Let them make their own games. They have have the big name voices, let them produce the games and outsource the programming, art, design and everything else that goes into it.
Any "game company" that enters into an agreement like this is on exactly the same footing as a movie company that pays $20million for a bankable star and $2million for the movie.
This case will be held up against liberals for years to come as an example where liberals think that the government can decide things better than you can.
Rocket Jumping has to be considered legitimate by now. Everyone making a game knows about it, no excuses.
If you don't want rocket jumping, make the splash damage higher for the person shooting it. Make them take more damage in landing. Implement ragdoll physics on the guy getting blasted and move their point of view around accordingly (let's see you shoot accurately from up in the air when you're head is whipped around like that).
I haven't played Halo2, but I'm wondering just what kinds of grenades these are that blow people upward but don't blow people up. As for snipers shooting people while flying through the air...you can keep any game that allows snipers to shoot smoothly while running/jumping/flying. After CounterStrike, I refuse to play any game where people shoot me through a scope while bunnyhopping.
I don't give a damn if it's pointed out to me by someone that thinks "guilty" can only have one meaning and that everyone should have to use their meaning because they learned a bit of the law.
Saying MS is guilty in this case doesn't make anyone ignorant, it makes them not-a-lawyer as every damn legal professional is so fond of pointing out every time someone says something about the law.
The word guilty conveys a certain meaning and everyone understands that meaning. Everyone, including the people that understand it perfectly well and still insist it's wrong.
If I look like an idiot because I understand what people mean then so be it. If you're tripped up because a non-lawyer writing to a non-legal forum uses legal term in a non-legal way, then you are what you are.
They could have also said, "MS got fucked" and you could have made the same argument they weren't technically fucked but that they were found liable.
Yes, but he does understand the word guilty perfectly well. You see, slashdot isn't a court of law, it is a message board where we aren't bound by legal definitions but are free to use the language in other ways.
Microsoft was guilty of this violation.
I'm guilty of taking the last cookies.
Just because you know one definition for one context doesn't make the rest of us bound to your specific world.
I really liked 2001 when Bowman gets locked outside the ship. The silence of an exterior shot is broken up by the heavy breathing of him inside the suit. It really gets across a feeling of controlled panic.
If my ex-girlfriend put pictures on the web and used chat rooms to get women to show up at my workplace demanding sex I think $3million would be about right. I have no idea how I'd come up with the $3million though.
Quit work, buy a license from franz.com and make your own stuff. I did.
The macro code is very complicated because it does complicated things. The good part is that it keeps those complications all in one little place.
There is a small smug, employed community that can't appeal to the masses. If I proposed using LISP to a client they would want to know how we'd be able to find 20 LISP programmers. Companies feel safer hiring mediocre programmers and hiring lots of them. (as an aside, I think this is one of the appealing things about offshoring)
LISP rewards good programmers with things that Java and its ilk think are beyond your capability. It is for people that are creating something new and wonderful. Java rewards the mediocre with rote application for decent pay.
In spite of programming Java and Perl consistently for the last 8 years, I'm considerably more productive in LISP, even as a relative newcomer. LISP bends to my will and does what I command. The patterns crowd apparently needs to be walked through a path outlining what they need to get done. I can sit back, look at the problem and solve it.
My code reuse shot through the roof when I switched to LISP, too. Java seems to have lots of comforting lines of code that get repeated over and over. It always struck me as wrong that I have to write those same lines *every damned time*. Some of these Java problems are being addressed by code generation. All I have to say about that is code generation is a cheap substitute for runtime expansion.
Sadly, Java pays better but that is irrelevant to those of us rediscovering the joys of programming.
Depending on talent as a programmer, you may want to spend a day or 6 months messing around with this. If you're like me, you spend 2 years writing helpful functions in emacs for producing code in other languages before ever seeing a real lisp implmentation.
Just remember that the way you first saw things isn't necessarily the best way. But that's something programmers should try to remember in general.
Ok, first imagine what it would take to add something to a language like Java. Let's take try/catch/finally as an example. You might have some java code that works like:
try {
methodCall(); } catch (Exception e){//TODO: we'll clean this up later } finally {
otherMethodCall(); }
Now let's say I wanted something like try/catch only specifically geared toward database transactions. I want it to look like this:
tran {//db operations go here } rollback {// code handling rollback } success {// code specific to a successful transaction }
You just can't do that. Sure you could get similar functionality through the use of try/catch and a bunch of helper functions, but you can't integrate it straight into the language itself. You can only add to the language's library. In LISP, there is no real difference.
I can implement a "tran" macro so I can do things like:
This particular instance is my favorite example. It may not seem like a big deal, but I have hundreds of these things that aren't a big deal in my code. If I think something can be done a better way in the language I can add it.
The tran macro would be expanded during runtime to something that looks more like:
(begin-tran) (withdraw...) (deposit...) (end- tran) or (rollback) depending on what happened.
A more complicated version of this macro could take into account nested versions of itself.
Someone will say that try/catch can be made to accomplish what I want. Yes it can. Those same people won't admit however that Perl can be bent to do what Java does.
There is a lot of writing about how great it is to have macro expansion at runtime. That was always meaningless to me until I latched on to that "tran" example above. All of a sudden I realized I wasn't bound to passing values (or references to values, essentially the same thing) to a function. Now I could pass whole chunks of code around. This struck me as such a right thing to do. I'd always been bugged that all the Java consultants around me were memorizing patterns. If something is a pattern, shouldn't the computer be doing it? LISP told me that yes, the computer should be doing it, not that I should be writing pages of patterned code.
It took me a year of talking to one of the guys I worked with where I explained macros to him. Six months after I left that place we went to lunch and he told me he finally saw the light as he was cutting and pasting some in one of his J2EE programs.
If you've ever been looking at something in the language (not the library) and wished that it worked just like that, only different, that is one case where you use a macro.
Re:This is not a troll, but a query...
on
Practical Common Lisp
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I got my start using lisp in emacs. I highly recommend this method. There is a lot of code readily available directly in the editor both for inspection and use. There are tons of functions that directly relate to a text editor.
This will get you familiar with some of the concepts of lists, atoms, quoting and order of evaluation. There really isn't much to a language like LISP or Scheme. The basic building blocks are few, it's largely a matter of where the line between language and library is drawn.
The functional languages are different because a language construct can be made indistinguishable from what the user writes himself.
If you are a python programmer, there is nothing LISP can do that python can't.
Full blown macros are still beyond the reach of python I believe. I use these all the time and any language without LISP macros feels like I'm back in high school doing endless exercises over things I already know. Other languages talk about patterns and abstraction but their idea of this pales next to what can be done in LISP.
I'd elaborate but people attached to their own languages won't believe.
Leasing something means that you can count the lease price against revenues during taxes. You only have one number to deal with.
Buying means depreciating the cost of the item usually over a number of years. So that computer you bought and used for just one year may stay on the books for a few more years. Also, it's still an asset that must be accounted for. If you liquidate the computer later and you've depreciated it, you have to claim any money you received as income.
Leasing is far more expensive than purchasing. There may be some support reasons as to how a leased computer gets replaced, but that is more a matter of support than lease vs buy. Leasing also tends to come in just a few packages so computers are more interchangeable.
Generally for the managers needing a computer, it's easier to get a lease approved than a purchase because money is put off until next year. Also, it's easier for a manager to get a lease approved than to work out accounting details of software.
There are certain threshholds that dictate whether you can write something off entirely or have to depreciate it. Once you cross those, most companies will lease.
It's much the same reasons that a company will hire a contractor for 20 years instead of an employee.
Slashdot Mirror
$150Million and nothing to show for it?!
I'd killed the project for half that and delivered it dead on arrival early too.
No, "A Boy and His Dog" was more like:
See Jane.
See Jane run.
Run Jane, run.
If you step back just a bit you can get the earth into view also.
Let them make their own games. They have have the big name voices, let them produce the games and outsource the programming, art, design and everything else that goes into it.
Any "game company" that enters into an agreement like this is on exactly the same footing as a movie company that pays $20million for a bankable star and $2million for the movie.
It's how many colors it comes in?
If I'm to agree that because I'm male I'm guilty of keeping women back, I want you to agree that because they're female they can't hack it in CS.
You've left out puzzle games which brings that ratio from 4 to 1 to much closer to parity.
This case will be held up against liberals for years to come as an example where liberals think that the government can decide things better than you can.
Rocket Jumping has to be considered legitimate by now. Everyone making a game knows about it, no excuses.
If you don't want rocket jumping, make the splash damage higher for the person shooting it. Make them take more damage in landing. Implement ragdoll physics on the guy getting blasted and move their point of view around accordingly (let's see you shoot accurately from up in the air when you're head is whipped around like that).
I haven't played Halo2, but I'm wondering just what kinds of grenades these are that blow people upward but don't blow people up. As for snipers shooting people while flying through the air...you can keep any game that allows snipers to shoot smoothly while running/jumping/flying. After CounterStrike, I refuse to play any game where people shoot me through a scope while bunnyhopping.
He only sees one side of it. He calls the invincibility a "blessing" but fails to see that getting banned would equally be viewed as a "curse".
The game allows the MUD's implementors to ban him but he seems to think that just because the code allows them to ban him doesn't mean they are right.
The answer here really isn't more rules defining what cheating is, it's less rules. Everyone, especiallly the cheaters, know what cheating is.
Call it Flamebait.
a stock purchase or an options purchase if you want to bet on the time frame as well.
I don't give a damn if it's pointed out to me by someone that thinks "guilty" can only have one meaning and that everyone should have to use their meaning because they learned a bit of the law.
Saying MS is guilty in this case doesn't make anyone ignorant, it makes them not-a-lawyer as every damn legal professional is so fond of pointing out every time someone says something about the law.
The word guilty conveys a certain meaning and everyone understands that meaning. Everyone, including the people that understand it perfectly well and still insist it's wrong.
If I look like an idiot because I understand what people mean then so be it. If you're tripped up because a non-lawyer writing to a non-legal forum uses legal term in a non-legal way, then you are what you are.
They could have also said, "MS got fucked" and you could have made the same argument they weren't technically fucked but that they were found liable.
Yes, but he does understand the word guilty perfectly well. You see, slashdot isn't a court of law, it is a message board where we aren't bound by legal definitions but are free to use the language in other ways.
Microsoft was guilty of this violation.
I'm guilty of taking the last cookies.
Just because you know one definition for one context doesn't make the rest of us bound to your specific world.
I really liked 2001 when Bowman gets locked outside the ship. The silence of an exterior shot is broken up by the heavy breathing of him inside the suit. It really gets across a feeling of controlled panic.
If my ex-girlfriend put pictures on the web and used chat rooms to get women to show up at my workplace demanding sex I think $3million would be about right. I have no idea how I'd come up with the $3million though.
Quit work, buy a license from franz.com and make your own stuff. I did.
The macro code is very complicated because it does complicated things. The good part is that it keeps those complications all in one little place.
There is a small smug, employed community that can't appeal to the masses. If I proposed using LISP to a client they would want to know how we'd be able to find 20 LISP programmers. Companies feel safer hiring mediocre programmers and hiring lots of them. (as an aside, I think this is one of the appealing things about offshoring)
LISP rewards good programmers with things that Java and its ilk think are beyond your capability. It is for people that are creating something new and wonderful. Java rewards the mediocre with rote application for decent pay.
There is no high road to LISP.
In spite of programming Java and Perl consistently for the last 8 years, I'm considerably more productive in LISP, even as a relative newcomer. LISP bends to my will and does what I command. The patterns crowd apparently needs to be walked through a path outlining what they need to get done. I can sit back, look at the problem and solve it.
My code reuse shot through the roof when I switched to LISP, too. Java seems to have lots of comforting lines of code that get repeated over and over. It always struck me as wrong that I have to write those same lines *every damned time*. Some of these Java problems are being addressed by code generation. All I have to say about that is code generation is a cheap substitute for runtime expansion.
Sadly, Java pays better but that is irrelevant to those of us rediscovering the joys of programming.
A person new to the language doesn't need to start programming in emacslisp, but it wouldn't hurt for them to start learning lisp using emacs.
Just running through a lot of the basics, I haven't found a better place than the emacs buffer to try things out:
(setq v '(1 2 3))
=> (1 2 3)
(car v)
=> 1
(cdr v)
=> (2 3)
(cadr v)
=> 2
(cons 0 v)
=> (0 1 2 3)
(car v)
=> 1
Depending on talent as a programmer, you may want to spend a day or 6 months messing around with this. If you're like me, you spend 2 years writing helpful functions in emacs for producing code in other languages before ever seeing a real lisp implmentation.
Just remember that the way you first saw things isn't necessarily the best way. But that's something programmers should try to remember in general.
Ok, first imagine what it would take to add something to a language like Java. Let's take try/catch/finally as an example. You might have some java code that works like:
//TODO: we'll clean this up later
//db operations go here // code handling rollback // code specific to a successful transaction
:rollback #'rollback))
- tran) or (rollback) depending on what happened.
try {
methodCall();
} catch (Exception e){
} finally {
otherMethodCall();
}
Now let's say I wanted something like try/catch only specifically geared toward database transactions. I want it to look like this:
tran {
} rollback {
} success {
}
You just can't do that. Sure you could get similar functionality through the use of try/catch and a bunch of helper functions, but you can't integrate it straight into the language itself. You can only add to the language's library. In LISP, there is no real difference.
I can implement a "tran" macro so I can do things like:
(tran (withdraw 25.00 from-account)
(deposit 25.00 to-account)
This particular instance is my favorite example. It may not seem like a big deal, but I have hundreds of these things that aren't a big deal in my code. If I think something can be done a better way in the language I can add it.
The tran macro would be expanded during runtime to something that looks more like:
(begin-tran)
(withdraw...)
(deposit...)
(end
A more complicated version of this macro could take into account nested versions of itself.
Someone will say that try/catch can be made to accomplish what I want. Yes it can. Those same people won't admit however that Perl can be bent to do what Java does.
There is a lot of writing about how great it is to have macro expansion at runtime. That was always meaningless to me until I latched on to that "tran" example above. All of a sudden I realized I wasn't bound to passing values (or references to values, essentially the same thing) to a function. Now I could pass whole chunks of code around. This struck me as such a right thing to do. I'd always been bugged that all the Java consultants around me were memorizing patterns. If something is a pattern, shouldn't the computer be doing it? LISP told me that yes, the computer should be doing it, not that I should be writing pages of patterned code.
It took me a year of talking to one of the guys I worked with where I explained macros to him. Six months after I left that place we went to lunch and he told me he finally saw the light as he was cutting and pasting some in one of his J2EE programs.
If you've ever been looking at something in the language (not the library) and wished that it worked just like that, only different, that is one case where you use a macro.
I got my start using lisp in emacs. I highly recommend this method. There is a lot of code readily available directly in the editor both for inspection and use. There are tons of functions that directly relate to a text editor.
This will get you familiar with some of the concepts of lists, atoms, quoting and order of evaluation. There really isn't much to a language like LISP or Scheme. The basic building blocks are few, it's largely a matter of where the line between language and library is drawn.
The functional languages are different because a language construct can be made indistinguishable from what the user writes himself.
If you are a python programmer, there is nothing LISP can do that python can't.
Full blown macros are still beyond the reach of python I believe. I use these all the time and any language without LISP macros feels like I'm back in high school doing endless exercises over things I already know. Other languages talk about patterns and abstraction but their idea of this pales next to what can be done in LISP.
I'd elaborate but people attached to their own languages won't believe.
Leasing something means that you can count the lease price against revenues during taxes. You only have one number to deal with.
Buying means depreciating the cost of the item usually over a number of years. So that computer you bought and used for just one year may stay on the books for a few more years. Also, it's still an asset that must be accounted for. If you liquidate the computer later and you've depreciated it, you have to claim any money you received as income.
Leasing is far more expensive than purchasing. There may be some support reasons as to how a leased computer gets replaced, but that is more a matter of support than lease vs buy. Leasing also tends to come in just a few packages so computers are more interchangeable.
Generally for the managers needing a computer, it's easier to get a lease approved than a purchase because money is put off until next year. Also, it's easier for a manager to get a lease approved than to work out accounting details of software.
There are certain threshholds that dictate whether you can write something off entirely or have to depreciate it. Once you cross those, most companies will lease.
It's much the same reasons that a company will hire a contractor for 20 years instead of an employee.
My preference to make things funnier is to have Bob Dylan reading it.
It wasn't a well run UN war like Korea, Vietnam or Yugoslavia.