" Who cares why you would or would not want to do it... many people will."
Oh, I'm _sure_ many people will. (I'll get to that later.) And many people will get disappointed, just like with all the other services.
Here's some free clue: friendship is more than two people knowing each other. For example at least having any common topic to discuss is pretty much a requirement.
That's why stuff like IRC or message boards work (somewhat): they come sorted by topics, not by irrelevant idiocies like ZIP codes or "who knows whom". If you want to talk about, say, cats, you can drop into a channel about cats and chances are most people there will also have some interest in that topic. You already have a common topic, and you know what that topic is.
Merely being "connected" to someone by some arbitrary criteria, whether it's ZIP code or by 6 degrees of separation, does not a friend make. It still makes just two strangers who don't really give a damn about each other. The same as if you just stopped and talked to a random neighbour without some idiotic online service.
But ah, you don't know how to start talking to that neighbour in the first place, right? (Or after that how to stop him from yawning and making a quick excuse.)
Which brings us to who those many people will be:
Anyone who was extroverted enough to just naturally hit it off with perfect strangers, is already out there chatting and making friends. They never needed an online service for that, and they still don't. So you won't find them on such crap sites, or not for long. (And they'd look for other extroverted people, not for the geeky guy who can't string more than two words together.)
So who joins this crap? The losers. The ones who can't actually go and make friends, but still live in some sad fantasy world where they're really the life of the party and they'd be up to their ears in friends if anyone only introduced them. Unlike last time they got introduced to someone IRL, and it still led nowhere. But you just wait and see. This online thing will surely be the magic bullet.
The same ones who clogged the other such services, got disappointed, and went looking for the 20'th such promised land where surely they'll be popular. Except they still won't, and it still won't work. Because they just don't have the personality type for that.
Just as with everything else, there is no magic bullet. There never was, there never will be. Wake up. Friendship isn't something you can win at an online lottery.
(And no, I'm _not_ calling every introvert a loser. I'm fairly introverted myself.
I'm just calling anyone who can't cope with reality a loser. If you want friends, go talk to people. That's the only way that works. It's that simple.
All the other fantasies and pipe dreams stay just that. The whiny angsty duckling doesn't grow up into a swan, it just grows into a lonely and bitter duck.
Or stay introverted, but accept the reality that you're _not_ going to be the life of the party. Don't build stupid fantasies and go buying _false_ hope online.)
"Seems like a damn good definition of evil to me! Evil always has a reason which doesn't stand up to logic."
You seem to be missing the whole point.
Both in history and in literature, the memorable villains weren't simply some random psycho who started shooting people off the street. They may be "evil", but they make for a piss-poor story or plot.
The villains that got famous in either history or in literature or in movies, were the ones who had a _plan_. A plan which involves gaining allies, power, seeming respectable or good to the masses, etc.
E.g., Al Capone wasn't just some guy who started shooting people, but someone who could plan, coordinate, and keep an impression of respectability. Not just not leaving evidence, and always having an alibi. We're talking a guy who was actually pretty popular with a lot of people. He was the first to open soup kitchens after the 1929 stock market crash, and he ordered merchants to give clothes and food to the needy at his expense.
That's quite far from the Black and White simplistic uni-dimensional view of good-vs-evil.
In literature, you don't see great novels being written about catching some idiot who didn't even bother running from the crime scene. So the cops shot him. End of story.
The ones you remember are the ones where the hero had to unravel a mystery, and generally go against someone who _wasn't_ just smacking innocents around in broad daylight. They're going against someone who's actually looking pretty damn respectable and beyond anyone else's doubt.
And that's the kind of subtlety that went straight over PM's head. B&W (or any other of his games) never addressed more than a laughable carricature of what "good" or "evil" means, but passed swift judgment nevertheless.
"But just as anyone can theoretically write a book, but in reallity it hard work and not really anyone really can, so it is with mods. It's hard and complicated, and not anyone has the wherewithall to actually produce an endresult, let alone a decent endresult."
I didn't say anyone is able to write a _good_ book. And I did say that 99.9% of attempts will at best result in crap.
But noone will stop them from _trying_. Noone will say "see, you first have to prove yourself as a carpenter (or any other equally irrelevant skill), and only then we'll let you even have a word-processor." That was my whole point.
By comparison, to even _try_ to make a whole new game, the entry barrier is huge. You have to work your way past that huge barrier before you're even allowed to _try_.
Even to make a mod nowadays, with the current tools there's far more work than just writing a novel. To get anywhere _near_ having a playable non-trivial mod you need a whole team. Including at _least_ 3D modellers _and_ programmers.
What I dream of, is some tool where you can do away with most of that. I don't know if it's possible. But it certainly would be nice to lower the entry barrier to the point where everyone is able to just start scripting.
I'd like to add that it's not even wild speculation: We've _already_ been at that point. In the old 8 bit days of the ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64, literally _anyone_ could make a game in a garage. (Again: "could" meaning "you didn't need anyone's royal seal of approval before you could even try.")
And unsurprisingly there was one helluva lot more variety back then, than we have today. Even if you think of stuff by genres, (A) there were at least twice as many genres, and (B) there was a helluva lot more variety inside a genre.
The problem remains that games nowadays tend _not_ to be up to either book or movie standards. Regardless of whether you're into plots, or angsty whiny character development, or whatever, your average computer game manages to just pull a ham-fisted approach to either.
When they try to address any problem or issue, e.g., good vs evil, it's usually just a quick excuse as to why you're allowed to kill those people. They're just evil, go kill them already. Doesn't matter if they actually did anything evil at all. They were just born that way. Go kill them.
E.g., since we're talking about its creator, when I played the first Populous, once let it on auto-play, just to see how the computer plays. The "evil" guys were just minding their business, building their evil towns and planting their evil crops. The "good" guys suddenly built an army and slaughtered them all. Who was good and who was evil there?
E.g., to stick to this guy's creations, Black and White didn't really address any issue of good or evil, and didn't even try to get into the subtleties of being evil without being purely self-destructive for no good reason.
When it did attempt to make a moral judgment, it was an arbitrary ham-fisted one. E.g., along the lines of "you failed to protect the village from the barrage of fireballs, so you're an evil evil monster." Ahem. There's a difference between evil and trying to protect someone and failing. The second is at most just incompetence.
When a game actually tries to tell a story, or even apply the Hero's Journey recipe that Hollywood loves, it usually again does it in a ham-fisted way that ruins it all. E.g., see Final Fantasy 8, which went so over the top, practically shouting in your face "see, I'm still at step 2 in that recipe! Not a hero yet!", that it just ended annoying everyone.
That is, if a game even tries. Most computer games actually have _less_ plot or behavioural analysis than your average porn flick. And that says a lot.
My theory is: the problem is the entry barrier. Anyone can write a novel. You don't have to, say, first prove that you're good in something completely unrelated, before someone lets you write a book. You just write it, take it to an editor, and that's that. So tens of thousands of crap attempts are written each year, but some gem from someone unknown before also happens now and then.
In games by comparison, there's a huge road ahead before anyone even considers letting you anywhere near a designer position. It's "Peter's Principle" all the way: you have to prove that you're good in some utterly unrelated skill (e.g., programming or 3D modelling) before you get promoted into a position you're utterly incompetent for: designer.
What I'd really like to see is some good open source game engine, and a good open-source 3D model generator, so _everyone_ can try their hand at making a game. Let them try. Just like with books, 99.9% of attempts will suck and silently disappear. But we might also see more people who can actually make a good and _new_ game. (I.e., something which isn't a lame rehash of whatever sold last year.)
As the title hints, maybe if you stopped being snotty about that arts degree, you could notice that reality isn't that simple.
There are "gamers" and there are "gamers"."Gamer" means pretty much everyone from the die-hard who only talks about Counter-Strike ever, to the old grandma playing Solitaire and Minesweeper. We're talking people ranging from 2 year olds (yes, a friend was teaching his 2 year old son to play Wolfenstein) to teenagers to 50-60 year olds. (Yes, both my parents are gamers.) As for "technical", "gamer" includes not on the die hard PC geeks who overclock and mod their PC, but also some console gamers who wouldn't know "technical" if it came up and bit them in the ass.
Judging and damning _that_ diverse a group into a single pre-conceived category is snotty and pretentious. Actually, lemme rephrase that: it's just brain dead.
And even when you acknowledge that some read stuff that's not a tech manual, you still manage to shovel it all into another pre-conceived notion: that it _must_ be SF and _must_ be related to technology.
Geesh. Talk about an "everyone but me is a nerd" troll...
Re:Have it do something worthwhile
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Palmtop Nirvana?
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· Score: 1
"We tried to address this one as well. I wrote a driver for an IrDA keyboard. My thought was, well - neat trick, but if you're committed to carrying around a keyboard anyways, why not just get a laptop?"
Point well taken. I'm asking for a small laptop, after all, but I'll stick to "small" being the keyword.
The 12" Apple laptops are a step in the right direction, but still too big for me. Someone give me a, say, 6" notebook, and I'll be a happy camper.
For starters, they could drop the huge filler space above and below the keyboard in most laptops. Do away with the touch-pad completely: a touch screen, like on the Psion, will do just fine as a substitute. Give me a wider screen, say, 800x480 or even 800x300, which is exactly the size of the keyboard.
Second, a keyboard doesn't have to be exactly the size of a PC 104 key keyboard to work well. The Psion one was good enough to type on, at a fraction of the size.
By "well enough" meaning it was actually possible to take notes in a meeting on it or write a doc in the train. Not as easy as with a full sized keyboard, no doubt, but far easier and faster than "handwriting recognition". Just the thought of trying to enter a whole technical doc via recognition gives me the creeps.
"I wouldn't trade better broadband......For communism, sorry."
Ignorant redneck, but patriotic, eh?;)
You know, contrary to what Hollywood movies may tell you, there _is_ a world outside your borders, and it does _not_ all consist of naked tribesmen with stone spears, oppressed by some tribal warlord with a bigger stone spear.
Pick a geography book sometimes. Fascinating read. You may well find that other countries are just as democratic... if not more, considering that they don't have the "waah!! Terrorists everywhere!!" lame excuse to take away even more civil liberties.
"It's interesting how the author fails to mention that there are restrictions on websites that users can visit in the aforementioned country, but I digress. I guess that's a convenient oversight."
Sorry to dawn some reality on your self-righteous redneck rant, but: I don't think Sweden, Germany, UK, or any other EU countries have any more censorship than you already have in the USA too. Yes, the government does say stuff like "thou shalt not watch child porn", but guess what? So does yours.
We're not talking China. Noone will arrest you in Sweden for having a site about how much the government sucks.
So again: get that head out of your ass. Learn a bit about the world outside your borders. Or just learn anything, for that matter. Might actually do you some good.
"I don't want my broadband to be a beurocracy, and I can put up with a few hiccups here and there because down the road, we're going to catch up and feel at ease."
There's nothing especially bureaucratic about broadband anywhere in the EU.
"I'm very happy to be living in within a structure of a decentralized broadband access where each individual state dictates the best method of communication, rather than a country tell me that only DSL or CABLE is available."
Ah, the standard display of talking out of the ass. So you're that great and free because state governments decide for you? Well, gee. Funny how the rest of us thought that freedom had something to do with the government _not_ deciding stuff for you.
So basically, son, there are plenty of arguments about liberty or economics that might apply to this situation. But you don't even understand either. You don't understand that prized freedom you wave around as a flag, and you don't understand the economics either.
Your idea of more liberty is merely being a faithful doggie to a lower state government, instead of a centralized government. But a faithful doggie nevertheless. Well, gee. You would have had a great time during feudalism. You'd only have your baron bossing you around, while the higher levels (counts, dukes, the king, etc) don't even give a damn that you exist. Yep, great liberty there.
So lemme ammend what I was saying: learn some history too.
Re:Have it do something worthwhile
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Palmtop Nirvana?
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· Score: 1
There are uses for a PDA, but currently I see mostly the interface as being the biggest idiocy. E.g., as an owner of a Psion 5, I can tell you what they did well for me. And what I wish they would have done better.
Basically it boils down to: I want a tiny laptop, and actually as useful (or reasonably close) as a laptop. I want a laptop that can fit in my pocket. Not just a fashion gizmo that's useless for more than tiny mangled reminder notes.
1. I want to take notes on that thing. And I mean actually _type_ for example what's being said in a meeting.
Handwriting recognition is a joke to that end. It's slow, it requires you to mangle your handwriting into a carricature that the PDA can recognize, and you still end up with something so mangled it could have just as well been written it l33t. No, that won't do.
I wish more such devices would just have a fscking keyboard. If I was to single out _the_ one Psion feature I appreciated the most, it would undoubtedly be the good keyboard.
Even the silly thumb "typing" on a cell phone is less retarded than "handwriting recognition". Next time you wonder why more people manage their stuff on cell phones than PDA, maybe, just maybe, there's more to it than "you can have phone calls with a phone."
2. Another thing that I liked about the Psion is that it actually has some working programs on it. Not even stuff you can buy extra, but stuff that's pre-installed and part of the OS.
No, it's not up to MS Office or even OOo standards, but it's actually possible to do more than handwrite short mangled reminders on it. You can, for example, actually type and format a document while stuck in the train or airport terminal.
3. I wouldn't say no to more RAM and screen resolution either. And BTW, use a flash card to store the files, and give me all that RAM to actually use.
4. While we're at it, I wish they'd ship the thing with compilers (including C++ _and_ Java), tools, and everything. A tiny simple IDE would be great too.
And I don't just mean stuff you can run on a PC and then copy the result to the PDA. I mean stuff which you can run on the PDA itself.
I'm a geek. I code. I wouldn't mind being able to code in the train without having to lug a laptop around.
Of course, someone will note that geeks aren't the only ones who buy those things. That's ok too. Those who aren't geeks, use programs written by geeks. Make it easy for those geeks to write their programs, and you may well have a more viable platform.
5. Being a little more compact and lightweight could go a long way. The Psions weren't too bulky, but nowadays you could probably squeeze them even thinner.
6. You know, it would be nice if those things actually were PC or Mac compatible. And I don't mean compatible as in "but you can transfer files via an USB cable", but as in "you can take an old PC program or game and run it on the thing."
I'm sure it would be possible to make an older Pentium MMX or G3 core with the latest 90nm SOI strained silicon technology, and end up with a small low-voltage chip that doesn't need huge amounts of power. (Or rather, you can keep the frequency low enough so that it doesn't.) Or it can probably be embedded in a larger chip, including the memory interface and other stuff.
Might just boost the thing's usefulness by an order of magnitude.
"Reviews of the black Rio Nitrus were luke-warm [ign.com] at best. Most people agreed that the player itself was stylish, but the interface was clunky, the software was garbage"
Read again what you wrote. So basically it had piss-poor usability _and_ garbage as software, but you still blame it on the marketting that it didn't sell?
That's been the real story of why the iPod rules, and all these "iPod slayers" went to the bit bucket of history: they were crap. They were cheaply made, with complete disregard to quality, usability or the customer.
Everyone thought that they could just throw together the cheapest crap possible, price it sky high, and watch the lemmings rush to give you a ton of money for pure crap.
Let me play Captain Obvious and spell out some of the ways in which they really failed:
1. Most of the "iPod slayers" were just huge. I've seen ones (e.g., the older Archos or Neuros comes to mind) which were as big as a brick. And about as heavy.
The kind which you could put in a sock and mug someone with. Or the kind for which you would need custom pants to carry in your pocket, and a second set of suspenders to keep your pants on when you do. The kind which looked like it had a 3.25" desktop hard drive in it, and likely half a car battery in it.
2. Yes, a helluva lot had and still have crap usability.
E.g., enough were actually produced with as little as forward, back, stop and play as the _only_ user interface. Like that's enough for a 20 GB hard drive.
E.g., a lot of companies seem to think that some tiny 2x16 character display is all you need to manage your music on their player.
E.g., some needed their own unwieldy software just to get your data on them.
Etc, etc, etc.
3. Most often they werent't even cheaper. Quite au contraire. They often had all sorts of expensive doodads instead, which pushed both the price and the weight through the roof. (Poorly programmed doodads too.) E.g., surely everyone will pay twice the price of an iPod, just to be able to also display their digital photos on a clunky huge MP3 player. On a tiny display.
When they could just get a Palm _and_ an iPod for that money, and in fact still have money left.
4. Especially Sony's tried (or still try) to impose their own crap formats, instead of just accepting a damn MP3. Yeah, I'm sooo gonna re-rip my whole 192 kb/s MP3 collection to Sony's crap format. At a whole 48 kb/s. Not.
5. Yes, iTunes. For a long time it was the _only_ such service. And a damn good service too. And it worked best (or at all) with an iPod. Dunno, seems to me like in and by itself that's one damn good reason to own an iPod.
See, contrary to popular belief, people are not _complete_ lemmings. And marketting helps, but only goes so far. At the end of the day, good products prevail, and utter crap products fail.
Games are already well past the point where the CPU mattered too much. There used to be a time when the CPU had to both handle the graphics (or at least the T&L part) and plot believable strategies. Nowadays it basically does neither.
In fact, it does extremely little more than serve as a front-end or IO processor for the GPU. Not only has the GPU taken over the graphics pretty much completely, the games have also been simplified (or dumbed down, if you will) to the point of being little more than 3D tech demos.
Which brings us to the real point:
For Doom 3 the graphics card is the bottleneck, period. Followed at a looong distance by the memory bandwidth that the CPU is seeing. (Hence the 1 MB cache Athlon 64 models and the Socket 939 models doing so well.) And CPU speed is pretty much the last factor.
Any other modern games show the same trend, and fortunately they'll still behave the same when ported to the Mac.
So basically if you're playing games on a 5200, it doesn't even matter how fast the G5 is. That machine is basically castrated to the point of being useless for anything more graphically intensive than Europa Universalis (a 2D game), even if you put a (non-existent) 3 GHz A64 or G5 in it.
"I'd say a 2GHz G5 would perform very well with the right video card, on par with at LEAST an Intel 2.4GHz machine with similar RAM and video card."
A very reasonable observation. Which unfortunately just serves to further hammer the point that the 5200 in that iMac is a joke.
Noone sane would call a P4 with a 5200 in it a "gaming PC". They might call it "that cheap box I've built for mum and dad to read email on", but definitely not a "gaming PC".
So basically, I don't know... Apple has a very good chance of making a good gaming machine nowadays. As you've said, with the latest graphics card, it ought to perform pretty much the same as a PC with the same graphics card.
Except they insist on making some crap with a 5200 in it, and no option to get a real graphics card instead. Oh well...
Being a programmer myself, let me shed some light on why and when it may look when someone is working at low speed. Or really is procrastinating.
1. The obvious, they are not a great programmer after all.
2. You mention fatigue. You're dead on. Being tired can sap someone's efficiency (including via increasing the number of bugs) a lot. Whipping a team into working 12 hour shifts, 7 days a week, may work for a week, maybe even two, but then you have tired _and_ demoralized people.
3. Morale problems. Being an intelectual activity, and not just something like digging dirt or flipping burgers, you can't just whip and shout some serfs and get results. Low morale can sap someone's efficiency _a_ lot. Or bring them in a "ah, wth do I bother anyway?" road to procrastination.
Morale is hard to build, but very easy to destroy. Sometimes the easiest road to destroying it is taking a ham fisted approach and trying to force people to be cheerful.
E.g., asking people to come to mandatory team building meetings in their free time, is a great way to make the team hate each other. You can't force people to be friends. And imposing on their free time or money just builds resentment.
Doubly so if it's done in a condescending or insulting way. "Hey, we're paying for a cheap buffet, so that's your pay for being here. Of course you're not supposed to put it on your timesheet." Eh. I'm not a beggar. I can pay for my own food, _when_ I need it. Right now I needed more to be at home.
E.g., ego masturbation meetings ("status report meetings") where only one person is supposed to speak, don't really build up morale. They are actually perceived as just that: public verbal masturbation. Any one-way information exchage, that doesn't really require any decision or feedback, ought to go through email. Or if not, at least keep it very short and to the point.
(And, no, the most common excuse "but what if they have questions?" is usually just that: a piss-poor excuse. "Yes, the company still exists, we're great, the marketting guys sold some other team's product, etc." Well, it's all great news, but exactly what questions is someone supposed to ask? The only you'll actually get is from idiots who think they get bad marks from the boss if they don't ask something. Anything. Just to show they were there.)
E.g., lack of feedback or lack of sense of any purpose. It may seem like it's conflicting with the previous point, but it's not. Feedback doesn't equal endless pointless meetings.
4. Mis-management.
E.g., poor resource use, when someone actually has nothing to do for a month.
E.g., poor team management where people are left to basically fend for themselves and coax each other into adding this one more function or fixing this bug. Some will take this as a good opportunity to not do anything, not even fix their own bugs, such as the Wally avatar I have for a co-worker. Some will get disheartened at having to spend hours coaxing Wally to even fix a bug, and delay that as much as possible out of self-preservation. Some things will deadlock because of conflicting requests and no management to decide which way to go. (True case: "Yes, I need this new parameter" from one co-worker, and 3 others going "No way mate, I'm not changing to a new and incompatible version of your EJB's client right before a release".)
E.g., the most harm that management can do is sapping morale, or letting people sap each others.
For example if it degenerates into a chaotic situation where everyone comes to work and finds that code that they spent 12 hours debugging yesterday doesn't work today, because someone changed something. And you don't even know who, what or where. It's not only a waste of time as such (and the boss may just see this as "these procrastinators aren't making any progress again"), it saps morale too.
5. Morale again: that feeling of "why should I bother any more?" Maybe it deserves its own point after all.
Let me tell you a true story from here. I call it "Jack and Jill up corporate hill".
Jack is the stereotypical incompetent monkey. He's a marketer who noticed that he could get more money if he switched to being a "programmer". Unfortunately his only IT skill is marketting himself to clueless PHBs. (I've worked with him before. He's the guy I mentioned that spent hours trying all combinations of *, & and nothing on every variable in C++, because he never could understand pointers.)
But the bosses _love_ Jack. Jack speaks their language. Jack may not be able to code shit, or anything else, but he knows how to say exactly what the bosses want to hear.
Jack also loves making compliments like "Hey, it's rare to see a chick with brains." (Said verbatim to a competent female employee who's programmed in assembly before. _Way_ more competent than him in any case.) He actually thinks it's a compliment, and not the sexist idiocy that it really is.
Jill, for better or worse, did finish a CS college. No, she's not a genius, but I'd say at least more competent than half the monkeys hired in that department just because they were cheap.
Jack has been on a sort of a personal Jihad against Jill for more than a year. He'd hunt every single mistake in her code and run show it to everyone else, or humiliate her in front of other employees.
He came to me a few times with such "proofs" that Jill writes bad code. Invariably Jill's code was right, and it just showed that Jack didn't understand even the _basics_ of Java. The language he's paid to program in these days. E.g., he didn't know that String constants are internalized.
I called him an idiot to his face on those occasions, and explained to him why Jill's code works and is OK. (Hey, I never said I was a diplomat.) He stopped coming to me, and I thought he got over it. I was wrong.
Recently Jack got promoted to team leader. (As I've said, the bosses _love_ him.)
Their team also had grown with two people fresh out of college. Again a male and a female. Let's call them Dick and Jane. Jane was undoubtedly inexperienced. On the other hand, Dick, by everyone else's assessment, bosses _and_ coworkers alike, was a fscking catastrophe.
What does Jack do? Jack recommends that they fire Jane, but keep Dick. The boss's question? "Huh? Why Jane? I thought Dick was the catastrophe."
Jack insists however that they keep Dick, reasoning that it would be bad for the project to fire both, and Dick will probably learn along the way. Takes all his marketting skills, but he gets the boss to aggree.
So Jane packs her bags, and Dick, for all I know, is still blundering to even understand Java, but still in that team.
Now let's get back to Jill. As I've said, at one point I thought Jack had gotten past his unexplicable feud against her. As I should have guessed, he was actually just avoiding me, after I had called him an idiot.
What's Jack doing now, in his team leader position? Finally getting Jill fired.
So it seems to me like you don't even have to try hard to see discrimination in action. You just need an open mind, which is really what's lacking.
CS _is_ a boy's club. Hiring interviews are conducted by prejudiced people. You have prejudiced people as team leaders and co-workers, spewing sexist idiocies without even realizing it. Or being condescending and treating you a priori like a poor retard just because of gender preconceptions. And you have to interact with prejudiced clients and internal PHBs, who need to assert their testosterone supremacy anyway, but doubly so when it comes to women in tech fields.
Seems to me that anyone who's not outright fired, needs a pretty thick skin to stay in CS. A lot prefer to just leave. I've seen people bail out of CS and into other jobs because of this. (E.g., from programming to usability or whatever else, which isn't as supposed to be an exclusive boys' club.)
And the results of this aren't even perceived as the results of blatant discrimination, but used as further "proof" that women aren't fit to use a computer.
It's not even the only discrimination in this field. Age discrimination against males is at least as widespread.
" First, when you double execution units and instruction fetch/decode units and reorder buffers, you are creating two cores!"
You know, the funny thing is that you may be the only one who at least partially understood what he was really saying. Yet you still seem to miss the big picture.
Basically, yes, it would be like two cores, excapt they allocate resources from a common pool. As opposed to the current easy way out of just glueing two completely separate cores (even with separate cache!).
For example, instead of having 2 hypothetical cores with 2 integer units each, you could have 2 which have a common pool of 4 integer units. Maybe at one point one of the cores can only schedule one integer operation at a time, but the other can use three in parallel.
On the other hand, technically speaking it's not really multi-core, it's still SMP. It's just SMP with twice as many resources available.
Seems to me like a more efficient use of silicon any way you want to look at it. Very expensive to design too, but nevertheless more efficient.
Basically you can think of it this way: which is more efficient? Let's say a construction company has 2 teams and 4 trucks. Is it more efficient to have 2 trucks exclusive to each team (current dual core), or a common pool of 4 trucks allocated to the teams as needed (SMP with twice the resources)? What happens if one day team A doesn't need any truck, while team B would sorely need all four?
Notice how sharing resources could be more efficient than not sharing anything?
I have programmed (both assembly and higher level) back in the 16 bit days (and in the 8 bit days for that matter), and the problem was entirely different.
The big problem wasn't just having to address more than 64k of data, it was having to address _one_ _chunk_ of more than 64k. (E.g., a 640x480 pixel bitmap was already over the limit, even in 4 bit colour.)
Having 50,000 chunks of 10-30k each wouldn't really even start to be a bother. You'd just load the segment register at the beginning
What made one large chunk be special was that you had to do segment arithmetic in the middle of addressing its contents.
E.g., if you wanted to apply a gauss blurr (or any other a matrix filter) to a bitmap, having to compute the segment and offset for each pixel was a huge performance hit. If you applied something as trivial as a 3x3 filter to a 640x480 bitmap, you'd end up doing segment arithmetic 9x640x480 = 2,764,800 times in the process, instead of just adding/subtracting a constant value to an int.
Of course, you could and did optimize it better than that. (E.g., it's trivial to reduce that to computing the segment/offset only once per row. I.e., only 480 times.) But that was something you had to do. That was the kludge and extra work of those times.
Frankly, I don't think we have the same problem nowadays. To have the same problem with the 4 GB limit of 32 bit addressing, you'd need one 4 GB chunk of allocated memory, which you can't possibly break into smaller chunks.
E.g., if you process a DVD movie (as per your example), does it really need to be a single chunk? Well, no. It's divided into frames, which are a lot smaller than that. You also don't have to hold the whole movie in RAM, and inddeed you don't, since few people have 4 GB RAM on their computers even at work.
Even on the server side, I'd wager a guess that 99% of server side stuff doesn't allocate over 4 GB to a single process. (None of our application servers do, and we're talking a rather big corporation.) And even if someone did, I doubt they'd get 4 GB as a single malloc().
So again, it's nowhere near being as big a problem as the old 16 bit problem.
Don't get me wrong, I do have an Athlon 64 and they're nice chips anyway. The extra registers and high IPC are reasons enough to have one anyway.
But the whole "we need 64 bit now!!!" is IMHO just marketting hype and bullshit. The majority of computers need 64 bit registers like fish needs a bycicle.
Yes, silicon carbide and water cooling will get the heat out of the CPU faster.
The problem still remains that a metric buttload of heat is produced, and that it comes out of the electricity bill. Sometimes twice: in the summer you also pay for the air conditioning, since that shiny new CPU is heating the room some more.
I think it's getting ludicrious.
The Prescott is already over 100 W, and Intel apparently plans dual core versions. Whoppee for 200+ W CPUs. NVidia 6800 Ultras are rated for 120 W, and they're hyping SLI setups now. Yep, _two_ graphics cards, if just 120W worth of hot air blowing off the back of the case wasn't enough.
Add hard drives, motherboard, and the PSUs own inefficiency, and you're already looking at 1000W worth of heat for the whole computer. That's already like a space heater.
In fact, go ahead and turn a space heater on near your desk in the summer, and you've got a pretty good approximation of what the next generation of computers promises to be like. Now picture some 4 of them in the same room, at the office.
And it's raising exponentially. Carbide and water cooling will only help them get further along that curve.
And I'll be damned if I'm thrilled at the prospect.
This also brings the problem of even more fans. Even with water cooling, you then have to get the heat out of the water. It still means fans. More heat will just mean more fans, bigger fans, or faster fans. Or all the above.
And I'm not thrilled at the prospect of the return of the noisy computer either. I can jolly well do without the machine sounding like a jumbo jet. Especially when I'm watching a DVD or such, I can do without having to turn the volume sky high just to be able to hear what they're saying. And at the office I can do without four noisy hovercrafts in the same room.
What could be even more annoying than being spammed by a friend, is being spammed by someone you don't even like. Stuff that comes to mind, off the top of my head:
1. Most of these "social networks" are based on the fundamentally _false_ assumption that if A is a friend of B, and B is a friend of C, and C is a friend of D, then surely A and D will also get along just fabulously.
Which is complete idiocy. Humans are not that one-dimensional personalities. It can well be that A and D are completely opposite personalities and don't even have any common topics to discuss.
I mean just look around you. You surely remember at least a case of some girlfriend's friend who you thought was an airhead. Or some friend's sibbling/parent/classmate/neighbour/friend who you thought was jerk or a complete idiot.
And that's already just two degrees of separation. Go any further and it becomes 100% lottery. The chances to have anything in common are the same as if you picked a random stranger off the street. Because essentially they _are_ a random stranger.
So basically why the heck do I need to be notified that a bunch of strangers are in Jack's pub? I could just go into Jack's anyway and be assured to find a bunch of strangers in there anyway.
2. Friendship is a two-sided thing. When you're free (or even _expected_) to just add people to your friends list without their confirmation, it's getting even more meaningless.
It just means you can get spammed by some people you don't even like. That annoying ex, the local tag-along loser, some relative who actually gets on your nerves, whatever. Now go along that line through several degrees of separation. It's pretty much guaranteed to be more stuff you'd rather avoid than a case of "omg! I must go quickly to the pub so I don't miss him/her!"
3. At the risk of being offensive, I can see the potential for such a service to get choked full of losers.
There's a lot more potential in it for people who just need to pretend they have a lot of friends. No, seriously, anyone who can put equals between a "friend" and being connected through 6 degrees of separation to a perfect stranger, most likely doesn't have any real friends to start with.
Bear in mind that these games _do_ already track you to some extent. If you thought you were totally anonymous in an online game, get over it: you aren't and you never were.
Even on MUDs, having been (briefly) a builder on one, I can assure you that there was some massive logging going on, and plenty of opportunity to snoop on what someone was up to.
It was amusing to see idiots thinking that the admins can't possibly know they're abusing some obscure bug or harrassing someone. In practice, an admin could be invisible right next to you while you spend hours abusing a bug. (I know at least one admin who literally sat and watched invisible for hours, just to see how long would someone keep at doing an exploit.)
Some liked to maintain some pretense of respecting privacy unless given reasonable doubt, or a direct request for help from a harrassment victim. E.g., yes, it was possible that all that hate text you sent someone was also going to an admin's screen too.
A lot didn't even have that kind of pretense. In fact, _most_ didn't have any kind of privacy promise or policy.
I.e., again, if you don't want to be tracked, never play an online game you don't host yourself. If you don't want something logged, don't do it online. It's that simple.
And by comparison, "tracking" for in-game advertising reasons can be a lot more benign. An ad provider doesn't need to know that "S1R N00BK1LL3R" or "Dread Lord IMHORNY" saw their ad, they just need to know how many distinct people did. That's all.
I hardly think that an aggregate statistic (like that a total of 10,000 people this week got the MacDonald billboard rendered on their screen) would violate your privacy or anything.
I'm not sure why everyone assumes it _must_ be an intrusive in-your-face affair, or that tracking _must_ mean your data being sold to the advertiser.
There are lots of opportunities for advertising in online multiplayer games which won't necessarily break the game.
E.g., a MMO which happens in modern times is pretty much expected to have billboards. City of Heroes for example has them, but they're just funny in-game stuff (bail bonds for villains and such) instead of trying to sell a real world product.
Now think a little. Getting a couple of real world banners for those billboards would definitely not be annoying or break suspension of disbelief in any way. E.g., if I saw a big MacDonalds billboard in that city, I wouldn't stop and think "wtf is it doing there." It would fit right in with the rest of the urban landscape.
It also doesn't even need to be a big billboard, but can be something even more subtle or less intrusive.
E.g., in a town you _expect_ shops. In fact, you tend to be disappointed when you don't see them. I know I've stopped and wondered about how few the shops in City of Heroes are.
So I don't think it would look out of place if in a hypothetical modern day MMO you saw a MacDonalds or Pizza Hut on a street corner. It fits there and it makes sense. Those townfolks must be eating somewhere.
Or you can go even more subtle and have stuff like: if that town has a shoe store, sometimes it could sprout a sign in the window proclaiming a big sale on Nike sportswear. It's not like you don't see those IRL, you know.
Also, these are massively bandwidth intensive games anyway, _and_ are based on stuff downloaded on-the-fly from their servers anyway. Having to download an extra 16k worth of compressed texture for some billboard ad wouldn't really make any difference.
For that matter, it doesn't say anyone has any generic rights to free speech even in the USA, when it's not an act of the US government restricting it.
It always amazes me that the people most proud of their free speech, are the ones who have no fscking clue what it means. Whenever you see some idiot being an asshole or troll on a forum, MUD, or whatever else, chances are good they'll scream about their freedom of speech right when they get banned.
Too bad for them that it doesn't apply there, but apparently noone told them what that right actually means.
As the title says. Windows, Linux, whatever, I find Oo.o's font rendering to be completely crap.
For starters, yes, it doesn't seem to do any anti-aliasing. Even under Windows. And since it has nothing to do with sub-pixel hinting, it's just as crap looking on a CRT as on an LCD. Probably worse looking on a CRT, actually.
Second, when you scale a document (yes, I like to have the page scaled to fit the window width), instead of getting the fonts simply rendered at the new size, it looks like something that got first rendered and then unevenly scaled.
I.e., to quote MacHall, "Hey, it doesn't look like OLD ass. It's CLASSIC ass." If you want that CLASSIC look you used to have in Windows 3.0 with a non-accelerated Trident graphics card and non-scalable fonts, you can't beat OOo for that.
Third, and most annoying, I'd like it to just fscking use whatever fonts are already installed on that machine. X and all normal X application can already use them. Nah, for OOo you have to explicitly install the fonts _again_ in OOo.
Once for each user, too. Whoppee.
Presumably because, for all the crack talk about how standards are great, OOo still does its very own font rendering. And if it at least did it better than Windows or X, I could see the point. But a hack that actually is _worse_ than using the standard libraries? Well, that's gotta count as cool.
Add other OOo "features" like the highly annoying nagging. E.g., daily I _have_ to edit one excel file: the hours I've worked in that day. Sometimes more than once a day. Every fscking time I have to click "yes" on not one, but _two_ nag dialogs.
You'd think it would be able to get the idea that _yes_, I do want to save it back as Excel. I know it's mind boggling that after loading a file, I'd want to save the changes back in the same file. Probably noone in the OOo team ever save their changes to the exact same file they loaded;)
And that _yes_, I still want to exit the program nevertheless.
At least, you know, give me a "don't ask this again" checkbox. It's not like it's that new and unheard of idea. But nah, some cretin probably felt a Holy Duty to nag the users to death to completely switch to OOo formats. Probably is even proud of that idiocy.
Etc, etc, etc.
Basically IMHO OOo is a substitute for Office in much the same way as a bullet to the head is a cure for headache. I.e., not really, other than in the "well, technically speaking..." way.
It's getting sorta in the right direction, but it has a looong way to go.
Well, his points are well known, and you can just buy a book where they're spelled out. So you don't _have_ to pay 10,000$ to get that good advice. You don't even need to make an 8-ball, you could just as well make a small bulleted list and put it next to your monitor.
It just requires some minimal clue and an open mind.
The problem is that a lot of web sites are just some PHB's ego trip site. The more clueless the PHB, the more he's convinced that the site:
- _has_ to be in his favourite colours, the users be damned if they don't like it. (Light orange or oragnge-ish yellow, and cyan on neon blue are actual colour schemes that the client's PHB demanded.)
- and some underadable font, while they're at it. (Surely everyone will have their screen set in 800x600, like that PHB does.)
- _has_ to have some convoluted navigation that noone understands. (Another actual example: a client actually wanted the site to have what looked like a heap of papercuts. You literally had to find the link in that heap.)
- _has_ to have the info divided to reflect the feudal fiefdoms inside the company, instead of by relevance to the user. (E.g., no way we'll let you get the hardware and the software information in the same place. Or even have links between them. It's different divisions!)
- _has_ to cut down costs by the most damaging means possible. (E.g., true story: _everyone_ I've worked for starts with ideas like "oh, we'll leave the search engine for next year. We'll start with the important parts first.")
- _has_ to had 1 MB of pictures, animations and roll-overs per page. Preferably Flash. Or flashing.
Etc, etc, etc.
Sure, they could get some clue without a $10,000 consultant. Sometimes their own programmers and designers tried giving them that clue already. But they won't.
Because it's an ego trip. The mere thought that His Royal PHB Highness could have been wrong is a blasphemy. The site must first crash and burn before he even considers getting any advice.
And even at $10,000, I don't envy him. As I've said, those sites are someone's ego trip. That someone already got that advice from internal sources, and chose to ignore it. Quite often why they bring the consultant is as a last hope to prove that their retarded design was right after all.
And then you have to explain to them that, no, their design does suck after all. (In more diplomatic terms, of course.)
And listen to them spewing bullshit in defense of their retarded idea, basically boiling down to "I know better than you, because I'm the boss here." (Another true story, quoted loosely from memory: "1 MB of graphics is nothing these days. Everyone has broadband. We need _more_ graphics, not less.")
Actually, being a programmer myself and working with programmers every day, I'll tend to aggree with him:
1. about 99% of programmers have no clue of usability. That goes double for those "raised" on Unix. You have to pretty much beat the unix way mentality out of them.
It's an uphill battle to even convince most of them that the user wants _one_ _complete_ _program_, which does all its job through one interface. E.g., that a user expects a word processing program to also print, _and_ spell check, _and_ import/export other formats.
Oh, it might spawn other programs in the background, or load shared libraries for that. But no end user wants to launch a separate utility, via command line no less, for each of those tasks.
Whereas your average "unix roolz, dood" type thinks that a piss-poor collection of incomplete and mis-matched utilities are _THE_ way to solve any problem. They think that any user has nothing better to do than to write shell scripts involving grep, sed, and a dozen other utilities (all with different syntax and parameters) to get even the most trivial tasks done.
2. most programmers don't _like_ usability work. In fact, about half actively oppose usability. Sometimes in very trollish terms.
Don't even believe me. Look at the attitude towards usability in most of the FOSS camp. The general attitude is "meh. the interface is the least important part. The last 1%. We'll do the important parts, thank you very much. Then someone else can come do that last polish in an afternoon, if they really need it."
Coding clever hacks seems glamorous and cool. (Even if said hack is brain-dead and unneeded. No, we don't need yet another re-implementation of an input file, or hash map, thank you very much.) Everyone wants to do just the cool parts, and leave the "finishing touches" to some unworthy minion.
Whereas designing and coding a usable GUI is just work. There is nothing glamorous about it and it is a _lot_ of work. Far from being just that last 1%, it's often most of the work. Those cool hacks and algorithms are like making a cool engine for a car. But making that usable GUI around it, is making the rest of the car around that engine.
"If cases were transparent Alumina then they would have the same properties as silica glass and you would have a nice greenhouse effect going on slowly (or not so slowly) frying your computer."
No they wouldn't, unless you leave your computer out in the sun or something.
We're way past the point where the heat inside a computer would simply be dissipated through the case. We now rely on fans to push warm air out and suck colder air in.
We've been past that point for over a decade. Even in an old 286 you likely had ar least the PSU fan.
Nowadays, it can get even more extreme. My case has 7 fans on the case alone, plus two more on the PSU. That's a lot of air circulated through the case.
So basically it REALLY doesn't matter what material you make your case of. There are already wooden cases, leather covered cases, or literally styrofoam cases. Yes, literally, some people put their computer in a styrofoam statue, thermally insulated by almost one foot of styrofoam in all directions.
As long as you pump enough air through it, you really won't see any difference in temperature.
As opposed to clicking on a rat to kill it, and then waiting for it to respawn? Well, gee, that's got to be so more exciting. Not.
Oh yeah, and better go solo at the end of nowhere. You wouldn't want to share that precioussss xp with other players. No time to lose! Gotta race to the next level, where you'll be allowed to beat slightly larger rats with a slightly larger stick.
And be sure to delude yourself that everyone will envy your über-levelled up character. Be sure to attach a list of characters and levels to every post. Yeah, that'll make everyone envious. Chicks will start begging you to let them bear your child because you have a level 50 sorcerer. Not.
See, your average MMORPG is boring, repetitive, mindless _work_. Unskilled blue-collar third-world manual labor. So repetitive and mindless, that a small shell script or zMud script could do that better. It's a brain-dead threadmill, for compulsive mouse-clickers.
They also try to outdo each other in cattering for soloers and anti-social types. I mean, phbt. Just because it's a MMO game, doesn't mean it ought to involve any social interaction. It obviously ought to involve everyone trying to avoid each other at all cost, and shout "kill stealer!" if you even get within 1000 yards of them. Right?
So, I don't know... a game which actually tries to promote at least _some_ interaction, seems to me like an improvement. Because the standard MMOs don't even need a "paint drying" mod. They're already at that point for me.
Getting 20 people to look at your statue is already a lot less boring than clicking on 20 rats to kill. It involves interaction. It also opens a lot more diverse possibilities than the mindless repetitive killing. You might simply bribe them. Or you might make some online friends. Or you might just go harrass every single stranger and hope some will take pity and help you pass the test. Etc.
Either way, it's not something you can solo out at the end of nowhere. You actually _need_ other players for that level-up.
Other tests can be even more extreme than that. Did you really make friends in that game or just acquaintances? How well do you know them? How far would you trust them? If one of them could steal a large part of your virtual wealth _and_ know there'd never be any proof against them, are you sure they wouldn't? See, that's something you can't pass by mindless repetitive clicking, either on rats or trees.
The Internet is an outstanding tool for finding raw data. (And 99% of it wrong, but hey.) Do you need the value of Pi? Sure, you'll find that on Google.
On the other hand, there are no jobs nowadays which require simply regurgitating memorized data. Noone will ever pay you to just know the value of Pi with 20 decimals. We have computers for that nowadays.
What a company needs is _solving_ _a_ _problem_.
1. It needs _skills_, which is something you won't find on Google. They're something you train. You can't be a chess master by just googling for "chess". And contrary to many clueless PHB's wet dream, you can't build a good, maintainable and secure program architecture by just hiring monkeys and telling the to google for "program architecture".
No, just finding 200+ patterns and tricks on the Internet and dumping them mindlessly into the program, won't actually make it a better architecture. It will just make a bloated unmaintainable monster, which has major performance issues too. Even on today's computers. Most of those cool tricks you find will be a brain-damaged liability, rather than help.
Someone needs to have the skill to actually filter and use that data. That's what study and experience give you, that Google can't.
2. The abbundance of conflicting data, or irrelevant data, is today the _problem_, not the solution. If you want to make, say, a business decision, the signal-to-noise ratio is such that you're literally deafened by noise and te signal is lost in it.
When Joe Manager wants to decide whether to do X or Y, he wants a concise study presenting the advantages, disadvantages and risks, on which to base that decision. What he finds on the Internet gazillions of blogs and posts along the lines of "X sucks", "Y blows", "X is un-american and should be outlawed", "Y will bring doom and economic crash upon us all", etc, 99% of which present no actual coherent reason.
I.e., what Joe Manager wants is _knowledge_, not raw data. Someone needs to have the skills to not just Google, but filter the noise out and extract the relevant bits.
And then not just copy-and-paste those bits, but apply them to the problem at hand and work some results out of them. I.e., not just "well, X seems more popular on the boards", but something like "for our situation, X will cost 5 million and 13 months to implement, and we're expecting to save 1.5 million per year. Whereas Y [...]"
Slashdot Mirror
" Who cares why you would or would not want to do it... many people will."
Oh, I'm _sure_ many people will. (I'll get to that later.) And many people will get disappointed, just like with all the other services.
Here's some free clue: friendship is more than two people knowing each other. For example at least having any common topic to discuss is pretty much a requirement.
That's why stuff like IRC or message boards work (somewhat): they come sorted by topics, not by irrelevant idiocies like ZIP codes or "who knows whom". If you want to talk about, say, cats, you can drop into a channel about cats and chances are most people there will also have some interest in that topic. You already have a common topic, and you know what that topic is.
Merely being "connected" to someone by some arbitrary criteria, whether it's ZIP code or by 6 degrees of separation, does not a friend make. It still makes just two strangers who don't really give a damn about each other. The same as if you just stopped and talked to a random neighbour without some idiotic online service.
But ah, you don't know how to start talking to that neighbour in the first place, right? (Or after that how to stop him from yawning and making a quick excuse.)
Which brings us to who those many people will be:
Anyone who was extroverted enough to just naturally hit it off with perfect strangers, is already out there chatting and making friends. They never needed an online service for that, and they still don't. So you won't find them on such crap sites, or not for long. (And they'd look for other extroverted people, not for the geeky guy who can't string more than two words together.)
So who joins this crap? The losers. The ones who can't actually go and make friends, but still live in some sad fantasy world where they're really the life of the party and they'd be up to their ears in friends if anyone only introduced them. Unlike last time they got introduced to someone IRL, and it still led nowhere. But you just wait and see. This online thing will surely be the magic bullet.
The same ones who clogged the other such services, got disappointed, and went looking for the 20'th such promised land where surely they'll be popular. Except they still won't, and it still won't work. Because they just don't have the personality type for that.
Just as with everything else, there is no magic bullet. There never was, there never will be. Wake up. Friendship isn't something you can win at an online lottery.
(And no, I'm _not_ calling every introvert a loser. I'm fairly introverted myself.
I'm just calling anyone who can't cope with reality a loser. If you want friends, go talk to people. That's the only way that works. It's that simple.
All the other fantasies and pipe dreams stay just that. The whiny angsty duckling doesn't grow up into a swan, it just grows into a lonely and bitter duck.
Or stay introverted, but accept the reality that you're _not_ going to be the life of the party. Don't build stupid fantasies and go buying _false_ hope online.)
"Seems like a damn good definition of evil to me! Evil always has a reason which doesn't stand up to logic."
You seem to be missing the whole point.
Both in history and in literature, the memorable villains weren't simply some random psycho who started shooting people off the street. They may be "evil", but they make for a piss-poor story or plot.
The villains that got famous in either history or in literature or in movies, were the ones who had a _plan_. A plan which involves gaining allies, power, seeming respectable or good to the masses, etc.
E.g., Al Capone wasn't just some guy who started shooting people, but someone who could plan, coordinate, and keep an impression of respectability. Not just not leaving evidence, and always having an alibi. We're talking a guy who was actually pretty popular with a lot of people. He was the first to open soup kitchens after the 1929 stock market crash, and he ordered merchants to give clothes and food to the needy at his expense.
That's quite far from the Black and White simplistic uni-dimensional view of good-vs-evil.
In literature, you don't see great novels being written about catching some idiot who didn't even bother running from the crime scene. So the cops shot him. End of story.
The ones you remember are the ones where the hero had to unravel a mystery, and generally go against someone who _wasn't_ just smacking innocents around in broad daylight. They're going against someone who's actually looking pretty damn respectable and beyond anyone else's doubt.
And that's the kind of subtlety that went straight over PM's head. B&W (or any other of his games) never addressed more than a laughable carricature of what "good" or "evil" means, but passed swift judgment nevertheless.
"But just as anyone can theoretically write a book, but in reallity it hard work and not really anyone really can, so it is with mods. It's hard and complicated, and not anyone has the wherewithall to actually produce an endresult, let alone a decent endresult."
I didn't say anyone is able to write a _good_ book. And I did say that 99.9% of attempts will at best result in crap.
But noone will stop them from _trying_. Noone will say "see, you first have to prove yourself as a carpenter (or any other equally irrelevant skill), and only then we'll let you even have a word-processor." That was my whole point.
By comparison, to even _try_ to make a whole new game, the entry barrier is huge. You have to work your way past that huge barrier before you're even allowed to _try_.
Even to make a mod nowadays, with the current tools there's far more work than just writing a novel. To get anywhere _near_ having a playable non-trivial mod you need a whole team. Including at _least_ 3D modellers _and_ programmers.
What I dream of, is some tool where you can do away with most of that. I don't know if it's possible. But it certainly would be nice to lower the entry barrier to the point where everyone is able to just start scripting.
I'd like to add that it's not even wild speculation: We've _already_ been at that point. In the old 8 bit days of the ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64, literally _anyone_ could make a game in a garage. (Again: "could" meaning "you didn't need anyone's royal seal of approval before you could even try.")
And unsurprisingly there was one helluva lot more variety back then, than we have today. Even if you think of stuff by genres, (A) there were at least twice as many genres, and (B) there was a helluva lot more variety inside a genre.
The problem remains that games nowadays tend _not_ to be up to either book or movie standards. Regardless of whether you're into plots, or angsty whiny character development, or whatever, your average computer game manages to just pull a ham-fisted approach to either.
When they try to address any problem or issue, e.g., good vs evil, it's usually just a quick excuse as to why you're allowed to kill those people. They're just evil, go kill them already. Doesn't matter if they actually did anything evil at all. They were just born that way. Go kill them.
E.g., since we're talking about its creator, when I played the first Populous, once let it on auto-play, just to see how the computer plays. The "evil" guys were just minding their business, building their evil towns and planting their evil crops. The "good" guys suddenly built an army and slaughtered them all. Who was good and who was evil there?
E.g., to stick to this guy's creations, Black and White didn't really address any issue of good or evil, and didn't even try to get into the subtleties of being evil without being purely self-destructive for no good reason.
When it did attempt to make a moral judgment, it was an arbitrary ham-fisted one. E.g., along the lines of "you failed to protect the village from the barrage of fireballs, so you're an evil evil monster." Ahem. There's a difference between evil and trying to protect someone and failing. The second is at most just incompetence.
When a game actually tries to tell a story, or even apply the Hero's Journey recipe that Hollywood loves, it usually again does it in a ham-fisted way that ruins it all. E.g., see Final Fantasy 8, which went so over the top, practically shouting in your face "see, I'm still at step 2 in that recipe! Not a hero yet!", that it just ended annoying everyone.
That is, if a game even tries. Most computer games actually have _less_ plot or behavioural analysis than your average porn flick. And that says a lot.
My theory is: the problem is the entry barrier. Anyone can write a novel. You don't have to, say, first prove that you're good in something completely unrelated, before someone lets you write a book. You just write it, take it to an editor, and that's that. So tens of thousands of crap attempts are written each year, but some gem from someone unknown before also happens now and then.
In games by comparison, there's a huge road ahead before anyone even considers letting you anywhere near a designer position. It's "Peter's Principle" all the way: you have to prove that you're good in some utterly unrelated skill (e.g., programming or 3D modelling) before you get promoted into a position you're utterly incompetent for: designer.
What I'd really like to see is some good open source game engine, and a good open-source 3D model generator, so _everyone_ can try their hand at making a game. Let them try. Just like with books, 99.9% of attempts will suck and silently disappear. But we might also see more people who can actually make a good and _new_ game. (I.e., something which isn't a lame rehash of whatever sold last year.)
As the title hints, maybe if you stopped being snotty about that arts degree, you could notice that reality isn't that simple.
There are "gamers" and there are "gamers"."Gamer" means pretty much everyone from the die-hard who only talks about Counter-Strike ever, to the old grandma playing Solitaire and Minesweeper. We're talking people ranging from 2 year olds (yes, a friend was teaching his 2 year old son to play Wolfenstein) to teenagers to 50-60 year olds. (Yes, both my parents are gamers.) As for "technical", "gamer" includes not on the die hard PC geeks who overclock and mod their PC, but also some console gamers who wouldn't know "technical" if it came up and bit them in the ass.
Judging and damning _that_ diverse a group into a single pre-conceived category is snotty and pretentious. Actually, lemme rephrase that: it's just brain dead.
And even when you acknowledge that some read stuff that's not a tech manual, you still manage to shovel it all into another pre-conceived notion: that it _must_ be SF and _must_ be related to technology.
Geesh. Talk about an "everyone but me is a nerd" troll...
"We tried to address this one as well. I wrote a driver for an IrDA keyboard. My thought was, well - neat trick, but if you're committed to carrying around a keyboard anyways, why not just get a laptop?"
Point well taken. I'm asking for a small laptop, after all, but I'll stick to "small" being the keyword.
The 12" Apple laptops are a step in the right direction, but still too big for me. Someone give me a, say, 6" notebook, and I'll be a happy camper.
For starters, they could drop the huge filler space above and below the keyboard in most laptops. Do away with the touch-pad completely: a touch screen, like on the Psion, will do just fine as a substitute. Give me a wider screen, say, 800x480 or even 800x300, which is exactly the size of the keyboard.
Second, a keyboard doesn't have to be exactly the size of a PC 104 key keyboard to work well. The Psion one was good enough to type on, at a fraction of the size.
By "well enough" meaning it was actually possible to take notes in a meeting on it or write a doc in the train. Not as easy as with a full sized keyboard, no doubt, but far easier and faster than "handwriting recognition". Just the thought of trying to enter a whole technical doc via recognition gives me the creeps.
"I wouldn't trade better broadband... ...For communism, sorry."
;)
Ignorant redneck, but patriotic, eh?
You know, contrary to what Hollywood movies may tell you, there _is_ a world outside your borders, and it does _not_ all consist of naked tribesmen with stone spears, oppressed by some tribal warlord with a bigger stone spear.
Pick a geography book sometimes. Fascinating read. You may well find that other countries are just as democratic... if not more, considering that they don't have the "waah!! Terrorists everywhere!!" lame excuse to take away even more civil liberties.
"It's interesting how the author fails to mention that there are restrictions on websites that users can visit in the aforementioned country, but I digress. I guess that's a convenient oversight."
Sorry to dawn some reality on your self-righteous redneck rant, but: I don't think Sweden, Germany, UK, or any other EU countries have any more censorship than you already have in the USA too. Yes, the government does say stuff like "thou shalt not watch child porn", but guess what? So does yours.
We're not talking China. Noone will arrest you in Sweden for having a site about how much the government sucks.
So again: get that head out of your ass. Learn a bit about the world outside your borders. Or just learn anything, for that matter. Might actually do you some good.
"I don't want my broadband to be a beurocracy, and I can put up with a few hiccups here and there because down the road, we're going to catch up and feel at ease."
There's nothing especially bureaucratic about broadband anywhere in the EU.
"I'm very happy to be living in within a structure of a decentralized broadband access where each individual state dictates the best method of communication, rather than a country tell me that only DSL or CABLE is available."
Ah, the standard display of talking out of the ass. So you're that great and free because state governments decide for you? Well, gee. Funny how the rest of us thought that freedom had something to do with the government _not_ deciding stuff for you.
So basically, son, there are plenty of arguments about liberty or economics that might apply to this situation. But you don't even understand either. You don't understand that prized freedom you wave around as a flag, and you don't understand the economics either.
Your idea of more liberty is merely being a faithful doggie to a lower state government, instead of a centralized government. But a faithful doggie nevertheless. Well, gee. You would have had a great time during feudalism. You'd only have your baron bossing you around, while the higher levels (counts, dukes, the king, etc) don't even give a damn that you exist. Yep, great liberty there.
So lemme ammend what I was saying: learn some history too.
There are uses for a PDA, but currently I see mostly the interface as being the biggest idiocy. E.g., as an owner of a Psion 5, I can tell you what they did well for me. And what I wish they would have done better.
Basically it boils down to: I want a tiny laptop, and actually as useful (or reasonably close) as a laptop. I want a laptop that can fit in my pocket. Not just a fashion gizmo that's useless for more than tiny mangled reminder notes.
1. I want to take notes on that thing. And I mean actually _type_ for example what's being said in a meeting.
Handwriting recognition is a joke to that end. It's slow, it requires you to mangle your handwriting into a carricature that the PDA can recognize, and you still end up with something so mangled it could have just as well been written it l33t. No, that won't do.
I wish more such devices would just have a fscking keyboard. If I was to single out _the_ one Psion feature I appreciated the most, it would undoubtedly be the good keyboard.
Even the silly thumb "typing" on a cell phone is less retarded than "handwriting recognition". Next time you wonder why more people manage their stuff on cell phones than PDA, maybe, just maybe, there's more to it than "you can have phone calls with a phone."
2. Another thing that I liked about the Psion is that it actually has some working programs on it. Not even stuff you can buy extra, but stuff that's pre-installed and part of the OS.
No, it's not up to MS Office or even OOo standards, but it's actually possible to do more than handwrite short mangled reminders on it. You can, for example, actually type and format a document while stuck in the train or airport terminal.
3. I wouldn't say no to more RAM and screen resolution either. And BTW, use a flash card to store the files, and give me all that RAM to actually use.
4. While we're at it, I wish they'd ship the thing with compilers (including C++ _and_ Java), tools, and everything. A tiny simple IDE would be great too.
And I don't just mean stuff you can run on a PC and then copy the result to the PDA. I mean stuff which you can run on the PDA itself.
I'm a geek. I code. I wouldn't mind being able to code in the train without having to lug a laptop around.
Of course, someone will note that geeks aren't the only ones who buy those things. That's ok too. Those who aren't geeks, use programs written by geeks. Make it easy for those geeks to write their programs, and you may well have a more viable platform.
5. Being a little more compact and lightweight could go a long way. The Psions weren't too bulky, but nowadays you could probably squeeze them even thinner.
6. You know, it would be nice if those things actually were PC or Mac compatible. And I don't mean compatible as in "but you can transfer files via an USB cable", but as in "you can take an old PC program or game and run it on the thing."
I'm sure it would be possible to make an older Pentium MMX or G3 core with the latest 90nm SOI strained silicon technology, and end up with a small low-voltage chip that doesn't need huge amounts of power. (Or rather, you can keep the frequency low enough so that it doesn't.) Or it can probably be embedded in a larger chip, including the memory interface and other stuff.
Might just boost the thing's usefulness by an order of magnitude.
Disclaimer: I do not even own an iPod.
You say, and I quote:
"Reviews of the black Rio Nitrus were luke-warm [ign.com] at best. Most people agreed that the player itself was stylish, but the interface was clunky, the software was garbage"
Read again what you wrote. So basically it had piss-poor usability _and_ garbage as software, but you still blame it on the marketting that it didn't sell?
That's been the real story of why the iPod rules, and all these "iPod slayers" went to the bit bucket of history: they were crap. They were cheaply made, with complete disregard to quality, usability or the customer.
Everyone thought that they could just throw together the cheapest crap possible, price it sky high, and watch the lemmings rush to give you a ton of money for pure crap.
Let me play Captain Obvious and spell out some of the ways in which they really failed:
1. Most of the "iPod slayers" were just huge. I've seen ones (e.g., the older Archos or Neuros comes to mind) which were as big as a brick. And about as heavy.
The kind which you could put in a sock and mug someone with. Or the kind for which you would need custom pants to carry in your pocket, and a second set of suspenders to keep your pants on when you do. The kind which looked like it had a 3.25" desktop hard drive in it, and likely half a car battery in it.
2. Yes, a helluva lot had and still have crap usability.
E.g., enough were actually produced with as little as forward, back, stop and play as the _only_ user interface. Like that's enough for a 20 GB hard drive.
E.g., a lot of companies seem to think that some tiny 2x16 character display is all you need to manage your music on their player.
E.g., some needed their own unwieldy software just to get your data on them.
Etc, etc, etc.
3. Most often they werent't even cheaper. Quite au contraire. They often had all sorts of expensive doodads instead, which pushed both the price and the weight through the roof. (Poorly programmed doodads too.) E.g., surely everyone will pay twice the price of an iPod, just to be able to also display their digital photos on a clunky huge MP3 player. On a tiny display.
When they could just get a Palm _and_ an iPod for that money, and in fact still have money left.
4. Especially Sony's tried (or still try) to impose their own crap formats, instead of just accepting a damn MP3. Yeah, I'm sooo gonna re-rip my whole 192 kb/s MP3 collection to Sony's crap format. At a whole 48 kb/s. Not.
5. Yes, iTunes. For a long time it was the _only_ such service. And a damn good service too. And it worked best (or at all) with an iPod. Dunno, seems to me like in and by itself that's one damn good reason to own an iPod.
See, contrary to popular belief, people are not _complete_ lemmings. And marketting helps, but only goes so far. At the end of the day, good products prevail, and utter crap products fail.
Games are already well past the point where the CPU mattered too much. There used to be a time when the CPU had to both handle the graphics (or at least the T&L part) and plot believable strategies. Nowadays it basically does neither.
In fact, it does extremely little more than serve as a front-end or IO processor for the GPU. Not only has the GPU taken over the graphics pretty much completely, the games have also been simplified (or dumbed down, if you will) to the point of being little more than 3D tech demos.
Which brings us to the real point:
For Doom 3 the graphics card is the bottleneck, period. Followed at a looong distance by the memory bandwidth that the CPU is seeing. (Hence the 1 MB cache Athlon 64 models and the Socket 939 models doing so well.) And CPU speed is pretty much the last factor.
Any other modern games show the same trend, and fortunately they'll still behave the same when ported to the Mac.
So basically if you're playing games on a 5200, it doesn't even matter how fast the G5 is. That machine is basically castrated to the point of being useless for anything more graphically intensive than Europa Universalis (a 2D game), even if you put a (non-existent) 3 GHz A64 or G5 in it.
"I'd say a 2GHz G5 would perform very well with the right video card, on par with at LEAST an Intel 2.4GHz machine with similar RAM and video card."
A very reasonable observation. Which unfortunately just serves to further hammer the point that the 5200 in that iMac is a joke.
Noone sane would call a P4 with a 5200 in it a "gaming PC". They might call it "that cheap box I've built for mum and dad to read email on", but definitely not a "gaming PC".
So basically, I don't know... Apple has a very good chance of making a good gaming machine nowadays. As you've said, with the latest graphics card, it ought to perform pretty much the same as a PC with the same graphics card.
Except they insist on making some crap with a 5200 in it, and no option to get a real graphics card instead. Oh well...
Being a programmer myself, let me shed some light on why and when it may look when someone is working at low speed. Or really is procrastinating.
1. The obvious, they are not a great programmer after all.
2. You mention fatigue. You're dead on. Being tired can sap someone's efficiency (including via increasing the number of bugs) a lot. Whipping a team into working 12 hour shifts, 7 days a week, may work for a week, maybe even two, but then you have tired _and_ demoralized people.
3. Morale problems. Being an intelectual activity, and not just something like digging dirt or flipping burgers, you can't just whip and shout some serfs and get results. Low morale can sap someone's efficiency _a_ lot. Or bring them in a "ah, wth do I bother anyway?" road to procrastination.
Morale is hard to build, but very easy to destroy. Sometimes the easiest road to destroying it is taking a ham fisted approach and trying to force people to be cheerful.
E.g., asking people to come to mandatory team building meetings in their free time, is a great way to make the team hate each other. You can't force people to be friends. And imposing on their free time or money just builds resentment.
Doubly so if it's done in a condescending or insulting way. "Hey, we're paying for a cheap buffet, so that's your pay for being here. Of course you're not supposed to put it on your timesheet." Eh. I'm not a beggar. I can pay for my own food, _when_ I need it. Right now I needed more to be at home.
E.g., ego masturbation meetings ("status report meetings") where only one person is supposed to speak, don't really build up morale. They are actually perceived as just that: public verbal masturbation. Any one-way information exchage, that doesn't really require any decision or feedback, ought to go through email. Or if not, at least keep it very short and to the point.
(And, no, the most common excuse "but what if they have questions?" is usually just that: a piss-poor excuse. "Yes, the company still exists, we're great, the marketting guys sold some other team's product, etc." Well, it's all great news, but exactly what questions is someone supposed to ask? The only you'll actually get is from idiots who think they get bad marks from the boss if they don't ask something. Anything. Just to show they were there.)
E.g., lack of feedback or lack of sense of any purpose. It may seem like it's conflicting with the previous point, but it's not. Feedback doesn't equal endless pointless meetings.
4. Mis-management.
E.g., poor resource use, when someone actually has nothing to do for a month.
E.g., poor team management where people are left to basically fend for themselves and coax each other into adding this one more function or fixing this bug. Some will take this as a good opportunity to not do anything, not even fix their own bugs, such as the Wally avatar I have for a co-worker. Some will get disheartened at having to spend hours coaxing Wally to even fix a bug, and delay that as much as possible out of self-preservation. Some things will deadlock because of conflicting requests and no management to decide which way to go. (True case: "Yes, I need this new parameter" from one co-worker, and 3 others going "No way mate, I'm not changing to a new and incompatible version of your EJB's client right before a release".)
E.g., the most harm that management can do is sapping morale, or letting people sap each others.
For example if it degenerates into a chaotic situation where everyone comes to work and finds that code that they spent 12 hours debugging yesterday doesn't work today, because someone changed something. And you don't even know who, what or where. It's not only a waste of time as such (and the boss may just see this as "these procrastinators aren't making any progress again"), it saps morale too.
5. Morale again: that feeling of "why should I bother any more?" Maybe it deserves its own point after all.
E.g., feedback from the team bei
Let me tell you a true story from here. I call it "Jack and Jill up corporate hill".
Jack is the stereotypical incompetent monkey. He's a marketer who noticed that he could get more money if he switched to being a "programmer". Unfortunately his only IT skill is marketting himself to clueless PHBs. (I've worked with him before. He's the guy I mentioned that spent hours trying all combinations of *, & and nothing on every variable in C++, because he never could understand pointers.)
But the bosses _love_ Jack. Jack speaks their language. Jack may not be able to code shit, or anything else, but he knows how to say exactly what the bosses want to hear.
Jack also loves making compliments like "Hey, it's rare to see a chick with brains." (Said verbatim to a competent female employee who's programmed in assembly before. _Way_ more competent than him in any case.) He actually thinks it's a compliment, and not the sexist idiocy that it really is.
Jill, for better or worse, did finish a CS college. No, she's not a genius, but I'd say at least more competent than half the monkeys hired in that department just because they were cheap.
Jack has been on a sort of a personal Jihad against Jill for more than a year. He'd hunt every single mistake in her code and run show it to everyone else, or humiliate her in front of other employees.
He came to me a few times with such "proofs" that Jill writes bad code. Invariably Jill's code was right, and it just showed that Jack didn't understand even the _basics_ of Java. The language he's paid to program in these days. E.g., he didn't know that String constants are internalized.
I called him an idiot to his face on those occasions, and explained to him why Jill's code works and is OK. (Hey, I never said I was a diplomat.) He stopped coming to me, and I thought he got over it. I was wrong.
Recently Jack got promoted to team leader. (As I've said, the bosses _love_ him.)
Their team also had grown with two people fresh out of college. Again a male and a female. Let's call them Dick and Jane. Jane was undoubtedly inexperienced. On the other hand, Dick, by everyone else's assessment, bosses _and_ coworkers alike, was a fscking catastrophe.
What does Jack do? Jack recommends that they fire Jane, but keep Dick. The boss's question? "Huh? Why Jane? I thought Dick was the catastrophe."
Jack insists however that they keep Dick, reasoning that it would be bad for the project to fire both, and Dick will probably learn along the way. Takes all his marketting skills, but he gets the boss to aggree.
So Jane packs her bags, and Dick, for all I know, is still blundering to even understand Java, but still in that team.
Now let's get back to Jill. As I've said, at one point I thought Jack had gotten past his unexplicable feud against her. As I should have guessed, he was actually just avoiding me, after I had called him an idiot.
What's Jack doing now, in his team leader position? Finally getting Jill fired.
So it seems to me like you don't even have to try hard to see discrimination in action. You just need an open mind, which is really what's lacking.
CS _is_ a boy's club. Hiring interviews are conducted by prejudiced people. You have prejudiced people as team leaders and co-workers, spewing sexist idiocies without even realizing it. Or being condescending and treating you a priori like a poor retard just because of gender preconceptions. And you have to interact with prejudiced clients and internal PHBs, who need to assert their testosterone supremacy anyway, but doubly so when it comes to women in tech fields.
Seems to me that anyone who's not outright fired, needs a pretty thick skin to stay in CS. A lot prefer to just leave. I've seen people bail out of CS and into other jobs because of this. (E.g., from programming to usability or whatever else, which isn't as supposed to be an exclusive boys' club.)
And the results of this aren't even perceived as the results of blatant discrimination, but used as further "proof" that women aren't fit to use a computer.
It's not even the only discrimination in this field. Age discrimination against males is at least as widespread.
" First, when you double execution units and instruction fetch/decode units and reorder buffers, you are creating two cores!"
You know, the funny thing is that you may be the only one who at least partially understood what he was really saying. Yet you still seem to miss the big picture.
Basically, yes, it would be like two cores, excapt they allocate resources from a common pool. As opposed to the current easy way out of just glueing two completely separate cores (even with separate cache!).
For example, instead of having 2 hypothetical cores with 2 integer units each, you could have 2 which have a common pool of 4 integer units. Maybe at one point one of the cores can only schedule one integer operation at a time, but the other can use three in parallel.
On the other hand, technically speaking it's not really multi-core, it's still SMP. It's just SMP with twice as many resources available.
Seems to me like a more efficient use of silicon any way you want to look at it. Very expensive to design too, but nevertheless more efficient.
Basically you can think of it this way: which is more efficient? Let's say a construction company has 2 teams and 4 trucks. Is it more efficient to have 2 trucks exclusive to each team (current dual core), or a common pool of 4 trucks allocated to the teams as needed (SMP with twice the resources)? What happens if one day team A doesn't need any truck, while team B would sorely need all four?
Notice how sharing resources could be more efficient than not sharing anything?
I have programmed (both assembly and higher level) back in the 16 bit days (and in the 8 bit days for that matter), and the problem was entirely different.
The big problem wasn't just having to address more than 64k of data, it was having to address _one_ _chunk_ of more than 64k. (E.g., a 640x480 pixel bitmap was already over the limit, even in 4 bit colour.)
Having 50,000 chunks of 10-30k each wouldn't really even start to be a bother. You'd just load the segment register at the beginning
What made one large chunk be special was that you had to do segment arithmetic in the middle of addressing its contents.
E.g., if you wanted to apply a gauss blurr (or any other a matrix filter) to a bitmap, having to compute the segment and offset for each pixel was a huge performance hit. If you applied something as trivial as a 3x3 filter to a 640x480 bitmap, you'd end up doing segment arithmetic 9x640x480 = 2,764,800 times in the process, instead of just adding/subtracting a constant value to an int.
Of course, you could and did optimize it better than that. (E.g., it's trivial to reduce that to computing the segment/offset only once per row. I.e., only 480 times.) But that was something you had to do. That was the kludge and extra work of those times.
Frankly, I don't think we have the same problem nowadays. To have the same problem with the 4 GB limit of 32 bit addressing, you'd need one 4 GB chunk of allocated memory, which you can't possibly break into smaller chunks.
E.g., if you process a DVD movie (as per your example), does it really need to be a single chunk? Well, no. It's divided into frames, which are a lot smaller than that. You also don't have to hold the whole movie in RAM, and inddeed you don't, since few people have 4 GB RAM on their computers even at work.
Even on the server side, I'd wager a guess that 99% of server side stuff doesn't allocate over 4 GB to a single process. (None of our application servers do, and we're talking a rather big corporation.) And even if someone did, I doubt they'd get 4 GB as a single malloc().
So again, it's nowhere near being as big a problem as the old 16 bit problem.
Don't get me wrong, I do have an Athlon 64 and they're nice chips anyway. The extra registers and high IPC are reasons enough to have one anyway.
But the whole "we need 64 bit now!!!" is IMHO just marketting hype and bullshit. The majority of computers need 64 bit registers like fish needs a bycicle.
Yes, silicon carbide and water cooling will get the heat out of the CPU faster.
The problem still remains that a metric buttload of heat is produced, and that it comes out of the electricity bill. Sometimes twice: in the summer you also pay for the air conditioning, since that shiny new CPU is heating the room some more.
I think it's getting ludicrious.
The Prescott is already over 100 W, and Intel apparently plans dual core versions. Whoppee for 200+ W CPUs. NVidia 6800 Ultras are rated for 120 W, and they're hyping SLI setups now. Yep, _two_ graphics cards, if just 120W worth of hot air blowing off the back of the case wasn't enough.
Add hard drives, motherboard, and the PSUs own inefficiency, and you're already looking at 1000W worth of heat for the whole computer. That's already like a space heater.
In fact, go ahead and turn a space heater on near your desk in the summer, and you've got a pretty good approximation of what the next generation of computers promises to be like. Now picture some 4 of them in the same room, at the office.
And it's raising exponentially. Carbide and water cooling will only help them get further along that curve.
And I'll be damned if I'm thrilled at the prospect.
This also brings the problem of even more fans. Even with water cooling, you then have to get the heat out of the water. It still means fans. More heat will just mean more fans, bigger fans, or faster fans. Or all the above.
And I'm not thrilled at the prospect of the return of the noisy computer either. I can jolly well do without the machine sounding like a jumbo jet. Especially when I'm watching a DVD or such, I can do without having to turn the volume sky high just to be able to hear what they're saying. And at the office I can do without four noisy hovercrafts in the same room.
What could be even more annoying than being spammed by a friend, is being spammed by someone you don't even like. Stuff that comes to mind, off the top of my head:
1. Most of these "social networks" are based on the fundamentally _false_ assumption that if A is a friend of B, and B is a friend of C, and C is a friend of D, then surely A and D will also get along just fabulously.
Which is complete idiocy. Humans are not that one-dimensional personalities. It can well be that A and D are completely opposite personalities and don't even have any common topics to discuss.
I mean just look around you. You surely remember at least a case of some girlfriend's friend who you thought was an airhead. Or some friend's sibbling/parent/classmate/neighbour/friend who you thought was jerk or a complete idiot.
And that's already just two degrees of separation. Go any further and it becomes 100% lottery. The chances to have anything in common are the same as if you picked a random stranger off the street. Because essentially they _are_ a random stranger.
So basically why the heck do I need to be notified that a bunch of strangers are in Jack's pub? I could just go into Jack's anyway and be assured to find a bunch of strangers in there anyway.
2. Friendship is a two-sided thing. When you're free (or even _expected_) to just add people to your friends list without their confirmation, it's getting even more meaningless.
It just means you can get spammed by some people you don't even like. That annoying ex, the local tag-along loser, some relative who actually gets on your nerves, whatever. Now go along that line through several degrees of separation. It's pretty much guaranteed to be more stuff you'd rather avoid than a case of "omg! I must go quickly to the pub so I don't miss him/her!"
3. At the risk of being offensive, I can see the potential for such a service to get choked full of losers.
There's a lot more potential in it for people who just need to pretend they have a lot of friends. No, seriously, anyone who can put equals between a "friend" and being connected through 6 degrees of separation to a perfect stranger, most likely doesn't have any real friends to start with.
Bear in mind that these games _do_ already track you to some extent. If you thought you were totally anonymous in an online game, get over it: you aren't and you never were.
Even on MUDs, having been (briefly) a builder on one, I can assure you that there was some massive logging going on, and plenty of opportunity to snoop on what someone was up to.
It was amusing to see idiots thinking that the admins can't possibly know they're abusing some obscure bug or harrassing someone. In practice, an admin could be invisible right next to you while you spend hours abusing a bug. (I know at least one admin who literally sat and watched invisible for hours, just to see how long would someone keep at doing an exploit.)
Some liked to maintain some pretense of respecting privacy unless given reasonable doubt, or a direct request for help from a harrassment victim. E.g., yes, it was possible that all that hate text you sent someone was also going to an admin's screen too.
A lot didn't even have that kind of pretense. In fact, _most_ didn't have any kind of privacy promise or policy.
I.e., again, if you don't want to be tracked, never play an online game you don't host yourself. If you don't want something logged, don't do it online. It's that simple.
And by comparison, "tracking" for in-game advertising reasons can be a lot more benign. An ad provider doesn't need to know that "S1R N00BK1LL3R" or "Dread Lord IMHORNY" saw their ad, they just need to know how many distinct people did. That's all.
I hardly think that an aggregate statistic (like that a total of 10,000 people this week got the MacDonald billboard rendered on their screen) would violate your privacy or anything.
I'm not sure why everyone assumes it _must_ be an intrusive in-your-face affair, or that tracking _must_ mean your data being sold to the advertiser.
There are lots of opportunities for advertising in online multiplayer games which won't necessarily break the game.
E.g., a MMO which happens in modern times is pretty much expected to have billboards. City of Heroes for example has them, but they're just funny in-game stuff (bail bonds for villains and such) instead of trying to sell a real world product.
Now think a little. Getting a couple of real world banners for those billboards would definitely not be annoying or break suspension of disbelief in any way. E.g., if I saw a big MacDonalds billboard in that city, I wouldn't stop and think "wtf is it doing there." It would fit right in with the rest of the urban landscape.
It also doesn't even need to be a big billboard, but can be something even more subtle or less intrusive.
E.g., in a town you _expect_ shops. In fact, you tend to be disappointed when you don't see them. I know I've stopped and wondered about how few the shops in City of Heroes are.
So I don't think it would look out of place if in a hypothetical modern day MMO you saw a MacDonalds or Pizza Hut on a street corner. It fits there and it makes sense. Those townfolks must be eating somewhere.
Or you can go even more subtle and have stuff like: if that town has a shoe store, sometimes it could sprout a sign in the window proclaiming a big sale on Nike sportswear. It's not like you don't see those IRL, you know.
Also, these are massively bandwidth intensive games anyway, _and_ are based on stuff downloaded on-the-fly from their servers anyway. Having to download an extra 16k worth of compressed texture for some billboard ad wouldn't really make any difference.
So, really, what's the problem?
For that matter, it doesn't say anyone has any generic rights to free speech even in the USA, when it's not an act of the US government restricting it.
It always amazes me that the people most proud of their free speech, are the ones who have no fscking clue what it means. Whenever you see some idiot being an asshole or troll on a forum, MUD, or whatever else, chances are good they'll scream about their freedom of speech right when they get banned.
Too bad for them that it doesn't apply there, but apparently noone told them what that right actually means.
As the title says. Windows, Linux, whatever, I find Oo.o's font rendering to be completely crap.
;)
For starters, yes, it doesn't seem to do any anti-aliasing. Even under Windows. And since it has nothing to do with sub-pixel hinting, it's just as crap looking on a CRT as on an LCD. Probably worse looking on a CRT, actually.
Second, when you scale a document (yes, I like to have the page scaled to fit the window width), instead of getting the fonts simply rendered at the new size, it looks like something that got first rendered and then unevenly scaled.
I.e., to quote MacHall, "Hey, it doesn't look like OLD ass. It's CLASSIC ass." If you want that CLASSIC look you used to have in Windows 3.0 with a non-accelerated Trident graphics card and non-scalable fonts, you can't beat OOo for that.
Third, and most annoying, I'd like it to just fscking use whatever fonts are already installed on that machine. X and all normal X application can already use them. Nah, for OOo you have to explicitly install the fonts _again_ in OOo.
Once for each user, too. Whoppee.
Presumably because, for all the crack talk about how standards are great, OOo still does its very own font rendering. And if it at least did it better than Windows or X, I could see the point. But a hack that actually is _worse_ than using the standard libraries? Well, that's gotta count as cool.
Add other OOo "features" like the highly annoying nagging. E.g., daily I _have_ to edit one excel file: the hours I've worked in that day. Sometimes more than once a day. Every fscking time I have to click "yes" on not one, but _two_ nag dialogs.
You'd think it would be able to get the idea that _yes_, I do want to save it back as Excel. I know it's mind boggling that after loading a file, I'd want to save the changes back in the same file. Probably noone in the OOo team ever save their changes to the exact same file they loaded
And that _yes_, I still want to exit the program nevertheless.
At least, you know, give me a "don't ask this again" checkbox. It's not like it's that new and unheard of idea. But nah, some cretin probably felt a Holy Duty to nag the users to death to completely switch to OOo formats. Probably is even proud of that idiocy.
Etc, etc, etc.
Basically IMHO OOo is a substitute for Office in much the same way as a bullet to the head is a cure for headache. I.e., not really, other than in the "well, technically speaking..." way.
It's getting sorta in the right direction, but it has a looong way to go.
Well, his points are well known, and you can just buy a book where they're spelled out. So you don't _have_ to pay 10,000$ to get that good advice. You don't even need to make an 8-ball, you could just as well make a small bulleted list and put it next to your monitor.
It just requires some minimal clue and an open mind.
The problem is that a lot of web sites are just some PHB's ego trip site. The more clueless the PHB, the more he's convinced that the site:
- _has_ to be in his favourite colours, the users be damned if they don't like it. (Light orange or oragnge-ish yellow, and cyan on neon blue are actual colour schemes that the client's PHB demanded.)
- and some underadable font, while they're at it. (Surely everyone will have their screen set in 800x600, like that PHB does.)
- _has_ to have some convoluted navigation that noone understands. (Another actual example: a client actually wanted the site to have what looked like a heap of papercuts. You literally had to find the link in that heap.)
- _has_ to have the info divided to reflect the feudal fiefdoms inside the company, instead of by relevance to the user. (E.g., no way we'll let you get the hardware and the software information in the same place. Or even have links between them. It's different divisions!)
- _has_ to cut down costs by the most damaging means possible. (E.g., true story: _everyone_ I've worked for starts with ideas like "oh, we'll leave the search engine for next year. We'll start with the important parts first.")
- _has_ to had 1 MB of pictures, animations and roll-overs per page. Preferably Flash. Or flashing.
Etc, etc, etc.
Sure, they could get some clue without a $10,000 consultant. Sometimes their own programmers and designers tried giving them that clue already. But they won't.
Because it's an ego trip. The mere thought that His Royal PHB Highness could have been wrong is a blasphemy. The site must first crash and burn before he even considers getting any advice.
And even at $10,000, I don't envy him. As I've said, those sites are someone's ego trip. That someone already got that advice from internal sources, and chose to ignore it. Quite often why they bring the consultant is as a last hope to prove that their retarded design was right after all.
And then you have to explain to them that, no, their design does suck after all. (In more diplomatic terms, of course.)
And listen to them spewing bullshit in defense of their retarded idea, basically boiling down to "I know better than you, because I'm the boss here." (Another true story, quoted loosely from memory: "1 MB of graphics is nothing these days. Everyone has broadband. We need _more_ graphics, not less.")
It's not a fun job.
Actually, being a programmer myself and working with programmers every day, I'll tend to aggree with him:
1. about 99% of programmers have no clue of usability. That goes double for those "raised" on Unix. You have to pretty much beat the unix way mentality out of them.
It's an uphill battle to even convince most of them that the user wants _one_ _complete_ _program_, which does all its job through one interface. E.g., that a user expects a word processing program to also print, _and_ spell check, _and_ import/export other formats.
Oh, it might spawn other programs in the background, or load shared libraries for that. But no end user wants to launch a separate utility, via command line no less, for each of those tasks.
Whereas your average "unix roolz, dood" type thinks that a piss-poor collection of incomplete and mis-matched utilities are _THE_ way to solve any problem. They think that any user has nothing better to do than to write shell scripts involving grep, sed, and a dozen other utilities (all with different syntax and parameters) to get even the most trivial tasks done.
2. most programmers don't _like_ usability work. In fact, about half actively oppose usability. Sometimes in very trollish terms.
Don't even believe me. Look at the attitude towards usability in most of the FOSS camp. The general attitude is "meh. the interface is the least important part. The last 1%. We'll do the important parts, thank you very much. Then someone else can come do that last polish in an afternoon, if they really need it."
Coding clever hacks seems glamorous and cool. (Even if said hack is brain-dead and unneeded. No, we don't need yet another re-implementation of an input file, or hash map, thank you very much.) Everyone wants to do just the cool parts, and leave the "finishing touches" to some unworthy minion.
Whereas designing and coding a usable GUI is just work. There is nothing glamorous about it and it is a _lot_ of work. Far from being just that last 1%, it's often most of the work. Those cool hacks and algorithms are like making a cool engine for a car. But making that usable GUI around it, is making the rest of the car around that engine.
True story:
I was had a trouble with a game on the dreamcast and went on to ask on the Sega board about "the level where monsters jump out of a glowing pile."
Look at that phrase. Do you see anything obscene or insulting in it? Well, Sega's lame censorship filter did.
Let me narrow your choices down a bit. The offending part was: "of a glowing".
Still don't see anything offensive? How about this: "o F A G lowing".
Yep, the software was "smart" enough to figure out that if you chop and combine parts of _three_ different words, you end up with something offensive.
Geesh. I mean, not even Beavis and Butthead would have made that association. Thank God we have idiot programmers to make it for us, eh?
So, yes, I believe that the same vigilant(e) piece of software would have seen the "fart" in "of art".
"If cases were transparent Alumina then they would have the same properties as silica glass and you would have a nice greenhouse effect going on slowly (or not so slowly) frying your computer."
No they wouldn't, unless you leave your computer out in the sun or something.
We're way past the point where the heat inside a computer would simply be dissipated through the case. We now rely on fans to push warm air out and suck colder air in.
We've been past that point for over a decade. Even in an old 286 you likely had ar least the PSU fan.
Nowadays, it can get even more extreme. My case has 7 fans on the case alone, plus two more on the PSU. That's a lot of air circulated through the case.
So basically it REALLY doesn't matter what material you make your case of. There are already wooden cases, leather covered cases, or literally styrofoam cases. Yes, literally, some people put their computer in a styrofoam statue, thermally insulated by almost one foot of styrofoam in all directions.
As long as you pump enough air through it, you really won't see any difference in temperature.
As opposed to clicking on a rat to kill it, and then waiting for it to respawn? Well, gee, that's got to be so more exciting. Not.
Oh yeah, and better go solo at the end of nowhere. You wouldn't want to share that precioussss xp with other players. No time to lose! Gotta race to the next level, where you'll be allowed to beat slightly larger rats with a slightly larger stick.
And be sure to delude yourself that everyone will envy your über-levelled up character. Be sure to attach a list of characters and levels to every post. Yeah, that'll make everyone envious. Chicks will start begging you to let them bear your child because you have a level 50 sorcerer. Not.
See, your average MMORPG is boring, repetitive, mindless _work_. Unskilled blue-collar third-world manual labor. So repetitive and mindless, that a small shell script or zMud script could do that better. It's a brain-dead threadmill, for compulsive mouse-clickers.
They also try to outdo each other in cattering for soloers and anti-social types. I mean, phbt. Just because it's a MMO game, doesn't mean it ought to involve any social interaction. It obviously ought to involve everyone trying to avoid each other at all cost, and shout "kill stealer!" if you even get within 1000 yards of them. Right?
So, I don't know... a game which actually tries to promote at least _some_ interaction, seems to me like an improvement. Because the standard MMOs don't even need a "paint drying" mod. They're already at that point for me.
Getting 20 people to look at your statue is already a lot less boring than clicking on 20 rats to kill. It involves interaction. It also opens a lot more diverse possibilities than the mindless repetitive killing. You might simply bribe them. Or you might make some online friends. Or you might just go harrass every single stranger and hope some will take pity and help you pass the test. Etc.
Either way, it's not something you can solo out at the end of nowhere. You actually _need_ other players for that level-up.
Other tests can be even more extreme than that. Did you really make friends in that game or just acquaintances? How well do you know them? How far would you trust them? If one of them could steal a large part of your virtual wealth _and_ know there'd never be any proof against them, are you sure they wouldn't? See, that's something you can't pass by mindless repetitive clicking, either on rats or trees.
The Internet is an outstanding tool for finding raw data. (And 99% of it wrong, but hey.) Do you need the value of Pi? Sure, you'll find that on Google.
On the other hand, there are no jobs nowadays which require simply regurgitating memorized data. Noone will ever pay you to just know the value of Pi with 20 decimals. We have computers for that nowadays.
What a company needs is _solving_ _a_ _problem_.
1. It needs _skills_, which is something you won't find on Google. They're something you train. You can't be a chess master by just googling for "chess". And contrary to many clueless PHB's wet dream, you can't build a good, maintainable and secure program architecture by just hiring monkeys and telling the to google for "program architecture".
No, just finding 200+ patterns and tricks on the Internet and dumping them mindlessly into the program, won't actually make it a better architecture. It will just make a bloated unmaintainable monster, which has major performance issues too. Even on today's computers. Most of those cool tricks you find will be a brain-damaged liability, rather than help.
Someone needs to have the skill to actually filter and use that data. That's what study and experience give you, that Google can't.
2. The abbundance of conflicting data, or irrelevant data, is today the _problem_, not the solution. If you want to make, say, a business decision, the signal-to-noise ratio is such that you're literally deafened by noise and te signal is lost in it.
When Joe Manager wants to decide whether to do X or Y, he wants a concise study presenting the advantages, disadvantages and risks, on which to base that decision. What he finds on the Internet gazillions of blogs and posts along the lines of "X sucks", "Y blows", "X is un-american and should be outlawed", "Y will bring doom and economic crash upon us all", etc, 99% of which present no actual coherent reason.
I.e., what Joe Manager wants is _knowledge_, not raw data. Someone needs to have the skills to not just Google, but filter the noise out and extract the relevant bits.
And then not just copy-and-paste those bits, but apply them to the problem at hand and work some results out of them. I.e., not just "well, X seems more popular on the boards", but something like "for our situation, X will cost 5 million and 13 months to implement, and we're expecting to save 1.5 million per year. Whereas Y [...]"