Wright is a brilliant guy and I can't wait for Spore. But I would point out one way in which he seems to have conflicting passions when it comes to making games. On one hand, he says he likes the idea of games that connect people more to the world, by showing them all these different things around them. On the other, he says he likes the idea of games which adapt themselves to the player. When you think of it, the first thing brings people "out of their bubble" and the second thing creates a new kind of "bubble".
After reading the article, I think I disagree with his notion that games which adapt themselves to the player will be very common in the future. Mainly because it's just not an idea that excites me, whatever that's worth. Plus, technically, it's hard to implement that kind of AI without fucking it up, and just ending up with a game that does random things. It's like how ten years ago, the industry thought MMORPG's were going to be big business in the future. All these developers tried making them, and fucked it up because it's a technical and logistical nightmare. (You could even say Sims Online is included on that list, but I don't know, I've never played it.) Now what? We've got WoW and a few peripheral MMOs played by losers (no offense).
Finally, there's a different way games can connect us to the real world, and it's what every old-school video game was based on: simple hand-eye co-ordination. Every game from Pong to Super Mario Bros was based on developing this skill. Now that games are so complex and cerebral, the importance of hand-eye co-ordination is diminished. But it still remains a tremendous way to "connect to reality". Look at Guitar Hero. It's essentially about hand-eye co-ordination (OK, ear too). Those are still my favorite games: ones where you develop a real motor skill. It's one of the reasons I worry for the Wii: The Wiimote doesn't seem precise enough to create games where your level of success meaningfully improves with practice.
People think up trillion dollar plans like putting up million of tiny umbrellas into geosynchronous orbit to deflect sunlight, but we can't get people to just not drive SUVs.
It's the same phenomenon at a different scale. Man sees himself as the ruler and conqueror of his environment, instead of coexisting with it. That's the root problem. If people realized that the earth was, literally, a physical extension of themselves, maybe they wouldn't find it so easy to abuse.
Those kids should have taken a Polaroid instead. Then there would be no arguments about how their computers could be hacked and exploited and blah blah blah.
Also, you just know that every member of the jury was immediately cranking one off as soon as they returned to their hotel rooms.
Sure, it's easy to only remember the bad times. But who among us can honestly say we won't miss him? His knowing winks, his cute little antics. His sage, though sometimes random and unrelated, wisdom. I already feel a piece of my heart missing and I fear it will never be clipped back together.
Cue Cinderella's "Don't Know What You've Got Til It's Gone".
1. You provide no examples.
2. "Quite close" is subjective, and therefore a useless metric of success.
3. Even if you did provide several strong existing examples, it would say absolutely nothing about the accuracy of this particular Asimov short story.
The only reason people want to daydream about how accurate this particular short story could be is because they hold their own intelligence to be an object of personal vanity.
And not that it matters, but here are a few science fiction pieces that were way off:
Your point is well-stated, but actually, I've been the social leper plenty of times. Don't you worry. I'm pretty experienced with that kind of anxiety. It really stems from having an over-active intellect, where you objectify, judge and analyze yourself and others. And that's exactly what TFA does. So I wanted to make an example out of it.
I also think that if a person cares, it's ever too late for them to learn some social grace. If you're interested in them, with no expectations, they'll be interested in you.
I know, I felt kinda weird after posting it. I tend to get worked up by this type of discussion (on or off Slashdot). That's just me. I wouldn't call sociology "evil", if it's not taken too seriously. I just didn't like the pretentious tone of the summary (and article) and I'm also interested in seeing how people react to a comment like that on Slashdot.
How do we make friends and get to know other people?
I hate shit like this. Question: Do you want to know how to make friends, or do you want to make friends? Because when you start to look for the secret procedure behind friendship, you start looking at people as if they were abstract personalities, with some quanitifiable set of properties, and you stop looking at them as human beings. And this attitude can prevent you from actually connecting with them. It's completely absurd. Not everything is meant to be turned into cold science.
Re:I call bullshit on this
on
Finding New Code
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I don't think people are giving programmers enough credit for having common sense, and this project to reduce code re-implementation sounds pretty idealistic. I don't know if I call bullshit on it, but I smell a few flawed assumptions.
First flawed assumption seems to be that the hard part in re-using code is simply to find it. But that's crap. When code is in the form where it can even be re-used, it's called a module, and a big chunk of this code is the module's interface. The interface is what lets you re-use it. But there are huge differences between interfaces. There are different calling conventions, different parameter orderings, different limitations on thread re-entry, different permissions on order of things you're allowed to call, and entirely different approaches to specifying the interface. A streaming library can have a public function Read() or it can have a pair of public functions BeginRead()/EndRead(), and there are many valid reasons for both cases.
Point being, you often have to refactor a module's interface before you can fit it into your project, and depending on the size and purpose of that module, the refactoring might be just as slow as writing a new implementation.
Second flawed assumption is that developers aren't even able to find the code which they need to find today. But that's crap too because there are a lot of great, re-useable libraries that programmers already commonly know about, or can easily find through Google or Sourceforge. First of all, the standard C/C++ libraries give you a lot. Then there's zlib, curl, glut, Allegro, and hundreds (thousands, depending on your standards) more, depending on what you're doing.
Come to think of it, when you really want to re-use code, you look for libraries, not source code. Searching for source code mainly helps people who want to learn programming.
I know that the site linked in the summary only contains Java code right now, and I'm mainly focusing on C/C++ here but I think a lot of what I said applies. (Don't tell me that Java's automatic turning of each class into a monitor solves the thread re-entry problem, because that really just substitutes one problem for another.)
It's not even as simple as being banned from the Internet. He's "banned from using the Internet for personal reasons for an unknown period of time". Basically, as long as nobody sees him on MySpace for a little while, he'll probably be fine.
I'm sure the whole sentence was handed down just to send a public message: Don't fuck with MySpace. They have a heavily vested interest in being online every minute of the day, and don't want to be taken down for 5 minutes.
You are right on the money. Programmers tend to try put more priority on building re-useable components (tools, modules, etc.) than on actually building the damn product. I know I've been as guilty of that as anyone.
We're all taught that re-useability, modularity and portability are great ideas. But if you look around at many software projects, these principles are often given top priority, and the cart goes squarely in front of the horse. Few people realize that early architecting can be as evil as early optimization.
How often have you heard of a programmer building a widget system instead of building a widget? Creating a render library instead of creating graphics? Creating an engine instead of an application? Even OOP tells us that we must write a class before writing a function (sorry, method). Anyone remember coding in straight C? It worked. And if you wanted to re-use any of it, it wasn't impossible.
You get the feeling that the quest for productivity becomes a drain on productivity, which, in turn, makes the quest for productivity even more attractive. Then we all wonder why writing software is so hard.
Explorer was [not] so much better than Netscape that it deserved a 90% market share.
Netscape was better up until around Netscape 4, when it turned into a clunky, steaming pile, and IE actually became the better, smoother, more enjoyable browser for a while. Today, Firefox is better.
Excel was not so much better than Quattro Pro. Word was not so much better than WordPerfect.
After Corel bought Quattro Pro and WordPerfect, they turned into steaming piles. I know... I worked there.:-) I think around WordPerfect 9, there was a latency in your typing that made it feel like a telnet session. And it crashed a lot. Excel and Word crash too, but generally, they've always been consistently solid, enjoyable products that get the job done.
It fits people's needs by being on their computer when they bought it; people don't choose OS's, they're considered features of the box you pay for.
This is a totally valid point, and you also cited a legitimate need for the end user. Most people do need something on their computers when they buy them. But you can't claim or even imply this is the secret of Windows' success. I remember when Windows 3.1 came out. Home users willingly bought and installed it on their existing 286/386 machines in droves, which were running DOS up to that point. It was a good product introduced at the right time for the right audience. It spawned a whole family of application software and grew from there, making Microsoft rich. The OEM bundling resulted as a by-product.
more users -> more developers -> more software titles -> more users
This is just another way of saying you want to expand market share for the sake of expanding it.
I'd prefer to use open source whose chief motivation was to offer a good experience. Not whose chief motivation was to expand market share. I know part of Windows' motivation was to grow a large market, but that only stemmed from their desire to make money. They were successful at that, and that's how they made something everyone uses.
I didn't know Microsoft had a "way" they're somehow losing now.
Surely you knew that 90% of the world uses Windows. You can't claim a figure like that is only the result of monopolistic practices and be serious. It fits people's needs by being something that is brain-dead useable across an enormous variety of hardware. That should be obvious from the 90%.
...we should, too, if we ever want to expand our installed base and market share beyond geeks and tech savvy users.
I might be wandering offtopic, but if you're involved in free software, why does it matter how much of the world is using it? I see the merit in offering people alternatives. That's commendable. They'll take it if they want, since it's free. But what's the point in trying to expand market share, just for its own sake? Is it an ego thing?
Yes, although security is a [complicated concept]. You're [referring to] the fact that there have been some security updates already for Windows Vista. This is exactly the way it should work. When somebody comes to us [after discovering a vulnerability] we've got [a fix] before there is any exploit. So it's totally according to plan, and that's why we have the whole Windows Update thing. We made it way harder for guys to do exploits. The number [of violations] will be way less because we've done some dramatic things [to improve security] in the code base. Apple hasn't done any of those things.
Is this a joke? It sure [is weird] to read an [article that] has so [many freaking] edits. I wonder [if Bill] was swearing [like a] sailor throughout [the] whole interview, and they [had to] clean [up] his potty mouth?
Well, it's actually cool that you say you don't want Nirvana. Religion is like psychotherapy, and Buddhism in particular I think, in that it's a temporary medicine for people who feel like they need something more or something's missing. And I find it interesting that nanotechnology attracts the same kind of audience (example).
I was attracted to Buddhism also, but I sensed that it was full of a lot of crap about "eightfold path" and "realms of existence" and stuff. But it eventually led me to meditation and I got a surprising little epiphany out of that. I just remembered what it felt like to have no name and less desire to influence people, and just be a guy sitting in a room. It's not like I totally lost my name and my identity... I just felt the way I always used to feel as a kid. It was cool and I got a lot out of it. But then again, I was quite desperate to get something out of it, at the time.
Thanks for the straightforward answer. I was aware that death was a big part of the motivation. It's certainly something I've agonized over in the past as much as anyone. Maybe even more. But since then I've learned that death is, in fact, not something to fear. Here is one book which puts it better than I am able to, and it isn't sci-fi or fantasy. If, 10, 20, 50 years from now, we can continue to expand our lifespan, that would be neat and everything, but I don't think it's sensible to view life extension as some kind of victory in the battle against the evil spectre of death. And that appears to be a common viewpoint among nanotech-hopefuls.
You're right! Your question could not have possibly implied anything at all! You said something stupid, but since it's mildly ambiguous, no one can justifiably comment on it!
That straw man sure says a lot of things on my behalf.
Four books? Yikes. Couldn't you just sum them up for me? I see they're fantasy and not Sci-Fi... Do they fall into the Harry Potter-side of the inspiration?
Leigh believes nanoscale science and engineering could have a huge impact on society - comparable to the impact of electricity, the steam engine and the Internet.
But quite how, is difficult to predict.
So far, the biggest impact of nanotechnology on society is that society is full of geeks who swoon at the idea of nanotechnology being the future. Why are so many nerds just dying for the nanotechnology future to get here? What's wrong with the present?
Things that seem like a Harry Potter film now are going to be a reality.
I thought the inspiration for nanotechnology came from Sci-Fi books and Star Trek. Now Harry Potter is the big inspiration?
Slashdot Mirror
Wright is a brilliant guy and I can't wait for Spore. But I would point out one way in which he seems to have conflicting passions when it comes to making games. On one hand, he says he likes the idea of games that connect people more to the world, by showing them all these different things around them. On the other, he says he likes the idea of games which adapt themselves to the player. When you think of it, the first thing brings people "out of their bubble" and the second thing creates a new kind of "bubble".
After reading the article, I think I disagree with his notion that games which adapt themselves to the player will be very common in the future. Mainly because it's just not an idea that excites me, whatever that's worth. Plus, technically, it's hard to implement that kind of AI without fucking it up, and just ending up with a game that does random things. It's like how ten years ago, the industry thought MMORPG's were going to be big business in the future. All these developers tried making them, and fucked it up because it's a technical and logistical nightmare. (You could even say Sims Online is included on that list, but I don't know, I've never played it.) Now what? We've got WoW and a few peripheral MMOs played by losers (no offense).
Finally, there's a different way games can connect us to the real world, and it's what every old-school video game was based on: simple hand-eye co-ordination. Every game from Pong to Super Mario Bros was based on developing this skill. Now that games are so complex and cerebral, the importance of hand-eye co-ordination is diminished. But it still remains a tremendous way to "connect to reality". Look at Guitar Hero. It's essentially about hand-eye co-ordination (OK, ear too). Those are still my favorite games: ones where you develop a real motor skill. It's one of the reasons I worry for the Wii: The Wiimote doesn't seem precise enough to create games where your level of success meaningfully improves with practice.
It's the same phenomenon at a different scale. Man sees himself as the ruler and conqueror of his environment, instead of coexisting with it. That's the root problem. If people realized that the earth was, literally, a physical extension of themselves, maybe they wouldn't find it so easy to abuse.
Those kids should have taken a Polaroid instead. Then there would be no arguments about how their computers could be hacked and exploited and blah blah blah.
Also, you just know that every member of the jury was immediately cranking one off as soon as they returned to their hotel rooms.
Sure, it's easy to only remember the bad times. But who among us can honestly say we won't miss him? His knowing winks, his cute little antics. His sage, though sometimes random and unrelated, wisdom. I already feel a piece of my heart missing and I fear it will never be clipped back together.
Cue Cinderella's "Don't Know What You've Got Til It's Gone".
1. You provide no examples.
2. "Quite close" is subjective, and therefore a useless metric of success.
3. Even if you did provide several strong existing examples, it would say absolutely nothing about the accuracy of this particular Asimov short story.
The only reason people want to daydream about how accurate this particular short story could be is because they hold their own intelligence to be an object of personal vanity.
And not that it matters, but here are a few science fiction pieces that were way off:
Yeah, Asimov's short story is a nice little piece of fiction, but let's try to remember that Universe is not fiction.
Your point is well-stated, but actually, I've been the social leper plenty of times. Don't you worry. I'm pretty experienced with that kind of anxiety. It really stems from having an over-active intellect, where you objectify, judge and analyze yourself and others. And that's exactly what TFA does. So I wanted to make an example out of it.
I also think that if a person cares, it's ever too late for them to learn some social grace. If you're interested in them, with no expectations, they'll be interested in you.
I know, I felt kinda weird after posting it. I tend to get worked up by this type of discussion (on or off Slashdot). That's just me. I wouldn't call sociology "evil", if it's not taken too seriously. I just didn't like the pretentious tone of the summary (and article) and I'm also interested in seeing how people react to a comment like that on Slashdot.
I hate shit like this. Question: Do you want to know how to make friends, or do you want to make friends? Because when you start to look for the secret procedure behind friendship, you start looking at people as if they were abstract personalities, with some quanitifiable set of properties, and you stop looking at them as human beings. And this attitude can prevent you from actually connecting with them. It's completely absurd. Not everything is meant to be turned into cold science.
I don't think people are giving programmers enough credit for having common sense, and this project to reduce code re-implementation sounds pretty idealistic. I don't know if I call bullshit on it, but I smell a few flawed assumptions.
First flawed assumption seems to be that the hard part in re-using code is simply to find it. But that's crap. When code is in the form where it can even be re-used, it's called a module, and a big chunk of this code is the module's interface. The interface is what lets you re-use it. But there are huge differences between interfaces. There are different calling conventions, different parameter orderings, different limitations on thread re-entry, different permissions on order of things you're allowed to call, and entirely different approaches to specifying the interface. A streaming library can have a public function Read() or it can have a pair of public functions BeginRead()/EndRead(), and there are many valid reasons for both cases.
Point being, you often have to refactor a module's interface before you can fit it into your project, and depending on the size and purpose of that module, the refactoring might be just as slow as writing a new implementation.
Second flawed assumption is that developers aren't even able to find the code which they need to find today. But that's crap too because there are a lot of great, re-useable libraries that programmers already commonly know about, or can easily find through Google or Sourceforge. First of all, the standard C/C++ libraries give you a lot. Then there's zlib, curl, glut, Allegro, and hundreds (thousands, depending on your standards) more, depending on what you're doing.
Come to think of it, when you really want to re-use code, you look for libraries, not source code. Searching for source code mainly helps people who want to learn programming.
I know that the site linked in the summary only contains Java code right now, and I'm mainly focusing on C/C++ here but I think a lot of what I said applies. (Don't tell me that Java's automatic turning of each class into a monitor solves the thread re-entry problem, because that really just substitutes one problem for another.)
More job security for those of us already in CS.
It's not even as simple as being banned from the Internet. He's "banned from using the Internet for personal reasons for an unknown period of time". Basically, as long as nobody sees him on MySpace for a little while, he'll probably be fine.
I'm sure the whole sentence was handed down just to send a public message: Don't fuck with MySpace. They have a heavily vested interest in being online every minute of the day, and don't want to be taken down for 5 minutes.
You are right on the money. Programmers tend to try put more priority on building re-useable components (tools, modules, etc.) than on actually building the damn product. I know I've been as guilty of that as anyone.
We're all taught that re-useability, modularity and portability are great ideas. But if you look around at many software projects, these principles are often given top priority, and the cart goes squarely in front of the horse. Few people realize that early architecting can be as evil as early optimization.
How often have you heard of a programmer building a widget system instead of building a widget? Creating a render library instead of creating graphics? Creating an engine instead of an application? Even OOP tells us that we must write a class before writing a function (sorry, method). Anyone remember coding in straight C? It worked. And if you wanted to re-use any of it, it wasn't impossible.
You get the feeling that the quest for productivity becomes a drain on productivity, which, in turn, makes the quest for productivity even more attractive. Then we all wonder why writing software is so hard.
Netscape was better up until around Netscape 4, when it turned into a clunky, steaming pile, and IE actually became the better, smoother, more enjoyable browser for a while. Today, Firefox is better.
After Corel bought Quattro Pro and WordPerfect, they turned into steaming piles. I know... I worked there. :-) I think around WordPerfect 9, there was a latency in your typing that made it feel like a telnet session. And it crashed a lot. Excel and Word crash too, but generally, they've always been consistently solid, enjoyable products that get the job done.
This is a totally valid point, and you also cited a legitimate need for the end user. Most people do need something on their computers when they buy them. But you can't claim or even imply this is the secret of Windows' success. I remember when Windows 3.1 came out. Home users willingly bought and installed it on their existing 286/386 machines in droves, which were running DOS up to that point. It was a good product introduced at the right time for the right audience. It spawned a whole family of application software and grew from there, making Microsoft rich. The OEM bundling resulted as a by-product.
This is just another way of saying you want to expand market share for the sake of expanding it.
I'd prefer to use open source whose chief motivation was to offer a good experience. Not whose chief motivation was to expand market share. I know part of Windows' motivation was to grow a large market, but that only stemmed from their desire to make money. They were successful at that, and that's how they made something everyone uses.
It's here.
Surely you knew that 90% of the world uses Windows. You can't claim a figure like that is only the result of monopolistic practices and be serious. It fits people's needs by being something that is brain-dead useable across an enormous variety of hardware. That should be obvious from the 90%.
I might be wandering offtopic, but if you're involved in free software, why does it matter how much of the world is using it? I see the merit in offering people alternatives. That's commendable. They'll take it if they want, since it's free. But what's the point in trying to expand market share, just for its own sake? Is it an ego thing?
Check out this part of TFA:
Is this a joke? It sure [is weird] to read an [article that] has so [many freaking] edits. I wonder [if Bill] was swearing [like a] sailor throughout [the] whole interview, and they [had to] clean [up] his potty mouth?
Well, it's actually cool that you say you don't want Nirvana. Religion is like psychotherapy, and Buddhism in particular I think, in that it's a temporary medicine for people who feel like they need something more or something's missing. And I find it interesting that nanotechnology attracts the same kind of audience (example).
I was attracted to Buddhism also, but I sensed that it was full of a lot of crap about "eightfold path" and "realms of existence" and stuff. But it eventually led me to meditation and I got a surprising little epiphany out of that. I just remembered what it felt like to have no name and less desire to influence people, and just be a guy sitting in a room. It's not like I totally lost my name and my identity... I just felt the way I always used to feel as a kid. It was cool and I got a lot out of it. But then again, I was quite desperate to get something out of it, at the time.
Thanks for the straightforward answer. I was aware that death was a big part of the motivation. It's certainly something I've agonized over in the past as much as anyone. Maybe even more. But since then I've learned that death is, in fact, not something to fear. Here is one book which puts it better than I am able to, and it isn't sci-fi or fantasy. If, 10, 20, 50 years from now, we can continue to expand our lifespan, that would be neat and everything, but I don't think it's sensible to view life extension as some kind of victory in the battle against the evil spectre of death. And that appears to be a common viewpoint among nanotech-hopefuls.
That straw man sure says a lot of things on my behalf.
Four books? Yikes. Couldn't you just sum them up for me? I see they're fantasy and not Sci-Fi... Do they fall into the Harry Potter-side of the inspiration?
Strawman alert! I never said today is perfect. I merely asked a question. The implied meaning took place entirely in your mind. You just got trolled!
You mean from a Sci-Fi book?
So far, the biggest impact of nanotechnology on society is that society is full of geeks who swoon at the idea of nanotechnology being the future. Why are so many nerds just dying for the nanotechnology future to get here? What's wrong with the present?
I thought the inspiration for nanotechnology came from Sci-Fi books and Star Trek. Now Harry Potter is the big inspiration?