It'd have been much more impressive if he had done this without any browser checks. It's hard, but frequently it can be done. I recently hacked together the Game of Life using Javascript and CSS and no browser detection tricks. It works on Mozilla, IE, Safari, and Opera (the latest versions, anyway). I just wish it wasn't so slow. Ah well. Ya win some, ya lose some...
I'm going to have to buy this game out of principal. Since I don't have a PC for gaming I'll have to get the XBox version (which doesn't have the sex game hack), but that'll have to do. Anything that causes this kind of sensation is bound to banned sooner or later and I'd like to have it before it finally gets pulled from the shelves.
Re:Bad boy! Use sleep(3) or select(2) or usleep(3)
on
Next-Gen Game of Life
·
· Score: 1
Are you uploading these changes someplace? The file on sourceforge doesn't seem any different than earlier today. I may be missing something there... (I've always felt sf to be highly confusing...)
It is neat, however you should reset the playing area to pure black before the game begins as my terminal's default background is not black and it looks a bit screwy before it gets going.
BTW, I'm using OSX. No errors or warnings, compiles just fine out of the box.
I did this a long time ago using SDL and OpenGL with spiffy colored blocks and a huge world you had to scroll around in using the mouse. One color would eat the other color, reproduce differently, had different basic rules, etc. I guess it was a cellular automata. I may have had a 3rd species, but at some point I started to lose interest and moved on to bigger and more 3D things.
I like simulations like this, but I fail to see what is revolutionary about it. I'm sure thousands of people have implemented something similar. Heck, in high school we implemented the game of life and my very first modification was to attempt to add a second life form using slightly different rules to make things interesting.
heh.. as I checked the link to the site I took a glance and suddenly found myself learning something new... how about that?:-) Ok, this is a mostly pointless comment, but I think it illustrates the usefulness of NeHe quite nicely!
Possibly the best way to get started with OpenGL is the NeHe Tutorials. The articles are often written in a C or C++ style but most of them have been ported to tons of other languages and platforms. Check the ends of the articles for links to source for whatever platform you want to work with.
I second the notion of just doing it (as I posted elsewhere in the parent thread). I also just wanted to chime in with my support for SDL as well. SDL is a wonderful platform for learning game programming as well as just messing around with OpenGL or 2D in general. SDL is not only available for several languages, it has a ton of plugins that do all sorts of things for you while adhering to an SDL-like API. This makes it very easy to add sound effects, do networking, draw text, etc. Much fun.
I toyed with this myself. In my experience, it isn't the technology that's hard. Simple games like you're talking about aren't much different from any other apps out there, so just dive in and do it in whatever language you want to use. It doesn't take some kind of special training to code a card game if you already know how to do GUI programming.
The hard part, IMO, is the extra stuff like graphics and sounds. Unless you're talented in such things, making a game look and sound good is a real problem. It is especially troublesome if you don't know anyone who can do the artwork and is willing to just toy around with you for free. Good artists are expensive and games need to look good or most people will pass right over them.
The only technology that is really hard is the 3D stuff due to all of the math and such. However, there are so many libraries and engines out there (many free and open source) that most of that isn't an issue anymore and once again you're back to the art and gameplay being the hard part.
Just do it. If you run into problems, there's always Google. The best way to learn what you will need to know is to get started now and discover it on your own - that way you will not only know what doesn't work, but you'll also know *why* and that's an important element that can often go missing if you try to do it the "right way" from the beginning.
The iPods aren't free. Neither are concert tickets. The songs aren't free either, just very cheap from Apple's point of view. They still pay bandwidth fees and likely will have to count them as songs sold for royalty purposes.
Besides, in things like this it isn't the value of the prize to the company that is important, it is the value of the prize to the winner or game-players that matters. Clearly you don't care and therefore you are not their target audience with this event.
If there's a lot of dirt or grime around and I get dirty I have to change my jeans. You can't expect the environment to just stay off of them, after all - especially if you have to kneel down in it.
Sure, there's almost always better ways to do things that are only illuminated by hindsight, but that doesn't mean that the old way should just be tossed out and replaced.
Besides, the Internet is one of those amazing flukes of history. It's a very open, public, and free world unlike anything before it. Does anyone really think that something designed now in the age of terrorism, by committee, using government money (NSF) would be carefully designed to protect those initial design elements that make the Internet what it is today?
I think the live transfer is the mark of a higher standard in technical support. I had a similar experience with Apple and was shocked at how polite and personable they were over the phone. The live transfer to another tech was also something I hadn't seen before then and it made a world of difference in terms of my perception. I didn't have to repeat myself and the new tech was already up to speed as if I had just talked to him myself! Not only that, you just get warm fuzzies with live transfers. Good stuff.
I posted the following awhile back on slashdot, but I think in some ways it bears repeating here. Not because it is amazingly unique or insightful, but more because I learned a ton by screwing around with computer--sometimes school-owned ones. And I think I'm the better for it. If I did this kind of stuff now, I'd probably have been in jail at the age of 16 or something. This trend needs to change.
----
There was a lab that I used to hang out in. Being one of the few geeks in the school, I pretty much had run of the place. The teacher who oversaw the lab encouraged creativity and ingenuity. Sometimes he'd get pissed with something I did, but in those cases I just fixed it and moved on. This kind of activity, over a year or so, ended up earning his trust as I would also fix the odd problems with windows/autocad and such that would crop up.
Eventually I became the de-facto admin for that entire lab. During my required study period he would give me a pass to hang out in his lab--sometimes even when other classes were in there. Talk about heaven. I had the run of a computer lab that was networked. It was like being a king.:)
Around my junior year or so, they replaced the computers in the lab (aging 386/486 era machines with DOS, mostly) with shiny new Pentiums running Windows. For a few months they were basically just open and normal Windows machines. I think they even had Internet access. This was, of course, a total disaster. The net was new, then. People didn't have it at home. They downloaded anything and everything. Porn, viruses, music, etc.
The result was an *cough* admin *cough* who ended up being in the room almost everyday for awhile. He would spend his time poking around in control panels and "fixing" the computers. Eventually he must have gotten sick of that because they hired a local consulting company to come in to secure them all. Pretty soon the whole place was all passworded up with all these layers of cheap third party locks, etc.
I broke all of them--with full (unofficial) support of the teacher who taught in the room. They had tried to lock the systems down so much that half his programs wouldn't work right anymore. He had endless problems with students just trying to save their completed CAD drawings. I made a lot of those problems go away by circumventing the security, showing him how, and then giving him pointers to try to minimize the visibility of the hole so that other kids and the admin dude wouldn't find it. Not perfect, but it helped.
After some time of this the teacher pulled me aside one day and tells me in a reasonably loud-so-that-others-near-by-can-hear voice that I need to be careful because Mr. Admin is getting pissed that someone keeps getting into his expensively secured systems and he's going to try for suspension of that person when he is caught. Of course nearly every one of his students knew it was me--but they weren't going to talk. I had helped them all out of computer jams at some point or other. So after doing the semi-public speech, he later pulls me aside in private and says, "Hey, keep doing what you're doing. I'll make sure they don't do anything to you. Those bastards are making my life such a living hell and they won't listen to my needs that I've given up trying to deal with them. You at least make it possible for me to teach my classes."
So of course after the next round of "security upgrades" I was once again on the job. Eventually I figured the way into the system and changed all the screen savers to be the marquee one and had it read, "Ha ha! I got in Mr. Security Guy!" Hoo boy did the shit hit the fan. I was shielded from it, but the teacher just loved it. The admin dude was pissed. The consulting guy was there almost everyday for like 2 weeks. My teacher would just smile and nod. Eventually they locked it down pretty heavily, but by this point I was a senior and I was graduating early and was out of there.
Those were some good times. Seriously, though, I swear that in this
Funny.. I read that as "Sounds like a Belgian liger" which might actually make a decent amount of sense for the OSX codename after Leopard if there's a merge with Intel...
Writing them down is low risk assuming you're not using the password to keep someone on-site from accessing your data. In general, for something like a wireless access point, who cares if it is written down on a scrap of paper someplace? Most of those passwords are there to prevent external people from getting on your network or changing the config. Generally those people are trying to get in remotely. They'd have to break into your house to read that scrap of paper just so they can log into your AP. That's a lot farther then you average script kiddie is going to go. If you have real honest reason to fear that someone could break in just to find your online stock password written on a Post-It note, then I'd suggest you're probably in a financial position where installing an actual building security system would be well within your means--in which case once again, writing your passwords down wouldn't really be much of a risk unless you happened to leave the note sit out so that the cleaning lady could snatch it up or something...
I might have missed it, but is there any indication if the Intel chips they are going to use are standard stock Intel stuff or if they perhaps have some modifications for Apple to make their PowerPC emulation work better, etc?
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm.. Well, my fiancee and I are probably going to watch all these shows tonight, so I'm not sure your stereotype holds.
It'd have been much more impressive if he had done this without any browser checks. It's hard, but frequently it can be done. I recently hacked together the Game of Life using Javascript and CSS and no browser detection tricks. It works on Mozilla, IE, Safari, and Opera (the latest versions, anyway). I just wish it wasn't so slow. Ah well. Ya win some, ya lose some...
I'm going to have to buy this game out of principal. Since I don't have a PC for gaming I'll have to get the XBox version (which doesn't have the sex game hack), but that'll have to do. Anything that causes this kind of sensation is bound to banned sooner or later and I'd like to have it before it finally gets pulled from the shelves.
Ass clowns suck. And yet they're so funny! If only they didn't have such power over our society...
There was a Next-Gen story yesterday, too. I guess we're all getting outdated and the new kids are moving in... *sigh*
Have you seen wireworld? It is another cellular automata which has some very interesting properties.
Hey that's pretty cool!
Are you uploading these changes someplace? The file on sourceforge doesn't seem any different than earlier today. I may be missing something there... (I've always felt sf to be highly confusing...)
It is neat, however you should reset the playing area to pure black before the game begins as my terminal's default background is not black and it looks a bit screwy before it gets going.
BTW, I'm using OSX. No errors or warnings, compiles just fine out of the box.
I did this a long time ago using SDL and OpenGL with spiffy colored blocks and a huge world you had to scroll around in using the mouse. One color would eat the other color, reproduce differently, had different basic rules, etc. I guess it was a cellular automata. I may have had a 3rd species, but at some point I started to lose interest and moved on to bigger and more 3D things.
I like simulations like this, but I fail to see what is revolutionary about it. I'm sure thousands of people have implemented something similar. Heck, in high school we implemented the game of life and my very first modification was to attempt to add a second life form using slightly different rules to make things interesting.
heh.. as I checked the link to the site I took a glance and suddenly found myself learning something new... how about that? :-) Ok, this is a mostly pointless comment, but I think it illustrates the usefulness of NeHe quite nicely!
Possibly the best way to get started with OpenGL is the NeHe Tutorials. The articles are often written in a C or C++ style but most of them have been ported to tons of other languages and platforms. Check the ends of the articles for links to source for whatever platform you want to work with.
I second the notion of just doing it (as I posted elsewhere in the parent thread). I also just wanted to chime in with my support for SDL as well. SDL is a wonderful platform for learning game programming as well as just messing around with OpenGL or 2D in general. SDL is not only available for several languages, it has a ton of plugins that do all sorts of things for you while adhering to an SDL-like API. This makes it very easy to add sound effects, do networking, draw text, etc. Much fun.
I toyed with this myself. In my experience, it isn't the technology that's hard. Simple games like you're talking about aren't much different from any other apps out there, so just dive in and do it in whatever language you want to use. It doesn't take some kind of special training to code a card game if you already know how to do GUI programming.
The hard part, IMO, is the extra stuff like graphics and sounds. Unless you're talented in such things, making a game look and sound good is a real problem. It is especially troublesome if you don't know anyone who can do the artwork and is willing to just toy around with you for free. Good artists are expensive and games need to look good or most people will pass right over them.
The only technology that is really hard is the 3D stuff due to all of the math and such. However, there are so many libraries and engines out there (many free and open source) that most of that isn't an issue anymore and once again you're back to the art and gameplay being the hard part.
Just do it. If you run into problems, there's always Google. The best way to learn what you will need to know is to get started now and discover it on your own - that way you will not only know what doesn't work, but you'll also know *why* and that's an important element that can often go missing if you try to do it the "right way" from the beginning.
The iPods aren't free. Neither are concert tickets. The songs aren't free either, just very cheap from Apple's point of view. They still pay bandwidth fees and likely will have to count them as songs sold for royalty purposes.
Besides, in things like this it isn't the value of the prize to the company that is important, it is the value of the prize to the winner or game-players that matters. Clearly you don't care and therefore you are not their target audience with this event.
If there's a lot of dirt or grime around and I get dirty I have to change my jeans. You can't expect the environment to just stay off of them, after all - especially if you have to kneel down in it.
Oh.. wait..
How about Mac.tel? I hear Apple trademarked that recently.
Don't fix what ain't broken.
Sure, there's almost always better ways to do things that are only illuminated by hindsight, but that doesn't mean that the old way should just be tossed out and replaced.
Besides, the Internet is one of those amazing flukes of history. It's a very open, public, and free world unlike anything before it. Does anyone really think that something designed now in the age of terrorism, by committee, using government money (NSF) would be carefully designed to protect those initial design elements that make the Internet what it is today?
Perhaps you should just stop listening... Well... yeah, that probably won't work either. :-)
I think the live transfer is the mark of a higher standard in technical support. I had a similar experience with Apple and was shocked at how polite and personable they were over the phone. The live transfer to another tech was also something I hadn't seen before then and it made a world of difference in terms of my perception. I didn't have to repeat myself and the new tech was already up to speed as if I had just talked to him myself! Not only that, you just get warm fuzzies with live transfers. Good stuff.
I posted the following awhile back on slashdot, but I think in some ways it bears repeating here. Not because it is amazingly unique or insightful, but more because I learned a ton by screwing around with computer--sometimes school-owned ones. And I think I'm the better for it. If I did this kind of stuff now, I'd probably have been in jail at the age of 16 or something. This trend needs to change.
:)
----
There was a lab that I used to hang out in. Being one of the few geeks in the school, I pretty much had run of the place. The teacher who oversaw the lab encouraged creativity and ingenuity. Sometimes he'd get pissed with something I did, but in those cases I just fixed it and moved on. This kind of activity, over a year or so, ended up earning his trust as I would also fix the odd problems with windows/autocad and such that would crop up.
Eventually I became the de-facto admin for that entire lab. During my required study period he would give me a pass to hang out in his lab--sometimes even when other classes were in there. Talk about heaven. I had the run of a computer lab that was networked. It was like being a king.
Around my junior year or so, they replaced the computers in the lab (aging 386/486 era machines with DOS, mostly) with shiny new Pentiums running Windows. For a few months they were basically just open and normal Windows machines. I think they even had Internet access. This was, of course, a total disaster. The net was new, then. People didn't have it at home. They downloaded anything and everything. Porn, viruses, music, etc.
The result was an *cough* admin *cough* who ended up being in the room almost everyday for awhile. He would spend his time poking around in control panels and "fixing" the computers. Eventually he must have gotten sick of that because they hired a local consulting company to come in to secure them all. Pretty soon the whole place was all passworded up with all these layers of cheap third party locks, etc.
I broke all of them--with full (unofficial) support of the teacher who taught in the room. They had tried to lock the systems down so much that half his programs wouldn't work right anymore. He had endless problems with students just trying to save their completed CAD drawings. I made a lot of those problems go away by circumventing the security, showing him how, and then giving him pointers to try to minimize the visibility of the hole so that other kids and the admin dude wouldn't find it. Not perfect, but it helped.
After some time of this the teacher pulled me aside one day and tells me in a reasonably loud-so-that-others-near-by-can-hear voice that I need to be careful because Mr. Admin is getting pissed that someone keeps getting into his expensively secured systems and he's going to try for suspension of that person when he is caught. Of course nearly every one of his students knew it was me--but they weren't going to talk. I had helped them all out of computer jams at some point or other. So after doing the semi-public speech, he later pulls me aside in private and says, "Hey, keep doing what you're doing. I'll make sure they don't do anything to you. Those bastards are making my life such a living hell and they won't listen to my needs that I've given up trying to deal with them. You at least make it possible for me to teach my classes."
So of course after the next round of "security upgrades" I was once again on the job. Eventually I figured the way into the system and changed all the screen savers to be the marquee one and had it read, "Ha ha! I got in Mr. Security Guy!" Hoo boy did the shit hit the fan. I was shielded from it, but the teacher just loved it. The admin dude was pissed. The consulting guy was there almost everyday for like 2 weeks. My teacher would just smile and nod. Eventually they locked it down pretty heavily, but by this point I was a senior and I was graduating early and was out of there.
Those were some good times. Seriously, though, I swear that in this
"Does this frighten anybody but me?"
Clearly it does as even the article submitter appears to be bothered by the idea. Are you afraid of being the only one who is scared?
Funny.. I read that as "Sounds like a Belgian liger" which might actually make a decent amount of sense for the OSX codename after Leopard if there's a merge with Intel...
Writing them down is low risk assuming you're not using the password to keep someone on-site from accessing your data. In general, for something like a wireless access point, who cares if it is written down on a scrap of paper someplace? Most of those passwords are there to prevent external people from getting on your network or changing the config. Generally those people are trying to get in remotely. They'd have to break into your house to read that scrap of paper just so they can log into your AP. That's a lot farther then you average script kiddie is going to go. If you have real honest reason to fear that someone could break in just to find your online stock password written on a Post-It note, then I'd suggest you're probably in a financial position where installing an actual building security system would be well within your means--in which case once again, writing your passwords down wouldn't really be much of a risk unless you happened to leave the note sit out so that the cleaning lady could snatch it up or something...
I might have missed it, but is there any indication if the Intel chips they are going to use are standard stock Intel stuff or if they perhaps have some modifications for Apple to make their PowerPC emulation work better, etc?