I can see how you might not be able to relate to it if you don't live in the US or other country affected by terrorism. Nevertheless, BG doesn't take a pure pro-US position, but rather tweaks people in the US a lot. When the Cylons are occupying New Caprica, the humans are referred to as insurgents. Some of the humans are involved in suicide bombings. BG forces you to consider both sides of these issues.
Of course, the war in Iraq is at least as important as 9/11 in shaping these analogies.
Of course HDDVD has a lot more capacity than 4.7GB too, so there was a lower-priced option available if higher capacity for the PS3 was the only issue. What's interesting about the PS3 is that it is both overpriced and loses money anyway.
One of the compromises made in adopting higher-level abstractions is the inability of contemporary platforms to support hard real-time programming. If you replaced the Atari 2600's 6507 CPU with a Pentium 4 and increased the RAM from 128 bytes to 1GB, but kept the original graphics system, it would actually be harder to write state-of-the-art (for Atari) games. The reason is that contemporary designs have non-determinsitic timing (at least to the extent a human could understand them) because of caches and other features. These systems were designed to make processing faster on the average, not to have consistent behavior.
Of course, we can still have hard real-time systems, we just have to put the hard stuff in hardware. That's a reasonable solution, but it's narrowed the scope of problems that software can solve.
"I've always wondered how some of the greats (like Crane) would have fared had they grown up 20 years after they did."
You make it sound like Crane and all his peers are retired or dead, but we're not.
As a former Atari 2600 programmer (although unfamous and less accomplished than Crane), I can tell you that today's challenges are just different from the ones we faced back then.
For the 2600 we had to have very precise timing (sometimes to an accuracy of 1 CPU cyle) in our display routines, but we never had to worry about programming style, compiler bugs, and (thank God) we didn't have to integrate a lot of third-party libraries into our games.
It seems like integration of other people's code is becoming a greater and greater part of software "development". It's becoming rather boring in a way even as the amount of "stuff" you need to understand get's larger and larger.
I don't see how this qualifies as "pushing MS around". The success of the XBox360 and MS isn't really based on whether movie studios support the HDDVD's, but the PS3 and Sony's fortunes are heavily dependent on studios supporting Blu-ray since they are taking a loss on the units to promote it.
What qualifications do the professors who teach these courses have? How many successful GUI's have they designed? Do they teach that context menus are bad?
Had you read the post I was responding to carefully, you'd have realized that he was referring to the page that contained the java applet, not other pages. Sure, you could open up another tab (assuming Java wasn't slowing your computer to a crawl), read a few pages of a book, or go get some coffee; all activities that have nothing to do with what you were trying to accomplish when you navigated to the page with the Java applet.
Let's face it, you just want believe that C# is Java clone but you really can't back it up. So you're pissed because I presented some counter-evidence.
I wasn't aware that Toyota made PC software. Or were you just trying to make the absurd point that AOL's business was no more related to the PC than Toyota's business was?
The point is that none of the Java characteristics you mentioned originated in Java. Java was just an implementation of ideas already commonly in use.
"I didn't even mention the standard libraries, frameworks or any other crap."
Nor should you since there are many differences between the two. For example, in ASP.NET all pages are compiled into.NET classes that can call any method in the FCL directly. What part of Java (circa 2002) was that copied from?
"There's no reason why the Java plug-in can't just spawn off a thread and return control to the browser. The page can continue to render while the applet loads."
What useful content is going to be rendered while the applet loads? It's like saying Window's boot time isn't problem because you can watch the Windows logo while the OS is loading.
"Also, you can't really blame Sun for not having Java pre-installed on most desktops. There were certain monopolists doing everything in their power to prevent Java's emergence as a solid platform."
Sure, that's why AOL wasn't successful in the dial-up era, unnamed monopolists prevented them from sending out install CDs or making deals with computer companies. Oh wait...
"The original Mac OS UI standardized on a single location to find actions: The Menu Bar.... Unfortunately, due to the monopoly position of Windows, even the Mac OS has been forced to go down this path of providing toolbars and contextual menus. One mitigating trend I've observed in some (not all) Macintosh software is the use of contextual menus to duplicate operations presented in the menu bar."
You're really an Apple apologist. First, you claim Apple had the best approach using soley the Menu Bar and than you excuse their later change in approach on Microsoft's monopoly. What other "bad" design decisions has Apple made because they were "forced" to by MS?
Here's an alternative explanation: GUI design evolved from what was established by Xerox and later Apple. Apple recognized that these new approaches added value and decided it adopt them. In other words, I'm suggesting that MS, Apple and others are right, and you're wrong.
"Does this mean a lack of diversity in OSS? No! If anything it means more diversiity because instead of many teams all making "me-too" products, OSS teams tend to focus on adding real value and focussing on differentiation, rather than reinventing wheels"
Sure, that's why typical Linux distros include only a single text editor, a single window manager, etc. No "me-too" stuff there.
4. Do nothing because X feature isn't important enough to interrupt your quest for survival (this doesn't apply if you're living in your parent's basement and they handle the survival part).
Sure, there's all kinds of used PC's out there as well, but since we can't all count on consistently finding specific old junk out there, we need to compare available new equipment.
I think that asshole CEOs get more attention than equally successful CEOs with a decent personality, so it's easy to jump to the conlusion that being an asshole is a requirement for success. Both Gates and Jobs have made some major business blunders that were the direct result of their ego problems.
"You can see the results of the differing philosophies in their respective products"
I don't know, their philosphies seem quite similar to me. Gates doesn't like to put fans in his software and Job's doesn't like to put fans in his hardware.
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I can see how you might not be able to relate to it if you don't live in the US or other country affected by terrorism. Nevertheless, BG doesn't take a pure pro-US position, but rather tweaks people in the US a lot. When the Cylons are occupying New Caprica, the humans are referred to as insurgents. Some of the humans are involved in suicide bombings. BG forces you to consider both sides of these issues.
Of course, the war in Iraq is at least as important as 9/11 in shaping these analogies.
Of course HDDVD has a lot more capacity than 4.7GB too, so there was a lower-priced option available if higher capacity for the PS3 was the only issue. What's interesting about the PS3 is that it is both overpriced and loses money anyway.
One of the compromises made in adopting higher-level abstractions is the inability of contemporary platforms to support hard real-time programming. If you replaced the Atari 2600's 6507 CPU with a Pentium 4 and increased the RAM from 128 bytes to 1GB, but kept the original graphics system, it would actually be harder to write state-of-the-art (for Atari) games. The reason is that contemporary designs have non-determinsitic timing (at least to the extent a human could understand them) because of caches and other features. These systems were designed to make processing faster on the average, not to have consistent behavior.
Of course, we can still have hard real-time systems, we just have to put the hard stuff in hardware. That's a reasonable solution, but it's narrowed the scope of problems that software can solve.
"I've always wondered how some of the greats (like Crane) would have fared had they grown up 20 years after they did."
You make it sound like Crane and all his peers are retired or dead, but we're not.
As a former Atari 2600 programmer (although unfamous and less accomplished than Crane), I can tell you that today's challenges are just different from the ones we faced back then.
For the 2600 we had to have very precise timing (sometimes to an accuracy of 1 CPU cyle) in our display routines, but we never had to worry about programming style, compiler bugs, and (thank God) we didn't have to integrate a lot of third-party libraries into our games.
It seems like integration of other people's code is becoming a greater and greater part of software "development". It's becoming rather boring in a way even as the amount of "stuff" you need to understand get's larger and larger.
I don't see how this qualifies as "pushing MS around". The success of the XBox360 and MS isn't really based on whether movie studios support the HDDVD's, but the PS3 and Sony's fortunes are heavily dependent on studios supporting Blu-ray since they are taking a loss on the units to promote it.
Isn't the conventional wisdom that due to the end-to-end argument, it's OS and application problem by definition?
Congratulations, you've combined the logical fallacies of argumentum ad verecundiam and argumentum ad hominem into a single sentence!
There's no problem, just no value. Loading time is just dead time whether you're talking about Java or Flash.
What qualifications do the professors who teach these courses have? How many successful GUI's have they designed? Do they teach that context menus are bad?
Had you read the post I was responding to carefully, you'd have realized that he was referring to the page that contained the java applet, not other pages. Sure, you could open up another tab (assuming Java wasn't slowing your computer to a crawl), read a few pages of a book, or go get some coffee; all activities that have nothing to do with what you were trying to accomplish when you navigated to the page with the Java applet.
Let's face it, you just want believe that C# is Java clone but you really can't back it up. So you're pissed because I presented some counter-evidence.
I wasn't aware that Toyota made PC software. Or were you just trying to make the absurd point that AOL's business was no more related to the PC than Toyota's business was?
The point is that none of the Java characteristics you mentioned originated in Java. Java was just an implementation of ideas already commonly in use.
.NET classes that can call any method in the FCL directly. What part of Java (circa 2002) was that copied from?
"I didn't even mention the standard libraries, frameworks or any other crap."
Nor should you since there are many differences between the two. For example, in ASP.NET all pages are compiled into
Sure, because we all know the Sun invented the virtual machine, bytecode, and C-style syntax.
"There's no reason why the Java plug-in can't just spawn off a thread and return control to the browser. The page can continue to render while the applet loads."
What useful content is going to be rendered while the applet loads? It's like saying Window's boot time isn't problem because you can watch the Windows logo while the OS is loading.
"Also, you can't really blame Sun for not having Java pre-installed on most desktops. There were certain monopolists doing everything in their power to prevent Java's emergence as a solid platform."
...
Sure, that's why AOL wasn't successful in the dial-up era, unnamed monopolists prevented them from sending out install CDs or making deals with computer companies. Oh wait
I wasn't aware there were credentials for being a usability expert. Is that something like a MCSE for GUIs?
I've used GUIs extensively starting from the Xerox Alto. I would think that would count for something.
"The original Mac OS UI standardized on a single location to find actions: The Menu Bar. ... Unfortunately, due to the monopoly position of Windows, even the Mac OS has been forced to go down this path of providing toolbars and contextual menus. One mitigating trend I've observed in some (not all) Macintosh software is the use of contextual menus to duplicate operations presented in the menu bar."
You're really an Apple apologist. First, you claim Apple had the best approach using soley the Menu Bar and than you excuse their later change in approach on Microsoft's monopoly. What other "bad" design decisions has Apple made because they were "forced" to by MS?
Here's an alternative explanation: GUI design evolved from what was established by Xerox and later Apple. Apple recognized that these new approaches added value and decided it adopt them. In other words, I'm suggesting that MS, Apple and others are right, and you're wrong.
Yes, but this list is about covering all the cases.
"Does this mean a lack of diversity in OSS? No! If anything it means more diversiity because instead of many teams all making "me-too" products, OSS teams tend to focus on adding real value and focussing on differentiation, rather than reinventing wheels"
Sure, that's why typical Linux distros include only a single text editor, a single window manager, etc. No "me-too" stuff there.
Since there is no non-GUI software in the minds of 90% of computer users, that doesn't seem to be a big competitive advantage for open source.
4. Do nothing because X feature isn't important enough to interrupt your quest for survival (this doesn't apply if you're living in your parent's basement and they handle the survival part).
Sure, there's all kinds of used PC's out there as well, but since we can't all count on consistently finding specific old junk out there, we need to compare available new equipment.
I think that asshole CEOs get more attention than equally successful CEOs with a decent personality, so it's easy to jump to the conlusion that being an asshole is a requirement for success. Both Gates and Jobs have made some major business blunders that were the direct result of their ego problems.
"You can see the results of the differing philosophies in their respective products"
I don't know, their philosphies seem quite similar to me. Gates doesn't like to put fans in his software and Job's doesn't like to put fans in his hardware.