So I'm back, brighter and earlier than I would have liked but I guess that was inevitable after 4 days away. A few things that caught my eye over the (rather slow) weekend...
Sometimes I think everything in this world is controversial to someone. Case in Point, Glenn Reid has an interesting post about XML where he says...
XML does not deserver its "ML", or even its "X". But first, the "ML" part.
I am one of the world's leading experts on markup languages. I'll start there. I'm a 20-year veteran of desktop publishing, am personally related to the author of one of the very first markup languages in the world (Scribe), and have actually used SGML, MML, HTML, and most of the other markup languages that came along decades before XML.
So I know what I'm talking about. XML is not a markup language.
Well, ok then. I don't really know how to respond to that to be honest. He may very well be right but (a) it really doesn't matter what you call something and (b) XML is easily the most widely adopted markup language in existence (if you count XHTML) so I would think that would be enough to change the definition (if we're brining it to a vote).
Anyway...
In other news Scott Watermasysk of Telligent has a post asking "Are Trackbacks (still) Worth It?" and I have no real answer for him. They do seem to be causing a lot of spam lately and though they're a good idea in theory I rarely see them used in any useful way. That said, from his perspective and the maker of blogging/community software I don't think we're to the point where you can drop it from the feature list and expect everyone to accept that.
Finally, on the "just kind of cool front", Greg Dolley posted on how he converted Quake II to managed C++ in the latest version of Visual Studio. It's a good post but the part I found most interesting was this...
On modern computer hardware and the commodity-priced video cards out there, it’s difficult to come up with speed comparisons between .NET versus native C++ when running Quake II. What I mean is this - pretty much all computers with a decent 3D video card run the game at its maximum frame rate anyway regardless of whether native or managed mode is used. However, I did see a difference in performance when I turned on just software rendering and used a high resolution. The speed differences weren’t that much - the .NET version was about 9% slower (94 FPS in native versus 85 FPS in managed).
However, non graphics related things, such as initializing the game and loading maps between levels were noticeably slower in the .NET version. I would wait about seven to ten seconds for the game to load in a managed build versus about two seconds in native mode. The same amount of slowdown was noticeable when switching between levels.
The truth is that very few people need the graphics power behind Quake II as it is so the fact that managed code is performing that well tells me that you are probably safe doing 99% of things in a managed environment. If you are planning the next Halo on the PC you are probably better off with unmanaged code but if you're planning the next Halo in this day and age you probably aren't targeting the PC anyway.