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Invisible wrote:
> The OEM has the spec sheet though, so it should be many millions of
> times easier for them to design software for it.
And yet, you think the spec sheet for Win32 doesn't make it millions of
times easier to reimplement it? Because of the millions of undocumented
features? You should make up your mind. ;-)
> The *software* is what makes it a useful device...
If the hardware is that simple, you don't need to reverse engineer it more
than looking at the hardware, right? You're not trying to build something
identical to some complex device.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
The NFL should go international. I'd pay to
see the Detroit Lions vs the Roman Catholics.
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Darren New wrote:
> Invisible wrote:
>> The OEM has the spec sheet though, so it should be many millions of
>> times easier for them to design software for it.
>
> And yet, you think the spec sheet for Win32 doesn't make it millions of
> times easier to reimplement it? Because of the millions of undocumented
> features? You should make up your mind. ;-)
The hardware for an MP3 player is simple. The task it's supposed to
perform is simple.
Windows, on the other hand, is a vast lump of software purposely
designed to be difficult to understand.
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Darren New wrote:
> I have often wondered how much of the development effort of a game goes
> into
> 1) Overall concept
> 2) Level design
> 3) Art and sound and motion capture and etc assets
> 4) Portable (like AI) coding, and
> 5) Engine-specific (DirX vs OpenGL) coding.
>
> It really would seem to me that porting the graphics to a different
> platform for a relatively large game (like, say, Half-life) would be a
> fairly small part of the problem.
[Just noticing, but... Halflife actually runs on "a heavily modified
Quake-2 engine".]
Anybody wanna take a guess how many LoC the Quake-2 engine is? (I
*believe* it's been open-sourced now... or is that the Doom engine?)
Warp might know the answer...
Surely if you wanted to build an entire game completely from scratch,
building the game engine would be a *relatively* small part of the
problem - but it's not trivial by any stretch of the imagination.
(Otherwise *I* would have one by now!)
>> Given how painfully difficult it is just working out how to *use* the
>> Win32 API,
>> the chances of somebody correctly implementing a clone of it seem
>> vanishingly small.
>
> It doesn't have to be identical functionality. It only has to be
> "correct."
No - has has to be "incorrect" in exactly the same way that Windows
implements it incorrectly. Every bug and glitch has to be precisely
replicated, or some lump of software somewhere that depends on those
bugs won't work right.
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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On 16-Dec-08 0:37, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Mon, 15 Dec 2008 23:27:13 +0100, andrel wrote:
>
>> On 15-Dec-08 23:15, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>>> Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
>>>> Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>>>>> And then I had to reboot the PC to get out of Vi. :-P
>>>> WTF?
>>> Do *you* know what the keystroke to quit the program is? :-P
>>>
>> q or q! if you made changes. Am I missing something?
>
> technically, :q or :q! - the first will exit and prompt you if you made
> changes, the second will quit and not save your changes. If you want to
> quit and save changes, then :w will write. I prefer shift+ZZ myself, it
> quits and writes changes. :-)
me too. I have been known to type ZZ to exit emacs and a variety of
other editors.
BTW to connect a few treads: Andrew have you ever seen the Turing
machine as implemented in vi? I had it once, it should be somewhere on
the interweb, no doubt, but I can not immediately find it.
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On 16-Dec-08 9:54, Invisible wrote:
> Jim Henderson wrote:
>
>> User error. He didn't know how to exit vi with shift-ZZ or :q! or :w!
>
> One might argue "designer error" for making the system so non-obvious to
> operate. :-P
If you continue that, you can also claim that it is an even more
fundamental error to assume that anyone can operate that flat beige
piece of plastic with all those buttons. From the designer at that point
in time and also for the first batches of users, that was obvious. You
OTOH have been brainwashed by current technology where even the ^C is
redefined in an horribly backwards incompatible way.
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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Surely if you wanted to build an entire game completely from scratch,
> building the game engine would be a *relatively* small part of the
> problem - but it's not trivial by any stretch of the imagination.
Certainly. I'm just wondering about the relative percentages. I think enough
people rebuild engines from scratch when they need to that it obviously
isn't ridiculously undoable.
>>
>> It doesn't have to be identical functionality. It only has to be
>> "correct."
>
> No - has has to be "incorrect" in exactly the same way that Windows
> implements it incorrectly.
It only has to be incorrect in the way that's consistent for all the
programs you want to support. If a virus takes advantage of a buffer
overflow, but no legitimate program does, you don't have to have the buffer
overflow work the same way.
More likely, if Win98 allocates memory on 2-byte boundaries, and WinNT et al
allocates it on four-byte boundaries, and you're happy not supporting Win98
binaries on your WINE, you don't need the code to allocate on 2-byte
boundaries. Anyone who depends on which boundary you allocate on will either
work, or fail in a way that you know isn't supported.
> Every bug and glitch has to be precisely
> replicated, or some lump of software somewhere that depends on those
> bugs won't work right.
Only the bugs and glitches that some piece of software you want to support
depends on needs to be implemented. And when you find that software failing,
you now have a test case to figure out what real Windows is doing that your
code isn't.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
The NFL should go international. I'd pay to
see the Detroit Lions vs the Roman Catholics.
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Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Mon, 15 Dec 2008 22:18:25 -0600, Mueen Nawaz wrote:
>
>> Let's be realistic: Linux could be a huge headache, especially
> for one
>> who's not very computer-savvy.
>
> My wife's not very computer savvy, and she uses openSUSE 11.0
> exclusively. She hasn't touched Windows in years.
>
> Her needs are fairly simple - web browsing, IM, writing tools. She uses
> an older Compaq laptop and has no problems at all (well, the speakers are
> a bit tinny, but you can't blame Linux for that).
>
> So sorry, I don't buy that.
You don't buy that it *could* be a huge headache? If you think a
counterexample suffices to make your case, I can start itemizing quite a
few real cases where it was a headache.
--
BREAKFAST.COM Halted... Cereal Port Not Responding.
/\ /\ /\ /
/ \/ \ u e e n / \/ a w a z
>>>>>>mue### [at] nawaz org<<<<<<
anl
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andrel wrote:
> me too. I have been known to type ZZ to exit emacs and a variety of
> other editors.
I often got Vim commands in the middle of POV-Ray code; since I was using
POV-Win editor, where the Esc key doesn't really get into command mode :)
And even more often, pressing Esc and noticing before typing a command.
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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> That's how Picasa for Linux was made (a photo organizer by Google).
And I must note: the day Picasa for Linux was released, Google also sent
around two hundred bug fixes to Wine developers.
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Invisible wrote:
> 100% impossible
Stop saying that!
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