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And the answer we're using is MediaWiki. Before we used MediaWiki we used GoogleDocs, but MediaWiki suits us better.

Agreed.

However, looking at the development of art history... I imagine gaming will do something similar as we become bored of perfectly realistic games, even if they are masterpieces of both art and game design.

Anybody else with a more extensive art background have any other comments on this?

Interesting thought, but not one that persuades me. Many games have already made a virtue of deliberately non-photo-realistic visuals. Molyneux' games, for example, have cartoonish visuals not because he doesn't have the graphic sophistication to go for near photo-real but because he chooses not to.

I think the visual aesthetic has a lot to do with the entire experience the director is trying to impart. I really love The Witcher (my review here) for its immersiveness, and part of that immersiveness is the beautiful visuals which are clearly aiming towards (although not, at least on my hardware, quite achieving it). You really can, in The Witcher, just stop and watch the moon rise and be blown away by the beauty of the scene.

Photorealism also suits stories which build on the 'film noir' genre, as it's clear that Heavy Rain does - but black-and-white might work better (it's noticeable that the palette in those Heavy Rain screenshots is pretty subdued).

However, in the game I'm trying to work on I want to end up with a 'charcoal and wash' visual - very little colour and not a lot of detail. I don't - yet - know how to do this - near photo real would be a lot easier and may be what I eventually end up with. But the reason for that choice is partly to make the game look distinctive, but it's also to comment on the culture of the people I'm trying to tell a story about.

We just need to figure out a way for our cars to run off our own fat. Fad diets would die quick if driving around burned massive amounts of fat.

It's already been done. It's called the bicycle. Here's one of mine...

Last time I was in this situation, back in 1997, I rolled my own. It's served me very well for nine years, but increasingly design commitments I made early have started to seem wrong in terms of subsequent developments. Now I'm thinking of where I go from here; I've been thinking about the features a modern software system should have. And I've got a proof of concept which generates all the elements of a Web application from a single source file.

I haven't yet decided which way I'm going to jump. But I have already ruled out a lot of approaches. Firstly, anything which mixes logic with presentation is clearly wrong. That rules out all the taglib based systems, including PHP, Cold Fusion, JSP, BRL and all the others. Ruby on Rails is sort-of OKish, since the presentation layer ('views') is separateish from the logic. But in practice it seems you can put any logic into the Rails templates. Having the templates in a different, standard language - ideally XSL - seems to me a better solution.

As to the underlying language, after ten years Java is stale for me. I spend too much of my time struggling round its limitations, and primarily, around static typing and baroque libraries. Ten years ago Java had a lot of promise, particularly in strong portability and platform independence. But everything else has caught up, and Java now looks increasingly like the wrong language for general purpose programming. So what's the right language?

Back in the 1980s everyone gave up on LISP because it needed machines which were too expensive. But the sort of horsepower LISP needs is now cheap, and, indeed, LISP is economic of machine resource compared to many modern language systems. The downside of LISP as an implementation language is that while Web hosting companies these days often provide PHP and are reasonably comfortable with Java and Ruby, a toolkit which uses a LISP foundation can only really take off with people who control their own servers. But, that apart, LISP currently looks like the best bet to me.

Last time I was in this situation, back in 1997, I rolled my own. It's served me very well for nine years, but increasingly design commitments I made early have started to seem wrong in terms of subsequent developments. Now I'm thinking of where I go from here; I've been thinking about the features a modern software system should have. And I've got a proof of concept which generates all the elements of a Web application from a single source file.

I haven't yet decided which way I'm going to jump. But I have already ruled out a lot of approaches. Firstly, anything which mixes logic with presentation is clearly wrong. That rules out all the taglib based systems, including PHP, Cold Fusion, JSP, BRL and all the others. Ruby on Rails is sort-of OKish, since the presentation layer ('views') is separateish from the logic. But in practice it seems you can put any logic into the Rails templates. Having the templates in a different, standard language - ideally XSL - seems to me a better solution.

As to the underlying language, after ten years Java is stale for me. I spend too much of my time struggling round its limitations, and primarily, around static typing and baroque libraries. Ten years ago Java had a lot of promise, particularly in strong portability and platform independence. But everything else has caught up, and Java now looks increasingly like the wrong language for general purpose programming. So what's the right language?

Back in the 1980s everyone gave up on LISP because it needed machines which were too expensive. But the sort of horsepower LISP needs is now cheap, and, indeed, LISP is economic of machine resource compared to many modern language systems. The downside of LISP as an implementation language is that while Web hosting companies these days often provide PHP and are reasonably comfortable with Java and Ruby, a toolkit which uses a LISP foundation can only really take off with people who control their own servers. But, that apart, LISP currently looks like the best bet to me.

Actually, a JVM is even less stable than Windows. It was not designed as a real OS. The garbage-collection, for example, will freeze the entire VM for as long as it needs to run -- and sometimes it goes out of whack and hangs permanently...

The JVM serving this page currently has an uptime of 32 days. But in the past it's had uptimes of over 200 days. Neither it, nor any of the other Tomcat servers I run, has ever gone out of whack. Java (Tomcat, Weblogic and others) powers the web servers of many of the world's biggest websites, serving millions of pages of dynamic content every day. If it was unreliable, that wouldn't be happening.

I've been doing technical sifting of CVs for a recruitment agency while I've been recovering from a broken back. One of the positions I've been sifting for is QA team leader for an new development unit of a bit Web retailer. Good QA people are really thin on the ground - most of the people going for this post are not at all well qualified for it, and those who are well qualified and experienced seem to change jobs on average more frequently than once a year.

So if you're a good bug-hunter with team leadership experience, the ability to write a coherent test plan, and familiarity with two or three well known automated test tools and a bug/issue tracker or two, there is gold in them that situations vacant adverts.

Just wish I was systematic enough to be good at bug hunting!

What we need in slashdot is some sort of advanced DIGG-like feature where a good story simply bubbles up and bad ones go down

I'm working up a design proposal for exactly this sort of functionality for news sites.

You're missing the point. If you go to my blog, as well as my content, you'll see current headlines from other sites I find interesting. How do you think they get there? Do you imagine I sit up every night carefully editing my pages and putting in new links? Hint: I don't. A little fragment of XSL pulls the current RSS from the sites I'm interested in, and integrates it into the page as it rebuilds it. And guess what? Those sidebars on Slashdot are just the same.

RSS may not be interesting to you on your browser (although with plugins like Wizz RSS for Firefox you may be missing something). But whether or not you know you're using RSS, you are using RSS.

And so you should, because it is exceedingly good stuff.

The newspapers are too trapped in the old paradigm of finding news and deciding what to write about. Instead they should open up the flood gates and let the readers decide what they want to hear about. While that idea will sound horridly scary to editors who's job it normally is to pick stories, allowing your users the interactive choice will increase readership.

Ok, you definitely want to read this.

For what it's worth, if you're interested you might want to look here.

Wikipedia's been under some pretty harsh pressure lately. Orlowski's articles in the Register have been referred to here already; when I replied to Orlowski he responded with an unrelated allegation that Wikipedia had become a haven for pædophiles.

Quite a lot of people evidently don't like Wikipedia; partly, of course, because its rapid growth is making waves and it promises to grow into an extremely influential (and consequently powerful) source of 'knowledge', but also, I suspect, because 'Jimbo' Wales simply gets up some people's noses.

I'm a fellow lone coder.

<aol> Me too </aol>

...I'd say that the GPL ... generally make it tougher to make a living.

And I'd say that the GPL is the one thing that guarantees we'll continue to be able to make a living. The GPL and keeping software patents out of Europe are the two things... Sorry, I'll come in again.

No-one expects the Polish Opposition!

Until we hit that breakthrough that gets the solar efficiency past 40%, we won't see much of any daily applications of this tech.

Then again, it's just my opinion, I could be wrong.

I think you are wrong. Agreed it's only for specalised purposes, but solar power is practical and useful now. For example, a solar panel provides all the power for all the systems - navigation instruments, radio, GPS, interior lighting, navigation lights - on my boat, and it does that reliably in Scotland which is not a sunny country. As far as I'm concerned, that's a practical daily application.

It's also worth pointing out that a lot of the tech we use wastes a huge amount of power because we're so used to having it on tap and so cheap. For example, at least 75% of the energy used by an incandescent lightbulb gets wasted as heat. My desktop computer has a 450 watt power supply. All the little gizmos you plug into your computer which have their own little AC/DC adaptors waste energy as heat (just feel how hot those little boxes get). In warmer countries than this all the heat given off by inefficient devixces then has to be couteracted by air conditioning systems which consume still more power.

If you want to make practical use of solar power then you have to think carefully about the systems you use. You can save vast amounts of power by changing to different lighting technologies (LEDs, compact flourescents...) and by using different processor families and more integrated devices. Solar power isn't practical for powering devices designed for mains electricity, but that doesn't mean it cant be practical for doing what you want to do.

I disagree. You can put together quite a nice film-based SLR system for around $500-800 or so (camera and lenses -- tripods/bags/filters extra). To get similar quality from a digital SLR would add at least $1000 (probably more) to the price tag. $1000 will buy a lot of film and processing. I am sticking with film for now.

My Canon A1 has sat on the shelf for about two years now; the only time it's been used has been when the digicam (Olympus C2100UZ) was away for repair. Yes, the Canon is a slightly better camera and at the limits takes bettwe pictures - the Olympus is slightly flimsy, its viewfinder isn't really good enough for precise manual focus and its autofocus isn't always trustworthy. But the Olympus is far more versatile and far more useable. I take far more photographs with it. As to the range of photograhic situations it's useful for, I've taken a lot of wildlife photographs, including dragonflies and other insects. I've taken a lot of night-time landscapes, moonlight and starlight shots. I've taken literally hundreds of photographs from and of fast moving boats in bumpy water. And of course I've taken the usual photos of house, friends, pets, etc.

As for resolution, 1600x1200 pixels is good enough for 8"x10" photos and doesn't look too bad blown up even further; obviously it isn't as good as 2000x3000. But for the amateur photographer the digi wins every time. It's lighter and more conenient to carry around, while still having as wide a range of focal lengths (equivalent of 38mm to 400mm) as I've ever carried. It takes snapshots without need for thought; and if you want to set things up to take a proper photograph, control over everything - shutter, aperture, focus, focal length - is there.

You'll get the little Olympus for the same $500ish you were quoting for an SLR kit, but provided you use rechargeable batteries that's all you'll pay. With an SLR, every shot you take costs film and processing, so if like me you take several thousand photographs a year that easily adds up to more money than the camera.

The next camera I buy will have a metal chasis and a proper optical viewfinder. It will also be more optimised for manual focus than the Olympus. But it will definitely be a digital - there's no way I'm going back to film.

This entire paragraph is inconsistent and makes little sense yet the fact that it is currently at +4 insightful just goes to show that any anti-copyright rant no matter how incoherent will be well received on Slashdot. If there was no copyright then the incentive to write books would drop significantly. Currently writing a good book (both fiction and non-fiction) is a significant effort that requires research, perseverance and a large expendition of time.

Bollocks

Putting my money where my mouth is: you can read my novels here and here, and my short stories here. You can't buy them in a bookstore because I've never offered any of them to a publisher. People who write fiction write fiction because they want to write fiction. Of course, a great deal of what gets written is crap; but by no means everything that doesn't get published is crap, and the number of good unpublished novels gathering dust in people's attics far exceeds the number of novels in print.

Thos of us in the West live in a post-scarcity world. People are no longer driven to engage in economic activity every minute of every day. While a very few authors make a lot of money, most published authors make a pittance; for those people, getting read is more important than getting paid. My novels and stories on the Web do get read, and occasionally I do get feedback (not as often as I'd like). The number of books you can read is not limited by the number that are written. It's limited (just like music) by the number the distribution channels are prepared to promote. And just like music, once creators bypass the distribution channels by making their owrk available directly to the reader over the Web, the number of stories available to read goes up and the cost of reading them goes down. As to quality, you'll have to judge that for yourself - but over time we'll see a new value add service springing up reviewing and selecting texts that are available on the Web, so that you can use your chosen critic to read through texts and select for you the ones you will like to read.

So: does copyright increase or decrease the number of stories available to you? The answer is it's pretty neutral. People who want to write will write whether there's copyright or not. Personally I like it, because I have an ego and would like you to know that the sory you're enjoying is one I wrote (and I wouldn't like it if you copied it and claimed you had written it).

But does hardware content protection increase or decrease the number of texts available to you? Why, it certainly decreases them, because I'm not going to be able to afford the digital certification from the content protection monopolists, and so I won't be able to publish my stories anymore and you won't be able to read them.

Do not confuse 'content protection' with copyright. 'Content protection' does nothing to rotect the artist and everything to protect the distributor.

This entire paragraph is inconsistent and makes little sense yet the fact that it is currently at +4 insightful just goes to show that any anti-copyright rant no matter how incoherent will be well received on Slashdot. If there was no copyright then the incentive to write books would drop significantly. Currently writing a good book (both fiction and non-fiction) is a significant effort that requires research, perseverance and a large expendition of time.

Bollocks

Putting my money where my mouth is: you can read my novels here and here, and my short stories here. You can't buy them in a bookstore because I've never offered any of them to a publisher. People who write fiction write fiction because they want to write fiction. Of course, a great deal of what gets written is crap; but by no means everything that doesn't get published is crap, and the number of good unpublished novels gathering dust in people's attics far exceeds the number of novels in print.

Thos of us in the West live in a post-scarcity world. People are no longer driven to engage in economic activity every minute of every day. While a very few authors make a lot of money, most published authors make a pittance; for those people, getting read is more important than getting paid. My novels and stories on the Web do get read, and occasionally I do get feedback (not as often as I'd like). The number of books you can read is not limited by the number that are written. It's limited (just like music) by the number the distribution channels are prepared to promote. And just like music, once creators bypass the distribution channels by making their owrk available directly to the reader over the Web, the number of stories available to read goes up and the cost of reading them goes down. As to quality, you'll have to judge that for yourself - but over time we'll see a new value add service springing up reviewing and selecting texts that are available on the Web, so that you can use your chosen critic to read through texts and select for you the ones you will like to read.

So: does copyright increase or decrease the number of stories available to you? The answer is it's pretty neutral. People who want to write will write whether there's copyright or not. Personally I like it, because I have an ego and would like you to know that the sory you're enjoying is one I wrote (and I wouldn't like it if you copied it and claimed you had written it).

But does hardware content protection increase or decrease the number of texts available to you? Why, it certainly decreases them, because I'm not going to be able to afford the digital certification from the content protection monopolists, and so I won't be able to publish my stories anymore and you won't be able to read them.

Do not confuse 'content protection' with copyright. 'Content protection' does nothing to rotect the artist and everything to protect the distributor.

This entire paragraph is inconsistent and makes little sense yet the fact that it is currently at +4 insightful just goes to show that any anti-copyright rant no matter how incoherent will be well received on Slashdot. If there was no copyright then the incentive to write books would drop significantly. Currently writing a good book (both fiction and non-fiction) is a significant effort that requires research, perseverance and a large expendition of time.

Bollocks

Putting my money where my mouth is: you can read my novels here and here, and my short stories here. You can't buy them in a bookstore because I've never offered any of them to a publisher. People who write fiction write fiction because they want to write fiction. Of course, a great deal of what gets written is crap; but by no means everything that doesn't get published is crap, and the number of good unpublished novels gathering dust in people's attics far exceeds the number of novels in print.

Thos of us in the West live in a post-scarcity world. People are no longer driven to engage in economic activity every minute of every day. While a very few authors make a lot of money, most published authors make a pittance; for those people, getting read is more important than getting paid. My novels and stories on the Web do get read, and occasionally I do get feedback (not as often as I'd like). The number of books you can read is not limited by the number that are written. It's limited (just like music) by the number the distribution channels are prepared to promote. And just like music, once creators bypass the distribution channels by making their owrk available directly to the reader over the Web, the number of stories available to read goes up and the cost of reading them goes down. As to quality, you'll have to judge that for yourself - but over time we'll see a new value add service springing up reviewing and selecting texts that are available on the Web, so that you can use your chosen critic to read through texts and select for you the ones you will like to read.

So: does copyright increase or decrease the number of stories available to you? The answer is it's pretty neutral. People who want to write will write whether there's copyright or not. Personally I like it, because I have an ego and would like you to know that the sory you're enjoying is one I wrote (and I wouldn't like it if you copied it and claimed you had written it).

But does hardware content protection increase or decrease the number of texts available to you? Why, it certainly decreases them, because I'm not going to be able to afford the digital certification from the content protection monopolists, and so I won't be able to publish my stories anymore and you won't be able to read them.

Do not confuse 'content protection' with copyright. 'Content protection' does nothing to rotect the artist and everything to protect the distributor.

From this page [w3.org] it seems both Apple and Kodak claim to have patents covering SVG.

See my analysis of these patents. Quick summary: both these patents are bare-faced attempts to claim techniques which were at the time of their filing long established and well understood techniques in broad general use. If W3C had had the courage to face down these patent claims in court, they would have collapsed.

This is possible and practical and we should prepare to do it. However, to have three Internet standards bodies would be a bad thing. What we should really seek to achieve is a situation where:

• Either
  • W3C commits to not incorporating any proprietary technologies into standards, and
  • W3C opens up its membership to ordinary peoplr, with a subscription for individual members of not more than US $50 per annum
• or
  • W3C winds up and IETF resumes the role of setting Web standards, and
  • IETF commits to not incorporating any proprietary technologies into standards.

So long as W3C remains a rich corporations club this sort of proposal will come bach again and again. It is, after all, in the rich corporations' interest.

Sorry to upset the apple-cart, but might a combination of XML and XSL challenge the dominance of Perl? I'm afraid I am not suffinciently advanced in these languages to bet on them, but I reckon they would give the other contenders a run for their money.

No.

XML is not a programming language, it's a markup language. You can't use it to compute anything. XSL-FO is not a programming language, it's a page description language. You can't use it to compute anything. XSL-T is a programming language, and a very elegant one, but it isn't (IMHO) well suited to this task, and certainly would not produce a compact output.

Sorry to upset the apple-cart, but might a combination of XML and XSL challenge the dominance of Perl? I'm afraid I am not suffinciently advanced in these languages to bet on them, but I reckon they would give the other contenders a run for their money.

No.

XML is not a programming language, it's a markup language. You can't use it to compute anything. XSL-FO is not a programming language, it's a page description language. You can't use it to compute anything. XSL-T is a programming language, and a very elegant one, but it isn't (IMHO) well suited to this task, and certainly would not produce a compact output.

Sorry to upset the apple-cart, but might a combination of XML and XSL challenge the dominance of Perl? I'm afraid I am not suffinciently advanced in these languages to bet on them, but I reckon they would give the other contenders a run for their money.

No.

XML is not a programming language, it's a markup language. You can't use it to compute anything. XSL-FO is not a programming language, it's a page description language. You can't use it to compute anything. XSL-T is a programming language, and a very elegant one, but it isn't (IMHO) well suited to this task, and certainly would not produce a compact output.

I can't do that. I can, however, publish the URL's of some pages which Mozilla had damn well better be able to render right, but doesn't:
http://www.mozilla.org (they make Mozilla)
http://www.mozillazine.org (the main Mozilla info/discussion site out there)
http://www.netscape.com (they make a browser based on Mozilla)
http://www.aol.com (they own the people who make Mozilla)
http://www.w3.org (they make the standards to which Mozilla is supposed to conform)

• Mozilla
• MozillaZine
• Netscape
• AOL
• W3C

I honestly don't believe you've used it.

I can't do that. I can, however, publish the URL's of some pages which Mozilla had damn well better be able to render right, but doesn't:
http://www.mozilla.org (they make Mozilla)
http://www.mozillazine.org (the main Mozilla info/discussion site out there)
http://www.netscape.com (they make a browser based on Mozilla)
http://www.aol.com (they own the people who make Mozilla)
http://www.w3.org (they make the standards to which Mozilla is supposed to conform)

• Mozilla
• MozillaZine
• Netscape
• AOL
• W3C

I honestly don't believe you've used it.

I can't do that. I can, however, publish the URL's of some pages which Mozilla had damn well better be able to render right, but doesn't:
http://www.mozilla.org (they make Mozilla)
http://www.mozillazine.org (the main Mozilla info/discussion site out there)
http://www.netscape.com (they make a browser based on Mozilla)
http://www.aol.com (they own the people who make Mozilla)
http://www.w3.org (they make the standards to which Mozilla is supposed to conform)

• Mozilla
• MozillaZine
• Netscape
• AOL
• W3C

I honestly don't believe you've used it.

I can't do that. I can, however, publish the URL's of some pages which Mozilla had damn well better be able to render right, but doesn't:
http://www.mozilla.org (they make Mozilla)
http://www.mozillazine.org (the main Mozilla info/discussion site out there)
http://www.netscape.com (they make a browser based on Mozilla)
http://www.aol.com (they own the people who make Mozilla)
http://www.w3.org (they make the standards to which Mozilla is supposed to conform)

• Mozilla
• MozillaZine
• Netscape
• AOL
• W3C

I honestly don't believe you've used it.

I can't do that. I can, however, publish the URL's of some pages which Mozilla had damn well better be able to render right, but doesn't:
http://www.mozilla.org (they make Mozilla)
http://www.mozillazine.org (the main Mozilla info/discussion site out there)
http://www.netscape.com (they make a browser based on Mozilla)
http://www.aol.com (they own the people who make Mozilla)
http://www.w3.org (they make the standards to which Mozilla is supposed to conform)

• Mozilla
• MozillaZine
• Netscape
• AOL
• W3C

I honestly don't believe you've used it.

Yes, probably, I could have got some of it published. But it would be a lot of hassle, and would have meant going through a process of being rejected again and again (which is not very good for the self confidence), and I would have been lucky to earn more than a few hundred pounds as a result. Very, very few people make a living out of writing fiction. The way I write it, because I'm not under pressure and don't have deadlines, I enjoy writing. It isn't a job. And I have plenty of time to write software, which I also enjoy and which pays far better.

Yes, probably, I could have got some of it published. But it would be a lot of hassle, and would have meant going through a process of being rejected again and again (which is not very good for the self confidence), and I would have been lucky to earn more than a few hundred pounds as a result. Very, very few people make a living out of writing fiction. The way I write it, because I'm not under pressure and don't have deadlines, I enjoy writing. It isn't a job. And I have plenty of time to write software, which I also enjoy and which pays far better.

However, suppose fifty people were to download it without agreeing to the licence (I just have, from http://warot.com/freedom/kerbspec.pdf), and each quoted just one paragraph on their web site (copyright law allows for the fair-use quoting of small parts of a document), and then suppose someone else later came along independently and made a Web page which linked to all those single paragraph Web pages, what law would have been broken?

As an example of what I mean, I have posted an example paragraph here

However, one thing is abundantly clear: starting new processes for CGI is hugely expensive, and the larger the binary you have to load to start the process, the more expensive it becomes. The PERL interpreter is huge, and consequently, run as CGI, PERL scripts perform comparatively very badly. THe situation must be very different with mod_perl, but I haven't tested this.

Mind you, this is not really a reason not to use PERL if you like it. Unless you have shedloads of bandwidth or run your website in a 386 box, or are doing some really complex backend processing, your CGI performance is not going to be your primary bottleneck.