Heheh - don't laugh. Take a look at VB and C#. They're the same damn language - both CLR languages that are just hacked up to look familiar to users of their respective legacy languages. Look into the function of the "break" statement in C# and you'll see how it's just made for all those people who couldn't be bothered to learn a new syntax.
They don't just compile the same - they look the same, but with different keywords. It's like a series of 2-word #defines were used for the translation. This is like people who drive a Saturn Sky bashing drivers of the Pontiac Solstice.
I hear this a lot... but I wonder how much this is just because coders were stuck with C? I mean, if you use C++ and actually take the time to learn the language and the free tools available (like doing little things like using vectors and smart pointers). I haven't gotten to use 2.0 (or Java 5) yet, but up until there I feel like C# and Java are like being forced back into highschool - everything I know about abstraction and once-and-only-once is now useless because the languages no longer include concepts essential for clean code. Instead, you end up with mindlessly long files doing all sorts of convoluted crap that would be typesafe one-liners in languages with generics or multiple inheritence, and instead are done with piles of unsafe casting and copy+pasted code.
Now, finally, these languages are becoming useful. But as somebody who actually sat down and took the time to _learn_ proper C++ coding, it seems like they re-invented the wheel and left out the tire, axle, and various other important parts in the name of "simplicity". Now, I'm not a C nut that wants pointer arithmetic and manual memory management and crap like that - I just mean having basic expressiveness in the language.
C++ was ugly, and it was notably sorely missing a true "ForEach" function (and don't suggest that fugly Boost hack), but it was a damn sight better than throwing type-safety out the window. If I wanted to cast everything to-and-from Object over and over again, I'd just program in Python.
But I do like the CLI, and properties are fun.
Really, I think of these new languages as C-like scripting engines that just happen to be required to use their complete, thorough libraries. The languages themselves I could take or leave.
The other thing I laugh at about C#/Java - the fact that they go to so much effort to look like C. When I found out about how the "break" statement in C# switch statements worked, it made me laugh my ass off. They've made it a point to sacrifice common sense in favour of familiarity.
So far, Nemerle is looking like what C# should have been.
C# Generics should've been in the language back when it was called Java. The fact that the whole development world jumped over to these JIT platforms before that kind of basic expressiveness was present in the language perplexed and disgusted me. I mean really, for all people call them "C++ without the cruft" missing templates was "C++ without the basic, usable functionality".
Well, the modified version did have it's merits - the touch-ups and remastering was very well done. The problem wasn't just the Greedo changes, but the computer graphics in general. They simply weren't applied consistently. There were tons of scenes where you could obviously see the change from CG to go-motion. The worst culprit was the battle of Yavin, where the death star surface is quite obviously a simple model. One moment there's an impressive space battle of TIEs and X-Wings, and the next is this fugly first-person strafing run across the Death Star surface that looks like it was made by spray-painting a bunch of containers pulled from a recycling bin a uniform powder grey. This scene is just made painful by the stark contrast against the rest of the upgraded special effects.
Judging from their continued success against products such as WordPerfect, Lotus Notes, Lotus 1-2-3, Eudora, NetScape, Icq, Java, Delphi, and a horde of others, I'd say yes - yes it does work.
(yes, I know a lot of those products are not gone yet - but losing ground, and a lot of those products were killed by their own incompetence).
Yes, but Microsoft does not have to compete - Google must show a profit in their endeavors, while MS can burn cash while living off of their OS and Office revenues.
For example, Microsoft search can be adless (or charge less for ads) and hyperfast thanks a server farm 100x Google's size. Hell, they can throw in prizes for prominent users, whatever. They can quite simply outspend their competators. Not saying that's what they will do, but it's what they can do. They can do so until Google no longer exists, and then they own the mindshare and can relax. They've done it before a hundred times.
Plus, they can integrate it into their ownership of the OS and browser markets.
Google has neither an endless mountain of cash, nor a 90% of the browsers, nor 90% of the desktops.
The simple fact is that MS does not have to win - they can lose, and lose by a wide margin (in terms of profits) until Google is starved out of business. And then they win anyways by default.
Because the game isn't about being a bully. It's about fighting back. And meeting girls, pranking teachers, etc. Imho, it's the coolest concept ever for a game, and I'm disgusted by people who think "ooh, Rockstar is making a bad game about beating up kids" without even looking into it (or looking at what your kids are going through at school and realising how this game might make them feel better about it).
Because games already are like movies and mags - there are no laws protecting minors from violent movies, magazines, comic books, etc. - those laws are all self-enforced by their respective industries. Games are getting the sort shrift because parents don't read the ESRB labels like they read the MPAA labels. And because games are a good scapegoat, the way comic books, rock music, and rap used to be.
Imho, if such a law is to be applied, it should be applied accross all industries. The game industry competes with movies and other media - look at the sales figures to see it - they're just chewing into the movie market. By applying the law to this industry and no other, they're giving an unfair advantage. Movie rental places are not told where to stock their violent movies, or what labels to put on them, or who to sell them to, by anyone except the MPAA.
Really, if you let your kid have unfettered access to the TV or the PC, they can see much nastier stuff than what appears in GTA with a little ingenuity. On the PC they can DL something nasty and view it on the DVD player on TV, or on their PC itself.
Focusing on games reveals the law for what it is - an arbitrary sensationalist attack that will be accepted because it harms only a marginalized industry.
Interesting gives karma, funny doesnt, hence people mod interesting instead of funny to approve of funny stuff. And that certainly deserves the honour - it kicked loads of ass.
Whoever made that top 15 list were sad, lonely losers. The only games on that list with decent mulitplayer were Contra, Mario 3, and River City Ransom - and I couldn't find any mention of it anyways.
And Duck Hunt was vastly inferior to Hogan's Alley anyways.
The games that we played the hell out of? Rock'n'ball, Base Wars, Super Dodge Ball, River City, Contra, Archon, etc.
I know, it reminds me of America's Funniest Home Videos that way - marring great footage by having idiotic shmucks comment on it. I wonder how the MXC guys would feel if they knew that Bob freakin' Saget makes them look like 'tards?
Oh, I firmly believe that he's going to do that. Because, of course, they're Microsoft - they've got all the experience forcing everyone else to support their hardware. This is a feature that the PS3 and the Revolution can't touch, because they don't already own operating systems that 99% of new hardware works with.
In all likelihood, ad revenue would not go to new content. Rather, it would likely go to: a) paying the operating costs of WP - serving data isn't cheap. b) adding additional services to Wikipedia that may be more bandwidth intensive - like large files of video or software. c) hiring moderators to clear out wikispam and help edit the wiki into a publishable "stable" form.
Hiring people to add content directly goes against the ideas of wiki, and besides - why should they since free work seems to work well?
Agreed. I always loved machinima, but watch most of my TV/movies on the sofa with my wife. So surfing and hunt-and-pick is out. But a good machinima disc would be fun.
Besides all the firmware and dedicated-hardware notes mentioned above, a lot of older enterprise systems still run on Dos products. Paradox is still in use in a lot of places, and Paradox is Dos based.
Word doc reader is only free to people that already have paid microsoft for their use of the windows platform. That's like saying that your car doors were free with your car - no, the doors came with the car, they were part of what you paid for.
When MS publishes a DOC reader for a free operating system, or releases a win32-compatible operating system for free (with a perpetual license) _then_ the Doc reader will be free.
PDF, on the other hand, can be viewed with free tools.
Hell, even the plotless Quake 3 would make a better movie than Doom 3. The doom style "Marines vs. Monsters" action has been done to death by much better directors. Quake 3 would be pretty simple - it's Mortal Combat meets The Matrix. Just make up some bullshit with starwars-style regeneration tanks, energy shields, nanosurgeons, and performance-enhancing nanites to explain the superhuman feats and the whole "coming back from the dead a dozen times in a single fight".
Quake 2's monsters already got a pretty good movie representation in the abysmal Virus. The movie sucked, but it perfectly captured the "sloppy, messy, ugly cybernetics used to make war machines" feel of the Stroggos.
Well then, fencing has been unmade. Fencing traditionally required 5 judges to judge 2 players fencing. With technological tools, it requires one judge. I don't see how that's a bad thing.
I find it retarded that such FM hacks are necessary anyways. Seriously, I've seen cars made in the past 4 years that come with a built-in casette player! Casettes for shit's sake! Meanwhile, I have never ever seen a car stereo with a freaking auxilliary line-in jack. I just don't get it - you put all this money into speakers, displays, buttons, etc. and can't be bothered to put in a freaking hole??
Am I the only one who, despite detesting such frivolous patent assaults, knowing full well that this one's full of crap, and working at a company that could stand to lose money over this, really hopes he gets away with it anyways?/hates XML
At the prices the nano goes for, I think they could've done well and used glass. This problem is pretty obvious, it would have come up in testing.
Still, it doesn't really impede the function of the device, I don't think the suit has any legs to stand on. To me, the lesson for buyers is "never buy an Apple product at launch".
ianal, iirc, iddqd, there's precedent here - I don't think you can copyright or patent gameplay. The rule is, as far as I understand it, that you can copy every aspect of a game as long as you use no original trademarks, terminology, or content.
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Heheh - don't laugh. Take a look at VB and C#. They're the same damn language - both CLR languages that are just hacked up to look familiar to users of their respective legacy languages. Look into the function of the "break" statement in C# and you'll see how it's just made for all those people who couldn't be bothered to learn a new syntax.
They don't just compile the same - they look the same, but with different keywords. It's like a series of 2-word #defines were used for the translation. This is like people who drive a Saturn Sky bashing drivers of the Pontiac Solstice.
I hear this a lot... but I wonder how much this is just because coders were stuck with C? I mean, if you use C++ and actually take the time to learn the language and the free tools available (like doing little things like using vectors and smart pointers). I haven't gotten to use 2.0 (or Java 5) yet, but up until there I feel like C# and Java are like being forced back into highschool - everything I know about abstraction and once-and-only-once is now useless because the languages no longer include concepts essential for clean code. Instead, you end up with mindlessly long files doing all sorts of convoluted crap that would be typesafe one-liners in languages with generics or multiple inheritence, and instead are done with piles of unsafe casting and copy+pasted code.
Now, finally, these languages are becoming useful. But as somebody who actually sat down and took the time to _learn_ proper C++ coding, it seems like they re-invented the wheel and left out the tire, axle, and various other important parts in the name of "simplicity". Now, I'm not a C nut that wants pointer arithmetic and manual memory management and crap like that - I just mean having basic expressiveness in the language.
C++ was ugly, and it was notably sorely missing a true "ForEach" function (and don't suggest that fugly Boost hack), but it was a damn sight better than throwing type-safety out the window. If I wanted to cast everything to-and-from Object over and over again, I'd just program in Python.
But I do like the CLI, and properties are fun.
Really, I think of these new languages as C-like scripting engines that just happen to be required to use their complete, thorough libraries. The languages themselves I could take or leave.
The other thing I laugh at about C#/Java - the fact that they go to so much effort to look like C. When I found out about how the "break" statement in C# switch statements worked, it made me laugh my ass off. They've made it a point to sacrifice common sense in favour of familiarity.
So far, Nemerle is looking like what C# should have been.
C# Generics should've been in the language back when it was called Java. The fact that the whole development world jumped over to these JIT platforms before that kind of basic expressiveness was present in the language perplexed and disgusted me. I mean really, for all people call them "C++ without the cruft" missing templates was "C++ without the basic, usable functionality".
Well, the modified version did have it's merits - the touch-ups and remastering was very well done. The problem wasn't just the Greedo changes, but the computer graphics in general. They simply weren't applied consistently. There were tons of scenes where you could obviously see the change from CG to go-motion. The worst culprit was the battle of Yavin, where the death star surface is quite obviously a simple model. One moment there's an impressive space battle of TIEs and X-Wings, and the next is this fugly first-person strafing run across the Death Star surface that looks like it was made by spray-painting a bunch of containers pulled from a recycling bin a uniform powder grey. This scene is just made painful by the stark contrast against the rest of the upgraded special effects.
Judging from their continued success against products such as WordPerfect, Lotus Notes, Lotus 1-2-3, Eudora, NetScape, Icq, Java, Delphi, and a horde of others, I'd say yes - yes it does work.
(yes, I know a lot of those products are not gone yet - but losing ground, and a lot of those products were killed by their own incompetence).
Yes, but Microsoft does not have to compete - Google must show a profit in their endeavors, while MS can burn cash while living off of their OS and Office revenues.
For example, Microsoft search can be adless (or charge less for ads) and hyperfast thanks a server farm 100x Google's size. Hell, they can throw in prizes for prominent users, whatever. They can quite simply outspend their competators. Not saying that's what they will do, but it's what they can do. They can do so until Google no longer exists, and then they own the mindshare and can relax. They've done it before a hundred times.
Plus, they can integrate it into their ownership of the OS and browser markets.
Google has neither an endless mountain of cash, nor a 90% of the browsers, nor 90% of the desktops.
The simple fact is that MS does not have to win - they can lose, and lose by a wide margin (in terms of profits) until Google is starved out of business. And then they win anyways by default.
Because the game isn't about being a bully. It's about fighting back. And meeting girls, pranking teachers, etc. Imho, it's the coolest concept ever for a game, and I'm disgusted by people who think "ooh, Rockstar is making a bad game about beating up kids" without even looking into it (or looking at what your kids are going through at school and realising how this game might make them feel better about it).
Because games already are like movies and mags - there are no laws protecting minors from violent movies, magazines, comic books, etc. - those laws are all self-enforced by their respective industries. Games are getting the sort shrift because parents don't read the ESRB labels like they read the MPAA labels. And because games are a good scapegoat, the way comic books, rock music, and rap used to be.
Imho, if such a law is to be applied, it should be applied accross all industries. The game industry competes with movies and other media - look at the sales figures to see it - they're just chewing into the movie market. By applying the law to this industry and no other, they're giving an unfair advantage. Movie rental places are not told where to stock their violent movies, or what labels to put on them, or who to sell them to, by anyone except the MPAA.
Really, if you let your kid have unfettered access to the TV or the PC, they can see much nastier stuff than what appears in GTA with a little ingenuity. On the PC they can DL something nasty and view it on the DVD player on TV, or on their PC itself.
Focusing on games reveals the law for what it is - an arbitrary sensationalist attack that will be accepted because it harms only a marginalized industry.
Interesting gives karma, funny doesnt, hence people mod interesting instead of funny to approve of funny stuff. And that certainly deserves the honour - it kicked loads of ass.
Whoever made that top 15 list were sad, lonely losers. The only games on that list with decent mulitplayer were Contra, Mario 3, and River City Ransom - and I couldn't find any mention of it anyways.
And Duck Hunt was vastly inferior to Hogan's Alley anyways.
The games that we played the hell out of? Rock'n'ball, Base Wars, Super Dodge Ball, River City, Contra, Archon, etc.
Single player is masturbation.
I know, it reminds me of America's Funniest Home Videos that way - marring great footage by having idiotic shmucks comment on it. I wonder how the MXC guys would feel if they knew that Bob freakin' Saget makes them look like 'tards?
Oh, I firmly believe that he's going to do that. Because, of course, they're Microsoft - they've got all the experience forcing everyone else to support their hardware. This is a feature that the PS3 and the Revolution can't touch, because they don't already own operating systems that 99% of new hardware works with.
"I've always complained that Wikipedia was infected with a socialist bias"
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Nonsense. I've seen numerous posts that have a capitalist bias instead of the usual socialist one. They usually read something like this:
<a href="http://pharmacy-cheap-phentermine.6x.to">ch
For some reason the evil socialists delete posts like that. Darn idealogues.
In all likelihood, ad revenue would not go to new content. Rather, it would likely go to:
a) paying the operating costs of WP - serving data isn't cheap.
b) adding additional services to Wikipedia that may be more bandwidth intensive - like large files of video or software.
c) hiring moderators to clear out wikispam and help edit the wiki into a publishable "stable" form.
Hiring people to add content directly goes against the ideas of wiki, and besides - why should they since free work seems to work well?
Agreed. I always loved machinima, but watch most of my TV/movies on the sofa with my wife. So surfing and hunt-and-pick is out. But a good machinima disc would be fun.
Besides all the firmware and dedicated-hardware notes mentioned above, a lot of older enterprise systems still run on Dos products. Paradox is still in use in a lot of places, and Paradox is Dos based.
Word doc reader is only free to people that already have paid microsoft for their use of the windows platform. That's like saying that your car doors were free with your car - no, the doors came with the car, they were part of what you paid for.
When MS publishes a DOC reader for a free operating system, or releases a win32-compatible operating system for free (with a perpetual license) _then_ the Doc reader will be free.
PDF, on the other hand, can be viewed with free tools.
Yeah, I find that funny too - all this talk about space planes, mini-shuttles, etc. and now giving up and going back to the old big missiles?
Sounds like the whole shuttle thing could be described as One False Step for Mankind.
Hell, even the plotless Quake 3 would make a better movie than Doom 3. The doom style "Marines vs. Monsters" action has been done to death by much better directors. Quake 3 would be pretty simple - it's Mortal Combat meets The Matrix. Just make up some bullshit with starwars-style regeneration tanks, energy shields, nanosurgeons, and performance-enhancing nanites to explain the superhuman feats and the whole "coming back from the dead a dozen times in a single fight".
Quake 2's monsters already got a pretty good movie representation in the abysmal Virus. The movie sucked, but it perfectly captured the "sloppy, messy, ugly cybernetics used to make war machines" feel of the Stroggos.
Oh, I know I can buy one - but I mean I've never seen anyone who _owns_ one. By that, I mean that it's really rare for no good reason.
Well then, fencing has been unmade. Fencing traditionally required 5 judges to judge 2 players fencing. With technological tools, it requires one judge. I don't see how that's a bad thing.
I find it retarded that such FM hacks are necessary anyways. Seriously, I've seen cars made in the past 4 years that come with a built-in casette player! Casettes for shit's sake! Meanwhile, I have never ever seen a car stereo with a freaking auxilliary line-in jack. I just don't get it - you put all this money into speakers, displays, buttons, etc. and can't be bothered to put in a freaking hole??
Am I the only one who, despite detesting such frivolous patent assaults, knowing full well that this one's full of crap, and working at a company that could stand to lose money over this, really hopes he gets away with it anyways? /hates XML
At the prices the nano goes for, I think they could've done well and used glass. This problem is pretty obvious, it would have come up in testing.
Still, it doesn't really impede the function of the device, I don't think the suit has any legs to stand on. To me, the lesson for buyers is "never buy an Apple product at launch".
ianal, iirc, iddqd, there's precedent here - I don't think you can copyright or patent gameplay. The rule is, as far as I understand it, that you can copy every aspect of a game as long as you use no original trademarks, terminology, or content.