Let's say you want to make blocks of plastic that fit together. *cough Lego cough*
The first piece you make, costs you $15,000. The rest of the peices off the same mold cost $0.001. It was the initial cost, along with R&D time, that makes the item expensive to produce. Making the Nth copy is just pennies.
i.e.
You spend 2 YEARS writing a game, on a 2 million dollar budget. The first [gold] CD produced has the high cost. The 2nd, 3rd, etc, cost almost nothing to reproduce, just the physical media.
In both cases, people expect to sell Y copies at Z price to offset the total cost of production.
> The Apple ][ was an amazing machine - it inspired a generation of hackers. (I still have one.)
Yes, the reason it was a such a great machine, was that a person could comprehend the WHOLE machine. From the "funky" bitmap graphics addresses (was linear from left to right, but not sequential from top to bottom), right down to the disk drive controller, and using tricks to read "illegal" byte containing 2 consequitive zeros. D5 AA 96 is forever burned into my memory.:-) Heck, it was pretty easy to remember most of the 6502 opcodes!
ApplePC - one of the best emulators around. Even has mockingboard support !
Long live Aquatron, Lode Runner, and Rescue Raiders:)
Most software does suck. (You'll have to forgive me if I tar all software with one brush.) Windows has it's problems, Linux has its problems. Anyone who can't critically analyse the deficiencies in their favorite software is either living in a dream world, a zealot, or blind. (No flames intended.)
The root of the problem is: bloat.
Every time we get faster hardware, we build bigger programs. We're doing so much more with the hardware nowadays -- who was doing speech recognition 20 years ago? Heck, we can partially do it in real-time now ! The latest 3D games are certainly a good example of this. Lots of nice eye-candy. *cough* Alice *cough*:)
The software we are building, is MANY MANY times more complicated then a 740. And the fact that we don't have off-the-shelf standarized components certainly doesn't help.
Which leads me to my next point:
The software has SO many code paths, there is NO way we can verify and spend enough time on quality assurance. And there will ALWAYS be bugs in the code we write. That sucks just as much as the bugs do.:-(
Lastly, how many programs spend and designate time to develop a good user interface. That's also part of the problem - too many programmers (open source/closed source, doesn't matter) couldn't put together a good gui layout if their life depended on it. How many have taken a UI design course? How many are asking management to allocate time in the schedule for "polish." (As a game developer I'm just as guilty. Beta = fix all the important bugs, and ignore the small ones since we don't have time to correct it. Maybe we'll do a patch, if not. Next game to start developing.)
And I think the greatest tradegy of all, is that people have come to expect computers as being unreliable.
Why can't we apply and have a "process for engineering high quality software" ? Is code that nebulous? Is it because we keep over-complicating the systems?
People aren't perfect, which means code isn't either. But it wouldn't hurt if more people took the time to say "how can I write this code, so it's easier to maintain, and something to be proud of, instead of something that is hacked together, works, and would be an embarrasment to show to your peers."
> Better yet: One number, period.
Yes, you could think of the spare 2 digits as a "port"
> The nature of the call is detected and handled accordingly.
Yes, I don't see why we couldn't have a packet sent first identifying the device type & connection.
i.e. I fax someone. The fax sends a digital identification, saying it would like a fax connection. Or I connect via TCP/IP to the same number, and the first packet signifies a IP connection. I phone, the first packet signals an voice connection. etc.
I guess it's a just a matter of time before everything converges into one data stream.
> Telemarketers would NEVER get off your back unless you were changing it periodically anyway.
I don't understand why so many people have a problem with the blasted telemarketers. I never pick up the phone, unless it's someone I know. And the occasional time when I do answer, I just hang up on them after 5 seconds. STOP letting them waste YOUR time.
> No matter what you do, you're doomed to be interrupted.
Why do you have to drop everything and answer the phone when it rings? If it's that important, the person will leave a message on the answering machine.
Let the answering machine take it, and if it's urgent, you can allways pick up. My family and friends use this system, and we never have a problem.
_ONE_ friggin number, that stays the same no matter where I move, and 2 spare digits on the end, so a cell, fax, pager, computer, all share a common number.
> The biggest problem, in my mind, is that it has long been rumored that humans are poor at memorizing sequences that are more than 7 digits long.
That is why we CHUNK the long 10 digit phone number into smaller groups. It's MUCH easier to memorize a long constant in pairs or triplets, then it is to memorize a long stream of single digits.
> machines was the ability to use more than one monitor simultaneously (and I don't mean mirroring). To my knowledge, windows and/or linux still cannot do this plug and play
Yes, Win2K supports Multimon (multiple monitors)
I have a Millenium II and a GeForce 2 in the same computer. It rocks for 3D development.
> you obviously don't know C!
Whoa there Nelly! That's incorrectly inferring A LOT from just ONE post !
> integer has no fixed size.
True. Only a RELATIVE and MINIMUM number of bits is specified. This is guaranteed by ANSI:
i.e.
sizeof( long ) >= sizeof( long )
sizeof( double ) >= sizeof( float )
and
sizeof( char ) >= 1 byte
sizeof( short ) >= 2 bytes
sizeof( int ) >= 2 bytes
sizeof( long ) >= 4 bytes
See the ARM 3.6.1 and 3.2c Numerical Limits which states "This section defines the minimum numerical limits that a C++ implementation consistent with the ANSI C standard will provide in the header file <limits.h> and <float.h>
Dennis Ritchie made an interesting comment on new languages
"There are plenty of beautiful languages (more beautiful than C) that didn't catch on."
Does anyone know what [programming] languages he is specifically talking about?
I was curious if anyone had started working on a successor to C++ yet?
i.e. The "long long" hack in C99 is just plain stupid. How is C/C++ going to be patched *cough hacked cough* to support 128-bit integers? "long long long"?
Don't get me wrong, I love C, but it needs to be cleaned up, and morphed into D.
Overrated. At 1, or 0, "Informative, but OFFTOPIC" is overrated.
Hmm, that's an interesting way of looking at it.
I would of tend to thought an misinformative post that incorrectly got moderated up, should get moderated over-rated when a moderator see the post is not entirely correct.
*shrugs*
--
Hey, moderators, lay off the $2 crack pipe, we're trying to have a serious discussion here.
Oh wait, this is/. Whoops, there goes the karma...
> What about the USA basketball Dream Team? What the hell happened to "for the love of the sport"?
I'm not exactly sure what your point is. If you're saying the "deck" was stacked with the USA Dream Team, then yes I agree.
But it was things like that, the USA Dream Team, that GOT me to watch the Olympics in 92. Normally I can't stand watching sports, but watching the sheer talent was just amazing (The All-Stars in Hockey are another great example of just beautifull gameplay.)
> The fact that Perl support some OOP principles doesn't make Perl "OO". Hell, even Matlab is being advertized as being OO... I even have had arguments with people who say C is an OO language.
You are correct, but I'd like to make a point:
You can use OO principles in almost any language. It's just how well the language supports it.
Proof: Remember cfront compiled early C++ into C. Did that mean C supported OO? Well, no, not natively, but with enough work you could do OO in C.
Java, Perl, and Lisp, have their place, but their paradigms (OO, etc) aren't the end-all-and-be-all silver bullet. Use the right tool for the job.
In Genesis 1:2 the first "was" is printed in ordinary type, the second "was" in italics. Similarly in verse 3, the first "was" is in ordinary type, but in verse 4 it is in italics. We are by this to understand that the Hebrew original supplies the appropriate form of the verb in the first instances, but omits the verb in the second. This signifies that a change had occurred with respect to the earth in verse 2 and a change occurred in respect to the coming of light. What was a perfect earth became a ruin; what was dark became light.
And here is one possible explaination for the "missing history" between Gen 1:1 and Gen 1:2
I'm not saying that monopolies are bad (Just because they can be, doesn't mean they are.) As you pointed out, certain "essential" services are sometimes more efficient as a monopoly. Hopefully the people who say "monopolies are illegal" will read the facts.
Very interesting that you mentioned the US Postal System is a quasi-public corporation. Do you have anymore links/references where one could read up about that? I know Spooner at one time was harassed for offering cheap postal services, and that everyone has the right to mail delivery, but that's about the extent of my "postal history" and would like to learn more.
Preaching to the choir here, but using an analogy:
There is a reason assembly language programmers prefer to use mnemonics instead of memorizing hex values (while memorizing the 6502 or 80386 opcodes is the hallmark of a true comp sci geek;-) - it's because symbolic names are a lot easier to remember! Heck, it's the reason we use higher level languages... it's much easier to say angle = dot( vec_a, vec_b ) then some long stream of bin/hex digits.
One will notice the phone numbers are broken down into small numbers that we can "chunk" quite nicely: 3 digits, 3 digits, 4 digits
Most sane people don't memorize the first X digits of pi, we compress it down into one symbol. Same for any other "constant."
Notice how we use url's to do the same thing. One domain name:= One long ip address.
Is the cable company illegal?
Is the gas company illegal?
Is the electric company illegal?
Is the water company illegal?
Is the US Mail System illegal?
Slashdot Mirror
Let's say you want to make blocks of plastic that fit together. *cough Lego cough*
The first piece you make, costs you $15,000. The rest of the peices off the same mold cost $0.001. It was the initial cost, along with R&D time, that makes the item expensive to produce. Making the Nth copy is just pennies.
i.e.
You spend 2 YEARS writing a game, on a 2 million dollar budget. The first [gold] CD produced has the high cost. The 2nd, 3rd, etc, cost almost nothing to reproduce, just the physical media.
In both cases, people expect to sell Y copies at Z price to offset the total cost of production.
Soul Caliber
and
Tony Hawks Pro Skater (1 & 2)
2 of the best Dreamcast games, bar none.
> It seems to me that the games you see today are all rehashes of older games. Hence the categories of games (RPG,RTS,FPS,etc).
Except when someone comes out with an orginal, fun, RTS+Sim hybrid title, no-one buys it!
> Most consoles have traditionally retailed, at launch, at $300 or more.
Yes. The PSX when it first came out was $300.
> The current consoles continue this trend and the Dreamcast was much lower, at $199, I believe.
Current price is $150! It's pretty hard to pass that up!
> With 7 bits columns, IIRC.
:-)
Yeap. And setting the high bit shifted those pixels overy by half a pixel. Could get 560 x 192 monochrome, baby !!
Strange, that the Apple ][ graphic techniques show up 20 years later in Sub-Pixel Font Rendering !
"A person hasn't learned to appreciate color monitors until they have played Gumball on a monochrome monitor and beaten the 1st level"
Cheers
> The Apple ][ was an amazing machine - it inspired a generation of hackers. (I still have one.)
:-) Heck, it was pretty easy to remember most of the 6502 opcodes!
:)
Yes, the reason it was a such a great machine, was that a person could comprehend the WHOLE machine. From the "funky" bitmap graphics addresses (was linear from left to right, but not sequential from top to bottom), right down to the disk drive controller, and using tricks to read "illegal" byte containing 2 consequitive zeros. D5 AA 96 is forever burned into my memory.
ApplePC - one of the best emulators around. Even has mockingboard support !
Long live Aquatron, Lode Runner, and Rescue Raiders
I know it's bad taste to follow up to one's own post, ...
but has anyone tried eXtreme Programming? (Has it worked? What worked well? What didn't work that good?)
... is because he is partially correct.
:)
:-(
Most software does suck. (You'll have to forgive me if I tar all software with one brush.) Windows has it's problems, Linux has its problems. Anyone who can't critically analyse the deficiencies in their favorite software is either living in a dream world, a zealot, or blind. (No flames intended.)
The root of the problem is: bloat.
Every time we get faster hardware, we build bigger programs. We're doing so much more with the hardware nowadays -- who was doing speech recognition 20 years ago? Heck, we can partially do it in real-time now ! The latest 3D games are certainly a good example of this. Lots of nice eye-candy. *cough* Alice *cough*
The software we are building, is MANY MANY times more complicated then a 740. And the fact that we don't have off-the-shelf standarized components certainly doesn't help.
Which leads me to my next point:
The software has SO many code paths, there is NO way we can verify and spend enough time on quality assurance. And there will ALWAYS be bugs in the code we write. That sucks just as much as the bugs do.
Lastly, how many programs spend and designate time to develop a good user interface. That's also part of the problem - too many programmers (open source/closed source, doesn't matter) couldn't put together a good gui layout if their life depended on it. How many have taken a UI design course? How many are asking management to allocate time in the schedule for "polish." (As a game developer I'm just as guilty. Beta = fix all the important bugs, and ignore the small ones since we don't have time to correct it. Maybe we'll do a patch, if not. Next game to start developing.)
And I think the greatest tradegy of all, is that people have come to expect computers as being unreliable.
Why can't we apply and have a "process for engineering high quality software" ? Is code that nebulous? Is it because we keep over-complicating the systems?
People aren't perfect, which means code isn't either. But it wouldn't hurt if more people took the time to say "how can I write this code, so it's easier to maintain, and something to be proud of, instead of something that is hacked together, works, and would be an embarrasment to show to your peers."
What are other people's views?
> Just like you have a natural right to travel where you like in the US,
True.
> you have an artificial right to drive on public highways.
False.
Read the documented court cases in The Right To Travel
EVERYONE has the right to travel on public highways. You DO NOT need a driver's license. (I have a International Driver's Permit.)
> Better yet: One number, period.
Yes, you could think of the spare 2 digits as a "port"
> The nature of the call is detected and handled accordingly.
Yes, I don't see why we couldn't have a packet sent first identifying the device type & connection.
i.e. I fax someone. The fax sends a digital identification, saying it would like a fax connection. Or I connect via TCP/IP to the same number, and the first packet signifies a IP connection. I phone, the first packet signals an voice connection. etc.
I guess it's a just a matter of time before everything converges into one data stream.
> Telemarketers would NEVER get off your back unless you were changing it periodically anyway.
I don't understand why so many people have a problem with the blasted telemarketers. I never pick up the phone, unless it's someone I know. And the occasional time when I do answer, I just hang up on them after 5 seconds. STOP letting them waste YOUR time.
> No matter what you do, you're doomed to be interrupted.
Why do you have to drop everything and answer the phone when it rings? If it's that important, the person will leave a message on the answering machine.
Let the answering machine take it, and if it's urgent, you can allways pick up. My family and friends use this system, and we never have a problem.
Cheers
_ONE_ friggin number, that stays the same no matter where I move, and 2 spare digits on the end, so a cell, fax, pager, computer, all share a common number.
i.e.
AAAA-BBBB-CCCC-00 = phone
AAAA-BBBB-CCCC-01 = cell
AAAA-BBBB-CCCC-02 = fax
AAAA-BBBB-CCCC-03 = pager
AAAA-BBBB-CCCC-04 = computer
We have the technology, so why aren't we more interested in making things easier for ourselves!
--
The nice thing about standards, is that there are so many to pick from! - Anonymous
> The biggest problem, in my mind, is that it has long been rumored that humans are poor at memorizing sequences that are more than 7 digits long.
:)
That is why we CHUNK the long 10 digit phone number into smaller groups. It's MUCH easier to memorize a long constant in pairs or triplets, then it is to memorize a long stream of single digits.
AAA - BBB - CCCC
vs
(X, X, X,) (X, X, X, X), (X, X, X, X)
Cheers, where everyone knows your name
> machines was the ability to use more than one monitor simultaneously (and I don't mean mirroring). To my knowledge, windows and/or linux still cannot do this plug and play
Yes, Win2K supports Multimon (multiple monitors)
I have a Millenium II and a GeForce 2 in the same computer. It rocks for 3D development.
You can check the Multimon database at http://www.realtimesoft.com/multimon/db.asp
> How about reusing parameterized type syntax, e.g. long<64>, long<128>.
Yes, it's a real pitty that C99 didn't adopt that syntax.
> you obviously don't know C!
Whoa there Nelly! That's incorrectly inferring A LOT from just ONE post !
> integer has no fixed size.
True. Only a RELATIVE and MINIMUM number of bits is specified. This is guaranteed by ANSI:
i.e.
sizeof( long ) >= sizeof( long )
sizeof( double ) >= sizeof( float )
and
sizeof( char ) >= 1 byte
sizeof( short ) >= 2 bytes
sizeof( int ) >= 2 bytes
sizeof( long ) >= 4 bytes
See the ARM 3.6.1 and 3.2c Numerical Limits which states "This section defines the minimum numerical limits that a C++ implementation consistent with the ANSI C standard will provide in the header file <limits.h> and <float.h>
Does anyone know what [programming] languages he is specifically talking about?
I was curious if anyone had started working on a successor to C++ yet?
i.e. The "long long" hack in C99 is just plain stupid. How is C/C++ going to be patched *cough hacked cough* to support 128-bit integers? "long long long"?
Don't get me wrong, I love C, but it needs to be cleaned up, and morphed into D.
Hmm, that's an interesting way of looking at it.
I would of tend to thought an misinformative post that incorrectly got moderated up, should get moderated over-rated when a moderator see the post is not entirely correct.
*shrugs*
--
Hey, moderators, lay off the $2 crack pipe, we're trying to have a serious discussion here.
Oh wait, this is
> What about the USA basketball Dream Team? What the hell happened to "for the love of the sport"?
I'm not exactly sure what your point is. If you're saying the "deck" was stacked with the USA Dream Team, then yes I agree.
But it was things like that, the USA Dream Team, that GOT me to watch the Olympics in 92. Normally I can't stand watching sports, but watching the sheer talent was just amazing (The All-Stars in Hockey are another great example of just beautifull gameplay.)
> The fact that Perl support some OOP principles doesn't make Perl "OO". Hell, even Matlab is being advertized as being OO... I even have had arguments with people who say C is an OO language.
You are correct, but I'd like to make a point:
You can use OO principles in almost any language. It's just how well the language supports it.
Proof: Remember cfront compiled early C++ into C. Did that mean C supported OO? Well, no, not natively, but with enough work you could do OO in C.
Java, Perl, and Lisp, have their place, but their paradigms (OO, etc) aren't the end-all-and-be-all silver bullet. Use the right tool for the job.
*sigh*
The bible NOWHERE says the Earth is 6000 years old.
Gen 1:2 describes the RE-CREATION of the earth. The word 'was' really should be translated "became"
http://www.custance.org/hidden/6ch1.html
And here is one possible explaination for the "missing history" between Gen 1:1 and Gen 1:2
http://www.homeworship101.com/recreation_of_the_e
Yahweh Bless
Nice informative post.
I'm not saying that monopolies are bad (Just because they can be, doesn't mean they are.) As you pointed out, certain "essential" services are sometimes more efficient as a monopoly. Hopefully the people who say "monopolies are illegal" will read the facts.
Very interesting that you mentioned the US Postal System is a quasi-public corporation. Do you have anymore links/references where one could read up about that? I know Spooner at one time was harassed for offering cheap postal services, and that everyone has the right to mail delivery, but that's about the extent of my "postal history" and would like to learn more.
Cheers
Preaching to the choir here, but using an analogy: ;-) - it's because symbolic names are a lot easier to remember! Heck, it's the reason we use higher level languages ... it's much easier to say angle = dot( vec_a, vec_b ) then some long stream of bin/hex digits.
:= One long ip address.
There is a reason assembly language programmers prefer to use mnemonics instead of memorizing hex values (while memorizing the 6502 or 80386 opcodes is the hallmark of a true comp sci geek
One will notice the phone numbers are broken down into small numbers that we can "chunk" quite nicely: 3 digits, 3 digits, 4 digits
Most sane people don't memorize the first X digits of pi, we compress it down into one symbol. Same for any other "constant."
Notice how we use url's to do the same thing. One domain name
> being a monopoly is illegal.
Is the cable company illegal?
Is the gas company illegal?
Is the electric company illegal?
Is the water company illegal?
Is the US Mail System illegal?
Monopolies, by themselves, are NOT illegal.
The state recognizes certain monopolies.
You can see the categories here.
"I stopped being analytical about movies ... I was being ripped off by my own intellect." - Jack Cameron
... to ENJOY the darn thing.
By over-analyzing and being super-critical of movies, I was missing the WHOLE point of watching
You can nit-pick ANY movie, but is it really fun? It's like dissecting a joke, to find out what makes it funny.