If I was serious about computer education, I would have a variety of systems available. Probably including DOS, older versions of Mac or Windows software, [Unix/BSD/Linux] (perhaps with a multi-user setup), and then onward with fully blown current GUI's. Networking? That's the last thing I would want to teach.
I'd also want to teach electronics that are much more mechanical in design, since touchy-feely hands-on seems to be one of the best way to learn things for many people, and easier to understand and visualize than a mental image of a directory structure and more complicated OS concepts. Plus, we might finally have a nation that understands how to program their VCR.;)
You scared me for a second there. Lord of the Dance.
Really, even though it might be neat to get a bunch of people (including lovely Irish redheads:) together dancing in unison quickly, is it really nescessary?
Back on-topic, I still consider the adoption of Linux on the average desktop to be going at a faster pace than I would really expect. Better education (from qualified instructors) about computers in general in grade school would really help though.
To be honest, I'm also a right hander. Mousing is one of the few things that my left hand does extraordinarily better than my right, and I blame my dad. He's left handed.;)
Of course, in joining the 10-20% of people that mouse left handed, I've also had to deal with the rarity of left-handed mice, and have to settle for an ambidextrous mouse. It's somewhat difficult to find good ones with more than the standard number of buttons that fit right, if it's not specialized for one hand or another.
Case in point, remember 3DFX? Great hardware, great software interface, great linux support. Lousy longevity. They are gone, swallowed up by Nvidia. So all of the games that worked great on my voodoo 3 card now absolutely stink with an equivalently priced Nvidia card (maybe if I buy a newer card)
My point is not to bash nvidia, but to emphasize that the games that worked great with voodoo were specifically coded to take advantage of that card, and because of that, would almost have to make other cards look bad. If I had purchaced games that were coded for nvidia, then i would have seen the exact opposite effect.
If nvidia had a special subset of OpenGL (like say, Glide), then perhaps someone would have taken advantage of it. However, they instead supported making hardware that conformed to open standards (that yes, change with times, with input from many manufacturers), and maximizing the hardware to work within those. 3DFX apparently had problems when you didn't use Glide, and their direction for next-generation hardware was completely trumped by the already-available T&L-capable offerings of nvidia and ATI.
A side note, a very popular game, Half-Life, works wonderfully with either a Voodoo3 or TNT2, and nvidia's offering also had support for 32 bit color (for games that actually supported it - HL seemed to fake it;) )
Now what is the development team to do? Re code software so that every single video card is supported? Rotsa ruck. As soon as it goes gole, there will be 30 more cards that aren't in the package that will require the patch to be downloaded.
No, these days, vendors make backwards-compatible hardware, that has the capability of the old hardware as well as new functionality, at a usually-faster speed. In fact, they have unified drivers, that can let people upgrade or downgrade their hardware without un-/installing different software for that hardware. Also, they now usually rely on OpenGL or DirectX versions to handle what is possible with a graphics card, which means in many cases not having to tailor multiple graphics engines for graphics cards, and usually means locking out older hardware (not that that hardware would perform well in the first place). Bugs will always happen, and can be fixed. If a card doesn't support a feature of a standard correctly, it's the manufacturer's fault, and their drivers should be updated.
Contrast this to ANY console. Sure, I can purchase much better hardware for a PC, but every console developer knows exactly what hardware he/she is coding for, and doesn't have to waste 6 man-years coding for multiple cards. Everything works. Performance is squeezed out of those machines to the nth degree.
Yes, it is more efficient to only have a standard platform that never changes. That also means it never gets better/updated for 5 years.
I don't think that this will mean either platform will 'die' but until video card developers come up with a 'consensus' set of api's that developers can code for, then it will always seem that the user will need a custom pc to for each game to get the best performance out of that particular title.
You mean like OpenGL, or DirectX? Besides, you can never get the 'best performance' out of a game. We're still climbing the fps benchmarks for Quake3 at 500fps (which is completely rediculous). New hardware just performs better than old. You ought to be able to tell at a glance if Card A is going to be a phenomenally better performer than Card B these days (this isn't always the case, but just do a little research before you buy that GeForce4 MX just cause it has a '4' in the title), and the biggest difference impact of similar cards within the same pricerange is going to now be stability on your system.
Sure. The Age Of *, Diablo *, *craft *, Rollercoaster Tycoon *, GTA*. That's just on the PC.
* - insert your favorite sequel here
Of course, this also points out that many successful games are sequels of other proven successful games; and that you don't have to have a 3d engine to have a successful game, but just a good engine with good art and gameplay direction.
Also, in the realm of 3d engines, there are quite a few still out there, or will be coming out soon, for FPS style gameplay that although aren't as popular as the big two, can be just as powerful if used correctly. Of note: Serious Engine 1&2 (Serious Sam, with Alpha Black Zero, Nitro Family, and SS2 to come), Lithtech (NOLF, AvP), and Source (Half-Life 2, obviously).
I firmly believe that the next era or two of game engines will be a great equalizer for many games, based on the standardized technology in shaders and other APIs. We're increasingly hitting the boundaries between what baseline and top-of-the-line hardware is capable of producing, and the ability for artists to produce content to match in a timely and cost-efficient manner; the framework for a game engine to have seamless interoperability with more focused engines (sound, graphics, network, AI, file I/O, etc) is becoming easier to produce, and the shift of concentration from graphics to the other components will help bring about better games with the same graphics capability (a common ground, equal-opportunity sort of thing).
Ideally, in the future it won't matter what engines power your game, but rather what the game actually is. In the meantime, it's still a good time to be a gamer, there's a lot of quality out there.:)
Perhaps they both share it to the same third party that collects and stores the information, and supplies them with the materials and know-how and spam they send out.
Man, I'd love to have the chance again to play music using an inferior media that sometimes gets 'eaten' by my sound system. Why would you buy and use cassettes at all? The point is that no one really wants cassettes anymore, because they aren't as good. Demand and price go down.
I'll admit that CDs are more expensive than they should be. I have to wonder though, was this sort of pricing thing ever an issue with other media formats? Was a tape much more expensive than an LP? Where did 8-Tracks fall in line?
Because you're also paying for royalties (CD format), marketing, and the ease of use, compatibility, and increased data size. You're paying for the quality and demand of the format, not the cost to produce.
And this is less convoluted... how?
(disclaimer: I consider myself a Windows power-user, and very new to Mandrake/Debian. Also, I don't claim to know much about how bittorrent works in regards to servers and end nodes, or whatever the correct terminology is.)
I suppose my ideas for a more seamless solution would be more like the ed2k url protocols, but it would create problems of its own for file servers. My impression of bittorent is that it's more complicated in its distributed system than I can really comprehend at the moment.;)
Call me a Joe User; I would rather just use a protocol, say bt://, and have my operating system handle which program is associated with that. I click the link in my browser for a file, it gives it to my torrent program, and it talks to the file server, which handles any sort of server/node tracking by way of naturally understanding bt:// and how to associate its files with its database. I imagine this would put more burden on the servers than users.
Are there major problems with this sort of system? Is it something that is easily integrated into it? I just see for regular users that only want to download a file, that it is not simple enough to one day replace the basic download mechanisms we have in place today, as files get larger and larger (movies, games, music, other media) and more people want them. The market is driven by people who want to know less about how things work, and just that it does work. I think that using existing standards may keep things more consistent and understandable for the average user.
Plum Island, by Nelson DeMille, is an excellent laugh-till-your-side-hurts detective novel. I'm suprised it hasn't been made into a DeMille movie yet.:)
It also has a sequel, The Lion's Game, which isn't quite as good, but still worth the read.
Personally, I think that having to use a file to launch an application to join the torrent network is a bit convoluted.
I think that ideally, the most a user should see is bt://sitename.domain/file.zip, or something similar. The OS/browser should be able to handle that sort of protocol, and send it to the right application or use an integrated bit torrent client to get the file.
Correct me if I'm really wrong on this, or if it already exists. This would also be a welcome addition to Mozilla, I think.
I hope you didn't ACTUALLY switch to Geico. I haven't ever heard a good thing about them from anyone (read: many people from work/school over the years, many different claims). You can get competitive/better rates, and much better service from other places, and might actually not get dropped from their service the moment you're involved in an accident.
Must have took too long typing out my submission.:(
Oh well. I think anyone that actually reads any of the review sites that Michael so prominently displays logos of on his own site, would realize they haven't done a review of his computers.
At least Dell et. al. don't use completely outrageous, bogus, dubious, blanket statements about the performance of the hardware they use in their computers. Guys like this give startups and AMD a bad name to average buyers.
I keep wondering why larger states are still headed by a generally same about of people as smaller ones, as far as the public is concerned. In the past, we have split up states, and does anyone else think that a North California and South California would be out of the realm of feasibility?
It's the citizens of California the AG is sworn to protect.
Yes, and he is "protecting" them from the evils of P2P sharing of copyrighted material and other illegal actions. It's evil.
Duh, they just contract out the Henson Co. It's much cheaper than relying on Sony or Mitsubishi to make a robot version (plus, there's that language barr--er, nevermind, I forgot about Schwartz-his-name)
Slashdot Mirror
So essentially, it's more like NetFlix, on a larger, musical, scope... right?
But does it have orbiting brain lasers? I think not!
This just in! Capitalism is DYING!
Generally speaking, they have these already. They're called Pilot Licenses.
I'd also want to teach electronics that are much more mechanical in design, since touchy-feely hands-on seems to be one of the best way to learn things for many people, and easier to understand and visualize than a mental image of a directory structure and more complicated OS concepts. Plus, we might finally have a nation that understands how to program their VCR. ;)
Really, even though it might be neat to get a bunch of people (including lovely Irish redheads :) together dancing in unison quickly, is it really nescessary?
Back on-topic, I still consider the adoption of Linux on the average desktop to be going at a faster pace than I would really expect. Better education (from qualified instructors) about computers in general in grade school would really help though.
Of course, in joining the 10-20% of people that mouse left handed, I've also had to deal with the rarity of left-handed mice, and have to settle for an ambidextrous mouse. It's somewhat difficult to find good ones with more than the standard number of buttons that fit right, if it's not specialized for one hand or another.
I already use my mouse with my left hand, you insensitive clods!
My point is not to bash nvidia, but to emphasize that the games that worked great with voodoo were specifically coded to take advantage of that card, and because of that, would almost have to make other cards look bad. If I had purchaced games that were coded for nvidia, then i would have seen the exact opposite effect.
If nvidia had a special subset of OpenGL (like say, Glide), then perhaps someone would have taken advantage of it. However, they instead supported making hardware that conformed to open standards (that yes, change with times, with input from many manufacturers), and maximizing the hardware to work within those. 3DFX apparently had problems when you didn't use Glide, and their direction for next-generation hardware was completely trumped by the already-available T&L-capable offerings of nvidia and ATI.
A side note, a very popular game, Half-Life, works wonderfully with either a Voodoo3 or TNT2, and nvidia's offering also had support for 32 bit color (for games that actually supported it - HL seemed to fake it ;) )
Now what is the development team to do? Re code software so that every single video card is supported? Rotsa ruck. As soon as it goes gole, there will be 30 more cards that aren't in the package that will require the patch to be downloaded.
No, these days, vendors make backwards-compatible hardware, that has the capability of the old hardware as well as new functionality, at a usually-faster speed. In fact, they have unified drivers, that can let people upgrade or downgrade their hardware without un-/installing different software for that hardware. Also, they now usually rely on OpenGL or DirectX versions to handle what is possible with a graphics card, which means in many cases not having to tailor multiple graphics engines for graphics cards, and usually means locking out older hardware (not that that hardware would perform well in the first place). Bugs will always happen, and can be fixed. If a card doesn't support a feature of a standard correctly, it's the manufacturer's fault, and their drivers should be updated.
Contrast this to ANY console. Sure, I can purchase much better hardware for a PC, but every console developer knows exactly what hardware he/she is coding for, and doesn't have to waste 6 man-years coding for multiple cards. Everything works. Performance is squeezed out of those machines to the nth degree.
Yes, it is more efficient to only have a standard platform that never changes. That also means it never gets better/updated for 5 years.
I don't think that this will mean either platform will 'die' but until video card developers come up with a 'consensus' set of api's that developers can code for, then it will always seem that the user will need a custom pc to for each game to get the best performance out of that particular title.
You mean like OpenGL, or DirectX? Besides, you can never get the 'best performance' out of a game. We're still climbing the fps benchmarks for Quake3 at 500fps (which is completely rediculous). New hardware just performs better than old. You ought to be able to tell at a glance if Card A is going to be a phenomenally better performer than Card B these days (this isn't always the case, but just do a little research before you buy that GeForce4 MX just cause it has a '4' in the title), and the biggest difference impact of similar cards within the same pricerange is going to now be stability on your system.
* - insert your favorite sequel here
Of course, this also points out that many successful games are sequels of other proven successful games; and that you don't have to have a 3d engine to have a successful game, but just a good engine with good art and gameplay direction.
Also, in the realm of 3d engines, there are quite a few still out there, or will be coming out soon, for FPS style gameplay that although aren't as popular as the big two, can be just as powerful if used correctly. Of note: Serious Engine 1&2 (Serious Sam, with Alpha Black Zero, Nitro Family, and SS2 to come), Lithtech (NOLF, AvP), and Source (Half-Life 2, obviously).
I firmly believe that the next era or two of game engines will be a great equalizer for many games, based on the standardized technology in shaders and other APIs. We're increasingly hitting the boundaries between what baseline and top-of-the-line hardware is capable of producing, and the ability for artists to produce content to match in a timely and cost-efficient manner; the framework for a game engine to have seamless interoperability with more focused engines (sound, graphics, network, AI, file I/O, etc) is becoming easier to produce, and the shift of concentration from graphics to the other components will help bring about better games with the same graphics capability (a common ground, equal-opportunity sort of thing).
Ideally, in the future it won't matter what engines power your game, but rather what the game actually is. In the meantime, it's still a good time to be a gamer, there's a lot of quality out there. :)
P.S. I am *not* the messiah.
Perhaps they both share it to the same third party that collects and stores the information, and supplies them with the materials and know-how and spam they send out.
Man, I'd love to have the chance again to play music using an inferior media that sometimes gets 'eaten' by my sound system. Why would you buy and use cassettes at all? The point is that no one really wants cassettes anymore, because they aren't as good. Demand and price go down. I'll admit that CDs are more expensive than they should be. I have to wonder though, was this sort of pricing thing ever an issue with other media formats? Was a tape much more expensive than an LP? Where did 8-Tracks fall in line?
Doesn't photocopying a large amount cost more than just buying a copy of the book in the first place?
Because you're also paying for royalties (CD format), marketing, and the ease of use, compatibility, and increased data size. You're paying for the quality and demand of the format, not the cost to produce.
You're now permitted to groan at my awful joke.
I suppose my ideas for a more seamless solution would be more like the ed2k url protocols, but it would create problems of its own for file servers. My impression of bittorent is that it's more complicated in its distributed system than I can really comprehend at the moment. ;)
Call me a Joe User; I would rather just use a protocol, say bt://, and have my operating system handle which program is associated with that. I click the link in my browser for a file, it gives it to my torrent program, and it talks to the file server, which handles any sort of server/node tracking by way of naturally understanding bt:// and how to associate its files with its database. I imagine this would put more burden on the servers than users.
Are there major problems with this sort of system? Is it something that is easily integrated into it? I just see for regular users that only want to download a file, that it is not simple enough to one day replace the basic download mechanisms we have in place today, as files get larger and larger (movies, games, music, other media) and more people want them. The market is driven by people who want to know less about how things work, and just that it does work. I think that using existing standards may keep things more consistent and understandable for the average user.
It also has a sequel, The Lion's Game, which isn't quite as good, but still worth the read.
I think that ideally, the most a user should see is bt://sitename.domain/file.zip, or something similar. The OS/browser should be able to handle that sort of protocol, and send it to the right application or use an integrated bit torrent client to get the file.
Correct me if I'm really wrong on this, or if it already exists. This would also be a welcome addition to Mozilla, I think.
I hope you didn't ACTUALLY switch to Geico. I haven't ever heard a good thing about them from anyone (read: many people from work/school over the years, many different claims). You can get competitive/better rates, and much better service from other places, and might actually not get dropped from their service the moment you're involved in an accident.
At least Dell et. al. don't use completely outrageous, bogus, dubious, blanket statements about the performance of the hardware they use in their computers. Guys like this give startups and AMD a bad name to average buyers.
It's the citizens of California the AG is sworn to protect.
Yes, and he is "protecting" them from the evils of P2P sharing of copyrighted material and other illegal actions. It's evil.
Yes, I'd much rather be an Adobe-whore than a Microsoft-whore. It's good to know there's a nice company like Adobe to keep my best interests at heart!
Man, it just makes me want to SOCK them.
Duh, they just contract out the Henson Co. It's much cheaper than relying on Sony or Mitsubishi to make a robot version (plus, there's that language barr--er, nevermind, I forgot about Schwartz-his-name)