61–70 of 112 posts
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Lazarus and FreePascal would beg to differ: https://www.lazarus-ide.org Everything you ever loved about Delphi 7, but with a ton of modernization. LGPL, too!
Serious question: Can you make "Netflix money", er, "FAANG money", as a Lazarus developer?
"Microsoft will acquire Skype, the leading Internet communications company, for $8.5 billion"
I see lots of instructions on how to set up a system on the website, but nothing which tells me why this software would be useful.
"Useful" in what sense? This is retrocomputing, a hobby. Nothing about it is "useful", it's about playing with old computers and emulators for its own sake.
> C64 OS has one goal. Make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful in today’s modern world.
So I guess whatever "useful in today's modern world" means. What does this new OS allow me to accomplish on a C64?
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I don't think it's "Luddite sentiment" to ask why one computer feels as productive with the same perceived performance as one that's literally a billion times faster. I believe the sibling saying that it's programmer productivity is correct. That same programmer can and does now spend a week whipping together a program in Python that took a year under the older constraints. And users expect more out of them, with whi…
It’s Luddite in that it rejects modern tools and methods in the belief that there’s an older, more artisanal method of doing work. If you believe this is the case then you can put your belief to the test. Build software the way you think it should be built and see if users are willing to pay for it.
"users willing to pay for it" is a very bad and simplistic metric because there is way more to user willingness to pay for something than how that something was made (not to mention that it excludes everything the user doesn't pay for) - it may not even have to do with the software itself.
Also the software in question may not even be "free" to use the better approach: imagine, for example, a client for a chat service that allows embedding images, videos and audio in messages but the way the protocol works is for the server to provide those as iframe and/or html content. At that point the client will have to use a browser component in one way or another with all the baggage that entails even if the features themselves (images, videos, audio and text) could be implemented directly by the client.
There is only so much you can do when you have to interface with a world built on tech that doesn't care about efficiency.
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You certainly don't need modern PC power even for 4k video, though you may need it for doing realtime decompression of some very high compression codecs (but that isn't "watching 4k video", it is "doing realtime h265 decompression for 4k video" or something along these lines). Though codecs are one of the few cases where you see hardware being taken advantage of because that is basically their entire purpose.
Playing video is very expensive task. Just updating 4K screen at 60 frames per second requires transferring of 3840×2160×60 ~ 497 million pixels or 1,49 Gbytes per second (if you skip every fourth byte). It will take at least several instructions (in the best case) to calculate value of every byte so the CPU should be able to perform billions of instructions per second. I doubt you can do it without a "modern PC" wit…
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Playing video is very expensive task. Just updating 4K screen at 60 frames per second requires transferring of 3840×2160×60 ~ 497 million pixels or 1,49 Gbytes per second (if you skip every fourth byte). It will take at least several instructions (in the best case) to calculate value of every byte so the CPU should be able to perform billions of instructions per second. I doubt you can do it without a "modern PC" wit…
> Playing video is very expensive task. Just updating 4K screen at 60 frames per second Nobody mentioned anything about 60 fps. A ton of video is at 24 or 30 fps. > requires transferring of 3840×2160×60 ~ 497 million pixels or 1,49 Gbytes per second (if you skip every fourth byte). You do not need to update the entire screen all the time, you can do partial updates (since very frequently not 100% of the screen change…
You forget that you are expected to keep up to 8 reference frames. And you need to update them too.
> You do not need to update the entire screen all the time, you can do partial updates
This would work only until first keyframe.
I see lots of instructions on how to set up a system on the website, but nothing which tells me why this software would be useful.
"Useful" in what sense? This is retrocomputing, a hobby. Nothing about it is "useful", it's about playing with old computers and emulators for its own sake.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Luddite sentiment common among programmers today really surprises me. The software we’re building today is vastly more powerful and capable than anything from the C64 era.
I don't think it's "Luddite sentiment" to ask why one computer feels as productive with the same perceived performance as one that's literally a billion times faster. I believe the sibling saying that it's programmer productivity is correct. That same programmer can and does now spend a week whipping together a program in Python that took a year under the older constraints. And users expect more out of them, with whi…
Modern computers have opened programming up to more people by making it simpler but with the tradeoff of more runtime execution cost.
Cool project. But much of that functionality was available with GEOS in 1986. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_%288-bit_operating_system...
I remember switching floppy discs rather a lot when trying to use GEOS back in the '80s. My C64 now has a USB interface 8)
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The Luddite sentiment common among programmers today really surprises me. The software we’re building today is vastly more powerful and capable than anything from the C64 era.
As I am writing this comment my 2017 macbook is spinning fans, as if it is doing protein folding.. and it has like 3 tabs open on chrome. And for what? to edit a text box? There are new capabilities around encryption and encoding, things like h265 and etc, which of course help with medical diagnostics and such. I would take c64 software any time, look at this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROr8JhilPhI its from 1983.…
I love these projects that show what can be done with 1mhz cpu and mere kilobytes of ram, really makes you wonder what we’re doing with the other 99% of hardware performance we’ve achieved since then
That 99% is dedicated to running Chrome