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Domain: charlesriver.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to charlesriver.com.
Comments · 7
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Re:E-books are the future! At least, they will be.I have no problems with authors wishing to be paid. I am, in fact, a published author who has written my own book, and contributed to half a dozen more, including one textbook. Honestly, I would have no problem if books I've worked on were available in a DRM-free format. I spent a year of my life writing my book, so believe me, I'm well aware of the implications involved, and the enormous effort that goes into writing.
My problem with DRM is that you're at the mercy of the encrypted format and whatever scheme is in place to prevent it's copying. Who's to say that particular type of encryption will be long supported? Granted, for a technical book, this is less of an issue, as these tend to have rather short shelf lives anyhow, but why take the chance? These schemes tend to be cumbersome and error-prone (I've helped to support DRM-supported add-ons for a game I work on), and are generally a worse user-experience than a non-DRM format.
Believe me, I'm the last person you'll find that authors shouldn't be compensated for their work. I was, in fact, refering to "DRM-free". Call it a limitation of the English language. I believe the phrase is something like "free as in free speech, not as in free beer".
As a slightly off-topic question, how do you get HTML tags to show up without the [domain.com] tag?
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Re:E-books are the future! At least, they will be.I have no problems with authors wishing to be paid. I am, in fact, a published author who has written my own book, and contributed to half a dozen more, including one textbook. Honestly, I would have no problem if books I've worked on were available in a DRM-free format. I spent a year of my life writing my book, so believe me, I'm well aware of the implications involved, and the enormous effort that goes into writing.
My problem with DRM is that you're at the mercy of the encrypted format and whatever scheme is in place to prevent it's copying. Who's to say that particular type of encryption will be long supported? Granted, for a technical book, this is less of an issue, as these tend to have rather short shelf lives anyhow, but why take the chance? These schemes tend to be cumbersome and error-prone (I've helped to support DRM-supported add-ons for a game I work on), and are generally a worse user-experience than a non-DRM format.
Believe me, I'm the last person you'll find that authors shouldn't be compensated for their work. I was, in fact, refering to "DRM-free". Call it a limitation of the English language. I believe the phrase is something like "free as in free speech, not as in free beer".
As a slightly off-topic question, how do you get HTML tags to show up without the [domain.com] tag?
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Re:E-books are the future! At least, they will be.I have no problems with authors wishing to be paid. I am, in fact, a published author who has written my own book, and contributed to half a dozen more, including one textbook. Honestly, I would have no problem if books I've worked on were available in a DRM-free format. I spent a year of my life writing my book, so believe me, I'm well aware of the implications involved, and the enormous effort that goes into writing.
My problem with DRM is that you're at the mercy of the encrypted format and whatever scheme is in place to prevent it's copying. Who's to say that particular type of encryption will be long supported? Granted, for a technical book, this is less of an issue, as these tend to have rather short shelf lives anyhow, but why take the chance? These schemes tend to be cumbersome and error-prone (I've helped to support DRM-supported add-ons for a game I work on), and are generally a worse user-experience than a non-DRM format.
Believe me, I'm the last person you'll find that authors shouldn't be compensated for their work. I was, in fact, refering to "DRM-free". Call it a limitation of the English language. I believe the phrase is something like "free as in free speech, not as in free beer".
As a slightly off-topic question, how do you get HTML tags to show up without the [domain.com] tag?
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Another good one...
...is M. Tim Jones' AI Application Programming. It's got all sorts of predator/prey and pathfinding stuff in there.
The code examples are in C, although I ported some of them from the 1st edition of the book to Ruby. -
While game magazines may be going downhill...
...books about programming games seem to be doing fine. At least, Charles River has published a bunch of high quality games titles, including the excellent Game Programming Gems series.
They're also starting a Journal of Game Programming, which looks nifty in an academic sort of way. But that's the way game programming seems to be these days - either you're a content artist or you've got a PhD in physics and can speak fluent assembler. -
A good intro to AI...
...including ant algorithms, simulated annealing, and fuzzy logic is M. Tim Jones' AI Application Programming.
The examples are especially helpful; they're written in nice portable C. I've been working on a little project to translate them to Ruby; porting notes and Gnuplot charts and such are here and the code for the Ant Algorithm translation is here. -
Re:similar programs out there?
That sounds a lot like Markov chains and bigrams (or trigrams). Build a table of words, put together some "this follows that x% of the time", and off we go.
Here's some Ruby code that implements a simple bigram model - it forms sentences using some quotes from C. S. Lewis as a corpus. It's based on examples from M. Tim Jones' excellent book AI Application Programming.