If an "average K-Mart buying linux user"{sic} wishes to keep their computer's performance and features up to par with what's currently available, they should keep their packages, including their kernel, up to date.
In general, the way to keep a given piece of hardware's performance up to par with what's currently available is not to upgrade anything. I'd be willing to put WriteNow 1.0 running on a 512k original Mac under Mac OS 3.2 up against a fully kitted up box of your choice running the latest kitchen sink word processor.
It's not bad that they prefer to use an existing game engine. Really. At this point, game engines are really like the DVD player is to Hollywood.
I think you're being a tad obtuse. There's a difference between the DVD Player and the game engine! There's also a difference between using middleware to -- for example -- handle 3D sound or video, and adding new content to an existing engine. Complaining about Middleware is like complaining about OpenGL and DirectX -- you mean you want to write EVERYTHING from scratch?
E.g. all games based on the Quake and Unreal engines have, so far, been pretty much the same. So have a bunch of games based on similar, less popular, engines.
One of the most innovative titles in recent years -- Thief -- could have been built using an existing engine (and Thief III is being built using Unreal), but it wasn't.
You need to bear in mind that the top engines, such as Unreal and Quake, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to license -- this money doesn't come from nowhere; it comes from someone who wants to avoid risk, etc. etc. and so once you license a name-brand engine you're already locked into Hollywood problems.
Let's go back to the DVD analogy. I can make an innovative short film using digital cameras, edit it on a Mac, and deliver it on a DVD -- all for a few thousand dollars. If I think I have a brilliant idea, all I need is to max out my credit card, lose a lot of sleep, and voila.
...if he'd switched over his entire company or consultancy. It's not news that you can "fit in" to (and even "stand out" from) a corporate PC IT environment, I did it for years at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture).
Indeed, when I worked at AC -- an actively Mac-hostile environment that in 1998 was forcing its DTP people to give up their Macs -- I found everything worked BETTER for Macs (we could access printers and file servers far more easily and reliably than could PC users). None of this is new or OSX related (there are new buzzwords to be compliant with is all).
What really annoyed me then and continues to annoy me now is that people standardise on the wrong things: platforms instead of protocols. Indeed, often vendors instead of protocols. "You can buy any computer solution you want, as long as it's from Compaq." But, we can't use Macs because "that would lock us in to a single vendor".
I found Seamus Blakely's remarks interesting but hardly exhaustive. It seems to me that the simplest way of describing the problem with the games industry is this: "Hollywood".
As computer games have become big business, the process of creating one bears a striking resemblance to the process of developing a film idea: no-one (as William Goldman famously said) knows anything, and they're all terrified of risk.
1) Avoid Technical Risk -- don't develop new game engines. Use an existing engine and plug new content into it.
2) Avoid Financial Risk -- sequels do better than new titles, so invest in sequels.
3) Aim for the lowest common denominator -- dialog needs to be localised, so avoid too much of it. Everyone understands explosions -- so do lots of them.
4) Spend as much on promotion as development. The key is to sell a lot of copies at full price really soon after release, because if you don't, people will figure out how unoriginal your game really is and you'll be selling at a tiny margin.
And as in the film industry, most of the interesting stuff is done by small independent developers on shoestring budgets. Of course, once they have a hit they get converted into a commodity product that spawns huge budget low innovation sequels.
I have a Compaq iPaq. I forget which model because it's so completely useless that it sits plugged into its charger underneath my desk.
It has a color display and a StrongARM processor running at 200-odd Megahertz... i.e. it COULD be a palm-sized color Newton MP2000 with 64MB of RAM and an SD-card slot... except for a tragic historical accident.
Actually I don't think you need to be a nerd, the predisposition to psychosis is sufficient (but possibly not necessary) to "flip out with a gun".
Indeed, I would suspect the nerds are under-represented among folks who "flip out with a gun" because they are more likely to have other emotional outlets.
If you want to be afraid of anything, be afraid of those alleged "anonymous surfing sites" that allow you to surf the web inside a frame that supposedly anonymises you.
If I were the CIA I'd be running a bunch of those sites...
I've been sold on Dave Barry ever since reading a fortune cookie program that quoted him on breakfast cereal (making fun of the all-too-frequent tag line "a part of this complete breakfast").
But apparently, this is not funny for a silent alleged "majority". Oh well. I prefer being in a minority.
I only disagree with the bit about Bush being good at disasters. He may prove good at causing them...
Old Apple ][ Ads...
on
Baked Apple
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Used to feature an Apple ][ recovered from a fire -- totally melted and still working.
There was also a story about a library in a village in Papua New Guinea that was flooded, and the Macs in the library were filled with mud. They hosed em off, dried them out, and they worked.
Finally there's an old BMUG article about "hanging your disks out to dry" after their shareware library was flooded. They opened the floppy disks, washed the disks gently with detergent, air dried them, and put them back in new cases. Voila they were readable.
I used the same trick on a floppy disk soaked with spilled coffee (far worse than flood water I imagine). No data loss.
Typically when the FBI arrest and the DJ prosecute a defendant they're very interested in inflating the importance of the case for all kinds of reasons.
Classic examples are the estimated "street values" of drug busts. Certainly, Mitnick got a very raw deal, but so do folks whose three marijuana plants have an alleged "street value" of $50,000.
I assume some of us remember the case of Steve Jackson Games being nearly put out of business for trying to develop a Cyberpunk supplement for their GURPS paper-based RPG...
The cost to build Columbia was $1,000,000,000. One estimate of real cost is $2,000,000,000 per trip 27.5 times for a total cost of $1,072,727,272. One Trillion dollars.
There's an arithmetic error here somewhere... 27.5 x 2 = 1000???
E.g. Qt supports more platforms than shown, and RealBasic, Director, Flash, and QuickTime are not shown.
RealBasic is a very effective cross-platform (windows / mac -- no *nix sadly) development tool that does a good job of native appearance and behavior from a single code base.
http://www.realbasic.com/
Director and Flash are multimedia development tools. They are also, incidently, both capable of creating cross-platform double-clickable or web applications from a single code base. Indeed, Flash code is probably one of the MOST portable and cross-platform GUI toolkits there is (it runs inside QuickTime and on quite a few embedded systems and both Palm and PocketPC).
QuickTime is -- aside from being a very nice digital video architecture -- a cross-platform GUI toolkit with an embedded bytecode-executing virtual machine.
Look at Sun and Corel and their efforts to sell Linux-based office suites.
This is really irrelevant. Both tried to sell these packages as proprietary commercial software first and failed at that too. Bad software is bad software; open source or not.
I think you vastly over-estimate the market for customized software
Perhaps. Or perhaps you're completely nuts. There are -- for example -- over 300,000 users of Macromedia Director -- an expensive niche multimedia development tool that can only be used to create customized [multimedia] software.
SAP turns over -- what? -- a billion a year writing customized software for clients.
Microsoft goes to significant effort to provide a number of fairly sophisticated development tools for its Operating Systems, and sells hundreds of thousands of SKUs to corporate users.
And then there's all the Perl, Python, Java, etc. etc. programmers out there.
Just exactly what do you think all these users are doing?
1) I don't see that there's any reason to base a business purely on open source. You can write proprietary software AND open source software (e.g. modifications to open software you interact with).
2) Even if for some ideological reason you choose to write open source software only, you can do it on a fee for service basis (e.g. other people who need custom modifications but don't have the wherewithal).
The nation's two biggest Apple distributors -- Ingram and TechData -- are sitting on anywhere from one to four weeks of iMac and eMac inventory. Only the top-level 17-inch, flat-panel G4 800MHz iMac with 80GB hard drive and SuperDrive are such great demand that more units are in shipment to distributors from Apple in quantities over 1,000.
As yet another cube owner -- the power button was oversensitive, and would trip itself in humid weather (turning the computer off). A lot of cubes were unreliable (based on my experience talking to support people during my cube's multiple sojourns at the repair shop).
My least favorite features of the cube though are:
1) The amazingly inconvenient cabling. It all plugs into the underside of the machine, meaning you have to lay it on something to hook it up. The cables are also thick and stiff.
2) The slot loading CD-ROM drive which sticks.
3) The speakers, which HAVE to plug directly into the Cube and not into the monitor or keyboard USB hubs.
I think the 17" iMac, in particular, was a big improvement on the cube, but swappable displays would have been nice.
I fondly remember Orlando rescuing Angelica from a ravenous "orc" in "Orlando Furioso" (aside from its name it bears no resemblance to a Tolkien orc).
Tolkien's sources/inspirations for all kinds of things have been fairly well documented in various books and reviews. E.g. he has lifted whole tracts from (obviously) the Bible, the Eddas (Norse Mythology), and miscellaneous Medieval Literature.
For example, the names of dwarves are taken from the Eddas, Gollum/Smeagol is of course Cain (killing his brother over the ring), most of his creatures are derivative of one mythos or another.
Note that under this definition, the Moon is orbiting the Earth. The Moon is also orbiting the Sun. The Earth is orbiting the Sun.
We can then say that a body is a "moon" if it is (closely) orbiting a larger body which may itself be orbiting a star. (I use the word "closely" since we might well find that the moon is also orbiting Jupiter, for example, under this definition, and this is a perfectly reasonable finding.)
Here we need a good definition of 'orbit' - if, at any time, an object's orbit brings it *away* from the center of mass of its solar system, and towards its planetary primary, it's in orbit around that planetary primary, and not its star. This means, incidentally, that the Earth's Moon is not a moon - it's another planet that happens to co-orbit the sun within the same boundry space as the Earth, and the two planets perturb each other's orbits.
This seems to be a bad and ambiguous definition and an erroneous interpretation of that definition.
1) It's circular. You definite orbit in terms of orbit.
2) The Earth is, at some point in its orbit, moving closer to the Moon and away from the sun, ergo it is the Moon's moon. And vice versa.
3) The Earth is, at some point in its orbit, moving closer to Neptune and away from the Sun, ergo it is Neptune's moon.
Surely the simple criterion is along the lines:
1) if we can see A moving around B and C, and we were to remove the influence of C, and then A continues around B, A is orbiting B -- if they would just fly off to infinity (or otherwise approximate a hyperbolic orbit) then A is not orbiting B.
2) if A and B satisfy condition 1, then we say A orbits B if A is (some degree of our choosing) less massive than B. If they are within (some degree of our choosing) we say they orbit each other.
Slashdot Mirror
If an "average K-Mart buying linux user"{sic} wishes to keep their computer's performance and features up to par with what's currently available, they should keep their packages, including their kernel, up to date.
In general, the way to keep a given piece of hardware's performance up to par with what's currently available is not to upgrade anything. I'd be willing to put WriteNow 1.0 running on a 512k original Mac under Mac OS 3.2 up against a fully kitted up box of your choice running the latest kitchen sink word processor.
It's not bad that they prefer to use an existing game engine. Really. At this point, game engines are really like the DVD player is to Hollywood.
I think you're being a tad obtuse. There's a difference between the DVD Player and the game engine! There's also a difference between using middleware to -- for example -- handle 3D sound or video, and adding new content to an existing engine. Complaining about Middleware is like complaining about OpenGL and DirectX -- you mean you want to write EVERYTHING from scratch?
E.g. all games based on the Quake and Unreal engines have, so far, been pretty much the same. So have a bunch of games based on similar, less popular, engines.
One of the most innovative titles in recent years -- Thief -- could have been built using an existing engine (and Thief III is being built using Unreal), but it wasn't.
You need to bear in mind that the top engines, such as Unreal and Quake, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to license -- this money doesn't come from nowhere; it comes from someone who wants to avoid risk, etc. etc. and so once you license a name-brand engine you're already locked into Hollywood problems.
Let's go back to the DVD analogy. I can make an innovative short film using digital cameras, edit it on a Mac, and deliver it on a DVD -- all for a few thousand dollars. If I think I have a brilliant idea, all I need is to max out my credit card, lose a lot of sleep, and voila.
...if he'd switched over his entire company or consultancy. It's not news that you can "fit in" to (and even "stand out" from) a corporate PC IT environment, I did it for years at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture).
Indeed, when I worked at AC -- an actively Mac-hostile environment that in 1998 was forcing its DTP people to give up their Macs -- I found everything worked BETTER for Macs (we could access printers and file servers far more easily and reliably than could PC users). None of this is new or OSX related (there are new buzzwords to be compliant with is all).
What really annoyed me then and continues to annoy me now is that people standardise on the wrong things: platforms instead of protocols. Indeed, often vendors instead of protocols. "You can buy any computer solution you want, as long as it's from Compaq." But, we can't use Macs because "that would lock us in to a single vendor".
I found Seamus Blakely's remarks interesting but hardly exhaustive. It seems to me that the simplest way of describing the problem with the games industry is this: "Hollywood".
As computer games have become big business, the process of creating one bears a striking resemblance to the process of developing a film idea: no-one (as William Goldman famously said) knows anything, and they're all terrified of risk.
1) Avoid Technical Risk -- don't develop new game engines. Use an existing engine and plug new content into it.
2) Avoid Financial Risk -- sequels do better than new titles, so invest in sequels.
3) Aim for the lowest common denominator -- dialog needs to be localised, so avoid too much of it. Everyone understands explosions -- so do lots of them.
4) Spend as much on promotion as development. The key is to sell a lot of copies at full price really soon after release, because if you don't, people will figure out how unoriginal your game really is and you'll be selling at a tiny margin.
And as in the film industry, most of the interesting stuff is done by small independent developers on shoestring budgets. Of course, once they have a hit they get converted into a commodity product that spawns huge budget low innovation sequels.
I have a Compaq iPaq. I forget which model because it's so completely useless that it sits plugged into its charger underneath my desk.
It has a color display and a StrongARM processor running at 200-odd Megahertz... i.e. it COULD be a palm-sized color Newton MP2000 with 64MB of RAM and an SD-card slot... except for a tragic historical accident.
Actually I don't think you need to be a nerd, the predisposition to psychosis is sufficient (but possibly not necessary) to "flip out with a gun".
Indeed, I would suspect the nerds are under-represented among folks who "flip out with a gun" because they are more likely to have other emotional outlets.
If you want to be afraid of anything, be afraid of those alleged "anonymous surfing sites" that allow you to surf the web inside a frame that supposedly anonymises you.
If I were the CIA I'd be running a bunch of those sites...
I've been sold on Dave Barry ever since reading a fortune cookie program that quoted him on breakfast cereal (making fun of the all-too-frequent tag line "a part of this complete breakfast").
But apparently, this is not funny for a silent alleged "majority". Oh well. I prefer being in a minority.
I only disagree with the bit about Bush being good at disasters. He may prove good at causing them...
Used to feature an Apple ][ recovered from a fire -- totally melted and still working.
There was also a story about a library in a village in Papua New Guinea that was flooded, and the Macs in the library were filled with mud. They hosed em off, dried them out, and they worked.
Finally there's an old BMUG article about "hanging your disks out to dry" after their shareware library was flooded. They opened the floppy disks, washed the disks gently with detergent, air dried them, and put them back in new cases. Voila they were readable.
I used the same trick on a floppy disk soaked with spilled coffee (far worse than flood water I imagine). No data loss.
Typically when the FBI arrest and the DJ prosecute a defendant they're very interested in inflating the importance of the case for all kinds of reasons.
Classic examples are the estimated "street values" of drug busts. Certainly, Mitnick got a very raw deal, but so do folks whose three marijuana plants have an alleged "street value" of $50,000.
I assume some of us remember the case of Steve Jackson Games being nearly put out of business for trying to develop a Cyberpunk supplement for their GURPS paper-based RPG...
Surely you'll need to wait another 19.99 odd years and hear nothing said on the matter before that comparison is salient.
Why not liken the departures of business and political leaders to "pursue other interests" or "spend more time with their families" to Stalinism?
The cost to build Columbia was $1,000,000,000. One estimate of real cost is $2,000,000,000 per trip 27.5 times for a total cost of $1,072,727,272. One Trillion dollars.
There's an arithmetic error here somewhere... 27.5 x 2 = 1000???
E.g. Qt supports more platforms than shown, and RealBasic, Director, Flash, and QuickTime are not shown.
RealBasic is a very effective cross-platform (windows / mac -- no *nix sadly) development tool that does a good job of native appearance and behavior from a single code base.
http://www.realbasic.com/
Director and Flash are multimedia development tools. They are also, incidently, both capable of creating cross-platform double-clickable or web applications from a single code base. Indeed, Flash code is probably one of the MOST portable and cross-platform GUI toolkits there is (it runs inside QuickTime and on quite a few embedded systems and both Palm and PocketPC).
QuickTime is -- aside from being a very nice digital video architecture -- a cross-platform GUI toolkit with an embedded bytecode-executing virtual machine.
Look at Sun and Corel and their efforts to sell Linux-based office suites.
This is really irrelevant. Both tried to sell these packages as proprietary commercial software first and failed at that too. Bad software is bad software; open source or not.
I think you vastly over-estimate the market for customized software
Perhaps. Or perhaps you're completely nuts. There are -- for example -- over 300,000 users of Macromedia Director -- an expensive niche multimedia development tool that can only be used to create customized [multimedia] software.
SAP turns over -- what? -- a billion a year writing customized software for clients.
Microsoft goes to significant effort to provide a number of fairly sophisticated development tools for its Operating Systems, and sells hundreds of thousands of SKUs to corporate users.
And then there's all the Perl, Python, Java, etc. etc. programmers out there.
Just exactly what do you think all these users are doing?
...on the plus side he can replace all those annoying views of the real world with panes showing Microsoft ads or something...
1) I don't see that there's any reason to base a business purely on open source. You can write proprietary software AND open source software (e.g. modifications to open software you interact with).
2) Even if for some ideological reason you choose to write open source software only, you can do it on a fee for service basis (e.g. other people who need custom modifications but don't have the wherewithal).
...for faking all this well enough to fool a bunch of idiots in the press / online / and judges.
...which (shock! horror!) isn't available for Windows. Nor have I found a worthwhile substitute.
From www.thinksecret.com...
The nation's two biggest Apple distributors -- Ingram and TechData -- are sitting on anywhere from one to four weeks of iMac and eMac inventory. Only the top-level 17-inch, flat-panel G4 800MHz iMac with 80GB hard drive and SuperDrive are such great demand that more units are in shipment to distributors from Apple in quantities over 1,000.
As yet another cube owner -- the power button was oversensitive, and would trip itself in humid weather (turning the computer off). A lot of cubes were unreliable (based on my experience talking to support people during my cube's multiple sojourns at the repair shop).
My least favorite features of the cube though are:
1) The amazingly inconvenient cabling. It all plugs into the underside of the machine, meaning you have to lay it on something to hook it up. The cables are also thick and stiff.
2) The slot loading CD-ROM drive which sticks.
3) The speakers, which HAVE to plug directly into the Cube and not into the monitor or keyboard USB hubs.
I think the 17" iMac, in particular, was a big improvement on the cube, but swappable displays would have been nice.
as for function-oriented code supposedly exceeding clarity of OO code, I find this remark, Ahem, embarrassing
How is, for example:
app.showurl("www.slashdot.org");
clearer than:
showurl("www.slashdot.org");
?
Sometimes OO isn't the answer.
I fondly remember Orlando rescuing Angelica from a ravenous "orc" in "Orlando Furioso" (aside from its name it bears no resemblance to a Tolkien orc).
Tolkien's sources/inspirations for all kinds of things have been fairly well documented in various books and reviews. E.g. he has lifted whole tracts from (obviously) the Bible, the Eddas (Norse Mythology), and miscellaneous Medieval Literature.
For example, the names of dwarves are taken from the Eddas, Gollum/Smeagol is of course Cain (killing his brother over the ring), most of his creatures are derivative of one mythos or another.
Note that under this definition, the Moon is orbiting the Earth. The Moon is also orbiting the Sun. The Earth is orbiting the Sun.
We can then say that a body is a "moon" if it is (closely) orbiting a larger body which may itself be orbiting a star. (I use the word "closely" since we might well find that the moon is also orbiting Jupiter, for example, under this definition, and this is a perfectly reasonable finding.)
Here we need a good definition of 'orbit' - if, at any time, an object's orbit brings it *away* from the center of mass of its solar system, and towards its planetary primary, it's in orbit around that planetary primary, and not its star. This means, incidentally, that the Earth's Moon is not a moon - it's another planet that happens to co-orbit the sun within the same boundry space as the Earth, and the two planets perturb each other's orbits.
This seems to be a bad and ambiguous definition and an erroneous interpretation of that definition.
1) It's circular. You definite orbit in terms of orbit.
2) The Earth is, at some point in its orbit, moving closer to the Moon and away from the sun, ergo it is the Moon's moon. And vice versa.
3) The Earth is, at some point in its orbit, moving closer to Neptune and away from the Sun, ergo it is Neptune's moon.
Surely the simple criterion is along the lines:
1) if we can see A moving around B and C, and we were to remove the influence of C, and then A continues around B, A is orbiting B -- if they would just fly off to infinity (or otherwise approximate a hyperbolic orbit) then A is not orbiting B.
2) if A and B satisfy condition 1, then we say A orbits B if A is (some degree of our choosing) less massive than B. If they are within (some degree of our choosing) we say they orbit each other.