The collected works of R-ten-K - Page 4

You may be thinking about the Picasso quote: "Good artists copy, great artists steal."

BTW, the quote has nothing to do with plagiarism. Picasso was referring to nature/reality, not other people's work.

Huh?

It is a proper superset of C, and does object orientation via message passing (how Alan Kay intended it). It is ridiculously simple to pick up if one is moderately proficient in C, IMHO. I learned it concurrently with C++ (NeXTStep was used by my uni to teach some undergrad classes), and Objective C was definitively easier to grasp and master.


My brain still thinks better in functional languages, though, so I always end up back to lisp every now and then, I have been looking into clojure recently. I really like Python for quick prototyping of ideas and to move away from Matlab. For wasting time having fun and experimenting, I really enjoy processing ( http://processing.org/ ).


I have worked with some groups doing research on sketch programing, that I feel may be a future direction for programming languages: provide the input and output definitions, define some constraints and expected behaviors for the algorithm, and let the "compiler" figure out the rest. It is the XXI century...

You can still code in C++ if you fancy, you probably will have to use wrappers to access the nice stuff in cocoa (and part of the reason why it is so nice is due to Objective-C IMO).

But seriously, Objective-C really is not that hard to pick up if you're proficient with C. Perhaps it may be my EE background, but thinking in terms of message passing seemed a more natural approach to imperative programming. Give it a week.

So what? I can still write code in LISP where I don't have to have assignments, values can be unmodifiable/immutable, etc.



Where did I say they were?

I guess Hamei was right after all.

Cheers.

We aim to please you...

So any pair will do? Pair programming FTW!!!

I use my Indigo as a bookend, a duty which it fulfills both admirably and competently.

REXX was the scripting language for the Amiga, so it saw some moderate action. But BASIC pre-dates it and was the default language for most micros during the 70s to late-80s, so that may have something to do with its popularity.

Geeks who like to mess with their computers are not the target demographic Apple is aiming for with these machines.

Computers are a commodity now, they have been for a while. The most successful companies in the field are the ones who have recognized that basic fact, Apple being a good example. I have no idea why some people are having trouble getting this memo, since these sort of arguments get repeated ad infinitum in this forum.

Also, if some of you don't like change that is fine, but I'd recommend against getting so emotionally vested in a filed which is progressing at an almost exponential rate... you're going to have a hard time.

For what it is worth, I ordered one of the new retina mac books, to me it has the perfect balance of mobility and performance. The retina display is just gorgeous and perfect for the type of stuff I do most of the time with a computer: text editing (and photo editing every now and then).

*sigh*

If your fuel is OK for the things that you do, then that is fantastic, for you. Thing is, most people don't do the things you do with their computers. And since there are more of those people, who are obviously morons and unworthy of being your equal, than there are of you, it follows those idiots buying all those products are the ones driving the market not you.

Since I happen to spend a lot of time traveling and writing text/presentations/spreadsheets. etc, this laptop is perfect for me. I fail to see under what useful metric your fuel would be a better or equal alternative to this product for my intended application, but to each their own I guess.

Thank you I will pass. Luckily I can afford a machine with a very nice screen and that weights little, I happen to value my eyesight and I'm of the opinion that when it comes to luggage, the lighter the better.

... or you can totally go off on another rant and continue proving my point about having a hard time being emotionally vested in this industry. It's up to you.

PS. I never said you had to buy the latest and spiffiest, btw. If your beloved fuel or 15 year old machine do whatever it is that you need to do with a computer, then good for you use that and be happy. Which is what I basically said already.

I had a T2000 so I assume it applies to the T1000 as well, the machine was definitively not suitable for home use... Unless you live right next to an airport slash jackhammer testing facility, or you have a separated room for your computers with good noise isolation. These things are loud, the fans were definitively over spec'ed.

BTW, has Oracle changed their stance regarding patches and firmware updates? It made the proposition of owning SUN HW for hobbyist purposes not very appealing.

My experience has been the opposite to yours Not every machine that makes it to private hands is up to the latest BIOS/PROM/whathaveyou version, which is what I was referring to. Plus, to me, the whole point of owning these sort of systems as a hobby is to tinker with them, and eventually things do wrong, and eventually you may need to reload something, and then... poof...

Slashdot is still around?

Dude, there are still 4 months before Lent...

Ah, I see. Apparently "Carnival" refers to different times of the year across the globe, so more like " German (ic) Carnival Season" no?

The whole suit seemed like a "hail Mary" attempt by SCO to bring revenue. So it did not make sense for SCO to waste time suing a company with no cash (I think SGI was already circling the drain by the time this nonsense was brought).

Of course, given the flimsy case SCO had, one has to question the wisdom of patent trolling IBM, a company with a track record of not being afraid of using aggressively their rather sizable patent and lawyer portfolio.

Anyhow, the NUMA stuff probably postdates the Unix codebase which SGI may have licensed at some point.

Torvalds was not a founder of Transmeta, and he left well before the company folded. I don't know how one can "make out like a bandit" off a tanked stock exactly.

Linux is the basis of an ecosystem that generates hundreds of millions (if not billions) of $. The guy who created and maintains the kernel which makes everything tick may have raked in a couple of million $ in the process. Apparently that is wrong, how exactly?

You can go to kernel.org, and download the Linux kernel for free. Furthermore, nothing in the GPL says that you can't charge for a product, or that you can't earn a living out of open source, only that you have to distribute the code and if someone modifies said code they have to contribute those modifications back. Here's what the gnu guys themselves have to say:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

It's a bit more complicated than that. At some point Apple actually developed their own version of Linux; mkLinux. However, Apple decided to purchase NeXT in the late 90s in order to use their OS/Software technologies to replace MacOS OS X is based on NextStep (or OpenStep or whatever it was named by then), which was an implementation of Mach using a BSD server/personality/userland and predates Linux actually. OSX is not FreeBSD, it uses parts/subsystems of FreeBSD (and NetBSD as well) for some of the stuff running on top of XNU (or whatever Apple calls their kernel) in order to keep the same BSD-on-top-of-Mach architecture inherited from NeXT.


Apple (or NeXT) never released as open source some of the run-time libraries however, since those were never derived from GNU sources. But Apple has use(d) the GNU toolchain extensively, gcc being the compiler of the NeXT/OpenStep/OSX/iOS ecosystem up to a few months ago. This is, NeXT and now apple have used (and included with their products) GNU-licensed software for a couple of decades at least. There is nothing about GNU that precludes it being used for commercial products.

I have no idea what this has to do with Torvalds's supposed moral shortcomings though.

The point being?

Objective C is one of the many languages gcc supports. Gcc is not just a C compiler but a compiling infrastructure. NeXT extended gcc in the 80s to be their original Objective C compiler. I don't think that an actual stand alone Objective C compiler existed at that point.

The irony is that in 1983, Microsoft was probably one of the larger Unix software vendors.

10 years ago was 2002 not the 90s.

Linux was handling SMP fine by 99, IBM and Oracle started to push Linux right about that time. By 2000 Linux was being deployed by everybody and their mother during the dot com boom. By '02 companies like amazon and google had been literally built on linux. And by '03 SGI was scaling it up to 512 processors on a single image. Perhaps you should consider the possibility that on this matter your perception and reality may be divorced.

In 99 the 2.3 kernel was out as well, which supported both SMP and NUMA. And yes, there was (and there is) room for improvement. The point still stands regarding the perception of the previous poster and reality not being correlated; by 2002 Linux was scaling and was not considered a "toy" by plenty of organizations using it for their infrastructure.

Back to the scheduled "moronic HP leadership" thread...

Hotmail relied heavily on FreeBSD as well, for a while Microsoft was operating one of the largest FreeBSD server farms. Microsoft still sells lots of Office for OS X licenses, so technically they are still a pretty big unix software vendor

I read somewhere, probably it is an apocryphal rumor, that Microsoft initially offered Xenix not DOS to IBM. Now, the OS for the original PC being based on Unix would have been an interesting turn of events for an alternative reality...

Shouldn't this thread be in the general discussion subsection?

Image processing and image generation are not necessarily the same thing.

SGI made some of the graphics HW available for image processing tasks (i.e. read back processed data from the graphics pipeline) via the Image Vision library (I believe that's the name). I have seen it bundled with some of the SGI mips development packs.

But I assume this is one of those mental masturbation exercises, as there seems to be no point to this project, honestly. It is a dead platform, it is very outdated, and frankly you can get better performance/support for image processing tasks with some of the newer OpenCL/Cuda hw/sw stacks you can have now a days for peanuts. Life is short, waste your time wisely.

Perhaps you should apply your own advice to you first?

You basically wrote a heavily opinionated post while chastising others about their lack of facts. Contrary to what you may have lead to believe, your "own personal opinion" and "facts" are not the same thing.

Cheers.