I wouldn't take a job with a company that didn't provide an option to work from home at least some of the time.
Good luck. Telecommuting is still extremely rare, unless you're a salesperson or someone else who does most of the work outside the office anyway.
Would rather have "old" programmers than young
on
Too Old To Code?
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· Score: 1
Quite honestly, the reason the software industry looks for young 'uns is because they're too naive to realize what's going on. For example, why do companies insist on developing huge projects with little planning in a lowish level language like C++? "The Mythical Man Month" was published over 25 years ago; the problems here were well-known.
The 40+ year old programmers are the ones who know when a project is a bad deal up front and are writing code using tools that get the job done as painlessly as possible, be it Lisp or a RAD environment.
Windows 2000 have a 20-megabyte-heavy kernel. Not Linux.
Not Windows 2000 either. The so-called "kernel" of Windows 2000 is more like "Linux Kernel + X windows + video drivers + very complete graphics library."
The Open Source Way: clone other software, take all the credit, keep all the bloat. I mean that seriously, not as a troll.
In all honesty, both Gnome and KDE are turning into free Windows clones. They're not any slimmer, not any easier to use, not any more stable. 'twould be nice if we could say "Look at how we can do the same thing as Microsoft in 1/20 the resources!" or "Look at the bold ease of use changes we're making!"
What a bunch of diddly changes to an already stable system. My need to upgrade = zero.
A wake-up call for Linux zealots
on
AtheOS
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· Score: 3
Linux is not, nor has ever been, the epitome of operating system design. It's a reworking of UNIX, the same operating system that could have used by the fathers of Slashdotters twenty or more years ago. Linux is a good UNIX-like system, and it is free. There's no argument there.
The modern OS philosophy is beoming more and more that "operating system" is an outdated term. Does anyone care what OS makes a Palm run? Or what the low-level features of the Mac OS X kernel are? No. If you do, then you're fixating on the wrong part of the computer.
Smaller, cleaner alternatives are certainly a good thing. Don't bash them because they conflict with your zealotry.
Amiga OS comparisons not a good thing
on
AtheOS
·
· Score: 2
The Amiga was a machine before it's time; everyone will admit that. The hardware was brilliant (RIP Jay Miner) and the tiny multitasking kernel was very nice. But you have to stop there. The desktop environment of the Amiga was generally poor, even when compared to a Macintosh from the same era. It improved somewhat later, but it was still nothing that should be raved about. The Amiga was a brilliant graphics and sound box, but that doesn't mean that everything with the Amiga name on it was brilliant. Amiga OS was mediocre at best.
If you asked a group of authors "What are your writing goals?", then you'd get responses about the novels they have in their heads and wish to write, or what they want to say in their work, or how they want to write something as great as writers they admire. Now replace those writers with Slashdotters and ask them the same question. You'll hear responses like:
I want to write lots and lots.
I want to convince people that English is the best language to write in.
I want to get so intricately involved in grammar and spelling that I never have to really write anything.
I want to learn everything I can about writing so I can, you know, just write stuff. Anything. It doesn't matter what it is.
I want to have grammar that's so perfect that no one can find any mistakes in what I write.
What strange to me is how programming is looked at as an end in itself and not a medium for creation. I would have expected raves about implementing great ideas. Huh.
The bottom line is that most people don't obsess about operating systems. Windows lets people run Word, Excel, use popular email managers, edutainment software, and lots of games. Right now the Linux desktop market consists mostly of people who *do* obsess about operating systems and people with other agendas (e.g. all software should be free; Bill Gates is a fag). This is not generally not a good target market for games.
The other thing, something that I wish weren't true, is that there's a definite attitude among Linux zealots. I don't mean that in a trolling sorta way, just in a "everybody has noticed this except you" way. The Macintosh market is similar in some ways, though not as extreme. If you don't do a Mac port, you get flamed for liking "Windoze." If you do a Mac port, you get flamed for bringing "peecee" software over to a superior machine. From following Slashdot, I can see that companies showing an interest in Linux development walk a thin line. Metrowerks gets slammed for claiming "RedHat only," though most distributions are the same internally. Borland gets trashed with a headline on Slashdot because someone misinterpreted the license agreement. People get annoyed simply because Borland is *giving away* a full fledged C++ compiler and they aren't including the source. There are twisted rants about how Emacs is better than Word and The Gimp smokes Photoshop, which are just plain uninformed. Nobody wants to get involved in such silliness.
The X-Files was a great series when it came out, and lasted well for what it was, but no show should be pushed beyond its shelf life.
Any show gets old after you've watched it too long. For people who only started watching recently, the new ones are just fine. But those people don't get to rant on about how great things were back in The Day and how the scene has totally fallen part.
X setup runs just dandy. Because our hardware is *supported*, right?
Under Windows, any video card is supported.
And we log in and we see the KDE desktop and we are happy people.
KDE is a weird jumble of features. Ditto for Windows. But KDE is less polished and runs much less software.
(X cut and paste : highlight marks, middle button pastes. End of discussion)
For the standard 3-button mouse that ships with all PCs right? Oh, I'm supposed to use chords to mimic the third button? What are the standard keyboars shortcuts for copy, cut, and paste?
"Twiddling with XWindows settings"? WTF? Just set it up (with the nice graphical XF86Setup tool, if your installer didn't do it for you) and use it.
If it doesn't recognize your video card then, yes, you have to muck with X windows settings.
Listen, Linux is harder to configure and the UIs are less polished than Windows. There's nothing to argue there. Hopefully the Eazel folks will address these issues in a way other than (1) blind zealotry, and (2) a group of college students who design GUIs out of spite for Microsoft rather than from a human interface point of view.
Once again, I see at least one legitimate response claiming that Linux should remain difficult to use, as it keeps away people without enough knowledge. There's one fundamental flaw to this line of thinking:
It's also keeping away people that *have* enough knowledge.
I've done my share of assembly coding. I spend my day job immersed in C++ code. I've used UNIX as my primary operating system on the job. I've written tens of thousands of lines of production code using vi on a Sun workstation. I also have both Windows and Linux installed on my machine at home, and, more often than not, I find myself using Windows.
Most of the reason is that Linux is just too tempermental and fussy. I admire the work that's gone into the kernel, but twiddling with Xwindows settings and getting my video card to work properly and having to deal with weird X cut and paste standards is just too much. And there are little things no one thinks about, too, like having to login as root in order to shut down, or remembering how to set it up so any user can shut down. Crusty.
Yes, you can respond with "You dolt! Here's how you can get around that problem!". But the bottom line is that some people have gotten tired of the attitude that getting to play 1970s system administrator is a wonderful thing. Some people don't mind, like people who passionately hate Microsoft and love to start email campaigns about getting game ABC ported over, and people who equate snagging MP3s and constantly upgrading different parts of their systems with "using a computer." It's almost cultish how these people will deny that Linux is hard to use. Get over it!
First, it wasn't six months. More like six weeks, before it was first shown at GDC.
Second, there are some things that OpenGL provides that can be nasty to port to simpler APIs. Texture management is one. OpenGL and Direct3D do this transparently, but on the PS2 you have to do it yourself. Clipping is another. If you use OpenGL, then your clipping is built in. Move to something else and you have to do the clipping yourself. This doesn't change the fact that any decent modern game shouldn't be based around 3D API calls.
The "Rah-rah OpenGL rocks!" attitude needs to get toned down. We're talking about a 3D API here. In an average game, maybe 2% of the total code has any involvement at all with 3D API calls. Most of the graphics-related code is encapsulated inside of "draw_character" and "draw_mesh" and "draw_bitmap" type of routines. It's not like using OpenGL or Direct3D or whatever has any real bearing on the game itself. If you want to switch from, say, OpenGL to Direct3D, then you go get one of those "Programmiong Direct3D" books, slog through it over the weekend, write code for a few days, and you're good to go. It's not like switching between C++ and Smalltalk or somesuch.
The other thing to keep in mind is that consoles like the PS2 use the hardware as the graphics API. Some people think this is crazy, but it's not a big deal. You take the 2% of your code that deals with actually drawing things and rewrite it to use PS2-specific features. That's about on par with switching between different software-oriented APIs. And Epic has stated that they'll be focusing on consoles first and PCs later for future projects. Other PC developers have said the same thing.
The bottom line is that 3D APIs aren't the cornerstones that people think they are.
Maybe you haven't been exposed to enough processor archictectures? The ARM chips have the cleanest instruction set and overall archictecture that I've seen, and that includes lots of hands-on experience with the PowerPC, x86, SHx, and MIPS chips. The ARM designers had some very good ideas for keeping instructions simple while getting a lot done and they had a novel way of avoiding the usual branch prediction troubles. Very slick.
The Alphas were not "head and shoulders above the 386." When they were first introduced, they were sucking up way, way more power and requiring much more cooling than an average Intel chip. Faster, yes, but at a price. Alphas were targeted at the "performance at all costs" CPU market, not something for the average desktop or laptop.
I found this article about the difficulties PS2 developers have had with the system. Given
No console has ever been easy to develop for. They all require you to read big, thick manuals of arcana and warp your game to fit the strengths of the hardware. The difference this time around is that lots of people who have only done desktop OS programming (mostly Windows, but similarly Linux and MacOS) are jumping into the PS2 with stars in their eyes and discovering that it's a different world. They just want to be able to use Direct3D and OpenGL and Windows API calls and rely on a bottomless virtual memory system, and instead they have to deal with the hardware on its own level, as typical embedded systems programmers do.
The bottom line is that you can't listen to these people. Of course they're going to whine.
Now you need to go into a rant about how the whole scene has degenerated, and how it's nothing like it used to be back when you first got into it two years ago.
More to games than tech...who'd a thought?
on
Dreadling Released
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· Score: 2
It's nice to see people scrambling over a black and white game running on a processor that was being taped out twenty years ago. The "GeForce kicks Voodoos a$$" nonsense and driver compatibility crap gets really tiring after a while. Now if we'd only see something original, instead of clones of the same old games, then we'd get some life back into the game biz that once seemed so promising.
Cash was a behind the scenes grunt at id. A nice guy, yes, and a good programmer, but there are hundreds of other John Cash types in the game business, people who have worked on amazing 3D games. It's strange that being at id causes such fame, with so many talented 3D gurus laboring in obscurity.
These are only slightly exaggerated. The general trouble with most things X or Linux related is that any fool can see how messed up they are, but much effort is put into defending them. We put down Windows, yes, but we defend our mistakes forever. Remember, UNIX was heavily criticized and out of favor in the the late 1980s, even to the point where it looked like it be on the way out. And those same criticisms are still applicable today.
Computers are junk. Everyone who's been using them for ten years or more knows this. MS-DOS was terrible. Windows is a house of cards. UNIX is more stable, but this benefit is often lost in a huge maze of system administration (that is, most people who pick up a Linux distribution at Borders aren't running any more securely than Joe Windows).
The difference between ten years ago and now is that these junky and unreliable systems are now ubiquitious in business and are connected to the internet; back then, there were commonly standalone database and word processing PCs. None of these systems were designed for the kind of use they're now getting. An insurance agency runs out and gets ten machines from Best Buy, gets internet access through AOL or a local ISP, and uses the freebie versions of Outlook, Word, and Excel that came with those machines.
This is a terrible situation. Machines that crash frequently and are difficult to configure have become commonplace and are being used for important work. The virus issue aside, look at some of the issues that have to be dealt with:
Most consumer level machines don't come with Zip drives or any way of making backups, other than 1.44M floppies. Yet these same machines come with 8 gigabyte hard drives. Even a Zip disk isn't going to make a dent in that. Linux is not any better than Windows in this regard.
When you get in a hole and have to reinstall Windows, you lose the registry. This means you have to reinstall every piece of software over again, even though it may already be on your hard drive and perfectly usable otherwise.
Shared libraries and DLLs are complete hell to maintain. Install a new program and watch one or some of your old ones stop working. Don't be smug; Gnome and KDE are just as bad as Windows in this regard.
Virii are just another kink in the system, maybe no worse than any of the above. If a hard drive crashed today on 95% of the computers in existence today, the information on it would be irretreivably lost. Heck, at every company I've worked at the usual followup to such a disaster is "The backup seems to be corrupted," and then "The safety backup is bad too." Would losing your system to a virus be any worse?
By "bad" I don't mean "bad system," I mean "bad vibes." There was so much advocacy among Amiga and Mac owners that I just couldn't stand it. In both cases, there was a degeneration into "let's try to beat the PC!" which dragged everyone into the much and slime. Every game had to try to outdo some PC game. Every app had to try to outdo some PC app. In the end, the underdog system came out looking like a wannabe.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't take a job with a company that didn't provide an option to work from home at least some of the time.
Good luck. Telecommuting is still extremely rare, unless you're a salesperson or someone else who does most of the work outside the office anyway.
Quite honestly, the reason the software industry looks for young 'uns is because they're too naive to realize what's going on. For example, why do companies insist on developing huge projects with little planning in a lowish level language like C++? "The Mythical Man Month" was published over 25 years ago; the problems here were well-known.
The 40+ year old programmers are the ones who know when a project is a bad deal up front and are writing code using tools that get the job done as painlessly as possible, be it Lisp or a RAD environment.
Windows 2000 have a 20-megabyte-heavy kernel. Not Linux.
Not Windows 2000 either. The so-called "kernel" of Windows 2000 is more like "Linux Kernel + X windows + video drivers + very complete graphics library."
The Open Source Way: clone other software, take all the credit, keep all the bloat. I mean that seriously, not as a troll.
In all honesty, both Gnome and KDE are turning into free Windows clones. They're not any slimmer, not any easier to use, not any more stable. 'twould be nice if we could say "Look at how we can do the same thing as Microsoft in 1/20 the resources!" or "Look at the bold ease of use changes we're making!"
What a bunch of diddly changes to an already stable system. My need to upgrade = zero.
Linux is not, nor has ever been, the epitome of operating system design. It's a reworking of UNIX, the same operating system that could have used by the fathers of Slashdotters twenty or more years ago. Linux is a good UNIX-like system, and it is free. There's no argument there.
The modern OS philosophy is beoming more and more that "operating system" is an outdated term. Does anyone care what OS makes a Palm run? Or what the low-level features of the Mac OS X kernel are? No. If you do, then you're fixating on the wrong part of the computer.
Smaller, cleaner alternatives are certainly a good thing. Don't bash them because they conflict with your zealotry.
The Amiga was a machine before it's time; everyone will admit that. The hardware was brilliant (RIP Jay Miner) and the tiny multitasking kernel was very nice. But you have to stop there. The desktop environment of the Amiga was generally poor, even when compared to a Macintosh from the same era. It improved somewhat later, but it was still nothing that should be raved about. The Amiga was a brilliant graphics and sound box, but that doesn't mean that everything with the Amiga name on it was brilliant. Amiga OS was mediocre at best.
I want to write lots and lots.
I want to convince people that English is the best language to write in.
I want to get so intricately involved in grammar and spelling that I never have to really write anything.
I want to learn everything I can about writing so I can, you know, just write stuff. Anything. It doesn't matter what it is.
I want to have grammar that's so perfect that no one can find any mistakes in what I write.
What strange to me is how programming is looked at as an end in itself and not a medium for creation. I would have expected raves about implementing great ideas. Huh.
Note: I work for a game company.
The bottom line is that most people don't obsess about operating systems. Windows lets people run Word, Excel, use popular email managers, edutainment software, and lots of games. Right now the Linux desktop market consists mostly of people who *do* obsess about operating systems and people with other agendas (e.g. all software should be free; Bill Gates is a fag). This is not generally not a good target market for games.
The other thing, something that I wish weren't true, is that there's a definite attitude among Linux zealots. I don't mean that in a trolling sorta way, just in a "everybody has noticed this except you" way. The Macintosh market is similar in some ways, though not as extreme. If you don't do a Mac port, you get flamed for liking "Windoze." If you do a Mac port, you get flamed for bringing "peecee" software over to a superior machine. From following Slashdot, I can see that companies showing an interest in Linux development walk a thin line. Metrowerks gets slammed for claiming "RedHat only," though most distributions are the same internally. Borland gets trashed with a headline on Slashdot because someone misinterpreted the license agreement. People get annoyed simply because Borland is *giving away* a full fledged C++ compiler and they aren't including the source. There are twisted rants about how Emacs is better than Word and The Gimp smokes Photoshop, which are just plain uninformed. Nobody wants to get involved in such silliness.
The X-Files was a great series when it came out, and lasted well for what it was, but no show should be pushed beyond its shelf life.
Any show gets old after you've watched it too long. For people who only started watching recently, the new ones are just fine. But those people don't get to rant on about how great things were back in The Day and how the scene has totally fallen part.
X setup runs just dandy. Because our hardware is *supported*, right?
Under Windows, any video card is supported.
And we log in and we see the KDE desktop and we are happy people.
KDE is a weird jumble of features. Ditto for Windows. But KDE is less polished and runs much less software.
(X cut and paste : highlight marks, middle button pastes. End of discussion)
For the standard 3-button mouse that ships with all PCs right? Oh, I'm supposed to use chords to mimic the third button? What are the standard keyboars shortcuts for copy, cut, and paste?
"Twiddling with XWindows settings"? WTF? Just set it up (with the nice graphical XF86Setup tool, if your installer didn't do it for you) and use it.
If it doesn't recognize your video card then, yes, you have to muck with X windows settings.
Listen, Linux is harder to configure and the UIs are less polished than Windows. There's nothing to argue there. Hopefully the Eazel folks will address these issues in a way other than (1) blind zealotry, and (2) a group of college students who design GUIs out of spite for Microsoft rather than from a human interface point of view.
Once again, I see at least one legitimate response claiming that Linux should remain difficult to use, as it keeps away people without enough knowledge. There's one fundamental flaw to this line of thinking:
It's also keeping away people that *have* enough knowledge.
I've done my share of assembly coding. I spend my day job immersed in C++ code. I've used UNIX as my primary operating system on the job. I've written tens of thousands of lines of production code using vi on a Sun workstation. I also have both Windows and Linux installed on my machine at home, and, more often than not, I find myself using Windows.
Most of the reason is that Linux is just too tempermental and fussy. I admire the work that's gone into the kernel, but twiddling with Xwindows settings and getting my video card to work properly and having to deal with weird X cut and paste standards is just too much. And there are little things no one thinks about, too, like having to login as root in order to shut down, or remembering how to set it up so any user can shut down. Crusty.
Yes, you can respond with "You dolt! Here's how you can get around that problem!". But the bottom line is that some people have gotten tired of the attitude that getting to play 1970s system administrator is a wonderful thing. Some people don't mind, like people who passionately hate Microsoft and love to start email campaigns about getting game ABC ported over, and people who equate snagging MP3s and constantly upgrading different parts of their systems with "using a computer." It's almost cultish how these people will deny that Linux is hard to use. Get over it!
First, it wasn't six months. More like six weeks, before it was first shown at GDC.
Second, there are some things that OpenGL provides that can be nasty to port to simpler APIs. Texture management is one. OpenGL and Direct3D do this transparently, but on the PS2 you have to do it yourself. Clipping is another. If you use OpenGL, then your clipping is built in. Move to something else and you have to do the clipping yourself. This doesn't change the fact that any decent modern game shouldn't be based around 3D API calls.
The "Rah-rah OpenGL rocks!" attitude needs to get toned down. We're talking about a 3D API here. In an average game, maybe 2% of the total code has any involvement at all with 3D API calls. Most of the graphics-related code is encapsulated inside of "draw_character" and "draw_mesh" and "draw_bitmap" type of routines. It's not like using OpenGL or Direct3D or whatever has any real bearing on the game itself. If you want to switch from, say, OpenGL to Direct3D, then you go get one of those "Programmiong Direct3D" books, slog through it over the weekend, write code for a few days, and you're good to go. It's not like switching between C++ and Smalltalk or somesuch.
The other thing to keep in mind is that consoles like the PS2 use the hardware as the graphics API. Some people think this is crazy, but it's not a big deal. You take the 2% of your code that deals with actually drawing things and rewrite it to use PS2-specific features. That's about on par with switching between different software-oriented APIs. And Epic has stated that they'll be focusing on consoles first and PCs later for future projects. Other PC developers have said the same thing.
The bottom line is that 3D APIs aren't the cornerstones that people think they are.
Maybe you haven't been exposed to enough processor archictectures? The ARM chips have the cleanest instruction set and overall archictecture that I've seen, and that includes lots of hands-on experience with the PowerPC, x86, SHx, and MIPS chips. The ARM designers had some very good ideas for keeping instructions simple while getting a lot done and they had a novel way of avoiding the usual branch prediction troubles. Very slick.
The Alphas were not "head and shoulders above the 386." When they were first introduced, they were sucking up way, way more power and requiring much more cooling than an average Intel chip. Faster, yes, but at a price. Alphas were targeted at the "performance at all costs" CPU market, not something for the average desktop or laptop.
I found this article about the difficulties PS2 developers have had with the system. Given
No console has ever been easy to develop for. They all require you to read big, thick manuals of arcana and warp your game to fit the strengths of the hardware. The difference this time around is that lots of people who have only done desktop OS programming (mostly Windows, but similarly Linux and MacOS) are jumping into the PS2 with stars in their eyes and discovering that it's a different world. They just want to be able to use Direct3D and OpenGL and Windows API calls and rely on a bottomless virtual memory system, and instead they have to deal with the hardware on its own level, as typical embedded systems programmers do.
The bottom line is that you can't listen to these people. Of course they're going to whine.
Now you need to go into a rant about how the whole scene has degenerated, and how it's nothing like it used to be back when you first got into it two years ago.
It's nice to see people scrambling over a black and white game running on a processor that was being taped out twenty years ago. The "GeForce kicks Voodoos a$$" nonsense and driver compatibility crap gets really tiring after a while. Now if we'd only see something original, instead of clones of the same old games, then we'd get some life back into the game biz that once seemed so promising.
Cash was a behind the scenes grunt at id. A nice guy, yes, and a good programmer, but there are hundreds of other John Cash types in the game business, people who have worked on amazing 3D games. It's strange that being at id causes such fame, with so many talented 3D gurus laboring in obscurity.
These are only slightly exaggerated. The general trouble with most things X or Linux related is that any fool can see how messed up they are, but much effort is put into defending them. We put down Windows, yes, but we defend our mistakes forever. Remember, UNIX was heavily criticized and out of favor in the the late 1980s, even to the point where it looked like it be on the way out. And those same criticisms are still applicable today.
The difference between ten years ago and now is that these junky and unreliable systems are now ubiquitious in business and are connected to the internet; back then, there were commonly standalone database and word processing PCs. None of these systems were designed for the kind of use they're now getting. An insurance agency runs out and gets ten machines from Best Buy, gets internet access through AOL or a local ISP, and uses the freebie versions of Outlook, Word, and Excel that came with those machines.
This is a terrible situation. Machines that crash frequently and are difficult to configure have become commonplace and are being used for important work. The virus issue aside, look at some of the issues that have to be dealt with:
Most consumer level machines don't come with Zip drives or any way of making backups, other than 1.44M floppies. Yet these same machines come with 8 gigabyte hard drives. Even a Zip disk isn't going to make a dent in that. Linux is not any better than Windows in this regard.
When you get in a hole and have to reinstall Windows, you lose the registry. This means you have to reinstall every piece of software over again, even though it may already be on your hard drive and perfectly usable otherwise.
Shared libraries and DLLs are complete hell to maintain. Install a new program and watch one or some of your old ones stop working. Don't be smug; Gnome and KDE are just as bad as Windows in this regard.
Virii are just another kink in the system, maybe no worse than any of the above. If a hard drive crashed today on 95% of the computers in existence today, the information on it would be irretreivably lost. Heck, at every company I've worked at the usual followup to such a disaster is "The backup seems to be corrupted," and then "The safety backup is bad too." Would losing your system to a virus be any worse?
Yes, I think I'll run home now and code an alternative to a 100,000+ line windowing system. Good idea!
This is a good read.
By "bad" I don't mean "bad system," I mean "bad vibes." There was so much advocacy among Amiga and Mac owners that I just couldn't stand it. In both cases, there was a degeneration into "let's try to beat the PC!" which dragged everyone into the much and slime. Every game had to try to outdo some PC game. Every app had to try to outdo some PC app. In the end, the underdog system came out looking like a wannabe.