Utter rubbish. Robot Wars is a full-fledged competition with rules too. The people build their own robots according to the rules, and battle it out. I never heard any complaints of rigging, and it's certainly not a show for kids... more a show for geeks, some of whom are kids.
Fact is, the UK got this show *way* before you guys, and Battlebots is just a recompilation of the exact same source code. Not a single new idea in there. You don't even have the adorable Philipa Forrester presenting.
UK: 1
USA: 0
Re:Software is just software
on
Men of Zeal
·
· Score: 2
Oh, please, save us from this "if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem" bullshit. Not only is it a statement which serves no purpose other than to divide people into factions, but it is also demonstrably untrue. The idea that "for evil to prevail, good men must merely do nothing" might be true... but to recast this into the idea that "if good men do nothing, they are evil" is logically incorrect, and alienates all those good men from your cause.
Making chips these days is just like printing T-shirts. You design it (that's the hard bit), you send the design to a chip maker, they make screens, they run you off a load. You want more later, they get the screens out of the file and run you off some more. The economics are the same, too. 1,000 chips might cost $500 a piece but 1,000,000 will cost a lot less.
Which means that everyone these days can make chips on a shoestring. Well, not an Open Source shoestring, but in the scale of corporate financing it's about as expensive to make a chip today as it is to buy a fleet of 10 cars, development costs notwithstanding.
"Ran away screaming when I saw their code" would be the decider for me. I wouldn't rely on the Dolphin being a success. It might be, it might not be, but don't bet your career on it!
On the other hand, it might be fun to taste the games industry for a few years. Please try and talk to some people at the company, IN PRIVATE, before you commit. Very Big Game Makers tend to be Fascist Bastards.
So does anyone here really believe that Napster were not engaged in vicarious infringment - or, in other words, do they believe that Napster did not intend their software to be primarily used to copy MP3s of commercial music?
This isn't actually true - an expert can spot fake photos, and even non-experts can spot CGI in movies. Adding real-time CGI into TV broadcasts is going to be bloody obvious to those people.
Why not just ship a big fscking 24x18 poster with the letters RTFM? They could do a bulk deal, and ship it with every piece of software they sold, and people STILL wouldn't listen.
There's that cool real-time processing stuff (RT Linux, ISTR) which runs Linux as a non-real-time subtask, thus giving guaranteed latencies even if you are running cron, et al. All you need on top of that is decent drivers.
I can't imagine any decent sound support on any multi-user, multi-application, paged OS. But with this real-time stuff it can all happen in the background with guaranteed QOS. And that is getting towards proaudio.
I'm not a Mac advocate - I hate the fscking things - but my iMac gives me 32 SAMPLE latency at 44kHz - that's well under ONE msec. Sub 4 msec is good on a PC; one msec is what proaudio requires; and saying that Linux is already beating the MacOS is just FUD.
If "gets it right" means "adds 10% to the R&D costs to support the tiny fraction of the population who are techno-savvy" then you need to go to business school.
It simply makes no economic sense, at this time, to offer ethernet on TiVo. When DSL has a larger market penetration, this will change.
This demonstrates well the utter bias of Slashdot towards PC games. Have people here never heard of Playstation or N64? Of beat-em-ups and platform games? Do they not realize that console games outsell PC games 10 to 1, or that the games industry (the *console* games industry, that is) is bigger than the movie industry?
I guess not; Slashdot has never been huge on reality checks.
Anyone heard of XP (eXtreme Progamming)? See e.g. "eXtreme Programming eXplained" by Kent Beck. One of XP's ten "rules" are "only work 9 to 5".
I acknowledge many of the problems this guy is talking about, and XP is a promising way of making this work in the real-world of software schedules. Also, some organizations (e.g. Data Connection Ltd, a former employer of mine) have amazing setups. Code review is mandatory - they don't try and tart it up as "objectives" either, it's part of the discipline of working professionally. It confounds me how many paid programmers don't even understand the meaning of the words "professional" and "discipline"!
Incidentally, I don't hold with his notion that a thousand developers adding features willy-nilly is better than a tight team with a coherent design philosophy, but - hey - you can hide all that crap behind a user interface and no-one's any the wiser. Hmm. Didn't Microsoft try something similar?
[The opinions stated in this article are not endorsed in any way by Data Connection Ltd. Just thought I'd make that clear!]
I guess the difference is that in the DVD player there is a key, which is licensed from the DVD-CCA. DeCSS needs no such key - it's like picking a lock.
If you get into someone's house by picking their locks, it's breaking and entering. If you do it by using their key, it's not. That's the difference between circumvention and plain use.
Slashdot Mirror
Fact is, the UK got this show *way* before you guys, and Battlebots is just a recompilation of the exact same source code. Not a single new idea in there. You don't even have the adorable Philipa Forrester presenting.
UK: 1
USA: 0
Oh, please, save us from this "if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem" bullshit. Not only is it a statement which serves no purpose other than to divide people into factions, but it is also demonstrably untrue. The idea that "for evil to prevail, good men must merely do nothing" might be true ... but to recast this into the idea that "if good men do nothing, they are evil" is logically incorrect, and alienates all those good men from your cause.
Mind you, he'd have to survive assassination by the CIA first ...
Which means that everyone these days can make chips on a shoestring. Well, not an Open Source shoestring, but in the scale of corporate financing it's about as expensive to make a chip today as it is to buy a fleet of 10 cars, development costs notwithstanding.
Bzzzt! Wrong! See "The Design and Evolution of C++" by Stroustrup for a full explanation.
Well, if you decide to take the job, good luck! Hope you enjoy it.
for (int ii = 0; ii < 4; ii++)
...
...
{
}
for (int ii = 0; ii < 8; ii++)
{
}
Should compile without errors.
for (int ii = 0; ii should compile without errors.
On the other hand, it might be fun to taste the games industry for a few years. Please try and talk to some people at the company, IN PRIVATE, before you commit. Very Big Game Makers tend to be Fascist Bastards.
This is the sort of honesty that I really like.
So does anyone here really believe that Napster were not engaged in vicarious infringment - or, in other words, do they believe that Napster did not intend their software to be primarily used to copy MP3s of commercial music?
This isn't actually true - an expert can spot fake photos, and even non-experts can spot CGI in movies. Adding real-time CGI into TV broadcasts is going to be bloody obvious to those people.
Why not just ship a big fscking 24x18 poster with the letters RTFM? They could do a bulk deal, and ship it with every piece of software they sold, and people STILL wouldn't listen.
Regarding the floating-point stuff, presumably the problem is things like divide-by-zero exception ... well, can't you mask that?
Er ... because Slashdot doesn't recognize the console industry, perhaps? Go fuck yourself, AC wimp.
You're right; I forgot that. Too enamoured with the idea of only working 9 to 5 to remember ;)
There's that cool real-time processing stuff (RT Linux, ISTR) which runs Linux as a non-real-time subtask, thus giving guaranteed latencies even if you are running cron, et al. All you need on top of that is decent drivers.
I can't imagine any decent sound support on any multi-user, multi-application, paged OS. But with this real-time stuff it can all happen in the background with guaranteed QOS. And that is getting towards proaudio.
I'm not a Mac advocate - I hate the fscking things - but my iMac gives me 32 SAMPLE latency at 44kHz - that's well under ONE msec. Sub 4 msec is good on a PC; one msec is what proaudio requires; and saying that Linux is already beating the MacOS is just FUD.
No, it doesn't. The keys (there are hundreds of them) are encoded in the ROM of the DVD player.
It simply makes no economic sense, at this time, to offer ethernet on TiVo. When DSL has a larger market penetration, this will change.
This demonstrates well the utter bias of Slashdot towards PC games. Have people here never heard of Playstation or N64? Of beat-em-ups and platform games? Do they not realize that console games outsell PC games 10 to 1, or that the games industry (the *console* games industry, that is) is bigger than the movie industry?
I guess not; Slashdot has never been huge on reality checks.
I acknowledge many of the problems this guy is talking about, and XP is a promising way of making this work in the real-world of software schedules. Also, some organizations (e.g. Data Connection Ltd, a former employer of mine) have amazing setups. Code review is mandatory - they don't try and tart it up as "objectives" either, it's part of the discipline of working professionally. It confounds me how many paid programmers don't even understand the meaning of the words "professional" and "discipline"!
Incidentally, I don't hold with his notion that a thousand developers adding features willy-nilly is better than a tight team with a coherent design philosophy, but - hey - you can hide all that crap behind a user interface and no-one's any the wiser. Hmm. Didn't Microsoft try something similar?
[The opinions stated in this article are not endorsed in any way by Data Connection Ltd. Just thought I'd make that clear!]
If you get into someone's house by picking their locks, it's breaking and entering. If you do it by using their key, it's not. That's the difference between circumvention and plain use.
Look up "circumvent".