does anyone have a reference to the 10 specific factors? At the risk of taking all the romance out of romance, it would be interesting to see them listed and described.
Yes, as far as conglomerated fakey bible verse go, it's tops!
Not to sound like a cranky old timer but I can barely recognize the color, ad-laden MAD.
Does Cracked still exist as a print publication? This new form seems to have less to do with the old magazine and more a continuation of funny, snarky, sophomoric web commentary of some other sites... but it's usually pretty well done.
My parents are ministers, I lost my attempt-to-reconcile-science-and-Genesis faith when I was a teenager, when I noticed how much my cultural environment had influenced my belief, if i was raised somewhere else i would most certainly be believing something else...
But there is a brittleness to the Christian Faith as it is general practiced in the USA, where literalist and fundamentalist interpretations seem to hold sway. Surprisingly, this goes hand in hand with a surprising lack of knowledge about everything but the most famous stories in the Bible.
Cracked had a funny piece on the most "badass" bible verses. I think many of these would come as surprises to most American Christians. So that, combined with a kind of "folk" interpretation of, say, what happens when you die (I think the pop culture idea of being whisked up to the gates of Heaven immediately holds a lot of sway, as opposed to the idea of a bodily resurrection at the end of the world)
Anyway, American Christian Fundamentalism is just ugly.
Or it looks bad because you don't understand all the constraints it was written under, from extra requirements (though those should be documented), to time constraints, to hidden gotchas -- sometimes you might miss the whole paradigm it's aiming for, and if it's not well-explained, you're going to think that it's awful. (Hell, even if it's documented, when you come into a codebase that you didn't hear the arguments for and against, and couldn't put in your two cents... it's going to feel bad. Or if a system started being super-flexible because they wanted to keep options open, and then by the time you get your hands on it, all the flexibility is gratuitous and just makes things wobbly...)
The thing is, laugh tracks aren't just a cynical way of trying to make a show "more funny" or being told when to laugh; they were meant in response to semi-legitimate fears of people feeling lonely as they watched a show alone...
From a programmer's point of view, PHP's advantages seem to be (1) that whole code-embedded-in-HTML thing, ala JSP or ASP (I feel I get about the same benefit through use of Perl's quoting operator) and (2) pretty much every damn library seems to be baked into the typical PHP install, as opposed to requiring trips through CPAN, and then some challenges installing locally, if you don't have admin privileges on the machine you're renting webspace off of.
When I was playing with PHP in 2002, then, the DISadvantages were stuff like well A, the iterator for an array being a component of that array, something that would need to be reset to walk the array a second time, seemed REALLY odd to me B. and then walking a 2D array was just broken... the PHP programmers tried to pass it off as an oversight in documentation, but really, the documentation described something that made logical sense, and there wasn't an acceptable work around for it.
I do wish Perl had an object model that seemed a bit more sane to me.
Well, don't get me wrong: I love Perl and it remains my "goto" language... everything on my own tends to be Perl CGI (and, oy, flatfiles...) but professionally I do Java, lately with a big hunk of "Wicket". (And I worry that my years of exposure to Perl CGI, and the strong mapping with CGI and Hashmaps in the normal HTTP cycle has made me have a hard time getting used to stuff like Wicket that abstracts that away)
My guesstimation that Perl is dwindling was based on A. fewer headhunters who were appearing to be buzzword hunting it and B the cheerleading going on for other languages, from the great mass of PHP users (I started playing w/ PHP before it was ready for primetime, apparently, and while Perl has a lot of quirks, but unlike PHP there are relatively few things that stand out as being that way because it was easier for the implementor of the language to do it that way...) to the folks championing Python (including a recent xkcd) and Ruby (felt a little too much like a Domain Specific Language to me, though being a complete stack was pretty cool.)
So career wise, I dunno, I might be a little too much "street perl" for my own good. But besides being fantastic for small serverside projects and misc. admin-y tasks, it's also a great complement to the stuff like Java, any language that's largely text based.
I'd think a regular "State of the Onion" pronouncement would be an avenue to discuss where we are today, and where we are headed, with Perl. Instead, it's a rambling short history of "scripting" languages, and a rundown of various language design choices with "Perl 6 will have [x]" statements.
I guess I really don't get the purpose of the essay. I think the purpose of the essay might be to be a rambling short history of "scripting" languages, and a rundown of various language design choices with "Perl 6 will have [x]" statements.
It was also (IMO) a damn fine read, with lots of intriguing rhetorical flourishes (I also learned a little C. [...] That's because a little C is all there is) and thought-provoking concepts, like how most human languages can express anything, but they differ in what you MUST express.
I think most people have a rough idea where Perl is now (present, though likely slipping as a % of interesting code being written) and where it's going (a guess about how the new perl 6 would be received when it finally shows up)
As to TMTOWTDI, I've concluded TOABWTDI (There's Often A Better Way To Do It). Better than Perl, or in general? If the latter, well sure... there will almost be another way that is better in some subset of the parameters you could use to measure "Betterness". One tradeoff you always have to make is how much time and conceptual effort do you put into optimizing that...
You have a premise that exploration is always better than linearity. I disagree.
Some of the charm of Mario is about giving the user a charming toy to play with. With Galaxies, these toys can be enjoyed in isolation. I had a real sense of I wonder what I'll run into next that Mario 64, for all of its exploration, didn't provide, because each part of a world in Mario 64 or Sunshine had to make more logical sense with the rest of the world.
For some reason I'm thinking of that one level by the docks in Sunshine... it was a pretty interesting level, with that big framework to climb kind of suspended in the sky, and then a little pierside minivillage, and stuff going on with the sea creatures. But I don't think I enjoyed finding out about the different parts of it nearly as much as I did being brought through a typical Galaxies level.
In the Gamers Quarter forums, someone (Dessgeega I think) pointed out that while most of the levels in, say, Mario 64 are about exploring the landscape and solving the star problem, each challenge in Galaxies tends to be more or less linear, on many of the worlds you really are guided from place to place (since usually the star-travel is a one way trip.) So in a lot of ways it is more of an update to the more classic left-to-right formula than Mario 64 is.
You have to be a mature enough gamer to realize that linear doesn't always mean worse... and personally I like that they still offer some choice in skipping starts and going back to them later.
I like being free of the distraction of other windows myself... I miss maximize when using a Mac. Most people aren't multitasking so much, even if their computer is.
I still think the start button/task bar combination is a more logic division of "new things to do" and "things I'm working on now" than the Dock.
And "install Linux"? Please. At work we run Linux desktops, Red Hat w/ Gnome. How much research would it take to find out why I can't copy and paste image data as well as text? How many decades has Mac and Windows been having clipboards that handled both seamlessly? (Ever since The Unix Haters Handbook pointed out how the clipboard does a fair chunk of what I'd otherwise do with pipes and files, (albeit in a less automatable way...) Anyway, having not being able to have "cut and paste graphics" on my "something I can take for granted list" is a loss.
Seriously, once you have a normal thumb keyboard, you won't want to go back to tapping the screen. Please don't mistake your opinion for fact. I went from one of those slideout windows mobile devices to an iPhone. The iPhone keyboard w/ the spell corrector has a slight edge already, and then when I take in to account how much less bulk its dealing with, it's a clear win. And the spellcheck does a better, faster job of "business emails" too.
Actually, iPhone's spell correction makes it difficult to use a lot of common abbreviations, "w/" gets turned to "a/". I guess you can still do "c" and "u" though.
I was an only child in a neighborhood without many kids. I really liked "Alphie", this game playing robot (circa 1979). Had him for years, then let some other kids play with him and he broke.
I kind of like the old ZZAP!64 method, where they had little portraits expressing the mood of the reviewer about the game. Not much different than stars. Whoops... I just checked, actually they used % as well, for the various parts and the overall.
Well, let me hedge my bet: GTA also innovates by making that WORK w/ the game overlaying sandbox thing. (More than I can say for that Simpsons Hit and Run or whatever their GTA-ish game was called.
Anyway. getting back to hte main point, I agree; it sounds like Rockstar and their lawyers are being terrible whiners here, with a streak of kettle/pot/black.
Did it ever occur to you that mixing "d2, smb, spyhunter, carmageddon, deathrace2000, syndicate." would actually be a bit of innovation, in and of itself? (actually, what's d2? and smb, super mario)?
Anyway, what GTA has done nearly better than anyone is create a world flexible enough that all this kind of gaming is possible, without an excessive amount of hacking the world and its physics. It's a great sandbox, just to drive around and interact with, and then the missions are all set up in that world, plus some story scenes. That's pretty cool, and no-one does it as well as they do.
Also (and this is all stuff I happened to do on Saturday, which is why it's on my mind)
http://kisrael.com/2007/10/26 is Conway West, where you get to play a little happy face trapped in Conway's Game of Life, with a ghost farting out random particles to add a random element the patterns. Dodge the Life cells and go for points! (made for http://glorioustrainwrecks.com/ Klik-of-the-Month 2 hour game jam)
yeah, I know I'm pimping my own site, sosumi... Anyway, I was thinking about 1D CA the other week, and realized one of the attractions was that you plot time and make it 2D... but there's no particular reason you can't do the same thing to a 2D CA, like Life... http://kisrael.com/2007/10/21/ is the result, ethereal blue sculptures made by plotting 2D Life with Time as a physical dimension. I'm not sure if I learned a lot or proved anything, but it *is* pretty...
The current bee in my bonnet is the way they cancelled a US version of Puzzle Collection for GC. So the only reason I have a Free Loader is to play that damn game.
And I guess I still don't buy it. As long as the publishers don't publish in places where they don't have copyright, do they really care if someone can play the software there? So that means we're at least 3 steps removed from the people who might care.
Slashdot Mirror
Off 4 big games I tackled this year, Crackdown, Chibi Robo, Twilight Princess, Halo 3, Mario Galaxies, I think I liked Crackdown the best.
Theoretically it was cheaper if you didn't have to buy a separate TV...
does anyone have a reference to the 10 specific factors?
At the risk of taking all the romance out of romance, it would be interesting to see them listed and described.
Yes, as far as conglomerated fakey bible verse go, it's tops!
Not to sound like a cranky old timer but I can barely recognize the color, ad-laden MAD.
Does Cracked still exist as a print publication? This new form seems to have less to do with the old magazine and more a continuation of funny, snarky, sophomoric web commentary of some other sites... but it's usually pretty well done.
My parents are ministers, I lost my attempt-to-reconcile-science-and-Genesis faith when I was a teenager, when I noticed how much my cultural environment had influenced my belief, if i was raised somewhere else i would most certainly be believing something else...
But there is a brittleness to the Christian Faith as it is general practiced in the USA, where literalist and fundamentalist interpretations seem to hold sway. Surprisingly, this goes hand in hand with a surprising lack of knowledge about everything but the most famous stories in the Bible.
Cracked had a funny piece on the most "badass" bible verses. I think many of these would come as surprises to most American Christians. So that, combined with a kind of "folk" interpretation of, say, what happens when you die (I think the pop culture idea of being whisked up to the gates of Heaven immediately holds a lot of sway, as opposed to the idea of a bodily resurrection at the end of the world)
Anyway, American Christian Fundamentalism is just ugly.
Bad code looks bad.
Good code looks natural and obvious.
Or it looks bad because you don't understand all the constraints it was written under, from extra requirements (though those should be documented), to time constraints, to hidden gotchas -- sometimes you might miss the whole paradigm it's aiming for, and if it's not well-explained, you're going to think that it's awful. (Hell, even if it's documented, when you come into a codebase that you didn't hear the arguments for and against, and couldn't put in your two cents... it's going to feel bad. Or if a system started being super-flexible because they wanted to keep options open, and then by the time you get your hands on it, all the flexibility is gratuitous and just makes things wobbly...)
The thing is, laugh tracks aren't just a cynical way of trying to make a show "more funny" or being told when to laugh; they were meant in response to semi-legitimate fears of people feeling lonely as they watched a show alone...
From a programmer's point of view, PHP's advantages seem to be (1) that whole code-embedded-in-HTML thing, ala JSP or ASP (I feel I get about the same benefit through use of Perl's quoting operator) and (2) pretty much every damn library seems to be baked into the typical PHP install, as opposed to requiring trips through CPAN, and then some challenges installing locally, if you don't have admin privileges on the machine you're renting webspace off of.
When I was playing with PHP in 2002, then, the DISadvantages were stuff like well A, the iterator for an array being a component of that array, something that would need to be reset to walk the array a second time, seemed REALLY odd to me B. and then walking a 2D array was just broken... the PHP programmers tried to pass it off as an oversight in documentation, but really, the documentation described something that made logical sense, and there wasn't an acceptable work around for it.
I do wish Perl had an object model that seemed a bit more sane to me.
Well, don't get me wrong: I love Perl and it remains my "goto" language... everything on my own tends to be Perl CGI (and, oy, flatfiles...) but professionally I do Java, lately with a big hunk of "Wicket". (And I worry that my years of exposure to Perl CGI, and the strong mapping with CGI and Hashmaps in the normal HTTP cycle has made me have a hard time getting used to stuff like Wicket that abstracts that away)
My guesstimation that Perl is dwindling was based on A. fewer headhunters who were appearing to be buzzword hunting it and B the cheerleading going on for other languages, from the great mass of PHP users (I started playing w/ PHP before it was ready for primetime, apparently, and while Perl has a lot of quirks, but unlike PHP there are relatively few things that stand out as being that way because it was easier for the implementor of the language to do it that way...) to the folks championing Python (including a recent xkcd) and Ruby (felt a little too much like a Domain Specific Language to me, though being a complete stack was pretty cool.)
So career wise, I dunno, I might be a little too much "street perl" for my own good. But besides being fantastic for small serverside projects and misc. admin-y tasks, it's also a great complement to the stuff like Java, any language that's largely text based.
I guess I really don't get the purpose of the essay. I think the purpose of the essay might be to be a rambling short history of "scripting" languages, and a rundown of various language design choices with "Perl 6 will have [x]" statements.
It was also (IMO) a damn fine read, with lots of intriguing rhetorical flourishes (I also learned a little C. [...] That's because a little C is all there is) and thought-provoking concepts, like how most human languages can express anything, but they differ in what you MUST express.
I think most people have a rough idea where Perl is now (present, though likely slipping as a % of interesting code being written) and where it's going (a guess about how the new perl 6 would be received when it finally shows up) As to TMTOWTDI, I've concluded TOABWTDI (There's Often A Better Way To Do It). Better than Perl, or in general?
If the latter, well sure... there will almost be another way that is better in some subset of the parameters you could use to measure "Betterness". One tradeoff you always have to make is how much time and conceptual effort do you put into optimizing that...
You have a premise that exploration is always better than linearity. I disagree.
Some of the charm of Mario is about giving the user a charming toy to play with. With Galaxies, these toys can be enjoyed in isolation. I had a real sense of I wonder what I'll run into next that Mario 64, for all of its exploration, didn't provide, because each part of a world in Mario 64 or Sunshine had to make more logical sense with the rest of the world.
For some reason I'm thinking of that one level by the docks in Sunshine... it was a pretty interesting level, with that big framework to climb kind of suspended in the sky, and then a little pierside minivillage, and stuff going on with the sea creatures. But I don't think I enjoyed finding out about the different parts of it nearly as much as I did being brought through a typical Galaxies level.
Sucks that you're modded down, man.
Zelda 2 was my favorite, 'til maybe Z:OoT.
The side view fights were a lot of fun.
But I had help from the old player's guide, the one with the black cover.
In the Gamers Quarter forums, someone (Dessgeega I think) pointed out that while most of the levels in, say, Mario 64 are about exploring the landscape and solving the star problem, each challenge in Galaxies tends to be more or less linear, on many of the worlds you really are guided from place to place (since usually the star-travel is a one way trip.) So in a lot of ways it is more of an update to the more classic left-to-right formula than Mario 64 is.
You have to be a mature enough gamer to realize that linear doesn't always mean worse... and personally I like that they still offer some choice in skipping starts and going back to them later.
I like being free of the distraction of other windows myself... I miss maximize when using a Mac. Most people aren't multitasking so much, even if their computer is.
I still think the start button/task bar combination is a more logic division of "new things to do" and "things I'm working on now" than the Dock.
And "install Linux"? Please. At work we run Linux desktops, Red Hat w/ Gnome. How much research would it take to find out why I can't copy and paste image data as well as text? How many decades has Mac and Windows been having clipboards that handled both seamlessly? (Ever since The Unix Haters Handbook pointed out how the clipboard does a fair chunk of what I'd otherwise do with pipes and files, (albeit in a less automatable way...) Anyway, having not being able to have "cut and paste graphics" on my "something I can take for granted list" is a loss.
Actually, iPhone's spell correction makes it difficult to use a lot of common abbreviations, "w/" gets turned to "a/". I guess you can still do "c" and "u" though.
I was an only child in a neighborhood without many kids.
I really liked "Alphie", this game playing robot (circa 1979).
Had him for years, then let some other kids play with him and he broke.
Lesson learned: other kids suck.
I kind of like the old ZZAP!64 method, where they had little portraits expressing the mood of the reviewer about the game. Not much different than stars.
Whoops... I just checked, actually they used % as well, for the various parts and the overall.
Can someone explain to me why http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_expletives was removed with barely a murmur? That was an interesting, relevant, entertaining, popular, and well-cited list.
Wikipedia sucks. They can be so damn zealous with that kind of pruning.
Is there any way to dig up the last version of a deleted article?
Well, let me hedge my bet: GTA also innovates by making that WORK w/ the game overlaying sandbox thing. (More than I can say for that Simpsons Hit and Run or whatever their GTA-ish game was called.
Anyway. getting back to hte main point, I agree; it sounds like Rockstar and their lawyers are being terrible whiners here, with a streak of kettle/pot/black.
Did it ever occur to you that mixing "d2, smb, spyhunter, carmageddon, deathrace2000, syndicate." would actually be a bit of innovation, in and of itself? (actually, what's d2? and smb, super mario)?
Anyway, what GTA has done nearly better than anyone is create a world flexible enough that all this kind of gaming is possible, without an excessive amount of hacking the world and its physics. It's a great sandbox, just to drive around and interact with, and then the missions are all set up in that world, plus some story scenes. That's pretty cool, and no-one does it as well as they do.
Also (and this is all stuff I happened to do on Saturday, which is why it's on my mind)
http://kisrael.com/2007/10/26 is Conway West, where you get to play a little happy face trapped in Conway's Game of Life, with a ghost farting out random particles to add a random element the patterns. Dodge the Life cells and go for points! (made for http://glorioustrainwrecks.com/ Klik-of-the-Month 2 hour game jam)
yeah, I know I'm pimping my own site, sosumi...
Anyway, I was thinking about 1D CA the other week, and realized one of the attractions was that you plot time and make it 2D... but there's no particular reason you can't do the same thing to a 2D CA, like Life...
http://kisrael.com/2007/10/21/ is the result, ethereal blue sculptures made by plotting 2D Life with Time as a physical dimension.
I'm not sure if I learned a lot or proved anything, but it *is* pretty...
Yeah, but Nintendo does it too.
The current bee in my bonnet is the way they cancelled a US version of Puzzle Collection for GC.
So the only reason I have a Free Loader is to play that damn game.
And I guess I still don't buy it. As long as the publishers don't publish in places where they don't have copyright, do they really care if someone can play the software there? So that means we're at least 3 steps removed from the people who might care.