Good ideas about multi-user, multi-tasking, and extensible operating systems don't come along with every new release of Windows. Sorry to burst your little bubble. Unix is an OLD concept, but a good one.
Multi-tasking, multi-user, extensible; those didn't originate with UNIX, sadly enough. UNIX has some good core concepts, but taken as a whole that OS is sadly, sadly outdated. Only someone without much OS background would say otherwise (hint: "OS background" cannot be equated with "I've installed a whole bunch of Linux distros").
Considering Nintendo sold their entire 750,000 first shipment in the FIRST WEEK of release. That article is stating they only sold 602,000 in *4* weeks which is WAY WAY off.
Are you a distributor or are you simply a rabid fanboy? "Sold" has multiple meanings. It could mean that Nintendo shipped that many to units to retailers. Or it could mean that Nintendo has sold that many units _from_ retailers. The classic mistake is looking at the first of these numbers ("sell-in") and equating it with actual sales ("sell-through"). If a company quickly shoots out a press release with high numbers on it, it's usually sell-in.
I attend the Univ. of RI and I am a CE major. Its nauseaing to see all the incoming freshmen, even sophmores and juniors that have no clue about Unix based OSs in general.
"If anyone had told me back then that getting back to embarrassingly primitive UNIX would be the great hope and investment obsession of the year 2000, merely because it's name was changed to LINUX and its source code was opened up again, I never would have had the stomach or the heart to continue in computer science."
-- Jaron Lanier
Unfortunately this method (Euler's method) is very inaccurate and unstable
This is only true if you're simulating a standalone system (like the orbiting planet example). In real games, the player is constantly pressing the controller, collisions are occurring, and the "AI" is making decisions. Stepwise integration makes perfect sense in that case. Calling it "inaccurate and unstable" shows a lack of game development experience.
This is a refresher course in high school physics, sometimes freshman college physics, but the author does not have any kind of perspective on game development. It's easy to pick up a book about physics and implement what's in there. The equations are well known. But that kind of implementation is much, much, too hardcore for game use, where you need to devote 15% of each frame to physics calculations.
The trick is coming up with a way to seem like you're doing much more than you really can. The book gives little help there, as trickery and non-traditional techniques can buy you a lot more than just implementing standard mechanics.
No video drivers that aren't compatible with OS upgrades.
This used to be true, back in the day before Macs had 3D accelerators in them, but no more. Macs have the same video card and drivers problems as the PC, just to a lesser extent.
Between this story and the one about setting up a dedicated server room at home, I'm thinking of tossing my PC completely and buying a used Atari 800. Well, not seriously, but it crosses my mind occasionally.
The amount of system administration required to run a PC home takes much of the fun out of computing for me. I'm a programmer and a technical kind of guy, but I really don't want to to be a sysadmin as a hobby. It's bad enough chasing down video card drivers and keeping track of all the related software incompatibilities--and having to upgrade everything every 18 months or so, even when I don't need it, as a brute force method of reducing conflicts--but having to deal with running servers and such at home is crazy. Sure, sure, the people who love recompiling kernels and running video card benchmarks and so on might not mind, but that's what those people _want_ out of a computer. Not everyone is like that.
99% percent of gamers can't tell the difference between sound cards, except in a small handful of cases. Play generic motherboard sound system through good speakers and a Live! on a system without a subwoofer. Everyone will swear that the first one is a better sound card. Remember, the sample quality and sample rate are what really matter, and those are independent of the sound card.
In all honesty, speaking from both a developer and gamer perspective, sound card technology peaked in the mid 1990s, even prior to the Live!. It's a solved problem.
Why don't you just propose a design for such a better chip? I thought so.
Here's my design: A processor that isn't catering to the 2% of computer users that need all the power they can get, but is sold across the board to the other 98% as well.
Re:Yay! Secret of Mana in the Car!
on
SNES Portable
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· Score: 2
GBA sprites can also be 256-color
For the record, so can SNES sprites, though they weren't used all that often because of memory reasons (video memory moreso than system memory).
In all seriousness--and I'm a programmer, not a luddite--I'd trade 50% computing power for something that didn't give me fits every few months or so. Every time I have to upgrade something, be it under Linux or Windows, it kills a couple of evenings and involves numerous trips to the store. "Okay, I just bought a new video card because Game X doesn't work with my old one, but then Game Y doesn't work with the new one." Or having to constantly upgrade drivers and worrying that one upgrade might cascade into a whole series of them.
No one has to do this kind of thing with their Palm, cell phone, or DVD player. I'd happily be behind the times in the coming years if I could buy the equivalent of an Atari 800 or Commodore 64 with the capabilities of, say, a bottom line Athlon. Seriously. People were mining the capabilities of the C64 for ten years, and we're talking about something with 500 times the raw capability.
Much higher possibility than if s/he was slaving away on the same code in some cube at Microsoft or Lucent Technologies. At least in the OpenSource world, if the code has enough merit, even if it's crap, the kid's gonna get a lot more help and hopefully learn from the help, than when his manager at Kinko's says, "That's great. Now, here's a couple more Flaming Logo EJBs that need to be implemented by next week."
Sorry, no. At least at Lucent there will be experienced engineers to review code and a formal testing process. Bad open source code gets ignored and stays bad. And almost no open source projects have regression test suites, which makes hacking them up very scary.
There's too much of a rush to justify Open Source. Just looking through the responses here shows that. Most of the justifications are self-serving and romantic. It's great and all to talk about scratching itches, millions of eyes, and survival of the fittest, but those are not what make or break programs. Think about it: Is some middling coding-job from a bored 17 year old with no software engineering experience whatsoever going to be more significant just because the source is available? That's overly cynical, but there's truth in there.
Also remember that very few people give a damn about open source. People who *use* programs sure don't (read: "the 99.9% of Windows users and the 99% of Linux users that are not programmers"). I'm a programmer who works on large (usually commercial) projects. I only looked at the gcc source once, just to see what it was like, and besides being repulsed at the verbosity of the code, it made no difference to me. I'm not going to hack up hundreds of thousands of lines of code without understanding the architecture.
Open source is a small issue, but it's still the path of least resistance. If 99% or more people don't give a hoot about the source, you might as well ship it because it's easier than being paranoid about trade secrets. But there's no reason to endlessly rant about the new economy and sticking it to the man and all that. How boring can you get?
I would say ballpark 6 to 15 years of age is Nintendo time. After that, Playstation and the now-defunct Sega take over for the most part.
This is the popular myth, but it isn't true. Nintendo does own the 6-13 market. After that, there's the usual teenage rebellion when kids think that Nintendo games are too kiddie and want dark and gritty instead. Think of the difference between the old live-action Batman TV show and Batman Beyond. But then after ten years or so that phase ends and 25 year old players think "Hey, that Nintendo stuff really was pretty good after all."
Bottom line: Nintendo isn't just for kids; it's simply not for people in the 14-25 age range.
C'mon this is hardly an amazing revelation. Cars have been getting more and more computerized and difficult for the average Joe to repair for at least the last 15 years. Open the hood on any car from *1990* and you'll find a big black box with wires running out of it. It controls the fuel injection, the engine tests, the digital controls, you name it. You don't want to be messing around with those cars, except maybe to change the oil.
But how is this different than any other electronic consumer device? Nobody hacks up their PC motherboard or DVD player innards. And nobody complains about it either, not even the crazies who think that every corporate manuver is an encroachment on freedom of speech.
Take it from someone who has been programming consoles and home computers for 20 years. Even back in the day, you'd read that the Atari 2600 had only a couple of sprites, then you'd see games with a dozen or more moving objects. The problem is simple: specs are the raw capabilities of what the hardware can do. They're the *starting* point for the programmer. And of course they're meaningless by themselves. Let's use a guitar as an analogy. Imagine that console makers sold guitars:
1. In the spec lists comparing Nintendo's guitar to Sony's guitar, you'd see that one had 6 strings and the other 12. Does this mean you can play twice as many songs on the latter?
2. Sony claims that their guitar is capable of 1000 chords per second. Now what do they mean by that? Is that the limit to how much beating the strings can take? But what if you played 1000 chords per second? Would there be any time for subtleties or even *changing* chords? Of course not, so who cares about that number.
Hardware specs really are like this (for example, 3dfx loved to claim 3 million triangles per second on some of their cards; in reality, programmers only got about 150,000). Fanboys *love* to think that bigger is better and that console X really can have games with 50,000,000 triangles per second, but that's not how it works.
Are you saying you agree completely with Joel's comments? I do agree with some of what he has to say but I wouldn't go all they way. Joel seems to be saying code re-writes are crap and it's more important to meet the deadline than get a good program out the door. That's where I take exception.
You can't take exception to his examples. Sometimes a rewrite is good, very often it is bad. There's a newbie tendency to think that rewrites are a silver bullet, which is why there's so much debate about it from the kiddies. Joel backs up his argument with examples. The kiddies just rant.
Like Joel, I have been programming for 20 years, so I'm certainly not trolling just because what I have to say isn't the in thing with the core of the Slashdot audience.
I read Joel's interview yesterday, before it was mentioned here. Good interview, I thought, he makes lots of good points. But the debate about it here has nothing whatsoever to do with what was said there. Many of the comments key off of the word "Microsoft" and so immediately assume that the interview is crap and has something to do with justifying Microsoft's monopoly position (are these people really bots?).
Most of the the comments, though, are taking little bits of advice and twisting them around into mini-lectures about commenting style or programming issues, or they're simply being used as jumping off points for the poster's own spouting. Let me make this perfectly clear:
These people are not professional programmers.
Anyone who has been through the wringer of commercial software development, and not just a few classes and some tiny open source projects, wouldn't be so religious about such trivialities. Real software development is different. It is not a battle between the Evil Bad Commenters and the Perfection of Beautiful Computer Science (or more correctly What My Professor Said in Class Last Semester). That's not how it works at all. All programmers know about commenting, about indentation style, and so on. There's more to developing commercial products, though: deadlines, missed features, last minute requests from the client, strict requirements for supported platforms, and so on. In this kind of environment, commenting style is a very minor issue (not to say it isn't important, but ranting about it is like ranting to an experienced guitarist about your pet music theories--when you barely know how to play guitar at all). A good way of spotting such people is to ask them what they think of "goto." Odds are you'll get all sorts of vitriol about the evils of goto and the benefits of structured programming and how you should never, never, ever, even if your life depended on it use a goto. An experience programmer would shrug and say "sometimes they are useful, sometimes not."
My advice: Learn, practice, work on projects, and over the years you'll become a pro. A college student without significant software engineering experience is not in a position to rant about how commercial development doesn't fit his ideals. The true sign of experienced developers is that they've been through it all and have enough experience that they don't feel the need to rant every chance they get--or at all.
Silly troll. I've used Amigas. Great machines. Far too underpowered to really decode movies on stock hardware, though. You could hardly call the Amiga a movie-playing machine.
Sigh. No. Go back in time to 1991. Notice those "amiga" computers? Get one, either a CDTV, or an A500 with an A570. Watch Neil armstrong walk on the moon, spooled from CDROM..
Sorry, no. That was a novelty for hardware that almost no one owned (even Amiga owners!). It had no effect whatsoever on getting movie playing to be a desktop standard.
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Good ideas about multi-user, multi-tasking, and extensible operating systems don't come along with every new release of Windows. Sorry to burst your little bubble. Unix is an OLD concept, but a good one.
Multi-tasking, multi-user, extensible; those didn't originate with UNIX, sadly enough. UNIX has some good core concepts, but taken as a whole that OS is sadly, sadly outdated. Only someone without much OS background would say otherwise (hint: "OS background" cannot be equated with "I've installed a whole bunch of Linux distros").
Considering Nintendo sold their entire 750,000 first shipment in the FIRST WEEK of release. That article is stating they only sold 602,000 in *4* weeks which is WAY WAY off.
Are you a distributor or are you simply a rabid fanboy? "Sold" has multiple meanings. It could mean that Nintendo shipped that many to units to retailers. Or it could mean that Nintendo has sold that many units _from_ retailers. The classic mistake is looking at the first of these numbers ("sell-in") and equating it with actual sales ("sell-through"). If a company quickly shoots out a press release with high numbers on it, it's usually sell-in.
I attend the Univ. of RI and I am a CE major. Its nauseaing to see all the incoming freshmen, even sophmores and juniors that have no clue about Unix based OSs in general.
"If anyone had told me back then that getting back to embarrassingly primitive UNIX would be the great hope and investment obsession of the year 2000, merely because it's name was changed to LINUX and its source code was opened up again, I never would have had the stomach or the heart to continue in computer science."
-- Jaron Lanier
Unfortunately this method (Euler's method) is very inaccurate and unstable
This is only true if you're simulating a standalone system (like the orbiting planet example). In real games, the player is constantly pressing the controller, collisions are occurring, and the "AI" is making decisions. Stepwise integration makes perfect sense in that case. Calling it "inaccurate and unstable" shows a lack of game development experience.
This is a refresher course in high school physics, sometimes freshman college physics, but the author does not have any kind of perspective on game development. It's easy to pick up a book about physics and implement what's in there. The equations are well known. But that kind of implementation is much, much, too hardcore for game use, where you need to devote 15% of each frame to physics calculations.
The trick is coming up with a way to seem like you're doing much more than you really can. The book gives little help there, as trickery and non-traditional techniques can buy you a lot more than just implementing standard mechanics.
No video drivers that aren't compatible with OS upgrades.
This used to be true, back in the day before Macs had 3D accelerators in them, but no more. Macs have the same video card and drivers problems as the PC, just to a lesser extent.
Between this story and the one about setting up a dedicated server room at home, I'm thinking of tossing my PC completely and buying a used Atari 800. Well, not seriously, but it crosses my mind occasionally.
The amount of system administration required to run a PC home takes much of the fun out of computing for me. I'm a programmer and a technical kind of guy, but I really don't want to to be a sysadmin as a hobby. It's bad enough chasing down video card drivers and keeping track of all the related software incompatibilities--and having to upgrade everything every 18 months or so, even when I don't need it, as a brute force method of reducing conflicts--but having to deal with running servers and such at home is crazy. Sure, sure, the people who love recompiling kernels and running video card benchmarks and so on might not mind, but that's what those people _want_ out of a computer. Not everyone is like that.
99% percent of gamers can't tell the difference between sound cards, except in a small handful of cases. Play generic motherboard sound system through good speakers and a Live! on a system without a subwoofer. Everyone will swear that the first one is a better sound card. Remember, the sample quality and sample rate are what really matter, and those are independent of the sound card.
In all honesty, speaking from both a developer and gamer perspective, sound card technology peaked in the mid 1990s, even prior to the Live!. It's a solved problem.
Reminds me of a pair of pants my neighbor had. So many patches there wasn't any original fabric left.
Just like any large software project, including the Linux kernel, KDE, Mozilla, you name it.
Why don't you just propose a design for such a better chip? I thought so.
Here's my design: A processor that isn't catering to the 2% of computer users that need all the power they can get, but is sold across the board to the other 98% as well.
GBA sprites can also be 256-color
For the record, so can SNES sprites, though they weren't used all that often because of memory reasons (video memory moreso than system memory).
--an old SNES game programmer
In all seriousness--and I'm a programmer, not a luddite--I'd trade 50% computing power for something that didn't give me fits every few months or so. Every time I have to upgrade something, be it under Linux or Windows, it kills a couple of evenings and involves numerous trips to the store. "Okay, I just bought a new video card because Game X doesn't work with my old one, but then Game Y doesn't work with the new one." Or having to constantly upgrade drivers and worrying that one upgrade might cascade into a whole series of them.
No one has to do this kind of thing with their Palm, cell phone, or DVD player. I'd happily be behind the times in the coming years if I could buy the equivalent of an Atari 800 or Commodore 64 with the capabilities of, say, a bottom line Athlon. Seriously. People were mining the capabilities of the C64 for ten years, and we're talking about something with 500 times the raw capability.
Much higher possibility than if s/he was slaving away on the same code in some cube at Microsoft or Lucent Technologies. At least in the OpenSource world, if the code has enough merit, even if it's crap, the kid's gonna get a lot more help and hopefully learn from the help, than when his manager at Kinko's says, "That's great. Now, here's a couple more Flaming Logo EJBs that need to be implemented by next week."
Sorry, no. At least at Lucent there will be experienced engineers to review code and a formal testing process. Bad open source code gets ignored and stays bad. And almost no open source projects have regression test suites, which makes hacking them up very scary.
There's too much of a rush to justify Open Source. Just looking through the responses here shows that. Most of the justifications are self-serving and romantic. It's great and all to talk about scratching itches, millions of eyes, and survival of the fittest, but those are not what make or break programs. Think about it: Is some middling coding-job from a bored 17 year old with no software engineering experience whatsoever going to be more significant just because the source is available? That's overly cynical, but there's truth in there.
Also remember that very few people give a damn about open source. People who *use* programs sure don't (read: "the 99.9% of Windows users and the 99% of Linux users that are not programmers"). I'm a programmer who works on large (usually commercial) projects. I only looked at the gcc source once, just to see what it was like, and besides being repulsed at the verbosity of the code, it made no difference to me. I'm not going to hack up hundreds of thousands of lines of code without understanding the architecture.
Open source is a small issue, but it's still the path of least resistance. If 99% or more people don't give a hoot about the source, you might as well ship it because it's easier than being paranoid about trade secrets. But there's no reason to endlessly rant about the new economy and sticking it to the man and all that. How boring can you get?
Could the GPL be extended to, say, artistic works?
Why? The GPL is designed by and for computer programmers. You already get the source code for books.
I would say ballpark 6 to 15 years of age is Nintendo time. After that, Playstation and the now-defunct Sega take over for the most part.
This is the popular myth, but it isn't true. Nintendo does own the 6-13 market. After that, there's the usual teenage rebellion when kids think that Nintendo games are too kiddie and want dark and gritty instead. Think of the difference between the old live-action Batman TV show and Batman Beyond. But then after ten years or so that phase ends and 25 year old players think "Hey, that Nintendo stuff really was pretty good after all."
Bottom line: Nintendo isn't just for kids; it's simply not for people in the 14-25 age range.
C'mon this is hardly an amazing revelation. Cars have been getting more and more computerized and difficult for the average Joe to repair for at least the last 15 years. Open the hood on any car from *1990* and you'll find a big black box with wires running out of it. It controls the fuel injection, the engine tests, the digital controls, you name it. You don't want to be messing around with those cars, except maybe to change the oil.
But how is this different than any other electronic consumer device? Nobody hacks up their PC motherboard or DVD player innards. And nobody complains about it either, not even the crazies who think that every corporate manuver is an encroachment on freedom of speech.
Take it from someone who has been programming consoles and home computers for 20 years. Even back in the day, you'd read that the Atari 2600 had only a couple of sprites, then you'd see games with a dozen or more moving objects. The problem is simple: specs are the raw capabilities of what the hardware can do. They're the *starting* point for the programmer. And of course they're meaningless by themselves. Let's use a guitar as an analogy. Imagine that console makers sold guitars:
1. In the spec lists comparing Nintendo's guitar to Sony's guitar, you'd see that one had 6 strings and the other 12. Does this mean you can play twice as many songs on the latter?
2. Sony claims that their guitar is capable of 1000 chords per second. Now what do they mean by that? Is that the limit to how much beating the strings can take? But what if you played 1000 chords per second? Would there be any time for subtleties or even *changing* chords? Of course not, so who cares about that number.
Hardware specs really are like this (for example, 3dfx loved to claim 3 million triangles per second on some of their cards; in reality, programmers only got about 150,000). Fanboys *love* to think that bigger is better and that console X really can have games with 50,000,000 triangles per second, but that's not how it works.
If you expected asc(chr(x)) to be an identity operation, why didn't you just use x?
Duh. He *did* use x, and it didn't work. And the reason it didn't work is because asc(chr(x)) is not an identity.
How you manage to get through any classes is a complete mystery.
Are you saying you agree completely with Joel's comments? I do agree with some of what he has to say but I wouldn't go all they way. Joel seems to be saying code re-writes are crap and it's more important to meet the deadline than get a good program out the door. That's where I take exception.
You can't take exception to his examples. Sometimes a rewrite is good, very often it is bad. There's a newbie tendency to think that rewrites are a silver bullet, which is why there's so much debate about it from the kiddies. Joel backs up his argument with examples. The kiddies just rant.
Like Joel, I have been programming for 20 years, so I'm certainly not trolling just because what I have to say isn't the in thing with the core of the Slashdot audience.
I read Joel's interview yesterday, before it was mentioned here. Good interview, I thought, he makes lots of good points. But the debate about it here has nothing whatsoever to do with what was said there. Many of the comments key off of the word "Microsoft" and so immediately assume that the interview is crap and has something to do with justifying Microsoft's monopoly position (are these people really bots?).
Most of the the comments, though, are taking little bits of advice and twisting them around into mini-lectures about commenting style or programming issues, or they're simply being used as jumping off points for the poster's own spouting. Let me make this perfectly clear:
These people are not professional programmers.
Anyone who has been through the wringer of commercial software development, and not just a few classes and some tiny open source projects, wouldn't be so religious about such trivialities. Real software development is different. It is not a battle between the Evil Bad Commenters and the Perfection of Beautiful Computer Science (or more correctly What My Professor Said in Class Last Semester). That's not how it works at all. All programmers know about commenting, about indentation style, and so on. There's more to developing commercial products, though: deadlines, missed features, last minute requests from the client, strict requirements for supported platforms, and so on. In this kind of environment, commenting style is a very minor issue (not to say it isn't important, but ranting about it is like ranting to an experienced guitarist about your pet music theories--when you barely know how to play guitar at all). A good way of spotting such people is to ask them what they think of "goto." Odds are you'll get all sorts of vitriol about the evils of goto and the benefits of structured programming and how you should never, never, ever, even if your life depended on it use a goto. An experience programmer would shrug and say "sometimes they are useful, sometimes not."
My advice: Learn, practice, work on projects, and over the years you'll become a pro. A college student without significant software engineering experience is not in a position to rant about how commercial development doesn't fit his ideals. The true sign of experienced developers is that they've been through it all and have enough experience that they don't feel the need to rant every chance they get--or at all.
It's not like you could just bring most Linux software over to it without experiencing extreme virtual memory thrashing.
The system is going to need some kind of OS when it comes time for Sony to launch their Internet platform for it.
The PS2 contains a proprietary multitasking OS.
Movie playing WAS a desktop standard, for them.
Silly troll. I've used Amigas. Great machines. Far too underpowered to really decode movies on stock hardware, though. You could hardly call the Amiga a movie-playing machine.
Sigh. No. Go back in time to 1991. Notice those "amiga" computers? Get one, either a CDTV, or an A500 with an A570. Watch Neil armstrong walk on the moon, spooled from CDROM..
Sorry, no. That was a novelty for hardware that almost no one owned (even Amiga owners!). It had no effect whatsoever on getting movie playing to be a desktop standard.