It's always interesting see the different reactions to hardware on Slashdot.
Dreamcast: Mostly gushing praise, even though Sega is a huge corporation (and Slashdotters in general seem to be anti-corporate, at least in theory).
Mac: 80% flamingly negative, 20% positive. OS X is changing this somewhat, though it seems most people don't want UNIX being used by people who aren't geeks.
iPod: High praise, though some people hate it because it's from Apple.
iPaq: Generally positive.
PS2: Brings out lots of anti-console rhetoric; negative overall.
Xbox: 60% positive, generally from people who dislike Sony and Nintendo and want a console to be more computer-like. This is even though Microsoft is usually hated otherwise.
Transmeta: 90% negative, though often for no real reason.
Intel: Intel suxors, down with Intel!
AMD: We'll make another exception to the "multi-billion dollar corporations are evil" rule, because we like those inexpensive processors.
Amiga: Misty-eyed nostalgia, including some people who incorrectly think that the Amiga sported the world's first multitasking OS. About 10% of the responders are still fighting the "Amiga is better than ____" battle, like Japanese sailors on small islands in the 1950s who didn't know WWII was over.
At least at the rate things are currently moving. You still can't rely on OpenGL 1.2 on any system, as drivers are few and far between.
The problem is that DirectX is getting very complex, and OpenGL is getting very complex. It has been hard enough for video card makers to get stable drivers of any kind in the past. This is only going to make it much worse. I can see cutting OpenGL support to be a common decision.
SDL is a 2D frame buffer and blitting library for the most part (to be pedantic, it also includes input, CD, and minimal sound libraries). The 3D side of SDL is just OpenGL. So if OpenGL goes away, so do 3D graphics in SDL.
without having to use a closed-source business model is to sell support and service contracts for the software
And then Slashdotters will moan and whine about how it isn't really free software, because the support isn't free. I know, I know, ESR and pals like to claim that this is the way to go, but in all honesty (1) as mentioned, people will whine about the cost of support (especially those people who don't actually use the software; (2) most companies don't want or need service contracts, especially for mature software; (3) service contracts only make sense for certain types of software.
And I think that's a pretty decent description for Windows: "Good enough".]
In all seriousness, it's a pretty good description of Linux too. Most people who have been in computing for twenty or more years are pretty shocked that we're still looking at UNIX as the great hope for the future.
Sure, there are some smaller and lesser known open source programs out there. Heck, lots of little solitaire games and remakes of Breakout (Arkanoid, for you young 'uns) are released under the GPL. But those are not the programs that give open source it's high profile. We're talking about:
1. Perl & Python
2. Apache
3. the Linux kernel
4. gcc
5. KDE
6. X
There are certainly commercial interests behind most of these, in that some people--not all--have full time jobs working on them. gcc especially wouldn't be anywhere near where it is today without the input of a number of large companies.
It's a nebulous term trying to roll lightweight programming jobs under one umbrella: CGI scripting, website Javascript, "enterprise" applications written in Visual Basic and Delphi, SQL and other database interfacing, etc.
I can understand that jobs involving the above are a lot less techie and stable than classic programming work. In the latter, the programmers are the key (think of embedded systems) where in the former you're just a tool of management.
Look at it! the hard drive even has a red to one IDE cable for gosh sakes, its a PC that looks like a console, what a clever company though, get a pc, package it as a console and call it the most advanced console ever (altho they did ignore the diffirence between RISC and CISC chips)
It's a console because it has fixed specs. That makes all the difference in the world. Writing technology-pushing 3D games on the PC is hell, because even simple things can fail between different driver versions on the same card.
Still I don't understand why Microsoft has decided to use a "customized PC" instead of a real console architecture designed from the ground up: they have the engineering (if they dont't have it, they can buy it;-]) , they have the resources, they have the money for creating something really new, but they don't...
Sony spend billions designing the PS2 hardware, and they had lots of experience. Microsoft wisely decided to avoid that expense.
I'm in a class learning it now. Boy does it seem usless
It has a different problem domain. APL is heavily used in statistical and financial analysis and Perl is used for text file processing. You really can't beat APL when you need to do math work, especially math work involving huge sets of data.
If it was strictly about polygons and mip-mapping, then the PS1 would not have been competition for the N64, because PS1 games all looked like shit.
Even that isn't true. There are PS1 games that look as almost good as PC games: Crash Bandicoot 3, Crash Team Racing, Spyro the Dragon. Sure they don't look _quite_ as good as PC games, but the fact that they never ever crash or have driver problems is enough reason to buy a PS1 for $99.
Um, in some geek circles Star Trek is the epitome of science fiction.
True. What's funny is that *every* award winning science fiction author dislikes Star Trek with a passion, because it is just so bloody *terrible* on so many levels.
How are they wasting their time? Does making games you don't like invalidate the effort or skill that went into creating them?
Or, more appropriately, what other sort of RPG would you expect someone to make..
The concept of an RPG is fine, but what people create in that genre is banal. They're creating the equivalent of what Star Trek is to science fiction.
try doing a search on home made rpgs or games on the net and you might be suprised.
If anything it's depressing that the homebrew crowd has wasted so much time making hackneyed medieval and science fiction role playing games. One would expect grassroots movements to go off in wonderful new directions.
1. You don't need to understand that whole program structure in order to fix a bug. you look at pieces of it that's causing problems. As long as the code is reasonably documented and well interfaced within, it shouldn't be too hard to find that piece.
And I'm sure you run a full regression test suite after making such a change, right? Is there even such a suite for programs other than gcc? Changes made without thorough testing are scary to the highest degree.
People should have access to the Internet and its products anyway, taxing it would only put another stumbling block between the public and the Internet.
All great in principle, but then when you think about the huge amount of networking resources yo use when you download gigabytes of porn a month from a $19.95 AOL account, then maybe, just maybe, you're use much more of the "public" network than you should be. That network is shared by all, and its resources are both finite and expensive. Have you ever seen the amount of hardware required for a single telephone exchange (i.e. digital switching center)?
This is a GOOD thing. The majority of people should not be let near a programming language as they don't have the ability to think logically and break down problems into their components in order to write functioning programs.
The GNOME, KDE, Apache, and Linux projects seem to be doing well despite most of their users not being programmers.
Yes, yes, yes, but you both missed the point. Someone was complaining because he didn't get much feedback on his code; only a few people submitted improvements. The point is that this is to be expected, because the great majority of computer users are not programmers.
OSS advocates routinely bring up points about how millions of eyes look for bugs, and how if you don't like something then you can just fix it. Those points are bogus, because they are assuming that the intended audience is not only made up of programmers, but that those programmers are bored enough that they decide to going spelunking around hundreds of thousands of lines of code they don't understand. And that they have the gall to think they can make seat of the pants fixes without a clear picture of the overall architecture.
A GPL-ed open source app [nographer.com] that I wrote has so far had >1200 downloads in 2 months, yet only six people have fed anything back (five of them were complementary). Admittedly this is on Windows, where maybe there are cultural differences.
It's not just Windows. The big secret of Open Source, the one Eric Raymond doesn't want to talk about, is that most users, even of Linux, are not programmers. With that in mind, most of the OSS philosophy is set on its ear.
Re:too bad it was going to be a big leap forward
on
XBox Released
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
being a big cross-breed between RTS and FPS.. but MS required bungie to orient it more toward the X-Box.
oh well:P yet another possibly great thing MS managed to stomp into the ground.
I'm not convinced. Fanboys deified Bungie and Halo years before anyone had ever seen the game. I think this is just yet another case of too much hype and people willingly buying into it. (And everyone ignoring that it is much, much easier for a game developer to *claim* they will do something than to actually deliver.)
Halo has been used a rallying cry by various factions, and those factions have changed dramatically over the course of its development. At first the Mac owners were screaming about Halo, because Bungie started as a Mac company. Then Windows users were using it as an example of game that you needed a PC for, that just couldn't be done on a console. Then Xbox fans were using it as a way of putting down the PS2. Of course none of these groups ever played the game, and in the end it turned out to be much less than everyone had built it up to be.
A PS2 with different games
on
XBox Released
·
· Score: 4, Troll
I have it. I've played it. The bottom line at the moment is: *shrug*. It's extremely difficult to see how this is any different than a PlayStation 2. If you're expecting something miles beyond the PS2, then you'll be disappointed. From my point of view it's a PS2 with different games.
Halo is Yet Another First Person Shooter. I was expecting something revolutionary. Don't get me wrong, it's fun just like Half-Life and friends are fun, but it's simply other game of that style. It isn't a great leap forward. Arguably it isn't any leap forward.
When I saw the title I thought this was a review of William Gibson's great book of the same title
Gibson's book is one of the very few science fiction books I stopped reading mid-stream because it was bloody *awful*. What a terrible, stilted writing style.
Wizardry was one of the original computer RPGs, but my hopes for this latest title are very, very low, almost to the point of not caring.
The Ultima games--kindred spirits to the Wizardry games--had the same spark to them, way back when. But it has been shocking just how much the series has degenerated. Ultima VII was so horribly bad that Richard Garriott publicly apologized for it. It was a Mario-style game in the guise of Ultima. Ultima IX was an embarassment to everyone involved. In the process of making the game fully 3D everything else was sacrificed. When the demo first shipped, it was laughably bad. Why did they even bother?
First, "Marshall Brain" seems to tacitly assume that all the WWW should do is make money for corporations.
The web is all about money, like it or not. All the servers, bandwidth, telecom infrastructure, it isn't free. This is one of the reasons that $40 a month cable modem access has been failing. Network access is so expensive that $40 barely covers expenses. Ever look at the monthly price of a T1 (hint: it is over $1000)? There's a reason the cost is so high.
What happens right now is that some guy or girl somewhere puts up an interesting web page about a hobby or other interest. It costs $100 a year to run. Then it gets Slashdotted, so to speak, by a mention in a magazine, and they get hit with a $500 bandwidth charge. They close down the site and have no incentive to ever try it again. For a while during the dot-com boom the site may have been picked up by a company--which is what happened to Slashdot--but that doesn't happen any more.
What is needed is a way to *balance* the web so that you don't need to be a corporation in order to run a popular site.
I dunno. Maybe it's just me. Maybe it's because I'm older than 12. But do gorwn adults actually enjoy playing all of the damned Mario/Luigi, and Pokemon games that are produced for Nintendo? It seems like all of the games are designed for little kids.
Well duh. That's Nintendo's market, and it always has been. More specifically, Nintendo's market is everyone *except* for teenagers going through the "I don't want none of that kiddie stuff; I want dark and edgy with lots of gore" phase. It is always amusing to hear kids who spent years playing Nintendo games suddely start berating them when they turn 14. Then when they hit 25 or so they realize "Hey, those games really *were* pretty fun after all."
Games on the PC are easy to make - anyone with a graphics toolkit and a few thousand dollars can make one, and just because you have big names behind it (John Romero) doesn't mean it'll be any good (Daikatana).
The average budget for a PC game is well over a million dollars. Probably over two million. Games like Daikatana, games that disappoint horribly, cost *millions* to make. So you're wrong on this point.
Slashdot Mirror
It's always interesting see the different reactions to hardware on Slashdot.
Dreamcast: Mostly gushing praise, even though Sega is a huge corporation (and Slashdotters in general seem to be anti-corporate, at least in theory).
Mac: 80% flamingly negative, 20% positive. OS X is changing this somewhat, though it seems most people don't want UNIX being used by people who aren't geeks.
iPod: High praise, though some people hate it because it's from Apple.
iPaq: Generally positive.
PS2: Brings out lots of anti-console rhetoric; negative overall.
Xbox: 60% positive, generally from people who dislike Sony and Nintendo and want a console to be more computer-like. This is even though Microsoft is usually hated otherwise.
Transmeta: 90% negative, though often for no real reason.
Intel: Intel suxors, down with Intel!
AMD: We'll make another exception to the "multi-billion dollar corporations are evil" rule, because we like those inexpensive processors.
Amiga: Misty-eyed nostalgia, including some people who incorrectly think that the Amiga sported the world's first multitasking OS. About 10% of the responders are still fighting the "Amiga is better than ____" battle, like Japanese sailors on small islands in the 1950s who didn't know WWII was over.
At least at the rate things are currently moving. You still can't rely on OpenGL 1.2 on any system, as drivers are few and far between.
The problem is that DirectX is getting very complex, and OpenGL is getting very complex. It has been hard enough for video card makers to get stable drivers of any kind in the past. This is only going to make it much worse. I can see cutting OpenGL support to be a common decision.
Something like SDL you mean?
SDL is a 2D frame buffer and blitting library for the most part (to be pedantic, it also includes input, CD, and minimal sound libraries). The 3D side of SDL is just OpenGL. So if OpenGL goes away, so do 3D graphics in SDL.
without having to use a closed-source business model is to sell support and service contracts for the software
And then Slashdotters will moan and whine about how it isn't really free software, because the support isn't free. I know, I know, ESR and pals like to claim that this is the way to go, but in all honesty (1) as mentioned, people will whine about the cost of support (especially those people who don't actually use the software; (2) most companies don't want or need service contracts, especially for mature software; (3) service contracts only make sense for certain types of software.
And I think that's a pretty decent description for Windows: "Good enough".]
In all seriousness, it's a pretty good description of Linux too. Most people who have been in computing for twenty or more years are pretty shocked that we're still looking at UNIX as the great hope for the future.
Sure, there are some smaller and lesser known open source programs out there. Heck, lots of little solitaire games and remakes of Breakout (Arkanoid, for you young 'uns) are released under the GPL. But those are not the programs that give open source it's high profile. We're talking about:
1. Perl & Python
2. Apache
3. the Linux kernel
4. gcc
5. KDE
6. X
There are certainly commercial interests behind most of these, in that some people--not all--have full time jobs working on them. gcc especially wouldn't be anywhere near where it is today without the input of a number of large companies.
It's a nebulous term trying to roll lightweight programming jobs under one umbrella: CGI scripting, website Javascript, "enterprise" applications written in Visual Basic and Delphi, SQL and other database interfacing, etc.
I can understand that jobs involving the above are a lot less techie and stable than classic programming work. In the latter, the programmers are the key (think of embedded systems) where in the former you're just a tool of management.
Look at it! the hard drive even has a red to one IDE cable for gosh sakes, its a PC that looks like a console, what a clever company though, get a pc, package it as a console and call it the most advanced console ever (altho they did ignore the diffirence between RISC and CISC chips)
It's a console because it has fixed specs. That makes all the difference in the world. Writing technology-pushing 3D games on the PC is hell, because even simple things can fail between different driver versions on the same card.
Still I don't understand why Microsoft has decided to use a "customized PC" instead of a real console architecture designed from the ground up: they have the engineering (if they dont't have it, they can buy it ;-]) , they have the resources, they have the money for creating something really new, but they don't...
Sony spend billions designing the PS2 hardware, and they had lots of experience. Microsoft wisely decided to avoid that expense.
I'm in a class learning it now. Boy does it seem usless
It has a different problem domain. APL is heavily used in statistical and financial analysis and Perl is used for text file processing. You really can't beat APL when you need to do math work, especially math work involving huge sets of data.
If it was strictly about polygons and mip-mapping, then the PS1 would not have been competition for the N64, because PS1 games all looked like shit.
Even that isn't true. There are PS1 games that look as almost good as PC games: Crash Bandicoot 3, Crash Team Racing, Spyro the Dragon. Sure they don't look _quite_ as good as PC games, but the fact that they never ever crash or have driver problems is enough reason to buy a PS1 for $99.
Um, in some geek circles Star Trek is the epitome of science fiction.
True. What's funny is that *every* award winning science fiction author dislikes Star Trek with a passion, because it is just so bloody *terrible* on so many levels.
How are they wasting their time? Does making games you don't like invalidate the effort or skill that went into creating them?
Or, more appropriately, what other sort of RPG would you expect someone to make..
The concept of an RPG is fine, but what people create in that genre is banal. They're creating the equivalent of what Star Trek is to science fiction.
try doing a search on home made rpgs or games on the net and you might be suprised.
If anything it's depressing that the homebrew crowd has wasted so much time making hackneyed medieval and science fiction role playing games. One would expect grassroots movements to go off in wonderful new directions.
1. You don't need to understand that whole program structure in order to fix a bug. you look at pieces of it that's causing problems. As long as the code is reasonably documented and well interfaced within, it shouldn't be too hard to find that piece.
And I'm sure you run a full regression test suite after making such a change, right? Is there even such a suite for programs other than gcc? Changes made without thorough testing are scary to the highest degree.
People should have access to the Internet and its products anyway, taxing it would only put another stumbling block between the public and the Internet.
All great in principle, but then when you think about the huge amount of networking resources yo use when you download gigabytes of porn a month from a $19.95 AOL account, then maybe, just maybe, you're use much more of the "public" network than you should be. That network is shared by all, and its resources are both finite and expensive. Have you ever seen the amount of hardware required for a single telephone exchange (i.e. digital switching center)?
This is a GOOD thing. The majority of people should not be let near a programming language as they don't have the ability to think logically and break down problems into their components in order to write functioning programs.
The GNOME, KDE, Apache, and Linux projects seem to be doing well despite most of their users not being programmers.
Yes, yes, yes, but you both missed the point. Someone was complaining because he didn't get much feedback on his code; only a few people submitted improvements. The point is that this is to be expected, because the great majority of computer users are not programmers.
OSS advocates routinely bring up points about how millions of eyes look for bugs, and how if you don't like something then you can just fix it. Those points are bogus, because they are assuming that the intended audience is not only made up of programmers, but that those programmers are bored enough that they decide to going spelunking around hundreds of thousands of lines of code they don't understand. And that they have the gall to think they can make seat of the pants fixes without a clear picture of the overall architecture.
A GPL-ed open source app [nographer.com] that I wrote has so far had >1200 downloads in 2 months, yet only six people have fed anything back (five of them were complementary). Admittedly this is on Windows, where maybe there are cultural differences.
It's not just Windows. The big secret of Open Source, the one Eric Raymond doesn't want to talk about, is that most users, even of Linux, are not programmers. With that in mind, most of the OSS philosophy is set on its ear.
being a big cross-breed between RTS and FPS.. but MS required bungie to orient it more toward the X-Box. :P yet another possibly great thing MS managed to stomp into the ground.
oh well
I'm not convinced. Fanboys deified Bungie and Halo years before anyone had ever seen the game. I think this is just yet another case of too much hype and people willingly buying into it. (And everyone ignoring that it is much, much easier for a game developer to *claim* they will do something than to actually deliver.)
Halo has been used a rallying cry by various factions, and those factions have changed dramatically over the course of its development. At first the Mac owners were screaming about Halo, because Bungie started as a Mac company. Then Windows users were using it as an example of game that you needed a PC for, that just couldn't be done on a console. Then Xbox fans were using it as a way of putting down the PS2. Of course none of these groups ever played the game, and in the end it turned out to be much less than everyone had built it up to be.
I have it. I've played it. The bottom line at the moment is: *shrug*. It's extremely difficult to see how this is any different than a PlayStation 2. If you're expecting something miles beyond the PS2, then you'll be disappointed. From my point of view it's a PS2 with different games.
Halo is Yet Another First Person Shooter. I was expecting something revolutionary. Don't get me wrong, it's fun just like Half-Life and friends are fun, but it's simply other game of that style. It isn't a great leap forward. Arguably it isn't any leap forward.
When I saw the title I thought this was a review of William Gibson's great book of the same title
Gibson's book is one of the very few science fiction books I stopped reading mid-stream because it was bloody *awful*. What a terrible, stilted writing style.
Wizardry was one of the original computer RPGs, but my hopes for this latest title are very, very low, almost to the point of not caring.
The Ultima games--kindred spirits to the Wizardry games--had the same spark to them, way back when. But it has been shocking just how much the series has degenerated. Ultima VII was so horribly bad that Richard Garriott publicly apologized for it. It was a Mario-style game in the guise of Ultima. Ultima IX was an embarassment to everyone involved. In the process of making the game fully 3D everything else was sacrificed. When the demo first shipped, it was laughably bad. Why did they even bother?
First, "Marshall Brain" seems to tacitly assume that all the WWW should do is make money for corporations.
The web is all about money, like it or not. All the servers, bandwidth, telecom infrastructure, it isn't free. This is one of the reasons that $40 a month cable modem access has been failing. Network access is so expensive that $40 barely covers expenses. Ever look at the monthly price of a T1 (hint: it is over $1000)? There's a reason the cost is so high.
What happens right now is that some guy or girl somewhere puts up an interesting web page about a hobby or other interest. It costs $100 a year to run. Then it gets Slashdotted, so to speak, by a mention in a magazine, and they get hit with a $500 bandwidth charge. They close down the site and have no incentive to ever try it again. For a while during the dot-com boom the site may have been picked up by a company--which is what happened to Slashdot--but that doesn't happen any more.
What is needed is a way to *balance* the web so that you don't need to be a corporation in order to run a popular site.
I dunno. Maybe it's just me. Maybe it's because I'm older than 12. But do gorwn adults actually enjoy playing all of the damned Mario/Luigi, and Pokemon games that are produced for Nintendo? It seems like all of the games are designed for little kids.
Well duh. That's Nintendo's market, and it always has been. More specifically, Nintendo's market is everyone *except* for teenagers going through the "I don't want none of that kiddie stuff; I want dark and edgy with lots of gore" phase. It is always amusing to hear kids who spent years playing Nintendo games suddely start berating them when they turn 14. Then when they hit 25 or so they realize "Hey, those games really *were* pretty fun after all."
I agree with your post except for this point:
Games on the PC are easy to make - anyone with a graphics toolkit and a few thousand dollars can make one, and just because you have big names behind it (John Romero) doesn't mean it'll be any good (Daikatana).
The average budget for a PC game is well over a million dollars. Probably over two million. Games like Daikatana, games that disappoint horribly, cost *millions* to make. So you're wrong on this point.