By what, 0.00001% of the population? It hardly seems worth even thinking about -- almost every word has a negative connotation in some context or another, if you look hard enough...
It seems to me that the computing industry is slowly moving the way of VMS. They had it perfect - in many ways - 30 years ago
VMS was a commercial OS that paid a lot more attention to issues like security, reliability, etc and in the real world, most systems end up implementing similar functionality -- but the fussy and complicated VMS interfaces and mechanisms are usually not what we want or need.
VMS is dead of course, so serves as an example to be learned from, not something to copy. Thank god too; while it had some neat features, from a user's or programmer's viewpoint, VMS was an overly complex mess, and the emphasis on simplicity and elegance brought in by the rise of Unix was a much-needed corrective in the industry.
"supports more devices" doesn't count for much when "more devices" is MFM hard disks, ISA network cards and other assorted stuff which simply hasn't been seen in the wild by most people for years.
Perhaps not, but it's not very relevant actually. Linux supports a vast number of devices however you look at it, old or new. Support for extremely new hardware is always going to be an issue for non-microsoft software as long as the the device manufacturers ignore or even actively try to prevent support for it, but Linux simply has more mind-share, more developers, and more companies working with it than other free OSes, and as a result has overall better support for new hardware. In general the coverage is quite good.
I'm not trying to bash Sony, but in most years it is pretty impressive if 6 Million units of all systems combined get sold in Q1 in Japan and North America.
Sony's main goal at this point is to keep the keep the hype, smoke, and mirrors going long enough to fool 3rd-party game developers into dedicating lots of resources towards making ps3 games. If they can keep that up long enough, and the ps3 becomes known as the "system to have" (and Sony can eek though some kind of price drop), the future will sort itself out more or less.
If not.... well, I think Sony simply cannot even let itself thing about that possibility; they've bet an awful lot on the ps3 dominating...
she has the potential to do so and get out of the programming field altogether.
So, buck up fellow creaking-jointed, progressive-bifocal-wearing, relaxed-fit-docker's-wearing folks, it's never too late to start again!
I dunno, I'm in the same age bracket as you, and even after 25 years in the field, I absolutely love programming -- the amount of fascinating stuff there is to do with the same core skillset is just amazing, given how computers play an increasingly large part in a vast number of fields. I'm an old school hacker I guess: I view the field as much or more as a craft (in the fine woodworking sense) than as an engineering field, and get a lot of satisfaction from an elegant solution to a problem.
Of course it is a huge field, and there are certainly a lot of boring programming jobs... avoid those ones.:-)
I've changed jobs or projects every year or two during that time though, and would probably be going crazy otherwise, but even within one company (I've been at my current position for 9 years) there are constantly cool new things to do -- I've done large amounts of kernel hacking, low level embedded work, done gcc ports and from-scratch compilers, and I constantly see new stuff I'd like to do if I get the chance.
I've been involved in the Free Software community for a long time, and I think this helps a lot: it gives you a relaxed global community to serve as a counterweight to the very local pressures of a job, and a very easy way to tentatively explore new fields that might be interesting. With the increasing prominence of FOSS in industry, this relationship is becoming more and more natural. [Of course, the rise of the internet is probably the technical basis for the increasingly global opportunities offered by FOSS, but I don't think that's enough -- FOSS's emphasis on free exchange of ideas and working towards common goals is critically important.]
"Sky Captain..." had good intentions, but it was an awful movie (that's why critics panned it). Despite the gorgeous computer generated scenery and a very nice "feel" (the whole 30s pulp/newsreel thing), the characters were so incredibly flat and uninvolving, and the plot such an uncompelling random mishmash, that I found myself nodding off despite my initial enthusiasm. The creators had a very neat idea, but they apparently just didn't have the movie-making chops to pull it off.
Raiders of the Lost Ark on the other hand, was a very good movie. The characters were interesting and charismatic, the plot kept you on the edge of your seat, and the pacing was just about perfect. Spielberg is a much better director than Lucas, and somehow working together with Lucas (and Ford) seemed to keep Spielberg on track, and restrained him from indulging in his most annoying habits (seen in his own rather saccharine movies from that period).
It would be cool if Lucas/Spielberg/Ford can pull it off again, even if they have to use large dollops of CGI and a family pack of canes to do so.
Fukuoka, Japan. Has fiber-to-the-house. Has had it for years. Pays less for it than you'd pay for xDSL or cablemodem here, and the bandwidth is incredible.
In Japan there are many more high-population density areas where people have a reasonably high average income, and as a result, there are many more companies competing to provide the same service: in one place, even in the suburbs, you'll get the telephone company, the cable company, and the electric company all building high-speed networks, including the final segment to individual homes/apartments. Any company that has any kind of pipes or conduit that might be used for optical fibers (the electric company strings them alongside the power lines) is putting them in, and they know they can't overcharge for long without getting destroyed by the competition in this environment.
I dunno if the U.S. has the kind of density in many places to support that, or whether the utility companies have the competitive instinct to go for it even where it does make sense....
Agreed. Roland has a tremendously weird name, and a fairly lame website, but he often submits interesting stories, and he apparently spends a lot of time doing it. I don't why we should care that a story is from him as long as it's interesting...
I've been running eclipse for the first time recently, working on a very large java project with someone else.
I've been very pleasantly surprised with it. Even though I'm using a pretty low-spec machine for this day and age -- a 450 MHz PIII with 512 MB of ram -- eclipse is absolutely fine, indeed it's quite responsive and solid. Of course when it needs to rebuild the entire project for some reason, it takes a while, but for normal usage, it's great.
I imagine it's very spiffy indeed on a more modern box!
You did catch the part where "Command-O" (which is a pretty good mnemonic for "Open this item") also works, right?
Geez, of course he got that.
But command-O, while it's not the worst binding for open, is not exactly the best either. People expect the big obvious return key to do that, because it's just, well, obvious (in a huge number of contexts, return basically means "activate"/"run"), as well as being rather more convenient than command-O.
"Rename" is an occasional comand that really doesn't deserve the biggest most convenient key on the keyboard, especially one whose traditional meaning is something different.
$499 'too pricey' for games that already look like this(Motorstorm):
Yes.
I've played the PS3 in the store, and while it looks nice, it clearly didn't live up to the hype, and my overall impression was sort of "meh". Not worth the price. I may get one when it hits $250 or so.
They aren`t quite objects if you need to conceptualize them in a different way...
The phrase "object oriented" does not refer to single implementation technique, it refers to a general category of languages. Perhaps the majority of people are more familiar with C++/java style class-based designs, but there are many others. One of the most famous (in the research community at least) is "prototype based" languages, of which the "Self" language is the most well-known example. Javascript, it would seem, is a Self-style prototype-based language.
Actually the vast majority of recently written (last 5 years) code I've seen from CS departments (at very good schools) has been in Java, with C++ a somewhat distant second. This seems to apply across the board, from hard-core long term research projects to undergrad frameworks to quick experimental coding.
I don't particularly like java (and it's particularly painful watching the hoops people jump through to make it perform well), but while it doesn't seem to really be the best at anything, I guess on average it turns out pretty well -- it's pretty safe, pretty fast, pretty readable, pretty well supported, pretty widespread,... One important point that many people seem to ignore is that java seems to have huge number of freely available libraries, often for somewhat specialized subjects.
The languages you mention are all great languages, and have carved out productive niches, but they seem to remain niche languages, even in academia...
[Disclaimer: I have never written a java program (!), though I have read many...]
What's amusing is that a previous ECMA rubber-stamping of a microsoft product as a "standard" was the C# language, which (at that point) almost nobody used!!
It's pretty clear that ECMA exists mainly as a tool for rich corporations, when they want to add a veneer of respectability to something (and/or subvert government purchasing regulations).
Wikipedia might be a novel human achievement, it might be the best they could do, but at the end of the day, it's a boat that almost floats; not good enough to be put to practical use.
Speak for yourself.
Wikipedia obviously is far from perfect, but it's certainly good enough for "practical use" in many subjects. I normally use it to look up mathematics-related articles, and while wikipedia's math-related articles tend to be a bit less elegantly written than more specialized sites (e.g. wolfram's mathworld), they are often more useful. I typically check multiple sites to get different perspectives but it's usually wikipedia that strikes the best balance of breadth/depth/accessibility (for instance, wikipeda tends to do a much better job of presenting a subject from the point of view of multiple fields, and giving practical examples and algorithms to illustrate them).
[My biggest complaint about wikipedia is not accuracy but rather that articles sometimes have a sort of clumsy "scattershot" tone that I suppose is the result of having multiple editors edit over time -- however this is also what gives the articles their welcome breadth. Ideally it would be nice if each article had a single editor concentrating just on language and structure, smoothing over the effects of multiple "content" editors.]
Emphasis mine. That pretty much sums up the article.
Yeah. Sofke sounds like he's got some serious self-image issues -- he's got a lot emotionally invested in being a "733t hardcore gamer" and predictably reacts rather negatively to anything new which puts him on the same level as the unwashed masses.
For everyone's claim of McDonalds being lame I just have to ask, with population numbers like it has what does that make the other restaurants? (Having never played WoW, I know next to nothing about it. I just hate that argument.)
It's the "a million flies can't be wrong" argument...:-)
10 Gig HDD that came with an IBM PII (I think) is still spinning Windows for my Athlon64. Geek cred +1
4.5 GB drive with 50-pin SCSI interface. I bought this drive used about 5 years ago for like $15, and it's been solid as a rock since, running nothing but Debian....
Kind of a pain always having to delete stuff when I want to install OpenOffice.org to edit someone's.doc file though (never leave it installed:-).
I watched some ps3 kiosks in a store yesterday -- one showing demo loops and one live unit with ridge racer -- and the graphics were actually sort of "meh". Definitely high-res, but that's about it really. The unit showing demo loops had some nice special effects in places (whereas ridge racer seemed pretty "last-gen"), but it was a really mixed bag, lots of low frame-rates, bad animation, weird lighting artifacts etc. Rige racer seemed like it could have been running on a ps2/gc/xbox (albeit probably not on an HDTV).
I suppose the graphics will improve later as developers gain experience, but honestly, given all the hype, I was expecting to be blown away, and wasn't. It's a nice update to the ps2 (which was always a bit weak graphically), to be sure, but it's not at all clear that it's really worth twice what the competition is asking. It's certainly not the life-changing experience Kutaragi seems to think it is.
Yeah, the dualshock is at best a highly mediocre controller, I find it kind of painful to use for long periods of time. Sony just doesn't seem to do much in the way of testing when they design controllers -- it's like they design based entirely on the way it looks, not how it feels (and it's true, the D.S. does look pretty good).
As far as the article, I don't know what they were smoking, the grades they assigned seem almost completely random (and with little apparent connection to the accompanying text)!
I guess this article says more about the state of gaming journalism than it does about any of the consoles... [hmm, now I notice the page header: "AOL games"....]
Slashdot Mirror
"Tagging" is often used to refer to graffiti
By what, 0.00001% of the population? It hardly seems worth even thinking about -- almost every word has a negative connotation in some context or another, if you look hard enough...
Hey if I had a million bucks and a Chihuahua, I'd pay Madonna to sit on it. Boy it must be fun to be rich!
It seems to me that the computing industry is slowly moving the way of VMS. They had it perfect - in many ways - 30 years ago
VMS was a commercial OS that paid a lot more attention to issues like security, reliability, etc and in the real world, most systems end up implementing similar functionality -- but the fussy and complicated VMS interfaces and mechanisms are usually not what we want or need.
VMS is dead of course, so serves as an example to be learned from, not something to copy. Thank god too; while it had some neat features, from a user's or programmer's viewpoint, VMS was an overly complex mess, and the emphasis on simplicity and elegance brought in by the rise of Unix was a much-needed corrective in the industry.
"supports more devices" doesn't count for much when "more devices" is MFM hard disks, ISA network cards and other assorted stuff which simply hasn't been seen in the wild by most people for years.
Perhaps not, but it's not very relevant actually. Linux supports a vast number of devices however you look at it, old or new. Support for extremely new hardware is always going to be an issue for non-microsoft software as long as the the device manufacturers ignore or even actively try to prevent support for it, but Linux simply has more mind-share, more developers, and more companies working with it than other free OSes, and as a result has overall better support for new hardware. In general the coverage is quite good.
I'm not trying to bash Sony, but in most years it is pretty impressive if 6 Million units of all systems combined get sold in Q1 in Japan and North America.
Sony's main goal at this point is to keep the keep the hype, smoke, and mirrors going long enough to fool 3rd-party game developers into dedicating lots of resources towards making ps3 games. If they can keep that up long enough, and the ps3 becomes known as the "system to have" (and Sony can eek though some kind of price drop), the future will sort itself out more or less.
If not.... well, I think Sony simply cannot even let itself thing about that possibility; they've bet an awful lot on the ps3 dominating...
she has the potential to do so and get out of the programming field altogether.
... avoid those ones. :-)
So, buck up fellow creaking-jointed, progressive-bifocal-wearing, relaxed-fit-docker's-wearing folks, it's never too late to start again!
I dunno, I'm in the same age bracket as you, and even after 25 years in the field, I absolutely love programming -- the amount of fascinating stuff there is to do with the same core skillset is just amazing, given how computers play an increasingly large part in a vast number of fields. I'm an old school hacker I guess: I view the field as much or more as a craft (in the fine woodworking sense) than as an engineering field, and get a lot of satisfaction from an elegant solution to a problem.
Of course it is a huge field, and there are certainly a lot of boring programming jobs
I've changed jobs or projects every year or two during that time though, and would probably be going crazy otherwise, but even within one company (I've been at my current position for 9 years) there are constantly cool new things to do -- I've done large amounts of kernel hacking, low level embedded work, done gcc ports and from-scratch compilers, and I constantly see new stuff I'd like to do if I get the chance.
I've been involved in the Free Software community for a long time, and I think this helps a lot: it gives you a relaxed global community to serve as a counterweight to the very local pressures of a job, and a very easy way to tentatively explore new fields that might be interesting. With the increasing prominence of FOSS in industry, this relationship is becoming more and more natural. [Of course, the rise of the internet is probably the technical basis for the increasingly global opportunities offered by FOSS, but I don't think that's enough -- FOSS's emphasis on free exchange of ideas and working towards common goals is critically important.]
glucas: There! A rollicking adventure about Indie finding a lost island and a chest full of cursed Aztec gold.
"... and a CGI humanoid chicken. Love that chicken!"
"Sky Captain ..." had good intentions, but it was an awful movie (that's why critics panned it). Despite the gorgeous computer generated scenery and a very nice "feel" (the whole 30s pulp/newsreel thing), the characters were so incredibly flat and uninvolving, and the plot such an uncompelling random mishmash, that I found myself nodding off despite my initial enthusiasm. The creators had a very neat idea, but they apparently just didn't have the movie-making chops to pull it off.
Raiders of the Lost Ark on the other hand, was a very good movie. The characters were interesting and charismatic, the plot kept you on the edge of your seat, and the pacing was just about perfect. Spielberg is a much better director than Lucas, and somehow working together with Lucas (and Ford) seemed to keep Spielberg on track, and restrained him from indulging in his most annoying habits (seen in his own rather saccharine movies from that period).
It would be cool if Lucas/Spielberg/Ford can pull it off again, even if they have to use large dollops of CGI and a family pack of canes to do so.
Fukuoka, Japan. Has fiber-to-the-house. Has had it for years. Pays less for it than you'd pay for xDSL or cablemodem here, and the bandwidth is incredible.
In Japan there are many more high-population density areas where people have a reasonably high average income, and as a result, there are many more companies competing to provide the same service: in one place, even in the suburbs, you'll get the telephone company, the cable company, and the electric company all building high-speed networks, including the final segment to individual homes/apartments. Any company that has any kind of pipes or conduit that might be used for optical fibers (the electric company strings them alongside the power lines) is putting them in, and they know they can't overcharge for long without getting destroyed by the competition in this environment.
I dunno if the U.S. has the kind of density in many places to support that, or whether the utility companies have the competitive instinct to go for it even where it does make sense....
Agreed. Roland has a tremendously weird name, and a fairly lame website, but he often submits interesting stories, and he apparently spends a lot of time doing it. I don't why we should care that a story is from him as long as it's interesting...
I've been running eclipse for the first time recently, working on a very large java project with someone else.
I've been very pleasantly surprised with it. Even though I'm using a pretty low-spec machine for this day and age -- a 450 MHz PIII with 512 MB of ram -- eclipse is absolutely fine, indeed it's quite responsive and solid. Of course when it needs to rebuild the entire project for some reason, it takes a while, but for normal usage, it's great.
I imagine it's very spiffy indeed on a more modern box!
[This is using Sun's java 1.5.0 JDK/JRE btw]
You did catch the part where "Command-O" (which is a pretty good mnemonic for "Open this item") also works, right?
Geez, of course he got that.
But command-O, while it's not the worst binding for open, is not exactly the best either. People expect the big obvious return key to do that, because it's just, well, obvious (in a huge number of contexts, return basically means "activate"/"run"), as well as being rather more convenient than command-O.
"Rename" is an occasional comand that really doesn't deserve the biggest most convenient key on the keyboard, especially one whose traditional meaning is something different.
$499 'too pricey' for games that already look like this(Motorstorm):
Yes.
I've played the PS3 in the store, and while it looks nice, it clearly didn't live up to the hype, and my overall impression was sort of "meh". Not worth the price. I may get one when it hits $250 or so.
They aren`t quite objects if you need to conceptualize them in a different way...
The phrase "object oriented" does not refer to single implementation technique, it refers to a general category of languages. Perhaps the majority of people are more familiar with C++/java style class-based designs, but there are many others. One of the most famous (in the research community at least) is "prototype based" languages, of which the "Self" language is the most well-known example. Javascript, it would seem, is a Self-style prototype-based language.
Actually the vast majority of recently written (last 5 years) code I've seen from CS departments (at very good schools) has been in Java, with C++ a somewhat distant second. This seems to apply across the board, from hard-core long term research projects to undergrad frameworks to quick experimental coding.
... One important point that many people seem to ignore is that java seems to have huge number of freely available libraries, often for somewhat specialized subjects.
I don't particularly like java (and it's particularly painful watching the hoops people jump through to make it perform well), but while it doesn't seem to really be the best at anything, I guess on average it turns out pretty well -- it's pretty safe, pretty fast, pretty readable, pretty well supported, pretty widespread,
The languages you mention are all great languages, and have carved out productive niches, but they seem to remain niche languages, even in academia...
[Disclaimer: I have never written a java program (!), though I have read many...]
What's amusing is that a previous ECMA rubber-stamping of a microsoft product as a "standard" was the C# language, which (at that point) almost nobody used!!
It's pretty clear that ECMA exists mainly as a tool for rich corporations, when they want to add a veneer of respectability to something (and/or subvert government purchasing regulations).
It appears that you've never actually been to New York City...
Wikipedia might be a novel human achievement, it might be the best they could do, but at the end of the day, it's a boat that almost floats; not good enough to be put to practical use.
Speak for yourself.
Wikipedia obviously is far from perfect, but it's certainly good enough for "practical use" in many subjects. I normally use it to look up mathematics-related articles, and while wikipedia's math-related articles tend to be a bit less elegantly written than more specialized sites (e.g. wolfram's mathworld), they are often more useful. I typically check multiple sites to get different perspectives but it's usually wikipedia that strikes the best balance of breadth/depth/accessibility (for instance, wikipeda tends to do a much better job of presenting a subject from the point of view of multiple fields, and giving practical examples and algorithms to illustrate them).
[My biggest complaint about wikipedia is not accuracy but rather that articles sometimes have a sort of clumsy "scattershot" tone that I suppose is the result of having multiple editors edit over time -- however this is also what gives the articles their welcome breadth. Ideally it would be nice if each article had a single editor concentrating just on language and structure, smoothing over the effects of multiple "content" editors.]
at least you don't find abandoned ponies at the pound.
... harder to identify. Wait until feeding time.
Sure you do, it's just that they're a bit
Emphasis mine. That pretty much sums up the article.
Yeah. Sofke sounds like he's got some serious self-image issues -- he's got a lot emotionally invested in being a "733t hardcore gamer" and predictably reacts rather negatively to anything new which puts him on the same level as the unwashed masses.
Kind of pathetic really...
For everyone's claim of McDonalds being lame I just have to ask, with population numbers like it has what does that make the other restaurants?
:-)
(Having never played WoW, I know next to nothing about it. I just hate that argument.)
It's the "a million flies can't be wrong" argument...
10 Gig HDD that came with an IBM PII (I think) is still spinning Windows for my Athlon64. Geek cred +1
.doc file though (never leave it installed :-).
4.5 GB drive with 50-pin SCSI interface. I bought this drive used about 5 years ago for like $15, and it's been solid as a rock since, running nothing but Debian....
Kind of a pain always having to delete stuff when I want to install OpenOffice.org to edit someone's
I watched some ps3 kiosks in a store yesterday -- one showing demo loops and one live unit with ridge racer -- and the graphics were actually sort of "meh". Definitely high-res, but that's about it really. The unit showing demo loops had some nice special effects in places (whereas ridge racer seemed pretty "last-gen"), but it was a really mixed bag, lots of low frame-rates, bad animation, weird lighting artifacts etc. Rige racer seemed like it could have been running on a ps2/gc/xbox (albeit probably not on an HDTV).
I suppose the graphics will improve later as developers gain experience, but honestly, given all the hype, I was expecting to be blown away, and wasn't. It's a nice update to the ps2 (which was always a bit weak graphically), to be sure, but it's not at all clear that it's really worth twice what the competition is asking. It's certainly not the life-changing experience Kutaragi seems to think it is.
Yeah, the dualshock is at best a highly mediocre controller, I find it kind of painful to use for long periods of time. Sony just doesn't seem to do much in the way of testing when they design controllers -- it's like they design based entirely on the way it looks, not how it feels (and it's true, the D.S. does look pretty good).
As far as the article, I don't know what they were smoking, the grades they assigned seem almost completely random (and with little apparent connection to the accompanying text)!
I guess this article says more about the state of gaming journalism than it does about any of the consoles... [hmm, now I notice the page header: "AOL games"....]
"Nintendo Real-Live Novelty Puppies that look like latest faddish breed that expire and turn into harmless powder when kids lose interest."
i would pay good money for that.
Especially with the bukkake and tentacle options.