I have one question here: will software really need more and more CPU performance as time goes by?
I mean, as the article says, sure, servers and stuff will definitely put good use to the increase in performance, but what about good ol' Joe Sixpack using Excel at his office? I mean, besides from cranking SETI@home units faster, is there really such a need for faster processors at home / office?
In all honestly, I stopped noticing any speed differences around 200MHz or so. I used a 200MHz Pentium running Win NT for a while at work, then I went to a 400MHz Pentium II. Couldn't tell the difference at all.
It is getting to where rewriting software and/or changing your approach are much more valuable than processor pissing contests. When I compile code with Visual C++ it seems to take forever, given a large project. If I use Object Pascal instead, the compilation time drops by 2-3 orders of magnitude. That's a much bigger win than increasing my machine to a 2GHz processor.
The key here is to filter Dumb Porn (tm). Most of the porn on the web can be pegged for it's blatant stupidity. Getting rid of that stuff goes a long way toward the making the internet more palatable. It's like all the MAKE MONEY FAST! spam that people set up filters to get rid of. Hilarious phrases are popular with the owners of these kind of sites: "cum-soaked," "cum sucking bitches," "fuck my slit," etc. Really stupid stuff that's almost always associated with "for pay" sites.
Eliminating that is as useful as eliminating email spam.
I know I'm supposed to be impressed by the bigness of the term "64 bit" and all, but this is striking me as another odd niche piece of hardware that most developers don't have time to exploit. Think MMX, Katmai, 3DNow.
Processor speeds have gotten high enough and software bloated enough that much bigger wins can be obtained from cleaning up existing software than from CPU pissing contests. Corporate fanboys don't want to hear that, though.
I think this whole "write in languages that are C, but easier" movement that's been going on for decades is a little weird.
Decades? The first real language to fit this description is Java. Pascal came before C, if that's what you're thinking of. Modula-2 and Oberon were after C, but they descended from Pascal, not C. Ada? It wasn't nearly as low-level as C, and had more modern features (e.g. packages). Objective C? That was a merging of C and OOP that went down a different path than C++.
UNIX means several different things. Traditionally, it's an OS kernel with a suite of common utilities. Very handy for some things, like software development and other processes where you can leverage lots of existing tools rather than having to put custom features into every program. It works well, for a certain type of usage.
These days, UNIX--well, Linux--is being viewed an alternative to offerings from Microsoft. To do that properly, what's needed is something else. It's more like Apple's approach to OS/X, in that you start with a kernel for basic services, then you pile a fixed layer of higher-level services on top of that. The whole package, kernel plus libraries plus GUI, is in effect it's own OS. Yes, "OS" isn't the correct term here, but you have to view the result as something that's different from what is normally called a Linux distribution. It's no longer a "choose your own WM, choose your own GUI" set of bricks , but something that has fused into a coherent, independent entity. It's not Linux; it's a system that happens to use the Linux kernel.
Gnome needs this kind of split. If Miguel or RedHat or whoever want to put together a system where everything is fixed and easy to use, then that's the way to go. Trying to spin all of UNIX and Linux in this direction is the wrong way to go. Many people, even myself, might prefer a Gnome-based system, but let's not make the mistake of trying to turn core UNIX into something it was never intended to be.
Assuming your gaming world consists of nothing but carbon-copy first-person shooters. Mine doesn't.:-b
Carmack is the master of PC gaming graphics. Or was, back before most PC developers knew mucb about 3D. These days, Quake III looks pretty run of the mill next to lots of games, technology-wise (ditto for Unreal Tournament).
Without people like us, who read Tom's Hardware Guide everyday and rate chips by how easily they can be overclocked, computer hardware would never had advanced as fast as it had for the past 20 years.
This is not the kind of question that should be posed to Slashdot readers, of all people. You'll get armchair takes on this from people with no legal understanding whatsoever, and lots of "what should be" rather than "what is." Then each of these will degenerate into clueness discussion threads.
I don't know if I'd call it selfishness as much as a weird cluelessness about technology. I'm not referring to grandma here, but the people that make up pseudo-techie communities on the web. For example, there are many people who take violent affront to the idea that that the PlayStation 2 is "superior" to the Dreamcast in some hardware-centric way. It is mind boggling to me that people will waste hours and days arguing fervently about such topics. There are other notable examples:
* Overclockers who somehow think they're sticking it to the man, though they're mostly putting their personal investments at risk for no tangible benefit (Quake runs at 280fps instead of 250!).
* Loons who argue the superiority of Linux over Windows when they don't use a computer for much more than downloading MP3s, surfing the web, and occasional word processing.
* People who violently argue the superiority of one programming language or methodology over another, when they don't seem to have a real need to write programs in the first place.
* Open Source advocates who have to go looking for projects because they don't have a personal need for any sort of program, and really don't know what end-users are wanting.
* Compulsive upgraders who buy new video cards every quarter because they just have to have the fastest graphics around, even though they have to deal with endless driver problems and most games don't run particularly faster or better with card X anyway.
* People who routinely put down 400MHz machines as slow (e.g. the PPC chip in an Apple G4 or a Transmeta offering) without a real purpose behind why such speed is needed. When cornered, they come up with "high-end video processing" and "solving systems of thousands of equations." The general philosophy is becoming "Anything released in the last six months is fast; anything prior to that is slow and worthless crap."
Maybe cluelessness is the wrong word. It's more of a peculiar techie geekishness without a purpose behind it other than consumerism.
How can companies like Sega be convinced that products that don't make them money anymore should be made GPL?
First, the designs of old games can be an asset to a company. Look at how old collections of Williams, Midway, Konami, and Atari games have sold very well for the PlayStation. Second, games can contain other property that can be valuable. Would Sega really want to start GPLing games that contain Sonic?
Either way, GPL is pointless in this case. If Sega just let the ROMs be copied freely, that would be enough. Nobody really wants Sega to give up all rights to what it has spent millions of dollars creating. Only real loons would take the opposite stance. They'd be saying that Stephen King should give up all the rights to what he has created, letting other people modify and sell his novels. That's idiotic.
Half-Life did not have a good story
on
New Doom Details
·
· Score: 2
The only people who think Half-Life storyline is great are people who think that Star Trek is high science fiction and Independence Day is the best movie ever made. The plot was hackneyed from start to finish. It was on par with an episode of the old Superman TV series.
While past Amiga stories have been, um, bizarre, there's something to this one that shows at least someone is on the right track. It may have nothing to do with the original Amiga, but it is a good track nonetheless.
The Amiga and other home computers from earlier years were about predictability and overall system design. An Amiga--or an Atari 800--wasn't about being the best in terms of CPU power or OS capabilities or raw graphics performance. Those machines were designed from the start to be balanced systems. Each subsystem was clean and well-integrated into the rest of the machine, without being an obvious bottleneck or weak link. On a typical PC, you might have a blazing CPU and a blazing graphics card, but you have a horrible bus between the two. And you have mishmoshes of horrible APIs that frustrate more than they assist.
Predictability was a great feature of old machines that has been lost. When you do something as simple as read a memory location on a modern PC, you aren't sure what's going to happen. You might hit the on-chip cache. You might hit a slower layer of cache. You might have to wait for a cache line to be filled from RAM. You might hit untouched virtual memory and have the OS intervene. You might have to wait a really long time while the OS pages some memory out to disk to make room for the memory you need. When you make an OpenGL call to draw a triangle, you're never sure if your request is simply going to be queued, if it is going to result in 200 previously queued requests being processed because a buffer has been filled, if you're using states that will take you down an unoptimized driver path, etc. Layers of unpredictability like this have always been the difference between heavy iron and smaller machines.
What the Amiga folks seem to be doing is trying to hide all the nonsense from the developer, letting him live in a fantasy world where everything is clean and pretty. If that prettiness is at the right level--that is, in terms of very small, understandable chunks and not highly abstract and complex system calls--then there's much peace of mind to be gained by living in such a world. After all, most programmers choose to live in the world provided by C++ and Windows or Linux APIs and libraries. That's a virtual world too, but it comes with a lot more niggling details and mental baggage than what we're talking about here, and not making any significant use of the available capabilities as a result. One of the great unfortunate truths about current PC hardware, is that is it is being tremendously under utilized.
Yes, we're still looking at some form of emulation here, but that's not a bad thing. The old Apple II let the programmer feel like he was the master of the machine, something that is rarely felt nowadays. If you decided to do Apple II development in 2000, you could get an emulator running under an OS, and you'd get the same feeling. You'd be emulated, but you wouldn't care. You'd be dealing with a much smaller world, and you'd feel less technical stress. I see the Amiga plan as being similar to this, but based on more recent hardware capabilities. It might provide a much needed focus for developers, rather than wading around in ever-changing this and that. One of the great unspoken truths is that modern PC hardware is tremendously under utilized. Lack of focus is the primary reason for this.
dW: In one sense, the Amiga community missed the open source revolution, and in another sense, they were pioneers of open source before it was known as such.
There was no open source pioneering on the Amiga. It was a closed system. The OS was a closed system. All notable Amiga applications were closed systems. The above statement is without basis. No one has ever considered the Amiga to be a stepping stone to what's now called Open Source.
The Europe is one of the best places to be if you're into alternative operating systems. Linux was a 'new thing' in the US while it was already become an established heavyweight in the Europe with the help of such Linux giants as the formidable SuSE.
Linux is not "alternative." It is, for all intents and purposes, another version of UNIX, which is going on thirty years old. In any Borders or Barnes & Noble chain in the US, you'll find just about as many books about Linux as Windows. You'll find more books about Windows *applications*, yes, but you'll still find shelves of Linux books (at my local Borders there are at least six full shelves of Linux books). And you still call it alternative? Something with that much exposure and easy accessibility is mainstream.
The term "alternative" should be applied to computing technologies that are difficult to get information on unless you know where to look. Like the Forth programming language, for example, the recently released Amiga SDK, and processors designed for massively parallel computing.
Amiga was revolutionary and truly changed computing. You remember what it was like back then: we had green screens, blips, and bleeps. Then suddenly, we had full-color animation and graphics. The Amiga created what we know today as the video-gaming market.
Of course, the Amiga wasn't released until 1985, after other home computers with full color graphics, sprites, and multi-voice sound had been available for years (6 years for the Atari 800, 3 for the Commodore 64, to mention a few systems). Yes, the Amiga was better, but lets not rewrite history, okay? There was even PC semi-compatible with hardware accelerated graphics released earlier which was very Amiga-like in many ways, but it never found a market.
If you want product speed, you program in C or C++. If you want fast development, you use a rapid application development package like Inprise's Delphi. If you want database access, you learn SQL. If you want a language that anyone with any coding genes at all in their body can use, you write in Perl or Python. If you want to make a serious stab at portability, you use Java. And C#? Uh...well, let me think now, uh...
That's a pretty narrow view, considering there are many, many good languages out there. For embedded systems, Forth is an excellent choice. For exploratory programming, Lisp is hard to beat. For writing compilers or slinging complex data structures, I'd choose ML or OCaml or maybe Haskell. For distributed systems, I'd use Erlang or Mozart. For certain problems, Prolog is an unbeatable tool.
C, C++, C#, Object Pascal, and Java are all working the same general territory. Sometimes you need a different approach.
Oh, people are designing origanal games. Some people are even developing origanal games. The problem is that no one will publish them.
I don't think that's true at all. Spend time poking around the web, looking for stuff done from a different point of view than "I wanna be like company X." There is almost nothing. I want to say "there is nothing," but after a long while you might actually find one.
Amateur game development once seemed like it could be an art form similar to fiction writing or music, but instead it has become something more like hobbyist carpentry than sculpture. There's discussion of the merits of different band saws and belt sanders, studying of books about how to build birdhouses and coffee tables, and the practitioners seemingly enjoy building birdhouses and coffee tables, with the emphasis on the crafting rather than creation. It never occurs to anyone that there's more to games than Tetris and Asteroids and Quake, just as it never occurs to birdhouse builders that they should be sculpting works of art instead.
Amateur game development is creatively dead, but it lives on as a craft for tech-oriented hobbyists.
What's disturbing is the trivia that geeks vehemently fight over. The GeForce people are against the Voodoo tribe. Quake 3 vs. Unreal Tournament. Dreamcast vs. PlayStation 2. Athlon vs. Pentium. RedHat vs. Debian. Emacs vs. vi. KDE vs. Gnome. These aren't treated as points of diversity, but as raging, personal offenses. You never see people fighting over brands of TV or coffee, so why tech stuff? Why are we so confrontational?
What's funny about most of these issues is that they're viewed as important battles to be won, and yet, aside from being superficial, they're mired in misunderstanding. Some people hate KDE because they firmly believe that only techies should be able to use computers, not realizing that most of the ease-of-use criticisms are coming from within the tech community. There are also people who argue about superiority of Linux over Windows, yet those persons' idea of using a computer is surfing for pr0n and MP3s. And there are people who insist that Nvidia is the only graphics show in town, yet they don't realize that game makers are barely supporting a fraction of what any card could do, because of driver instabilities and the too-high pace of change.
But those are simply enhancements to the rendering engine. A rendering engine built and maintained by one person. If Unreal followed the same path a Mozilla, then Sweeney would have decided to add support for emulating old arcade games, a built-in email client, a utility to convert between dozens of bitmap formats, the ability to run 3D Studio MAX plugins directly, and MPEG2 compression code to generate movies.
I find it strange that Myst and Looking Glass are even mentioned in the same story. Myst was a slideshow with an interesting background story that drew people in. It was the game for non gamers. Looking Glass was the exact opposite. They took hardcore style games and made them _really_ hardcore, where you had to be a serious hobbyist gamer to even consider playing them (arguably, this is why they went out of business). There's no overlap. None.
You've got to be kidding 'Corporations *created* popular culture'? Coporations hype and exploit popular culture. And they do so with one purpose in mind. To make a buck. (which is not wrong in and of itself IMHO). The problem with Crops is that many times they don't care how they make that buck. Bottom line baby.
Yes, corporations push pop culture and people want the result. If you took corporations out of the loop, what is popular and what is now would be much different than it is now.
What happens today is that one band or musician is singled out to receive a big promotional budget, then they sell copies like crazy. If you go over to Amazon.com, you're not seeing the little guy rising to the top, as many people expected on the web. You're seeing big name bands selling like crazy. It's not that they're always better than the lesser known bands, it's that their names and music have been made familiar to you via marketing. Lots of people don't want to admit this. They want to think they discover Chemical Brothers--or whoever--in a smoky, underground club.
Corporations created popular culture? Wrong. Corporations took advantage of artists and manipulated popular culture to their advantage.
Not so. Pick most any band, and you'll find they were slingshotted into fame by distribution and marketing. For example, right *now* you'll find bands in Seattle that are better than the well-known Seattle bands of the 1990s. They may be amazing. They may have local fans. But are they pop culture? Not in the least. You don't see them on MTV. You don't have hundreds of wannabe bands trying to imitate them. You won't find their CDs on the desks of engineers and stockbrokers. But if Big Record Company X pushed money behind them and put them on MTV and promoted them in a way to make people think they were hip and underground, then they'd move into pop culture. This doesn't happen in today's world without corporate muscle.
tilts the copyright issue dramatically in favor of media corporations, who now virtually own popular culture
Wait just a second here. Corporations *created* popular culture. You can't go back now and claim that we want corporate-created popular culture but without the corporations.
In any town, you'll find many great bands, for example, that make you wonder why you don't hear them on the radio. And nobody's ever heard of those bands, except locals, and the locals often put them down for being, well, local. They play for half empty coffeehouses and provide background noise in clubs. But if one of these bands was promoted and hyped as being underground and pushed into rotation on MTV, then it would enter pop culture and people would be clamoring to hear them. And those same people want to be able to nab MP3s of that band's music. So now, after Moby, for example, has hit is big, you can't act like "screw the record company, screw the ticket agents, screw the suits," because they provided Moby to the masses.
If you want to be anti-corporate, then you need to walk the talk. Go local. Don't watch TV. Stop drinking Coke. Don't waste time armchair second-guessing what Apple or RedHat or Microsoft do.
Slashdot Mirror
I have one question here: will software really need more and more CPU performance as time goes by?
I mean, as the article says, sure, servers and stuff will definitely put good use to the increase in performance, but what about good ol' Joe Sixpack using Excel at his office? I mean, besides from cranking SETI@home units faster, is there really such a need for faster processors at home / office?
In all honestly, I stopped noticing any speed differences around 200MHz or so. I used a 200MHz Pentium running Win NT for a while at work, then I went to a 400MHz Pentium II. Couldn't tell the difference at all.
It is getting to where rewriting software and/or changing your approach are much more valuable than processor pissing contests. When I compile code with Visual C++ it seems to take forever, given a large project. If I use Object Pascal instead, the compilation time drops by 2-3 orders of magnitude. That's a much bigger win than increasing my machine to a 2GHz processor.
The key here is to filter Dumb Porn (tm). Most of the porn on the web can be pegged for it's blatant stupidity. Getting rid of that stuff goes a long way toward the making the internet more palatable. It's like all the MAKE MONEY FAST! spam that people set up filters to get rid of. Hilarious phrases are popular with the owners of these kind of sites: "cum-soaked," "cum sucking bitches," "fuck my slit," etc. Really stupid stuff that's almost always associated with "for pay" sites.
Eliminating that is as useful as eliminating email spam.
I know I'm supposed to be impressed by the bigness of the term "64 bit" and all, but this is striking me as another odd niche piece of hardware that most developers don't have time to exploit. Think MMX, Katmai, 3DNow.
Processor speeds have gotten high enough and software bloated enough that much bigger wins can be obtained from cleaning up existing software than from CPU pissing contests. Corporate fanboys don't want to hear that, though.
I think this whole "write in languages that are C, but easier" movement that's been going on for decades is a little weird.
Decades? The first real language to fit this description is Java. Pascal came before C, if that's what you're thinking of. Modula-2 and Oberon were after C, but they descended from Pascal, not C. Ada? It wasn't nearly as low-level as C, and had more modern features (e.g. packages). Objective C? That was a merging of C and OOP that went down a different path than C++.
Not sure what you're talking about here.
UNIX means several different things. Traditionally, it's an OS kernel with a suite of common utilities. Very handy for some things, like software development and other processes where you can leverage lots of existing tools rather than having to put custom features into every program. It works well, for a certain type of usage.
These days, UNIX--well, Linux--is being viewed an alternative to offerings from Microsoft. To do that properly, what's needed is something else. It's more like Apple's approach to OS/X, in that you start with a kernel for basic services, then you pile a fixed layer of higher-level services on top of that. The whole package, kernel plus libraries plus GUI, is in effect it's own OS. Yes, "OS" isn't the correct term here, but you have to view the result as something that's different from what is normally called a Linux distribution. It's no longer a "choose your own WM, choose your own GUI" set of bricks , but something that has fused into a coherent, independent entity. It's not Linux; it's a system that happens to use the Linux kernel.
Gnome needs this kind of split. If Miguel or RedHat or whoever want to put together a system where everything is fixed and easy to use, then that's the way to go. Trying to spin all of UNIX and Linux in this direction is the wrong way to go. Many people, even myself, might prefer a Gnome-based system, but let's not make the mistake of trying to turn core UNIX into something it was never intended to be.
>Carmack is master of the gaming world.
:-b
Assuming your gaming world consists of nothing but carbon-copy first-person shooters. Mine doesn't.
Carmack is the master of PC gaming graphics. Or was, back before most PC developers knew mucb about 3D. These days, Quake III looks pretty run of the mill next to lots of games, technology-wise (ditto for Unreal Tournament).
Without people like us, who read Tom's Hardware Guide everyday and rate chips by how easily they can be overclocked, computer hardware would never had advanced as fast as it had for the past 20 years.
That is laughably naive.
This is not the kind of question that should be posed to Slashdot readers, of all people. You'll get armchair takes on this from people with no legal understanding whatsoever, and lots of "what should be" rather than "what is." Then each of these will degenerate into clueness discussion threads.
I don't know if I'd call it selfishness as much as a weird cluelessness about technology. I'm not referring to grandma here, but the people that make up pseudo-techie communities on the web. For example, there are many people who take violent affront to the idea that that the PlayStation 2 is "superior" to the Dreamcast in some hardware-centric way. It is mind boggling to me that people will waste hours and days arguing fervently about such topics. There are other notable examples:
* Overclockers who somehow think they're sticking it to the man, though they're mostly putting their personal investments at risk for no tangible benefit (Quake runs at 280fps instead of 250!).
* Loons who argue the superiority of Linux over Windows when they don't use a computer for much more than downloading MP3s, surfing the web, and occasional word processing.
* People who violently argue the superiority of one programming language or methodology over another, when they don't seem to have a real need to write programs in the first place.
* Open Source advocates who have to go looking for projects because they don't have a personal need for any sort of program, and really don't know what end-users are wanting.
* Compulsive upgraders who buy new video cards every quarter because they just have to have the fastest graphics around, even though they have to deal with endless driver problems and most games don't run particularly faster or better with card X anyway.
* People who routinely put down 400MHz machines as slow (e.g. the PPC chip in an Apple G4 or a Transmeta offering) without a real purpose behind why such speed is needed. When cornered, they come up with "high-end video processing" and "solving systems of thousands of equations." The general philosophy is becoming "Anything released in the last six months is fast; anything prior to that is slow and worthless crap."
Maybe cluelessness is the wrong word. It's more of a peculiar techie geekishness without a purpose behind it other than consumerism.
How can companies like Sega be convinced that products that don't make them money anymore should be made GPL?
First, the designs of old games can be an asset to a company. Look at how old collections of Williams, Midway, Konami, and Atari games have sold very well for the PlayStation. Second, games can contain other property that can be valuable. Would Sega really want to start GPLing games that contain Sonic?
Either way, GPL is pointless in this case. If Sega just let the ROMs be copied freely, that would be enough. Nobody really wants Sega to give up all rights to what it has spent millions of dollars creating. Only real loons would take the opposite stance. They'd be saying that Stephen King should give up all the rights to what he has created, letting other people modify and sell his novels. That's idiotic.
The only people who think Half-Life storyline is great are people who think that Star Trek is high science fiction and Independence Day is the best movie ever made. The plot was hackneyed from start to finish. It was on par with an episode of the old Superman TV series.
While past Amiga stories have been, um, bizarre, there's something to this one that shows at least someone is on the right track. It may have nothing to do with the original Amiga, but it is a good track nonetheless.
The Amiga and other home computers from earlier years were about predictability and overall system design. An Amiga--or an Atari 800--wasn't about being the best in terms of CPU power or OS capabilities or raw graphics performance. Those machines were designed from the start to be balanced systems. Each subsystem was clean and well-integrated into the rest of the machine, without being an obvious bottleneck or weak link. On a typical PC, you might have a blazing CPU and a blazing graphics card, but you have a horrible bus between the two. And you have mishmoshes of horrible APIs that frustrate more than they assist.
Predictability was a great feature of old machines that has been lost. When you do something as simple as read a memory location on a modern PC, you aren't sure what's going to happen. You might hit the on-chip cache. You might hit a slower layer of cache. You might have to wait for a cache line to be filled from RAM. You might hit untouched virtual memory and have the OS intervene. You might have to wait a really long time while the OS pages some memory out to disk to make room for the memory you need. When you make an OpenGL call to draw a triangle, you're never sure if your request is simply going to be queued, if it is going to result in 200 previously queued requests being processed because a buffer has been filled, if you're using states that will take you down an unoptimized driver path, etc. Layers of unpredictability like this have always been the difference between heavy iron and smaller machines.
What the Amiga folks seem to be doing is trying to hide all the nonsense from the developer, letting him live in a fantasy world where everything is clean and pretty. If that prettiness is at the right level--that is, in terms of very small, understandable chunks and not highly abstract and complex system calls--then there's much peace of mind to be gained by living in such a world. After all, most programmers choose to live in the world provided by C++ and Windows or Linux APIs and libraries. That's a virtual world too, but it comes with a lot more niggling details and mental baggage than what we're talking about here, and not making any significant use of the available capabilities as a result. One of the great unfortunate truths about current PC hardware, is that is it is being tremendously under utilized.
Yes, we're still looking at some form of emulation here, but that's not a bad thing. The old Apple II let the programmer feel like he was the master of the machine, something that is rarely felt nowadays. If you decided to do Apple II development in 2000, you could get an emulator running under an OS, and you'd get the same feeling. You'd be emulated, but you wouldn't care. You'd be dealing with a much smaller world, and you'd feel less technical stress. I see the Amiga plan as being similar to this, but based on more recent hardware capabilities. It might provide a much needed focus for developers, rather than wading around in ever-changing this and that. One of the great unspoken truths is that modern PC hardware is tremendously under utilized. Lack of focus is the primary reason for this.
More nonsense:
dW: In one sense, the Amiga community missed the open source revolution, and in another sense, they were pioneers of open source before it was known as such.
There was no open source pioneering on the Amiga. It was a closed system. The OS was a closed system. All notable Amiga applications were closed systems. The above statement is without basis. No one has ever considered the Amiga to be a stepping stone to what's now called Open Source.
The Europe is one of the best places to be if you're into alternative operating systems. Linux was a 'new thing' in the US while it was already become an established heavyweight in the Europe with the help of such Linux giants as the formidable SuSE.
Linux is not "alternative." It is, for all intents and purposes, another version of UNIX, which is going on thirty years old. In any Borders or Barnes & Noble chain in the US, you'll find just about as many books about Linux as Windows. You'll find more books about Windows *applications*, yes, but you'll still find shelves of Linux books (at my local Borders there are at least six full shelves of Linux books). And you still call it alternative? Something with that much exposure and easy accessibility is mainstream.
The term "alternative" should be applied to computing technologies that are difficult to get information on unless you know where to look. Like the Forth programming language, for example, the recently released Amiga SDK, and processors designed for massively parallel computing.
Amiga was revolutionary and truly changed computing. You remember what it was like back then: we had green screens, blips, and bleeps. Then suddenly, we had full-color animation and graphics. The Amiga created what we know today as the video-gaming market.
Of course, the Amiga wasn't released until 1985, after other home computers with full color graphics, sprites, and multi-voice sound had been available for years (6 years for the Atari 800, 3 for the Commodore 64, to mention a few systems). Yes, the Amiga was better, but lets not rewrite history, okay? There was even PC semi-compatible with hardware accelerated graphics released earlier which was very Amiga-like in many ways, but it never found a market.
If you want product speed, you program in C or C++. If you want fast development, you use a rapid application development package like Inprise's Delphi. If you want database access, you learn SQL. If you want a language that anyone with any coding genes at all in their body can use, you write in Perl or Python. If you want to make a serious stab at portability, you use Java. And C#? Uh ...well, let me think now, uh...
That's a pretty narrow view, considering there are many, many good languages out there. For embedded systems, Forth is an excellent choice. For exploratory programming, Lisp is hard to beat. For writing compilers or slinging complex data structures, I'd choose ML or OCaml or maybe Haskell. For distributed systems, I'd use Erlang or Mozart. For certain problems, Prolog is an unbeatable tool.
C, C++, C#, Object Pascal, and Java are all working the same general territory. Sometimes you need a different approach.
Oh, people are designing origanal games. Some people are even developing origanal games. The problem is that no one will publish them.
I don't think that's true at all. Spend time poking around the web, looking for stuff done from a different point of view than "I wanna be like company X." There is almost nothing. I want to say "there is nothing," but after a long while you might actually find one.
Amateur game development once seemed like it could be an art form similar to fiction writing or music, but instead it has become something more like hobbyist carpentry than sculpture. There's discussion of the merits of different band saws and belt sanders, studying of books about how to build birdhouses and coffee tables, and the practitioners seemingly enjoy building birdhouses and coffee tables, with the emphasis on the crafting rather than creation. It never occurs to anyone that there's more to games than Tetris and Asteroids and Quake, just as it never occurs to birdhouse builders that they should be sculpting works of art instead.
Amateur game development is creatively dead, but it lives on as a craft for tech-oriented hobbyists.
What's disturbing is the trivia that geeks vehemently fight over. The GeForce people are against the Voodoo tribe. Quake 3 vs. Unreal Tournament. Dreamcast vs. PlayStation 2. Athlon vs. Pentium. RedHat vs. Debian. Emacs vs. vi. KDE vs. Gnome. These aren't treated as points of diversity, but as raging, personal offenses. You never see people fighting over brands of TV or coffee, so why tech stuff? Why are we so confrontational?
What's funny about most of these issues is that they're viewed as important battles to be won, and yet, aside from being superficial, they're mired in misunderstanding. Some people hate KDE because they firmly believe that only techies should be able to use computers, not realizing that most of the ease-of-use criticisms are coming from within the tech community. There are also people who argue about superiority of Linux over Windows, yet those persons' idea of using a computer is surfing for pr0n and MP3s. And there are people who insist that Nvidia is the only graphics show in town, yet they don't realize that game makers are barely supporting a fraction of what any card could do, because of driver instabilities and the too-high pace of change.
But those are simply enhancements to the rendering engine. A rendering engine built and maintained by one person. If Unreal followed the same path a Mozilla, then Sweeney would have decided to add support for emulating old arcade games, a built-in email client, a utility to convert between dozens of bitmap formats, the ability to run 3D Studio MAX plugins directly, and MPEG2 compression code to generate movies.
Why does every damned review of mac hardware have to mention, "Mine is a grape flavored mac, shaped like a cube!"
:)
On the PC side, everyone always has to mention the processor speed and video card, "Word sure is slow on my Pentium II 2600/GeForce."
If you ever played D&D, this downloadable movie is a riot.
I find it strange that Myst and Looking Glass are even mentioned in the same story. Myst was a slideshow with an interesting background story that drew people in. It was the game for non gamers. Looking Glass was the exact opposite. They took hardcore style games and made them _really_ hardcore, where you had to be a serious hobbyist gamer to even consider playing them (arguably, this is why they went out of business). There's no overlap. None.
You've got to be kidding 'Corporations *created* popular culture'? Coporations hype and exploit popular culture. And they do so with one purpose in mind. To make a buck. (which is not wrong in and of itself IMHO). The problem with Crops is that many times they don't care how they make that buck. Bottom line baby.
Yes, corporations push pop culture and people want the result. If you took corporations out of the loop, what is popular and what is now would be much different than it is now.
What happens today is that one band or musician is singled out to receive a big promotional budget, then they sell copies like crazy. If you go over to Amazon.com, you're not seeing the little guy rising to the top, as many people expected on the web. You're seeing big name bands selling like crazy. It's not that they're always better than the lesser known bands, it's that their names and music have been made familiar to you via marketing. Lots of people don't want to admit this. They want to think they discover Chemical Brothers--or whoever--in a smoky, underground club.
Corporations created popular culture? Wrong. Corporations took advantage of artists and manipulated popular culture to their advantage.
Not so. Pick most any band, and you'll find they were slingshotted into fame by distribution and marketing. For example, right *now* you'll find bands in Seattle that are better than the well-known Seattle bands of the 1990s. They may be amazing. They may have local fans. But are they pop culture? Not in the least. You don't see them on MTV. You don't have hundreds of wannabe bands trying to imitate them. You won't find their CDs on the desks of engineers and stockbrokers. But if Big Record Company X pushed money behind them and put them on MTV and promoted them in a way to make people think they were hip and underground, then they'd move into pop culture. This doesn't happen in today's world without corporate muscle.
tilts the copyright issue dramatically in favor of media corporations, who now virtually own popular culture
Wait just a second here. Corporations *created* popular culture. You can't go back now and claim that we want corporate-created popular culture but without the corporations.
In any town, you'll find many great bands, for example, that make you wonder why you don't hear them on the radio. And nobody's ever heard of those bands, except locals, and the locals often put them down for being, well, local. They play for half empty coffeehouses and provide background noise in clubs. But if one of these bands was promoted and hyped as being underground and pushed into rotation on MTV, then it would enter pop culture and people would be clamoring to hear them. And those same people want to be able to nab MP3s of that band's music. So now, after Moby, for example, has hit is big, you can't act like "screw the record company, screw the ticket agents, screw the suits," because they provided Moby to the masses.
If you want to be anti-corporate, then you need to walk the talk. Go local. Don't watch TV. Stop drinking Coke. Don't waste time armchair second-guessing what Apple or RedHat or Microsoft do.