I would think a rising tide lifts all boats: Apple says it's a hardware company, so they produce the best hardware and the best interface to said hardware (OSX and the iPhone variant), period. Make the hardware absolutely bulletproof, a dream to program for, and sit back and let the $$$ roll in.
If Google come up with software that allows me to make 60-way calls while also making toast and watering the garden, then there should be no reason for Apple to stop them; "we made the best hardware and the best interface to that hardware around. That's all we care about. Go for it!"
In other words, why is there a problem in the first place? Does Apple really make enough additional money in its contracts with at&t et al to justify meddling in software developers' affairs? I own a Mac, I run OS X, and it gives me everything I want to start with. They've done their job, so now I can install the software I want to use to actually get things done, and go about my business. Why does it have to be different with the iPhone?
I personally believe the app store is a great idea insofar as it's a single place to go for everything; it was a total nightmare to find JavaMe apps for my Razr and even worse trying to get them installed. That said, I also totally disagree with Apple's heavy-handed approach; if you don't want questionable apps, don't install them, and if they turn out to be not what they purported to be, then review them out of existence.
In other words, leave me the hell alone to make my own damn choices about apps I want to run. Let Google write whatever they want; if it works for me I'll use it. If it doesn't, I won't. But let me choose for myself.
...but I'm a big fan of giving machines actual names, after TV shows, bands, movies, fiction, etc. I prefer to log into "Trixie.mycompany.com" instead of "LAUX001"; the former, in addition to being easier to remember, just gives the machine a trifle bit of "personality". Yes, I realize that the latter may convey more information (mail servers especially seem to do this: "CHIMAIL01", "NYCEXCH05", etc.), but it feels cold and impersonal; if you treat your machines as just machines, as just any old random tool you'd grab and work with, then they become just a series of interchangeable parts. Giving a machine a name invokes something, typically whimsical, that just adds a touch of humanity back into the system. Yes it's still a machine, yes it's going to spit out a thousand nonsensical errors when you forget a semicolon somewhere in your C++ file, and yes it will eventually be replaced, but for that period of time when you're working with it, you're just that little bit more connected to something more... personal.
Maybe this is just old school thinking; it seems like this was much more common back when everyone had an account on the campus Unix boxen, complete with subtle importance ("Oh, you have an account on Kramden? That's a much faster Vax than Norton...what project are you working on that you scored that??").
Th FA talks about laughing at WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS users, but as one of those users, I never ever wondered why the font suddenly changed (and always to Times New Roman, no matter what I set my default to), or why pages suddenly ended for no reason, or why widows and orphans basically just didn't work. "Reveal Codes" was WordPerfect's killer feature that saved me hours of frustration (that I got back and more when I had to switch to Word) in that I could tell exactly where the "bad" code was and remove it.
When the Web and HTML came along, I initially thought the designers had used WP as their inspiration.
The other thing WP 5.1 had was the ultimate in minimalist interface; the lower right hand corner had the page, line and word position and nothing else. The closest to a blank sheet of paper I've ever had in writing software. The FA also laughs at all the function key combos, but in reality you only used a few (Shift-F7 comes to mind...).
Also, WP had, at the time, the best support...an 800-number and all the free tech/user support you could want. It's no exaggeration to say that their support helped me learn WP macro programming.
Sigh, okay, everyone off my lawn...I have to get back to my TPS reports; I accidentally saved them in docx format and have to re-save them all as.doc so people with Word 2007 can read them.
So would this extend to something like, say, a Photoshop filter, where the machine is generating the output? Does nik software suddenly have a copyright claim on my photos?
Or does Autodesk have a claim on my animated movie, because, while I used the software to create the objects and things, it was really the software that generated the resulting file.
This isn't a slippery slope, this is a big bottomless hole.
Everybody even remotely involved with movies or music from the beginning probably assumed that new formats would come along with new opportunities for both creativity, as well as profit; companies could be angry that the phonograph was stealing money away from their piano roll business, until they jumped into the phonograph business themselves.
Now with music and movies, and everything, being nothing more than a pile of bits, there's simply nowhere to go. Digital is the perfect medium insofar as there's nothing that anyone can conceive of coming after; people could imagine smaller records, color movies, etc., no one has even hinted at the possibility of something to replace a digital file.
So more than anything, they realize that an mp3 will be available forever and ever; it's even *more* perfect because it can be changed to fit the need (burning to a cd, etc.). The problem is that they see the problem from a purely infrastructure point of view: "we have to keep these drm servers running forever? No freaking way!" On top of that, it's only going to go further downhill; the tunes that are DRM'ed today will likely be un-DRM'ed later today, and will eventually get out onto the wider market, so not only are they spending a lot of money keeping up a bunch of servers, the servers become more expensive over time for all the work they're *not* doing as people eventually find the non-DRM version.
I'm curious about how projects, in general, fare after someone with rather intimate knowledge leaves for whatever reason. I'm not being specific to Linux; you gotta think some of the kernel developers of Windows have left over the years. That's gotta be hard on the next person regardless of project; "here's his code, all three million lines of it. Oh, he seemed to like Pascal syntax so he wrote all these macros to make his C++ code look like Pascal. Good luck!"
Right, which is exactly why I want it...no big epic story, just some stupid fun laying trip mines in the grocery store while going after friends with the microwave gun.
I always thought of DN3D as the perfect blend of Quake and Unreal Tournament; there's levels to go through (Quake) but you don't really need to just jump in to have fun (UT) with some multiplayer action.
I agree...DNF became an industry joke to the point that it totally overshadowed the game itself, along with DN3D. The fact is, the game was a lot of *fun* to play. Quake was the "better" game in having a real 3D environment, but it wasn't a lot of fun; level after level of stone walls and wooden beams.
It's too bad that any version is unlikely to see the light of day because of intellectual property laws and all that; theoretically all you'd need to do is take the Quake 3 engine and start building some levels. Hell, even a fan-mod Duke Nukem would be welcome.
Happens to me every time I drink XFKG MZJTZ. But then I chase it down with some JIZV KLZV and start thinking of Maud, and forget about everything else.
Sega had some great games in the 90s that I'd love to see done again:
- Crazy Taxi (how about a multiplayer version, everyone competing for fares?) - Jet Set Radio (that funky Tokyo-esque rollerblading game with its awesome soundtrack never gets old) - Shenmue (hell, forget the reboot, I just want to see the damn storyline finished!) - Sonic (on second thought, no, forget Sonic)
Sorry, I meant to say that without a final C++ standard, we wouldn't have these features in a standard commercial compiler; I didn't mean to imply that they had been removed from the standard itself.
Many of the pics show people wearing what look like disposable glasses to view the eclipse; I thought looking at the sun at any time was a Really Bad Idea (tm) and during an eclipse was supposedly an Even Worse Really Bad Idea.
I guess they now make thin films that are so dark as to be safe to look at the sun now?
NetHack still has more game awesomeness than any other game I've ever played. Not only are you potentially one cockatrice away from death, but the levels are randomly built and stocked (never the same game twice) and there are a lot of them. The game has many levels that are fixed (castle, town, etc.) but even there what you will encounter is a total crap shoot; the game even takes into consideration the phases of the moon and adjusts your "luck" accordingly (sacrifices don't give you anything, etc.). It has something of a story arc; you are definitely not the same character by the time you've "ascended" and the puzzles and challenges fit accordingly to where you are in the story. Throw in an amazingly deep set of game rules, more items than you know what to do with (though you'll want to cache them on some levels 'cause you're gonna need them coming back up), more characters and monsters than in the D&D MM, and the ability to play it on every computer/operating system in existence.
In short, if you don't mind that it doesn't have multiplayer or graphics that require OpenGL or DirectX, it's the perfect RPG. But as a college freshman who discovered it on a VT100 in the library, I can easily say it's the game I've played the most over the years, bar none. And I've never played the same game twice. And, to my eternal frustration, I've never ascended (got as far as the plain of water, though!).
This post reminded me of an article that was written a couple years ago about the people who program the space shuttle. I couldn't find a link to it, but I recall a similar article about the software on the Boeing 777; essentially the pilots are sitting in front of a computer screen that they can bring up any piece of data about the airplane, and how these systems must all co-exist without interfering in any way with the flight systems, etc. Pretty interesting reads.
Frankly, the pressure in such an environment has got to be *beyond* intense; you're being asked to write software to, in some cases, cheat physics, and if you get it wrong, everybody dies. I have great sympathy for pilots who have to use the software, knowing that you can train to handle just so much, but I also have sympathy for the developers who have to write the programs that have to handle so much more.
I remember furiously bulldozing whole sections of the city in the hopes to re-arrange stuff to boost tax revenues, cut down on pollution, or even just disperse everything as a last-ditch attempt at boosting tax revenues. Sadly, it never worked, I would always get into a downward spiral of plummeting commercial/residential, which caused me to raise taxes and cut services, causing more flight, etc.
The big lesson I learned (other than the general "wow, managing a city is hard!") was that bulldozing more than a couple of tiles was a recipe for disaster.
SIMH is a hardware emulator for a lot of the machines Unix ran on (PDP-8, PDP-11, etc.). They also have some original Unix versions along with some other software for the other hardware they support.
I have run Unix V5 on a SIMH-based PDP-11, and it worked well, though it was strange to realize how fast it was running, in emulation, on a machine 1/16 its original size (Mac laptop).
Sadly, I can say pretty safely that respect is not something you get in IT. Computers are strange, scary things that most people have not a clue how it works (see: series of tubes). People who *do* understand them are treated with a mixture of awe and mild disapproval that are reserved for magicians and artists. In a corporate environment IT is always seen as a "necessary evil" as if the only thing standing in everyone's way from getting work done were these dang-blast-it-computer-things.
The computer is unique among the tools we've created and used throughout history in that you can't actually see what it's doing; "chips" are magically doing "things" that somehow present pictures and words on a screen. Open a computer and you see no moving parts, nothing that translates to ordinary life. Nothing else comes close to this; people understand basically how cars work and could point to the engine and know that's what makes 'er go. People understand phones (though cell phones are basically computers now, so maybe the analogy doesn't apply anymore). When people don't "get it", they get scared. Scared you're pulling a fast one on 'em, and since you know how it works, you must be in on it.
Though all is not lost; you can still stand tall among your peers. Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson invented what I'd argue is the most important operating system in history, but 99.999% of the population could sit next to them on a bus and never know, nor care, what they did. But they rank pretty high up there in the annals of all things uber. Then there are the folks whose names scroll by in the credits for the latest Pixar movie; people who quite literally made those movies possible. Would you recognize any of them if they were sitting next to you? Probably not, but you can deeply appreciate the work they must have put in, everyone revels in the job they did, and they can say "I did that. That's me."
So forget it, ordinary folks will never understand. It's all magic and if everything is working the way it should, no one complains (a sad paradox: the most things work, the less users see the need for IT, because they're expensive and, hey, nothing goes wrong). At best you can create something that will give *you* the satisfaction of a job well done.
As the guy who designed Lotus Notes, Ray Ozzie has no credit with me about complaining about complexity. What is Lotus Notes? Is it a database? Email system? Application development platform? How about all that and more! A good friend of mine was a Lotus Notes developer back in the day said "Lotus Notes is everything you want and need from now to the end of time, and it's all available to you right now."
VC6, to me, is the '57 Chevy of IDEs; it's out of date, lacking in features, isn't to everyone's tastes, but just keeps on runnin' with a strange magic that Microsoft has never been able to reproduce in its later versions. I've used every VS version since 2, and all the versions after 6 were plagued by bugginess, general slowness, and, here's the real subjective part, a feeling of fragility that I never experienced with VC6. I have used VS8 quite a bit and while I appreciate having a more up-to-date compiler (stupid BS "security warnings" aside), VC6 still, for whatever reason, remains the IDE I want to use if I have to write Windows-specific C++.
Frankly, I don't *want* to use VC6, just like I don't want to put a bottle of lead-substitute into my gas tank every time I fill up, it's just that it has that perfect mix of speed, usefulness, and the ability to get out of my way that none of the.net versions have been able to capture.
Though technically a programming language, most people didn't interact with it as such; it was the hidden application in printers that made them produce such gorgeous text and graphics from Pagemaker, Quark, Illustrator (wasn't as important for bitmap-based programs like Photoshop).
The article talking about Quark, other folks have mentioned Pagemaker, but it really was Postscript that showed that mere mortals could produce camera-worthy output, and now we absolutely expect it, in both the most ephemeral print out and our displays. It's no surprise that the most advanced windowing system at the time, IMHO, was NextStep, which used Display Postscript as its rendering engine. Now we have the Mac (descendant from NextStep), and Windows, which uses its own rendering system.
I got my PADI certification in Hawaii and for the "deep" dive, we went out to where the U of H had sunk a research vessel that had once been a minesweeper. It was sitting upright at 100ft and that was an experience nothing to date had prepared me for: we descended down and down and suddenly this enormous black shape appeared right below me, and there was this ship, in all its sunken glory.
Standing on the ocean floor, looking up at the ship from "ground" level, was wild. I'm not certified to do the kind of diving you'd need for the Vandenberg, but if I thought swimming over a minesweeper was a mind-blowing experience, I can't imagine what something like that Vandenberg would be.
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I would think a rising tide lifts all boats: Apple says it's a hardware company, so they produce the best hardware and the best interface to said hardware (OSX and the iPhone variant), period. Make the hardware absolutely bulletproof, a dream to program for, and sit back and let the $$$ roll in.
If Google come up with software that allows me to make 60-way calls while also making toast and watering the garden, then there should be no reason for Apple to stop them; "we made the best hardware and the best interface to that hardware around. That's all we care about. Go for it!"
In other words, why is there a problem in the first place? Does Apple really make enough additional money in its contracts with at&t et al to justify meddling in software developers' affairs? I own a Mac, I run OS X, and it gives me everything I want to start with. They've done their job, so now I can install the software I want to use to actually get things done, and go about my business. Why does it have to be different with the iPhone?
I personally believe the app store is a great idea insofar as it's a single place to go for everything; it was a total nightmare to find JavaMe apps for my Razr and even worse trying to get them installed. That said, I also totally disagree with Apple's heavy-handed approach; if you don't want questionable apps, don't install them, and if they turn out to be not what they purported to be, then review them out of existence.
In other words, leave me the hell alone to make my own damn choices about apps I want to run. Let Google write whatever they want; if it works for me I'll use it. If it doesn't, I won't. But let me choose for myself.
...but I'm a big fan of giving machines actual names, after TV shows, bands, movies, fiction, etc. I prefer to log into "Trixie.mycompany.com" instead of "LAUX001"; the former, in addition to being easier to remember, just gives the machine a trifle bit of "personality". Yes, I realize that the latter may convey more information (mail servers especially seem to do this: "CHIMAIL01", "NYCEXCH05", etc.), but it feels cold and impersonal; if you treat your machines as just machines, as just any old random tool you'd grab and work with, then they become just a series of interchangeable parts. Giving a machine a name invokes something, typically whimsical, that just adds a touch of humanity back into the system. Yes it's still a machine, yes it's going to spit out a thousand nonsensical errors when you forget a semicolon somewhere in your C++ file, and yes it will eventually be replaced, but for that period of time when you're working with it, you're just that little bit more connected to something more ... personal.
Maybe this is just old school thinking; it seems like this was much more common back when everyone had an account on the campus Unix boxen, complete with subtle importance ("Oh, you have an account on Kramden? That's a much faster Vax than Norton...what project are you working on that you scored that??").
Th FA talks about laughing at WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS users, but as one of those users, I never ever wondered why the font suddenly changed (and always to Times New Roman, no matter what I set my default to), or why pages suddenly ended for no reason, or why widows and orphans basically just didn't work. "Reveal Codes" was WordPerfect's killer feature that saved me hours of frustration (that I got back and more when I had to switch to Word) in that I could tell exactly where the "bad" code was and remove it.
When the Web and HTML came along, I initially thought the designers had used WP as their inspiration.
The other thing WP 5.1 had was the ultimate in minimalist interface; the lower right hand corner had the page, line and word position and nothing else. The closest to a blank sheet of paper I've ever had in writing software. The FA also laughs at all the function key combos, but in reality you only used a few (Shift-F7 comes to mind...).
Also, WP had, at the time, the best support...an 800-number and all the free tech/user support you could want. It's no exaggeration to say that their support helped me learn WP macro programming.
Sigh, okay, everyone off my lawn...I have to get back to my TPS reports; I accidentally saved them in docx format and have to re-save them all as .doc so people with Word 2007 can read them.
So would this extend to something like, say, a Photoshop filter, where the machine is generating the output? Does nik software suddenly have a copyright claim on my photos?
Or does Autodesk have a claim on my animated movie, because, while I used the software to create the objects and things, it was really the software that generated the resulting file.
This isn't a slippery slope, this is a big bottomless hole.
...to realize you've reached the end game.
Everybody even remotely involved with movies or music from the beginning probably assumed that new formats would come along with new opportunities for both creativity, as well as profit; companies could be angry that the phonograph was stealing money away from their piano roll business, until they jumped into the phonograph business themselves.
Now with music and movies, and everything, being nothing more than a pile of bits, there's simply nowhere to go. Digital is the perfect medium insofar as there's nothing that anyone can conceive of coming after; people could imagine smaller records, color movies, etc., no one has even hinted at the possibility of something to replace a digital file.
So more than anything, they realize that an mp3 will be available forever and ever; it's even *more* perfect because it can be changed to fit the need (burning to a cd, etc.). The problem is that they see the problem from a purely infrastructure point of view: "we have to keep these drm servers running forever? No freaking way!" On top of that, it's only going to go further downhill; the tunes that are DRM'ed today will likely be un-DRM'ed later today, and will eventually get out onto the wider market, so not only are they spending a lot of money keeping up a bunch of servers, the servers become more expensive over time for all the work they're *not* doing as people eventually find the non-DRM version.
Lose now, lose more later.
I'm curious about how projects, in general, fare after someone with rather intimate knowledge leaves for whatever reason. I'm not being specific to Linux; you gotta think some of the kernel developers of Windows have left over the years. That's gotta be hard on the next person regardless of project; "here's his code, all three million lines of it. Oh, he seemed to like Pascal syntax so he wrote all these macros to make his C++ code look like Pascal. Good luck!"
Right, which is exactly why I want it...no big epic story, just some stupid fun laying trip mines in the grocery store while going after friends with the microwave gun.
I always thought of DN3D as the perfect blend of Quake and Unreal Tournament; there's levels to go through (Quake) but you don't really need to just jump in to have fun (UT) with some multiplayer action.
No, I'd say it doesn't have any cruft; it just needs to be rebooted as a franchise to get it onto the new consoles.
I agree...DNF became an industry joke to the point that it totally overshadowed the game itself, along with DN3D. The fact is, the game was a lot of *fun* to play. Quake was the "better" game in having a real 3D environment, but it wasn't a lot of fun; level after level of stone walls and wooden beams.
It's too bad that any version is unlikely to see the light of day because of intellectual property laws and all that; theoretically all you'd need to do is take the Quake 3 engine and start building some levels. Hell, even a fan-mod Duke Nukem would be welcome.
Happens to me every time I drink XFKG MZJTZ. But then I chase it down with some JIZV KLZV and start thinking of Maud, and forget about everything else.
Sega had some great games in the 90s that I'd love to see done again:
- Crazy Taxi (how about a multiplayer version, everyone competing for fares?)
- Jet Set Radio (that funky Tokyo-esque rollerblading game with its awesome soundtrack never gets old)
- Shenmue (hell, forget the reboot, I just want to see the damn storyline finished!)
- Sonic (on second thought, no, forget Sonic)
Well, the pictures did show some runners in the night...
Sorry, I meant to say that without a final C++ standard, we wouldn't have these features in a standard commercial compiler; I didn't mean to imply that they had been removed from the standard itself.
Many of the pics show people wearing what look like disposable glasses to view the eclipse; I thought looking at the sun at any time was a Really Bad Idea (tm) and during an eclipse was supposedly an Even Worse Really Bad Idea.
I guess they now make thin films that are so dark as to be safe to look at the sun now?
They commit all their crimes inside, so spies flying around outside can't see them.
NetHack still has more game awesomeness than any other game I've ever played. Not only are you potentially one cockatrice away from death, but the levels are randomly built and stocked (never the same game twice) and there are a lot of them. The game has many levels that are fixed (castle, town, etc.) but even there what you will encounter is a total crap shoot; the game even takes into consideration the phases of the moon and adjusts your "luck" accordingly (sacrifices don't give you anything, etc.). It has something of a story arc; you are definitely not the same character by the time you've "ascended" and the puzzles and challenges fit accordingly to where you are in the story. Throw in an amazingly deep set of game rules, more items than you know what to do with (though you'll want to cache them on some levels 'cause you're gonna need them coming back up), more characters and monsters than in the D&D MM, and the ability to play it on every computer/operating system in existence.
In short, if you don't mind that it doesn't have multiplayer or graphics that require OpenGL or DirectX, it's the perfect RPG. But as a college freshman who discovered it on a VT100 in the library, I can easily say it's the game I've played the most over the years, bar none. And I've never played the same game twice. And, to my eternal frustration, I've never ascended (got as far as the plain of water, though!).
This post reminded me of an article that was written a couple years ago about the people who program the space shuttle. I couldn't find a link to it, but I recall a similar article about the software on the Boeing 777; essentially the pilots are sitting in front of a computer screen that they can bring up any piece of data about the airplane, and how these systems must all co-exist without interfering in any way with the flight systems, etc. Pretty interesting reads.
Frankly, the pressure in such an environment has got to be *beyond* intense; you're being asked to write software to, in some cases, cheat physics, and if you get it wrong, everybody dies. I have great sympathy for pilots who have to use the software, knowing that you can train to handle just so much, but I also have sympathy for the developers who have to write the programs that have to handle so much more.
I remember furiously bulldozing whole sections of the city in the hopes to re-arrange stuff to boost tax revenues, cut down on pollution, or even just disperse everything as a last-ditch attempt at boosting tax revenues. Sadly, it never worked, I would always get into a downward spiral of plummeting commercial/residential, which caused me to raise taxes and cut services, causing more flight, etc.
The big lesson I learned (other than the general "wow, managing a city is hard!") was that bulldozing more than a couple of tiles was a recipe for disaster.
SIMH is a hardware emulator for a lot of the machines Unix ran on (PDP-8, PDP-11, etc.). They also have some original Unix versions along with some other software for the other hardware they support.
I have run Unix V5 on a SIMH-based PDP-11, and it worked well, though it was strange to realize how fast it was running, in emulation, on a machine 1/16 its original size (Mac laptop).
Sadly, I can say pretty safely that respect is not something you get in IT. Computers are strange, scary things that most people have not a clue how it works (see: series of tubes). People who *do* understand them are treated with a mixture of awe and mild disapproval that are reserved for magicians and artists. In a corporate environment IT is always seen as a "necessary evil" as if the only thing standing in everyone's way from getting work done were these dang-blast-it-computer-things.
The computer is unique among the tools we've created and used throughout history in that you can't actually see what it's doing; "chips" are magically doing "things" that somehow present pictures and words on a screen. Open a computer and you see no moving parts, nothing that translates to ordinary life. Nothing else comes close to this; people understand basically how cars work and could point to the engine and know that's what makes 'er go. People understand phones (though cell phones are basically computers now, so maybe the analogy doesn't apply anymore). When people don't "get it", they get scared. Scared you're pulling a fast one on 'em, and since you know how it works, you must be in on it.
Though all is not lost; you can still stand tall among your peers. Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson invented what I'd argue is the most important operating system in history, but 99.999% of the population could sit next to them on a bus and never know, nor care, what they did. But they rank pretty high up there in the annals of all things uber. Then there are the folks whose names scroll by in the credits for the latest Pixar movie; people who quite literally made those movies possible. Would you recognize any of them if they were sitting next to you? Probably not, but you can deeply appreciate the work they must have put in, everyone revels in the job they did, and they can say "I did that. That's me."
So forget it, ordinary folks will never understand. It's all magic and if everything is working the way it should, no one complains (a sad paradox: the most things work, the less users see the need for IT, because they're expensive and, hey, nothing goes wrong). At best you can create something that will give *you* the satisfaction of a job well done.
As the guy who designed Lotus Notes, Ray Ozzie has no credit with me about complaining about complexity. What is Lotus Notes? Is it a database? Email system? Application development platform? How about all that and more! A good friend of mine was a Lotus Notes developer back in the day said "Lotus Notes is everything you want and need from now to the end of time, and it's all available to you right now."
That is not the hallmark of simplicity.
VC6, to me, is the '57 Chevy of IDEs; it's out of date, lacking in features, isn't to everyone's tastes, but just keeps on runnin' with a strange magic that Microsoft has never been able to reproduce in its later versions. I've used every VS version since 2, and all the versions after 6 were plagued by bugginess, general slowness, and, here's the real subjective part, a feeling of fragility that I never experienced with VC6. I have used VS8 quite a bit and while I appreciate having a more up-to-date compiler (stupid BS "security warnings" aside), VC6 still, for whatever reason, remains the IDE I want to use if I have to write Windows-specific C++.
Frankly, I don't *want* to use VC6, just like I don't want to put a bottle of lead-substitute into my gas tank every time I fill up, it's just that it has that perfect mix of speed, usefulness, and the ability to get out of my way that none of the .net versions have been able to capture.
Though technically a programming language, most people didn't interact with it as such; it was the hidden application in printers that made them produce such gorgeous text and graphics from Pagemaker, Quark, Illustrator (wasn't as important for bitmap-based programs like Photoshop).
The article talking about Quark, other folks have mentioned Pagemaker, but it really was Postscript that showed that mere mortals could produce camera-worthy output, and now we absolutely expect it, in both the most ephemeral print out and our displays. It's no surprise that the most advanced windowing system at the time, IMHO, was NextStep, which used Display Postscript as its rendering engine. Now we have the Mac (descendant from NextStep), and Windows, which uses its own rendering system.
Yeah, whatever.
I got my PADI certification in Hawaii and for the "deep" dive, we went out to where the U of H had sunk a research vessel that had once been a minesweeper. It was sitting upright at 100ft and that was an experience nothing to date had prepared me for: we descended down and down and suddenly this enormous black shape appeared right below me, and there was this ship, in all its sunken glory.
Standing on the ocean floor, looking up at the ship from "ground" level, was wild. I'm not certified to do the kind of diving you'd need for the Vandenberg, but if I thought swimming over a minesweeper was a mind-blowing experience, I can't imagine what something like that Vandenberg would be.