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Microsoft Flight Simulator X is supposed to be available at 13th of October. A coworker told me he's read on a forum people bought Flight Simulator X on Friday. I have called Expert Shop in Oslo, and I have heard that "yes, we've got and it's available". Flight Simulator X Deluxe Edition costs 700 Norwegian Kroner, two DVDs.

How is it so far?
Frankly speaking, I didn't find enough time to play yet I am planning to fly between EDDF-RKSI (might be RKSI-EDDF, too) tomorrow (Sunday). I have, however, spotted really cool improvements. Before starting "really cool improvements", let's talk about "requirements" As most expected, this game is thirsty for powerful hardware. See mine below, and decide yours;
ASUS P5LD2 motherboard (we know, it's slow)
2GB RAM (PC2-5300)
Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz Double Core
nVidia GeForce 7950GT 512MB RAM
400GB Seagate Hard Disk (8MB cache)

This configuration can generate 3-20fps when flying at low altitude with default aircrafts and scenery, with slightly improved scenery quality. I will try to find out optimal settings for Flight Simulator, and may disable driver's overrides.

Cool improvements I saw:

• Flexing aircraft wings, but they are flexing nicely.
  
• Realistic lightning (both in aircraft lights and runway lights, which are my favorites)
  
• Realistic water
  
• Realistic weather and thermal effects (however, it still requires, I think, something like ActiveSky)
  
• Realistic ground environment (like smarter autogen, moving cars on road, boats and ships on sea, etc)
  
• Default aircrafts have cool virtual cockpits (with reflection, etc - and it doesn't look like Quake-like 3D stuff we were seeing in FS2004)
  
• A321 switches TOGA if aircraft begins stalling when pilot, who was not using ATHR, is busy with looking around to find out "cool improvements" in new version of the game.
  

These are just a few highlights I have spotted during my 2 hours "test".

Same stuff:

• Same AI (probably, slightly improved same good ol' stupid AI, I mean)
  
• Same voices
  
• Same ATC (I think it's much like what I said for AI)
  

Backwards compatibility:
Istanbul Ataturk scenery (Biber's LTBA) works fine, except some land mesh problems (I think). Aircraft jumps despite the fact that it's parked still on the gate.
PSS A343 works fine. It doesn't display overhead panel, some textures on aircraft are not painted, looks a bit ugly. MCDU couldn't find my flights, couldn't import from FSX either. So I couldn't complete test But when I flying previously, I also couldn't get AP to hold altitude or VS.

I have bought this new GeForce 7950 GT one week ago, FS2004 has never been smoother before. But now, I can't believe why my machine is so slow. I really wonder what sort of hardware I need to run simulator "smoother".

According to Opera Press Release, we have announced Windows CE SDK officially, as of yesterday.

I have started Windows CE port a few months ago. This official announcement made me very happy! I can now share my porting experience and excitement of rest of the team.

I would like to start with brief information about basic features we have today:

• Features are equivalent with Linux SDK, so that a company can basically reuse its code on both platforms (Wow!)
  
• Multiple tabs
  
• One native window, multiple Opera windows
  
• Widgets
  
• User JavaScript, User CSS
  
• AJAX
  
• Wand
  
• Bookmarks
  
• Netscape Plug-ins
  
• Multiple rendering modes (like Medium Screen, Small Screen, Desktop, etc)
  
• Page Zoom
  
• Native JSPlugin (basically; calling native code from JavaScript)
  
• Many more, countless features!
  

It was a real effort
Starting a new port from scratch is difficult. Platform doesn't provide everything you need so you need to re-invent wheel. You need to know what does platform provide, what's the best way to utilize platform's API and not invent an equivalent one (which is potentially slower and less stable).

Preparing an SDK is slightly more difficult than preparing a full application. Customer of an SDK is usually another company, or say, another developer. These people will build their business upon something you do. They need full and correct documentation; what sort of functions does SDK provide, what are function arguments, return values, disaster scenerios... SDK should prefer telling caller that one of its functions is called incorrectly, instead of crashing whole application. SDK should be more stable, rock-solid than application itself.

SDK is a closed box but vendor should not make people to wonder its code (either just to see "how stuff works" or worse "fix a bug"). At this point, well documentation is crucial. Well testing is essential.

Testing an SDK is slightly different than testing a final product. Most users can test a final product, because, for example, it's got buttons, menus, help - something that they can understand and experience; this may not require any software engineering knowledge.

In SDK case, testers have to be experienced software engineers who can harness given library, who can guess pitfalls in software engineering and find potential crash-bugs. They can call functions in many weird ways, try to break it; like passing NULL to a function, where argument is intended to be an output buffer. Similarly, passing -1, calling from multiple threads, subsequent calls, out-of-memory conditions, etc.

We have added just one more platform, Windows CE, and hundreds of different embedded devices to platforms and devices Opera can run.