Site is still down here. Given the header of the story, however, I believe this is still on topic. I would like to comment on how once again we're hearing about the magical qualities of "P2P" software. Oh what a lovely new buzzword for journalists to exploit and for us to put on our bingo boards.
What a remarkable new development this is, we must not have had this sort of technology since some 18 year old came around and made Napster! (/sarcasm)
Ugh. Double ugh. I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't even consider Napster a peer-to-peer application. Without the server, it is nothing. Sure, the file transfers are between clients of the same server, but then again, both clients are acting as mini servers. On the same terms, I could call AIM P2P software, because a connection between clients is needed for file transfers. And hey, IRC is P2P also, because of the DCC functionality in lots of clients.
As usual, the whole thing is blown out of proportion by the media. File sharing has been around for a long time. Pirating has been around for a long time. It's nothing new...
Uh-huh, and real carpenters don't work with wood, and real writers don't write. More accurately, I'd say "real computer scientists don't need to use computers." Of course, if you want to go beyond theory, I should hope a computer scientist would test on a computer. =)
Re:Alternate story title...
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Spidergoats
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I play on both sides of the fence, but this stuff's so stupid it's funny. For instance:
For a code example, suppose we have an application that calculates taxes for individuals. A common object oriented approach is to create a Person class and a Tax class. You might end up with something like this:
Person P = new Person("Fred")
Tax T = new Tax() // assign attributes to our person ("//" = comment)
P.x = foo
P.y = bar
P.z = blah() // display tax amount
output T.calcTax(P)
A more traditional, parametric approach may look something like this:
output CalcTax("Fred", foo, bar)
The parametric approach simply asks for the pieces of information it needs up front and only the information it needs. The OOP approach requires that a Person object be set up as a prerequisite to tax calculation.
That's kind of ridiculous. By using overloaded constructors, the whole headache of initializing each individual member could be avoided. For instance:
Person P = new Person( "Fred", foo, bar, blah() );
I'm seeing lots of flaws in most of these arguments...I agree that OOP isn't the best solution for everything, but it certainly is more useful than this article claims it to be. I also think it's funny that he makes a comment that explains what a comment is in C++...what's the point? You can do C-style comments in C++; it's just another example of how he berates the language for spite.
I'll know who to blame if I can't log in between classes tomorrow.;-)
I'm a student at USF, working towards a CS degree. I've seen the engineering guys do some pretty cool stuff: not long ago I saw a couple guys outside one of the buildings testing out a robot that ran on some wireless controls through a Linux app.
And then there's the garage of solar vehicles...The roof is covered in solar panels, and the cars can all plug in to recharge there. Pretty neat stuff, there was even a picture of it published in one of my textbooks last semester.
There's also apparently a larger cycle of about 90 years that's even stronger, if I remember correctly. I'm not sure how far along we are on this, though.
Supporting voxels for things like medical imaging is good, but I don't think it's such a big thing for games. Yes, voxels can be used for landscapes, and even characters. But do we even need that third dimension of resolution? When I'm playing a game, I don't see through a character, so wouldn't it be a waste to define elements inside the character? (Though a neat trick there would be to define his guts so shooting him would reveal them at any level of penetrati--Geez, I'm disturbed. There are other ways of doing that anyway.)
A landscape could be defined with things like curved surfaces and probably be much more efficient. From what I understand about 3D graphics, using voxels to store something like a 3D object as opposed to polygons is akin to using a huge array instead of a linked list to store data in memory.
Additionally, we viewed that if the framerate of Quake 3 was set too high, the monitor would produce flawed images. Setting the framerate to 60 frames per second alleviated this problem, however.
Since the monitor's refresh rate is, as they said, 60 Hz, shouldn't this be attributed to the tearing effects that can happen when vertical sync is disabled? That doesn't sound like the monitor's fault...sounds more like they let the vid card get out of sync with it.
Well, it was initially developed by a commercial development team, and later opened to the community. One of the original dev team guys is running the show now, and he doesn't have time to work on it full time. When WildTangent bought them out, the project forked and Jet3D 2.0 is the open source side. The other side is WildTangent's Web Driver/Game Driver. (This is an interesting idea, BTW, if you're on Windows.)
I think starting with the closed team worked well, because it got it off the ground and released in a very organized and clean fashion. Then when the source was opened, a huge number of requested features started getting put in there. There's a BeOS port (it's slow, though), and some people are supposedly working on a Linux port. There's also an OpenGL driver somewhere around there.
The major caveat I found when working with it was that it's (IMO) poorly documented. Some people are working on docs, but I really haven't seen anything but stuff generated from symbols (which I could easily look in the headers for). I got too frustrated trying to figure out initialization order for the components. Like working with DirectX without the help reference. =p
I love their editor, though. Very nice, and a huge improvement over the one they had for Genesis. I'm still figuring out Crystal Space's MazeD.
::waves goodbye to his site's server:: Someone get a mirror of this going or something. I originally just sent this to CmdrTaco, but...what the heck, happy festivus. =)
Speaking of direct neural interfaces, I found a link from that FAQ to a company called Brain Actuated Technologies, Inc. Looks like they use a few forehead sensors to detect electrical and muscular impulses. Neat, but quite an expensive toy. =)
I actually tried out something similar at Epcot Center in Orlando, FL. It was a kind of neural joystick hooked into an SGI workstation running a skiing game. You basically stuck your finger in the interface and it would pick up electrical impulses from your brain. It took a few tries to get myself going safely, but it got easier after some practice.
Slashdot Mirror
Site is still down here. Given the header of the story, however, I believe this is still on topic. I would like to comment on how once again we're hearing about the magical qualities of "P2P" software. Oh what a lovely new buzzword for journalists to exploit and for us to put on our bingo boards.
What a remarkable new development this is, we must not have had this sort of technology since some 18 year old came around and made Napster! (/sarcasm)
Ugh. Double ugh. I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't even consider Napster a peer-to-peer application. Without the server, it is nothing. Sure, the file transfers are between clients of the same server, but then again, both clients are acting as mini servers. On the same terms, I could call AIM P2P software, because a connection between clients is needed for file transfers. And hey, IRC is P2P also, because of the DCC functionality in lots of clients.
As usual, the whole thing is blown out of proportion by the media. File sharing has been around for a long time. Pirating has been around for a long time. It's nothing new...
Yeah, I couldn't get a 486 DX2/66 to work, either. I had to downsample or else it'd skip, even when I overclocked it to 83 MHz. =)
Uh-huh, and real carpenters don't work with wood, and real writers don't write. More accurately, I'd say "real computer scientists don't need to use computers." Of course, if you want to go beyond theory, I should hope a computer scientist would test on a computer. =)
LOL, took the words right out of my mouth. +)
That's kind of ridiculous. By using overloaded constructors, the whole headache of initializing each individual member could be avoided. For instance:
Person P = new Person( "Fred", foo, bar, blah() );
I'm seeing lots of flaws in most of these arguments...I agree that OOP isn't the best solution for everything, but it certainly is more useful than this article claims it to be. I also think it's funny that he makes a comment that explains what a comment is in C++...what's the point? You can do C-style comments in C++; it's just another example of how he berates the language for spite.
Did he have an object bite him as a child?
I'm a student at USF, working towards a CS degree. I've seen the engineering guys do some pretty cool stuff: not long ago I saw a couple guys outside one of the buildings testing out a robot that ran on some wireless controls through a Linux app.
And then there's the garage of solar vehicles...The roof is covered in solar panels, and the cars can all plug in to recharge there. Pretty neat stuff, there was even a picture of it published in one of my textbooks last semester.
Ah yes, but if we want a good Brownian motion generator, we don't need to look any farther than a really hot cup of tea. ;-)
There's also apparently a larger cycle of about 90 years that's even stronger, if I remember correctly. I'm not sure how far along we are on this, though.
Supporting voxels for things like medical imaging is good, but I don't think it's such a big thing for games. Yes, voxels can be used for landscapes, and even characters. But do we even need that third dimension of resolution? When I'm playing a game, I don't see through a character, so wouldn't it be a waste to define elements inside the character? (Though a neat trick there would be to define his guts so shooting him would reveal them at any level of penetrati--Geez, I'm disturbed. There are other ways of doing that anyway.)
A landscape could be defined with things like curved surfaces and probably be much more efficient. From what I understand about 3D graphics, using voxels to store something like a 3D object as opposed to polygons is akin to using a huge array instead of a linked list to store data in memory.
Since the monitor's refresh rate is, as they said, 60 Hz, shouldn't this be attributed to the tearing effects that can happen when vertical sync is disabled? That doesn't sound like the monitor's fault...sounds more like they let the vid card get out of sync with it.
I think starting with the closed team worked well, because it got it off the ground and released in a very organized and clean fashion. Then when the source was opened, a huge number of requested features started getting put in there. There's a BeOS port (it's slow, though), and some people are supposedly working on a Linux port. There's also an OpenGL driver somewhere around there.
The major caveat I found when working with it was that it's (IMO) poorly documented. Some people are working on docs, but I really haven't seen anything but stuff generated from symbols (which I could easily look in the headers for). I got too frustrated trying to figure out initialization order for the components. Like working with DirectX without the help reference. =p
I love their editor, though. Very nice, and a huge improvement over the one they had for Genesis. I'm still figuring out Crystal Space's MazeD.
It may not be anyone who can make Quake client cracks, but anyone can certainly distribute them for others to use...therein lies the problem. =)
Or, if Xerox hasn't learned their lesson, management would throw it out along with the other good ideas.
"Graphical User Interface? Oh please, nobody will use that."
Whoa! "They've gone to plaid!"
I can't resolve it, either. So, what do you think it is: incredible timing, or the slashdot effect? =)
::waves goodbye to his site's server::
Someone get a mirror of this going or something. I originally just sent this to CmdrTaco, but...what the heck, happy festivus. =)
Star Wars Holiday Special in crappy Real Video format.
Speaking of direct neural interfaces, I found a link from that FAQ to a company called Brain Actuated Technologies, Inc. Looks like they use a few forehead sensors to detect electrical and muscular impulses. Neat, but quite an expensive toy. =)
I actually tried out something similar at Epcot Center in Orlando, FL. It was a kind of neural joystick hooked into an SGI workstation running a skiing game. You basically stuck your finger in the interface and it would pick up electrical impulses from your brain. It took a few tries to get myself going safely, but it got easier after some practice.