Nice to see that more people than i think todays computers are pretty dull, boring and lame excuses of a calculator. I have an Amiga 500 that still performs better in some areas than a brand spanking new PC with Windows on it. Thats just sad. Where are the interesting technologies? Computing has been standing pretty much still over the last 15 years. The only really interesting thing that has happened was the internet. The rest is just hardware speeds and such.
A lot of people hear about early innovation like Doug Englbart's famous 1968 demo and react like you have, as if we all should have been using networked GUI computers by 1974 or something (hey, 6 years is enough right?). But this isn't one big progression from a to b to c; people have different ideas and things take time, or rather: it takes people a lot of time to absorb real innovations. The world was ready for the WWW in 1994, but the world was not ready for smalltalk in 1972. I would say that we are just ready for smalltalk and LISP in the past 5 years. You can see that as their more advanced ideas are sprouting up in other popular languages like Python and Ruby. It just takes time.
as for "just hardware speeds", well those hardware speeds have enabled more that I ever thought I would be able to do on a computer - like edit video. I remember dreaming of the day when I could just digitize a video frame. I edited deck-to-deck on vhs in 1985, and it's not that it sucked or anything, but what I can do on consumer hardware today is just astonishing.
For much of the computer-using world, we have attained the point where the computer is now a really useful tool beyond (a) projectile calculations and (b) spreadsheets. What people are doing with these tools are now where the interesting things are happening, like blogs, personal audio/video recording, ebay, etc. Like lots of people, digital still photography has allowed me to do and become good at something I never had the time/patience for in the analog days. all this activity is pushing prices down so even more people can have access to these tools. compared to all the new things happening, yes, the tools themselves are pretty boring, and I say: finally.
art is the work of an artist. I don't know the history of chess, but it is obviously of enduring value. A master chess player is an artist and specific famous gameplays are works of art, and classic in their enduring power to amaze and teach.
Excluding simulations, I would compare video games to other games like chess, which people have been playing in one form or another for thousands of years. I have to believe that people will probably still be playing some form of tetris a hundred or more years from now.
Absolutely true. I might have said the same thing.
It may not look like it, but we are living in a golden age, a renaissance, where entirely new forms of creative art are being invented. computer games are one of them. what will endure from this age? tetris is probably right, but we will never know.
So, given that I've got some Apple II+ computers sitting in my garage with floppy disks that are probably melted to goo now, I'd guess that the chance that any game from today will exist 500 years from now is close to nil.
If they're not actually goo, I wouldn't be surprised if they worked. Low density magnetic media can last a really, really long time. I haven't had a 5.25 drive hooked up in quite a while (got a//e card for my mac LC in the closet waiting for some day), but the last time I checked, my 3.5 disks from 1987 still worked fine. And those were disks I used for hours every day and carried with me just about everywhere I went.
As opposed to, say, the stack of DVDs I burned in 2002 that have been sitting carefully in their cases untouched on the shelf --- nearly all of them unreadable now.
Are you joking? WTF does this have to do with the CIA? The private sector is connected to the reality of making money, but you surely can't be suggesting that the CIA could be replaced by competition among private sector entities in a market.
The purpose of public institutions is that they are accountable to the public. Private institutions are not. Insofar as the public good is at stake, the institutions that deal with it ought to be public. the more you privatize, the more you take away public accountability, and the more corporations become our defacto government. Privatization of government is the opposite in every way of government by the people, for the people. It is fascism.
The private sector is not perfect, but it's reliance on VOLUNTARY financial support (at least to the extent the government keeps the hell out) means that it's connected with reality in a way the government never can be. In the long run, the private sector is self-correcting.
Our capitalist system works because the law protects the weak from the strong. Take it away and we will quickly revert to feudalism. Corrections happen within and are due to our system of laws and regulations. Not to mention our culture of laws and legal remediation (versus honor killings, for instance, private armies and warlords, the mob, etc.)
Why preserve it? It's obviously been doing just fine for 11 million years.
Preserve is used here in contrast to actively destroy.
Extinction is not a bad thing. Over 90% of the animals that ever existed are extinct and thanks to those animals going away, we now have the exotic animals we have today, including humans.
I highly doubt you know anything about conservation efforts in asia since you made such an abstract argument. You clearly have no interest in it either, because the answer is so simple to you. You managed to turn an interesting anecdote about the finding of an animal thought extinct into an occasion to blast your ideological enemies from your ethical high horse. You must be on the lookout for those liberal extremists everywhere.
you just add firewire hard drives. There are several companies that make nice stackable mini-lookalike drives/cases. Altogether they are still tiny. also note that the high end mini has stuff the iMac doesn't, like a dual layer dvd burner.
Back in the day, I used to use games as examples of great software. We were doing banking software for enormous financial institutions. We got the Big Book of Requirements and we did our best to make it happen. Not exactly an environment where you can get passionate about the results. So much software is built by people who don't really care, have no real connection (emotional or otherwise) with the final result, and don't feel like they have any way to fix real problems - like usability or bad design. The beast is huge. I always thought that games might be the one place where people really truly cared. I'd played a lot of games since the early 80s, and rarely can I remember an instance of those games crashing, for instance. Games can be better or worse, but they all seemed to have a level of quality that I assumed derived from the passion of the creators due to the unique situation of game creators as user-developers. This, of course, has changed as games became truly Big Business.
But the answer isn't found in Brooks. It's purely Christopher Alexander - when things are built by their inhabitants, they can achieve a wholeness that does not exist in any other way of creating.
Everything else results in the big book of requirements and people that don't care. To the extent that big business drives games in that direction, they will suck, no matter their development time or team structure.
You can listen to any recording of say the Kronos Quartet, but no matter how well the recording tech is matched to the medium the sound is flat compared to hearing the quartet play live.
Absolutely; recorded music is fundamentally different that music played live by musicians, and not only due to the sound itself or the way our ear hears it or how it is amplified or where the speakers are placed.
Everyone who likes music should attend live shows as much as possible because the downsides of recorded music on the scale we have today include the raising of our expectations of quality in a performance to a level beyond human ability. (not to mention others like the devaluation of music in general) What we once had in recording was a single performance - recorded. In listening to that over and over, every flaw that you would otherwise not notice in a live performance is magnified, as you hear it over and over. But the musician in the studio begins attempt to erase these flaws and to produce music that is simply not possible to play live.
What is the difference? Live music is performance; some recordings record that single performance, and that performance, it should be noted, is an individual like all other performances. Musicians are not robots or audio codecs. Whether that individual performance "sounds" like it "should" is beside the point entirely, to my mind.
If you dislike joelonsoftware because of what somebody posted on a forum there, how can you stand slashdot?
I'm more of a Lambda the Ultimate kind of guy. Thus, I think JoS is neither particularly interesting nor insightful. His POV is so narrow on the issues I care about. I don't come to slashdot for insight, so it's happy when I find some. I don't know why I read slashdot now that I think of it. I often find myself writing a reply to someone when I realize -- who really cares? But this time, I'll hit submit anyway, just because.
At least if each single tool doesn't do everything you want, you can build around it. If you are using one tool that does everything, you are probably going to be a lot more constrained in the ways you can do things, or the tool is going to be so abstracted that you're going to have to spend a bunch of time flushing it out anyway.
Totally. I think I said something similar from a different pov. those constraints are the assumptions about the kind of problems the framework was designed to solve, and in a framework, you have to work from the inside, rather than from the outside with smaller tools. inside, you're subjugated like you are inside a language. As long as you and the framework are both going to Oz, you can go merrily together along the yellow brick road, but if your goals diverge, the divorce will be messy. Think of the child processes!
snarky. reminds me of why I dislike joel on software.
It is claimed in that article that the distinction between a framework and a library is a subtle one. Not so, not so. Programming languages are themselves frameworks, whereas an add-on framework is often a poorly implemented, misunderstood, misappropriated, half-assed, dumbed down, broken programming language. It is an attempt to add task-based end-use assumptions to a language, to turn an existing language into a special purpose tool. That could be bad, unless the framework was designed by someone who understands programming language design, or if it is done in a language designed with such extensions in mind - CLOS for instance.
So either forget frameworks, or choose them as you would a programming language, and accept that you have to learn and play by their rules, philosophy, paradigm, what-have-you. Just as you wouldn't want to write C style code in CLOS, you would rather learn and use the CLOS special facilities. CLOS *is* a framework, as is C, as is any programming language. This is why Objective-C is the greatest language EVAR, it took two completely at-odds programming philosophies and bashed their heads together. C, fark your static type system and compile-time checking! Smalltalk, let me introduce my old friends malloc() and SIGSEGV!..but to answer the poster's question, first choose a language that best matches your problem domain, ensuring (hopefully) the minimum size of the framework and minimizing philosophical contradictions between it and the host language.
Re:Why do people care about this guy? (serious inq
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Woz On Apple's Success
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· Score: 1
A person like Woz thrives in the lower tech frontier environment of 1975-1982. It's long gone. The garage startups turned into giant corporations, but Woz seems to be a garage hacker kind of guy.
Sure, you got an 4.0 in your business degree, but can you actually sell product and make money? Once you begin working, that is when your true worth becomes apparent.
agreed. but in defense of the business degree, they only truly worthwhile business school experience is when you go back to school after having worked in the real world for a time. the executive MBA programs are entirely different from your random business degree, especially in the top schools that are taught by real life successful business people, who do real work in the real world, and where all the students have done real work in the real world also.
Well, that could be it... IIRC the apple version of Ultima V looked much better than the PC version.
I guess I figured it was the reverse for some reason, given the funky pixel shifting apple// graphics. (and I only ever had a green monitor in those days).
Even more offtopic... Origin games had a history back then of driving new hardware purchases for me. Ultima VI made me buy a VGA card and monitor.
It was a sad day when I heard that Origin stopped Apple development. though I played through V, I never played it again - never had a PC. Hmm... wonder if they work in virtual PC...
Yes, In 22 years of programming I have only once (that I can recall) received the solution in a dream. I think it was 1998 and I was debugging an application level network protocol, marshalling and unmarshalling data, but something was really dragging the parser down. I worked on it for days, then one night I had a seriously vivid dream that I was the parser. I was looking out from my process to the bytes as they came and I discovered the answer in the dream as I went through the algorithm motions. Next day in the office it was exactly right. I've never experienced anything else like that, or at least, to that degree.
(I think when you had a TRS-80 I had a TI-99 4/A. wooo!)
Indeed... but what you really want to say is: parents need to be able to talk to their kids and their kids need to feel that they can tell their parents anything. (almost anything). Keeping an eye on kids is virtually impossible by the time they are teens. The only way a parent can know what the kids are doing is if the kids feel free to tell their parents and that they will be treated with respect whether they did right or wrong. Open communication is the only way. It starts from the beginning and I have to say it is one of the hardest things to do in this world. I'm sure there are some kids who need to be given commands with dire consequences for crossing the line, but for mine the worst thing that can happen is for them to clam up. I need them to tell me what they're thinking about, what they're doing, etc. They only way they will is if I'm receptive so we can talk about what's happening and then both agree on what's right and what's wrong. That is how I know they will develop understanding, empathy, and good judgement - which are the most important things.
The problem is so many people today seem deeply selfish and without much empathy; they do not know how to treat other people including their kids in ways that get the results they want. it has little to do with whether they keep an eye on their kids or not.
Re:Not a very well researched list
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What is Next-Gen?
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Hell, Doom listed as being innovative because it was a FPS? What happened to Wolfenstein 3D? Doom is a great game, but again, it refines on the innovation provided by earlier games.
Doom is the game that really started the game hardware upgrade cycle. At the time, it was therefore a truly next-gen game. You wanted to buy the biggest, baddest hardware you could afford just to play Doom. You upgraded just to play Doom.
... because up to that point, democracies had ended when the people realized they could vote to divide the treasury among themselves. sounds familiar - sounds like tax cuts and "starving the beast".
A republic is not "less than" a democracy. It's a realist's democracy. It's a form of democratic government that can survive.
Public universities use taxpayer money. In a perfect world, taxpayer money would not be used to advance one ideology over another. Therefore, it makes perfect sense to criticize that behaviour when it happens.
You've bought into the false idea of fair balance.
This university system itself is considered the public good, not any one individual professor. Taxpayers don't fund them individually. Professors are supported to think freely; this is their value. Every boundary you draw around that is a limitation - a political one. After all, who and how would we decide what it means for taxpayer money to support one ideology over another? Should we not have professors of Marxism? Should they not be allowed to, for instance, point out the things that are good (and bad) about it? Does that make you, a taxpayer (I presume) uncomfortable? What about all those capitalism-supporting economists?
I would also remind you that we don't live in a perfect world, and we have no idea of what that means, and it can be dangerous to try to force upon our world what we think of as the perfect model. That is the very definition of ideology. For instance, a perfect world has no war, right? So we should disband the military immediately. I think everyone would agree that would be a disaster, even if it seems like it would move us "closer" to this abstract "perfect world"...
Totally. Though I haven't played an RPG in years and years, I quit the Ultima series after having played II-V when the character pictures were all of a sudden detailed (VI). I found I just like the abstract representation better because I had the images in my own mind.
iirc the first (and of course the best) game cinematics were in Karateka.
I wasn't really getting into the reactions people have to violent games, I think that's a separate issue and a more complicated one to boot.
It is, though I imagine it colors perception ever since the hype about Eric Harris making Doom II levels. let's leave it though
Where I live (Albany, NY) most of the people I meet on the job are very staid and square. Government workers, you know? They look at video games as a silly thing children do, but which isn't suitable for grownups.
Ok, I hear you on this one. I work in software though, where it's rather normal. I think it is both a geek thing and also a generational thing. While my neighboors are all mostly golf and cars "adults", I do know at least one old programmer who just never got into email (let alone those internets). There's something here I can't quite put my finger on; while technically I'm all grown up, pretty much, being married with kids, I just don't see myself that way - not in the way my neighboors and other non-geeks seem to. Most of them are about ten years older with kids in their teens, and I have had that conversation - the kids' xboxes and their strange internet ways (what is this about online chat?). Everyone I know in their thirties is pretty much where I am: we were twenties in the mid 90s for the internet revolution. and we grew up with atari, commodore and the apple//. There is a certain playfulness that is missing in a lot of (most?) non-geeks I know -- especially, of course, the older ones. I think being a "grown up" is changing.
Those are my thoughts. I see what you're saying about perceptions among the mundanes about gaming and geek habits. But again, I honestly can't say I have experienced it much. Don't your coworkers kill time in waiting rooms or whatever playing cell/pda games? Or solitaire on the pc when nobody is watching? no online gambling? not even fantasy football/golf etc.? brickout on their iPod? No palms or pocket pcs? I'd be surprised.
I think you should just take the theme and run with it. get one of those space invader floor mats for the office.
Fine. But you have to debate too, which you haven't done. Your first reply to the article seemed like you were simply reacting to the word "addiction". But whatever. You said:
The ONLY reason gaming has been singled out as "addictive" and negative in context is that the majority of our population is very closed-minded and can't wrap their mind around an activity that doesn't involve sports or television sitcoms. If you want to take the gloves off and deal with the issue honestly, that's it in a nutshell: gamers are "different and weird" and Must Be Stopped
Gaming has been mainstream since the 80s. I think I have never met people like you're describing; treating gamers as "different and weird" is totally outside of my experience. Thus, I wonder how this strongly-stated opinion of yours has been formed. Debating your opinions and wondering why you have them are one and the same in this case. It's not just your point, its how forcefully you made it. It makes me think you don't know a variety of gamers, actually; does online gambling count? Online bridge? chess? the sims? Fantasy football? Solitare/minesweeper? Gaming cuts across the entire social strata from 4-year-olds to gramma. Almost everyone plays games.
Now, to whatever degree this "gamers Must Be Stopped" thing is real, it is obviously not about a game like minesweeper or Tetris, it's about GTA and graphic first-person violence. Right? It's the implication that such video games numb people to violence or even causes violent and aggressive behavior - as you yourself wrote. But what does that have to do with addiction? Isn't addiction a behavior you can't stop that disrupts your life? If you want to argue about Everquest addiction, that's one thing totally separate from blaming GTA for violent behavior in real life. There is actual controversy over violence in video games. But I don't see the anti-video game thing in general, at at all, in any way shape or form, that you seem to.
The article stated that gaming was an addiction; I'm calling bullshit on it. You're going to dare to tell me I'm not allowed to counter his opinion, in the same breath with which you try to counter mine??? Ha, ha ha... Thanks for the laugh.
I felt you missed the whole point of his article. But obviously it makes you upset, and I think you need to think about that. Feeling defensive having your lifestyle attacked?
Videogames are mainstream when old people, young people, and middle aged people all agree that gaming is normal, healthy, and fun (and not a sign that you're a loser about to freak out and shoot up the neighborhood).
I think I've figured it out. If they aren't considered mainstream today, it is the first person violence and realism that is taking it out of the mainstream. If that's the case, it wasn't always like that. Atari was mainstream. Nintendo was mainstream. Arcades were mainstream in the 80s. Pinball was mainstream before it.
If being a gamer causes you to be treated as different and weird, I think it is all in your head. Or you should move or I don't know, get out more or something. I can't recall experiencing that growing up in Ohio. Video games were the greatest thing. Then... I grew up. There are games I'd like to play, but it's not important enough to me to make the time. I think that in my life if I spent even an hour each day playing games I'd call myself addicted. Instead, I spend that time being addicted to reading political blogs and fricking slashdot.
But seriously dude, relax. play a game or something.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice to see that more people than i think todays computers are pretty dull, boring and lame excuses of a calculator. I have an Amiga 500 that still performs better in some areas than a brand spanking new PC with Windows on it. Thats just sad. Where are the interesting technologies? Computing has been standing pretty much still over the last 15 years. The only really interesting thing that has happened was the internet. The rest is just hardware speeds and such.
A lot of people hear about early innovation like Doug Englbart's famous 1968 demo and react like you have, as if we all should have been using networked GUI computers by 1974 or something (hey, 6 years is enough right?). But this isn't one big progression from a to b to c; people have different ideas and things take time, or rather: it takes people a lot of time to absorb real innovations. The world was ready for the WWW in 1994, but the world was not ready for smalltalk in 1972. I would say that we are just ready for smalltalk and LISP in the past 5 years. You can see that as their more advanced ideas are sprouting up in other popular languages like Python and Ruby. It just takes time.
as for "just hardware speeds", well those hardware speeds have enabled more that I ever thought I would be able to do on a computer - like edit video. I remember dreaming of the day when I could just digitize a video frame. I edited deck-to-deck on vhs in 1985, and it's not that it sucked or anything, but what I can do on consumer hardware today is just astonishing.
For much of the computer-using world, we have attained the point where the computer is now a really useful tool beyond (a) projectile calculations and (b) spreadsheets. What people are doing with these tools are now where the interesting things are happening, like blogs, personal audio/video recording, ebay, etc. Like lots of people, digital still photography has allowed me to do and become good at something I never had the time/patience for in the analog days. all this activity is pushing prices down so even more people can have access to these tools. compared to all the new things happening, yes, the tools themselves are pretty boring, and I say: finally.
art is the work of an artist. I don't know the history of chess, but it is obviously of enduring value. A master chess player is an artist and specific famous gameplays are works of art, and classic in their enduring power to amaze and teach.
Excluding simulations, I would compare video games to other games like chess, which people have been playing in one form or another for thousands of years. I have to believe that people will probably still be playing some form of tetris a hundred or more years from now.
Absolutely true. I might have said the same thing.
It may not look like it, but we are living in a golden age, a renaissance, where entirely new forms of creative art are being invented. computer games are one of them. what will endure from this age? tetris is probably right, but we will never know.
So, given that I've got some Apple II+ computers sitting in my garage with floppy disks that are probably melted to goo now, I'd guess that the chance that any game from today will exist 500 years from now is close to nil.
//e card for my mac LC in the closet waiting for some day), but the last time I checked, my 3.5 disks from 1987 still worked fine. And those were disks I used for hours every day and carried with me just about everywhere I went.
If they're not actually goo, I wouldn't be surprised if they worked. Low density magnetic media can last a really, really long time. I haven't had a 5.25 drive hooked up in quite a while (got a
As opposed to, say, the stack of DVDs I burned in 2002 that have been sitting carefully in their cases untouched on the shelf --- nearly all of them unreadable now.
Are you joking? WTF does this have to do with the CIA? The private sector is connected to the reality of making money, but you surely can't be suggesting that the CIA could be replaced by competition among private sector entities in a market.
The purpose of public institutions is that they are accountable to the public. Private institutions are not. Insofar as the public good is at stake, the institutions that deal with it ought to be public. the more you privatize, the more you take away public accountability, and the more corporations become our defacto government. Privatization of government is the opposite in every way of government by the people, for the people. It is fascism.
The private sector is not perfect, but it's reliance on VOLUNTARY financial support (at least to the extent the government keeps the hell out) means that it's connected with reality in a way the government never can be. In the long run, the private sector is self-correcting.
Our capitalist system works because the law protects the weak from the strong. Take it away and we will quickly revert to feudalism. Corrections happen within and are due to our system of laws and regulations. Not to mention our culture of laws and legal remediation (versus honor killings, for instance, private armies and warlords, the mob, etc.)
Why preserve it? It's obviously been doing just fine for 11 million years.
Preserve is used here in contrast to actively destroy.
Extinction is not a bad thing. Over 90% of the animals that ever existed are extinct and thanks to those animals going away, we now have the exotic animals we have today, including humans.
I highly doubt you know anything about conservation efforts in asia since you made such an abstract argument. You clearly have no interest in it either, because the answer is so simple to you. You managed to turn an interesting anecdote about the finding of an animal thought extinct into an occasion to blast your ideological enemies from your ethical high horse. You must be on the lookout for those liberal extremists everywhere.
you just add firewire hard drives. There are several companies that make nice stackable mini-lookalike drives/cases. Altogether they are still tiny. also note that the high end mini has stuff the iMac doesn't, like a dual layer dvd burner.
Mythical Man Month
Back in the day, I used to use games as examples of great software. We were doing banking software for enormous financial institutions. We got the Big Book of Requirements and we did our best to make it happen. Not exactly an environment where you can get passionate about the results. So much software is built by people who don't really care, have no real connection (emotional or otherwise) with the final result, and don't feel like they have any way to fix real problems - like usability or bad design. The beast is huge. I always thought that games might be the one place where people really truly cared. I'd played a lot of games since the early 80s, and rarely can I remember an instance of those games crashing, for instance. Games can be better or worse, but they all seemed to have a level of quality that I assumed derived from the passion of the creators due to the unique situation of game creators as user-developers. This, of course, has changed as games became truly Big Business.
But the answer isn't found in Brooks. It's purely Christopher Alexander - when things are built by their inhabitants, they can achieve a wholeness that does not exist in any other way of creating.
Everything else results in the big book of requirements and people that don't care. To the extent that big business drives games in that direction, they will suck, no matter their development time or team structure.
You can listen to any recording of say the Kronos Quartet, but no matter how well the recording tech is matched to the medium the sound is flat compared to hearing the quartet play live.
Absolutely; recorded music is fundamentally different that music played live by musicians, and not only due to the sound itself or the way our ear hears it or how it is amplified or where the speakers are placed.
Everyone who likes music should attend live shows as much as possible because the downsides of recorded music on the scale we have today include the raising of our expectations of quality in a performance to a level beyond human ability. (not to mention others like the devaluation of music in general) What we once had in recording was a single performance - recorded. In listening to that over and over, every flaw that you would otherwise not notice in a live performance is magnified, as you hear it over and over. But the musician in the studio begins attempt to erase these flaws and to produce music that is simply not possible to play live.
What is the difference? Live music is performance; some recordings record that single performance, and that performance, it should be noted, is an individual like all other performances. Musicians are not robots or audio codecs. Whether that individual performance "sounds" like it "should" is beside the point entirely, to my mind.
If you dislike joelonsoftware because of what somebody posted on a forum there, how can you stand slashdot?
I'm more of a Lambda the Ultimate kind of guy. Thus, I think JoS is neither particularly interesting nor insightful. His POV is so narrow on the issues I care about. I don't come to slashdot for insight, so it's happy when I find some. I don't know why I read slashdot now that I think of it. I often find myself writing a reply to someone when I realize -- who really cares? But this time, I'll hit submit anyway, just because.
At least if each single tool doesn't do everything you want, you can build around it. If you are using one tool that does everything, you are probably going to be a lot more constrained in the ways you can do things, or the tool is going to be so abstracted that you're going to have to spend a bunch of time flushing it out anyway.
Totally. I think I said something similar from a different pov. those constraints are the assumptions about the kind of problems the framework was designed to solve, and in a framework, you have to work from the inside, rather than from the outside with smaller tools. inside, you're subjugated like you are inside a language. As long as you and the framework are both going to Oz, you can go merrily together along the yellow brick road, but if your goals diverge, the divorce will be messy. Think of the child processes!
snarky. reminds me of why I dislike joel on software.
..but to answer the poster's question, first choose a language that best matches your problem domain, ensuring (hopefully) the minimum size of the framework and minimizing philosophical contradictions between it and the host language.
It is claimed in that article that the distinction between a framework and a library is a subtle one. Not so, not so. Programming languages are themselves frameworks, whereas an add-on framework is often a poorly implemented, misunderstood, misappropriated, half-assed, dumbed down, broken programming language. It is an attempt to add task-based end-use assumptions to a language, to turn an existing language into a special purpose tool. That could be bad, unless the framework was designed by someone who understands programming language design, or if it is done in a language designed with such extensions in mind - CLOS for instance.
So either forget frameworks, or choose them as you would a programming language, and accept that you have to learn and play by their rules, philosophy, paradigm, what-have-you. Just as you wouldn't want to write C style code in CLOS, you would rather learn and use the CLOS special facilities. CLOS *is* a framework, as is C, as is any programming language. This is why Objective-C is the greatest language EVAR, it took two completely at-odds programming philosophies and bashed their heads together. C, fark your static type system and compile-time checking! Smalltalk, let me introduce my old friends malloc() and SIGSEGV!
A person like Woz thrives in the lower tech frontier environment of 1975-1982. It's long gone. The garage startups turned into giant corporations, but Woz seems to be a garage hacker kind of guy.
Sure, you got an 4.0 in your business degree, but can you actually sell product and make money?
Once you begin working, that is when your true worth becomes apparent.
agreed. but in defense of the business degree, they only truly worthwhile business school experience is when you go back to school after having worked in the real world for a time. the executive MBA programs are entirely different from your random business degree, especially in the top schools that are taught by real life successful business people, who do real work in the real world, and where all the students have done real work in the real world also.
Well, that could be it... IIRC the apple version of Ultima V looked much better than the PC version.
// graphics. (and I only ever had a green monitor in those days).
I guess I figured it was the reverse for some reason, given the funky pixel shifting apple
Even more offtopic... Origin games had a history back then of driving new hardware purchases for me. Ultima VI made me buy a VGA card and monitor.
It was a sad day when I heard that Origin stopped Apple development. though I played through V, I never played it again - never had a PC. Hmm... wonder if they work in virtual PC...
Ultima V had crappy graphics but it took 200 hours to beat.
// version, too.
OT but.. wha?? for someone who had played them from the beginning, no: V was awesome. And I'm talking about the apple
Yes, In 22 years of programming I have only once (that I can recall) received the solution in a dream. I think it was 1998 and I was debugging an application level network protocol, marshalling and unmarshalling data, but something was really dragging the parser down. I worked on it for days, then one night I had a seriously vivid dream that I was the parser. I was looking out from my process to the bytes as they came and I discovered the answer in the dream as I went through the algorithm motions. Next day in the office it was exactly right. I've never experienced anything else like that, or at least, to that degree.
(I think when you had a TRS-80 I had a TI-99 4/A. wooo!)
Parents need to keep an eye on their kids.
Indeed... but what you really want to say is: parents need to be able to talk to their kids and their kids need to feel that they can tell their parents anything. (almost anything). Keeping an eye on kids is virtually impossible by the time they are teens. The only way a parent can know what the kids are doing is if the kids feel free to tell their parents and that they will be treated with respect whether they did right or wrong. Open communication is the only way. It starts from the beginning and I have to say it is one of the hardest things to do in this world. I'm sure there are some kids who need to be given commands with dire consequences for crossing the line, but for mine the worst thing that can happen is for them to clam up. I need them to tell me what they're thinking about, what they're doing, etc. They only way they will is if I'm receptive so we can talk about what's happening and then both agree on what's right and what's wrong. That is how I know they will develop understanding, empathy, and good judgement - which are the most important things.
The problem is so many people today seem deeply selfish and without much empathy; they do not know how to treat other people including their kids in ways that get the results they want. it has little to do with whether they keep an eye on their kids or not.
Hell, Doom listed as being innovative because it was a FPS? What happened to Wolfenstein 3D? Doom is a great game, but again, it refines on the innovation provided by earlier games.
Doom is the game that really started the game hardware upgrade cycle. At the time, it was therefore a truly next-gen game. You wanted to buy the biggest, baddest hardware you could afford just to play Doom. You upgraded just to play Doom.
... because up to that point, democracies had ended when the people realized they could vote to divide the treasury among themselves. sounds familiar - sounds like tax cuts and "starving the beast".
A republic is not "less than" a democracy. It's a realist's democracy. It's a form of democratic government that can survive.
Yes... although half the web at that point was ing...
Public universities use taxpayer money. In a perfect world, taxpayer money would not be used to advance one ideology over another. Therefore, it makes perfect sense to criticize that behaviour when it happens.
You've bought into the false idea of fair balance.
This university system itself is considered the public good, not any one individual professor. Taxpayers don't fund them individually. Professors are supported to think freely; this is their value. Every boundary you draw around that is a limitation - a political one. After all, who and how would we decide what it means for taxpayer money to support one ideology over another? Should we not have professors of Marxism? Should they not be allowed to, for instance, point out the things that are good (and bad) about it? Does that make you, a taxpayer (I presume) uncomfortable? What about all those capitalism-supporting economists?
I would also remind you that we don't live in a perfect world, and we have no idea of what that means, and it can be dangerous to try to force upon our world what we think of as the perfect model. That is the very definition of ideology. For instance, a perfect world has no war, right? So we should disband the military immediately. I think everyone would agree that would be a disaster, even if it seems like it would move us "closer" to this abstract "perfect world"...
Totally. Though I haven't played an RPG in years and years, I quit the Ultima series after having played II-V when the character pictures were all of a sudden detailed (VI). I found I just like the abstract representation better because I had the images in my own mind.
iirc the first (and of course the best) game cinematics were in Karateka.
I wasn't really getting into the reactions people have to violent games, I think that's a separate issue and a more complicated one to boot.
//. There is a certain playfulness that is missing in a lot of (most?) non-geeks I know -- especially, of course, the older ones. I think being a "grown up" is changing.
It is, though I imagine it colors perception ever since the hype about Eric Harris making Doom II levels. let's leave it though
Where I live (Albany, NY) most of the people I meet on the job are very staid and square. Government workers, you know? They look at video games as a silly thing children do, but which isn't suitable for grownups.
Ok, I hear you on this one. I work in software though, where it's rather normal. I think it is both a geek thing and also a generational thing. While my neighboors are all mostly golf and cars "adults", I do know at least one old programmer who just never got into email (let alone those internets). There's something here I can't quite put my finger on; while technically I'm all grown up, pretty much, being married with kids, I just don't see myself that way - not in the way my neighboors and other non-geeks seem to. Most of them are about ten years older with kids in their teens, and I have had that conversation - the kids' xboxes and their strange internet ways (what is this about online chat?). Everyone I know in their thirties is pretty much where I am: we were twenties in the mid 90s for the internet revolution. and we grew up with atari, commodore and the apple
Those are my thoughts. I see what you're saying about perceptions among the mundanes about gaming and geek habits. But again, I honestly can't say I have experienced it much. Don't your coworkers kill time in waiting rooms or whatever playing cell/pda games? Or solitaire on the pc when nobody is watching? no online gambling? not even fantasy football/golf etc.? brickout on their iPod? No palms or pocket pcs? I'd be surprised.
I think you should just take the theme and run with it. get one of those space invader floor mats for the office.
well, good luck
Fine. But you have to debate too, which you haven't done. Your first reply to the article seemed like you were simply reacting to the word "addiction". But whatever. You said:
The ONLY reason gaming has been singled out as "addictive" and negative in context is that the majority of our population is very closed-minded and can't wrap their mind around an activity that doesn't involve sports or television sitcoms. If you want to take the gloves off and deal with the issue honestly, that's it in a nutshell: gamers are "different and weird" and Must Be Stopped
Gaming has been mainstream since the 80s. I think I have never met people like you're describing; treating gamers as "different and weird" is totally outside of my experience. Thus, I wonder how this strongly-stated opinion of yours has been formed. Debating your opinions and wondering why you have them are one and the same in this case. It's not just your point, its how forcefully you made it. It makes me think you don't know a variety of gamers, actually; does online gambling count? Online bridge? chess? the sims? Fantasy football? Solitare/minesweeper? Gaming cuts across the entire social strata from 4-year-olds to gramma. Almost everyone plays games.
Now, to whatever degree this "gamers Must Be Stopped" thing is real, it is obviously not about a game like minesweeper or Tetris, it's about GTA and graphic first-person violence. Right? It's the implication that such video games numb people to violence or even causes violent and aggressive behavior - as you yourself wrote. But what does that have to do with addiction? Isn't addiction a behavior you can't stop that disrupts your life? If you want to argue about Everquest addiction, that's one thing totally separate from blaming GTA for violent behavior in real life. There is actual controversy over violence in video games. But I don't see the anti-video game thing in general, at at all, in any way shape or form, that you seem to.
The article stated that gaming was an addiction; I'm calling bullshit on it. You're going to dare to tell me I'm not allowed to counter his opinion, in the same breath with which you try to counter mine??? Ha, ha ha... Thanks for the laugh.
I felt you missed the whole point of his article. But obviously it makes you upset, and I think you need to think about that. Feeling defensive having your lifestyle attacked?
Videogames are mainstream when old people, young people, and middle aged people all agree that gaming is normal, healthy, and fun (and not a sign that you're a loser about to freak out and shoot up the neighborhood).
I think I've figured it out. If they aren't considered mainstream today, it is the first person violence and realism that is taking it out of the mainstream. If that's the case, it wasn't always like that. Atari was mainstream. Nintendo was mainstream. Arcades were mainstream in the 80s. Pinball was mainstream before it.
If being a gamer causes you to be treated as different and weird, I think it is all in your head. Or you should move or I don't know, get out more or something. I can't recall experiencing that growing up in Ohio. Video games were the greatest thing. Then... I grew up. There are games I'd like to play, but it's not important enough to me to make the time. I think that in my life if I spent even an hour each day playing games I'd call myself addicted. Instead, I spend that time being addicted to reading political blogs and fricking slashdot.
But seriously dude, relax. play a game or something.