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.