On Jun 6, 2005, at 6:18 PM, Joel Rees wrote:
For me, the computer industry just lost its last little bit of shine.
For me, it lost that shine years ago. When I began learning to
program, everything was new. Every week, it seemed, someone was
finding a new use for these gadgets. Games could be written by one
person in two months. My heroes were people like Jobs, Wozniak, Nolan
Bushnell, Eugene Jarvis, Richard Garriott, Sid Meier, and Roberta
Williams - pioneers in every sense of the word. Shigeru Miyamoto
deserves a place on that list too, but I didn't know his name back
then, even though I greatly admired his work, without having a clue
whose it was.
These days, there's very little true innovation is going on. Most of
the effort is put into squeezing a few more pennies from the bottom
line. Games are designed and produced by the same committee-driven
process that has reduced Hollywood and the music industry to
mockeries of their former selves.
Things have changed, and the Almighty Buck is king now.
Pragmatically, that's a good thing; it's a sign of progress towards a
mature, stable industry. In another way, I can't help feeling that
something valuable has been lost along the way.
Any general purpose computers I buy will run AMD since I doubt I'll
be able to afford PPC hardware, and I'll be scratching Mac OS X
from this old iBook this weekend. Not sure if I'll load Linux or
openBSD on it, since it's my server.
Jobs is insane.
I'm not sure I'd go quite that far. There's a good business case to
be made for switching, from Apple's perspective. It will help the
supply-side problems they've been having, and broaden the appeal of
their products.
To most developers using Cocoa or Carbon, building a "fat" binary is
painless - it's a matter of checking the right box in Xcode. The
problem I'm facing is that for CamelBones, because of the way Perl
builds its modules, the transition will be far more painful than it
will be for most apps.
I'm not seriously considering a switch to Windows or Linux, or
anything along those lines. I doubt I'll ever truly and completely
abandon CamelBones, either. Basically what I'm considering right now
is whether I can continue making CamelBones my primary focus, or
whether I should shift it to the back burner for a while and focus on
something more likely to help me either find a job or make a living
on my own.
sherm--
Cocoa programming in Perl: http://camelbones.sourceforge.net
Hire me! My resume: http://www.dot-app.org
