A lot of people I know in the industry consider Edge to be way too far up its own arse. They still buy it, for the jobs section. The supplement aimed at graduates is probably a worthwhile thing to read though. --
"Open source, as advocated by Sun, IBM, etc., says that you bought the hardware... here's the software that comes with it."
I don't know about Sun, but that's not the way I see IBM's attitude to Open Source. IBM's attitude varies from product to product, but let's take three examples:
1. Apache -- IBM noticed that their proprietary web server had a tiny market share, while Apache was wildly successful. Someone thought "hey, this is silly, if we become Apache developers, we can help mould it into something that we want, and we can sell it by adding proprietary sugar-coating and selling support" -- and that's what you get with the WebSphere range of products. IBM contribute greatly to the core, free, Apache -- but they also sell proprietary systems which hook into Apache to provide more functionality (e.g. their servlet engine, Commerce Suite etc).
2. Linux -- Someone at IBM noticed "Hey, this thing is *portable*. If we port this to all our server platforms, then we can develop server software once, and be able to run it on anything from a NetFinity PC, to an X-Series mainframe. We can offer our customers a true, smooth, growth path". We have yet to see what this means for AIX...
3. Jikes -- simple one this, a researcher develops something cool. It's not marketable as-is (although later it could become part of a "prettier" product) so it becomes great "Geek PR" to give it away. --
Good question. If the games companies involved here lose the case, then who knows where it will end.
However, there's an optimistic view that says this court case is a positive thing: if the jury throws it out of court, and I really hope they do, then we have a precedent, and it may just turn out that the answer to the question "where will it end?" turns out to be "with this court case".
It is not by accident that I used OPEC; the similarity reveals one thing: labor unions are cartels.
Possibly, but they are not necessarily monopolistic cartels. For example I can reel off three UK teaching unions -- NUT (National Union of Teachers), NASUWT (National Association of Schoolteachers/Union of Women Teachers), PAT (Professional Association of Teachers) -- and there are more. These unions compete for members, have slightly different values, and their campaigns and their aims will not always overlap. --
Odd that, my experience is exactly the opposite. At university we were given a few projects that specified HyperCard (writing stacks to demonstrate 2D graphics primitives). I don't know where I was supposed to get documentation, because asking for HyperCard's online help caused the whole machine to crash.
I don't believe it's big or clever to allow English-looking code, the way Hypercard does. In the absence of documentation, I had no way of knowing whether one English phrase (let's say "put input into x") would work or another would not (get the input and put it into x).
In the end I believe I just gave up on the project and sacrificed the grade. I mean, what's more important, a degree or your sanity? (I got a decent degree in the end -- Hypercard was not needed in the final year)...
I appreciate there are a lot of Hypercard stacks out there that may be valuable. Perhaps someone needs to find a way to allow those scripts to be maintained, while preventing anyone from ever having to embark on a project using it again.... --
I'm surprised nobody mentioned POSIX standards. I now realise that these "Open" standards are not available on the Web because you have to pay for them -- but at the time I thought I needed them, I was staggered.
It turns out (I read in Rebel Code) that Linus was just as surprised, and instead went to the Sun manpages for documentation to base his system call implementations on. --
The Observer (the UK Guardian's sister Sunday paper) had a story about a project to print harcopy versions of all the classic literature available on the Web, bind them into volumes, and lend them out from "Cyber-Libraries"...
On TV, "On The Record" had a topical pre-election piece about proposals to increase voter turnout by giving voters lottery tickets and free sherry just for turning up... also advertising on voting slips (Coca Cola ads were okayed, but a Wonderbra "Hello Voters" ad was supposedly vetoed)....
I am aware with some problems with Linux's scheduling algorithm (which assumes it has a whole, physical CPU at its disposal) and VM. You need to reduce the polling interval to accomodate this, until IBM's Linux/390 team sort it. This will make the system feel sluggish in interactive use (shell, X etc.), but is not relevant for most server applications, such as apache servers.
I certainly have literature that quotes thousands of instances, although I don't have first hand experience in it to match yours.
Remember that two of the three ways of running Linux on an S/390 (sorry z/Architecture) is to run it on a VM maintained by OS/390 (sorry, z/OS). Far from being "like kicking a dead whale down a beach", each instance will look and feel just like any other Linux installation you'd tried - Bash, Apache, remote X, you name it... execept for the small difference that you can create a new instance of a Linux system in under a minute, and you can have several THOUSAND such instances running a comparable performance to a PC, on z/Architecture machine.
--
Re:My prediction for the overall winner is...
on
Mario's Revenge?
·
· Score: 2
Might I be the first to note that you are an imbecile? In a console war, a developer is not a winner; their rewards are reaped in a manner completely different from those of the console makers. Granted, I agree that Sega will make a goodly profit from their developing, but it is now impossible for them to be a winner in the console war.
I guess the original poster was redefining the terms, yes -- just as Sega have redefined their terms by opting out of the hardware market....
Certainly, when I bought my Playstation, I wasn't opting into to a Sony world a gaming: I was seduced by the "Dream Ticket" of Namco and Sony together. My choice was Tekken 2 vs Virtua Fighter 2 -- Sega (the software developer) vs Namco (the software developer) not Sega (the hardware developer) vs Sony.
So, while not helping to predict which console will win the forthcoming sales war, the original poster made a worthwhile point about how software companies are in a great position, as long as they don't go signing any exclusivity deals... With Dreamcast as their sole platform, Sega were onto a loser. Now, I don't see how they can lose. --
Classification keeps "concerned parents" and the like happy, while reducing the need for censorship.
As an adult year old, I can see films that are not suitable for a twelve year old. If it weren't for the system enforcing this, all films unsuitable for a 12 year old would have to be banned -- not good news.
In the UK, some films are denied an 18 certificate -- this I have a problem with. As an adult I feel I have the right to view whatever I like, and I would like to see the 18 certificate as some sort of "catch all", the default in the switch statement that is the British Board of Film Classification... and things are gradually moving in that direction, with films like Ai No Corrida and The Excorcist finally being granted video certificates. --
I spent my university days in Birmingham, Britain's second city. I had a part-time job working in a cinema, which was sometimes open for late-night showings. It was well publicised that you were seldom off-camera in the centre of Birmingham, and walking to the bus on the deserted late-night streets, I was glad to know that.
In addition, the early TV games and coin-ops known by the "pong" umbrella term, as well as the official Atari Pong, were almost all analogue devices, not digital computers as the 2600 was. --
Windows does not have any concept of a fork. Cygwin reimplements this as well as a unix like process table. It limits the number of processes to 127 and fork are very expensive with all the context switching going on to make it happen.
I'll back that up -- Cygwin is an excellent product, but watching shell scripts that fly on UNIX grind to a halt under Cygwin is pretty soul destroying. Shell scripts by their very nature are constantly forking new processes, and something simple like:
$filename=`echo $pathname | sed 's/.*\///' | tr 'A-Z' 'a-z'`
... is likely to take a couple of *seconds* under Cygwin as it forks 4 new processes, compared to a blink of an eye on Linux (this is on the Pentium 200 Laptop I took to America, and didn't dare uninstall Windows from).
I bit the bullet and just had a coffee while scripts that should have taken seconds took half an hour: if I'd been willing to recode, I could have used Perl and got far better performance, but I'd *really* like a free way to run bash, sh, or ksh under Windows at respectable speeds. --
Worse than that, when was the last time you encountered a user out there in webland with a client certificate? How about a client certificate signed by a CA which you trust to have shown due diligence before signing (i.e. not a Thawte free email certificate)? That would probably be within the last couple of minutes...
Maybe I was assuming people would know what I understand by "out there in webland" -- I guess it wasn't made clear that I was talking about bog standard home web users, the kind who don't know the difference between "email" "the web" and "the internet".
For well defined, closed groups, PKI is a lot easier. For example, all the Lotus Notes accounts used within IBM have a keypair, and the public key is easily obtained from a corporation-wide directory. --
Re:I played aorund with cracking PKI
on
Making PKI Work
·
· Score: 2
I was looking for an algorithm to factor large numbers into prime factors without using division.
... then what you were doing was only related to PKI by its association with RSA encryption.
Public Key Infrastructure is an attempt to solve the problem of how to distribute public keys widely, in a trustworthy manner. Yes, RSA CA signatures are an important part of that, but there are many more parts to the jigsaw (e.g. directory technology such as X500) -- saying you were "cracking PKI" is just confusing (it must be, it certainly confused me). --
Re:I played aorund with cracking PKI
on
Making PKI Work
·
· Score: 2
You'll have to be more specific than that. What do you mean by "cracking" PKI? The X509 based PKI used at the moment uses RSA, do you mean you've been working on cracking RSA? --
Honestly, when is the last time you received encrypted email resulting from a succesful key exchange with a user out there in webland?
Worse than that, when was the last time you encountered a user out there in webland with a client certificate? How about a client certificate signed by a CA which you trust to have shown due diligence before signing (i.e. not a Thawte free email certificate)?
PKI is hard partly because that stage -- establishing identity before signing -- is intrinsically difficult and expensive. --
"Evolution: A natural force for creating 'higher' beings from 'lower' beings. "
Well, I don't know what Darwin himself thought, but I (and I consider myself a Neo-Darwinian) don't see it that way at all. Evolution fills ecological niches -- there's no concept of "higher" and "lower". Lichen is as much a result of Darwinian evolution, and a success, as mankind is.
However, I don't think mapping the genome did anything to "vindicate" Darwin -- his ideas have been vindicated for a long time, to anyone willing to stop taking things on faith, and look at the evidence. --
How will teenagers play arcade video games in the future? Giggling away with friends or alone in a networked world, battling anonymous foes in foreign cities, miles away, communicating only through blinking screens?
This is a trifle bleak and shortsighted. PC gamers with bandwidth to spare are already using Voice over IP products such as Roger Wilco to make WAN gaming more personal. I can envisage video conferencing technology making the arcade equivalent really very sociable.
There's a Namco arcade racing game (I forget the name) wherein a picture of taken of your face before the race begins, and that picture hovers above your car, so that in 2-8 player games you can see which of your friends you've just overtaken (or been overtaken by). It's a very simple idea, which adds to the pleasure of the game immensely. Imagine little ideas like this in a WAN context.
The real problem with WAN gaming, both in arcades and in the home, is this: who wants to play against arbitary strangers? You either want to play against people who are already your friends (I've never seen a lobby system that makes this easy), or in some sort of cup or leage that matches you against people whos skill level is similar to yours. This is a problem I haven't seen dealt with yet (although I don't frequent die-hard Quake communities, where things might be more organised -- but those communities demand your life and soul...).
Oh, one more thing... If camera work is nothing and storytelling is everything, read a book.
All Dogme 95 states is that all cameras must be handheld. I guess you can actually do quite a lot with a handheld camera if you put your mind to it. --
I do, however, mean that if everyone followed these, we would have no new games like these.
Yup, still missing the point. Nobody is saying everyone should follow these rules. The idea of Dogme95 for films is that a filmmaker might *choose* to follow these rules for an individual project, to test themselves, see what they come up with. For games it would be the same.
Lars Von Trier directed the Dogme 95 film "The Idiots", then went on to direct "Dancer In the Dark", a film which very much breaks the Dogme 95 rules.
The film vow was to give up gimmicks that are now substituting for plots. They were not required to give up genres: drama, comedy, science fiction, fantasy, fiction, or nonfiction.
I'd love to see a new genre, but I currently don't have the creative energy to create one. It's a monumental task to give up all genres and create a new one.
But that's exactly the reason Dogme 95 exists (for films) -- it's worthwhile *because* it's hard. It's a challenge for those who *do* have that creative energy, something designed to help them channel that energy to create something new and exciting.
Remember, nobody is saying all films, or all games, should comply with the Dogme vow of chastity: Lars Von Trier (sp? In conformance with Dogme rules, his name doesn't appear on the website) went on to direct the very non-Dogme "Dancer in the Dark" after Dogme's "The Idiots" -- it's just an interesting set of rules to work within, and it's good to see what comes out the other end. Constraints often produce good art. Some of my better amateur poster design as a schoolkid came from being restricted to what the school office's photocopier was capable of reproducing... --
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of people I know in the industry consider Edge to be way too far up its own arse. They still buy it, for the jobs section. The supplement aimed at graduates is probably a worthwhile thing to read though.
--
"Open source, as advocated by Sun, IBM, etc., says that you bought the hardware... here's the software that comes with it."
I don't know about Sun, but that's not the way I see IBM's attitude to Open Source. IBM's attitude varies from product to product, but let's take three examples:
1. Apache -- IBM noticed that their proprietary web server had a tiny market share, while Apache was wildly successful. Someone thought "hey, this is silly, if we become Apache developers, we can help mould it into something that we want, and we can sell it by adding proprietary sugar-coating and selling support" -- and that's what you get with the WebSphere range of products. IBM contribute greatly to the core, free, Apache -- but they also sell proprietary systems which hook into Apache to provide more functionality (e.g. their servlet engine, Commerce Suite etc).
2. Linux -- Someone at IBM noticed "Hey, this thing is *portable*. If we port this to all our server platforms, then we can develop server software once, and be able to run it on anything from a NetFinity PC, to an X-Series mainframe. We can offer our customers a true, smooth, growth path". We have yet to see what this means for AIX...
3. Jikes -- simple one this, a researcher develops something cool. It's not marketable as-is (although later it could become part of a "prettier" product) so it becomes great "Geek PR" to give it away.
--
"Where will it end?"
Good question. If the games companies involved here lose the case, then who knows where it will end.
However, there's an optimistic view that says this court case is a positive thing: if the jury throws it out of court, and I really hope they do, then we have a precedent, and it may just turn out that the answer to the question "where will it end?" turns out to be "with this court case".
Here's hoping.
--
It is not by accident that I used OPEC; the similarity reveals one thing: labor unions are cartels.
Possibly, but they are not necessarily monopolistic cartels. For example I can reel off three UK teaching unions -- NUT (National Union of Teachers), NASUWT (National Association of Schoolteachers/Union of Women Teachers), PAT (Professional Association of Teachers) -- and there are more. These unions compete for members, have slightly different values, and their campaigns and their aims will not always overlap.
--
Does Opera crash as frequently as B&W?
Do your window decorations morph to reflect the kind of sites you visit?
--
Odd that, my experience is exactly the opposite. At university we were given a few projects that specified HyperCard (writing stacks to demonstrate 2D graphics primitives). I don't know where I was supposed to get documentation, because asking for HyperCard's online help caused the whole machine to crash.
I don't believe it's big or clever to allow English-looking code, the way Hypercard does. In the absence of documentation, I had no way of knowing whether one English phrase (let's say "put input into x") would work or another would not (get the input and put it into x).
In the end I believe I just gave up on the project and sacrificed the grade. I mean, what's more important, a degree or your sanity? (I got a decent degree in the end -- Hypercard was not needed in the final year)...
I appreciate there are a lot of Hypercard stacks out there that may be valuable. Perhaps someone needs to find a way to allow those scripts to be maintained, while preventing anyone from ever having to embark on a project using it again....
--
I'm surprised nobody mentioned POSIX standards. I now realise that these "Open" standards are not available on the Web because you have to pay for them -- but at the time I thought I needed them, I was staggered.
It turns out (I read in Rebel Code) that Linus was just as surprised, and instead went to the Sun manpages for documentation to base his system call implementations on.
--
The Observer (the UK Guardian's sister Sunday paper) had a story about a project to print harcopy versions of all the classic literature available on the Web, bind them into volumes, and lend them out from "Cyber-Libraries"...
On TV, "On The Record" had a topical pre-election piece about proposals to increase voter turnout by giving voters lottery tickets and free sherry just for turning up... also advertising on voting slips (Coca Cola ads were okayed, but a Wonderbra "Hello Voters" ad was supposedly vetoed)....
--
I am aware with some problems with Linux's scheduling algorithm (which assumes it has a whole, physical CPU at its disposal) and VM. You need to reduce the polling interval to accomodate this, until IBM's Linux/390 team sort it. This will make the system feel sluggish in interactive use (shell, X etc.), but is not relevant for most server applications, such as apache servers.
I certainly have literature that quotes thousands of instances, although I don't have first hand experience in it to match yours.
--
Remember that two of the three ways of running Linux on an S/390 (sorry z/Architecture) is to run it on a VM maintained by OS/390 (sorry, z/OS). Far from being "like kicking a dead whale down a beach", each instance will look and feel just like any other Linux installation you'd tried - Bash, Apache, remote X, you name it... execept for the small difference that you can create a new instance of a Linux system in under a minute, and you can have several THOUSAND such instances running a comparable performance to a PC, on z/Architecture machine.
--
Might I be the first to note that you are an imbecile? In a console war, a developer is not a winner; their rewards are reaped in a manner completely different from those of the console makers. Granted, I agree that Sega will make a goodly profit from their developing, but it is now impossible for them to be a winner in the console war.
I guess the original poster was redefining the terms, yes -- just as Sega have redefined their terms by opting out of the hardware market....
Certainly, when I bought my Playstation, I wasn't opting into to a Sony world a gaming: I was seduced by the "Dream Ticket" of Namco and Sony together. My choice was Tekken 2 vs Virtua Fighter 2 -- Sega (the software developer) vs Namco (the software developer) not Sega (the hardware developer) vs Sony.
So, while not helping to predict which console will win the forthcoming sales war, the original poster made a worthwhile point about how software companies are in a great position, as long as they don't go signing any exclusivity deals... With Dreamcast as their sole platform, Sega were onto a loser. Now, I don't see how they can lose.
--
I'm all for classification.
Classification keeps "concerned parents" and the like happy, while reducing the need for censorship.
As an adult year old, I can see films that are not suitable for a twelve year old. If it weren't for the system enforcing this, all films unsuitable for a 12 year old would have to be banned -- not good news.
In the UK, some films are denied an 18 certificate -- this I have a problem with. As an adult I feel I have the right to view whatever I like, and I would like to see the 18 certificate as some sort of "catch all", the default in the switch statement that is the British Board of Film Classification... and things are gradually moving in that direction, with films like Ai No Corrida and The Excorcist finally being granted video certificates.
--
I spent my university days in Birmingham, Britain's second city. I had a part-time job working in a cinema, which was sometimes open for late-night showings. It was well publicised that you were seldom off-camera in the centre of Birmingham, and walking to the bus on the deserted late-night streets, I was glad to know that.
--
In addition, the early TV games and coin-ops known by the "pong" umbrella term, as well as the official Atari Pong, were almost all analogue devices, not digital computers as the 2600 was.
--
Windows does not have any concept of a fork. Cygwin reimplements this as well as a unix like process table. It limits the number of processes to 127 and fork are very expensive with all the context switching going on to make it happen.
I'll back that up -- Cygwin is an excellent product, but watching shell scripts that fly on UNIX grind to a halt under Cygwin is pretty soul destroying. Shell scripts by their very nature are constantly forking new processes, and something simple like:
$filename=`echo $pathname | sed 's/.*\///' | tr 'A-Z' 'a-z'`
... is likely to take a couple of *seconds* under Cygwin as it forks 4 new processes, compared to a blink of an eye on Linux (this is on the Pentium 200 Laptop I took to America, and didn't dare uninstall Windows from).
I bit the bullet and just had a coffee while scripts that should have taken seconds took half an hour: if I'd been willing to recode, I could have used Perl and got far better performance, but I'd *really* like a free way to run bash, sh, or ksh under Windows at respectable speeds.
--
Worse than that, when was the last time you encountered a user out there in webland with a client certificate? How about a client certificate signed by a CA which you trust to have shown due diligence before signing (i.e. not a Thawte free email certificate)? That would probably be within the last couple of minutes...
Maybe I was assuming people would know what I understand by "out there in webland" -- I guess it wasn't made clear that I was talking about bog standard home web users, the kind who don't know the difference between "email" "the web" and "the internet".
For well defined, closed groups, PKI is a lot easier. For example, all the Lotus Notes accounts used within IBM have a keypair, and the public key is easily obtained from a corporation-wide directory.
--
I was looking for an algorithm to factor large numbers into prime factors without using division.
... then what you were doing was only related to PKI by its association with RSA encryption.
Public Key Infrastructure is an attempt to solve the problem of how to distribute public keys widely, in a trustworthy manner. Yes, RSA CA signatures are an important part of that, but there are many more parts to the jigsaw (e.g. directory technology such as X500) -- saying you were "cracking PKI" is just confusing (it must be, it certainly confused me).
--
You'll have to be more specific than that. What do you mean by "cracking" PKI? The X509 based PKI used at the moment uses RSA, do you mean you've been working on cracking RSA?
--
Honestly, when is the last time you received encrypted email resulting from a succesful key exchange with a user out there in webland?
Worse than that, when was the last time you encountered a user out there in webland with a client certificate? How about a client certificate signed by a CA which you trust to have shown due diligence before signing (i.e. not a Thawte free email certificate)?
PKI is hard partly because that stage -- establishing identity before signing -- is intrinsically difficult and expensive.
--
I find it heartening to see, on page 80, that the PDF is printed on recycled paper...
--
"Evolution: A natural force for creating 'higher' beings from 'lower' beings. "
Well, I don't know what Darwin himself thought, but I (and I consider myself a Neo-Darwinian) don't see it that way at all. Evolution fills ecological niches -- there's no concept of "higher" and "lower". Lichen is as much a result of Darwinian evolution, and a success, as mankind is.
However, I don't think mapping the genome did anything to "vindicate" Darwin -- his ideas have been vindicated for a long time, to anyone willing to stop taking things on faith, and look at the evidence.
--
How will teenagers play arcade video games in the future? Giggling away with friends or alone in a networked world, battling anonymous foes in foreign cities, miles away, communicating only through blinking screens?
This is a trifle bleak and shortsighted. PC gamers with bandwidth to spare are already using Voice over IP products such as Roger Wilco to make WAN gaming more personal. I can envisage video conferencing technology making the arcade equivalent really very sociable.
There's a Namco arcade racing game (I forget the name) wherein a picture of taken of your face before the race begins, and that picture hovers above your car, so that in 2-8 player games you can see which of your friends you've just overtaken (or been overtaken by). It's a very simple idea, which adds to the pleasure of the game immensely. Imagine little ideas like this in a WAN context.
The real problem with WAN gaming, both in arcades and in the home, is this: who wants to play against arbitary strangers? You either want to play against people who are already your friends (I've never seen a lobby system that makes this easy), or in some sort of cup or leage that matches you against people whos skill level is similar to yours. This is a problem I haven't seen dealt with yet (although I don't frequent die-hard Quake communities, where things might be more organised -- but those communities demand your life and soul...).
--
Oh, one more thing... If camera work is nothing and storytelling is everything, read a book.
All Dogme 95 states is that all cameras must be handheld. I guess you can actually do quite a lot with a handheld camera if you put your mind to it.
--
I do, however, mean that if everyone followed these, we would have no new games like these.
Yup, still missing the point. Nobody is saying everyone should follow these rules. The idea of Dogme95 for films is that a filmmaker might *choose* to follow these rules for an individual project, to test themselves, see what they come up with. For games it would be the same.
Lars Von Trier directed the Dogme 95 film "The Idiots", then went on to direct "Dancer In the Dark", a film which very much breaks the Dogme 95 rules.
--
The film vow was to give up gimmicks that are now substituting for plots. They were not required to give up genres: drama, comedy, science fiction, fantasy, fiction, or nonfiction.
Check item 8 of theDogme 95 vow of chastity -- "Genre movies are not acceptable".
I'd love to see a new genre, but I currently don't have the creative energy to create one. It's a monumental task to give up all genres and create a new one.
But that's exactly the reason Dogme 95 exists (for films) -- it's worthwhile *because* it's hard. It's a challenge for those who *do* have that creative energy, something designed to help them channel that energy to create something new and exciting.
Remember, nobody is saying all films, or all games, should comply with the Dogme vow of chastity: Lars Von Trier (sp? In conformance with Dogme rules, his name doesn't appear on the website) went on to direct the very non-Dogme "Dancer in the Dark" after Dogme's "The Idiots" -- it's just an interesting set of rules to work within, and it's good to see what comes out the other end. Constraints often produce good art. Some of my better amateur poster design as a schoolkid came from being restricted to what the school office's photocopier was capable of reproducing...
--