Slashdot is big. It isn't anyone's blog now; it's a corporate news site. You report the news and let people form their own opinions. You don't say "Python 2.5 released. BTW, what kind of drugs made Guido think indentation was better than braces?" (a made up but not atypical example). First, because it often comes across as juvenile. Second, you have a knowledgeable audience. Okay, not everyone is all that smart, but a good many are. As such, these comments often seem out of place, like you're reiterating a classic misguided layman's point of view in a scientific journal ("Is that Columbus crazy about the world being round or what?"). There's no intelligent thought behind them. They're just little bashes at things to incite people to comment. That works apparently, as often a majority of the comments are about the ignorant nature of of the tag. Plus they're juvenile...oh wait I said that already.
Re:Too many changes all at once
on
What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Did I say everyone should drop Perl 6? To the contrary, I said I was looking forward to it.
I think you're in denial of what's gone wrong with the P6 process, regardless of how great a language it may be five years from now. You don't develop a language by soliciting opinions and letting things pile up for years without prototyping anything. You certainly don't throw out everything on every level all at once and start up an independent project to develop a virtual machine for an undefined language. Mr. Tang has done things the right way. He wrote a very simple, very straightforward prototype and has been iterating it ever since. Were it not for him--arguably a random hacker--there STILL wouldn't be any kind of P6 prototype.
The P6 process should have started with a simple, high-level testbed for Perl ideas.
Too many changes all at once
on
What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 1
The developers made the classic mistake with Perl 6: they threw out what they had and started over. And they started over on too many levels: do-it-all VM, regular expressions, core language. At the same time, the language designers have been throwing in every feature under the sun, to where experienced Perl 5 programmers get dizzy reading the apocalypses. This is the language that makes C++ seem straightforward. In fact, we wouldn't even have a Perl 6 prototype at all--even after five years of work--if it hadn't been for a plucky programmer who took it upon himself to write one (Pugs) in Haskell. To a great extent that saved the P6 project.
The developers honestly should have started with the P5 code and incrementally made changes, eventually making sweeping changes.
Even after saying all of that, I'm still looking forward to P6, but I fear it may be a long wait. Long enough that I'm using Ruby and Python more and more.
What if, instead, you logged into a world and the world area around you was loaded, and the world continued to be dynamically loaded as you moved around? In current games, you can't play a map much bigger than a few buildings; what if instead you could drive from New York to LA (Or at least New York to New Haven?)
This has been common on consoles for years (GTA 3, for example). There's no reason it couldn't be done on PCs, other than that developers aren't willing to.
Look at it this way: computers are mainstream in a way that no one imagined even ten years ago. You can go into any coffeeshop and find half a dozen people with laptops. Every company has websites. Google's stock is huge. Computers are a reqiured part of life.
And yet for an industry so huge, so criticial, so required for modern life, there's hardly any variety. Macs are the exceptions. They're designed to be computers that people want to own and use. Even if you argue that Windows is functionally similar to OS X, it doesn't matter. Macs are the computer people *want*. There's no competition.
It comes down to "Write trivial, borderline-unplayable games that hold your interest for a minute or so," then write many versions of each game. There are a few gems, but on the whole the results were disappointing.
That's the kind I enjoy the most. Such as "Pontifex" (Bridge Builder) and to a lesser extend "Gish" (same from the same company [chroniclogic.com] by the way.
His comment is correct, although performance issues in both Java and.Net are overblown. C# compiles into bytecode (or whatever MS calls it) and the.Net framework compiles that into machine code and runs it. Same exact concept as Java. There is a performance tradoff to this of course, but the.Net framework mitigates it by caching the generated machine code.
It's correct, but irrelevant. Almost all compilers--save some simplistic ones--compile to some sort of internal intermediate language, then machine code is generated from that language. This is Compilers 101:) It doesn't matter if the final machine code is generated at compile time or load time.
C#, for all of the claims of performance, is a a JIT based interpretive language. Ditto Java.
This comment makes no sense. You could easily write a C++ compiler that did final code generation at load time. Would that change your view of C++ performance? I'm no fan of C# (or Java), but there's no way I'd ever consider C# to be an interpreted language.
No one I've met doing serious development is building on python, it's just too error prone.
Ha, I get it! You mean people you specifically know, and disregarding all the well-known companies leaning hard on Python, like Google.
Honestly, I have never *ever* heard "Python" and "error-prone" in the same sentence before. That doesn't mean Python is perfect, of course, but I think the primary reason people use Python in the first place is so they can build more reliable software more quickly.
Are adaptations of books, old movies and sequels all that Hollywood can produce now?
That's pointless cynicism. This isn't new. A majority of Hollywood movies have always been based off of books. It's not some new "in the last few years" kind of thing.
Computer science, as a pure subject, isn't the same as computer programming, and it certainly isn't anywhere near the same as "doing useful things with computers." If you're wanting to write a better blogging tool or pretty much anything that's works with the web, then you don't need computer science. What you need is some time, some books, good tools and libraries, and a solid idea. That approach will take you down some paths that will irk the uber-geeks of computer science. PHP? Python? Perl?You'll make money with them, but you'll lose years from your life discussing it on Slashdot. Even if you want to be out there, writing code in Lisp or another esoteric language (which is often a poor idea, because of the lack of standard libraries), then you still don't need to major in computer science to do so.
The bottom line is that just because the gender cap is widening in computer science, doesn't mean that it is widening across technology in general.
Until Windows 95 came out (and 3.11 to a lesser extent)... NO ONE HAD PC's AT HOME.
Note true at all. There was a big home market for PC clones in the late 1980s. People wanted them to run word processors, mostly. Remember Word Perfect? WordStar? Q&A Write? And you could buy a lot of Atari, Apple, and C64 games that were ported over to the PC, though usually with horrific graphics.
If you just need reference material on C# or HTML or C++ or whatever, then go for O'Reilly books--or the equivalent--for what you need to know.
But if you want to expand your mind as a programmer, then go for books like:
Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming (Norvig) Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (Abelson & Sussman) Thinking Forth (Brodie) - One of my favorites; read even if you don't care for Forth.
First, let me say that I was not trolling, and I surprised at how many people saw it that way.
Obviously the Xbox 360 and a desktop PC are quite different beasts, otherwise there wouldn't be a need for the former. The big difference--and this is generally true of all consoles--is that you get some extremely high-end performance out a console in some specialized areas, almost always at the expense of general across-the-board performance. Take the Super Nintendo. It could blit an amazing amount of stuff to the screen: 80 sprites per scan line, three full-screen backgrounds, transparency, etc. It completely blew away PC performance at the time. Yes, including the Amiga:). But what was running the show? A sub-4MHz 16-bit variation of the venerable 6502. And why did Nintendo do that? Because you can't make a system be accross-the-board high-end unless you price yourself out of the market. They put in killer graphics and below par power elsewhere. The same principle applies to all consoles, including the Xbox 360.
Mostly I find "Let's put Linux on it!" to be an odd reaction. I think what people want is for the hardware to be open, for documentation and development kits to be freely available. But that doesn't mean "Linux." I suspect those comments come from people who don't have a clear picture of what "operating system" means, people who think you need a big OS in order to write code. In reality, you hardly need an OS at all. You just need some very basic hooks.
My question when I see stories like this is: Why? More specifically, why would anyone want to put a bulky, general purpose operating system onto lean and special-purpose hardware? One of the big advantages of consoles is that the "os" is minimal, to the point of being a tiny set of hardware interfacing code. The Xbox 360 (and the original Xbox) isn't running Windows or anything like that, because there's no need. You get nothing out of running Linux on such hardware.
Please don't label me as a troll. I understand the benefits of OSS as much as anyone.
Honestly, I think much of the problem comes from over-hyping OSS. It should be obvious that the usefulness of OSS is directly related to the quality of the software, but unfortunately there's a tendency to lump all open software together. Witness how many people respond to "There's no good OSS equivalent of Photoshop" with "Use the GIMP!" when in reality there's no comparison, even with the Photoshop GUI hacks for The GIMP.
Numerous times I've looked at open source clones of software, only to dismiss them because they're written by bored students with little software engineering experience. I'd hate to become attached to something that the author could drop when he gets a job or girlfriend or new game system. You run much less risk when there's a company behind it. Sure, I *could* learn the code and take over it myself, but that's unrealistic. You can't just pick up a 50,000+ line program and understand it. (In many cases looking at the code would be enough to make me avoid that program.)
Bottom line: Some OSS is good, some is crap. J"OSS" isn't any kind of magic term.
Kinda obvious, I suppose, but the submitter made it sound like he was the authority on the subject. There are also natural gas water heaters that work just like the electric ones: keeping a tank of water hot all the time. These are very common in the U.S. Gas is not synonymous with "on demand."
There have a been a few cases where consoles were sold at a loss, most notably the Sega Saturn and the Xbox 1. So far, that's it. Atari didn't sell consoles at a loss, neither did Nintendo, neither did Sony. But this is hardly the norm for console sales.
Do you know what "OS" is running in your digital camera? Your DVD player? Your MP3 player? Your GPS system? In the majority of cases, the answer is no.
Point #2: Web applications
Google search, Google reader, gmail, Flickr, etc. They look the same to me whether I'm running Linux, Unix, OS X, BSD, etc.
Point #3: Cross platform apps
Python coding and development feels the same on Windows, Linux, and OS X. Makes no difference to me. Ditto for editing with vim. Quite a few other languages and applications are identical, too: Inkscape, The Gimp, etc.
Most embedded GUIs are not desktop-based
on
Prepping For The 360
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Once again, this would have been a better article without the tacked-on, and often incorrect, opinion line. The desktop metaphor is only used in general-purpose personal computers. Does your DVD player use a desktop metaphor? Your MP3 player? Your TV? Your GPS system? Your digital camera? Any video game system ever made? Of course not, because it doesn't make sense.
This is one of those frequent Slashdot articles by someone who's had a personal realization, then goes on to think that their ephiphany is cutting edge thought. In reality, geekdom started melding into mainstream society in the mid-1990s and has been mainstream for at least the last 5 years. You walk into any coffeeshop and see half a dozen people using notebook computers, 50% of which are iBooks or PowerBooks. You hear middle-aged women talking about WiFi configuration in the supermarket. Battlestar Galactica is hugely popular. Linux is written about weekly in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times.
If anything, I think there's a new breed of geek: the person who isn't as introverted as stuck in his or her ways as classic geeks tend to be. And from that point of view, Slashdot is more of an old-geek magnet, something to be chuckled at for it's quaint naiveness, much like Wired.
What I'm trying to say is that Xbox did not come to market with a higly anticipated game that made the units sell, no one said this about Halo before the Xbox release.
Sorry, this is wrong. Halo was the most hyped FPS ever. Even though it was originally a Mac & PC game, the hype carried over to the console. Loads of PC owners who had followed the hype bought Xboxes so they could play Halo. Just the name carried weight at that point, even though the game was nothing like what was shown in teaser footage from 1-2 years prior.
You're missing the point. There's a big difference between taking high-end-price-is-no-object technology and consumerizing it. Putting multi-CPU systems into a small box that sits next to your TV *is* state of the art. No one has done it before.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot is big. It isn't anyone's blog now; it's a corporate news site. You report the news and let people form their own opinions. You don't say "Python 2.5 released. BTW, what kind of drugs made Guido think indentation was better than braces?" (a made up but not atypical example). First, because it often comes across as juvenile. Second, you have a knowledgeable audience. Okay, not everyone is all that smart, but a good many are. As such, these comments often seem out of place, like you're reiterating a classic misguided layman's point of view in a scientific journal ("Is that Columbus crazy about the world being round or what?"). There's no intelligent thought behind them. They're just little bashes at things to incite people to comment. That works apparently, as often a majority of the comments are about the ignorant nature of of the tag. Plus they're juvenile...oh wait I said that already.
Did I say everyone should drop Perl 6? To the contrary, I said I was looking forward to it.
I think you're in denial of what's gone wrong with the P6 process, regardless of how great a language it may be five years from now. You don't develop a language by soliciting opinions and letting things pile up for years without prototyping anything. You certainly don't throw out everything on every level all at once and start up an independent project to develop a virtual machine for an undefined language. Mr. Tang has done things the right way. He wrote a very simple, very straightforward prototype and has been iterating it ever since. Were it not for him--arguably a random hacker--there STILL wouldn't be any kind of P6 prototype.
The P6 process should have started with a simple, high-level testbed for Perl ideas.
The developers made the classic mistake with Perl 6: they threw out what they had and started over. And they started over on too many levels: do-it-all VM, regular expressions, core language. At the same time, the language designers have been throwing in every feature under the sun, to where experienced Perl 5 programmers get dizzy reading the apocalypses. This is the language that makes C++ seem straightforward. In fact, we wouldn't even have a Perl 6 prototype at all--even after five years of work--if it hadn't been for a plucky programmer who took it upon himself to write one (Pugs) in Haskell. To a great extent that saved the P6 project.
The developers honestly should have started with the P5 code and incrementally made changes, eventually making sweeping changes.
Even after saying all of that, I'm still looking forward to P6, but I fear it may be a long wait. Long enough that I'm using Ruby and Python more and more.
What if, instead, you logged into a world and the world area around you was loaded, and the world continued to be dynamically loaded as you moved around? In current games, you can't play a map much bigger than a few buildings; what if instead you could drive from New York to LA (Or at least New York to New Haven?)
This has been common on consoles for years (GTA 3, for example). There's no reason it couldn't be done on PCs, other than that developers aren't willing to.
Look at it this way: computers are mainstream in a way that no one imagined even ten years ago. You can go into any coffeeshop and find half a dozen people with laptops. Every company has websites. Google's stock is huge. Computers are a reqiured part of life.
And yet for an industry so huge, so criticial, so required for modern life, there's hardly any variety. Macs are the exceptions. They're designed to be computers that people want to own and use. Even if you argue that Windows is functionally similar to OS X, it doesn't matter. Macs are the computer people *want*. There's no competition.
I am more impressed by these guys: http://www.experimentalgameplay.com/ - 4 grad studens who created 50+ games in one semester.
It comes down to "Write trivial, borderline-unplayable games that hold your interest for a minute or so," then write many versions of each game. There are a few gems, but on the whole the results were disappointing.
And a MacBook Pro that's 10x more powerful than a iBook?!? There goes the iBook market...
*Except* that the iBook was $999 and the MacBook Pro twice that. That's an expensive bit of hardware to be lugging around.
That's the kind I enjoy the most. Such as "Pontifex" (Bridge Builder) and to a lesser extend "Gish" (same from the same company [chroniclogic.com] by the way.
Right, but those games are not from 2005.
His comment is correct, although performance issues in both Java and .Net are overblown. C# compiles into bytecode (or whatever MS calls it) and the .Net framework compiles that into machine code and runs it. Same exact concept as Java. There is a performance tradoff to this of course, but the .Net framework mitigates it by caching the generated machine code.
:) It doesn't matter if the final machine code is generated at compile time or load time.
It's correct, but irrelevant. Almost all compilers--save some simplistic ones--compile to some sort of internal intermediate language, then machine code is generated from that language. This is Compilers 101
C#, for all of the claims of performance, is a a JIT based interpretive language. Ditto Java.
This comment makes no sense. You could easily write a C++ compiler that did final code generation at load time. Would that change your view of C++ performance? I'm no fan of C# (or Java), but there's no way I'd ever consider C# to be an interpreted language.
No one I've met doing serious development is building on python, it's just too error prone.
Ha, I get it! You mean people you specifically know, and disregarding all the well-known companies leaning hard on Python, like Google.
Honestly, I have never *ever* heard "Python" and "error-prone" in the same sentence before. That doesn't mean Python is perfect, of course, but I think the primary reason people use Python in the first place is so they can build more reliable software more quickly.
Are adaptations of books, old movies and sequels all that Hollywood can produce now?
That's pointless cynicism. This isn't new. A majority of Hollywood movies have always been based off of books. It's not some new "in the last few years" kind of thing.
Now this is heresy, but bear with me.
Computer science, as a pure subject, isn't the same as computer programming, and it certainly isn't anywhere near the same as "doing useful things with computers." If you're wanting to write a better blogging tool or pretty much anything that's works with the web, then you don't need computer science. What you need is some time, some books, good tools and libraries, and a solid idea. That approach will take you down some paths that will irk the uber-geeks of computer science. PHP? Python? Perl?You'll make money with them, but you'll lose years from your life discussing it on Slashdot. Even if you want to be out there, writing code in Lisp or another esoteric language (which is often a poor idea, because of the lack of standard libraries), then you still don't need to major in computer science to do so.
The bottom line is that just because the gender cap is widening in computer science, doesn't mean that it is widening across technology in general.
Until Windows 95 came out (and 3.11 to a lesser extent)... NO ONE HAD PC's AT HOME.
Note true at all. There was a big home market for PC clones in the late 1980s. People wanted them to run word processors, mostly. Remember Word Perfect? WordStar? Q&A Write? And you could buy a lot of Atari, Apple, and C64 games that were ported over to the PC, though usually with horrific graphics.
If you just need reference material on C# or HTML or C++ or whatever, then go for O'Reilly books--or the equivalent--for what you need to know.
But if you want to expand your mind as a programmer, then go for books like:
Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming (Norvig)
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (Abelson & Sussman)
Thinking Forth (Brodie) - One of my favorites; read even if you don't care for Forth.
First, let me say that I was not trolling, and I surprised at how many people saw it that way.
:). But what was running the show? A sub-4MHz 16-bit variation of the venerable 6502. And why did Nintendo do that? Because you can't make a system be accross-the-board high-end unless you price yourself out of the market. They put in killer graphics and below par power elsewhere. The same principle applies to all consoles, including the Xbox 360.
Obviously the Xbox 360 and a desktop PC are quite different beasts, otherwise there wouldn't be a need for the former. The big difference--and this is generally true of all consoles--is that you get some extremely high-end performance out a console in some specialized areas, almost always at the expense of general across-the-board performance. Take the Super Nintendo. It could blit an amazing amount of stuff to the screen: 80 sprites per scan line, three full-screen backgrounds, transparency, etc. It completely blew away PC performance at the time. Yes, including the Amiga
Mostly I find "Let's put Linux on it!" to be an odd reaction. I think what people want is for the hardware to be open, for documentation and development kits to be freely available. But that doesn't mean "Linux." I suspect those comments come from people who don't have a clear picture of what "operating system" means, people who think you need a big OS in order to write code. In reality, you hardly need an OS at all. You just need some very basic hooks.
My question when I see stories like this is: Why? More specifically, why would anyone want to put a bulky, general purpose operating system onto lean and special-purpose hardware? One of the big advantages of consoles is that the "os" is minimal, to the point of being a tiny set of hardware interfacing code. The Xbox 360 (and the original Xbox) isn't running Windows or anything like that, because there's no need. You get nothing out of running Linux on such hardware.
Please don't label me as a troll. I understand the benefits of OSS as much as anyone.
Honestly, I think much of the problem comes from over-hyping OSS. It should be obvious that the usefulness of OSS is directly related to the quality of the software, but unfortunately there's a tendency to lump all open software together. Witness how many people respond to "There's no good OSS equivalent of Photoshop" with "Use the GIMP!" when in reality there's no comparison, even with the Photoshop GUI hacks for The GIMP.
Numerous times I've looked at open source clones of software, only to dismiss them because they're written by bored students with little software engineering experience. I'd hate to become attached to something that the author could drop when he gets a job or girlfriend or new game system. You run much less risk when there's a company behind it. Sure, I *could* learn the code and take over it myself, but that's unrealistic. You can't just pick up a 50,000+ line program and understand it. (In many cases looking at the code would be enough to make me avoid that program.)
Bottom line: Some OSS is good, some is crap. J"OSS" isn't any kind of magic term.
Kinda obvious, I suppose, but the submitter made it sound like he was the authority on the subject. There are also natural gas water heaters that work just like the electric ones: keeping a tank of water hot all the time. These are very common in the U.S. Gas is not synonymous with "on demand."
There have a been a few cases where consoles were sold at a loss, most notably the Sega Saturn and the Xbox 1. So far, that's it. Atari didn't sell consoles at a loss, neither did Nintendo, neither did Sony. But this is hardly the norm for console sales.
Slashdot is clearly behind the curve on this one.
Point #1: Embedded devices
Do you know what "OS" is running in your digital camera? Your DVD player? Your MP3 player? Your GPS system? In the majority of cases, the answer is no.
Point #2: Web applications
Google search, Google reader, gmail, Flickr, etc. They look the same to me whether I'm running Linux, Unix, OS X, BSD, etc.
Point #3: Cross platform apps
Python coding and development feels the same on Windows, Linux, and OS X. Makes no difference to me. Ditto for editing with vim. Quite a few other languages and applications are identical, too: Inkscape, The Gimp, etc.
Once again, this would have been a better article without the tacked-on, and often incorrect, opinion line. The desktop metaphor is only used in general-purpose personal computers. Does your DVD player use a desktop metaphor? Your MP3 player? Your TV? Your GPS system? Your digital camera? Any video game system ever made? Of course not, because it doesn't make sense.
This is one of those frequent Slashdot articles by someone who's had a personal realization, then goes on to think that their ephiphany is cutting edge thought. In reality, geekdom started melding into mainstream society in the mid-1990s and has been mainstream for at least the last 5 years. You walk into any coffeeshop and see half a dozen people using notebook computers, 50% of which are iBooks or PowerBooks. You hear middle-aged women talking about WiFi configuration in the supermarket. Battlestar Galactica is hugely popular. Linux is written about weekly in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times.
If anything, I think there's a new breed of geek: the person who isn't as introverted as stuck in his or her ways as classic geeks tend to be. And from that point of view, Slashdot is more of an old-geek magnet, something to be chuckled at for it's quaint naiveness, much like Wired.
What I'm trying to say is that Xbox did not come to market with a higly anticipated game that made the units sell, no one said this about Halo before the Xbox release.
Sorry, this is wrong. Halo was the most hyped FPS ever. Even though it was originally a Mac & PC game, the hype carried over to the console. Loads of PC owners who had followed the hype bought Xboxes so they could play Halo. Just the name carried weight at that point, even though the game was nothing like what was shown in teaser footage from 1-2 years prior.
You're missing the point. There's a big difference between taking high-end-price-is-no-object technology and consumerizing it. Putting multi-CPU systems into a small box that sits next to your TV *is* state of the art. No one has done it before.