"Open Source" may be successful in some ways, but they tend to be geeky and underground in the same way that someone in the US would say "Oh, band XXX is very big in Malaysia." Try to explain to the person using Word and Outlook on a laptop next to you on the plane about sendmail and Apache and Linux. Those applications are outside the realm of most computer users, just as telephone switching systems and embedded apps are outside the realm of most Linux zealots. In fact, this is the same trouble that lots of underdog systems have run into in the past, such as the Amiga/Video Toaster combo being good for television production and Forth or Smalltalk being good programming languages. Forth has been used to run airports and is inside those FedEx tracking wands--huge, huge applications--but you can't name a popular game or desktop application written in Forth, therefor it is branded unsuccessful. Almost all open source applications tend to fit the same mold. You can rant all you like about Gnome and so on, but they're oddities.
In the Slashdot parody, Suckdot, the leading headline was "Linux possibly defamed somewhere." More and more I'm realizing how dead on that parody was. Somebody says something misinformed or critical of Open Source or Linux (or more and more, the Athlon or GeForce), and raving lunatics get all bent out of shape. Yikes. I've been through two bad computer scenes--the Amiga and the Mac--and this is just as idiotic.
One shared point between Free Software and Open Source software has become more commmonplace in recent years: the releasing of source code to at least certain types of applications. Yeah, Microsoft doesn't give out the source to Word or Excel, but you can get the source to Quake, Descent, an entire OS, C compilers, window managers, device drivers, etc. And that's a good thing. Other times, software is given away in a "free as in beer" way, and that's also a good thing, though some people get very down on it. A student who has to use Windows and would like to work on some projects on his own can get Borland C++ free of charge. That's better alternative than any of the "free" compilers available for Windows (gcc and lcc variants).
Then we get into the whole "We need to be saved from evil businesses" line. The Free Software guys are very extreme about this. The Open Source guys are less so, promoting the collaborative development side of things. There are two things that jump out here.
The first is that, overall, free/open software has been out-done by non-free/closed commercial efforts. I know, I know, the Linux kernel is cool. Ditto for Apache. But in general, gcc is destroyed by Metrowerks and Borland, XWindows interfaces are beaten by Microsoft and Apple, The Gimp doesn't begin to approach Corel Draw or Photoshop, and nobody's come even close to developing a compelling or innovative free/open game (unless you consider a zillion Tetris and Asteroids variants to be compelling). Some halfway decent stuff comes along occasionally and many people fool themselves into thinking they've outdone mighty corporations, but they're scattered victories from skewed perspectives.
The second is that no one has even begun a good attempt to create a business-free computing environment. Wait, that's too wishy-washy. No one *wants* to have a business-free computing environment. There's much hoo-hah about MP3s and Napster and the big bad music industry--stick it to the man--but in the fan-boy computer biz people want multi-million dollar corporations developing toys for them: Pentium III, Athlon, GeForce, Voodoo 5, Soundblaster Live, optical mice, 72GB hard drives, etc. As a result, much of the ranting about GPL and so on is pointless, because nobody wants to get rid of businesses any more than they want Hollywood to stop making movies.
I spent some time poking through the Tome and it's seriously depressing. Asteroids clones, Space Invaders clones, worm-gets-longer games, Tetris clones, Sokoban clones, etc. I don't know which is worse, that:
1. Programmers have monstrously powerful systems in front of them--orders of magnitude beyond what was available for home use 20 years ago--and yet they're writing knock-offs of 20 year old software and the results aren't nearly as polished or fun as the originals.
- OR -
2. That there's almost a complete lack of "I'm going to follow my own vision" as opposed to "I'm gonna look for someone else's game to clone." Is this an inherent weakness of Open Source or are video games, the medium that was once halfway considered to be on the road to a new art form, truly dead?
This is truer than you may think
on
The Eroded Self
·
· Score: 4
It's typical to do web searches and deja.com searches on all technical job applicants. More than anything, this turns up flame wars the person may have been involved in or really stupid activities ("Got any warez?"). People when tend to get in raving Usenet battles about OpenGL vs. Direct3D, Linux vs. Windows, Windows vs. Macintosh, GeForce vs. Voodoo, Athlon vs. Pentium, etc., are people you don't want to have to work with every day. In general, someone who fits the fan-boy personality has two strikes against him, as unfair as that may seem.
Re:I'm Not a Fan of Sequels, Trilogys and That Sor
on
New Ender Sequel
·
· Score: 3
SF has gotten very bad about this. You sit down and read a 600 page book--like Dan Simmons' Hyperion--and then find it's just a set-up for another book. It takes three more books to conclude anything, and after all that reading the conclusion is almost always a great let down.
This is one of the primary reasons I stopped reading SF. I enjoy reading novels, but I hate getting sucked into huge series' of books unwillingly. Heck, Card himself warned authors against doing this sort of thing in his "How to Write Science Fiction And Fantasy" book which came out over ten years ago. That was before he turned the two volumes of Ender's Game into five, going on six. And the Alvin Maker series looks like a never ending bunch of nonsense too. Sigh.
Re:Orson Scott Card's politics...
on
New Ender Sequel
·
· Score: 2
I don't know. He comes across as pretty level headed in his views (for example, marriage has always been associated with procreation and raising a family, so it's understandable that he doesn't see the same term being applicable to gay couples). It's very politicially incorrect these days to say anything negative about homosexuality. Doing so doesn't mean someone is a gay basher or a homophobe, but not being out and out pro-gay certainly wasn't the in thing in the 1990s. I think the interviewee was pushing an irrelevant agenda.
This just goes to show that the rise of the web has brought an end to all interesting college pranks. The idea is to be clever and offbeat, not predictable. An amusing part of college was always watching the new guys try to pull the same set of "hilarious" gags every year.
For a while it looked like you'd be able to run out and get any good 3D video card for $79 and that would be that. Now with these newer cards we're back to the $250 and up range. Seeing as how even cards from two generations back haven't been pushed to the limit yet, this is mostly an outlet for people who want bragging rights.
The other disturbing trend is the power consumption is getting much worse. Whatever happened to the "faster, smaller, less power" mantra? The Voodoo 5, for example, needs to have a hard drive power cable plugged into it. The GeForce 2 is in the same ballpark, if not worse. Yes folks, hardware engineers can do whatever they want without limits on power consumption or price. Now how about getting back on track?
Could we calm down a bit before posting on this subject? Like any "study" that shows Linux may be inferior to some other OS in some obscure way, this topic always brings out the raving lunatics who disagree, because, dammit!, it's wrong! This doesn't help the "cause" any.
Violent video games are in a bad position, because they get kids talking about how much damage different weapons do and how much ammo they hold and how they took down Joe 3/_ee+ with a head shot. Well, duh, this is going to cause people to wonder. Yeah, yeah, yeah, violent movies, blah, blah, blah, but they didn't let the viewer to do the killing. Being smug about this is the wrong angle. It's like going in front of a PTA and saying, "C'mon all you soccer moms! Marijuana isn't bad like everyone says! Look at me!"
Let's look that this calmly, without going all nuts about big corporations and patents and the GPL and so on.
If someone writes a game that really is a clone of Asteroids or Pac-Man or Centipede, as is way too common among shareware authors, is there really an issue about whether or not they swiped an existing design? The arguments I've seen against this are from people who seem to think that they can write an Asteroids clone and claim it as an original they can make money from. Now we're not talking about games that are simply in the same genre, as Pole Position and Daytona are, but games that feature a ship that moves via thrust and rotate that shoots floating rocks that get smaller each time, the only things that shoot at the player are little spaceship things that come out occasionally, and the game ends when all the rocks are gone. Is that Asteroids? You betcha.
Legal and moral issues aside, I see this as more of a complete lack of creativity on the part of many amateur game programmers. There are endless concepts for games, just as there are endless concepts for stories (Orson Scott Card has given seminars on this topic). Starting with the basic Asteroids concept, you can go crazy in all directions. How about eggs instead of rocks and groups of creatures come out when you shoot an egg, instead of simply breaking into smaller eggs? How about making the rocks explode into showers of sizzling, trail-leaving pieces when they collide, making for great chain reactions? How about replacing the rocks with spinning flowers that throw seeds that can grow into new flowers? Those seeds can be collected by the player by running over them before they get fully grown.
All of these ideas are off the top of my head, and yet all of them are way more creative than any existing "Asteroids enhanced" that we've seen over the years. Perhaps the best example is Atari's own Millipede, a 1982 sequel to Centipede. This game included all sorts of great additions to the original game: DDT bombs the explode when shot, swarm attacks, an inchworm that kicks the game into slow motion mode, mushroom growth, a moving mushroom field, a ladybug that turns mushrooms into unshootable flowers. But look at what enhancements have been done to Centipede by oh-so-creative game designers over the years. Powerups, mostly. Higher resolution graphics. Digitized sound. That's not creativity, that's just out and out knocking off.
So you're saying that a company that manages to make, say, 50 million dollars a year is completely worthless, and that you have to make billions a year in order to be a *real* company?
RAMBUS memory is being used in the PlayStation 2. Considering that 2 million systems have shipped in Japan and the PS2 hasn't been released to the rest of the world yet, I think RAMBUS is going to get some nice business. Remember, the original PlayStation has sold over 75 million units.
Sadly, the Star Wars news needs to be laid to rest. I didn't see TPM when it was released, because there was just too much hype, and I didn't want to get sucked in by it. I have great memories of the first three movies, so I was certainly eager to see it, but I didn't. I finally saw TPM recently and, in all honesty, there's only one thing that can be said about it: It's a bad movie.
The characters were flat; you didn't care about them at all. The acting was wooden, with no exceptions. The plot was poorly written and suspenseless. It jumped all over the place, throwing out names and terms like crazy, but I just didn't *care* about what was going on. The presentation waffled between trying to be complex--with all the diplomatic nonsense and so on--and trying to be a kids movie, with goofy characters that used comedy accents (Italian, Asian, JarJar's faux Jamaican). Nothing was played up like it should have been. Darth Maul was just sort of thrown into the plot in a casual way and didn't seem to fit. And yet he turned out to be in the climactic battle at the end? Strange. Anakin accidentally blows up the control ship to save the planet? Uh, I guess that was supposed to be the force guiding him but that was never brought up. An army is exterminating JarJar's people, yet he's making pratfalls throughout the scene. Come on, why didn't Saving Private Ryan bring out the vaudeville during battles? And that oh, so sophisticated droid army doesn't seem to have advanced beyond US revolutionary war tactics: get in a big line and march forward so to be easy targets.
The CG effects were nice, but they didn't save the rest of the movie. I like SF, but I have to admit that TPM was abysmal. To say otherwise would be to belittle the good movies I've seen in the last few years.
Ah, this is a good thing for a variety of reasons:
More than one good choice for paint software under Linux.
A competitor with a nicer UI might spur some improvements to The Gimp's UI.
It's nice to see some Linux software from a different background.
Re:Why Gaming is important
on
Carmack Speaks
·
· Score: 2
Hmmm...this is maybe the first time I've heard of id being a front runner in the gameplay department.
First and foremost, id took 25+ years of graphics research and started using it in computer games. Carmack wasn't the first to do this, as there were dozens of 3D games in the seventies and 80s (Tailgunner, Battlezone, I Robot, Tempest, Stunt Track Racer, Encounter, Mercenary, Flight Simulator, Zenith, Stunts, and so on and so on). But he was the first to get people on the path to doing honest-to-goodness 3D and not just trickery. In general, even basic 3D concepts were foreign to 95% of game programmers when Doom was released.
Second of all, id took a stand against rising development costs and fluff and concentrated on the games themselves. DOOM didn't even have a menuing system with flashy graphics, just text overlaid on a replay. Quake wasn't filled with cutscenes and dialog systems and RPG elements; it was just a shooter.
Third, id started a particular type of game and the culture around it. In some ways it's sort of depressing that many game companies are still chasing after the "ultimate first person shooter" rather than trying to be original, but that's how it goes.
I think these are the three legacies of id. You can't generalize backward in time and act like id was revolutionizing the 2D platform game market, because Commander Keen was, what, seven years after Super Mario Bros. And when Commander Keen was released, there were some really sophisticated games out there already, like Microsoft Flight Simulator. So let's not go overboard with the praise, okay?
Re:how good is the human eye?
on
Carmack Speaks
·
· Score: 2
The difference between 30 and 60 *is* very noticible--a side-by-side test makes this obvious--but in the end it depends on the type of game. There's a large contingent of "60 fps is pointless" ranters, but I fear that mostly comes from people who don't want their PC to be outdone by a $200 console.
Amen. I don't care if a CPU is 5% faster than the previous generation, because with the 5% comes an equivalent or greater increase in power consumption and heat output. The laptop industry may be the savior of us all, and solar cells are a step in the right direction.
This is looking like an incorrect rumor for a couple of reasons:
Sony has stated in the past that they wouldn't be shipping a modem because it didn't make sense to slap such outdated technology on a machine as cutting edge as the PS2. They're waiting for more people to get DSL or cable modems.
The PS2 case has already been designed and is in production. Is Sony really going to start over on this now?
There's no purpose for a hard drive. The Sony Network isn't ready yet. No online games are in development. People are writing games for 32MB RAM and a huge DVD. What is a hard drive going to add to the mix that will justify the significant extra cost? It would be cheaper to just add another 32MB of memory, or to double the VRAM.
Hard drives are a consumer nightmare: relatively high failure rate, not suited to being kicked around in a console.
On the other hand, a US release date for the PS2 hasn't been announced yet, so anything is possible.
Sony wasn't planning on shipping and analog modem because they were waiting for broadband to become more widespread. It would be pretty damn stupid to saddle a machine with the horsepower of the PS2 with a 56K pile of crap.
Forget about programmers. Only a small percentage of students will ever become programmers, so let's not put them before everyone else.
As for learning "how to function in business," come on. There's nothing particularly difficult about using a computer. Any fool that's never touched a computer could just take a junior college course and be set enough to be a receptionist or database entry type. It's not like this needs to be an integral part of education from grade school through college. The fixation on so-called computer literacy is from an age gone by.
I see much effort into making overclocking seem like it requires skillz. No. This is one of those endeavors where some people want to be honored as 3/_33t, but it's just dumb. In the best case it's "Look at me! Look at how much faster Word runs on my overclocked Celeron 500 as compared to the original 433!" In worst it's "Take that Intel! I disagree with your corporate monopoly, so I'm gonna fry your lousy Pentium II and then I'm gonna buy a Pentium III to replace it!"
This isn't going to make a bit of difference. Games are going to spend very little time in kernel code. Shaving cycles off of client networking is irrelevant; that data still has to go over a very slow wire.
Slashdot Mirror
"Open Source" may be successful in some ways, but they tend to be geeky and underground in the same way that someone in the US would say "Oh, band XXX is very big in Malaysia." Try to explain to the person using Word and Outlook on a laptop next to you on the plane about sendmail and Apache and Linux. Those applications are outside the realm of most computer users, just as telephone switching systems and embedded apps are outside the realm of most Linux zealots. In fact, this is the same trouble that lots of underdog systems have run into in the past, such as the Amiga/Video Toaster combo being good for television production and Forth or Smalltalk being good programming languages. Forth has been used to run airports and is inside those FedEx tracking wands--huge, huge applications--but you can't name a popular game or desktop application written in Forth, therefor it is branded unsuccessful. Almost all open source applications tend to fit the same mold. You can rant all you like about Gnome and so on, but they're oddities.
This is because the fundamental rule of KDE (and Gnome) development is "We hate Microsoft, but we copy their every move anyway."
In the Slashdot parody, Suckdot, the leading headline was "Linux possibly defamed somewhere." More and more I'm realizing how dead on that parody was. Somebody says something misinformed or critical of Open Source or Linux (or more and more, the Athlon or GeForce), and raving lunatics get all bent out of shape. Yikes. I've been through two bad computer scenes--the Amiga and the Mac--and this is just as idiotic.
As usual, this has gotten out of hand.
One shared point between Free Software and Open Source software has become more commmonplace in recent years: the releasing of source code to at least certain types of applications. Yeah, Microsoft doesn't give out the source to Word or Excel, but you can get the source to Quake, Descent, an entire OS, C compilers, window managers, device drivers, etc. And that's a good thing. Other times, software is given away in a "free as in beer" way, and that's also a good thing, though some people get very down on it. A student who has to use Windows and would like to work on some projects on his own can get Borland C++ free of charge. That's better alternative than any of the "free" compilers available for Windows (gcc and lcc variants).
Then we get into the whole "We need to be saved from evil businesses" line. The Free Software guys are very extreme about this. The Open Source guys are less so, promoting the collaborative development side of things. There are two things that jump out here.
The first is that, overall, free/open software has been out-done by non-free/closed commercial efforts. I know, I know, the Linux kernel is cool. Ditto for Apache. But in general, gcc is destroyed by Metrowerks and Borland, XWindows interfaces are beaten by Microsoft and Apple, The Gimp doesn't begin to approach Corel Draw or Photoshop, and nobody's come even close to developing a compelling or innovative free/open game (unless you consider a zillion Tetris and Asteroids variants to be compelling). Some halfway decent stuff comes along occasionally and many people fool themselves into thinking they've outdone mighty corporations, but they're scattered victories from skewed perspectives.
The second is that no one has even begun a good attempt to create a business-free computing environment. Wait, that's too wishy-washy. No one *wants* to have a business-free computing environment. There's much hoo-hah about MP3s and Napster and the big bad music industry--stick it to the man--but in the fan-boy computer biz people want multi-million dollar corporations developing toys for them: Pentium III, Athlon, GeForce, Voodoo 5, Soundblaster Live, optical mice, 72GB hard drives, etc. As a result, much of the ranting about GPL and so on is pointless, because nobody wants to get rid of businesses any more than they want Hollywood to stop making movies.
I spent some time poking through the Tome and it's seriously depressing. Asteroids clones, Space Invaders clones, worm-gets-longer games, Tetris clones, Sokoban clones, etc. I don't know which is worse, that:
1. Programmers have monstrously powerful systems in front of them--orders of magnitude beyond what was available for home use 20 years ago--and yet they're writing knock-offs of 20 year old software and the results aren't nearly as polished or fun as the originals.
- OR -
2. That there's almost a complete lack of "I'm going to follow my own vision" as opposed to "I'm gonna look for someone else's game to clone." Is this an inherent weakness of Open Source or are video games, the medium that was once halfway considered to be on the road to a new art form, truly dead?
It's typical to do web searches and deja.com searches on all technical job applicants. More than anything, this turns up flame wars the person may have been involved in or really stupid activities ("Got any warez?"). People when tend to get in raving Usenet battles about OpenGL vs. Direct3D, Linux vs. Windows, Windows vs. Macintosh, GeForce vs. Voodoo, Athlon vs. Pentium, etc., are people you don't want to have to work with every day. In general, someone who fits the fan-boy personality has two strikes against him, as unfair as that may seem.
SF has gotten very bad about this. You sit down and read a 600 page book--like Dan Simmons' Hyperion--and then find it's just a set-up for another book. It takes three more books to conclude anything, and after all that reading the conclusion is almost always a great let down.
This is one of the primary reasons I stopped reading SF. I enjoy reading novels, but I hate getting sucked into huge series' of books unwillingly. Heck, Card himself warned authors against doing this sort of thing in his "How to Write Science Fiction And Fantasy" book which came out over ten years ago. That was before he turned the two volumes of Ender's Game into five, going on six. And the Alvin Maker series looks like a never ending bunch of nonsense too. Sigh.
I don't know. He comes across as pretty level headed in his views (for example, marriage has always been associated with procreation and raising a family, so it's understandable that he doesn't see the same term being applicable to gay couples). It's very politicially incorrect these days to say anything negative about homosexuality. Doing so doesn't mean someone is a gay basher or a homophobe, but not being out and out pro-gay certainly wasn't the in thing in the 1990s. I think the interviewee was pushing an irrelevant agenda.
This just goes to show that the rise of the web has brought an end to all interesting college pranks. The idea is to be clever and offbeat, not predictable. An amusing part of college was always watching the new guys try to pull the same set of "hilarious" gags every year.
For a while it looked like you'd be able to run out and get any good 3D video card for $79 and that would be that. Now with these newer cards we're back to the $250 and up range. Seeing as how even cards from two generations back haven't been pushed to the limit yet, this is mostly an outlet for people who want bragging rights.
The other disturbing trend is the power consumption is getting much worse. Whatever happened to the "faster, smaller, less power" mantra? The Voodoo 5, for example, needs to have a hard drive power cable plugged into it. The GeForce 2 is in the same ballpark, if not worse. Yes folks, hardware engineers can do whatever they want without limits on power consumption or price. Now how about getting back on track?
Low end ARM chips are cheaper.
Could we calm down a bit before posting on this subject? Like any "study" that shows Linux may be inferior to some other OS in some obscure way, this topic always brings out the raving lunatics who disagree, because, dammit!, it's wrong! This doesn't help the "cause" any.
Violent video games are in a bad position, because they get kids talking about how much damage different weapons do and how much ammo they hold and how they took down Joe 3/_ee+ with a head shot. Well, duh, this is going to cause people to wonder. Yeah, yeah, yeah, violent movies, blah, blah, blah, but they didn't let the viewer to do the killing. Being smug about this is the wrong angle. It's like going in front of a PTA and saying, "C'mon all you soccer moms! Marijuana isn't bad like everyone says! Look at me!"
Let's look that this calmly, without going all nuts about big corporations and patents and the GPL and so on.
If someone writes a game that really is a clone of Asteroids or Pac-Man or Centipede, as is way too common among shareware authors, is there really an issue about whether or not they swiped an existing design? The arguments I've seen against this are from people who seem to think that they can write an Asteroids clone and claim it as an original they can make money from. Now we're not talking about games that are simply in the same genre, as Pole Position and Daytona are, but games that feature a ship that moves via thrust and rotate that shoots floating rocks that get smaller each time, the only things that shoot at the player are little spaceship things that come out occasionally, and the game ends when all the rocks are gone. Is that Asteroids? You betcha.
Legal and moral issues aside, I see this as more of a complete lack of creativity on the part of many amateur game programmers. There are endless concepts for games, just as there are endless concepts for stories (Orson Scott Card has given seminars on this topic). Starting with the basic Asteroids concept, you can go crazy in all directions. How about eggs instead of rocks and groups of creatures come out when you shoot an egg, instead of simply breaking into smaller eggs? How about making the rocks explode into showers of sizzling, trail-leaving pieces when they collide, making for great chain reactions? How about replacing the rocks with spinning flowers that throw seeds that can grow into new flowers? Those seeds can be collected by the player by running over them before they get fully grown.
All of these ideas are off the top of my head, and yet all of them are way more creative than any existing "Asteroids enhanced" that we've seen over the years. Perhaps the best example is Atari's own Millipede, a 1982 sequel to Centipede. This game included all sorts of great additions to the original game: DDT bombs the explode when shot, swarm attacks, an inchworm that kicks the game into slow motion mode, mushroom growth, a moving mushroom field, a ladybug that turns mushrooms into unshootable flowers. But look at what enhancements have been done to Centipede by oh-so-creative game designers over the years. Powerups, mostly. Higher resolution graphics. Digitized sound. That's not creativity, that's just out and out knocking off.
So you're saying that a company that manages to make, say, 50 million dollars a year is completely worthless, and that you have to make billions a year in order to be a *real* company?
This kind of thinking irks me.
RAMBUS memory is being used in the PlayStation 2. Considering that 2 million systems have shipped in Japan and the PS2 hasn't been released to the rest of the world yet, I think RAMBUS is going to get some nice business. Remember, the original PlayStation has sold over 75 million units.
Sadly, the Star Wars news needs to be laid to rest. I didn't see TPM when it was released, because there was just too much hype, and I didn't want to get sucked in by it. I have great memories of the first three movies, so I was certainly eager to see it, but I didn't. I finally saw TPM recently and, in all honesty, there's only one thing that can be said about it: It's a bad movie.
The characters were flat; you didn't care about them at all. The acting was wooden, with no exceptions. The plot was poorly written and suspenseless. It jumped all over the place, throwing out names and terms like crazy, but I just didn't *care* about what was going on. The presentation waffled between trying to be complex--with all the diplomatic nonsense and so on--and trying to be a kids movie, with goofy characters that used comedy accents (Italian, Asian, JarJar's faux Jamaican). Nothing was played up like it should have been. Darth Maul was just sort of thrown into the plot in a casual way and didn't seem to fit. And yet he turned out to be in the climactic battle at the end? Strange. Anakin accidentally blows up the control ship to save the planet? Uh, I guess that was supposed to be the force guiding him but that was never brought up. An army is exterminating JarJar's people, yet he's making pratfalls throughout the scene. Come on, why didn't Saving Private Ryan bring out the vaudeville during battles? And that oh, so sophisticated droid army doesn't seem to have advanced beyond US revolutionary war tactics: get in a big line and march forward so to be easy targets.
The CG effects were nice, but they didn't save the rest of the movie. I like SF, but I have to admit that TPM was abysmal. To say otherwise would be to belittle the good movies I've seen in the last few years.
More than one good choice for paint software under Linux.
A competitor with a nicer UI might spur some improvements to The Gimp's UI.
It's nice to see some Linux software from a different background.
Hmmm...this is maybe the first time I've heard of id being a front runner in the gameplay department.
First and foremost, id took 25+ years of graphics research and started using it in computer games. Carmack wasn't the first to do this, as there were dozens of 3D games in the seventies and 80s (Tailgunner, Battlezone, I Robot, Tempest, Stunt Track Racer, Encounter, Mercenary, Flight Simulator, Zenith, Stunts, and so on and so on). But he was the first to get people on the path to doing honest-to-goodness 3D and not just trickery. In general, even basic 3D concepts were foreign to 95% of game programmers when Doom was released.
Second of all, id took a stand against rising development costs and fluff and concentrated on the games themselves. DOOM didn't even have a menuing system with flashy graphics, just text overlaid on a replay. Quake wasn't filled with cutscenes and dialog systems and RPG elements; it was just a shooter.
Third, id started a particular type of game and the culture around it. In some ways it's sort of depressing that many game companies are still chasing after the "ultimate first person shooter" rather than trying to be original, but that's how it goes.
I think these are the three legacies of id. You can't generalize backward in time and act like id was revolutionizing the 2D platform game market, because Commander Keen was, what, seven years after Super Mario Bros. And when Commander Keen was released, there were some really sophisticated games out there already, like Microsoft Flight Simulator. So let's not go overboard with the praise, okay?
The difference between 30 and 60 *is* very noticible--a side-by-side test makes this obvious--but in the end it depends on the type of game. There's a large contingent of "60 fps is pointless" ranters, but I fear that mostly comes from people who don't want their PC to be outdone by a $200 console.
Amen. I don't care if a CPU is 5% faster than the previous generation, because with the 5% comes an equivalent or greater increase in power consumption and heat output. The laptop industry may be the savior of us all, and solar cells are a step in the right direction.
Sony has stated in the past that they wouldn't be shipping a modem because it didn't make sense to slap such outdated technology on a machine as cutting edge as the PS2. They're waiting for more people to get DSL or cable modems.
The PS2 case has already been designed and is in production. Is Sony really going to start over on this now?
There's no purpose for a hard drive. The Sony Network isn't ready yet. No online games are in development. People are writing games for 32MB RAM and a huge DVD. What is a hard drive going to add to the mix that will justify the significant extra cost? It would be cheaper to just add another 32MB of memory, or to double the VRAM.
Hard drives are a consumer nightmare: relatively high failure rate, not suited to being kicked around in a console.
On the other hand, a US release date for the PS2 hasn't been announced yet, so anything is possible.
Sony wasn't planning on shipping and analog modem because they were waiting for broadband to become more widespread. It would be pretty damn stupid to saddle a machine with the horsepower of the PS2 with a 56K pile of crap.
Forget about programmers. Only a small percentage of students will ever become programmers, so let's not put them before everyone else.
As for learning "how to function in business," come on. There's nothing particularly difficult about using a computer. Any fool that's never touched a computer could just take a junior college course and be set enough to be a receptionist or database entry type. It's not like this needs to be an integral part of education from grade school through college. The fixation on so-called computer literacy is from an age gone by.
I see much effort into making overclocking seem like it requires skillz. No. This is one of those endeavors where some people want to be honored as 3/_33t, but it's just dumb. In the best case it's "Look at me! Look at how much faster Word runs on my overclocked Celeron 500 as compared to the original 433!" In worst it's "Take that Intel! I disagree with your corporate monopoly, so I'm gonna fry your lousy Pentium II and then I'm gonna buy a Pentium III to replace it!"
This isn't going to make a bit of difference. Games are going to spend very little time in kernel code. Shaving cycles off of client networking is irrelevant; that data still has to go over a very slow wire.