Or at least that most people here have only learned about it from watching Star Trek and reading science fiction novels.
The primary focus of AI has never been to create self-aware machines or machines that are on the same level as humans or any nonsense like that. "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim," as said Dijkstra. AI is more concerned with approaching difficult problems that don't fall neatly into traditional algorithms. At one time symbolic math was an area of heavy AI research, but today it's a well-understood problem so it isn't AI any more. The issue is how do you write a program to "reason" about tough problems, where I put "reason" in quotes because it has nothing to do with what a human would do.
Natural language processing is a good example. It's ugly, it's messy, and there's no straightforward solution. Actually, this is an old field and it isn't nearly as mysterious as it used to be. It's much more mechanical than you'd think. It's not some magic brain simulator.
Nowhere in any of this do feelings and sentientness and all that come into play. It's irrelevant. It's like worrying about a C compiler coming to life.
Are we really supposed to believe that all languages are equally good/bad and that we might just as well choose any of them for any project? This is nonsense.
But quality is often a personal opinion. Some people hate Perl and Ruby, but love Python. Some people hate Python and Ruby, but love Perl. Some people hate Perl and Python, but love Ruby. How can you get anywhere in such discussions?
that until they design a system that is upgradable, consoles will NEVER be able to compete with PC's
Heh. That's not true by any means. It usually comes down to this:
Cost of a new console: $200
Cost of a fancy new video card, sound card, or hard drive: $200
Now even if the second is less than $200 sometimes, you get the idea. PC upgrading isn't free, and you still have to chuck your PC every few years and get a brand new one, and that doesn't preclude all the upgrading that can be done in the meantime. So your argument is a red herring.
Every time there's an article like this, there are lots of replies about Linux not being dead, and so on. Now open your mind for a minute, and try to understand what "dead" means in this case:
1. It is difficult to define exactly how Linux is superior to alternatives. 2. There is an obsession with boring stuff in the Linux community, such as window managers and emulators for old games, and not a lot what I could call spark. Lack of such spark is what characterized the later years of the Apple IIgs and other now-dead systems. 3. The endless advocacy and angst has grown tiresome and has greatly contributed to #2 above. Linux users used to love that Ghandi quote (paraphrased): first they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. The point is that if you are doing something right and keep on doing something right, and don't worry about what other people are doing or think of you, then you can come out ahead. But Linux advocates have chosen to pick and endless fight with Microsoft, which has turned the tables. "Then they fight you," is now Linux fighting Windows.
In a lot of ways, #1 is the key. In the early 1990s Windows and the MacOS were degenerating, growing bloated and unreliable. UNIX was dying a slow death, as it had been doing since the mid 1980s. At the time it seems that going back to the reliability of UNIX was a good alternative, but it's not like we really wanted to go back to it. But some people were new to computers and didn't know much about OS history, and saw it as the new thing. And some key people, most notably Eric Raymond, saw the possiblity of the OS of their youth returning to glory, much as old Commodore 64 coders would rise again if the C64 was chosen as a standard cell phone and PDA platform.
This is not to say that UNIX doesn't have some good points, and that some great innovations like Perl are anything less than that. But this whole "let's all return to Big UNIX and it will put Microsoft out of business" era is coming to a close. In 2002, operating systems are much less important than they used to be. Quite possibly, as Chuck Moore has said, the concept of an operating system is an outdated one.
To me, this kind of thing strikes me as the wrong solution. I'd much rather see the emphasis on low power on low energy, rather than fixing this on the back end by coming up with a novel way of eliminating all the excess heat that is generated.
It's like saying "We found a way to reduce the emissions from SUVs," which ignores the fact that SUVs are grossly fuel inefficient in the first place.
Uh, none of these comments are about the story
on
Perl 5.8.0 Released
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I see people bashing Perl for it's supposed unreadability. I see people bashing Perl so they can advocate Python or Ruby. I see people making general, blanket statements about code readability, as if these opinions are always ready to burst forth, making the speaker a hit at parties.
Arguments about programming languages on this level are pointless beyond belief. It's like arguing which pop band is better than another. Who cares? It's all opinion and hearsay.
I'm not all that fond of Windows. It's gotten too bulky and impossible to understand, both from a user's and programmer's perspective. Linux, to me, is more of the same. It's simpler, yes, but this reminds me of a good quote from Larry O'Brien:
"Claiming Java is easier than C++ is like saying that K2 is shorter than Everest."
I write video games for a living. I know a lot of people don't want to believe it, but writing code to display windows and such is trivial. It really is. You could spent a month trying to figure out how to do things with Gtk or the Windows API or some other toolkit, or you could write code to do all of the same stuff *without* an underlying library in 25% of the time. But so-called modern operating systems rely on people thinking all that stuff is really hard to do and that we need giant APIs to dealt with it.
What I really want is something lean and mean, something like a 1GHz palmtop with lean hooks to a 3D card. It's pretty appalling when you realize that a *driver* for a modern video card is so large that you couldn't even fit it in a 32MB game console. And then you see Grand Theft Auto 3 running on such a console...
I know, I know, this isn't going to go over well. What I really want, so to speak, is a modern Commodore 64 or Atari 800. Something that isn't just layers of complexity upon layers of complexity. This is within reach.
What I don't want is to be part of some angst-ridden geek club, fighting over which bloated OS is better than another.
Not gamers, since a GeForce4 MX is a stripped down, cheaper version of the real powerhouse GeForce4 TI
This is like saying "Why buy a 450HP car when you can get one that's 500HP?" Performance has gotten all but irrelevant. Price and form factor are what matter. If this will let manufacturers create smaller, cheaper, cooler running computers, then that's great.
Short of genocide against psychopaths we will continue to have a plague of spammers for at least as long as people think there's money to be made (or fun to be had) and it won't get you busted.
It's ridiculous to equate psychopaths and spammers.
There's much more to this than just fat vs. carbohydrates. Just think about what has changed since, oh, 1970:
* High fructose corn syrup is now in everything. * Huge portions of grocery stores are devoted to microwave-type meals. Back in 1970, you just had TV dinners, which were pretty much a novelty. * Diet soft drinks containing artificial sweeteners, the long-term effects of which are unknown, have become a multi-billion dollar industry. * The fast food industry has gotten much larger. It's no longer just McDonald's, Burger King, and Hardees, but dozens and dozens of huge chains. * There has been a large increase in the number of antibiotics and hormones used in meat and dairy animals. * Partially-hyrdrogenated vegetable oils are now found in everything.
There are too many factors to make this clear-cut.
Everyone *knows* that SUVs are horribly inefficient and expensive to run. Everyone knows that a fancy home theater set-up eats more power than a plain ol' TV. Everyone knows that all of the packaging in a McDonald's meal cannot be recycled (the wrappers, the plastic cup lids and straws, the Happy Meal toys, the wax-coated cups). Everyone knows that old computers and video cards end up in the landfill, but that doesn't stop Slashdotters from upgrading annuallly.
So I don't know what the points of stories like this are. It's not like you're going to get people to do things that really matter if you can't even get them to stop doing the obviously bad things.
Perl has always had ugly points, but regular expressions were always concise and well-known. And now Wall's ramblings about how he wants to change regular expressions are longer than the entire section about them in the camel book. Doesn't this strike anyone else as ridiclous? Perhaps too many special cases and too many borrowed extensions are being thrown into the language. What an ugly mess it is becoming.
I'm not a big Python fan, but now I'm wondering why I shouldn't just switch to Python now and save myself the grief of having to switch to a completely new Perl-like language later.
Actually the books are very sophisticated intellectually. The sophistication is generally lost on American readers however who are unaware of the cultural and litterary references that Rowling ads in for the amusement of older readers. For example....The use of Magic as a substitute for technological mod cons is a homage to the Flintstones.
Re-read those sentences over and over again until you realize how ridiculous they are.
The standard line about open source, is that programmers scratch their own itches. The idea being that an audio guy who really needs some kind of fancy audio filter will write it himself, and then it will be a much more personal product that something corporately developed.
With the whole crazy push to have Linux take over the desktop, we no longer have this personal itch scratching. KDE developers are trying to figure out how to scratch the itches of people using Windows and MacOS. The disconnect is painful and obvious. And these same developers are, because they have to use KDE et al, adding a heavy developer-centric flavor. The result is a peculiar environment without a target audience. KDE works, I'll give it that, but it's muddled. It's not clear why anyone would want to use KDE instead of Windows. It's more like, "well, I like the Windows UI better, but KDE is the best there is for Linux so I guess I have to use it." And that kind of result doesn't seem to have been worth the man-decades of implementation effort.
I know, I know, KDE fans will mark me as a troll, and Gnome fans will moderate me up. How silly moderation can be!
Well, there is a free version of it, but the actual suite is US$895, which is a little pricey for the average individual. The free version isn't the same thing as the pro version:
You've never used J, have you? You only get a couple of extra features with the prokey, and they only really matter if you're distributing large software packages for re-release. That's it. There are no other differences. JSoftware even says you don't even need the prokey for commercial use of J. It's the most liberal license I've ever seen.
No, PDAs and consoles are solidly reliable because they don't offer you any choice. Decide that your Palm III doesn't have enough space for all of your contacts anymore and you can't just put in a new 120 GB Maxtor hard drive. Realize that your NES doesn't support T&L, you can't just slot in a new video card.
Choice mattered at one time. It matters a lot less now. It mattered if you wanted to do 3D modelling and all you had was 6502 processor. It mattered when first generation 3D accelerators for the PC were severely fill-rate limited. It mattered when you wanted to do video editing and your computer came with a 300MB hard drive.
What has happened, though, is that computer performance has gotten so amazingly fast, that processor speed, fill rate, and hard drive space are effectively infinite for a great majority of purposes. Note that I didn't say *all* purposes, just the majority. It has gotten to where only hardware collecting geeks care about new processors. Everyone else was fine when 300MHz was the norm, and now we can call Dell and get a 1.4GHz Pentium IV for $700. Games are a weird exception, but then again games don't take good advantage of general-purpose PCs. You see games on consoles that out-do PCs running many times faster. The console makers have the right idea: go for low price, low power consumption, and rock solid reliability.
If someone came out with the modern equivalent of a Commodore 64, a tiny 1GHz computer with half a gigabyte of memory, and a GeForce 2 quality video card, then went for a tiny form factor and a tiny price, then it would be decades before people stopped mining the capabilities of it. And it would be a relief to have standard parts and standard software and not have to mess with constant upgrades and flaky drivers. Seriously.
Computers have made it much easier to experiment with mathematical ideas, and experimenting helps you learn better. I'd suggest buying a copy of Mathematica and one of the companion books. It will do you more good than college courses until you're back in the swing of things.
For the more adventuresome, I'd try J from JSoftware. It's terser, and more intellectually challenging, but it's free and also has advantages over Mathematica in some respects. Ken Iverson has some on-line papers that make a good companion (one of which comes with the J distribution).
We've all gotten very used to thinking that "computers == 1970s mainframe shrunk to desktop size," in that we deal with fragile hardware, fragile drivers, fragile applications, overly complex systems, and having to become system administrators. That's not how it has to be.
Some computer systems are solidly reliable, but we don't think of them as computers. We call them consoles and PDAs. But technology has advanced so much that we could easily have a PDA with more horsepower in it than was used at Boeing to design the 777, or what animators had on their desks when working on Toy Story. It's a matter of breaking free from thinking of computers as generic "PC"s running generic operating systems. Smaller is better in this case. How much performance and time do we waste just to keep running the same generic, "modern" systems: Linux, Windows, MacOS. They're all the same, and they're all missing the point.
bzzzt wrong. Joss Wheden has managed to create a show without WB (the Corp. you failed to mention) finally dropped the hugely popular show and UPN picked it up... as is. Joss enjoys complete creative control even more now. He has stated that the WP Drones simply didn't pay attention to the show.
Sorry, you're completely wrong. Do you have any idea how many people and how much money it takes to produce a single episode of Buffy? Just watch the credits. It isn't some little band of artists against the world. It's a large number of people working in a corporate environment. Don't fool yourself into thinking otherwise.
(Yes, this is rhetorical. It's just greatly amusing to see people bash record companies and anyone else trying to make a buck, and then to see those same people fawn all over a corporately developed and corporately marketed TV show.)
I've heard lots of bad stuff about the x86 architecture... hacks upon hacks...
That's overstating things. Go to Intel's site and dowload the PDF file describing the Pentium II instruction set. It's absolutely huge. There are hundreds and hundreds of instructions, and the funny thing is that only minority--maybe 30%--really matter. The rest of them are things like MMX, old instructions that are no longer relevant, and lots of peculiar special purpose instructions that are rarely used. And this is only the Pentium II, so it doesn't include all of the SIMD instructions added with the P3.
So most of the cruft comes from old stuff that was relevant at one time, and now there's no way to get rid of it. It isn't because of hacks, per se.
Linux? Windows? Is there a difference any more?
on
Is Linux Dead?
·
· Score: 2
"Dead" in this case means that there's little point of differentiation so why not go with the choice that will offer you fewer headaches?
When the Amiga was dying a painful death in the early 1990s (and, yes, I know, it isn't completely dead in some corners), developers could have been focusing on making interesting and distinctive applications and games. Instead, there was a lot of angst about the PC being mainstream and consoles having superior games. The result was that developers kept trying to clone things already available on other systems, and the Amiga ended up looking even more derivative and sad. But many Amiga owners didn't see it that way. They thought "Wow! Look! My Amiga can play a clone of some old game just as well as a PC can!."
Developers for Linux have spent much time and effort trying to catch up to what Microsoft developed years ago. I know, Microsoft didn't invent those things, but that's not the issue. So now we have people all excited about KDE and various open office suites, and it just looks like yesterday's news, and they _still_ don't feel as polished as what you get with Windows 2000. And then there are the people who like to say you don't need desktop environments, just use bash, and that you don't need an office suite, just use Emacs, but somehow that isn't compelling to most people, even most developers.
The bottom line is that Windows and Linux are two flavors of the same thing. Why get all idealistic and force yourself to use The Gimp instead of Photoshop? There's no reason to. Misguided idealism doesn't count. But if Linux really *were* something drastically and radically better than Windows, and not just in a hard to defined techie sense, then that would be a different story.
Save 90 to 95 percent on the costs, and have fewer bugs in the first place, plus own the code outright - either BSD (owned by the feds) or GPL or one of the variants.
So you don't think Open Source code can be sloppy? You've never looked at the gcc sources, for example. Ugh.
The development time that saved was simply breathtaking, and it pretty much defined the future of games engines and games development
Of course, while UnrealScript is cool, let's not be too quick to give it credit for VMs in games. UnrealScript was heavily influenced by Quake C from two year earlier (much like everything in Unreal, which should be obvious enough anyone). And there were a number of games from the VGA days which included scripting languages. A popular example is the lame side-scroller Abuse, but there certainly were others.
Slashdot Mirror
Or at least that most people here have only learned about it from watching Star Trek and reading science fiction novels.
The primary focus of AI has never been to create self-aware machines or machines that are on the same level as humans or any nonsense like that. "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim," as said Dijkstra. AI is more concerned with approaching difficult problems that don't fall neatly into traditional algorithms. At one time symbolic math was an area of heavy AI research, but today it's a well-understood problem so it isn't AI any more. The issue is how do you write a program to "reason" about tough problems, where I put "reason" in quotes because it has nothing to do with what a human would do.
Natural language processing is a good example. It's ugly, it's messy, and there's no straightforward solution. Actually, this is an old field and it isn't nearly as mysterious as it used to be. It's much more mechanical than you'd think. It's not some magic brain simulator.
Nowhere in any of this do feelings and sentientness and all that come into play. It's irrelevant. It's like worrying about a C compiler coming to life.
These can be objectively measured--it's not just a question of opinion.
What fantasy world are you living in? Seriously. And it's all irrelevant anyway, look at the popularity of C++.
Are we really supposed to believe that all languages are equally good/bad and that we might just as well choose any of them for any project? This is nonsense.
But quality is often a personal opinion. Some people hate Perl and Ruby, but love Python. Some people hate Python and Ruby, but love Perl. Some people hate Perl and Python, but love Ruby. How can you get anywhere in such discussions?
that until they design a system that is upgradable, consoles will NEVER be able to compete with PC's
Heh. That's not true by any means. It usually comes down to this:
Cost of a new console: $200
Cost of a fancy new video card, sound card, or hard drive: $200
Now even if the second is less than $200 sometimes, you get the idea. PC upgrading isn't free, and you still have to chuck your PC every few years and get a brand new one, and that doesn't preclude all the upgrading that can be done in the meantime. So your argument is a red herring.
Every time there's an article like this, there are lots of replies about Linux not being dead, and so on. Now open your mind for a minute, and try to understand what "dead" means in this case:
1. It is difficult to define exactly how Linux is superior to alternatives.
2. There is an obsession with boring stuff in the Linux community, such as window managers and emulators for old games, and not a lot what I could call spark. Lack of such spark is what characterized the later years of the Apple IIgs and other now-dead systems.
3. The endless advocacy and angst has grown tiresome and has greatly contributed to #2 above. Linux users used to love that Ghandi quote (paraphrased): first they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. The point is that if you are doing something right and keep on doing something right, and don't worry about what other people are doing or think of you, then you can come out ahead. But Linux advocates have chosen to pick and endless fight with Microsoft, which has turned the tables. "Then they fight you," is now Linux fighting Windows.
In a lot of ways, #1 is the key. In the early 1990s Windows and the MacOS were degenerating, growing bloated and unreliable. UNIX was dying a slow death, as it had been doing since the mid 1980s. At the time it seems that going back to the reliability of UNIX was a good alternative, but it's not like we really wanted to go back to it. But some people were new to computers and didn't know much about OS history, and saw it as the new thing. And some key people, most notably Eric Raymond, saw the possiblity of the OS of their youth returning to glory, much as old Commodore 64 coders would rise again if the C64 was chosen as a standard cell phone and PDA platform.
This is not to say that UNIX doesn't have some good points, and that some great innovations like Perl are anything less than that. But this whole "let's all return to Big UNIX and it will put Microsoft out of business" era is coming to a close. In 2002, operating systems are much less important than they used to be. Quite possibly, as Chuck Moore has said, the concept of an operating system is an outdated one.
To me, this kind of thing strikes me as the wrong solution. I'd much rather see the emphasis on low power on low energy, rather than fixing this on the back end by coming up with a novel way of eliminating all the excess heat that is generated.
It's like saying "We found a way to reduce the emissions from SUVs," which ignores the fact that SUVs are grossly fuel inefficient in the first place.
I see people bashing Perl for it's supposed unreadability. I see people bashing Perl so they can advocate Python or Ruby. I see people making general, blanket statements about code readability, as if these opinions are always ready to burst forth, making the speaker a hit at parties.
Arguments about programming languages on this level are pointless beyond belief. It's like arguing which pop band is better than another. Who cares? It's all opinion and hearsay.
I'm not all that fond of Windows. It's gotten too bulky and impossible to understand, both from a user's and programmer's perspective. Linux, to me, is more of the same. It's simpler, yes, but this reminds me of a good quote from Larry O'Brien:
"Claiming Java is easier than C++ is like saying that K2 is shorter than Everest."
I write video games for a living. I know a lot of people don't want to believe it, but writing code to display windows and such is trivial. It really is. You could spent a month trying to figure out how to do things with Gtk or the Windows API or some other toolkit, or you could write code to do all of the same stuff *without* an underlying library in 25% of the time. But so-called modern operating systems rely on people thinking all that stuff is really hard to do and that we need giant APIs to dealt with it.
What I really want is something lean and mean, something like a 1GHz palmtop with lean hooks to a 3D card. It's pretty appalling when you realize that a *driver* for a modern video card is so large that you couldn't even fit it in a 32MB game console. And then you see Grand Theft Auto 3 running on such a console...
I know, I know, this isn't going to go over well. What I really want, so to speak, is a modern Commodore 64 or Atari 800. Something that isn't just layers of complexity upon layers of complexity. This is within reach.
What I don't want is to be part of some angst-ridden geek club, fighting over which bloated OS is better than another.
Not gamers, since a GeForce4 MX is a stripped down, cheaper version of the real powerhouse GeForce4 TI
This is like saying "Why buy a 450HP car when you can get one that's 500HP?" Performance has gotten all but irrelevant. Price and form factor are what matter. If this will let manufacturers create smaller, cheaper, cooler running computers, then that's great.
Short of genocide against psychopaths we will continue to have a plague of spammers for at least as long as people think there's money to be made (or fun to be had) and it won't get you busted.
It's ridiculous to equate psychopaths and spammers.
There's much more to this than just fat vs. carbohydrates. Just think about what has changed since, oh, 1970:
* High fructose corn syrup is now in everything.
* Huge portions of grocery stores are devoted to microwave-type meals. Back in 1970, you just had TV dinners, which were pretty much a novelty.
* Diet soft drinks containing artificial sweeteners, the long-term effects of which are unknown, have become a multi-billion dollar industry.
* The fast food industry has gotten much larger. It's no longer just McDonald's, Burger King, and Hardees, but dozens and dozens of huge chains.
* There has been a large increase in the number of antibiotics and hormones used in meat and dairy animals.
* Partially-hyrdrogenated vegetable oils are now found in everything.
There are too many factors to make this clear-cut.
Everyone *knows* that SUVs are horribly inefficient and expensive to run. Everyone knows that a fancy home theater set-up eats more power than a plain ol' TV. Everyone knows that all of the packaging in a McDonald's meal cannot be recycled (the wrappers, the plastic cup lids and straws, the Happy Meal toys, the wax-coated cups). Everyone knows that old computers and video cards end up in the landfill, but that doesn't stop Slashdotters from upgrading annuallly.
So I don't know what the points of stories like this are. It's not like you're going to get people to do things that really matter if you can't even get them to stop doing the obviously bad things.
Perl has always had ugly points, but regular expressions were always concise and well-known. And now Wall's ramblings about how he wants to change regular expressions are longer than the entire section about them in the camel book. Doesn't this strike anyone else as ridiclous? Perhaps too many special cases and too many borrowed extensions are being thrown into the language. What an ugly mess it is becoming.
I'm not a big Python fan, but now I'm wondering why I shouldn't just switch to Python now and save myself the grief of having to switch to a completely new Perl-like language later.
Actually the books are very sophisticated intellectually. The sophistication is generally lost on American readers however who are unaware of the cultural and litterary references that Rowling ads in for the amusement of older readers. For example....The use of Magic as a substitute for technological mod cons is a homage to the Flintstones.
Re-read those sentences over and over again until you realize how ridiculous they are.
The standard line about open source, is that programmers scratch their own itches. The idea being that an audio guy who really needs some kind of fancy audio filter will write it himself, and then it will be a much more personal product that something corporately developed.
With the whole crazy push to have Linux take over the desktop, we no longer have this personal itch scratching. KDE developers are trying to figure out how to scratch the itches of people using Windows and MacOS. The disconnect is painful and obvious. And these same developers are, because they have to use KDE et al, adding a heavy developer-centric flavor. The result is a peculiar environment without a target audience. KDE works, I'll give it that, but it's muddled. It's not clear why anyone would want to use KDE instead of Windows. It's more like, "well, I like the Windows UI better, but KDE is the best there is for Linux so I guess I have to use it." And that kind of result doesn't seem to have been worth the man-decades of implementation effort.
I know, I know, KDE fans will mark me as a troll, and Gnome fans will moderate me up. How silly moderation can be!
Well, there is a free version of it, but the actual suite is US$895, which is a little pricey for the average individual. The free version isn't the same thing as the pro version:
You've never used J, have you? You only get a couple of extra features with the prokey, and they only really matter if you're distributing large software packages for re-release. That's it. There are no other differences. JSoftware even says you don't even need the prokey for commercial use of J. It's the most liberal license I've ever seen.
No, PDAs and consoles are solidly reliable because they don't offer you any choice. Decide that your Palm III doesn't have enough space for all of your contacts anymore and you can't just put in a new 120 GB Maxtor hard drive. Realize that your NES doesn't support T&L, you can't just slot in a new video card.
Choice mattered at one time. It matters a lot less now. It mattered if you wanted to do 3D modelling and all you had was 6502 processor. It mattered when first generation 3D accelerators for the PC were severely fill-rate limited. It mattered when you wanted to do video editing and your computer came with a 300MB hard drive.
What has happened, though, is that computer performance has gotten so amazingly fast, that processor speed, fill rate, and hard drive space are effectively infinite for a great majority of purposes. Note that I didn't say *all* purposes, just the majority. It has gotten to where only hardware collecting geeks care about new processors. Everyone else was fine when 300MHz was the norm, and now we can call Dell and get a 1.4GHz Pentium IV for $700. Games are a weird exception, but then again games don't take good advantage of general-purpose PCs. You see games on consoles that out-do PCs running many times faster. The console makers have the right idea: go for low price, low power consumption, and rock solid reliability.
If someone came out with the modern equivalent of a Commodore 64, a tiny 1GHz computer with half a gigabyte of memory, and a GeForce 2 quality video card, then went for a tiny form factor and a tiny price, then it would be decades before people stopped mining the capabilities of it. And it would be a relief to have standard parts and standard software and not have to mess with constant upgrades and flaky drivers. Seriously.
Computers have made it much easier to experiment with mathematical ideas, and experimenting helps you learn better. I'd suggest buying a copy of Mathematica and one of the companion books. It will do you more good than college courses until you're back in the swing of things.
For the more adventuresome, I'd try J from JSoftware. It's terser, and more intellectually challenging, but it's free and also has advantages over Mathematica in some respects. Ken Iverson has some on-line papers that make a good companion (one of which comes with the J distribution).
We've all gotten very used to thinking that "computers == 1970s mainframe shrunk to desktop size," in that we deal with fragile hardware, fragile drivers, fragile applications, overly complex systems, and having to become system administrators. That's not how it has to be.
Some computer systems are solidly reliable, but we don't think of them as computers. We call them consoles and PDAs. But technology has advanced so much that we could easily have a PDA with more horsepower in it than was used at Boeing to design the 777, or what animators had on their desks when working on Toy Story. It's a matter of breaking free from thinking of computers as generic "PC"s running generic operating systems. Smaller is better in this case. How much performance and time do we waste just to keep running the same generic, "modern" systems: Linux, Windows, MacOS. They're all the same, and they're all missing the point.
bzzzt wrong. Joss Wheden has managed to create a show without WB (the Corp. you failed to mention) finally dropped the hugely popular show and UPN picked it up... as is. Joss enjoys complete creative control even more now. He has stated that the WP Drones simply didn't pay attention to the show.
Sorry, you're completely wrong. Do you have any idea how many people and how much money it takes to produce a single episode of Buffy? Just watch the credits. It isn't some little band of artists against the world. It's a large number of people working in a corporate environment. Don't fool yourself into thinking otherwise.
Buffy is great!!
Corporations are evil!!
Buffy is the product of a corporation!!
What to do?!?!?!?!
(Yes, this is rhetorical. It's just greatly amusing to see people bash record companies and anyone else trying to make a buck, and then to see those same people fawn all over a corporately developed and corporately marketed TV show.)
I've heard lots of bad stuff about the x86 architecture...
hacks upon hacks...
That's overstating things. Go to Intel's site and dowload the PDF file describing the Pentium II instruction set. It's absolutely huge. There are hundreds and hundreds of instructions, and the funny thing is that only minority--maybe 30%--really matter. The rest of them are things like MMX, old instructions that are no longer relevant, and lots of peculiar special purpose instructions that are rarely used. And this is only the Pentium II, so it doesn't include all of the SIMD instructions added with the P3.
So most of the cruft comes from old stuff that was relevant at one time, and now there's no way to get rid of it. It isn't because of hacks, per se.
"Dead" in this case means that there's little point of differentiation so why not go with the choice that will offer you fewer headaches?
When the Amiga was dying a painful death in the early 1990s (and, yes, I know, it isn't completely dead in some corners), developers could have been focusing on making interesting and distinctive applications and games. Instead, there was a lot of angst about the PC being mainstream and consoles having superior games. The result was that developers kept trying to clone things already available on other systems, and the Amiga ended up looking even more derivative and sad. But many Amiga owners didn't see it that way. They thought "Wow! Look! My Amiga can play a clone of some old game just as well as a PC can!."
Developers for Linux have spent much time and effort trying to catch up to what Microsoft developed years ago. I know, Microsoft didn't invent those things, but that's not the issue. So now we have people all excited about KDE and various open office suites, and it just looks like yesterday's news, and they _still_ don't feel as polished as what you get with Windows 2000. And then there are the people who like to say you don't need desktop environments, just use bash, and that you don't need an office suite, just use Emacs, but somehow that isn't compelling to most people, even most developers.
The bottom line is that Windows and Linux are two flavors of the same thing. Why get all idealistic and force yourself to use The Gimp instead of Photoshop? There's no reason to. Misguided idealism doesn't count. But if Linux really *were* something drastically and radically better than Windows, and not just in a hard to defined techie sense, then that would be a different story.
Save 90 to 95 percent on the costs, and have fewer bugs in the first place, plus own the code outright - either BSD (owned by the feds) or GPL or one of the variants.
So you don't think Open Source code can be sloppy? You've never looked at the gcc sources, for example. Ugh.
The development time that saved was simply breathtaking, and it pretty much defined the future of games engines and games development
Of course, while UnrealScript is cool, let's not be too quick to give it credit for VMs in games. UnrealScript was heavily influenced by Quake C from two year earlier (much like everything in Unreal, which should be obvious enough anyone). And there were a number of games from the VGA days which included scripting languages. A popular example is the lame side-scroller Abuse, but there certainly were others.