In any publishing industry (music, books, video), content is cheap. The real value is fighting off sturgeon's law.
Sturgeon's law says that 90% of everything is crud. The contents of mp3.com are the same as a book editor's "slush pile", which is full of a thousand amateurs all trying to write the great american novel, and 99.5% of them really sucking at it. mp3.com has every garage band on the planet that can rune Lame or BladeEnc sending in a demo tape, and most are really awful.
This is normal. There's great stuff out there, but you have to find it. This is why search engines exist on the web, because most web pages are terrible and pointless, and the value is in finding the good ones. That's what SLASHDOT does! (And why slashdot's comments have a ranking system.)
That's what Red Hat or Debian does bringing out new Linux distributions, going through the hordes of code on freshmeat and such and finding the stuff that's worth including.
Fighting off sturgeon's law is a useful service, quite possibly THE most successful business model on the web. Skimming off the cream, polishing it up, and packaging it in a shiny box. But that is -NOT- what mp3.com did.
mp3.com did for music what sourceforge does for open source or what geocities does for web pages. It's nice, but it also rapidly fills up with unfinished or even random cruft. It's also not something people are really willing to pay for, except maybe to view advertising. The very "freeness" of it is why people use it. It's a big public canvas, blank space in which amateurs can scribble.
What mp3.com needed, and what they never had, was an editorial board that found their top 1%, collected it together, polished it, and promoted it. THAT is the valuable service music companies have forgotten they provide. (NOT distribution, sorting through heaps of demo tapes to find talent and then, once upon a time, nurturing it.)
Same with the motion picture industry, the point isn't that they can crank out yet another crocodile dundee movie but that they can find people like Steven Spielberg and hand him the budget to make "Jaws". These days the new talent is going to atomfilms.com or some such, and getting lost in the slush pile...
Fighting off sturgeon's law is a service people ARE willing to pay money for. If you can ensure quality and save them time, they will pay for it. Always have, always will. The publishing industries are terrified of the web taking away their distribution role, but only because they've forgotten why they were the ones who had something to distribute.
>I'm betting that any other gamehack who just read this article (and there are 90,000
>potential gamehacks reading slashdot on any given day) can whack up something with the same
>user-selectable-parallel-universe model in a couple of months, if not a couple of weeks.
The infrastructure maybe, but would it be a fun game?
Plotting out a detailed story can easily take a year. Forget about the technology for a moment and look at print authors. How long does it take Terry Pratchett to knock out another diskworld novel? That guys' really GOOD, and writing is his full time job, and he still only does about one book a year.
With most games these days, the story is "let's go kill something". Uh-huh. The most recent ground-breaking uber-game was "The Sims", which actively avoided any plot-like elements anywhere in the design.
R.G. doesn't have to redefine the world to make a successful game. There's a new "game of the year" every year.
Considering that his first product is repackaging a proven game in a new market, and that he's financing the company with a small chunk of his personal wealth and so doesn't have loans to repay or investors to placate. Basically, he's doing it to scratch his own itch, because he likes making games.
I'd say the new company's on a pretty strong footing. Now we just have to bug him for a Linux version...:)
Then they laugh at you...
Then they fight you...
Then you win.
Mundie is just trying to buy time. He's giving the anthill another stir because it's the only action he has left that can really seriously annoy us. Microsoft's other forms of leverage are evaporating like dry ice in a microwave.
Maybe he'll convince a few CIO's to hold off on the switch to Open Source for another eight to twelve months. Ooh. Maybe he'll even convince a few to go back to old Cobol mainframes.:)
But he wouldn't be bothering to directly address us unless we were now officially a threat.
I'm just wondering how this is going to look on his resume at his next job, once MS is driven out of the OS business. Then again they've got $20 billion in the bank, plenty to start a new business from scratch if necessary. Maybe they'll open a chain of restaurants or something...
(Remember, we're not TRYING to make MS go away. We're trying to make Windows go away.)
Yes, but the over 100 gig area is IBM's bread and butter, and they're the ones pushing Linux up there.:)
So that leaves windows blocked at the top and being nibbled to death from the bottom. Kind of like the old DEC vaxen squashed between mainframes and the killer micros. All the top end has to do is slow their upward retreat faster than they're getting eaten up from below.
>This is exactly the point, though. Stallman calls
>his software 'free', but as you well point out,
>it comes with a price tag. I am not arguing
>whether or not it this price tag is reasonable -
>I agree that if you give me something, you should
>be able to attach any conditions you wish to it.
Yes, and in a truly "free" society murder wouldn't be a crime, would it? Otherwise, you'd be free to commit it.
I believe that's called "anarchy". If you stop and think about it, the bill of rights is just a list of behaviors that are prevented. (Can't censor people. Can't take people's guns away. Can't stop people from getting together in large groups...) What a totalitarian document.
>Get over it. THere will never be another Bill
>Gates in the software industry.
Or another rockefeller in the oil industry. Or Henry Ford in the automobile industry. And (switching from money to fame), it'd be a touch hard to get another Linus Torvalds in the operating system space.
Hands up everybody who's suprised it's easier to get a 50% share of an industry when it's really really tiny, and then hang on for the ride as it grows, than try to de-commoditize established one.
The problem is a lot of people don't trust the KDE team's judgement.
This is residue from when QT was a "source under glass" library. Yes, that has now been fixed, but back when that was the case, THE KDE PEOPLE DID NOT HAVE A PROBLEM WITH IT.
Anybody remember Unix? Everyone blissfully ignoring AT&T's unenforced copyright for fifteen years, then out of the blue "oh, by the way, all your bases are belonging to us". That kind of thing leaves a scar on a community.
More recently, the reason 90% of the Java development momentum drained away into Linux in 1998 was that everyone realised that Sun was never going to release Java to the ISO. We all remember how Microsoft was all sweetness and light compared to IBM, at first. And how IBM's commodity PC was saving the world from (pick one: Apple, Digital Equipment Corporation, IBM's own mainframes, Somebody Else. Until the PS/2, anyway). But Sun wouldn't even port the JDK to Linux (which annoyed people who had never even HEARD of Linux). If they support that, what else wouldn't they allow?
Nobody ever REALLY trusts a "benevolent dictator", they're only happy if they know they have a way out. They may never really believe they'll need to use it, but people get claustrophobic otherwise. Even the best of the lot, Linus or Guido Van Rossom or Larry Wall, COULD BE REPLACED. If necessary. Everyone's sanity depends on it. If any of them came down with a brain infection and started going after people with an axe, a new leader would be ready and the community would go on. It ISN'T currently necessary, and we're happy that's so. But we couldn't sleep at night otherwise.
The KDE people -ARE- happy inserting proprietary technology into the fundamental infrastructure upon which we're all trying to build shared code. And that ALWAYS winds up causing a problem, it's just a question of how long it takes to snowball. But they don't SEE it.
The fact that this instance of the problem has been fixed doesn't mean the Gnome folks have started to trust the KDE people's judgement, because they WON'T ADMIT THEY MADE A MISTAKE!
Nothing against TrollTech. Nice people who simply didn't understand the benefits of dual licensing, and their code IS now GPL. But it was just wrong for KDE to pick the poisoned apple no matter how tempting, and the fact they still don't seem to understand why is a problem.
>But there's no way I can ever tolerate his
>distorted vision for the future of software. To
>the extent that he denies a software author the
>right to do with his code as he pleases, the man
>is a maniac.
You mean how dare I demand the same treatment from you as you got from me, I.E. the publication of any source code derived from my work?
How dare I, as a software author, attach a price tag to my work which you only have to pay if your code incorporates my own?
Nobody ever said you had to include any GPLed code in a program you write, and if that's your attitude about it I seriously hope you never do.
Open Source is -NOT- a threat to Microsoft. They're thrilled to co-opt code out of BSD (where do you think windows got its network stack)? The standard interface to the internet for 3/4 of the people using it is Internet Explorer. Embrace and extend, and with a BSD style license it's so easy everybody from IBM (AIX) to BSDI has already done it, even WITHOUT trying to kill off Unix.
The GPL is what makes Linux a threat. They can't embrace and extend it, it embraces and extends THEM. And that scares the heck otu of them, so they're fudding it. Ransom Love's stupid enough to buy into this, but that's no suprise. This is the man who saw value in the corpse of SCO.
Sheesh, Microsoft is THRILLED about non-GPL open source. Just as Microsoft embraced and extended the internet, the macintosh-like GUI, and any other idea to get within 50 paces. Nothing new comes out of MS, they NEED stuff to copy. Open Source development could easily be their R&D department. Without the internet, their growth would already have peaked a few years ago, their whole.NET strategy is co-opting other people's ideas (the internet and Java).
If Microsoft was facing BSD right now in place of Linux, it would just fork it. Embrace and extend, bundle a BSD variant with Explorer and a Win32 API compatability library, and of course half of the office suite buried and hidden in the standard system libraries just like it's in windows now. And it would work.
But they can't do that with GPL code. So they're trying to get the Open Source movement to leave the GPL behind, so they have stuff they can fork off proprietary versions of.
The GPL is the open source movement's immune system against proprietary things like MS. Lots of people say that in an ideal world you don't need an immune system. Apparently, they live in a bubble.
> Looking around at all the biased, uninformed,
> ignorant posts reminds me why FUD is such a good
> marketing tool. How many of you that just bashed
> Os/2 have ever ran it?
I not only ran it, I was a member of Team OS/2 for years and I worked at IBM on OS/2 for the Power PC and OS/2 version 4. (I wrote the half of "Feature Install" that works, and no I could never get permission to fix the other half. Or the flawed design that predated my employment at IBM.)
I watched OS/2 die along with all the other non-MS proprietary OSes after Windows 95 came out and finally customers weren't actively looking to replace windows.
Being a tiny fragment was no longer an option, the anything but microsoft crowd had to unite behind something, and all the momentum shifted over to Java as the last hope to keep OS/2 alive by being part of something bigger.
Then Sun got greedy, refused to release Java to a standards body (despite endless promises), refused to make a Linux port of the JDK, had everybody sign non-disclosure agreements to see the Java runtime source code... Everybody's monopoly detector went off, and nobody wanted to replace microsoft's leash with sun's.
The netscape (that great guru of Javadom who gave up the applet) suddenly went "Look! The cathedral and the bazaar! Open Source! Linux!" And all the java people went "ooh". And there was much rejoicing.
I'd been toying with Linux since college, and had been TRYING to use it as my java development platform after leaving OS/2 (NOT easy back then). It was a bit like coming home.
For "surfing" access, cable's a better technical solution. People who think shared bandwidth is somehow not a workable solution for network access have apparently never used ethernet. Dedicated bandwidth is wasted bandwidth if you aren't running a server. Client access is bursty. (Even if you're watching streaming video, you're probably not doing so more than 1% of the time.) In the real world, 90% of the time you're borrowing other people's bandwidth to get way than you would have otherwise.
In my experience, the real bottleneck bandwidth-wise is almost never the last hop in a cable modem. (The cable company's own connection to the internet is often the limiting factor, but if they have two uplinks some sites may be slow while others aren't). If not, the limit's how busy the server you're talking to is, or some other bottleneck in an intermediate hop. Even at peak activity I've never seen a download from an otherwise fast site drop below about 140 kilobytes (not bits, bytes) per second. Average is 250-350, and theoretical peak (never seen it) is 500. I've never seen kernel.org drop below 200k/sec.
Now trying to use a cable modem as a server is ludicrous; upstream bandwidth is only about 20k/second. I uploaded 1.6 gigs to work once, it took a day and change. DSL is a MUCH better solution for servers, in theory anyway. (My own experience with it involves a lot of 15 second signal dropouts which aren't acceptable in a real server. But for a hobbyist starting out, who can't afford anything like server side hosting and needs "surfing" access anyway...)
Determining whether big evil cable corporations are worse than big evil phone companies is an open question, of course.:)
Back when I got my commodore 64 in the 80's the second big project I wrote was my own BBS. (The first was a disk editor.) I ended up writing three of them on the commodore (in basic, compiled with blitz.)
I learned C so I could modify a friend's copy of WWIV. That's also why I got my own PC. (And THERE was an early bazaar community if ever there was one, the WWIV.mod file community.)
The last BBS I wrote was in, a multinode fidonet compatable bbs written from scratch in c++ including my own fidonet message processing routines that were WAY more efficient than anything else I'd seen. A friend of mine ran a copy that's listed on there (xblat, under the 609 area code). Strangely, my own bbs (The Conversation Pit) is listed as "unknown".:)
I had xblat multitasking under desqview with no synchronization primitive except file locking. I had the capacity to do 9 nodes (8 FOSSIL driver ports plus one on the keyboard), plus the mail tosser running. Not that I had that many phone lines.:)
And the mail tosser processed 30 messages/second on a 386/33DX while updating a text mode display of what it was doing. And I eventually got it to where it would handle outgoing messages posted by a user on another node in the middle of digesting an incoming fido packet without ever having to look at the same message twice. All done without resorting to Turbo C's "huge" pointers, I might add.:)
Those were the days...
In 1995 I started porting it to 32 bit OS/2 code under EMX, but I had a day job and I'd found the internet anyway. (Strangely, my BBS work never impressed IBM.:) Kept meaning to write a BBS in java, but I wanted to make it internet based and I couldn't find a hosting service that would let me run actual daemons instead of just CGI on a web page. Eventually I moved on to other things...
>SMP and NUMA are different problems because they
>have different failure characteristics.
It's a question of what problems you want to address. It's entirely possible to have multitasking multiuser operating systems without virtual memory. (Just about every 1970's era unix before the Vax, actually.)
Doesn't make the problem fundamentally different, just that there's more cases to cover. Do you always check for a non-null return from your mallocs, or do you just say "the system should just never run out of memory"?
>As far as I know, an SMP operating system
>assumes that, if CPU #2 was there just a moment
>ago, it will still be there.
Three words: Hot pluggable hardware.
And yes, they're talking about adding that capability to the Linux kernel in 2.5. (Although the current patch has a/proc entry to switch the appropriate processors of and on before just yanking them. Then again, PCMCIA proves you can do it without manual notification since you get several miliseconds of warning, which is ages to the computer...)
>What happens when your operating system needs to
>fault in a page, but your distributed VM manager
>lost network contact with your other server(s)?
Well, when piranha.rutgers.edu did this (no local hard drive, it swapped through the network to the server in the back room), its response was to die spectacularly (sunOS didn't blue screen, it white screened). This is not a new problem.
Then again, how many apps never check the return value of malloc and just expect the OS to go down if the system runs out of memory anyway?
If you were really swapping through the network (despite hard drives being cheap they ARE failure-prone moving parts), I'd say use distributed redundant swap devices and treat them like RAID 5 so you can loose one and recover the data? Also avoids network bottlenecks. But then you're eating network bandwidth needlessly, which is usually your limiting factor. (Then again, you page fault all sorts of other stuff through the network anyway in a shared memory config, it wouldn't so much be swapping as a larger distributed memory management system.)
It's an open question on the best way to go. Performance vs reliability is often a tradeoff. But there are PLENTY of different options.
>How can the operating system handle this error
>gracefully? Or politely warn the userspace
>application?:-(
How does RAID 5 do it today? (Let's see, SMART disks, battery packed up power supplies notifying of failure, hot pluggable hardware... It'll probably all get molded together someday into pseudo-coherent infrastructure of dynamic system status.)
The most graceful thing for the OS to do may just be to suspend the app and save off its state until it can continue. It depends. As I said, there are a lot of options.
Rob
Re:Finally, something resembling clustering for Li
on
Mosix 1.0 Released
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· Score: 3
>Repeat after me "THERE ARE MANY KINDS OF
>CLUSTERS". Again...again...again....
>Now we will play a game: match the clustering
>technology description to a popular name. Match
>the letter to the number.
Berries come in clusters. Stars come in clusters. Military rank insignia come in clusters...
Californians... No wait, this is a family oriented area.
Rob
(Austinite. They move here and can't drive, so we get to make fun of them.)
A quick primer on types of paralell systems.
on
Mosix 1.0 Released
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· Score: 5
There are traditionally three different types of paralell processing systems: SMP, NUMA, and networked clusters like Beowulf. In reality, these form a continuous range, with SMP at one end, Beowulf at the other, and NUMA in the middle.
SMP is Symmetrical Multi-Processing, or one computer with multiple processors just like multiple hard drives, multiple serial ports, or multiple banks of RAM. In an SMP setup, each processor has equal access to the other system resources, and although they may need locking to avoid stomping on each other's activities, it's no more expensive for processor #2 to access a certain resource (such as an area of main memory) than it is for processor #5 to do so. Thus there's no real reason to shuffle processes around to be "closer" to some other resource.
The other end of the spectrum is message passing networked clustering, like beowulf, where isolated systems (each with its associated set of resources) accept complete tasklets, work on them more or less alone, and output the results. Accessing resources from the rest of the cluster is very expensive, and you try not to do it more than absolutely necessary (once per transaction). A message comes in with all the info a node needs to do its work, and the node sends a message back out with the result and to announce it's ready for the next mouthful.
NUMA is in between, and it stands for Non-Uniform Memory Architecture. You have a bunch of similar processors, like in SMP, but some resources are "close" to each processor and some are far away.
Remember, clusters own resources outright, this is my node's memory. On SMP all processors access a pool of shared resources (like main memory) at the same speed (hence symmetrically). On NUMA, processor #53 -CAN- access memory over by processor #1736, but it'll take much longer than if it accesses memory near itself. It'll block, it'll have wait states. (Just like accessing a page swapped to the hard drive vs accessing one in memory.)
The thing is, as systems on either end become more complex they move towards NUMA. Think mondo SMP systems with dozens of processors, each of which has megabytes of L1 cache. You want to keep stuff "in cache" rather than accessing main memory, and sometimes you wan't to access something that's currently in some other processor's cache. Cache line pollution and such. That's a NUMA type of problem.
From the other end, once you start connecting beowulf clusters together with really high speed interconnects (like gigbit ethernet or myrinet, and often speed here is more a question of latency than bandwidth,) and start teaching them how to pretend to be one big shared memory image by page faulting through the network, you're approcaching NUMA from the other end. Stuff's in my machine's memory locally right now, and swapping it in from some other guy's memory (and swapping out some of my stuff to make room for it) is something I only want to do when absolutely necessary, because it slows me down.
MOSIX is taking beowulf clusters in the direction of NUMA. This is a good thing, it makes them more flexible and capable, but it opens up a whole can of worms to optimize it properly. (Not a new can of course, the kernel hackers are already dealing with a rather significant portion of NUMA's issues just trying to get 32 processor alphas to work smoothly.) If the interconnects between clusters were perfect, we could just treat it as one big SMP machine. Then again if our hard drives were as fast as our ram we wouldn't try so hard to minimize swapping, would we?
You could still just treat MOSIX as SMP instead of NUMA if you don't want to optimize your performance. And for many things that's a fine solution, just distributing it cross the cluster gives you all the performance you need, and adding nodes is more cost effective than rewriting your app for greater speed in the new environment.
But performance hits of thrashing all your pages through the network can be just as bad as thrashing them in and out of the swap partition. And performance is the only reason we're using clusters in the first place, isn't it?
And NUMA optimization just makes maintaining locality of reference, streamlined locking, and minimizing contention for commonly accessed resources even MORE important. It's the same kind of thing you'd do on a normal SMP machine anyway, it just has more of an impact, because there's more inefficiency to optimize away.
The moderation range is saturated. No doubt about that. The obvious solution is increasing the moderation range (possibly all the way to ten, for future growth), but first we've got to get Slash HQ to acknowledge that there is a problem.
There used to be a moderation category that was "just the best, most pithy synopses of the dicussion". Now that can easiy be 30 posts, and reading them doesn't fit in 3 minute "while this compiles" break anymore.
Part of it is that there's more posters these days, and more moderators, and the top 5% of 50 posts is a lot smaller than the top 5% of 500 posts.
Part of it is the automatic +1 of posters with a history of good karma. This is a good thing, but it reduces by 25% the range that can only be reached by active moderation. (The original moderation range of 2-5 has been reduced to 3-5. You used to be able to read at 2 and filter out the stuff that hadn't been voluntarily moderated up at least once. That's no longer the case, and even Einstein wasn't ALWAYS worth listening to. Sometimes he was just ordering breakfast, or complaining about the weather.)
Zero used to be a penalty for posting as an anonymous coward (since the troll ratio there was higher). 1 was standard. 2 being experienced poster who generally has somethng to say, that's meaningfull. This is a good heuristic for a starting position, but there's not enough room to go up fromt here, the system is swamped.
Slashdot has outgrown that range, even WITHOUT raising the floor. More marginal opinions less universally approved of (and less central to the topic) now reach the top category, because they have more opportunities to be moderated up. 5% of the viewership can easily spend 5 moderation points now.
perhaps we can go to a moderation percentage system? "Show me just the top 5% of posts"? Or sort them by popularity and give me the top fifteen...
>Stocks should be based on a company's business
>model and diversified revenue stream. Putting
>your eggs in one basket doesn't create a
>catalyst, it creates a huge risk.
Coca-cola's been selling one product for a hundred years now.
As Mark Twain said, puting all your eggs in one basket and WATHING THAT BASKET is often a good idea. Beats spreading yourself too thin doing 15 things poorly.
Rambus's problem is that their original business idea (rambus memory) turned out to be a technical dud along the lines of itanium and pentium 4. (Great in theory, doesn't work so well in practice). So they turned to suing everybody in sight, which is NOT a core business.
Remember Ken Thompson's trojaned compiler that realised when it was recompiling itself and patched the trojan in so it wasn't anywhere in the source code?
It's possible to be paranoid enough to qualify for medication and STILL not be 100% sure they can't "get you". NSA spooks sniffing your monitor's EM radiation to see your screen. A virus in your flashable bios. Those fun kernel module rootkits you can't detect without a clean boot disk and a hex editor (which is a fun way to inspect a 40 gigabyte drive...)
Personal inpsection simply doesn't scale. It hasn't been a realistic option for anybody who couldn't afford to do it as a full time job since the days of the commodore 64.
What you do is you find somebody to trust who will do this for you. Then you have to trust them. If Red Hat doesn't do it, than somebody who makes a distro based on paranoia (Red Helmet?) will make money by being, basically, paranoid and proud of it.
Red Hat obviously isn't it. It installs nfs by default. It installs a network writeable LPR even if you haven't installed printer support. That's just wrong...
But RPM's are just Linux's equivalent of running normal programs under an MS os. You can get viruses/trojans/whatever we're calling the variant this week. That's what being root means, and some things HAVE to have that access. (By definition, configuring the system requires the ability to make changes to it. Why does this seem to suprise people?)
At the end of each DNA strand is a region called a telomere, a long repeated sequence of the same nucleic acid (Adenine, I think) that regulates cell division. Cell division starts when the approriate molecule binds to the telomeres. The longer the telomeres are, the more likely the cell is to divide. The shorter it is, the more of a stimulus it needs to get started dividing.
Each time the cell divides, the telomeres get shorter. The the DNA strands aren't copied all the way to the end, and they down like a fuse. Right next to the telomeres is vital metabolic proteins, so when the telomeres are exhausted the next cell division damages those genes and kills the cell. This is, fundamentally speaking, the cell's aging process.
There's an enzyme called telomerase that protects the telomeres during cell division so they don't get shorter. This means cells with this enzyme in them can divide an unlimited number of times. In the body, this is used during early fetal delopent, for the production of sex cells (so the next generation doesn't die sooner than the previous one), and in a few other places like bone marrow stem cells where unlimited cell division is pretty much required to keep the blood supply up.
The presence of telomerase in any other cell is pretty much the definition of cancer. Cancer cells divide an unlimited number of times because they have a genetic flaw that switches on the gene for telomerase, which is present in most cells but not enabled. (This is why testicular cancer and lukemia are so common: those cells use telomerase normally, so if their division process gets damaged and runs out of control they don't die off. There's no such thing as a benign bone marrow tumor, it won't use up all its cell divisions and die off normally.)
The problem with cloning is you're starting from a cell that's already aged, and so has shorter telomeres. The baby starts out with a much shorter lifespan, and a much slower healing process because its cells don't divide as easily (due to shorter telomeres being a smaller target for the division triggering enzymes to find).
What you need to make a good clone is some way to repair the telomeres AFTER they've already partially burned down. Gluing extra AAAAA sequences onto the end of each gene.
Active telomere reconstruction basically requires nanotechnology. On the bright side, it would be about 50% of the way to extending human lifespans indefinitely. (Limited cell division's half the problem. The other half is that our DNA is a recipe, not a blueprint, which means that it lists the steps required to make something but not what the finished product should look like. With a blueprint, you can fix the finished product because you know what it should look like. With a recipe, you have to start over from the beginning and build a new one, and see what you get.)
A 25 cent game that lasts ten minutes provides a lot of value for the money. Even if I can buy the same game for $30, that's 120 plays at the arcade. But at 50 cents/game, that's only 60 plays. And at $1/game, that's 30 plays.
More to the point, I can walk into a 25 cent arcade with $5 and be amused for an hour. I can walk into a $1 arcade and be amused for maybe fifteen minutes if I stretch.
The lack of innovation in the industry recently hits home consoles and arcades alike. We used to have dig dug, bubble bobble, pac man, lock 'n chase, space invaders, frogger, blue print, and galaga. We blew stuff up with planes, tanks, motorcycles, and cars. Games were based on time travel, outer space, cartoons, ninjas...
Now we have street fighter clones, shooting things on screen with light guns, and a few racing games. (Hydro thunder runs on W2K, I saw it crash and reboot.) The "innovation" is putting street fighter in 3D (virtua fighter, soul edge, spawn, etc).
The closest thing to an exciting new game was a rewrite of Gauntlet. There are a couple of "puzzle" type games from japanese companies (anybody remember when Tetris was in the arcades?). But these days, large corporations put out the games, and innovation simply can't survive a cost benefit analysis. Why they didn't do a cost benefit analysis raising their prices until they weren't worth our time is beyond me...
Slashdot Mirror
Sturgeon's law says that 90% of everything is crud. The contents of mp3.com are the same as a book editor's "slush pile", which is full of a thousand amateurs all trying to write the great american novel, and 99.5% of them really sucking at it. mp3.com has every garage band on the planet that can rune Lame or BladeEnc sending in a demo tape, and most are really awful.
This is normal. There's great stuff out there, but you have to find it. This is why search engines exist on the web, because most web pages are terrible and pointless, and the value is in finding the good ones. That's what SLASHDOT does! (And why slashdot's comments have a ranking system.)
That's what Red Hat or Debian does bringing out new Linux distributions, going through the hordes of code on freshmeat and such and finding the stuff that's worth including.
Fighting off sturgeon's law is a useful service, quite possibly THE most successful business model on the web. Skimming off the cream, polishing it up, and packaging it in a shiny box. But that is -NOT- what mp3.com did.
mp3.com did for music what sourceforge does for open source or what geocities does for web pages. It's nice, but it also rapidly fills up with unfinished or even random cruft. It's also not something people are really willing to pay for, except maybe to view advertising. The very "freeness" of it is why people use it. It's a big public canvas, blank space in which amateurs can scribble.
What mp3.com needed, and what they never had, was an editorial board that found their top 1%, collected it together, polished it, and promoted it. THAT is the valuable service music companies have forgotten they provide. (NOT distribution, sorting through heaps of demo tapes to find talent and then, once upon a time, nurturing it.)
Same with the motion picture industry, the point isn't that they can crank out yet another crocodile dundee movie but that they can find people like Steven Spielberg and hand him the budget to make "Jaws". These days the new talent is going to atomfilms.com or some such, and getting lost in the slush pile...
Fighting off sturgeon's law is a service people ARE willing to pay money for. If you can ensure quality and save them time, they will pay for it. Always have, always will. The publishing industries are terrified of the web taking away their distribution role, but only because they've forgotten why they were the ones who had something to distribute.
Rob
>I'm betting that any other gamehack who just read this article (and there are 90,000
:)
>potential gamehacks reading slashdot on any given day) can whack up something with the same
>user-selectable-parallel-universe model in a couple of months, if not a couple of weeks.
The infrastructure maybe, but would it be a fun game?
Plotting out a detailed story can easily take a year. Forget about the technology for a moment and look at print authors. How long does it take Terry Pratchett to knock out another diskworld novel? That guys' really GOOD, and writing is his full time job, and he still only does about one book a year.
With most games these days, the story is "let's go kill something". Uh-huh. The most recent ground-breaking uber-game was "The Sims", which actively avoided any plot-like elements anywhere in the design.
R.G. doesn't have to redefine the world to make a successful game. There's a new "game of the year" every year.
Considering that his first product is repackaging a proven game in a new market, and that he's financing the company with a small chunk of his personal wealth and so doesn't have loans to repay or investors to placate. Basically, he's doing it to scratch his own itch, because he likes making games.
I'd say the new company's on a pretty strong footing. Now we just have to bug him for a Linux version...
Rob
>1) Environmentalists using privacy sites to
>recruit children?
You mean like the "captain planet" cartoon?
Rob
Then they laugh at you...
:)
Then they fight you...
Then you win.
Mundie is just trying to buy time. He's giving the anthill another stir because it's the only action he has left that can really seriously annoy us. Microsoft's other forms of leverage are evaporating like dry ice in a microwave.
Maybe he'll convince a few CIO's to hold off on the switch to Open Source for another eight to twelve months. Ooh. Maybe he'll even convince a few to go back to old Cobol mainframes.
But he wouldn't be bothering to directly address us unless we were now officially a threat.
I'm just wondering how this is going to look on his resume at his next job, once MS is driven out of the OS business. Then again they've got $20 billion in the bank, plenty to start a new business from scratch if necessary. Maybe they'll open a chain of restaurants or something...
(Remember, we're not TRYING to make MS go away. We're trying to make Windows go away.)
Rob
So that leaves windows blocked at the top and being nibbled to death from the bottom. Kind of like the old DEC vaxen squashed between mainframes and the killer micros. All the top end has to do is slow their upward retreat faster than they're getting eaten up from below.
Rob
>his software 'free', but as you well point out,
>it comes with a price tag. I am not arguing
>whether or not it this price tag is reasonable -
>I agree that if you give me something, you should
>be able to attach any conditions you wish to it.
Yes, and in a truly "free" society murder wouldn't be a crime, would it? Otherwise, you'd be free to commit it.
I believe that's called "anarchy". If you stop and think about it, the bill of rights is just a list of behaviors that are prevented. (Can't censor people. Can't take people's guns away. Can't stop people from getting together in large groups...) What a totalitarian document.
>Gates in the software industry.
Or another rockefeller in the oil industry. Or Henry Ford in the automobile industry. And (switching from money to fame), it'd be a touch hard to get another Linus Torvalds in the operating system space.
Hands up everybody who's suprised it's easier to get a 50% share of an industry when it's really really tiny, and then hang on for the ride as it grows, than try to de-commoditize established one.
Rob
This is residue from when QT was a "source under glass" library. Yes, that has now been fixed, but back when that was the case, THE KDE PEOPLE DID NOT HAVE A PROBLEM WITH IT.
Anybody remember Unix? Everyone blissfully ignoring AT&T's unenforced copyright for fifteen years, then out of the blue "oh, by the way, all your bases are belonging to us". That kind of thing leaves a scar on a community.
More recently, the reason 90% of the Java development momentum drained away into Linux in 1998 was that everyone realised that Sun was never going to release Java to the ISO. We all remember how Microsoft was all sweetness and light compared to IBM, at first. And how IBM's commodity PC was saving the world from (pick one: Apple, Digital Equipment Corporation, IBM's own mainframes, Somebody Else. Until the PS/2, anyway). But Sun wouldn't even port the JDK to Linux (which annoyed people who had never even HEARD of Linux). If they support that, what else wouldn't they allow?
Nobody ever REALLY trusts a "benevolent dictator", they're only happy if they know they have a way out. They may never really believe they'll need to use it, but people get claustrophobic otherwise. Even the best of the lot, Linus or Guido Van Rossom or Larry Wall, COULD BE REPLACED. If necessary. Everyone's sanity depends on it. If any of them came down with a brain infection and started going after people with an axe, a new leader would be ready and the community would go on. It ISN'T currently necessary, and we're happy that's so. But we couldn't sleep at night otherwise.
The KDE people -ARE- happy inserting proprietary technology into the fundamental infrastructure upon which we're all trying to build shared code. And that ALWAYS winds up causing a problem, it's just a question of how long it takes to snowball. But they don't SEE it.
The fact that this instance of the problem has been fixed doesn't mean the Gnome folks have started to trust the KDE people's judgement, because they WON'T ADMIT THEY MADE A MISTAKE!
Nothing against TrollTech. Nice people who simply didn't understand the benefits of dual licensing, and their code IS now GPL. But it was just wrong for KDE to pick the poisoned apple no matter how tempting, and the fact they still don't seem to understand why is a problem.
Rob
exobyte, yottabyte, zetabyte. x-y-z.
THEN you do a lottabyte. :)
Rob
>distorted vision for the future of software. To
>the extent that he denies a software author the
>right to do with his code as he pleases, the man
>is a maniac.
You mean how dare I demand the same treatment from you as you got from me, I.E. the publication of any source code derived from my work?
How dare I, as a software author, attach a price tag to my work which you only have to pay if your code incorporates my own?
Nobody ever said you had to include any GPLed code in a program you write, and if that's your attitude about it I seriously hope you never do.
Rob
The GPL is what makes Linux a threat. They can't embrace and extend it, it embraces and extends THEM. And that scares the heck otu of them, so they're fudding it. Ransom Love's stupid enough to buy into this, but that's no suprise. This is the man who saw value in the corpse of SCO.
Sheesh, Microsoft is THRILLED about non-GPL open source. Just as Microsoft embraced and extended the internet, the macintosh-like GUI, and any other idea to get within 50 paces. Nothing new comes out of MS, they NEED stuff to copy. Open Source development could easily be their R&D department. Without the internet, their growth would already have peaked a few years ago, their whole .NET strategy is co-opting other people's ideas (the internet and Java).
If Microsoft was facing BSD right now in place of Linux, it would just fork it. Embrace and extend, bundle a BSD variant with Explorer and a Win32 API compatability library, and of course half of the office suite buried and hidden in the standard system libraries just like it's in windows now. And it would work.
But they can't do that with GPL code. So they're trying to get the Open Source movement to leave the GPL behind, so they have stuff they can fork off proprietary versions of.
The GPL is the open source movement's immune system against proprietary things like MS. Lots of people say that in an ideal world you don't need an immune system. Apparently, they live in a bubble.
Rob
> ignorant posts reminds me why FUD is such a good
> marketing tool. How many of you that just bashed
> Os/2 have ever ran it?
I not only ran it, I was a member of Team OS/2 for years and I worked at IBM on OS/2 for the Power PC and OS/2 version 4. (I wrote the half of "Feature Install" that works, and no I could never get permission to fix the other half. Or the flawed design that predated my employment at IBM.)
I watched OS/2 die along with all the other non-MS proprietary OSes after Windows 95 came out and finally customers weren't actively looking to replace windows.
Being a tiny fragment was no longer an option, the anything but microsoft crowd had to unite behind something, and all the momentum shifted over to Java as the last hope to keep OS/2 alive by being part of something bigger.
Then Sun got greedy, refused to release Java to a standards body (despite endless promises), refused to make a Linux port of the JDK, had everybody sign non-disclosure agreements to see the Java runtime source code... Everybody's monopoly detector went off, and nobody wanted to replace microsoft's leash with sun's.
The netscape (that great guru of Javadom who gave up the applet) suddenly went "Look! The cathedral and the bazaar! Open Source! Linux!" And all the java people went "ooh". And there was much rejoicing.
I'd been toying with Linux since college, and had been TRYING to use it as my java development platform after leaving OS/2 (NOT easy back then). It was a bit like coming home.
OS/2 is dead. Let it rest in peace.
Rob
In my experience, the real bottleneck bandwidth-wise is almost never the last hop in a cable modem. (The cable company's own connection to the internet is often the limiting factor, but if they have two uplinks some sites may be slow while others aren't). If not, the limit's how busy the server you're talking to is, or some other bottleneck in an intermediate hop. Even at peak activity I've never seen a download from an otherwise fast site drop below about 140 kilobytes (not bits, bytes) per second. Average is 250-350, and theoretical peak (never seen it) is 500. I've never seen kernel.org drop below 200k/sec.
Now trying to use a cable modem as a server is ludicrous; upstream bandwidth is only about 20k/second. I uploaded 1.6 gigs to work once, it took a day and change. DSL is a MUCH better solution for servers, in theory anyway. (My own experience with it involves a lot of 15 second signal dropouts which aren't acceptable in a real server. But for a hobbyist starting out, who can't afford anything like server side hosting and needs "surfing" access anyway...)
Determining whether big evil cable corporations are worse than big evil phone companies is an open question, of course. :)
Rob
I learned C so I could modify a friend's copy of WWIV. That's also why I got my own PC. (And THERE was an early bazaar community if ever there was one, the WWIV .mod file community.)
The last BBS I wrote was in, a multinode fidonet compatable bbs written from scratch in c++ including my own fidonet message processing routines that were WAY more efficient than anything else I'd seen. A friend of mine ran a copy that's listed on there (xblat, under the 609 area code). Strangely, my own bbs (The Conversation Pit) is listed as "unknown". :)
I had xblat multitasking under desqview with no synchronization primitive except file locking. I had the capacity to do 9 nodes (8 FOSSIL driver ports plus one on the keyboard), plus the mail tosser running. Not that I had that many phone lines. :)
And the mail tosser processed 30 messages/second on a 386/33DX while updating a text mode display of what it was doing. And I eventually got it to where it would handle outgoing messages posted by a user on another node in the middle of digesting an incoming fido packet without ever having to look at the same message twice. All done without resorting to Turbo C's "huge" pointers, I might add. :)
Those were the days...
In 1995 I started porting it to 32 bit OS/2 code under EMX, but I had a day job and I'd found the internet anyway. (Strangely, my BBS work never impressed IBM. :) Kept meaning to write a BBS in java, but I wanted to make it internet based and I couldn't find a hosting service that would let me run actual daemons instead of just CGI on a web page. Eventually I moved on to other things...
Rob
Rob
>have different failure characteristics.
It's a question of what problems you want to address. It's entirely possible to have multitasking multiuser operating systems without virtual memory. (Just about every 1970's era unix before the Vax, actually.)
Doesn't make the problem fundamentally different, just that there's more cases to cover. Do you always check for a non-null return from your mallocs, or do you just say "the system should just never run out of memory"?
>As far as I know, an SMP operating system
>assumes that, if CPU #2 was there just a moment
>ago, it will still be there.
Three words: Hot pluggable hardware.
And yes, they're talking about adding that capability to the Linux kernel in 2.5. (Although the current patch has a /proc entry to switch the appropriate processors of and on before just yanking them. Then again, PCMCIA proves you can do it without manual notification since you get several miliseconds of warning, which is ages to the computer...)
>What happens when your operating system needs to
>fault in a page, but your distributed VM manager
>lost network contact with your other server(s)?
Well, when piranha.rutgers.edu did this (no local hard drive, it swapped through the network to the server in the back room), its response was to die spectacularly (sunOS didn't blue screen, it white screened). This is not a new problem.
Then again, how many apps never check the return value of malloc and just expect the OS to go down if the system runs out of memory anyway?
If you were really swapping through the network (despite hard drives being cheap they ARE failure-prone moving parts), I'd say use distributed redundant swap devices and treat them like RAID 5 so you can loose one and recover the data? Also avoids network bottlenecks. But then you're eating network bandwidth needlessly, which is usually your limiting factor. (Then again, you page fault all sorts of other stuff through the network anyway in a shared memory config, it wouldn't so much be swapping as a larger distributed memory management system.)
It's an open question on the best way to go. Performance vs reliability is often a tradeoff. But there are PLENTY of different options.
>How can the operating system handle this error :-(
>gracefully? Or politely warn the userspace
>application?
How does RAID 5 do it today? (Let's see, SMART disks, battery packed up power supplies notifying of failure, hot pluggable hardware... It'll probably all get molded together someday into pseudo-coherent infrastructure of dynamic system status.)
The most graceful thing for the OS to do may just be to suspend the app and save off its state until it can continue. It depends. As I said, there are a lot of options.
Rob
>CLUSTERS". Again...again...again....
>Now we will play a game: match the clustering
>technology description to a popular name. Match
>the letter to the number.
Berries come in clusters. Stars come in clusters. Military rank insignia come in clusters...
Californians... No wait, this is a family oriented area.
Rob
(Austinite. They move here and can't drive, so we get to make fun of them.)
SMP is Symmetrical Multi-Processing, or one computer with multiple processors just like multiple hard drives, multiple serial ports, or multiple banks of RAM. In an SMP setup, each processor has equal access to the other system resources, and although they may need locking to avoid stomping on each other's activities, it's no more expensive for processor #2 to access a certain resource (such as an area of main memory) than it is for processor #5 to do so. Thus there's no real reason to shuffle processes around to be "closer" to some other resource.
The other end of the spectrum is message passing networked clustering, like beowulf, where isolated systems (each with its associated set of resources) accept complete tasklets, work on them more or less alone, and output the results. Accessing resources from the rest of the cluster is very expensive, and you try not to do it more than absolutely necessary (once per transaction). A message comes in with all the info a node needs to do its work, and the node sends a message back out with the result and to announce it's ready for the next mouthful.
NUMA is in between, and it stands for Non-Uniform Memory Architecture. You have a bunch of similar processors, like in SMP, but some resources are "close" to each processor and some are far away.
Remember, clusters own resources outright, this is my node's memory. On SMP all processors access a pool of shared resources (like main memory) at the same speed (hence symmetrically). On NUMA, processor #53 -CAN- access memory over by processor #1736, but it'll take much longer than if it accesses memory near itself. It'll block, it'll have wait states. (Just like accessing a page swapped to the hard drive vs accessing one in memory.)
The thing is, as systems on either end become more complex they move towards NUMA. Think mondo SMP systems with dozens of processors, each of which has megabytes of L1 cache. You want to keep stuff "in cache" rather than accessing main memory, and sometimes you wan't to access something that's currently in some other processor's cache. Cache line pollution and such. That's a NUMA type of problem.
From the other end, once you start connecting beowulf clusters together with really high speed interconnects (like gigbit ethernet or myrinet, and often speed here is more a question of latency than bandwidth,) and start teaching them how to pretend to be one big shared memory image by page faulting through the network, you're approcaching NUMA from the other end. Stuff's in my machine's memory locally right now, and swapping it in from some other guy's memory (and swapping out some of my stuff to make room for it) is something I only want to do when absolutely necessary, because it slows me down.
MOSIX is taking beowulf clusters in the direction of NUMA. This is a good thing, it makes them more flexible and capable, but it opens up a whole can of worms to optimize it properly. (Not a new can of course, the kernel hackers are already dealing with a rather significant portion of NUMA's issues just trying to get 32 processor alphas to work smoothly.) If the interconnects between clusters were perfect, we could just treat it as one big SMP machine. Then again if our hard drives were as fast as our ram we wouldn't try so hard to minimize swapping, would we? You could still just treat MOSIX as SMP instead of NUMA if you don't want to optimize your performance. And for many things that's a fine solution, just distributing it cross the cluster gives you all the performance you need, and adding nodes is more cost effective than rewriting your app for greater speed in the new environment.
But performance hits of thrashing all your pages through the network can be just as bad as thrashing them in and out of the swap partition. And performance is the only reason we're using clusters in the first place, isn't it?
And NUMA optimization just makes maintaining locality of reference, streamlined locking, and minimizing contention for commonly accessed resources even MORE important. It's the same kind of thing you'd do on a normal SMP machine anyway, it just has more of an impact, because there's more inefficiency to optimize away.
Rob
There used to be a moderation category that was "just the best, most pithy synopses of the dicussion". Now that can easiy be 30 posts, and reading them doesn't fit in 3 minute "while this compiles" break anymore.
Part of it is that there's more posters these days, and more moderators, and the top 5% of 50 posts is a lot smaller than the top 5% of 500 posts.
Part of it is the automatic +1 of posters with a history of good karma. This is a good thing, but it reduces by 25% the range that can only be reached by active moderation. (The original moderation range of 2-5 has been reduced to 3-5. You used to be able to read at 2 and filter out the stuff that hadn't been voluntarily moderated up at least once. That's no longer the case, and even Einstein wasn't ALWAYS worth listening to. Sometimes he was just ordering breakfast, or complaining about the weather.)
Zero used to be a penalty for posting as an anonymous coward (since the troll ratio there was higher). 1 was standard. 2 being experienced poster who generally has somethng to say, that's meaningfull. This is a good heuristic for a starting position, but there's not enough room to go up fromt here, the system is swamped.
Slashdot has outgrown that range, even WITHOUT raising the floor. More marginal opinions less universally approved of (and less central to the topic) now reach the top category, because they have more opportunities to be moderated up. 5% of the viewership can easily spend 5 moderation points now.
perhaps we can go to a moderation percentage system? "Show me just the top 5% of posts"? Or sort them by popularity and give me the top fifteen...
It's an interesting problem.
Rob
>model and diversified revenue stream. Putting
>your eggs in one basket doesn't create a
>catalyst, it creates a huge risk.
Coca-cola's been selling one product for a hundred years now.
As Mark Twain said, puting all your eggs in one basket and WATHING THAT BASKET is often a good idea. Beats spreading yourself too thin doing 15 things poorly.
Rambus's problem is that their original business idea (rambus memory) turned out to be a technical dud along the lines of itanium and pentium 4. (Great in theory, doesn't work so well in practice). So they turned to suing everybody in sight, which is NOT a core business.
Rob
> that it's not generally possible to design
> aircraft or cars for the joy of it.
Okay, I'll bite. How much DID Orville and Wilbur Wright get paid? How rich did Chuck Yaeger and Verner Vohn Braun get?
Rob
It's possible to be paranoid enough to qualify for medication and STILL not be 100% sure they can't "get you". NSA spooks sniffing your monitor's EM radiation to see your screen. A virus in your flashable bios. Those fun kernel module rootkits you can't detect without a clean boot disk and a hex editor (which is a fun way to inspect a 40 gigabyte drive...)
Personal inpsection simply doesn't scale. It hasn't been a realistic option for anybody who couldn't afford to do it as a full time job since the days of the commodore 64.
What you do is you find somebody to trust who will do this for you. Then you have to trust them. If Red Hat doesn't do it, than somebody who makes a distro based on paranoia (Red Helmet?) will make money by being, basically, paranoid and proud of it.
Red Hat obviously isn't it. It installs nfs by default. It installs a network writeable LPR even if you haven't installed printer support. That's just wrong...
But RPM's are just Linux's equivalent of running normal programs under an MS os. You can get viruses/trojans/whatever we're calling the variant this week. That's what being root means, and some things HAVE to have that access. (By definition, configuring the system requires the ability to make changes to it. Why does this seem to suprise people?)
Rob
Back when I ran OS/2 I once fired up a Win/OS2 session running a dos box running a commodore 64 emulator, on a 486.
The cursor blinked about once every fifteen seconds.
These days, I could probably do that all that under Plex86 from within Linux. I'm just trying to figure out how to squeeze Wine into there...
Rob
Each time the cell divides, the telomeres get shorter. The the DNA strands aren't copied all the way to the end, and they down like a fuse. Right next to the telomeres is vital metabolic proteins, so when the telomeres are exhausted the next cell division damages those genes and kills the cell. This is, fundamentally speaking, the cell's aging process.
There's an enzyme called telomerase that protects the telomeres during cell division so they don't get shorter. This means cells with this enzyme in them can divide an unlimited number of times. In the body, this is used during early fetal delopent, for the production of sex cells (so the next generation doesn't die sooner than the previous one), and in a few other places like bone marrow stem cells where unlimited cell division is pretty much required to keep the blood supply up.
The presence of telomerase in any other cell is pretty much the definition of cancer. Cancer cells divide an unlimited number of times because they have a genetic flaw that switches on the gene for telomerase, which is present in most cells but not enabled. (This is why testicular cancer and lukemia are so common: those cells use telomerase normally, so if their division process gets damaged and runs out of control they don't die off. There's no such thing as a benign bone marrow tumor, it won't use up all its cell divisions and die off normally.)
The problem with cloning is you're starting from a cell that's already aged, and so has shorter telomeres. The baby starts out with a much shorter lifespan, and a much slower healing process because its cells don't divide as easily (due to shorter telomeres being a smaller target for the division triggering enzymes to find).
What you need to make a good clone is some way to repair the telomeres AFTER they've already partially burned down. Gluing extra AAAAA sequences onto the end of each gene.
Active telomere reconstruction basically requires nanotechnology. On the bright side, it would be about 50% of the way to extending human lifespans indefinitely. (Limited cell division's half the problem. The other half is that our DNA is a recipe, not a blueprint, which means that it lists the steps required to make something but not what the finished product should look like. With a blueprint, you can fix the finished product because you know what it should look like. With a recipe, you have to start over from the beginning and build a new one, and see what you get.)
Now you know where my email address comes from. :)
Rob
More to the point, I can walk into a 25 cent arcade with $5 and be amused for an hour. I can walk into a $1 arcade and be amused for maybe fifteen minutes if I stretch.
The lack of innovation in the industry recently hits home consoles and arcades alike. We used to have dig dug, bubble bobble, pac man, lock 'n chase, space invaders, frogger, blue print, and galaga. We blew stuff up with planes, tanks, motorcycles, and cars. Games were based on time travel, outer space, cartoons, ninjas...
Now we have street fighter clones, shooting things on screen with light guns, and a few racing games. (Hydro thunder runs on W2K, I saw it crash and reboot.) The "innovation" is putting street fighter in 3D (virtua fighter, soul edge, spawn, etc).
The closest thing to an exciting new game was a rewrite of Gauntlet. There are a couple of "puzzle" type games from japanese companies (anybody remember when Tetris was in the arcades?). But these days, large corporations put out the games, and innovation simply can't survive a cost benefit analysis. Why they didn't do a cost benefit analysis raising their prices until they weren't worth our time is beyond me...
Rob