Also, "I reboot my computer... why should I have to reboot my computer?" I find it hard to realize that he wouldn't know the technical difficulties in replacing a dll while the system is running, and possible ways around this, and the current state of affairs. That's the difference between a pure programmer and someone with a higher level view. The user *doesn't care* about why the reboot needs to occur. It's annoying and affects the overall experience. Technical justification is irrelevant.
Thanks to the marketplace now, the word "necessary" will no longer mean "compensates for my small penis", and start meaning "justifies the costs of running it".
And how does that not apply to geeks who buy $400 video cards and need 1000W power supplies to run them>
All this SUV bashing, but geeks are essentially the same as the person who insists on buying a giant car and doesn't really need it.
Look at all the geeks who constantly upgrade their computers for no reason, who have kilowatt power supplies just to run the latest ATI or NVidia card, who rush out and buy the newest video card as soon as it appears. Same mindset.
On a standard install of OS X on Intel hardware, all of the applications AND all of the command line tools are fat binaries. You can strip the PowerPC code out of the tools if you wish, but then when download an OS update, you get the fat versions again. How much network bandwidth and hard drive space is wasted because of that?
More than just programmers. There were dozens and dozens of people working for YEARS to make GTA IV. That includes designers, artists, programmers, writers, tool programmers, audio engineers, etc.
A voice actor comes in and does recording for a couple of days to a couple of weeks, which is so irrelevant in terms of overall work involved.
It was a simple, focused game. It was an atmospheric game. It was a nostalgia trip.
From a design point of view, you can certainly criticize it. For starters, 3-4 levels could have been removed to improve the pacing of new features. Some level design tricks were used to excess (e.g., monster closets). One of the bosses was ridiculous and out of place (in terms of using Nintendo-style mechanics). It also had some brilliant moments: the atmosphere of the first level, the incredible hook of wanting to see what hell was like.
But most of the complaints are about things that are outside the scope of the game: wanting puzzles, wanting character interaction, wanting an elaborate story with multiple plot twists, funny arguments about how everything in the original DOOM was so much better back when I was 12 and played it on the school network. That's not criticism. That's just armchair design.
I read all the bashing of glossy screens and even started to repeat the propaganda. But in reality, it doesn't matter. The glossy screens tend to have better contrast and be easier on my eyes, and glare isn't an issue in practice. You do tend to notice glare in a store, looking at a big row of laptops, but it's a total non-issue for me.
The majority of PC users want portability (notebooks), lower power consumption (long battery life), and cooler running systems (no burned laps, hot keyboards).
All three of those are at odds with what graphic card and console makers want. The trend has been toward uber-powerful video cards and to hell with heat or power consumption. The low end and high end graphics cards differ by an order of magnitude in terms of power consumption.
Some brands are awful. Some are okay. Some are clearly worse quality than most incandescents. The range here is huge.
I've found that Sylvania bulbs are significantly better than the other brands I've tried, but I had to go through a whole bunch of different makes before I figured this out. If you know of other good brands, please let me know.
I've been telling people I "don't do Windows" for years, and have kept almost all personal PC maintenance favors away despite having a degree in Computer Science. You just now figured out to leave the riffraff to themselves? The sheer joy of telling PC users to fix it themselves makes the learning curve of Linux worthwhile.
And so nothing ever needs fixing under Linux? I'm not sure what your point is here.
Chemistry sets started being castrated a long time back, a decade before 2001 at least. It was more a perceived child safety issue (a.k.a. overprotection) than any links with terrorism.
It's expensive, considering that you only need a card like this for a very small handful of games, 3D gaming on the PC is not exactly vibrant, and high-end video cards come with power consumption penalties. My apologies for people who need cards like this for Maya or 3D Studio MAX, but those people aren't worried about price anyway:)
I don't remember the transition from 2000 to XP being this difficult. There were a few bumps, the usual driver follies but nothing like the problems plaguing Vista. I don't remember companies going with 2000 because XP caused so many problems.
Most individuals and smaller companies went directly from Windows 98 or ME to Windows XP.
...that web 2.0 companies are making money. They're not just airy fairy exercises in giving everything away forever. Flickr sold pro-accounts, for example, and huge numbers of people bought them even before Yahoo acquired the company. I bought one, and got much enjoyment out of it.
There are some oddities out there that get lots of press for no discernible reason (twitter comes to mind), but most of the so-called 2.0 companies are solid companies with ways of generating revenue.
I used a Kensington Orbit for many years, till it got old and grimy. Then I replaced it with a Logitech Marble Mouse, which I love, but it only has two buttons (you can mimic a third button by pressing two smaller buttons simultaneous, but ugh). That makes it a poor match for 3D packages like Maya and Blender. Logitech makes a three button trackball--the Trackman--but it's controlled with the thumb, not the forefinger, which makes it klunky to use.
I'd love to know if there's a three-button equivalent of the Orbit or Marble Mouse. Or has anyone used a Marble Mouse with Blender or Maya and been fine? Does a specific button configuration help?
There have been examples in other postings about BeOS and its "eight movies at once" performance. If you play eight movies at once under Windows or OS X, they're *already* each in a separate thread. Windows Explorer and OS X Finder are also multhithreaded to some extent, so you can start a big search across your whole drive and not bring the system to a halt.
It feels like the original question is "When will systems feel as responsive as I expect them to be?" but it was phrased as a question about multithreading. In reality, there are processes and threads like crazy under all modern operating systems, but that doesn't always translate to "responsive." I've seen cases where there's a 10 second delay between pressing Windows+E and a new explorer window popping up. That's significantly slower than requesting a list of files on an ftp server halfway around the globe. Multithreading isn't going to fix this.
Somehow I never managed to see it until recently. I've seen all the other geek classics, but not Blade Runner, even though I was certainly aware of the movie. And I've read a collection of Philip K. Dick stories, too. So finally watched it Blade Runner last year (the Director's Cut--yeah, I know).
And, wow, was it a waste of my time. It's moody, it has nice special effects, but it's such a flimsy and boring show. I actually kept losing interest and hoping something would happen to move it along. The characters were flat. The ending was generic action movie stuff, but less exciting than most action movies, and I still cared nothing for the characters.
I don't understand the fawning all over this one. Please don't say it's "deep," and I'm too pop-culture. I watch art films all the time. I just don't get what makes this an interesting movie. In 1982, maybe, purely because the effects (think "TRON"), but today?
It takes a lot of hubris to label the part of the genome you don't understand as "junk DNA." This was painfully obvious right from the start, and yet the term propagated throughout papers and textbooks as law.
Mr. Wizard got his claim to fame with a show that ran from 1951 through 1965. 500+ episodes in all. His show on Nickelodeon (which I watched and loved) was more or less a retro revival of his earlier show.
The difficulty curve was certainly rougher on GH2 than on GH1, but it wasn't insurmountable -- and I don't see any reason not to continue including challenging material for veteran players.
As long as they don't miss the overall point of playing along to songs for fun, that's fine by me.
I've finished both GH games on medium, and can get 4/5 stars on most songs. I've gotten about halfway through GH1 in hard. But even after spending frustrating hours, and going over all parts of the song in practice mode, I absolutely cannot play Woman in GH2's hard mode. I can time Star Power to help me out in the parts that kill me, but it's not enough.
Erlang succeeds because it has message passage between lightweight processes, not true OS threads. You can easily get 100,000 processes cooking along and talking to each other in Erlang, but such numbers would kill most operating systems. And even if you could get those numbers with Linux or Windows, Erlang would still walk all over them performance-wise by a huge factor.
So what we really need is for OSes to be designed around having massive numbers of threads that communicate via message passing (i.e. shared nothing). Then the need for custom languages will go away.
Why isn't there a mass stampede to Erlang or Haskell, languages that address this problem in a serious way? My conclusion is that most programmers are just too dumb to do major mind-bending once they've burned their first couple languages into their ROMs.
Because, quite honestly, and this very rarely gets pointed out, Erlang and Haskell can be awkward to program in. For concurrency, Erlang is wonderful. For algorithmic beauty--for some types of algorithms--Haskell is oh so pretty. But for other things that would be a doddle in C, both Erlang and Haskell are bears to work with. Try doing array or matrix work in Erlang, for example. Try writing something that would map well to an OOP language, something involving many "actors" that have dozens of frequently updated state variables, in Erlang. While you can do it, it's awkward, just like doing text processing in Pascal is so clunky in comparison to Perl.
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Thanks to the marketplace now, the word "necessary" will no longer mean "compensates for my small penis", and start meaning "justifies the costs of running it".
And how does that not apply to geeks who buy $400 video cards and need 1000W power supplies to run them>
All this SUV bashing, but geeks are essentially the same as the person who insists on buying a giant car and doesn't really need it.
Look at all the geeks who constantly upgrade their computers for no reason, who have kilowatt power supplies just to run the latest ATI or NVidia card, who rush out and buy the newest video card as soon as it appears. Same mindset.
On a standard install of OS X on Intel hardware, all of the applications AND all of the command line tools are fat binaries. You can strip the PowerPC code out of the tools if you wish, but then when download an OS update, you get the fat versions again. How much network bandwidth and hard drive space is wasted because of that?
Voice actors are a dime a dozen, but I am surprised there are not more rock star Programmers gaining fame like Carmack.
That's because the average game has 20+ programmers working on it. GTA IV likely had triple that. There isn't one superstar, but lots of specialists.
Carmack gained fame back in the day when one programmer made a huge difference.
More than just programmers. There were dozens and dozens of people working for YEARS to make GTA IV. That includes designers, artists, programmers, writers, tool programmers, audio engineers, etc.
A voice actor comes in and does recording for a couple of days to a couple of weeks, which is so irrelevant in terms of overall work involved.
It was a simple, focused game. It was an atmospheric game. It was a nostalgia trip.
From a design point of view, you can certainly criticize it. For starters, 3-4 levels could have been removed to improve the pacing of new features. Some level design tricks were used to excess (e.g., monster closets). One of the bosses was ridiculous and out of place (in terms of using Nintendo-style mechanics). It also had some brilliant moments: the atmosphere of the first level, the incredible hook of wanting to see what hell was like.
But most of the complaints are about things that are outside the scope of the game: wanting puzzles, wanting character interaction, wanting an elaborate story with multiple plot twists, funny arguments about how everything in the original DOOM was so much better back when I was 12 and played it on the school network. That's not criticism. That's just armchair design.
I read all the bashing of glossy screens and even started to repeat the propaganda. But in reality, it doesn't matter. The glossy screens tend to have better contrast and be easier on my eyes, and glare isn't an issue in practice. You do tend to notice glare in a store, looking at a big row of laptops, but it's a total non-issue for me.
The majority of PC users want portability (notebooks), lower power consumption (long battery life), and cooler running systems (no burned laps, hot keyboards).
All three of those are at odds with what graphic card and console makers want. The trend has been toward uber-powerful video cards and to hell with heat or power consumption. The low end and high end graphics cards differ by an order of magnitude in terms of power consumption.
Some brands are awful. Some are okay. Some are clearly worse quality than most incandescents. The range here is huge.
I've found that Sylvania bulbs are significantly better than the other brands I've tried, but I had to go through a whole bunch of different makes before I figured this out. If you know of other good brands, please let me know.
I've been telling people I "don't do Windows" for years, and have kept almost all personal PC maintenance favors away despite having a degree in Computer Science. You just now figured out to leave the riffraff to themselves? The sheer joy of telling PC users to fix it themselves makes the learning curve of Linux worthwhile.
And so nothing ever needs fixing under Linux? I'm not sure what your point is here.
Chemistry sets started being castrated a long time back, a decade before 2001 at least. It was more a perceived child safety issue (a.k.a. overprotection) than any links with terrorism.
It's expensive, considering that you only need a card like this for a very small handful of games, 3D gaming on the PC is not exactly vibrant, and high-end video cards come with power consumption penalties. My apologies for people who need cards like this for Maya or 3D Studio MAX, but those people aren't worried about price anyway :)
Anyone know how to disable file last access timestamps under OS X?
Most of the work on a modern video game is in the video card.
What are you basing that one? In my experience--writing commercial video games--it isn't true.
I don't remember the transition from 2000 to XP being this difficult. There were a few bumps, the usual driver follies but nothing like the problems plaguing Vista. I don't remember companies going with 2000 because XP caused so many problems.
Most individuals and smaller companies went directly from Windows 98 or ME to Windows XP.
...that web 2.0 companies are making money. They're not just airy fairy exercises in giving everything away forever. Flickr sold pro-accounts, for example, and huge numbers of people bought them even before Yahoo acquired the company. I bought one, and got much enjoyment out of it.
There are some oddities out there that get lots of press for no discernible reason (twitter comes to mind), but most of the so-called 2.0 companies are solid companies with ways of generating revenue.
I used a Kensington Orbit for many years, till it got old and grimy. Then I replaced it with a Logitech Marble Mouse, which I love, but it only has two buttons (you can mimic a third button by pressing two smaller buttons simultaneous, but ugh). That makes it a poor match for 3D packages like Maya and Blender. Logitech makes a three button trackball--the Trackman--but it's controlled with the thumb, not the forefinger, which makes it klunky to use.
I'd love to know if there's a three-button equivalent of the Orbit or Marble Mouse. Or has anyone used a Marble Mouse with Blender or Maya and been fine? Does a specific button configuration help?
There have been examples in other postings about BeOS and its "eight movies at once" performance. If you play eight movies at once under Windows or OS X, they're *already* each in a separate thread. Windows Explorer and OS X Finder are also multhithreaded to some extent, so you can start a big search across your whole drive and not bring the system to a halt.
It feels like the original question is "When will systems feel as responsive as I expect them to be?" but it was phrased as a question about multithreading. In reality, there are processes and threads like crazy under all modern operating systems, but that doesn't always translate to "responsive." I've seen cases where there's a 10 second delay between pressing Windows+E and a new explorer window popping up. That's significantly slower than requesting a list of files on an ftp server halfway around the globe. Multithreading isn't going to fix this.
Somehow I never managed to see it until recently. I've seen all the other geek classics, but not Blade Runner, even though I was certainly aware of the movie. And I've read a collection of Philip K. Dick stories, too. So finally watched it Blade Runner last year (the Director's Cut--yeah, I know).
And, wow, was it a waste of my time. It's moody, it has nice special effects, but it's such a flimsy and boring show. I actually kept losing interest and hoping something would happen to move it along. The characters were flat. The ending was generic action movie stuff, but less exciting than most action movies, and I still cared nothing for the characters.
I don't understand the fawning all over this one. Please don't say it's "deep," and I'm too pop-culture. I watch art films all the time. I just don't get what makes this an interesting movie. In 1982, maybe, purely because the effects (think "TRON"), but today?
It takes a lot of hubris to label the part of the genome you don't understand as "junk DNA." This was painfully obvious right from the start, and yet the term propagated throughout papers and textbooks as law.
Mr. Wizard got his claim to fame with a show that ran from 1951 through 1965. 500+ episodes in all. His show on Nickelodeon (which I watched and loved) was more or less a retro revival of his earlier show.
The difficulty curve was certainly rougher on GH2 than on GH1, but it wasn't insurmountable -- and I don't see any reason not to continue including challenging material for veteran players.
As long as they don't miss the overall point of playing along to songs for fun, that's fine by me.
I've finished both GH games on medium, and can get 4/5 stars on most songs. I've gotten about halfway through GH1 in hard. But even after spending frustrating hours, and going over all parts of the song in practice mode, I absolutely cannot play Woman in GH2's hard mode. I can time Star Power to help me out in the parts that kill me, but it's not enough.
Erlang succeeds because it has message passage between lightweight processes, not true OS threads. You can easily get 100,000 processes cooking along and talking to each other in Erlang, but such numbers would kill most operating systems. And even if you could get those numbers with Linux or Windows, Erlang would still walk all over them performance-wise by a huge factor.
So what we really need is for OSes to be designed around having massive numbers of threads that communicate via message passing (i.e. shared nothing). Then the need for custom languages will go away.
Why isn't there a mass stampede to Erlang or Haskell, languages that address this problem in a serious way? My conclusion is that most programmers are just too dumb to do major mind-bending once they've burned their first couple languages into their ROMs.
Because, quite honestly, and this very rarely gets pointed out, Erlang and Haskell can be awkward to program in. For concurrency, Erlang is wonderful. For algorithmic beauty--for some types of algorithms--Haskell is oh so pretty. But for other things that would be a doddle in C, both Erlang and Haskell are bears to work with. Try doing array or matrix work in Erlang, for example. Try writing something that would map well to an OOP language, something involving many "actors" that have dozens of frequently updated state variables, in Erlang. While you can do it, it's awkward, just like doing text processing in Pascal is so clunky in comparison to Perl.