Decompiling never results in the original source code.
I think only a few of the responders have a firm grip on the distinction between decompilers and disassemblers.
The true distinction is not on the input to these programs, but instead on their output. You can feed a good decompiler some white noise and still get some high level source code.
Someone has to write the game engine, if it is shit on certain platforms because it wasn't ported well then the games using it will suffer obviously.
You realize that a very large majority of high profile games use one of four different game engines? and that all have been extensively developed for all platforms?
Doom3/Quake4 Engine (Now called 'ID Tech 4')
Gamebryo
Unreal
CryEngine
These all work very well cross-platform, not counting the Wii.
The API arguement between consoles and Windows-based PC's rings hollow, because game developers use game engines.. a further API abstraction beyond specific architectural issues.. the PC's graphics hardware has all the capabilities of the consoles, plus a whole hell of a lot more.
And will you grant me my observation that the Linux video card driver ecosystem is complete and utter shit, that the only decent 3D API (OpenGL) happens to be one the market ran away from just about everywhere else, that the audio API ecosystem is worse than the graphics API ecosystem, and that Linus has this nice habit of fucking over existing binaries by changing the ABI.. an attempt to *force* open source?
Yeah.. Linux will never be a major gaming platform until these things are resolved.
The Rock/Paper/Scissors is working fine in Eve Online.
At its simplest example is that of the balance in the strategy game Homeworld, which had space craft of different sizes:
Fighters, Corvettes, Frigates, and Capital Ships.
Corvettes beat Fighters
Frigates beat Corvettes
Capital Ships beat Frigates
Fighters beat Capital Ships
other matchups were more or less even (Fighters vs Frigates and Corvettes vs Capital Ships)
But keep in mind that games like Eve Online do not have "arranged pvp".. Few people will jump into an arranged PvP if they know that their paper will be facing a pair of scissors.
That leads to requiring PvP as part of normal game play.
In Diablo II in hardcore PvP games, I wouldn't take the short end of the stick because I had the choice not to.
That's ridiculous. Rights are self-evident things that we all have.
Rights are defined in things like the constitution (called the Bill of Rights), which BTW does not mention a right to privacy, but does limit the *governments* ability to investigate you.
Perhaps you should look into it, instead of reaching for dogma like "self-evident."
When you take a job that is constantly in the public spotlight (like "president") then yes, you're going to have a lot of your personal details in the public eye. You also have a trained security force working 24/7 to keep you safe. That's known when people take the job. When police officers go home, they are at the same level of security and protection as average citizens.
A police officer is a trained in security, and has the authority to do things to protect himself.. an authority which goes well beyond that of an average citizen.
Still further, the supreme court has ruled that a public employer is responsible for the protection of a public employees personal information. If his home address is in the public record, then it is either considered public information, or the police force itself is at fault and liable for releasing private information. Thats according to the supreme court, the grand interpreter of law.
After I spent an hour just rocking back and forth on the floor waiting for the pain to subside
A whole hour? WOW!
I rest my case on how medicine has pussified you. You are a pussy.
While I believe you, that it would have eventually subsided, I didn't wait to find out. No sane person would have
An extraction costs between $100 and $200. You didnt do the calculation, did you? 300 million people, 32 teeth per person, 70 year average lifespan.. cost $100..$200 per extraction.. even in the very worst case where *everyone* has *all* of their teeth removed by the time they die, its cheaper than yearly dental cleanings.
I never said you should have done nothing. I just pointed out that your statements about rotting teeth were absolute fabrucations (as in: Falsehood, Complete Bullshit, Lies, Not True.)
The fact remains that preventative dental cleaning is *more expensive* than the alternative. Period. You cannot argue it because the numbers do not lie. Even in the absolute worst case, its cheaper to extract once than to perpetualy clean.
Yet this is the kind of healthcare Obama wants to provide.. LUXURY CARE.. thats right, dental cleanings are a LUXURY.
It is these luxuries which private insurance currently covers. We do not need national luxury healthcare. I expect you to pay for your own luxuries, or go without. If you cant afford a $100..$200 extraction then you are already on medicare/medicaid.
That's called "competition". If FOO is worth creating, implementing, and using because it gives a significant advantage over the status quo, then it will be an advantage for the company that implemented it, and a loss for others. You can market card A with FOO when programmers begin implementing it in games as not being available on card B.
The reality is that programmers *DO NOT* implement it in games if its not available on card B.
Thats the error in your logic. A game company cannot afford to give the finger to half of the market. This leads right back to the hardware company being fucked for spending money on arbitrary innovation.
What you are proposing, and what is happening, is that graphics become a bland sameness across all cards where everything looks horribly generic and nothing exciting or revolutionary can occur.
Maybe you don't know this, but graphics cards render what the programmers tell them to render. They look exactly like what the programers expect. If the programmer wanted it to look different, it would look different. You seem to think that the programmer shouldn't be in control of how things look, that the video card makers should have control over how things look. Thats stupid, and you are stupid.
There have been enough "Gems" over the past decade that I cannot not agree with you.
Three examples of great sequels are Civilization IV, Oblivion, and Half-Life 2. I admit that there are a lot of crappy sequels out there, but there has always been loads of craptacular games dating all the way back to the Atari 2600. Thats just the way it is.
For great new innovative games you check out World of Goo, and Defense Grid.
If platformers are your thing, you gotta check out Trine.
The only time Opera loses the stuff in edit boxes is when you forcefully reload the page. You can click on links and rewind back, or you can start out rewinding to see what was on the previous page and then go forward again and the stuff in edit boxes is still there.
This has been standard Opera behavior for as long as I can remember (at least 10 years.) Other browsers require plugins to mimick the extent of behavior (and those arent even very good at it)
What you are suggesting is that ATI and NVIDIA compete on features in such a way that their hardware isnt interchangable. Further, that software makers themselves would need to pick one or the other. That consumers would then need to be mindfull of who the software targets, and so on and on and on...
The fact was that when things are done as you suggest, it sucks bigtime for the companies making the hardware. When you have multiple large competitors in the market, neither one can afford to drift from the status quo. Suppose NVIDIA spends countless millions developing proprietary extension FOO, increasing the cost of their hardware as a result.. but then ATI simply refuses to also implement the extension. NVIDIA, in this scenario, is fucked. They just spent millions on a useless extension that nobody will ever care about and priced themselves out of the market as a result.
The fact is that if an extension is worthwhile to implement, then its also worthwhile to standardize up front.
Lower power consumption leads to longer battery life.
I'm not sure that you understand how things work.
Lower power consumption leads to smaller cheaper batteries with the same capacity, a fact which manufacturers will surely take advantage of to increase profits. As long as competition exists which uses less efficient CPU's, thats the way its going to be.
What percentage of those people are already getting them done?
..of those that have no health insurance, about 0%.
But a rotten tooth left to its own devices goes something more like this:
mild pain / soreness -> intermittent excruciating pain ->
constant excruciating unmanagable pain with nausea and dizzyness
I guess you havent let a tooth rot out. If you had, you would know full well that you are full of shit.
Pain -> More Pain -> No More Pain
Thats right. It ends in no pain every single time. The nerve dies. No nerve, no pain.
The human body deals with most problems on its own. You want, instead, to pay expensive fees and collect taxes in spite of thios obvious fact. You have become soft and pussified by healthcare. You obviously worry constantly about every little ailment.
You are wrong on so many counts thats its clearly no longer productive to converse with your willfully blind ignorance. If you want minor-bullshit healthcare, how about you get off your ass and earn it for yourself like everyone else.
You argue that I am already paying. The way I see it, if I am already paying then the services were rendered. If there is someone paying for the services AND they are being rendered, then there is no problem and we do not need national healthcare.
Don't you think thats a quite reasonable stand to take?
The problem with this stand is that its based on the false premise that I am already paying. I am not already paying. Sure, I already pay for some things.. but I am not currently paying for the trillions of dollars this will cost. I am not covering your obsessive dental cleanings. I am not covering your viagra. I am not covering your anti-depressants. I am not covering your back adjustments. I am not covering your group sessions.
I suppose that those obsessive dental cleanings are what you call preventative?
300 million people * $200/year for dental cleanings is $60 billion dollars/year. Thats just ONE SINGLE "preventative" THING.
Do you honestly think that dental cleanings saves at least $60 billion per year in future costs? As a point of reference, a tooth extraction costs between $100 and $200 and when they fall out on their own, its free.
I'm sorry but the people telling me that prevenative medicine saves money are the same people who profit from preventative medicine. Show me an independent study for each and every prevenative thing that you propose, and if the study does conclude that that specific thing saves the country money then we can talk about nationalizing that specific thing.
Yes. You would absolutely effectively be paying for both. I'm not arguing or pretending otherwise. But your ignoring the fact that you are paying for both now.
Making things up much? There is a difference between taxes covering people with emergencies, and taxes covering people that would otherwise not run to the doctor.
You are claiming that I am already paying for both, but thats not the case. Your entire arguement relies on me buying disingenuous claims about the current situation that are patently and demonstrably false.
medicaid plus whatever plus everyone else showing up in the emergency room
Medicaid is a fine example of a failed system. Thanks for pointing out how much Obamacare resembles Medicaid.
And you can keep it. The government health reform doesn't take away your option to obtain coverage with an insurance company of your choosing.
They shall tax me for the governments contractless version. Sure, I can keep my private insurance.. but will be paying twice.
Did you think that you could get away with pretending that government healthcare will be optional?
That is probably the most amusing part of this debate, really. *IF* you can afford and have alternative private health insurance and you have no intention of using the government option, what do you care how well they run it. Its not going to affect you.
When you said "not going to effect you", did you actualy mean "going to hurt you financialy with increased tax burdens" ??
So really, the ONLY objection someone like you should have regarding the health reform bill is regarding what it will cost you in taxes.
Wrong. This is mandatory coverage and mandatory payment. Only a chump sucker fresh out of an acedemy might think that this wont adversely effect the private insurance industry. Its going to fucking destroy it.
Not to mention that the government will likely be able to bring the price of pills down, as well (given medication prices in other countries as an example).
Oh, I love how you added "will" and "likely" together. They *can* do that now (no "will", no "likely"), without any nationalized medicine. Its called regulation, and they already heavily regulate this industry.
For example simple things like adding a firewall didn't occur to them until years after Linux distributors had made it apart of most if not all installs.
I'm waiting for Comodo, ZoneAlarm, etc, to file complaints against Microsoft in the E.U. They shouldnt be allowed to leverage their monopoly position in the firewall market. We need a firewall ballot.
Slashdot Mirror
Decompiling never results in the original source code.
I think only a few of the responders have a firm grip on the distinction between decompilers and disassemblers.
The true distinction is not on the input to these programs, but instead on their output. You can feed a good decompiler some white noise and still get some high level source code.
I was thinking the same sort of thing.
For their next attention-getting trick, they are going to open source Hello World.
And three of those runs like shit on Wii.
I said that. Do you always take the last thing someone says, and then repeat it yourself like it was your own idea?
Also, you missed a few other major commercial game engines. (Crystal, SAGE/W3D, 3DGS, RAGE, Source, and Unity)
This is some new definition of the word 'major' that I wasnt previously aware of.
Someone has to write the game engine, if it is shit on certain platforms because it wasn't ported well then the games using it will suffer obviously.
You realize that a very large majority of high profile games use one of four different game engines? and that all have been extensively developed for all platforms?
Doom3/Quake4 Engine (Now called 'ID Tech 4')
Gamebryo
Unreal
CryEngine
These all work very well cross-platform, not counting the Wii.
The API arguement between consoles and Windows-based PC's rings hollow, because game developers use game engines.. a further API abstraction beyond specific architectural issues.. the PC's graphics hardware has all the capabilities of the consoles, plus a whole hell of a lot more.
And will you grant me my observation that the Linux video card driver ecosystem is complete and utter shit, that the only decent 3D API (OpenGL) happens to be one the market ran away from just about everywhere else, that the audio API ecosystem is worse than the graphics API ecosystem, and that Linus has this nice habit of fucking over existing binaries by changing the ABI.. an attempt to *force* open source?
Yeah.. Linux will never be a major gaming platform until these things are resolved.
9000?!
There's no way that can be right!
The Rock/Paper/Scissors is working fine in Eve Online.
.. Few people will jump into an arranged PvP if they know that their paper will be facing a pair of scissors.
At its simplest example is that of the balance in the strategy game Homeworld, which had space craft of different sizes:
Fighters, Corvettes, Frigates, and Capital Ships.
Corvettes beat Fighters
Frigates beat Corvettes
Capital Ships beat Frigates
Fighters beat Capital Ships
other matchups were more or less even (Fighters vs Frigates and Corvettes vs Capital Ships)
But keep in mind that games like Eve Online do not have "arranged pvp"
That leads to requiring PvP as part of normal game play.
In Diablo II in hardcore PvP games, I wouldn't take the short end of the stick because I had the choice not to.
You are correct. You should instead name computers based on your optimism for its role in the company, such as:
WasteOfMoney
SureToBeHacked
WorthlessAsset
ClearlyUnderpowered
SpiderSolitair
For "special" machines, you can name them based on your prediction on what part will fail first:
BadPowerSupply
WorstMotherboardEver
NoisyFan
That's ridiculous. Rights are self-evident things that we all have.
Rights are defined in things like the constitution (called the Bill of Rights), which BTW does not mention a right to privacy, but does limit the *governments* ability to investigate you.
Perhaps you should look into it, instead of reaching for dogma like "self-evident."
When you take a job that is constantly in the public spotlight (like "president") then yes, you're going to have a lot of your personal details in the public eye. You also have a trained security force working 24/7 to keep you safe. That's known when people take the job. When police officers go home, they are at the same level of security and protection as average citizens.
A police officer is a trained in security, and has the authority to do things to protect himself.. an authority which goes well beyond that of an average citizen.
Still further, the supreme court has ruled that a public employer is responsible for the protection of a public employees personal information. If his home address is in the public record, then it is either considered public information, or the police force itself is at fault and liable for releasing private information. Thats according to the supreme court, the grand interpreter of law.
Personal lives, outside of the job, are not.
We are talking about information in the public record. Note that the word "public", not "private."
Your injection of the term "personal" is unfounded. The public record is not a personal record.
If you are going to have a right to privacy, it has to apply to everyone.
Wrong. It doesnt apply to everyone. It does not apply to public servants, nor does it apply to people who put themselves in the public eye.
If you don't like it, don't serve the public and don't become a matter of public interest.
After I spent an hour just rocking back and forth on the floor waiting for the pain to subside
A whole hour? WOW!
I rest my case on how medicine has pussified you. You are a pussy.
While I believe you, that it would have eventually subsided, I didn't wait to find out. No sane person would have
An extraction costs between $100 and $200. You didnt do the calculation, did you? 300 million people, 32 teeth per person, 70 year average lifespan.. cost $100..$200 per extraction.. even in the very worst case where *everyone* has *all* of their teeth removed by the time they die, its cheaper than yearly dental cleanings.
.. thats right, dental cleanings are a LUXURY.
I never said you should have done nothing. I just pointed out that your statements about rotting teeth were absolute fabrucations (as in: Falsehood, Complete Bullshit, Lies, Not True.)
The fact remains that preventative dental cleaning is *more expensive* than the alternative. Period. You cannot argue it because the numbers do not lie. Even in the absolute worst case, its cheaper to extract once than to perpetualy clean.
Yet this is the kind of healthcare Obama wants to provide.. LUXURY CARE
It is these luxuries which private insurance currently covers. We do not need national luxury healthcare. I expect you to pay for your own luxuries, or go without. If you cant afford a $100..$200 extraction then you are already on medicare/medicaid.
Use your brain.
She posted the location of that officer's home with the full knowledge that it could endanger his life.
Ok, so am I breaking the law when I tell you that a Obama lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, District of Columbia?
Could this be "endangering his life?"
I am sure that you do agree, that me posting this here, does not endanger his life. You agree because it is public information.
Now, those police officers home addresses are *also* public information.
Both Obama and the officers are public servants. The only substantial difference between them is the role they play.
That's called "competition". If FOO is worth creating, implementing, and using because it gives a significant advantage over the status quo, then it will be an advantage for the company that implemented it, and a loss for others. You can market card A with FOO when programmers begin implementing it in games as not being available on card B.
The reality is that programmers *DO NOT* implement it in games if its not available on card B.
Thats the error in your logic. A game company cannot afford to give the finger to half of the market. This leads right back to the hardware company being fucked for spending money on arbitrary innovation.
What you are proposing, and what is happening, is that graphics become a bland sameness across all cards where everything looks horribly generic and nothing exciting or revolutionary can occur.
Maybe you don't know this, but graphics cards render what the programmers tell them to render. They look exactly like what the programers expect. If the programmer wanted it to look different, it would look different. You seem to think that the programmer shouldn't be in control of how things look, that the video card makers should have control over how things look. Thats stupid, and you are stupid.
There have been enough "Gems" over the past decade that I cannot not agree with you.
Three examples of great sequels are Civilization IV, Oblivion, and Half-Life 2. I admit that there are a lot of crappy sequels out there, but there has always been loads of craptacular games dating all the way back to the Atari 2600. Thats just the way it is.
For great new innovative games you check out World of Goo, and Defense Grid.
If platformers are your thing, you gotta check out Trine.
Opera does this automatically for you.
The only time Opera loses the stuff in edit boxes is when you forcefully reload the page. You can click on links and rewind back, or you can start out rewinding to see what was on the previous page and then go forward again and the stuff in edit boxes is still there.
This has been standard Opera behavior for as long as I can remember (at least 10 years.) Other browsers require plugins to mimick the extent of behavior (and those arent even very good at it)
You have no idea how things work.
What you are suggesting is that ATI and NVIDIA compete on features in such a way that their hardware isnt interchangable. Further, that software makers themselves would need to pick one or the other. That consumers would then need to be mindfull of who the software targets, and so on and on and on...
The fact was that when things are done as you suggest, it sucks bigtime for the companies making the hardware. When you have multiple large competitors in the market, neither one can afford to drift from the status quo. Suppose NVIDIA spends countless millions developing proprietary extension FOO, increasing the cost of their hardware as a result.. but then ATI simply refuses to also implement the extension. NVIDIA, in this scenario, is fucked. They just spent millions on a useless extension that nobody will ever care about and priced themselves out of the market as a result.
The fact is that if an extension is worthwhile to implement, then its also worthwhile to standardize up front.
Lower power consumption leads to longer battery life.
I'm not sure that you understand how things work.
Lower power consumption leads to smaller cheaper batteries with the same capacity, a fact which manufacturers will surely take advantage of to increase profits. As long as competition exists which uses less efficient CPU's, thats the way its going to be.
What percentage of those people are already getting them done?
But a rotten tooth left to its own devices goes something more like this: mild pain / soreness -> intermittent excruciating pain -> constant excruciating unmanagable pain with nausea and dizzyness
I guess you havent let a tooth rot out. If you had, you would know full well that you are full of shit.
Pain -> More Pain -> No More Pain
Thats right. It ends in no pain every single time. The nerve dies. No nerve, no pain.
The human body deals with most problems on its own. You want, instead, to pay expensive fees and collect taxes in spite of thios obvious fact. You have become soft and pussified by healthcare. You obviously worry constantly about every little ailment.
You are wrong on so many counts thats its clearly no longer productive to converse with your willfully blind ignorance. If you want minor-bullshit healthcare, how about you get off your ass and earn it for yourself like everyone else.
You argue that I am already paying. The way I see it, if I am already paying then the services were rendered. If there is someone paying for the services AND they are being rendered, then there is no problem and we do not need national healthcare.
Don't you think thats a quite reasonable stand to take?
The problem with this stand is that its based on the false premise that I am already paying. I am not already paying. Sure, I already pay for some things.. but I am not currently paying for the trillions of dollars this will cost. I am not covering your obsessive dental cleanings. I am not covering your viagra. I am not covering your anti-depressants. I am not covering your back adjustments. I am not covering your group sessions.
I suppose that those obsessive dental cleanings are what you call preventative?
300 million people * $200/year for dental cleanings is $60 billion dollars/year. Thats just ONE SINGLE "preventative" THING.
Do you honestly think that dental cleanings saves at least $60 billion per year in future costs? As a point of reference, a tooth extraction costs between $100 and $200 and when they fall out on their own, its free.
I'm sorry but the people telling me that prevenative medicine saves money are the same people who profit from preventative medicine. Show me an independent study for each and every prevenative thing that you propose, and if the study does conclude that that specific thing saves the country money then we can talk about nationalizing that specific thing.
Yes. You would absolutely effectively be paying for both. I'm not arguing or pretending otherwise. But your ignoring the fact that you are paying for both now.
Making things up much? There is a difference between taxes covering people with emergencies, and taxes covering people that would otherwise not run to the doctor.
You are claiming that I am already paying for both, but thats not the case. Your entire arguement relies on me buying disingenuous claims about the current situation that are patently and demonstrably false.
medicaid plus whatever plus everyone else showing up in the emergency room
Medicaid is a fine example of a failed system. Thanks for pointing out how much Obamacare resembles Medicaid.
And you can keep it. The government health reform doesn't take away your option to obtain coverage with an insurance company of your choosing.
They shall tax me for the governments contractless version. Sure, I can keep my private insurance.. but will be paying twice.
Did you think that you could get away with pretending that government healthcare will be optional?
That is probably the most amusing part of this debate, really. *IF* you can afford and have alternative private health insurance and you have no intention of using the government option, what do you care how well they run it. Its not going to affect you.
When you said "not going to effect you", did you actualy mean "going to hurt you financialy with increased tax burdens" ??
So really, the ONLY objection someone like you should have regarding the health reform bill is regarding what it will cost you in taxes.
Wrong. This is mandatory coverage and mandatory payment. Only a chump sucker fresh out of an acedemy might think that this wont adversely effect the private insurance industry. Its going to fucking destroy it.
Not to mention that the government will likely be able to bring the price of pills down, as well (given medication prices in other countries as an example).
Oh, I love how you added "will" and "likely" together. They *can* do that now (no "will", no "likely"), without any nationalized medicine. Its called regulation, and they already heavily regulate this industry.
For example simple things like adding a firewall didn't occur to them until years after Linux distributors had made it apart of most if not all installs.
I'm waiting for Comodo, ZoneAlarm, etc, to file complaints against Microsoft in the E.U. They shouldnt be allowed to leverage their monopoly position in the firewall market. We need a firewall ballot.