Don't brand support good game on a platform you don't use/like as fanaticism just because you don't care about the differences.
Sigh. I've *owned* a Mac for quite some time. Marathon was obviously written by someone who saw DOOM and said "Wow! I've gotta do that!" I think this has been generally admitted. The differences were that Marathon had some trivial extra tech (but so did every doomalike), DOOM had much better art direction, and Marathon had a sideline plot that you could follow if you wanted to. The plot is the biggie here, but it was just icing, and not something that really took the game beyond DOOM. If you sit both games side by side, and roll your mind back to 1994, then you'd say, "Well, these games came from the same loaf of bread." The sticking point is that DOOM was released for the PC in 1993 and Marathon a year later for the Mac. There was a lot of raving at the time, because most Mac owners had never played DOOM, so Marathon was their first exposure to it. Then when DOOM was finally ported, it was substandard in some ways (resolution, speed) so the "Marathon is Superior" legend grew. Marathon was also released for the PC, and it tanked in a horrendous way. It looked just like so many other DOOM wannabees that also included plots and the ability to look up and down. Most of those have been forgotten. Marathon would have been forgotten too, had it not been released first for the Mac.
NO WAY, DUDE! Marathon was so far ahead of Doom - Marathon had LOOK UP/DOWN... Marathon had TEAM PLAY. Marathon had MULTI-LEVEL ENVIRONMENTS, RAMPS and STAIRS. It even had Network Voice Taunting (or maybe that was M2) DOOM had none of this.
This is such classic Mac fanaticism it kills me. You're quibbling over details. It's like saying "Maelstrom has nothing at all to do with Asteroids, because it has rendered rocks."
Heck, back in the early 1980s you'd see kids pictured on the front of magazines for writing computer games and making boatloads of money (Mark Turmell, John Harris, Greg Christensen, etc). And remember whiz kids like Jobs, Wozniak, Gates, Dell, and Torvalds? These days, you see kids on the cover of Wired for starting nebulous web-based businesses. You don't see teenagers making a fortune in games any more, because big business has moved into that field. Similarly, big business has moved heavily on the web.
BTW, there are interviews with some of those game-geeks of yesteryear over here. Ah, memories...
I don't think you can deny Marathon as one of the best original games in the history of general computing, not just Macs.
No offense intended, but Marathon was DOOM for the Mac. It had a good story, yes, but the game itself was a DOOM mimic. Had Marathon been released first for the PC, instead of for a platform that hadn't received a DOOM port yet, Marathon would have been lumped in with all the other attempts to tack plots and stories onto DOOM (and, yes, there were many for the PC).
Deus Ex has also gone Gold, and you can preorder it directly...
There's still, unfortunately, nothing to make the Mac game market unique. You get PC games anywhere from a week to two years later, but not much original stuff. This is surprising for a computer originally billed as being for creative types. Note: Remakes of twenty year old arcade games don't count as original, as much as some people want to deny it.
about how we just sort accept flaws in the systems we use
Heck, we justify them. The worst thing about Linux advocacy is hearing raving justifications for something that's been total crap for ten or thirty years. (I'm not saying that Linux is total crap, just that parts of the UNIX culture were heavily criticized all through the 1980s, and rightly so.)
Sites that sell ad space will do anything to increase their page views. If you hit Back and everything reloads, there's a another page view. Intro screens serve the same purpose. Lots of sites break articles into too small pieces, so you have to look at a dozen pages instead of one or two. And each time you click, there's another banner ad.
You need to be careful with this subject. Knowing how to use ICQ, IRC, and Napster has nothing to be do with being in charge or being more intelligent. Anyone who buys a home knows all about mortgages and escrow, which are things that people under 25 rarely know about. Neither of these things are so-called rocket science.
Second, think about what "out of touch" means. Usually, it refers to being outside the prime target for corporate-driven pop culture. Just because someone doesn't give a hoot about electronica or modern static rock doesn't mean he or she is out of touch. Pop culture doesn't make sense as it is. In the mid 1990s everyone was wearing clothes from the late sixties, early seventies (originally worn by people who are 50-60 now). Then *swing* came back a few years later. What the hell? This was music that people's *grandparents* listened to during World War II. And you heard people saying "if you don't like Squirrel Nut Zippers then you're out of touch." Recently I heard a high school kid putting down an acoustic version of "Higher Ground" with the comment "Man, he's butchering the Chili Peppers." Yikes, that's a Stevie Wonder song from over 25 years ago.
People into Linux tend to be the same way with the "out of touch" silliness. Linus's dad could have been hacking UNIX in the seventies. Heck, ESR and RMS *were* hacking UNIX in the seventies. So people who insist on using more recent developments, like the Mac and Windows, are labeled as out of touch:)
Personally, I avoid ICQ at all costs because I don't need another intrusion. Getting constant email is bad enough.
Linux was originally designed as a bazzar-type project. As such, it is designed for the people who want inner access to the system. To those who want to add, and inovate. Most *nix software comes in source form for me to compile on any system, weither an iBook running Linux or an intel running OpenBSD. This is the market it is designed for - control freaks and people who like to take stuff apart.
This is a huge, huge misconception. It reminds me of the common newbie programmer obsession with irrelevant performance--the kind of thing that makes one write custom versions of memcpy instead of the system library version because of a perceived speed boost, even though it ends up being *slower* by a factor of two.
Do you spend your days pouring through source code to understand how it works? Do you submit kernel patches to Linus? Do you rewrite parts of the operating system to benefit you in tangible ways? Do you think that you're really going to get some big boost in your productivity this way? Or is this just your hobby, and playing sysadmin is the end, not the means?
The truth about Linux sysadmining on your own machine is that you don't have as much control as you think. You're dealing with a big system and there's lots of poke around in and twiddle with, but you're not getting anywhere. It's just a game, not something with a point.
Linux people have a hard time differentiating between diddling and using computers. One is self-referential, the other is not.
A very good article that's worth a read before you blindly attack it.
More and more it is becoming apparent that access to the source code of a program and Open Source development are two different animals. Having access to the source is a good thing, be it simply access or complete GPL or BSD freedom. Most cases of solid, commonly used programs with available source don't follow anything like ESR's bazaar development model. Linus rules the kernel with an iron fist, refusing additions simply because they add clutter or are, in his view, ill-conceived. There don't seem to be any successful projects using the herd of cats style of development. There are certainly lots of failures, though.
It is also becoming obvious that having hundreds or thousands of developers working on a project isn't leading to innovation. We've been struggling along with GNOME and KDE, both of which have the feeling of being rushed and missing the mark, and the entire goal of those projects is to mimic the Microsoft/Apple desktop environment. And they're still based on the embarrassing X Windows system. The funny thing is that if just about *any* company decided to spend the money, it could develop a sharp alternative to X in six months. It's not that big a project. Apple isn't using X for Aqua. Linux software still seems so backward, possibly because the user base is a jumble of zealots who hate people interested in usability, others who mistake advocacy with computer use, and programmers who want to hack on projects but don't know what their goals are.
The Linux kernel is a great piece of work, but we are being beaten into irrelevancy in just about every other realm.
The sad things though, is that he seems to repeat Romero's biggest error: overlook technology to only focus on art/design.
If that was Romero's error, then Valve made the same error with Half-Life (i.e. they used a prebuilt engine and focused on design). The days of using technology to carry a game are over.
John Romero's mistake was more that he chose a project too grand in scope to be completed in a reasonable amount of time. This is a common error in the game business; it looked worse in his case because of all the publicity.
I'm interested to know whether there is acutally a market for a UNIX/MacOS combination. I agree that it sounds like a neat idea in general, and would definitely raise my opinion of the Macintosh, but will the average (even the above average,) Mac user welcome such a thing?
It is not being touted as UNIX. It is being touted as something that gives you a more stable, more modern Macintosh. Trying to explain exactly how it is more stable and more modern is the difficult part, and understandably so. Most Mac owners are content with what they have.
Why keep MacOS X backwards compatible? It's killing efficiency
Is this from personal experience or are you just pulling this out of your hat? Note: Unless you have personal experience with OS X and know that this is an effiency issue, then you shouldn't proclaim it as such.
what bothers me is how everyone assumes that KDE and GNOME are the only non-cli interfaces linux has. how about enlightenment? sawmill? blackbox? windowmaker? afterstep?
Those are the crufty, minimalist GUIs I mentioned. Enlightenment has pretty pictures, yes, but like the others in your list it's just a way of reducing your 19" monitor to a bunch of smaller windows containing inconsistent applications. What are the standard keyboard shortcuts for cut, copy, and paste? There aren't any.
We need something dramatically better. Something that focuses on usability and not customization and twiddling.
The most disturbing things about Liunx GUIs is that the architects--and I hesitate to call them that--are not paying attention to any research or good advice. There are a number of good books and online resources about GUI design, and many of them go off in very different directions than Windows. So, yes, there is research going on and there are alternatives, but no one is listening. "Gotta clone Windows!" is the battle cry.
Two good examples are the Genera environment from Symbolics and the system software of the Apple Newton. The latter of these is astounding. It does away with a filesystem, and is based on scraps of information that are indexed and compressed on the fly, invisible to the user. Lisp Machine fanatics can tell you about Genera.
The biggest flaw of KDE and GNOME is that they aren't designed to solve any particular problem. They're just nebulous environments with doodads and gadgets. KDE, for example, seems to have been developed solely to allow people to tinker with and customize KDE. And what a lot of effort and code has gone into a project without a real point.
It would be nice to have a GUI that was more fitting for the small and well-engineered Linux kernel. A 1970s terminal window misses the mark. So does a crufty, minimalist interface sitting on top of X Windows. Are there any real alternatives besides the jump to KDE and GNOME?
Do you think the Crusoe is a flash in the pan or not?
It is very low power, without any competition in that arena, at least in the x86 market. So far, nobody is even trying to get into the same niche. If you want compatibility with a current microprocessor and need low power, where else do you go? You could switch to someting like ARM, but then you run into another set of problems.
It's interesting that, for the longest time, expandability was seen as the way of the future. That's part of why the PC clones killed earlier machines, like the Apple II and Atari 800. But we've come full circle, and we're not so sure. There's much to be said for fixed hardware. Heck, you could have taken an Atari 800, shrunk it down to a small unit that could run on AA batteries, and you'd have something comparable to a Game Boy. 1978 hardware would still be selling in 2000.
There are some lessons for Linux in here, though I don't know if they'll ever help the cause. There are many stories about how companies doing development for the original IBM PC or Apple or Atari computers used VAXen or other minicomputers for development. After all, a hulking machine with gobs of processor and storage, a real multitasking operating system, and optimizing compilers just *had* to be better for development than an 8-bit machine with 48K RAM, right? But it turned out that assemblers written for those 8-bit machines were outrunning the minicomputers by a factor of 2-10 times. Why? Because lots of the standard goop that 1970s geeks thought was necessary turned out not be so. We're coming around to that point again, as lots of people don't know their computer history.
Realize that game developers are only taking advantage of a fraction of the power of the average PC at the moment. Wanna specifically support Katmai instructions? Only if you want extra QA headaches and don't care about processors prior to the Pentium III. Wanna support Matrox bump mapping? Only if you want extra QA headaches and think there are enough Matrox owners to make it worthwhile. Wanna support 3DNow? Wanna support GeForce T&L? Wanna support the 3dfx T-buffer? Wanna optimize texture handling for a particular card? Same answer to all of them.
We just give up and support a generic subset of what's out there. We could push the two year old Voodoo 2 beyond what people expect from a GeForce 2, but there's no incentive. Crazy geeks never say "forget it, my graphics card is reliable, and I'm gonna stick with it." They'll upgrade at any cost, even if a new card is priced as much as a PlayStation 2 and has horrible drivers (as anything from nVidia does).
The term "open source" needs clarification. In practice, this means that the developer of software makes the source code available under a license similar to GPL or the BSD artistic license. This is a good thing, because it means you can make fixes or changes if you become desperate, and there's always the possibility of someone else picking up the project should the original developer(s) lose interest. Or someone could use the source as a basis for another project. And so on.
But let's stop fooling ourselves into thinking that open source means better and faster development. The best software is still developed by focused groups of people who are following their original vision. Add too many people and you get design by committee. There aren't good examples of non-system software that has benefited from OS. Perl, the Linux kernel, apache, and sendmail are the usual examples that get trotted out, just like fraternities trot out the "We do charity work!" line each time they get nailed for hazing or drunkeness. The bottom line is that just having the source code freely available (as in speech) does not make for open source development. That's something different altogether.
"Open Source" means that the source code is freely available. "Open Source Development" means "development by people who are making the source code publicly available." ESR would have you believe that all the work is being done by people who happen across the source and add major features, which is far from the truth.
People put it down, because it comes as part of the Corel Draw suite, but it is a very good program with quite a professional following. It does everything you'd want from Photoshop, with a less cluttered and confusing interface. It handles some things better than Photoshop, like paletted images. It's also a better choice for doing actual painting work (as opposed to image retouching). Good job Corel!
Comparing Photo Paint to the Gimp is tricky, because the Gimp is such a beast in many ways, at least when you view it through something other than eyes of zealotry. Telling a graphic artist to use The Gimp is like telling a programmer to use lcc over all other compilers. I'm not flaming The Gimp, just pointing out that its main benefits have always been (a) it's free, and (b) it runs under Linux.
I've criticized Katz before, after trying for a long time to resist, but this is better than usual. It's interesting and contains some non-obvious thoughts.
People are generally foolish, at least in the US, about many issues involved with children. For example, it doesn't take much thought to realize that putting a kid in day care from six weeks old isn't as good for him or her as being raised at home. But parents are doing this by the millions, and they fool themselves into thinking that it is in their child's best interests, because otherwise it would be unspeakable. And there's a weird pre-occupation in the US with normal childbirth being an aberration of nature. You have to intervene and use vaccuums and drugs and such, and still have higher infant mortality rates than countries which aren't looked at as such world powers (Finland, Norway, Belgium, Germany, France, Sweden, Switzerland). Kinda seems silly to even think about genetic issues in light of the other nonsense that's going on.
If an open source game project were to collect a large enough following of programmers and artists, it could 'pull a linux' on the game industry. It will take time to build that sort of following, but I am beginning to see it happen with several projects
We are currently undergoing a renaissance in independent film making. I've seen some incredibly high quality films churned out by teams of talented volunteers.
Those high quality films are done by small, focused groups of people with a vision. Throwing lots of people at project isn't necessarily going to make it better. If anything, I would expect it to cause the project to lose focus. This is starting to become a real issue with big open source projects.
The vision issue is just as important. Right now, almost all Linux game projects are from coders who want to clone something, be it a current game or a relic. You would think that free tools, free libraries, and free documentation would open the door to creativity; "I have something 500x more powerful than an Apple II, so I can create whatever my mind desires, unlike those game designers who had to work within the limitations of an Apple II." But it isn't happening. We're not seeing anything creative. Browse through the Linux Game Tome if you want to be slapped in this face with this.
In general, the average gated community software has more focus and is of higher quality. Yes, there are high profile exceptions (the Linux kernel, Apache, sendmail). It isn't hard to see why this is true. Apple or Bell Labs, for example, have have teams of screened, experienced people working on projects day in and day out for years. The average Open Source project tends to be a loose group of people of varying experience, with a sizable percentage of those people being idealistic students without much knowledge of software engineering.
Yes, you can say "Microsoft puts out crap," and maybe that's true, but CorelDraw and Photoshop and Delphi and Allegro Common Lisp and QNX are all excellent products. So you can't slam all "for pay" software developers. Hooking up with such a group makes sense, because it results in better software for everyone. A group of renegade college students trying to clone Excel or Word is more doomed to fail, and not the best use of one's time.
It will be a free game development platform/animation studio. So anyone can create OpenGL games.
So if someone has OpenGL and a modeler he can create games? "OpenGL = game engine" is one of the persistant myths of recent times. Even if you used OpenGL to write a renderer, or even if you used Crystal Space or something else canned, you still have 90% of the work ahead of you.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't brand support good game on a platform you don't use/like as fanaticism just because you don't care about the differences.
Sigh. I've *owned* a Mac for quite some time. Marathon was obviously written by someone who saw DOOM and said "Wow! I've gotta do that!" I think this has been generally admitted. The differences were that Marathon had some trivial extra tech (but so did every doomalike), DOOM had much better art direction, and Marathon had a sideline plot that you could follow if you wanted to. The plot is the biggie here, but it was just icing, and not something that really took the game beyond DOOM. If you sit both games side by side, and roll your mind back to 1994, then you'd say, "Well, these games came from the same loaf of bread." The sticking point is that DOOM was released for the PC in 1993 and Marathon a year later for the Mac. There was a lot of raving at the time, because most Mac owners had never played DOOM, so Marathon was their first exposure to it. Then when DOOM was finally ported, it was substandard in some ways (resolution, speed) so the "Marathon is Superior" legend grew. Marathon was also released for the PC, and it tanked in a horrendous way. It looked just like so many other DOOM wannabees that also included plots and the ability to look up and down. Most of those have been forgotten. Marathon would have been forgotten too, had it not been released first for the Mac.
On the plus side, the Mac spawned SimCity, and for that I am grateful.
Not true. It was originally developed on a Commodore 64 (no joke!), then re-worked and released first for the PC.
NO WAY, DUDE! Marathon was so far ahead of Doom - Marathon had LOOK UP/DOWN... Marathon had TEAM PLAY. Marathon had MULTI-LEVEL ENVIRONMENTS, RAMPS and STAIRS. It even had Network Voice Taunting (or maybe that was M2) DOOM had none of this.
This is such classic Mac fanaticism it kills me. You're quibbling over details. It's like saying "Maelstrom has nothing at all to do with Asteroids, because it has rendered rocks."
Heck, back in the early 1980s you'd see kids pictured on the front of magazines for writing computer games and making boatloads of money (Mark Turmell, John Harris, Greg Christensen, etc). And remember whiz kids like Jobs, Wozniak, Gates, Dell, and Torvalds? These days, you see kids on the cover of Wired for starting nebulous web-based businesses. You don't see teenagers making a fortune in games any more, because big business has moved into that field. Similarly, big business has moved heavily on the web.
BTW, there are interviews with some of those game-geeks of yesteryear over here. Ah, memories...
I don't think you can deny Marathon as one of the best original games in the history of general computing, not just Macs.
No offense intended, but Marathon was DOOM for the Mac. It had a good story, yes, but the game itself was a DOOM mimic. Had Marathon been released first for the PC, instead of for a platform that hadn't received a DOOM port yet, Marathon would have been lumped in with all the other attempts to tack plots and stories onto DOOM (and, yes, there were many for the PC).
Deus Ex has also gone Gold, and you can preorder it directly...
There's still, unfortunately, nothing to make the Mac game market unique. You get PC games anywhere from a week to two years later, but not much original stuff. This is surprising for a computer originally billed as being for creative types. Note: Remakes of twenty year old arcade games don't count as original, as much as some people want to deny it.
about how we just sort accept flaws in the systems we use
Heck, we justify them. The worst thing about Linux advocacy is hearing raving justifications for something that's been total crap for ten or thirty years. (I'm not saying that Linux is total crap, just that parts of the UNIX culture were heavily criticized all through the 1980s, and rightly so.)
Sites that sell ad space will do anything to increase their page views. If you hit Back and everything reloads, there's a another page view. Intro screens serve the same purpose. Lots of sites break articles into too small pieces, so you have to look at a dozen pages instead of one or two. And each time you click, there's another banner ad.
You need to be careful with this subject. Knowing how to use ICQ, IRC, and Napster has nothing to be do with being in charge or being more intelligent. Anyone who buys a home knows all about mortgages and escrow, which are things that people under 25 rarely know about. Neither of these things are so-called rocket science.
:)
Second, think about what "out of touch" means. Usually, it refers to being outside the prime target for corporate-driven pop culture. Just because someone doesn't give a hoot about electronica or modern static rock doesn't mean he or she is out of touch. Pop culture doesn't make sense as it is. In the mid 1990s everyone was wearing clothes from the late sixties, early seventies (originally worn by people who are 50-60 now). Then *swing* came back a few years later. What the hell? This was music that people's *grandparents* listened to during World War II. And you heard people saying "if you don't like Squirrel Nut Zippers then you're out of touch." Recently I heard a high school kid putting down an acoustic version of "Higher Ground" with the comment "Man, he's butchering the Chili Peppers." Yikes, that's a Stevie Wonder song from over 25 years ago.
People into Linux tend to be the same way with the "out of touch" silliness. Linus's dad could have been hacking UNIX in the seventies. Heck, ESR and RMS *were* hacking UNIX in the seventies. So people who insist on using more recent developments, like the Mac and Windows, are labeled as out of touch
Personally, I avoid ICQ at all costs because I don't need another intrusion. Getting constant email is bad enough.
Linux was originally designed as a bazzar-type project. As such, it is designed for the people who want inner access to the system. To those who want to add, and inovate. Most *nix software comes in source form for me to compile on any system, weither an iBook running Linux or an intel running OpenBSD. This is the market it is designed for - control freaks and people who like to take stuff apart.
This is a huge, huge misconception. It reminds me of the common newbie programmer obsession with irrelevant performance--the kind of thing that makes one write custom versions of memcpy instead of the system library version because of a perceived speed boost, even though it ends up being *slower* by a factor of two.
Do you spend your days pouring through source code to understand how it works? Do you submit kernel patches to Linus? Do you rewrite parts of the operating system to benefit you in tangible ways? Do you think that you're really going to get some big boost in your productivity this way? Or is this just your hobby, and playing sysadmin is the end, not the means?
The truth about Linux sysadmining on your own machine is that you don't have as much control as you think. You're dealing with a big system and there's lots of poke around in and twiddle with, but you're not getting anywhere. It's just a game, not something with a point.
Linux people have a hard time differentiating between diddling and using computers. One is self-referential, the other is not.
A very good article that's worth a read before you blindly attack it.
More and more it is becoming apparent that access to the source code of a program and Open Source development are two different animals. Having access to the source is a good thing, be it simply access or complete GPL or BSD freedom. Most cases of solid, commonly used programs with available source don't follow anything like ESR's bazaar development model. Linus rules the kernel with an iron fist, refusing additions simply because they add clutter or are, in his view, ill-conceived. There don't seem to be any successful projects using the herd of cats style of development. There are certainly lots of failures, though.
It is also becoming obvious that having hundreds or thousands of developers working on a project isn't leading to innovation. We've been struggling along with GNOME and KDE, both of which have the feeling of being rushed and missing the mark, and the entire goal of those projects is to mimic the Microsoft/Apple desktop environment. And they're still based on the embarrassing X Windows system. The funny thing is that if just about *any* company decided to spend the money, it could develop a sharp alternative to X in six months. It's not that big a project. Apple isn't using X for Aqua. Linux software still seems so backward, possibly because the user base is a jumble of zealots who hate people interested in usability, others who mistake advocacy with computer use, and programmers who want to hack on projects but don't know what their goals are.
The Linux kernel is a great piece of work, but we are being beaten into irrelevancy in just about every other realm.
The sad things though, is that he seems to repeat Romero's biggest error: overlook technology to only focus on art/design.
If that was Romero's error, then Valve made the same error with Half-Life (i.e. they used a prebuilt engine and focused on design). The days of using technology to carry a game are over.
John Romero's mistake was more that he chose a project too grand in scope to be completed in a reasonable amount of time. This is a common error in the game business; it looked worse in his case because of all the publicity.
I'm interested to know whether there is acutally a market for a UNIX/MacOS combination. I agree that it sounds like a neat idea in general, and would definitely raise my opinion of the Macintosh, but will the average (even the above average,) Mac user welcome such a thing?
It is not being touted as UNIX. It is being touted as something that gives you a more stable, more modern Macintosh. Trying to explain exactly how it is more stable and more modern is the difficult part, and understandably so. Most Mac owners are content with what they have.
Why keep MacOS X backwards compatible? It's killing efficiency
Is this from personal experience or are you just pulling this out of your hat? Note: Unless you have personal experience with OS X and know that this is an effiency issue, then you shouldn't proclaim it as such.
what bothers me is how everyone assumes that KDE and GNOME are the only non-cli interfaces linux has. how about enlightenment? sawmill? blackbox? windowmaker? afterstep?
Those are the crufty, minimalist GUIs I mentioned. Enlightenment has pretty pictures, yes, but like the others in your list it's just a way of reducing your 19" monitor to a bunch of smaller windows containing inconsistent applications. What are the standard keyboard shortcuts for cut, copy, and paste? There aren't any.
We need something dramatically better. Something that focuses on usability and not customization and twiddling.
The most disturbing things about Liunx GUIs is that the architects--and I hesitate to call them that--are not paying attention to any research or good advice. There are a number of good books and online resources about GUI design, and many of them go off in very different directions than Windows. So, yes, there is research going on and there are alternatives, but no one is listening. "Gotta clone Windows!" is the battle cry.
Two good examples are the Genera environment from Symbolics and the system software of the Apple Newton. The latter of these is astounding. It does away with a filesystem, and is based on scraps of information that are indexed and compressed on the fly, invisible to the user. Lisp Machine fanatics can tell you about Genera.
The biggest flaw of KDE and GNOME is that they aren't designed to solve any particular problem. They're just nebulous environments with doodads and gadgets. KDE, for example, seems to have been developed solely to allow people to tinker with and customize KDE. And what a lot of effort and code has gone into a project without a real point.
It would be nice to have a GUI that was more fitting for the small and well-engineered Linux kernel. A 1970s terminal window misses the mark. So does a crufty, minimalist interface sitting on top of X Windows. Are there any real alternatives besides the jump to KDE and GNOME?
Do you think the Crusoe is a flash in the pan or not?
It is very low power, without any competition in that arena, at least in the x86 market. So far, nobody is even trying to get into the same niche. If you want compatibility with a current microprocessor and need low power, where else do you go? You could switch to someting like ARM, but then you run into another set of problems.
It's interesting that, for the longest time, expandability was seen as the way of the future. That's part of why the PC clones killed earlier machines, like the Apple II and Atari 800. But we've come full circle, and we're not so sure. There's much to be said for fixed hardware. Heck, you could have taken an Atari 800, shrunk it down to a small unit that could run on AA batteries, and you'd have something comparable to a Game Boy. 1978 hardware would still be selling in 2000.
There are some lessons for Linux in here, though I don't know if they'll ever help the cause. There are many stories about how companies doing development for the original IBM PC or Apple or Atari computers used VAXen or other minicomputers for development. After all, a hulking machine with gobs of processor and storage, a real multitasking operating system, and optimizing compilers just *had* to be better for development than an 8-bit machine with 48K RAM, right? But it turned out that assemblers written for those 8-bit machines were outrunning the minicomputers by a factor of 2-10 times. Why? Because lots of the standard goop that 1970s geeks thought was necessary turned out not be so. We're coming around to that point again, as lots of people don't know their computer history.
Realize that game developers are only taking advantage of a fraction of the power of the average PC at the moment. Wanna specifically support Katmai instructions? Only if you want extra QA headaches and don't care about processors prior to the Pentium III. Wanna support Matrox bump mapping? Only if you want extra QA headaches and think there are enough Matrox owners to make it worthwhile. Wanna support 3DNow? Wanna support GeForce T&L? Wanna support the 3dfx T-buffer? Wanna optimize texture handling for a particular card? Same answer to all of them.
We just give up and support a generic subset of what's out there. We could push the two year old Voodoo 2 beyond what people expect from a GeForce 2, but there's no incentive. Crazy geeks never say "forget it, my graphics card is reliable, and I'm gonna stick with it." They'll upgrade at any cost, even if a new card is priced as much as a PlayStation 2 and has horrible drivers (as anything from nVidia does).
The term "open source" needs clarification. In practice, this means that the developer of software makes the source code available under a license similar to GPL or the BSD artistic license. This is a good thing, because it means you can make fixes or changes if you become desperate, and there's always the possibility of someone else picking up the project should the original developer(s) lose interest. Or someone could use the source as a basis for another project. And so on.
But let's stop fooling ourselves into thinking that open source means better and faster development. The best software is still developed by focused groups of people who are following their original vision. Add too many people and you get design by committee. There aren't good examples of non-system software that has benefited from OS. Perl, the Linux kernel, apache, and sendmail are the usual examples that get trotted out, just like fraternities trot out the "We do charity work!" line each time they get nailed for hazing or drunkeness. The bottom line is that just having the source code freely available (as in speech) does not make for open source development. That's something different altogether.
"Open Source" means that the source code is freely available. "Open Source Development" means "development by people who are making the source code publicly available." ESR would have you believe that all the work is being done by people who happen across the source and add major features, which is far from the truth.
People put it down, because it comes as part of the Corel Draw suite, but it is a very good program with quite a professional following. It does everything you'd want from Photoshop, with a less cluttered and confusing interface. It handles some things better than Photoshop, like paletted images. It's also a better choice for doing actual painting work (as opposed to image retouching). Good job Corel!
Comparing Photo Paint to the Gimp is tricky, because the Gimp is such a beast in many ways, at least when you view it through something other than eyes of zealotry. Telling a graphic artist to use The Gimp is like telling a programmer to use lcc over all other compilers. I'm not flaming The Gimp, just pointing out that its main benefits have always been (a) it's free, and (b) it runs under Linux.
I've criticized Katz before, after trying for a long time to resist, but this is better than usual. It's interesting and contains some non-obvious thoughts.
People are generally foolish, at least in the US, about many issues involved with children. For example, it doesn't take much thought to realize that putting a kid in day care from six weeks old isn't as good for him or her as being raised at home. But parents are doing this by the millions, and they fool themselves into thinking that it is in their child's best interests, because otherwise it would be unspeakable. And there's a weird pre-occupation in the US with normal childbirth being an aberration of nature. You have to intervene and use vaccuums and drugs and such, and still have higher infant mortality rates than countries which aren't looked at as such world powers (Finland, Norway, Belgium, Germany, France, Sweden, Switzerland). Kinda seems silly to even think about genetic issues in light of the other nonsense that's going on.
If an open source game project were to collect a large enough following of programmers and artists, it could 'pull a linux' on the game industry. It will take time to build that sort of following, but I am beginning to see it happen with several projects
We are currently undergoing a renaissance in independent film making. I've seen some incredibly high quality films churned out by teams of talented volunteers.
Those high quality films are done by small, focused groups of people with a vision. Throwing lots of people at project isn't necessarily going to make it better. If anything, I would expect it to cause the project to lose focus. This is starting to become a real issue with big open source projects.
The vision issue is just as important. Right now, almost all Linux game projects are from coders who want to clone something, be it a current game or a relic. You would think that free tools, free libraries, and free documentation would open the door to creativity; "I have something 500x more powerful than an Apple II, so I can create whatever my mind desires, unlike those game designers who had to work within the limitations of an Apple II." But it isn't happening. We're not seeing anything creative. Browse through the Linux Game Tome if you want to be slapped in this face with this.
In general, the average gated community software has more focus and is of higher quality. Yes, there are high profile exceptions (the Linux kernel, Apache, sendmail). It isn't hard to see why this is true. Apple or Bell Labs, for example, have have teams of screened, experienced people working on projects day in and day out for years. The average Open Source project tends to be a loose group of people of varying experience, with a sizable percentage of those people being idealistic students without much knowledge of software engineering.
Yes, you can say "Microsoft puts out crap," and maybe that's true, but CorelDraw and Photoshop and Delphi and Allegro Common Lisp and QNX are all excellent products. So you can't slam all "for pay" software developers. Hooking up with such a group makes sense, because it results in better software for everyone. A group of renegade college students trying to clone Excel or Word is more doomed to fail, and not the best use of one's time.
It will be a free game development platform/animation studio. So anyone can create OpenGL games.
So if someone has OpenGL and a modeler he can create games? "OpenGL = game engine" is one of the persistant myths of recent times. Even if you used OpenGL to write a renderer, or even if you used Crystal Space or something else canned, you still have 90% of the work ahead of you.