On 2005.6.7, at 05:47 PM, Sherm Pendley wrote:
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.
I hit that point with MSW3. The first tarnish was in realizing how few
other people saw the magic I saw in FORTH. But it was MSW3 that opened
my eyes to the fact that there really were a lot of people who really
did want Bill Gates or somebody to do their thinking for them.
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.
Monoculture.
The only successful alternative OSses that run on x86 yet are entirely
free (as in speech) and run on multiple platforms. Even FreeBSD is not
just x86. I would not be going rabid if Steve had said, "Okay, due to
popular request, we're going to add an architecture." or something
similar. Apple has the resources to sell to multiple architectures,
although it would likely mean that they would need to open up quite a
bit of the userland beyond the command line.
There's a good business case to be made for switching, from Apple's
perspective.
Only if they have blinders and and don't notice anything wrong with the
picture being dangled in front of their face.
It will help the supply-side problems they've been having, and broaden
the appeal of their products.
Oh, sure. What is this thing about iNTEL having some sort of appeal?
That''s a strawman, and the people who have been arguing it will not be
buying it.
IBM made a few too many forward looking statements without knowing how
much the fancy non-RISC address modes (etc.) were going to cost in heat
and timing. But, except for certain server software where the context
switch overhead (FreeBSD's giant lock, the way I read it) drags the
system down, the speed is close enough when you put Macs side-by-side
with x86 boxes. The server speed problems will not be fixed with iNTEL,
because it's from the OS's context switching overhead.
Pentium D looks good in the lab, but I'm not going to let it eat _my_
lunch in the real world. And I do not want monoculture buffer overflows
killing my servers.
And Cell should not be a bad option, particularly if Apple's looking at
a re-compile anyway.
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.
It's going to be painful basically for everybody who isn't already
compiling cross-platform, and, as you point out about Python, painful
even with some that are compiling cross-platform.
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.
Well, after all the rant, I have to admit that I hope you can get
CamelBones moved onto the new platform okay. Just because I'm convinced
it's going to crash and burn doesn't mean everybody should give up on
it.
--
Joel Rees
(A FORTH dreamer imprisoned in a Java world)
