Actually, I feel I must dissent. I found nothing whatsoever interesting about that interview at all. He said the same things that every other designer says. I suppose I was deluding myself to think that Sid Meier would have some special insight... but really, his responses were that of Joe game-fan.
Idunno, I guess I just expected a guy who founded the 4X genre and stuck his name on the game title would be a bit more of a character.
Now, to qualify this - I don't know PHP - it may very well have the problems I'm about to describe.
But I've used a lot of Java 1.4 and.NET 1.1, and let me tell you, program lines in Java or C# are a dirt-poor indication of program complexity. Why? Because it is totally impossible to write well-structured code in those languages. Before the generic-enabled versions of those languages, the simplest operations would require writing heaps and heaps of redundant classes. They're just stripped down arithmetic combined with the bare minimum components of OOP, with a spray-gloss of C-like syntax that makes coders think they're smart.
You know why these languages have so many "architects" and books on patterns and layouts and whatnot involved? Why they have code-generators and UML toolkits and all that jazz? Because they're too clumsy to stand up on their own without them.
Your 70k-line Java program would be 50 very legible lines in Plone. The reason that Java and C# succeed is not because of the god-awful languages, but the excellent IDEs and libraries that they come with.
Judging from the replies, you're not alone. I didn't know it was out either. Personally, I think this is a sign that Id's slipping - after Doom 3, nobody's even taking the flagship brand (Quake) seriously anymore.
Plus, it's a Raven game. Raven makes games that are interesting and solid... but somehow fall short of actually being "fun". This will be like Quake 2 but with graphics we've already seen (in Doom 3) and without the kickass deathmatch maps - in short, a reasonably good, artisticly interesting, and thoroughly dull game. The last creative thing Raven did was Hexen, and that game was so frustratingly difficult they changed their policy to be as bland as possible.
The best programmer in my undergrad was a skinny asian dude with drug habits that would've made Hunter S. Thompson blush. He never developed any addictions or problems and graduated near the head of his class. I still believe that the reason he never got in trouble was that he never took the same thing twice in a row.
Case sensitivity was the worst idea in the long and sordid history of bad ideas. A dismal failure in basic usability thoughts, doing what's easier to implement instead of what's right. There is no reason why Foo should be a different identifier from foo except for ease of implementation. Case sensitivity should not exist at any level - including the programming language.
This is one case where I've always believed that MS outperformed the Unix world (primarily by being second and ignoring standards, so they can see what works and what doesn't).
And as for deletion of files that are not in use, a better approach would be to allow one to discover which application is holding a certain file open and kill it. In many cases I've found a file locked with no apparent process doing the locking.
But yes, your mentioned changes would be needed to make it functionally POSIX compliant... but also functionally worse. POSIX is good because it is a standard. It is not good because it is good.
Well, if you really want to teach the subject, why not play the game that specifically had it as subject matter? Colonization was a solid title, but again very challenging. The game really was good at making you see it from a colonist's perspective - you use the natives help until you can't anymore (they help train your colonists in useful skills), then you wipe them out and steal their land because they're in the way.
This is spectacular. I've never seen such a dismal product pitch. It's just fascinating how much that sucks.
There's only one way I'll ever buy one of those esoteric 3rd-party handhelds (I'm happy with my DS, thanks) - full x86 compatibility, to the point that I can load PC-DOS onto the sucker and play old Liero, X-Com and Descent on the damn thing. Until then, keep dreaming.
The difference is that none of those people have the ear of the government like Thomson and McCarthy. The people, maybe, but not the government. Besides, comparing Coulter and Thompson to Moore and Franken is the worst kind of equivocating. Moore's no saint, but Coulter is a freaking lunatic.
The problem is that every solution to the patent problem is subjective, because patents themselves are subjective. There are few clear, absolutist definitions for the concepts required for a patent. Likewise, it's hard to say how to define a fair licensing fee.
One approach would be to base it on the cost involved in re-implementing the patent from scratch. If a patented design can be reimplemented using four man-hours of work from a coder/sysadmin with a computer bought off-the-shelf, then it can't be worth much and doesn't deserve a long life or high licensing costs. Alternately, if designing and implementing a design the patent is based on requires a hundred thousand man hours, a cyclotron, and an array of custom-built 2ghz microcontrollers, than the patent deserves it's high cost and long life.
Of course, this is again, subjective, because how do you determine the cost of an implementation? Do you count tools that can be sold at the end of implementation? Existing infrastructure?
Everything about patents is totally subjective, but for some reason courts insist on being absolutist about them as if it had been handed down by God.
THe problem is that there is no absolutist metric for determining this stuff. Fundamentally, the question is whether or not an idea is "obvious". For example, using a database to track phone usage and refusing to connect once the number of minutes is = 0 is the "obvious" way to implement a Pay-As-You-Go system to any IT professional.
But what defines "obvious"? How do you test for "obviousness"? Ask a recent grad how to solve a problem, and if their first design after a 5 minute session is the device (which I suspect it would be here) is the patent in question? It's such a subjective concept.
Broadband + torrents + multicasting could make TV-on-demand-over-IP a reality. At the minimum, downloading tomorrow evening's programming tonight should be feasible soon. But right now, it takes an evening to fetch an episode over BT most of the time, and few servers can handle the full load of a TV ep, so I don't think the technology is quite there for 100% replacement for a normal couch-potato.
iPod video may still prove to be a gimmick. That's not for certian. However, iTMS videos/movies/TV is a dead-obvious kick-ass product, and I doubt anybody argued that point.
But yeah, you're kicking that strawman's ass. Give 'im hell!
Well, often it could be as simple as a firmware patch. Particularly with companies who're friendly about independants screwing with their firmware (Linksys comes to mind) I doubt it will be a problem.
My concern is the same thing happening with IPV6. Sure, there may be lots more addresses, but who's to say how efficiently they will be dispersed. What happens when ISP's still hand out only _one_ address per user? You still end up hacking NAT crap, except that you've got worse support because people think NAT shouldn't exist anymore.
I know it would be technically monstrous to do, but I've always felt that IPv6 should've been null-terminated or something - some case where the max IP address length could be obscenely long.
Let's not forget Jerry Pournelle. Every non-military character in a Pournelle book seems to be just an effigy of an establishment he want's to tear a hole into. Weak, useless academics, obstructivist politicians, and whiny liberals all exist to keep the heroic military men from saving the universe.
Personally, I can't see any software/hardware solution actually solving the problem, because ultimately there are interface levels that can be sniffed. Ultimately there is a UI somewhere.
I think the best solution is single-use passwords. The password can be obtained from a secure source (phone, in person, etc.) and discarded after it has been used. A little inconvenient, but way better than dongles and doodads.
Ultimately, becaue a windows PC can be compromised in so many ways, you cannot trust your users to secure them. Assume that every single facet of the user's computer has been compromised, from the drives to the USB ports to the screen to the keyboard.
I don't think that any anti-trust suits have been brought to them for their security fixes. The point is that _security_ should be there already, and fixes for security should be free because they basically sold you something that didn't work otherwise.
Meanwhile, bundling in software that competes with competators with the expressed purpose of putting them out of business (note how MS software stagnates the moment the competator is gone) is a whole different story.
Alternately, the layout could be trivially restructured so that the system is no longer a problem. I'm no expert, so stop me if I'm full of crap.
Eliminate non-national top-level domain names. Let each country run their own server for their national TLDs. Move com, net, org, etc. over to.us, so that rotten.com becomes rotten.com.us.
Then the top-level servers will only be just (a) keeping track of the national TLD DNS and (b) receiving and propagating updates from the national DNS. At that point, the top-level servers really don't have that bad a job - the national servers are doing the nasty legwork. Since you only really have to own a few hundred entries (the national TLDs) then the top-level servers could be configured using an excel spreadsheet, and keeping them synchronised would be simple.
Nope. Because it will still cost $200 million to make a game with said photorealistic graphics. As such, only retreads of successful titles will be tolerated. So, expect about a bazillion more releases of Generic Heavy Metal Behind-View Shooter.
Here's the problem - the people who buy games - lots of games, not just once every few months, are teenaged boys. They're insecure, hormonal, and rather stupid. So, games must market to them.
First of all, they violently object to anything stylized as being "kiddy" and "stupid faggy crap" - witness the reaction to "celda". Second, they don't have very complicated tastes.
Also, as costs go up the game industry will become increasingly risk-averse.
So, the games of the future are $200 million titles that feature photorealistic graphics, voices provided by pop artists, and lots and lots of explosions and tits. Plus, since the market grows up in roughly 8 years (assume they start on hardcore action games at 12, and grow out of them in college when they can chase RL tits and beer) then they don't need to worry about rehashing - it doesn't matter if your gameplay has been done 1000 times, these kids never played the original Doom and all it's ripoffs.
I don't think I would expect anyone to know what ENGG245 is at the school I attended. I think it's just a matter of "our school is prestigious and cool and so all non-attendees should get our in-jokes just because of our massive pop-culture integration" just like how people who've never visited New York know the names of the five boroughs thanks to ever other TV show and movie being set there.
Yes. Layers upon layers of abstraction make things crawl. Look around, and you can find a pseudo-language in XML being handled by Python, running on a Java interpreter, which interprets into machine code.
Combine that kind of problem with the usual bad practices. Somewhere in all that mass of code somebody is polling a file to see if it's changed. Somewhere somebody has a busy-wait loop.
Personally, I blame weak macro languages. Functionally solveable programming concepts are being handled at run-time when they shouldn't need to be. Things that should be configured only once are instead being handled by repeatedly parsing text files.
I remember windows 3.1 being perfectly snappy on my 386 and having all the GUI features I needed for easy to use, informative software. We don't have to backtrack all the way to the amber screen and sacrifice usability to our god of efficiency. There were tons of programs that were perfectly fast with extremely helpful UIs back in the day. As much as I loved Word 5.1, I realise that the hotkey-only interface is no longer appopriate. But still, there were fast, light GUIs.
This should set off warning bells. "Linux for Human Beings" requires hacking text files to upgrade.
Meanwhile, do you know how I got my SP2 on Windows? It grabbed it and installed it automatically all through GUI. Of course, it broke half my settings and fscked up some drivers, so that demonstrates how crappy MS software actually is at implementation...
but my point is UI. The fact is that even the most user-friendly *nix distro _still_ isn't safe for Grandma.
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Actually, I feel I must dissent. I found nothing whatsoever interesting about that interview at all. He said the same things that every other designer says. I suppose I was deluding myself to think that Sid Meier would have some special insight... but really, his responses were that of Joe game-fan.
Idunno, I guess I just expected a guy who founded the 4X genre and stuck his name on the game title would be a bit more of a character.
Now, to qualify this - I don't know PHP - it may very well have the problems I'm about to describe.
.NET 1.1, and let me tell you, program lines in Java or C# are a dirt-poor indication of program complexity. Why? Because it is totally impossible to write well-structured code in those languages. Before the generic-enabled versions of those languages, the simplest operations would require writing heaps and heaps of redundant classes. They're just stripped down arithmetic combined with the bare minimum components of OOP, with a spray-gloss of C-like syntax that makes coders think they're smart.
But I've used a lot of Java 1.4 and
You know why these languages have so many "architects" and books on patterns and layouts and whatnot involved? Why they have code-generators and UML toolkits and all that jazz? Because they're too clumsy to stand up on their own without them.
Your 70k-line Java program would be 50 very legible lines in Plone. The reason that Java and C# succeed is not because of the god-awful languages, but the excellent IDEs and libraries that they come with.
Judging from the replies, you're not alone. I didn't know it was out either. Personally, I think this is a sign that Id's slipping - after Doom 3, nobody's even taking the flagship brand (Quake) seriously anymore.
Plus, it's a Raven game. Raven makes games that are interesting and solid... but somehow fall short of actually being "fun". This will be like Quake 2 but with graphics we've already seen (in Doom 3) and without the kickass deathmatch maps - in short, a reasonably good, artisticly interesting, and thoroughly dull game. The last creative thing Raven did was Hexen, and that game was so frustratingly difficult they changed their policy to be as bland as possible.
The best programmer in my undergrad was a skinny asian dude with drug habits that would've made Hunter S. Thompson blush. He never developed any addictions or problems and graduated near the head of his class. I still believe that the reason he never got in trouble was that he never took the same thing twice in a row.
Case sensitivity was the worst idea in the long and sordid history of bad ideas. A dismal failure in basic usability thoughts, doing what's easier to implement instead of what's right. There is no reason why Foo should be a different identifier from foo except for ease of implementation. Case sensitivity should not exist at any level - including the programming language.
This is one case where I've always believed that MS outperformed the Unix world (primarily by being second and ignoring standards, so they can see what works and what doesn't).
And as for deletion of files that are not in use, a better approach would be to allow one to discover which application is holding a certain file open and kill it. In many cases I've found a file locked with no apparent process doing the locking.
But yes, your mentioned changes would be needed to make it functionally POSIX compliant... but also functionally worse. POSIX is good because it is a standard. It is not good because it is good.
That, and they must've used Kleer Skeletons to build the pyramids because it's freaking nuts how many of those little bastards they've got.
Well, if you really want to teach the subject, why not play the game that specifically had it as subject matter? Colonization was a solid title, but again very challenging. The game really was good at making you see it from a colonist's perspective - you use the natives help until you can't anymore (they help train your colonists in useful skills), then you wipe them out and steal their land because they're in the way.
This is spectacular. I've never seen such a dismal product pitch. It's just fascinating how much that sucks.
There's only one way I'll ever buy one of those esoteric 3rd-party handhelds (I'm happy with my DS, thanks) - full x86 compatibility, to the point that I can load PC-DOS onto the sucker and play old Liero, X-Com and Descent on the damn thing. Until then, keep dreaming.
The difference is that none of those people have the ear of the government like Thomson and McCarthy. The people, maybe, but not the government. Besides, comparing Coulter and Thompson to Moore and Franken is the worst kind of equivocating. Moore's no saint, but Coulter is a freaking lunatic.
The problem is that every solution to the patent problem is subjective, because patents themselves are subjective. There are few clear, absolutist definitions for the concepts required for a patent. Likewise, it's hard to say how to define a fair licensing fee.
One approach would be to base it on the cost involved in re-implementing the patent from scratch. If a patented design can be reimplemented using four man-hours of work from a coder/sysadmin with a computer bought off-the-shelf, then it can't be worth much and doesn't deserve a long life or high licensing costs. Alternately, if designing and implementing a design the patent is based on requires a hundred thousand man hours, a cyclotron, and an array of custom-built 2ghz microcontrollers, than the patent deserves it's high cost and long life.
Of course, this is again, subjective, because how do you determine the cost of an implementation? Do you count tools that can be sold at the end of implementation? Existing infrastructure?
Everything about patents is totally subjective, but for some reason courts insist on being absolutist about them as if it had been handed down by God.
THe problem is that there is no absolutist metric for determining this stuff. Fundamentally, the question is whether or not an idea is "obvious". For example, using a database to track phone usage and refusing to connect once the number of minutes is = 0 is the "obvious" way to implement a Pay-As-You-Go system to any IT professional.
But what defines "obvious"? How do you test for "obviousness"? Ask a recent grad how to solve a problem, and if their first design after a 5 minute session is the device (which I suspect it would be here) is the patent in question? It's such a subjective concept.
Broadband + torrents + multicasting could make TV-on-demand-over-IP a reality. At the minimum, downloading tomorrow evening's programming tonight should be feasible soon. But right now, it takes an evening to fetch an episode over BT most of the time, and few servers can handle the full load of a TV ep, so I don't think the technology is quite there for 100% replacement for a normal couch-potato.
iPod video may still prove to be a gimmick. That's not for certian. However, iTMS videos/movies/TV is a dead-obvious kick-ass product, and I doubt anybody argued that point.
But yeah, you're kicking that strawman's ass. Give 'im hell!
Well, often it could be as simple as a firmware patch. Particularly with companies who're friendly about independants screwing with their firmware (Linksys comes to mind) I doubt it will be a problem.
My concern is the same thing happening with IPV6. Sure, there may be lots more addresses, but who's to say how efficiently they will be dispersed. What happens when ISP's still hand out only _one_ address per user? You still end up hacking NAT crap, except that you've got worse support because people think NAT shouldn't exist anymore.
I know it would be technically monstrous to do, but I've always felt that IPv6 should've been null-terminated or something - some case where the max IP address length could be obscenely long.
Let's not forget Jerry Pournelle. Every non-military character in a Pournelle book seems to be just an effigy of an establishment he want's to tear a hole into. Weak, useless academics, obstructivist politicians, and whiny liberals all exist to keep the heroic military men from saving the universe.
This should set of alarm bells to game developers. There is a part of the game so unbearably dull that players will pay cold, hard cash to skip it.
Personally, I can't see any software/hardware solution actually solving the problem, because ultimately there are interface levels that can be sniffed. Ultimately there is a UI somewhere.
I think the best solution is single-use passwords. The password can be obtained from a secure source (phone, in person, etc.) and discarded after it has been used. A little inconvenient, but way better than dongles and doodads.
Ultimately, becaue a windows PC can be compromised in so many ways, you cannot trust your users to secure them. Assume that every single facet of the user's computer has been compromised, from the drives to the USB ports to the screen to the keyboard.
I don't think that any anti-trust suits have been brought to them for their security fixes. The point is that _security_ should be there already, and fixes for security should be free because they basically sold you something that didn't work otherwise.
Meanwhile, bundling in software that competes with competators with the expressed purpose of putting them out of business (note how MS software stagnates the moment the competator is gone) is a whole different story.
Alternately, the layout could be trivially restructured so that the system is no longer a problem. I'm no expert, so stop me if I'm full of crap.
.us, so that rotten.com becomes rotten.com.us.
Eliminate non-national top-level domain names. Let each country run their own server for their national TLDs. Move com, net, org, etc. over to
Then the top-level servers will only be just (a) keeping track of the national TLD DNS and (b) receiving and propagating updates from the national DNS. At that point, the top-level servers really don't have that bad a job - the national servers are doing the nasty legwork. Since you only really have to own a few hundred entries (the national TLDs) then the top-level servers could be configured using an excel spreadsheet, and keeping them synchronised would be simple.
Nope. Because it will still cost $200 million to make a game with said photorealistic graphics. As such, only retreads of successful titles will be tolerated. So, expect about a bazillion more releases of Generic Heavy Metal Behind-View Shooter.
Here's the problem - the people who buy games - lots of games, not just once every few months, are teenaged boys. They're insecure, hormonal, and rather stupid. So, games must market to them.
First of all, they violently object to anything stylized as being "kiddy" and "stupid faggy crap" - witness the reaction to "celda". Second, they don't have very complicated tastes.
Also, as costs go up the game industry will become increasingly risk-averse.
So, the games of the future are $200 million titles that feature photorealistic graphics, voices provided by pop artists, and lots and lots of explosions and tits. Plus, since the market grows up in roughly 8 years (assume they start on hardcore action games at 12, and grow out of them in college when they can chase RL tits and beer) then they don't need to worry about rehashing - it doesn't matter if your gameplay has been done 1000 times, these kids never played the original Doom and all it's ripoffs.
Yay future.
You do realise that such an argument is going to get fleshed out into a whole song in said musical.
o_O
I don't think I would expect anyone to know what ENGG245 is at the school I attended. I think it's just a matter of "our school is prestigious and cool and so all non-attendees should get our in-jokes just because of our massive pop-culture integration" just like how people who've never visited New York know the names of the five boroughs thanks to ever other TV show and movie being set there.
Yes. Layers upon layers of abstraction make things crawl. Look around, and you can find a pseudo-language in XML being handled by Python, running on a Java interpreter, which interprets into machine code.
Combine that kind of problem with the usual bad practices. Somewhere in all that mass of code somebody is polling a file to see if it's changed. Somewhere somebody has a busy-wait loop.
Personally, I blame weak macro languages. Functionally solveable programming concepts are being handled at run-time when they shouldn't need to be. Things that should be configured only once are instead being handled by repeatedly parsing text files.
I remember windows 3.1 being perfectly snappy on my 386 and having all the GUI features I needed for easy to use, informative software. We don't have to backtrack all the way to the amber screen and sacrifice usability to our god of efficiency. There were tons of programs that were perfectly fast with extremely helpful UIs back in the day. As much as I loved Word 5.1, I realise that the hotkey-only interface is no longer appopriate. But still, there were fast, light GUIs.
This should set off warning bells. "Linux for Human Beings" requires hacking text files to upgrade.
Meanwhile, do you know how I got my SP2 on Windows? It grabbed it and installed it automatically all through GUI. Of course, it broke half my settings and fscked up some drivers, so that demonstrates how crappy MS software actually is at implementation...
but my point is UI. The fact is that even the most user-friendly *nix distro _still_ isn't safe for Grandma.