In your blog you talk about getting interest in a game (e.g. Sudoku for the DS; which may be somewhat of a crowded market what with Brain Training already having sold millions of units) but not claiming massive sales.
Oh. Also, no, it's not a crowded market - Brain Training's implementation is shite, and neither of the other two pure-sudoku games out there do anything other than the core game at 3x3, with fewer than a thousand puzzles each.
He was nominated for "Development Legend" status at the Develop Awards 2004 alongside Michel Ancel and winner Peter Molyneaux, so it's not entirely self-appointed.
Well, just because some nobody awards show calls some other nobody a legend doesn't mean they actually are. (shrugs) What makes someone famous is being known, not an awards show who couldn't get anyone better. There are literally hundreds of better candidates they've never even tipped their hat to. It's absurd. Honestly, if he were a better man, he just wouldn't use the term.
Ad hominem attacks are by definition invalid. I only make them at Jeff because he pisses me off.
We disagree that Jeff is not famous.
I never said he wasn't famous. I said he was nobody. There's a big difference. Other famous nobodies include Renee Zellweger, Anne Heche, whatever this month's boy band is, Al Roker, Renee Zellweger, the guy from the original Highlander movie, any man in a porn with Ron Jeremy, the logical inverse of Samuel L Jackson (because he's so famous that even his exact opposite is famous,) Renee Zellweger, the Mayor of Cleveland, Canadians, the Royal Family of Luxembourg, Jey Leno and Renee Zellweger.
The point isn't whether you know who they are. The point is whether or not they're human filler. If Jey Leno never existed, it's not like anything he's done wouldn't have happened in his stead. If whoever Tom Cruise's current arm candy is hadn't come about, Scientology wouldn't collapse. There was no special Zellweger touch on Bridget Jones' Diary which would preclude a different actress.
The germane bit is, if Jeff Minter was hit by one of those science fiction bombs that make you never have been born, would gaming change much? And the answer is, "maybe there would be less clones around." That, my friend, is the epitome of "nobody."
and the "legend" label reflects that
I still openly reject his self-appointed legendary status.
We disagree about the ethics of the originality of his games. Intellectual Property was a different beast back in the 1980s. I guess that makes me sound like an apologist, but the early 1980s saw a great mix of game mechanics coupled with free "borrowing" from one game to another. The idea of a software patent on a game mechanic is anathema to me.
Oh, you're blowing what I said way out of proportion. I'm not saying games can't borrow from one another; Sonic is an awesome game, even though it's largely an adaptation of concepts from earlier games like the Mario series. The difference is that Sonic has new elements, a new style, it isn't a dead fucking ripoff.
Jeff Minter is a human xerox machine. Laws be damned, what he did was immoral a thousand years ago, and is today, too. I'm not saying it's illegal. I'm saying it's disgusting. There is no originality in any of his work, except a bunch of lame, stapled on llama jokes.
so I am coming to the opinion that originality does not pay the mortgage.
We debate that opinion. Either way, failing in the marketplace is no excuse for becoming a boldfaced plagarist. This isn't a question of similarity. It's a question of outright reappropriation.
As far as the later "we agree, we disagree" stuff, I'm not sure where you're getting that stuff, since I haven't said any of it. I don't think Phil Harrison is famous, as people who aren't in the industry by and on the whole have no idea who he is without his job title stapled onto his name. I haven't come to any decision about the PS3 sales rates; all I said was that Jeff had no right to second guess the most successful franchise in history, given his abysmal records. I have made no comment about the effect of PS3 price on sales, and indeed I believe its high price will be a huge problem for sales, just as the Neo-Geo's was. I've made no comments about Sony's arrogance; only Jeff's. Of your six "we agrees," only two actually represented my beliefs. I would thank you to stop guessing at my beliefs.
We both think we are in the games industry but neither of us has Ferraris:-(
I don't believe I'm in the games industry, actually. I believe I'm moving into it. I'm an industrial programmer and an entrepreneur. Don't confuse my saying I know people and that the reason you don't know things is that you're not a pro with my saying that I'm a pro. I'm not. I've released games, sure, and I have a hell of a lot of gaming press, sure. But I'm an industrial programmer.
As far as what I drive, why are you guessing? You have no idea.
I didn't. Well, not you. I did call Jeff some names, but unless you're him, you don't need to worry about that. Unless you mean where I said you weren't an industry professional, but, well, you aren't, and that's not an insult; I'm not an automobile industry professional, by counter-example.
But just because he is publishing it doesn't necessarily mean he coded it.
It's almost like you're trying to give me opportunities to insult the man.:D But, um, you're right - perhaps this reference will help. He really did write Gridrunner++. (I find it amusing that that article refers to the very games I cited as what it rips off as "this game is like XXX on someDrug."
As for not being in the games industry, one of the games I was lead programmer on sold several million units.
Very few games sell that kind of volume. Using US numbers for example, Namco's highest selling game of all time, Soul Calibur 2, which has been out for a hair under three years, has only sold 911,000 units. Only two Pokemon titles have ever broken the 2 million mark - Ruby / Sapphire (4,992,000) and Fire Red / Leaf Green (3,344,000.) It's worth noting that those are Nintendo's two highest selling titles of all time. Indeed, Nintendo has only released 11 games which broke the 2 million copies shipped mark, and all but three of them are Mario titles (Super Smash Brothers has Mario characters, but I don't count it as a Mario title.) EA has only broken that line four times. Sony, Square, Microsoft and Take 2 have each only broken that line twice. In both cases, Take 2 broke that line on Grand Theft Auto. Firaxis has broken the line once, as has Blizzard. No Playstation 1 title ever broke that line - no XBox 360 game has even hit 1 million. Only one DS game, Nintendogs, has crossed the 2 million mark, and only just barely (2,036,000.) No other game company has ever broken that line in the United States. If you are telling the truth, you are one of exactly 14 people. I know all but two of them.
Which game was this, please? I suspect you need to check with your marketing team; you're misremembering the data they gave you.
(Mind you, these numbers are for console video games, not PC games; if you include PC games, another four people hit that list with nine games, more than half of them Sid Meier. Sid is awesome. You aren't Sid, are you?)
I don't need to look him up to remember quite a few of his games by heart: Gridrunner, Lazerzone, Attack of the Mutant Camels, Revenge of the Mutant Camels, Sheep in Space, Anticipal, Hovver Bovver (thanks for the boardgame reference there!) Mama Llama, Psychedelia (hence Neon), Tempest 2000.
If you would be more careful, you would realize that what I asked you to do were to name two games which weren't clones or sequels. Not one game in that list is a non-clone non-sequel. Try again, please; I'm asking you to do this for a very specific reason.
Considering Justin Frankel was 6 years old when Psychedelia came out in 1984 he may not have as much to complain about as you think.
Please read this in context; you've missed the point. The claim Jeff Minter made was that specifically his XBox screensaver was inventing a new genre, not that Psychedelia did. The reason Justin was angry was because Jeff quite obviously said that as a publicity stunt; that you've now named something Jeff himself wrote which invalidates Jeff's claim is the specific reason Justin was complaining. Jeff is a media whore who has no problems with saying absolutely asinine things to get attention. You're bolstering my claim by providing that example.
Philadelphia, New Beijing, Taiwan, Seoul, Londinium, Carthos, Constantinople, Phoenix, Chicago, Tampa, Rio De Janeiro, Tokyo/Kyoto, Sydney, Jakarta and Dubai were all carefully planned.
A defining feature of many of those cities is that they were completely destroyed, sometimes repeatedly, and rebuilt. As such they went through "iterations" of planning which resemble an agile process much more closely than they resemble a waterfall process. Not a single one of those cities was originally planned according to some conception when the city was founded.
Er, that's just not correct. Philadelphia's expansion after incorporation - that is, after the 20,000 person mark - was planned carefully. No destruction. New Beijing was an emperor's experiment; so was Seoul. Londinium was invented as a support system for the critical military juncture of the area by the Romans. Carthos was created to fortify a supply depot with major importance to fighting Rome, and was designed by military leaders for the express purpose of maintaining definsibility throughout growth. Constantinople was founded, and Rome quite literally stripped to create it, in the interests of re-seating the Roman empire to deal with communications problems springing from sheer empire size; it was arguably the finest example of Roman pre-creation planning, and had its first 500 years of growth sketched out before the ground was broken. Phoenix was planned when it was founded, and re-planned with the advent of air conditioning. Tampa was planned as a swamp-dredge city in the same way that Washington DC was. Rio de Janeiro was the root of Spanish action in the area, and the only destruction that happened during its creation was the Spanish razing the area and starting over. Tokyo has been planned and re-planned seven times, all but one of which reflect simple socio-political changes. Sydney was planned as the port supplier and basis of the British penal system of the day. Jakarta is an imperial city which carefully phased out the old city a piece at a time. Dubai is currently under development as a monarchial experiment in the interests of commerce.
Indeed, the only cities in that list that have actually been replanned due to destruction were Chicago and Kyoto, both after fire, and both cities had been previously planned for other reasons. There is no such coincidence regarding destruction at hand; I was quite careful to avoid such a thing.
Most people don't know that one of the most carefully planned cities in the US was Los Angeles.
Los Angeles predates the United States by almost two hundred years, and is the confluence of nine monasteries. It was largely grown by accident as a commercial hub during the gold rushes of 1849 and later 1861. In fact the formal urban planning of Los Angeles did not begin until 1922. This simply is not true. Please begin to cite sources; your data is false.
It's amazing to me how ridiculous were the planning assumptions, made 4 decades ago, for a city with a population 1/5th what it is now.
Los Angeles had a population of 9,519,338 at the 2000 census, and a current population estimate of 9,935,475. In 1960, the population at census was 6,038,771. This is a growth rate of 64% in 40 years, rather than the 400% you suggest. I would appreciate it if you wouldn't invent data while arguing.
Los Angeles has traditionally had the most rigid zoning requirements, and the strictest building codes, of anywhere.
Los Angeles is actually famous for its lack of zoning requirements, something typified by the Long Beach port wars of the 1980s and the Earthquake Safety Urban Reinvention Board after the quake in 1993. You are in fact simply incorrect. I would ask that in the future, when making sweeping claims like this that you begin to cite da
Isn't the work of "understanding context" simply identifying the relationships between certain items in your data and other items. Which may involve discovering further relationships?
No.
Basically, the issue is this. Semantics are specifically the case of attempting to discern the meaning of a word given its usage. When you have something that says "anything in this column is a FOO," then there's no need for semantics: usage is moot, as the meaning of what's in that column is absolutely described. Semantics are a purely natural-language concern. They do not occur in programming at all, ever. Programming languages work entirely on syntax and grammar.
Syntax is, given a fragment of a sentence, the set of rules governing what is allowed in the next step in the sentence. To use a natural-language example, "I went to the ---." English syntax suggests that what's in the --- must be a noun, a context-aware specific adjective (such as "front" or "top,") or a constraint ("best," "largest" or so on.) Yes, there are some weird dodges, but the important thing to understand is that syntax is the set of rules that says "when you write that sentence, filling in the words 'purple,' 'without' or 'twelve' are illegal."
Grammar is the set of rules governing the placement, conjugation or usage of words in order to communicate extra meaning. To use a natural-language example, you may conjugate the name "Joe" into "Joe's" to indicate something belonging to or characteristic of Joe. You may use "-est" to denote that the conjugated word is a limit, such as "greatest" or "coldest." You may move the direct object to the end of the sentence, to indicate that the middle of the sentence is subordinate to that clause, such as "I thought that he, while afraid of the Chinese culture, would go to Beijing to save the business account."
In programming, these things are easier to explain with errors. In C++, "for (int i=0; i" is a syntax error. It is easily understood to a human to be a faulty attempt to set a second constraint on the for loop, but since C++ doesn't allow that structure, it's a syntax error. A grammar error might include trying to declare an anonymous class in the for loop's declaration.
Semantic errors are a little more difficult. Semantics are about inference. Since they don't occur in programming, to show them in computing is hard; I'll need to refer to fact-processing systems (aka expert systems or knowledge engines) like Prolog or Cyc, and to construct an example, in order to make my point. I'm sorry; I've tried to give a simple definition several times, and I am having a hard time doing so in a way that I don't feel is easy to misunderstand.
Consider the case that you're writing a fact system for the Volkswagon company. This fact system is intended to create a large dataset describing what is known about Volkswagon's tool software development process. For the purposes of this example, we'll just pretend they're having a hard time creating milling and die-tooling software on budget, and that they're building the fact system to try to figure the problem out; it's actually a pretty common and useful practice in large industrial environments. I don't expect they're having any real such problems, but let's pretend.
So, the first thing they would need to do was to teach the system about the process. This means teaching it about the Jetta and the Golf, what's involved in making one, how long this takes, how much that costs, and so on. Then they have to teach the system about the robots that do the actual assembly, what their fault tolerances are, how much maintenance costs, how long it takes, what the impact of being down for a certain amount of time is on the greater system, etc. Then they need to start teaching the system about software conditions like (say) function points, what their error rates are, what the average cost of failure has been, and so on.
Now, let's say that we started this project six years ago. The next year, the ne
so it really does not matter if it is lisp or c++ or whatever, although since you have so much c++ material on your blog, you have to promote it(i guess).
The blog is relatively new. Try looking at the base site, http://sc.tri-bit.com/. You'll find I have material up there for PHP, C, C++, Delphi, Erlang, FormulaONE, Lua, and occasional smatterings of various other languages. I'm not promoting C++ for large-scale web applications because I'm a C++ zealot. I'm doing it because I genuinely believe the strictness of C++ is more valuable than the convenience of Rails. In fact, I believe the difference is dramatically one-sided.
i'm sure as c++ coder rails would not work for you
Actually, my native languages are Pascal and LISP. Please do not attempt to dismiss my opinions by guessing at what my languages of preference are. I use more than a dozen languages on a regular basis, and my arguments are well-founded regardless of my personal practices.
instead of complaining about particular language implementation try to find out if code that you are looking at is compliant to language desirable maintainability practices.
I'm sorry, but I don't believe that I did any such thing. I made specific comparisons of specific advantages of each methodology, and came to a concrete conclusion based on my beliefs. I've made no random complaints, and the things I said are not in fact related to code quality.
in fact, if i would want my stff to work in c++, i would first write it in some other language, like perl or ruby or php, and then rewrite it in c++, just so i dont have to babysit my compiler.
If you make your tool selection based on a fifteen second compile and link pass, then it's no wonder we disagree so strongly. You don't appear to have actually read what I said, and you seem to be arguing by the attempt to incorrectly pigeonhole me into a stereotype based on guesses. I believe this conversation ends here; I do not enjoy being told that I'm wrong because you're guessing what language I use most often.
The reason my blog and wiki have a bunch of C and C++ on them is because they're written for Nintendo programmers, and because C and C++ are almost the only languages available to them. It's got nothing to do with my personal preferences; I use several languages more often than I use C++. Enough with the stereotyping. It's ugly and offensive. If you can't discuss what someone said on the merits of what was said, but rather feel the need to treat them like one-trick ponies, I'd appreciate it if you didn't speak with me anymore.
IIRC Gridrunner++ was not written by him, but rather by some fans of his in BASIC.
Generally speaking, you should check before correcting people. Jeff Minter wrote Gridrunner++, which is why he's selling it on his web page.
but I'm still no wiser as to the type of games you play or write. The resume section is blank.
Perhaps you should read the blog a third time. It discusses what I do for a living. Also, there are several categories on my blog about the games I write for fun. I'm the guy who ran the TCP/IP bounty for the Nintendo DS, and who wrote the first Nintendo DS IRC client. I wrote the SC DS interface, for people who wanted to develop for the DS before it came out. I'm the guy who arranged the 25-game buyout of GameBoy Advance games for Datel. I write roguelikes, strategy games, sudoku games, BBS doors, and so on. Etc, etc, etc.
Again, none of what I do is actually important here, and I'd like for you to stop attempting ad hominem please. If I was some random nobody, I would still be well within my rights to point out that this clone factory named Minter has no right to be basing on other people, when all he is is a game mechanic thief. That I happen to come up more on Google on gaming matters than he does is just icing on the cake.
Certainly I hadn't heard him being called a thief in the circles I move in.
Not to seem rude, but that's because you're not an industry game developer. There are lots of people who are well known for being thieves and self-aggrandizing liars who you probably don't know about. It's the same reason you don't know about the scumbags in the movie industry, the automobile industry or the playing card printing industry. Every industry has bad apples, but unless you're part of it, you're never going to know who they are. If you heard the horror stories that come out of explaining why Sid created Firaxis, you'd be approaching this quite differently. His current team is awesome, but some of the people he's had to deal with in the past? You'd be ill if you realized in how many ways people have tried to screw him. Ever wonder why Hasbro made two Civ sequels without Sid? Ever wonder why Microsoft made an obvious Civ clone? Did you notice that the guy behind Age of Empires had just quit Firaxis with about fifteen other people two weeks before Microsoft hired them all as a group? If you ever get on the good side of someone at Firaxis, ask about the big exodus in the middle of Civ 3. The story is just amazing.
The point is, go to one of those big game information farms, and get a list of everything Jeff Minter has ever done. Find me two games which aren't clones (fair warning: Hover Bovver is a clone of The Maze of the Minotaur, a board game. Gotta love how the box says "you've never played a game like this before!," when I have my dad's copy printed on cardboard from 20 years before Minter was born.) Once you're done trying to find two games that aren't rip-offs, and only after you've tried, go read his self description on his web page. You'll be nauseous.
The things he's famous for are a Robotron 2084 clone (Llamatron 2184,) a Tempest sequel (Tempest 2000 is Minter, sure, but it's essentially just a faster and prettier version of Tempest by Dan Theurer,) and a broken knock-off of Centipede with some creatures that do Galaga moves (gridrunner / gridrunner++ ; in the original, look for stolen Galaxian graphics on level 9; in Gridrunner++ they don't start until level 15.) Jeff Minter is a second-rate video game Bluebeard. Now he's bragging that his music-aware screensaver is a whole new genre of gaming. I'm lucky enough to know (in passing) Justin Frankel, from where he used to hang out on IRC. I asked him his reaction once. I haven't seen that much swearing, even on IRC, in quite a while.
Jeff doesn't even try to hide his thievery. He steals not only game mechanics but also graphics and even titles from other games. You may not have heard it before, but you're hearing it now. Go take a close look, and ask yourself again whether he's someone you want to defend.
Industry statistics suggest that hard-nosed engineering outperforms agile dramatically. Maybe Agile works better for you, but when fifteen thousand programmers have been measured and more than 95% end up doing better with real metrics, and when these engineers are some of the best on earth (the first military software house to hit CMM5, the Boeing 747 software team, etc,) it's a fair guess that you're the exception rather than the rule. Believe it or not, genuine formal engineering does exist for software, and the training isn't all that expensive.
Is it possible you would do better with up-front planning once you were familiar with a formal method like PSP / TSP? It turns out that saying you're planning hard then writing a bunch of stuff down isn't actually as good as learning statistical methods and keeping years of data from which to make schedules using mathematical models derived from tens of millions of man-hours of detailed real-world data. When the 747 software team sees a 60% time to market drop, a 95% testing time drop and two known bugs in a million and a half lines of code on an 18 month project (as compared to 228 on the previous iteration, by the same people,) it's time to consider whether to learn what it is that's helping them so much. After all, they're actually pretty good at their jobs.
Whereas I agree with you, there is a consideration here for terms of pure pragmatism - early career coders aren't able to do the kind of planning which ends one up with that kind of long-term maintainable software. Even with proper planning in something like the PSP / TSP, it often just takes someone with real experience to be able to knock something like that out in the first place. You can't begrudge them the experience that their own naïveté has taught them.
Philadelphia, New Beijing, Taiwan, Seoul, Londinium, Carthos, Constantinople, Phoenix, Chicago, Tampa, Rio De Janeiro, Tokyo/Kyoto, Sydney, Jakarta and Dubai were all carefully planned. All have scaled to the modern world very well, with the exception of dealing with automobiles, something you can't really fault the ancients for not seeing coming. Essentially the entire Roman empire had very careful city planning, and in fact they did well enough that even now, 2500 years later, their water solutions and much of their infrastructure is still in use today.
Cities ARE built in a "agile development" fashion.
Most of them, yes, but certainly not all of them, and those that aren't ad-hoc are having far fewer problems than those which are.
These days, everybody zones. There's a reason for that. The reason cities are moving away from on-the-fly planning is that we're finally waking up to that just because that's how it's always been done in the past doesn't mean that's how it should be done. Several cities, like my hometown of Pittsburgh, are finding out the hard way that that can cause just tremendous problems in infrastructure which can throttle economies. Have a look at a land value map of Pittsburgh some time, and look at where you have good rail coverage. Compare it to another city, like Chicago or Phoenix, which was planned. You'll notice that in unplanned cities like Pittsburgh, the presence of rail has a comparatively enormous impact on land value, because it offloads industrial infrastructure use, keeping the byways open for commercial and residential use. In planned cities like Phoenix and Chicago, the problem isn't nearly as severe. Notice that Phoenix is growing at something like 60x the national average; Phoenix was nowheresville until about five years after the invention of the air conditioner, and now it's one of America's biggest cities.
There's a reason for that. Actually, I've got a pretty good article for you on the topic - it's 45 pages and very, very detailed, but it's a little dry. Still, give it a shot - for someone who feels that city planning is a good parallel to software planning, it may be eye opening to learn why the cities in the US who are doing the best in terms of scaling are the ones who ignore the trends you correctly point out, and who instead go with a strict urban growth plan whose conceptual parallel would arguably be stricter software methodologies.
The thing is, in my admittedly limited experience, most of the people who really stand behind Agile/XP/Scrumm are people who've only ever dealt with Agile/XP/Scrumm or no methodology at all. It is frequently the case then that people see Agile/XP/Scrumm outperforming a complete lack of organization, and quickly begin to believe that to develop without Agile/XP/Scrumm is suicide. There is a reasonable parallel here in your city planning metaphor - most people who look at city planning think it's all ad-hoc, and don't know about the problems going on in city scaling right now. This turns out to be a massive repeating issue to both the Department of Agriculture and to the Department of the Interior. The case can be made that what you are suggesting amounts to Argumentum ad Antiquitatem, and that indeed though this is how it's usually and traditionally been done doesn't mean that it's how things should be done. By extension of your parallel back to software, the way it's always been done might well be described as the waterfall model or the monolithic model, or even by non-planning entirely, and I think we're all to the point of understanding how big of a mistake that would be. (Might as well do some Structured Programming in COBOL, huhuhu.)
Thing is, though, there are methodologies other than Agile. Agile/XP/Scrumm are very good for in-house software in a business environment, because they are well adapted to unpredict
The saddest thing about this is how correct you are, and how it hinders you. If you and another team developed Product X, and both went 33% over schedule, the other team would hit early milestones, declare progressive success, change the schedule to fit the new needs, allow bloat, hammer in new features to justify the lag, and end up coming in 200% over budget. You would come in 33% over budget, but since you didn't dance around acting like the schedule was the only important thing, your lean and nearly on-time product would be seen as disasterously over-budget, and you wouldn't be allowed to manage again.
It's a pity that what you said is correct, because it encourages a kind of myopic and nearly religious devotion to what is really just a measuring tool, and the results are a massive drop in actual quality in exchange for the feeling of success. What you said is right, but remarkably counterintuitive, and it is my belief that what you're correct about is the primary basis for most of the problems in this industry today.
I wish more people were like you, and were willing to take the up-front hit instead of playing self-deception games to feel better about slippage. You plus a real estimating tool like the PSP/TSP (see propoganda video) are exactly what this industry needs, but facing the problem is so difficult and fixing it so superficially expensive-looking (despite the remarkable cost benefits in the long run) that I think your kind of actual observant development is a long time in coming.
Pat yourself on the back. You've made all the old people proud today.
Well sure, except it's not as if Ruby on Rails enables that in any way. That's the fundamental basis of both object-oriented and interface-oriented programming, and has been around since the mid 1980s. (If you're really old, you might say "bah, you can do that with function pointers, and it's been common since BCPL.) Those of us who write CGIs in C++ are still amazed that the web is only just now discovering modularization. Granted almost no PHP you see in the real world is written this way; still, that's not a reflection of PHP, but rather the quality of the people writing the code.
You're quite right to observe that careful differentiation of interface and implementation has a major effect on the long term maintainability of a system. However, I openly take issue with the supposition that that has anything whatsoever to do with RoR, and in fact it's my contention that RoR tries to showhorn you into a combined model where, though there is modularization, the modules are frequently not ideally selected. It is my belief that a programmer can do a better job at modularizing than what RoR forces you into.
Try writing a large-scale web application in C++ sometime. Sure, it takes a while to nail down some simple text parsing stuff, but the long term maintainability makes most other languages look positively silly by comparison. Really, these days I just can't imagine doing web work in anything other than C++, PHP or Erlang, and I write code in more than 60 languages. Yes, you have to put down a lot of groundwork to get underway with C++, but it's my belief that in a large application, the benefits more than outweigh the up-front work.
It's remarkable how many bugs disappear with real, strictly compiled languages.
I know what you're saying is true; I've worked for people like that. Nonetheless, I feel it important to point out that companies like that are generally out of business quickly, and that if you're working somewhere like that, you might want to consider looking around. Not all companies are so naïve, and places with better behavior are usually much more satisfying places to work.
The emphasis on fast devlopment is justified, at least from a business perspective, because first to market gives a huge advantage in software, not to mention the network effect.
Tell that to Yahoo! Groups and Friendster. When the quality of your service suffers, a competitor will take your userbase away. Things like RoR may be great for getting to market first (and that's in fact fairly arguable when you get past trivially simple example code,) but they quickly turn into a ball-and-chain when you start having to face extensibility and performance concerns. People drastically overvalue arbitrary equations like Metcalfe's law, and turn away from the actual statistical data sitting right in front of them. Yahoo's got something like 350m users, and you still almost never see anyone who complains about their 255 user friend list limit. Squaring the user count is just stupid; so is taking its logarithm. Neither of those are based on real world data.
Real world data suggests that almost nobody keeps track of fewer than 10 people or more than 150 people. If you're treating the value of the userbase as growing at anything other than the linear arithmetic mean of 98 users per user (and even then that's arguably much too high,) then you're in for a nasty shock.
If you want a web tool which gets you to market fast and keeps you there, you need to look at PHP or Erlang. No two ways about it. It just isn't worth the ten extra percent speed in development to have to gut it and start over a second time. Besides, unless your whole staff is already deeply familiar with the tools, there's a pretty good chance you'll lose that entire advantage in training time and new-language bugs.
If you're more comfortable in RoR than other tools, and if you're going to pull a Fred Brooks and "plan to throw one away, because you will anyway," then RoR is admittedly a pretty useful prototyping tool. That said, in that arena, in my opinion, LISP just completely owns RoR, as do Erlang, Python and PHP. Erlang and PHP have the advantages of being legitimate places to build a production-level tool.
But, I'll tell you up-front: you do not want a RoR application when you're planning to scale into a large-userbase product. It just falls apart. Flame-suit on, as I'm sure there are a lot of fanboys who are about to tell me I'm full of it and that their game has almost a thousand users or some nonsense like that. I've built services that deal with more than a thousand people simultaneously. I'm not talking out of my ass. I know what hurts when you get into that area, and I know that RoR is just not where I'd want to be.
If you ever get into that kind of place, do yourself a favor and fake the service. Benchmark it. You'll thank me later.
Similiarily start-ups don't care about these issues since they plan on being bought out before they matter.
That kind of startup doesn't get bought out. Surprisingly, the people who can afford to put up eight digits for a product will send in their own engineers to find out if the product is going to be a problem in the long run. If it is, the investor just fights you, instead of buying you; it's cheaper, it's faster, and if your product is a shoddy, thrown-together mess, it'll keep the audience better in the long run.
Besides, these days it's almost impossible to find a startup without ten competitors in the same market space. Odds are damned good that at least one of those competitors did a good job.
Yes these attitudes create serious problems and lead to poorly made software, but what can you do about it?
Compete in the open marketplace, and win. It happens every day. Either make software which isn't of poor quality, or expect to go nowhere. Arguably the best thing about the internet marketplace is that you have access to tens of thousands of vendors. You just don't have to work with someone who cuts corners,
I don't see anything arrogant about my linking to something I said in detail several days ago. I am not saying anything about my importance, nor am I being over-bearing; I just didn't think it appropriate to cut and paste the whole diatribe into SlashDot. In fact, that's what SlashDot prefers one to do. It's how things have worked here for eight years.
So, mr. AC, perhaps you could explain to me what's arrogant about that? And, perhaps you could gather together the gonads to use your account when you answer?
Hey, he is a much-loved industry figure from the 1980s.
Well, he is from the 1980s. He might also be much loved by the fans. He was not much loved within the industry. Game thieves never are.
I remember with fondness disassembling GridRunner on the VIC-20 by hand...
Okay. Go grab the demo from his webpage. You'll be surprised to learn that it's just enemy behavior from Centipede and Galaga, without the mushrooms or enemy formations that made the other two games good, and with a screen saver for a background. He doesn't even try to hide it - at level 9, he starts using graphics stolen from Galaxian (in the PC version of gridrunner++, it starts at 15 instead.) They're not the only ones, but they're the easiest to get to quickly - not that the game is even remotely difficult.
The only real difference between this game and Centipede, besides the progressive level constraints and the stupid sheep jokes, is that Centipede (at least back then) required a trackball.
Your blog does not immediately say what authority you speak from.
Yes, it does. Read it again.
That said, it doesn't really matter who I am; what I say is factual, even if I'm some nobody from under a rock (which I'm not.)
Admittedly when I said hi to phil harrison on wednesday night he blanked me, so i guess I won't get any sony party invites soon unless I tag on with someone else.
Well, if you see me at E3 next year, tell me who you are, and I'll introduce you. Phil and I have gotten along well ever since I met him at one of the panels three years ago, when one of the panellists said something snarky about one of his decisions (he was in the audience, not on the panel, so I just got a chance to speak before he did.) We're not bosom buddies by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm relatively easy to remember by sight - I'm a very large person with very long hair - so he still gets me into doors when he sees me.
I'm honestly getting a little tired of these fanboy reporters wasting what could have been productive interviews by instead parroting the rantings of a clone-factory also-ran. There's a reason nobody can name a game of Jeff's that isn't a sequel or a ripoff: they don't exist. Why is Sony arrogant for not tipping their hand? They've cornered what was a thoroughly dominated market in under two years and held it for more than a decade. Yes, the price is high, but Sony knows how to handle markets; their seven year old PS2 is outselling Microsoft's brand new XBox360 in every territory, even though the 360 is the only one of the next-gen consoles available, and probably will be so until at least Christmas.
(His two famous games are a Robotron ripoff and a sequel to someone else's game which is essentially a graphics upgrade and a speed boost. Most people have to look him up online to even come up with another one of his games. C'mon. Arrogant means to exaggerate your own worth in an overbearing manner, and here's some guy who has released 40 games, the sum total of which don't outsell even one game in the Playstation2 Top 100, talking about Sony's full of it because he doesn't like their new price line? Pots and kettles, man.)
It seems to me that creating them is exactly what this is about.
Like I said, it's a subtle difference, and I don't expect most people to get it.
Taking a step back, what they're saying is, "XML is hard. But if you make up a pattern of HTML elements and reserve some class names, programs can parse out information in standard ways."
I've never seen anyone say that. Indeed, these are no different than XML itself, and are in fact valid XML. Please show me someone saying the words "XML is hard," or any actual evidence in that direction.
This is the same problem that XML namespaces were intended to solve.
No, it isn't, as I just said in the post you replied to. You can very easily read the W3 discussion that led to the creation of namespaces; they have nothing to do with any of this. Namespaces serve exactly one simple purpose, and it's the exact same simple purpose they serve in C++; indeed the parallel in C++, and the discussion that led to namespaces in C++ in the ISO communit, was very heavily leaned on in the W3 discussions. Namespaces in XML were created solely for the purpose of preventing name conflicts. This is something well documented and easily researched. You really need to not claim the underlying motivation for a tool when said motivation is well documented and contrary to your claim.
But this solution doesn't scale! Eventually you're going to get "formats" that start to step on each other's toes. They use the same class names, or the same pattern of elements. Maybe you want an "event" but want to add some supplementary information about that event using another "format". Do they mingle together?
You seem to be re-iterating questions that were already discussed by other people. Please actually read the discussion tree before engaging in it. This has all been explained and resolved. The reason you think this problem isn't well solved by the solution is that this just isn't what the tool is meant to solve. Similarly, a Honda isn't very good at baking a cake. Someone who doesn't understand what a Honda is for might think they're for baking cakes, since there's an enclosure which builds up a well-controlled temperature which (by revving the gas) can be altered by the person running the car. But, it doesn't "scale well" (cough) because the car has too much ventilation and the cake starts tasting like exhaust.
If IE can get off of its ass and properly support XHTML, this problem is already solved.
IE already supports the part of XHTML that deals with these concerns. It has since IE4. Perhaps you should try it. The things IE has trouble with in XHTML are things like the underlying MIME types and DTD verifications, neither of which are germane here. If you build custom tags in IE, they work just fine. They have for almost 8 years, since before XHTML was even considered. On this topic, IE is in fact way ahead of the curve.
Indeed, it's not at all difficult to dig up MSDN examples of doing exactly these things from 1998.
Create your event in XHTML
Event? What do events have to do with anything?
If you're concerned about how to style this XML data
Nobody was concerned in that way.
remember that CSS can style (or, by extension, hide) XML just fine.
If you'd read the discussion tree you'd realize that we all took that for granted. Will you next tell us that if we're concerned about getting < > in the document that we can use entities?
Please don't join discussions unless you're willing to figure out what people are talking about. It's remarkably rude and conceited.
Yes, that'll look nice out the back of the rack. How many cables?
Well, the whole reason you'd be dealing with 3x larger was to make them all internal. And, depending on your arrangement, probably 16 total. If you're willing to deal with external enclosures, you can knock the whole thing down to 5U. Besides, take a look in a datacenter some time. You'll find the average machine has a dozen or more cables sticking out of it.
put silicone glue in for the inner rails You have a lot of spare time.
It takes like five seconds per screw. To knock $48k down to about $5k, yeah, I've got a few minutes. Bet you would too.
Er, speed is one of Solaris' big selling points, if you'd actually look before announcing. Well, I worked at Sun for 7 years and know a few things about Solaris. If you think Solaris is fast at NFS compared to NetApp, well I beg to differ.
I'm glad to know you're a former Sun engineer; otherwise my reply would be long-winded and probably seem condescending. Basically, the issue here isn't one of OS speed. The issue is of disk speed. The reason ZFS is near-platter speed is that almost all of the work is amortized into the write phase; it's a ridiculously read-focussed scheme, which is appropriate in the rare situations where it's deployed.
Granted that Solaris itself isn't the speed champion it once was, the throttlepoint is the disk subsystem, not the OS/CPU. Sure, if you're doing heavy simulation or something else machine-intensive, that might be a problem. But, in context it seems like we're talking about a data store, and the situations in which a data store has significant non-disk responsibilities are vanishingly rare.
Yeah, uh, ZFS takes like five minutes to set up. It's trivially simple. Why would you pretend otherwise? Have you even touched it?
Yes, I spent two years explaining and demonstrating it to customers. It's a huge change and takes a big mindset change for those who are used to Vxvm or other LVMs.
Well, my apologies; I had not previously realized your familiarity. That said, I'm not sure why that mindset change would come in, specifically from the perspective of an external data store. Perhaps you could enlighten me? Realizing your former position, I now wonder whether I'm missing something, or whether I just took for granted something customers often don't understand.
At least spell "privilege" right in your nit-picking.
I deserved that. Touché.
Also, if we're going to have a "sense of scale" here, there is a huge cost difference between 12 RU and 4 RU in datacenter costs.
Well, yes and no. 4U goes for $50/mo these days from a place like ColoPronto (it may be cheaper elsewhere - I haven't looked in a long time.) So, sure, you're looking at an extra $100/mo. On the other hand, the Thumper fully built out is $48k, whereas the equivalent machine stitched together is about $11k. So, you're looking at about a $37k difference, which at $100/mo is almost 30 years of datacenter rental to break positive.
I'm not saying the Thumper isn't worth it - it damned well is, and Sun isn't stupid. They wouldn't price it up there if it wasn't worth that. The reason isn't the cost of rental, though. The issue is paying the time for someone to put stuff together, to maintain stuff, to handle keeping the machines playing well together, all that jazz. For the little guy (and let's not kid ourselves, that means startups, and startups need these things too,) the Thumper isn't the right way to go. Too much cost up-front, and all the startup kids are dramatically underpaid anyway, so getting them to maintain the box is just cost effective.
That said, that's not Sun's customer base; those kids are usually using BSD or Loonix instead. Sun's customer base are corporations who need the datacenter today or they lose $12k/day. Sun's customer base are people who don't have time to screw with making the server work, because
Uh. Don't get angry until you read context. I didn't say they were the same thing at all. I simply responded to grandparent suggesting that you needed to spend $1000 on the chassis to mount 48 drives. Also, I'm not sure where you get 4x11.
Get angry on your own time. I wasn't talking to you, and I don't need you talking down to me when you don't even realize why I said what I did.
DTDs provide structure but no meaning beyond what humans ascribe to it.
Uh, yeah, that's because that's what they're for. I said the reason he didn't have structure was because he didn't provide an appropriate structure document. Now you're trying to rebutt me by saying that they're really only for structure.
I fail to see the disconnect here.
Likewise, you claim that meaning is not reusable and are not arbitrarily applied, yet you chose to define bug as a Volkswagon, rather than as a vehicle, car, or automobile, all of which would be different to a computer armed with only strncmp()
You seem to have missed the point. The point is that you can't arbitrarily say that this bug is now also a Volkswagon; it is and it always was, if it ever was at all, and if it wasn't, it never will be. You can't copy semantics because they're unique and determinant. There is no germane relationship between two different bugs. Unlike DTD, there is no appropriate measure for standardizing context. The germane point is that a schema and semantics are in many ways need-exclusive: if you have one, the other is effectively useless. If you have a thorough schema for data, then you know perfectly well what's contained, and you don't need to mark it up semantically. If you have thorough semantics, then a schema is redundant.
Incidentially, if you're billing Medicare without the patient's Medicare ID number and it's not failing, I'd really love to know how you got that to work.
In many cases, Medicare will subsidize medical situations not already covered by insurance, even for those who aren't yet Medicare registered. A good example is addiction: the government provides a stipend to people with substance habits under the Americans with Disabilities act of 1976. This coverage is provided through Medicare as a matter of simplifying bureaucracy, and is not in fact limited to the elderly and mentally challenged; you can be a perfectly healthy young person with a cocaine problem, and get help. In those cases, Medicare will reimburse you by your Blue Cross ID, your social security number, or any of a host of other identifying numbers.
Indeed, Medicare does not require a Medicare ID. It simply requires an ID. The reason grandparent's software doesn't require Medicare charges to come from a Medicare ID is that neither does the government.
I'm sure Medicare's insurance fraud people would love to know how you're doing it too.
In general you shouldn't accuse people of fraud regarding a system you don't understand. It's offensive.
Slashdot Mirror
In your blog you talk about getting interest in a game (e.g. Sudoku for the DS; which may be somewhat of a crowded market what with Brain Training already having sold millions of units) but not claiming massive sales.
Oh. Also, no, it's not a crowded market - Brain Training's implementation is shite, and neither of the other two pure-sudoku games out there do anything other than the core game at 3x3, with fewer than a thousand puzzles each.
He was nominated for "Development Legend" status at the Develop Awards 2004 alongside Michel Ancel and winner Peter Molyneaux, so it's not entirely self-appointed.
Well, just because some nobody awards show calls some other nobody a legend doesn't mean they actually are. (shrugs) What makes someone famous is being known, not an awards show who couldn't get anyone better. There are literally hundreds of better candidates they've never even tipped their hat to. It's absurd. Honestly, if he were a better man, he just wouldn't use the term.
But you think ad hominum attacks are invalid
:-(
Ad hominem attacks are by definition invalid. I only make them at Jeff because he pisses me off.
We disagree that Jeff is not famous.
I never said he wasn't famous. I said he was nobody. There's a big difference. Other famous nobodies include Renee Zellweger, Anne Heche, whatever this month's boy band is, Al Roker, Renee Zellweger, the guy from the original Highlander movie, any man in a porn with Ron Jeremy, the logical inverse of Samuel L Jackson (because he's so famous that even his exact opposite is famous,) Renee Zellweger, the Mayor of Cleveland, Canadians, the Royal Family of Luxembourg, Jey Leno and Renee Zellweger.
The point isn't whether you know who they are. The point is whether or not they're human filler. If Jey Leno never existed, it's not like anything he's done wouldn't have happened in his stead. If whoever Tom Cruise's current arm candy is hadn't come about, Scientology wouldn't collapse. There was no special Zellweger touch on Bridget Jones' Diary which would preclude a different actress.
The germane bit is, if Jeff Minter was hit by one of those science fiction bombs that make you never have been born, would gaming change much? And the answer is, "maybe there would be less clones around." That, my friend, is the epitome of "nobody."
and the "legend" label reflects that
I still openly reject his self-appointed legendary status.
We disagree about the ethics of the originality of his games. Intellectual Property was a different beast back in the 1980s. I guess that makes me sound like an apologist, but the early 1980s saw a great mix of game mechanics coupled with free "borrowing" from one game to another. The idea of a software patent on a game mechanic is anathema to me.
Oh, you're blowing what I said way out of proportion. I'm not saying games can't borrow from one another; Sonic is an awesome game, even though it's largely an adaptation of concepts from earlier games like the Mario series. The difference is that Sonic has new elements, a new style, it isn't a dead fucking ripoff.
Jeff Minter is a human xerox machine. Laws be damned, what he did was immoral a thousand years ago, and is today, too. I'm not saying it's illegal. I'm saying it's disgusting. There is no originality in any of his work, except a bunch of lame, stapled on llama jokes.
so I am coming to the opinion that originality does not pay the mortgage.
We debate that opinion. Either way, failing in the marketplace is no excuse for becoming a boldfaced plagarist. This isn't a question of similarity. It's a question of outright reappropriation.
As far as the later "we agree, we disagree" stuff, I'm not sure where you're getting that stuff, since I haven't said any of it. I don't think Phil Harrison is famous, as people who aren't in the industry by and on the whole have no idea who he is without his job title stapled onto his name. I haven't come to any decision about the PS3 sales rates; all I said was that Jeff had no right to second guess the most successful franchise in history, given his abysmal records. I have made no comment about the effect of PS3 price on sales, and indeed I believe its high price will be a huge problem for sales, just as the Neo-Geo's was. I've made no comments about Sony's arrogance; only Jeff's. Of your six "we agrees," only two actually represented my beliefs. I would thank you to stop guessing at my beliefs.
We both think we are in the games industry but neither of us has Ferraris
I don't believe I'm in the games industry, actually. I believe I'm moving into it. I'm an industrial programmer and an entrepreneur. Don't confuse my saying I know people and that the reason you don't know things is that you're not a pro with my saying that I'm a pro. I'm not. I've released games, sure, and I have a hell of a lot of gaming press, sure. But I'm an industrial programmer.
As far as what I drive, why are you guessing? You have no idea.
Hey let's not get into namecalling.
:D But, um, you're right - perhaps this reference will help. He really did write Gridrunner++. (I find it amusing that that article refers to the very games I cited as what it rips off as "this game is like XXX on someDrug."
I didn't. Well, not you. I did call Jeff some names, but unless you're him, you don't need to worry about that. Unless you mean where I said you weren't an industry professional, but, well, you aren't, and that's not an insult; I'm not an automobile industry professional, by counter-example.
But just because he is publishing it doesn't necessarily mean he coded it.
It's almost like you're trying to give me opportunities to insult the man.
As for not being in the games industry, one of the games I was lead programmer on sold several million units.
Very few games sell that kind of volume. Using US numbers for example, Namco's highest selling game of all time, Soul Calibur 2, which has been out for a hair under three years, has only sold 911,000 units. Only two Pokemon titles have ever broken the 2 million mark - Ruby / Sapphire (4,992,000) and Fire Red / Leaf Green (3,344,000.) It's worth noting that those are Nintendo's two highest selling titles of all time. Indeed, Nintendo has only released 11 games which broke the 2 million copies shipped mark, and all but three of them are Mario titles (Super Smash Brothers has Mario characters, but I don't count it as a Mario title.) EA has only broken that line four times. Sony, Square, Microsoft and Take 2 have each only broken that line twice. In both cases, Take 2 broke that line on Grand Theft Auto. Firaxis has broken the line once, as has Blizzard. No Playstation 1 title ever broke that line - no XBox 360 game has even hit 1 million. Only one DS game, Nintendogs, has crossed the 2 million mark, and only just barely (2,036,000.) No other game company has ever broken that line in the United States. If you are telling the truth, you are one of exactly 14 people. I know all but two of them.
Which game was this, please? I suspect you need to check with your marketing team; you're misremembering the data they gave you.
(Mind you, these numbers are for console video games, not PC games; if you include PC games, another four people hit that list with nine games, more than half of them Sid Meier. Sid is awesome. You aren't Sid, are you?)
I don't need to look him up to remember quite a few of his games by heart: Gridrunner, Lazerzone, Attack of the Mutant Camels, Revenge of the Mutant Camels, Sheep in Space, Anticipal, Hovver Bovver (thanks for the boardgame reference there!) Mama Llama, Psychedelia (hence Neon), Tempest 2000.
If you would be more careful, you would realize that what I asked you to do were to name two games which weren't clones or sequels. Not one game in that list is a non-clone non-sequel. Try again, please; I'm asking you to do this for a very specific reason.
Considering Justin Frankel was 6 years old when Psychedelia came out in 1984 he may not have as much to complain about as you think.
Please read this in context; you've missed the point. The claim Jeff Minter made was that specifically his XBox screensaver was inventing a new genre, not that Psychedelia did. The reason Justin was angry was because Jeff quite obviously said that as a publicity stunt; that you've now named something Jeff himself wrote which invalidates Jeff's claim is the specific reason Justin was complaining. Jeff is a media whore who has no problems with saying absolutely asinine things to get attention. You're bolstering my claim by providing that example.
Er, that's just not correct. Philadelphia's expansion after incorporation - that is, after the 20,000 person mark - was planned carefully. No destruction. New Beijing was an emperor's experiment; so was Seoul. Londinium was invented as a support system for the critical military juncture of the area by the Romans. Carthos was created to fortify a supply depot with major importance to fighting Rome, and was designed by military leaders for the express purpose of maintaining definsibility throughout growth. Constantinople was founded, and Rome quite literally stripped to create it, in the interests of re-seating the Roman empire to deal with communications problems springing from sheer empire size; it was arguably the finest example of Roman pre-creation planning, and had its first 500 years of growth sketched out before the ground was broken. Phoenix was planned when it was founded, and re-planned with the advent of air conditioning. Tampa was planned as a swamp-dredge city in the same way that Washington DC was. Rio de Janeiro was the root of Spanish action in the area, and the only destruction that happened during its creation was the Spanish razing the area and starting over. Tokyo has been planned and re-planned seven times, all but one of which reflect simple socio-political changes. Sydney was planned as the port supplier and basis of the British penal system of the day. Jakarta is an imperial city which carefully phased out the old city a piece at a time. Dubai is currently under development as a monarchial experiment in the interests of commerce.
Indeed, the only cities in that list that have actually been replanned due to destruction were Chicago and Kyoto, both after fire, and both cities had been previously planned for other reasons. There is no such coincidence regarding destruction at hand; I was quite careful to avoid such a thing.
Most people don't know that one of the most carefully planned cities in the US was Los Angeles.
Los Angeles predates the United States by almost two hundred years, and is the confluence of nine monasteries. It was largely grown by accident as a commercial hub during the gold rushes of 1849 and later 1861. In fact the formal urban planning of Los Angeles did not begin until 1922. This simply is not true. Please begin to cite sources; your data is false.
It's amazing to me how ridiculous were the planning assumptions, made 4 decades ago, for a city with a population 1/5th what it is now.
Los Angeles had a population of 9,519,338 at the 2000 census, and a current population estimate of 9,935,475. In 1960, the population at census was 6,038,771. This is a growth rate of 64% in 40 years, rather than the 400% you suggest. I would appreciate it if you wouldn't invent data while arguing.
Los Angeles has traditionally had the most rigid zoning requirements, and the strictest building codes, of anywhere.
Los Angeles is actually famous for its lack of zoning requirements, something typified by the Long Beach port wars of the 1980s and the Earthquake Safety Urban Reinvention Board after the quake in 1993. You are in fact simply incorrect. I would ask that in the future, when making sweeping claims like this that you begin to cite da
Forgetting to close the on code is for the lose. Sorry about the eye-pain.
Isn't the work of "understanding context" simply identifying the relationships between certain items in your data and other items. Which may involve discovering further relationships?
No.
Basically, the issue is this. Semantics are specifically the case of attempting to discern the meaning of a word given its usage. When you have something that says "anything in this column is a FOO," then there's no need for semantics: usage is moot, as the meaning of what's in that column is absolutely described. Semantics are a purely natural-language concern. They do not occur in programming at all, ever. Programming languages work entirely on syntax and grammar.
Syntax is, given a fragment of a sentence, the set of rules governing what is allowed in the next step in the sentence. To use a natural-language example, "I went to the ---." English syntax suggests that what's in the --- must be a noun, a context-aware specific adjective (such as "front" or "top,") or a constraint ("best," "largest" or so on.) Yes, there are some weird dodges, but the important thing to understand is that syntax is the set of rules that says "when you write that sentence, filling in the words 'purple,' 'without' or 'twelve' are illegal."
Grammar is the set of rules governing the placement, conjugation or usage of words in order to communicate extra meaning. To use a natural-language example, you may conjugate the name "Joe" into "Joe's" to indicate something belonging to or characteristic of Joe. You may use "-est" to denote that the conjugated word is a limit, such as "greatest" or "coldest." You may move the direct object to the end of the sentence, to indicate that the middle of the sentence is subordinate to that clause, such as "I thought that he, while afraid of the Chinese culture, would go to Beijing to save the business account."
In programming, these things are easier to explain with errors. In C++, "for (int i=0; i" is a syntax error. It is easily understood to a human to be a faulty attempt to set a second constraint on the for loop, but since C++ doesn't allow that structure, it's a syntax error. A grammar error might include trying to declare an anonymous class in the for loop's declaration.
Semantic errors are a little more difficult. Semantics are about inference. Since they don't occur in programming, to show them in computing is hard; I'll need to refer to fact-processing systems (aka expert systems or knowledge engines) like Prolog or Cyc, and to construct an example, in order to make my point. I'm sorry; I've tried to give a simple definition several times, and I am having a hard time doing so in a way that I don't feel is easy to misunderstand.
Consider the case that you're writing a fact system for the Volkswagon company. This fact system is intended to create a large dataset describing what is known about Volkswagon's tool software development process. For the purposes of this example, we'll just pretend they're having a hard time creating milling and die-tooling software on budget, and that they're building the fact system to try to figure the problem out; it's actually a pretty common and useful practice in large industrial environments. I don't expect they're having any real such problems, but let's pretend.
So, the first thing they would need to do was to teach the system about the process. This means teaching it about the Jetta and the Golf, what's involved in making one, how long this takes, how much that costs, and so on. Then they have to teach the system about the robots that do the actual assembly, what their fault tolerances are, how much maintenance costs, how long it takes, what the impact of being down for a certain amount of time is on the greater system, etc. Then they need to start teaching the system about software conditions like (say) function points, what their error rates are, what the average cost of failure has been, and so on.
Now, let's say that we started this project six years ago. The next year, the ne
so it really does not matter if it is lisp or c++ or whatever, although since you have so much c++ material on your blog, you have to promote it(i guess).
The blog is relatively new. Try looking at the base site, http://sc.tri-bit.com/. You'll find I have material up there for PHP, C, C++, Delphi, Erlang, FormulaONE, Lua, and occasional smatterings of various other languages. I'm not promoting C++ for large-scale web applications because I'm a C++ zealot. I'm doing it because I genuinely believe the strictness of C++ is more valuable than the convenience of Rails. In fact, I believe the difference is dramatically one-sided.
i'm sure as c++ coder rails would not work for you
Actually, my native languages are Pascal and LISP. Please do not attempt to dismiss my opinions by guessing at what my languages of preference are. I use more than a dozen languages on a regular basis, and my arguments are well-founded regardless of my personal practices.
instead of complaining about particular language implementation try to find out if code that you are looking at is compliant to language desirable maintainability practices.
I'm sorry, but I don't believe that I did any such thing. I made specific comparisons of specific advantages of each methodology, and came to a concrete conclusion based on my beliefs. I've made no random complaints, and the things I said are not in fact related to code quality.
in fact, if i would want my stff to work in c++, i would first write it in some other language, like perl or ruby or php, and then rewrite it in c++, just so i dont have to babysit my compiler.
If you make your tool selection based on a fifteen second compile and link pass, then it's no wonder we disagree so strongly. You don't appear to have actually read what I said, and you seem to be arguing by the attempt to incorrectly pigeonhole me into a stereotype based on guesses. I believe this conversation ends here; I do not enjoy being told that I'm wrong because you're guessing what language I use most often.
The reason my blog and wiki have a bunch of C and C++ on them is because they're written for Nintendo programmers, and because C and C++ are almost the only languages available to them. It's got nothing to do with my personal preferences; I use several languages more often than I use C++. Enough with the stereotyping. It's ugly and offensive. If you can't discuss what someone said on the merits of what was said, but rather feel the need to treat them like one-trick ponies, I'd appreciate it if you didn't speak with me anymore.
IIRC Gridrunner++ was not written by him, but rather by some fans of his in BASIC.
Generally speaking, you should check before correcting people. Jeff Minter wrote Gridrunner++, which is why he's selling it on his web page.
but I'm still no wiser as to the type of games you play or write. The resume section is blank.
Perhaps you should read the blog a third time. It discusses what I do for a living. Also, there are several categories on my blog about the games I write for fun. I'm the guy who ran the TCP/IP bounty for the Nintendo DS, and who wrote the first Nintendo DS IRC client. I wrote the SC DS interface, for people who wanted to develop for the DS before it came out. I'm the guy who arranged the 25-game buyout of GameBoy Advance games for Datel. I write roguelikes, strategy games, sudoku games, BBS doors, and so on. Etc, etc, etc.
Again, none of what I do is actually important here, and I'd like for you to stop attempting ad hominem please. If I was some random nobody, I would still be well within my rights to point out that this clone factory named Minter has no right to be basing on other people, when all he is is a game mechanic thief. That I happen to come up more on Google on gaming matters than he does is just icing on the cake.
Certainly I hadn't heard him being called a thief in the circles I move in.
Not to seem rude, but that's because you're not an industry game developer. There are lots of people who are well known for being thieves and self-aggrandizing liars who you probably don't know about. It's the same reason you don't know about the scumbags in the movie industry, the automobile industry or the playing card printing industry. Every industry has bad apples, but unless you're part of it, you're never going to know who they are. If you heard the horror stories that come out of explaining why Sid created Firaxis, you'd be approaching this quite differently. His current team is awesome, but some of the people he's had to deal with in the past? You'd be ill if you realized in how many ways people have tried to screw him. Ever wonder why Hasbro made two Civ sequels without Sid? Ever wonder why Microsoft made an obvious Civ clone? Did you notice that the guy behind Age of Empires had just quit Firaxis with about fifteen other people two weeks before Microsoft hired them all as a group? If you ever get on the good side of someone at Firaxis, ask about the big exodus in the middle of Civ 3. The story is just amazing.
The point is, go to one of those big game information farms, and get a list of everything Jeff Minter has ever done. Find me two games which aren't clones (fair warning: Hover Bovver is a clone of The Maze of the Minotaur, a board game. Gotta love how the box says "you've never played a game like this before!," when I have my dad's copy printed on cardboard from 20 years before Minter was born.) Once you're done trying to find two games that aren't rip-offs, and only after you've tried, go read his self description on his web page. You'll be nauseous.
The things he's famous for are a Robotron 2084 clone (Llamatron 2184,) a Tempest sequel (Tempest 2000 is Minter, sure, but it's essentially just a faster and prettier version of Tempest by Dan Theurer,) and a broken knock-off of Centipede with some creatures that do Galaga moves (gridrunner / gridrunner++ ; in the original, look for stolen Galaxian graphics on level 9; in Gridrunner++ they don't start until level 15.) Jeff Minter is a second-rate video game Bluebeard. Now he's bragging that his music-aware screensaver is a whole new genre of gaming. I'm lucky enough to know (in passing) Justin Frankel, from where he used to hang out on IRC. I asked him his reaction once. I haven't seen that much swearing, even on IRC, in quite a while.
Jeff doesn't even try to hide his thievery. He steals not only game mechanics but also graphics and even titles from other games. You may not have heard it before, but you're hearing it now. Go take a close look, and ask yourself again whether he's someone you want to defend.
Industry statistics suggest that hard-nosed engineering outperforms agile dramatically. Maybe Agile works better for you, but when fifteen thousand programmers have been measured and more than 95% end up doing better with real metrics, and when these engineers are some of the best on earth (the first military software house to hit CMM5, the Boeing 747 software team, etc,) it's a fair guess that you're the exception rather than the rule. Believe it or not, genuine formal engineering does exist for software, and the training isn't all that expensive.
Is it possible you would do better with up-front planning once you were familiar with a formal method like PSP / TSP? It turns out that saying you're planning hard then writing a bunch of stuff down isn't actually as good as learning statistical methods and keeping years of data from which to make schedules using mathematical models derived from tens of millions of man-hours of detailed real-world data. When the 747 software team sees a 60% time to market drop, a 95% testing time drop and two known bugs in a million and a half lines of code on an 18 month project (as compared to 228 on the previous iteration, by the same people,) it's time to consider whether to learn what it is that's helping them so much. After all, they're actually pretty good at their jobs.
Just a thought.
The norm is that developers, testers, maintainers and users are four separate groups that are kept as far apart as management can manage.
That's funny. I've worked for fourteen software houses. Only two of them behaved this way, and they're both out of business now.
What is it which makes you believe this is the norm?
Whereas I agree with you, there is a consideration here for terms of pure pragmatism - early career coders aren't able to do the kind of planning which ends one up with that kind of long-term maintainable software. Even with proper planning in something like the PSP / TSP, it often just takes someone with real experience to be able to knock something like that out in the first place. You can't begrudge them the experience that their own naïveté has taught them.
That's just stupid; nobody does a city like that.
Philadelphia, New Beijing, Taiwan, Seoul, Londinium, Carthos, Constantinople, Phoenix, Chicago, Tampa, Rio De Janeiro, Tokyo/Kyoto, Sydney, Jakarta and Dubai were all carefully planned. All have scaled to the modern world very well, with the exception of dealing with automobiles, something you can't really fault the ancients for not seeing coming. Essentially the entire Roman empire had very careful city planning, and in fact they did well enough that even now, 2500 years later, their water solutions and much of their infrastructure is still in use today.
Cities ARE built in a "agile development" fashion.
Most of them, yes, but certainly not all of them, and those that aren't ad-hoc are having far fewer problems than those which are.
These days, everybody zones. There's a reason for that. The reason cities are moving away from on-the-fly planning is that we're finally waking up to that just because that's how it's always been done in the past doesn't mean that's how it should be done. Several cities, like my hometown of Pittsburgh, are finding out the hard way that that can cause just tremendous problems in infrastructure which can throttle economies. Have a look at a land value map of Pittsburgh some time, and look at where you have good rail coverage. Compare it to another city, like Chicago or Phoenix, which was planned. You'll notice that in unplanned cities like Pittsburgh, the presence of rail has a comparatively enormous impact on land value, because it offloads industrial infrastructure use, keeping the byways open for commercial and residential use. In planned cities like Phoenix and Chicago, the problem isn't nearly as severe. Notice that Phoenix is growing at something like 60x the national average; Phoenix was nowheresville until about five years after the invention of the air conditioner, and now it's one of America's biggest cities.
There's a reason for that. Actually, I've got a pretty good article for you on the topic - it's 45 pages and very, very detailed, but it's a little dry. Still, give it a shot - for someone who feels that city planning is a good parallel to software planning, it may be eye opening to learn why the cities in the US who are doing the best in terms of scaling are the ones who ignore the trends you correctly point out, and who instead go with a strict urban growth plan whose conceptual parallel would arguably be stricter software methodologies.
The thing is, in my admittedly limited experience, most of the people who really stand behind Agile/XP/Scrumm are people who've only ever dealt with Agile/XP/Scrumm or no methodology at all. It is frequently the case then that people see Agile/XP/Scrumm outperforming a complete lack of organization, and quickly begin to believe that to develop without Agile/XP/Scrumm is suicide. There is a reasonable parallel here in your city planning metaphor - most people who look at city planning think it's all ad-hoc, and don't know about the problems going on in city scaling right now. This turns out to be a massive repeating issue to both the Department of Agriculture and to the Department of the Interior. The case can be made that what you are suggesting amounts to Argumentum ad Antiquitatem, and that indeed though this is how it's usually and traditionally been done doesn't mean that it's how things should be done. By extension of your parallel back to software, the way it's always been done might well be described as the waterfall model or the monolithic model, or even by non-planning entirely, and I think we're all to the point of understanding how big of a mistake that would be. (Might as well do some Structured Programming in COBOL, huhuhu.)
Thing is, though, there are methodologies other than Agile. Agile/XP/Scrumm are very good for in-house software in a business environment, because they are well adapted to unpredict
The saddest thing about this is how correct you are, and how it hinders you. If you and another team developed Product X, and both went 33% over schedule, the other team would hit early milestones, declare progressive success, change the schedule to fit the new needs, allow bloat, hammer in new features to justify the lag, and end up coming in 200% over budget. You would come in 33% over budget, but since you didn't dance around acting like the schedule was the only important thing, your lean and nearly on-time product would be seen as disasterously over-budget, and you wouldn't be allowed to manage again.
It's a pity that what you said is correct, because it encourages a kind of myopic and nearly religious devotion to what is really just a measuring tool, and the results are a massive drop in actual quality in exchange for the feeling of success. What you said is right, but remarkably counterintuitive, and it is my belief that what you're correct about is the primary basis for most of the problems in this industry today.
I wish more people were like you, and were willing to take the up-front hit instead of playing self-deception games to feel better about slippage. You plus a real estimating tool like the PSP/TSP (see propoganda video) are exactly what this industry needs, but facing the problem is so difficult and fixing it so superficially expensive-looking (despite the remarkable cost benefits in the long run) that I think your kind of actual observant development is a long time in coming.
Pat yourself on the back. You've made all the old people proud today.
Hear here. You're exactly right, and it's both disappointing and scary to realize how few people understand what you just said.
If you're ever looking for a game development job in Southern California, you let me know, and I'll get you an interview.
Well sure, except it's not as if Ruby on Rails enables that in any way. That's the fundamental basis of both object-oriented and interface-oriented programming, and has been around since the mid 1980s. (If you're really old, you might say "bah, you can do that with function pointers, and it's been common since BCPL.) Those of us who write CGIs in C++ are still amazed that the web is only just now discovering modularization. Granted almost no PHP you see in the real world is written this way; still, that's not a reflection of PHP, but rather the quality of the people writing the code.
You're quite right to observe that careful differentiation of interface and implementation has a major effect on the long term maintainability of a system. However, I openly take issue with the supposition that that has anything whatsoever to do with RoR, and in fact it's my contention that RoR tries to showhorn you into a combined model where, though there is modularization, the modules are frequently not ideally selected. It is my belief that a programmer can do a better job at modularizing than what RoR forces you into.
Try writing a large-scale web application in C++ sometime. Sure, it takes a while to nail down some simple text parsing stuff, but the long term maintainability makes most other languages look positively silly by comparison. Really, these days I just can't imagine doing web work in anything other than C++, PHP or Erlang, and I write code in more than 60 languages. Yes, you have to put down a lot of groundwork to get underway with C++, but it's my belief that in a large application, the benefits more than outweigh the up-front work.
It's remarkable how many bugs disappear with real, strictly compiled languages.
I know what you're saying is true; I've worked for people like that. Nonetheless, I feel it important to point out that companies like that are generally out of business quickly, and that if you're working somewhere like that, you might want to consider looking around. Not all companies are so naïve, and places with better behavior are usually much more satisfying places to work.
The emphasis on fast devlopment is justified, at least from a business perspective, because first to market gives a huge advantage in software, not to mention the network effect.
Tell that to Yahoo! Groups and Friendster. When the quality of your service suffers, a competitor will take your userbase away. Things like RoR may be great for getting to market first (and that's in fact fairly arguable when you get past trivially simple example code,) but they quickly turn into a ball-and-chain when you start having to face extensibility and performance concerns. People drastically overvalue arbitrary equations like Metcalfe's law, and turn away from the actual statistical data sitting right in front of them. Yahoo's got something like 350m users, and you still almost never see anyone who complains about their 255 user friend list limit. Squaring the user count is just stupid; so is taking its logarithm. Neither of those are based on real world data.
Real world data suggests that almost nobody keeps track of fewer than 10 people or more than 150 people. If you're treating the value of the userbase as growing at anything other than the linear arithmetic mean of 98 users per user (and even then that's arguably much too high,) then you're in for a nasty shock.
If you want a web tool which gets you to market fast and keeps you there, you need to look at PHP or Erlang. No two ways about it. It just isn't worth the ten extra percent speed in development to have to gut it and start over a second time. Besides, unless your whole staff is already deeply familiar with the tools, there's a pretty good chance you'll lose that entire advantage in training time and new-language bugs.
If you're more comfortable in RoR than other tools, and if you're going to pull a Fred Brooks and "plan to throw one away, because you will anyway," then RoR is admittedly a pretty useful prototyping tool. That said, in that arena, in my opinion, LISP just completely owns RoR, as do Erlang, Python and PHP. Erlang and PHP have the advantages of being legitimate places to build a production-level tool.
But, I'll tell you up-front: you do not want a RoR application when you're planning to scale into a large-userbase product. It just falls apart. Flame-suit on, as I'm sure there are a lot of fanboys who are about to tell me I'm full of it and that their game has almost a thousand users or some nonsense like that. I've built services that deal with more than a thousand people simultaneously. I'm not talking out of my ass. I know what hurts when you get into that area, and I know that RoR is just not where I'd want to be.
If you ever get into that kind of place, do yourself a favor and fake the service. Benchmark it. You'll thank me later.
Similiarily start-ups don't care about these issues since they plan on being bought out before they matter.
That kind of startup doesn't get bought out. Surprisingly, the people who can afford to put up eight digits for a product will send in their own engineers to find out if the product is going to be a problem in the long run. If it is, the investor just fights you, instead of buying you; it's cheaper, it's faster, and if your product is a shoddy, thrown-together mess, it'll keep the audience better in the long run.
Besides, these days it's almost impossible to find a startup without ten competitors in the same market space. Odds are damned good that at least one of those competitors did a good job.
Yes these attitudes create serious problems and lead to poorly made software, but what can you do about it?
Compete in the open marketplace, and win. It happens every day. Either make software which isn't of poor quality, or expect to go nowhere. Arguably the best thing about the internet marketplace is that you have access to tens of thousands of vendors. You just don't have to work with someone who cuts corners,
I don't see anything arrogant about my linking to something I said in detail several days ago. I am not saying anything about my importance, nor am I being over-bearing; I just didn't think it appropriate to cut and paste the whole diatribe into SlashDot. In fact, that's what SlashDot prefers one to do. It's how things have worked here for eight years.
So, mr. AC, perhaps you could explain to me what's arrogant about that? And, perhaps you could gather together the gonads to use your account when you answer?
Hey, he is a much-loved industry figure from the 1980s.
Well, he is from the 1980s. He might also be much loved by the fans. He was not much loved within the industry. Game thieves never are.
I remember with fondness disassembling GridRunner on the VIC-20 by hand...
Okay. Go grab the demo from his webpage. You'll be surprised to learn that it's just enemy behavior from Centipede and Galaga, without the mushrooms or enemy formations that made the other two games good, and with a screen saver for a background. He doesn't even try to hide it - at level 9, he starts using graphics stolen from Galaxian (in the PC version of gridrunner++, it starts at 15 instead.) They're not the only ones, but they're the easiest to get to quickly - not that the game is even remotely difficult.
The only real difference between this game and Centipede, besides the progressive level constraints and the stupid sheep jokes, is that Centipede (at least back then) required a trackball.
Your blog does not immediately say what authority you speak from.
Yes, it does. Read it again.
That said, it doesn't really matter who I am; what I say is factual, even if I'm some nobody from under a rock (which I'm not.)
Admittedly when I said hi to phil harrison on wednesday night he blanked me, so i guess I won't get any sony party invites soon unless I tag on with someone else.
Well, if you see me at E3 next year, tell me who you are, and I'll introduce you. Phil and I have gotten along well ever since I met him at one of the panels three years ago, when one of the panellists said something snarky about one of his decisions (he was in the audience, not on the panel, so I just got a chance to speak before he did.) We're not bosom buddies by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm relatively easy to remember by sight - I'm a very large person with very long hair - so he still gets me into doors when he sees me.
I'm honestly getting a little tired of these fanboy reporters wasting what could have been productive interviews by instead parroting the rantings of a clone-factory also-ran. There's a reason nobody can name a game of Jeff's that isn't a sequel or a ripoff: they don't exist. Why is Sony arrogant for not tipping their hand? They've cornered what was a thoroughly dominated market in under two years and held it for more than a decade. Yes, the price is high, but Sony knows how to handle markets; their seven year old PS2 is outselling Microsoft's brand new XBox360 in every territory, even though the 360 is the only one of the next-gen consoles available, and probably will be so until at least Christmas.
News flash: Jeff Minter is Nobody. Film at never.
(His two famous games are a Robotron ripoff and a sequel to someone else's game which is essentially a graphics upgrade and a speed boost. Most people have to look him up online to even come up with another one of his games. C'mon. Arrogant means to exaggerate your own worth in an overbearing manner, and here's some guy who has released 40 games, the sum total of which don't outsell even one game in the Playstation2 Top 100, talking about Sony's full of it because he doesn't like their new price line? Pots and kettles, man.)
There is, of course, nothing trollish about the above. Yay mod abuse.
It seems to me that creating them is exactly what this is about.
Like I said, it's a subtle difference, and I don't expect most people to get it.
Taking a step back, what they're saying is, "XML is hard. But if you make up a pattern of HTML elements and reserve some class names, programs can parse out information in standard ways."
I've never seen anyone say that. Indeed, these are no different than XML itself, and are in fact valid XML. Please show me someone saying the words "XML is hard," or any actual evidence in that direction.
This is the same problem that XML namespaces were intended to solve.
No, it isn't, as I just said in the post you replied to. You can very easily read the W3 discussion that led to the creation of namespaces; they have nothing to do with any of this. Namespaces serve exactly one simple purpose, and it's the exact same simple purpose they serve in C++; indeed the parallel in C++, and the discussion that led to namespaces in C++ in the ISO communit, was very heavily leaned on in the W3 discussions. Namespaces in XML were created solely for the purpose of preventing name conflicts. This is something well documented and easily researched. You really need to not claim the underlying motivation for a tool when said motivation is well documented and contrary to your claim.
But this solution doesn't scale! Eventually you're going to get "formats" that start to step on each other's toes. They use the same class names, or the same pattern of elements. Maybe you want an "event" but want to add some supplementary information about that event using another "format". Do they mingle together?
You seem to be re-iterating questions that were already discussed by other people. Please actually read the discussion tree before engaging in it. This has all been explained and resolved. The reason you think this problem isn't well solved by the solution is that this just isn't what the tool is meant to solve. Similarly, a Honda isn't very good at baking a cake. Someone who doesn't understand what a Honda is for might think they're for baking cakes, since there's an enclosure which builds up a well-controlled temperature which (by revving the gas) can be altered by the person running the car. But, it doesn't "scale well" (cough) because the car has too much ventilation and the cake starts tasting like exhaust.
If IE can get off of its ass and properly support XHTML, this problem is already solved.
IE already supports the part of XHTML that deals with these concerns. It has since IE4. Perhaps you should try it. The things IE has trouble with in XHTML are things like the underlying MIME types and DTD verifications, neither of which are germane here. If you build custom tags in IE, they work just fine. They have for almost 8 years, since before XHTML was even considered. On this topic, IE is in fact way ahead of the curve.
Indeed, it's not at all difficult to dig up MSDN examples of doing exactly these things from 1998.
Create your event in XHTML
Event? What do events have to do with anything?
If you're concerned about how to style this XML data
Nobody was concerned in that way.
remember that CSS can style (or, by extension, hide) XML just fine.
If you'd read the discussion tree you'd realize that we all took that for granted. Will you next tell us that if we're concerned about getting < > in the document that we can use entities?
Please don't join discussions unless you're willing to figure out what people are talking about. It's remarkably rude and conceited.
Yes, that'll look nice out the back of the rack. How many cables?
Well, the whole reason you'd be dealing with 3x larger was to make them all internal. And, depending on your arrangement, probably 16 total. If you're willing to deal with external enclosures, you can knock the whole thing down to 5U. Besides, take a look in a datacenter some time. You'll find the average machine has a dozen or more cables sticking out of it.
put silicone glue in for the inner rails You have a lot of spare time.
It takes like five seconds per screw. To knock $48k down to about $5k, yeah, I've got a few minutes. Bet you would too.
Er, speed is one of Solaris' big selling points, if you'd actually look before announcing. Well, I worked at Sun for 7 years and know a few things about Solaris. If you think Solaris is fast at NFS compared to NetApp, well I beg to differ.
I'm glad to know you're a former Sun engineer; otherwise my reply would be long-winded and probably seem condescending. Basically, the issue here isn't one of OS speed. The issue is of disk speed. The reason ZFS is near-platter speed is that almost all of the work is amortized into the write phase; it's a ridiculously read-focussed scheme, which is appropriate in the rare situations where it's deployed.
Granted that Solaris itself isn't the speed champion it once was, the throttlepoint is the disk subsystem, not the OS/CPU. Sure, if you're doing heavy simulation or something else machine-intensive, that might be a problem. But, in context it seems like we're talking about a data store, and the situations in which a data store has significant non-disk responsibilities are vanishingly rare.
Yeah, uh, ZFS takes like five minutes to set up. It's trivially simple. Why would you pretend otherwise? Have you even touched it?
Yes, I spent two years explaining and demonstrating it to customers. It's a huge change and takes a big mindset change for those who are used to Vxvm or other LVMs.
Well, my apologies; I had not previously realized your familiarity. That said, I'm not sure why that mindset change would come in, specifically from the perspective of an external data store. Perhaps you could enlighten me? Realizing your former position, I now wonder whether I'm missing something, or whether I just took for granted something customers often don't understand.
At least spell "privilege" right in your nit-picking.
I deserved that. Touché.
Also, if we're going to have a "sense of scale" here, there is a huge cost difference between 12 RU and 4 RU in datacenter costs.
Well, yes and no. 4U goes for $50/mo these days from a place like ColoPronto (it may be cheaper elsewhere - I haven't looked in a long time.) So, sure, you're looking at an extra $100/mo. On the other hand, the Thumper fully built out is $48k, whereas the equivalent machine stitched together is about $11k. So, you're looking at about a $37k difference, which at $100/mo is almost 30 years of datacenter rental to break positive.
I'm not saying the Thumper isn't worth it - it damned well is, and Sun isn't stupid. They wouldn't price it up there if it wasn't worth that. The reason isn't the cost of rental, though. The issue is paying the time for someone to put stuff together, to maintain stuff, to handle keeping the machines playing well together, all that jazz. For the little guy (and let's not kid ourselves, that means startups, and startups need these things too,) the Thumper isn't the right way to go. Too much cost up-front, and all the startup kids are dramatically underpaid anyway, so getting them to maintain the box is just cost effective.
That said, that's not Sun's customer base; those kids are usually using BSD or Loonix instead. Sun's customer base are corporations who need the datacenter today or they lose $12k/day. Sun's customer base are people who don't have time to screw with making the server work, because
Uh. Don't get angry until you read context. I didn't say they were the same thing at all. I simply responded to grandparent suggesting that you needed to spend $1000 on the chassis to mount 48 drives. Also, I'm not sure where you get 4x11.
Get angry on your own time. I wasn't talking to you, and I don't need you talking down to me when you don't even realize why I said what I did.
DTDs provide structure but no meaning beyond what humans ascribe to it.
Uh, yeah, that's because that's what they're for. I said the reason he didn't have structure was because he didn't provide an appropriate structure document. Now you're trying to rebutt me by saying that they're really only for structure.
I fail to see the disconnect here.
Likewise, you claim that meaning is not reusable and are not arbitrarily applied, yet you chose to define bug as a Volkswagon, rather than as a vehicle, car, or automobile, all of which would be different to a computer armed with only strncmp()
You seem to have missed the point. The point is that you can't arbitrarily say that this bug is now also a Volkswagon; it is and it always was, if it ever was at all, and if it wasn't, it never will be. You can't copy semantics because they're unique and determinant. There is no germane relationship between two different bugs. Unlike DTD, there is no appropriate measure for standardizing context. The germane point is that a schema and semantics are in many ways need-exclusive: if you have one, the other is effectively useless. If you have a thorough schema for data, then you know perfectly well what's contained, and you don't need to mark it up semantically. If you have thorough semantics, then a schema is redundant.
Incidentially, if you're billing Medicare without the patient's Medicare ID number and it's not failing, I'd really love to know how you got that to work.
In many cases, Medicare will subsidize medical situations not already covered by insurance, even for those who aren't yet Medicare registered. A good example is addiction: the government provides a stipend to people with substance habits under the Americans with Disabilities act of 1976. This coverage is provided through Medicare as a matter of simplifying bureaucracy, and is not in fact limited to the elderly and mentally challenged; you can be a perfectly healthy young person with a cocaine problem, and get help. In those cases, Medicare will reimburse you by your Blue Cross ID, your social security number, or any of a host of other identifying numbers.
Indeed, Medicare does not require a Medicare ID. It simply requires an ID. The reason grandparent's software doesn't require Medicare charges to come from a Medicare ID is that neither does the government.
I'm sure Medicare's insurance fraud people would love to know how you're doing it too.
In general you shouldn't accuse people of fraud regarding a system you don't understand. It's offensive.