Edward Angel wrote at 02/08/2013 12:57 PM: > For many years > graphics and mathematical software was driven by the scientific > community which valued stability and backward compatibility. When the > market became dominated by game players who are willing to replace their > entire systems every year, the business changed dramatically, not only > in terms of the software but also in terms of the hardware.
Arg! You piqued me again. ;-) I know lots of gamers who don't merely value backward compatibility, they go to ungodly extremes to maintain old systems/games, port old games to new systems, build emulators for old games, etc. But my pique isn't to argue about whether gamers value backward compatibility. It's a common thread I've been pushing with regard to scientific modeling and simulation (M&S). For better or worse, I've taken the stance that science using M&S should be handled in the same way other science is handled. If you want to reproduce a result, you don't slice out the repeatability at some logically impermeable layer of compatibility. Instead, you keep (or reconstruct) the _machine_ that was used for the original research. To the extent that's not reasonable, then you run your experiments with an alternative machine and characterize how the variation introduced by the machine percolates into the variation in the results of the experiments. The pure (math, physics, first principles) perspective of coming up with _precise_ analogs for various machine parts is bizarre ... fine as a fetish/avocation but inappropriate as a vocation. Yes, I know this is antithetic to most compsci people ... portable code, universal turing machines, IEEE designed floating point representations, etc. But, to me, it makes the most sense. As (non-universal) computers further burrow themselves deep into our ecology, the concept of a logical abstraction layer makes less and less sense. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
