I'm sure this has been pointed out already, but it's Farmville's fault. No Flash app should ever hang the browser for 10 seconds, or even 1 second. BlakeyFox's comment about "while(true)" is right on the money. Any operation that's going to take longer than a few frames should be broken up, and any (deservingly) self-respecting Flash programmer knows how to implement a loader.
The problem is you people all have LIVING ROOMS to begin with. The only way I have of knowing what you all are watching and then talking about at work is if I download it somewhere. If you all were to stop watching TV, I'd be lost. And found. A wallet from a careless man, is what I would be as. Too bad!
After seeing people from that background follow the same advice given them by more advanced programmers, I can say from experience that this is usually bad advice.
Unless the person's real interest is in learning about culling algorithms with the eventual goal of improving on them or inventing new ones, please don't tell them to write a 3D engine from scratch and then sometime later start looking up things on how to implement their own culling algorithms from scratch. For them it would be a waste of time, unless they are more interested in 3D game engine architecture than in getting their game design idea up and running, which is clearly not the case. The fact that John Carmack says all this stuff is fun and easy might not be the best argument...
Like someone else said, it's not surprising that there aren't a lot of good choices of cheap/free 3D game engines that are well-designed and easy to use. It's a huge design and engineering task to create something like that. Try Blender, Torque, Unity(if you have a Mac), Panda3D, Alice, Yake, maybe do a tutorial in each to see if any of them will do what you need. If none of those work out, maybe try a 3D rendering engine like Ogre or Irrlicht together with other libraries for physics or whatever - this will require being comfortable in C++ though.
I will say that it's probably going to be worth it to take a course / get a book on C++, whatever you do - it will allow you access to a wider range of tools, and also the ability to figure out how something works (if it's well-designed) by reading the source code when the documentation isn't cutting it. Also, if what you're mainly doing is using a single high-level game engine with a C++ API, a lot of what you'll be doing with C++ will be much like scripting anyway.
+1 to this - it doesn't have the nice functionality that WebCalendar or some of the others have, but I settled on it as soon as I saw how bad the usability on all those other ones was and just how many hoops the users are expected to jump through to use all those extra features. I was very surprised to see how badly designed they ALL are. Even Plans has some glaring flaws, like the inability to differentiate events from shared calendars by color, but overall it's definitely the least-bad of the bunch. Google's calendar would be fine if it was available as a free perl script anyone could put on their site, but obviously that would serve no purpose for them. Still, that puts Plans ahead of Google Calendar by far.
It does surprise me... I mean, 'input type crash' ?? or is the input type significant or just for emphasis? It seems like what with 1-6, 8, and 9 of 9, plus all those eager-beaver interns and million typing monkeys at Microsoft this would have been caught earlier, unless the 'crash' thing was put there on purpose to intentionally cause a segfault or something so people could see what happens with all the activex controls etc. when IE does crash, and somebody forgot to remove it. Or, is Slashdot in permanent April Fool mode now? I hope so.
This must have been asked before but I've never seen it... would it be possible for Slashdot to cache all the links in an article before publishing them, and publish the cached links too? I guess there might be copyright issues or something, but it seems like Slashdot should try to take some responsibility for the fact that in some cases it's bringing a huge audience to websites that were never designed for it and don't benefit much from it. I'm sure many sites love the publicity, but others may just want business as usual.
Also, you should take into account that the index and pinky fingers are more independent than the two middle fingers, so for example having the two middle fingers on separate rows causes more strain and should cost more. I think it has to do with the two middle fingers sharing the same tendon sheath or something like that.
i wonder if the kiosks are really xbox devkits or other such slapped-together PCs running some kind of emulation.
I like the PS2 HD setup better - the assumption is you're running it as a regular console with no HD so it will always work that way, but if you want to go against nature and run it as a computer with all the crashing you're sure to have, that's up to you. keep your computer out of my console?
I used to take a lot of lenticular 3D pictures for fun, and I always thought that with digital LCD screens it would be easy to do no-glasses 3D video with that technology, if you could get the right density of lenticular film to match the screen's dot-pitch. I'm surprised it's taken them this long, but maybe it's because LCD screens are still way too expensive.
Bragging about not needing a head-tracker is silly, it's a limitation, not an advantage (unless their device does some kind of funky position-sensing on your head, which I doubt). But it should be functionally equivalent to a monitor with shutter-glasses so I suppose you could add a head tracker if you wanted to. You'd have to keep your head vertical for it to work though.
This technique is also limited to pretty low resolutions, which is fine for consumers like me but I wonder if they can make it cheap enough. I think the holographic-film technique has more promise for higher-end applications.
Finally a funny quote from the Philips 3D page:
"Multiview 3D-LCD as developed by Philips is truly autostereoscopic because it requires no artificial devices,"
Isn't that firmware change you describe more or less equivalent to what everyone wanted to do with DVD on their computers and can't now?
Where to find the content? Same place I find mp3s: on official, legal entertainment-industry websites of companies that might someday, in some fantasy-future that will never happen, have some sort of clue.
Maybe a better use of my vague and uninformed logic (which I like to think helps me to better see the big picture, step back from an issue, until I fall down backwards into some kind of mushy swampy area full of gooey green sludge and everyone has a good laugh and all the townspeople line up to taunt and utterly humiliate me) would be to bring up the idea that consumer computing devices like the Playstation 2 are going to be competing with or replacing things like VCRs, DVD players, etc. A device like that can play any format in the world if you put the codec software on the DVD with it. What if I become a big so-called "indie"-movie producer and don't WANT to put my film out on a regular DVD? Is the MPAA going to do something about those formats, too?
Finally, you ask, "And what's the point of buying a player which in 'ethically pure' mode plays nothing?"
...Isn't that an awfully precise description of a Linux machine?
In the meantime, is there an alternative -- ie some other format that would allow playback in Linux of MPEG2 (or some other codec of comparable quality, M-JPEG2000 maybe?) content stored on DVDs, whether or not it could play on existing standalone players? It seems like even if a new format had a small customer base, depending on what it was there might be little (technical) challenge for companies to update their hardware/firmware to support it. I suppose the MPAA would try to prevent them from doing this but then again we're already seeing DVD players that support many different formats including mp3 audio.
I realize that it's a long shot to expect any motion picture companies to ever use some weird format that could explicitly facilitate copying, but who knows -- it would make people think they were cool, and if it existed there would be a lot of people who would refuse to buy anything else.
It would be nice to see something like this happen -- kind of like a rematch of Beta vs. VHS where this time Beta could actually win (so much for 'to-the-point and intelligently written').
I'm a dummy when it comes to marketing, but... It could have been SO easy! If as soon as mp3 became popular, the music industry had gotten all excited about it and provided free mp3 services right away, they could have had the opportunity to lay the groundwork for a broadcast system that would have perfectly accurate listener ratings, AND offer a direct path to the "buy" button. A perfect situation for making advertising money and paying appropriate royalties, with perfectly documentable statistics to base it all on. Plus, in doing all of this, they could have made the whole process of making and storing mp3s seem tedious by comparison to just listening to them anytime and anywhere you want without having to download or convert anything! And now everybody is so used to doing it that it probably is too late. But the other point is that, in this scenario, it wouldn't matter anyway if a few people wanted to keep mp3s around on their hard drives, as long as most of us were doing it the "easy" way and making them lots of cash. I tape the radio sometimes and I don't have FBI agents at my door, at least not for that...
This is exactly it. Under the guise of fighting piracy, they are trying to secure control now of future digital video channels. They know better than any of us exactly how much money piracy actually costs (or makes) them, so there is no way that this is really the issue.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure this has been pointed out already, but it's Farmville's fault. No Flash app should ever hang the browser for 10 seconds, or even 1 second. BlakeyFox's comment about "while(true)" is right on the money. Any operation that's going to take longer than a few frames should be broken up, and any (deservingly) self-respecting Flash programmer knows how to implement a loader.
The problem is you people all have LIVING ROOMS to begin with. The only way I have of knowing what you all are watching and then talking about at work is if I download it somewhere. If you all were to stop watching TV, I'd be lost. And found. A wallet from a careless man, is what I would be as. Too bad!
After seeing people from that background follow the same advice given them by more advanced programmers, I can say from experience that this is usually bad advice.
Unless the person's real interest is in learning about culling algorithms with the eventual goal of improving on them or inventing new ones, please don't tell them to write a 3D engine from scratch and then sometime later start looking up things on how to implement their own culling algorithms from scratch. For them it would be a waste of time, unless they are more interested in 3D game engine architecture than in getting their game design idea up and running, which is clearly not the case. The fact that John Carmack says all this stuff is fun and easy might not be the best argument...
Like someone else said, it's not surprising that there aren't a lot of good choices of cheap/free 3D game engines that are well-designed and easy to use. It's a huge design and engineering task to create something like that. Try Blender, Torque, Unity(if you have a Mac), Panda3D, Alice, Yake, maybe do a tutorial in each to see if any of them will do what you need. If none of those work out, maybe try a 3D rendering engine like Ogre or Irrlicht together with other libraries for physics or whatever - this will require being comfortable in C++ though.
I will say that it's probably going to be worth it to take a course / get a book on C++, whatever you do - it will allow you access to a wider range of tools, and also the ability to figure out how something works (if it's well-designed) by reading the source code when the documentation isn't cutting it. Also, if what you're mainly doing is using a single high-level game engine with a C++ API, a lot of what you'll be doing with C++ will be much like scripting anyway.
+1 to this - it doesn't have the nice functionality that WebCalendar or some of the others have, but I settled on it as soon as I saw how bad the usability on all those other ones was and just how many hoops the users are expected to jump through to use all those extra features. I was very surprised to see how badly designed they ALL are. Even Plans has some glaring flaws, like the inability to differentiate events from shared calendars by color, but overall it's definitely the least-bad of the bunch. Google's calendar would be fine if it was available as a free perl script anyone could put on their site, but obviously that would serve no purpose for them. Still, that puts Plans ahead of Google Calendar by far.
You're suffering from a common misconception... Robots play pianos all the time.
It does surprise me... I mean, 'input type crash' ?? or is the input type significant or just for emphasis? It seems like what with 1-6, 8, and 9 of 9, plus all those eager-beaver interns and million typing monkeys at Microsoft this would have been caught earlier, unless the 'crash' thing was put there on purpose to intentionally cause a segfault or something so people could see what happens with all the activex controls etc. when IE does crash, and somebody forgot to remove it. Or, is Slashdot in permanent April Fool mode now? I hope so.
This must have been asked before but I've never seen it... would it be possible for Slashdot to cache all the links in an article before publishing them, and publish the cached links too? I guess there might be copyright issues or something, but it seems like Slashdot should try to take some responsibility for the fact that in some cases it's bringing a huge audience to websites that were never designed for it and don't benefit much from it. I'm sure many sites love the publicity, but others may just want business as usual.
Also, you should take into account that the index and pinky fingers are more independent than the two middle fingers, so for example having the two middle fingers on separate rows causes more strain and should cost more. I think it has to do with the two middle fingers sharing the same tendon sheath or something like that.
i wonder if the kiosks are really xbox devkits or other such slapped-together PCs running some kind of emulation.
I like the PS2 HD setup better - the assumption is you're running it as a regular console with no HD so it will always work that way, but if you want to go against nature and run it as a computer with all the crashing you're sure to have, that's up to you. keep your computer out of my console?
I used to take a lot of lenticular 3D pictures for fun, and I always thought that with digital LCD screens it would be easy to do no-glasses 3D video with that technology, if you could get the right density of lenticular film to match the screen's dot-pitch. I'm surprised it's taken them this long, but maybe it's because LCD screens are still way too expensive.
Bragging about not needing a head-tracker is silly, it's a limitation, not an advantage (unless their device does some kind of funky position-sensing on your head, which I doubt). But it should be functionally equivalent to a monitor with shutter-glasses so I suppose you could add a head tracker if you wanted to. You'd have to keep your head vertical for it to work though.
This technique is also limited to pretty low resolutions, which is fine for consumers like me but I wonder if they can make it cheap enough. I think the holographic-film technique has more promise for higher-end applications.
Finally a funny quote from the Philips 3D page:
"Multiview 3D-LCD as developed by Philips is truly
autostereoscopic because it requires no artificial devices,"
Isn't that firmware change you describe more or less equivalent to what everyone wanted to do with DVD on their computers and can't now?
...Isn't that an awfully precise description of a Linux machine?
Where to find the content? Same place I find mp3s: on official, legal entertainment-industry websites of companies that might someday, in some fantasy-future that will never happen, have some sort of clue.
Maybe a better use of my vague and uninformed logic (which I like to think helps me to better see the big picture, step back from an issue, until I fall down backwards into some kind of mushy swampy area full of gooey green sludge and everyone has a good laugh and all the townspeople line up to taunt and utterly humiliate me) would be to bring up the idea that consumer computing devices like the Playstation 2 are going to be competing with or replacing things like VCRs, DVD players, etc. A device like that can play any format in the world if you put the codec software on the DVD with it. What if I become a big so-called "indie"-movie producer and don't WANT to put my film out on a regular DVD? Is the MPAA going to do something about those formats, too?
Finally, you ask, "And what's the point of buying a player which in 'ethically pure' mode plays nothing?"
In the meantime, is there an alternative -- ie some other format that would allow playback in Linux of MPEG2 (or some other codec of comparable quality, M-JPEG2000 maybe?) content stored on DVDs, whether or not it could play on existing standalone players? It seems like even if a new format had a small customer base, depending on what it was there might be little (technical) challenge for companies to update their hardware/firmware to support it. I suppose the MPAA would try to prevent them from doing this but then again we're already seeing DVD players that support many different formats including mp3 audio.
I realize that it's a long shot to expect any motion picture companies to ever use some weird format that could explicitly facilitate copying, but who knows -- it would make people think they were cool, and if it existed there would be a lot of people who would refuse to buy anything else.
It would be nice to see something like this happen -- kind of like a rematch of Beta vs. VHS where this time Beta could actually win (so much for 'to-the-point and intelligently written').
I'm a dummy when it comes to marketing, but... It could have been SO easy! If as soon as mp3 became popular, the music industry had gotten all excited about it and provided free mp3 services right away, they could have had the opportunity to lay the groundwork for a broadcast system that would have perfectly accurate listener ratings, AND offer a direct path to the "buy" button. A perfect situation for making advertising money and paying appropriate royalties, with perfectly documentable statistics to base it all on. Plus, in doing all of this, they could have made the whole process of making and storing mp3s seem tedious by comparison to just listening to them anytime and anywhere you want without having to download or convert anything! And now everybody is so used to doing it that it probably is too late. But the other point is that, in this scenario, it wouldn't matter anyway if a few people wanted to keep mp3s around on their hard drives, as long as most of us were doing it the "easy" way and making them lots of cash. I tape the radio sometimes and I don't have FBI agents at my door, at least not for that...
This is exactly it. Under the guise of fighting piracy, they are trying to secure control now of future digital video channels. They know better than any of us exactly how much money piracy actually costs (or makes) them, so there is no way that this is really the issue.