Compare and Contrast the Turner Diaries and Atlas Shrugged.
If you can complete this project without your brain melting, you get a free straight-jacket./not that I'm saying that Atlas Shrugged is anywhere near on the level of monstrosity as The Turner Diaries - I'm just picking out two books that tend to make people wince at the very thought of their existence.
Well, it's not really fair to include C in there - since _everything_ is tricky in C. C is good because it's simple, fast, and universal... the fact that it is dangerous and hard has never stopped anyone from using it. Likewise, that same fact won't stop people from using it for heavily parallelized apps.
The problem is the middling languages that are designed to be _easy_ and have none of the aforementioned advantages of C are just about as bad as C for concurrency.
And Forth's manual stack-loading is practically 1:1 to the underlying OS too, why don't you use that? Garbage collection has nothing to do with the underlying OS, but we keep it around.
Mapping 1:1 to the underlying OS is not the be-all and end-all of linguistic constructs. Consider Actors model languages, or dataflow-model languages - or the native rendezvous concepts from Ada. Im not saying that any of these are ideal approaches (I hate Ada, for example) - Im just saying that Algol-descended languages were designed to model procedure and formulas... so modelling concurrency doesnt come naturally to them.
Even worst-case-scenario, minimally-threaded workstation software can still allow for manual multitasking - if the render-loop of your 3D-modelling app is only using a small amount of the available processor, then at least the others remain available for continuing to work in the main app.
The real problem is that procedural languages are fugly for working in on this stuff. Even the "modern" commercial languages like Java/DotNet still are somewhat cumbersome in the world of threading, compared to other languages where the threading metaphors are deeper in teh logic (or more mutable languages, like Lisp, where creating new core metaphors is trivial).
I find that dawn generally breaks when somebody asks "Hey, I can rip my CDs for my music collection for my iPod - why can't I do the same thing with my DVDs and my iPod Video?"
Well, a lot of modders are having fun with DarkPlaces and the other various Quake-derivatives opened by Id. Witness Alien Arena, Nexuiz, WarSow, Tremulous, OpenArena, just to name a few. Most of them are a little dated, but they all look solid. The (from-scratch) Sauerbraten OSS engine is shaping up pretty sexy, but it's only technologically impressive features are it's shaders and it's mapping topology - everything else is Quake2-era tech.
I played it at a lan party. It was fun, but horrifically one-sided. Once you're off your rocket, you're toast - you spend the rest of the game being torn to shreds by the other players. The "Sport" mode worked much nicer... and as always, the race mode is painfully hard.
To me, the "shill" is a good way to fake a reserve/high-starting-bid. After all, the reserve and the high-starting-bid scare buyers away - the former because nobody even looks at reserve items, and the starting-bid because most people sort by price so they never see it.
Think about it - the item goes on sale for $1 - low enough to get to the top of all the "sort by price" lists. This gets the item tons of attention - lots of watchers and bidders. Then the seller can crank the item up to his "reserve" price with a shill. The item, already having the attention of other bidders, may get pushed higher still and sold - or else the buyer will only have to pay the selling fee.
Really, I'm shocked that ebay hasn't simply deprecated the original two methods (starting-price and reserve) and simply introduced bidding on your own wares as the official way to do it.
Heheh, I thought I was the only one with one of those. It was nasty when I realized that (long, long after the original install), since there was no way in hell I was going to find my old win3.1 install disks when I needed to wipe-and-repave it.
On the other hand, it came with a cool hovercar game.
I consider Dune/GDI-vs-NOD/Red-Alert to be all one franchise, since the game mechanics of them all were nearly identical. Up until Generals (I think - missed that one), they had nearly the same unit list, gameplay, resources, etc. Just a change of setting.
And as for Legends - do you remember the dungeons that were obviuosly entirely composed of 2m x 2m cubes with all the same texture? It had some cute concepts, but the core gameplay/level design was too painful to make up for it.
I'll have to look into MMX8 - I lost interest at X5 when I realised that they were making the cheap direct-to-video-esque version of X4.
Best Megaman games: 2 (best levels, most useful weapons), 3 (challenging follow-up to 2), 8 (obviously made by fans of 2), X1 (tons of fun new concepts), X2 (even more new stuff), X4 (Zero).
Haven't played the Zero/ZX games on the GB though - been meaning to try them.
Well, I have a 3-year-old InFocus DLP that is still running on it's original bulb simply because I only use it for watching movies and playing Dreamcast games. For TV watching I just have a regular old CRT.
Ah, but the amount of money lost to consumers would (theoretically) be recouped by consumers because of the tax-savings involved in no longer having to mint the expensive coins. Theoretically - in reality the money would vanish into the ether of the Government.
That's very nice. How considerate of them to make a workaround to avoid the fact that machines on your local network can pwn your OS and turn it into a zombie by using a service that was supposed to provide the 40+-year-old concept of transferring files.
If I implement file and printer sharing on my PC, I think it's reasonably fair to expect it to (a) share the files in folders I have marked shared, and (b) share the printers I have marked shared... and nothing else.
I didn't like legends at all. The cute "animated fullbright textures" animation approach was cool, and the RPG-structure was nice, but the actual gameplay was weak, and the dungeons were abysmal constructs of cubes. Misadventures of Tronne Bonne was the game that Legends should have been (except for the tedious levelling-up of your servebots).
Even if it wasn't in writing, a verbal contract is a valid binding contract unless superceded by a written contract (IANAL, just remembered from a course)... of course, proving that a verbal offer was made is nearly impossible.
Agreed. That list sucked - half the "franchises" weren't even franchises. Seriously, who remembers Dynasty Warriors and Tenchu. Spy Hunter doesn't deserve to be called a "franchise" - it's a nostalgia revival. Complaining about Spy Hunter is like saying that the re-make of "The Shining" was the end of "The Shining" franchise - that's not a franchise, that's one old classic and one crappy re-make.
Megaman X wrawked. The thing that killed Megaman was Capcom's total inability to move it out of the sprite-based engine - sprite-based games are now in the ghetto of handheld gaming alone. A modern platformer is done in 3D graphics (possibly using shaders for a cartoon effect), or at least heavily uses the 3D chip... and attempts to convert Megaman to 3D produced the gameplay-abortions that were the Megaman Legends games.
Oh, and I believe that Sonic the Hedgehog will be played by Eddie Murphy in the eventual movie adaptation, unless they are in fact the same person (which is true, judging by their careers).
Imho, Dune/C&C belongs on this list - what started as incredibly innovative gradually turned into a series of "same game, new engine" with originality that would rival EA Sports.
And let's not forget Earthworm Jim. And the X-Wing series (although Alliance reclaimed some of that which was lost in X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter).
Personally, I'm more interested in the ones that have been completely run into the ground while starting as smash hits - Sonic has no rivals there.
Yeah, that's gonna be a hard decision. On the one hand, StarCraft is the seminal classic - they _still_ have a substantial playerbase for it. On the other hand, StarCraft perfected traditional RTS gameplay, which exposed how completely flawed the original RTS gameplay concepts were. So much of StarCraft was about memorized build-orders, hyperfast usage of labour-intensive spellcasting, little expansion in the open territory, etc. Later RTS games have dropped that play-style like a bad habit.
I have a similar problem - it seems that my old gamer friends have split into two categories: 1) those who don't game anymore 2) those who only play WoW, to the exclusion of other games
WoW has eaten the lunch of a big chunk of the games industry. For somebody who just wants to dive-in-and-play other games, that kinda sucks.
Completely different. Creative commons license is about letting somebody copy your work. Letting them redistribute it. Which, under copyright law, they're not allowed to do.
Copyright law is this: you can't copy it, or make derivative works (with a few exceptions). Creative commons gives you _more_ rights eg: you CAN copy it, but only if you give me props and keep it non-commercial.
EULAs go the other way: not only can you not copy it - but we're telling you all this other stuff you can't do with something you bought and paid for.
I bought it, it's mine. The government says I can't copy it, and that's fine. But I'll be damned if someone tells me I can't wipe my bum with the CD.
Slashdot Mirror
Yahoo.com shows the second search box.
ca.yahoo.com (yahoo Canada) does not - so likely all the nation-specific websites don't do it.
Suicidal graduate English assignment:
/not that I'm saying that Atlas Shrugged is anywhere near on the level of monstrosity as The Turner Diaries - I'm just picking out two books that tend to make people wince at the very thought of their existence.
Compare and Contrast the Turner Diaries and Atlas Shrugged.
If you can complete this project without your brain melting, you get a free straight-jacket.
Well, it's not really fair to include C in there - since _everything_ is tricky in C. C is good because it's simple, fast, and universal... the fact that it is dangerous and hard has never stopped anyone from using it. Likewise, that same fact won't stop people from using it for heavily parallelized apps.
The problem is the middling languages that are designed to be _easy_ and have none of the aforementioned advantages of C are just about as bad as C for concurrency.
And Forth's manual stack-loading is practically 1:1 to the underlying OS too, why don't you use that? Garbage collection has nothing to do with the underlying OS, but we keep it around.
Mapping 1:1 to the underlying OS is not the be-all and end-all of linguistic constructs. Consider Actors model languages, or dataflow-model languages - or the native rendezvous concepts from Ada. Im not saying that any of these are ideal approaches (I hate Ada, for example) - Im just saying that Algol-descended languages were designed to model procedure and formulas... so modelling concurrency doesnt come naturally to them.
Even worst-case-scenario, minimally-threaded workstation software can still allow for manual multitasking - if the render-loop of your 3D-modelling app is only using a small amount of the available processor, then at least the others remain available for continuing to work in the main app.
The real problem is that procedural languages are fugly for working in on this stuff. Even the "modern" commercial languages like Java/DotNet still are somewhat cumbersome in the world of threading, compared to other languages where the threading metaphors are deeper in teh logic (or more mutable languages, like Lisp, where creating new core metaphors is trivial).
I find that dawn generally breaks when somebody asks "Hey, I can rip my CDs for my music collection for my iPod - why can't I do the same thing with my DVDs and my iPod Video?"
Well, a lot of modders are having fun with DarkPlaces and the other various Quake-derivatives opened by Id. Witness Alien Arena, Nexuiz, WarSow, Tremulous, OpenArena, just to name a few. Most of them are a little dated, but they all look solid. The (from-scratch) Sauerbraten OSS engine is shaping up pretty sexy, but it's only technologically impressive features are it's shaders and it's mapping topology - everything else is Quake2-era tech.
I played it at a lan party. It was fun, but horrifically one-sided. Once you're off your rocket, you're toast - you spend the rest of the game being torn to shreds by the other players. The "Sport" mode worked much nicer... and as always, the race mode is painfully hard.
To me, the "shill" is a good way to fake a reserve/high-starting-bid. After all, the reserve and the high-starting-bid scare buyers away - the former because nobody even looks at reserve items, and the starting-bid because most people sort by price so they never see it.
Think about it - the item goes on sale for $1 - low enough to get to the top of all the "sort by price" lists. This gets the item tons of attention - lots of watchers and bidders. Then the seller can crank the item up to his "reserve" price with a shill. The item, already having the attention of other bidders, may get pushed higher still and sold - or else the buyer will only have to pay the selling fee.
Really, I'm shocked that ebay hasn't simply deprecated the original two methods (starting-price and reserve) and simply introduced bidding on your own wares as the official way to do it.
Heheh, I thought I was the only one with one of those. It was nasty when I realized that (long, long after the original install), since there was no way in hell I was going to find my old win3.1 install disks when I needed to wipe-and-repave it.
On the other hand, it came with a cool hovercar game.
I consider Dune/GDI-vs-NOD/Red-Alert to be all one franchise, since the game mechanics of them all were nearly identical. Up until Generals (I think - missed that one), they had nearly the same unit list, gameplay, resources, etc. Just a change of setting.
And as for Legends - do you remember the dungeons that were obviuosly entirely composed of 2m x 2m cubes with all the same texture? It had some cute concepts, but the core gameplay/level design was too painful to make up for it.
I'll have to look into MMX8 - I lost interest at X5 when I realised that they were making the cheap direct-to-video-esque version of X4.
Best Megaman games: 2 (best levels, most useful weapons), 3 (challenging follow-up to 2), 8 (obviously made by fans of 2), X1 (tons of fun new concepts), X2 (even more new stuff), X4 (Zero).
Haven't played the Zero/ZX games on the GB though - been meaning to try them.
Well, I have a 3-year-old InFocus DLP that is still running on it's original bulb simply because I only use it for watching movies and playing Dreamcast games. For TV watching I just have a regular old CRT.
Ah, but the amount of money lost to consumers would (theoretically) be recouped by consumers because of the tax-savings involved in no longer having to mint the expensive coins. Theoretically - in reality the money would vanish into the ether of the Government.
That's very nice. How considerate of them to make a workaround to avoid the fact that machines on your local network can pwn your OS and turn it into a zombie by using a service that was supposed to provide the 40+-year-old concept of transferring files.
If I implement file and printer sharing on my PC, I think it's reasonably fair to expect it to (a) share the files in folders I have marked shared, and (b) share the printers I have marked shared... and nothing else.
I didn't like legends at all. The cute "animated fullbright textures" animation approach was cool, and the RPG-structure was nice, but the actual gameplay was weak, and the dungeons were abysmal constructs of cubes. Misadventures of Tronne Bonne was the game that Legends should have been (except for the tedious levelling-up of your servebots).
Even if it wasn't in writing, a verbal contract is a valid binding contract unless superceded by a written contract (IANAL, just remembered from a course)... of course, proving that a verbal offer was made is nearly impossible.
Agreed. That list sucked - half the "franchises" weren't even franchises. Seriously, who remembers Dynasty Warriors and Tenchu. Spy Hunter doesn't deserve to be called a "franchise" - it's a nostalgia revival. Complaining about Spy Hunter is like saying that the re-make of "The Shining" was the end of "The Shining" franchise - that's not a franchise, that's one old classic and one crappy re-make.
Megaman X wrawked. The thing that killed Megaman was Capcom's total inability to move it out of the sprite-based engine - sprite-based games are now in the ghetto of handheld gaming alone. A modern platformer is done in 3D graphics (possibly using shaders for a cartoon effect), or at least heavily uses the 3D chip... and attempts to convert Megaman to 3D produced the gameplay-abortions that were the Megaman Legends games.
Oh, and I believe that Sonic the Hedgehog will be played by Eddie Murphy in the eventual movie adaptation, unless they are in fact the same person (which is true, judging by their careers).
Imho, Dune/C&C belongs on this list - what started as incredibly innovative gradually turned into a series of "same game, new engine" with originality that would rival EA Sports.
And let's not forget Earthworm Jim. And the X-Wing series (although Alliance reclaimed some of that which was lost in X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter).
Personally, I'm more interested in the ones that have been completely run into the ground while starting as smash hits - Sonic has no rivals there.
RTFAs - she meets with the CRIA but won't meet with any other relevant organizations (such as consumer rights groups or Canadian artists groups).
I thought the Conservative party was supposed to bring an end to corruption and a new environment of accountability.
OW! My political beliefs!
Yeah, that's gonna be a hard decision. On the one hand, StarCraft is the seminal classic - they _still_ have a substantial playerbase for it. On the other hand, StarCraft perfected traditional RTS gameplay, which exposed how completely flawed the original RTS gameplay concepts were. So much of StarCraft was about memorized build-orders, hyperfast usage of labour-intensive spellcasting, little expansion in the open territory, etc. Later RTS games have dropped that play-style like a bad habit.
I have a similar problem - it seems that my old gamer friends have split into two categories:
1) those who don't game anymore
2) those who only play WoW, to the exclusion of other games
WoW has eaten the lunch of a big chunk of the games industry. For somebody who just wants to dive-in-and-play other games, that kinda sucks.
A statesman is just a dead politician.
We need more statesmen
(props to Bloom County)
Completely different. Creative commons license is about letting somebody copy your work. Letting them redistribute it. Which, under copyright law, they're not allowed to do.
Copyright law is this: you can't copy it, or make derivative works (with a few exceptions). Creative commons gives you _more_ rights eg: you CAN copy it, but only if you give me props and keep it non-commercial.
EULAs go the other way: not only can you not copy it - but we're telling you all this other stuff you can't do with something you bought and paid for.
I bought it, it's mine. The government says I can't copy it, and that's fine. But I'll be damned if someone tells me I can't wipe my bum with the CD.
The final solution for both manned and unmanned launches of any size is obvious - the Earth needs a belt.
Never done that.
Now, ctrl+F on the other hand...
And when drawing, I'm always looking for the undo.