Typically, the "computers will be more powerful than humans!" comments come from newbies, while "computers will get faster but will be distinctly different than brains" is what you hear from people who have been involved in AI for a while.
The tremendous speed increases in computing hardware are often mistaken for something deeper. We're writing larger applications, yes, but they're not necessarily more stable or more advanced in a way that's different than simply adding more features. If anything, we're starting to come to the realization that simpler is better, or at least that having straightforward goals is much better than shooting for extremes.
Take compilers, for example. In the 1970s, two top goals of compiler writers were "incredibly high levels of optimization" and "automatic correction of user errors." Today the goal is more conservative: "go for a straightforward implementation that will have the fewest problems." It isn't worth doing over-the-top optimization if you're trading a 0.5% speed increase for greatly increased code complexity. As a result, more compiler writers have taken a conservative approach. In terms of correcting user errors, it is simpler and more predictable to simply report errors as they are found. Trying to be smart causes more trouble than it is worth ("How can my program be wrong if it compiles and runs?").
Complexity is a limiting factor in grandoise plans for AI.
Great in principle, unimpressive in practice
on
Embracing Insanity
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· Score: 5
This is one of those books and Jon Katz rants that leans heavily on the perceived romantic, underground nature of Open Source and free software, but misses the technical issues greatly. Namely that most of the Great Works these movements are re-hashes of software that could have been used by our parents in the 1970s, leaving great figures in software and computer science wondering why we refuse to advance.
"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
Linus created Linux because he couldn't find a decent UNIX that he could get for his PC. It's not that he thought UNIX should be the future, or that UNIX is the ultimate operating system. Realize this. Somehow we've gotten ourselves all wrapped up in UNIX again, thinking that we're oh so cool, but we shouldn't have to be subjected to this nonsense. I think many technical gurus are similarly horrified that we've started a revolution that's given us exactly what we were trying to get away from (Jamie Zawinski and Rob Pike, for example). Stability, pre-emptive multitasking, memory protection, yes, they are all good things. But this doesn't equate to "Linux over Windows."
The bottom line is that it's a shame Linux and FreeBSD are the crown jewels of Open Source. Sigh.
There's an interesting loophole in the electoral college and is perfectly legal and possible, though it has never happened.
All we're doing is choosing "electorates," people who will select the president for us. We assume that the electorates will vote for who we tell them to, but are not bound by law to do so. So theoretically some of, say, Bush's electorates could decide late in the game that Bush is a putz and cast votes for Gore or Nader.
Note that if Bush does pull off a victory in Florida (which at this point, I suspect is likely), then we will conclusively be able to say that Ralph Nader cost Gore the election.
Oh stop it already. If Nader hadn't been running, then likely one of the other 3rd party candidates would have gotten more press and sucked up about the same number of votes as Nader (or maybe a combination of 3rd party candidates). Many people who voted Reform Party in the past few elections went with the Green Party this time around, but only because that option existed. Leave the idiotic lessons in so-called "strategic voting" to news commentators who dropped out of college because Math 101 was too difficult.
Overall, I'm annoyed at people who treat this like a high school election. This is President we're talking about. We're trying to elect someone who has been proven to be a great statesman or someone who has higher aspirations than simply to be a career politician. It's pretty sad that bozos like Gore and Bush (and especially Bush) managed to end up on the ballot. I'm sure Europe and the rest of the world are laughing heartily.
It's been nothing but bad news for Transmeta lately, two product cancellations in two weeks, poor performance numbers and just a general lack of direction in getting to market.
Be careful here. Getting your news via secondhand web surfing tends to over-expose you to the negative side of things. There's a dangerous anti-Transmeta spin that Slashdot seems to enjoy promoting. Are there other non-Transmeta project cancelations that are not reported? How common is it for a computer maker to announce a project and decided to kill it before shipping? The over analysis of Transmeta is leading to warped views.
Think most people want to program in anything called an assembly language? not I.
But a lot of that comes from brainwashing by college professors and the like. I remember when a newbie co-worker found out I had written a smallish program entirely in assembly language, he couldn't believe it. He had heard "you cannot write code in assembly because it is impossibly difficult" from too many sources.
Assembly is trivial and predictable. There are good reasons to work with at, and there are good reasons not to. Two of the reasons not to are (1) portability, and (2) processors are changing are changing much too quickly. Both of those go away in this case. Something to note about this so-called VP assembly is that it is designed to be simple for the programmer. That makes it very different than writing code for messed-up processors like those in the x86 family, or where the designers deliberately do messy stuff because they don't care how it looks on the back end (e.g. Itanium).
Ever look at the size of the average C compiler? The executable is huge, it involves all sorts of passes from external programs, and runs like a dog. Writing a straightforward and simple C compiler, like Small C (which had the source code published in a thin book over fifteen years ago), isn't too bad. But C hasn't scaled well. It has gotten out of control.
The VP was designed to be simple to translate to real machine code, and have good speed of execution. It's a definite balance. Remember, VP code is translated to machine code on the *fly*. You wouldn't want to have to run a C compiler every time you started an application, would you?
Here's another way of thinking about it. In the mid 1980s, the average PC C compiler fit on a 360K floppy disc and worked in 640K memory. I remember Amiga C compilers than ran fine in 512K on the original 7+ MHz processor. But now you can't get enough processor power to compile. gcc and Visual C++ and CodeWarrior just eat up the cycles like there's no tomorrow. Then there are compilers like Borland's Object Pascal that are hitting 1,000,000 lines per minute on old hardware. Going with the VP over C was a good choice. It gets away from a lot of C baggage that we like to pretend doesn't exist.
Every popular bookstore in my town, including Borders, Barnes & Noble, and a large local store, have copies of SUSE, Mandrake, Caldera, and several versions of RedHat. There's also a huge section of Linux books, from programming to installation to using The Gimp. I'm talking at least ten shelves of distributions and books in Borders, plus a separate display of distributions.
Folks, this is mainstream. If you're worried about the impression that poor installation will give, then you should have been worried about the general mass retail acceptance of Linux that's been going on for several years now. Many of the people I've heard talking about a RedHat box in Borders don't seem like they could install Linux without any help.
Maybe the real question is that why Slashdotters insist that Linux is still an underground movement. It's like someone thinking that The Simpsons is underground--and many people honestly think this. If you can run into a bookstore and buy 50 books on Linux, then it's not esoteric or underground. It makes perfect sense for Wal-Mart to pick up on Linux, because they're into selling what's popular.
(As a footnote, I still think that most of the copies of Linux sold in mass market outlets are for tinkering or seeing what all the fuss is about. I bought a copy of RedHat through CheapBytes a few years ago for the same reason. I had used UNIX for years prior to that, but never installed Linux. My Linux partition has languished, partially because I tired of being in constant upgrade mode.)
Good game design make a good game, not pretty graphics, sorry but Myst and Riven both sucked.
Ah, but those games had much more than graphics. People were pulled into them because of the intriguing world and sense of mystery, similar to books like Clarke's Rendevous with Rama. The graphics weren't really that impressive, considering they were stills.
Re:How I could tell ...
on
Death March
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· Score: 2
When I joined my latest Deathmarch Project, almost every member of the team had this book on their desks.
A friend once pointed out to me that at any company with projects deeply in trouble, you'll find copies of "Code Complete," and "Managing the Software Development Process."
This is one of those celebrations of the irrelevant lampoooned in the recent Bill Gates satire letter. Does having Linux installed on terminals in Japan somehow do something to boost the productivity of Linux users? Does it do anything to promote Linux on the desktop? Why does it matter that they didn't use a one of many lesser-known embedded OSes that already have larger installed bases in these circles? Heck, you could run articles like this about embedded systems every week (QNX used for project XXX), because the embedded market is so huge that 15,000 units is pitifully small. We're one step away from rah-rahing over stories like "Linux-based PC seen in background of new Kim Basinger movie," which is pretty much what the Amiga crowd stooped to in it's declining years (no joke).
Took me a while to get to the part about "satire," but it might as well have been written by Bill G. himself. It's dead on, especially the part about slashdotters having a Mardi Gras every time something insigifnicant happens. When I used to follow the Amiga world, one of the signs of desperation was when people would post about seeing an Amiga in the background of a TV show or movie.
The entire point regarding infighting is maybe the most important of the piece. Open Source vs. Free Software? KDE vs. Gnome? Linux vs. BSD? People who love X vs. people who want it replaced? Perl vs. Python? It's all draining and tiring and makes me want to run as far from this so-called community as much as possible. When a "community" is driving people away, that's bad. I get the feeling that you can't just use Linux, you have to be a wacked out zealot. Heck, even if you don't use Linux for anything, apparently you can still be a wacked out zealot.
Honestly, there are non-technical reasons for using other operating systems.
He's got Slashdotters and Linux zealots nailed down perfectly. Meanwhile, we just blindly make fun of Microsoft. Anyone really serious about Linux needs to print out that email, frame it, and read it daily. Seriously.
Let's see, we have one group of people who knows nothing about operating system design arguing that monilithic kernels are superior because they vaguely remember hearing that Linus Torvalds said that monolithic architectures are better than microkernels.
On the other side, you have a group of people who knows nothing about operating systems arguing that microkernels are superior because of some kind of elegance factor they don't understand, plus they are annoyed that Linux has become successful (or at least that it has gone mainstream).
This is right up there with goofy junior high arguments about the PlayStation 2 vs. Dreamcast that are based on sound bites picked from biased gaming news sites. Most amusing to watch!
CPU power consumption is probably one of the lowest consuming elements of a laptop: those screens use the most
You're overstating your case here. Other bits of hardware use lots of power, like the hard drive and display, but the CPU is still in the top three. And CPU power usage is significant in laptops, which is why Intel keeps retooling their chips for laptop use.
Could we please stop with the blind negativity?
on
Perl 6 Showcase
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· Score: 2
Reminds me of junior high kids fighting of game consoles, you know?
Perl is an interesting language because it comes from a decidedly different philosophy than most languages. Language designers and zealots usually give the highest priority to (1) elegance, (2) ability to build very high levels of abstraction, and sometimes (3) minimalism. Larry has the approach of designing for usefulness. You can get off track very quickly in language design by trying to be too pretty or leaning too hard on pet abstractions. If you get nothing else out of his paper, read the section on common language design mistakes.
Perl is too over the top on some areas, certainly. References and OOP features sure clogged up the language in a weird way. But it looks like some interesting changes for the better are in the queue. And you can always ignore what you don't like or need.
The truth is, technology and politics are no longer separable.
That may be true, but the kind of tech you see people obsessed with all over the web is irrelevant to politics. It seems that the only political issues many netters are interested in are those related to internet taxes and Napster and encryption. It's a weird, twisted out-of-touch view.
Recently posted a story about low end video cards. It turned out that the definition of "low end" in the article was pretty much "anything that's not a GeForce 2." Then there was verbal blasting from people putting down cards like the TNT 2 and ATI Rage 128. Whoa. Top of the line game developers were doing 3D modelling using software rendering all the way up until 1997 or so. Now here we are, three years later, and people are putting down cards that are 10-20x more powerful? Excuse me, but you can't continually be relative about the state of technology. Heck, the Game Boy has surpassed 100 million units and is selling like hotcakes.
It's not so much that geeks have an interest in technology, but that there's a peculiar fixation in what I see as a self-centered backwater swamp that's irrelevant outside such neurotic circles.
Take it from a PS2 programmer: you don't. Polygons get drawn into the frame buffer, yes, but you don't have to allocate vram for each polygon that needs to be drawn. Got it?
You don't store polygons into vram. You store textures. Polygons are drawn by sending commands to the Graphics Synthesizer via DMA. The entire reasoning behind this article is based on a huge technical error.
People releasing harmful microcode. Hmmm. Nope. Don't think I've got to worry about buggy processors . ..I've got an Athlon.
Argh. The uppity nature of Athlon advocates is getting more than a bit annoying. It's not like the Athlon is some brilliant new processor with no ties to Intel, you know?
The PS2 is hard to program for:
1. Because it's new, obviously, and therefore there is a lack of developers with PS2 experience
But is that a reason for a programmer who already knows Windows to never trying writing code for Linux? Of course not. The PS2 is hard to program for, yes, but that's true of anything new. Wanna-be-techies are using the "hard to program" issue as fuel against the PS2, which is misplaced.
A guitar is hard to play, too, if you don't know how to play guitar. I submit this as evidence that there will never be any good guitar players.
They were all doing that before. The net just changes their audience.
Maybe, but it took a lot more guts to break into an Apple II user group meeting, in person, just to argue that the Amiga was more powerful. Similarly, who would verbally assault a Windows user in a McDonalds? You see this all the time on the web, but in real life it's just dumb.
The net gives an opportunity for the messed-up weirdos of the world to show their faces in "public." Think about it: What kind of person does it take to violently argue the superiority of the Dreamcast over the PS2? Or KDE vs. Gnome? I'm not talking about technical nitpicking, but hardcore goofiness like posting phony (negative) reviews of KDE in order to boost Gnome, or posting slams at Linux every time a BSD story is posted. That kind of behavior is seriously messed up.
Slashdot Mirror
Typically, the "computers will be more powerful than humans!" comments come from newbies, while "computers will get faster but will be distinctly different than brains" is what you hear from people who have been involved in AI for a while.
The tremendous speed increases in computing hardware are often mistaken for something deeper. We're writing larger applications, yes, but they're not necessarily more stable or more advanced in a way that's different than simply adding more features. If anything, we're starting to come to the realization that simpler is better, or at least that having straightforward goals is much better than shooting for extremes.
Take compilers, for example. In the 1970s, two top goals of compiler writers were "incredibly high levels of optimization" and "automatic correction of user errors." Today the goal is more conservative: "go for a straightforward implementation that will have the fewest problems." It isn't worth doing over-the-top optimization if you're trading a 0.5% speed increase for greatly increased code complexity. As a result, more compiler writers have taken a conservative approach. In terms of correcting user errors, it is simpler and more predictable to simply report errors as they are found. Trying to be smart causes more trouble than it is worth ("How can my program be wrong if it compiles and runs?").
Complexity is a limiting factor in grandoise plans for AI.
This is one of those books and Jon Katz rants that leans heavily on the perceived romantic, underground nature of Open Source and free software, but misses the technical issues greatly. Namely that most of the Great Works these movements are re-hashes of software that could have been used by our parents in the 1970s, leaving great figures in software and computer science wondering why we refuse to advance.
"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
Linus created Linux because he couldn't find a decent UNIX that he could get for his PC. It's not that he thought UNIX should be the future, or that UNIX is the ultimate operating system. Realize this. Somehow we've gotten ourselves all wrapped up in UNIX again, thinking that we're oh so cool, but we shouldn't have to be subjected to this nonsense. I think many technical gurus are similarly horrified that we've started a revolution that's given us exactly what we were trying to get away from (Jamie Zawinski and Rob Pike, for example). Stability, pre-emptive multitasking, memory protection, yes, they are all good things. But this doesn't equate to "Linux over Windows."
The bottom line is that it's a shame Linux and FreeBSD are the crown jewels of Open Source. Sigh.
Pretty much what you'd expect from a review of Volkswagens written by an executive at Chrysler.
There's an interesting loophole in the electoral college and is perfectly legal and possible, though it has never happened.
All we're doing is choosing "electorates," people who will select the president for us. We assume that the electorates will vote for who we tell them to, but are not bound by law to do so. So theoretically some of, say, Bush's electorates could decide late in the game that Bush is a putz and cast votes for Gore or Nader.
Note that if Bush does pull off a victory in Florida (which at this point, I suspect is likely), then we will conclusively be able to say that Ralph Nader cost Gore the election.
Oh stop it already. If Nader hadn't been running, then likely one of the other 3rd party candidates would have gotten more press and sucked up about the same number of votes as Nader (or maybe a combination of 3rd party candidates). Many people who voted Reform Party in the past few elections went with the Green Party this time around, but only because that option existed. Leave the idiotic lessons in so-called "strategic voting" to news commentators who dropped out of college because Math 101 was too difficult.
Overall, I'm annoyed at people who treat this like a high school election. This is President we're talking about. We're trying to elect someone who has been proven to be a great statesman or someone who has higher aspirations than simply to be a career politician. It's pretty sad that bozos like Gore and Bush (and especially Bush) managed to end up on the ballot. I'm sure Europe and the rest of the world are laughing heartily.
It's been nothing but bad news for Transmeta lately, two product cancellations in two weeks, poor performance numbers and just a general lack of direction in getting to market.
Be careful here. Getting your news via secondhand web surfing tends to over-expose you to the negative side of things. There's a dangerous anti-Transmeta spin that Slashdot seems to enjoy promoting. Are there other non-Transmeta project cancelations that are not reported? How common is it for a computer maker to announce a project and decided to kill it before shipping? The over analysis of Transmeta is leading to warped views.
Think most people want to program in anything called an assembly language? not I.
But a lot of that comes from brainwashing by college professors and the like. I remember when a newbie co-worker found out I had written a smallish program entirely in assembly language, he couldn't believe it. He had heard "you cannot write code in assembly because it is impossibly difficult" from too many sources.
Assembly is trivial and predictable. There are good reasons to work with at, and there are good reasons not to. Two of the reasons not to are (1) portability, and (2) processors are changing are changing much too quickly. Both of those go away in this case. Something to note about this so-called VP assembly is that it is designed to be simple for the programmer. That makes it very different than writing code for messed-up processors like those in the x86 family, or where the designers deliberately do messy stuff because they don't care how it looks on the back end (e.g. Itanium).
Ever look at the size of the average C compiler? The executable is huge, it involves all sorts of passes from external programs, and runs like a dog. Writing a straightforward and simple C compiler, like Small C (which had the source code published in a thin book over fifteen years ago), isn't too bad. But C hasn't scaled well. It has gotten out of control.
The VP was designed to be simple to translate to real machine code, and have good speed of execution. It's a definite balance. Remember, VP code is translated to machine code on the *fly*. You wouldn't want to have to run a C compiler every time you started an application, would you?
Here's another way of thinking about it. In the mid 1980s, the average PC C compiler fit on a 360K floppy disc and worked in 640K memory. I remember Amiga C compilers than ran fine in 512K on the original 7+ MHz processor. But now you can't get enough processor power to compile. gcc and Visual C++ and CodeWarrior just eat up the cycles like there's no tomorrow. Then there are compilers like Borland's Object Pascal that are hitting 1,000,000 lines per minute on old hardware. Going with the VP over C was a good choice. It gets away from a lot of C baggage that we like to pretend doesn't exist.
Every popular bookstore in my town, including Borders, Barnes & Noble, and a large local store, have copies of SUSE, Mandrake, Caldera, and several versions of RedHat. There's also a huge section of Linux books, from programming to installation to using The Gimp. I'm talking at least ten shelves of distributions and books in Borders, plus a separate display of distributions.
Folks, this is mainstream. If you're worried about the impression that poor installation will give, then you should have been worried about the general mass retail acceptance of Linux that's been going on for several years now. Many of the people I've heard talking about a RedHat box in Borders don't seem like they could install Linux without any help.
Maybe the real question is that why Slashdotters insist that Linux is still an underground movement. It's like someone thinking that The Simpsons is underground--and many people honestly think this. If you can run into a bookstore and buy 50 books on Linux, then it's not esoteric or underground. It makes perfect sense for Wal-Mart to pick up on Linux, because they're into selling what's popular.
(As a footnote, I still think that most of the copies of Linux sold in mass market outlets are for tinkering or seeing what all the fuss is about. I bought a copy of RedHat through CheapBytes a few years ago for the same reason. I had used UNIX for years prior to that, but never installed Linux. My Linux partition has languished, partially because I tired of being in constant upgrade mode.)
Good game design make a good game, not pretty graphics, sorry but Myst and Riven both sucked.
Ah, but those games had much more than graphics. People were pulled into them because of the intriguing world and sense of mystery, similar to books like Clarke's Rendevous with Rama. The graphics weren't really that impressive, considering they were stills.
When I joined my latest Deathmarch Project, almost every member of the team had this book on their desks.
A friend once pointed out to me that at any company with projects deeply in trouble, you'll find copies of "Code Complete," and "Managing the Software Development Process."
This is one of those celebrations of the irrelevant lampoooned in the recent Bill Gates satire letter. Does having Linux installed on terminals in Japan somehow do something to boost the productivity of Linux users? Does it do anything to promote Linux on the desktop? Why does it matter that they didn't use a one of many lesser-known embedded OSes that already have larger installed bases in these circles? Heck, you could run articles like this about embedded systems every week (QNX used for project XXX), because the embedded market is so huge that 15,000 units is pitifully small. We're one step away from rah-rahing over stories like "Linux-based PC seen in background of new Kim Basinger movie," which is pretty much what the Amiga crowd stooped to in it's declining years (no joke).
Took me a while to get to the part about "satire," but it might as well have been written by Bill G. himself. It's dead on, especially the part about slashdotters having a Mardi Gras every time something insigifnicant happens. When I used to follow the Amiga world, one of the signs of desperation was when people would post about seeing an Amiga in the background of a TV show or movie.
The entire point regarding infighting is maybe the most important of the piece. Open Source vs. Free Software? KDE vs. Gnome? Linux vs. BSD? People who love X vs. people who want it replaced? Perl vs. Python? It's all draining and tiring and makes me want to run as far from this so-called community as much as possible. When a "community" is driving people away, that's bad. I get the feeling that you can't just use Linux, you have to be a wacked out zealot. Heck, even if you don't use Linux for anything, apparently you can still be a wacked out zealot.
Honestly, there are non-technical reasons for using other operating systems.
He's got Slashdotters and Linux zealots nailed down perfectly. Meanwhile, we just blindly make fun of Microsoft. Anyone really serious about Linux needs to print out that email, frame it, and read it daily. Seriously.
Let's see, we have one group of people who knows nothing about operating system design arguing that monilithic kernels are superior because they vaguely remember hearing that Linus Torvalds said that monolithic architectures are better than microkernels.
On the other side, you have a group of people who knows nothing about operating systems arguing that microkernels are superior because of some kind of elegance factor they don't understand, plus they are annoyed that Linux has become successful (or at least that it has gone mainstream).
This is right up there with goofy junior high arguments about the PlayStation 2 vs. Dreamcast that are based on sound bites picked from biased gaming news sites. Most amusing to watch!
CPU power consumption is probably one of the lowest consuming elements of a laptop: those screens use the most
You're overstating your case here. Other bits of hardware use lots of power, like the hard drive and display, but the CPU is still in the top three. And CPU power usage is significant in laptops, which is why Intel keeps retooling their chips for laptop use.
Reminds me of junior high kids fighting of game consoles, you know?
Perl is an interesting language because it comes from a decidedly different philosophy than most languages. Language designers and zealots usually give the highest priority to (1) elegance, (2) ability to build very high levels of abstraction, and sometimes (3) minimalism. Larry has the approach of designing for usefulness. You can get off track very quickly in language design by trying to be too pretty or leaning too hard on pet abstractions. If you get nothing else out of his paper, read the section on common language design mistakes.
Perl is too over the top on some areas, certainly. References and OOP features sure clogged up the language in a weird way. But it looks like some interesting changes for the better are in the queue. And you can always ignore what you don't like or need.
The truth is, technology and politics are no longer separable.
That may be true, but the kind of tech you see people obsessed with all over the web is irrelevant to politics. It seems that the only political issues many netters are interested in are those related to internet taxes and Napster and encryption. It's a weird, twisted out-of-touch view.
Recently posted a story about low end video cards. It turned out that the definition of "low end" in the article was pretty much "anything that's not a GeForce 2." Then there was verbal blasting from people putting down cards like the TNT 2 and ATI Rage 128. Whoa. Top of the line game developers were doing 3D modelling using software rendering all the way up until 1997 or so. Now here we are, three years later, and people are putting down cards that are 10-20x more powerful? Excuse me, but you can't continually be relative about the state of technology. Heck, the Game Boy has surpassed 100 million units and is selling like hotcakes.
It's not so much that geeks have an interest in technology, but that there's a peculiar fixation in what I see as a self-centered backwater swamp that's irrelevant outside such neurotic circles.
>You don't store polygons into vram.
Yes you do
Take it from a PS2 programmer: you don't. Polygons get drawn into the frame buffer, yes, but you don't have to allocate vram for each polygon that needs to be drawn. Got it?
You don't store polygons into vram. You store textures. Polygons are drawn by sending commands to the Graphics Synthesizer via DMA. The entire reasoning behind this article is based on a huge technical error.
People releasing harmful microcode. Hmmm. Nope. Don't think I've got to worry about buggy processors . . .I've got an Athlon.
Argh. The uppity nature of Athlon advocates is getting more than a bit annoying. It's not like the Athlon is some brilliant new processor with no ties to Intel, you know?
When is the last time a game console got this much attention on it's launch. This is strange.
How about "every console for the last ten years"?
The PS2 is hard to program for:
1. Because it's new, obviously, and therefore there is a lack of developers with PS2 experience
But is that a reason for a programmer who already knows Windows to never trying writing code for Linux? Of course not. The PS2 is hard to program for, yes, but that's true of anything new. Wanna-be-techies are using the "hard to program" issue as fuel against the PS2, which is misplaced.
A guitar is hard to play, too, if you don't know how to play guitar. I submit this as evidence that there will never be any good guitar players.
They were all doing that before. The net just changes their audience.
Maybe, but it took a lot more guts to break into an Apple II user group meeting, in person, just to argue that the Amiga was more powerful. Similarly, who would verbally assault a Windows user in a McDonalds? You see this all the time on the web, but in real life it's just dumb.
The net gives an opportunity for the messed-up weirdos of the world to show their faces in "public." Think about it: What kind of person does it take to violently argue the superiority of the Dreamcast over the PS2? Or KDE vs. Gnome? I'm not talking about technical nitpicking, but hardcore goofiness like posting phony (negative) reviews of KDE in order to boost Gnome, or posting slams at Linux every time a BSD story is posted. That kind of behavior is seriously messed up.