I always wonder why people fixate on D&D as the only PnP RPG? I mean, it's a solid game, but it seems to be stuck in the past. I played a fair number of Steve Jackson, White Wolf, West End, and Palladium titles, and D&D seems to be stuck in the past like the Palladium ones.
I wanna see a Fading Suns MMO. Or even better, Paranoia.
Actually, that could be an interesting approach - convert each character into a PNG, with the "alt" text of the first character being the text of the paragraph. No Flash, and it would (technically) support lynx/vision impared users. Would be annoying for embedded links though.
With that approach, you could have multicoloured text, drop shadow, and other graphical effects not normally available in a font.
Of course, it would be massively annoying for various reasons (not selectable text, not searchable, not resizable) but it would still be better than flash.
I wouldn't be surprised, then, to hear them extend this requirement to such middleware server providers - anything that could be considered such a proxy. Expect WoW to be legally required to log the time, source, and destination of all player-to-player communications.
Re:Half ton of bio-mechanically enhanced armor-cla
on
When Halo Met DOA
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· Score: 1
Battle Arena Toshinden series had a riflemen in the later games - in the second game he was a hidden character - a mad vagrant named Vermillion wielding a shotgun and pistol. In the 3rd game they lost a lot of the charm by converting him into some Bond-esque spy villain.
Of course, BAT was a horribly balanced and primitively modeled mess, but it was a fun fighter back when the only other 3d fighter was Virtua Fighter (which I found dull).
The main educated, wealthy people who let commercials tell them what to buy are children/teenagers, which brings us back to the Lowest Common Denominator. And a person can be very well off and still be gullible and bereft of good taste.
Re:Half ton of bio-mechanically enhanced armor-cla
on
When Halo Met DOA
·
· Score: 1
I remember that ending. I was so startled at the very idea of it that I just stood there while he shot me through the head.
Afaik, it's specifically logging info they want - this ip connects to that ip on such and such port, this dynamic ip is that user, this email header was sent to that address. I doubt they want the ISP to store every packet that comes through.
Yes, it will still be an expensive PITA, but probably no worse than running a Usenet service.
All the malls are owned by Cadillac Fairview. For example, your area probably has a recently built mall called "X mills" where X is the region it is located. The ads have a cute little cartoon woman, parts of which are made of products. The music is catchy swing with some guy going "bah bah". There are similar ads on bus stops.
This is a mall chain. I've seen the one near Chicago, I've seen the one in Vaughan (Toronto). They're all the same.
Meanwhile, the last-gen of malls also is all the same - just a little smaller, but still the same damn Reitmans, semi-detached Old Navy, and La Senza as every other mall.
This is why I shop downtown, in an old run-down mall that is having a pleasant resurgence. Despite being laid out like a cold-war rat-maze, it at least has different stores (plus a kickass farmers' market).
Unfortunately, there are two games stores there. One is a discount store selling severely outdated stuff they obviously bought bulk, and the other is an overpriced poor quality wannabe-EB.
I'm thinking that, with the movie-style blockbuster games coming out where everything must be a triple-A megagame, the indies will end up stuck in internet-only distribution.
Yep. Just remember, unless you watch an expensive for-pay commercial free channel like HBO, then to the TV producers, you are not the customer. The advertisers are the customer. You are what they sell to the advertisers.
You, the viewer, are the product. And the viewers that are more easily bent by commercials are a far better quality product than the skeptics. Thus, TVs focus on the lowest common denominator. It's not that the LCD is a larger proportion of the populace - its that they're a higher quality product to sell to advertisers.
That is why TV is trash - eyeballs are _not_ equal. Gullible eyeballs are worth more money.
Yes, but this isn't like water pollution. We're throwing several orders of magnitude less crap into several orders of magnitude more volume. This is one of those cases where you don't have to deal in absolutes like "we will eventually fill it, we said the same about pollution" - at our current rate, filling it is the least of our worries.
Basically, by the time that we have enough industry that creating space pollution is a serious problem, we should have the technology to start thinking about junk removal. Right now, we have neither the ability to cause significant pollution, nor the capability to avoid it, so it's doubly moot.
Actually, scuttlemonkey just grabs the articles by author in alphabetical order. If it's not * * Beatles Beatles, then it's someone whose nick begins with "a".
Yep. I wish people were better acquainted with how mindbogglingly huge space is. The amount of volume in near earth orbit means that worrying about this stuff is the height of ridiculousness. Even if you're dumping a lot in the exact_same orbit, you'd still be hard pressed to see anything.
Re:I guess it depends on where you came from
on
Java Is So 90s
·
· Score: 1
Nice to see someone gets my point - that a 100% standards-compliant C++ compiler with some a solid set of Java-like object-oriented libraries designed to be 100% cross-platform would be _much_less_ work than Sun spent implementing Java. The loss would be the few actual language-level features where Java actually beats C++ (linguistic-level threading, easy imports, introspection, etc.) and the gains would be (a) supporting a standard language, (b) easy access to unsafe coding for performance-oriented applications, (c) not needing the memory/space monster of the VM, (d) faster.
However, it's far too late for all this. Java has taken hold.
While C++ can't be compile-once-run-anywhere, there's no intrinsic reason it can't be write-once-compile-for-anywhere.
Just make a custom "java-like" flag for the compiler that makes it throw warnings whenever you use unsafe or non-platform-agnostic structures such as arrays (instead of vectors), pointers (as opposed to the various safe forms of pointers), and platform-dependant types (int instead of int32).
Fine. End limited -legal- liability. Just not -fiscal- liability. Allow a judge to fine the shareholders directly. Thus, if a business is an abysmal failure, then the shareholders maintain their economic condom. Conversely, if a corporation behaves in a manner that could only be described as criminal and destructive, then a judge can hold accountable it's financiers.
Ohh, centrifugal force is the term for the outward pulling that occurs when you spin something - the point is that said force does not exist. Rather, when spinning an object, the outer points are constantly accelerating towards the middle in order to maintain that rotation. Hence, the term is "centripetal acceleration". The "force" is the tension of the object holding everything together.
Re:I guess it depends on where you came from
on
Java Is So 90s
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
People always blame C++, but I still think that the problems with C++ come from two sources, neither of which are the language itself: 1) lack of a single, dominant library for all the things that Java provides (like serialization, gui, etc.) and generally fugly APIs for the ones that are mainstream. 2) coders who treated C++ as "C, with some new features" rather than treating it like "Java where you can import C functions". Use vectors, smart pointers, etc. and the language miraculously changes from fugly to pleasant.
If Java was just a C++ library and a good free compiler, we might have dodged this whole mess. The only loss would be applets (not gonna run untrusted C++ code on the browser) - and who would miss those? Really, who uses the hardware-agnosticism of Java anyways? If the hypothetical "Java Library for C++" was created to be platform agnostic (just as Java is) then you'd have the same functionality in C++ - after all, it's pretty easy to write C++ code that will compile/run everywhere if your libraries work the same everywhere, and your compilers actually follow the standards.
Re:Torvalds is right. Avoid GNOME use KDE!
on
Torvalds Says 'Use KDE'
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Honestly, I think the best approach would be to follow an approach similar to apple and MS before MS jumped on the VM bandwagon. Running a VM is a huge and unnecessary overhead, since developing in C# isnt' really that much easier than any other OO language if you're using a solid safe library.
Just use C++ - and have strict code conventions. No arrays except for optimized internal loops - only safe vectors. No unmanaged "new"s - only refcounted or auto_ptrs for heap objects. With auto_ptrs, no pointers - only weak references. Pick a common C++ library to use for common problems that aren't in the standard library (eg. XML serialization).
Then you can take advantage of OSS and do platform-specific compiles and get optimal speeds, but also get the safety and ease provided by VMs.
Then, pick a standard scripting platform. Think lightweight - monsters like Python and even worse Mono/.NET have too much overhead. Something more like TCL or Lua. Use that platform for scripted interactions, serialization, and quick config tools. Sure, it would be slower than C#, but if you need speed you should be coding natively anyways.
Switching to a VM means you always have a bloated VM running, and that keeps your platform off of lighter hardware when there's no reason to be. Except for introspection, C++ has most of the tools available to these VM-langauges at a fraction of the speed/memory cost. VMs fill a space between native apps and scripting languages that generally isn't necessary for desktop apps.
The only real advantage I see to standardising on.NET/Mono is language-agnosticism, since multiple languages can target the platform.
It was ported. There was a lame version of Battlezone for N64. The singleplayer was there, but the multiplayer was crippled.
Definitely deserves a remake or knock-off or something. These days all the FPS/RTS hybrids are teamplay-based, not "you command an AI army from FPS perspective" which is imho more interesting than just being a soldier in some commander's game of Natural Selection.
That is the difference between Engineering and Design. Engineering implies accountability. Being an engineer means "if this cocks up, it will be my fault".
Personally, I'm quite happy to work in software *design* instead of software *engineering*. They don't pay me enough for that kind of blame.
How much you want to bet that the last Slashdot article on this company was an attempt to build up some buzz and drive up share values before the buyout?
Slashdot Mirror
Good point. Usually there is the implicit "higher-efficiency = less pollution" but here that's not necessarily the case.
Torg - God, that would be perfect. Forgot about that one. Let the fantasy nuts, the superhero nuts, the sci-fi nuts, and so on all duke it out.
I always wonder why people fixate on D&D as the only PnP RPG? I mean, it's a solid game, but it seems to be stuck in the past. I played a fair number of Steve Jackson, White Wolf, West End, and Palladium titles, and D&D seems to be stuck in the past like the Palladium ones.
I wanna see a Fading Suns MMO. Or even better, Paranoia.
Actually, that could be an interesting approach - convert each character into a PNG, with the "alt" text of the first character being the text of the paragraph. No Flash, and it would (technically) support lynx/vision impared users. Would be annoying for embedded links though.
With that approach, you could have multicoloured text, drop shadow, and other graphical effects not normally available in a font.
Of course, it would be massively annoying for various reasons (not selectable text, not searchable, not resizable) but it would still be better than flash.
I wouldn't be surprised, then, to hear them extend this requirement to such middleware server providers - anything that could be considered such a proxy. Expect WoW to be legally required to log the time, source, and destination of all player-to-player communications.
Battle Arena Toshinden series had a riflemen in the later games - in the second game he was a hidden character - a mad vagrant named Vermillion wielding a shotgun and pistol. In the 3rd game they lost a lot of the charm by converting him into some Bond-esque spy villain.
Of course, BAT was a horribly balanced and primitively modeled mess, but it was a fun fighter back when the only other 3d fighter was Virtua Fighter (which I found dull).
The main educated, wealthy people who let commercials tell them what to buy are children/teenagers, which brings us back to the Lowest Common Denominator. And a person can be very well off and still be gullible and bereft of good taste.
I remember that ending. I was so startled at the very idea of it that I just stood there while he shot me through the head.
The game only gives you one try.
Afaik, it's specifically logging info they want - this ip connects to that ip on such and such port, this dynamic ip is that user, this email header was sent to that address. I doubt they want the ISP to store every packet that comes through.
Yes, it will still be an expensive PITA, but probably no worse than running a Usenet service.
All the malls are owned by Cadillac Fairview. For example, your area probably has a recently built mall called "X mills" where X is the region it is located. The ads have a cute little cartoon woman, parts of which are made of products. The music is catchy swing with some guy going "bah bah". There are similar ads on bus stops.
This is a mall chain. I've seen the one near Chicago, I've seen the one in Vaughan (Toronto). They're all the same.
Meanwhile, the last-gen of malls also is all the same - just a little smaller, but still the same damn Reitmans, semi-detached Old Navy, and La Senza as every other mall.
This is why I shop downtown, in an old run-down mall that is having a pleasant resurgence. Despite being laid out like a cold-war rat-maze, it at least has different stores (plus a kickass farmers' market).
Unfortunately, there are two games stores there. One is a discount store selling severely outdated stuff they obviously bought bulk, and the other is an overpriced poor quality wannabe-EB.
I'm thinking that, with the movie-style blockbuster games coming out where everything must be a triple-A megagame, the indies will end up stuck in internet-only distribution.
Yep. Just remember, unless you watch an expensive for-pay commercial free channel like HBO, then to the TV producers, you are not the customer. The advertisers are the customer. You are what they sell to the advertisers.
You, the viewer, are the product. And the viewers that are more easily bent by commercials are a far better quality product than the skeptics. Thus, TVs focus on the lowest common denominator. It's not that the LCD is a larger proportion of the populace - its that they're a higher quality product to sell to advertisers.
That is why TV is trash - eyeballs are _not_ equal. Gullible eyeballs are worth more money.
Yes, but this isn't like water pollution. We're throwing several orders of magnitude less crap into several orders of magnitude more volume. This is one of those cases where you don't have to deal in absolutes like "we will eventually fill it, we said the same about pollution" - at our current rate, filling it is the least of our worries.
Basically, by the time that we have enough industry that creating space pollution is a serious problem, we should have the technology to start thinking about junk removal. Right now, we have neither the ability to cause significant pollution, nor the capability to avoid it, so it's doubly moot.
Actually, scuttlemonkey just grabs the articles by author in alphabetical order. If it's not * * Beatles Beatles, then it's someone whose nick begins with "a".
Sounds like the Narwhal equivalent of dogs sniffing each other's asses.
Still, notice the nick. Starts with all 'a's. I need to change my nick to "* * * aaronson" if I want to get posted.
Yep. I wish people were better acquainted with how mindbogglingly huge space is. The amount of volume in near earth orbit means that worrying about this stuff is the height of ridiculousness. Even if you're dumping a lot in the exact_same orbit, you'd still be hard pressed to see anything.
Nice to see someone gets my point - that a 100% standards-compliant C++ compiler with some a solid set of Java-like object-oriented libraries designed to be 100% cross-platform would be _much_less_ work than Sun spent implementing Java. The loss would be the few actual language-level features where Java actually beats C++ (linguistic-level threading, easy imports, introspection, etc.) and the gains would be (a) supporting a standard language, (b) easy access to unsafe coding for performance-oriented applications, (c) not needing the memory/space monster of the VM, (d) faster.
However, it's far too late for all this. Java has taken hold.
While C++ can't be compile-once-run-anywhere, there's no intrinsic reason it can't be write-once-compile-for-anywhere.
Just make a custom "java-like" flag for the compiler that makes it throw warnings whenever you use unsafe or non-platform-agnostic structures such as arrays (instead of vectors), pointers (as opposed to the various safe forms of pointers), and platform-dependant types (int instead of int32).
Fine. End limited -legal- liability. Just not -fiscal- liability. Allow a judge to fine the shareholders directly. Thus, if a business is an abysmal failure, then the shareholders maintain their economic condom. Conversely, if a corporation behaves in a manner that could only be described as criminal and destructive, then a judge can hold accountable it's financiers.
Why the CEO? Stop the buck at the top. End unlimited liability and go after the CEO's boss - the shareholders.
Ohh, centrifugal force is the term for the outward pulling that occurs when you spin something - the point is that said force does not exist. Rather, when spinning an object, the outer points are constantly accelerating towards the middle in order to maintain that rotation. Hence, the term is "centripetal acceleration". The "force" is the tension of the object holding everything together.
People always blame C++, but I still think that the problems with C++ come from two sources, neither of which are the language itself:
1) lack of a single, dominant library for all the things that Java provides (like serialization, gui, etc.) and generally fugly APIs for the ones that are mainstream.
2) coders who treated C++ as "C, with some new features" rather than treating it like "Java where you can import C functions". Use vectors, smart pointers, etc. and the language miraculously changes from fugly to pleasant.
If Java was just a C++ library and a good free compiler, we might have dodged this whole mess. The only loss would be applets (not gonna run untrusted C++ code on the browser) - and who would miss those? Really, who uses the hardware-agnosticism of Java anyways? If the hypothetical "Java Library for C++" was created to be platform agnostic (just as Java is) then you'd have the same functionality in C++ - after all, it's pretty easy to write C++ code that will compile/run everywhere if your libraries work the same everywhere, and your compilers actually follow the standards.
Honestly, I think the best approach would be to follow an approach similar to apple and MS before MS jumped on the VM bandwagon. Running a VM is a huge and unnecessary overhead, since developing in C# isnt' really that much easier than any other OO language if you're using a solid safe library.
.NET/Mono is language-agnosticism, since multiple languages can target the platform.
Just use C++ - and have strict code conventions. No arrays except for optimized internal loops - only safe vectors. No unmanaged "new"s - only refcounted or auto_ptrs for heap objects. With auto_ptrs, no pointers - only weak references. Pick a common C++ library to use for common problems that aren't in the standard library (eg. XML serialization).
Then you can take advantage of OSS and do platform-specific compiles and get optimal speeds, but also get the safety and ease provided by VMs.
Then, pick a standard scripting platform. Think lightweight - monsters like Python and even worse Mono/.NET have too much overhead. Something more like TCL or Lua. Use that platform for scripted interactions, serialization, and quick config tools. Sure, it would be slower than C#, but if you need speed you should be coding natively anyways.
Switching to a VM means you always have a bloated VM running, and that keeps your platform off of lighter hardware when there's no reason to be. Except for introspection, C++ has most of the tools available to these VM-langauges at a fraction of the speed/memory cost. VMs fill a space between native apps and scripting languages that generally isn't necessary for desktop apps.
The only real advantage I see to standardising on
It was ported. There was a lame version of Battlezone for N64. The singleplayer was there, but the multiplayer was crippled.
Definitely deserves a remake or knock-off or something. These days all the FPS/RTS hybrids are teamplay-based, not "you command an AI army from FPS perspective" which is imho more interesting than just being a soldier in some commander's game of Natural Selection.
That is the difference between Engineering and Design. Engineering implies accountability. Being an engineer means "if this cocks up, it will be my fault".
Personally, I'm quite happy to work in software *design* instead of software *engineering*. They don't pay me enough for that kind of blame.
How much you want to bet that the last Slashdot article on this company was an attempt to build up some buzz and drive up share values before the buyout?