When a CD sells a zillion copies, but not a bazillion copies, that's not a flop. That's more success than just about any of us reading this will ever have.
All the people blasting Moby as being old and over the hill are pretty funny. 36 is not old, except to know-it-all teenagers.
There sure are a lot of people with bottled up angst, wanting to put down this CD in some sort of all-encompassing way. It's just a CD! If you don't like it, don't listen to it!
And then there are the people who say you should copy it because either (a) it sucks, or (b) Moby has an attitude problem. What weird logic! If those cases you think you wouldn't want anything to do with it, but it's the old double standard of "I hate you music industry, but I desperately need what you sell."
PS -- It's *completely* unfair to label "techies" as CD copy fiends. It seems the last time I checked, the #1 CD on cddb.com was Eminem... that's *hardly* music for the "techie crowd" (I'll resist the opening to label the Eminem crowd;-).
The new Eminem CD was a story on Slashdot, and one that had a huge number of replies I might add.
I'm always sad to see that the excitement among hobbyist developers always seems to involve porting emulators for old arcade games. Yeah, I love those old games too, but I'd much rather see some kind of real grassroots game development movement emerge. The stuff posted to linuxgames.com is depressing for the most part. Here we have a powerful, free operating system and development tools, something thousands of times more powerful than what early game designers had in 1980, and yet all we can do is write emulators for those games.
And so does everyone else. Linux and OS X are in the same complexity ballpark. You could argue that Linux is simpler than Windows, but that's like saying that a 747 is simpler than a 777.
When you look at what people are doing on systems without operating systems--take a look at Grand Theft Auto 3 on the PlayStation 2--then it makes you wonder.
As a software developer, I have wasted a lot of time tracking down problems with home-built PCs. The problem is usually that the builder goes for the "too good to be true" parts, getting things that are not all that reliable, or they don't do enough reading to avoid common mistakes. One oddball issue I've seen again and again is certain types of hard drive adapters coupled with some sound cards can cause sporadic lockups in some games that transfer data in specific ways. It sounds weird, I know, but it happens, and it can be traced back to the type of hard drive connection people with the sound card are using. So do some reading and get some good diagnostic programs.
That's about it. That's what E3 is for. Certaintly it has generated more buzz than any other game released at E3. There's more to games than buzz, of course.
Even so, Doom III is currently all about rendering. It looks really nice. The lighting and shadows are amazing. It's going to up the bar a couple of notches for everyone else. But is it a game? No one really knows yet. And we don't know if there's any innovation there besides the rendering engine. It takes a dozen or more people to make a modern game (50 or more for big titles), and there's usually one person writing the core rendering code. Everyone else works on the game side of things. So don't make the mistake of equating rendering with gameplay.
Though remember, this is Slashdot:) Automated testing is common in embedded systems programming, and all but non-existant for any kind of Open Source desktop applications (gcc is an exception).
You write test cases as you go. You make sure you can run an automated regression test at any time. If you don't do this, then any time you change code you might break old code and you won't realize it. Just doing spot checks at the keyboard isn't good enough. And the programmers need to be writing these test cases first, and they need to be kept separate from tests written by external groups.
To a certain extent you're correct, but it's far easier to get unbloated software for Linux. You only have to use the bloated stuff if you want to. I won't touch GNOME if I can help it, and I never use a file manager. I mostly just have a bunch of shells and a web browser open (whether at home or at work). I get my work done just as quickly as anyone- the learning curve was definitely higher, but I'm more efficient in the end.
You're leaning too far in one direction, I think. A so-called desktop environment can be a great thing, but it doesn't have to be bloated and slow. This is not a black and white issue with bare shells on one side and 512MB IDEs on the other. You certainly can have your cake and eat it too, but that's not how things currently work.
Depends on your definition of "IT"
on
General IT Books?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Every time I see that acronym used, it's in a context far and away from what I would call traditional software engineering. I think of it as somewhere between web programming and corporate database programmer. As such, it seems that the recommended books are lean too far away from what the typical IT worker needs to know.
It's always reassuring when companies such as Disney that are generally understood to be Evil(tm) break down and go for things developed by the forces of Good(tm).
And I know I'll get tagged as a troll (I'm not), but more and more it's not at all obvious what the differences between Linux and Windows are. Both are fast, stable, and reliable (I'm talking about Windows 2K here, not 98). And both have their many hells: library conflicts, driver problems, bloated and buggy software. Okay, yeah, Linux is free, but otherwise we're just looking at several forms of the same thing.
Tone deaf? or just deaf. Even the most expensive PCI card I have tried has noise problems, especially at high volume.
Well, I turn the speakers up but I don't turn them up full blast. I think the difference is that some people just can't stand watching movies on a TV that isn't hooked up to an elaborate home theatre system, where as I Don't Really Care. I suppose if I focused on just the sound, then I might care, but when I'm playing games on my PC I'm doing more than that. I've never had any complaints about the sound from any PC since about 1995.
I was just thinking about the limits of sound cards the other day. What features are still in demand from them, considering they can play damn near any sound that we can possibly hear already, and do it directionally?
The limit was reached in the mid 1990s, at least as far as I'm concerned. I really can't tell the difference between a generic motherboard sound chipset played through okay speakers and an overpriced sound card. I think that quite a few people fall into the same category. Certainly, upgrading one's sound card is about fiftieth on the list of pressing computer problems.
I'm seeing lots of comments about how software isn't "engineering" or a "science." Well, I hate to break it to you guys but engineering is just as much hackery as anything else. Yes, there is some science to figuring out how much stress a material can take, but it's not like you can mathematically prove that an airplane is safe. Products are recalled all the time because of oversights and design errors. And planes do crash because of mechanical failures. Aerospace engineers are more afraid of flying than the general populace.
I see two big problems with modern software. The first is that computer systems are much, much, much too complicated, to where people accept lines like "no sofware can be bug free." Sure it can! How depressing it is that we let that be spood fed to us! But not when you have a huge operating system and huge language libraries and huge OS libraries and huge hardware drivers and so on. Heck, there's more code in one of Nvidia's drivers than in OSes from the 1970s. You see many fewer bugs on less complicated platforms, like game consoles and PDAs. PCs are pretty much a lost cause in that respect, and that's not going to change. One day I hope that we can return to more reliable systems, even at the expense of expandability (who cares about expandability any more?).
The second problem is simply that most developers don't give any importance to producing reliable software. In the telecom business, there's no way you could getting away without writing comprensive test suites and a huge amount of work from a dedicated testing group. But you hardly see automated testing for any software these days, outside of embedded systems. And you'll see silly newbie developers argue that they need to use C++ to write some silly app because "it is faster," when they actually should be using Python or Lisp instead.
BTW -- I am having oodles of fun playing Warcraft II and Red Alert on my Pentium 200MMX laptop with 1.5 megs of Video Ram and 64 Megs of memory -- Sad that game companies nowdays think that resource rape will make up for clever design and gameplay.
In this case it's just that the game is being designed for the PS2 hardware. It's a PS2 game first, and a PC port second. On the PS2 you can do a lot of specific trickery that takes advantage of its architecture. On the PC, you need a system that lets you get the same visual results but by using a *generic* graphics API. So where there might be some low level fiddling that will let you do certain things on the PS2, you have to do it the so-called "correct" way on the PC, and that may be much more expensive.
Still, there are some advantages of PC hardware over the PS2, like 8:1 texture compression and multitexturing.
And, of course, you're comparing games displaying a few dozen 2D sprites per frame with a game that's drawing 20,000+ texture-mapped, shaded, and filtered triangles per frame. That's maybe too obvious to point out, but you seem to have missed it.
Where does Spolsky get these myths? Does anybody seriously believe that Gerstner has gone all hippy-love on his shareholders? Has anybody published the idea that Sun and HP are ideological converts to Free Software? Does this even past the "huh?" test?
They're mild parodies of what seem to be mainstream views on Slashdot. You'll find lots and lots of people arguing, for example, that record companies are evil and all music should be given away free. People *love* to hear that IBM is doing work to support Linux, but that the same time don't remind them that IBM is a business. They don't want to hear that. They like to think that IBM is doing this out of the goodness of its heart.
In general, Slashdot represents the ideal of college students without much disposable income.
Digs on VA Linux, RMS, Sun, and Linux zealots all in one big breath.
When the criticism is by someone level-headed, it's not trolling. Trolling is when silly people start arguments just so they can argue justify their own beliefs.
A modern computer is an asymmetric dual-processor system. GPUs are already at least as complex as CPUs
Actually, they're not. An Athlon, for example, has to support hundreds of instructions, branch prediction, integer and floating point operations, SIMD, multiple levels of caches, etc. A GPU, for the most part, supports one basic pipeline, but with lots of parallelism (e.g. 16 pixel units). Now that's an oversimplification, but the principle is there. A GPU does one thing well, while a CPU has to do quite a bit more
The whole concept behind broadband was that we, the user, would have high bandwidth to do with as we like. But now this idea is completely lost.
No, the idea was that we, the user, would have much faster access than we had via modem. I don't ever remember cable ISPs talking about much *more* you could download, just how much *faster* your surfing would be. If you start downloading dozens of 50MB movies a day--one of which would have taken all night with a modem--then that changes the picture drastically.
Strange that OO-ness is such a major feature that it found it's way into the name of the engine. I've never really thought of OO-ness as making or breaking an engine.
A guy doesn't like his job. He thinks his boss is a slave driver. His boss won't listen to his pet ideas. Therefore the company sucks and is overrated.
Porters should be as respected as other programers.
I've done ports; they're at least an order of magnitude easier than writing original code. Porting a game is usually done in one to six months. New games take 1 to 3 years. If you cover a song, you at least have to learn how to play it. When you port code, you just diddle around with select parts of it on the backend until it works.
The spirit of the indie game scene is *design*. Ports of Nethack and emulators are boooring.
As most people use software that adheres to specific IE compatibility, which relies on closed protocols and standards, then yes you can write this one off on Microsoft leveraging their position.
No, no, no, you're missing the point. If you create a web page that follows the standards to the letter, then there's a much better chance that it will display correctly in IE than in Mozilla and Opera. We're not talking about closed standards at all.
I think a lot of Slashdotters don't use it out of spite, because it's Microsoft software. But it's one of those unfortunate situations where the alternatives really aren't as good, just as with Microsoft Office vs. Star Office. I know, I know, it pains me to say that, but I'd be unwilling to foist any other browser on someone who isn't going to understand why certain pages don't render correctly with Mozilla and Opera.
And what's most personally disturbing is that IE does a *much* better job of adhering to the standards than the alternatives. You can't write this one off on Microsoft leveraging their position. Why is no one else able to write a browser of the same quality?
It's never been that their cards are junk, it's just that for every card, they start anew with completely untested drivers,
That was the story with Nvidia for the longest time, too, lest people forget. They only started getting really good drives after the GeForce 2 was released (and early GeForce 2 drivers were horrible).
Slashdot Mirror
When a CD sells a zillion copies, but not a bazillion copies, that's not a flop. That's more success than just about any of us reading this will ever have.
All the people blasting Moby as being old and over the hill are pretty funny. 36 is not old, except to know-it-all teenagers.
There sure are a lot of people with bottled up angst, wanting to put down this CD in some sort of all-encompassing way. It's just a CD! If you don't like it, don't listen to it!
And then there are the people who say you should copy it because either (a) it sucks, or (b) Moby has an attitude problem. What weird logic! If those cases you think you wouldn't want anything to do with it, but it's the old double standard of "I hate you music industry, but I desperately need what you sell."
PS -- It's *completely* unfair to label "techies" as CD copy fiends. It seems the last time I checked, the #1 CD on cddb.com was Eminem... that's *hardly* music for the "techie crowd" (I'll resist the opening to label the Eminem crowd ;-).
The new Eminem CD was a story on Slashdot, and one that had a huge number of replies I might add.
I'm always sad to see that the excitement among hobbyist developers always seems to involve porting emulators for old arcade games. Yeah, I love those old games too, but I'd much rather see some kind of real grassroots game development movement emerge. The stuff posted to linuxgames.com is depressing for the most part. Here we have a powerful, free operating system and development tools, something thousands of times more powerful than what early game designers had in 1980, and yet all we can do is write emulators for those games.
Fourth, Microsoft likes a complicated OS
And so does everyone else. Linux and OS X are in the same complexity ballpark. You could argue that Linux is simpler than Windows, but that's like saying that a 747 is simpler than a 777.
When you look at what people are doing on systems without operating systems--take a look at Grand Theft Auto 3 on the PlayStation 2--then it makes you wonder.
As a software developer, I have wasted a lot of time tracking down problems with home-built PCs. The problem is usually that the builder goes for the "too good to be true" parts, getting things that are not all that reliable, or they don't do enough reading to avoid common mistakes. One oddball issue I've seen again and again is certain types of hard drive adapters coupled with some sound cards can cause sporadic lockups in some games that transfer data in specific ways. It sounds weird, I know, but it happens, and it can be traced back to the type of hard drive connection people with the sound card are using. So do some reading and get some good diagnostic programs.
That's about it. That's what E3 is for. Certaintly it has generated more buzz than any other game released at E3. There's more to games than buzz, of course.
Even so, Doom III is currently all about rendering. It looks really nice. The lighting and shadows are amazing. It's going to up the bar a couple of notches for everyone else. But is it a game? No one really knows yet. And we don't know if there's any innovation there besides the rendering engine. It takes a dozen or more people to make a modern game (50 or more for big titles), and there's usually one person writing the core rendering code. Everyone else works on the game side of things. So don't make the mistake of equating rendering with gameplay.
Though remember, this is Slashdot :) Automated testing is common in embedded systems programming, and all but non-existant for any kind of Open Source desktop applications (gcc is an exception).
You write test cases as you go. You make sure you can run an automated regression test at any time. If you don't do this, then any time you change code you might break old code and you won't realize it. Just doing spot checks at the keyboard isn't good enough. And the programmers need to be writing these test cases first, and they need to be kept separate from tests written by external groups.
To a certain extent you're correct, but it's far easier to get unbloated software for Linux. You only have to use the bloated stuff if you want to. I won't touch GNOME if I can help it, and I never use a file manager. I mostly just have a bunch of shells and a web browser open (whether at home or at work). I get my work done just as quickly as anyone- the learning curve was definitely higher, but I'm more efficient in the end.
You're leaning too far in one direction, I think. A so-called desktop environment can be a great thing, but it doesn't have to be bloated and slow. This is not a black and white issue with bare shells on one side and 512MB IDEs on the other. You certainly can have your cake and eat it too, but that's not how things currently work.
Every time I see that acronym used, it's in a context far and away from what I would call traditional software engineering. I think of it as somewhere between web programming and corporate database programmer. As such, it seems that the recommended books are lean too far away from what the typical IT worker needs to know.
It's always reassuring when companies such as Disney that are generally understood to be Evil(tm) break down and go for things developed by the forces of Good(tm).
And I know I'll get tagged as a troll (I'm not), but more and more it's not at all obvious what the differences between Linux and Windows are. Both are fast, stable, and reliable (I'm talking about Windows 2K here, not 98). And both have their many hells: library conflicts, driver problems, bloated and buggy software. Okay, yeah, Linux is free, but otherwise we're just looking at several forms of the same thing.
Tone deaf? or just deaf. Even the most expensive PCI card I have tried has noise problems, especially at high volume.
Well, I turn the speakers up but I don't turn them up full blast. I think the difference is that some people just can't stand watching movies on a TV that isn't hooked up to an elaborate home theatre system, where as I Don't Really Care. I suppose if I focused on just the sound, then I might care, but when I'm playing games on my PC I'm doing more than that. I've never had any complaints about the sound from any PC since about 1995.
I was just thinking about the limits of sound cards the other day. What features are still in demand from them, considering they can play damn near any sound that we can possibly hear already, and do it directionally?
The limit was reached in the mid 1990s, at least as far as I'm concerned. I really can't tell the difference between a generic motherboard sound chipset played through okay speakers and an overpriced sound card. I think that quite a few people fall into the same category. Certainly, upgrading one's sound card is about fiftieth on the list of pressing computer problems.
I'm seeing lots of comments about how software isn't "engineering" or a "science." Well, I hate to break it to you guys but engineering is just as much hackery as anything else. Yes, there is some science to figuring out how much stress a material can take, but it's not like you can mathematically prove that an airplane is safe. Products are recalled all the time because of oversights and design errors. And planes do crash because of mechanical failures. Aerospace engineers are more afraid of flying than the general populace.
I see two big problems with modern software. The first is that computer systems are much, much, much too complicated, to where people accept lines like "no sofware can be bug free." Sure it can! How depressing it is that we let that be spood fed to us! But not when you have a huge operating system and huge language libraries and huge OS libraries and huge hardware drivers and so on. Heck, there's more code in one of Nvidia's drivers than in OSes from the 1970s. You see many fewer bugs on less complicated platforms, like game consoles and PDAs. PCs are pretty much a lost cause in that respect, and that's not going to change. One day I hope that we can return to more reliable systems, even at the expense of expandability (who cares about expandability any more?).
The second problem is simply that most developers don't give any importance to producing reliable software. In the telecom business, there's no way you could getting away without writing comprensive test suites and a huge amount of work from a dedicated testing group. But you hardly see automated testing for any software these days, outside of embedded systems. And you'll see silly newbie developers argue that they need to use C++ to write some silly app because "it is faster," when they actually should be using Python or Lisp instead.
BTW -- I am having oodles of fun playing Warcraft II and Red Alert on my Pentium 200MMX laptop with 1.5 megs of Video Ram and 64 Megs of memory -- Sad that game companies nowdays think that resource rape will make up for clever design and gameplay.
In this case it's just that the game is being designed for the PS2 hardware. It's a PS2 game first, and a PC port second. On the PS2 you can do a lot of specific trickery that takes advantage of its architecture. On the PC, you need a system that lets you get the same visual results but by using a *generic* graphics API. So where there might be some low level fiddling that will let you do certain things on the PS2, you have to do it the so-called "correct" way on the PC, and that may be much more expensive.
Still, there are some advantages of PC hardware over the PS2, like 8:1 texture compression and multitexturing.
And, of course, you're comparing games displaying a few dozen 2D sprites per frame with a game that's drawing 20,000+ texture-mapped, shaded, and filtered triangles per frame. That's maybe too obvious to point out, but you seem to have missed it.
Where does Spolsky get these myths? Does anybody seriously believe that Gerstner has gone all hippy-love on his shareholders? Has anybody published the idea that Sun and HP are ideological converts to Free Software? Does this even past the "huh?" test?
They're mild parodies of what seem to be mainstream views on Slashdot. You'll find lots and lots of people arguing, for example, that record companies are evil and all music should be given away free. People *love* to hear that IBM is doing work to support Linux, but that the same time don't remind them that IBM is a business. They don't want to hear that. They like to think that IBM is doing this out of the goodness of its heart.
In general, Slashdot represents the ideal of college students without much disposable income.
Digs on VA Linux, RMS, Sun, and Linux zealots all in one big breath.
When the criticism is by someone level-headed, it's not trolling. Trolling is when silly people start arguments just so they can argue justify their own beliefs.
A modern computer is an asymmetric dual-processor system. GPUs are already at least as complex as CPUs
Actually, they're not. An Athlon, for example, has to support hundreds of instructions, branch prediction, integer and floating point operations, SIMD, multiple levels of caches, etc. A GPU, for the most part, supports one basic pipeline, but with lots of parallelism (e.g. 16 pixel units). Now that's an oversimplification, but the principle is there. A GPU does one thing well, while a CPU has to do quite a bit more
The whole concept behind broadband was that we, the user, would have high bandwidth to do with as we like. But now this idea is completely lost.
No, the idea was that we, the user, would have much faster access than we had via modem. I don't ever remember cable ISPs talking about much *more* you could download, just how much *faster* your surfing would be. If you start downloading dozens of 50MB movies a day--one of which would have taken all night with a modem--then that changes the picture drastically.
Strange that OO-ness is such a major feature that it found it's way into the name of the engine. I've never really thought of OO-ness as making or breaking an engine.
A guy doesn't like his job.
He thinks his boss is a slave driver.
His boss won't listen to his pet ideas.
Therefore the company sucks and is overrated.
Porters should be as respected as other programers.
I've done ports; they're at least an order of magnitude easier than writing original code. Porting a game is usually done in one to six months. New games take 1 to 3 years. If you cover a song, you at least have to learn how to play it. When you port code, you just diddle around with select parts of it on the backend until it works.
The spirit of the indie game scene is *design*. Ports of Nethack and emulators are boooring.
This would totally rule.. I'd love to see Nethack for the GB.
So you want indie games...that are really just ports of old games? Isn't that like worshipping a cover band?
As most people use software that adheres to specific IE compatibility, which relies on closed protocols and standards, then yes you can write this one off on Microsoft leveraging their position.
No, no, no, you're missing the point. If you create a web page that follows the standards to the letter, then there's a much better chance that it will display correctly in IE than in Mozilla and Opera. We're not talking about closed standards at all.
I really wonder how many /.ers don't use IE.
I think a lot of Slashdotters don't use it out of spite, because it's Microsoft software. But it's one of those unfortunate situations where the alternatives really aren't as good, just as with Microsoft Office vs. Star Office. I know, I know, it pains me to say that, but I'd be unwilling to foist any other browser on someone who isn't going to understand why certain pages don't render correctly with Mozilla and Opera.
And what's most personally disturbing is that IE does a *much* better job of adhering to the standards than the alternatives. You can't write this one off on Microsoft leveraging their position. Why is no one else able to write a browser of the same quality?
It's never been that their cards are junk, it's just that for every card, they start anew with completely untested drivers,
That was the story with Nvidia for the longest time, too, lest people forget. They only started getting really good drives after the GeForce 2 was released (and early GeForce 2 drivers were horrible).