Not that it will be a selling point for me -- unfortunately, the disposable income to keep up with the technology curve on both the console and PC front is not a luxury I have right now. And so I find myself reacting to the release of a new Starcraft title not with the excitement and joy that I'd hoped, but with mixed disappointment and dread. Gee, thanks, Blizzard.
In all honesty, it's much cheaper to keep up with consoles than PCs. A new console is $199. You can pay more than that for a new video card. And consoles have a good 5 year lifecycle, but PC hardware gets outdated much more quickly, though less quickly than it used to.
The real problem with PC hardware, especially video hardware, is that only a relative minority own the coolest stuff. For example, Dell and Gateway--and others--are still actively promoting machines with fairly bare bones 3D cards. That means no hardware T&L for starters, and that's now a requirement for many major games, like the upcoming No One Lives Forever 2. Now even if you have a card capable of hardware T&L, like the hugely successful GeForce 2, of which there are millions and millions, then you still don't have any hardware support for vertex and pixel shaders. So only a relative few game developers want to touch those features, as spectacular as they are. But if you get an Xbox, then you have these features from day 1, and you can assume all owners have them. The result is that they get used, and used heavily, whereas on the PC we're talking about a minority feature.
Aren't most forms of advertising "published" in some form or another? Say newspapers, magazines, and anthologies?
I am astounded at that level of nitpicking.
Quite obviously, if you're writing a book or newspaper article or anything non-advertising related, then you aren't going to say "Johnson was nearly hit by a fast-moving kar this morning."
Indeed, I recently moved to the US and was surprised that so much has a, shall we say, innovative spelling, Ez(easy), Lite(light), Thru(through), Kar(car), Kare(care), da(the) etc etc are very common mostly everywhere.
They're common in advertising, but you won't an author using "Kar" instead of "Car" in a published work.
Already in 1983 I saw Logo as useless and a waste of time. As a learning tool, it is just deceptive or even damaging to try to use it to introduce programming to children... At the time, basic, 6502, assembler, display lists, player missile graphics and the mysteries of ANTIC were far more engaging and useful. I was 13 years old.
But almost certainly you started with BASIC, not 6502 assembler, and you probably wrote little programs to draw lines and print your name and such. You didn't immediately jump into creating your own display lists and hitting player/missile registers.
Logo is an alternative to starting off with BASIC, one that involves more immediate visual feedback, lets you do more complex tasks right off the bat (like rotation, without having to understand trig), and is a much nicer language.
Now that computers have gotten "infinitely" fast, at least as far as I'm concerned (I'm developing commercial software on an 866MHz P3, and I have _zero_ complaints about performance, and now you can't even buy a PC slower than 1.7GHz), I wish I had started off with a higher-level, more abstract language like Logo, rather than grungy ol' BASIC.
Aside from the "get a life" fanboy/girls at trekbbs.com, does anyone really care about this show? Or find it remotely interesting? I dunno, I watch the occasional episode, and it just doesn't go anywhere. It all feels too calculated. Maybe season 2 will be better.
And the obvious comment--and I know this will tag me as a troll--is "How can geeks possibly stand *any* of the Star Trek shows?" We're talking about people who go ballistic because AMD is not longer stamping MHz values on processors, and these people like B-quality shows with bad acting and ridiculous science at every turn?
which is highly ironic in light of his infamous Hungarian Notation style of naming variables.
It was a technique for making types easy to identify in a language (C) that doesn't have any native way of indicating type. In BASIC, you know that A$ is a string. In Perl, you know that @names is a list. In C you don't know what "last_position" is. A pointer? An index? A floating point vector? It's not as if Hungarian Notation was designed to be the ultimate language-independent programming tool.
No. The jaguar featured 2 32 bit processors on board. That was where the 64 came from.
You're incorrect. It had a 64 bit bus--you could count the traces on the board, if you like--so if you consider that to be 64-bitness, then it is indeed a 64-bit machine. But if you go by that definition, then the PlayStation 2 is a 128-bit machine.
Why in the world would anyone want to spend the money on a top of the line processor when they can buy an entire computer based on a value processor for $299 at Walmart.com?
And the funny part about that $299 PC, is that it's more powerful than what software developers--even game developers--were using just a few years ago. If you had dropped that Walmart PC onto John Carmack's desk in 1993, he would have been completely blown away by its performance.
Good. It's about time, though 50% of current high-power CPUs may be too little too late. I know of at least one major embedded systems corporation in a panic, because modern CPUs consume way too much power for use in many embedded environments.
Well, that's the hardware geek take on it anyway. It's not like there are widespread complaints about OS X applications running slowly. The GUI side of things was fixed with Jaguar, and there are some specific applications that still need to be fixed. Otherwise, a 700 or 800 MHz G4 is snappy as all hell. I still think an 866MHz Pentium III is snappy as all hell too--I do high-end commercial software development on one--but the fanboys want more, more more.
Pitfall was my favourite game when I was a kid. I'd say it's a tie between Pitfall! and Super Mario Bros. as to which game really invented the platform game genre.
And "Pac-Land," which certainly preceded Super Mario Bros.
I've read lots of papers like this, going back to Eric Raymond's rants. And you know, it sounds great on paper. It really does. And I love the idea of the GPL. But in practice, we're just not seeing all the innovation that you would expect. The classic examples are always cited--Perl, gcc, Emacs, Apache, the Linux kernel--but for a model that's supposed to be so superior, the success stories are fewer than you'd expect.
One striking example is that the GPLed games for Linux always tend to variations of Tetris, Boulder Dash, Missile Command, etc. You would expect the innovative games to be coming out for Linux: no pressure from marketing, free development tools, big community. But the games with spark, like The Sims and Grand Theft Auto 3 are coming from elsewhere.
Of course, with the computational power that will come of this, maybe we will be satisfied for a while. Somebody once said "Nobody will need more than 640 k of RAM" Right?
I'm not saying that more power wouldn't have many uses, but it always bothers me when people quote the "640K" line about modern computers. Imagine if Bill Gates, living in three bedroom house, had said "Nobody needs more than three bedrooms." And then now, living in a forty bedroom house, he says "Nobody needs more than forty bedrooms."
The latter, I think, rings a lot more true than the former. In most endeavors, diminishing returns can kick in after a while. It's the same reason we can't get away from the x86 architecture: There are more important issues than raw performance.
Also, they're alot more challenging and you're given a lot more freedom, as you can move in all different directions.
I agree that the core gameplay of Quake-like games has gotten stale. But then you take a wild leap of fanboy logic with the above statement. Moving "in all different directions" is equated with "a lot more freedom"? That's crazy. It sounds like something from a circa 1997 debate over some comments in a.plan file, back when hardcore gamers thought that More Polygons meand More Gameplay.
Re:Structured programming and perl
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Ask Larry Wall
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· Score: 2
The reason I like perl is it is not a structured programming language.
What could you possibly be talking about here? If Perl isn't structured programming--and it most certainlt is, with it's structured if, for, sub, and unless statements--then what is it exactly?
(I want to say they you don't understand the term "structured programming" but I'm witholding judgement.)
Nonsense. It was only faster if you used a DOS extender, but I have memories of a dozen smart programmers gathered around one computer trying to figure out how to get a CD-ROM driver working with enough free memory in order to run a Large And Important Application. Oh, those days were horrible.
Having to exit one application in order to run a different application is not cleaner by any means. It is easy to forget just how ugly that was. At the time, Mac users were appalled, and rightfully so.
I am a bitter old man. I hate change. Mac OS -- not Mac OS X, which is a different OS -- in its various iterations has been my OS of choice for over 15 years
Quotes like this remind me of the crazy people who pine for the days of MS-DOS, because they're convinced that OS is cleaner and faster than Windows.
Your post is funny because you complain that "computer guru" is a "loaded" term, and then you go on to define it and attack the people who fit your definition.
No, you missed the point. I was saying that people who often describe themselves as a "computer guru" very often have weird ideas about what a guru is. The original poster was blasting MacOS X as not being for "gurus," which was a completely vague attack.
I think it's a great system, especially for people who aren't computer gurus, but it's not for me.
I hate comments like this, because "computer gurus" is a loaded term. The implication is that someone who knows what they're doing would never use a Mac; it's only a system for people who do art and make web pages and want to edit their photos. And even if someone using a Mac writes Perl and Python scripts and so on, then you are still superior to them.
Enough of that please. That's the kind of elitist attitude that perpetuates the horrible reputation that Linux users have garnered. I do hardcore software development. I love languages like Lisp. I write Perl scripts to automate tasks, but then I get pegged as a compute newbiew because:
I use a GUI.
I don't have serious objections to Windows of the Mac.
I still find an 800MHz processor more than fast enough for commercial software development.
I don't have an obsession with buying every new $400 video card that comes along.
Maybe it's the faux "power users" that need a condescending term for them? They're certainly a loud segment of the computer using population.
The guys at Opera have been rewriting their rendering engine over the past 18 months
Was rendering speed ever a problem, in either Opera or IE? Back when I used a double-digit MHz processor maybe, but even on a Pentium II 333 I don't give page rendering speed a second thought.
"World's fastest browser" smacks a whole lot of the "Pentium IV makes the internet faster" nonsense. The bottleneck, even on a slow processor, is the network connection.
I strongly disagree with this sort "we own your mind" nonsense, but it is common. Every company I've worked for, in several fields, has made me sign the same kind of document.
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Not that it will be a selling point for me -- unfortunately, the disposable income to keep up with the technology curve on both the console and PC front is not a luxury I have right now. And so I find myself reacting to the release of a new Starcraft title not with the excitement and joy that I'd hoped, but with mixed disappointment and dread. Gee, thanks, Blizzard.
In all honesty, it's much cheaper to keep up with consoles than PCs. A new console is $199. You can pay more than that for a new video card. And consoles have a good 5 year lifecycle, but PC hardware gets outdated much more quickly, though less quickly than it used to.
The real problem with PC hardware, especially video hardware, is that only a relative minority own the coolest stuff. For example, Dell and Gateway--and others--are still actively promoting machines with fairly bare bones 3D cards. That means no hardware T&L for starters, and that's now a requirement for many major games, like the upcoming No One Lives Forever 2. Now even if you have a card capable of hardware T&L, like the hugely successful GeForce 2, of which there are millions and millions, then you still don't have any hardware support for vertex and pixel shaders. So only a relative few game developers want to touch those features, as spectacular as they are. But if you get an Xbox, then you have these features from day 1, and you can assume all owners have them. The result is that they get used, and used heavily, whereas on the PC we're talking about a minority feature.
Aren't most forms of advertising "published" in some form or another? Say newspapers, magazines, and anthologies?
I am astounded at that level of nitpicking.
Quite obviously, if you're writing a book or newspaper article or anything non-advertising related, then you aren't going to say "Johnson was nearly hit by a fast-moving kar this morning."
Indeed, I recently moved to the US and was surprised that so much has a, shall we say, innovative spelling, Ez(easy), Lite(light), Thru(through), Kar(car), Kare(care), da(the) etc etc are very common mostly everywhere.
They're common in advertising, but you won't an author using "Kar" instead of "Car" in a published work.
Already in 1983 I saw Logo as useless and a waste of time. As a learning tool, it is just deceptive or even damaging to try to use it to introduce programming to children... At the time, basic, 6502, assembler, display lists, player missile graphics and the mysteries of ANTIC were far more engaging and useful. I was 13 years old.
But almost certainly you started with BASIC, not 6502 assembler, and you probably wrote little programs to draw lines and print your name and such. You didn't immediately jump into creating your own display lists and hitting player/missile registers.
Logo is an alternative to starting off with BASIC, one that involves more immediate visual feedback, lets you do more complex tasks right off the bat (like rotation, without having to understand trig), and is a much nicer language.
Now that computers have gotten "infinitely" fast, at least as far as I'm concerned (I'm developing commercial software on an 866MHz P3, and I have _zero_ complaints about performance, and now you can't even buy a PC slower than 1.7GHz), I wish I had started off with a higher-level, more abstract language like Logo, rather than grungy ol' BASIC.
Aside from the "get a life" fanboy/girls at trekbbs.com, does anyone really care about this show? Or find it remotely interesting? I dunno, I watch the occasional episode, and it just doesn't go anywhere. It all feels too calculated. Maybe season 2 will be better.
And the obvious comment--and I know this will tag me as a troll--is "How can geeks possibly stand *any* of the Star Trek shows?" We're talking about people who go ballistic because AMD is not longer stamping MHz values on processors, and these people like B-quality shows with bad acting and ridiculous science at every turn?
which is highly ironic in light of his infamous Hungarian Notation style of naming variables.
It was a technique for making types easy to identify in a language (C) that doesn't have any native way of indicating type. In BASIC, you know that A$ is a string. In Perl, you know that @names is a list. In C you don't know what "last_position" is. A pointer? An index? A floating point vector? It's not as if Hungarian Notation was designed to be the ultimate language-independent programming tool.
No. The jaguar featured 2 32 bit processors on board. That was where the 64 came from.
You're incorrect. It had a 64 bit bus--you could count the traces on the board, if you like--so if you consider that to be 64-bitness, then it is indeed a 64-bit machine. But if you go by that definition, then the PlayStation 2 is a 128-bit machine.
Why in the world would anyone want to spend the money on a top of the line processor when they can buy an entire computer based on a value processor for $299 at Walmart.com?
And the funny part about that $299 PC, is that it's more powerful than what software developers--even game developers--were using just a few years ago. If you had dropped that Walmart PC onto John Carmack's desk in 1993, he would have been completely blown away by its performance.
That doesn't prevent the fragile coding that is so prevalent these days.
Never, never call HTML markup "coding." It's simply a markup language.
Good. It's about time, though 50% of current high-power CPUs may be too little too late. I know of at least one major embedded systems corporation in a panic, because modern CPUs consume way too much power for use in many embedded environments.
Apple needs more horsepower to make OS X shine.
Well, that's the hardware geek take on it anyway. It's not like there are widespread complaints about OS X applications running slowly. The GUI side of things was fixed with Jaguar, and there are some specific applications that still need to be fixed. Otherwise, a 700 or 800 MHz G4 is snappy as all hell. I still think an 866MHz Pentium III is snappy as all hell too--I do high-end commercial software development on one--but the fanboys want more, more more.
that the 20GB hard drive I've been using to develop commercial 3D games for the last two years is less than half full.
Are cursors that big really that necessary?
When screen resolution is high enough, yes.
Pitfall was my favourite game when I was a kid. I'd say it's a tie between Pitfall! and Super Mario Bros. as to which game really invented the platform game genre.
And "Pac-Land," which certainly preceded Super Mario Bros.
I've read lots of papers like this, going back to Eric Raymond's rants. And you know, it sounds great on paper. It really does. And I love the idea of the GPL. But in practice, we're just not seeing all the innovation that you would expect. The classic examples are always cited--Perl, gcc, Emacs, Apache, the Linux kernel--but for a model that's supposed to be so superior, the success stories are fewer than you'd expect.
One striking example is that the GPLed games for Linux always tend to variations of Tetris, Boulder Dash, Missile Command, etc. You would expect the innovative games to be coming out for Linux: no pressure from marketing, free development tools, big community. But the games with spark, like The Sims and Grand Theft Auto 3 are coming from elsewhere.
Of course, with the computational power that will come of this, maybe we will be satisfied for a while. Somebody once said "Nobody will need more than 640 k of RAM" Right?
I'm not saying that more power wouldn't have many uses, but it always bothers me when people quote the "640K" line about modern computers. Imagine if Bill Gates, living in three bedroom house, had said "Nobody needs more than three bedrooms." And then now, living in a forty bedroom house, he says "Nobody needs more than forty bedrooms."
The latter, I think, rings a lot more true than the former. In most endeavors, diminishing returns can kick in after a while. It's the same reason we can't get away from the x86 architecture: There are more important issues than raw performance.
Also, they're alot more challenging and you're given a lot more freedom, as you can move in all different directions.
.plan file, back when hardcore gamers thought that More Polygons meand More Gameplay.
I agree that the core gameplay of Quake-like games has gotten stale. But then you take a wild leap of fanboy logic with the above statement. Moving "in all different directions" is equated with "a lot more freedom"? That's crazy. It sounds like something from a circa 1997 debate over some comments in a
The reason I like perl is it is not a structured programming language.
What could you possibly be talking about here? If Perl isn't structured programming--and it most certainlt is, with it's structured if, for, sub, and unless statements--then what is it exactly?
(I want to say they you don't understand the term "structured programming" but I'm witholding judgement.)
Well, DOS is cleaner and faster.
Nonsense. It was only faster if you used a DOS extender, but I have memories of a dozen smart programmers gathered around one computer trying to figure out how to get a CD-ROM driver working with enough free memory in order to run a Large And Important Application. Oh, those days were horrible.
Having to exit one application in order to run a different application is not cleaner by any means. It is easy to forget just how ugly that was. At the time, Mac users were appalled, and rightfully so.
I am a bitter old man. I hate change. Mac OS -- not Mac OS X, which is a different OS -- in its various iterations has been my OS of choice for over 15 years
Quotes like this remind me of the crazy people who pine for the days of MS-DOS, because they're convinced that OS is cleaner and faster than Windows.
Unix has been around for 30 yrs+...
It's "modern" as in "modern art." More of a period thing than a term meaning "cutting edge."
Your post is funny because you complain that "computer guru" is a "loaded" term, and then you go on to define it and attack the people who fit your definition.
No, you missed the point. I was saying that people who often describe themselves as a "computer guru" very often have weird ideas about what a guru is. The original poster was blasting MacOS X as not being for "gurus," which was a completely vague attack.
I hate comments like this, because "computer gurus" is a loaded term. The implication is that someone who knows what they're doing would never use a Mac; it's only a system for people who do art and make web pages and want to edit their photos. And even if someone using a Mac writes Perl and Python scripts and so on, then you are still superior to them.
Enough of that please. That's the kind of elitist attitude that perpetuates the horrible reputation that Linux users have garnered. I do hardcore software development. I love languages like Lisp. I write Perl scripts to automate tasks, but then I get pegged as a compute newbiew because:
I use a GUI.
I don't have serious objections to Windows of the Mac.
I still find an 800MHz processor more than fast enough for commercial software development.
I don't have an obsession with buying every new $400 video card that comes along.
Maybe it's the faux "power users" that need a condescending term for them? They're certainly a loud segment of the computer using population.
The guys at Opera have been rewriting their rendering engine over the past 18 months
Was rendering speed ever a problem, in either Opera or IE? Back when I used a double-digit MHz processor maybe, but even on a Pentium II 333 I don't give page rendering speed a second thought.
"World's fastest browser" smacks a whole lot of the "Pentium IV makes the internet faster" nonsense. The bottleneck, even on a slow processor, is the network connection.
I strongly disagree with this sort "we own your mind" nonsense, but it is common. Every company I've worked for, in several fields, has made me sign the same kind of document.