Platforms are changing faster than people can. Because chips get faster there is less consideration to optimising and refactoring a system to make it compact, efficient and useful.
Projects change too frequently and often have no vision behind them just a series of bullet marks.
No one is an expert anymore - if you change jobs every 3 years then after 5 years companies will have no real experts on any of their projects.
If u stay - u may become part of the wallpaper.
It really depends on what your doing - R U building something amazing or collecting a salary but REALLY using your brain to do so.
Further, not everyone at the bottom can reach the top and when those at the top seem to have profited so much for something they didn't necessarily create that can be disheartening - how many coders actually made money from $$$$$$.coms?
"Many 50-ish engineers will never learn Java, C++, and other new technologies. They become obsolete"
What do you suggest replacing it with???? There's always going to be 1 dominant force in any industry. I don't see what other architecture you could replace it with.
Even if you spent gazillions of $$$$$$s to fab something twice as fast for the same price the competition would catch up within 18 months anyway and there's no way your gonna get all those x86 binaries recompiled in time.
The nearest anyone got was Alpha with FX!32 recompling those x86 binaries on the fly. On the other hand how much faster is it now.... (please factor in cost) and where's that chip designer fellow gone... Hmmmmm....
There are many architectures to be chosen from - for now we have a clear winner - hyper pipelined CPUs with a huge instruction decoder chopping up the x86 instruction format. Perhaps stack machines or some kind of programmable logic perhaps logic in memory. 1 thing is clear - it had better be able to keep up with the best x86 CPU whilst running x86 code. It is the dominant binary format.
I'm not so sure.... What if Sony have already (or nearly) sold all the PS2s they are going to? What if the only people who want PS2s are the hardcore PS1 fans (and there is a lot of them!) but that is not all PS1 owners. Many PS1 owners only ever owned a few games and may not feel the need to upgrade. Also - casual game players are starting to get casual gaming from GBA (which seems to be every - at least on the London Underground!), mobile phones, set top boxes (Sky, Telewest - if the box doesn't crash.... doh.... these guys need better engineers and some organisation! - Looking?!!).
The PS2 is comparitively expensive compared to GC - This is the system I want! I am not a particuarly hardcore gamer although I LUURRVV games - Nintendo always produce excellent games and unless your a schoolboy/girl with a lotta time u may as well just have a few good games.
XBox does not be suffering the problem everybody thought it was going to have - namely (literally) MS. That name HASN'T put people off. And from what I have seen of their advertising so far I am very impressed with there approach even if it does seem more DC than PS2. I wonder why...;)
At 150 quid GC could just slam the market - esp. if they do something groovey with GBA linkup.
Sequels... How many films make it to 3.... GTA3 - Oh god.... Even the BIG N haven't done Mario for GC yet! Gimme Monkey Ball... Gimme JSRFuture. Please - GTA3... 3 for gods sake...;->
AMD don't need to change the ratings of the Durons. Intel need to start selling the low end P4s as budget vs AMDs Duron. The Celeron could probably last out to 1500Mhz but there just isn't any point Intel probably hope to replace it with an older remodelled P$. Duron could get up to 2Ghz easy.
The P42000 and XP2000+ can fight it out for the fat wallets or greedy hackers and the "low spec" machines of everyone else have equal ratings BUT!! I bet AMD will pull the price rug from under Intel.... yuup.... and for once AMD has a good selection of integrated motherboards as well.... yum...
Will Intel sell P4s under the Celeron name??? Yeah... right....:)
I have to agree but I have found a few ways around these problems.
The first is that I use a trackball (logitech trackman marble wheel. This is trackball where cursor movement is affected by thumb movements. I think this SIGNIFICANTLY speeds up cursor manipulation for two main reasons. Firstly you can move the cursor before your hand is actually on the thing (using your thumb first - then resting your hand). The second is far more simple - It doesn't move - to find a mouse I find my self hunting with my hand to get a proper hold on it because it gets left in different places all the time. The trackball is static and therefore (nearly) always in the same place. (Trackballs also allow infinite movement - you never get to the edge of the "mouse mat...")
The second is to remap keys. Windows lets you assing CTRL+ALT+key combos to start apps and what I tend to do is use Q,W,E,R,A,S,D,F,Z,X,C,V for app hotkeys as these can be reached with just my left hand (even if my right hand is on the trackball...) If your left handed use NMJKLHIOP keys instead.
One of the most productive text editors I have ever used was microemacs (I still have an ancient copy weighing in at a hefty 72K).
The key combos took a while to learn but once learnt the speed at which text can be manipulated is plain scarey! They are mostly sensibly mapped and the use of the meta key to make operations "bigger/more powerful" even makes sense eventually.
DOS was fantastic!! Writing TSR proggies to fake DLLs! Hooking int 2f and adding your own services... int 2e backdoor to the interpreter. Grabbing the entire serial port interrupt mechanism so you you write your own serial packet state machines. You started app development by writing a keyboard handler!
You could stick things anywhere, cruise the operating system, write semi re-entrant code with the use in the InDOS flag, hack hack hack.... Just don't tryu to be hardware independent!
It was amazing what people did get out of a DOS machine. 640K is still quite a lot you know.....
Biggest piece of bullshit I ever heard.....
Give it a year - EA~!! Eidos!!! shit your pants - Sega are gonna kill ya!. Sony?/ Ninty gonna get yer....
DC was(is) the best console with the best games I've bought since my SNES (super famicom)....
Simply put - Sega needed DC to win back mindshare they had good rep for games despite all their hardware cockups - this time they made the ultimate console (for the time). Excellent graphics, built in modem etc..... It didn't take over the world.... it wasn't supposed to!
The DC has been a fantastic success for Sega. In its few years I have rarely seen (or bought) a duff game for it. THAT WINS MINDSHARE AMONGST USERS!! It looke beuatiful. It did justice to Sega games.... Just play JSR without cvumming over those graphics (OK! - OTT!!!)
They'll port their already amazing and popular titles to the XBox - Sony BWARE!!! They'll look even better - JSR with anti-aliasing and finally switch on trilinear everywhere....
If Gamecube fails (I hope it doesn't cos' I love ninty games - GBA is soooo coool! and I have wonderful games on N64 - F-zero, Mario, Perfect Dark, Bango etc...) then Ninty will go straight to XBox... garauntee it... Sony - closed box no h0lds barred they'll shit on you if they feel like it... MS - have they ever cared what software wos released for there platform??
In 5 years time when all the machines run ARM Java enabled CPU's with bithin' 2D/3D engines built into the firmware we'll wonder what the hardware args were about....
Matthew.............
I THINK THEREFORE I STOUT.... slrp....
Slashdot Mirror
Platforms are changing faster than people can. Because chips get faster there is less consideration to optimising and refactoring a system to make it compact, efficient and useful.
.coms?
Projects change too frequently and often have no vision behind them just a series of bullet marks.
No one is an expert anymore - if you change jobs every 3 years then after 5 years companies will have no real experts on any of their projects.
If u stay - u may become part of the wallpaper.
It really depends on what your doing - R U building something amazing or collecting a salary but REALLY using your brain to do so.
Further, not everyone at the bottom can reach the top and when those at the top seem to have profited so much for something they didn't necessarily create that can be disheartening - how many coders actually made money from $$$$$$
"Many 50-ish engineers will never learn Java, C++, and other new technologies. They become obsolete"
Life mimicking technology? Monkey c monkey do?
Trust me - I'm not cynical!!! HONEST!
Hmmm... that's half an argument....
What do you suggest replacing it with???? There's always going to be 1 dominant force in any industry. I don't see what other architecture you could replace it with.
Even if you spent gazillions of $$$$$$s to fab something twice as fast for the same price the competition would catch up within 18 months anyway and there's no way your gonna get all those x86 binaries recompiled in time.
The nearest anyone got was Alpha with FX!32 recompling those x86 binaries on the fly. On the other hand how much faster is it now.... (please factor in cost) and where's that chip designer fellow gone... Hmmmmm....
There are many architectures to be chosen from - for now we have a clear winner - hyper pipelined CPUs with a huge instruction decoder chopping up the x86 instruction format. Perhaps stack machines or some kind of programmable logic perhaps logic in memory. 1 thing is clear - it had better be able to keep up with the best x86 CPU whilst running x86 code. It is the dominant binary format.
Matthew
I'm not so sure.... What if Sony have already (or nearly) sold all the PS2s they are going to? What if the only people who want PS2s are the hardcore PS1 fans (and there is a lot of them!) but that is not all PS1 owners. Many PS1 owners only ever owned a few games and may not feel the need to upgrade. Also - casual game players are starting to get casual gaming from GBA (which seems to be every - at least on the London Underground!), mobile phones, set top boxes (Sky, Telewest - if the box doesn't crash.... doh.... these guys need better engineers and some organisation! - Looking?!!).
;)
;->
The PS2 is comparitively expensive compared to GC - This is the system I want! I am not a particuarly hardcore gamer although I LUURRVV games - Nintendo always produce excellent games and unless your a schoolboy/girl with a lotta time u may as well just have a few good games.
XBox does not be suffering the problem everybody thought it was going to have - namely (literally) MS. That name HASN'T put people off. And from what I have seen of their advertising so far I am very impressed with there approach even if it does seem more DC than PS2. I wonder why...
At 150 quid GC could just slam the market - esp. if they do something groovey with GBA linkup.
Sequels... How many films make it to 3.... GTA3 - Oh god.... Even the BIG N haven't done Mario for GC yet! Gimme Monkey Ball... Gimme JSRFuture. Please - GTA3... 3 for gods sake...
Matthew.
AMD don't need to change the ratings of the Durons. Intel need to start selling the low end P4s as budget vs AMDs Duron. The Celeron could probably last out to 1500Mhz but there just isn't any point Intel probably hope to replace it with an older remodelled P$. Duron could get up to 2Ghz easy.
:)
The P42000 and XP2000+ can fight it out for the fat wallets or greedy hackers and the "low spec" machines of everyone else have equal ratings BUT!! I bet AMD will pull the price rug from under Intel.... yuup.... and for once AMD has a good selection of integrated motherboards as well.... yum...
Will Intel sell P4s under the Celeron name??? Yeah... right....
I have to agree but I have found a few ways around these problems.
The first is that I use a trackball (logitech trackman marble wheel. This is trackball where cursor movement is affected by thumb movements. I think this SIGNIFICANTLY speeds up cursor manipulation for two main reasons. Firstly you can move the cursor before your hand is actually on the thing (using your thumb first - then resting your hand). The second is far more simple - It doesn't move - to find a mouse I find my self hunting with my hand to get a proper hold on it because it gets left in different places all the time. The trackball is static and therefore (nearly) always in the same place. (Trackballs also allow infinite movement - you never get to the edge of the "mouse mat...")
The second is to remap keys. Windows lets you assing CTRL+ALT+key combos to start apps and what I tend to do is use Q,W,E,R,A,S,D,F,Z,X,C,V for app hotkeys as these can be reached with just my left hand (even if my right hand is on the trackball...) If your left handed use NMJKLHIOP keys instead.
One of the most productive text editors I have ever used was microemacs (I still have an ancient copy weighing in at a hefty 72K).
The key combos took a while to learn but once learnt the speed at which text can be manipulated is plain scarey! They are mostly sensibly mapped and the use of the meta key to make operations "bigger/more powerful" even makes sense eventually.
Matthew
http://www.freshbrains.co.uk - stuff.....
DOS was fantastic!! Writing TSR proggies to fake DLLs! Hooking int 2f and adding your own services... int 2e backdoor to the interpreter. Grabbing the entire serial port interrupt mechanism so you you write your own serial packet state machines. You started app development by writing a keyboard handler!
You could stick things anywhere, cruise the operating system, write semi re-entrant code with the use in the InDOS flag, hack hack hack.... Just don't tryu to be hardware independent!
It was amazing what people did get out of a DOS machine. 640K is still quite a lot you know.....
Matthew.
http://www.freshbrains.co.uk
Biggest piece of bullshit I ever heard..... Give it a year - EA~!! Eidos!!! shit your pants - Sega are gonna kill ya!. Sony?/ Ninty gonna get yer.... DC was(is) the best console with the best games I've bought since my SNES (super famicom).... Simply put - Sega needed DC to win back mindshare they had good rep for games despite all their hardware cockups - this time they made the ultimate console (for the time). Excellent graphics, built in modem etc..... It didn't take over the world.... it wasn't supposed to! The DC has been a fantastic success for Sega. In its few years I have rarely seen (or bought) a duff game for it. THAT WINS MINDSHARE AMONGST USERS!! It looke beuatiful. It did justice to Sega games.... Just play JSR without cvumming over those graphics (OK! - OTT!!!) They'll port their already amazing and popular titles to the XBox - Sony BWARE!!! They'll look even better - JSR with anti-aliasing and finally switch on trilinear everywhere.... If Gamecube fails (I hope it doesn't cos' I love ninty games - GBA is soooo coool! and I have wonderful games on N64 - F-zero, Mario, Perfect Dark, Bango etc...) then Ninty will go straight to XBox... garauntee it... Sony - closed box no h0lds barred they'll shit on you if they feel like it... MS - have they ever cared what software wos released for there platform?? In 5 years time when all the machines run ARM Java enabled CPU's with bithin' 2D/3D engines built into the firmware we'll wonder what the hardware args were about.... Matthew............. I THINK THEREFORE I STOUT.... slrp....