This is the best thing that could have happened to Linux. The problem with other desktop environments to date is that they're being developed by people bent on one-upping windows. They may not even realize it, but they're taking all the user interface decisions that Microsoft has made--many of them fundamentally wrong--and are duplicating them. For example, human interface designers have been been very vocal about the problems of "nested expand-to-the-right" pull down menus (a la the Start menu). And yet this a fundamental feature of KDE (not to pick on it too hard).
What Linux needs is some fresh air; some people who are more than just coders looking for a project, and who have their own ideas they want to bring to life. There has been much research and are many available books and papers on interface design that don't follow the Mac/Windows paradigms that we've been seeing on personal computers for sixteen years now.
Something to note here is that there are some real gurus behind this effort. This is much different than two college students with little historical perspective trying to outdo Microsoft in a "me too!" sort of way.
So marketing people do know what they're doing!
on
Stamps of the 80s
·
· Score: 2
The weird thing about the reminiscing here is that it's all based around junk that advertisers marketed at people. "Oh, man, do you remember when McDonalds didn't serve breakfast or have Chicken McNuggets?" "Do you remember when The Simpsons was between-sketch filler on The Tracy Ullman Show?" "How about those clothes, like Flashdance sweatshirts and acid-wash denim and nylon running shorts?"
In a way, the quick changes in fads make time seem like it's just flying by much faster than it is (nostalgic relativity?). If you're in college, then just three years after you graduate you can go back to campus and see that everyone is wearing something different that you never would have expected. And it probably will be something that seems really dumb, like comically oversized pants or Herman Munster shoes (both of which are now soooo 90s).
* Quasi-metal pretty boy bands? * The return of the miniskirt (esp. in denim)? * Intellivision commercials starring George Plimpton? * Weird Al? * Tight designer jeans? * The death of UNIX (it was generally assumed to be dying out by the end of the 80s).
Overall, it's a strange assortment. It's depressing in a way that the 1980s will be remembered for pop culture commercial fads more than anything else. I mean, really, those people who paid $100+ for Cabbage Patch Kids look back on it fondly? I'd be embarrassed.
The Linux killer is going to be something that doesn't look like an OS. People want to be able to fire up a machine and work. They don't want to do system administration; they don't want to focus on customization. Right now the biggest "non OS" is what's running on the Palm.
Advocates see Linux as a techie operating system with a command line prompt and an X interface, but if Linux ever get somewhere then that's not what's going to be visible. Linux will be buried under the hood to the point that no one cares it's there.
As someone who works at a game company and reads the incoming mail, I see this from the opposite side of most slashdotters. As soon as any game is announced, there's an inevitable group of mail that's always received:
A request to support the T&L of the GeForce.
A request to make sure the game properly supports the Athlon.
Fervent mail from Mac owners asking if there will be a Mac version.
Fervent mail from Linux users asking if there will be a Linux version.
Thing is, though, that this mail is predictable; we know what causes have their fans. It's also generally accepted that Linux freebies--like server ports--are a good thing, if only because they appease the natives. But we still all know that Linux is a totally different market than Windows, and that a Linux game would almost certainly sell 20x fewer copies. And realize that most PC games are far from selling 100,000 copies or more.
The muddling of "geek" and "technology" and the general consensus that the combination is always a good thing is annoying. For example, Linus is certainly a hacker with a vision, but he's also married, has a kid, and has interests outside of programming. But the geeks Jon Katz always write about are weird people who tend to be introverted--as many people are--but they make up for their lack of social life by doing the high tech equivalent of watching TV. They obsessively surf the web for nudie pictures of Natalie Portman and Gillian Anderson. They rally behind pointless causes (e.g. GeForce, Athlon). They collect MP3s and software cracks. And that's about all. Somehow Mr. Katz is trying to put these people and more intelligent people who can write code on the same level. It's not the same thing. Give it up.
I'm not disputing the brilliance of John Carmack. He was there when PC first person shooters were born. But it's disturbing that so much of the game world is focused on "Carmack did this" and "Sweeney did that" when there are dozens of unknown game people who are doing absolutely incredible things. For example:
The programmers that worked on the stunning FreeSpace 2.
Anyone who was writing fully 3D PC games five years before Quake, like Stunts! and Stunt Driver or numerous other 3D games that were released for the C64, Amiga, and Atari ST.
Remember Bruce Artwick? The guy who was writing flight simulators for 2MHz home computers back in 1981?
The programmers behind either of the Gran Turismo games for the PlayStation. Damn! And in only one megabyte of memory and one megabyte of vram!
All the people who've written engines for great 3D games released in the last few years: Motocross Madness, Crazy Taxi, Hydro Thunder, San Francisco Rush, Zelda 64 (Miyamoto designed it, but who did the coding?), etc., etc.,
It's not not the female hackers are needed on open source projects, but people who are outside of the religious circles that are so common among Linux programmers and users. Being inside such a circle is a primary cause of design errors and business mistakes. How many times have we run into people who:
have some beef with RedHat and put a note in the documentation along the lines of "RedHat users will have to fix this themselves because RedHat doesn't know how to set things up properly."
refuse to work on a decent UI because the Emacs interface is all anyone needs.
write APIs that won't support languages other than C++ because anybody who doesn't realize the benefits of OOP has rocks in his head.
write APIs that don't support C++ because Bjarne is a flaming idiot who should be shot on sight.
don't understand that not everyone is a student with massive amounts of free time who'd like nothing better to do than dink around installing crotchety software.
think that providing hundreds of customizable options is much more important than anything else.
think that people will settle for second rate software simply because it runs under Linux rather than using something better for Windows.
You can toss a few hundred thousand 26-sided, lettered dice and "roll" the script of MacBeth. It's unlikely, but the odds can be calculated, and to exact precision, and they are non-zero.
While that's true, we're not just talking about one lucky roll here, but millions. And the odds of hitting all of these could *possibly* be beyond the billions of years available.
This "fight against multibillion dollar corporations" is impotent at best.
The bottom line is that just about everyone--and 100% of people with web access--want and enjoy what multibillion dollar corporations produce. Movies. CDs. CPUs. You can't make a stand against giant corporations unless you're willing to do without them. "Oh, yes, we hate the corporate interest that drives anti-piracy measures for DVDs! But we love the giant corporations that pour money into action movies and million-dollar-an-episode animated TV shows!"
In the end, this protest comes out looking dumb. We've shown that we're not willing to stand for measures that keep us from pirating movies, but we most certainly still want hundreds of million of dollars to be poured into movies so we can pirate them.
If you're really against multibillion dollar corporations, then you should be buying all your music CDs from local indie bands. You should be running Linux (though I have no idea on what CPU). And you shouldn't be watching Hollywood movies or TV *at all*.
What we need is an "Ask a Playstation 2 coder" interview so we can get see how of that machine is really hype. Even with NDAs, maybe we can at least get some impressions.
How about this guy? The quote that caught my eye was "we had a four month jump on most developers." And doesn't the PS2 use Linux in some form or another?
Two big gotchas, from experience, that geeks never want to believe:
1. Just because you can make better products than a successful company doesn't mean you'll be able to get anywhere near that level of success. When that company started out, they were in a different situation than you (maybe they started five years ago for example, when the landscape was different). And you're not seeing the years of work that went into doing non-techie stuff like marketing and generally making good decisions.
2. Look at the median sales for your field, not the mean. A very common mistake is for a software entrepeneur to say "Big Company X has sold 2,000,000 copies of its software; all we need to do is sell 5% of that to stay in business." That's not how it works. Realistically, a handful of big companies might sell 90% of the products in a field, and that remaining 10 is made up of hundreds of little guys trying to get some action. So while the mean number of sales might be 100,000, the median might be 10.
Going to Linux, and they won't go with AMD chips? Tsk, tsk, tsk.
I don't know about anyone else, but I'm starting to tire of the weird rallying behind anything that's not "mainstream." Any CPU thread is now filled with "Athlon rocks!" posts, because Intel is considered the bad guy. Any video card thread is flooded with "GeForce rocks!" posts, because 3dfx is evil.
The problem with both the Athlon and the Pentium II and III chips (and the GeForce, and anything else from 3dfx or Nvidia) is that they're huge suckers of power. Incremental improvements in speed are not nearly as useful to most anyone as would be drastically lower power consumption.
Modern word processing still opens really old file formats like Windows.WRI and Word 1.0, and I don't see that likely to change in the near future.
But it could happen at any time and without warning.
In my experience the typical non-geek computer user buys a computer and uses it hard for eight or ten years. I know people who still use AppleWorks on an Apple//e on a daily basis, and many more people who are still using old word processors (Word or Word Perfect) for Windows 3.1
All someone at Microsoft has to do is say in a meeting "You know, I wonder if it's time we dropped support for ancient version of Word X.YZ?" and it could easily happen.
I was an educator before I started doing what I'm doing now. I've seen people cheat. Why do they do it? They're too lazy to do the work themselves. Now if you're lazy, are you actually going to take the time to covertracks right, or are you just going to do a halfass job?
But this isn't cheating. The whole point is to be able to use other peoples' code so you don't have to write every single thing yourself.
The issue here is that some people don't want other people to make a buck off their work Or, rephrased, some people don't want to mess with the business side of things, so they give their work away free; other people enjoy the business end.
I think the author is right in principle, though I don't always agree with his wording. He talks of innovative user interfaces, which is exactly the wrong way to go. What we need are clean user interfaces, and that's exactly the antithesis of UNIX. In text mode, the user experience is a mess even for people who know what they're going. Type "ls --help" and look at the bazillion screwy options for doing something as simple as getting a directory listing. Then look at the man page and you get a message reading "This documentation is no longer being maintained and may be inaccurate or incomplete," right up at the top. "This does not bode well," thinks the newbie.
X-windows application GUI's are in much worse shape. The much ballyhooed GIMP is a great example. It's filled with all the usual fluff--tips of the day, all sorts of configuration options, toolbars everywhere--but just about every panel you bring up is so brimming with things to tweak that you don't know where to begin. It's a pile of stuff all thrown together with a GUI on top, but that doesn't mean it was well thought out.
What is desperately needed is a good example from someone who knows what's important and what's not; someone who isn't just trying to show Microsoft a thing or two by duplicating a Windows style interface in his basement coding lair. I've read some very interesting UI design papers over the years. Jef Raskin has much to say. There's also an excellent book from someone who used to be in charge of such things at Microsoft and left when he didn't like the direction they insisted on taking. The key to remember is that the purpose of an application is not to shuffle windows and menus and toolbars; it's to actually get a particular job done.
I know this sounds like a rant, but I mean it in all sincerity: The lack of good voting options for software in this poll worries me. KDE still comes across as a Windows wannabe (all the frittery details and nonsense, but no real advance). Gnome is the great unfinished project. The Gimp is up for best graphical interface? Okay, it has a lot of interface with a lot of frills, but *yuck*, no would should ever design a user interface like this one--ugh.
I guess my real point is that this could have been a poll from 1998. Has nothing changed?
You're right, of course. No matter what some people have been trying to say for 40 years or more, you can almost always write better code than a compiler. This is especially true when you're dealing with something bigger than a a single function. The usual way of showing that a compiler is better than a human is by using one smallish C function as an example. That's a pointless example, because the benefit comes from analyzing that function in context and not on its own.
The point of diminishing returns comes into play quickly, however. For example, take the renderer for most any fast 3D game. If you went into the routine that passes triangles to the graphics card, a frequent hot spot, and added a pointless call to a supposedly expensive function, like sqrt, you're not going to notice an effect on frame rate. Doing a higher level optimization, like removing a single polygon from a model, is going to be more of a benefit than optimizing the polygon code, but it's still not going to be noticible. Sometimes you can get big benefits by using algorithms that look more complicated, ones you wouldn't want to approach in assembly, even though they use more code.
With complex programs, it's even conceivable for an interpreted language to out run a compiled one, because everything comes down to architecture and an understanding of the problem. This is hasn't been the case with Java, because Java is a fairly low level language (the more abstract a language is, the less win from compliation) and because Java has become entrenched in the "learn programming in 14 days" market of web designers turned programmers.
So, yes, an assembly programmer can outrun most any compiler. But does it matter? Almost never.
Abuse (a great game) was written almost entirely in Lisp. I can't think of other examples, but there's no reason there couldn't be more games written in Lisp.
Be careful, even the author of that game readily admits that it's not "almost entirely" written in Lisp. A custom Lisp is used as the scripting language, but there's a whole lot more C code than Lisp code in the game. It's something like 85% C and 15% Lisp.
Now I realize that many hair-trigger free speech advocates read slashdot, but I think that the principle behind the bill makes sense in a number of ways. It makes even more sense if you consider the geek angle.
On the surface, having one-click access to porn in your room is different than having to go across the street to the gas station to buy a magazine. First difference: you don't have to pay to get access to internet porn (yes there are pay services, but we all know how much free stuff is out there). Second difference: you have an unlimited supply of porn on the internet. So in many ways the university is providing students with access to porn. If nothing else, this could fuel some addiction among those of little will power.
On a geek level, porn is a huge, huge bandwidth eater. It's based around huge image galleries and movies. Restricting access to such services, and also restricting, say, downloads of files larger than N megabytes (such as 120 MB game demos), is a good idea from a system administration point of view. It has nothing to do with freedom of speech.
Let me tell you, they're failing males too. The average game magazine is targeted at spotty pre-teens and teens who have such varied interests as Star Trek, Pokemon, and comic books. That's how they've been for ten years or more, with a slight pardon given to Next Generation. What's happening now is that lots of people are getting into games, but aren't liking the existing game communities at all. I can't say I blame them.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the best thing that could have happened to Linux. The problem with other desktop environments to date is that they're being developed by people bent on one-upping windows. They may not even realize it, but they're taking all the user interface decisions that Microsoft has made--many of them fundamentally wrong--and are duplicating them. For example, human interface designers have been been very vocal about the problems of "nested expand-to-the-right" pull down menus (a la the Start menu). And yet this a fundamental feature of KDE (not to pick on it too hard).
What Linux needs is some fresh air; some people who are more than just coders looking for a project, and who have their own ideas they want to bring to life. There has been much research and are many available books and papers on interface design that don't follow the Mac/Windows paradigms that we've been seeing on personal computers for sixteen years now.
Something to note here is that there are some real gurus behind this effort. This is much different than two college students with little historical perspective trying to outdo Microsoft in a "me too!" sort of way.
The weird thing about the reminiscing here is that it's all based around junk that advertisers marketed at people. "Oh, man, do you remember when McDonalds didn't serve breakfast or have Chicken McNuggets?" "Do you remember when The Simpsons was between-sketch filler on The Tracy Ullman Show?" "How about those clothes, like Flashdance sweatshirts and acid-wash denim and nylon running shorts?"
In a way, the quick changes in fads make time seem like it's just flying by much faster than it is (nostalgic relativity?). If you're in college, then just three years after you graduate you can go back to campus and see that everyone is wearing something different that you never would have expected. And it probably will be something that seems really dumb, like comically oversized pants or Herman Munster shoes (both of which are now soooo 90s).
What about:
* Quasi-metal pretty boy bands?
* The return of the miniskirt (esp. in denim)?
* Intellivision commercials starring George Plimpton?
* Weird Al?
* Tight designer jeans?
* The death of UNIX (it was generally assumed to be dying out by the end of the 80s).
Overall, it's a strange assortment. It's depressing in a way that the 1980s will be remembered for pop culture commercial fads more than anything else. I mean, really, those people who paid $100+ for Cabbage Patch Kids look back on it fondly? I'd be embarrassed.
The Linux killer is going to be something that doesn't look like an OS. People want to be able to fire up a machine and work. They don't want to do system administration; they don't want to focus on customization. Right now the biggest "non OS" is what's running on the Palm.
Advocates see Linux as a techie operating system with a command line prompt and an X interface, but if Linux ever get somewhere then that's not what's going to be visible. Linux will be buried under the hood to the point that no one cares it's there.
He's a designer and, more recently an executive producer. Very surprising that the author didn't realize this.
A request to support the T&L of the GeForce.
A request to make sure the game properly supports the Athlon.
Fervent mail from Mac owners asking if there will be a Mac version.
Fervent mail from Linux users asking if there will be a Linux version.
Thing is, though, that this mail is predictable; we know what causes have their fans. It's also generally accepted that Linux freebies--like server ports--are a good thing, if only because they appease the natives. But we still all know that Linux is a totally different market than Windows, and that a Linux game would almost certainly sell 20x fewer copies. And realize that most PC games are far from selling 100,000 copies or more.
The muddling of "geek" and "technology" and the general consensus that the combination is always a good thing is annoying. For example, Linus is certainly a hacker with a vision, but he's also married, has a kid, and has interests outside of programming. But the geeks Jon Katz always write about are weird people who tend to be introverted--as many people are--but they make up for their lack of social life by doing the high tech equivalent of watching TV. They obsessively surf the web for nudie pictures of Natalie Portman and Gillian Anderson. They rally behind pointless causes (e.g. GeForce, Athlon). They collect MP3s and software cracks. And that's about all. Somehow Mr. Katz is trying to put these people and more intelligent people who can write code on the same level. It's not the same thing. Give it up.
The programmers that worked on the stunning FreeSpace 2.
Anyone who was writing fully 3D PC games five years before Quake, like Stunts! and Stunt Driver or numerous other 3D games that were released for the C64, Amiga, and Atari ST.
Remember Bruce Artwick? The guy who was writing flight simulators for 2MHz home computers back in 1981?
The programmers behind either of the Gran Turismo games for the PlayStation. Damn! And in only one megabyte of memory and one megabyte of vram!
All the people who've written engines for great 3D games released in the last few years: Motocross Madness, Crazy Taxi, Hydro Thunder, San Francisco Rush, Zelda 64 (Miyamoto designed it, but who did the coding?), etc., etc.,
have some beef with RedHat and put a note in the documentation along the lines of "RedHat users will have to fix this themselves because RedHat doesn't know how to set things up properly."
refuse to work on a decent UI because the Emacs interface is all anyone needs.
write APIs that won't support languages other than C++ because anybody who doesn't realize the benefits of OOP has rocks in his head.
write APIs that don't support C++ because Bjarne is a flaming idiot who should be shot on sight.
don't understand that not everyone is a student with massive amounts of free time who'd like nothing better to do than dink around installing crotchety software.
think that providing hundreds of customizable options is much more important than anything else.
think that people will settle for second rate software simply because it runs under Linux rather than using something better for Windows.
You can toss a few hundred thousand 26-sided, lettered dice and "roll" the script of MacBeth. It's unlikely, but the odds can be calculated, and to exact precision, and they are non-zero.
While that's true, we're not just talking about one lucky roll here, but millions. And the odds of hitting all of these could *possibly* be beyond the billions of years available.
This "fight against multibillion dollar corporations" is impotent at best.
The bottom line is that just about everyone--and 100% of people with web access--want and enjoy what multibillion dollar corporations produce. Movies. CDs. CPUs. You can't make a stand against giant corporations unless you're willing to do without them. "Oh, yes, we hate the corporate interest that drives anti-piracy measures for DVDs! But we love the giant corporations that pour money into action movies and million-dollar-an-episode animated TV shows!"
In the end, this protest comes out looking dumb. We've shown that we're not willing to stand for measures that keep us from pirating movies, but we most certainly still want hundreds of million of dollars to be poured into movies so we can pirate them.
If you're really against multibillion dollar corporations, then you should be buying all your music CDs from local indie bands. You should be running Linux (though I have no idea on what CPU). And you shouldn't be watching Hollywood movies or TV *at all*.
How about this guy? The quote that caught my eye was "we had a four month jump on most developers." And doesn't the PS2 use Linux in some form or another?
Two big gotchas, from experience, that geeks never want to believe:
1. Just because you can make better products than a successful company doesn't mean you'll be able to get anywhere near that level of success. When that company started out, they were in a different situation than you (maybe they started five years ago for example, when the landscape was different). And you're not seeing the years of work that went into doing non-techie stuff like marketing and generally making good decisions.
2. Look at the median sales for your field, not the mean. A very common mistake is for a software entrepeneur to say "Big Company X has sold 2,000,000 copies of its software; all we need to do is sell 5% of that to stay in business." That's not how it works. Realistically, a handful of big companies might sell 90% of the products in a field, and that remaining 10 is made up of hundreds of little guys trying to get some action. So while the mean number of sales might be 100,000, the median might be 10.
Going to Linux, and they won't go with AMD chips? Tsk, tsk, tsk.
I don't know about anyone else, but I'm starting to tire of the weird rallying behind anything that's not "mainstream." Any CPU thread is now filled with "Athlon rocks!" posts, because Intel is considered the bad guy. Any video card thread is flooded with "GeForce rocks!" posts, because 3dfx is evil.
The problem with both the Athlon and the Pentium II and III chips (and the GeForce, and anything else from 3dfx or Nvidia) is that they're huge suckers of power. Incremental improvements in speed are not nearly as useful to most anyone as would be drastically lower power consumption.
Modern word processing still opens really old file formats like Windows .WRI and Word 1.0, and I don't see that likely to change in the near future.
//e on a daily basis, and many more people who are still using old word processors (Word or Word Perfect) for Windows 3.1
But it could happen at any time and without warning.
In my experience the typical non-geek computer user buys a computer and uses it hard for eight or ten years. I know people who still use AppleWorks on an Apple
All someone at Microsoft has to do is say in a meeting "You know, I wonder if it's time we dropped support for ancient version of Word X.YZ?" and it could easily happen.
I was an educator before I started doing what I'm doing now. I've seen people cheat. Why do they do it? They're too lazy to do the work themselves. Now if you're lazy, are you actually going to take the time to covertracks right, or are you just going to do a halfass job?
But this isn't cheating. The whole point is to be able to use other peoples' code so you don't have to write every single thing yourself.
The issue here is that some people don't want other people to make a buck off their work Or, rephrased, some people don't want to mess with the business side of things, so they give their work away free; other people enjoy the business end.
No.
I think the author is right in principle, though I don't always agree with his wording. He talks of innovative user interfaces, which is exactly the wrong way to go. What we need are clean user interfaces, and that's exactly the antithesis of UNIX. In text mode, the user experience is a mess even for people who know what they're going. Type "ls --help" and look at the bazillion screwy options for doing something as simple as getting a directory listing. Then look at the man page and you get a message reading "This documentation is no longer being maintained and may be inaccurate or incomplete," right up at the top. "This does not bode well," thinks the newbie.
X-windows application GUI's are in much worse shape. The much ballyhooed GIMP is a great example. It's filled with all the usual fluff--tips of the day, all sorts of configuration options, toolbars everywhere--but just about every panel you bring up is so brimming with things to tweak that you don't know where to begin. It's a pile of stuff all thrown together with a GUI on top, but that doesn't mean it was well thought out.
What is desperately needed is a good example from someone who knows what's important and what's not; someone who isn't just trying to show Microsoft a thing or two by duplicating a Windows style interface in his basement coding lair. I've read some very interesting UI design papers over the years. Jef Raskin has much to say. There's also an excellent book from someone who used to be in charge of such things at Microsoft and left when he didn't like the direction they insisted on taking. The key to remember is that the purpose of an application is not to shuffle windows and menus and toolbars; it's to actually get a particular job done.
I know this sounds like a rant, but I mean it in all sincerity: The lack of good voting options for software in this poll worries me. KDE still comes across as a Windows wannabe (all the frittery details and nonsense, but no real advance). Gnome is the great unfinished project. The Gimp is up for best graphical interface? Okay, it has a lot of interface with a lot of frills, but *yuck*, no would should ever design a user interface like this one--ugh.
I guess my real point is that this could have been a poll from 1998. Has nothing changed?
You're right, of course. No matter what some people have been trying to say for 40 years or more, you can almost always write better code than a compiler. This is especially true when you're dealing with something bigger than a a single function. The usual way of showing that a compiler is better than a human is by using one smallish C function as an example. That's a pointless example, because the benefit comes from analyzing that function in context and not on its own.
The point of diminishing returns comes into play quickly, however. For example, take the renderer for most any fast 3D game. If you went into the routine that passes triangles to the graphics card, a frequent hot spot, and added a pointless call to a supposedly expensive function, like sqrt, you're not going to notice an effect on frame rate. Doing a higher level optimization, like removing a single polygon from a model, is going to be more of a benefit than optimizing the polygon code, but it's still not going to be noticible. Sometimes you can get big benefits by using algorithms that look more complicated, ones you wouldn't want to approach in assembly, even though they use more code.
With complex programs, it's even conceivable for an interpreted language to out run a compiled one, because everything comes down to architecture and an understanding of the problem. This is hasn't been the case with Java, because Java is a fairly low level language (the more abstract a language is, the less win from compliation) and because Java has become entrenched in the "learn programming in 14 days" market of web designers turned programmers.
So, yes, an assembly programmer can outrun most any compiler. But does it matter? Almost never.
Abuse (a great game) was written almost entirely in Lisp. I can't think of other examples, but there's no reason there couldn't be more games written in Lisp.
Be careful, even the author of that game readily admits that it's not "almost entirely" written in Lisp. A custom Lisp is used as the scripting language, but there's a whole lot more C code than Lisp code in the game. It's something like 85% C and 15% Lisp.
Saw this at gamasutra.com:
:)
Toward Programmer Interactivity: Writing Games In Modern Programming Languages
But I guess this guy isn't as well known as Sweeney
Now I realize that many hair-trigger free speech advocates read slashdot, but I think that the principle behind the bill makes sense in a number of ways. It makes even more sense if you consider the geek angle.
On the surface, having one-click access to porn in your room is different than having to go across the street to the gas station to buy a magazine. First difference: you don't have to pay to get access to internet porn (yes there are pay services, but we all know how much free stuff is out there). Second difference: you have an unlimited supply of porn on the internet. So in many ways the university is providing students with access to porn. If nothing else, this could fuel some addiction among those of little will power.
On a geek level, porn is a huge, huge bandwidth eater. It's based around huge image galleries and movies. Restricting access to such services, and also restricting, say, downloads of files larger than N megabytes (such as 120 MB game demos), is a good idea from a system administration point of view. It has nothing to do with freedom of speech.
This touches on the overwhelming failure of indie game developers.
This has links to some good articles about the future of gaming and the rise and fall of shareware and hobbyist game programming.
Let me tell you, they're failing males too. The average game magazine is targeted at spotty pre-teens and teens who have such varied interests as Star Trek, Pokemon, and comic books. That's how they've been for ten years or more, with a slight pardon given to Next Generation. What's happening now is that lots of people are getting into games, but aren't liking the existing game communities at all. I can't say I blame them.