If you can, hunt down a ROM of a game called "Somari". This is NOT endorsed by Sega or Nintendo; it's a Chinese bootleg game. It is a brilliant adaptation of the Sonic the Hedgehog engine, except with Mario as a main character. It even plays rudimentary synthesized (i.e., not just square waves) music on the NES hardware, all while going full speed!
Knowing Microsoft, the approach they will take to "get serious" about security will mirror their previous approaches when they decide they need some new technology. It will likely play out as follows:
1) Purchase a technology leader in security. (Maybe RSA. Hey, maybe Schneier's outfit!)
2) Cannibalize their product and incorporate it into Windows.
3) Screw it up royally.
Re:Perl, Python, Mono, what next for Billy's Borg
on
.NETly News
·
· Score: 2
To answer your questions:
1) Larry Wall, who gave a ringing endorsement of Visual Perl a few years ago (that was before.NET though); and
2) Yes! It's called Visual J#.
Signs that .NET will take over
on
.NETly News
·
· Score: 1
I've been almost convinced that as much as it is just another Microsoft copycat "innovation", the.NET marketecture will be where the bulk of programming will take place in a few years.
Now, I am utterly convinced.
Why you ask? Because Slashdot is running Visual Studio.NET banner ads. With such a ringing endorsement from OSDN, normally Microsoft's biggest critics, how can.NET not fail?
Re:Classes and APIs more important than language
on
What is .NET?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
This reminds me of something...
One of the early premises behind the Guile project was that all languages are essentially Scheme, modulo their different syntaxes. Guile was thus to become a Scheme interpreter with various syntax front ends on it to translate from Perl, Tcl, etc. Essentially achieving language independence in a unified runtime. The Guile team has largely abandoned these efforts, however, and concentrated on making Guile a practical workhorse Scheme for standalone use or embedded in a larger program.
I'm a big Scheme and Guile fan, and a part of me is disappointed... Scheme, being self-extensible, would make for a much more robust base upon which to construct a language-neutral runtime than the C# and VB-oriented CLR.
Because of blazing fast compilation times one will definitly get in the spirit of using the debugger. First, you will get used to doing full recompiles once after you implement one method. Then you will get use to using breakpoints and watches to find bugs. I love using breakpoints, watches, evaluations, etc. It is the way to go. However, Visual C++ fosters bad debuging habits in the form of that stupid TRACE macro, or the Win32 API call OutputDebugString. It is like using printf to figure out the state of your program to try to figure out the bug.
Hey, don't knock debugging by printf(). Saved my ass at times when the shiny debugging tools failed.
Smart managers will let their programmers use whatever gets the job done.
Smart programmers will choose the most powerful tools for their job.
They don't get the mainstream IT press headlines that Java, C#,.NET, and even Python do, but really "cool" languages like Smalltalk and LISP are seeing heavy use out there in the Real World. The bulk of C# and Java work will be the domain of code monkeys; the really cool stuff is being done with a variety of tools and languages.
... is Smalltalk. In its standard form it's missing multiple inheritance, but is powerful enough to tackle just about any OOP task, even without MI. What the IDE is like depends on the environment you get; but I hear great things about VisualAge.
-- Your copy protected HDTV, D-VHS, "rights managed" media, etc. will fail in the marketplace. Should you purchase legislation to mandate them, people will simply turn elsewhere for entertainment.
Not if it means missing the series finale of Friends, where Ross, Joey, Chandler, Monica, Rachel, and Phoebe cast fate to the wind and engage in an all-out orgy.
That reminds me of Short Circuit 2 in which Benjamin Jahrvi (who gets his idioms mixed up, 'cause he's a foreigner, get it?) says, "Oh, you are hitting the nail right between the eyes."
The Euro is gold-backed. The US dollar is not. As a result, eventually, the global economy will shift towards reliance on the Euro instead of the dollar.
Console RPGs were in fact very heavily influenced by PC adventure games. In fact, the first successful RPG for NES, a precursor to the Final Fantasy series, was called Dragon Quest, no doubt an homage to the * Quest series on PC. DQ worked by having a menu of commands at the top of each screen, like an adventure game, instead of just hitting the "Use" button.
I've been a big fan of Sierra games, and Space Quest games in particular, ever since I was a kid. And then we got a multimedia kit which included Space Quest 4 as a bundle-in. Man, I was in hog heaven. This wasn't a game with cheap multimedia features slapped on. It was a gem, with formerly textual dialog spoken by the characters (with real lip-sync and great voice acting). And a narrative (a staple for any Space Quest game) provided by none other than Gary Owens, the voice of Powdered Toast Man! Hearing him say that I've been a real pantload when I die makes me crack a smile.
I think what he's saying is that you can't just pass code around willy-nilly like you pass JPEGs or text files since programs have the potential to actually do something.[1] Microsoft, and the Windows world in general, is incredibly cavalier about distributing.EXEs and macros all over the place since they operate on two basic assumptions:
1) Everybody runs Windows.
2) Any program you run will have been written by Microsoft, by third-party company, or by your own organization.
Hence, ActiveX. Microsoft's original response to Java: why use a clunky interpreted runtime when you just hand 'em an EXE? After all they're running Windows, right?
Java was designed with the purpose of making it safer to pass code around willy-nilly since the runtime does some checks to make sure the code is safe before executing it, at least in theory. The Java security model isn't bulletproof but that's the idea. Java actually turned out to be a big win because it's reasonably cross-platform, easy to code for, and has a huge API.
Anyway, the moral of the story is this: As developers we must take responsibility for what we write; as users we must take responsibility for what we run.
[1]I once conversed with someone who told me straight-facedly that he knew a way to put a virus in a JPEG so if you opened it in a browser or viewer program, it would infect your disk. I asked him how and he mentioned some BS about Sub7, then said he wasn't going to tell me; the technique was too secret and precious to divulge. Which is l33t h4x0r for "I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about."
I have a name for those "Wired magazine visionaries and gurus". I call them Latte Drinkers. (Yes, the reference to Quiche Eaters is entirely intentional.) Latte Drinkers like to pontificate about that which they don't understand. They are bogon emitters. They latch onto the cultures they find on the net, parasitize them, and generate hype about technology they can't be arsed to learn about. They may be largely responsible for the tech bubble of the late nineties. Of course they won't fade away as the bubble collapses; they'll just find something new to latch onto. But they're still around. Case in point, the author of the above article exhibits Latte Drinker behavior to such a degree that it's a wonder he's still kept around on a "news for nerds" site. Go figure.
RMS is actually a Harvard graduate. MIT was his place of employment when he started the GNU project. The man is smart, and knows his software; there is no denying that.
Looking at the original playstation, and comparing it to a PC in the same era, let's see what you get. It had a 33 MHz core processor (CPU) for doing the I/O/Physics/backend work, a seperate GPU with its own memory for graphics, and a seperate SPU (Sound processing unit)for the audio. All well balanced, and each part doing its job individually, controlled and piped by the IO processor, are capable of beating the shit out of a P-200 with a Voodoo graphics accelarator (which was commonplace when the PS-1 came out).
Erm, no. Have you ever looked closely at PlayStation graphics? While in the hands of the right developers the PS1 produced impressive visuals, it was by no means capable of "beating the shit out of" a PC with a decent 3D accel. The textures were not filtered, and were not entirely perspective correct, producing strange "warping" effects when you approached a wall in many games. The final image was, I believe, rendered in something less than 16-bit color, as dithering is quite apparent in many games (Silent Hill being a good example; gotta love that halftone fog). The Voodoo had much higher quality output, and did so at twice the resolution or four times the screen area of the PS1.
I will agree with your contention that the X-box was sort of cobbled together so Microsoft could say they had something BETTAR TAHN PS2, but the real-world performance doesn't match the hype by a long shot.
Re:I work in AI, and...
on
Arguing A.I.
·
· Score: 2
The question of whether "humans are computers", or rather, whether or not all of the functions that constitute human intelligence are possible within the confines of a Turing machine, is far from a definitive answer. Part of the problem is that we don't have a working definition of "human intelligence" because we haven't successfully reverse engineered our own brains yet.
Until that happens and we start answering these fundamental questions, then the debate about whether strong AI will occur and whether robots will rule the earth (hail King Bender), will remain the domain of science fiction authors and Latte Drinkers.
As Cipher said, "Surprise, Enstein!" DirectX has won the 3D standard wars; it's from Microsoft, ergo it is the standard. OpenGL is a niche market; I don't think the reporter even knows what it is. If Carmack mentioned OpenGL without explanantion to a clueless tech "journalist", the assumption that Carmack magicked it out of the void is not surprising, albeit no less disappointing.
But the most common offense I see is when they put in ads for their own company or development team. Sure it was funny maybe a few years ago, but I don't want to see giant ads for Interplay, Inc. or "Team Blue" in every game I play. (Note to developers: this also goes for pictures of your family and obscure in-jokes that only Bob will find hilarous.)
Oh, yeah, and while we're on the topic, note to John Carmack: User Friendly is not funny. Burying the Dust Puppy somewhere in level Q3DMumpteen is a pretty lackluster easter egg, especially when compared to the famous John Romero Head of Death.
Technically, the 2600 Atari ET game had Reese's Pieces in it. True they were represented by little white dots, and even the manual skirted deftly around calling them by name, but still...
I was a little peeved at the presence of blatant promotions for Soap shoes in the game Sonic Adventure 2. Sonicteam kind of represented an independent spirit, despite the often shameless marketing of their mascot, and it kind of saddened me to see them tie the little blue guy to yet another way for preteens to injure themselves.
It's fun looking for the ads-- real and fake-- in SA2, though. "Got Ring?"
Slashdot Mirror
That reminds me...
If you can, hunt down a ROM of a game called "Somari". This is NOT endorsed by Sega or Nintendo; it's a Chinese bootleg game. It is a brilliant adaptation of the Sonic the Hedgehog engine, except with Mario as a main character. It even plays rudimentary synthesized (i.e., not just square waves) music on the NES hardware, all while going full speed!
Knowing Microsoft, the approach they will take to "get serious" about security will mirror their previous approaches when they decide they need some new technology. It will likely play out as follows:
1) Purchase a technology leader in security. (Maybe RSA. Hey, maybe Schneier's outfit!)
2) Cannibalize their product and incorporate it into Windows.
3) Screw it up royally.
To answer your questions:
.NET though); and
1) Larry Wall, who gave a ringing endorsement of Visual Perl a few years ago (that was before
2) Yes! It's called Visual J#.
I've been almost convinced that as much as it is just another Microsoft copycat "innovation", the .NET marketecture will be where the bulk of programming will take place in a few years.
.NET banner ads. With such a ringing endorsement from OSDN, normally Microsoft's biggest critics, how can .NET not fail?
Now, I am utterly convinced.
Why you ask? Because Slashdot is running Visual Studio
This reminds me of something...
One of the early premises behind the Guile project was that all languages are essentially Scheme, modulo their different syntaxes. Guile was thus to become a Scheme interpreter with various syntax front ends on it to translate from Perl, Tcl, etc. Essentially achieving language independence in a unified runtime. The Guile team has largely abandoned these efforts, however, and concentrated on making Guile a practical workhorse Scheme for standalone use or embedded in a larger program.
I'm a big Scheme and Guile fan, and a part of me is disappointed... Scheme, being self-extensible, would make for a much more robust base upon which to construct a language-neutral runtime than the C# and VB-oriented CLR.
Hey, don't knock debugging by printf(). Saved my ass at times when the shiny debugging tools failed.
Smart managers will let their programmers use whatever gets the job done.
.NET, and even Python do, but really "cool" languages like Smalltalk and LISP are seeing heavy use out there in the Real World. The bulk of C# and Java work will be the domain of code monkeys; the really cool stuff is being done with a variety of tools and languages.
Smart programmers will choose the most powerful tools for their job.
They don't get the mainstream IT press headlines that Java, C#,
... is Smalltalk. In its standard form it's missing multiple inheritance, but is powerful enough to tackle just about any OOP task, even without MI. What the IDE is like depends on the environment you get; but I hear great things about VisualAge.
Not if it means missing the series finale of Friends, where Ross, Joey, Chandler, Monica, Rachel, and Phoebe cast fate to the wind and engage in an all-out orgy.
Think I'm joking? Just watch...
That reminds me of Short Circuit 2 in which Benjamin Jahrvi (who gets his idioms mixed up, 'cause he's a foreigner, get it?) says, "Oh, you are hitting the nail right between the eyes."
The Euro is gold-backed. The US dollar is not. As a result, eventually, the global economy will shift towards reliance on the Euro instead of the dollar.
Or you could run Bochs. Or MESS in PC mode. :)
Console RPGs were in fact very heavily influenced by PC adventure games. In fact, the first successful RPG for NES, a precursor to the Final Fantasy series, was called Dragon Quest, no doubt an homage to the * Quest series on PC. DQ worked by having a menu of commands at the top of each screen, like an adventure game, instead of just hitting the "Use" button.
I've been a big fan of Sierra games, and Space Quest games in particular, ever since I was a kid. And then we got a multimedia kit which included Space Quest 4 as a bundle-in. Man, I was in hog heaven. This wasn't a game with cheap multimedia features slapped on. It was a gem, with formerly textual dialog spoken by the characters (with real lip-sync and great voice acting). And a narrative (a staple for any Space Quest game) provided by none other than Gary Owens, the voice of Powdered Toast Man! Hearing him say that I've been a real pantload when I die makes me crack a smile.
I think what he's saying is that you can't just pass code around willy-nilly like you pass JPEGs or text files since programs have the potential to actually do something.[1] Microsoft, and the Windows world in general, is incredibly cavalier about distributing .EXEs and macros all over the place since they operate on two basic assumptions:
1) Everybody runs Windows.
2) Any program you run will have been written by Microsoft, by third-party company, or by your own organization.
Hence, ActiveX. Microsoft's original response to Java: why use a clunky interpreted runtime when you just hand 'em an EXE? After all they're running Windows, right?
Java was designed with the purpose of making it safer to pass code around willy-nilly since the runtime does some checks to make sure the code is safe before executing it, at least in theory. The Java security model isn't bulletproof but that's the idea. Java actually turned out to be a big win because it's reasonably cross-platform, easy to code for, and has a huge API.
Anyway, the moral of the story is this: As developers we must take responsibility for what we write; as users we must take responsibility for what we run.
[1]I once conversed with someone who told me straight-facedly that he knew a way to put a virus in a JPEG so if you opened it in a browser or viewer program, it would infect your disk. I asked him how and he mentioned some BS about Sub7, then said he wasn't going to tell me; the technique was too secret and precious to divulge. Which is l33t h4x0r for "I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about."
I have a name for those "Wired magazine visionaries and gurus". I call them Latte Drinkers. (Yes, the reference to Quiche Eaters is entirely intentional.) Latte Drinkers like to pontificate about that which they don't understand. They are bogon emitters. They latch onto the cultures they find on the net, parasitize them, and generate hype about technology they can't be arsed to learn about. They may be largely responsible for the tech bubble of the late nineties. Of course they won't fade away as the bubble collapses; they'll just find something new to latch onto. But they're still around. Case in point, the author of the above article exhibits Latte Drinker behavior to such a degree that it's a wonder he's still kept around on a "news for nerds" site. Go figure.
RMS is actually a Harvard graduate. MIT was his place of employment when he started the GNU project. The man is smart, and knows his software; there is no denying that.
Erm, no. Have you ever looked closely at PlayStation graphics? While in the hands of the right developers the PS1 produced impressive visuals, it was by no means capable of "beating the shit out of" a PC with a decent 3D accel. The textures were not filtered, and were not entirely perspective correct, producing strange "warping" effects when you approached a wall in many games. The final image was, I believe, rendered in something less than 16-bit color, as dithering is quite apparent in many games (Silent Hill being a good example; gotta love that halftone fog). The Voodoo had much higher quality output, and did so at twice the resolution or four times the screen area of the PS1.
I will agree with your contention that the X-box was sort of cobbled together so Microsoft could say they had something BETTAR TAHN PS2, but the real-world performance doesn't match the hype by a long shot.
The question of whether "humans are computers", or rather, whether or not all of the functions that constitute human intelligence are possible within the confines of a Turing machine, is far from a definitive answer. Part of the problem is that we don't have a working definition of "human intelligence" because we haven't successfully reverse engineered our own brains yet.
Until that happens and we start answering these fundamental questions, then the debate about whether strong AI will occur and whether robots will rule the earth (hail King Bender), will remain the domain of science fiction authors and Latte Drinkers.
"Mr. Evil..."
"Dr. Evil. I didn't spend four years in evil medical school to be called Mr., thank you very much."
^_^
As Cipher said, "Surprise, Enstein!" DirectX has won the 3D standard wars; it's from Microsoft, ergo it is the standard. OpenGL is a niche market; I don't think the reporter even knows what it is. If Carmack mentioned OpenGL without explanantion to a clueless tech "journalist", the assumption that Carmack magicked it out of the void is not surprising, albeit no less disappointing.
Oh, yeah, and while we're on the topic, note to John Carmack: User Friendly is not funny. Burying the Dust Puppy somewhere in level Q3DMumpteen is a pretty lackluster easter egg, especially when compared to the famous John Romero Head of Death.
Technically, the 2600 Atari ET game had Reese's Pieces in it. True they were represented by little white dots, and even the manual skirted deftly around calling them by name, but still...
I was a little peeved at the presence of blatant promotions for Soap shoes in the game Sonic Adventure 2. Sonicteam kind of represented an independent spirit, despite the often shameless marketing of their mascot, and it kind of saddened me to see them tie the little blue guy to yet another way for preteens to injure themselves.
It's fun looking for the ads-- real and fake-- in SA2, though. "Got Ring?"
... that Bender will become our king? He'll mess up the entire robot government within six months!