to harp on Actionscript: It's moving in the right direction and I have high hopes for it (especially when it moves into 3.0). It's very useful in its current state as well, but let's not oversing its praises. The time will come when it will earn them fair and square, and I think it'll be pretty soon.
Sounds like some good progress on the horizon: that stuff's been needed in Flash for years. I'm glad to see it on the way, but my support for Flash hinges on one burning question: will it start really supporting Linux any time soon? If so, count me right in.
Object oriented and powerful, Actionscript aint. Heck, it doesn't even have real pointers yet. I like Flash in general: I really do, but I wouldn't say Actionscript is a powerful, robust, feature-rich language by any stretch of the imagination.
Re:i dissed them for lousy linux support on news.c
on
The Future of Flash
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· Score: 1
Works great on PPC as well, actually. Flash has been running smoothly on Mac for years.
Yes, it sucks that the linux support is so antiquated and there's no 64 bit support, I know.
Well the desktop environment itsself may not be intended to ever be ported away from *nix, the apps made for it can still be ported, right? I for one would love to see Amarok on Windows. Apps written for KDE that are ported over to Windows could be some great advertising for *nix and KDE. People seem to be under the impression that there are no good apps out there for linux, but that's likely because they've never tried them (and never will unless they can try them in Windows first).
The KDE guys also could've chosen Qt for the features it provides aside from the cross-platform support. Its Signal/Slot system is powerful, its API is very powerful, it's efficient, it's very well documented (and always has been) the list goes on.
Anyway, I'd go for a KDE Windows port instantly if there was one. Hell, I usually use KDE under colinux at work (hey! don't laugh at me!). If I have to use Windows it might as well feel like home.
I've tried wx, actually. I use it at my current job. After having been spoied with Qt, I'm not such a fan of wx. To be completely fair I haven't tried a whole lot of GTK programming, but I haven't been impressed with the Windows GTK ports I've seen.
I kid you not. First off, they had problems right off the bat loading large image files. There's some limit to the size of a jpg you can load in Java's standard libraries (at least with default settings), so most of them couldn't load say a 5000x5000 image. Not sure if any of them ever found a workaround for it.
I watched 3 other students' final presentations: 2 used Java and 1 used VB.NET. One java guy chose java because he wanted to develop on his Mac and only use Windows machines for testing. He wasn't clear (wish I could give you details, but I don't know them) about what issues he ran into but during the last month or so of the project he ended up just staying on Windows machines because something broke badly enough (portability-wise) that it wasn't worth his time to figure it out. His version did not work on Mac anymore at the time of the presentation. He reported testing it in Linux using both the Sun VM and the free-as-in-speech VM and neither worked out for him.
The other java guy didn't report the status of his program on any platform except Windows, so for all I know it could've worked flawlessly or it might just eat shit if you ran it on a Mac. No word on Linux either. Oh, and there were some pretty serious speed issues on his app, but he did implement some pretty fancy features...
So yeah, sorry I don't have details about what exactly didn't work, but shenanigans it aint.
I'd argue that it's improbable you'd write for windows and not spend a penny. Sure, you can develop.NET applications with nothing more than notepad and the command line, but it'd be a lot like building a 10 story card castle.
In my senior design class my last year of college, the project was to build a Windows app that did X, Y, and Z - any extra features and polish were left to the students' imaginations.
The 3 students that used Qt did substantially better than the others, and their stuff ran on Windows, Mac, and Linux. None of them reported having to change a single line of source code porting from one platform to the next.
The 6 Java people didn't do as well as the.net people overall, but their stuff ran on Mac most of the time. They reported spending some time and effort to get the Mac version working.
The 8.NET people by and large got better ratings than the Java people as far as features, usability, and speed, but their stuff only ran on Windows.
So while the populations weren't large enough for anything vastly conclusive, it is a tribute to Qt that the 3 students using it did noticeably better than the 14 others just on windows, but also ran on Mac and Linux.
I thought your project had to be licensed under something GPL compatible. OpenSource.com has a few lists of GPL compatible licenses, btw. So that rules out BSD licensed projects using Qt, as far as I knew.
I was never a KDE fan - I always liked Gnome stuff better, until I programmed in Qt for a project at school. After working with Qt I got absolutely sold on it and KDE. I kind of wish that GTK was better than Qt because then I would use it on commercial products, but honestly I'd gladly pay the fee to use Qt.
All of the limitations you're talking about were common to apps of Agenda's day: they're certainly not unique to Agenda. One can expect that if Agenda was resurrected it'd share the traits of modern apps and lose those limitations.
Also "a lot of freaking work" is exactly what the $5M is for:-) That much money gets "a lot of freaking work" done.
Anyway, I don't believe Chandler is going to be an updated Agenda: I think it's a new animal that will share a lot of the features and strengths that Agenda had.
Just because a country is poor doesn't mean its residents are all starving and foolish. There will be plenty of people that will realize that their childrens' futures rest in education, and that these machines are keys to that door. There will be plenty of parents that would sooner starve than relinquish that. It's a typical middle to upper class misconception that everyone in a less developed country is either starving or ignorant or both, and that's really not the case.
The key to advancement is education. Perhaps rather than spending $100 to feed a person for a few months they're spending $100 to teach them how to help themselves. I understand that some areas are too underdeveloped for this to be helpful, but in others this is exactly what they need.
Knowlege is power. I want to see shoes on their feet and food in their stomachs too, but an intermediate step - education - could have a much longer lasting and widespread benefit.
It really depends on what you use it for. At my job we're all running XP boxen for development - doing distriuted builds, test-runs of the (very memory heavy and graphics intensive) software we develop, etc. Under stress like that, an XP box doesn't stay up for very long before it gets pretty unstable and very unresponsive. We find ourselves rebooting our machines every couple of days. It was more frequent than that until we all got about 2 GB of ram.
I'd agree with that, for sure. In modern computing people are more than willing to pay out the nose for convenience. They'd gladly pay a few hundred dollars to never have to use a compiler or touch a command line.
I can't blame them, really: while I don't share their fear/distaste of learning new technologies, I can understand it.
Midi guitars have been around a while, yes. There are actually a few bands ("Bela Fleck and the Flecktones" are rumoured to be among them) whose drummers are actually just using a midi guitar. They'd have to go down a lot in price to be shipped as an accessory for a game like this, though.
Midi's pretty old technology, though, so I bet the price could go down a ways if a larger market developed.
There's a difference between accepting and utilizing a necessary evil and integrating that necessary evil with your long term operations. I don't pretend to have a well-informed opinion on whether or not the FSF's position on shipping things like proprietary drivers and codecs with GPL software is the correct one, but I know it's important to address that issue before acting in potentially harmful ways (and regretting it later).
Let's not look at the way things are when we decide the way things should be.
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From TFA:
"In the same time frame, it has shipped Windows XP Home Edition, Windows XP Professional Edition, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, Windows XP Media Center Edition, Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004, Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 (and 2005 UR2), Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005, Windows XP Home and Professional N Editions, Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (SP2, absolutely a big Windows upgrade), Windows XP Embedded, Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs, and Windows XP Starter Edition"
That's great. Not only are the 64 bit editions very unstable to this day (and shouldn't be counted as "released" until they are), the difference between all of these "releases" of Windows XP is which features were #ifdef'ed out of the pro version, which service pack they shipped with, and which drivers they shipped with. That's not a "release." I don't know anyone that would look at XP Starter Edition and say "Yes! What a great new release! A true engineering marvel!"
Besides, until we really see Vista as a released product, I'm not ready to compare it to the very first version of OSX, much less Leopard. Maybe it'll fall short of what OSX has always been, maybe it'll eclipse Leopard - I'll decide when it's released, but comparing a few tweaks for XP to the OSX releases is hillariously ignorant.
I stand corrected. Want to trade my personal worth for your shiny car? I'll throw in a dusty Oldsmobile...
so it's a new thing that deriving your life's worth from your material possessions leaves you lacking in the long run? Don't feel sorry for these people whose stuff was destroyed: at least they have a chance at gaining perspective. Feel sorry for the guy that's still got his XBox and wastes all day, every day on it, or the guy that has a bright shiny car but no sense of personal worth.
Could be really nice having another commercial Windows C++ IDE around. At my workplace we really need an alternative to Visual Studio. In a codebase that's nearly 1,000,000 lines intellisense is insanely slow, completely inaccurate, and honestly just plain annoying. Visual studio randomly crashes, etc. We're in the process of switching to CMake so people can use Eclipse or whatever IDE they want, but Eclipse's CDT is still a bit too young for my tastes. Perhaps Borland's IDE will provide a welcome reprieve and nice debugging.
You could probably get a lot of college CS majors interested if it was the adventures of TurboWoman.
MMMmmmmm... bitmasks and tights... I'll orient your objects, baby!
Haha. Naw, I haven't been reading /. enough to have that up from here. The reason I said "yet" is because AS 3.0 is slated to have pointers. The reason one needs pointers is for manipulations of data structures required for many algorithms to be efficient. Helping my friend implement a linked-list-esque data structure in actionscript turned out to be a bloody mess, and I'd never even consider doing a tree or heap.
Anyway I never said pointers had anything to do with OOP: I mentioned them in the same paragraph and that's all. Actionscript is object oriented, yes, but lacks a lot of the power of mature object oriented languages. Implementing the bare minimum set of features required to be OO does not a "powerful object oriented language" make. I think they originally intended for actionscript to be a simple procedural scripting language, attempted to turn their old infrastructure into something OO in AS2, and in the upcoming 3 they're going to go back and replace the restrictive older foundations from the early days. That part is completely my conjecture and is likely wrong, but if it's true then AS3 is going to be leaps and bounds above AS2 in speed and stability.
Now I'm not trying to harp on Actionscript: It's moving in the right direction and I have high hopes for it (especially when it moves into 3.0). It's very useful in its current state as well, but let's not oversing its praises. The time will come when it will earn them fair and square, and I think it'll be pretty soon.
Sounds like some good progress on the horizon: that stuff's been needed in Flash for years. I'm glad to see it on the way, but my support for Flash hinges on one burning question: will it start really supporting Linux any time soon? If so, count me right in.
Object oriented and powerful, Actionscript aint. Heck, it doesn't even have real pointers yet. I like Flash in general: I really do, but I wouldn't say Actionscript is a powerful, robust, feature-rich language by any stretch of the imagination.
Works great on PPC as well, actually. Flash has been running smoothly on Mac for years.
Yes, it sucks that the linux support is so antiquated and there's no 64 bit support, I know.
Uranium used to be used only as a weak dye for porcelain.
Well the desktop environment itsself may not be intended to ever be ported away from *nix, the apps made for it can still be ported, right? I for one would love to see Amarok on Windows. Apps written for KDE that are ported over to Windows could be some great advertising for *nix and KDE. People seem to be under the impression that there are no good apps out there for linux, but that's likely because they've never tried them (and never will unless they can try them in Windows first).
The KDE guys also could've chosen Qt for the features it provides aside from the cross-platform support. Its Signal/Slot system is powerful, its API is very powerful, it's efficient, it's very well documented (and always has been) the list goes on.
Anyway, I'd go for a KDE Windows port instantly if there was one. Hell, I usually use KDE under colinux at work (hey! don't laugh at me!). If I have to use Windows it might as well feel like home.
I've tried wx, actually. I use it at my current job. After having been spoied with Qt, I'm not such a fan of wx. To be completely fair I haven't tried a whole lot of GTK programming, but I haven't been impressed with the Windows GTK ports I've seen.
I kid you not. First off, they had problems right off the bat loading large image files. There's some limit to the size of a jpg you can load in Java's standard libraries (at least with default settings), so most of them couldn't load say a 5000x5000 image. Not sure if any of them ever found a workaround for it. I watched 3 other students' final presentations: 2 used Java and 1 used VB.NET. One java guy chose java because he wanted to develop on his Mac and only use Windows machines for testing. He wasn't clear (wish I could give you details, but I don't know them) about what issues he ran into but during the last month or so of the project he ended up just staying on Windows machines because something broke badly enough (portability-wise) that it wasn't worth his time to figure it out. His version did not work on Mac anymore at the time of the presentation. He reported testing it in Linux using both the Sun VM and the free-as-in-speech VM and neither worked out for him. The other java guy didn't report the status of his program on any platform except Windows, so for all I know it could've worked flawlessly or it might just eat shit if you ran it on a Mac. No word on Linux either. Oh, and there were some pretty serious speed issues on his app, but he did implement some pretty fancy features... So yeah, sorry I don't have details about what exactly didn't work, but shenanigans it aint.
I'd argue that it's improbable you'd write for windows and not spend a penny. Sure, you can develop .NET applications with nothing more than notepad and the command line, but it'd be a lot like building a 10 story card castle.
In my senior design class my last year of college, the project was to build a Windows app that did X, Y, and Z - any extra features and polish were left to the students' imaginations. The 3 students that used Qt did substantially better than the others, and their stuff ran on Windows, Mac, and Linux. None of them reported having to change a single line of source code porting from one platform to the next. The 6 Java people didn't do as well as the .net people overall, but their stuff ran on Mac most of the time. They reported spending some time and effort to get the Mac version working.
The 8 .NET people by and large got better ratings than the Java people as far as features, usability, and speed, but their stuff only ran on Windows.
So while the populations weren't large enough for anything vastly conclusive, it is a tribute to Qt that the 3 students using it did noticeably better than the 14 others just on windows, but also ran on Mac and Linux.
I thought your project had to be licensed under something GPL compatible. OpenSource.com has a few lists of GPL compatible licenses, btw. So that rules out BSD licensed projects using Qt, as far as I knew.
I was never a KDE fan - I always liked Gnome stuff better, until I programmed in Qt for a project at school. After working with Qt I got absolutely sold on it and KDE. I kind of wish that GTK was better than Qt because then I would use it on commercial products, but honestly I'd gladly pay the fee to use Qt.
All of the limitations you're talking about were common to apps of Agenda's day: they're certainly not unique to Agenda. One can expect that if Agenda was resurrected it'd share the traits of modern apps and lose those limitations.
:-) That much money gets "a lot of freaking work" done.
Also "a lot of freaking work" is exactly what the $5M is for
Anyway, I don't believe Chandler is going to be an updated Agenda: I think it's a new animal that will share a lot of the features and strengths that Agenda had.
Just because a country is poor doesn't mean its residents are all starving and foolish. There will be plenty of people that will realize that their childrens' futures rest in education, and that these machines are keys to that door. There will be plenty of parents that would sooner starve than relinquish that. It's a typical middle to upper class misconception that everyone in a less developed country is either starving or ignorant or both, and that's really not the case.
The key to advancement is education. Perhaps rather than spending $100 to feed a person for a few months they're spending $100 to teach them how to help themselves. I understand that some areas are too underdeveloped for this to be helpful, but in others this is exactly what they need.
Knowlege is power. I want to see shoes on their feet and food in their stomachs too, but an intermediate step - education - could have a much longer lasting and widespread benefit.
It really depends on what you use it for. At my job we're all running XP boxen for development - doing distriuted builds, test-runs of the (very memory heavy and graphics intensive) software we develop, etc. Under stress like that, an XP box doesn't stay up for very long before it gets pretty unstable and very unresponsive. We find ourselves rebooting our machines every couple of days. It was more frequent than that until we all got about 2 GB of ram.
I'd agree with that, for sure. In modern computing people are more than willing to pay out the nose for convenience. They'd gladly pay a few hundred dollars to never have to use a compiler or touch a command line.
I can't blame them, really: while I don't share their fear/distaste of learning new technologies, I can understand it.
I would love to delete your post. How petty.
Midi guitars have been around a while, yes. There are actually a few bands ("Bela Fleck and the Flecktones" are rumoured to be among them) whose drummers are actually just using a midi guitar. They'd have to go down a lot in price to be shipped as an accessory for a game like this, though.
Midi's pretty old technology, though, so I bet the price could go down a ways if a larger market developed.
There's a difference between accepting and utilizing a necessary evil and integrating that necessary evil with your long term operations. I don't pretend to have a well-informed opinion on whether or not the FSF's position on shipping things like proprietary drivers and codecs with GPL software is the correct one, but I know it's important to address that issue before acting in potentially harmful ways (and regretting it later).
Let's not look at the way things are when we decide the way things should be.