The basic problem was that file i/o is slow in Emacs Lisp.
This is like saying that a particular implementation of the C++ STL is slow, therefore C++ is slow. You can't blame the high level language for a particularly crappy implementation. Emacs Lisp is so famously bad that even Lisp programmers won't touch it.
That said, I still stand by using high level languages for these kind of applications. These days you can write a well-designed program in Python that appears lightning fast and a poorly designed application in C that's several times slower, despite being compiled to native code.
Tell me what my mail client should be written in? Java? C#?
Or Python. Or Ruby. Or Lisp. Or REBOL.
Maybe this guy buys a new supercomputer every month, but my Duron at work isn't getting faster any time soon.
I assume that you're trolling. An email client is so lightweight--mostly GUI and waiting for sockets--that you could write it in *anything* and even on 200MHz Pentium, and it would be just fine.
There has gotten to be some misplaced angst among younger coders, those who are frustrated at the lack of perceived performance in Windows and KDE and various large applications. They come up with pet excuses for that slowness, most of which are invariably, flamingly wrong.
If you have someone who is realizing Windows is WONDERFUL (sarcasm intended..duh), give them this book and the latest distro of choice (mandrake/redhat for ease of use). Help someone else be released from the borg [microsoft.com].
Followed by an explanation of why they can't use all of the applications they are used to:P
Look at Treasure Planet...how AWFUL that movie was
Treasure Planet was meant to be a light, action-oriented kids movie. And it was. And as such, it was entertaining. I thought the animation was better than in most Disney films, the voice acting was very good, and as Disney kids' fare goes, it was decently inventive (compare this to, say, "Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron," which was just plain awful in every respect).
The general problem with this thread is that everyone is fawning all over Spirited Away simply because it's anime. Can't we just look at it as a good film? And yet at the same time, people are getting all uptight about Treasure Planet and Lilo & Stitch, just because they're also animated features. Surely one doesn't have to be so petty as to put them down just because you like Spirited Away?
The people that they get much of their profits from are overclocking enthusiasts, or at least people who consider the ability to overclock to be a plus
Realistically, this is about 0.01% of the CPU market at most.
Anybody saying that we don't need more than 2GB is as short-sighted as Bill Gates saying 640K oughta be enough for anybody.
At some point diminishing returns kick in. It is one thing to say "a two cyclinder engine should be enough for anybody" and quite another to say the same thing about an eight cylinder engine. You might get more performance out of ten or twelve cylinders, and certainly such engines have been built, but at the same time there are significant drawbacks: higher fuel consumption, more weight, more expensive, more parts to break.
In the case of 64-bit, there's a small group of people that really need it (and a much larger group who thinks that they do). This is not enough reason to promote moving the entire PC industry to 64-bit processors and huge memories.
Seriously though... Despite sounding a bit excessive, you will never grow to appreciate 1024 MB of RAM until you own a machine that has that much... Even when you only do regular every-day tasks.
Do you consider developing high-end 3D games to be more than regular every-day tasks? I have 512MB under Windows 2000 and I never hit the swap file. I have zero reasons to upgrade either my RAM or processor. Zero.
But if you want rich multimedia content, the ability to do serious 3D imaging on the fly (think 3D operating systems) and the like, you're going to need more RAM. The only way to get that is with a 64-bit chip.
Consider, of course, that the average amount of RAM in use in deskop PCs 256MB. Few people go above 512MB, even for 3D rendering. And, very, very, very few people have 1GB. So if the 2GB limit were a serious problem, you'd expect to have a significant percentage of PCs maxed out at 2GB, and that's hardly the case. 0.1% of all industrial PC users needs more than 2GB, and I accept that, but that's not a reason to switch to 64-bit across the board, for everyone.
I'm skeptical as to how well this will work. The mac community is different, chiefly in that there is some sense of community. A certain desire to support companies that develop for the platform.
This is true to a large extent. If you Google back to the original discussions about Maelstrom in 1992 or so, you'll see the Mac word going nuts over what's essentially an Asteroids clone. At the same time, Wolfenstein 3D was all the rage on the PC. Would an Asteroids clone have been the same media darling on the PC? Doubtful. Many early Ambrosia games leaned heavily on the Mac market being more "desperate" (a loaded word, I admit) than PC gamers. Of cpurse the politically correct synonym for "desperate" is "sense of community."
But some of their other games have gotten big attention, most notably the Escape Velocity series. Again, maybe they wouldn't have done so well way back when, essentially being Star Control derivatives, but they've built up a big reputation over the years. This reputation carries over the the PC to some degree, if for no other reason that many Windows owners know people with Macs.
Good grief, go over to shockwave.com or popcap.com dexterinty.com or any of dozens of other places. What do you see? 90% puzzle games. Admittedly these games are all pretty stale and have been feeding off of each other for a long time now, but it's a thriving market.
While Spector and the rest still work with giant teams and foster (well, their companies certainly do) this aura of "they're gods that should be looked up to", Brian is out there doing things mostly on his own.
And that's good, except that he's not doing anything interesting or notable. I have the utmost repsect for people who start their own small game companies, but let's be frank: Brian Hook has essentially written a clone in the vein of Diamond Mine and a dozen other games. That too, is okay, but it shouldn't brand him as any kind of luminary or folk hero. A lone wolf who raged against the machine with wild and innovative designs, or even interesting designs going for mass market appeal, now that would be someone worth listening to.
I was trying to say that there are lots of deserving people out there that should be getting interviewed besides the usual suspects (Spector, etc.). Those "gods" are essentially managers as it is. So what do we have instead? Someone who has written a me-too puzzle game. My point is that there's a an in-between. It's like saying that Popular Music sucks, but then selecting a ho-hum Bon Jovi cover band as the savior of the medium.
I know this will come across as sour grapes, but if there was ever someone in game development who made a name for himself without much to back it up, it's Mr. Hook.
He worked at 3dfx in the early days, and hats off for the Glide API (RIP), but that's not a game, of course.
He wrote a book about writing game engines in C++, but hadn't actually written a 3D game when he wrote it.
He worked at id for a bit, but he never shipped a title while there, and he never worked on a project start to finish.
Then he worked for Sony Online, but never shipped a game there either.
Then he started a little bedroom company--good for him!--and finally wrote a game: the 2D puzzler known as Candy Cruncher.
Surely there are some more illuminated people in the game industry that are more worthy of interviews? Take away Spector and Meier and Wright and all the usual gods and there are still oh so many brilliant people out there whose names aren't even known. Who worked on Metroid Prime (hint: one of them is also ex-id)? Who worked on Splinter Cell? Who worked on GTA 3? You never hear about these people.
If by "extremely short" you mean "the same 18 to 30 month cycle that most games take to develop," then I'll agree. It's easier to write a from-scratch renderer for the Xbox, but the other 90% of the game, plus creation of art and levels and scripting, takes the same amount of time. The renderer issue is irrelevant, too, as by now everyone has solid PS2 rendering code to lean on (or is using RenderWare).
Why is it you can buy an Intel or AMD chip at a thousand different sites, but hardly anyone sells these Transmeta chips. Seems like low power consumption leads to less noise, and I for one would love anything to make my system quieter.
Because most geeks still want Ultimate Performance At Any Cost. The standard pattern is that you can pay a $1000 premium for a new Intel chip that gives you a 9% clock speed boost in exchange for a 15% increase in power consumption. But people are tiring of this.
but I have little faith in any third party entries in the CPU market at this point. Much like vid-cards, I the market only has enough room for a two horse race.
(That's insightful? C'mon now.)
Transmeta is going off in a different direction. Intel and AMD have gotten to be about trading massive power consumption for incremental performance increases. Now Intel is backpedalling because you just can't stick a high end P4 in a laptop (hence the Centrino). Transmeta is putting power consumption first, which is a different angle.
Because we don't have anything better, if you don't count Macs.
This is the kind of reply you expect from someone who has only been exposed to Windows and UNIX-variants.
"Operating system" is an outdated concept. All the cruft accumulated from Big Iron machines in the 1970s no longer applies in many or most cases. The mobile device people have this nailed, in that they're writing lean and mean operating environments with less memory thant you'd need to load gcc on a desktop. Rather than cloning UNIX yet again, the goal is small, clean, and tailored to what users need. Linux is more of a retro fantasy for 1970s system administrators, but a large number of people have been fooled into thinking that it's the cutting edge of OS design. In reality, we shouldn't even be thinking about operating systems.
I don't subscribe to this theory. A game console, DVD player or modern cell phone is a comparable device in terms of technological complexity. The difference is in the user interface.
"Complexity" involves anything the user must care about. No one cares about internal complexity, so your disagreement is essentially an agreement.
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The basic problem was that file i/o is slow in Emacs Lisp.
This is like saying that a particular implementation of the C++ STL is slow, therefore C++ is slow. You can't blame the high level language for a particularly crappy implementation. Emacs Lisp is so famously bad that even Lisp programmers won't touch it.
That said, I still stand by using high level languages for these kind of applications. These days you can write a well-designed program in Python that appears lightning fast and a poorly designed application in C that's several times slower, despite being compiled to native code.
Tell me what my mail client should be written in? Java? C#?
Or Python. Or Ruby. Or Lisp. Or REBOL.
Maybe this guy buys a new supercomputer every month, but my Duron at work isn't getting faster any time soon.
I assume that you're trolling. An email client is so lightweight--mostly GUI and waiting for sockets--that you could write it in *anything* and even on 200MHz Pentium, and it would be just fine.
There has gotten to be some misplaced angst among younger coders, those who are frustrated at the lack of perceived performance in Windows and KDE and various large applications. They come up with pet excuses for that slowness, most of which are invariably, flamingly wrong.
Lots of people are listing big hits, it's just that they're big hits that came out 15-20 years ago :)
This place has been selling a similar service called "Velocity Access" for well over a year now. They claim 6x instead of 7x.
If you have someone who is realizing Windows is WONDERFUL (sarcasm intended..duh), give them this book and the latest distro of choice (mandrake/redhat for ease of use). Help someone else be released from the borg [microsoft.com].
:P
Followed by an explanation of why they can't use all of the applications they are used to
Look at Treasure Planet...how AWFUL that movie was
Treasure Planet was meant to be a light, action-oriented kids movie. And it was. And as such, it was entertaining. I thought the animation was better than in most Disney films, the voice acting was very good, and as Disney kids' fare goes, it was decently inventive (compare this to, say, "Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron," which was just plain awful in every respect).
The general problem with this thread is that everyone is fawning all over Spirited Away simply because it's anime. Can't we just look at it as a good film? And yet at the same time, people are getting all uptight about Treasure Planet and Lilo & Stitch, just because they're also animated features. Surely one doesn't have to be so petty as to put them down just because you like Spirited Away?
The people that they get much of their profits from are overclocking enthusiasts, or at least people who consider the ability to overclock to be a plus
Realistically, this is about 0.01% of the CPU market at most.
Anybody saying that we don't need more than 2GB is as short-sighted as Bill Gates saying 640K oughta be enough for anybody.
At some point diminishing returns kick in. It is one thing to say "a two cyclinder engine should be enough for anybody" and quite another to say the same thing about an eight cylinder engine. You might get more performance out of ten or twelve cylinders, and certainly such engines have been built, but at the same time there are significant drawbacks: higher fuel consumption, more weight, more expensive, more parts to break.
In the case of 64-bit, there's a small group of people that really need it (and a much larger group who thinks that they do). This is not enough reason to promote moving the entire PC industry to 64-bit processors and huge memories.
Seriously though... Despite sounding a bit excessive, you will never grow to appreciate 1024 MB of RAM until you own a machine that has that much... Even when you only do regular every-day tasks.
Do you consider developing high-end 3D games to be more than regular every-day tasks? I have 512MB under Windows 2000 and I never hit the swap file. I have zero reasons to upgrade either my RAM or processor. Zero.
But if you want rich multimedia content, the ability to do serious 3D imaging on the fly (think 3D operating systems) and the like, you're going to need more RAM. The only way to get that is with a 64-bit chip.
Consider, of course, that the average amount of RAM in use in deskop PCs 256MB. Few people go above 512MB, even for 3D rendering. And, very, very, very few people have 1GB. So if the 2GB limit were a serious problem, you'd expect to have a significant percentage of PCs maxed out at 2GB, and that's hardly the case. 0.1% of all industrial PC users needs more than 2GB, and I accept that, but that's not a reason to switch to 64-bit across the board, for everyone.
Ambrosia is looking at porting *one* of their games to Windows. Not all of them. Not several of them. One.
I'm skeptical as to how well this will work. The mac community is different, chiefly in that there is some sense of community. A certain desire to support companies that develop for the platform.
This is true to a large extent. If you Google back to the original discussions about Maelstrom in 1992 or so, you'll see the Mac word going nuts over what's essentially an Asteroids clone. At the same time, Wolfenstein 3D was all the rage on the PC. Would an Asteroids clone have been the same media darling on the PC? Doubtful. Many early Ambrosia games leaned heavily on the Mac market being more "desperate" (a loaded word, I admit) than PC gamers. Of cpurse the politically correct synonym for "desperate" is "sense of community."
But some of their other games have gotten big attention, most notably the Escape Velocity series. Again, maybe they wouldn't have done so well way back when, essentially being Star Control derivatives, but they've built up a big reputation over the years. This reputation carries over the the PC to some degree, if for no other reason that many Windows owners know people with Macs.
Good grief, go over to shockwave.com or popcap.com dexterinty.com or any of dozens of other places. What do you see? 90% puzzle games. Admittedly these games are all pretty stale and have been feeding off of each other for a long time now, but it's a thriving market.
While Spector and the rest still work with giant teams and foster (well, their companies certainly do) this aura of "they're gods that should be looked up to", Brian is out there doing things mostly on his own.
And that's good, except that he's not doing anything interesting or notable. I have the utmost repsect for people who start their own small game companies, but let's be frank: Brian Hook has essentially written a clone in the vein of Diamond Mine and a dozen other games. That too, is okay, but it shouldn't brand him as any kind of luminary or folk hero. A lone wolf who raged against the machine with wild and innovative designs, or even interesting designs going for mass market appeal, now that would be someone worth listening to.
I was trying to say that there are lots of deserving people out there that should be getting interviewed besides the usual suspects (Spector, etc.). Those "gods" are essentially managers as it is. So what do we have instead? Someone who has written a me-too puzzle game. My point is that there's a an in-between. It's like saying that Popular Music sucks, but then selecting a ho-hum Bon Jovi cover band as the savior of the medium.
If CandyCrusher is the best that an innovator like Hook can do for Linux, the future for Free is indeed bleak.
Exactly. Plus remember that Hook is not an innovator. Candy Cruncher is the first game he ever worked on start to finish.
I know this will come across as sour grapes, but if there was ever someone in game development who made a name for himself without much to back it up, it's Mr. Hook.
He worked at 3dfx in the early days, and hats off for the Glide API (RIP), but that's not a game, of course.
He wrote a book about writing game engines in C++, but hadn't actually written a 3D game when he wrote it.
He worked at id for a bit, but he never shipped a title while there, and he never worked on a project start to finish.
Then he worked for Sony Online, but never shipped a game there either.
Then he started a little bedroom company--good for him!--and finally wrote a game: the 2D puzzler known as Candy Cruncher.
Surely there are some more illuminated people in the game industry that are more worthy of interviews? Take away Spector and Meier and Wright and all the usual gods and there are still oh so many brilliant people out there whose names aren't even known. Who worked on Metroid Prime (hint: one of them is also ex-id)? Who worked on Splinter Cell? Who worked on GTA 3? You never hear about these people.
You can get a 17" LCD from Hitachi with a 12ms refresh rate. At 60fps, 1 frame is 16.67ms, so this is good enough.
I'm used to having FREE email
So you don't have an ISP? And you're not paying semsesterly network fees at school (possibly rolled into a general student or residence hall fee)?
X-box has extremely short development times
If by "extremely short" you mean "the same 18 to 30 month cycle that most games take to develop," then I'll agree. It's easier to write a from-scratch renderer for the Xbox, but the other 90% of the game, plus creation of art and levels and scripting, takes the same amount of time. The renderer issue is irrelevant, too, as by now everyone has solid PS2 rendering code to lean on (or is using RenderWare).
Why is it you can buy an Intel or AMD chip at a thousand different sites, but hardly anyone sells these Transmeta chips. Seems like low power consumption leads to less noise, and I for one would love anything to make my system quieter.
Because most geeks still want Ultimate Performance At Any Cost. The standard pattern is that you can pay a $1000 premium for a new Intel chip that gives you a 9% clock speed boost in exchange for a 15% increase in power consumption. But people are tiring of this.
but I have little faith in any third party entries in the CPU market at this point. Much like vid-cards, I the market only has enough room for a two horse race.
(That's insightful? C'mon now.)
Transmeta is going off in a different direction. Intel and AMD have gotten to be about trading massive power consumption for incremental performance increases. Now Intel is backpedalling because you just can't stick a high end P4 in a laptop (hence the Centrino). Transmeta is putting power consumption first, which is a different angle.
right here.
sucks to be him just as much as us if he doesn't play the part.
Yeah, it's not like he doesn't have 10+ million in the bank right now...oh, wait, he does. Never mind.
Because we don't have anything better, if you don't count Macs.
This is the kind of reply you expect from someone who has only been exposed to Windows and UNIX-variants.
"Operating system" is an outdated concept. All the cruft accumulated from Big Iron machines in the 1970s no longer applies in many or most cases. The mobile device people have this nailed, in that they're writing lean and mean operating environments with less memory thant you'd need to load gcc on a desktop. Rather than cloning UNIX yet again, the goal is small, clean, and tailored to what users need. Linux is more of a retro fantasy for 1970s system administrators, but a large number of people have been fooled into thinking that it's the cutting edge of OS design. In reality, we shouldn't even be thinking about operating systems.
I don't subscribe to this theory. A game console, DVD player or modern cell phone is a comparable device in terms of technological complexity. The difference is in the user interface.
"Complexity" involves anything the user must care about. No one cares about internal complexity, so your disagreement is essentially an agreement.