The Apple ][ version (and probably others, but that's the one I played) of Karateka had my favorite Easter egg ever: while there was nothing to indicate this, the original floppy was two-sided. Inserting the floppy upside-down would bring up another copy of the game, identical in every way -- except that it was flipped over (and inverted left-to-right, IIRC); title screen, all of the character's movements and animation, scores, all of it. It may not have taken that much effort to do, but it's brilliant in its simplicity.
Modern Software engineering has NOTHING to do with CS. Once you realize that, you're 99% of the way there. Some colleges now have Software Engineering departments. Hire those students or just an engineer that knows the problem domain, and teach them to code.
Nonsense. The non-software side of software engineering -- project planning, development methodologies and the like -- may be divorced from Computer Science, but modern CS has a deep and lengthy relationship with modern programming practice and software design. Formal correctness principles (and proofs!) inspire type-safety, functors/functionals come from recursion theory (with a small splash of category theory), generic programming also has deep roots in category theory and denotational semantics... and that's without ever getting into the algorithms that are still at the heart of modern software. All the finest engineering principles still wouldn't have produced something like PageRank without developers who had an intimate knowledge of Linear Algebra and Markov Theory.
What are your relevant browsers (and platforms), and what is Flash giving you that couldn't be achieved with (a) good CSS and DOM scripting code talking to a back-end server, or in a worst-case scenario, (b) Java running on the user's system? Yes, the latter requires a user install, but so does Flash itself -- neither Firefox nor IE comes with it pre-installed...
I have yet to drop $60 on a retail PS3 game (LBP will be the first, and I actually got my PS3 just for it -- a few months back, when I could still get a PS2-compatible system), but both flOw and Everyday Shooter are $10 titles available through the PSN store that push the 'art game' form in different directions. flOw is a bit closer to interactive screensaver than to game in some ways, but it's still gorgeous to watch and reasonable to play; and the gameplay in Everyday Shooter is fantastic. More recently there's Echochrome, a really clever game based on Escherian paradoxical geometry; not the deepest title in the world, and not without its share of frustrations, but wholly unlike anything else out there.
20 years ago this was a great idea, and Kernighan&Ritchie stands up as a fine example of technical writing (IMHO at least), but the coding guidelines there (short variable names, some of the control structure idioms, and even arguably the brace conventions) were written for an age when you had a reasonable shot at out-optimizing your compiler, there was a good chance you were developing on an 80x24 terminal, and it was critical to write for speed over clarity. In the modern world of IDEs and optimizing compilers a lot of K&R is just painful.
As beloved as Portal is, and as amazing as it is, it feels more 'of the moment' than 'enduring classic' to me. Meme-ish, if you will; and it's no surprise that most of what's still alive (innocent look) from Portal at this point is the memes. Contrast that with a game like SMB1, where certainly everyone remembers that the Princess is still in another castle, but most people can easily see the rough layout of level 1-1 (and probably even level 1-2) in their heads even 20 years later, and can tell you the broad themes of the sublevels.
To my mind, Counterstrike has an even more serious issue -- it's an inherently multiplayer experience, arguably even an inherently large-group experience. While there may be multiplayer games that survive the test of time (party games: Charades, Truth or Dare, and the like), the sheer volume of setup required to get a CS game going compared to any of those will probably keep it from being eternally replayed.
In an attempt to bring the Wii closer to the hardcore gamer's taste, Sega is preparing to release MadWorld, a violent 'hack and slash' game.
Not a new annoyance, but a constant one: why is the phrase 'hardcore gamer' always coupled with the splatterfest M titles? I've been gaming on virtually every platform under the sun for the last 20 years, spending north of $1000/year on games and systems and playing a little bit of everything (Well, almost everything -- I never have managed the combination of brainpower and dexterity to play RTSen effectively, but that's a corner case). And the two most hardcore games I've played lately are Braid and Geometry Wars 2, with Bangai-O Spirits coming up rapidly behind; all three have fantastically hard elements and a distilled purity of experience that really makes them 'Gamer's games'(Braid perhaps a bit less so). They're the hardest of the hardcore, and all the other serious gamers I know are much more interested in these titles than in Mad World (though the visual style there is fantastic, I have to say) -- and none is rated worse than E10+.
Also unlike COD4, Sins doesn't have console versions available for every system under the sun (pun not really intended). Yes, what Sins has done is remarkable, but comparing Sins PC sales to COD4 PC sales is apples to oranges, because PC games of virtually all console titles are cannibalized by the console sales. (For reference, the XBOX 360 version of COD4 sold 750K copies its first *week* -- http://www.vgchartz.com/aweekly.php?date=39397&boxartz=1 has the numbers).
While this isn't directly related to the 'gaming on Linux' question, there's still a huge gap between open-source gaming and other open-source software projects. If I (as a profit-oriented corporation) release an open-source IDE, Office environment, etc., then I have a pretty straightforward support-oriented business model; I can give away my software and still have some faith that I'll be able to make money post-'sale'. (And in particular, make large portions of that money off of other large corps that need my software). But, to put it bluntly, what's the profit model in open-source games? You're not going to be able to do any meaningful level of 'support', certainly not enough to pay for development, and especially when you don't have those large corporate customers. Your primary differentiation from your competition is in the content, and that's all but impossible to maintain in an open-source world. There will be OSS gaming, don't get me wrong, but I'm hard-pressed to see how there'll be an OSS gaming market.
In the beginning, there were computers... the hardware... the software was free. People were paid to write programs, but the programs weren't sold "as a product without guarantees." Then Bill Gates said "let there be profit where there was none!" And so there was.
...ummm, were you actually coding back then? I hate to break this to you, but by propagating (bit by bit, and admittedly occasionally by accident) the concept of a common computing environment with well-defined, public (and mostly-open) APIs and by encouraging the commoditization of computing, Bill Gates has probably done more to ensure the development of more free software than anyone else in the history of computing...
...I'm surprised no one has mentioned one of the most serious issues with ray tracing: cache coherency. As processors have gotten faster, the bottlenecks are shifting drastically; being able to feed data to your processor quickly enough is as important as being able to get it through the processor's pipelines.
Traditional rasterization is about as cache-friendly as you can get; feed your GPU a list of triangles to rasterize, along with small chunks of additional data here and there, and watch it fly through them. Texturing can cause a little bit of thrash since arbitrary orientations mean that you're not going to be sampling your texture maps in consistent patterns (and things like mipmapping throw additional wrenches into the works), but the major GPU manufacturers have done a ton of work on those issues and they're pretty well worked out at this point.
Now, contrast this with raytracing. Even for primary rays, it can be hard to exploit ray-to-ray coherency; the snazzy spatial partitioning algorithms that give the bragged-about O(log n) asymptotic time can send you romping about your scene memory in fairly arbitrary fashion, and while trusting that you're going to intersect the same objects as the last (primary) ray cast is a good start, tests still need to be done to make sure that nothing has intruded on the scene any closer to the camera than the last ray's nearest hit. And secondary rays (lighting, reflections, etc) -- the ones needed for all the effects that have people interested in ray tracing in the first place -- are much, much worse; the direction of reflections off of a curved surface might as well be random, from a caching perspective; it's all but impossible to do any predictive preloading there except in certain degenerate cases. We're still nowhere near the object counts needed for ray tracing's ostensibly-better asymptotic performance to wipe out the hugely better constant factor that good cache behavior gives rasterization algorithms, and I wouldn't be shocked if we never get there (but that's a rant in its own right).
He's selling feature-length commentaries as audio files to be played alongside the movies (and even a few scattered TV shows) at http://www.rifftrax.com/. Not always brilliant, but there are certainly some chuckles scattered in there, and at about $3/movie the price is right. Now if we could just get them all back together again, dammit...
There may be games out on the system -- and I'm a huge fan of PSN, easily the most appealing feature of the system right now, with a much more interesting selection than XBLA -- but it seems fair to say that nobody's playing it. There are all of two PS3 games in the top 20 on this week's estimated games sales charts (yes, US only), and they're 16th and 20th. Last week there were also only two games in the top 20, both ports of NBA titles that did less than half what the 360 versions did. Weekly hardware sales at this point are still running behind the PS2, nevermind the other next-gen consoles. There may still be hope on the horizon, but saying that people aren't buying PS3s or PS3 games in any real volume is still a matter of fact more than it is an opinion.
...for all the egregious mistakes they've made in marketing the PS3, they're doing one thing that neither Nintendo nor Microsoft (XNA aside) has really managed: luring fantastic independent and artistic game developers onto the platform. Titles like Everyday Shooter, Jenova Chen's flOw, and even stuff like Calling All Cars are really making a PS3 a temptation, as absurd as it seems to spend $400 on a system to play $5 games on. Microsoft took some good initial steps with games like Eets and Alien Hominid, but they've slipped dramatically since then; more and more it's looking like the PS3 will be the primary platform for fans of the indie scene.
It may appear that way, but IIRC several surveys have shown far and away the opposite -- the quality of work you get after a certain threshold (somewhere in the 40-50 hour range) goes down so rapidly that you're substantially better off throwing more people at the problem than more time. This is more applicable in large organizations where the additional people are already on staff, of course, but ramp-up on projects is generally swift enough for anyone you can hire from within the industry (especially now that middleware technologies such as the Unreal Engine, Havok physics, etc. are becoming so prominent) that even hiring new people from outside the company can be much more cost-effective than trying to double the hours of the people already working for you.
Unfortunately, quite a few people *do* take Thompson seriously -- he's still used regularly as a talking-head on news programs talking about video game violence (or at least was, before his recent crazy-turn; that my have been the nail in the coffin). He's dangerously effective at manipulating the media to listen to him, and I for one like to keep on top of what he's up to.
In fact, the corrected study shows that half of the 10 warmest years on record occurred before World War II.
Mentioned nowhere: the uncorrected version of the study has only, ummm, four of the 10 warmest years on record occurring before WW2. In fact, the net effect of this 'massive' bugfix (aside from a couple of minor changes of position on the list) is to replace the year 2001, in the bottom of the top 10, with the year 1939. Yes, there is a drastic change in 2001's temperature deviation (about 15 percent), and a notable change in 2006's (a bit under 10 percent), but to claim that this somehow puts the lie to the data is an absurd overreach. Can anyone offer an explanation for explicitly mentioning the '5 years before WW2' figure in the new data without mentioning that this is only one year more than previous, that doesn't involve a deliberate effort to spin the results?
Simple bluffs are pretty straightforward to handle, but the combination of factors in poker (multiple rounds of action, shifting hand strength, complex unknown information) makes it inordinately difficult to compute Von Neumann optimal strategies. Even simpler games like (0,1) poker (both players are randomly 'dealt' a number in the 0..1 range, smallest number wins) with multiple betting rounds are remarkably difficult to solve under normal betting patterns. For more information, I heartily recommend The Mathematics of Poker by Chen and Ankenman.
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The Apple ][ version (and probably others, but that's the one I played) of Karateka had my favorite Easter egg ever: while there was nothing to indicate this, the original floppy was two-sided. Inserting the floppy upside-down would bring up another copy of the game, identical in every way -- except that it was flipped over (and inverted left-to-right, IIRC); title screen, all of the character's movements and animation, scores, all of it. It may not have taken that much effort to do, but it's brilliant in its simplicity.
Modern Software engineering has NOTHING to do with CS. Once you realize that, you're 99% of the way there. Some colleges now have Software Engineering departments. Hire those students or just an engineer that knows the problem domain, and teach them to code.
Nonsense. The non-software side of software engineering -- project planning, development methodologies and the like -- may be divorced from Computer Science, but modern CS has a deep and lengthy relationship with modern programming practice and software design. Formal correctness principles (and proofs!) inspire type-safety, functors/functionals come from recursion theory (with a small splash of category theory), generic programming also has deep roots in category theory and denotational semantics... and that's without ever getting into the algorithms that are still at the heart of modern software. All the finest engineering principles still wouldn't have produced something like PageRank without developers who had an intimate knowledge of Linear Algebra and Markov Theory.
What are your relevant browsers (and platforms), and what is Flash giving you that couldn't be achieved with (a) good CSS and DOM scripting code talking to a back-end server, or in a worst-case scenario, (b) Java running on the user's system? Yes, the latter requires a user install, but so does Flash itself -- neither Firefox nor IE comes with it pre-installed...
I have yet to drop $60 on a retail PS3 game (LBP will be the first, and I actually got my PS3 just for it -- a few months back, when I could still get a PS2-compatible system), but both flOw and Everyday Shooter are $10 titles available through the PSN store that push the 'art game' form in different directions. flOw is a bit closer to interactive screensaver than to game in some ways, but it's still gorgeous to watch and reasonable to play; and the gameplay in Everyday Shooter is fantastic. More recently there's Echochrome, a really clever game based on Escherian paradoxical geometry; not the deepest title in the world, and not without its share of frustrations, but wholly unlike anything else out there.
20 years ago this was a great idea, and Kernighan&Ritchie stands up as a fine example of technical writing (IMHO at least), but the coding guidelines there (short variable names, some of the control structure idioms, and even arguably the brace conventions) were written for an age when you had a reasonable shot at out-optimizing your compiler, there was a good chance you were developing on an 80x24 terminal, and it was critical to write for speed over clarity. In the modern world of IDEs and optimizing compilers a lot of K&R is just painful.
As beloved as Portal is, and as amazing as it is, it feels more 'of the moment' than 'enduring classic' to me. Meme-ish, if you will; and it's no surprise that most of what's still alive (innocent look) from Portal at this point is the memes. Contrast that with a game like SMB1, where certainly everyone remembers that the Princess is still in another castle, but most people can easily see the rough layout of level 1-1 (and probably even level 1-2) in their heads even 20 years later, and can tell you the broad themes of the sublevels.
To my mind, Counterstrike has an even more serious issue -- it's an inherently multiplayer experience, arguably even an inherently large-group experience. While there may be multiplayer games that survive the test of time (party games: Charades, Truth or Dare, and the like), the sheer volume of setup required to get a CS game going compared to any of those will probably keep it from being eternally replayed.
Not a new annoyance, but a constant one: why is the phrase 'hardcore gamer' always coupled with the splatterfest M titles? I've been gaming on virtually every platform under the sun for the last 20 years, spending north of $1000/year on games and systems and playing a little bit of everything (Well, almost everything -- I never have managed the combination of brainpower and dexterity to play RTSen effectively, but that's a corner case). And the two most hardcore games I've played lately are Braid and Geometry Wars 2, with Bangai-O Spirits coming up rapidly behind; all three have fantastically hard elements and a distilled purity of experience that really makes them 'Gamer's games'(Braid perhaps a bit less so). They're the hardest of the hardcore, and all the other serious gamers I know are much more interested in these titles than in Mad World (though the visual style there is fantastic, I have to say) -- and none is rated worse than E10+.
Also unlike COD4, Sins doesn't have console versions available for every system under the sun (pun not really intended). Yes, what Sins has done is remarkable, but comparing Sins PC sales to COD4 PC sales is apples to oranges, because PC games of virtually all console titles are cannibalized by the console sales. (For reference, the XBOX 360 version of COD4 sold 750K copies its first *week* -- http://www.vgchartz.com/aweekly.php?date=39397&boxartz=1 has the numbers).
While this isn't directly related to the 'gaming on Linux' question, there's still a huge gap between open-source gaming and other open-source software projects. If I (as a profit-oriented corporation) release an open-source IDE, Office environment, etc., then I have a pretty straightforward support-oriented business model; I can give away my software and still have some faith that I'll be able to make money post-'sale'. (And in particular, make large portions of that money off of other large corps that need my software). But, to put it bluntly, what's the profit model in open-source games? You're not going to be able to do any meaningful level of 'support', certainly not enough to pay for development, and especially when you don't have those large corporate customers. Your primary differentiation from your competition is in the content, and that's all but impossible to maintain in an open-source world. There will be OSS gaming, don't get me wrong, but I'm hard-pressed to see how there'll be an OSS gaming market.
...I'm surprised no one has mentioned one of the most serious issues with ray tracing: cache coherency. As processors have gotten faster, the bottlenecks are shifting drastically; being able to feed data to your processor quickly enough is as important as being able to get it through the processor's pipelines.
Traditional rasterization is about as cache-friendly as you can get; feed your GPU a list of triangles to rasterize, along with small chunks of additional data here and there, and watch it fly through them. Texturing can cause a little bit of thrash since arbitrary orientations mean that you're not going to be sampling your texture maps in consistent patterns (and things like mipmapping throw additional wrenches into the works), but the major GPU manufacturers have done a ton of work on those issues and they're pretty well worked out at this point.
Now, contrast this with raytracing. Even for primary rays, it can be hard to exploit ray-to-ray coherency; the snazzy spatial partitioning algorithms that give the bragged-about O(log n) asymptotic time can send you romping about your scene memory in fairly arbitrary fashion, and while trusting that you're going to intersect the same objects as the last (primary) ray cast is a good start, tests still need to be done to make sure that nothing has intruded on the scene any closer to the camera than the last ray's nearest hit. And secondary rays (lighting, reflections, etc) -- the ones needed for all the effects that have people interested in ray tracing in the first place -- are much, much worse; the direction of reflections off of a curved surface might as well be random, from a caching perspective; it's all but impossible to do any predictive preloading there except in certain degenerate cases. We're still nowhere near the object counts needed for ray tracing's ostensibly-better asymptotic performance to wipe out the hugely better constant factor that good cache behavior gives rasterization algorithms, and I wouldn't be shocked if we never get there (but that's a rant in its own right).
He's selling feature-length commentaries as audio files to be played alongside the movies (and even a few scattered TV shows) at http://www.rifftrax.com/. Not always brilliant, but there are certainly some chuckles scattered in there, and at about $3/movie the price is right. Now if we could just get them all back together again, dammit...
There may be games out on the system -- and I'm a huge fan of PSN, easily the most appealing feature of the system right now, with a much more interesting selection than XBLA -- but it seems fair to say that nobody's playing it. There are all of two PS3 games in the top 20 on this week's estimated games sales charts (yes, US only), and they're 16th and 20th. Last week there were also only two games in the top 20, both ports of NBA titles that did less than half what the 360 versions did. Weekly hardware sales at this point are still running behind the PS2, nevermind the other next-gen consoles. There may still be hope on the horizon, but saying that people aren't buying PS3s or PS3 games in any real volume is still a matter of fact more than it is an opinion.
...for all the egregious mistakes they've made in marketing the PS3, they're doing one thing that neither Nintendo nor Microsoft (XNA aside) has really managed: luring fantastic independent and artistic game developers onto the platform. Titles like Everyday Shooter, Jenova Chen's flOw, and even stuff like Calling All Cars are really making a PS3 a temptation, as absurd as it seems to spend $400 on a system to play $5 games on. Microsoft took some good initial steps with games like Eets and Alien Hominid, but they've slipped dramatically since then; more and more it's looking like the PS3 will be the primary platform for fans of the indie scene.
It may appear that way, but IIRC several surveys have shown far and away the opposite -- the quality of work you get after a certain threshold (somewhere in the 40-50 hour range) goes down so rapidly that you're substantially better off throwing more people at the problem than more time. This is more applicable in large organizations where the additional people are already on staff, of course, but ramp-up on projects is generally swift enough for anyone you can hire from within the industry (especially now that middleware technologies such as the Unreal Engine, Havok physics, etc. are becoming so prominent) that even hiring new people from outside the company can be much more cost-effective than trying to double the hours of the people already working for you.
Unfortunately, quite a few people *do* take Thompson seriously -- he's still used regularly as a talking-head on news programs talking about video game violence (or at least was, before his recent crazy-turn; that my have been the nail in the coffin). He's dangerously effective at manipulating the media to listen to him, and I for one like to keep on top of what he's up to.
Can we get this sooner, please? God knows I've been to enough movies I wish I could forget the moment after leaving the theatre...
Simple bluffs are pretty straightforward to handle, but the combination of factors in poker (multiple rounds of action, shifting hand strength, complex unknown information) makes it inordinately difficult to compute Von Neumann optimal strategies. Even simpler games like (0,1) poker (both players are randomly 'dealt' a number in the 0..1 range, smallest number wins) with multiple betting rounds are remarkably difficult to solve under normal betting patterns. For more information, I heartily recommend The Mathematics of Poker by Chen and Ankenman.