Like most people who saw them in the theatre, I have good memories of the first three movies. I've seen them again and they've held up over the years, except some of the disco-y sets of Episode V and the muppets of Episode VI, but those are quibbles. But Episode I was a complete and utter embarrassment to everyone involved with it. The original trailer from 1999 was awesome, but the movie held up none of that promise. It was corny, it had horrific acting, it was predictable, it had obvious and major holes, it included inexcusible scenes such as slapstick comedy during the big invasion.
I didn't bother seeing Episode II in the theatre. I watched it at home after most everyone else had already rented it. It was kinda better, and the acting wasn't as painful, but it wasn't a good movie. It was a mishmash of supposedly story advancing plot and action scenes, but the two didn't mesh together. Overall, it was boring. I've forgotten most of the movie.
I have no plans to see Episode III, either in the theatre or at home.
I don't know much about processor design, but one problem of the IBM POWER series is that they are NOT very streamlined.
They are FUNCTIONALLY streamlined. Just look at the PowerPC instruction set and architecture as compared with the x86.
That IBM is using automated design is a good thing, because it means that any improvements they make to their design tools will be felt across the board.
IBM hasn't hit the power/heat problems that Intel has, primarily because the PPC is a more streamlined processor. It's still very complex, mind you, but the x86 line is so complex, with all of the legacy support and CISC to RISC conversion and wacky nonsense like MMX *and* SSE *and* SSE2 all at the same time. Intel is already talking 150 watts for processors to be released this year. It is quite likely that the PowerPC line is going to pass Intel in the next 8 to 12 months.
It is amusing that the obsession with raw speed never goes away, even though computers have gotten thousands of times faster since the the days of the original wisdom about how one shouldn't be obsessed with speed. Programmers put down Visual Basic as slow when it was an interpreted language running on a 66MHz 486. It was still put down as slow when it shared the same machine code generating back-end as Visual C++ running on a 3GHz Pentium 4. And still some people--usually people with little commercial experience--continue to insist that speed is everything.
Here's a bombshell: if you have a nice language, and that language doesn't have any hugely glaring drawbacks (such as simple benchmarks filling up hundreds of megabytes of memory), then don't worry about speed. From past experience, I've found it's usually easy to start with what someone considers to be a fast C or C++ program. Then I write a naive version in Python or another language I like. And guess what? My version will be 100x slower. Sometimes this is irrelevant. 100x slower than a couple of microseconds doesn't matter. Other times it does matter. But it usually isn't important to be anywhere near as fast as C, just to speed up the simpler, cleaner Python version by 2-20x. This can usually be done by fiddling around a bit, using a little finesse, trying different approaches. It's all very easy to do, and one of the great secrets is that high-level optimization is a lot of fun and more rewarding than assembly level optimization, because the rewards are so much greater.
This is mostly undiscovered territory, but I found one interesting link.
Note that I'm not talking about diddly high-level tasks in language like Python, but even things like image processing. It doesn't matter. Sticking to C and C++ for performance reasons, even though you know there are better languages out there, is a backward way of thinking.
Oh, come on, just because he mentions this in a speech means its legitimate? Bush is (A) an ass, and (B) has zero experience in this field. So if some smart people at NASA want a renewed push for space exploration, then great. But enough with the typical credit-taking president whose just looking for re-election and a distraction from everything he's been screwing up.
This is a foolproof plan by Microsoft to keep Linux zealots tied up arguing and angst-ridden, thus slowing development of software for Linux. And you know, it is working.
One of the things that make 'Nix based distros, and OS X attractive is that each new development cycle (and they tend to be quick) brings more apps and more features to increase productivity.
OS X, yes. Apple has been on a roll. Unix/Linux distribtions in general? Well, no, not really. Gnome development has been painfully slow, for example. I'd argue that Linux development has slowly drastically. Sure, there are kernel updates and desktop application updates, but they're all relatively small things, nothing earth shattering.
I see lots of arguments to the contrary, and they've all been modded up to 5. But let's look at this issue in a calmer fashion, okay?
Linux is technically solid. This is no surprise, as it essentially borrowed its technical solidity from UNIX, which had been around for 20 years when Linux first appeared. This is good.
But beyond the kernel and server-type applications and developer utilities, Linux has less focus. Some people like using bare window managers. Some people want X Windows replaced with something saner. Then there are the KDE/Gnome desktop environment battles. Lets not even get into the various GUI creation libraries.
One side will say "Choice is good!", and I agree. But all the arguing and general muddling has made Linux much less appealing as an alternative to more focused operating systems. Apple forces a GUI down your throat, but at the same time they've succeeded in making desktop UNIX appealing and a target for well-known applications. So Linux needs to grow in the sense that there should be more focus to what the desktop Linux experience *is* exactly, and with that is going to come wider curiosity and adoption. UserLinux may pull this off...or not.
But please just don't blow off the comment, okay? Personally, I see OS X as a much brighter alternative to Linux, simply because decisions have been made and there's strong leadership.
"Core Team" Development models are out-dated and sound more M$'ish than Open Source'ish.
But realistically, the most successful open source projects have "core teams" behind them, or at least were that way for a long time: the Linux kernel, Perl, Python, etc. You need a solid vision and understanding of the architecture. You don't get a coherent and sparking product by a bunch of random people hacking away independently.
Open Source means "you can see the source." You can find and fix bugs. You can make improvements. You can send fixes and improvements to the development team. That's all. The "herd of cats" methodology is more myth than anything else, one that's promoted by people without much software engineering experience.
I've been hearing the "PCs are cheaper" argument since the early 90's at least. One problem: It's never been true. Sure, you can buy a PC for less than you can buy a Mac. But you cannot buy a PC of *comparable quality* for significantly less.
In my experience this isn't true. Sure, the bottom end of the PC market is full of junk, but the "mid-range"--which these days is 85-95% of the supposed "high end"--is much more inexpensive than Apple's offerings. Look at the price of the lowest cost G5. Then go to Dell or abspc.com and put together a 2.8GHz P4 with the same amount of memory. If you ignore the goofy "gamer systems," you can put together a very nice system for under $1000 from ABS, and maybe $1100-1200 from Dell. You don't have to try very hard at all. The resultant PC will compare favorably to the G5 performance-wise.
Note that this is ignoring the latest and greatest video card, which is completely irrelevant to all but a handful of people. You get a "slow" GeForce FX standard, but you have to pay $250 or more to get a Radeon 9800. But for most people this is like arguing about one commercial airliner being faster than another: they're much faster than a car. But even if you go for the Radeon 9800, you'll still get more system for your buck than with a G5.
At the moment, no, there's no reason for Microsoft to be worried. Well, except that Windows virii have gotten so bad that the typical Dell purchaser will get nailed by several before Windows Update has finished running for the first time. But otherwise PCs are less expensive and generally much faster for the price.
But lets look a few years down the road. The next update to Windows is a huge one. Microsoft is essentially switching to a.net-based OS, and changing lots of core components at the same time. And the minimum system requirements are going way up. None of the Longhorn features are battle proven yet. It will be a long time before we know how it will hold up.
On the flipside, the Mac already based on proven UNIX technology and security. The GUI is fully hardware accelerated. The core CPU line looks to be in a much better position for moving forward in performance (Intel has been very vocal about the power issues they're running into), and PowerPC's run cooler, which is getting to be an important issue.
All told, I can see a lot of people jumping ship to Apple in the next few years, especially if the hardware and OS X improvements continue at the rate they have been.
You're quoting numbers from 130nm x86 processors. Make no mistake, Intel and AMD will have 90nm processor offerings that will have the same benefits that IBM is claiming, and dare I say - much higher performance and performance/watt. That 4GHz P4 you're quoting will be on a 90nm process but it certainly won't be 150W.
The 100+ watt dissipation figure is for the 3.4GHz Prescott, which is based on a 90nm process. It was supposed to be out this year, but was pushed into 2004.
Does anyone even care about the leetness of their speed with Apple stuff? I always thought the sort of people who used "the other computer" were more interested in doing normal everyday things that don't require much cpu power: word processing, email, web etc. Most of the people encoding audio and video and playing games are running x86.
But there's getting to be quite a leet-geek crowd using Macs now, thanks to OS X. It's a huge draw for people who understand the advantages of UNIX, but don't want to get into the Linux fray (because of lack of certain commercial applications, for example).
Macs will run at 3 ghz? WOOHOO! That means AMD and Intel will have 6gig chips!
Realistically speaking, though, performance increases have slowed down in the x86 camp. The jump from 2.8GHz to 3.0GHz came with a much larger increase in power than than the 7% increase in raw clockrate. Ditto for the 3.2GHz P4. Now Intel is apparently having a lot of trouble just getting bumped up to 3.4GHz, a CPU that dissipates over 100 watts. I'm not saying Intel won't break past this barrier--of course they will--but diminishing returns have kicked in hard. A 4GHz P4 is going to dissipate 150W at this rate. How long can it keep up? These are not the kind of CPUs you can easily put in a desktop, let alone a small-form-factor PC or notebook.
IBM is going to have the same troubles with the PPC970, but at least they're ahead of the game. The cleaner design of the PPC line has suddenly become a powerful advantage.
This "proves" that MySQL is better than commercial offerings. Good. A lot of people knew that. Hats off to the developers. But...
1. This cannot be generalized into a property of all open source projects. 2. It's more a tribute to the architecture and original core developers of MySQL than anything else. 3. Realize that even though MySQL is an open source product, MySQL AB is the *company* that organizes and pays for MySQL development. So, again, you can't generalize this into something that covers late night hackers working on personal projects in their basements (the open source geek fantasy).
MySQL is awesome! But let's be careful about this story, okay? It's the over-generalization that gives OSS/Linux advocates a bad name ("The Gimp is equivalent to Photoshop!").
Re:Market forces that be, please start working
on
The Return of S3
·
· Score: 1
Oh well, as cheap, junky, consumer-level computers are being made, S3 will always have a customer. Its all about the profit margin.
Intel has this market sewn up with the "Extreme Graphics 2" chipset. It's the most common graphics chipset in consumer machines, period.
There was a time that I would put up with binary-only compilers. That was before gcc. Sure, both free and non-free compilers have bugs, but it's so much easier just to fix those compiler bugs yourself in the compiler's own source code, rather than have to craft a binary patch to fix the bug while you wait 6 months for the vendor to think about releasing the next version.
So is this something you've actually done--fix errors in gcc--or something you're just spouting off about? What were the errors specifically? Did you do full regression testing on your changes? Did you update the test suite?
machines that we use are not all that great, P4 1.7Ghz with 2 year old NVidia graphics cards, so Quake and the likes are out of the question.
Let's see now: Quake III was released in 1998. That means the bulk of the development was done in 1997 and 1998. What was the fastest PC you could buy at that time? In early 1998 it was a 333MHz Pentium II with a 66MHz bus. I know, because I intentionally bought the fastest PC available at that time.
In terms of video cards, 1998 was the year the 3dfx Voodoo 2 was released. There were *zero* cards available that did transforms in hardware. The CPU still did all that.
And now a 1.7GHz Pentium 4 with a circa 2001 video card--several generations past the Voodoo 2--is considered too slow for Quake? I'm not going to be the guy who says 640K is enough for anyone, but methinks that some people's perspectives on speed are greatly skewed.
Too many people think that Microsoft invented computing and don't realize that most of what we have today is simply re-hashing of things from the 60's, but in smaller cases.
To be perfectly fair, this affect's Linux as much as Windows. Linux users are happy with essentially 30 year old tech, and Windows users started with something else and have been happy to move closer and closer to 1970s tech.
Opensource works because even though 90% of users of a project won't contribute, the 10% that do (not just code, but bug reports, comments, newbie help, documentation, etc.) make a huge difference.
The 10% figure applies only to very technical, programmer-oriented projects, like libraries. It's still pretty high, though; I'd put it at more like 1-2%. For most other projects, it's more like 0.0001% of users contribute. Most people--even programmers--just don't want or have the time to track through a complex 100,000+ line project to understand the architecture and fix bugs. Seriously.
Spiderman, Hulk, and Harry Potter...these are targeted at *kids*. Sure, the Harry Potter books are good (I've read the first four), but we're really talking about fantasy books that sell the most among preteens. And who buys Spideman and Hulk *toys*? Kids! Duh! Sure, adults have fond memories of superheroes, but we don't obssess about them. The movies are more feel-good nostalgia than anything else. But none of this has anything to go with the general populace being nerds.
Now the rise of the PC, that's unsettling. You hear middle aged women talking about firewalls and WiFi, and it takes some getting used to. But realize that PCs are completely mainstream now, so this shouldn't be a big shock. The catch is that such people use their computers to do their work, or to browse the web, or whatever, and don't just obssess about computers for computers' sake.
No offense intended, but where have you been? This slide started back in 2000 or so. The number of PC developers dropped dramatically, many of them switching entirely to consoles. Even Blizzard is doing a console-only game.
Slashdot Mirror
Like most people who saw them in the theatre, I have good memories of the first three movies. I've seen them again and they've held up over the years, except some of the disco-y sets of Episode V and the muppets of Episode VI, but those are quibbles. But Episode I was a complete and utter embarrassment to everyone involved with it. The original trailer from 1999 was awesome, but the movie held up none of that promise. It was corny, it had horrific acting, it was predictable, it had obvious and major holes, it included inexcusible scenes such as slapstick comedy during the big invasion.
I didn't bother seeing Episode II in the theatre. I watched it at home after most everyone else had already rented it. It was kinda better, and the acting wasn't as painful, but it wasn't a good movie. It was a mishmash of supposedly story advancing plot and action scenes, but the two didn't mesh together. Overall, it was boring. I've forgotten most of the movie.
I have no plans to see Episode III, either in the theatre or at home.
In Windows Longhorn's case, I think an entire rewrite (or close to it) is a good thing.
And if there was ever a time to switch to someting besides Windows, this is it.
Between this and all of Mac rumors that get posted...maybe the tag should be changed to "The latest dirt for nerds?"
I don't know much about processor design, but one problem of the IBM POWER series is that they are NOT very streamlined.
They are FUNCTIONALLY streamlined. Just look at the PowerPC instruction set and architecture as compared with the x86.
That IBM is using automated design is a good thing, because it means that any improvements they make to their design tools will be felt across the board.
IBM hasn't hit the power/heat problems that Intel has, primarily because the PPC is a more streamlined processor. It's still very complex, mind you, but the x86 line is so complex, with all of the legacy support and CISC to RISC conversion and wacky nonsense like MMX *and* SSE *and* SSE2 all at the same time. Intel is already talking 150 watts for processors to be released this year. It is quite likely that the PowerPC line is going to pass Intel in the next 8 to 12 months.
It is amusing that the obsession with raw speed never goes away, even though computers have gotten thousands of times faster since the the days of the original wisdom about how one shouldn't be obsessed with speed. Programmers put down Visual Basic as slow when it was an interpreted language running on a 66MHz 486. It was still put down as slow when it shared the same machine code generating back-end as Visual C++ running on a 3GHz Pentium 4. And still some people--usually people with little commercial experience--continue to insist that speed is everything.
Here's a bombshell: if you have a nice language, and that language doesn't have any hugely glaring drawbacks (such as simple benchmarks filling up hundreds of megabytes of memory), then don't worry about speed. From past experience, I've found it's usually easy to start with what someone considers to be a fast C or C++ program. Then I write a naive version in Python or another language I like. And guess what? My version will be 100x slower. Sometimes this is irrelevant. 100x slower than a couple of microseconds doesn't matter. Other times it does matter. But it usually isn't important to be anywhere near as fast as C, just to speed up the simpler, cleaner Python version by 2-20x. This can usually be done by fiddling around a bit, using a little finesse, trying different approaches. It's all very easy to do, and one of the great secrets is that high-level optimization is a lot of fun and more rewarding than assembly level optimization, because the rewards are so much greater.
This is mostly undiscovered territory, but I found one interesting link.
Note that I'm not talking about diddly high-level tasks in language like Python, but even things like image processing. It doesn't matter. Sticking to C and C++ for performance reasons, even though you know there are better languages out there, is a backward way of thinking.
Oh, come on, just because he mentions this in a speech means its legitimate? Bush is (A) an ass, and (B) has zero experience in this field. So if some smart people at NASA want a renewed push for space exploration, then great. But enough with the typical credit-taking president whose just looking for re-election and a distraction from everything he's been screwing up.
This is a foolproof plan by Microsoft to keep Linux zealots tied up arguing and angst-ridden, thus slowing development of software for Linux. And you know, it is working.
One of the things that make 'Nix based distros, and OS X attractive is that each new development cycle (and they tend to be quick) brings more apps and more features to increase productivity.
OS X, yes. Apple has been on a roll. Unix/Linux distribtions in general? Well, no, not really. Gnome development has been painfully slow, for example. I'd argue that Linux development has slowly drastically. Sure, there are kernel updates and desktop application updates, but they're all relatively small things, nothing earth shattering.
I see lots of arguments to the contrary, and they've all been modded up to 5. But let's look at this issue in a calmer fashion, okay?
Linux is technically solid. This is no surprise, as it essentially borrowed its technical solidity from UNIX, which had been around for 20 years when Linux first appeared. This is good.
But beyond the kernel and server-type applications and developer utilities, Linux has less focus. Some people like using bare window managers. Some people want X Windows replaced with something saner. Then there are the KDE/Gnome desktop environment battles. Lets not even get into the various GUI creation libraries.
One side will say "Choice is good!", and I agree. But all the arguing and general muddling has made Linux much less appealing as an alternative to more focused operating systems. Apple forces a GUI down your throat, but at the same time they've succeeded in making desktop UNIX appealing and a target for well-known applications. So Linux needs to grow in the sense that there should be more focus to what the desktop Linux experience *is* exactly, and with that is going to come wider curiosity and adoption. UserLinux may pull this off...or not.
But please just don't blow off the comment, okay? Personally, I see OS X as a much brighter alternative to Linux, simply because decisions have been made and there's strong leadership.
"Core Team" Development models are out-dated and sound more M$'ish than Open Source'ish.
But realistically, the most successful open source projects have "core teams" behind them, or at least were that way for a long time: the Linux kernel, Perl, Python, etc. You need a solid vision and understanding of the architecture. You don't get a coherent and sparking product by a bunch of random people hacking away independently.
Open Source means "you can see the source." You can find and fix bugs. You can make improvements. You can send fixes and improvements to the development team. That's all. The "herd of cats" methodology is more myth than anything else, one that's promoted by people without much software engineering experience.
I've been hearing the "PCs are cheaper" argument since the early 90's at least. One problem: It's never been true. Sure, you can buy a PC for less than you can buy a Mac. But you cannot buy a PC of *comparable quality* for significantly less.
In my experience this isn't true. Sure, the bottom end of the PC market is full of junk, but the "mid-range"--which these days is 85-95% of the supposed "high end"--is much more inexpensive than Apple's offerings. Look at the price of the lowest cost G5. Then go to Dell or abspc.com and put together a 2.8GHz P4 with the same amount of memory. If you ignore the goofy "gamer systems," you can put together a very nice system for under $1000 from ABS, and maybe $1100-1200 from Dell. You don't have to try very hard at all. The resultant PC will compare favorably to the G5 performance-wise.
Note that this is ignoring the latest and greatest video card, which is completely irrelevant to all but a handful of people. You get a "slow" GeForce FX standard, but you have to pay $250 or more to get a Radeon 9800. But for most people this is like arguing about one commercial airliner being faster than another: they're much faster than a car. But even if you go for the Radeon 9800, you'll still get more system for your buck than with a G5.
That said, my next computer will likely be a Mac.
At the moment, no, there's no reason for Microsoft to be worried. Well, except that Windows virii have gotten so bad that the typical Dell purchaser will get nailed by several before Windows Update has finished running for the first time. But otherwise PCs are less expensive and generally much faster for the price.
.net-based OS, and changing lots of core components at the same time. And the minimum system requirements are going way up. None of the Longhorn features are battle proven yet. It will be a long time before we know how it will hold up.
But lets look a few years down the road. The next update to Windows is a huge one. Microsoft is essentially switching to a
On the flipside, the Mac already based on proven UNIX technology and security. The GUI is fully hardware accelerated. The core CPU line looks to be in a much better position for moving forward in performance (Intel has been very vocal about the power issues they're running into), and PowerPC's run cooler, which is getting to be an important issue.
All told, I can see a lot of people jumping ship to Apple in the next few years, especially if the hardware and OS X improvements continue at the rate they have been.
You're quoting numbers from 130nm x86 processors. Make no mistake, Intel and AMD will have 90nm processor offerings that will have the same benefits that IBM is claiming, and dare I say - much higher performance and performance/watt. That 4GHz P4 you're quoting will be on a 90nm process but it certainly won't be 150W.
The 100+ watt dissipation figure is for the 3.4GHz Prescott, which is based on a 90nm process. It was supposed to be out this year, but was pushed into 2004.
Does anyone even care about the leetness of their speed with Apple stuff? I always thought the sort of people who used "the other computer" were more interested in doing normal everyday things that don't require much cpu power: word processing, email, web etc. Most of the people encoding audio and video and playing games are running x86.
But there's getting to be quite a leet-geek crowd using Macs now, thanks to OS X. It's a huge draw for people who understand the advantages of UNIX, but don't want to get into the Linux fray (because of lack of certain commercial applications, for example).
Macs will run at 3 ghz? WOOHOO! That means AMD and Intel will have 6gig chips!
Realistically speaking, though, performance increases have slowed down in the x86 camp. The jump from 2.8GHz to 3.0GHz came with a much larger increase in power than than the 7% increase in raw clockrate. Ditto for the 3.2GHz P4. Now Intel is apparently having a lot of trouble just getting bumped up to 3.4GHz, a CPU that dissipates over 100 watts. I'm not saying Intel won't break past this barrier--of course they will--but diminishing returns have kicked in hard. A 4GHz P4 is going to dissipate 150W at this rate. How long can it keep up? These are not the kind of CPUs you can easily put in a desktop, let alone a small-form-factor PC or notebook.
IBM is going to have the same troubles with the PPC970, but at least they're ahead of the game. The cleaner design of the PPC line has suddenly become a powerful advantage.
This "proves" that MySQL is better than commercial offerings. Good. A lot of people knew that. Hats off to the developers. But...
1. This cannot be generalized into a property of all open source projects.
2. It's more a tribute to the architecture and original core developers of MySQL than anything else.
3. Realize that even though MySQL is an open source product, MySQL AB is the *company* that organizes and pays for MySQL development. So, again, you can't generalize this into something that covers late night hackers working on personal projects in their basements (the open source geek fantasy).
MySQL is awesome! But let's be careful about this story, okay? It's the over-generalization that gives OSS/Linux advocates a bad name ("The Gimp is equivalent to Photoshop!").
Oh well, as cheap, junky, consumer-level computers are being made, S3 will always have a customer. Its all about the profit margin.
Intel has this market sewn up with the "Extreme Graphics 2" chipset. It's the most common graphics chipset in consumer machines, period.
There was a time that I would put up with binary-only compilers. That was before gcc. Sure, both free and non-free compilers have bugs, but it's so much easier just to fix those compiler bugs yourself in the compiler's own source code, rather than have to craft a binary patch to fix the bug while you wait 6 months for the vendor to think about releasing the next version.
So is this something you've actually done--fix errors in gcc--or something you're just spouting off about? What were the errors specifically? Did you do full regression testing on your changes? Did you update the test suite?
Denigrate it loudly while duplicating it quietly.
Of course remember that Linux started as an attempt to clone Minix, then full UNIX. UNIX was around for a while before Microsoft was even founded.
machines that we use are not all that great, P4 1.7Ghz with 2 year old NVidia graphics cards, so Quake and the likes are out of the question.
Let's see now: Quake III was released in 1998. That means the bulk of the development was done in 1997 and 1998. What was the fastest PC you could buy at that time? In early 1998 it was a 333MHz Pentium II with a 66MHz bus. I know, because I intentionally bought the fastest PC available at that time.
In terms of video cards, 1998 was the year the 3dfx Voodoo 2 was released. There were *zero* cards available that did transforms in hardware. The CPU still did all that.
And now a 1.7GHz Pentium 4 with a circa 2001 video card--several generations past the Voodoo 2--is considered too slow for Quake? I'm not going to be the guy who says 640K is enough for anyone, but methinks that some people's perspectives on speed are greatly skewed.
Too many people think that Microsoft invented computing and don't realize that most of what we have today is simply re-hashing of things from the 60's, but in smaller cases.
To be perfectly fair, this affect's Linux as much as Windows. Linux users are happy with essentially 30 year old tech, and Windows users started with something else and have been happy to move closer and closer to 1970s tech.
Opensource works because even though 90% of users of a project won't contribute, the 10% that do (not just code, but bug reports, comments, newbie help, documentation, etc.) make a huge difference.
The 10% figure applies only to very technical, programmer-oriented projects, like libraries. It's still pretty high, though; I'd put it at more like 1-2%. For most other projects, it's more like 0.0001% of users contribute. Most people--even programmers--just don't want or have the time to track through a complex 100,000+ line project to understand the architecture and fix bugs. Seriously.
Spiderman, Hulk, and Harry Potter...these are targeted at *kids*. Sure, the Harry Potter books are good (I've read the first four), but we're really talking about fantasy books that sell the most among preteens. And who buys Spideman and Hulk *toys*? Kids! Duh! Sure, adults have fond memories of superheroes, but we don't obssess about them. The movies are more feel-good nostalgia than anything else. But none of this has anything to go with the general populace being nerds.
Now the rise of the PC, that's unsettling. You hear middle aged women talking about firewalls and WiFi, and it takes some getting used to. But realize that PCs are completely mainstream now, so this shouldn't be a big shock. The catch is that such people use their computers to do their work, or to browse the web, or whatever, and don't just obssess about computers for computers' sake.
Is this the beginning of the end for PC games?
No offense intended, but where have you been? This slide started back in 2000 or so. The number of PC developers dropped dramatically, many of them switching entirely to consoles. Even Blizzard is doing a console-only game.