As a Dapper user since before it was cool I'd like to warn everyone using Apple products, especially iBooks and other slightly more supported hardware, against upgrading just yet. A severe bug was introduced having to do with the ATI cards in laptops on May 29 that causes persistant systems freezes. (Why would you upgrade all of xorg two days before release?) The errors are unrecoverable and require a system reboot. There hasn't been much in the way of response, as everyone seems to be celebrating the release of Dapper.
> This is extremely dangerous given Microsoft's history of crushing anyone who's in their way.
While I don't contest your depiction of Microsoft's history (and, personally, I agree with your paranoid rhetoric) there's a very important assumption wrapped up in the above sentence that doesn't apply to the F/OSS community. There's no single point of failure in the system. Netscape bit the dust because it was a single company that relied on a constant influx of funds from it's browser. Microsoft cut that off, so they died. If Microsoft took out Novell tomorrow (who, unless I am mistaken, holds all the copyrights for Mono and so would be the sole party open to attack) the movement would still go along much the same as before.
It's hard to kill a distributed network of hackers, academics and corporations. What's the harm in Mono, especially if Novell is the one sticking it's neck out? If Microsoft does attack we lose, what, potentially a handful of applications and maybe the parts of GNOME relying on the contested libraries? Maybe Novell would tank?
I understand the paranoia, just not the conclusion.
>...And the OSS community has just gotten into bed with them.
Given your link to the Mono project were the words "trap of the enemy" I'm going to assume that you're stating that the development of Mono is some sort of community deal with the devil. I guess I don't quite see how this is true, given that Mono is just a re-implementation of emca standards. There has been some worry as to how the MIT license of the Mono class-libraries could be manipulated by various companies, but, if I recall, it was Intel that insisted on the license and not Microsoft. Mono doesn't count as Free (freedom) software because of this, but it does count as Open according to the OSI.
So, what's the deal? How is re-implementing a standard jumping into bed with the company that just so happened to have created the standard? Are those that use gjc, likewise, jumping into bed with Sun?
==PEDANTIC MODE ON==
Also, to say that the OSS community has jumped into bed with anyone is a bit of a falsehood, given how nebulous we are. Not everyone, on the founding of the Mono project, said to themselves, "Fuck yes! An open.Net!"
but there's really no substitute for learning a new operating system like being 16, being in a special school for gifted kids that completely stiffles any socializing after 8PM, being without a lady friend, having the drive to learn new things, and having the intense desire to show that really annoying kid two floors up that he's got shit for brains.
>...then they must be using Windows or have a broken compiler.
Ah, not so. Many distros, especially Debian based, ship without a compiler or build tools. It's a security precaution. No gcc, less of an easy way for badies to compile code.
I am intrigued by your son's theory, and would like to know more. (No, seriously, I'm really curious. For some reason debating Star Wars is great fun.)
Assuming you're not being overly pedantic and are pointing out that {apt,port,portage,...} do happen to use the internet for data transfer then you are wrong. However, if you feel that you aren't, I'd love to hear why.
All of that, with the exception of dicking around with the WindowServer, is applicable to the Mac.
I disagree.
I like being able to dick around the system (at any level) when I'm bored if I feel like it.
As you've already pointed out I can't play with the GUI, that's closed. However, that's a really small part of the whole. Below the GUI is the commandline, which is simply GNU spread over the top of Darwin. But, as the article and previous discussions have pointed out, XNU isn't availiable to be diddled with. Were's the code for that, especially the x86 part? Besides, if all I wanted to do was play with GNU code I have no reason to not keep using Linux. The unique bits of OSX are locked. While that's their right it makes the whole system uninteresting to me, and intollerable to use in part.
I like having centralized repositories of software.
You contend that such things exist for OSX. While that is technically true, I assume you refer to fink or darwinports, why do I still have to download updates to parts of the system through a GUI tool whereas with, say, apt, ports, portage, or any number of distro-specific things I can pull all my software updates through the same consistant interface, in addition to pulling new software for no cost. Ignoring that, fink and darwinports both pale in comparison to other similar systems, likely just because of their smaller user communities or poor integration with the overall system. Going even further, why can't I swap out the desktop-environment entirely and pull the proprietary update tools up from GNOME or KDE? I can install those with fink or darwinports. Why don't they Just Work?
I like using a system that's been designed for ease of development.
With apt I can pull numerous python modules, c/c++ libraries, perl abominations, in addition to all the documentation for those things with a few key-strokes. fink and darwinports just don't cut it, so in a lot of cases on OSX I'd have to go find those projects, satisfy their dependancies by hand, build them, pray that worked, then code. Which sounds easier? You might contest that, of course, most coding time is spent inside your own code and not in the process of assembling external parts of your machine. I would contest that as {vim,emacs} is availiable everywhere it's really no more useful or productive to use OSX. To code I'm just going to drop down into a command line anyway. So there's no real reason to use one or the other, unless one takes into account that sometimes days are wasted trying to track down dependancy issues. Keeping that in mind a Free system is more productive then.
Plus, there's the whole Freedom thing, lack of DRM, open code for security auditing (if that's your thing) but I'll leave that alone.
I don't like closed systems. I don't like being given the One Way to Do Things, even if that One Way has obviously been well thought out. I don't like farting around the internet looking for software. I don't like installing all of the cruft that comes with Xcode just to get gcc. I don't like being unable to link the command line with the GUI.
I like my Freedom. I like being able to dick around with my system (at any level) when I'm bored if I feel like it. I like the feeling of doing clever things with source code. I like having centralized repositories of software. I like using a system that's been designed for ease of development.
I like GNU, I like Linux and I like being in control of _my_ computer. Granted I'm not a typical user by far, but we're out there.
I've heard this concern a lot about GM foods. In some cases it makes sense to worry about crossbreeding. Rice that glows in the dark, for instance, might not be the greatest thing. But what's the harm of having rice whose side-effect happens to limit the effects of deadly diarrhea? Certain sorts of prunes contain more fiber and are more likely to make me poo liquid. Should I protest over my neighbor growing that sort of prune tree next door because it might crossbread with my normal prune tree?
Unfortunately, according to the wikipedia link you provided, we can get the source to the Singularity project, meaning it's of little worth to anyone outside Microsoft Research.
Today, the PC most needs to become quiet and reliable.
It most needs, or you want most? Besides, have you heard mini-computers these days? They're pretty silent, making no noise except under heavy load.
It needs to lose the moving parts. This would have already happened if we didn't keep adding fluff just because we can.
Interesting reasoning you've got there. So, all of those thousands of people that researched 3D algorithms for the past decade have been doing so to add fluff to PCs. In addition, if those people had not been working to add fluff to PCs they would have instead been working on solid state devices and motorless cooling apparatuses?
We reached attractive usability long ago, and are now adding crud just to be new and shiny.
Actually, in many cases, we're adding new things to find better ways of doing things. Sure, sometimes those ways don't work out or seem really dumb (like Project Looking Glass which you so crankily dismissed) but other times they are really very useful.
An example: I work for the Xiangtangshan Caves Project at the University of Chicago and assemble scans of bits of statues from 12th century China. The software that we use has optional transparency on all of its floating dialogs. Making them completely transparent allows me to see more of the shell scans, meaning I work faster and more accurately. Having 3D drivers is absolutely necessary in this situation and, additionally, transparency is a boon. I submit, trollish sir, that you have a rather narrow, closed view of how 3D computing can be of use. (Actually, it seems you've a narrow mind on many things, considering that you equated anything other than having a wife and job as a waste of time. However, I digress.)
I don't know, that sounds pretty familiar. Hmm... let's try this:
Fellow panelists echoed this sentiments, telling a room full of scruffy hackers, academics, and professional software developers that moonlight as "free" software hackers that the path to entering the $7-billion market is fraught with more pitfalls than DOS boxes running BBSes. While opportunities for hobbyists do exist, no serious software can be supported by any less than paid programmers working for corporations. Hobbyists often have to deal with past projects that pigeonhole them and potentially hamper future expansion.
I am of the opinion that Free (think freedom) games can do very well in the current climate, assuming that you don't play the same rules as everyone. Games that are simple at their core but allow for easy community extension and are backed with a strong sense of what the eventual story should be, while putting an emphasis on the game actually being fun to play could probably get a sizable following. Sure, you won't make millions and you won't be able to animate the fur of the rats in your film-noir inspired MMORPG revenge game, but you and a bunch of other people might have fun with it.
That's the point of games, to have fun (and maybe learn), right?
Did anybody else using it find the experience frustrating? I thought the search function was pretty able, but given that my browser already comes with a perfectly functional scroll bar I don't see the reason to over-ride it with a javascript jerky bar from hell.
But maybe I'm just cranky today.
Anyone else think the scroll bar was a bit inappropriate?
I'm an American student at the University of Chicago, which is a pretty okay school and should provide a general idea of my educational background. That said, my background has actually made me less likely to compete in such competitions, more of an emphasis throughout my public and University education has been placed on individual or tiny group craftsmanship. A nifty application that solves a problem elegantly or a well coded toy that taught me something new has always been more likely to elicit a better response than competition trophies.
For me, at least, it's been a feedback loop. The cooler the toy, the better response, the cooler the toy has to become and so on. Personally, I think it's much neater to have made a simple versioning filesystem than to place in the top three of a competition. But, hey, my background is slightly weird, so it could be just me.
Re:Annoyance as a marketing technique?
on
Explorer Destroyer
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· Score: 1
Hehe, oh dear. No, I don't. However, my post certainly does make it sound that way.:)
Re:Annoyance as a marketing technique?
on
Explorer Destroyer
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· Score: 1
I don't have a pun, but I do have this: Bunnies bleed furiously while beating off behind bakeries.
Re:Annoyance as a marketing technique?
on
Explorer Destroyer
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· Score: 1
That's very true. Really, though, how many people who object to eating meat on moral grounds (I'm implicitly assuming here that vegetarians are so on moral grounds, not for medical reasons.) will feel comfortable wearing a bunny fir coat that still drips with their blood?
Re:Annoyance as a marketing technique?
on
Explorer Destroyer
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· Score: 1
Please note that I never said anything about eating the bunnies, that's far too practical a death. I said I would skin the bunnies and wear their bloody firs as a coat, casually discarding the meat.
The point being that when someone is particularly annoying I often feel the urge to do exactly the opposite of what they advocate. Mindlessly slaughtering bunnies for wasteful coats is pretty diametrically opposed to the stance an annoying PETA person would take.
As an aside, not all PETA people are annoying, just a very visible few. It's kind of like ESR and the Open Source movement.
Annoyance as a marketing technique?
on
Explorer Destroyer
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Is it just me or does annoying the people you're trying to attract sound like a poor idea? I know when I am annoyed by something I'm more likely to resist. For example, whenever I meet militant PETA people I really want to go kill baby bunnies, skin them, and wear their bloody firs as a coat... and I'm vegetarian!
I think if I were an IE user I'd refuse to use Firefox on these grounds. Impress me on technical or philosophical merits, not by being a bully.
Re:That's an okay idea, but...
on
Abandoned Games
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· Score: 1
Before I begin, in case you didn't pick it up, I'm reading the Arabic and Greek poetry in the original. You brought up Latin, and I am very well aware of the impossibility of 1:1 natural language translation.
With that in mind, it would be benificial to move away from using natural language based analogies. The reasoning is very simple. Natural languages are ambigous by (lack of) design where as computer languages are not. Comparing the two is fruitless. So, moving away from natural language things...
I just disagree. Emulation, by nature, is intended to offer the *exact same experience*, or as close as is possible, to the original one.
It's the "as close as possible" that's really the rub.
We have access to the original code - the machine code. That's code too. Graphics and sounds, same; albeit in the way they were encoded to interface with the game engine.
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that you've seen machine code. You know as well as I that this is simply not enough to reconstruct the original sources, let alone the graphics and sound independant from the rest of the machine code (What if the sounds or graphics aren't statically linked? In this case they are lost.). In addition, it's pretty goddamn hard to reconstruct software from machine code, even assuming you have a perfect machine and perfect documentation on the machine itself. Incidentally, future historians are not going to be very likely to have this perfect documentation.
If anything, emulation is a better, more authentic way to carry forward antiquity than translation to modern language.
Here's the funny thing about emulation. It doesn't really work all that well for various reasons: undocumented hardware errors, undocumented hardware features, unforseen consequences of various hardware components, so on and so forth. Source code, just being a sequence of logical structures, is usually a little easier to figure out than in-existant hardware. Not always, mind you, but at least usually. (An ideal situation would be one wherein a computer historian had documentation to the hardware and the code.)
Emulation is not the answer, ultimately and especially as we move farther away from having access to the specific hardware which we are emulating. If it were, the guys that have been working to emulate the NES would have been done a long time ago. Why aren't they? The cartridges contained undocumented hardware. Sure, they have the ROMs, but no real idea how all those 0s and 1s are supposed to work with the cartridges. Another, very good example, would be NASA losing parts of old probe data simply because they no longer know how to decode certain strings of 0s and 1s. Having the old hardware, or emulating it, doesn't really solve the problem. It just gets transfered in that case.
I'd say that having the source (including graphics, sound, whatever) would be vastly preferable to having only machine code. The logical structure human readable code is easier to parse, in areas where the code is non-portable you can tell from the source how the hardware should approximately behave (this would especially be nice with hardware documentation), plus, and perhaps most importantly, people can look back at all this code and figure out where parts of their world came from and how it got this way.
I suppose, really, I just want as much of my present to be transferable to the future as possible. Binary blobs make it that much less likely that parts of my culture will be availiable to the future.
Re:That's an okay idea, but...
on
Abandoned Games
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· Score: 1
Yes I was. Thank you for pointing that out.
Re:That's an okay idea, but...
on
Abandoned Games
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· Score: 1
Your analogy is broken. While I cannot read ancient Latin (who brought up Latin again?) someone can. That someone can then write a translation from the original, or as close to original as has been found. Your analogy breaks because, in the case of games, we do not have access to the original code, graphics or sounds. No one can make a translation (rewrite, port, whatever) because no one can see the original.
Emulation is not the equivalent of translation. Emulation is the equivalent of writting the original text down after it's been transmitted by mouth for a couple hundred years and then translating that.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's the free xorg driver that's barfing.
As a Dapper user since before it was cool I'd like to warn everyone using Apple products, especially iBooks and other slightly more supported hardware, against upgrading just yet. A severe bug was introduced having to do with the ATI cards in laptops on May 29 that causes persistant systems freezes. (Why would you upgrade all of xorg two days before release?) The errors are unrecoverable and require a system reboot. There hasn't been much in the way of response, as everyone seems to be celebrating the release of Dapper.
More information can be found in the forums and launchpad.net.
> This is extremely dangerous given Microsoft's history of crushing anyone who's in their way.
While I don't contest your depiction of Microsoft's history (and, personally, I agree with your paranoid rhetoric) there's a very important assumption wrapped up in the above sentence that doesn't apply to the F/OSS community. There's no single point of failure in the system. Netscape bit the dust because it was a single company that relied on a constant influx of funds from it's browser. Microsoft cut that off, so they died. If Microsoft took out Novell tomorrow (who, unless I am mistaken, holds all the copyrights for Mono and so would be the sole party open to attack) the movement would still go along much the same as before.
It's hard to kill a distributed network of hackers, academics and corporations. What's the harm in Mono, especially if Novell is the one sticking it's neck out? If Microsoft does attack we lose, what, potentially a handful of applications and maybe the parts of GNOME relying on the contested libraries? Maybe Novell would tank?
I understand the paranoia, just not the conclusion.
> ...And the OSS community has just gotten into bed with them.
.Net!"
Given your link to the Mono project were the words "trap of the enemy" I'm going to assume that you're stating that the development of Mono is some sort of community deal with the devil. I guess I don't quite see how this is true, given that Mono is just a re-implementation of emca standards. There has been some worry as to how the MIT license of the Mono class-libraries could be manipulated by various companies, but, if I recall, it was Intel that insisted on the license and not Microsoft. Mono doesn't count as Free (freedom) software because of this, but it does count as Open according to the OSI.
So, what's the deal? How is re-implementing a standard jumping into bed with the company that just so happened to have created the standard? Are those that use gjc, likewise, jumping into bed with Sun?
==PEDANTIC MODE ON==
Also, to say that the OSS community has jumped into bed with anyone is a bit of a falsehood, given how nebulous we are. Not everyone, on the founding of the Mono project, said to themselves, "Fuck yes! An open
==PEDANTIC MODE OFF==
but there's really no substitute for learning a new operating system like being 16, being in a special school for gifted kids that completely stiffles any socializing after 8PM, being without a lady friend, having the drive to learn new things, and having the intense desire to show that really annoying kid two floors up that he's got shit for brains.
Everyone has their own method, I suppose.
>...then they must be using Windows or have a broken compiler.
Ah, not so. Many distros, especially Debian based, ship without a compiler or build tools. It's a security precaution. No gcc, less of an easy way for badies to compile code.
I am intrigued by your son's theory, and would like to know more. (No, seriously, I'm really curious. For some reason debating Star Wars is great fun.)
Assuming you're not being overly pedantic and are pointing out that {apt,port,portage,...} do happen to use the internet for data transfer then you are wrong. However, if you feel that you aren't, I'd love to hear why.
All of that, with the exception of dicking around with the WindowServer, is applicable to the Mac.
I disagree.
I like being able to dick around the system (at any level) when I'm bored if I feel like it.
As you've already pointed out I can't play with the GUI, that's closed. However, that's a really small part of the whole. Below the GUI is the commandline, which is simply GNU spread over the top of Darwin. But, as the article and previous discussions have pointed out, XNU isn't availiable to be diddled with. Were's the code for that, especially the x86 part? Besides, if all I wanted to do was play with GNU code I have no reason to not keep using Linux. The unique bits of OSX are locked. While that's their right it makes the whole system uninteresting to me, and intollerable to use in part.
I like having centralized repositories of software.
You contend that such things exist for OSX. While that is technically true, I assume you refer to fink or darwinports, why do I still have to download updates to parts of the system through a GUI tool whereas with, say, apt, ports, portage, or any number of distro-specific things I can pull all my software updates through the same consistant interface, in addition to pulling new software for no cost. Ignoring that, fink and darwinports both pale in comparison to other similar systems, likely just because of their smaller user communities or poor integration with the overall system. Going even further, why can't I swap out the desktop-environment entirely and pull the proprietary update tools up from GNOME or KDE? I can install those with fink or darwinports. Why don't they Just Work?
I like using a system that's been designed for ease of development.
With apt I can pull numerous python modules, c/c++ libraries, perl abominations, in addition to all the documentation for those things with a few key-strokes. fink and darwinports just don't cut it, so in a lot of cases on OSX I'd have to go find those projects, satisfy their dependancies by hand, build them, pray that worked, then code. Which sounds easier? You might contest that, of course, most coding time is spent inside your own code and not in the process of assembling external parts of your machine. I would contest that as {vim,emacs} is availiable everywhere it's really no more useful or productive to use OSX. To code I'm just going to drop down into a command line anyway. So there's no real reason to use one or the other, unless one takes into account that sometimes days are wasted trying to track down dependancy issues. Keeping that in mind a Free system is more productive then.
Plus, there's the whole Freedom thing, lack of DRM, open code for security auditing (if that's your thing) but I'll leave that alone.
Even though I own an iBook G4 I don't want to!
I don't like closed systems. I don't like being given the One Way to Do Things, even if that One Way has obviously been well thought out. I don't like farting around the internet looking for software. I don't like installing all of the cruft that comes with Xcode just to get gcc. I don't like being unable to link the command line with the GUI.
I like my Freedom. I like being able to dick around with my system (at any level) when I'm bored if I feel like it. I like the feeling of doing clever things with source code. I like having centralized repositories of software. I like using a system that's been designed for ease of development.
I like GNU, I like Linux and I like being in control of _my_ computer. Granted I'm not a typical user by far, but we're out there.
I've heard this concern a lot about GM foods. In some cases it makes sense to worry about crossbreeding. Rice that glows in the dark, for instance, might not be the greatest thing. But what's the harm of having rice whose side-effect happens to limit the effects of deadly diarrhea? Certain sorts of prunes contain more fiber and are more likely to make me poo liquid. Should I protest over my neighbor growing that sort of prune tree next door because it might crossbread with my normal prune tree?
Unfortunately, according to the wikipedia link you provided, we can get the source to the Singularity project, meaning it's of little worth to anyone outside Microsoft Research.
Today, the PC most needs to become quiet and reliable.
It most needs, or you want most? Besides, have you heard mini-computers these days? They're pretty silent, making no noise except under heavy load.
It needs to lose the moving parts. This would have already happened if we didn't keep adding fluff just because we can.
Interesting reasoning you've got there. So, all of those thousands of people that researched 3D algorithms for the past decade have been doing so to add fluff to PCs. In addition, if those people had not been working to add fluff to PCs they would have instead been working on solid state devices and motorless cooling apparatuses?
We reached attractive usability long ago, and are now adding crud just to be new and shiny.
Actually, in many cases, we're adding new things to find better ways of doing things. Sure, sometimes those ways don't work out or seem really dumb (like Project Looking Glass which you so crankily dismissed) but other times they are really very useful.
An example: I work for the Xiangtangshan Caves Project at the University of Chicago and assemble scans of bits of statues from 12th century China. The software that we use has optional transparency on all of its floating dialogs. Making them completely transparent allows me to see more of the shell scans, meaning I work faster and more accurately. Having 3D drivers is absolutely necessary in this situation and, additionally, transparency is a boon. I submit, trollish sir, that you have a rather narrow, closed view of how 3D computing can be of use. (Actually, it seems you've a narrow mind on many things, considering that you equated anything other than having a wife and job as a waste of time. However, I digress.)
I don't know, that sounds pretty familiar. Hmm... let's try this:
Fellow panelists echoed this sentiments, telling a room full of scruffy hackers, academics, and professional software developers that moonlight as "free" software hackers that the path to entering the $7-billion market is fraught with more pitfalls than DOS boxes running BBSes. While opportunities for hobbyists do exist, no serious software can be supported by any less than paid programmers working for corporations. Hobbyists often have to deal with past projects that pigeonhole them and potentially hamper future expansion.
I am of the opinion that Free (think freedom) games can do very well in the current climate, assuming that you don't play the same rules as everyone. Games that are simple at their core but allow for easy community extension and are backed with a strong sense of what the eventual story should be, while putting an emphasis on the game actually being fun to play could probably get a sizable following. Sure, you won't make millions and you won't be able to animate the fur of the rats in your film-noir inspired MMORPG revenge game, but you and a bunch of other people might have fun with it.
That's the point of games, to have fun (and maybe learn), right?
Did anybody else using it find the experience frustrating? I thought the search function was pretty able, but given that my browser already comes with a perfectly functional scroll bar I don't see the reason to over-ride it with a javascript jerky bar from hell.
But maybe I'm just cranky today.
Anyone else think the scroll bar was a bit inappropriate?
I'm an American student at the University of Chicago, which is a pretty okay school and should provide a general idea of my educational background. That said, my background has actually made me less likely to compete in such competitions, more of an emphasis throughout my public and University education has been placed on individual or tiny group craftsmanship. A nifty application that solves a problem elegantly or a well coded toy that taught me something new has always been more likely to elicit a better response than competition trophies.
For me, at least, it's been a feedback loop. The cooler the toy, the better response, the cooler the toy has to become and so on. Personally, I think it's much neater to have made a simple versioning filesystem than to place in the top three of a competition. But, hey, my background is slightly weird, so it could be just me.
Boo! Someone get the hook!
Hehe, oh dear. No, I don't. However, my post certainly does make it sound that way. :)
I don't have a pun, but I do have this: Bunnies bleed furiously while beating off behind bakeries.
That's very true. Really, though, how many people who object to eating meat on moral grounds (I'm implicitly assuming here that vegetarians are so on moral grounds, not for medical reasons.) will feel comfortable wearing a bunny fir coat that still drips with their blood?
Please note that I never said anything about eating the bunnies, that's far too practical a death. I said I would skin the bunnies and wear their bloody firs as a coat, casually discarding the meat.
The point being that when someone is particularly annoying I often feel the urge to do exactly the opposite of what they advocate. Mindlessly slaughtering bunnies for wasteful coats is pretty diametrically opposed to the stance an annoying PETA person would take.
As an aside, not all PETA people are annoying, just a very visible few. It's kind of like ESR and the Open Source movement.
Is it just me or does annoying the people you're trying to attract sound like a poor idea? I know when I am annoyed by something I'm more likely to resist. For example, whenever I meet militant PETA people I really want to go kill baby bunnies, skin them, and wear their bloody firs as a coat... and I'm vegetarian!
I think if I were an IE user I'd refuse to use Firefox on these grounds. Impress me on technical or philosophical merits, not by being a bully.
Before I begin, in case you didn't pick it up, I'm reading the Arabic and Greek poetry in the original. You brought up Latin, and I am very well aware of the impossibility of 1:1 natural language translation.
With that in mind, it would be benificial to move away from using natural language based analogies. The reasoning is very simple. Natural languages are ambigous by (lack of) design where as computer languages are not. Comparing the two is fruitless. So, moving away from natural language things...
I just disagree. Emulation, by nature, is intended to offer the *exact same experience*, or as close as is possible, to the original one.
It's the "as close as possible" that's really the rub.
We have access to the original code - the machine code. That's code too. Graphics and sounds, same; albeit in the way they were encoded to interface with the game engine.
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that you've seen machine code. You know as well as I that this is simply not enough to reconstruct the original sources, let alone the graphics and sound independant from the rest of the machine code (What if the sounds or graphics aren't statically linked? In this case they are lost.). In addition, it's pretty goddamn hard to reconstruct software from machine code, even assuming you have a perfect machine and perfect documentation on the machine itself. Incidentally, future historians are not going to be very likely to have this perfect documentation.
If anything, emulation is a better, more authentic way to carry forward antiquity than translation to modern language.
Here's the funny thing about emulation. It doesn't really work all that well for various reasons: undocumented hardware errors, undocumented hardware features, unforseen consequences of various hardware components, so on and so forth. Source code, just being a sequence of logical structures, is usually a little easier to figure out than in-existant hardware. Not always, mind you, but at least usually. (An ideal situation would be one wherein a computer historian had documentation to the hardware and the code.)
Emulation is not the answer, ultimately and especially as we move farther away from having access to the specific hardware which we are emulating. If it were, the guys that have been working to emulate the NES would have been done a long time ago. Why aren't they? The cartridges contained undocumented hardware. Sure, they have the ROMs, but no real idea how all those 0s and 1s are supposed to work with the cartridges. Another, very good example, would be NASA losing parts of old probe data simply because they no longer know how to decode certain strings of 0s and 1s. Having the old hardware, or emulating it, doesn't really solve the problem. It just gets transfered in that case.
I'd say that having the source (including graphics, sound, whatever) would be vastly preferable to having only machine code. The logical structure human readable code is easier to parse, in areas where the code is non-portable you can tell from the source how the hardware should approximately behave (this would especially be nice with hardware documentation), plus, and perhaps most importantly, people can look back at all this code and figure out where parts of their world came from and how it got this way.
I suppose, really, I just want as much of my present to be transferable to the future as possible. Binary blobs make it that much less likely that parts of my culture will be availiable to the future.
Yes I was. Thank you for pointing that out.
Your analogy is broken. While I cannot read ancient Latin (who brought up Latin again?) someone can. That someone can then write a translation from the original, or as close to original as has been found. Your analogy breaks because, in the case of games, we do not have access to the original code, graphics or sounds. No one can make a translation (rewrite, port, whatever) because no one can see the original.
Emulation is not the equivalent of translation. Emulation is the equivalent of writting the original text down after it's been transmitted by mouth for a couple hundred years and then translating that.