According to the article, it already ran on OSX. That implies it was already using OpenGL.

I'll admit that I mostly didn't bother with suse and gentoo because gameplayers don't use suse and gentoo. I haven't yet had any reports of my code not working on those platforms, which means either it works, or nobody cares :)

It doesn't work on 64-bit, but it's a known problem because one of my libraries doesn't support 64-bit well. If that were fixed, I don't expect it would be much more difficult than changing a few build flags.

I've considered renaming it to "blog", sadly, because even though I dislike the word it's pretty normal. For now, though . . . nope, stickin' with devlog :D

Yeah it is, you install vmware and drop a bunch of distros in. That week included testing on ubuntu 10.04, ubuntu 8.04, kubuntu 10.04, ubuntu 10.04-64, fedora 12, and debian 5.04.

(Doesn't currently work on ubuntu 10.04-64 but that's mostly due to me being lazy with 64-bit porting. Works on all the rest, though.)

I hate to ask this because it sounds like looking a gift horse in the mouth, but how on earth did it take them two man-months? I ported my game engine over and it took about a week. And that's with manual X11 calls - if I'd wimped out and used a library for it, it would've taken just a few days.

What exactly took the time there?

I seem to recall that when Google provided some governments with the data they'd accidentally collected, it fit on less than a DVD. As an ex-Googler, that amount of data was absolutely irrelevant three years ago - I used ten times that much for scratch space for personal projects. I can't imagine it's somehow gotten [i]more[/i] important.

Want to irradiate your scalp? There's an app for that!

You [i]can[/i] say "oh, that application isn't connected to the network, it doesn't need to be secure". However, you have to keep a very close eye on how it communicates with insecure applications, otherwise your so-called "secure" app is actually not secure in the least.

Because you can get people to pay for it, and therefore, they do.

around $236.4B USD per year, just in maintenance costs

Divided among 307 million US citizens, that's $768/year, or approximately $64/mo. Kind of pricey, but not particularly exorbitant. I don't know exactly what common food costs are per month, but I'm willing to believe that's within an order of magnitude of them.

Of course, if you're paying $64/mo for your water, I imagine many people would use less of it in various ways, reducing the overall water required quite a bit. Also, manufacturing processes that required excess amounts of water might become impractical.

Still think desalination is "easy" ?

Yes. We'd just need the money for it.

I'll put you in charge of designing the time machine so we can keep looking forward a few centuries to see what turns out to be a good idea and what doesn't. Until then, though, "it's not a bad idea" shouldn't have legal weight.

As opposed to the closed inaccessible LLVM/Clang combo?

The GCC developers have shown their ability to compete with MSVC. For a while, they had the edge. They no longer do, and part of that, from what I know, is thanks to how grim and unmaintainable the GCC codebase is.

Personally, I'm quite excited for something better, and I'm really excited for something better that can be embedded in other projects.

The patent is for capturing the metadata and analyzing it. Guess what the Google van was supposed to do? That's right: capture the metadata, and analyze it. Nobody's disputing that, nobody ever has disputed that.

The accidental part is that it turns out they were capturing more than metadata. The patent doesn't talk about doing that, there's no evidence Google ever intended to do that, and it's difficult to determine what they could possibly gain from it anyway.

So, here, let's improve the headline.

"Google Has Pending Patent For Exactly The Process They Tried To Implement, But Slightly Screwed Up"

SHOCKING!

The Android widget interface uses a 4×4 grid to arrange widgets and icons. With a larger display, there needs to be better use of the screen real estate. Some of the early tablets we've seen are running a basic stock Android home launcher. This makes space feel wasted by having giant widgets and shortcuts taking up too much room.

No, really? With a larger screen you have more screen real estate? What genius! Google has certainly not thought of that.

I mean, call me nuts, but I suspect this is pretty far down on their list of Critical Things To Change Right Now, but pretty high up on the list of Things That Must Be Fixed Before Release. It's not done yet. They still have time.

And, in at least one case: she's under 18, but she took the video herself and didn't release it until she was over 18. I'd personally consider it hard to claim she was victimizing herself, but it's been successfully prosecuted.