I like this analogy in this article from SD Times, Think of Clouds as Restaurants. Marty Puranik makes the point that as Cloud service providers cut costs in a ‘battle to the bottom’ to compete with each other, it’s far more important to look at the services they each provide rather than just the cost per unit of whatever.
USB bootable OS/2?
OS/2 was technically far superior than any other desktop OS available at it’s time. The fact that it continued to be used in ATMs by banks, ticket machines, voice mails systems, PABXs and various other systems for years after IBM sales and support was discontinued says everything. Even though it was discontinued by IBM in 2006, it is still sold as eComStation, packaged with updated drivers for common hardware available today. According to eComStation’s site, it’s still in use by a number of major corporations.
I’ve spent probably too much time recently installing and playing around with OS/2, especially since ISOs of the install disks became freely available on the Internet Archive. This article about eComStation looking for help to build a version of OS/2 bootable from USB flash drives caught my attention. Interestingly though, from my experience recently trying to install OS/2 Warp on fairly recent PC hardware, I’d rather prefer to see updated drivers for today’s CPUs, motherboards and hard disks.
Wired: “Microsoft kisses up to Tim Cook in front of millions”
I was recently looking at the IDC global tablet sales and was surprised to see that sales of Microsoft’s Surface are not yet showing up. I thought I’d read somewhere that the were selling reasonably well, but I guess not enough to show up on the global sales numbers. That means they’re selling less that 1 million units a quarter because LG and Huawei, both selling 1.6 million in 2Q15 take slot 4 and 5 in IDC’s stats, and others (?) are grouped together as 20M, but who knows what’s counted in that category (there’s probably as many as 20M different companies flooding the market with Android tables at this point).
The only Surface sales I could find mentioned was a $888M revenue number that Microsoft announced in it’s last quarterly earnings statement. Given that the Surface price ranges from models around $500 up to $1700 for a full loaded Surface Pro 3 (why wouldn’t you just buy a MacBook Pro for that price?) let’s take an average: $888M at $1000 a unit, well, yeah, that’s 888,000 units a quarter. That’s not too many. Not when Apple are flogging 11M units a quarter and that’s even with their numbers dropping quarter after quarter.
So the Wired article really summed it up for me. I was about to write something witty about why Apple are producing a new tablet with a keyboard and a stylus, something that Jobs said people would never want or need. But 888,000 sales of Surfaces is 888,000 of lost sales to Apple, so, hey, why wouldn’t they produce one of those too.
Choice quote from the Wired article:
For Microsoft, it was a moment of apotheosis. Since Satya Nadella took over as CEO last year, the company has pushed Office onto the iPhone as well as the iPad; open sourced its crown jewels of software development so people can build more Microsoft software that runs on Apple gear; and jettisoned its $7.6 billion effort to dominate the smartphone market with Nokia, a Finnish company famous for recent failure.
Kissing Cook’s ring was the next logical step.
And here’s the truth of the matter:
If you hadn’t noticed before, the mobile wars are over. For a while there, Microsoft was confident its Windows operating system would capture a sizable portion of the market. But that’s not gonna happen. The company still sells phones and tablets, but relatively few consumers will ever buy them.
That’s a harsh reality in a changing, post-PC world.
Wrapping up a Java2D game: custom fonts and transparent pngs
A while back (turns out it was about 8 years ago) I started working on a simple 2d game in the style of Nintendo Game and Watch LCD games that were popular in the 1980s, but I never finished it completely.
I dug up the source and committed it to GitHub in its original state, how I last left it, and then took a look at wrapping up the last few issues and adding finishing touches.
Here’s the source for the game, and here’s the source for a generic 2d game framework that I abstracted from the game as I was developing it. Here’s a couple of posts from when I was actively working on developing this, here and here.
There was a couple of bugs in the animation that I never fixed, and I wanted to polish it up a bit.
It never really had the look of an old monochrome LCD displ
ay, so I first changed the background (using a color dropper to pick a color from online photos), but then realized none of the images were transparent so it ended up looking like this:
Notice the bank on the top-left now has the first of the sprites updated to add transparency. I did this by adding an alpha layer in Gimp per simple steps here. I updated each of the image sprites to resave them as PNGs with a transparent layer.
The end result now looks like this:
The LCD segment font is from http://www.styleseven.com/. To load the custom font, use:
[code]
ge = GraphicsEnvironment.getLocalGraphicsEnvironment();
ge.registerFont(Font.createFont(Font.TRUETYPE_FONT, System.class.getResourceAsStream("/fonts/digital-7.ttf")));[/code]
And then when you need to use it, create a new Font using it’s name and you can use it in place of any regular system font:
[code]
g.setFont(new Font("digital-7", Font.BOLD, 20));
[/code]
Updated results for the game are here and the 2d game engine here.