The same thing happened in the early days of home computing. Sixty different word processors for the Apple II, which one is worth it? Joe swears by Wordstar, but Jane likes Bank Street Writer.
What we had back then were magazines like Byte and Creative Computing to help inform us about features and caveats. I think toucharcade does some of this for the iPhone, but I worry about how easy it is to shill on these sites.
At my job, I was given a "quick and dirty" project that involved reading three dimensional grids from text
and displaying them in a visualization window. It had to run on Linux (all the way back to RH 7.3) and Windows (back to Win98),
as well as correctly parsing text files in DOS and UNIX format.
PROS:
I had it up, running and debugged in six weeks. I had never seen the Qt library before in my life. That is how quick the
Qt Framework is to learn and deploy.
CONS:
The completed work was shelved, never to see the light of day again, because the library licensing fees were so outrageous ($4800 for just little old me? what?)
I have looked at both GTK and Qt, and IMHO the Qt framework is more consistent and reasonably defined, and seems to port more easily to other operating systems. If you get the chance, browse through the class libraries at Trolltech.
But at these prices, Qt is almost, but not quite, worth it.
Actually, 99 percent of the movie is correct, according to the biographies and histories I've read. There were one or two minor details that were wrong, but I was surprised at how little license was taken. And folklore.org is some of the most entertaining stuff on the web. I almost died laughing when I read about the encounter between Steve Jobs and Donald Knuth.
Someone already suggested that the ego of the programmers is the largest cause of bad software. In my experience, the need of the middle managers and marketing wonks to demonstrate their superiority is a major part of the problem. Most will come up with off-the-cuff ideas at "bull session" creative meetings and then use all the political wherewithal they have to make sure that their ideas are implemented. God help you if more than one of these people is on your project and they have irreconcilable views of the end product. These are the people who run the show and sign the checks, not us programmers.
This is an interesting observation, but compare the right things.
GEM (Digital Research), TopView (IBM), MS Windows all came out as graphical shells over DOS. You still needed to have DOS in the first place. In contrast,
OS/2 was the origin/inspiration of Microsoft Windows 3.0.
Lotus 1-2-3 originally competed against Microsoft Multiplan, and completely crushed it (what? you've never heard of Multiplan? Guess why?). Bill was so mad that the next version of MS-DOS broke API compatibility and Lotus apopeared to be "buggy". Lotus had to issue a fix once they understood what had happened. Yes, Excel did eventually win, and I'll tell you why shortly.
Wordperfect had the market cold against everything, because they supported nearly every model of printer on the market. In addition, the formatting scheme that the program used made sense, IMHO much more so than Word style sheets. Yes, Word did eventually win, and I'll tell you why.
Bundling. Around 1994, Microsoft put a word processor (Word), a spreadsheet (Excel), something else, I can't remember what, and made them all work together. One could even use Visual Basic to script up special applications with these things. It still wasn't enough to get people to switch.So they dropped the price for the whole package to $150 USD. Nobody could compete with that, so everybody else lost. Once MS had the market to themselves, they slowly raised the rate on every new version of MS Office until it was profitable again.
...was when they moved the kill button right next to the maximize button. This had to be the dumbest thing anyone ever thought of. How many times have I accidently killed a mail client because I was trying to get to the desktop? Yes, the application is supposed to catch the signal and open an are you sure? dialog, but they don't have to, and some don't!
Please, somebody tell Apple to put the Nuke button back where it belongs... on the other side of the window.
Those who perform miserably have to wait another year ot take the exam.
Not unlike the GRE Subject examination for Computer Science in the U.S.?
And by the way, it looks as though the cheating has been going on for a while now...
Another example is uncompressed video capture. If you choose 640x400 framebuffer at 24 bit color, you're capturing about 27 MB per second. ATA Hard drives that I have tested generally have a sustained write speed of around 10 MB per second. So you can either buy a really expensive superdrive, or 4 really cheap ones.
The Comma Separated Value format is a different animal than the Concurrent Versioning System.
The comma is a great invention, but it won't do automatic diffs and merges for you. Unless Google creates
their own Clippy-type character, Commie
Actually, my brother told me about something similar at the college he attended. I think it's a special deal between the university and the film distributors.
However, in my area, back in the early nineties, there was a theater that would show movies just after the movie had completed the initial 'big run'. It only cost two dollars, and I saw both great and terrible movies there. The bad movies (I'm looking at you, Robocop 3) were tolerable because it was cheap and yes, it was something to do on Saturday night. Of course, a Regal Cineplex was built 60 yards away from it, stole all the ticket salec, and put it out of business. Then the Regal Cineplex closed down after reaising prices from six-fifty a movie to eight-fifty, and people decided it just wasn't worth it. Their building was taken over by a Cinema Cafe (Have a hamburger, salad or steak delivered to you table while you watch the big screen). Since they make more money on the food, the ticket prices are back down to six-fifty.
I do like the idea of using empty/unused halls for showing films cheaply, though. I don't need a super-plush environment, I just want to watch a movie.
My biggest problem with seeing movies at theaters is:
The high ticket prices.
The lack of quality control on the part of the publisher.
The lack of honest reviews on the part of the media.
Now, if you can correct any one of those three, I'll start going to the movies like I did before (at least every weekend). But as long as the publisher keeps turning out lots of movies that are craptastic instead of focusing on refining the few promising ideas, I'll stay home. Unless the cost is minimal, like 2 dollars or so, then I won't mind if I wasted the money. Or how about 10 movies come out every week, but instead of "George Shmuck of WLIE says it's the greatest film of all time!", the reviews all call a stinker a stinker.
In truth, the decline of revenue at the theaters is their own damn fault and I refuse to listen to all the cries of piracy, etc.
This downturn in movie-going seems very similar to the Video Game Crash of 1983, with similar causes.
Does anybody have an old NeXT cube still sitting around? I mean the original one that came with a recordable optical drive.
Do any of the recorded disks still work?
I remember reading in Creative Computing about the different recordable optical formats being developed in 1985. A few companies had working Magneto-optical drives, but some companies were working on amorphous phase-change drives.
The difference was supposed to be that MO was more expensive to make, but nobody knew what the degradation lifetime of phase-change media was.
The original NeXT cube shipped with a MO drive storing about 130 MB per disk. How long did that media last?
Not sure if it's worth reading the rest of his book review / article
Actually, it is. If you haven't read any of his work, you might dismiss Bruce Eckel as just another one of the proliferation of people writing programming books these days. Fifteen years ago, if you walked into a bookstore, you'd find about three books on programming languages, with all the rest being dedicated to Lotus Symphony and DBase III. Today, any schmuck with a publishing connection can write a book on Ruby, Perl, Java, or what have you. When I went looking for a book to make the transition from C to C++, I scanned through dozens of C++ programming books before I found Thinking in C++. It's very well written, does not patronize you, covers real world problems in the language instead of boring you with another introduction to sorting, and demonstrates some pretty nifty tricks that he gleaned from Andrew Koenig, among others.
Bruce is a real software engineer, and writes and speaks to the same.
Not trying to start a flamewar, just don't dismiss the man because he speaks the truth.
Also, check out Stoll's book if you want a really thorough introduction to sets, groups, rings, fields, predicate calculus, first order axiomatic theories, and a pretty good explanation of Gödel's theorem. It's actually quite readable and thorough.
Actually, I don't believe any of these people will be writing new material for this. More likely, they're just giving credit for the songs they'll be using from past works. Like Mama Miascore by ABBA or Moving Outscore by Billy Joel. Which believe me, we don't need any more of.
Having said that, I think the cantana music from Episode 4 was practically made for a tap dance act. And they could use that Elton John tune that says "it's a little bit funny... this feeling inside" when Luke first sees the hologram of Princess Leia.
Of course we find out in Episode 6 that it's actually a little bit sick...
Yeah, but what about when your playing the latest Mission:Impossible tie-in game?
You: "Open the door." Phone: "The door opens. Stepping inside, you see a large water tank, possibly the cooling chamber for the reactor you were sent to destroy." You: "Place the plastic explosives on the nuclear reactor coolant controller."
Whumpf! "Hey, what the heck? Who are you guys? Why did you tackle me? What's going on? Secret Police: "By authority of the Terrorist Wartime Powers Act, I'm taking you in! But before I start doing particularly nasty stuff to you, you'd better tell me: who were you talking to?!!
The very reason that people did not create wave after wave of FPS games is that they were not technically possible on the Commodore 64, Apple II, or Atari 800. Sure, there were some wireframe simulations of FPS exploration like Cholo, The Colony and others, but they did not move fast enough to give the visceral feelings modern hardware can (Run! Shoot! Flee!), so they just did not appeal to the mass populace.
Modern hardware now allows full First Person immersion, so why make anything else? Just as modern CG effects allow us to make grand space operas without plot, dialogue or interesting characters.
Hopefully, we'll see the return of creativity that allowed games like M.U.L.E., Boulder Dash, and The Bilestoad to be produced. You build it, they'll help you market it. Like EA in the early days.
Gotta go now, and get started on my overhead scrolling adventure...
Slashdot Mirror
The same thing happened in the early days of home computing. Sixty different word processors for the Apple II, which one is worth it? Joe swears by Wordstar, but Jane likes Bank Street Writer. What we had back then were magazines like Byte and Creative Computing to help inform us about features and caveats. I think toucharcade does some of this for the iPhone, but I worry about how easy it is to shill on these sites.
Bah! I defy anyone at Circuit City to show me source code that is better than mine!
PROS:
I had it up, running and debugged in six weeks. I had never seen the Qt library before in my life. That is how quick the Qt Framework is to learn and deploy.
CONS:
The completed work was shelved, never to see the light of day again, because the library licensing fees were so outrageous ($4800 for just little old me? what?)
I have looked at both GTK and Qt, and IMHO the Qt framework is more consistent and reasonably defined, and seems to port more easily to other operating systems. If you get the chance, browse through the class libraries at Trolltech.
But at these prices, Qt is almost, but not quite, worth it.
No. The hatred is still strong in this one.
Actually, 99 percent of the movie is correct, according to the biographies and histories I've read. There were one or two minor details that were wrong, but I was surprised at how little license was taken. And folklore.org is some of the most entertaining stuff on the web. I almost died laughing when I read about the encounter between Steve Jobs and Donald Knuth.
I thought nintendo was supposed to be using the Gyration miniature gyroscopes. Link here
Please Mod Parent up..
Someone already suggested that the ego of the programmers is the largest cause of bad software. In my experience, the need of the middle managers and marketing wonks to demonstrate their superiority is a major part of the problem. Most will come up with off-the-cuff ideas at "bull session" creative meetings and then use all the political wherewithal they have to make sure that their ideas are implemented. God help you if more than one of these people is on your project and they have irreconcilable views of the end product. These are the people who run the show and sign the checks, not us programmers.
It seems that all the complaints finally paid off.
GEM (Digital Research), TopView (IBM), MS Windows all came out as graphical shells over DOS. You still needed to have DOS in the first place. In contrast, OS/2 was the origin/inspiration of Microsoft Windows 3.0.
Lotus 1-2-3 originally competed against Microsoft Multiplan, and completely crushed it (what? you've never heard of Multiplan? Guess why?). Bill was so mad that the next version of MS-DOS broke API compatibility and Lotus apopeared to be "buggy". Lotus had to issue a fix once they understood what had happened. Yes, Excel did eventually win, and I'll tell you why shortly.
Wordperfect had the market cold against everything, because they supported nearly every model of printer on the market. In addition, the formatting scheme that the program used made sense, IMHO much more so than Word style sheets. Yes, Word did eventually win, and I'll tell you why.
Bundling.
Around 1994, Microsoft put a word processor (Word), a spreadsheet (Excel), something else, I can't remember what, and made them all work together. One could even use Visual Basic to script up special applications with these things. It still wasn't enough to get people to switch.So they dropped the price for the whole package to $150 USD. Nobody could compete with that, so everybody else lost. Once MS had the market to themselves, they slowly raised the rate on every new version of MS Office until it was profitable again.
Your mom wouldn't happen to be Sally Field would she?
Please, somebody tell Apple to put the Nuke button back where it belongs... on the other side of the window.
Not unlike the GRE Subject examination for Computer Science in the U.S.?
And by the way, it looks as though the cheating has been going on for a while now...
Another example is uncompressed video capture. If you choose 640x400 framebuffer at 24 bit color, you're capturing about 27 MB per second. ATA Hard drives that I have tested generally have a sustained write speed of around 10 MB per second. So you can either buy a really expensive superdrive, or 4 really cheap ones.
The Comma Separated Value format is a different animal than the Concurrent Versioning System. The comma is a great invention, but it won't do automatic diffs and merges for you. Unless Google creates their own Clippy-type character, Commie
However, in my area, back in the early nineties, there was a theater that would show movies just after the movie had completed the initial 'big run'. It only cost two dollars, and I saw both great and terrible movies there. The bad movies (I'm looking at you, Robocop 3) were tolerable because it was cheap and yes, it was something to do on Saturday night. Of course, a Regal Cineplex was built 60 yards away from it, stole all the ticket salec, and put it out of business. Then the Regal Cineplex closed down after reaising prices from six-fifty a movie to eight-fifty, and people decided it just wasn't worth it. Their building was taken over by a Cinema Cafe (Have a hamburger, salad or steak delivered to you table while you watch the big screen). Since they make more money on the food, the ticket prices are back down to six-fifty.
I do like the idea of using empty/unused halls for showing films cheaply, though. I don't need a super-plush environment, I just want to watch a movie.
My biggest problem with seeing movies at theaters is:
Now, if you can correct any one of those three, I'll start going to the movies like I did before (at least every weekend). But as long as the publisher keeps turning out lots of movies that are craptastic instead of focusing on refining the few promising ideas, I'll stay home. Unless the cost is minimal, like 2 dollars or so, then I won't mind if I wasted the money. Or how about 10 movies come out every week, but instead of "George Shmuck of WLIE says it's the greatest film of all time!", the reviews all call a stinker a stinker.
In truth, the decline of revenue at the theaters is their own damn fault and I refuse to listen to all the cries of piracy, etc.
This downturn in movie-going seems very similar to the Video Game Crash of 1983, with similar causes.
Just my two cents.
Actually, he'd be more likely to start explaining to the kids why the lawn was Insanely Great.
Do any of the recorded disks still work?
I remember reading in Creative Computing about the different recordable optical formats being developed in 1985. A few companies had working Magneto-optical drives, but some companies were working on amorphous phase-change drives.
The difference was supposed to be that MO was more expensive to make, but nobody knew what the degradation lifetime of phase-change media was.
The original NeXT cube shipped with a MO drive storing about 130 MB per disk. How long did that media last?
Actually, it is. If you haven't read any of his work, you might dismiss Bruce Eckel as just another one of the proliferation of people writing programming books these days. Fifteen years ago, if you walked into a bookstore, you'd find about three books on programming languages, with all the rest being dedicated to Lotus Symphony and DBase III. Today, any schmuck with a publishing connection can write a book on Ruby, Perl, Java, or what have you. When I went looking for a book to make the transition from C to C++, I scanned through dozens of C++ programming books before I found Thinking in C++. It's very well written, does not patronize you, covers real world problems in the language instead of boring you with another introduction to sorting, and demonstrates some pretty nifty tricks that he gleaned from Andrew Koenig, among others.
Bruce is a real software engineer, and writes and speaks to the same.
Not trying to start a flamewar, just don't dismiss the man because he speaks the truth.
1) You're wrong (these are finite sets), and
2) This is a bad translation straight out of Stoll's book. Read the second paragraph.
Also, check out Stoll's book if you want a really thorough introduction to sets, groups, rings, fields, predicate calculus, first order axiomatic theories, and a pretty good explanation of Gödel's theorem. It's actually quite readable and thorough.
Having said that, I think the cantana music from Episode 4 was practically made for a tap dance act. And they could use that Elton John tune that says "it's a little bit funny... this feeling inside" when Luke first sees the hologram of Princess Leia.
Of course we find out in Episode 6 that it's actually a little bit sick...
You: "Open the door."
Phone: "The door opens. Stepping inside, you see a large water tank, possibly the cooling chamber for the reactor you were sent to destroy."
You: "Place the plastic explosives on the nuclear reactor coolant controller."
Whumpf! "Hey, what the heck? Who are you guys? Why did you tackle me? What's going on?
Secret Police: "By authority of the Terrorist Wartime Powers Act, I'm taking you in! But before I start doing particularly nasty stuff to you, you'd better tell me: who were you talking to?!!
The very reason that people did not create wave after wave of FPS games is that they were not technically possible on the Commodore 64, Apple II, or Atari 800. Sure, there were some wireframe simulations of FPS exploration like Cholo, The Colony and others, but they did not move fast enough to give the visceral feelings modern hardware can (Run! Shoot! Flee!), so they just did not appeal to the mass populace.
Modern hardware now allows full First Person immersion, so why make anything else? Just as modern CG effects allow us to make grand space operas without plot, dialogue or interesting characters.
Hopefully, we'll see the return of creativity that allowed games like M.U.L.E., Boulder Dash, and The Bilestoad to be produced. You build it, they'll help you market it. Like EA in the early days.
Gotta go now, and get started on my overhead scrolling adventure...
Yes, I do believe that IBM and John Backus developed the earliest high level language.