First, they ignore you. Then, they laugh at you. Then, they fight you. Then you win.
Every time I see this my immediate reaction is "So _that's_ why Microsoft is so successful." I'm not trolling; I just find it hilarious that so many Linux advocates consider crazed zealotry and endless flames about other operating systems to be passive resistance.
Its amazing that they are able to fit that data density and functionality (realtime encryption/decryption of data) into something the size of a credit card for 'under $15', but the reader is about $100.
You have an odd definition of expensive, considering that you need a PC to even use the reader. $100 is the price of a video card or a Zip drive or two recently released games or a few months of broadband access. $100 is low enough in the computer world to become ubiquitous very quickly.
If you want expensive, look at the 3GHz Pentium 4 or a the latest Radeon.
Of course, it's still more expensive than a CD-R.....
True, but am I the only person bothered by having stacks of old CD-Rs that I don't know what to do with? It sure would be nice to have something a little less wasteful.
Enough with "enterprise" already. It mostly means "business," but then it also covers a few other larger groups, like schools. "Business" is good enough. Does anyone ever ask what enterprise you work for?
I'm surprised that no one here has mentioned some biggy indie developments.
The biggies, though, are the rare exceptions. For every 10,000 indie game developers that don't make a dime, there's one Counter-Strike. And CS piggybacked off of an extremely popular game, so it's fairly different from custom-built indie games.
I realize that there is inflation, but CDs were expensive at about $15 in the late 80s, and now CD player and discman prices have dropped dramatically over the years while the price of CDs has remained more or less constant.
That's because the cost to manufacture CD players has dropped, thanks to experience and economies of scale. The price of music CDs, however, has never been about the cost of the materials.
... the home computers of the early '80s didn't really have OSes, they had programming languages. You'd boot a BBC Micro and it would fire up into BBC Basic - with a few * commands for file system manipulation.
That doesn't mean BASIC was the OS, just that there was no desktop or GUI or whatever, and that BASIC started by default. Replace the Windows Explorer--which is just a user-level program, after all--with a BASIC interpreter and you'll get the same effect.
This isn't what the author of the cited article was talking about, in any case.
You're essentially saying that every single band from the last 40 years that has any kind of name recognition is garbage. That's a lot of bands to be smacking down with one offhand comment. Sure, there's a lot of crap out there like Creed and Mariah Carey, but if you put together a list of all good bands that have had major label deals *ever*, then that's a mighty long list.
You think AMD and Intel don't have about a trillion offsite backups of their chip designs? Sure, you could cripple the manufacturing, but that can be replaced relatively quickly if needed.
Naturally, but it's more than just that. It put either company into a deep financial hole from which it couldn't recover. It could result in the loss of the engineers who really understand how things work and where the the next gen designs are headed.
This makes me wonder how vulnerable the chipmakers are... One good fire, flood or earthquake and we're without cpu's? Imagine the sabotage posibilities... (hey Intel, for 1M, I'll wipe out amd ?)
Suppose that both Intel and AMD engineering headquarters were destroyed, either accidentally or by someone deliberately trying to cripple the US tech market. With the extreme complexity of what those companies are working on, Qhow long would it take to recover? Quite possibly it would be the end of the x86 line, period.
There's much to be said to diversifying a bit, and not having all of our collective eggs in one basket. Yes, there are other CPUs out there, such as the PowerPC and MIPS, but think about how much we're really dependent on the x86 in so many ways.
They would release the source and and make free, Win9x and a lot of people would stay with them. The downside would be that people would see how bad it is.
So I'm assuming that you've read through and have a good understanding of the Linux kernel, all drivers, XFree86, and whatever window manager you use, and you've determined that it's good? Nice work!
The designer of The Sims even claimed himself to be inspired by Little Computer People.
That's inspiration, which is different than stating "I'm going to write a game just like Little Computer People."
Parappa is Simon with cartoon graphics. The core gameplay is the same. Just a different skin.
The core gameplay is not the same! Both involve the player repeating a pattern, but in the first case you just try to remember one endless sequence, so it's a game of memorization. PaRappa is not a game of memorization, it's a game of musical timing.
After 1990, every game has been derivative.
Utter nonsense! And in any case, just writing off games as derivative is meaningless. There are degrees of inspiration. Many great novels were inspired by other novels, but you can't really tell. The author used a previous work to start his thinking and went from there. But if you specifically set out to write a book "like Ender's Game, only better," then that really shows through. Most games developed in the 1990s take the latter route, but not all of them.
The Sims: Little Computer People Project PaRappa the Rapper: Come on - ever play "Simon"?
This is anal retentive nit-picking, like refusing to read a science fiction novel because it includes space flight on the basis that earlier books did as well.
PaRappa, for example, is a musical game. You repeat short sequences to a beat. Simon was simply "memorize a long, never ending sequence." The play experience is completely and utterly different.
There is nothing to be gained from pristine originality, and that's okay. But if you insist on pristine originality then you quickly start calling all games derivative, and that marginalizes the creative effort behind some games. For example, blowing off PaRappa as a Simon knock-off is not the same thing as blowing off Snood as a Bust-A-Move knock-off. In one case there's a genealogy of concepts, in another case there's a design template.
Most of today's games are rehashes of earlier games. The last time a 'new' game came about was probably wolfenstein- and it made a huge impact on the industry
Most games are in established genres, but Snood is more than just in the puzzle genre: it's a 1-for-1 rewrite of Bust-A-Move. Period. That's perfectly fine...unless you're trying to use it as the poster childer for what a brash, independent game designer can come up with, which is what's happening here.
There have been a lot of original games over the last ten years. To say otherwise is defeatist. Here are a few: Tony Hawk Pro-Skater 1, Theif, The Sims, PaRappa the Rapper, Super Monkey Ball, Crazy Taxi, Prop-Cycle, and Jet Grind Radio. Please note that "original" does not imply some kind of mythical lack of ties to other games, but rather a game that has some independent vision, and not just an attempt to be like another game.
Blindly accepting the overly derivative nature of most games is like admitting that there's no good music, so you just listen to pop crap like Mariah Carey. In actuality though, there's a lot of really good music with independent vision, and lots of people seek it out. Not so with games, however.
I've played it on and off since then. But the ninth most popular game in 2001? That's nuts. Is Snood part of a series of tiny puzzley games, like Tetris and Bejeweled, that can still do well in a world of Counterstrikes and Unreal Tournaments?
I like the sentiment, wanting the little indie game designer to succeed. That's great!
But at the same time, is it really a success for all these so called inde developers to keep endlessly, endlessly, cloning the same handful of Tetris variants? Even ten years ago these things were stale, and now, in 2003, we have people hailing a design 100% borrowed from the Bust-A-Move arcade game from the mid 1990s as a "success" for the little developer? Surely there is a way to stay outside the "world of Counterstrikes and Unreal Tournaments" without resorting to writing rehashes of the same diddly batch of puzzle games.
Mozilla has become the poster child of open source development for reasons I can't understand. The progress has been horribly slow, the code has gotten a reputation for being unweildy, the UI has spawned more examples of things not to do than good features (except using window tabs, like the majority of text editors under Windows), and in the end it's not even turning out to be that great of a browser. None of this is surprising, and criticisms of the project are easy to find, so no one needs any more from me.
What I don't understand is why Mozilla is viciously defended as some kind of open source sacred cow. It's just like discussions about the X Window System, which are usually split between people who think it's a steaming pile and people who insist that it's been around for so long that we can't get rid of it (and they almost always use the "you can run it over a network" argument as a basis for why X needs to stay).
Isn't Colony [macehq.cx] older than anything from Carmack?
Let me clarify. There were a few first person shooter style games before id, such as MIDI-Maze for the Atari ST (which was networked even). And the raycasting effect of Wolfenstein 3D can be traced back to WayOut and Capture the Flag for the Atari 800, if not further. But id created the model for first person shooters as we know them.
Now if people would just stop giving Carmack credit for inventing 3D graphics...
I realize that they do make use of linux, but haven't they got their own OS?
It's not productive to quibble about the differences between UNIX variants. I *know* that a minority of Linux users hate to be lumped in with UNIX, but from a user's point of view there's little difference.
John Carmack started the genre of 3D games on the PC. When it comes to games, who else do you think of?
No, no, no! He--along with Romero and others--started the first person shooter genre, but not 3D games on the PC. Some fully 3D games that came out before Wolfenstein are:
Stunts! Stunt Driver Flight Simulator 2 (later Microsoft Flight Simulator) Jet UFO Ultima Underworld Stunt Island (also 1992)
All of these were fully polygonal games. Id's games didn't go fully polygonal until Quake (1996).
I was getting into it, then you have confused me again. I would use C when I wanted something that involved system level stuff, use fortran when I used arrays etc. I dont choose languages based on how easy it is to code etc. except in the case of python. Now if fortran.NET is as slow as python.NET why would I choose fortran.NET?
Python is, simply by its language defnition, going to be much slower than Fortran no matter what the platform. I *suspect* that Python.NET is just a quickie port to show that it's possible, not to amaze the natives with raw speed.
Other more traditional languages, like FORTRAN, will still be slower in their.NET versions. This is simply because.NET provides more up front, like garbage collection. You get the same kind of overhead with any other heavier weight language, like ML and Lisp.
I've seen a number of posts trying to clarify what.NET is, and they're missing the point..NET isn't just about web services and so on, which in itself is a good reason to change the name..NET is a major attempt to shed legacy Windows problems and modernize both Windows itself and Windows application development. If you read the.NET and C# documents, you'll see this. For example, if you want to write a GUI application for Windows today, you have to use one of (a) raw Win32 API, (b) MFC, (c) a cross-platform toolkit like WxWindows, or (d) a tool like Delphi or Visual Basic. By a large margin, the last of these is the cleanest and least stressful--if you're only concerned about Windows that is (of course you can get Delphi for Linux in the guise of Kylix). But.NET is bringing the GUI building features of Delphi and Visual Basic to the OS, so there's support for this from the ground up. Ditto for technologies like DirectX 9. No more do you have to deal with arcane C++ interfaces to COM, you can use a pretty little C# component.
In short, Microsoft is deprecating most of the Win32 API, making.NET the preferred method for developing Windows applications. If don't like C#, that's okay. Microsoft has been getting indepdendent language developers to port their own languages to.NET, including lesser used languages like Smalltalk, APL, and Mercury.
As much as I hate to say it,.NET could be a huge win. No more struggling with Petzold books, just use the much simpler.NET components. No need to hang onto awful legacy frameworks like MFC, which even Microsoft employees hate. No more having to choose between C++ and much slower scripting languages like Python for application development, just use C#.
(Did you mean complexity of the ISA itself or the chip?)
The ISA, though it's more than just instruction set. For example, floating point math is done internally at 80 bits--16 bits higher than is standard. There's no good reason to do that, other than "that's how we've always done it."
I am quite sure that IBM and AMD teamed together could easily give Intel a run for speed and technology.
It's not that Intel doesn't know how to get more speed, it's that faster designs are unimplementable because of power consumption issues. The 3GHz P4 is pushing the limits of what's possible, and uses an outrageous amount of power. I'm sure we'll see faster P4s, but every 10% increase in speed will be paid for with a 15% higher power requirement. AMD is going to have exactly the same problem.
To get significant gains, the complexity of the x86 needs to be trimmed way back, so much that it's likely easier to just start from scratch.
Have you ever read the paper? I read it after learning Pascal in school, and found very true. It's not true of the mile of hacks built on standard Pascal that modern Pascals are, but it's very accurate about standard Pascal, which is torture to program in.
Yes, I've read it many times over the years. The trouble is exactly as you point out: Kernighan is analyzing a pure teaching language as if were somehow supposed to be a systems programming language. When he wrote his rant, Wirth had already developed Modula-2 as a "real world" systems programming version of Pascal. And not surprisingly it addressed Kernighan's problems, but the paper was written after the fact anyway.
(As an aside, it would have been easy to for Wirth to write a trifling paper criticizing C, but I'm glad he didn't.)
It doesn't take much to go from pure Pascal to something much more useful, though--certainly not "miles of hacks." All you really need are a few things:
Separately compiled units. Borland did this with four keywords: unit, uses, interface, implementation. The result is oh so much better than C's hacky header system and FORTRAN-like separate compilation.
Typecasts. Interestingly enough C++ took the Modula-2 syntax for this.
A generic pointer type.
Interestingly, C++ has gone back and taken a number of features from Pascal, such as references (which were just called var parameters in Pascal).
Slashdot Mirror
First, they ignore you.
Then, they laugh at you.
Then, they fight you.
Then you win.
Every time I see this my immediate reaction is "So _that's_ why Microsoft is so successful." I'm not trolling; I just find it hilarious that so many Linux advocates consider crazed zealotry and endless flames about other operating systems to be passive resistance.
Its amazing that they are able to fit that data density and functionality (realtime encryption/decryption of data) into something the size of a credit card for 'under $15', but the reader is about $100.
You have an odd definition of expensive, considering that you need a PC to even use the reader. $100 is the price of a video card or a Zip drive or two recently released games or a few months of broadband access. $100 is low enough in the computer world to become ubiquitous very quickly.
If you want expensive, look at the 3GHz Pentium 4 or a the latest Radeon.
Of course, it's still more expensive than a CD-R.....
True, but am I the only person bothered by having stacks of old CD-Rs that I don't know what to do with? It sure would be nice to have something a little less wasteful.
Enough with "enterprise" already. It mostly means "business," but then it also covers a few other larger groups, like schools. "Business" is good enough. Does anyone ever ask what enterprise you work for?
I'm surprised that no one here has mentioned some biggy indie developments.
The biggies, though, are the rare exceptions. For every 10,000 indie game developers that don't make a dime, there's one Counter-Strike. And CS piggybacked off of an extremely popular game, so it's fairly different from custom-built indie games.
And a 6% increase after several years of larger increases does not mean "heading toward bankruptcy."
I realize that there is inflation, but CDs were expensive at about $15 in the late 80s, and now CD player and discman prices have dropped dramatically over the years while the price of CDs has remained more or less constant.
That's because the cost to manufacture CD players has dropped, thanks to experience and economies of scale. The price of music CDs, however, has never been about the cost of the materials.
... the home computers of the early '80s didn't really have OSes, they had programming languages. You'd boot a BBC Micro and it would fire up into BBC Basic - with a few * commands for file system manipulation.
That doesn't mean BASIC was the OS, just that there was no desktop or GUI or whatever, and that BASIC started by default. Replace the Windows Explorer--which is just a user-level program, after all--with a BASIC interpreter and you'll get the same effect.
This isn't what the author of the cited article was talking about, in any case.
Troll.
You're essentially saying that every single band from the last 40 years that has any kind of name recognition is garbage. That's a lot of bands to be smacking down with one offhand comment. Sure, there's a lot of crap out there like Creed and Mariah Carey, but if you put together a list of all good bands that have had major label deals *ever*, then that's a mighty long list.
You think AMD and Intel don't have about a trillion offsite backups of their chip designs? Sure, you could cripple the manufacturing, but that can be replaced relatively quickly if needed.
Naturally, but it's more than just that. It put either company into a deep financial hole from which it couldn't recover. It could result in the loss of the engineers who really understand how things work and where the the next gen designs are headed.
This makes me wonder how vulnerable the chipmakers are... One good fire, flood or earthquake and we're without cpu's?
Imagine the sabotage posibilities... (hey Intel, for 1M, I'll wipe out amd ?)
Suppose that both Intel and AMD engineering headquarters were destroyed, either accidentally or by someone deliberately trying to cripple the US tech market. With the extreme complexity of what those companies are working on, Qhow long would it take to recover? Quite possibly it would be the end of the x86 line, period.
There's much to be said to diversifying a bit, and not having all of our collective eggs in one basket. Yes, there are other CPUs out there, such as the PowerPC and MIPS, but think about how much we're really dependent on the x86 in so many ways.
They would release the source and and make free, Win9x and a lot of people would stay with them. The downside would be that people would see how bad it is.
So I'm assuming that you've read through and have a good understanding of the Linux kernel, all drivers, XFree86, and whatever window manager you use, and you've determined that it's good? Nice work!
The designer of The Sims even claimed himself to be inspired by Little Computer People.
That's inspiration, which is different than stating "I'm going to write a game just like Little Computer People."
Parappa is Simon with cartoon graphics. The core gameplay is the same. Just a different skin.
The core gameplay is not the same! Both involve the player repeating a pattern, but in the first case you just try to remember one endless sequence, so it's a game of memorization. PaRappa is not a game of memorization, it's a game of musical timing.
After 1990, every game has been derivative.
Utter nonsense! And in any case, just writing off games as derivative is meaningless. There are degrees of inspiration. Many great novels were inspired by other novels, but you can't really tell. The author used a previous work to start his thinking and went from there. But if you specifically set out to write a book "like Ender's Game, only better," then that really shows through. Most games developed in the 1990s take the latter route, but not all of them.
The Sims: Little Computer People Project
PaRappa the Rapper: Come on - ever play "Simon"?
This is anal retentive nit-picking, like refusing to read a science fiction novel because it includes space flight on the basis that earlier books did as well.
PaRappa, for example, is a musical game. You repeat short sequences to a beat. Simon was simply "memorize a long, never ending sequence." The play experience is completely and utterly different.
There is nothing to be gained from pristine originality, and that's okay. But if you insist on pristine originality then you quickly start calling all games derivative, and that marginalizes the creative effort behind some games. For example, blowing off PaRappa as a Simon knock-off is not the same thing as blowing off Snood as a Bust-A-Move knock-off. In one case there's a genealogy of concepts, in another case there's a design template.
Most of today's games are rehashes of earlier games. The last time a 'new' game came about was probably wolfenstein- and it made a huge impact on the industry
Most games are in established genres, but Snood is more than just in the puzzle genre: it's a 1-for-1 rewrite of Bust-A-Move. Period. That's perfectly fine...unless you're trying to use it as the poster childer for what a brash, independent game designer can come up with, which is what's happening here.
There have been a lot of original games over the last ten years. To say otherwise is defeatist. Here are a few: Tony Hawk Pro-Skater 1, Theif, The Sims, PaRappa the Rapper, Super Monkey Ball, Crazy Taxi, Prop-Cycle, and Jet Grind Radio. Please note that "original" does not imply some kind of mythical lack of ties to other games, but rather a game that has some independent vision, and not just an attempt to be like another game.
Blindly accepting the overly derivative nature of most games is like admitting that there's no good music, so you just listen to pop crap like Mariah Carey. In actuality though, there's a lot of really good music with independent vision, and lots of people seek it out. Not so with games, however.
I've played it on and off since then. But the ninth most popular game in 2001? That's nuts. Is Snood part of a series of tiny puzzley games, like Tetris and Bejeweled, that can still do well in a world of Counterstrikes and Unreal Tournaments?
I like the sentiment, wanting the little indie game designer to succeed. That's great!
But at the same time, is it really a success for all these so called inde developers to keep endlessly, endlessly, cloning the same handful of Tetris variants? Even ten years ago these things were stale, and now, in 2003, we have people hailing a design 100% borrowed from the Bust-A-Move arcade game from the mid 1990s as a "success" for the little developer? Surely there is a way to stay outside the "world of Counterstrikes and Unreal Tournaments" without resorting to writing rehashes of the same diddly batch of puzzle games.
Mozilla has become the poster child of open source development for reasons I can't understand. The progress has been horribly slow, the code has gotten a reputation for being unweildy, the UI has spawned more examples of things not to do than good features (except using window tabs, like the majority of text editors under Windows), and in the end it's not even turning out to be that great of a browser. None of this is surprising, and criticisms of the project are easy to find, so no one needs any more from me.
What I don't understand is why Mozilla is viciously defended as some kind of open source sacred cow. It's just like discussions about the X Window System, which are usually split between people who think it's a steaming pile and people who insist that it's been around for so long that we can't get rid of it (and they almost always use the "you can run it over a network" argument as a basis for why X needs to stay).
Isn't Colony [macehq.cx] older than anything from Carmack?
Let me clarify. There were a few first person shooter style games before id, such as MIDI-Maze for the Atari ST (which was networked even). And the raycasting effect of Wolfenstein 3D can be traced back to WayOut and Capture the Flag for the Atari 800, if not further. But id created the model for first person shooters as we know them.
Now if people would just stop giving Carmack credit for inventing 3D graphics...
I realize that they do make use of linux, but haven't they got their own OS?
It's not productive to quibble about the differences between UNIX variants. I *know* that a minority of Linux users hate to be lumped in with UNIX, but from a user's point of view there's little difference.
John Carmack started the genre of 3D games on the PC. When it comes to games, who else do you think of?
No, no, no! He--along with Romero and others--started the first person shooter genre, but not 3D games on the PC. Some fully 3D games that came out before Wolfenstein are:
Stunts!
Stunt Driver
Flight Simulator 2 (later Microsoft Flight Simulator)
Jet
UFO
Ultima Underworld
Stunt Island (also 1992)
All of these were fully polygonal games. Id's games didn't go fully polygonal until Quake (1996).
I was getting into it, then you have confused me again. I would use C when I wanted something that involved system level stuff, use fortran when I used arrays etc. I dont choose languages based on how easy it is to code etc. except in the case of python. Now if fortran.NET is as slow as python.NET why would I choose fortran.NET?
.NET versions. This is simply because .NET provides more up front, like garbage collection. You get the same kind of overhead with any other heavier weight language, like ML and Lisp.
Python is, simply by its language defnition, going to be much slower than Fortran no matter what the platform. I *suspect* that Python.NET is just a quickie port to show that it's possible, not to amaze the natives with raw speed.
Other more traditional languages, like FORTRAN, will still be slower in their
I've seen a number of posts trying to clarify what .NET is, and they're missing the point. .NET isn't just about web services and so on, which in itself is a good reason to change the name. .NET is a major attempt to shed legacy Windows problems and modernize both Windows itself and Windows application development. If you read the .NET and C# documents, you'll see this. For example, if you want to write a GUI application for Windows today, you have to use one of (a) raw Win32 API, (b) MFC, (c) a cross-platform toolkit like WxWindows, or (d) a tool like Delphi or Visual Basic. By a large margin, the last of these is the cleanest and least stressful--if you're only concerned about Windows that is (of course you can get Delphi for Linux in the guise of Kylix). But .NET is bringing the GUI building features of Delphi and Visual Basic to the OS, so there's support for this from the ground up. Ditto for technologies like DirectX 9. No more do you have to deal with arcane C++ interfaces to COM, you can use a pretty little C# component.
.NET the preferred method for developing Windows applications. If don't like C#, that's okay. Microsoft has been getting indepdendent language developers to port their own languages to .NET, including lesser used languages like Smalltalk, APL, and Mercury.
.NET could be a huge win. No more struggling with Petzold books, just use the much simpler .NET components. No need to hang onto awful legacy frameworks like MFC, which even Microsoft employees hate. No more having to choose between C++ and much slower scripting languages like Python for application development, just use C#.
In short, Microsoft is deprecating most of the Win32 API, making
As much as I hate to say it,
(Did you mean complexity of the ISA itself or the chip?)
The ISA, though it's more than just instruction set. For example, floating point math is done internally at 80 bits--16 bits higher than is standard. There's no good reason to do that, other than "that's how we've always done it."
I am quite sure that IBM and AMD teamed together could easily give Intel a run for speed and technology.
It's not that Intel doesn't know how to get more speed, it's that faster designs are unimplementable because of power consumption issues. The 3GHz P4 is pushing the limits of what's possible, and uses an outrageous amount of power. I'm sure we'll see faster P4s, but every 10% increase in speed will be paid for with a 15% higher power requirement. AMD is going to have exactly the same problem.
To get significant gains, the complexity of the x86 needs to be trimmed way back, so much that it's likely easier to just start from scratch.
Yes, I've read it many times over the years. The trouble is exactly as you point out: Kernighan is analyzing a pure teaching language as if were somehow supposed to be a systems programming language. When he wrote his rant, Wirth had already developed Modula-2 as a "real world" systems programming version of Pascal. And not surprisingly it addressed Kernighan's problems, but the paper was written after the fact anyway.
(As an aside, it would have been easy to for Wirth to write a trifling paper criticizing C, but I'm glad he didn't.)
It doesn't take much to go from pure Pascal to something much more useful, though--certainly not "miles of hacks." All you really need are a few things:
Separately compiled units. Borland did this with four keywords: unit, uses, interface, implementation. The result is oh so much better than C's hacky header system and FORTRAN-like separate compilation.
Typecasts. Interestingly enough C++ took the Modula-2 syntax for this.
A generic pointer type.
Interestingly, C++ has gone back and taken a number of features from Pascal, such as references (which were just called var parameters in Pascal).