Me too - the problem is that there is no longer any mechanism for running untrusted code. I would be satisfied with a bare-bones approach - the ability to compile the Python interpreter with no access to the system (no calling sys, no access to filesystem) so that everythin would be done through extension modules. This would be not nearly as complicated as Rexec, and should be doable with a reasonable degree of security.
Hell, I'm a Python coder, and I'm already going "oh yeah"
IMHO, it won't be secure until they bring back Bastion and Rexec and get them right this time. Actually, all I want is to be able to remove all the builtins that access the system directly (so Python can't crash your computer, delete files, or otherwise access the filesystem) - but while the language and API documentation is pretty good, the compiler variables are wholly unkown.
Idunno - while I'm unsure about some of the design decisions, I do like what they've done with the loot. Why the fuck do giant spiders carry emerald rings? This makes much more sense - when you kill a womp rat - you get a dead womp rat. If that's worth anything, yippee.
That, and people dumping on the classless nature of the game - I'm happy to see RPG's moving away from player classes - book RPG's abandoned player classes in the 1980's and only D&D (and its knock-offs) kept that limiting and boring concept.
because this will vastly improve the popularity of their products, putting them in the company of Nigerian scams and penis enlargement systems. Very popular indeed.
That's funny, I've never had a PC controller last more than 3 months (including the GPPro - the verticals slide into diagonals way to easily), while I've never had a console controller wear out on me.
I agree - althought I'm agnostic, I'm marrying an Anglican, and am learning about the Christian perspective. For one thing, actually playing the part of Jesus seems egotistical and silly. It reminds me of the part of the Wolfenstein games where you actually, personally kill Hitler. It is one thing to set a game in the historical backdrop and import themes, its quite another to have the player fictitiously enacting (playing or killing) the icons of history/religion. Maybe it would be better if it weren't an action/rpg game. You know it will be some monstrous childish game of levelling up and dungeoncrawling suchlike - and it seems wrong to include such important characters in such low-minded a game. That'd be like having a paper-doll game or dating sim game about Princess Di. It just feels tacky.
Actually, I think the best game I played that could be adapted for teaching values in a religious perspective was a SNES game called ActRaiser. It was a hybrid action-strategy game where you played an angel. Black&White would be good as well for teaching values - but I don't think Polytheism is popular.
I would think if someone wanted a religious-minded game, a less directly biblical route would be the way to go (and also more attainable to non-Christians as well). For example, a game of Sim Village, demonstrating how to care for your people - the life of a small 19-th century village revolves around its church.
I heard of another game - an FPS where your weapons don't kill the enemies - they make them fall to the ground and pray. Wow, it sounds like Rod and Todd so much its not funny. Why not something more reasonable? Like a game where you play a knight protecting your people from disaster/bandits/warfare? A game that shows you the importance of mercy, and protecting the innocents, etc. Prayer could be incorporated as a way to strengthen your abilities, heal, and protect your people. Something like a religious version of Toys For Bob's "The Horde".
People who want stuff like this should keep VeggiTales in mind - the stories are told in allegory, and often are barely recognizable as the Biblical stories they represent. Because of that, and because of the quality of the stories, they are popular. That is how to give people religion in a way that's palatable - not in some "Buddy Jesus" sort of mockery.
I'm not a religious person, but I think more games with a good value-system would be good for the kids today. Personally, I play violent games, and enjoy them - but when I have kids, I want them to have better options then hack&slash games and stupid puzzles or sport games. Well, until they're old enough for the violent stuff, at least. Like everyone says here - I want to raise my kids eductationally - and part of that is going to be in their entertainment.
Then again, the story of Joan of Ark would make a good religious-based hack&slash type game.
Personally, all I care is when someone will make a voice-chat system that stands a rats-chance in hell of making it passed a basic router, much less a firewall. I'm sorry, but when I can play UT against people in and out of the University but I can't voice chat with them, there's something wrong there. At the very least keep it on one or two ports so its possible to plan around it and forward it, instead of running up and down half of the upper ports like some do.
I have one problem with this: while the games are simple to learn, they tend to be designed as simple timewasters. Things like Tetris, or some level-uppage RPG games.
Games can be simple and quick and episodic but still have depth in their play. I've been waiting for a handheld version of Z (yes, it is planned). Most often the "handheld fun" games are extremely repetitive and mind-numbing. I like a game to be simple and easy to grasp, but still mentally-challenging and preferably multiplayer. Yes, they do exist. C64, NES, and SNES are full of those. Remember Spy Vs. Spy? Star Control 1? Simple, easy, but deep games - and games you can challeng another player in - which is the true test of a game (IMHO) - its easy to make a game where you jump a single player through hoops - making it both fun and balance for two players is a real trick.
His point is that striking it rich without contributing to the productivity of society (being rich off of trading something pointless on the stock market, or the lottery, or pyramid schemes - wait, those are the same thing) is effectively robbing everyone else around you, because at any given moment in time, there is a finite amount of money/resources in the game. No, the game is not zero sum - but if you are profiting off the game without contributing to it, its bad regardless of whether the game is zero sum or not.
The principle of the stock market is sound, but its current implementation has become a monstrous scam. Non-dividend stocks are roughly like trading baseball cards - the only connection of a non-dividend stock's value to is in the minds of the traders - there is no actual physical connection between the value of the non-dividend stock to the company it represents. The only value is how much you can sell it for to someone else. Other systems like money-market speculation are similarly pointless.
And before you start quoting Adam Smith - even Smith himself only described direct investment into industry. Not into frivolous speculative money systems.
I want more stock-market crashes. Death to those who invest in nothings.
That wasn't the failure of socialism, that was the failure of large scale military dictatorship. There are capitalist military dictatorships that are just as abusive as Stalin ever was, the only thing they don't have is as many people to pick on.
Storyline is for single-player masturbation games like RPG's. But anyways - I'm working on a game engine, and even with DirectX taking most of the graphics load off of us (yeah, we're win32 bitches) its still a fuckload of work.
He's not saying that the engine is the hard part, or the most important part (the amount of quality games for the Half-Life engine shows that a shitty engine can produce quality games) its just that its a buttload of work that is being reinvented over and over.
That being said - like the OS world is great at code reuse and building projects. I find that OSS coders are just as bad about reinventing the wheel as professional devs. Unless the project is famous and easy to embed (STL, Python, etc) then they'll work from scratch.
I think the fact is that msn's client isn't bad at all. It was among the first to have good voice chat, and the UI, although very eye-candy ish, was actually a pretty slick functional style (although they recently bloated it badly). I still like ICQ the best because of offline messaging - although the non-existent security of the protocol bothers me. Too bad WASTE got canned - that could've been good.
Well, simple logic like that has caused problems too. The reason one of the recent mars landers toasted was because it mistook the thump from launching the parachute to be making touchdown. With this knowledge, it decided it was safe to deactivate the landing thruster.
A more intricate, complex system may have provided the lander with the intellect to figure out that it was going to be grey paste on the red earth if it did that (as opposing what happens to humans who fall from the sky).
Are you kidding? Half life is by far the best for supporting their developers with conventions, contests, and outright buyouts. Despite having (IMHO) the best engine to develop in (mutator, gametype system & maptype system = schweet) Epic has traditionally lagged behind in the subject of support and documentation. Half-life quickly stole the chalice from ID for best nurturing of mod community.
So, now everyone has a real incentive to learn "I Can't Believe It's Not Java" - AKA Uscript.
4) the documentation invariably sucks. I'm working on my first major C++ project. The system involves a deeply embedded Python interpreter, and a large amount of STLport. By most accounts, these are well-documented libraries.
I am quickly losing my mind trying to track down poorly written documentation through conflicting and dated sources. And nobody puts any friggin' useful comments in their code. Hell, it took me the longest time to find out that auto_ptr's aren't meant to go in container objects, when at first glance it looks like that's what they were exactly designed for.
Well, the funny thing they're complaining about is things like the poor zooming in PDF: it sounds like they want it to be presentation flexible. Which is HTML.
Personally, I'd take an old, easy to render HTML standard (Netscape 2 era) - just the basics. links, tables, frames, text stuff, images, nothing else. No javascript, no ASP, no CSS, no whatever. Support standard image types (jpeg, gif, png) and nothing else. For sanity's sake, do not support animated GIF.
Change the name - call it BkML - say its a fork from HTML, even if its just an old version. This will prevent people from loading in higher-level HTML into the thing. HTML files are named by page number, and the system is hardcoded for next/prev through page numbers. Multiple "books" are stored in a directory structure.
Thus, you have something that's easy to hand code (but you'd better use a TeX compiler or something similar anyways, as consistent syntax sans CSS will be tricky). Its low on processor stress, and it can be renderd natively by a web browser.
Sure, different ebook readers will render it differently. As they should. EBooks should not be presentation-dependant. You can use tables to control most of the formatting. The rest is up to the user - after all, a large panel-sized e-book is not the same as a watch-book reader. The user should not have to read by panning around, or by squinting for tiny type. If the user wants teh screen to be 20 characters wide and scroll down a lot, that should be there right. HTML is designed for scalable width. Deal with it.
Plus, locallized, controlled EMP is becoming more and more doable every day - the use of all this high-tech computer equipment may be vulnerable to that (though I'm sure the computers on these things are shielded out the wazoo, I still worry)
And speaking of computer control - did you notice the mention of autonomous robotic artillery vehicles? Doesn't that bother anyone? Currently, robots function as spy planes, spy jeeps, bomber planes, and now artillery tanks. This is a bad trend. They seem to be giving the robots all the heavy firepower. Whether the catastrophe is SkyNet or some ham radio guy who knows his crypto, this does not seem to be a good trend.
Its a book. People read it. Hence, the text is whats important. Yes, if its a textbook or a graphic novel, presentation is important. For that, I accept that we need a standard (*cough* *rtf* *cough*) but otherwise, HTML or (god forbid) plain text works fine.
I'm curious - where would you take your patterns to be plotted? Particularly if its something large (like a long skirt) it would take a substantially sized plotter to print such a pattern.
Do they actually use AutoCAD is the dominant format? If so, I find it kind of notable that after so many decades no cheaper (less proprietary) format has become popular for 2D plotter-oriented vector drawing.
I've played some simple online-games with browser-based Java. Its good fun, and you can log in from anywhere. The problem is that now, with the JRE schism brought on by the MS/Sun lawsuit, all the online Javascript-based companies are gone under or reformatting themselves (like my favourite game, WormHole, was taken down and is being recreated for cellphones). There's also a good robo-rally clone.
None of these games are epic, mind you, but its nice to be able to play an innovative game agains a large number of human players at any terminal (even the library).
I use this feature, and it frustrates me to no end - it insists on restarting the system for everything. It could be patching a hole in something very peripheral, and will still insist on restarting the machine.
Windows escaped restarting for driver updates, and now has restarting for security patching. The more things change...
Idunno - I didn't mind that the scene was there - it was part of the whole "lets show the audience what Zion is, so they can understand why its worth saving" - my problem with it was that it was, like every other "scene" of the movie, way to frigging long.
Idunno, I just saw ReLoaded and enjoyed it - the pseudo-intellectual crap was all nicely debunked at the end, which I really enjoyed. What actually annoyed me most was the fight scenes, not the teen-angst philosophy. I'm sorry, but the Smiths scene just seemed to drag on forever. The highway scene was fun, but I always get annoyed when that many bullets fly and noone gets shot ever. The penthouse fight with ancient weapons just felt pointless. But, overall, I liked the movie - I just thought the action scenese were dragged out.
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Me too - the problem is that there is no longer any mechanism for running untrusted code. I would be satisfied with a bare-bones approach - the ability to compile the Python interpreter with no access to the system (no calling sys, no access to filesystem) so that everythin would be done through extension modules. This would be not nearly as complicated as Rexec, and should be doable with a reasonable degree of security.
Hell, I'm a Python coder, and I'm already going "oh yeah"
IMHO, it won't be secure until they bring back Bastion and Rexec and get them right this time. Actually, all I want is to be able to remove all the builtins that access the system directly (so Python can't crash your computer, delete files, or otherwise access the filesystem) - but while the language and API documentation is pretty good, the compiler variables are wholly unkown.
Idunno - while I'm unsure about some of the design decisions, I do like what they've done with the loot. Why the fuck do giant spiders carry emerald rings? This makes much more sense - when you kill a womp rat - you get a dead womp rat. If that's worth anything, yippee.
That, and people dumping on the classless nature of the game - I'm happy to see RPG's moving away from player classes - book RPG's abandoned player classes in the 1980's and only D&D (and its knock-offs) kept that limiting and boring concept.
Heheh, there's a good flash comic on the subject of the Terminator in politics.
because this will vastly improve the popularity of their products, putting them in the company of Nigerian scams and penis enlargement systems. Very popular indeed.
That's funny, I've never had a PC controller last more than 3 months (including the GPPro - the verticals slide into diagonals way to easily), while I've never had a console controller wear out on me.
I agree - althought I'm agnostic, I'm marrying an Anglican, and am learning about the Christian perspective. For one thing, actually playing the part of Jesus seems egotistical and silly. It reminds me of the part of the Wolfenstein games where you actually, personally kill Hitler. It is one thing to set a game in the historical backdrop and import themes, its quite another to have the player fictitiously enacting (playing or killing) the icons of history/religion. Maybe it would be better if it weren't an action/rpg game. You know it will be some monstrous childish game of levelling up and dungeoncrawling suchlike - and it seems wrong to include such important characters in such low-minded a game. That'd be like having a paper-doll game or dating sim game about Princess Di. It just feels tacky.
Actually, I think the best game I played that could be adapted for teaching values in a religious perspective was a SNES game called ActRaiser. It was a hybrid action-strategy game where you played an angel. Black&White would be good as well for teaching values - but I don't think Polytheism is popular.
I would think if someone wanted a religious-minded game, a less directly biblical route would be the way to go (and also more attainable to non-Christians as well). For example, a game of Sim Village, demonstrating how to care for your people - the life of a small 19-th century village revolves around its church.
I heard of another game - an FPS where your weapons don't kill the enemies - they make them fall to the ground and pray. Wow, it sounds like Rod and Todd so much its not funny. Why not something more reasonable? Like a game where you play a knight protecting your people from disaster/bandits/warfare? A game that shows you the importance of mercy, and protecting the innocents, etc. Prayer could be incorporated as a way to strengthen your abilities, heal, and protect your people. Something like a religious version of Toys For Bob's "The Horde".
People who want stuff like this should keep VeggiTales in mind - the stories are told in allegory, and often are barely recognizable as the Biblical stories they represent. Because of that, and because of the quality of the stories, they are popular. That is how to give people religion in a way that's palatable - not in some "Buddy Jesus" sort of mockery.
I'm not a religious person, but I think more games with a good value-system would be good for the kids today. Personally, I play violent games, and enjoy them - but when I have kids, I want them to have better options then hack&slash games and stupid puzzles or sport games. Well, until they're old enough for the violent stuff, at least. Like everyone says here - I want to raise my kids eductationally - and part of that is going to be in their entertainment.
Then again, the story of Joan of Ark would make a good religious-based hack&slash type game.
Personally, all I care is when someone will make a voice-chat system that stands a rats-chance in hell of making it passed a basic router, much less a firewall. I'm sorry, but when I can play UT against people in and out of the University but I can't voice chat with them, there's something wrong there. At the very least keep it on one or two ports so its possible to plan around it and forward it, instead of running up and down half of the upper ports like some do.
I have one problem with this: while the games are simple to learn, they tend to be designed as simple timewasters. Things like Tetris, or some level-uppage RPG games.
Games can be simple and quick and episodic but still have depth in their play. I've been waiting for a handheld version of Z (yes, it is planned). Most often the "handheld fun" games are extremely repetitive and mind-numbing. I like a game to be simple and easy to grasp, but still mentally-challenging and preferably multiplayer. Yes, they do exist. C64, NES, and SNES are full of those. Remember Spy Vs. Spy? Star Control 1? Simple, easy, but deep games - and games you can challeng another player in - which is the true test of a game (IMHO) - its easy to make a game where you jump a single player through hoops - making it both fun and balance for two players is a real trick.
His point is that striking it rich without contributing to the productivity of society (being rich off of trading something pointless on the stock market, or the lottery, or pyramid schemes - wait, those are the same thing) is effectively robbing everyone else around you, because at any given moment in time, there is a finite amount of money/resources in the game. No, the game is not zero sum - but if you are profiting off the game without contributing to it, its bad regardless of whether the game is zero sum or not.
The principle of the stock market is sound, but its current implementation has become a monstrous scam. Non-dividend stocks are roughly like trading baseball cards - the only connection of a non-dividend stock's value to is in the minds of the traders - there is no actual physical connection between the value of the non-dividend stock to the company it represents. The only value is how much you can sell it for to someone else. Other systems like money-market speculation are similarly pointless.
And before you start quoting Adam Smith - even Smith himself only described direct investment into industry. Not into frivolous speculative money systems.
I want more stock-market crashes. Death to those who invest in nothings.
That wasn't the failure of socialism, that was the failure of large scale military dictatorship. There are capitalist military dictatorships that are just as abusive as Stalin ever was, the only thing they don't have is as many people to pick on.
Storyline is for single-player masturbation games like RPG's. But anyways - I'm working on a game engine, and even with DirectX taking most of the graphics load off of us (yeah, we're win32 bitches) its still a fuckload of work.
He's not saying that the engine is the hard part, or the most important part (the amount of quality games for the Half-Life engine shows that a shitty engine can produce quality games) its just that its a buttload of work that is being reinvented over and over.
That being said - like the OS world is great at code reuse and building projects. I find that OSS coders are just as bad about reinventing the wheel as professional devs. Unless the project is famous and easy to embed (STL, Python, etc) then they'll work from scratch.
I think the fact is that msn's client isn't bad at all. It was among the first to have good voice chat, and the UI, although very eye-candy ish, was actually a pretty slick functional style (although they recently bloated it badly). I still like ICQ the best because of offline messaging - although the non-existent security of the protocol bothers me. Too bad WASTE got canned - that could've been good.
I use Miranda for both anyway tho.
That's for criminal cases. He's SOL. Besides, public defenders invariably suck.
Well, simple logic like that has caused problems too. The reason one of the recent mars landers toasted was because it mistook the thump from launching the parachute to be making touchdown. With this knowledge, it decided it was safe to deactivate the landing thruster.
A more intricate, complex system may have provided the lander with the intellect to figure out that it was going to be grey paste on the red earth if it did that (as opposing what happens to humans who fall from the sky).
Are you kidding? Half life is by far the best for supporting their developers with conventions, contests, and outright buyouts. Despite having (IMHO) the best engine to develop in (mutator, gametype system & maptype system = schweet) Epic has traditionally lagged behind in the subject of support and documentation. Half-life quickly stole the chalice from ID for best nurturing of mod community.
So, now everyone has a real incentive to learn "I Can't Believe It's Not Java" - AKA Uscript.
4) the documentation invariably sucks. I'm working on my first major C++ project. The system involves a deeply embedded Python interpreter, and a large amount of STLport. By most accounts, these are well-documented libraries.
I am quickly losing my mind trying to track down poorly written documentation through conflicting and dated sources. And nobody puts any friggin' useful comments in their code. Hell, it took me the longest time to find out that auto_ptr's aren't meant to go in container objects, when at first glance it looks like that's what they were exactly designed for.
Well, the funny thing they're complaining about is things like the poor zooming in PDF: it sounds like they want it to be presentation flexible. Which is HTML.
Personally, I'd take an old, easy to render HTML standard (Netscape 2 era) - just the basics. links, tables, frames, text stuff, images, nothing else. No javascript, no ASP, no CSS, no whatever. Support standard image types (jpeg, gif, png) and nothing else. For sanity's sake, do not support animated GIF.
Change the name - call it BkML - say its a fork from HTML, even if its just an old version. This will prevent people from loading in higher-level HTML into the thing. HTML files are named by page number, and the system is hardcoded for next/prev through page numbers. Multiple "books" are stored in a directory structure.
Thus, you have something that's easy to hand code (but you'd better use a TeX compiler or something similar anyways, as consistent syntax sans CSS will be tricky). Its low on processor stress, and it can be renderd natively by a web browser.
Sure, different ebook readers will render it differently. As they should. EBooks should not be presentation-dependant. You can use tables to control most of the formatting. The rest is up to the user - after all, a large panel-sized e-book is not the same as a watch-book reader. The user should not have to read by panning around, or by squinting for tiny type. If the user wants teh screen to be 20 characters wide and scroll down a lot, that should be there right. HTML is designed for scalable width. Deal with it.
Plus, locallized, controlled EMP is becoming more and more doable every day - the use of all this high-tech computer equipment may be vulnerable to that (though I'm sure the computers on these things are shielded out the wazoo, I still worry)
And speaking of computer control - did you notice the mention of autonomous robotic artillery vehicles? Doesn't that bother anyone? Currently, robots function as spy planes, spy jeeps, bomber planes, and now artillery tanks. This is a bad trend. They seem to be giving the robots all the heavy firepower. Whether the catastrophe is SkyNet or some ham radio guy who knows his crypto, this does not seem to be a good trend.
Its a book. People read it. Hence, the text is whats important. Yes, if its a textbook or a graphic novel, presentation is important. For that, I accept that we need a standard (*cough* *rtf* *cough*) but otherwise, HTML or (god forbid) plain text works fine.
I'm curious - where would you take your patterns to be plotted? Particularly if its something large (like a long skirt) it would take a substantially sized plotter to print such a pattern.
Do they actually use AutoCAD is the dominant format? If so, I find it kind of notable that after so many decades no cheaper (less proprietary) format has become popular for 2D plotter-oriented vector drawing.
I've played some simple online-games with browser-based Java. Its good fun, and you can log in from anywhere. The problem is that now, with the JRE schism brought on by the MS/Sun lawsuit, all the online Javascript-based companies are gone under or reformatting themselves (like my favourite game, WormHole, was taken down and is being recreated for cellphones). There's also a good robo-rally clone.
None of these games are epic, mind you, but its nice to be able to play an innovative game agains a large number of human players at any terminal (even the library).
I use this feature, and it frustrates me to no end - it insists on restarting the system for everything. It could be patching a hole in something very peripheral, and will still insist on restarting the machine.
Windows escaped restarting for driver updates, and now has restarting for security patching. The more things change...
Idunno - I didn't mind that the scene was there - it was part of the whole "lets show the audience what Zion is, so they can understand why its worth saving" - my problem with it was that it was, like every other "scene" of the movie, way to frigging long.
Idunno, I just saw ReLoaded and enjoyed it - the pseudo-intellectual crap was all nicely debunked at the end, which I really enjoyed. What actually annoyed me most was the fight scenes, not the teen-angst philosophy. I'm sorry, but the Smiths scene just seemed to drag on forever. The highway scene was fun, but I always get annoyed when that many bullets fly and noone gets shot ever. The penthouse fight with ancient weapons just felt pointless. But, overall, I liked the movie - I just thought the action scenese were dragged out.