As others have pointed out the US did give us plenty of help in the Falklands war, thanks in good part to the personal relationship between Thatcher and Reagan (much more of a partnership than the current lap-dog relationship Blair has with Bush).
Suez however is more interesting. Suez was a totaly wrongheaded conflict based on Eden's complete misreading of the situation. The UK and France were duplicitous in working with the Israeli's behind the scenes and there is no reading of history that can place the decision to go in as anything other than complete idiocy. The Americans indeed did us a favour by refusing to help and indeed forcing is to withdraw. OK it damaged our reputation and national pride (humiliation wouldn't be too strong a word) but it'd have been worse if we'd have stayed and the blame is all down to Eden, not the USA.
Of course the tragedy here is that 30-odd years later in the reverse situation with Bush engaging on another wrongheaded conflict in Iraq instead of Blair helping his friends by telling a few truths he lined up behind Bush and jumped into the quagmire too. One the few assets the British Establishment does have on it's side is a sense of history, and given the two centuries of Imperial involvment in the region one would have thought the Foreign Office would have had a few insights they could have passed on.
This is the company that has consistently managed to position itself in shrinking market niche's since 2001 and currently has no viable long-term market strategy. The most notable thing about Sun over the past few years has been there complete lack of ability to predict and utilize the market in any useful way. If Greg Papadopoulos had any normal ego he'd be far too embarrassed to be making public prophecies about the internet than this.
One would have thought that given Sun's current headlong decline into irrelevance he'd have been better employed trying to think of a way Sun can get out of the godawful mess it's currently in and leaving the prophecy to others who have some idea what they are talking about.
A bright spot is I just discovered Second Life seems to have got to the point where it's interesting. I had a look about a year ago and it didn't grab me, but following some comments here last week about the scripting language being Turing Complete I decided to give it another go.
And I'm hooked. Now about 3 days into laeval phase, and I havn't even touched the scripting yet;-)
The problem I have though is I increasingly feel like an outcast from my generation. I've hacked code since my 20s, played games as long and was working at a University when the Internet was growing in 1995. I hung out on IRC for years, MSN to my clients. I pride myself in being able to give the kids a run for there money on any shooter or RTS (which I adore). And I read/. and suchlike so I know what MySpace and similar are at around the same time, if not before, my kids. None of this is at all exceptional for anyone under 30-35, but I find that everyone I meet socially in Real Life who are around my age just don't have a clue. Sure they've now got to the stage where (most) use the net for shopping and the like, but the actual online culture just passes them by and a good proportion are still proud of the idea that they don't 'do' computers.
Sure there's a lot of people online of my skills, generation and interests (although swamped by the young'uns) and I have the advantage that I seem to get respect from my kids friends (which is a better position to be than the contempt most hold for their parents abilities and understanding) but I simply find it a bit sad sometime that nearly everyone I meet will not have the faintest clue if I talk about a large portion of my life.
Good call. MySQL is perhaps one of the worst, for years they would protest that ACID complience was for wimps, relational integrity was best done at the 'application level' and you'd never want to join more than three tables or do a subselect. That in itself wouldn't be so bad if it was recognised that MySQL was good at doing what it did - a simple 'database' for non-critical simpler applications - and was not a competitor for Oracle, MSSQL and the like. Trouble is anyone mentioning that here or on any similar forum would be immediatly be trampled by FOSS groupies.
Except when MySQL finally did get some measure of the above all the weenies spun on a dime and suddenly ACID complience was good etc. etc. The change of mindset was worthy of the communist party after Stalin died.
I agree with all you say, I used to work as a Oracle dba managing an enterprise level database so yep, MSSQL doesn't compare at that level.
However I've worked as a consultant/developer for the past few years, and I love MSSQL. As a Departmental or SME database it's great as it offers all the power and features I'd expect from a real database (as opposed to MySQL;-) but takes virtually zilch maintenance when installed and configured. So long as I've got the backups and maintanance tasks in place I can deploy and a regular monthly check is more than sufficient. It may be a toy at the Enterprise level, but below that I really can't fault it.
I'm afraid you're the one with the gibberish. It's a common misconception that all databases are equal, it's just that some are larger than others. That's simply not true, when you get to multi-million row tables with scores or hundreds of tables in mission-critical environments then this is a quite different beastie to your department level database or even web site backend. Also, in one of these large databases the tables and data are probably considerably less than half the business functionality wrapped up in it, the various relationships defined, procedures, functions and triggers will contain vast amounts of business logic are just as important as the actual data. Furthermore having these coded up at server, rather than application level (aka MySQL) will save money in development and management that could offset TOC of even Oracle to below that of MySQL.
It's true of course that MySQL has been improving of late, to the point where they finally seem to have recognised that Atomicity is a good thing, relational integrity might have some uses and subselects can be fun:-). Haven't they even got some sort of transaction sql scripting now too?. Unfortunatly I still get the impression that these might be tacked on and they certainly don't inspire the sort of solid confidence yet that Oracle, DB2 or even MSSQL supplies.
Yeah, but that sort of misses the point in you can't really compare them on straight TCO. If I was looking a multi-million row enterprise mission critical database for a large organisation then really I'd stick with DB2 or Oracle. Coming down the scale to department of mid-sized company level MSSQL or Postgres would be top of my shopping list. Smaller again and we're into SQLServer Express, Postgres, or in some circumstances MySQL.
Of course the lines are blurred and products tend to improve over time, but generally I think you'd find most developers with experience of a wide range of databases and companies would tend to agree with the above in outline.
As others have said, SQL Server is a stunningly good product, and if Windows and Office were written to the same standard then nobody would be bitchin' about Microsoft.
As someone who has used SQLServer, Oracle, DB2, PostrgresSQL, MySQL and several other smaller DBs on various projects over the past 20 years I've been in IT, and has been DBA on some of those too, SQLServer is most definatly my favourite. It's absolutly solid, runs itself largely and has excellent features. I also like Postgres, which can stand with the heavyweights. MySQL is most definatly the worst: although it has been improving recently to the stage it can be considered a database rather than a flat file management system.
I've had similar experiences. My home office generaly has around 10 - 20 harddrives running in various, generally around 6 or 7, machines. A few years ago when HD's were around the 20 - 40Gb capacity I used to loose one a year or so, but always with indications of something going wrong and time to back-off. More recently I've not had a HD go for some considerable time but I've been loosing a PSU a year - they used never to die.
Because I live in a rural location I've always keep a spare HD so I could back of data immediatly I found a problem (ok, critical stuff is regulalrly backed up anyway), and since PSUs seemed to become an issue I keep a spare one of those too.
Which is not to say most HD seem never to fail. My oldest functioning one is a 8Gb on a P450 linux machine which is used for downloading and some test server functionality. Runs fine.
I think the important point is that all this CCTV is generally owned and monitored by a *lot* of different organisations. Shops, clubs, pubs, malls etc all monitor there own little bit. True there are a police and council cameras too, but they are limited to a small % of coverage in city centres and traffic cameras on main commuter routes. So although if you wander around a city centre you're probably on camera most of the time, in practice the monitoring is so widely spread that it's difficult to say you are actually being watched in any meaningful way.
This is reflected by the fact that when there is a major incident it takes days if not weeks for the police to assemble footage tracking those concerned from all the different sources and indeed they often end up appealing for people with CCTV footage to come forward - there's not even a central list of who hass the CCTV.
IMHO the danger point is not cameras but the central control and access to information.
Oh absolutly. If you used a system and it was brought by CA you knew that within 6 months you were going to be (a) screwed by a price increase and (b) screwed because there would be no support or new development beyond rushing out what was already in the pipeline.
In the late 1980's I worked for a UK Blue Chip company that had a semi-official 'No CA' policy. Indeed when CA took over Clipper (a dBase III clone) which they used for most desktop development at that point they immediatly decided that there would be no more development with it and all existing projects were reviewed for a move to Foxbase.
No, as I understand the theory (and IANAA - well except an occassional amateur one) if a supernova explodes in or near a gas cloud the shockwave initiates star formation.
Oh definatly on of my top 10 favourite bands. What is somewhat suprising is that after 10 years I'm not aware of anyone else doing anything similar of the same quality, although on a somewhat more traditional note Shooglenifty (http://www.shoogle.com/) are pretty good and truly excellent live.
I think the AfroCelt app was called Noodle - they did a couple of versions with different tracks and was great and fun waste of time to play around with.
The Afro-Celt Sound System - also on Real World records - did something similar several years ago, although the tracks were distributed with a Flash remixer so I'm not sure how open they actually were.
Also to brand them as a cheap retailer is rather superficial as they sell quite a lot of better quality stuff too - my local one, medium sized I guess, has probably two different brands of extra-virgin olive oil - not prime quality, but perfectly acceptable stuff. The stock also includes things like single estate coffe, vanilla pods, several malt whiskys and the like. Generally they occupy a middle position in the market above the likes of ASDA (i.e. wal-mart) and the Netto etc, but below Waitrose and to some extent Sainsburys.
The perception of being cheap may be because they were indeed down the bottom end of the market when they first became established as a chain in the late 1970s, but they apparently made a determined effort to move upmarket in the late 80s
Oh same here, we'd been planning to take our whole family across to NYC for my wife's 40th birthday next year - she was a foreign student at Columbia so would have been of some significance. Regretfully we've cancelled this and made other plans because we don't want to subject our kids to the security inspections going in to the USA. We're not alone in this - anecdotal of course, but we've heard several friends say that they decided against holidays in the states because of the security, and one who swears that she'll never go back after her experience a few months back. And we're all white caucasians.
Must be costing the USA millions in lost tourist dollars.
It's by no means certain that if the NAD did stop they'd be that much on a effect in northern europe. It's been received wisdom for decades that northern europe is kept warm by the NAD, but a few years ago there was a report came out from a group that actually checked that and found that about 10% of the additional warmth of Europe came from the NAD, with the vast majority being delivered by the path of air currents deflected by the Rockies.
See this...
Richard A. Kerr "EUROPEAN CLIMATE: Mild Winters Mostly Hot Air, Not Gulf Stream" Science 27 September 2002 297: 2202 [DOI: 10.1126/science.297.5590.2202] (in News Focus) The Gulf Stream does little to moderate European winters, it turns out, and the atmosphere plays a bigger role in climate change than once thought. The new analysis, to appear in next month's Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, will no doubt stoke the debate over the relative role of the Gulf Stream and the tropics in climate change http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/297/5590/220 2.pdf
I think I broadly agree that we've 'leveled up', except the original question was about entering/learning simple code rather than manipulating tools and it that context I stand by the stratospheric obesrvation.
One ray of hope though is Processing http://processing.org/ which is a simply awsome java-like script runner designed for doing really cool graphics. Worth playing with for all coders with 2 weeks to 2(+) decades experience.
I don't think it's because the barrier to entry is too high, rather the barrier to do something cool is in the stratosphere. Think about it - back in the 80's when you first started playing around with code creating your own version of pong was pretty dam cool. Actually even getting the machine to draw a few boxes on the screen in different colours was cool. True there was a learning curve and it was quite steep if you'd never coded before, but it wasn't that far from bottom to top.
Nowdays cool is Half-Life 2 type graphics. And I suppose the nearest to drawing a few boxes on the screen is coding DirectX/OpenGL shaders to do cool things on a few objects. The learning curve is still as steep, but think of all the stuff you need to know before getting something interesting done - it's a much longer way from bottom to top and you consequently need more determination to get there.
I think you'll now find many of the kids who would have previously cut code now working on mods for games. Maybe that will sprout creativity in a way that the article suggests, but it is difficult to see what.
For my money that moment when you jump back to Kharak to find it's been destroyed - and Barber's Adagio for strings kicks in in the background is the single most stunning game moment ever. Only time for me that a game has had the same emotional hit as a film.
So for the record my list
1. Homeworld 2. Civ 4 (I like the depth of the new one) 3. Freespace II (was this the last good space sim?) 4. Doom (not really an FPS fan, but I played this obsesively when it came out) 5. Europa Universalis II
Europa Universalis may seem a bit odd too, but if you like any form of alternative history it's compelling - what would happen if Burgundy had remained independent? or Catalonia had combined with the kingdom of oc? or the Hansa had unified Germany instead of Prussia? Immense replay value.
Having been around for IT for a while (20 years) and see quite a few revolutions come and go my sceptiscm with these kind of environments is that although the demo apps always look really good, the trouble comes when you take them out for a stroll in the real world and invariably you soon hit some sort of limitation on implementing something outside what the app was designed to do because the app hasn't been created with sufficient scalability or flexibility in mind. This is easily recognised when you brand-new tool whizzes through the basics as promised in a fraction of the time you would spend hand-coding, but then you loose all that time and more trying to code around the limitations when the going gets tough. Good mature development environments degrade gracefully with increasing size and complexity, poor and often new ones tend to have an asymptotic curve hidding in the undergrowth.
This isn't to say that Web 2.0 isn't wonderful. I'm doing a lot of contracts at the moment recoding old systems into browser-based ones and AJAX and partners are a joy to work with. My workbench at present is a mix of PHP using TinyButStrong http://www.tinybutstrong.com/ templates, AJAX using the xajax framework http://www.xajaxproject.org/, as much CSS 2.x as I can deploy that doesn't break on all common browsers, and whatever javascript widgets that meet the needs.
I can't recommend the two core tools in here highly enough - xajax is really nicely designed and I've only found one bug in it so far (when running a window modal), tiny-but-strong is even better - if you do any coding with PHP and havn't found this yet then you are missing the best templating system yet devised.
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As others have pointed out the US did give us plenty of help in the Falklands war, thanks in good part to the personal relationship between Thatcher and Reagan (much more of a partnership than the current lap-dog relationship Blair has with Bush).
Suez however is more interesting. Suez was a totaly wrongheaded conflict based on Eden's complete misreading of the situation. The UK and France were duplicitous in working with the Israeli's behind the scenes and there is no reading of history that can place the decision to go in as anything other than complete idiocy. The Americans indeed did us a favour by refusing to help and indeed forcing is to withdraw. OK it damaged our reputation and national pride (humiliation wouldn't be too strong a word) but it'd have been worse if we'd have stayed and the blame is all down to Eden, not the USA.
Of course the tragedy here is that 30-odd years later in the reverse situation with Bush engaging on another wrongheaded conflict in Iraq instead of Blair helping his friends by telling a few truths he lined up behind Bush and jumped into the quagmire too. One the few assets the British Establishment does have on it's side is a sense of history, and given the two centuries of Imperial involvment in the region one would have thought the Foreign Office would have had a few insights they could have passed on.
This is the company that has consistently managed to position itself in shrinking market niche's since 2001 and currently has no viable long-term market strategy. The most notable thing about Sun over the past few years has been there complete lack of ability to predict and utilize the market in any useful way. If Greg Papadopoulos had any normal ego he'd be far too embarrassed to be making public prophecies about the internet than this.
One would have thought that given Sun's current headlong decline into irrelevance he'd have been better employed trying to think of a way Sun can get out of the godawful mess it's currently in and leaving the prophecy to others who have some idea what they are talking about.
A bright spot is I just discovered Second Life seems to have got to the point where it's interesting. I had a look about a year ago and it didn't grab me, but following some comments here last week about the scripting language being Turing Complete I decided to give it another go.
;-)
And I'm hooked. Now about 3 days into laeval phase, and I havn't even touched the scripting yet
Mid-40's here.
/. and suchlike so I know what MySpace and similar are at around the same time, if not before, my kids. None of this is at all exceptional for anyone under 30-35, but I find that everyone I meet socially in Real Life who are around my age just don't have a clue. Sure they've now got to the stage where (most) use the net for shopping and the like, but the actual online culture just passes them by and a good proportion are still proud of the idea that they don't 'do' computers.
The problem I have though is I increasingly feel like an outcast from my generation. I've hacked code since my 20s, played games as long and was working at a University when the Internet was growing in 1995. I hung out on IRC for years, MSN to my clients. I pride myself in being able to give the kids a run for there money on any shooter or RTS (which I adore). And I read
Sure there's a lot of people online of my skills, generation and interests (although swamped by the young'uns) and I have the advantage that I seem to get respect from my kids friends (which is a better position to be than the contempt most hold for their parents abilities and understanding) but I simply find it a bit sad sometime that nearly everyone I meet will not have the faintest clue if I talk about a large portion of my life.
Good call. MySQL is perhaps one of the worst, for years they would protest that ACID complience was for wimps, relational integrity was best done at the 'application level' and you'd never want to join more than three tables or do a subselect. That in itself wouldn't be so bad if it was recognised that MySQL was good at doing what it did - a simple 'database' for non-critical simpler applications - and was not a competitor for Oracle, MSSQL and the like. Trouble is anyone mentioning that here or on any similar forum would be immediatly be trampled by FOSS groupies.
Except when MySQL finally did get some measure of the above all the weenies spun on a dime and suddenly ACID complience was good etc. etc. The change of mindset was worthy of the communist party after Stalin died.
I agree with all you say, I used to work as a Oracle dba managing an enterprise level database so yep, MSSQL doesn't compare at that level.
;-) but takes virtually zilch maintenance when installed and configured. So long as I've got the backups and maintanance tasks in place I can deploy and a regular monthly check is more than sufficient. It may be a toy at the Enterprise level, but below that I really can't fault it.
However I've worked as a consultant/developer for the past few years, and I love MSSQL. As a Departmental or SME database it's great as it offers all the power and features I'd expect from a real database (as opposed to MySQL
I'm afraid you're the one with the gibberish. It's a common misconception that all databases are equal, it's just that some are larger than others. That's simply not true, when you get to multi-million row tables with scores or hundreds of tables in mission-critical environments then this is a quite different beastie to your department level database or even web site backend. Also, in one of these large databases the tables and data are probably considerably less than half the business functionality wrapped up in it, the various relationships defined, procedures, functions and triggers will contain vast amounts of business logic are just as important as the actual data. Furthermore having these coded up at server, rather than application level (aka MySQL) will save money in development and management that could offset TOC of even Oracle to below that of MySQL.
:-). Haven't they even got some sort of transaction sql scripting now too?. Unfortunatly I still get the impression that these might be tacked on and they certainly don't inspire the sort of solid confidence yet that Oracle, DB2 or even MSSQL supplies.
It's true of course that MySQL has been improving of late, to the point where they finally seem to have recognised that Atomicity is a good thing, relational integrity might have some uses and subselects can be fun
Yeah, but that sort of misses the point in you can't really compare them on straight TCO. If I was looking a multi-million row enterprise mission critical database for a large organisation then really I'd stick with DB2 or Oracle. Coming down the scale to department of mid-sized company level MSSQL or Postgres would be top of my shopping list. Smaller again and we're into SQLServer Express, Postgres, or in some circumstances MySQL.
Of course the lines are blurred and products tend to improve over time, but generally I think you'd find most developers with experience of a wide range of databases and companies would tend to agree with the above in outline.
As others have said, SQL Server is a stunningly good product, and if Windows and Office were written to the same standard then nobody would be bitchin' about Microsoft.
As someone who has used SQLServer, Oracle, DB2, PostrgresSQL, MySQL and several other smaller DBs on various projects over the past 20 years I've been in IT, and has been DBA on some of those too, SQLServer is most definatly my favourite. It's absolutly solid, runs itself largely and has excellent features. I also like Postgres, which can stand with the heavyweights. MySQL is most definatly the worst: although it has been improving recently to the stage it can be considered a database rather than a flat file management system.
I've had similar experiences. My home office generaly has around 10 - 20 harddrives running in various, generally around 6 or 7, machines. A few years ago when HD's were around the 20 - 40Gb capacity I used to loose one a year or so, but always with indications of something going wrong and time to back-off. More recently I've not had a HD go for some considerable time but I've been loosing a PSU a year - they used never to die.
Because I live in a rural location I've always keep a spare HD so I could back of data immediatly I found a problem (ok, critical stuff is regulalrly backed up anyway), and since PSUs seemed to become an issue I keep a spare one of those too.
Which is not to say most HD seem never to fail. My oldest functioning one is a 8Gb on a P450 linux machine which is used for downloading and some test server functionality. Runs fine.
I think the important point is that all this CCTV is generally owned and monitored by a *lot* of different organisations. Shops, clubs, pubs, malls etc all monitor there own little bit. True there are a police and council cameras too, but they are limited to a small % of coverage in city centres and traffic cameras on main commuter routes. So although if you wander around a city centre you're probably on camera most of the time, in practice the monitoring is so widely spread that it's difficult to say you are actually being watched in any meaningful way.
This is reflected by the fact that when there is a major incident it takes days if not weeks for the police to assemble footage tracking those concerned from all the different sources and indeed they often end up appealing for people with CCTV footage to come forward - there's not even a central list of who hass the CCTV.
IMHO the danger point is not cameras but the central control and access to information.
Oh absolutly. If you used a system and it was brought by CA you knew that within 6 months you were going to be (a) screwed by a price increase and (b) screwed because there would be no support or new development beyond rushing out what was already in the pipeline.
In the late 1980's I worked for a UK Blue Chip company that had a semi-official 'No CA' policy. Indeed when CA took over Clipper (a dBase III clone) which they used for most desktop development at that point they immediatly decided that there would be no more development with it and all existing projects were reviewed for a move to Foxbase.
No, as I understand the theory (and IANAA - well except an occassional amateur one) if a supernova explodes in or near a gas cloud the shockwave initiates star formation.
Oh definatly on of my top 10 favourite bands. What is somewhat suprising is that after 10 years I'm not aware of anyone else doing anything similar of the same quality, although on a somewhat more traditional note Shooglenifty (http://www.shoogle.com/) are pretty good and truly excellent live.
I think the AfroCelt app was called Noodle - they did a couple of versions with different tracks and was great and fun waste of time to play around with.
The Afro-Celt Sound System - also on Real World records - did something similar several years ago, although the tracks were distributed with a Flash remixer so I'm not sure how open they actually were.
Also to brand them as a cheap retailer is rather superficial as they sell quite a lot of better quality stuff too - my local one, medium sized I guess, has probably two different brands of extra-virgin olive oil - not prime quality, but perfectly acceptable stuff. The stock also includes things like single estate coffe, vanilla pods, several malt whiskys and the like. Generally they occupy a middle position in the market above the likes of ASDA (i.e. wal-mart) and the Netto etc, but below Waitrose and to some extent Sainsburys.
The perception of being cheap may be because they were indeed down the bottom end of the market when they first became established as a chain in the late 1970s, but they apparently made a determined effort to move upmarket in the late 80s
Oh same here, we'd been planning to take our whole family across to NYC for my wife's 40th birthday next year - she was a foreign student at Columbia so would have been of some significance. Regretfully we've cancelled this and made other plans because we don't want to subject our kids to the security inspections going in to the USA. We're not alone in this - anecdotal of course, but we've heard several friends say that they decided against holidays in the states because of the security, and one who swears that she'll never go back after her experience a few months back. And we're all white caucasians.
Must be costing the USA millions in lost tourist dollars.
It's by no means certain that if the NAD did stop they'd be that much on a effect in northern europe. It's been received wisdom for decades that northern europe is kept warm by the NAD, but a few years ago there was a report came out from a group that actually checked that and found that about 10% of the additional warmth of Europe came from the NAD, with the vast majority being delivered by the path of air currents deflected by the Rockies.
0 2.pdf
See this...
Richard A. Kerr "EUROPEAN CLIMATE:
Mild Winters Mostly Hot Air, Not Gulf Stream"
Science 27 September 2002 297: 2202
[DOI: 10.1126/science.297.5590.2202] (in News Focus)
The Gulf Stream does little to moderate European winters, it
turns out, and the atmosphere plays a bigger role in climate
change than once thought. The new analysis, to appear in
next month's Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological
Society, will no doubt stoke the debate over the relative role
of the Gulf Stream and the tropics in climate change
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/297/5590/22
We drive a largish people-carrier type-car. OK it's diesel, but even so we get 60mpg. We traded from an old volvo - a 1.8 - which did 35mpg.
Your gas prices should be at least tripled. It's obviously far to cheap at the moment for you to take fuel efficiency seriously.
I think I broadly agree that we've 'leveled up', except the original question was about entering/learning simple code rather than manipulating tools and it that context I stand by the stratospheric obesrvation.
One ray of hope though is Processing http://processing.org/ which is a simply awsome java-like script runner designed for doing really cool graphics. Worth playing with for all coders with 2 weeks to 2(+) decades experience.
Take a look at 'Processing' http://processing.org/
If that doesn't inspire potential coders to start playing around with programming I don't know what would.
I don't think it's because the barrier to entry is too high, rather the barrier to do something cool is in the stratosphere. Think about it - back in the 80's when you first started playing around with code creating your own version of pong was pretty dam cool. Actually even getting the machine to draw a few boxes on the screen in different colours was cool. True there was a learning curve and it was quite steep if you'd never coded before, but it wasn't that far from bottom to top.
Nowdays cool is Half-Life 2 type graphics. And I suppose the nearest to drawing a few boxes on the screen is coding DirectX/OpenGL shaders to do cool things on a few objects. The learning curve is still as steep, but think of all the stuff you need to know before getting something interesting done - it's a much longer way from bottom to top and you consequently need more determination to get there.
I think you'll now find many of the kids who would have previously cut code now working on mods for games. Maybe that will sprout creativity in a way that the article suggests, but it is difficult to see what.
For my money that moment when you jump back to Kharak to find it's been destroyed - and Barber's Adagio for strings kicks in in the background is the single most stunning game moment ever. Only time for me that a game has had the same emotional hit as a film.
So for the record my list
1. Homeworld
2. Civ 4 (I like the depth of the new one)
3. Freespace II (was this the last good space sim?)
4. Doom (not really an FPS fan, but I played this obsesively when it came out)
5. Europa Universalis II
Europa Universalis may seem a bit odd too, but if you like any form of alternative history it's compelling - what would happen if Burgundy had remained independent? or Catalonia had combined with the kingdom of oc? or the Hansa had unified Germany instead of Prussia? Immense replay value.
Having been around for IT for a while (20 years) and see quite a few revolutions come and go my sceptiscm with these kind of environments is that although the demo apps always look really good, the trouble comes when you take them out for a stroll in the real world and invariably you soon hit some sort of limitation on implementing something outside what the app was designed to do because the app hasn't been created with sufficient scalability or flexibility in mind. This is easily recognised when you brand-new tool whizzes through the basics as promised in a fraction of the time you would spend hand-coding, but then you loose all that time and more trying to code around the limitations when the going gets tough. Good mature development environments degrade gracefully with increasing size and complexity, poor and often new ones tend to have an asymptotic curve hidding in the undergrowth.
This isn't to say that Web 2.0 isn't wonderful. I'm doing a lot of contracts at the moment recoding old systems into browser-based ones and AJAX and partners are a joy to work with. My workbench at present is a mix of PHP using TinyButStrong http://www.tinybutstrong.com/ templates, AJAX using the xajax framework http://www.xajaxproject.org/, as much CSS 2.x as I can deploy that doesn't break on all common browsers, and whatever javascript widgets that meet the needs.
I can't recommend the two core tools in here highly enough - xajax is really nicely designed and I've only found one bug in it so far (when running a window modal), tiny-but-strong is even better - if you do any coding with PHP and havn't found this yet then you are missing the best templating system yet devised.
Manuals are fine, but most can be replaced by the various excellent websites around - w3schools is mentioned below and I'd agree with that.
t -Voices/dp/0321303474/ref=sr_11_1/102-7311422-8694 536?ie=UTF8 and adds a lot to what's available on the site.
However for some inspiration about what CSS can do for you a trip to the CSS Zen Garden at http://www.csszengarden.com/ is worth a thousand pages of dry css scripts. The recently published book 'the Zen of CSS design' is also excellent - http://www.amazon.com/Zen-CSS-Design-Enlightenmen