the_mat

It's easy to forget that the SNES game library was mostly a sewer filled with "character with attitude" platformers. Loads of really, tremendously bad, unoriginal stuff

I suspect you're right, though I'm hoping it was done unintentionally, that he hired a company or acquaintance to "promote" the game, and it resulted in bot-fueled reviews and downloads.

The smoking gun is that he had two other games in the top ten, and that happened without in-app cross-promotion. People would have to look-up Flappy Birds in the app store and click on the "also by" link to even find those games, and there's no way enough people would be doing that to place them in the #2 and #6 slot.

Think about the CPU landscape in 1984. You had all these 8-bit home computers running at sub-2MHz. The IBM PC was 16-bits running at 4.77MHz, and most of those were actually using 8-bit buses (the 8088 vs. 8086). The super expensive IBM PC/AT was the top of the line: a 6MHZ 80286.

In comparison to all of this, a processor running at 8MHz that could do full 32-bit operations (though, yes, the external bus was half that) and with 16 32-bit registers. and no segments...mind blowing!

I felt the same way about Wolfenstein 3D. The graphics were neat, but the game was a big step back from its 2D namesake on 8-bit hardware. It was just run and shoot and rub along walls hoping for a secret panel. I never understood why so many people wanted to clone it. Mostly the engine, I guess, because the game was just an ok design.

Doom, though, was amazing. It was a much more realized world, both visually and in terms of mood and design. Eventually the levels got a bit too puzzley, but it certainly deserves all the accolades heaped upon it.

This is the end for id.

The only thing id has had going for it are Carmack's engines. In recent years his stuff has been as amazing as ever, but so many commercial engines are only a fraction of a step behind, and the difference hardly matters.

Design-wise id is a complete mess. They're stuck back in the 1990s. RAGE appears to have had no leadership and no vision, and the actual design work that shipped is amateur-hour at best.

Was that cut and pasted from some kind of template for empty, verbose corporate-speak?

The "it feels so much faster" comments don't fly with me. The iPhone 4 still feels slick and speedy in September 2012. The 4S was faster, but it wasn't noticeable except for certain apps. Now the 5 is 2x faster again, but it's how much CPU is really needed to slide icons around and play music and look at photos?

Can you imagine the pain caused by transitioning away from HFS+? Is there something so fundamentally wrong with it to justify all the compatibility headaches of a new filesystem?

Under the hood, there's some low-hanging fruit that I'm surprised Apple hasn't gone for yet:

* Turn off the writing of ALL memory to disk every time a laptop is put to sleep. Got an SSD MacBook Pro with 16GB? Every time you close the lid, sixteen gigabytes get written. Every time.

* Disable file access times so every file that gets opened doesn't need to have the timestamp updated.

You missed a key point: with OpenGL 1.3 you don't need to follow the glBegin/glVertex/glEnd paradigm. You can create a display list or you can use vertex arrays. In fact the reason for including display lists in the first place was to make it so you didn't have to send one vertex at a time.

I don't agree with JWZ, regardless. OpenGL ES was a good simplification to the overall system. But he is right in that an optional compatibility layer that lives on top of OpenGL ES would have kept the original API valid for those who need it (and without slowing down the core of OpenGL ES).

The main thing Apple did with the iPad was make it work without any major gotchas. Sure, you could have stuck a desktop CPU and desktop OS in a touchscreen device. Other people tried that. It wasn't appealing.

The iPad gave long battery life, a comfortable form-factor, solid usability and reliability, an impossibly low price point for such high-end hardware, and most importantly it was a tablet above all else. Every app becomes the machine. That's entirely different than carrying a desktop around in an iPad-sized box.

Be careful if you think this is simply dumbing down a desktop, because it shows you're missing the point.

A good article, thanks for writing it.

I'm not convinced that a majority of cyclists understand that they have to follow the same rules as motorized vehicles. It's unusual to see the driver of a car blast through a stop sign without slowing down at all. It happens, but not that often. On the other hand, it's unusual for me to see a cyclist who doesn't run stop signs.

I can see why: because you're going slower and have a full view around you. But that's still not an excuse if you're going to play the "cars and bikes are both vehicles" card.

He missed the point of the Instagram logo. The whole purpose of Instagram is to make retro-styled photos, so a retro camera icon makes total sense.

Well, let's be fair. OMGPOP is hardly a bastion of game design originality. For example, dinglepop is a 100% complete rip-off of Puzzle Bobble / Bust a Move, which Taito released in 1994. There have been countless clones since then, and there's nothing distinguishing dinglepop from any of them.

This list reads exactly like advice from business books from the 1970s or earlier. And I mean exactly. No deviation. Nothing new.

Clearly there's more to the meeting issue or people wouldn't be shouting the same advice into the wind 40+ years later.

I'm beginning to wonder if the memory "issue" is psychological. I run OS X Lion on a 2GB notebook. I use Xcode, Python, ImageMagick, Firefox w/Firebug. I've never had noticeable paging issues or felt the desire to upgrade.

"most of these sites look stuck in a much older paradigm of thinking about web design"

This needs some explanation. The vim site looks dated, but clearly I'm not enough of an insidery web guy to know why some of these sites are stuck in a much older paradigm.

In fact, I'm kind of lost on the purpose of the entire rant. UI is important? Is that the takeway? Why even write an article about that?

I can't see writing text-based Lua scripts on an iPad as anything other than an anachronism.

There's a dangerous flip side to this: In my experience just about all programmers want to remove things from code that they don't understand or see the reason for. Why is that weird check there? Who thought it was a good idea to allocate memory that way? Very often there ARE good reasons for those decisions, and they can stem from bug fixes or odd special cases that may not be obvious..

Moral: Be careful.

Many of the comments following that story are deranged, and I mean that in the strongest sense of the word. "Software extremists" like that really exist? There are people who honestly think Steve Jobs was evil? And most disturbingly, there are people who will flat out bash on the reputation of someone who so recently died? Wow. Just wow.

To me, there's a dichotomy between the "if it compiles, it usually works" aspect of Haskell (and how this is often touted as superior to the dynamic typing, test-driven approach) and that you can't get a picture of memory usage until you run and profile the code. In my experience, hard to understand memory consumption issues are common and take effort to solve.

Reference: http://blog.ezyang.com/2011/06/pinpointing-space-leaks-in-bi...

Please stop with the toy benchmarks and pretty one-liners that show how awesome Haskell is.

There is growing list of smart programmers who get all enchanted with Haskell, jump into it wholeheartedly, and end up frustrated (see bottom of message). GHC makes the typical C++ compiler seem fast. Once code grows past the homework problem size, all hope of understanding memory usage is lost. I don't think people really get how bad that it is. The whole culture of Haskell is based around static checking, yet you have to run a program in order to find out if it blows your memory limit several times over.

Haskell is still a neat language, but we need less advocacy based on toy programs and more honest realism.

(Here's a typical, non-superficial example: http://wagerlabs.com/haskell-vs-erlang-reloaded-0)

Of course, the Zip drive was massively popular. It was the first legitimate, mass-market step past the floppy drive. They sold like crazy, even being standard options from Dell.

Zip drives were surpassed by USB drives and cheap hard drives, but there's no way you can label them "an epic tech fail."

In what way? It's already on par with most point and shoot cameras and better than many. Resolution is well beyond useful levels for a phone; I'm surprised Apple is chasing higher megapixel numbers when 99% of iPhone photos get cut-down for web use anyway.