You know, these complaints, why are they using an Intel CPU, the box is going to stagnate, blah blah blah, are all indicitive of a lack of understanding of efficient development and what makes entertainment successful.
First of all, OF COURSE it makes sense to use an Intel CPU, and a system close to a current PC. Developers can make games RIGHT NOW, without the final hardware, using the exact same tools they'll use for their final build, even though the GPU is not burned in silicon yet, and even though no boxes with the finalized spec actually exist yet. We can use MSDS and all the tools we're familiar with on a PC right now, and never have a porting headache at the end. That's a good decision.
As for the so called stagnation, it's misleading to suggest that as technology improves, entertainment improves. Better special effects have not made dramatically better movies. Casablanca, no CGI there, yet one of the best movies made. Likewise, a lot of people will agree that DOOM, a far less technologically advanced game than the Quake series, was a better game than it's successors. Hell, the Infocom interactive text adventures are still listed as favorites by millions worldwide.
A fixed platform with as much power as the X-Box will allow a HUGE number of developers already familiar with Win32 development to jump into creation with only the slightest learning curve for any platform specific differences. Furthermore, with the power available, even when "latest and greatest" chipsets that follow allow for more special features and polygons, XBox developers will be encouraged to work more on the story, the plotline, the involving drive that draws the players into the game, and this will result in better games for years to come.
But what the hell do I know? I'm just a game developer.
Well, here are some short program ideas that may be interesting to your average teenager. Most of them involve games, but are not game development projects themselves, until the final project. (I'm totally assuming some kind of MSVC development environment here, but it can probably be applied to whatever...)
1) Write a program that brute force solves the 12 hole Golf Tee (or peg) mindbender puzzle that you see at restraunts. It should use recursion to discover a solution for any given blank starting hole, and should print out the results in some format that can be read into another program that tests the solutions for correctness (ie. 4>1;6>4;...). Have your students show that the puzzle is solvable from every possible starting position (all 12 peg holes, altough the smart ones will figure out that you only need to test 4) using the software.
2) Have your students write an AI program to play checkers. It should take as an input a player move, then do some lookahead on possible moves, and output a resulting move, while internally updating the board state. Have students test the complexity of lookaheads vs. how often the computer wins.
3) Have students make a graphics program that allows for drag and drop pieces on a game board. Pieces should be bitmaps, and should have the ability to animate under certain conditions, and be added and destroyed (removed from the board). This will teach basic user interface programming, and event handling.
4) (simpler) Have students create a sound playback program that can alter the volume and panning of a sound based on positioning on 2D plane, so that sounds toward the top (rear) of the plane are quieter and the panning is based on the position. Sound playback should be event based, and should be able to be looped, or stopped suddenly. Multiple sounds should mix together currectly.
5) FINAL PROJECT. Have students create a game of Ogres vs. Trolls, a turn based game, where the computer plays one side, and a human plays the other. The game takes place on an arbitrary sized grid, with teams of 16-32 plus a King, and the goal is to kill the King of the other side. Non-King characters should be divided into three classes (for a Rock-Paper-Scissors type effect) and obsticles or special squares should populate the board at random. Each turn, each player has a number of spaces they can move their pieces. Combat is based on two pieces occupying the same square. Sound should be based on the above sound task. Interface should be based on the drag and drop task. The computer should do lookahead and brute force solution finding to mount it's attack, comparing warriors to move against the known rules of battle. Allow up to 5 classmates to work together on this project, and have them divy up the tasks of art, sound, AI, interface, and rules implementation. This should probably take two months to develop, if they work based on their existing code.
Well, one major point of the RIAA's recent attacks are about preserving their artificial Barrier to Entry for new artists... Just listen to Fred Derst's message to that band that decided not to sign to Interscope if you don't believe me.
You may curse Katz and say his topics are irrevelant to this site and the people who read it, but in your fervent Anti-Katz Crusade, perhaps you're missing out on the deeper insights that his admittedly often sensationalistic posts bring to light: That there are other paths besides our own that may be of importance to our futures, and these paths may be worthy of our investigation.
Like the girl in High School who mocked your interests in "dorky computers" while she gabbed about 90210, your foray into what to her was a meaningless and obscure topic probably changed your life for the better. How are we being any different if we fail to see the alternate topics being presented to us, choosing instead to settle into our own comfortable lifestyles, and deciding, like that popular cheerleader, that the world revolves around our interests, rather than our lives being dependant upon the spin of the world?
Good authentication systems don't store the actual data used for authentication (passwords, fingerprints). They store One Way Hashes of this data in a central authentication DB, and usually large enough hashes that doing a brute force search of the hash value space won't return valid values. Sure, you can tap the line and capture these hashes, but ideally, the hashes aren't sent in the clear (they're encrypted), so that's not too much of a problem.
Before spouting off about how terrible these solutions are and how they present a risk to security, you should read Applied Cryptography (which explains how most of these issues are solved problems) and check to see that the vendors of these products have also read the relavent literature.
There is nothing wrong with a system where the producer of an item (music) gets only 6% from the sales of their work. No one put a gun to their head and made them sign a recording contract.
Ha, what a farce. The Record Industry maintains a Barrier to Entry for all artists, which is essentially a legal monopoly. Until independant internet distribution takes off (and I mean REALLY takes off), this is the ONLY way for most artists to get a chance at making any money - sign their souls over to the devil.
There are blind people who wish they could both program in a normal office environment and see a beautiful girl every day. Count your blessings, and buckle down and get to work.
I get as easily distracted as the next hormonally-balanced male, but when push comes to shove, I know my paycheck doesn't come from ogling some hottie, it comes from making those electrons do their magic dance.
Okay, so we should either halt AI research, or halt Genome research for a while, because no one wants an AI computer cracking the genome faster than humans can, and then releasing a killer virus so the AI can more easily take over the world...
No, seriously. Perhaps a big webcast extravaganza with top artists from MP3.com or whatever independant music distribution channel you want to use, and top films from iFilm, and AtomFilms. We can do books too, that are published online. Hell, we'll even be nice guys and let Stephen King in the running for his e-book...
I'm all for it. I should go get sized for a tux now...
Again, on the Eastside (Seattle Area), houses are being sold with a centralized 10BT hub in the same location as the incoming phone line and cable lines. These houses are generally sold with 4 network drops around the house, and I'm guessing Cat5 running through the walls. The builders subcontract to some company in Bellevue (whose name escapes me) but they provide all the connectivity, drops, and functionality for 2-way video cable, etc...
Basically, you just move in, order your high bandwidth connection, plug it in, and you're good to go. I'm guessing you can order/swap out the hub with a 100BT or whatever else suits your fancy...
I want to master the Art well enough that I never have to pour through documentation trying to grok some feature for more than five minutes. To have a thorough enough understanding of the tools, technology, libraries and structure that I can go directly from notion to design to implementation with little to no research necessary for underlying code structure and algorithms.
I don't know enough about Copper Interconnect technology, but I do know this:
About three years ago, I worked as a consultant for an East Coast firm that made SIMOX Wafers, or Silicon-on-Insulator wafers. These are wafers where a layer of SiO2 is formed beneath the surface of the wafer, so you have a layer of Si, then an insulating layer of SiO2, and then the remainder is Si again. These wafers were advantgeous for space applications (radiation resistance due to the insulating layer lowering voltage disturbances from particles that happened to pass through the chip), and for low power applications, since the voltage sink was considerably lower without the huge semiconductor substrate underneath. IBM (who was, and probably still is, a client of these guys) bought one of their implanters and discovered that SIMOX wafers handled Copper interconnects a LOT better than plain old Silicon.
Now the funny thing was, these wafers are really difficult and expensive to make. There's also apparantly an unpublished "secret" to making them that is closely guarded by this company. So I don't know if IBM is willing to let other companies in on the process, or whether places like Intel are out on their own to get the Copper magic up and running...
I think there could be an easy solution to this. The RIAA would simply need to convince hard drive manufacturers to tack a reasonable fee, based on what audio tapes and blank audio CD's are subject to on all *consumer* hard drives (some differentiation should be made for servers, work machines without audio hardware, etc to be fair).
God, this is so completely idiotic. Should I have to pay a tax to Italy on every strainer I buy because it might be used to make pasta? This is such a pathetic money grabbing joke, all of it, that it really sickens me to be a musician sometimes. Music is data, and in the end, it comes out to be pressure waves in air, no matter how you slice it. Why is there such a differentiation as to how the representation of those pressure waves are stored? A toaster that works with filiments burns bread as well as one that has ceramic elements. Storing music on a computer with MP3 format is functionally the same as burning a CD with a dedicated Audio CD burner...
And of course, the final issue is, in all this wicked grabbing for money by the RIAA, how much are artists really seeing? Has any musical group that made under $50k last year really seen a single dime of this money "rescued" from pirates? Why are we letting lawyers run this show, when the artists should be making these decisions?
The Smiley Face was continually mangled, starting about a month after it appeared, and throughout my college career. A few steps away, other groups would usually write messages, including the "Drop Squad" mentioned in another message here...
I'm glad people liked it, and that some of us could do something to liven up the atmosphere at RPI.
And no, I didn't send people to Amos Eaton. That must have been another group. Our target was a room on the 2nd floor of the JEC, just outside the (almost useless) CDC...
Well, I was at RPI from the Fall of 92 to December of 95. Yes, I got out a semester early...
Anyway, there were better hacks on campus than dropping things down the nine story stairwell, and these were two of them:
The JEC engineering building had a walkway around the Northern side, and during my Freshman year, workers were resurfacing it by placing large tiles (red and grey) on the walkway. The tiles were raised above the surface to provide drainage, but were not cemented in place. Only plastic spacers kept the tiles in position. While a bane to any women wearing heels, it was obvious that a strong but narrow bar could easily pry these tiles up, after which they could be rearranged. So, myself and about half a dozen friends sketeched out a plan to reposition the tiles from the red and grey strips that the workmen had laid down to a big smiley face, approximately 8x8 tiles. Then, one morning at about 2 AM, we ran out, moved the tiles, took a picture, and went back to our dorms.
The impressive feat about this prank is that while the workmen broke countless tiles laying down their regular pattern with real tools, we preserved every one we moved. We also posted guards at both ends of the walkway to guard against Public Safety and passerbys. I think one of our guards wound up going home with a passerby she tried to dissuade... Anyway, the next day, there it was, the RPI Smiley Face, for all to see.
The second, smaller scale prank, occured on April Fools day about a year later. Because some rooms were always being closed due to the endless campus contruction, we printed up some room change signs and ran around in the early morning posting them on various classroom and lecture hall doors. Of course, they all directed students to the same room, which in some cases was completly across campus. This room of redirection happened to be where I had a recitation later in the day, and it was quite amusing to see students sitting outside the occupied room, stating "But it said to come here!". I think we even got one professor...
Anyway, these were great pranks, because nobody really got hurt, nothing was destroyed, and people looked back on them and laughed. It was also a nice diversion from drinking, studying, and wondering why the hell we had decided to come to Troy, NY for a higher education...
1) Removing the helmet - okay, what would actually happen here is that he would probably get freezer burn around his neck, nostrils and mouth pretty much instantly. The atmosphere in his suit would undergo rapid decompression when he took off his helmet, and he would probably be forced to exhale by the pressure change. Anyway, all that expanding gas would drop in temperature really really fast, probably coating him with some ice crystals. He's probably going to start bleeding through the skin, eyes, ears, etc, and his lungs would collapse. He'd also be pushed downwards by the jet of gas he created in the upward direction, and of course his helmet would heep moving away from his body. But he'd probably live for a minute or two while he bled out and his body was deprived of oxygen. Under the stress, he might also prespire, which would cause more frost on his skin as the liquid boiled/froze due to the nonexistant pressure.
2) I don't know how long it took the Mir astronauts to seal up the breach when they had their collision, but I distinctly remember them saying "We knew there was a problem when our ears popped." I'm sure there's a maximum flow rate through a hole of that size. But it didn't seem like those guys were in any hurry to fix it...
3) Remember that temperature is a measure of kinetic energy, and that pressure is the real determiner in this situation. Liquids in vacuum would become gas quickly to equalize the vapor pressure - but since there is a huge space of vacuum to fill, the liquid would spread out into a huge gas cloud. Since the pressure of the gas is dropping, the gas would lose temperature (it's not stablizing it's heat by bouncing off nearby molecules) and thus any molecules which bounced into each other may freeze together, causing tiny ice crystals of the aforementioned gas. This all depends on the gas in question of course, since hydrogen will probably just form diatoms, but water may freeze into substantial crystals
A point worth mentioning here is that Good Code Alone Does Not a Good Game Make.
As rude an awakening it may be to some die hard bit pushers, good games are derived from good stories, good art, good balances of tension and release, and good technology. Having a kick ass 3D renderer will make a good technology demo, but a lousy game. This holds true for movies as well. I'm sure we can all name a flick with good effects, but no plot, that left us feeling hollow.
Sadly, you can't just "code up" a good story yet. Perhaps when we can, all the software developers of the world will totally dominate the entertainment industry. Until then, I actually prefer the day to day diversity of talents and interests that I get to work with at my particular game development house.
Try these: http://www.ala.org/alaorg/oif/filt_res.html http://www.ciec.org/SC_appeal/decision.shtml (this one is a little pokey) Oh, and yay for open minded people who like to make their own decisions... -pjf
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, OF COURSE it makes sense to use an Intel CPU, and a system close to a current PC. Developers can make games RIGHT NOW, without the final hardware, using the exact same tools they'll use for their final build, even though the GPU is not burned in silicon yet, and even though no boxes with the finalized spec actually exist yet. We can use MSDS and all the tools we're familiar with on a PC right now, and never have a porting headache at the end. That's a good decision.
As for the so called stagnation, it's misleading to suggest that as technology improves, entertainment improves. Better special effects have not made dramatically better movies. Casablanca, no CGI there, yet one of the best movies made. Likewise, a lot of people will agree that DOOM, a far less technologically advanced game than the Quake series, was a better game than it's successors. Hell, the Infocom interactive text adventures are still listed as favorites by millions worldwide.
A fixed platform with as much power as the X-Box will allow a HUGE number of developers already familiar with Win32 development to jump into creation with only the slightest learning curve for any platform specific differences. Furthermore, with the power available, even when "latest and greatest" chipsets that follow allow for more special features and polygons, XBox developers will be encouraged to work more on the story, the plotline, the involving drive that draws the players into the game, and this will result in better games for years to come.
But what the hell do I know? I'm just a game developer.
1) Write a program that brute force solves the 12 hole Golf Tee (or peg) mindbender puzzle that you see at restraunts. It should use recursion to discover a solution for any given blank starting hole, and should print out the results in some format that can be read into another program that tests the solutions for correctness (ie. 4>1;6>4;...). Have your students show that the puzzle is solvable from every possible starting position (all 12 peg holes, altough the smart ones will figure out that you only need to test 4) using the software.
2) Have your students write an AI program to play checkers. It should take as an input a player move, then do some lookahead on possible moves, and output a resulting move, while internally updating the board state. Have students test the complexity of lookaheads vs. how often the computer wins.
3) Have students make a graphics program that allows for drag and drop pieces on a game board. Pieces should be bitmaps, and should have the ability to animate under certain conditions, and be added and destroyed (removed from the board). This will teach basic user interface programming, and event handling.
4) (simpler) Have students create a sound playback program that can alter the volume and panning of a sound based on positioning on 2D plane, so that sounds toward the top (rear) of the plane are quieter and the panning is based on the position. Sound playback should be event based, and should be able to be looped, or stopped suddenly. Multiple sounds should mix together currectly.
5) FINAL PROJECT. Have students create a game of Ogres vs. Trolls, a turn based game, where the computer plays one side, and a human plays the other. The game takes place on an arbitrary sized grid, with teams of 16-32 plus a King, and the goal is to kill the King of the other side. Non-King characters should be divided into three classes (for a Rock-Paper-Scissors type effect) and obsticles or special squares should populate the board at random. Each turn, each player has a number of spaces they can move their pieces. Combat is based on two pieces occupying the same square. Sound should be based on the above sound task. Interface should be based on the drag and drop task. The computer should do lookahead and brute force solution finding to mount it's attack, comparing warriors to move against the known rules of battle. Allow up to 5 classmates to work together on this project, and have them divy up the tasks of art, sound, AI, interface, and rules implementation. This should probably take two months to develop, if they work based on their existing code.
Good luck!
-pjf
Well, one major point of the RIAA's recent attacks are about preserving their artificial Barrier to Entry for new artists... Just listen to Fred Derst's message to that band that decided not to sign to Interscope if you don't believe me.
Like the girl in High School who mocked your interests in "dorky computers" while she gabbed about 90210, your foray into what to her was a meaningless and obscure topic probably changed your life for the better. How are we being any different if we fail to see the alternate topics being presented to us, choosing instead to settle into our own comfortable lifestyles, and deciding, like that popular cheerleader, that the world revolves around our interests, rather than our lives being dependant upon the spin of the world?
-pjf
Before spouting off about how terrible these solutions are and how they present a risk to security, you should read Applied Cryptography (which explains how most of these issues are solved problems) and check to see that the vendors of these products have also read the relavent literature.
-pjf
Ha, what a farce. The Record Industry maintains a Barrier to Entry for all artists, which is essentially a legal monopoly. Until independant internet distribution takes off (and I mean REALLY takes off), this is the ONLY way for most artists to get a chance at making any money - sign their souls over to the devil.
-Paul Furio
Static Engine
http://www.staticengine.com
There are blind people who wish they could both program in a normal office environment and see a beautiful girl every day. Count your blessings, and buckle down and get to work.
I get as easily distracted as the next hormonally-balanced male, but when push comes to shove, I know my paycheck doesn't come from ogling some hottie, it comes from making those electrons do their magic dance.
Okay, so we should either halt AI research, or halt Genome research for a while, because no one wants an AI computer cracking the genome faster than humans can, and then releasing a killer virus so the AI can more easily take over the world...
I'm all for it. I should go get sized for a tux now...
Basically, you just move in, order your high bandwidth connection, plug it in, and you're good to go. I'm guessing you can order/swap out the hub with a 100BT or whatever else suits your fancy...
I want to master the Art well enough that I never have to pour through documentation trying to grok some feature for more than five minutes. To have a thorough enough understanding of the tools, technology, libraries and structure that I can go directly from notion to design to implementation with little to no research necessary for underlying code structure and algorithms.
About three years ago, I worked as a consultant for an East Coast firm that made SIMOX Wafers, or Silicon-on-Insulator wafers. These are wafers where a layer of SiO2 is formed beneath the surface of the wafer, so you have a layer of Si, then an insulating layer of SiO2, and then the remainder is Si again. These wafers were advantgeous for space applications (radiation resistance due to the insulating layer lowering voltage disturbances from particles that happened to pass through the chip), and for low power applications, since the voltage sink was considerably lower without the huge semiconductor substrate underneath. IBM (who was, and probably still is, a client of these guys) bought one of their implanters and discovered that SIMOX wafers handled Copper interconnects a LOT better than plain old Silicon.
Now the funny thing was, these wafers are really difficult and expensive to make. There's also apparantly an unpublished "secret" to making them that is closely guarded by this company. So I don't know if IBM is willing to let other companies in on the process, or whether places like Intel are out on their own to get the Copper magic up and running...
It would be cheaper (and more fun) to buy whores by the hour, every hour of every day...
God, this is so completely idiotic. Should I have to pay a tax to Italy on every strainer I buy because it might be used to make pasta? This is such a pathetic money grabbing joke, all of it, that it really sickens me to be a musician sometimes. Music is data, and in the end, it comes out to be pressure waves in air, no matter how you slice it. Why is there such a differentiation as to how the representation of those pressure waves are stored? A toaster that works with filiments burns bread as well as one that has ceramic elements. Storing music on a computer with MP3 format is functionally the same as burning a CD with a dedicated Audio CD burner...
And of course, the final issue is, in all this wicked grabbing for money by the RIAA, how much are artists really seeing? Has any musical group that made under $50k last year really seen a single dime of this money "rescued" from pirates? Why are we letting lawyers run this show, when the artists should be making these decisions?
-pjf
Why hasn't someone hacked the RIAA site yet with some slogan like "Making sure you can't do jack unless we stand to make a buck"???
http://www.staticengine.com/news.html
I'm glad people liked it, and that some of us could do something to liven up the atmosphere at RPI.
And no, I didn't send people to Amos Eaton. That must have been another group. Our target was a room on the 2nd floor of the JEC, just outside the (almost useless) CDC...
Anyway, there were better hacks on campus than dropping things down the nine story stairwell, and these were two of them:
The JEC engineering building had a walkway around the Northern side, and during my Freshman year, workers were resurfacing it by placing large tiles (red and grey) on the walkway. The tiles were raised above the surface to provide drainage, but were not cemented in place. Only plastic spacers kept the tiles in position. While a bane to any women wearing heels, it was obvious that a strong but narrow bar could easily pry these tiles up, after which they could be rearranged. So, myself and about half a dozen friends sketeched out a plan to reposition the tiles from the red and grey strips that the workmen had laid down to a big smiley face, approximately 8x8 tiles. Then, one morning at about 2 AM, we ran out, moved the tiles, took a picture, and went back to our dorms.
The impressive feat about this prank is that while the workmen broke countless tiles laying down their regular pattern with real tools, we preserved every one we moved. We also posted guards at both ends of the walkway to guard against Public Safety and passerbys. I think one of our guards wound up going home with a passerby she tried to dissuade... Anyway, the next day, there it was, the RPI Smiley Face, for all to see.
The second, smaller scale prank, occured on April Fools day about a year later. Because some rooms were always being closed due to the endless campus contruction, we printed up some room change signs and ran around in the early morning posting them on various classroom and lecture hall doors. Of course, they all directed students to the same room, which in some cases was completly across campus. This room of redirection happened to be where I had a recitation later in the day, and it was quite amusing to see students sitting outside the occupied room, stating "But it said to come here!". I think we even got one professor...
Anyway, these were great pranks, because nobody really got hurt, nothing was destroyed, and people looked back on them and laughed. It was also a nice diversion from drinking, studying, and wondering why the hell we had decided to come to Troy, NY for a higher education...
You really want everyone to have access to your Credit Card numbers, because that information "wants to be free?"
You really believe that nations without armies are better for it?
-pjf
1) Removing the helmet - okay, what would actually happen here is that he would probably get freezer burn around his neck, nostrils and mouth pretty much instantly. The atmosphere in his suit would undergo rapid decompression when he took off his helmet, and he would probably be forced to exhale by the pressure change. Anyway, all that expanding gas would drop in temperature really really fast, probably coating him with some ice crystals. He's probably going to start bleeding through the skin, eyes, ears, etc, and his lungs would collapse. He'd also be pushed downwards by the jet of gas he created in the upward direction, and of course his helmet would heep moving away from his body. But he'd probably live for a minute or two while he bled out and his body was deprived of oxygen. Under the stress, he might also prespire, which would cause more frost on his skin as the liquid boiled/froze due to the nonexistant pressure.
2) I don't know how long it took the Mir astronauts to seal up the breach when they had their collision, but I distinctly remember them saying "We knew there was a problem when our ears popped." I'm sure there's a maximum flow rate through a hole of that size. But it didn't seem like those guys were in any hurry to fix it...
3) Remember that temperature is a measure of kinetic energy, and that pressure is the real determiner in this situation. Liquids in vacuum would become gas quickly to equalize the vapor pressure - but since there is a huge space of vacuum to fill, the liquid would spread out into a huge gas cloud. Since the pressure of the gas is dropping, the gas would lose temperature (it's not stablizing it's heat by bouncing off nearby molecules) and thus any molecules which bounced into each other may freeze together, causing tiny ice crystals of the aforementioned gas. This all depends on the gas in question of course, since hydrogen will probably just form diatoms, but water may freeze into substantial crystals
The rest is pretty much dead on.
-pjf
A point worth mentioning here is that Good Code Alone Does Not a Good Game Make.
As rude an awakening it may be to some die hard bit pushers, good games are derived from good stories, good art, good balances of tension and release, and good technology. Having a kick ass 3D renderer will make a good technology demo, but a lousy game. This holds true for movies as well. I'm sure we can all name a flick with good effects, but no plot, that left us feeling hollow.
Sadly, you can't just "code up" a good story yet. Perhaps when we can, all the software developers of the world will totally dominate the entertainment industry. Until then, I actually prefer the day to day diversity of talents and interests that I get to work with at my particular game development house.
-pjf
Try these: http://www.ala.org/alaorg/oif/filt_res.html http://www.ciec.org/SC_appeal/decision.shtml (this one is a little pokey) Oh, and yay for open minded people who like to make their own decisions... -pjf
Heh... Yeah, well, maybe SETI@Home isn't really scanning radio frequencies, and there certainly are enough users now for a valid Chineese Lottery...