As an added bonus, the paper seems to ignore the fact that it's damn hard to get the right-of-ways required to build Transmission, let alone this goofy-just-for-wind transmission system.
Consider this story about wind farm projects in trouble because the Transmission they need is only justifiable if a base-load Coal plant is built nearby.
Everyone wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.
It's worth pointing out that, most likely, this issue never would have been raised if the course required the program to compile under g++ on the schools mainframes/UNIX boxes.
Personally, all my courses required that I use g++ to test my programs; I hated g++ because to use it I either had to trudge down to a terminal room or use a 2400bps dialup connection. So I built everything in Borland C++ on my DOS box, then 'ported' it over to g++; that took about 10 minutes.
There's nothing wrong with the school's policies, it's just that the tool they're pushing uses an 'uncool' technology, i.e. Windows, so it gets bagged on.
This is outlandish! It's been statistically proven that in many of these cases the defendant has been wrongfully accused. So Bush merrily murders innocent people. I have no desire to see this ignorant murderer as the president of our country.
Fvck.
No such thing has been 'proven'. No one has shown than innocent people are being executed. It has been shown that innocent people were _scheduled_ to be executed, and it has been shown, over and over and over again, that innocent people were _incarcerated_, and deprived of their property and liberty without cause.
Personally, I'm a little sick of the whining about the death penalty. Yes, it's barbaric and cruel and we should be taken aback that the state will actually put people to death. But the far more serious issue is that the state will, with increasingly less provocation, take your property and liberty with the threat of force. This, I might add, goes far beyond the normal confiscatory tax rates (40% effective rates? No way in hell.) and overly intrusive laws we face every day.
GWB isn't a great candidate, but the first rule of holes is to stop digging. AlGore is a catastrophe waiting to happen; The fool thinks it's necessary and approriate to ban the internal combustion engine! If Gore is elected, you can look forward to, among other things, ever tighter restrictions on 'hate speech', which is to say, unpopular speech. Kiss "YRO" goodbye.
"Once the system software has determined that the media contains an Xbox game, it loads the game developer bitmaps, publisher bitmaps, license bitmaps, and so on. These will be stored in a predetermined location on the DVD, will contain no executable code, and will be identified with a predefined schema. The system software will display these bitmaps sequentially, after the boot graphic and sound have appeared, while the game itself is being streamed from the DVD into RAM. As the game image is streamed into memory, the system software checks the signatures of each section of the image on the fly."
IMNSHO, you wouldn't want this crap to be hardwired into the OS. Not everyone has the same credits scheme (i.e. what if a game gets kicked through 3 developers before publication? It happens.) Furthermore, it says "bitmaps"..... strictly read, this means no movies/animations, which seems horribly backwards.
Looks like MS can't stop feature creep in a lil' ol' game console OS any more than it could in Win98+.
No, buffer overflows are the fault of the _programmer_. The language makes no real difference. All code in all languages ultimately gets crunched to machine language, so they are, a few twists and turns aside, equivalent. Granted, each makes different tradeoffs in terms of what it does the best from a dev-time/performance point of view, but if you can overflow-safe it in one langauge, you can overflow-safe it in another.
It's reasonable (but wrong) to say that the hardware is to blame, and it's reasonable to say that the programmer is to blame, but to blame the langauge is off-base. That's like claiming the directions your uncle gave you were wrong because he gave them to you in English. "If only he'd used German, I would have got on I-280N instead of I-101S!"
The truth is that no one knows what anyone really wants in a game. No one knows what any subdivision of people want in a game. No one knows what boys/men want in a game, and, relevantly here, no one knows what girls/women want in a game. Least of all the professionally marginallized such as the staff of womengamers.com.
If you don't believe this, ask yourself why no game development house or designer has been able to produce an unbroken string of commercial successes (and, like they taught us in school, if people aren't willing to pay for something, then they don't really want it) and only a handful have been able to produce more than one or two really successful products.
So, speculating about what sorts of games will be successful in general, let alone what sorts of games will appeal to a subgroup (i.e. women) is a tremendous waste of time. And asking women what kind of games they want to play, coupled with a notion that responses should be acted upon, is a sure way to lose lots of money.
For instance: How many responses of 'Barbie stuff' do you think you'll get in answer to the preceeding question? But that franchise was, to the consternation of feminists everywhere, a big seller. Us game developers hated that fact as well....developing crap like that is not a good way to spend your life.
No one wants to sell games to girls/women more than the developers. The failure to do so is more likely to indicate the shocking fact that girls/women don't much like games than anything else. That's not to say there aren't a lot of exceptions, but the tacit assumption of womengamers.com that all the industry needs is a little advice from women is simply too stupid to be believed. If that were the case, whither Purple Moon and all the other attempts to make non-franchised girl/women friendly games?
I hope this has HRTs when it posts - it didn't in the preview window!/begin(find fault with others) Okay, Ray-Tracing. This is a pretty mediocre idea, because the number of intersections you have to do per scene is terrifically high. I had a debate with a friend a while back about whether or not the perspective-correction and linear-interpretation h/w currently on cards added up to the ability to build really fast line-tri intersection hardware. The short answer was "no, not really". The most obvious problem is the much higher number of divides that RT requires to figure out what rays are hitting (or missing) which tris. Furthermore, RT really sucks for many kinds of scenes; that's why they invented Radiosity. As for CSG: Please. CSG is a great building technique, but a $h!tty run-time representation. Figuring out whether something intersected something else when there's an object ANDed into a NOTed region of another object is not a good way to spend your day. The reason everyone uses polygons is that they have a lot of nice mathematical properties, are useful for VSD and physics as well as rendering, do LoD well, can be represented in a modest amount of memory (all things considered) and are very well supported in h/w. To supplant them, a new technique would have to be insanely great, and the only technique I know of that holds such promise is Image-Space Rendering, which lets you walk through real-world photographs; but slowly, and with a lot of warping. Not mature yet, if it ever will be. The Psi technique is total crap, unless you really need cheapo terrain for your flight sim. Compare it to Black&White. Psi is slow, ugly, and difficult to control. And, inaccurate at human-sized scale, where it really matters in game design. I don't know who was drooling over this, but they must be pretty dumb./end(find fault with others)
Only if you like having Sony have go/no go authority over your product.
My view is that PSX2 is way, way, way overhyped; It'll be behind the fastest PCs almost the minute it arrives on our shores, and will be woefully behind by the end of its lifespan.
The idea that the "Emotion Engine" is so powerful borders on the superstitious; Sony uses the same silicon as everyone else, or will, just the minute they have that fab up and running. Which should be any day now.
But as far as thinking this is a step forward for the way we use computers: Remember that you can't ship anything on PSX w/o Sony's blessing. (This is true for Nintendo as well - it's the way the console business works.)
Finally, there's the madonna/whore complex problem; i.e. people just don't _want_ to use a game console for computing....q.v. WebTV.
Let me first say that I am a gun owner, so I take this kind of thing personally. You digitaldaniel) obviously don't like or own guns, so it's easy for you to demand restrictions on them; it doesn't cost you anything.
It costs me a great deal. I like guns for their elegance of design; depriving me of my right to own them deprives me of aesthetic satisfaction, in addition to sport and self-defense. That said, I'd request that you learn about guns before you advocate their ADDITIONAL regulation. Cases in point:
It is not easy to purchase a gun. I have to wait 15 days to pick up a gun I've paid for, in addition to submitting to a background check. Now much harder do you want to make this? Should I have to petition some authority for permission to engage in lawful commerce?
You want "tougher laws." Do you have specific easures in mind? Do you have arguments why any measures you propose would actually reduce the availability of guns to people unimpressed with legal niceties?
You want restrictions on the "kinds of guns" out there. What specific features do you want to restrict? Guns are simple, but technical, things. The pump shotgun these kids had was probably their most effective weapon. (It should have been, if they knew what they were about.) I'd guess you would rather ban the Tec-9, an infamous piece of crap, than the pump. That bothers me.
We do not "have" to do anything. We certainly do not have to pursue measures which would deprive me of things I enjoy while providing no real benefit to anyone, however happy they might make you.
Personally, I would rather live in a society where I could carry a handgun. If the risk of mass murder is great enough to justify depriving millions of Americans of their rights to own guns, then it must be severe enough to justify my desire to provide for my own protection, no?
Xman
P.S. I apologize for the often acrimonious tone of this post, but, as I said, this issue threatens me personally and directly. It's as if someone proposed government Internet censorship; it's abhorent, pointless, and ominous.
Slashdot Mirror
As an added bonus, the paper seems to ignore the fact that it's damn hard to get the right-of-ways required to build Transmission, let alone this goofy-just-for-wind transmission system.
Consider this story about wind farm projects in trouble because the Transmission they need is only justifiable if a base-load Coal plant is built nearby.
Everyone wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.
It's worth pointing out that, most likely, this issue never would have been raised if the course required the program to compile under g++ on the schools mainframes/UNIX boxes.
Personally, all my courses required that I use g++ to test my programs; I hated g++ because to use it I either had to trudge down to a terminal room or use a 2400bps dialup connection. So I built everything in Borland C++ on my DOS box, then 'ported' it over to g++; that took about 10 minutes.
There's nothing wrong with the school's policies, it's just that the tool they're pushing uses an 'uncool' technology, i.e. Windows, so it gets bagged on.
This is outlandish! It's been statistically proven that in many of these cases the defendant has been wrongfully accused. So Bush merrily murders innocent people. I have no desire to see this ignorant murderer as the president of our country.
Fvck. No such thing has been 'proven'. No one has shown than innocent people are being executed. It has been shown that innocent people were _scheduled_ to be executed, and it has been shown, over and over and over again, that innocent people were _incarcerated_, and deprived of their property and liberty without cause.
Personally, I'm a little sick of the whining about the death penalty. Yes, it's barbaric and cruel and we should be taken aback that the state will actually put people to death. But the far more serious issue is that the state will, with increasingly less provocation, take your property and liberty with the threat of force. This, I might add, goes far beyond the normal confiscatory tax rates (40% effective rates? No way in hell.) and overly intrusive laws we face every day.
GWB isn't a great candidate, but the first rule of holes is to stop digging. AlGore is a catastrophe waiting to happen; The fool thinks it's necessary and approriate to ban the internal combustion engine! If Gore is elected, you can look forward to, among other things, ever tighter restrictions on 'hate speech', which is to say, unpopular speech. Kiss "YRO" goodbye.
Xman
"Once the system software has determined that the media contains an Xbox game, it loads the game developer bitmaps, publisher bitmaps, license bitmaps, and so on. These will be stored in a predetermined location on the DVD, will contain no executable code, and will be identified with a predefined schema. The system software will display these bitmaps sequentially, after the boot graphic and sound have appeared, while the game itself is being streamed from the DVD into RAM. As the game image is streamed into memory, the system software checks the signatures of each section of the image on the fly."
IMNSHO, you wouldn't want this crap to be hardwired into the OS. Not everyone has the same credits scheme (i.e. what if a game gets kicked through 3 developers before publication? It happens.) Furthermore, it says "bitmaps"..... strictly read, this means no movies/animations, which seems horribly backwards.
Looks like MS can't stop feature creep in a lil' ol' game console OS any more than it could in Win98+.
Xman
No, buffer overflows are the fault of the _programmer_. The language makes no real difference. All code in all languages ultimately gets crunched to machine language, so they are, a few twists and turns aside, equivalent. Granted, each makes different tradeoffs in terms of what it does the best from a dev-time/performance point of view, but if you can overflow-safe it in one langauge, you can overflow-safe it in another.
It's reasonable (but wrong) to say that the hardware is to blame, and it's reasonable to say that the programmer is to blame, but to blame the langauge is off-base. That's like claiming the directions your uncle gave you were wrong because he gave them to you in English. "If only he'd used German, I would have got on I-280N instead of I-101S!"
If you don't believe this, ask yourself why no game development house or designer has been able to produce an unbroken string of commercial successes (and, like they taught us in school, if people aren't willing to pay for something, then they don't really want it) and only a handful have been able to produce more than one or two really successful products.
So, speculating about what sorts of games will be successful in general, let alone what sorts of games will appeal to a subgroup (i.e. women) is a tremendous waste of time. And asking women what kind of games they want to play, coupled with a notion that responses should be acted upon, is a sure way to lose lots of money.
For instance: How many responses of 'Barbie stuff' do you think you'll get in answer to the preceeding question? But that franchise was, to the consternation of feminists everywhere, a big seller. Us game developers hated that fact as well....developing crap like that is not a good way to spend your life.
No one wants to sell games to girls/women more than the developers. The failure to do so is more likely to indicate the shocking fact that girls/women don't much like games than anything else. That's not to say there aren't a lot of exceptions, but the tacit assumption of womengamers.com that all the industry needs is a little advice from women is simply too stupid to be believed. If that were the case, whither Purple Moon and all the other attempts to make non-franchised girl/women friendly games?
I hope this has HRTs when it posts - it didn't in the preview window! /begin(find fault with others) Okay, Ray-Tracing. This is a pretty mediocre idea, because the number of intersections you have to do per scene is terrifically high. I had a debate with a friend a while back about whether or not the perspective-correction and linear-interpretation h/w currently on cards added up to the ability to build really fast line-tri intersection hardware. The short answer was "no, not really". The most obvious problem is the much higher number of divides that RT requires to figure out what rays are hitting (or missing) which tris. Furthermore, RT really sucks for many kinds of scenes; that's why they invented Radiosity. As for CSG: Please. CSG is a great building technique, but a $h!tty run-time representation. Figuring out whether something intersected something else when there's an object ANDed into a NOTed region of another object is not a good way to spend your day. The reason everyone uses polygons is that they have a lot of nice mathematical properties, are useful for VSD and physics as well as rendering, do LoD well, can be represented in a modest amount of memory (all things considered) and are very well supported in h/w. To supplant them, a new technique would have to be insanely great, and the only technique I know of that holds such promise is Image-Space Rendering, which lets you walk through real-world photographs; but slowly, and with a lot of warping. Not mature yet, if it ever will be. The Psi technique is total crap, unless you really need cheapo terrain for your flight sim. Compare it to Black&White. Psi is slow, ugly, and difficult to control. And, inaccurate at human-sized scale, where it really matters in game design. I don't know who was drooling over this, but they must be pretty dumb. /end(find fault with others)
"Freedom?"
Only if you like having Sony have go/no go authority over your product.
My view is that PSX2 is way, way, way overhyped; It'll be behind the fastest PCs almost the minute it arrives on our shores, and will be woefully behind by the end of its lifespan.
The idea that the "Emotion Engine" is so powerful borders on the superstitious; Sony uses the same silicon as everyone else, or will, just the minute they have that fab up and running. Which should be any day now.
But as far as thinking this is a step forward for the way we use computers: Remember that you can't ship anything on PSX w/o Sony's blessing. (This is true for Nintendo as well - it's the way the console business works.)
Finally, there's the madonna/whore complex problem; i.e. people just don't _want_ to use a game console
for computing....q.v. WebTV.
Xman
Let me first say that I am a gun owner, so I take this kind of thing personally. You digitaldaniel) obviously don't like or own guns, so it's easy for you to demand restrictions on them; it doesn't cost you anything.
It costs me a great deal. I like guns for their elegance of design; depriving me of my right to own them deprives me of aesthetic satisfaction, in addition to sport and self-defense. That said, I'd request that you learn about guns before you advocate their ADDITIONAL regulation. Cases in point:
It is not easy to purchase a gun. I have to wait 15 days to pick up a gun I've paid for, in addition to submitting to a background check. Now much harder do you want to make this? Should I have to petition some authority for permission to engage in lawful commerce?
You want "tougher laws." Do you have specific easures in mind? Do you have arguments why any measures you propose would actually reduce the availability of guns to people unimpressed with legal niceties?
You want restrictions on the "kinds of guns" out there. What specific features do you want to restrict? Guns are simple, but technical, things. The pump shotgun these kids had was probably their most effective weapon. (It should have been, if they knew what they were about.) I'd guess you would rather ban the Tec-9, an infamous piece of crap, than the pump. That bothers me.
We do not "have" to do anything. We certainly do not have to pursue measures which would deprive me of things I enjoy while providing no real benefit to anyone, however happy they might make you.
Personally, I would rather live in a society where I could carry a handgun. If the risk of mass murder is great enough to justify depriving millions of Americans of their rights to own guns, then it must be severe enough to justify my
desire to provide for my own protection, no?
Xman
P.S. I apologize for the often acrimonious tone of this post, but, as I said, this issue threatens me personally and directly. It's as if someone proposed government Internet censorship; it's abhorent, pointless, and ominous.