James Fallows reports that Microsoft has laid off the team that works on Flight Simulator. I was never much of a player of Flight Simulator, but it should be recognized as one of the most important games in the history of personal computing. It was one of the very first games to offer a first person perspective on the action, it was one of the first games for the IBM PC platform, and I think it’s likely that it’s the oldest continually developed computer game on the market.
Wikipedia has a lengthy article on Microsoft Flight Simulator.
PC Magazines has further details.
I can’t help but wonder if the better choice would have been to spin off ACES Studios and give them the Flight Simulator intellectual property to try to make it on their own.
MacWorld surveyed a panel of Mac experts on which model was the best in the 25 year history of the Macintosh. Three out of five voted for the Macintosh SE/30. It looked like the original Mac but was blazingly fast in comparison. It also happens to be the first Mac I used on a day to day basis, when I had a job writing thank you letters to donors to the University of Houston.
I thought the speech was great, and this was my favorite bit:
In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted – for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things – some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom. For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life. For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth. For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sahn.
There were many great passages, though. I very much appreciated his full throated renunciation of torture and his offer of friendship to everyone in the world. I really liked that he made it clear that economic policy is a tool to increased shared prosperity rather than a moral end unto itself.
Here’s a link to the full text.
I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t appreciate context.
I write that sentence after reading Andrew Brown’s post on how the failure to appreciate history on its own terms clouds the thinking of fundamentalists. (In this case, he’s talking about fundamentalist atheists.)
This is the paragraph that grabbed me:
Thinking about the ignorant, angry atheists who infest the Guardian’s comment pages I realised one thing they have in common with scriptural fundamentalists: they have no idea of history. They live in an eternally dazzling present and they can’t imagine that there is anything outside it. Oh, sure, they have legends — the inquisition, the crusades, the middle ages — but within these legends the actors move, as they do in renaissance paintings, entirely in contemporary dress. There is no sense of the strangeness and difficulty of the past; no sense that many things have been tried and failed; no sense that words once meant things entirely different and possibly inexpressible now.
It’s impossible to properly appreciate anything without understanding, to some degree, where it came from. Failure to appreciate things in their own context is a problem I often find when people talk about software development. I read arguments about the superiority of Ruby on Rails to J2EE without any appreciation of the fact that Ruby on Rails is built upon many lessons that were learned the hard way as Java frameworks evolved. Without the 1999 article Understanding JavaServer Pages Model 2 architecture, Struts, and plenty of other lessons learned along the way, there would be no Rails as it exists today. Without Active Server Pages there would have been no Java Server Pages. Without CGI there would have been no ASP. Without Perl and Lisp and Scheme there would have been no Ruby.
Whether the topic is programming, history, politics, or music, attempting to explain or criticize things without judging within their own context is waste of time and energy. The only upside is that when someone persists in doing so, it’s a good signal that their analysis can be safely dismissed without further consideration.
In 1940, the New York Times endorsed Republican Wendell Willkie after having endorsed Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 and 1936. They went back to endorsing Roosevelt in 1944, when he won his fourth term.
Why Willkie? From the endorsement:
We give our own support to Mr. Willkie primarily for these reasons: Because we believe that he is better equipped than Mr. Roosevelt to provide this country with an adequate national defense: because we believe he is a practical liberal who understands the need of increased production; because we believe that the fiscal policies of Mr. Roosevelt have failed disastrously; because we believe that at a time when the traditional safeguards of democracy are failing everywhere it is particularly important to honor and preserve the American tradition against vesting the enormous powers of the Presidency in the hands of any man for three consecutive terms of office.
Roosevelt went on to win 449 electoral votes to Willkie’s 82. (He won by 10 points in the popular vote.)
The Mozilla Foundation is celebrating the ten year anniversary of AOL’s having released the Netscape Navigator source code and creating the foundation. Here’s the original press release. One thing I remember is that Slashdot broke the story of AOL releasing the code before it was announced — it was the first really big story Slashdot broke. (In fact, I think I learned of the existence of Slashdot when someone pointed me to the story there.)
Not long after the code was released, there was a big argument about whether Mozilla should dump the Netscape 4 HTML rendering engine and use a new, modern, standards compliant engine called NGLayout, or whether they should just get a release out the door built on the existing code. Back in October of 1998, I wrote a scathing piece insulting the Web Standards Project for lobbying the Mozilla folks to move to NGLayout, which I’ve quoted in full below. (This was in my pre-blog days when I was more an essayist.) The Mozilla Foundation rewarded me for defending them so ardently by announcing that they were adopting NGLayout just a month later.
“I Want My NGLayout!”
October 5, 1998
As regular Outraged! readers already know, this writer is generally dissatisfied with the so-called standards process in the computer industry. Standards which are written before working code is created are more often than not doomed to failure, standing instead as filthy monuments to the capriciousness and excess energy of companies with time and money to burn.
One particular showpiece of the standards process is the current state of HTML, as implemented by the world’s two most popular browsers, Netscape and Internet Explorer. They both comply to varying degrees with the relevant standards (CSS1, CSS2, and DOM to the buzzword savvy), but neither browser maker has shown much initiative in the race for 100% standards compliance. This indicates two things; one, that writing browsers that comply with standards isn’t a high priority, and two, that it isn’t particularly easy (if implementing CSS and DOM were easy, both browsers would support them).
Anyway, some disgruntled Web developers have banded together to cajole Microsoft and Netscape into providing full standards compliance in their Web browsers, in order to further the Web as a platform for deploying applications, and to make the job of designing nice Web sites easier and less expensive. Anyone who has attempted to use the latest features in the Web browsers (generally mashed together under the misnomer DHTML) can attest to the fact that this is a worthy effort; the current state of standards compliance basically dictates that everything must be written twice (once for each browser).
Unfortunately, the members of the Web Standards Project, as this nascent group is called, have decided that their first axe to grind is with Netscape over which “rendering engine” will be included with version 5.0 of its browser. As most everyone who hasn’t been in a deep sleep for most of 1998 knows, Netscape released the source code to its browser back on March 31. Since then, even though Netscape has retained the prime caretaking role over the code, the browser has been open to public input, contributions, and scrutiny.
Thus, the public has gotten a rare inside look at the guts of the development process of an incredibly complex, popular application. Not long after the Mozilla project got underway, Netscape released the source code to NGLayout (which was, at the time, called Raptor). NGLayout is Netscape’s next generation rendering engine; it will provide tighter standards compliance and better performance than the current rendering engine, which is known as Mariner. Unfortunately, it is also significantly further from completion than Mariner, and hasn’t been integrated with the rest of the browser. Today, you can download a rough build of NGLayout which runs in a skeleton window and renders HTML extremely quickly during the brief period of time before it crashes.
Under ordinary circumstances, the public wouldn’t even know that NGLayout existed, and certainly wouldn’t know where its level of completion stands as compared to the Mariner engine, which is undergoing incremental improvements for the first public release of Mozilla. But, now that it’s part of the Mozilla project, people are free to view and toy with the source code, and compare it to what’s currently out there.
The Web Standards Project (WaSP) has started a petition to urge Netscape to forget about Mariner (the current rendering engine), and focus all of its energies on NGLayout, which is going to be much better than Mariner when it is completed. While this seems like a good idea, and I have no doubt that the WaSP means well, this effort betrays a baffling lack of understanding of the way the open source development model works, and poor choice of tactics.
First, let me talk about the sheer inanity of the very concept of the Internet petition. Perhaps, at one time, the online petition was a fine way to demonstrate that there was a groundswell of support behind an issue, but I firmly believe that day has passed. There are petitions for everything on the Internet; covering everything from television shows that get cancelled to the lack of a particular game for the Macintosh. News of various petitions spreads like wildfire, and since the cost of filling out a petition is nothing, people fill out petitions campaigning for issues that they scarcely care about. Unfortunately, because the level of effort required to circulate a petition online is so low, the petitions get no respect. Decision makers just aren’t interested in reading a report saying that 150,000 people want the latest version of QuickBooks to be ported to the Macintosh without knowing how many of them are willing to put their money where their mouth is.
The fact that Mozilla is an open source project only further dooms the WaSP petition to irrelevance. Even if the signatories of the petition have money to spend, it doesn’t matter, because Mozilla is totally and completely free. The blessing and the curse of the open source movement is that the areas of development are driven by the aims of the people who actually work on the projects. Mozilla will support Apple’s ColorSync because people at Apple felt it was worthwhile to contribute that code, not because somebody signed a petition saying they should do it.
The galling thing is that if the WaSP wants better standards support in Mozilla, they should be working to contribute to the Mozilla project directly, or to find some friends who can. The reason Mariner is slated to be part of Mozilla is that NGLayout doesn’t look like it will be ready in time to meet the project’s timetable. Does it really make sense to hold up the release of the first public version of Mozilla in order to appease a few puling Web developers?
Jeffery Zeldman, one of the leading members of the WaSP urges Netscape to “do the right thing,” but I’m forced to wonder if he even really knows what that is. What he and the other members of the WaSP seem to be saying is, “do the right thing for us.” Dan Shafer, pundit at large for CNet’s Builder.com, lays down an ultimatum, “Netscape must not ship a 5.0 browser without NGLayout.” He further urges them to pull out all the stops and commit its entire engineering resource to this effort.
What he, and the other folks behind this petition, fail to realize is that they are part of Netscape’s engineering resource. The success or failure of Mozilla depends on the Internet community at large as much as it does on Netscape. If they, or others, want Mozilla to have a particular feature, or look a certain way, or run on a certain platform, then they’re as empowered as anyone at Netscape to make it happen.
The source code is out there. The rest is up to you.
© rc3.org. Powered by WordPress using the DePo Skinny Theme.