Because we have seen all of this before. In the software piracy community. I suspect that developers in general have worked up just about the same regard for software pirates as the software pirates have displayed for them over the last few decades.
Since when do software pirates hack into developers' systems and delete their stuff? Even in the rare cases like the famous HL2 hack at Valve, code was copied out not deleted.
These are people with the behavior patterns of small, scheming children.
Small, scheming children hoard everything for themselves, they don't share everything freely with the world. (Whether the things shared are "stolen" is a separate matter.) Developers like this one, with callous, selfish antipiracy measures are the only ones resembling children here.
it is that software pirates don't do a lot of deep thinking.
I see you don't either, since your comparison is baseless and driven only by your obviously deep-seated visceral hate of pirates.
It is thoughtless, cruel, and unethical, yet the benefit is so tempting that this same member is unlikely to be able to resist it without at least some soul-searching.
I make my living as a developer and I am not tempted to implement this measure in my software one iota. The fact that you do (and project your feelings onto others) is telling about how irrational and hateful you are in this matter.
Isn't that like catching me trying to steal your wallet and merely going "bad person, go away" and taking your wallet back?
Maybe, but this guy's response is like punching the thief in the face and taking your wallet back, and then for good measure calling in three guys with baseball bats.
Or maybe a better analogy is those automated machine gun turrets guarding doors you see in the movies sometimes. Type in your passcode wrong and... oops!
Future commercial games will support DirectX 10, and only Vista uses DirectX 10, which means future games will shut out the Windows XP and lower markets because they cannot do DirectX 10. Civilization IV might have issues, for example, but Civilization V might not and only run under Vista.
At some point probably yes, but this is several years away. The vast majority of the game industry is still developing for DX9 exclusively, and even those who are planning to support DX10 will provide an alternative DX9 rendering path for the foreseeable future. It will be months before people even start taking advantage of DX9Ex (the enhanced version of DX9 made available by Vista).
The problem with it is not readability, it's peripheral things like the way it interacts poorly with merge/source control tools (many of which are designed to ignore whitespace), and with poorly configured editors (which will sometimes insert hard tabs instead of whitespace and cause an error). I mean, it's not a big deal either way but it does cause a few problems sometimes.
Nuclear power has all sorts of silly regulations, I don't think that really means anything. Loops are just as likely to go out of control and write past the end of a buffer. All that regulation achieves is to force you to avoid certain algorithms and maybe use stupider ones.
More because of readability than efficiency
Which seems backwards to me, and you even go on to contradict yourself:
Well recursion is easier to read for someone who's been trained to think in terms of recursion all the time, but most programmers without an academic background find loops more intuitive. There's also the matter that more use of recursion would often require splitting up functions into lots of smaller function in C and other popular languages.
I must confess I really don't understand the industry yet. Most of my coworkers couldn't tell me their loop invariant if their lives depended on it. It's like most of the software industry writes code by guessing. Does it not matter to you if your code is correct, and if not, why are you writing it?
The answer, I think, is that industry relies heavily on testing to provide evidence for correctness. With all the unpredictable factors that arise in large real-life applications (bugs in libraries, poorly documented components, etc), it's not like a "deep-thought and deductive logic" approach would be able to resolve all of the problems that arise anyway. The majority of difficulties that arise in industry are not due to fundamental problems with algorithms, but silly technicalities which are best resolved by trying to run the code and stepping through it. Not to say that a little more CS-style reasoning wouldn't do the industry some good, but a lack of concern with provable correctness isn't an insane attitude given the circumstances.
Ack! Thanks to that annoying song, not only do people frequently misuse the word "irony", any genuinely correct use (such as the GP's) is immediately attacked by idiots who claim it's incorrect. Curse you, Alanis! Curse you!
In industry almost everybody uses loops instead of recursion unless there's a really good reason to use recursion (e.g. tree traversal). More because of readability than efficiency; in principle your optimizer should be able to convert tail recursion to iteration anyway (though whether this will actually happen or not does depend on the specific language and implementation). Academics just love recursion because it maps neatly to mathematical induction and hence makes algorithm correctness more easily provable.
The reason "bloat" happens is more because programming teams have deadlines and if there's a choice between a new feature, a bugfix or some not-strictly-necessary optimization (and there's always a choice), the optimization's never going to get done. It's just good business sense; sure everybody complains about slowness, but if application A is mean-and-lean and application B is bloated but has a feature you need to do your job, you'll whine and cavil and buy B anyway.
Twenty bucks says that he wrote the review in Word, which inserted nonstandard "smart quotes" instead of regular ASCII apostrophes, and then they were slashed out by the web app. At least they didn't appear as some crap resembling ^A~ like they sometimes do.
Wait, what's the problem with Dosbox being slow? Are there any Dos games that required more than a Pentium 1? I'm fine with a few orders of magnitude of slowness.
I'm not making any grandiose claims, and I'm no cult follower. It looks more to me like you've just gotten so cynical and jaded about all the "Web 2.0" blather you believe nothing on the Internet can possibly be important in a real sense.
It just stands to reason that disseminating information more efficiently helps growth in an increasingly knowledge-based economy. It's impossible to measure the impact, to be sure. The one thing we can measure is that Wikipedia is among the most visited sites on the Internet.
In most cases, the primary, secondary and tertiary sources from which wikipedia pulls content are far more reliable.
True enough, and Wikipedia's links to these sources are itself one of its most useful features.
Wikipedia is not being used in any serious economic activity, including in schools where such a project would seem to be able to reduce costs for currucular materials if the project had any value at all as an educational asset.
Tell that to the thousands of students cribbing off Wikipedia. Wikipedia isn't being used in any official capacity due to concerns about reliability, but you can be sure it's being heavily used behind the scenes. And Wikipedia is not a top-quality source but it is certainly more than good enough for its use to be a net benefit.
It's another copy -- it's about.com redux, with a bit of expanded google search stirred in among some often unintelligable language. It's not much more than that.
Yes, Wikipedia is explicitly nothing but an aggregation. But it's the largest aggregation in history, and such things become more useful the larger they are (since I can almost always rely on Wikipedia having an article on whatever I'm interested in).
And since you mention Google, for the record I do think search engines are even more valuable than Wikipedia. But Wikipedia is an important puzzle piece in the new way of finding information.
Creativity and innovation is far more important than mirroring and aggregating content that I can easily find online or - god forbid - in an actual book (Which I can look up online from home if I wish).
This isn't the comparison you were making, but anyway. I wouldn't say that one is more useful than the other; they complement each other. New ideas aren't useful unless they find their way to those people who can use them. And to some extent the whole distinction between those two things is meaningless, since a large amount of modern creativity goes into analyzing and reinterpreting existing information.
Wikipedia in a way illustrates the problem the internet age has thrust upon us - we are too busy gathering and cataloging all the possible information, obsessed with collecting every nuance of unimportant topics. As a result our innovation stagnates.
By any measure innovation is rapidly accelerating, not stagnating -- for instance, the number of scientific papers published each year is following an exponential curve. And mastering every nuance of highly technical topics is precisely what is required to be able to innovate.
The difference between wikipedia and the first paper encyclopedia is the value of the information (not to mention the questionable veracity of any given section) e.g. Think the difference between an article on the Simpsons and one on George Washington.
It is true that there a large veracity gap -- Wikipedia is much closer to the truth on most topics than early encyclopedias! And the presence of Wikipedia articles on trivial topics hardly excludes any other type of article.
Wait, a game engine is more valuable to you than a vast free easily-accessible encyclopedia? Your priorities are remarkably short-sighted. Do you have any idea the kind of subtle impact Wikipedia is having on society and the economy as a whole? Anyone is capable of quickly getting the basic facts, with usually reasonable reliability, on just about any topic. It's an advance in information dissemination comparable to the creation of the first paper encyclopedia in the 18th century.
I rarely visit wikipedia - and usually when I do there are other similar google results where I can get the same information, wikipedia just has a slightly cleaner aggregation of it.
This doesn't correspond at all to my experience. But I imagine you only search for computer-related topics.
And real terrorists just learned a neat new trick: scatter lite-brites around the city, distracting the bomb squad while your real bomb explodes somewhere else.
Obviously OS X can run on some commodity hardware, Macs' CPU and videocards are sold as PC parts too. I meant supported. The main target market isn't going to jump through all the hoops to get it running (heck even a nerd like me can't be bothered), so can run/is supported is basically the same.
Yes. A hack that only works on some machines and requires extensive research from the end-user to get running isn't the same as a saleable operating system.
The elaborate hardware abstraction framework required to support more than one type of hardware in itself imposes large costs, independently of the cost of writing the drivers. Also, no, many manufacturers would not bother to write good Apple drivers, or at least not good ones, considering Apple's minority market share.
Apple can't run on commodity hardware. The fixed hardware is fundamental to their strategy. How do you think Apple is able to make operating systems that are more advanced than Windows despite having a much smaller staff than Microsoft? Because they are geniuses? No, because they aren't carrying two millstones around their neck: 1) Decades of backwards compatibility, and 2) Support for huge amounts of varied hardware.
Those two factors are why Microsoft is dominant and Apple is in a niche. But the flip side of that coin is, Apple's not attempting to address those factors is reason they are able to hold on to their niche in the first place. If Apple was to try to carry one or both those millstones, all of a sudden they would be directly competing with Microsoft, they would lose their niche and they would die.
Yes, the Gates foundation has been much criticized, but I've yet to see much there that amounts to more than cavils about certain details of the investments. I would say there's criticism mainly because Gates is very famous, and because he's challenging some of the usual ways of doing things in philanthropy.
there was some evidence for its research and AIDS vaccination "grants" to be veiled investments into pharma companies that Gates holds shares in.
How could Gates be somehow planning to monetarily profit by dumping all his money into a one-way sinkhole? These kinds of allegations just don't make sense. I've never heard of anyone making money by giving it away, except perhaps as political donations (which Gates conspicuously is not making any of).
I'm sure his money is doing good things. I'm not sure that the same money in the hands of other people wouldn't be able to do much better things. There are enough people on the ground in Africa who have made a difference with tiny fractions of that budget.
The key word being "tiny fractions of that budget". The more money you have, the harder it is to allocate it efficiently. The opportunities for inefficiency and corruption increase along with the stakes. Gates' money is not being used perfectly, but don't be quick to assume someone else could do better. It is very very easy to donate money in Africa in ways that are not only inefficient but actually counterproductive.
And yes, illegal business practices resulting in monopoly rents aren't theft. They're worse. At least theft is a zero-sum game.
Theft is zero-sum?! What about the security costs and transactions that aren't done because of the risk it represents? The externalities of theft are much worse than abusive monopolies, assuming the theft is done on the same scale. Enron and Worldcom did far more damage to the American economy than Microsoft did.
The point is to force business customers wanting to multiplex Vista on their big servers to buy more expensive versions of it. I think the Mac virtual machine business is just a side effect.
Any way you spin it, anti-competitive practices aren't on the same level as theft. And it's more like "get 50 billion from everyone, give 49.98 billion to a good cause" since all his money except 10 million to each of his children is going to be donated to the foundation.
Gates is not only giving away vast amounts, he's also revolutionizing philanthropy with his strategy of results-oriented investments, and inspiring many of the other ultra-rich to donate. His gifts have already saved thousands of lives from disease, and over the decades that his foundation will exist, the vaccine research it is funding may save millions. I'm not saying he's a "hero" since that term usually implies putting oneself at personal risk, but there's no doubt he's doing a vast amount of good. You are being short-sighted and petty.
Outsourcing art doesn't work nearly as well in games compared to animation, since the art people need to work closely with the programmers to deal with the constantly evolving engine and tools. It's not a bad idea but game technology would have to stop evolving as quickly for it to work.
The shaders in the 'Cube are "full fledged". Just like a Pentium 3 is a "full fledged" x86 microprocessor, even if it isn't as modern and powerful as Core 2 Duo.
This comparison is laughable. Do you think GPUs are Turing-complete like CPUs? The shaders in the Gamecube and Wii have a tiny instruction limit and no branching or loop support, among other problems. "Gamecube doesn't have full-fledged shaders" is perfectly accurate.
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Since when do software pirates hack into developers' systems and delete their stuff? Even in the rare cases like the famous HL2 hack at Valve, code was copied out not deleted.
Small, scheming children hoard everything for themselves, they don't share everything freely with the world. (Whether the things shared are "stolen" is a separate matter.) Developers like this one, with callous, selfish antipiracy measures are the only ones resembling children here.
I see you don't either, since your comparison is baseless and driven only by your obviously deep-seated visceral hate of pirates.
I make my living as a developer and I am not tempted to implement this measure in my software one iota. The fact that you do (and project your feelings onto others) is telling about how irrational and hateful you are in this matter.
Maybe, but this guy's response is like punching the thief in the face and taking your wallet back, and then for good measure calling in three guys with baseball bats.
Or maybe a better analogy is those automated machine gun turrets guarding doors you see in the movies sometimes. Type in your passcode wrong and... oops!
At some point probably yes, but this is several years away. The vast majority of the game industry is still developing for DX9 exclusively, and even those who are planning to support DX10 will provide an alternative DX9 rendering path for the foreseeable future. It will be months before people even start taking advantage of DX9Ex (the enhanced version of DX9 made available by Vista).
The problem with it is not readability, it's peripheral things like the way it interacts poorly with merge/source control tools (many of which are designed to ignore whitespace), and with poorly configured editors (which will sometimes insert hard tabs instead of whitespace and cause an error). I mean, it's not a big deal either way but it does cause a few problems sometimes.
Nuclear power has all sorts of silly regulations, I don't think that really means anything. Loops are just as likely to go out of control and write past the end of a buffer. All that regulation achieves is to force you to avoid certain algorithms and maybe use stupider ones.
Well recursion is easier to read for someone who's been trained to think in terms of recursion all the time, but most programmers without an academic background find loops more intuitive. There's also the matter that more use of recursion would often require splitting up functions into lots of smaller function in C and other popular languages.
The answer, I think, is that industry relies heavily on testing to provide evidence for correctness. With all the unpredictable factors that arise in large real-life applications (bugs in libraries, poorly documented components, etc), it's not like a "deep-thought and deductive logic" approach would be able to resolve all of the problems that arise anyway. The majority of difficulties that arise in industry are not due to fundamental problems with algorithms, but silly technicalities which are best resolved by trying to run the code and stepping through it. Not to say that a little more CS-style reasoning wouldn't do the industry some good, but a lack of concern with provable correctness isn't an insane attitude given the circumstances.
Ack! Thanks to that annoying song, not only do people frequently misuse the word "irony", any genuinely correct use (such as the GP's) is immediately attacked by idiots who claim it's incorrect. Curse you, Alanis! Curse you!
In industry almost everybody uses loops instead of recursion unless there's a really good reason to use recursion (e.g. tree traversal). More because of readability than efficiency; in principle your optimizer should be able to convert tail recursion to iteration anyway (though whether this will actually happen or not does depend on the specific language and implementation). Academics just love recursion because it maps neatly to mathematical induction and hence makes algorithm correctness more easily provable.
The reason "bloat" happens is more because programming teams have deadlines and if there's a choice between a new feature, a bugfix or some not-strictly-necessary optimization (and there's always a choice), the optimization's never going to get done. It's just good business sense; sure everybody complains about slowness, but if application A is mean-and-lean and application B is bloated but has a feature you need to do your job, you'll whine and cavil and buy B anyway.
Twenty bucks says that he wrote the review in Word, which inserted nonstandard "smart quotes" instead of regular ASCII apostrophes, and then they were slashed out by the web app. At least they didn't appear as some crap resembling ^A~ like they sometimes do.
Wait, what's the problem with Dosbox being slow? Are there any Dos games that required more than a Pentium 1? I'm fine with a few orders of magnitude of slowness.
A couple hundred computers of high-ranking officials do not make much of a botnet.
Oooh Wal-mart is just shaking in their boots about the potential lost business here.
I'm not making any grandiose claims, and I'm no cult follower. It looks more to me like you've just gotten so cynical and jaded about all the "Web 2.0" blather you believe nothing on the Internet can possibly be important in a real sense.
It just stands to reason that disseminating information more efficiently helps growth in an increasingly knowledge-based economy. It's impossible to measure the impact, to be sure. The one thing we can measure is that Wikipedia is among the most visited sites on the Internet.
True enough, and Wikipedia's links to these sources are itself one of its most useful features.
Tell that to the thousands of students cribbing off Wikipedia. Wikipedia isn't being used in any official capacity due to concerns about reliability, but you can be sure it's being heavily used behind the scenes. And Wikipedia is not a top-quality source but it is certainly more than good enough for its use to be a net benefit.
Yes, Wikipedia is explicitly nothing but an aggregation. But it's the largest aggregation in history, and such things become more useful the larger they are (since I can almost always rely on Wikipedia having an article on whatever I'm interested in).
And since you mention Google, for the record I do think search engines are even more valuable than Wikipedia. But Wikipedia is an important puzzle piece in the new way of finding information.
This isn't the comparison you were making, but anyway. I wouldn't say that one is more useful than the other; they complement each other. New ideas aren't useful unless they find their way to those people who can use them. And to some extent the whole distinction between those two things is meaningless, since a large amount of modern creativity goes into analyzing and reinterpreting existing information.
By any measure innovation is rapidly accelerating, not stagnating -- for instance, the number of scientific papers published each year is following an exponential curve. And mastering every nuance of highly technical topics is precisely what is required to be able to innovate.
It is true that there a large veracity gap -- Wikipedia is much closer to the truth on most topics than early encyclopedias! And the presence of Wikipedia articles on trivial topics hardly excludes any other type of article.
Wait, a game engine is more valuable to you than a vast free easily-accessible encyclopedia? Your priorities are remarkably short-sighted. Do you have any idea the kind of subtle impact Wikipedia is having on society and the economy as a whole? Anyone is capable of quickly getting the basic facts, with usually reasonable reliability, on just about any topic. It's an advance in information dissemination comparable to the creation of the first paper encyclopedia in the 18th century.
This doesn't correspond at all to my experience. But I imagine you only search for computer-related topics.
And real terrorists just learned a neat new trick: scatter lite-brites around the city, distracting the bomb squad while your real bomb explodes somewhere else.
Obviously OS X can run on some commodity hardware, Macs' CPU and videocards are sold as PC parts too. I meant supported. The main target market isn't going to jump through all the hoops to get it running (heck even a nerd like me can't be bothered), so can run/is supported is basically the same.
Yes. A hack that only works on some machines and requires extensive research from the end-user to get running isn't the same as a saleable operating system.
The elaborate hardware abstraction framework required to support more than one type of hardware in itself imposes large costs, independently of the cost of writing the drivers. Also, no, many manufacturers would not bother to write good Apple drivers, or at least not good ones, considering Apple's minority market share.
Apple can't run on commodity hardware. The fixed hardware is fundamental to their strategy. How do you think Apple is able to make operating systems that are more advanced than Windows despite having a much smaller staff than Microsoft? Because they are geniuses? No, because they aren't carrying two millstones around their neck: 1) Decades of backwards compatibility, and 2) Support for huge amounts of varied hardware.
Those two factors are why Microsoft is dominant and Apple is in a niche. But the flip side of that coin is, Apple's not attempting to address those factors is reason they are able to hold on to their niche in the first place. If Apple was to try to carry one or both those millstones, all of a sudden they would be directly competing with Microsoft, they would lose their niche and they would die.
Yes, the Gates foundation has been much criticized, but I've yet to see much there that amounts to more than cavils about certain details of the investments. I would say there's criticism mainly because Gates is very famous, and because he's challenging some of the usual ways of doing things in philanthropy.
How could Gates be somehow planning to monetarily profit by dumping all his money into a one-way sinkhole? These kinds of allegations just don't make sense. I've never heard of anyone making money by giving it away, except perhaps as political donations (which Gates conspicuously is not making any of).
The key word being "tiny fractions of that budget". The more money you have, the harder it is to allocate it efficiently. The opportunities for inefficiency and corruption increase along with the stakes. Gates' money is not being used perfectly, but don't be quick to assume someone else could do better. It is very very easy to donate money in Africa in ways that are not only inefficient but actually counterproductive.
Theft is zero-sum?! What about the security costs and transactions that aren't done because of the risk it represents? The externalities of theft are much worse than abusive monopolies, assuming the theft is done on the same scale. Enron and Worldcom did far more damage to the American economy than Microsoft did.
The point is to force business customers wanting to multiplex Vista on their big servers to buy more expensive versions of it. I think the Mac virtual machine business is just a side effect.
Any way you spin it, anti-competitive practices aren't on the same level as theft. And it's more like "get 50 billion from everyone, give 49.98 billion to a good cause" since all his money except 10 million to each of his children is going to be donated to the foundation.
Gates is not only giving away vast amounts, he's also revolutionizing philanthropy with his strategy of results-oriented investments, and inspiring many of the other ultra-rich to donate. His gifts have already saved thousands of lives from disease, and over the decades that his foundation will exist, the vaccine research it is funding may save millions. I'm not saying he's a "hero" since that term usually implies putting oneself at personal risk, but there's no doubt he's doing a vast amount of good. You are being short-sighted and petty.
Outsourcing art doesn't work nearly as well in games compared to animation, since the art people need to work closely with the programmers to deal with the constantly evolving engine and tools. It's not a bad idea but game technology would have to stop evolving as quickly for it to work.
This comparison is laughable. Do you think GPUs are Turing-complete like CPUs? The shaders in the Gamecube and Wii have a tiny instruction limit and no branching or loop support, among other problems. "Gamecube doesn't have full-fledged shaders" is perfectly accurate.