I agree with Anonymous (no relation) on this one. In addition, the
costs of
developing and marketing a game are very high, so programmer
compatibility
is hardly sufficient to have a successful games
platform. Connectix's
business was
virtual hosting. I was a customer and
used their Virtual PC for Mac which was
the best way to have Windows running
simultaneously with OS X on PowerPC.
Windows and all Windows-based applications
are written as though there is a
x386 processor listening. Virtual PC
intercepted and translated those machine
instructions into the
ones that
worked with the G3, G4, and G5 processors. Frankly, it was inefficient
and many
high-performance applications, such as games, didn't really run well.
For
business applications, such as Access, it was slower and beat having two
computers on the desk. The essential business model of Connectix
was to
sell a way for owners of an application (or game) which ran on that
processor
to run the application on another processor.
I also suspect that
"functional" is being misunderstood. All code does
something and is thus
functional, but we know that some code may be
protected by copyright. I think
functional is best understood as describing code
which is written a particular
way because it could not be correctly written
another way. Let's examine
the "int max(int i1, int i2)" code used in
the trial. We are all going to write
essentially the same code because one
compares the two numbers and returns the
greater. I assert that means that
even if I saw your code, you could not say I
was copying because everything I
did was as the problem dictated, thus
unprotected as functional. More complex
structures of code involve side effects
and sequences of operation and the more
abstract the job to be done, the more
variations in "skinning the cat."
Connectix may
have been using it to
describe how any one solving the BIOS problem would
have to, because they were
working with what the games expected, come up
with essentially the same
solution as Sony's interfaces. One other
point, about Sun having
a
monopoly with java. Java was a Sun product and is one of many, many
languages
one may use for programming. Talking about Sun's (or Oracle's)
monopoly in java
would be like talking about Apple's monopoly in OS X, as the
Psystar people
attempted. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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