It's the "healthy dose of innovation" that gets you. From a modern standpoint, suppose you said "we're going to write a space-combat game where you can be a pirate or trader or anything you like". You might reckon it's revolutionary, cos there's not much around today that does it. Then someone says "Didn't Elite do that 20 years ago?" and you end up looking like a dick, bcos your game doesn't measure up playability-wise against something god-knows-how-many years old. The guys in charge of Galaxies could have learnt a thing or two from that.
And if you're going to innovate, you have to know what's out there already and what's bad about them all (ie. what you can improve on). Level design on a FPS, for instance, is something that's progressed *so* much since Wolfenstein 3D and Doom 1. If you don't recognise that, your game won't cut it.
For games that got missed, oh boy, how many do we want?!
Arcade:- Pinball (especially tables with odd features like Addams Family) Star Wars Space Harrier (my all-time fave arcade game) Afterburner (and the R360 version thereof) Pitfighter Operation Thunderbolt
Multiple platforms:- Soccer manager games Repton Elite
Commodore 64:- Last Ninja Uridium Paradroid
Amiga:- Starglider 2
I'm sure there's more, but they're not coming to mind right now.
Why flamebait? Look at the two groups he gives you to belong in. Either you are a "pro" who doesn't prefer one platform to another, or you are a "priest" who irrationally favours one platform. (I'm assuming we can all say "well I'm not a zealot" so we can rule out that group, right?;-)
So that disregards vast classes of people who prefer one platform to another on solid technical grounds. Maybe they can't get the hardware or the hardware drivers on an alternative platform, maybe the software doesn't exist on an alternative platform, maybe the software does exist but isn't as feature-rich as that available on another platform, maybe one platform costs more to buy and/or run than another platform, etc. But this writer says that it is flatly impossible to make a rational decision that one platform is better for your purposes than another. And leading on from that, if you *have* made such a decision, then you yourself are not being rational.
This is *not* an attack on the open source philosophy. It's quite simply an ad hominem attack on anyone involved in open source or using open source software.
> > The problem with that conclusion is that Cisco didn't build the house. > I didn't build my house either, but I wouldn't be happy if RMS & crew tried to strongarm me into burning it down.
But for damn sure you own it. If someone came to your sports club, gave it a coat of paint, then sold it and kept the money himself, wouldn't you be a little annoyed?
OK, that's a physical property which doesn't translate well. Suppose I took the Harry Potter series, changed the names and sold it as my own work. How justified would I be in doing that?
> Where's your proof?
The simple fact that they didn't take one of the other options. They're not likely to choose the least cost-effective method, are they?
Well, a major "desktop" class of devices for Linux are PDA:s and similar handheld stuff
Maybe eventually. ATM though, Linux PDAs are pretty damn scarce. Incidentally, handhelds are also light on memory, so a more "cut-down" version of X which doesn't include all the network-transparency would be ideal for a handheld - saves them having to load the whole of XFree86 unnecessarily!
About your later point about getting a desktop to do the whole 3D thing for you - that isn't ever going to happen, I don't think. Desktop representation of 3D is very approximate. It assumes light coming from top-left, for instance - for damn sure I don't want the top-left corner of my screen to show up brighter than the rest, even though that's what a proper light-source would do, so a 3D lighting model is not going to be suitable for a desktop.
Anyway, this is only one choice of X implementation. If there's one version that's fastest on a desktop, and another that's fastest on a handheld, what's your beef? After all, we don't slate Mozilla simply bcos it requires X support and won't run on old text-only terminals!:-)
Cars are designed based on concept drawings by an artist. There may be some limitations imposed by air resistance and the like, but within those limitations you can get an amazing variety of shapes. And if you look at sci-fi films and the like, there's a vast amount of attention paid to the cars/transport in all of them, bcos the style of the car embodies the style of that era. In Art Deco for instance, the car and ship are the two great iconic symbols of the style; and you can definitely track the progress of contemporary fashion through production cars of various decades this century.
These days, most cars run well, handle well, have decent fuel economy, and stuff like that. The only way to differentiate them is therefore how they look. Ford's whole recent range of Focus/Puma/Cougar is an object lesson in this. To my mind then, cars are absolutely a form of art. Some are bad art, admittedly, but art nonetheless.
So how does that affect games? Well, for starters games are "of their time". They're technologically limited in the same way as cars, but the concepts behind them are also somewhat of their time in the same way as books and films. The "killing aliens" theme will probably be one of the most distinctive features of 20th-century entertainment, for instance. A particularly well-designed game is also pleasing to the eye, and more importantly forces the player to consider concepts they wouldn't normally think about. GTA is a good example of considering those concepts - given that you're in a place with no moral limits on what you do and no serious come-back, what do you do? When game characters become more "human" and your choices become more like the choices you face IRL, it starts getting ethically challenging. And challenges to modern ethics and thinking is traditionally where art comes in.
I used to use Crimson, and it was pretty good, for a month or two. Then it decided it was going to crash every time I opened it, and reinstalling and redownloading the install didn't fix the problem. I gave up. I have MSVC anyway, so there wasn't a big incentive to pursue it further.
Sure, but the point of the original article was that writers don't want to become experts, they just want to sit down and type. On that basis, Vi sucks badly, and Emacs isn't a whole lot better.
Trouble is, Richard E Grant is just too obvious a choice. I reckon they'd do better taking someone who's good at off-the-wall characters but isn't as well known. I favour Peter Capaldi, who's a very good actor with exactly the right kind of heritage.
As for a side-kick, I wouldn't mind the return of Sophie Aldred (hey, I'm the Sylvester McCoy generation, I know which Dr. Who girl I prefer!:-) Better to have some kick-ass girl with a baseball bat than some token bit of skirt in a fur bikini.
Thing is, X-Files has redefined what you can do for "cheap". Doctor Who needs to take a leaf out of that book, rather than following the example of Invasion Earth which was the last big BBC sci-fi programme. Invasion Earth tried hard, but in the end they just couldn't rise above bad acting and lousy FX.
But if they can hire the folks who did 28 Days Later, we're in for a serious treat...
You're laying out your pages by putting manual carriage returns after the last paragraph?!?!? Tell me, do you also full-justify your text by putting in extra spaces between words? Or do you type with your nose to make life harder?
As far as a learning curve goes, Vi has a near vertical one, and Emacs isn't much better. Keyboard commands are great for advanced users, but the whole point is that a writer shouldn't have to become an advanced user before they can write something. For a beginner, keyboard commands are a nightmare, and the source of all those complaints of "the computer ate my work" by hitting the wrong one.
My main complaint with Word is that it comes with all the bells and whistles turned on by default, and it's so damn difficult to turn them off. Putting the controls somewhere obvious and giving the user a prompt after installation to ask what options they want to use would make this much better. With the bloat turned off though, it works pretty damn well.
If you want a simpler editor, just use WordPad which comes bundled with Windows. It's graphical, you can select a font and paragraph scheme which appeals to your eye while you're editting, and there's no annoying bloat-features. Job done.
Hey, weren't those minidiscs a great success? Can you still buy music on them, even? The only ppl I know who use MD, they burn copies of CDs onto MD for use in their pocket-size player.
In other words, even if the industry does come up with some new medium, it needs to give some *massive* benefit to get ppl to upgrade. Vinyl to CD was one such. Tape to CD-R was another. VHS to DVD was a third. But you really need to show a *huge* improvement over the original, and also sell at the same price as the original, to get mass adoption. For those reason, HDTV isn't likely to take off soon - not enough of an improvement for too much money. Maybe when we all have 30" LCD TVs, but not with the current tube technology.
I'm actually working on that project at Ford, and it runs pretty damn well. It's no big secret that Ford are a bit behind the curve on hybrids, given that Toyota have had the Prius in production for several years now and are on version 3 (I think) of the powertrain and controls, whilst Ford still won't have theirs on sale for over a year. But it really is a nifty bit of kit nonetheless. I can own up to some worried moments during the program;-) but the car that hits the street should be in pretty good shape, and being a hybrid SUV it should have a decent market niche.
I'm not a fan of SUVs, so I still think it's unnecessarily large and polluting. I really would like to see legislators breaking the US fascination with ludicrously oversized cars, but I can accept that it's never going to happen. At least a hybrid version is cleaner than the 15mpg SUV that soccer-mom drives on the school run.
I'm really looking forward to Ford using this powertrain in something smaller like a Cougar - don't know if that'll happen though. Trouble with smaller cars is that the battery pack weight (and size) starts to become more significant, although being able to use a smaller engine will counterbalance that to some extent. And of course it'll then be competing against the Prius and Civic which will both have a helluva headstart. See how it goes, I guess.
Grab.
Re:I have always wondered...
on
Blind Lake
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Why? If your program needs some security measures, that's the time to learn them. Not when you're still just getting the hang of printing "Hello world" to a file.
Who told you that the abstraction was going to solve every problem for you? Did you think the C++ Pixies were going to arrive and write your code for you?;-)
What C++ (and other OO languages) give you is an abstraction which may make your solution easier to design/code. If this abstraction doesn't match the needs of your problem, use a different one. C++ and other OO languages are perfect for GUI-type stuff, but they suck big-time for writing embedded software. The best hammer is a damn poor screwdriver, and all that.
If you insist on only using C for GUI applications, good luck - I did some substantial GUI work in X (X11R5) using C about 10 years ago, and trying to use C to emulate object-orientation is one of the abiding horrors in my memory. Equally we had a uni project to design a real-time position controller using C++, and I'm scarred by those memories too.
What sets the computing industry back is some twonk assuming that a particular methodology (structured design, OO, etc) is a magic bullet. That sucks, bcos it isn't. What also sets the industry back is some other twonk acting Luddite and saying "the old way is the One True Way" (*cough*).
Don't think that was the Mars series, it was in a short story collection (whose name eludes me) by KSR. The city is called Terminator (which probably dates the story to pre-Arnie;-)
Grab.
Re:Looks like an interesting book.
on
Hacking the XBox
·
· Score: 1
Excuse me? If a company is charging $50 for one card and $250 for another card, and the only difference is one blob of solder, that information for damn sure should be widely known! Consumers are being ripped off. So what if the company ripping off consumers loses money on it? That's the principle behind capitalism; you're allowed to spot a rip-off and refuse to buy products when they're priced extortionately.
And from the DMCA perspective, you reckon a company should be able to sue its customers if it chooses a bad business model and loses money?! I hardly know where to start with that one...
Utterly irrelevant. You've already said that this is a fixed speed camera which photographs you. These take photos of the road at two intervals of time. Examining the photos then makes it clear which vehicle was speeding. Multipath effects on the radar detecting the speed aren't going to affect the photos, now are they?
Slashdot Mirror
It's the "healthy dose of innovation" that gets you. From a modern standpoint, suppose you said "we're going to write a space-combat game where you can be a pirate or trader or anything you like". You might reckon it's revolutionary, cos there's not much around today that does it. Then someone says "Didn't Elite do that 20 years ago?" and you end up looking like a dick, bcos your game doesn't measure up playability-wise against something god-knows-how-many years old. The guys in charge of Galaxies could have learnt a thing or two from that.
And if you're going to innovate, you have to know what's out there already and what's bad about them all (ie. what you can improve on). Level design on a FPS, for instance, is something that's progressed *so* much since Wolfenstein 3D and Doom 1. If you don't recognise that, your game won't cut it.
Grab.
For games that got missed, oh boy, how many do we want?!
Arcade:-
Pinball (especially tables with odd features like Addams Family)
Star Wars
Space Harrier (my all-time fave arcade game)
Afterburner (and the R360 version thereof)
Pitfighter
Operation Thunderbolt
Multiple platforms:-
Soccer manager games
Repton
Elite
Commodore 64:-
Last Ninja
Uridium
Paradroid
Amiga:-
Starglider 2
I'm sure there's more, but they're not coming to mind right now.
Grab.
Why flamebait? Look at the two groups he gives you to belong in. Either you are a "pro" who doesn't prefer one platform to another, or you are a "priest" who irrationally favours one platform. (I'm assuming we can all say "well I'm not a zealot" so we can rule out that group, right? ;-)
So that disregards vast classes of people who prefer one platform to another on solid technical grounds. Maybe they can't get the hardware or the hardware drivers on an alternative platform, maybe the software doesn't exist on an alternative platform, maybe the software does exist but isn't as feature-rich as that available on another platform, maybe one platform costs more to buy and/or run than another platform, etc. But this writer says that it is flatly impossible to make a rational decision that one platform is better for your purposes than another. And leading on from that, if you *have* made such a decision, then you yourself are not being rational.
This is *not* an attack on the open source philosophy. It's quite simply an ad hominem attack on anyone involved in open source or using open source software.
Grab.
> > The problem with that conclusion is that Cisco didn't build the house.
> I didn't build my house either, but I wouldn't be happy if RMS & crew tried to strongarm me into burning it down.
But for damn sure you own it. If someone came to your sports club, gave it a coat of paint, then sold it and kept the money himself, wouldn't you be a little annoyed?
OK, that's a physical property which doesn't translate well. Suppose I took the Harry Potter series, changed the names and sold it as my own work. How justified would I be in doing that?
> Where's your proof?
The simple fact that they didn't take one of the other options. They're not likely to choose the least cost-effective method, are they?
Grab.
Hey doofus, did you read even the first sentence? This is a *physical* form!
Grab.
Well, a major "desktop" class of devices for Linux are PDA:s and similar handheld stuff
:-)
Maybe eventually. ATM though, Linux PDAs are pretty damn scarce. Incidentally, handhelds are also light on memory, so a more "cut-down" version of X which doesn't include all the network-transparency would be ideal for a handheld - saves them having to load the whole of XFree86 unnecessarily!
About your later point about getting a desktop to do the whole 3D thing for you - that isn't ever going to happen, I don't think. Desktop representation of 3D is very approximate. It assumes light coming from top-left, for instance - for damn sure I don't want the top-left corner of my screen to show up brighter than the rest, even though that's what a proper light-source would do, so a 3D lighting model is not going to be suitable for a desktop.
Anyway, this is only one choice of X implementation. If there's one version that's fastest on a desktop, and another that's fastest on a handheld, what's your beef? After all, we don't slate Mozilla simply bcos it requires X support and won't run on old text-only terminals!
Grab.
Cars are designed based on concept drawings by an artist. There may be some limitations imposed by air resistance and the like, but within those limitations you can get an amazing variety of shapes. And if you look at sci-fi films and the like, there's a vast amount of attention paid to the cars/transport in all of them, bcos the style of the car embodies the style of that era. In Art Deco for instance, the car and ship are the two great iconic symbols of the style; and you can definitely track the progress of contemporary fashion through production cars of various decades this century.
These days, most cars run well, handle well, have decent fuel economy, and stuff like that. The only way to differentiate them is therefore how they look. Ford's whole recent range of Focus/Puma/Cougar is an object lesson in this. To my mind then, cars are absolutely a form of art. Some are bad art, admittedly, but art nonetheless.
So how does that affect games? Well, for starters games are "of their time". They're technologically limited in the same way as cars, but the concepts behind them are also somewhat of their time in the same way as books and films. The "killing aliens" theme will probably be one of the most distinctive features of 20th-century entertainment, for instance. A particularly well-designed game is also pleasing to the eye, and more importantly forces the player to consider concepts they wouldn't normally think about. GTA is a good example of considering those concepts - given that you're in a place with no moral limits on what you do and no serious come-back, what do you do? When game characters become more "human" and your choices become more like the choices you face IRL, it starts getting ethically challenging. And challenges to modern ethics and thinking is traditionally where art comes in.
Grab.
I used to use Crimson, and it was pretty good, for a month or two. Then it decided it was going to crash every time I opened it, and reinstalling and redownloading the install didn't fix the problem. I gave up. I have MSVC anyway, so there wasn't a big incentive to pursue it further.
Grab.
Sure, but the point of the original article was that writers don't want to become experts, they just want to sit down and type. On that basis, Vi sucks badly, and Emacs isn't a whole lot better.
You married Leela? Remind me not to visit your place in case K-9 gets me... ;-)
Grab.
He's doing a version on the radio, I think.
:-) Better to have some kick-ass girl with a baseball bat than some token bit of skirt in a fur bikini.
Trouble is, Richard E Grant is just too obvious a choice. I reckon they'd do better taking someone who's good at off-the-wall characters but isn't as well known. I favour Peter Capaldi, who's a very good actor with exactly the right kind of heritage.
As for a side-kick, I wouldn't mind the return of Sophie Aldred (hey, I'm the Sylvester McCoy generation, I know which Dr. Who girl I prefer!
Grab.
Thing is, X-Files has redefined what you can do for "cheap". Doctor Who needs to take a leaf out of that book, rather than following the example of Invasion Earth which was the last big BBC sci-fi programme. Invasion Earth tried hard, but in the end they just couldn't rise above bad acting and lousy FX.
But if they can hire the folks who did 28 Days Later, we're in for a serious treat...
Graham.
You're laying out your pages by putting manual carriage returns after the last paragraph?!?!? Tell me, do you also full-justify your text by putting in extra spaces between words? Or do you type with your nose to make life harder?
As far as a learning curve goes, Vi has a near vertical one, and Emacs isn't much better. Keyboard commands are great for advanced users, but the whole point is that a writer shouldn't have to become an advanced user before they can write something. For a beginner, keyboard commands are a nightmare, and the source of all those complaints of "the computer ate my work" by hitting the wrong one.
My main complaint with Word is that it comes with all the bells and whistles turned on by default, and it's so damn difficult to turn them off. Putting the controls somewhere obvious and giving the user a prompt after installation to ask what options they want to use would make this much better. With the bloat turned off though, it works pretty damn well.
If you want a simpler editor, just use WordPad which comes bundled with Windows. It's graphical, you can select a font and paragraph scheme which appeals to your eye while you're editting, and there's no annoying bloat-features. Job done.
Grab.
"Courtesan Consulting"??? I've heard ppl described as corporate whores before, but it's the first time I've seen it as an actual job description...
Grab.
Hey, weren't those minidiscs a great success? Can you still buy music on them, even? The only ppl I know who use MD, they burn copies of CDs onto MD for use in their pocket-size player.
In other words, even if the industry does come up with some new medium, it needs to give some *massive* benefit to get ppl to upgrade. Vinyl to CD was one such. Tape to CD-R was another. VHS to DVD was a third. But you really need to show a *huge* improvement over the original, and also sell at the same price as the original, to get mass adoption. For those reason, HDTV isn't likely to take off soon - not enough of an improvement for too much money. Maybe when we all have 30" LCD TVs, but not with the current tube technology.
Grab.
I'm actually working on that project at Ford, and it runs pretty damn well. It's no big secret that Ford are a bit behind the curve on hybrids, given that Toyota have had the Prius in production for several years now and are on version 3 (I think) of the powertrain and controls, whilst Ford still won't have theirs on sale for over a year. But it really is a nifty bit of kit nonetheless. I can own up to some worried moments during the program ;-) but the car that hits the street should be in pretty good shape, and being a hybrid SUV it should have a decent market niche.
I'm not a fan of SUVs, so I still think it's unnecessarily large and polluting. I really would like to see legislators breaking the US fascination with ludicrously oversized cars, but I can accept that it's never going to happen. At least a hybrid version is cleaner than the 15mpg SUV that soccer-mom drives on the school run.
I'm really looking forward to Ford using this powertrain in something smaller like a Cougar - don't know if that'll happen though. Trouble with smaller cars is that the battery pack weight (and size) starts to become more significant, although being able to use a smaller engine will counterbalance that to some extent. And of course it'll then be competing against the Prius and Civic which will both have a helluva headstart. See how it goes, I guess.
Grab.
Magical space jibber jabber?
"I ain't gettin' on no space shuttle, fool!"
Grab.
Elvis! You're alive after all! ;-)
I believe it was Chris Rock, although I don't have the email to hand.
Grab.
Why? If your program needs some security measures, that's the time to learn them. Not when you're still just getting the hang of printing "Hello world" to a file.
Grab.
Who told you that the abstraction was going to solve every problem for you? Did you think the C++ Pixies were going to arrive and write your code for you? ;-)
What C++ (and other OO languages) give you is an abstraction which may make your solution easier to design/code. If this abstraction doesn't match the needs of your problem, use a different one. C++ and other OO languages are perfect for GUI-type stuff, but they suck big-time for writing embedded software. The best hammer is a damn poor screwdriver, and all that.
If you insist on only using C for GUI applications, good luck - I did some substantial GUI work in X (X11R5) using C about 10 years ago, and trying to use C to emulate object-orientation is one of the abiding horrors in my memory. Equally we had a uni project to design a real-time position controller using C++, and I'm scarred by those memories too.
What sets the computing industry back is some twonk assuming that a particular methodology (structured design, OO, etc) is a magic bullet. That sucks, bcos it isn't. What also sets the industry back is some other twonk acting Luddite and saying "the old way is the One True Way" (*cough*).
Grab.
Don't think that was the Mars series, it was in a short story collection (whose name eludes me) by KSR. The city is called Terminator (which probably dates the story to pre-Arnie ;-)
Grab.
Excuse me? If a company is charging $50 for one card and $250 for another card, and the only difference is one blob of solder, that information for damn sure should be widely known! Consumers are being ripped off. So what if the company ripping off consumers loses money on it? That's the principle behind capitalism; you're allowed to spot a rip-off and refuse to buy products when they're priced extortionately.
And from the DMCA perspective, you reckon a company should be able to sue its customers if it chooses a bad business model and loses money?! I hardly know where to start with that one...
Grab.
Read the damn reviews, perhaps? Lord knows there's enough computer gamer magazines and websites around.
Grab.
Utterly irrelevant. You've already said that this is a fixed speed camera which photographs you. These take photos of the road at two intervals of time. Examining the photos then makes it clear which vehicle was speeding. Multipath effects on the radar detecting the speed aren't going to affect the photos, now are they?
Grab.