Comment Re:cmp %rdi,%rax (Score 1) 729
Hear hear! Those of us that learned assembler on the big iron (IBM mainframes) totally agree. Teaching new students to assembler in AT&T format was something I was NOT going to do.
Comment Re:Null Terminated Strings (Score 1) 729
Nope. Punched cards was the era of fixed length fields . . . You described each field with a size, including packed decimal numbers.
Comment Re:What's there to compare? (Score 1) 402
Notepad++ is my favorite, but windows only. It just has all the most important features. Since I'm not on Windows much anymore, I've had to move on... Atom is pretty decent on the Mac (ignoring how huge it is), Gedit is increasingly indecent and unstable, but it's close to Notepad++ in features.
If you like notepad++ on Windows, check you the Scite editor http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE... on *nix systems. Same engine, just as fast, horrendus config file tho . . .
Comment Computers in High School (Score 1) 632
As a Junior (in 1976), I got to program in BASIC by timesharing into the Dartmouth computers, where BASIC was invented! There was also some lecture on what computers were and could do, but the majority of time was spent in a local college lab programming.
Senior year I got to code FORTRAN on punched cards in my Calculus class. Our teacher had a deal with a different local college that allowed us time on their IBM mainframe (maybe a 360 . . .).
Actually really enjoyed both experiences, but that did not translate over in College. I became a computer professional after being in the "real world".
Comment Re:This chip snickers at my 6502... (Score 1) 292
Heck, I wrote a lot of 370 (and 370/XA) code in assembly on mainframes. Different call structure (no stack, although the newer mainframes have that now) and register conventions (don't ever use register 1, register 0 is right out, and return back to your caller through the address in register 14, etc.). A lot of fun writing assembly code for system exits, in-house utilities, and invoking services not normally provided to the higher-level languages (like dynamic allocation of datasets).
Those were fun days . . .
Google Stops Ads For "Cougar" Sites 319
teh31337one writes "Google is refusing to advertise CougarLife, a dating site for mature women looking for younger men. However, they continue to accept sites for mature men seeking young women. According to the New York Times, CougarLife.com had been paying Google $100,000 a month since October. The Mountain View company has now cancelled the contract, saying that the dating site is 'nonfamily safe.'"
US Air Force To Suffer From PS3 Update 349
tlhIngan writes "The US Air Force, having purchased PS3s for supercomputing research, is now the latest victim of Sony's removal of the Install Other OS feature. It turns out that while their PS3s don't need the firmware update, it will be impossible to replace PS3s that fail. PS3s with the Other OS feature are no longer produced since the Slim was introduced, so replacements will have to come from the existing stock of used PS3s. However, as most gamers have probably updated their PS3s, that used stock is no longer suitable for the USAF's research. In addition, smaller educational clusters using PS3s will share the same fate — unable to replace machines that die in their clusters."
In related news, Sony has been hit with two more lawsuits over this issue.
More Evidence For Steam Games On Linux 256
SheeEttin writes "Back in November 2008, Phoronix reported that Linux libraries appeared in the Left 4 Dead demo, and then in March, Valve announced that Steam and the Source engine were coming to Mac OS X. Now, Phoronix reports that launcher scripts included with the (closed beta) Mac version of Steam include explicit support for launching a Linux version."
Game Devs On the Future of PC Gaming 375
Shacknews wraps up a developer panel at PAX East discussing the future of gaming on the PC. They cover topics including DRM, digital download platforms and cloud-based gaming services.
"Joe Kreiner of Terminal Reality: 'If you look at it from a giant publisher perspective, then the numbers on the PC just really don't make financial sense for you to bother with it. But if you start out with the mindset — you know, you're targeting that group, you make a niched product that's going [to] do well, if you look at a lot of the titles on Steam, Torchlight's a really good example — as long as you know that's your audience to begin with, and you make something inside of a budget that you know you're going to be selling those kinds of numbers, you can be very successful. I think it just takes a targeted developer. ... There is no [PC] platform, really. It's just a mish-mosh of hardware, an operating system that kind of supports games. The problem with that platform is, there's no standards and piracy is rampant, so why would we want to make a video game for that platform unless you had some sort of draconian DRM thing to keep it from being stolen?"
Devs Finally Finding Success With Xbox Indie Games 65
McBacon writes with this excerpt from Wired.co.uk:
"Often dismissed as a failed venture, the Xbox Indie Games programme has earned successful man-and-his-dog developers tens of thousands of pounds from sales of their homebrew games. Wired explores the success stories of this hidden marketplace. ... now, more than a year since its launch, the Xbox Indie Games are seeing something of a revival. Microsoft has made huge strides to improve the service, games are beginning to be taken more seriously and success stories are becoming more and more common. Especially for [James] Silva, a New York-based developer, who became an impromptu Indie celebrity after his game The Dishwasher won Microsoft's Dream-Build-Play competition. He says he's 'absolutely thrilled' to have seen I Maed a Gam3 w1th Zomb1es!!!1 — his latest game — become a cult hit, for gamers to flock to it in record numbers and to have sold over 200,000 copies."
The 10 Most Absurd Scientific Papers 127
Lanxon writes "It's true: 'Effects of cocaine on honeybee dance behavior,' 'Fellatio by fruit bats prolongs copulation time,' and 'Are full or empty beer bottles sturdier and does their fracture-threshold suffice to break the human skull?' are all genuine scientific research papers, and all were genuinely published in journals or similar publications. Wired's presentation of a collection of the most bizarrely-named research papers contains seven other gems, including one about naval fluff and another published in The Journal of Sex Research."
OpenSSH 5.4 Released 127
HipToday writes "As posted on the OpenBSD Journal, OpenSSH 5.4 has been released: 'Some highlights of this release are the disabling of protocol 1 by default, certificate authentication, a new "netcat mode," many changes on the sftp front (both client and server) and a collection of assorted bugfixes. The new release can already be found on a large number of mirrors and of course on www.openssh.com.'"
Comment Re:75% of apps? Shaa, right! (Score 1) 277
Heck yes you can do web pages in Cobol, given the latest CICS (for you non-mainframers: Customer Information and Control System) setup.
It's also possible to do so from MicoFocus COBOL http://www.microfocus.com/products/RMCOBOL/COBOLCGI.asp
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