Saturday, December 14, 2002|
From the Lore Dept: Similarities Between Halo and Marathon
Differences
Wait... for SPNKRs to be around, that means this would have happened around the Marathon 2 timeframe, not before (like was speculated before Halo was released). Perhaps while The Marine was asleep? And that raises another question... how did you get a SPNKR in Marathon 2? The rocket launcher in Marathon 1 was a LZYBY. Must... catch... up... on... new... lore.... |
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From the Re-Hired Dept: Darwin Engineer Wilfredo Sánchez Back At Apple [MacSlash: A daily dose of Macintosh News and Discussion] It's good to see him back at Apple. Go him. |
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From the 4n1m3 Dept: Sequel to Ghost In The Shell [Slashdot] Oh yeah. The first one was a classic. Hopefully they don't screw up this next one. |
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From the Languages-Are-Easy-Designs-Are-Hard Dept: An interview with Richard Gabriel, with some interesting points about how we teach software engineering.
What do people do when they’re being trained, for example, to get a Master of Fine Arts in poetry? They study great works of poetry. Do we do that in our software engineering disciplines? No. You don’t look at the source code for great pieces of software. Or look at the architecture of great pieces of software. You don’t look at their design. You don’t study the lives of great software designers. So, you don’t study the literature of the thing you’re trying to build. About 4 months ago I started working on a project in Pascal, having never really seen the language before. While I won't say I'm fluent in the language, I've picked up enough syntax to be able to write code in it. Design, especially with an existing product, is much harder, and (more often then not) unique to the project. How does it integrate with existing code? How extensible is it? How does it "feel" in terms of design? Is it user-friendly? Languages you can pick up in days to weeks. Designing may be more of an art-form. I like art. |
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From the Sci-Fi Dept: Ain’t It Cool News really doesn't like the new Star Trek movie. [Michael Tsai’s Weblog] "Really Doesn't Like" is being nice. But it'll make money because it's StarTrek. The nerds will see it even if it does suck. And then complain about how much it sucks |
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From the Intelligent Sci-Fi Dept: Snippets from the above article: Joss Whedon is promises not to give up, but if the show does come back it won't be until next fall. Mac guy Jason Snell has written the best eulogy I’ve seen. And, the themesong lyrics: [Michael Tsai’s Weblog] Firefly is one of the only shows that I looked forward to watching. Of course, I missed it the last two weeks... Christmas concerts and stuff. Grr. The article by Jason Sneell includes this nail-it-on-the-head quote: ... Do you see a show with a half-dozen characters and start having trouble telling them apart? Like those three interchangeable guys on Enterprise, who are exactly the same character except that one of them is black and one is English... And it's so true. The Pilot-Wonderkid, the Armory-wonderkid, and the Engineer-wonderkid, who occasionally make "brilliant" leaps of foresight and knowledge that create the policies that would be dues ex machina/be ignored/or cover up major plot holes in episodes of the later series. Visit The StarTrek Website if you really want. I could provide links for the above characters... that is, if I had bandwidth. |
