I should add one thing. Why did I use the Palm if it has all these problems? Well, for a long time I found the Pocket PCs much worse. Finally they now have the CPU power required to run their bloated OS but when I received a Dell Axim as a present a year or two ago I quickly sold it as it was too slow to use. It felt like you could see each pixel being redrawn individually!
I should clarify what I mean by legacy support by means of an example. The OS was designed from the beginning to work on 160x160 displays. The display size was hard-coded right in from the beginning. I wrote a couple of games for 160x160 Palms. I then decided to upgrade the games for my 320x480 T|3. After a few days of hunting for documents I was still bewildered. I have to do endless checking for this or that type of display. I have to include special support for Sony displays that work differently. I have to write code to handle the dynamic input area. This is ridiculous. Writing GUI code should not be this messy. At an early date Palm should have realized that their device might one day have XxY displays where X and Y are arbitrary. But no, we have all these incremental changes and this means that a big chunk of your code is tests to see which version of the OS you're running. It's great for the end user, but it could have been better for the developer. Windows CE scores here because it was stripped down from a more general OS rather than an incremental growth from a tiny machine. (PS I'm what you could call a 'graphics professional' with experience of libraries like Win32, MFC, X11, Motif and Qt.)
File browsers are useful. People like to be able to use their Palms to store data from their desktop machines (Palm have belatedly just figured this out with the T5). Additionally I'd like to have apps on my Palm that can use ordinary files from my desktop without a horrible conversion to/from.pdb format. And with these files in place, I'd like to be able to browse them. People need browsers to manage their mp3 files, or to manage photos on their SD cards. I'm not talking 'power user' here. File browsers are also essential to clear up the junk that accretes on Palms over time. Without a file browser you risk eventually losing your memory to leftovers from apps that didn't clean up when you deleted them.
And another thing. I temporarily lost my T|3 for a while and reverted to an original Palm Pilot Professional. The number of advantages of that machine were incredible: better batteries (because I could use external 15 minute rechargeable NiMHs) and a longer lifespan for those batteries between recharges, a display that I could see in any light conditions whether bright or dark and better text input in the form of Graffiti 1. The display doesn't scratch (not one scratch after 8 years. I had to return a Zire 71 when the display wore out after 3 or 4 months). The painted logo and button designs are still in perfect condition. (It does have a slight crack in the case but you can't normally see it and it has no effect.) My new T|3 is showing signs of wear already: the Palm logo fell off(!!!) and the leather flip-cover actually rubs against the metal of the case so that it has 4 'polshed' patches with a completely different look. In some respects Palm devices are getting worse!
Treating employees badly is one thing. Breaking the law is another. EA's attitude to overtime isn't strictly legal, though it's no different from many other companies.
Palm (the two halves) must be the worst example of complacency I have ever seen. For a start they frequently release hardware, after a long period, that is the tiniest incremental improvement from previous hardware.
They're still releasing devices with PalmOS 5 which is the saddest apology for an operating system I have seen. Writing PalmOS GUI code is hard - there are so many legacy features you need to check for and deal with. It's clear that the whole thing has just accreted without planning over the years. The current schizophrenia between 68000 and ARM is a nightmare with the worse endianness horrors you've ever seen. I won't even mention proper OS features like memory management, multi-threading and so on.
Customers have been begging for proper wireless support on Palms for a long time and Palm have failed to deliver. A device, today, without at least 802.11b, is a dinosaur before it's born. What the hell are the Palm engineers doing over there?
The software that delivers with the Palm is a little pathetic. Not even a file browser. And main memory has a completely flat file hierarchy so that even with a file browser it's hard to find what you want. No word processor (well, there's an awful 3rd party thing).
It's no surprise they're losing the war. But it needn't have been like this. They had the advantage. And they simply sat on their laurels.
His talks are nothing but self-aggrandisement. I've been to talks by countless intellectuals ranging from people like Witten, Hawking, Bell and Feynman. Nobel prize winners. Fields medal winners. None of them promoted themselves in the way Mandelbrot does. Quite frankly, Mandelbrot talks like a complete asshole. I don't expect a bibliography from everyone. Mandelbrot is different from any other speaker I've known. He's obnoxious, and also a complete bullshitter. He talks endlessly about applications of his work that actually come to nothing. He's a fake riding on the success of his earlier years. And his earlier work is merely technicalities. FInd me the mathematician who actually cares about Mandelbrot's work. They are few and far between. His work is a dead-end that has had little impact anywhere. And yet he continues to give talks on applications of his work to things like financial markets (he's been doing that very recently) that are complete and utter bull. None of this stuff works. But he wows people with pretty pictures and once you're famous you're treated with undue reverence whatever you say.
But his primary ability is convincing people that he was the discoverer of work discovered by other people. He did not invent fractals. He did not discover many important properties of fractals. He did not discover the "Mandelbrot" Set (I have the orange covered collection of papers that contains the original Brooks-Metelsky paper with the ASCII art printout, from a teletype, of the set.) He's a full time self-publicist and bullshitter in the style of people who appear in Wired. When he speaks publicly he credits few other people and uses the word 'I' far more than any other speaker I've seen.
(Chaitin in pretty similar too. And come to think of it, so's Latham. These IBM Research Fellows are an untrustworthy bunch.)
Plenty of games are late, but I don't think games are all that buggy. With a console game, say, you can't download a patch at a later date. It has to just work. And by and large, I haven't seen many serious bugs in console games. I think console games are far more reliable than many other types of application.
I've had a few problems with PC games - but that's usually because they make use of intimate knowledge of the hardware and it's not easy to test your game on every type of hardware out there, including hardware not yet released.
No, I still don't think this is self-interest, even in the long run. I don't think that my adoption of respect for IP is going to have a significant impact on the way other people behave in the long run. In fact, I think it has zero impact. I eventually buy all of my music. (Well, I have some bootleg material that can't be bought so I should say I buy all of my music, when it can be bought.) I've told other people I do this. I don't see them doing the same. In fact, they probably think I'm an idiot for doing this. There's no self-interest here.
...to carve your data into rock using hieroglyphs. That should give a lifespan of around a few thousand years at least. Should even withstand earthquakes, extremes of heat and cold, and maybe even having your city sacked by those pesky Assyrians.
I don't understand why this is "self-interest". Apart from the risk of landing in jail, how is it in your interest to respect other people's IP? If you know you can get away with it it makes much more sense to rip off every bit of useful software you can. In fact, that's why we have laws about IP. Because without them people would act in their own interest and ignore other people's IP rights.
Oh, and I know people are going to misread what I've just asked, so I'd better say that I'm not advocating ripping off people's code. I'm just asking why you call this "self-interest".
And why, pray tell, do we have a Constitution, when all we have to do is vote people out when they act like tyrants? The Constitution seems kinda redundant. But it's not, because as we all know, a crude tool like the ballot box can easily fail us. Same thing goes for markets. I don't want to trust my rights to the hope that a bunch of ignorant people will choose companies that provide less censorship. We all know that doesn't happen.
Are you a failed academic? You sound like one. Or maybe an engineer, resentful that you didn't understand physics. Are you able to make a genuine judgement of what is or isn't a 'contorted argument'? The people who peer review papers are a smart bunch. Are you telling me you could do a better job?
Exactly. Ultimately all functions of the government will be replaced by private enterprise. When this happens we'll lose all of our freedoms. Constitution? What constitution? It only serves to limit the powers of government. But there are no such checks on the power of corporations. And everyone will live in denial. Censorship? How can there be censorship, there's no government to do it. It'll be called self-censorship instead and will be accepted by everyone.
Risk is training kids to wipe out would-be aggressors who might attack our great country. This new game, however, serves no good purpose. It simply trains kids to be evil.
In real life evil geniuses are people like Adolf Hitler and Osama Bin Laden. In fact, both of these people were on quests to create the perfect doomsday weapon. This game will cause a generation of kids to grow up with similar ambitions. I'm going to stick with Vice City where the violence is on a much smaller scale and hence far less morally reprehensible.
Never make presumptions about how much audio someone else needs to carry around. The reasons for wanting to carry this or that amount vary significantly and can be quite complex.
Well yeah. Illicitly copying the Coke can deprives A of the revenue from one payment but actually taking the can away from A deprives A of an entire revenue stream. Taking stuff away from people is even worse than mere stealing.
No, because if such a thing as a can copier existed A could sell copies of the can. A will have incurred an opportunity cost becaue he could have sold the can to B and kept it.
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I should add one thing. Why did I use the Palm if it has all these problems? Well, for a long time I found the Pocket PCs much worse. Finally they now have the CPU power required to run their bloated OS but when I received a Dell Axim as a present a year or two ago I quickly sold it as it was too slow to use. It felt like you could see each pixel being redrawn individually!
File browsers are useful. People like to be able to use their Palms to store data from their desktop machines (Palm have belatedly just figured this out with the T5). Additionally I'd like to have apps on my Palm that can use ordinary files from my desktop without a horrible conversion to/from .pdb format. And with these files in place, I'd like to be able to browse them. People need browsers to manage their mp3 files, or to manage photos on their SD cards. I'm not talking 'power user' here. File browsers are also essential to clear up the junk that accretes on Palms over time. Without a file browser you risk eventually losing your memory to leftovers from apps that didn't clean up when you deleted them.
And another thing. I temporarily lost my T|3 for a while and reverted to an original Palm Pilot Professional. The number of advantages of that machine were incredible: better batteries (because I could use external 15 minute rechargeable NiMHs) and a longer lifespan for those batteries between recharges, a display that I could see in any light conditions whether bright or dark and better text input in the form of Graffiti 1. The display doesn't scratch (not one scratch after 8 years. I had to return a Zire 71 when the display wore out after 3 or 4 months). The painted logo and button designs are still in perfect condition. (It does have a slight crack in the case but you can't normally see it and it has no effect.) My new T|3 is showing signs of wear already: the Palm logo fell off(!!!) and the leather flip-cover actually rubs against the metal of the case so that it has 4 'polshed' patches with a completely different look. In some respects Palm devices are getting worse!
Treating employees badly is one thing. Breaking the law is another. EA's attitude to overtime isn't strictly legal, though it's no different from many other companies.
They're still releasing devices with PalmOS 5 which is the saddest apology for an operating system I have seen. Writing PalmOS GUI code is hard - there are so many legacy features you need to check for and deal with. It's clear that the whole thing has just accreted without planning over the years. The current schizophrenia between 68000 and ARM is a nightmare with the worse endianness horrors you've ever seen. I won't even mention proper OS features like memory management, multi-threading and so on.
Customers have been begging for proper wireless support on Palms for a long time and Palm have failed to deliver. A device, today, without at least 802.11b, is a dinosaur before it's born. What the hell are the Palm engineers doing over there?
The software that delivers with the Palm is a little pathetic. Not even a file browser. And main memory has a completely flat file hierarchy so that even with a file browser it's hard to find what you want. No word processor (well, there's an awful 3rd party thing).
It's no surprise they're losing the war. But it needn't have been like this. They had the advantage. And they simply sat on their laurels.
We all know he's a he. Women have better things to do with their time than crack software.
His talks are nothing but self-aggrandisement. I've been to talks by countless intellectuals ranging from people like Witten, Hawking, Bell and Feynman. Nobel prize winners. Fields medal winners. None of them promoted themselves in the way Mandelbrot does. Quite frankly, Mandelbrot talks like a complete asshole. I don't expect a bibliography from everyone. Mandelbrot is different from any other speaker I've known. He's obnoxious, and also a complete bullshitter. He talks endlessly about applications of his work that actually come to nothing. He's a fake riding on the success of his earlier years. And his earlier work is merely technicalities. FInd me the mathematician who actually cares about Mandelbrot's work. They are few and far between. His work is a dead-end that has had little impact anywhere. And yet he continues to give talks on applications of his work to things like financial markets (he's been doing that very recently) that are complete and utter bull. None of this stuff works. But he wows people with pretty pictures and once you're famous you're treated with undue reverence whatever you say.
(Chaitin in pretty similar too. And come to think of it, so's Latham. These IBM Research Fellows are an untrustworthy bunch.)
Lego is an adjective, not a noun. It's not like sheep at all.
I've had a few problems with PC games - but that's usually because they make use of intimate knowledge of the hardware and it's not easy to test your game on every type of hardware out there, including hardware not yet released.
No, I still don't think this is self-interest, even in the long run. I don't think that my adoption of respect for IP is going to have a significant impact on the way other people behave in the long run. In fact, I think it has zero impact. I eventually buy all of my music. (Well, I have some bootleg material that can't be bought so I should say I buy all of my music, when it can be bought.) I've told other people I do this. I don't see them doing the same. In fact, they probably think I'm an idiot for doing this. There's no self-interest here.
...to carve your data into rock using hieroglyphs. That should give a lifespan of around a few thousand years at least. Should even withstand earthquakes, extremes of heat and cold, and maybe even having your city sacked by those pesky Assyrians.
Oh, and I know people are going to misread what I've just asked, so I'd better say that I'm not advocating ripping off people's code. I'm just asking why you call this "self-interest".
And I suppose you claim that reading of the article is unbiased.
Hmmm...here's a theorem: at least one person of median intelligence in the US voted for Bush. Doesn't say much for the median.
Are you a failed academic? You sound like one. Or maybe an engineer, resentful that you didn't understand physics. Are you able to make a genuine judgement of what is or isn't a 'contorted argument'? The people who peer review papers are a smart bunch. Are you telling me you could do a better job?
Exactly. Ultimately all functions of the government will be replaced by private enterprise. When this happens we'll lose all of our freedoms. Constitution? What constitution? It only serves to limit the powers of government. But there are no such checks on the power of corporations. And everyone will live in denial. Censorship? How can there be censorship, there's no government to do it. It'll be called self-censorship instead and will be accepted by everyone.
The goal of every academic is to be on the leading edge of a new wave of discovery. Where are you getting your stereotypes from?
Risk is training kids to wipe out would-be aggressors who might attack our great country. This new game, however, serves no good purpose. It simply trains kids to be evil.
In real life evil geniuses are people like Adolf Hitler and Osama Bin Laden. In fact, both of these people were on quests to create the perfect doomsday weapon. This game will cause a generation of kids to grow up with similar ambitions. I'm going to stick with Vice City where the violence is on a much smaller scale and hence far less morally reprehensible.
Never make presumptions about how much audio someone else needs to carry around. The reasons for wanting to carry this or that amount vary significantly and can be quite complex.
This is an analogy. Nobody is starving because they can't afford to buy the latest Britney Spears album.
Well yeah. Illicitly copying the Coke can deprives A of the revenue from one payment but actually taking the can away from A deprives A of an entire revenue stream. Taking stuff away from people is even worse than mere stealing.
No, because if such a thing as a can copier existed A could sell copies of the can. A will have incurred an opportunity cost becaue he could have sold the can to B and kept it.