Wish I can mod you up.

A lot of the "Ghost in the Shell"-style anthropomorphizing evident in the original Tron and further modernized in "South Park", basically a MMO/SecondLife type of world interaction, seems to be lost in this sequel.

What about Sanctuary? Occasionally filled with Stargate alumni, and has more of the SG1 story-writing feeling than any of SGA/SGU ...

It was like watching Voyager's "Year of Hell" down to every second. Really not exciting and a ratings killer.

Give me the dog episode from Enterprise for more character development.

What kept SG1 alive and SGA somewhat was the adventuring theme. The same theme and spirit that kept Tomb Raider, The Mummy, National Treasure, Indiana Jones, etc going and with great success -- a semi-steam-punk 1940s era story-telling.

As soon as the SG producers destroyed that formula and left only a semblance of it while chasing BSG is why SGU should've been DOA.

The only scifi currently that keeps to that great adventuring theme of the "old is the new-chic" is Sanctuary.

I think, as usual, Disney and the creators have completely missed cyberpunk and the Internet revolution.

I think the original TRON was really in the vein of Ghost in the Shell, The Matrix and the rest where computer concepts and actions are anthropomorphized in a Lawnmower Man/Avatar way.

Flynn ended up being a superuser avatar who didn't know he was until he started using his capabilities, and TRON was a specific, unattended, program designed to dive for information while fighting off security "guards".

Even South Park had a modernized view of the Tron world from the viewpoint of Facebook and the power of accounts. Disney's view is more like a poor, unnetworked version of WoW. Believably, they missed the MMO angle too.

For a better, up to date, more cyberpunk movie, check out Summer Wars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_Wars . It shows how Second Life the Internet is in a heavily networked world while incorporating the importance of gaming (in a Street Fighter-ish way) and the power of p0wning accounts.

Too bad my anniversary TRON dvd still duplicates the mastering errors (at the layer flip) from the LD version.

"experimental port". That's worse than writing code in Silverlight because you're already halfway in a hellhole with no end in sight.

And did you notice I've talked about WinMob. Or how Qt eats 50% of available virtual memory for ALL processes when each only gets 32MB maximum? I know Qt/WinMob well as I also did some experimental backend retargeting for DirectDraw as well as straight Qualcomm-OGLES and discovered just how bad Qt's renderer is.

Or how they don't really support it past WM6.1: they're ignoring the necessary patches to compile cleanly targeting WM6.5 SDK as well as not using -Os which would eliminate at least 5-10% of the code and virtual rss bloat? Another ignored WM6.5 patch would've enabled LayerWindows API support. Oh well!

Stick with what is in production by a lot of people there already making money. Skia is another 2D ui option as a subset is used by Webkit Android.

There's also some 2D UI attachments for Ogre/Irrlicht that you could try exploring too.

Now you're dead to the rest of us?

Wait, so it's now Apple that created these kernel-thread-like backgrounding APIs that PalmOS was production-using years before?

People modding up either don't remember, or are really young.

It sounds like they took WTL and ran with it. I'm impressed.

I vote against using Qt. Having used and hacked it extensively (up to 4.8, or the master branch in git), Qt is way overboard for any simple project.

1 QtCreator is good as a common-platform IDE vs Eclipse, but cannot be used as a selling point for programming IN Qt
2 the code ISN'T as cross-platform as many would like to lead you to think because most here only did some simple apps in it, not full-blow production and public releases
3 the framework is TOO comprehensive and doesn't have a modular substructure to rip out unnecessary bloat; the MFC class structure lends to that bloat
4 it is easy to learn, but requires wrapping your head around weird idiosyncrasies of core elements that are poorly explained in the documentation and require trolling through the immense amount of source
5 Qt's problem reporting system pretty much buries any bugs or fixes you contribute that they don't personally like

Expanding on #2 and #3: Qt is only truly portable between Linux/MacOSX/MSWindows. It really sucks on embedded/smallMemoryCpu as they stopped supporting their qconfig modularization since 4.5. Ex. For Windows Mobile and other embedded, the smallest footprint is 12MB MINIMUM (Core, Gui, OGLES). That's > 50% of the entirely virtual memory available to a single WM app -- for a hello-world in OGLES.

Qt uses a strict single-tree (MFC) inheritance class hierarchy (instead of recursive templating due to legacy and hard-noses) which means code for everything ends up in the shared library, used or not. It's software rasterization most of the time and then hardware-accelerates the results, so it's not a true opengl renderer. You'll have to rewrite it yourself to clean it up. This means it has some speed but a lot of bloat in code and texture memory.

Their MOC is a nice alternative to ObjC, but it's a flawed design decision that didn't bet on the templating abilities of C++ modernization. Boost and Boost signals2 is a less magical alternative to Qt's signaling system.

If it was truly portable on mobile, why is it used extensively ONLY on Nokia products? There's few to zero examples for Symbian and Windows Mobile, and it's not ported to Android/iOS. This means you're already limited if you invest in Qt.

Their QGraphicsView canvas drawing layer is still immature and is still NOT multi-thread compatible (as much of Qt). This means you have to work your way around it a lot of times, or avoid it completely (and still can't compile out the software renderer) especially if you wanted a fancy multi-threaded renderer, or simply just loading textures in one thread and then drawing it in a master draw thread.

I strongly recommend going with a lighter, less drama foundation such as Clutter (which is MORE portable than Qt), SDL, or the bindings some languages provide such as gtk.

The wisdom from this is engines were Honda's passion, bread and butter. Everything MS does is about market dominance, no passion, they could care less about profits. As soon as they dominate, MS looses interest (IE, Windows Mobile, Microsoft Money, etc etc).

Isn't this how GM shoveled their "product brand" (while Toyota/Honda were pushing CS and product quality) before GM went bankrupt? Pushing a pure brand message seems to have "always" worked.

says it's about 77K people. You can probably discount about ~50K of that as the developers and MS/Dell employee giveaway, however.

http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=135892916448833&v=info

For the Qualcomm Android platform and generally most smartphones, the radio stack/base-band/etc on a different processor running a RTOS. Makes it really hard to hack too.

It is quite safe to mess with the scheduler for the "user" application processor.

Commonly called BS because they were already negligent in their infrastructure buildup when at least 70% composed of old-guard AT&T vs Cingular after the merger. This is backed up by their quarterly reports where they were making making massive profits and executive bonuses instead of sinking it into infrastructure.

OTOH, T-Mobile's recent quarterly report shows they are building out heavily hence the pretty lean profits -- ignoring the flat subscriber growth.