So SDL does the work of DirectDraw and DirectSound at least, except it works on multiple platforms.
That OpenGL isn't up to par is hard to argue with the Quake series being based on OpenGL. I have dabbled with both OpenGL and Direct3D (8), and I think OpenGL is significantly easier to just pick up and start using. OpenGL even has standardized extensions for programmable shaders, which is the hot new feature these days.
The rest of the game logic code should be easy to write in ANSI C or C++ (or a higher-level language if you like) so that porting it should be a non-issue.
The issue that I do see is gaming device support (gamepads/flightsticks). Sounds like that could be a reasonable next step for SDL, if it doesn't in fact exist already. But, I also think that this is not a reason to go platform-dependant for many games. Some games need that support, but many *PC* games don't benefit from specialized controllers.
When win95 and directX first came out, they were the only game in town... er, no pun intended - but these days I think SDL+OpenGL is a reasonable alternative for developing professional games if portability is of any concern.
I've found that I can "hyperfocus" on things sometimes, working straight for hours without a break... but only at random, sporadically occurring moments. But for day-to-day work, I can't focus on programming for 8 straight hours a day. And I know most of the people I've worked with are the same way - some of them admit it, some of them don't. I think this is true for almost any intensely mental occupation. I can't speak for physical occupations, but there are protective laws for that sort of thing.
People who seem to be constantly producing code, in my experience, are not thinking about it much. They aren't trying to engineer a proper solution, they just hack in whatever gets the job done as soon as possible. And that sort of thing REALLY kicks you in the nads 12-18 months down the line, especially if you are working on an evolving piece of software and have to maintain and extend it for an significant period of time.
I think non-technical management tends not to understand this very well, especially if they have no direct way of measuring performance.
Actually, what it comes down to is this whole subject is just a symptom of the problem that non-techinical (and even technical) management don't have EFFECTIVE ways of measuring productivity/performance. I mean, sure, a guy can hit all his deadlines, but maybe you have to throw out his code when he leaves. Maybe another person misses every deadline, but their code is robust and easily maintained. Which one you want depends on your situation. Sometimes you want a guy who can prototype and build a working demo super fast, if you don't care about maintaining it. Sometimes you want someone who will invest a lot of thought into a project and build something you can reuse over and over again, or that reduces overall development time. But management generally DOES NOT KNOW what they want in this regard. Or they don't know what they are actually getting. Or they think they know, but they are wrong. And, for lack of a better option, they look to Slashdot (or web browsing) on the job as an explanation.
Of course, some people really are slackers and don't get anything done, good or bad. But, I think productive people are productive with or without internet access. We want to correlate these behaviors, but I don't think it's there.
Well, I have to say... the amount of Slashdot-viewing I did at my last job was inversely proportional to my morale. At the end, my morale was pretty low, I was starting to feel guilty. I think I spent more time on/. than doing actual work. That's when I knew it was time to quit!
But, in reasonable amounts, I think it's fair for any tech worker to keep up on Star Wars news on the job. I mean, we aren't ANIMALS!
The thing with this particular site is that it's not Flash. It is just using Javascript to manipulate the DOM, repositioning images and such. The animation is done using mouse-rollover style image swapping.
The code is pretty fugly, though. It's not formatted, and seems to be purposefully obfuscated.
Sierra tried to do something sort of similar. It was called "The Realm." It was an MMORPG made with the Sierra interface. It sucked. As usual, Sierra discovered an online market before it's time and, as usual, completely failed to execute on it. I also beta-tested The Sierra Network (later the ImagiNation Network), which was actually really cool for it's time, but the internet was about 5 years from hitting homes, so the connectivity issue was too big a problem then, i think.
I didn't mean to imply that XML was derived from HTML. I was just saying that you should come up with your syntax standard (XML) before applying it (HTML). Because this happened in the reverse order, we have to retrofit HTML to XML (XHTML), and content developers don't want to deal with it.
Similarly, CSS1 had a confusing and inexpressive way of setting properties of nodes via rules. XSL/XSLT required a much more powerful way of querying an XML document, and they used XPath, which does the job rather well. But now CSS is stuck with this awkward node selection syntax. So, to retrofit CSS, they add some XPath-like selectors and whatnot, but that's arguably more confusing to someone who has to deal with both. The fact that CSS can't be specified in an XML format kind of bites, too.
When does Internet 2 come out? We need to start over, knowing what we know now.
My question is, why not use XPath instead of coming up with a chinsy alternate-but-similar notation for selecting nodes in HTML? XPath is a w3 property... why not be consistent? They are trying to retrofit HTML to XML anyway, and IE lets you select nodes in scripts using XPath. (I thought it was part of the DOM standard, but I can't find it - I guess it's an MS extension.)
I guess it would cause some of the CSS syntax to be incompatible with new versions. But that should be solvable by having a well defined way of specifying which version of CSS a CSS file or section is, like you can with javascript. You can specify language="JavaScript1.0" or "Javascript1.2" or whatever to load a JS engine that conforms to that version's specifications (which, unfortunately, conflict in some cases).
I often think that these web standards have all evolved in the wrong order. HTML came before XML and DOM. CSS came before XSL. Bleah.
Well, Microsoft also has ActiveX - and they substitute X with anything from "Script" to "Desktop." I wouldn't be surprised to see ActiveToast or ActiveRice in the future.
I don't see why it matters whether you can meet yourself. I don't want to die! I don't care if there's 20 other copies of me wandering around behaving, for all empirical purposes, exactly like me - I associate my identity with my stream of consciousness. Presumably if you created a copy of me, it would have a different stream of consciousness, just with the same memories.
Of course, perhaps the stream of consciousness is just an illusion anyway, in which case it doesn't matter. Bah, I don't know.
Copying off your hard drive without your permission may constitute copyright infringement, but it's more like... I dunno... Invasion of Privacy? Breaking and Entering? Trespassing?
Hmm... what would it be called if someone installed a new piece of furniture without your permission? Certainly they have to break into your house to put it there. Now, what if that furniture had termites, and it infested your house?
So, this is the equivalent of entering your house, installing some termine-infested furniture, and perhaps taking some pictures of the place, and making a xerox copy of your diary, all without your permission. Of course, if they strain their back rearranging your living room against your will, they can sue YOU for $5000. Whee!
Sun's version of the JRE is probably never going to be the fastest - it's a reference implementation. Many of the JVM crashes with the Sun JDK happen when the JIT is turned on (Which is is by default, these days). That's why there are many different JVM vendors out there trying to provide a really robust and high-performance Java runtime environment. Just using IBM's JRE is supposed to be quite a lot faster than Sun's. But there are commercial guys who are supposed to be even faster, depending on your application. JRockit is one such JVM vendor, for example, but I don't know if they are actually any good.
Of course, this is mostly targetted towards ISV's looking to bundle a JRE with their Java software. For web-deployed Java applets, you have to work with whatever is out there, and chances are that's going to be Sun's JVM, or MS's JVM. So Sun really should get their JIT VM running a bit more stable. Also, I don't know of any 3rd Party JDK 1.4 VM's out there, so if you want to play with the new stuff, you have to use Sun's JDK, too.
I dunno, I still think applets died in 1996. Java is great, it's presently my most comfortable language to work in, but you can do some crazy fun stuff with JavaScript and DHTML if you want a rich client-side web UI.
Oh, damn, I just checked my link, and see that BEA bought JRockit. I guess that makes sense...
Absolutely. I think GTA3 is a modern artwork more effective than any sculpture, painting, or interpretive dance I've ever seen. It shares an experience with people - MANY people - and spawns thought and discussion about moral and ethical issues. That's the highest form of art, as far as I am concerned.
You can draw all kinds of meaning from it: It's a brutal depiction of reality, maybe it's a warning. At more of a meta-level maybe it's making a point about how humans have the ability to seperate fantasy and reality, almost at a level of protest. Maybe they had no idea what they were saying, but that doesn't mean it doesn't say something, and that doesn't mean it isn't art.
According to pckeyboard.com, the two plug styles are DIN and mini-DIN. They qualify them as the AT DIN and the PS2 mini-DIN, but that's probably just to clarify for customers.
I believe that MIDI also uses the DIN and mini-DIN plugs.
They have another keyboard (UNICOMP) which is basically the same as a Model M, but they are built new, and come (optionally) with PS2 connectors. No USB, unfortunately. They were $45 each, so I bought three, and I haven't had any problems with any of them...
I recently saw Bowling for Columbine in an indie theatre in Palo Alto, and really enjoyed it. It was fairly liberal-minded, but I thought it was thought-provoking and well done. I'm not a big Michael Moore fan, either.
In it, he compares the gun-related death counts of some other countries with the US, and, even scaling by relative population, we are above and beyond our western counterparts. Consider a place like Canada, who watches all our violent movies, plays all of our violent games, AND has a very high guns-per-capita. And they really rarely shoot each other, compared to the US.
I've found that some things are just really easy with tables, and some things are easy with CSS - not the same things. I admit I don't know CSS as well as I know tables... but there's less to know, I think, which scores a point in table's favor. Usually I use a combination of tables + css.
Slashdot needs to normalize the character encodings. This japanese looks fine... if your browser is interpreting it as SHIFT-JIS. But how can it autodetect? Another guy used ISO-8859-1 to represent an e with an accent. Slashdot needs to autodetect each submission (or allow the user to specify) and convert to UTF-8 before adding the comment to the page for this to really work.
Slashdot Mirror
So SDL does the work of DirectDraw and DirectSound at least, except it works on multiple platforms.
That OpenGL isn't up to par is hard to argue with the Quake series being based on OpenGL. I have dabbled with both OpenGL and Direct3D (8), and I think OpenGL is significantly easier to just pick up and start using. OpenGL even has standardized extensions for programmable shaders, which is the hot new feature these days.
The rest of the game logic code should be easy to write in ANSI C or C++ (or a higher-level language if you like) so that porting it should be a non-issue.
The issue that I do see is gaming device support (gamepads/flightsticks). Sounds like that could be a reasonable next step for SDL, if it doesn't in fact exist already. But, I also think that this is not a reason to go platform-dependant for many games. Some games need that support, but many *PC* games don't benefit from specialized controllers.
When win95 and directX first came out, they were the only game in town... er, no pun intended - but these days I think SDL+OpenGL is a reasonable alternative for developing professional games if portability is of any concern.
-If
I've found that I can "hyperfocus" on things sometimes, working straight for hours without a break... but only at random, sporadically occurring moments. But for day-to-day work, I can't focus on programming for 8 straight hours a day. And I know most of the people I've worked with are the same way - some of them admit it, some of them don't. I think this is true for almost any intensely mental occupation. I can't speak for physical occupations, but there are protective laws for that sort of thing.
People who seem to be constantly producing code, in my experience, are not thinking about it much. They aren't trying to engineer a proper solution, they just hack in whatever gets the job done as soon as possible. And that sort of thing REALLY kicks you in the nads 12-18 months down the line, especially if you are working on an evolving piece of software and have to maintain and extend it for an significant period of time.
I think non-technical management tends not to understand this very well, especially if they have no direct way of measuring performance.
Actually, what it comes down to is this whole subject is just a symptom of the problem that non-techinical (and even technical) management don't have EFFECTIVE ways of measuring productivity/performance. I mean, sure, a guy can hit all his deadlines, but maybe you have to throw out his code when he leaves. Maybe another person misses every deadline, but their code is robust and easily maintained. Which one you want depends on your situation. Sometimes you want a guy who can prototype and build a working demo super fast, if you don't care about maintaining it. Sometimes you want someone who will invest a lot of thought into a project and build something you can reuse over and over again, or that reduces overall development time. But management generally DOES NOT KNOW what they want in this regard. Or they don't know what they are actually getting. Or they think they know, but they are wrong. And, for lack of a better option, they look to Slashdot (or web browsing) on the job as an explanation.
Of course, some people really are slackers and don't get anything done, good or bad. But, I think productive people are productive with or without internet access. We want to correlate these behaviors, but I don't think it's there.
-If
Well, I have to say... the amount of Slashdot-viewing I did at my last job was inversely proportional to my morale. At the end, my morale was pretty low, I was starting to feel guilty. I think I spent more time on /. than doing actual work. That's when I knew it was time to quit!
But, in reasonable amounts, I think it's fair for any tech worker to keep up on Star Wars news on the job. I mean, we aren't ANIMALS!
-If
The thing with this particular site is that it's not Flash. It is just using Javascript to manipulate the DOM, repositioning images and such. The animation is done using mouse-rollover style image swapping.
The code is pretty fugly, though. It's not formatted, and seems to be purposefully obfuscated.
-If
Sierra tried to do something sort of similar. It was called "The Realm." It was an MMORPG made with the Sierra interface. It sucked. As usual, Sierra discovered an online market before it's time and, as usual, completely failed to execute on it. I also beta-tested The Sierra Network (later the ImagiNation Network), which was actually really cool for it's time, but the internet was about 5 years from hitting homes, so the connectivity issue was too big a problem then, i think.
-If
I didn't mean to imply that XML was derived from HTML. I was just saying that you should come up with your syntax standard (XML) before applying it (HTML). Because this happened in the reverse order, we have to retrofit HTML to XML (XHTML), and content developers don't want to deal with it.
Similarly, CSS1 had a confusing and inexpressive way of setting properties of nodes via rules. XSL/XSLT required a much more powerful way of querying an XML document, and they used XPath, which does the job rather well. But now CSS is stuck with this awkward node selection syntax. So, to retrofit CSS, they add some XPath-like selectors and whatnot, but that's arguably more confusing to someone who has to deal with both. The fact that CSS can't be specified in an XML format kind of bites, too.
When does Internet 2 come out? We need to start over, knowing what we know now.
-If
My question is, why not use XPath instead of coming up with a chinsy alternate-but-similar notation for selecting nodes in HTML? XPath is a w3 property... why not be consistent? They are trying to retrofit HTML to XML anyway, and IE lets you select nodes in scripts using XPath. (I thought it was part of the DOM standard, but I can't find it - I guess it's an MS extension.)
I guess it would cause some of the CSS syntax to be incompatible with new versions. But that should be solvable by having a well defined way of specifying which version of CSS a CSS file or section is, like you can with javascript. You can specify language="JavaScript1.0" or "Javascript1.2" or whatever to load a JS engine that conforms to that version's specifications (which, unfortunately, conflict in some cases).
I often think that these web standards have all evolved in the wrong order. HTML came before XML and DOM. CSS came before XSL. Bleah.
-If
Females also have a urethra, which could be considered a "hose-type device."
-If
Well, Microsoft also has ActiveX - and they substitute X with anything from "Script" to "Desktop." I wouldn't be surprised to see ActiveToast or ActiveRice in the future.
-If
Well, I'm sorry, if that helps.
-If
I don't see why it matters whether you can meet yourself. I don't want to die! I don't care if there's 20 other copies of me wandering around behaving, for all empirical purposes, exactly like me - I associate my identity with my stream of consciousness. Presumably if you created a copy of me, it would have a different stream of consciousness, just with the same memories.
Of course, perhaps the stream of consciousness is just an illusion anyway, in which case it doesn't matter. Bah, I don't know.
-If
I just see so many American natives miss using then and than on here.
I miss using "then" and "than," too. It's been so long...
-If
No way! Pitfall II!!! River Raid and Frostbite kicked ass, too.
-If
Copying off your hard drive without your permission may constitute copyright infringement, but it's more like... I dunno... Invasion of Privacy? Breaking and Entering? Trespassing?
Hmm... what would it be called if someone installed a new piece of furniture without your permission? Certainly they have to break into your house to put it there. Now, what if that furniture had termites, and it infested your house?
So, this is the equivalent of entering your house, installing some termine-infested furniture, and perhaps taking some pictures of the place, and making a xerox copy of your diary, all without your permission. Of course, if they strain their back rearranging your living room against your will, they can sue YOU for $5000. Whee!
-If
Penny Arcade is really hit-or-miss. Here are some that I found funny recently.
2002-09-02
2002-09-23
2002-09-27
2002-10-07
2002-10-18
-If
Hmm... I guess Wil Wheaton is the Kevin Bacon of the internet!
-If
Sun's version of the JRE is probably never going to be the fastest - it's a reference implementation. Many of the JVM crashes with the Sun JDK happen when the JIT is turned on (Which is is by default, these days). That's why there are many different JVM vendors out there trying to provide a really robust and high-performance Java runtime environment. Just using IBM's JRE is supposed to be quite a lot faster than Sun's. But there are commercial guys who are supposed to be even faster, depending on your application. JRockit is one such JVM vendor, for example, but I don't know if they are actually any good.
Of course, this is mostly targetted towards ISV's looking to bundle a JRE with their Java software. For web-deployed Java applets, you have to work with whatever is out there, and chances are that's going to be Sun's JVM, or MS's JVM. So Sun really should get their JIT VM running a bit more stable. Also, I don't know of any 3rd Party JDK 1.4 VM's out there, so if you want to play with the new stuff, you have to use Sun's JDK, too.
I dunno, I still think applets died in 1996. Java is great, it's presently my most comfortable language to work in, but you can do some crazy fun stuff with JavaScript and DHTML if you want a rich client-side web UI.
Oh, damn, I just checked my link, and see that BEA bought JRockit. I guess that makes sense...
-If
"Art, eh?"
Absolutely. I think GTA3 is a modern artwork more effective than any sculpture, painting, or interpretive dance I've ever seen. It shares an experience with people - MANY people - and spawns thought and discussion about moral and ethical issues. That's the highest form of art, as far as I am concerned.
You can draw all kinds of meaning from it: It's a brutal depiction of reality, maybe it's a warning. At more of a meta-level maybe it's making a point about how humans have the ability to seperate fantasy and reality, almost at a level of protest. Maybe they had no idea what they were saying, but that doesn't mean it doesn't say something, and that doesn't mean it isn't art.
-If
According to pckeyboard.com,
the two plug styles are DIN and mini-DIN. They qualify them as the AT DIN and the PS2 mini-DIN, but that's probably just to clarify for customers.
I believe that MIDI also uses the DIN and mini-DIN plugs.
-If
They have another keyboard (UNICOMP) which is basically the same as a Model M, but they are built new, and come (optionally) with PS2 connectors. No USB, unfortunately. They were $45 each, so I bought three, and I haven't had any problems with any of them...
-If
If only I had dates to look up their questionable past on Google...
-If
I recently saw Bowling for Columbine in an indie theatre in Palo Alto, and really enjoyed it. It was fairly liberal-minded, but I thought it was thought-provoking and well done. I'm not a big Michael Moore fan, either.
In it, he compares the gun-related death counts of some other countries with the US, and, even scaling by relative population, we are above and beyond our western counterparts. Consider a place like Canada, who watches all our violent movies, plays all of our violent games, AND has a very high guns-per-capita. And they really rarely shoot each other, compared to the US.
Makes me want to move to Canada.
-DG
I've found that some things are just really easy with tables, and some things are easy with CSS - not the same things. I admit I don't know CSS as well as I know tables... but there's less to know, I think, which scores a point in table's favor. Usually I use a combination of tables + css.
-If
"It's probably better to say "faster than average" rather than better."
It's probably faster to say "It's probably faster to say 'faster than average' rather than better," rather than better.
-If
Slashdot needs to normalize the character encodings. This japanese looks fine... if your browser is interpreting it as SHIFT-JIS. But how can it autodetect? Another guy used ISO-8859-1 to represent an e with an accent. Slashdot needs to autodetect each submission (or allow the user to specify) and convert to UTF-8 before adding the comment to the page for this to really work.
-If