Posted 11/14/2009 at 06:24:46am

You don't have to remind me of anything, Will.  I would, on the other hand, suggest this for the future:  If you ban someone and delete their comment, you should simply delete the comment entirely.  What the moderator ended up doing was drawing attention to the whole thing by replacing the offending remark with a comment of his (or her) own that made it appear as though it was the moderator who was "being a dick."

Posted 11/13/2009 at 04:05:54pm

I did not see what brannak originally posted because it was deleted by the moderator.  However, Turing's sexuality and his persecution for it was what the first two paragraphs were all about!  It set the tone for the whole article:
"Alan Turing should have been knighted. He should have been Sir Alan Turing. Instead he was prosecuted for being homosexual and committed suicide in despair... Sorry, guys, but an apology does not erase an egregious wrong."
Any computer programmer worth their paycheck is familiar with Alan Turing; the father of our profession. I neither knew nor cared about Turing's personal life until David Gerrold just had to bring it up.  The message I got from this article was, 'If the British were not so homophobic, then Turing would have gotten the recognition he deserved.'
I wasn't born yesterday.  The author went out of his way to put a gay rights slant to this article.  Again, I did not see what brannak posted, and if his comment was way over the top, then I would agree with the moderator's decision to delete it.  However, if you don't want someone commenting on the contents of an article you post, then please leave the content out to begin with.  And banning a commenter for just "missing the point" seems a bit juvenile.

Posted 11/13/2009 at 03:13:10pm

"1...I use OpenDocument"

Well, I doubt you have edited any 4GB OpenDocument files, either.  Boy, did you miss the point.

"2.Mac OS 7 (more specifically, System 7), came out in 1991. Back then, Windows 3.0 was the latest version of Windows. Try running a 16-bit 3x program under the x64 version of Windows 7 sometime and tell me how it works."

OK, try Mac OS 9 and it won't work either.

"3...[insert lots of pompous UNIX hand-wringing here]...Need I go on?" 

Again, you totally missed the point: the subject was the consumer desktop, not servers.  And yes, I have had to deal with plenty of UNIX geeks who maintain their server software like it's a hobby and behave like no one is affected when they rewrite something that wasn't broken to begin with.

“4… As for the time consuming nature of 64-bit work and the expenses of it, it would be a lot less time consuming had people written their code in an architecture-independent format.”

Unfortunately, outside of “Hello World” it is nearly impossible to write a serious application (I’m not talking about command-line console applications either) in a perfectly architecture-independent format and have it perform at its best for the targeted platform.

This is absolutely hilarious!  There are so many crazy assertions in this paragraph that I don’t even know where to begin.  Following your logic...anyone using IDEs like Eclipse under UNIX doesn’t understand programming either.  What? You think using a console command line and make files makes you a better programmer?  No, it makes you less productive.  Going to the logical conclusion of your line of thinking then, people who used punch cards for programming a TOPPS-10 OS must be even better programmers.

“B.The Linux world is mostly free software.” 

Yes, and 9 times of 10 you get exactly what you paid for. 

“5.As someone who both works for a company who produces commercial software and as someone who has to deal with big software companies in a B2B relationship on a daily basis…[etc., etc]”

Posted 11/11/2009 at 03:24:09pm

Yet another script kiddie programming language for your server.

 ...Oh yeah, and it has a cute mascot logo too.

Posted 11/02/2009 at 01:22:41pm

The Mac's record rise in market share to 5.27% is still waaay down from the 25% market share it enjoyed in the early 1990's.  Apple views itself as a hardware company, not a software company, so seeing Apple make an official release of the Mac OS for the Intel PC platform is not going to happen.

At the 1993 Apple Developers Conference, I remember attending a secret, invitation-only demonstration of the Mac OS running on the Intel platform.  They even had multiple monitors running for the desktop (something Windows did not support).  We were really excited about this since it would open up our applications to a whole new audience.  Unfortunately, nothing came of it and Apple gave us their reasoning: "We're a hardware company, not a software company.  Releasing the Mac OS on the intel platform would hurt our sales."

Things are still the same over at 1 Infinite Loop.

Posted 10/30/2009 at 01:47:15pm

...Anything available out there yet to plug into this?

Posted 10/23/2009 at 11:39:21am

64 and 32 bits refer to the size of the primary registers in the processor (not counting any vector processing registers).  32-bit programs handle atomic data types between 1 and 32 bits wide.  64-bit programs handle atomic data types between 1 and 64 bits wide.  A 64-bit programming model is a superset of the 32-bit model.  Both models, for example, support 16-bit data types.  But it doesn’t follow that 32 and 64 bit models aren't true 32 or 64 bit because they also support 16-bits.

Please understand something: converting any 32-bit program to 64-bit is a lot more than just "recompiling a program...to get it using 64-bit data types."  Under ALL operating systems--even Linux-- you need to perform "significant replumbing" to convert a program.  The only way a program can be built on the fly using either 64-bit or 32-bit memory models is to have its source code carefully constructed with conditional compilation blocks and carefully chosen identifier definitions that build according to what memory model is chosen.  And even then it isn’t completely fool proof.  It is no easier on Linux than it is on Windows or any other OS for that matter.

The unix.org page you cite is only talking about abstract simple data type identifiers under a C compiler and how they can use the choice of identifiers to help portability between 32 and 64 bit compilations.   Whether you want to call a 64-bit data type “longlong” or “Int64” is completely arbitrary. I have done lots of cross-platform software development in my time; LP64 helps, but it is no magic bullet.

“This is all because Microsoft chose to cater to a bunch of sloppy programmers that couldn't be bothered to figure out how to use typedef to avoid making hardcoded assumptions about data types.”

This is a patently absurd and asinine statement from someone who knows nothing about professional software development.  It takes a lot of time, and therefore a lot of money, to convert any legacy application from 32 to 64 bits.  It’s a hell of a lot more complex than knowing how to use “typedef.”  Most of the time it is just not worth the expense: how many 4GB+ Word files have you edited lately?

*crickets chirping *

It has nothing to do with sloppy programming.  If you have an application with literally millions of lines of legacy code, regardless of the operating system, you just can’t change it to a new programming model by re-defining a few compiler identifiers.  Anyone who believes that is seriously deluded.  If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, fool.

Over the years, Microsoft has done a remarkable job of preserving backwards compatibility in their support of legacy software.  Windows has hundreds of times the number of applications available for it than any other operating system.  I have 12-year-old, 32-bit, Windows applications I can still run under Windows 7 x64.   Try running a Mac OS 7 application under Mac OS X sometime…lots of luck with that, pal.  And if you want to talk about sloppy programming, get under the hood of Mac OS X and look at the mess they have there with NextStep and Carbon.  Since the UNIX hobbyist geeks don't have millions of users depending on their software, they can afford to give their puny user base the finger and not support legacy applications. 

Stop sounding like an ignoramus and go troll somewhere else, please.

Posted 10/22/2009 at 04:51:30pm

Xp x64, Vista x64 and 7 x64 are all true 64-bit operating systems. WoW64 is the emulation layer that enables 32-bit Windows-based applications to run seamlessly on 64-bit Windows. The data typing is backwardly compatible so we can run most all of our old software.

damicatz, you are just as clueless about everything else you posted as well, so I won't waste my time. Yeesh!

Posted 09/23/2009 at 04:12:17pm

Most people confuse the persistence of vision with the perception of motion.  You can drop a frame rate down to around 16 fps before any flickering becomes too noticeable  That is the persistence of vision.  24 fps was chosen for the theatre because all flickering disappeared at that frame rate.   Additionally, 24fps has common factors with 60Hz electricity so making synchronous motors for film drives for 24fps was relatively easy.

However, the human eye can perceive motion up to around 60 fps.  That's why real-time rendered games look better at the higher frame rates.  The motion blur in Crysis and other games is just a gimmick to make the video look more like 24 fps film.  This detracts from the video quality and defeats the purpose of having higher frame rates, so I always disable any motion blur.

Posted 09/08/2009 at 03:18:16pm

...Maybe marketers can start calling products "Special Edition Xtreme" or "SEX".  That combines every marketing cliche of the past 20 years and sex at the same time!