Spot on. It's funny to watch people do demonstrations of how quickly Ruby on Rails can be used to build something because it's exactly the same sort of thing that was used to promote WebObjects ten years ago and I know from experience what rubbish it is. For all but the most simplistic applications you have to abandon the mapping of form elements to the database because you need to do validation. If you start off with a RAD approach to problems to these pages and add validation as an afterthought they quickly degenerate into a horrible mess. There will be less of a problem in this respect with ruby on rails because the data layer is so primitive so there are some knots you can't even contemplate being tied into, but - um - what was the point of Ruby on Rails again?:)
I imagine that doing major schema refactors on Ruby on Rails apps would be a nightmare because there's no easy way to check that you've fixed all the breakages. Whereas if you use EOF or Cayenne and get a culture in your software where developers avoid using key-paths except in agreed spots it's quite easy - you make the change, fix the areas where you find compile problems and then its done.
Something I would be interested to see would be some sort of business logic layer that could emulate a JDBC adaptor. Then you could write your application against that and bind to it as though it were a schema, but in the background it would in fact have business logic behind it. This would allow a separation between business logic and presentation but still allow you to quickly bind applications up as you do in the RAD webapp tools.
> Having a Linux desktop today is not as cool as having one say 10 years ago.
I disagree. The gang is bigger these days, and you can actually do useful things with the computer where you'd be stretched to say that about linux ten years ago: rubbish browsers, missing multimedia tools, truly horrible desktop environments. Being alternative is a factor in 'coolness' but to be cool you really need to be successfully alternative. Linux allows this now.
I'm disturbed to realise that I an opinion on this.
> Some evidence from a Family First media release announcing their > House of Representatives preference deal
This does NOT evidence your statement that "The Liberals (just a name, they're not really liberal) know they're going to need the Family First's (Australia's fundamentalist political party) support over the next few years."
It is consistent with the theory but it is not evidence.
Since you cite Crikey maybe you could go back to the 26 June edition where Kerr wrote of Fielding's maiden speech "That's conservatism - but it sure isn't Bible bashing." Australia's fundamentalist political party - well - yeah - kinda. Kinda.
You say a lot of things which are kind of correct but take liberties in brushing aside uncertainty to state conclusions that simply aren't supported by what preceeds them. It would be one thing to say "I think that these things indicate [blah] and that this is the most likely outcome." And if you did I'd be agreeing with some of what you're saying. But that's not what you're doing - you seem determined to reach a certain conclusion and are bending everything to do so.
Could you be some sort of a fundamentalist?
> The fact that Rupert Murdoch's intervention with John Howard has resulted > in the indefinite shelving of any reform should tell you just how little > their principles matter.
There are other reasonable theories you could propose to account for the actions that are also theories and nothing more. eg: the government is dug in currently with unpopular industrial relations legislation and is shedding anything new that's politically unpopular from the agenda. The fact that they have sacrificed the snowy mountain privatisation is a strong indication of this mindset being at work - twelve months ago they were spending political capital introducing politically expensive VSU, yet now they're backing down from a simple privatisation. Maybe it's a combination of things. *My* gut feel is that they are all factors. But I don't know and as far as I can tell neither do you.
Your original statement said: "In reality, the Libs are pretty much owned by the big media outlets and won't be doing anything to annoy them - as evidenced by their response to attempted media reform."
While consistent with your theory this is not conclusive and certainly not deserving of the "in reality" you pretend to evidence.
You also said "This sort of posturing is their way of pandering to the religious nuts without actually changing anything." I'm an atheist and believe that if an Australian broadcaster is limited in one regard on the television they should also be limited for their internet broadcasts. I'm not a religious nut and that is a reasonable position - so what does that say of your bold claim?
> Roads are very meaningfull things, so are railroads, just to name > some examples.
Yup.
> Why not read a whole variety of publications from opposing > sources? gives a much better picture. Reading what you like > to hear is not gonna teach you much usually.
Aha - now this is a very interesting thing to talk about and it's been through my thoughts in the last day. I'm not sure that it's possible to take it all in and I think you need to be open minded but strategic with your focus.
Some time ago I read an article about Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feyman's unsuccessful attempt to get through Newton's 'Principia'. [1] Now this guy is a successful physicist and even he struggles to get familiar with one of the very basic texts. I have had similar troubles when trying to read Rousseau, Voltaire and (worst of all) Kant. I think there's a limit to what you can consume, and if you don't go to the source the danger increases that you'll be led astray - recently a whole lot of historians have run into trouble in Australia for citing derived sources only to be confronted by a historian coming along and pouring doubt upon the references they had relied on.
My strategy is to work with what time I have and follow designs, which is quite similar to what I do in my work (applications and frameworks). Pick something that's clearly solid and work from that base. Part of this involves a judgement as described in the recent Graham article - "you have to figure out for yourself what's good. You can't trust authorities." [2 - This is probably the cause of me thinking about these things, although the thrust of the essay is only slightly related to what I'm saying here]
That's not to say be close-minded. In fact, I used to be a centrist and have moved to my current position based on my readings, and it is quite extreme to judge by current mainstream politics and certainly the opinions of my friends. (I have to be quiet about my thoughts on public arts funding on rehearsal nights:) ) But I can't spend my life reading everything - I have to make a choice about where to place my limited energies. I'm convinced that the Austrian school are a better starting point than any other distinct movement and so I'm choosing to focus there.
> I just get sad whenever I hear the 'Ok, maybe he is terrible, but > he was miles better then the competition' argument about politicians, > regardless of where it comes from.
Interesting. A genuine reflection of what's going on inside but also a fall back to bad habits. Still - made for an interesting thread.
Some of the other difficulties in following Newton's work are that many of the concepts were not named. For example he clearly grasped the concept of angular momentum, but it was not a concept that he ever named or used mathematically directly. The word 'motion' in his works clearly means what we now call momentum, yet the f
> We are not gonna tell you what to do at all! but now we are talking > anyway, you did this and this, and we regard that as prime example of > you failing to self regulate.. FIX IT!
Yeah - fair enough.
> Makes me wonder, did you copy/paste that post? it sounds a lot like > the typical political misdirection,
The quote was paraphrased from what I saw on lateline earlier this week. Or do you mean the whole post? Er? I wrote the post and paraphrased the bit featuring what Howard said. I thnk it is relevent that Howard specifically indicated he wasn't in favour of legislating against channel ten or shows like Big Brother before he made the remarks that the media services chose to quote in isolation but still - my critism of what you said was still too thin to be valid.
> consider a carreer in that if you thought it up yourself.
There was a time where I could have easily. But I intensely hate political tribalism (that "I'm a Labor man" or "I've voted Liberal or my life" or gymnastics where people support or oppose things based on who's calling for it rather than how the facts add up) and I won't compromise myself on the need for small government and low taxes and none of the Australian platforms are sufficiently pushing for that for me to feel comfortable being part of the inner system. More importantly, I feel it's important that people (including me) have work that actually creates value; I'm very unhappy with the sprawl of the civil service in this country and don't want to be part of that when I could be working and creating meaningful things. But - at times I write letters to the paper, seek to derail corrupt tenders, campaign against people and policies that diminish our freedom and the strength of our political systems, read liberal think tank publications, that sort of thing. I like that Howard is reformist when the political climate means that he could so easily just sit back and enjoy the good times (eg: gst, industrial regulations) but I'm uncomfortable with his political style and the fact that he has done nothing to stem the creep of copyright and patents. Still - he's miles better than any of the alternatives and unless something crazy happens I'll certainly be finding a reformist, non-machine-driven Liberal candidate to support at the next federal election.
> The Liberals (just a name, they're not really liberal)
I can't think of a situation where a name of an elected political outfit is fitting. In this case, the federal government coalition is a 'catch-all' grouping and and thus don't have a pure defining philosophy. However, the Liberal Party is economically liberal - much more so than self-proclaimed Liberal parties in most other countries, and while the majority of members are not generally socially liberal there are some who are.
> know they're going to need the Family First's (Australia's fundamentalist political party) support over the next few years.
You say that yet offer no evidence.
When the government had brainless deregulation policies, every time the issue of Australian policy-makers came up the slashdot comments section would fill with claims that it was part of a deal between Harradine and the government to get the GST through the senate... even though anybody who followed the politics of the time knew that Harradine had voted *against* the GST.
As in that matter - people saying it doesn't make it the truth.
> In reality, the Libs are pretty much owned by the big media outlets and won't be doing anything to annoy them
While I doubt they'd be enthusiastic about annoying media players, deregulation is a strong tennet of economic liberalism and media deregulation is consistent with those philosophies.
> That's the defense that capitalists always turn to, yes.
I hold that it's a fine defence, and I hope that my case below convinces you of this.
> and they certainly won't rise now with Work Choices ( Business Choices )
The point of work choices isn't to deliver higher wages, it's to use the good times to deliver reforms that will benefit us in the bad times.
Keating has recently been in the media taking credit for 'the recession we had to have' and pointing out that though he was criticised for it, the economists who have been directing the US reserve bank have been praised for delivering the same outcome - keeping wages under control. Although I'm overall a critic of Keating's economics during his period as Prime Minister, the reforms that he and the Howard opposition pushed to deliver in the 80s (and which the opposition backed) set the country up for the success it enjoyed in the 80s. Unfortunately the reforms didn't go far enough, particularly in the area of labour regulation.
Work choices is the sort of reform that Howard, Hewson and economic soulmates have wanted to deliver throughout this period and is designed to benefit two distinct groups: 1) People who are looking to hire labour but currently can't due the risk of picking the wrong person or picking a bad time and being stuck with someone they can't afford to support. Ie: Small business owners. 2) The very bottom of the economy who are not in employment and who previously had no prospects of empoyment. It is not a feasible option to hire someone with no work experience in the confidence that you can retrench them if it doesn't work out. Previously these people wouldn't have been hired.
This is a crucial reform needed to fight the patterns of long-term unemployment which accumulated between the end of the Macmahon and beginning of the Howard administrations. Only recently has this group started to be reduced, and only through constant deregulation will we be able to bring these people back into society.
If Beazley wins the next election and delivers on re-regulating the labor market and re-instating the power of unions all that will happen is that we'll have an immediate benefit of wage rises for low-income earners but then the next time we go through a down in the economic cycle we'll crash seriously and need our own equivalent of margaret thatcher to brutally de-stall the economy and get things moving again.
It's all too rare that politicians sacrifice political capital during the good times to bring in inevitable reform. That's what Howard's doing on this matter, and I support it wholeheartedly. Make hay while the sun shines.
> The most telling of statistics is the distibution of wealth. 1% of the population own 99% of the wealth.
That statistic is wrong, and the correct one is irrelevent. If I go out tomorrow and start a successful manufacturing and export business that hires lots of people and brings lots of money into the economy then that is a fantastic thing, and the fact I should get rich from it is nothing to be ashamed of. In doing so I have increased the wealth gap but everyone is better off - my customers, my employees and myself. Using the distribution of wealth as a measure of the success of a society is based on the mistaken notion that there is a fixed amount of wealth in an economy that has to be divided up between the members of that economy. This is absolutely not true.
As you take away the incentive for successful people to be successful you destroy the economy. I strongly recommend you read this article by Paul Graham: http://www.paulgraham.com/inequality.html Graham is hardly a pin up for the right wing - he supported Kerry in the last US election.
Please read that article, and if you'd like to continue the discussion further post here or email me, craig att ahdore do com.
If you get into this sort of thing I'd also strongly recommend F A Hayek's _The Fatal Conceit: The Err
> As an Australian, I can only shake my head and say "we're not all like this".
Did you read the story? It's not talking about anything other than a review and of the three political forces quoted in the story the government is the most reasonable.
> Originally our Prime Minister wanted the broadcaster to take the whole show off the air.
Well - yes - but he said was that he dislikes the government telling the business community what to do. He suggested that there's a place for self-regulation and that channel ten had an opportunity here to exercise self-regualtion. Your comment could reasonably be interpreted to mean that the government was about to cause it to happen.
"Australian government has once again demonstrated that it simply does not understand the internet by indicating that they intend to regulate streaming video. I wonder what these geniuses plan on doing with porn streamed from Europe?"
This is a poor summary of the situation. It's clear from the article that the government's intention is the review regualtion, not necessarily (as the poster snidely suggests) to impose regulation on porn streamed from Europe. The outcome of such a review could reasonably be that material streamed from within Australia should meet certain guidelines. While this doesn't prevent trash coming from overseas sources, it does ensure that broadcasts where responsiibility lies within Australia meets certain standards. This is typically what governments seek to do, and would lead towards consistency with other broadcasting formats for shows which have a large, youthful viewership such as Big Brother.
About eight years ago the government did show naivity on internet regulation by passing measures that were unworkable and which were panned within the IT community and within sections of the Liberal party itself. However, the current minister has cleaned things up a lot. Her approach to internet regulation has been to encourage education of parents and availability of client-side filtering - which is exactly the approach that I'd expect most of the slashdot readership would endorse.
Notice that of all the players with something to say in this article the government is the most restrained - calling for a review but not going overboard with censorship demands. In fact, it has been the federal opposition in recent times which has called for ridiculous measures while the government has been realistic in its approach, even by the reasonable (but in earlier times typically conflicting) standards of Electronic Frontiers Australia. See http://www.efa.org.au/Issues/Censor/mandatoryblock ing.html
Slashdot editors - panning Australians for our bad internet regulation system may once have been fitting. However, it would be nice if you could review things a bit more carefully based on the evidence rather than knee-jerks to posts making grand claims about Australian policy. It's annoying to see my country being portrayed as stoneage based on bad evidence. This snide post is not a story and it shouldn't have been put through.
This reminded me of this paper, "The Psychology of Learning". In it the writer describes the act of people who don't want to learn new things: "As long as everybody around them use tools, techniques, and methods that they themselves know, they can count on outperforming these other people. But when the people around them start learning different, perhaps better, ways, they must defend themselves. Other people having other knowledge might require learning to keep up with performance, and learning, as we pointed out, increases the risk of failure. One possibility for these people is to discredit other people's knowledge. If done well, it would eliminate the need for the extra effort to learn, which would fit very well with their objectives."
This issue is about Microsoft defending their turf rather than not wanting to learn something new. But it's basically the same motive at work: find ways to undermine the new to benefit the old.
It goes on, "This model of learning also explains other surprising behavior that I frequently observe. I have seen novices in software development with knowledge of a single programming language explain to experienced expert developers why their choice of programming language was a particularly bad one. In one case, I talked to a student of computer science who told me why a particular programming language was bad. In fact he told me it was so bad that he had moved to a different university in order to avoid courses that used that particular language. When asked, he admitted he had never written a single program in that language. He simply did not know what he was talking about. And he was willing to fight for it. With respect to programming languages, negative opinions about a language that a person does not know, are usually based on very superficial aspects of it. To people obsessed with performance lack of such in a programming language is a favorite reason to advocate its eradication (even though performance is not a quality of a language, but of a particular implementation)."
The positive lesson to take away from this is the MS is undoing itself. It's turning to cheap, nasty, suit-driven mentalities to defend its turf rather than the old days when it would just go out and write something new and nasty. It's become an unwieldy beast. I read about the Vista delays yesterday and briefly thought "Will anyone notice - who uses Windows these days". To an extent it shows what a bubble I live in. But it's true - *all* of my regular contacts use linux, freebsd or mac os x. As they should. After all - friends don't let friends use Windows.
I wonder if they've gotten around to adding the feature where if you install Microsoft Office on a system set up for Australian English it installs the British English dictionary, rather than installing the American English dictionary and making you jump through hoops to get it to work the way that it should work by default. It perplexes me that they can do so much in the way of magic, yet after however many releases of the product something as basic as this remains broken.
En-route you get to learn neat morsels about the way Word is architectured. For example - trying to fix it through one strategy it appears to keep 'losing' the setting you've set up. What's actually happening here is that the text already in your document has been localised as US English, and whenever you move into those blocks the setting reverts back to that based on context.
The default is wrong on the oldish version I've tested it on for the Mac but it was a lot easier to fix than for Windows.
Either way, I don't buy the "well it's possible to configure it" excuse for stupid defaults: in order to fix a default installation you need the original install CD (and I think you need admin privileges as well). Many users never bother and end up with documents that get frowned on because Australia is standardised on UK English. And when I'm that user and I don't have the ability to fix it and the local sysadmin thinks it's unimportant it annoys the hell out of me.
> First they ignore you, then they mod you +1 Funny, then they mod you down, then you win.
Is that an allusion to the Nixon farewell?:) "others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself." (If so - wo-ho that an Australian picked up on it!:) )
I'm a wiki skeptic. It works fine on a large scale like wikipedia, but smalls-scale wikis - such as in your office - tend to be rubbish. Nobody has ownership over content and they suffer from the tragedy of the commons. I think it's probably more effective to use a blog for lots of internal communication, and then probably some sort of CMS-with-comments where you need a graph of pages.
Part of the problem with java is that to write it the way Sun encourage you to write it you need to fuss around with beans (lots of typing to make accessors unless you have an IDE) and having a class per file and packages, etc. You spend ages setting things up right and refactoring is laborious using command line tools. I think the reason that IDEs are popular is to help come up with ways around these problems.
I despise IDEs because they never work quite right and I find myself fighting their intention to reformat my syntax or to ignore complains about imports I've made for classes I haven't yet imported. Many also lock you in to using their platform.
When I write java I tend to cram everything into a single Application class until I've stablised my approach to the problem. That's a RAD approach. If you want to do things the Sun way then you need to design things on paper first and then write it once you know exactly what you're doing.
IMO, if students are studying CS then they should get a grasp of unix early on, and being useful with one of the cardinal text editors is part of that experience. There's just no need for IDEs and it's bad to lock students into ways of working that they'll later need to break out of.
> Now, many people don't need Java. For instance, if you are > making a smallish website, you are just stupid if you try > to use java--use ROR or.net technologies that just slide together.
Err - excuse me. Java != J2EE. Java solutions like Jakarta Tapestry and Apple WebObjects do just fine on small websites and the sliding together thing.
I can't *believe* this got modded to +5 insightful.
> You can write lousy Swing apps, but if you know what you're doing, you can also > write a pretty good one too. You might well argue that it's too difficult to write > a good Swing app, but don't conclude from your failures that everyone is doomed. The same could be said of assembly language.
> One thing that too many people here don't appreciate is that > what Sun set out to do is almost impossible to get right the > first time. This has no bearing on whether or not something sucks.
> Look at what Apple did with Swing. A Swing app running on OS > X can look almost like a native app, without breaking cross > platform compatibility, because Apple EMBRACED Java and Swing. > What would have happened if Microsoft did the same thing? Microsoft have structured their business model around a competing platform that they own..NET is the direct competitor to Java.
They tried doing something this and Sun nailed them in the courts over it.
> It sounds a little harsh considering.NET is not open at all
Not at all. If it doesn't work it's broken.
This reminds of when I sometimes hear on the radio people comparing US economic fundamentals to Europe and saying that they're strong in comparisson and they treat that as a valid excuse for bad fundamentals and it's not valid. Being strong in comparisson to a basketcase is nothing to boast about.
> Sun may hate to admit it, but Swing sucks.
I don't quite agree with this. Swing is good for some contexts, but those contexts are invalid. For the most part, consumer software can be divided into two camps: applications and tools. And almost universally, applications should be webapps, and tools should be high-performance client-side software. The arguments in favour of thin client apps and web apps in particular are very strong. But sometimes you need to do something more than that. Swing just doesn't fit into any of this (for that matter neither does visual basic). But following on from this - I don't think java has any place in the client-side software because of performance. I'm not one of these "java is slow" types. I know java is fast, I use java all the time and I write java-based web app frameworks for my day job. But java launch time *is* slow and it's annoying not being able to distribute java as a binary that users can double click on and rely to work (they need the runtime). That rules it our for desktop software.
If Sun were smart, they might be able to get around some of these problems: 1) change the way they use java works so that on a target system there would always be a JVM 'silo' running. under linux it would be started up via/etc/init.d. Then, when users launched java apps, rather than launching a new VM, some sort of injection happened into the existing JVM. That would speed up launches. 2) embrace linux and try and get java shipped with distributions
But - what do they gain from this? I still can't see where Sun make money out of Java - in the current environment or in the hypothetical I've proposed.
Interesting. I switched *to* freebsd a couple of weekends ago - 6.1RC1 and was stunned when it picked up my raid controller in the installation process. It's a piece of shit promise controller that the manufacturers claimed supported linux when I bought it but of course only supported 2.4 for people running long-obsolete versions redhat or suse. Yet freebsd just picked it up and everything has worked as expected. I can remove a disk and it complains, put it back and it syncs (RAID1).
I had some troubles getting X working properly as well but did in the end. It's a bit stupid the hoops you have to jump through to set up X in 2006 but there ya go. I did a quick writeup here: http://stable.cowoh.org/2006/05/05/linux-users-adj usting-to-in-freebsd-or-solaris/ If you think of any more commands I should mention in my list let me know.
John Howard has spent all but two years of his ten years as PM of Australia having to deal with speculation on when he'll retire - it's an open joke. WRT McNealy similar rumours have passed around for years and years and years also and it's even more stupid for him because he's so much younger.
In the article it says "Mr. Stahlman wrote a research note about the possibility of a management change in early March." If I were him, I wouldn't be boasting about it.
"Dusk could be near". That's news with confidence.
When I say clipboard in this essay, I'm talking about the thing you communicate with when you use ctrl+c, ctrl+v (except in gnome-terminal where it's ctrl+shift).
The current clipboard design is broken in at least two significant ways: - At the moment text that contains windows characters cannot be copied. I believe this is bad behaviour and that instead the text should strip the offending characters. Current behaviour is very confusing, particularly as clipboard operation is notoriously inconsistent in X - if it isn't working it could be any of several problems (ie: oh maybe this app doesn't talk to gnome and I need to mouse select) - At the moment the clipboard data disappears if you close the application it came from. This is *very annoying* and should be unnecessary.
This is far and away my biggest grievance with the gnome de.
A couple of other things that annoy: - You can't get rid of the quickbar
- Autohide the quickbar only mostly disappears it, not completely
- You can't configure the quickbar so that it doesn't behave as 'always on top' - gnome-terminal is slow (looks like they're improving this - nice work!:) )
Yup, me too. I wanted Unix on a notebook with rock-solid wireless networking and no ongoing driver hassles or fear of losing support as my OS upgraded - I got a mac.
> Why do we try and force a "real application" through a web browser? The way we > are treating browsers these days, it seems like they are less about information > presentation/sharing and more about actual application-type functionality.
Spot on on this point. Programming practice for even basic html and form-based web applications is still nowhere near mature. You only need to look at the number of people who jump up and down over ruby on rails to see that - in spite of the fact it offers limited business-logic/model/presentation separation and a far-from-cutting-edge
I've been doing amazing things in an application platform I've been writing - having workflows that users can freeze and stack (complete with in-progress data transactions), a 'dock' (to allow you to dock and use objects to a sidebar in the LAF on a context-sensitive basis), and a few other cool things I haven't seen done in applications anywhere else. All this is operating on the backend. And since I'm no genius and have done it all myself, something makes me feel that there is far far more room to evolve in this direction.
This whole ajax phase is business-as-usual in that every couple of years a new fad comes along that tries to turn our browser into a desktop app despite the fact that it doesn't actually add that much to the user experience and costs far far too much to develop elegantly. These movements are a mirage - the technology doesn't translate into better webpages because they miss the point of the web: it's a simple and stable means of deploying applications with a consistent interface without the user having to download a specific client.
If anything, html is too powerful and complicated, and we'd benefit from a simpler standard that was easier to template and there'd be no such thing as site-specific styling (or else it would be very limited). Ajax can be cool for preemptive data validation and cute searches, but it's not revolutionary or particularly signficant.
I don't agree with you about GUI components - I don't think they're so significant that it would be worth the enormous work it would take to make it happen. Most applications are better served by being web-based anyway. The only things you should need to do on your desktop are terminal; browser (which is actually just a different type of terminal); hardware-intensive apps (image editors, games, etc). Everything else is better served by being simple and server-side (with all the advantages that allows - ccentralised backups, redundancy options, straightforward remote access, etc, etc).
> I really resent the current trend to shorten games
Wow - I feel the opposite. I have memories of wading through level after level of old games and just wishing it would end. There was a Final Fantasty game for the gameboy that was bad, and Crusader: No Regret was enormous. I spent an age playing No Regret and gave up on it eventually (I think I had a hdd crash that killed my save files or something). Later I learned I was probably far less than half way through the game at that point (part of this would be that I insisted on playing on the insane difficulty level but it was stil just huge). I think games are moving towards a model where they have a tighter plot and less mindless filler, and that's a good thing. Consider some of the old 8 bit games as well - you didn't have a hope in hell of finishing a game like Jet Set Willy.
I agree with you that Half Life 2 was just too short. An aspect of this might have been the poor quality of the plot wrapup and closing levels. Some early bits were excellent - the priest in the zombie village; the coastal outpost where you get the buggy; the bug section. But everything after the moment the player has killed the bug in the gym feels like an afterthought. There was a similar feel about the Xen section of the original.They're getting there but there's lots of room to improve.
It's hard to finish a game well though. The original No One Lives Forever was fantastic from start to end, but apart from that, I can't think of many endings that have impressed me. The Interactive Fiction _Spider and Web_ was pretty cool. I imagine the ending of nethack would have to be cool through sheer satisfaction. I think a lot of the problem with endings is they just realise the aims of the game without making a point. That's fine for mario games. But where's the conclusion about the nature of the human spirit at the end of the half life games, or the fact that even if the combine were evil "at least they made the trains run on time"?
Slashdot Mirror
> What do you think?
:)
Spot on. It's funny to watch people do demonstrations of how quickly Ruby on Rails can be used to build something because it's exactly the same sort of thing that was used to promote WebObjects ten years ago and I know from experience what rubbish it is. For all but the most simplistic applications you have to abandon the mapping of form elements to the database because you need to do validation. If you start off with a RAD approach to problems to these pages and add validation as an afterthought they quickly degenerate into a horrible mess. There will be less of a problem in this respect with ruby on rails because the data layer is so primitive so there are some knots you can't even contemplate being tied into, but - um - what was the point of Ruby on Rails again?
I imagine that doing major schema refactors on Ruby on Rails apps would be a nightmare because there's no easy way to check that you've fixed all the breakages. Whereas if you use EOF or Cayenne and get a culture in your software where developers avoid using key-paths except in agreed spots it's quite easy - you make the change, fix the areas where you find compile problems and then its done.
Something I would be interested to see would be some sort of business logic layer that could emulate a JDBC adaptor. Then you could write your application against that and bind to it as though it were a schema, but in the background it would in fact have business logic behind it. This would allow a separation between business logic and presentation but still allow you to quickly bind applications up as you do in the RAD webapp tools.
> Having a Linux desktop today is not as cool as having one say 10 years ago.
I disagree. The gang is bigger these days, and you can actually do useful things with the computer where you'd be stretched to say that about linux ten years ago: rubbish browsers, missing multimedia tools, truly horrible desktop environments. Being alternative is a factor in 'coolness' but to be cool you really need to be successfully alternative. Linux allows this now.
I'm disturbed to realise that I an opinion on this.
> Some evidence from a Family First media release announcing their
> House of Representatives preference deal
This does NOT evidence your statement that "The Liberals (just a name, they're not really liberal) know they're going to need the Family First's (Australia's fundamentalist political party) support over the next few years."
It is consistent with the theory but it is not evidence.
Since you cite Crikey maybe you could go back to the 26 June edition where Kerr wrote of Fielding's maiden speech "That's conservatism - but it sure isn't Bible bashing." Australia's fundamentalist political party - well - yeah - kinda. Kinda.
You say a lot of things which are kind of correct but take liberties in brushing aside uncertainty to state conclusions that simply aren't supported by what preceeds them. It would be one thing to say "I think that these things indicate [blah] and that this is the most likely outcome." And if you did I'd be agreeing with some of what you're saying. But that's not what you're doing - you seem determined to reach a certain conclusion and are bending everything to do so.
Could you be some sort of a fundamentalist?
> The fact that Rupert Murdoch's intervention with John Howard has resulted
> in the indefinite shelving of any reform should tell you just how little
> their principles matter.
There are other reasonable theories you could propose to account for the actions that are also theories and nothing more. eg: the government is dug in currently with unpopular industrial relations legislation and is shedding anything new that's politically unpopular from the agenda. The fact that they have sacrificed the snowy mountain privatisation is a strong indication of this mindset being at work - twelve months ago they were spending political capital introducing politically expensive VSU, yet now they're backing down from a simple privatisation. Maybe it's a combination of things. *My* gut feel is that they are all factors. But I don't know and as far as I can tell neither do you.
Your original statement said: "In reality, the Libs are pretty much owned by the big media outlets and won't be doing anything to annoy them - as evidenced by their response to attempted media reform."
While consistent with your theory this is not conclusive and certainly not deserving of the "in reality" you pretend to evidence.
You also said "This sort of posturing is their way of pandering to the religious nuts without actually changing anything." I'm an atheist and believe that if an Australian broadcaster is limited in one regard on the television they should also be limited for their internet broadcasts. I'm not a religious nut and that is a reasonable position - so what does that say of your bold claim?
> Roads are very meaningfull things, so are railroads, just to name
:) ) But I can't spend my life reading everything - I have to make a choice about where to place my limited energies. I'm convinced that the Austrian school are a better starting point than any other distinct movement and so I'm choosing to focus there.
> some examples.
Yup.
> Why not read a whole variety of publications from opposing
> sources? gives a much better picture. Reading what you like
> to hear is not gonna teach you much usually.
Aha - now this is a very interesting thing to talk about and it's been through my thoughts in the last day. I'm not sure that it's possible to take it all in and I think you need to be open minded but strategic with your focus.
Some time ago I read an article about Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feyman's unsuccessful attempt to get through Newton's 'Principia'. [1] Now this guy is a successful physicist and even he struggles to get familiar with one of the very basic texts. I have had similar troubles when trying to read Rousseau, Voltaire and (worst of all) Kant. I think there's a limit to what you can consume, and if you don't go to the source the danger increases that you'll be led astray - recently a whole lot of historians have run into trouble in Australia for citing derived sources only to be confronted by a historian coming along and pouring doubt upon the references they had relied on.
My strategy is to work with what time I have and follow designs, which is quite similar to what I do in my work (applications and frameworks). Pick something that's clearly solid and work from that base. Part of this involves a judgement as described in the recent Graham article - "you have to figure out for yourself what's good. You can't trust authorities." [2 - This is probably the cause of me thinking about these things, although the thrust of the essay is only slightly related to what I'm saying here]
That's not to say be close-minded. In fact, I used to be a centrist and have moved to my current position based on my readings, and it is quite extreme to judge by current mainstream politics and certainly the opinions of my friends. (I have to be quiet about my thoughts on public arts funding on rehearsal nights
> I just get sad whenever I hear the 'Ok, maybe he is terrible, but
> he was miles better then the competition' argument about politicians,
> regardless of where it comes from.
Interesting. A genuine reflection of what's going on inside but also a fall back to bad habits. Still - made for an interesting thread.
--
[1] In a search for references, the one I found pointing to his difficulties with it are at this google cache, http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:Nplnx757pg4J:w ww.pilates-move.com/articles/Philosophiae_Naturali s_Principia_Mathematica+%22principia+mathematica%2 2+sabbatical+newton+professor&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=8
but no longer at the original site. This may imply that he succeeded in a later attempt. The relevant section reads:
"""Nearly 300 years later Richard Feynman, a famous Nobel Prize winning physicist, failed in his attempt to follow Newton's proofs during a sabbatical year, and instead spent a significant amount of time producing his own geometric proofs, as was his custom when mastering a subject ("What I cannot create, I do not understand" -- Feynman).
Some of the other difficulties in following Newton's work are that many of the concepts were not named. For example he clearly grasped the concept of angular momentum, but it was not a concept that he ever named or used mathematically directly. The word 'motion' in his works clearly means what we now call momentum, yet the f
> We are not gonna tell you what to do at all! but now we are talking
> anyway, you did this and this, and we regard that as prime example of
> you failing to self regulate.. FIX IT!
Yeah - fair enough.
> Makes me wonder, did you copy/paste that post? it sounds a lot like
> the typical political misdirection,
The quote was paraphrased from what I saw on lateline earlier this week. Or do you mean the whole post? Er? I wrote the post and paraphrased the bit featuring what Howard said. I thnk it is relevent that Howard specifically indicated he wasn't in favour of legislating against channel ten or shows like Big Brother before he made the remarks that the media services chose to quote in isolation but still - my critism of what you said was still too thin to be valid.
> consider a carreer in that if you thought it up yourself.
There was a time where I could have easily. But I intensely hate political tribalism (that "I'm a Labor man" or "I've voted Liberal or my life" or gymnastics where people support or oppose things based on who's calling for it rather than how the facts add up) and I won't compromise myself on the need for small government and low taxes and none of the Australian platforms are sufficiently pushing for that for me to feel comfortable being part of the inner system. More importantly, I feel it's important that people (including me) have work that actually creates value; I'm very unhappy with the sprawl of the civil service in this country and don't want to be part of that when I could be working and creating meaningful things. But - at times I write letters to the paper, seek to derail corrupt tenders, campaign against people and policies that diminish our freedom and the strength of our political systems, read liberal think tank publications, that sort of thing. I like that Howard is reformist when the political climate means that he could so easily just sit back and enjoy the good times (eg: gst, industrial regulations) but I'm uncomfortable with his political style and the fact that he has done nothing to stem the creep of copyright and patents. Still - he's miles better than any of the alternatives and unless something crazy happens I'll certainly be finding a reformist, non-machine-driven Liberal candidate to support at the next federal election.
> The Liberals (just a name, they're not really liberal)
I can't think of a situation where a name of an elected political outfit is fitting. In this case, the federal government coalition is a 'catch-all' grouping and and thus don't have a pure defining philosophy. However, the Liberal Party is economically liberal - much more so than self-proclaimed Liberal parties in most other countries, and while the majority of members are not generally socially liberal there are some who are.
> know they're going to need the Family First's (Australia's fundamentalist political party) support over the next few years.
You say that yet offer no evidence.
When the government had brainless deregulation policies, every time the issue of Australian policy-makers came up the slashdot comments section would fill with claims that it was part of a deal between Harradine and the government to get the GST through the senate... even though anybody who followed the politics of the time knew that Harradine had voted *against* the GST.
As in that matter - people saying it doesn't make it the truth.
> In reality, the Libs are pretty much owned by the big media outlets and won't be doing anything to annoy them
While I doubt they'd be enthusiastic about annoying media players, deregulation is a strong tennet of economic liberalism and media deregulation is consistent with those philosophies.
> That's the defense that capitalists always turn to, yes.
I hold that it's a fine defence, and I hope that my case below convinces you of this.
> and they certainly won't rise now with Work Choices ( Business Choices )
The point of work choices isn't to deliver higher wages, it's to use the good times to deliver reforms that will benefit us in the bad times.
Keating has recently been in the media taking credit for 'the recession we had to have' and pointing out that though he was criticised for it, the economists who have been directing the US reserve bank have been praised for delivering the same outcome - keeping wages under control. Although I'm overall a critic of Keating's economics during his period as Prime Minister, the reforms that he and the Howard opposition pushed to deliver in the 80s (and which the opposition backed) set the country up for the success it enjoyed in the 80s. Unfortunately the reforms didn't go far enough, particularly in the area of labour regulation.
Work choices is the sort of reform that Howard, Hewson and economic soulmates have wanted to deliver throughout this period and is designed to benefit two distinct groups:
1) People who are looking to hire labour but currently can't due the risk of picking the wrong person or picking a bad time and being stuck with someone they can't afford to support. Ie: Small business owners.
2) The very bottom of the economy who are not in employment and who previously had no prospects of empoyment. It is not a feasible option to hire someone with no work experience in the confidence that you can retrench them if it doesn't work out. Previously these people wouldn't have been hired.
This is a crucial reform needed to fight the patterns of long-term unemployment which accumulated between the end of the Macmahon and beginning of the Howard administrations. Only recently has this group started to be reduced, and only through constant deregulation will we be able to bring these people back into society.
If Beazley wins the next election and delivers on re-regulating the labor market and re-instating the power of unions all that will happen is that we'll have an immediate benefit of wage rises for low-income earners but then the next time we go through a down in the economic cycle we'll crash seriously and need our own equivalent of margaret thatcher to brutally de-stall the economy and get things moving again.
It's all too rare that politicians sacrifice political capital during the good times to bring in inevitable reform. That's what Howard's doing on this matter, and I support it wholeheartedly. Make hay while the sun shines.
> The most telling of statistics is the distibution of wealth. 1% of the population own 99% of the wealth.
That statistic is wrong, and the correct one is irrelevent. If I go out tomorrow and start a successful manufacturing and export business that hires lots of people and brings lots of money into the economy then that is a fantastic thing, and the fact I should get rich from it is nothing to be ashamed of. In doing so I have increased the wealth gap but everyone is better off - my customers, my employees and myself. Using the distribution of wealth as a measure of the success of a society is based on the mistaken notion that there is a fixed amount of wealth in an economy that has to be divided up between the members of that economy. This is absolutely not true.
As you take away the incentive for successful people to be successful you destroy the economy. I strongly recommend you read this article by Paul Graham: http://www.paulgraham.com/inequality.html
Graham is hardly a pin up for the right wing - he supported Kerry in the last US election.
Please read that article, and if you'd like to continue the discussion further post here or email me, craig att ahdore do com.
If you get into this sort of thing I'd also strongly recommend F A Hayek's _The Fatal Conceit: The Err
> As an Australian, I can only shake my head and say "we're not all like this".
Did you read the story? It's not talking about anything other than a review and of the three political forces quoted in the story the government is the most reasonable.
> Originally our Prime Minister wanted the broadcaster to take the whole show off the air.
Well - yes - but he said was that he dislikes the government telling the business community what to do. He suggested that there's a place for self-regulation and that channel ten had an opportunity here to exercise self-regualtion. Your comment could reasonably be interpreted to mean that the government was about to cause it to happen.
> In my opinion, it's about time the economy (businesses) suffered a
> little bit for the community (people) to be better off.
The economy is all of us - not just 'business'. When you hurt business the ocmmunity suffers.
"Australian government has once again demonstrated that it simply does not understand the internet by indicating that they intend to regulate streaming video. I wonder what these geniuses plan on doing with porn streamed from Europe?"
k ing.html
This is a poor summary of the situation. It's clear from the article that the government's intention is the review regualtion, not necessarily (as the poster snidely suggests) to impose regulation on porn streamed from Europe. The outcome of such a review could reasonably be that material streamed from within Australia should meet certain guidelines. While this doesn't prevent trash coming from overseas sources, it does ensure that broadcasts where responsiibility lies within Australia meets certain standards. This is typically what governments seek to do, and would lead towards consistency with other broadcasting formats for shows which have a large, youthful viewership such as Big Brother.
About eight years ago the government did show naivity on internet regulation by passing measures that were unworkable and which were panned within the IT community and within sections of the Liberal party itself. However, the current minister has cleaned things up a lot. Her approach to internet regulation has been to encourage education of parents and availability of client-side filtering - which is exactly the approach that I'd expect most of the slashdot readership would endorse.
Notice that of all the players with something to say in this article the government is the most restrained - calling for a review but not going overboard with censorship demands. In fact, it has been the federal opposition in recent times which has called for ridiculous measures while the government has been realistic in its approach, even by the reasonable (but in earlier times typically conflicting) standards of Electronic Frontiers Australia. See http://www.efa.org.au/Issues/Censor/mandatorybloc
Slashdot editors - panning Australians for our bad internet regulation system may once have been fitting. However, it would be nice if you could review things a bit more carefully based on the evidence rather than knee-jerks to posts making grand claims about Australian policy. It's annoying to see my country being portrayed as stoneage based on bad evidence. This snide post is not a story and it shouldn't have been put through.
This reminded me of this paper, "The Psychology of Learning". In it the writer describes the act of people who don't want to learn new things: "As long as everybody around them use tools, techniques, and methods that they themselves know, they can count on outperforming these other people. But when the people around them start learning different, perhaps better, ways, they must defend themselves. Other people having other knowledge might require learning to keep up with performance, and learning, as we pointed out, increases the risk of failure. One possibility for these people is to discredit other people's knowledge. If done well, it would eliminate the need for the extra effort to learn, which would fit very well with their objectives."
This issue is about Microsoft defending their turf rather than not wanting to learn something new. But it's basically the same motive at work: find ways to undermine the new to benefit the old.
It goes on, "This model of learning also explains other surprising behavior that I frequently observe. I have seen novices in software development with knowledge of a single programming language explain to experienced expert developers why their choice of programming language was a particularly bad one. In one case, I talked to a student of computer science who told me why a particular programming language was bad. In fact he told me it was so bad that he had moved to a different university in order to avoid courses that used that particular language. When asked, he admitted he had never written a single program in that language. He simply did not know what he was talking about. And he was willing to fight for it. With respect to programming languages, negative opinions about a language that a person does not know, are usually based on very superficial aspects of it. To people obsessed with performance lack of such in a programming language is a favorite reason to advocate its eradication (even though performance is not a quality of a language, but of a particular implementation)."
The positive lesson to take away from this is the MS is undoing itself. It's turning to cheap, nasty, suit-driven mentalities to defend its turf rather than the old days when it would just go out and write something new and nasty. It's become an unwieldy beast. I read about the Vista delays yesterday and briefly thought "Will anyone notice - who uses Windows these days". To an extent it shows what a bubble I live in. But it's true - *all* of my regular contacts use linux, freebsd or mac os x. As they should. After all - friends don't let friends use Windows.
Attention citizens of the united states: Reform your legal system so that judges can award costs.
There's some pretty snazzy features there.
I wonder if they've gotten around to adding the feature where if you install Microsoft Office on a system set up for Australian English it installs the British English dictionary, rather than installing the American English dictionary and making you jump through hoops to get it to work the way that it should work by default. It perplexes me that they can do so much in the way of magic, yet after however many releases of the product something as basic as this remains broken.
En-route you get to learn neat morsels about the way Word is architectured. For example - trying to fix it through one strategy it appears to keep 'losing' the setting you've set up. What's actually happening here is that the text already in your document has been localised as US English, and whenever you move into those blocks the setting reverts back to that based on context.
The default is wrong on the oldish version I've tested it on for the Mac but it was a lot easier to fix than for Windows.
Either way, I don't buy the "well it's possible to configure it" excuse for stupid defaults: in order to fix a default installation you need the original install CD (and I think you need admin privileges as well). Many users never bother and end up with documents that get frowned on because Australia is standardised on UK English. And when I'm that user and I don't have the ability to fix it and the local sysadmin thinks it's unimportant it annoys the hell out of me.
> First they ignore you, then they mod you +1 Funny, then they mod you down, then you win.
:) "others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself." (If so - wo-ho that an Australian picked up on it! :) )
Is that an allusion to the Nixon farewell?
I'm a wiki skeptic. It works fine on a large scale like wikipedia, but smalls-scale wikis - such as in your office - tend to be rubbish. Nobody has ownership over content and they suffer from the tragedy of the commons. I think it's probably more effective to use a blog for lots of internal communication, and then probably some sort of CMS-with-comments where you need a graph of pages.
Part of the problem with java is that to write it the way Sun encourage you to write it you need to fuss around with beans (lots of typing to make accessors unless you have an IDE) and having a class per file and packages, etc. You spend ages setting things up right and refactoring is laborious using command line tools. I think the reason that IDEs are popular is to help come up with ways around these problems.
I despise IDEs because they never work quite right and I find myself fighting their intention to reformat my syntax or to ignore complains about imports I've made for classes I haven't yet imported. Many also lock you in to using their platform.
When I write java I tend to cram everything into a single Application class until I've stablised my approach to the problem. That's a RAD approach. If you want to do things the Sun way then you need to design things on paper first and then write it once you know exactly what you're doing.
IMO, if students are studying CS then they should get a grasp of unix early on, and being useful with one of the cardinal text editors is part of that experience. There's just no need for IDEs and it's bad to lock students into ways of working that they'll later need to break out of.
> Now, many people don't need Java. For instance, if you are .net technologies that just slide together.
> making a smallish website, you are just stupid if you try
> to use java--use ROR or
Err - excuse me. Java != J2EE. Java solutions like Jakarta Tapestry and Apple WebObjects do just fine on small websites and the sliding together thing.
I can't *believe* this got modded to +5 insightful.
.NET is the direct competitor to Java.
> You can write lousy Swing apps, but if you know what you're doing, you can also
> write a pretty good one too. You might well argue that it's too difficult to write
> a good Swing app, but don't conclude from your failures that everyone is doomed.
The same could be said of assembly language.
> One thing that too many people here don't appreciate is that
> what Sun set out to do is almost impossible to get right the
> first time.
This has no bearing on whether or not something sucks.
> Look at what Apple did with Swing. A Swing app running on OS
> X can look almost like a native app, without breaking cross
> platform compatibility, because Apple EMBRACED Java and Swing.
> What would have happened if Microsoft did the same thing?
Microsoft have structured their business model around a competing platform that they own.
They tried doing something this and Sun nailed them in the courts over it.
What point were you trying to make?
> It sounds a little harsh considering .NET is not open at all
/etc/init.d. Then, when users launched java apps, rather than launching a new VM, some sort of injection happened into the existing JVM. That would speed up launches.
Not at all. If it doesn't work it's broken.
This reminds of when I sometimes hear on the radio people comparing US economic fundamentals to Europe and saying that they're strong in comparisson and they treat that as a valid excuse for bad fundamentals and it's not valid. Being strong in comparisson to a basketcase is nothing to boast about.
> Sun may hate to admit it, but Swing sucks.
I don't quite agree with this. Swing is good for some contexts, but those contexts are invalid. For the most part, consumer software can be divided into two camps: applications and tools. And almost universally, applications should be webapps, and tools should be high-performance client-side software. The arguments in favour of thin client apps and web apps in particular are very strong. But sometimes you need to do something more than that. Swing just doesn't fit into any of this (for that matter neither does visual basic). But following on from this - I don't think java has any place in the client-side software because of performance. I'm not one of these "java is slow" types. I know java is fast, I use java all the time and I write java-based web app frameworks for my day job. But java launch time *is* slow and it's annoying not being able to distribute java as a binary that users can double click on and rely to work (they need the runtime). That rules it our for desktop software.
If Sun were smart, they might be able to get around some of these problems:
1) change the way they use java works so that on a target system there would always be a JVM 'silo' running. under linux it would be started up via
2) embrace linux and try and get java shipped with distributions
But - what do they gain from this? I still can't see where Sun make money out of Java - in the current environment or in the hypothetical I've proposed.
Interesting. I switched *to* freebsd a couple of weekends ago - 6.1RC1 and was stunned when it picked up my raid controller in the installation process. It's a piece of shit promise controller that the manufacturers claimed supported linux when I bought it but of course only supported 2.4 for people running long-obsolete versions redhat or suse. Yet freebsd just picked it up and everything has worked as expected. I can remove a disk and it complains, put it back and it syncs (RAID1).
j usting-to-in-freebsd-or-solaris/ If you think of any more commands I should mention in my list let me know.
I had some troubles getting X working properly as well but did in the end. It's a bit stupid the hoops you have to jump through to set up X in 2006 but there ya go. I did a quick writeup here: http://stable.cowoh.org/2006/05/05/linux-users-ad
John Howard has spent all but two years of his ten years as PM of Australia having to deal with speculation on when he'll retire - it's an open joke. WRT McNealy similar rumours have passed around for years and years and years also and it's even more stupid for him because he's so much younger.
In the article it says "Mr. Stahlman wrote a research note about the possibility of a management change in early March." If I were him, I wouldn't be boasting about it.
"Dusk could be near". That's news with confidence.
When I say clipboard in this essay, I'm talking about the thing you communicate with when you use ctrl+c, ctrl+v (except in gnome-terminal where it's ctrl+shift).
:) )
The current clipboard design is broken in at least two significant ways:
- At the moment text that contains windows characters cannot be copied. I believe this is bad behaviour and that instead the text should strip the offending characters. Current behaviour is very confusing, particularly as clipboard operation is notoriously inconsistent in X - if it isn't working it could be any of several problems (ie: oh maybe this app doesn't talk to gnome and I need to mouse select)
- At the moment the clipboard data disappears if you close the application it came from. This is *very annoying* and should be unnecessary.
This is far and away my biggest grievance with the gnome de.
A couple of other things that annoy:
- You can't get rid of the quickbar
- Autohide the quickbar only mostly disappears it, not completely
- You can't configure the quickbar so that it doesn't behave as 'always on top'
- gnome-terminal is slow (looks like they're improving this - nice work!
Yup, me too. I wanted Unix on a notebook with rock-solid wireless networking and no ongoing driver hassles or fear of losing support as my OS upgraded - I got a mac.
> Why do we try and force a "real application" through a web browser? The way we
> are treating browsers these days, it seems like they are less about information
> presentation/sharing and more about actual application-type functionality.
Spot on on this point. Programming practice for even basic html and form-based web applications is still nowhere near mature. You only need to look at the number of people who jump up and down over ruby on rails to see that - in spite of the fact it offers limited business-logic/model/presentation separation and a far-from-cutting-edge
I've been doing amazing things in an application platform I've been writing - having workflows that users can freeze and stack (complete with in-progress data transactions), a 'dock' (to allow you to dock and use objects to a sidebar in the LAF on a context-sensitive basis), and a few other cool things I haven't seen done in applications anywhere else. All this is operating on the backend. And since I'm no genius and have done it all myself, something makes me feel that there is far far more room to evolve in this direction.
This whole ajax phase is business-as-usual in that every couple of years a new fad comes along that tries to turn our browser into a desktop app despite the fact that it doesn't actually add that much to the user experience and costs far far too much to develop elegantly. These movements are a mirage - the technology doesn't translate into better webpages because they miss the point of the web: it's a simple and stable means of deploying applications with a consistent interface without the user having to download a specific client.
If anything, html is too powerful and complicated, and we'd benefit from a simpler standard that was easier to template and there'd be no such thing as site-specific styling (or else it would be very limited). Ajax can be cool for preemptive data validation and cute searches, but it's not revolutionary or particularly signficant.
I don't agree with you about GUI components - I don't think they're so significant that it would be worth the enormous work it would take to make it happen. Most applications are better served by being web-based anyway. The only things you should need to do on your desktop are terminal; browser (which is actually just a different type of terminal); hardware-intensive apps (image editors, games, etc). Everything else is better served by being simple and server-side (with all the advantages that allows - ccentralised backups, redundancy options, straightforward remote access, etc, etc).
This started as a reply but gets ranty.
> I really resent the current trend to shorten games
Wow - I feel the opposite. I have memories of wading through level after level of old games and just wishing it would end. There was a Final Fantasty game for the gameboy that was bad, and Crusader: No Regret was enormous. I spent an age playing No Regret and gave up on it eventually (I think I had a hdd crash that killed my save files or something). Later I learned I was probably far less than half way through the game at that point (part of this would be that I insisted on playing on the insane difficulty level but it was stil just huge). I think games are moving towards a model where they have a tighter plot and less mindless filler, and that's a good thing. Consider some of the old 8 bit games as well - you didn't have a hope in hell of finishing a game like Jet Set Willy.
I agree with you that Half Life 2 was just too short. An aspect of this might have been the poor quality of the plot wrapup and closing levels. Some early bits were excellent - the priest in the zombie village; the coastal outpost where you get the buggy; the bug section. But everything after the moment the player has killed the bug in the gym feels like an afterthought. There was a similar feel about the Xen section of the original.They're getting there but there's lots of room to improve.
It's hard to finish a game well though. The original No One Lives Forever was fantastic from start to end, but apart from that, I can't think of many endings that have impressed me. The Interactive Fiction _Spider and Web_ was pretty cool. I imagine the ending of nethack would have to be cool through sheer satisfaction. I think a lot of the problem with endings is they just realise the aims of the game without making a point. That's fine for mario games. But where's the conclusion about the nature of the human spirit at the end of the half life games, or the fact that even if the combine were evil "at least they made the trains run on time"?