Why I think the oldskool scene is dead
Why I think the old scene / oldskool scene is dead?
Before answering, I must explain what the question means: I ask myself why the old scene spirit is "dead". For me, when there is no spirit, there is nothing valuable and so I think something without spirit is something dead. So as I think the old demo scene spirit is gone, I also think the old scene is dead.
Which scene spirit?
The one of the original scene, the one of the cracktros, the oldskool, the first scene. This is what I call - spiritually talking - the only valuable scene (for me, subjective point of view, not the ultimate truth, notice that).
What is the scene spirit for me?
The scene's spirit is IMHO about using the maximum of the available hardware, reaching its limits, and even exceed them while creating good display and sounds in an artistical way: "good" demos are technically interesting whilst being beautiful to watch or listen.
Why?
Stuff which only shows performance understandable by coders is not fair for other parts of the scene: musicians, graphicians, raytracers,... should also be charmed by what is on screen, otherwise it's egoistic coder pleasure.
Examples?
Samples / soundtrack playing on a ST, a CPC, Overscan on the ST, lots of dots on the screen, lots of hardware scrolling on the ST, plasmas, fractals zooming, rotating,... + well designed colors, layout, transition and a timeline followed by effect with rhythm
Doom emulation and cloning wasn't good, nor stuff which can be understood only by the coder who has built it.
A demo is mainly a show, think of the audience please. This doesn't mean a demo has to be a clone of fr-025 to be good. It simply has to be made of beautiful luminous colors, with sunny pictures, good melodic sounds.
Why not resurrect 2D effects?
Why not establish two trends:
An oldskool 2D oriented one and a new one, 3D oriented. The first for people who have a low budget hardware or simply love 2D only. The second for those who have money and love 3D.
Why not? See how people have found Turrican 64Kb by Rig: they have loved it and there is no 3D. And please think of people who have normal hardware: the base Geforce FX5200 is sold in every supermarket, not the other cards.
2D effects still exist?
Yes, and here I can tell you one thing about my misunderstanding of nowadays' scene: no classification - I mean at pouet and other great sites. Where we can download all demos, we have lots and lots of stuff, but no trend classification: this is needed to understand the movement at least for the beginner.
Why is it no more interesting today to code for an oldskooler?
I must state here that for me the PC has no well defined limits. It's anything but a standard: nobody has the same CPU, motherboard, memory capacity and timing, GFX card, chipset (northbridge + southbridge), so it's impossible to reach the limits as everybody has a computer with different limits than his friend's one.
Let me explain that:
1/ CPU
You can have an Intel Celeron, a Pentium III, IV, a Centrino processor, an AMD Duron, Athlon, XP, 64 CPU and some other strange clones. All these chips are available in several revisions, several models.
Well, I mean: You may have a Celeron and your friend may have a Celeron too and this does not mean you have the same computer... They have different cache sizes and timing, so it's now impossible to get a code optimized for your CPU, you only get something using it roughly as the compiler will generate a code optimized for a typical CPU and not several version for each CPU available.
2/ Mother Board
There are several motherboards available, of different brands, and more importantly with different chipsets on them. All these chipsets have different timings, and have different performance, some are good for something, others aren't, and vice versa. I mean, something running with the same CPU but on a different motherboard will have a different result on screen or at least will need less or more CPU / GPU time. Even the loading time will be different as the southbridges are different.
3/ GFX Card
The rendering will be different too as nobody gets the same GPU: even if you own the same card as somebody else, if you don't have the same revision of the card or more probably if you have a card built by another manufacturer, you will have a GPU that is a little faster or slower; it will be different, with different timings,... Most probably you will not have the same driver revisions installed and so you will have different results.
4/ Memory timing
Memory is installed inside your computer and it comes with different throughput - PC2700, PC3200,..., different CAS, RAS. Well, that means your code will not run the same on every computer.
So as the hardware is so different, there are at least 100 CPU * 100 MB * 20 GFX Card * 10 Mem timing = 2 000 000 different hardware combinations. And I have been light as I have not included everthing in the calculation. I mean now, it's impossible to get something to run the same everywhere, except with the unpopular video conversion called animation... Heavy to download, featuring a loss of quality if divxed - that sucks.
Moreover, when it comes to what is displayed on screen, I hardly see any drawn 2D GFX today. For me a demo is a team made product meaning there are at least three functions used to release a good one: a GFX function, a SFX function, a code function. All the three functions in theory can be done by the same guy but it's obvious that you will hardly find anybody who excels in all the three fields.
And to the software side:
Nowadays people use tools like photoshop and such. They are in fact a part of the whole making of. I mean it's these tools which do the stuff, no more human. Of course, sceners give the order to the tools to do the stuff but now time to make something by yourself is less important than it was before. So it's not really people who do the work, it is tools: there is.a lot of simplification, automatisation, procedure / macro calls. This is mainly programming in all aspects. Nowadays the challenge is to know as much as possible about the tools and use them. So what they release isn't hand made but tools made. This is really a difference: the same difference there is between a firm and a craftworker, the same difference between factory baked-cakes and the cakes of my mother.
So for an oldskooler, ingredients of the nowadays scene seem to be the opposite of the old scene. That's why!
"Natural" scene ingredients tend to disappear
Why?
TIME!
You don't have time to do natural stuff.
Well, let's start with the 2D GFX, which has almost totally disappeared today.
1/ 2D Gfx
A 2D drawing is something really human made, meaning the computer isn't used as a help to render it, it's 100% hand (mouse) drawn and that's good as skills and style appear. Nowadays photoshop and all its competitors with filters and a lot of tools have eased the pain of GFX artists but IMHO they have lost control over their creation, I mean they don't do GFX with a dot accuracy like before but instead use tools to produce results. Pictures are different and do not look "hand made". They lack something called inspiration and imagination. And they are dark.
Of course everything is relative, this is my own point of view,
my vision. I left the scene many years ago
and now I take time to watch stuff and see that the scene is well alive
but too much media conditioned and especially TV conditioned,
meaning people or sceners are sad, have dark ideas and so produce dark results.
Moreover, computers and tools make scene people act like machines,
meaning everything is mechanic, automatic, well - not interesting:
Without a human touch, art isn't art, it's too rational, not irrational enough.
I think the scene needs something new to get the good old scene feelings coming back.
I know there are talented GFX people
and
I think the tools they use simply don't let me see
what they are really able to do.
There are a lot of 2D GFX tools though,
ZBrush by pixologic is one of them,
and there is a good galery of stuff released with it here:
http://pixologic.com/gallery/galleryfr.html
By 2D GFX I mean, GFX which isn't only texture mapped onto a 3D mesh object, meaning something totally released by a GFX man. This approach in making Real Time Rendered graphics really annoys myself and here is why:
a) With 3D rendered GFX, handrawn pictures have vanished, the coders have melted their skills with those of the graphicians, a bit as if a phone had melted with a camera. The result is that people do several things and work closer, too close: functions melt. Who's doing what? Everybody is doing everything, so of course when you do more than one thing there is a loss somewhere, for me it's in visual quality, in the entertaining component.
b) With the "I map a texture on an object" trend, the demos start from cube to 3D scene rendering and this is not really great as it approaches reality. There is confusion between reality and demos. I hate that as before and FOR ME DEMOS WERE SOMETHING TO ESCAPE FROM REALITY. So bringing 3D objects which look real IMHO is something not desirable. This approach was decided by the industry to make money selling GFX cards fast enough to render and make this way a lot of money (GPU research, RAM embedded,...).
c) On another side, some coders and demo groups have found their ways making really abstract stuff. And at the same time, texts have vanished. The result is confusion: it exists but without a name on them nor explanation of what this stuff is. I don't understand it and it confuse me so much. It exists but I can't name it, so please put names on your creations. Lamers or even oldskoolers don't understand it. It becomes not as interesting as it was before: when there is a meaning, things have an interest. Nowadays most stuff I see is a totally mathematical trip and with such shapes and colors, it's totally boring.
2/ Colors
As noted, colors used nowadays are too dark. BRRRRR!, when I see all this stuff, I feel bad. How can sceners be so joyless? For me it's too dark, too uniform. Well, this needs something and this should be: TIME & LOVE.
Nowadays sceners need to earn their life and they don't have time to make something great. Sadly a lots of sceners have decided to improve their productivity even more, which has a direct result on the quality:
The more you produce and the less time you invest in building each demo, each music tune, the more the result is uniform, meaning everything looks the same and that sucks as art is entirely based on originality and difference.
Well here is a simple computation: on a 1280*1024*32 screen, there are 5,629,499,534,213,120 possible combinations of pixels, for each frame, so why are demos so uniform?
Lack of imagination, or lack of time, sadness, or lack of meaning for what you do? Why are is so few colors on screen? There are 2^32 = 4,294,967,296 possible colors. So use them and please, please change that black background trend... See nature around you, apart from when it's night, everything around you is not as dark as nowadays demos are.
3/ 3D
It's everywhere and well, it's sucks too: mathematical objects everywhere, well, ugly, meaning everything looks like your car engine, looks mechanic - hey guys, are you robots? I don't think so: you have a rational part of your brain, the left part, but your right part is irrational, use it, it's useful, it leads to mistakes and human is all about mistakes.
In the art field everything is about experimentation and this allows you to make mistakes as they have less consequence than making real mistakes. I mean art is a laboratory and there are no nuclear bombs here so use this freedom as much as you can and don't do like others.
Don't copy, but imagine, create, mix, watch other things than demos, go to museum, to party, to cinema, see art books, go to a supermarket, walk here and there in the nature, go to the zoo, the sea, the mountain, listen to different musics, well, eat the reality and you will see that in your brain beautiful plants will grow, beautiful ideas, and so beautiful demos.
4/ Music
Too much techno stuff, too mechanic too. Music is the best "weapon" sceners have: there are so many sounds we can generate - why waste our skills with non-melodic, boring noise. Life is all about sound, about frequencies, so please flood us with good vibes. Listen to sly radio using winamp: http://212.73. 29.83:8000, c64 remixes, never beaten.
5/ VBL
Nowadays there are so many parameters the user can tweak in the display properties that's it's a nightmare to have to change them: let see this table to understand the problem. I have a Geforce FX 5200, other cards have different numbers of parameters; often expensive cards have more.
parameter name parameters number integer range combinations
display mode timer 2 5+1 6
performance
and quality settings 12 6/5/4/3/1/3/2/25 69 120
quality settings 5 2/2/2/2/2 10
screen resolution 1 28 28
screen depth 1 3 3
screen refresh 1 10 10
Well, so there are 6 * 69120 * 28 * 3 * 10 = 348,364,800 combinations.
That's high tech!
THAT'S TOO COMPLEX, THAT'S A MESS AND THAT SUCKS!
These show coders have lost control over their code: the user can tweak important parameters. That's also something really annoying: It means we can't be sure that what we have coded will be displayed the way we want it to be.
6/ Code
Most importantly, the job of scene coders was about using the most of the well defined hardware. With the arms race in the CPU / GPU sector, I have lost the main interest in the coders scene. I'm an oldskooler, you see, and today when I see frequencies, bus bandwith and stuff which features slowdowns, no vertical synchro or any such stuff, I tell myself: "There are so much glitches that:
a) coders don't know to code or it's really complex, even more than before
b) hardware and architectures are so varied that nobody really masters anything
c) the hardware is fast but it's power without control meaning it leads people into a wall".
I think coders are demo coders: they don't really respect the system guidelines. And now I think they are right to do so: I remember when I was coding on the Amiga, I owned a big book which was a reference and in which this was stated: "Don't use the hardware registers, hardware can change!" HA HA HA! Following such guidelines was the surest way not to release anything in either demo or game business: a reason for my failure, with my weaknesses, my family and my laziness..
Nowadays it has changed: system programming is mandatory as all PC coders use DirectX or OpenGL. I also think it's more complex nowadays than before: using an abstraction system like API isn't really a joy and we lose something which is for me totally mandatory to get pleasure at coding. This is intimacy with hardware programming, this is also control over everything. That's what I found really interesting and nowadays it's lost. And with GPUs which are different and with some which are 4 times faster than others, I can understand that nothing can run like before. I also understand that the scene is nowadays mainly based on top end PCs and that the required hardware is expensive and really powerful, so the challenge is lower than before or in fact different: on the IRC I met a coder of Fairlight if I remember well and he told me nowadays the trip for a coder is an algorithmic trip, to use GFX card tweaking to get an as good rendering as a CPU can do but faster. Another scener told me that now demos are intended to please more people, not only sceners. Well, that's for sure the "problem": masses can't really understand everything as people specialised like sceners can. I mean demos needs an education: you need some time to understand the deep clockwork which is inside them. And so as computers are now products of mass production, they bring along with them mass spirit, not really a shaded one. For me the masses are militarily indoctrinated by school and the media but that's another story, another article.
To come back to the topic of what the scene was like and what it is no more like: Before it was all about building something intended for a typical, well defined computer architecture, whereas nowadays everything is built without too much optimisation: It runs so why doing anything more? It's impossible to optimise, there is so much different hardware, nobody can really make 10 or 20 versions, one for each typical CPU / GPU.
And I'm Ok with that, but that sucks: we have lost intimacy, I want to control everything about the code as this is a good trip. I hate all this C/C++ stuff, all these APIs, all these trademarks, all these licences, well - all this so too complex money based system.
C++ compilers and high level language have succeeded in making the code faster: Yes, compiler coders have "explained" the compiler how to optimize C++ code by itself, so it will be better than any human written Assembler. But what makes a coder demo interesting used to be: the coder code and spirit used to get the result, not the compiler generated code! Seems you live in an automated scene! Writers can understand that: they write by themselves, Word doesn't create the articles for them.
Now some proofs:
David A. Kaplan, "Nothing by Net," Newsweek, Dec. 25, 1995, pp. 32-36
"The [original Mosaic] amounted to just 9,000 lines of code--compared, say, with Windows 95's 8 million."
-> more shit in the code, slower programs, CPU hungry, Memory Hungry, push stock exchanges higher easily, windows is a lever.
Stryker McGuire, "Software Pirates, Beware," Newsweek, October 29, 2001, p. 68C
"Microsoft:... But with 11 percent market share, it's the largest player in the packaged-software industry, which sells $175 billion globally each year."
Jared Sandberg, "Multimedia Childhood," Newsweek Special Issue on Your Child, Fall/Winter 2000, p. 78
"Already there's an estimated $30 million software market for children 3 and younger. It's only a small slice of the $500 million youth-software market. But the demand for baby titles--particularly for kids 1.5 to 3-- is growing faster than any other software segment."
Robert J. Samuelson, "Puzzles of the 'New Economy'" Newsweek, April 17, 2000. p. 49.
"Between 1990 and 1999, here's what happened:
* the share of U.S. households with personal computers rose from 22 to 53 percent;
* annual U.S. shipments of personal computers increased from 9 million to 43 million;
* households with Internet access went from 0 to 38 percent;
* total global Web sites grew from 313,000 to 56 million;
* sales by U.S. software firms went from $63 billion to $141 billion."
N'Gai Croal, "The Art of the Game," Newsweek, March 6, 2000, p. 60
"At 25 million units sold, one in four U.S. households now has a PlayStation. And what started out as child's play now attracts all ages - - 59 percent of console players are over 18."
Bill Gates, "Why the PC Will Not Die," Newsweek, May 31, 1999, p. 64
"Sales [in the first quarter of 1999] grew at a healthy 19 percent annual rate. Worldwide, well over 100 million PCs will be sold this year. That means the world now buys almost as many PCs as color TVs."
Egil Juliussen, "Small Computers," IEEE Spectrum, January, 1995, p. 44
"... 16 million personal computers will be sold in the United States in 1995 and a further 34 million units worldwide. Workstation sales will add a million units more. To put this in perspective, PCs' and automobiles' yearly unit sales are now in the same ball park. By the end of 1994, the installed base of PCs exceeded 80 million units in the United States and 200 million worldwide (0.3 and 0.035 unit per person respectively). Intel Corp. chairman Andy Grove predicts that by the end of this decade, PC sales will surpass 100 million units worldwide--more than sales of cars or TVs."
Market share by Machine Size
Source: Dataquest, WSJ, 1/4/94, (from Marvin Sirbu, CMU)
1992
Segment Revenue $ (millions) Market Revenue Share(%) Market $(millions) Share(%)
Supercomputer 2,062.10 1.8 2,198.30 1.8
Mainframe 23,376.40 20.6 21,151.10 17.5
Midrange 21,809.80 19.2 21,000.50 17.4
Workstation 9,327.90 8.2 10,127.50 8.4
PCs 57,045.20 50.2 66,265.00 54.9
Total 113,621.40 100.0 120,742.40 100.0
Michael L. Dertouzos, "What Will Be," NY: HarperEdge, 1997. p. 36
"Today, the economic benefits of all these [computer] innovations account for 10 percent of the world's industrial economies, nearly $2 trillion a year worldwide. Not a bad return--100,000 percent--on the $1 billion (in today's dollars) that ARPA spent on computer research during its early years to fund 'half' of these innovations!"
-> PC is a money machine: it can't die because it's everywhere used as it's cheaper than other computers. Moreover, it features everything for the developer to build business software quickly. As all major brands of electronic stuff like Samsung are involved in making its chips like RAM, none of these big firms will suddenly stop building what gives them so much income. Moreover, this is like in the fairy tale: They will not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. But here the goose is dying every 3 years to come back with different hardware, useless software compatibility, but useful information safety (Word, Excel,...). Information is the key of the world as it has always been: information is what you use to make your decision, information is power. So TV is power,...
"Into the Mysts of Time", Newsweek, November 2, 1998, p. 10
Myst Windows 95 Jurassic Park
Date Released: Nov. 1993 Aug. 1995 June 1993
Revenue: $143 million $544 million $357 million
Earnings/Cost: 191/1 1.81/1 6/1
Months in top 10: 55 22 4
Allan Sloan, "The New Rich," Newsweek, August 4, 1997, p.48-49
* "Michael Dell 32, Mail order magician, His 16% stake in Dell Computer is worth more than $4 billion."
* "Jerry Yang 28, David Filo 31, Yahoo! indeed. Their stakes in the Internet firm are worth $191 million each."
* "Scott McNealy 42, With his Sun Microsystems going supernova, his stock's worth $324 millions."
* "Bill Gates 41, The Croesus of our age. With $38 billion, he's three times as rich as John D. Rockefeller was."
Steven Levy, "Breaking Windows," Newsweek, Nov. 3, 1997, p. 48
Operating Systems 1996 Market Share
Microsoft (Windows and DOS) 87%
Apple 5.6%
Other 7.2%
Business Performance, 1996, in Billions
Company Revenues Market Value
General Motors $158.0 $50.7
IBM $75.9 $98.6
Hewlett Packard $38.4 $67.6
Microsoft $8.7 $164.5
Katie Hafner and Jennifer Tanaka, "Hollywood's New Game," Newsweek, May 29, 1995, pp. 54-55
Rich Rashid, Microsoft Corporation, speech at CMU on Oct. 26, 1994
* Microsoft gets 50% of its revenue from products released in the last 12 months.
* Microsoft releases 50 new products a year.
* Microsoft upgrades products every 18 to 24 months to maintain the revenue stream.
* In an upgrade, 2/3 of the bits are new code, including 1/4 of the underlying software.
* Microsoft is now the largest producer of encyclopedias in the world
* Microsoft's product mix is now:
o 49% Desktop applications
o 26% Operating systems
o 5% Developer tools
o 11% Consumer games and information products, and this is the fastest growing sector
Well, Microsoft is a politically important firm: its OS is installed everywhere. It can be dangerous for the rest of the world that this continues to be true: information is power and soon with TCPA politics will get more and more power over PC users. From now M$ educated us, provide uss with software to create and send information (Word, Outlook), provides us with tools to build software and even entertains us.
Jeff Fischer, "Clicks for Bricks," Newsweek, February 12, 2001, p. 67.
"Domestic online-retail sales neared $12 billion in 2000, up as much as 66 percent from 1999."
FUCK OFF CAPITALISM.
FUCK OFF MONEY: MONEY MAKES PEOPLE ABANDON ARTS & QUALITY.
Charles M. Vest, "Report of the President", Technology Review, Jan 1995, vol. 98, no. 1, pp. MIT59 - MIT67
"Department of Defense support of research at universities... supports over 75 percent of all electrical engineering research on our campuses, and it accounts for approximately 50 of research in other critical fields such as mechanical engineering, computer science, materials science and engineering."
Juan Antonio Osuna, "Computing Research Association Bulletin," Volume 2 Number 18, December 9, 1994
In 1993-1994, the following estimates of the percentages of university funding obtained from DOD were released by the government:
* 50% Math and Computer Science
* 42% Engineering Sciences
* 53% Electrical Engineering
Nearly fifty percent of current graduate student support in computer science comes from DoD Funding.
FUCK OFF UNIFORMITY. FUCK MILITARY INDOCTRINATION.
William Hudson, "Web of Confusion, Part 1", ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, January/ February, 2001, p. 9
"Jared Spool reports that in usability testing conducted at User Interface Engineering, users only achieve their self-selected goals 42% of the time. A particularly worrying aspect of this figure is that it has not changed significantly since they started collecting data in 1996. The situation is even worse in UIE's studies of web purchasing, with only 35% of sales succeeding. UIE have found and classified over 250 obstacles to success in this area."
Anna Kuchment, "One Step Ahead," Newsweek, October 30, 2000, p. 100.
"By the end of this year, only 8 percent of mobile phones in the United States will have Internet access; of those, just 2 percent will be subscribed to the Internet."
Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt, "Contextual Design: A Customer-Centric Approach to Systems Design," interactions, Sep+Oct, 1997, iv.5, p. 62.
"Some estimates report that only slightly more than 30% of the code developed in application software development ever gets used as intended by end-users. The reason for this statistic may be a result of developers not understanding what their users need."
Frank Linton, Andy Charron, & Debbie Joy, "OWL: A Recommender System for Organization-Wide Learning", MITRE Technical Report http://www.mitre. org/technology/tech_tats/modeling/owl/owl.html Summarized in The Computists' Communiqué 8(26.3), August 27, 1998
In tracking Microsoft Word use by 16 people (Version 6 for the Mac), of the 642 commands available, just 20 commands accounted for 90% of use. The average person used only 57 commands in six months, and all of the users together used only 152 commands in 18 months.
"More than 2,000 new CD-ROM titles are expected to be on the market by the end of the year. About 60 will succeed.... On average, producing a CD-ROM costs about $500,000."
-> if all programmers are like sceners who give me bad replies to my pouet post, I understand why such waste of time, energy, money and grey matter can appear: PLEASE LISTEN WHEN I WRITE, PLEASE UNDERSTAND INSTEAD OF JUDGING, PLEASE ASK YOURSELF "Why does he say that? What does he really want to say?" BEFORE KICKING.
Peter McGrath, "Bandwidth Be Thy Name," Newsweek, October 2, 2000, p. 74H.
"A single web site called mail.com filled 28 terabytes of storage in 45 days earlier this year--equal to the total monthly traffic on the internet four years ago."
Keith Naughton, "CyberSlacking", Newsweek. Nov. 29, 1999. p. 62-65.
"90 percent of the nation's workers admit to surfing recreational sites during office hours. And 84 percent of workers say they send personal e- mail from work.... Nearly one third of American worker's time on the Net is spent cheating the boss out of real work, double last year's rate of on-the-job recreational surfing... More than half of American workers cybershop on company time.... On EIN five online game players logs on from work... [This all costs] corporate America more than $1 billion a year in wasted computer resources."
"More than two thirds of U.S. companies engage in electronic surveillance of their employees... The biggest growth is in cybersnooping, with 27 percent of companies reviewing e-mail, up from 15 percent two years ago, and 21 percent going over computer files, up from 13 percent."
"The New Wired World", Newsweek. Sep 20, 1999. p. 40-78
Number of daily office communications by:
Telephone: 52
E-mail: 36
Voice Mail: 23
Postal Mail: 18
Interoffice: 18
Fax: 14
Pager: 8
Cell Phone: 4
Jennifer Tanaka, "The Perfect Search", Newsweek, Sep 27, 1999. pp. 71-72
"The Web now contains some 1.2 billion pages and roughly doubles in size each year... [which works out to] about 38 pages per second.... Everyone agrees that search engines are necessary, but one study has shown that seven of 10 Internet users are dissatisfied with them.... `All the Web' [is] currently the largest index at 200 million pages.... Yahoo employs some 150 editors and Web surfers to create what it calls a `directory,' which categorizes a total of 1.2 million links to Web pages. ... Less than 6 percent of surfers manage to use Boolean search terms, which are the `and' and `or,' and plus and minus signs that correspond to the way a computer filters data."
Mohamed F. Fayad and Douglas C. Schmidt, "Object-Oriented Application Frameworks", CACM, vol 40, no. 10, October, 1997, p. 35
"It often takes 6-12 months to become highly productive with a GUI framework like MFC or MacApp.... Typically, hands-on mentoring and training courses are required."
Copied from the LUCID Computing Home Page
The lack of attention to good software design is costing corporations $ 80 billion dollars a year, according to the Standish Group. Research by Professor Thomas K. Landauer suggests that the quality of software may be depressing the national growth by 3-4%. And, if we care, it is making millions of people miserable.
The Gartner Group has characterized the state of software development as chaos. 25% of software development efforts fail outright. Another 60% produce a sub-standard product. In what other industry would we tolerate such inefficiency? Imagine if 25% of all bridges fell down or 25% of airplanes crashed.
Thyra Rauch, Susan Kahler, George Flanagan, "Usability Techniques - What Can You Do?", SIGCHI Bulletin, vol. 28, no. 4, Oct. 1996, pp. 63-64
"Studies have shown that usability is the characteristic most often identified with quality in a survey of 500 business computer users. In addition, surveys of I/S organizations emphasize usability when making their software purchase decisions. Usability is equal to reliability and performance as the most often identified characteristics that affect end- user satisfaction. And, if that isn't enough, usability accounts for 56% of the write-in comments across all major product characteristics evaluated in satisfaction surveys.... Usability is the most important factor in the Japanese software market, even more so than in the U.S."
"... One third of all [software] projects fail.... Top 5 Causes of Failure: Lack of user input, Lack of executive support, Incomplete requirements and specifications, Changing requirements, Technologically inept."
FUCK OFF WASTE.
Brad Stone, "The Keyboard Kids", Newsweek, June 8, 1998, p. 72
"More than 9.8 million children are using the Internet, a number projected to triple in the next four years... In a recent poll by CNN and USA Today, 28 percent of teens said they could live without their TV, but only 23 percent said they could get by without a computer."
FUCK OFF ADDICTION.
Wanna get back my freedom.
N'Gai Croal, "The Art of the Game," Newsweek, March 6, 2000, p. 61
"The average budget to produce a game on Sega's Genesis on the '90s was about $200,000. For today's PlayStation and Nintendo 64, it's around $2 million. Many designers expect development costs for a PlayStation 2 game to jump to at least $4 million."
-> a bit expensive for a game, not?
Do we need millions, stars and such useless stuff to get fun? I think no: see the world success of chess, jigsaw, puzzle, cards and such games.
Robert L. Glass, "The Ups and Downs of Programmer Stress", CACM, vol 40, no. 4, April, 1997, p. 18
Japanese researchers found that 37% of software faults would have been avoided "by appropriate scheduling and placing no stress on the developers." Another 34% of those faults were attributed by the researchers to "human nature" rather than to technical difficulties. Adding these percentages together, the researchers conclude "71% of all faults are the responsibility of the project manager, the quality assurance manager, and the senior management" (in the sense that these faults arise from human-factors considerations).
-> So why stress yourself at a party?
But do we need to have such research be done to know its result? Is there no more common sense in this world or what?
What about people in the scene?
Something really interesting about the nowadays scene is people: The scene is a social phenomenon. I mean that if parties have so much success it's thanks to people: sceners love meeting each other in reality, flesh, faces have precedence over technologies, which are obviously far too complex than we need: lots of people over the world find computers too complex to set up and use. They are right as computers were released to the public, in the hope for speeding up repetitive tasks, but usually this requires a training and a lot of rigour to achieve such a result, and this requires time to be realed and as we don't have time, this kind of complex hardware makes us lose time. Just see how simple is a video console or a non-cellular phone and you will admit that computers are far more complex than them.
Functions aren't the same? Well, a computer can be used to play with like a video console, you can phone over the internet using VOIP, you can send photos using email, you can even have a video conference using a web cam like 3G phones. Well so functions are the same but computers add creativity. And a lot of fuzz: directX versions, dll, viruses, trojans, hackers, bugs, and useless functions. Word is a word processor but you can include sounds in documents, animations and even do calculations so what is Word? A MESS!
I may appear to some as really conservative, but believe it or not, a Swiss army knife is useless and the Swiss are neutral so their army is useless!!! Moreover, when functions are melted there is always something which is lost, and in the computer field it's simplicity: I've never seen anything becoming as complex as computers have become. I've worked with tons of people in the last five years and believe it, they are really lamers as they aren't technically educated, like I'm a lamer in black magic or health. WELL, THOSE GUYS AND GIRLS WANT TO GET A RESULT FROM A COMPUTER AND NOT BEING ANNOYED BY TECHNOLOGY FEATURES. Well they are right but they really wanna know nothing, they aren't really curious and that sucks. Sadly technology and especially hi-tech are complex by their nature so... everything sucks!!! I KNOW THAT NOWADAYS SIMPLICITY IS THE WAY TO IMPROVE LIFE FOR USERS.
Sadly all this technology stuff leads to loss of time:
"Spam: Workplace Hazard" Newsweek, May 14, 2001, p. 60H.
"34% of internal business emails are unsolicited messages. 24% of employees spend more than one hour managing their e-mail. Only 27% of e- mail requires worker's immediate attention."
Jennifer Tanaka, "Crammed with Spam", Newsweek
"44% of all domestic mail sent in 1998 was junk, or 87 million pieces. Last year Americans bought $230 billion worth of goods and services as a result of marketing phone calls."
"AT&T WorldNet says it rejects 10 million to 12 million e-mails a day because the addresses don't match real users'--a sure sign that spammers are at work. AOL estimates that 30 percent of the e-mail it delivers to its 22 million users is unsolicited bulk messages."
Nowadays the scene suffers from the same problems as the whole society: too much complexity.
-> to please everybody hardware and software are trying to do everything and this leads to confusion. What people look for is to be happy and bad salesmen and bad industry build and sell stuff which is useless and requires to buy more and more stuff. This is a consumption system.
That means there are a lot of things which stay in a cupboard not used, there are a lot of functions of software and hardware which aren't used, and even not known. ,
CPU / GPU aren't used to the max: nobody uses the typical architecture like CPU caches, memory timing and for example AGP 8X which is brand new, has never been used whereas PCI Express has just been released. That means a lot of engineers work for so little result and that people from the point of the production chain aren't understood by people at the point of consumption. That means nowadays the scene is no more a rebel like it was before: exceeding the hardware limits is impossible as hardware does not have well defined limits today. THIS IS NOT THE SCENERS' RESPONSIBILITY, THIS IS THE INDUSTRY's RESPONSIBILITY.
And that means I can't understand a society where so many do absolutely nothing logical: I can't understand people who drink so much alcohol or go to parties with so loud sound as for me this leads to headache and pain. As I'm not a masochist, I sadly have to leave such an organisation. So as the society is far too close of the scene or vice versa, I consider myself as out of the nowadays demomaking scene.
Moreover, for me the old scene spirit is exactly the opposite of the nowadays scene: before this was traditional demomaking directly using the hardware, knowing its computer by heart, discovering its hidden features. Nowadays it's mass production:
Sanity have built 22 demos/slides/intros... in 3 years, 7.3 demos / year on the amiga whereas Farbrausch have released 52 demos/slides/intros/... in 4 years, 13 demos / year on the PC. That's a production rate which is near the double as on the Amiga. I have nothing against Farbrausch nor against sceners: this is an example to show that the production is far higher now than before and too much speed means less time for details, for perfection. I mean sceners now have other tools to reach their goals as the whole software industry needs to deliver software as fast as possible. Sadly this philosophy is not the one I am accustomed to: art is everything about love, details and time to reach a goal with high quality in mind. Moreover, the scene was about using the hardware to the maximum and nowadays with so much power there are so many problems, so many slowdowns, so many configurations to consider (I own a P4, 2.6 GHz, 1 GB DDR Dual Channel PC3200 RAM, Geforce 5200, 128 MB, Asus P4C800 Deluxe or Athlon XP 2200+, 256 MB PC2700 RAM, Geforce 5200, A7N8X MB, total value = 800£ + 280£ + an LCD screen at 260£ = 1060£ / 540£ for a demo station) and I don't get the same feelings I got from my old 250£ amiga with a TV. Sceners will tell me Geforce FX 5200 is a big shit: Ok, but it's the most sold mass video card as supermarkets sell it as the only card... So for me demos are no more demonstrations as nothing is demonstrated, but instead "des maux" (maux is the plural of mal = sorrow, pains in French) and I don't love them anymore. They require too much CPU and GFX power for not so good a result, the ratio of EP's IMHO good demos / "bad" demos is nowadays lower than before so I leave.
I have nothing against sceners:
1- I think we are all in a transition meaning nothing is clear in the computer world. Nowadays it's more chaotic than ever and the future isn't oriented towards clarity: the more confusing it is, the more we buy quickly and the more we make buying mistakes and the more firms make money so this will not change as the economic system we are living in is money based. It's total chaos on the hardware and software industries: too many standards, too much stuff whichs run at the same time like AGP, PCI, PCI Express, USB / Firewire, IE, Netscape, Firefox, HTML, XHTML, XML,... I mean why are there so many standards for the same functions? Concurrence leads to confusion and incompatibility, not ergonomy, while no concurrence leads to failure to act. I think hardware needs to be more standardized and simpler than it is now. That's why I'm pretty sure my next computer will be a MAC!
2- I think sceners need time for their real life and that's why demos aren't as good as they were before. I understand that: I use computers 50 hours per week for job purposes and so I don't like computers as much as I loved them before, I need spare time and demos would only lead me to something bad for my health. So I stop watching demos right now. And I will instead write articles as this really please myself. I'd rather be a part of a diskmag team as this is nearer my habits: reading, comparing, having shaded judgement. My style is mine and is a part of my personality so I don't see why I have to change it. I'm direct whereas others (not sceners) are hypocritical, this is a life choice. At least my way of communicating leads me to find people with whom I'm happy and that's what counts the most for the whole happiness: happy people lead other people to be happy too. Saying what is pleasing you and what is frustrating you is a way to be happy so I use it. If I'm caricatured as the scener's biggest mouth, then I accept this picture of myself: I'm a big mouth :)
3- PC is the goose that lays the golden eggs: you will never get one without slowdown, without weaknesses. Why? To make money: each weakness will need to be resolved and this will make a "good" reason and a good argument to sell. But never ever will the PC be good in all aspects, this is a rule in marketing: never satisfy the need, always leave the customers in the need for something. How will they sell us TCPA? "We need protection, we need control, we need to arrest terrorists."
Well, the real terrorists are in the government offices:
Jacques Chirac responsible for nuclear bomb test in the most world's beautiful islands:
http://www-cgi.cnn.com/WORLD/9601/france_nuclear/01-28/
George Bush, responsible with his big friend "so good" Ben Laden for the fall of "so bad" Saddam Hussein. Ben has sold oil and a false pretext to the US for their act, you can be sure, that's the truth. Another truth is that this is the army which rules this world with force. Stupid political class, before governing others, you must really do one thing: learn and practise governing yourselves. Politics, animate the society, PC, Windows are games for adults, children and this creates a basic toy for people to play. Some play quake, some play computing big bombs simulation, some play research what is the aids remedy, some play statistical marketing analysis, some play financial planning, some play making video realtime rendered effects and some play with millions of people who dream and don't see they are slaves...
So for me the scene spirit or more accurately the demo spirit is gone because nowadays the scene is spiritually the opposite of what it was in its roots: old computers were weak but with intelligence and tricks they were doing wonders, new computers are strong but with lack of time and no or too many different standardisations nothing good can be achieved. Money ruins everything and the need to survive leads to producing more instead of achieving quality. Trademarks Intel, AMD, Nvidia, ATI, Asus, Q-Tec, MSI, Creative Labs, and others need to feed their employees and gain money so this is why it is chaos: a well organised society only requires some brains, a lot of machines building a huge quantity of products and nothing else. So this is a bad world organisation needed to let everybody live. People can then spend their spare time in front of a TV or a computer, this lets them dream and during this time they don't think. Good to manipulate them, isn't it?
And the scene?
Nowadays it's finding the good site with a search engine or asking by email showing you are a big lamer (only elite knows, people who don't are all lamers you know, some sceners are really top elite mega megalo, with a big ego, no?), writing big articles to show my lameness, showing you I need help, then finding your way through millions files, downloading some big demos made by unknown people or Farbrausch, unarchiving the whole stuff, moving inside the created drawers, finding the. exe, clicking on it, configuring the resolutions, both in the sound and graphics, and watching what? Boring 3D stuff with some fade here and there as the only transitions, finding a gem only once each 100 demos watched. People once contacted reply let's say in a quarter of time as often emails are obsolete. We know nothing about groups, people are from all corners of the world, some have never met each other, only exchanged emails. Where is the warmth, the body heat? Nowhere and demos show that: it's too mechanic, too machine-like, too mathematic, this is no more well balanced.
Nowadays it's General motors: boring and nag, drinking a lot of gasoline, slow. Nowadays it's Quake: blood, military 3D real baddies, 3D reality violence in dark environment. Nowadays it's 12 button joystick, an alien has done the usability test. This is terribly based on quantity, complexity, inefficiency, stupidity. Today we are scattered all over the world, at parties we can't speak to each other as there is loud music everywhere, some are playing qwak, quake, quaque, well boum boum, tacatac, I kill him! Some are drinking, quickly eating bad food as the dead line is near. People don't listen to others (of course, we are so intelligent, why losing some time listening to others' point of view). Some are dancing on a dance floor, well - parties are everything except demo parties (the big ones). We are adults.
Yesterday it was putting a disk given by a friend
who has taken the time to write you a letter.
This disk in a drive, you switched on the computer,
to enjoy a trackloaded demo by well known groups,
and voila, the show was on.
There were transitions from the beginning to the end. This was interesting.
This was delicious and entertaining,
records were broken,
quality was rarely neglected for performance,
following an old Andromeda recommendation,
written on a small, beautiful hand drawn font with nice colours
and a good human made soundtrack, with human made code.
This was human:
the scene was a little family where everybody was knowing everybody.
The code / music / graphics mix was well balanced,
and artists expressed themselves often in slideshows and music disks.
This was simple, and good to see with full brand new ideas.
Before this was Ferrari testarossa: fast and smart.
Before this was Turrican:
Good GFX, SFX, excellent code and no real like baddies,
this was imagination to the max,
see this good remake with good colors
http://www.demonews.de/download.php?id=553
and others here http://turricanforever.de/games
and there http://www.nemmelheim.de/turrican/in_development.php.
Yesterday there was a one button joystick, full of fun. Every party brought not so often, just when needed the good quantity of demos with quality, simplicity, efficiency and intelligence in mind. Yesterday we were like a team, there was demo spreading by a human relay, this was friendship, no alcohol at parties as we don't need to be drunk to speak directly to others. We were children.
Please, forget the present and adult problems, become back a child, read Zen, read Tibetan Buddhism philosophy, read physics, don't smoke grass. Reality is not a nightmare, it's a dream and it exists.
Smile: the sun is over your head, and you are alive, open your eyes, enjoy life, breath, move, don't live in your ideas and in your head only. The reality is outside you too. Bring the beauty of the outside inside yourself, let's grow good thoughts and restore your sanity, meet back your Amigos, meditate like the guru and avoid the software failure. Flower power my friends, the spirit is back. Stop math, stop abstracts, start physics, start reality. Avoid to be stuck in the circle of Boolean logic: study asiatic philosophies. Avoid being a computer, think different, don't think sheep, don't think robot. See the differences, accept them: they are treasures, they are life. Switch on the light, and please make a tunnel between the past and the present. Take the best of the past and keep it in the present: experience. Coders, stop automate everything: life is interesting when you live it, when you do something in it, demos are good when a coder does them.
Old / blind before the age come.
You don't want to be like that, no?
Please be like that:
an eye on everything, open minded, balanced
Be like this: innovative, fresh, full of ideas.
:-)
All quotes come from: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/numbers/#WinMacUnix
All pictures from the internet / The scene art London magazine / Desert Dream Alien by RWO of Kefrens.