That is why adventure games work best as comedies - the inherent absurdity of the situation is a great platform for jokes.
That said, comedy is sadly lacking in computer games. Many games have some comic relief, but very few games these days could truly be classified as comedies.
We're so worked up about gaming genres - FPS, Adventure, etc, that we've forgotten about the story genres - drama, comedy, action, etc.
Whatever else you add to it, an FPS can never be anything other than an action game. This was amply demonstrated by Deus Ex, which had a fabulous story, but at the end of the day had to have the fighting because that's what the game part was. If you're crap at fighting, then you don't get to find out what happens.
You couldn't make a romantic-comedy FPS, though you might be able to make a romantic-comedy-action FPS.
Similarly, adventure games consist of a bunch of absurd puzzles, and no matter what else you add, they will always be somewhat absurd. You can't easily make a pure dramatic adventure, but you can make great comedy-dramas like Grim Fandango, or great pure comedies like the Monkey Island games.
Some people don't like storytelling and gaming to overlap, but for those who do, Adventure games have tended to be the games that deliver. This is why many Adventure gamers felt kinda let down by Myst - it had no plot, it just had backstory about stuff which happened to other people. Your actions didn't advance the plot one iota, they merely allowed you to find out more about what had happened.
That is what Myst killed - the idea that plot was an essential element of the Adventure game.
Adventures are still the best bet for telling non-action stories in games, but they're far from perfect.
I've always been an advocate of teen rights. I just think it's absurd to have arbitrary ages like 16 and 18, and say once you're this age you're now allowed to do stuff.
Rights go hand in hand with responsibilities. I'm in favour of a test-of-adulthood, which somehow tests (By what means I'm not sure) whether you're capable of handling the responsibilities of adulthood. If you are, then you get the rights - all the rights, all at once.
Currently the teenage years are a slow trickle of rights, but I think that it's psychologically important to have a single rite-of-passage. In primitive societies this might have been having your foreskin cut off, or going out on the hunt for the first time. What it is doesn't matter, but once it's done that person is an adult; no ifs, no buts.
This used to happen around about 13, but these days full rights of adulthood aren't granted until 21, which as far as I'm concerned is very late.
PHP is very similar to Perl - I tend to consider it Perl without the syntactic sugar.
In Perl:
foreach $thing (@list) {
print $thing
}
In PHP:
reset($list);
while (list($key, $value) = each($list)) {
print $value;
}
This is the basic pattern - every place Perl has a nice new syntax to do something, PHP falls back on functions, or things that look like functions but aren't (like list()).
PHP avoids new syntax like the plague. Sometimes this is good, sometimes annoying - I hate the PHP list/array syntax.
I also hate that PHP has no database abstraction layer (Unless you use ODBC) - you change databases, you have to change all your database functions.
Professional PHP Programming is okay, but it contains way too much PHP advocacy.
I don't need to read 10 chapters about why PHP and open source are so great - I'm already using it, just tell me how.
It also starts out very slowly - like it's geared towards non-programmers. That's fair enough, but not what I expected from a book called Professional PHP Programming; it's more like Beginners' PHP Programming.
Oh, and the pics on the cover look like mugshots without the serial numbers.;-)
As for the PHP Pocket Reference, as the reviewer says, it's only a list of functions. A list of functions would be useful, except the descriptions are too sparse to find out what they do, and what the arguments are meant to be. Example:
string date(string format[, int timestamp])
Format a local date/time.
Absolutely no info on what the format string should contain, what the timestamp should be (Seconds since 1970?), and how it differs from strftime, and gmstrftime, and gmdate, all of which format a date/time and take the same arguments.
It's occasionally useful if you need to remember a function name, or the order of parameters, but I find myself going to the online docs more often. The php.net online docs have a great commenting system which often highlight the little quirks (aka bugs) of the function.
You pay these people to resolve a domain name to your IP address. The address is like the phone number (that's the only analogy I can use to explain it to people anymore anyway), and a company provides a layer linking your friendly name to an address.
Therefore, how NSI runs its business should be entirely up to NSI. I'm not against a little intervention; after all, the Internet is well on its way to being a utility similar to the phone system, but it doesn't mean that they aren't property. They're just the property of NSI.
Excellent, so anyone running a DNS should send a bill to NSI? I guess that's why NSI's business seems like it's pure profit - other people are providing the service that NSI is being paid for.
If the me of 10 years ago saw my computer today, I'd be saying "Wow, the monitor is a couple of inches larger, and MS Word now takes up half a 13Gb hard drive instead of half a 40Mb hard drive..."
I seriously doubt any kind of major paradigm shift in computing in the next 10 years. Hell, Unix was the big news of the '90s. In 10 years, maybe they'll invent a super groovy new version of... Unix.
Bigger, faster, better, but ultimately still the same.
My favourite villain death scene will be when a crazed fan disembowels Joel Schumaker with a fork for taking Tim Burton's great dark gotham city and filling it with stupid neon lights, and putting nipples on the batsuits, and casting a blonde girl as Batgirl, and casting a blonde guy as Robin, and... (et cetera et cetera et cetera)
Even Tim Burton got it wrong, though. You don't kill the Joker. You send him to Arkham. Movies which kill all the villains soon run out of villains.
Temperature and pressure are just two sides of the same coin. Take water up to an altitude where it boils at room temperature, and run turbines off it, it's still a steam engine. Same with pressurized liquid nitrogen.
You can generate electricity with any of the others (And many more besides, including hydrodams, solar and wind power), so clearly electricity can take on the properties of any of the others. You can even mix and match to tradeoff cost and pollution in any way you want.
Even alcohol will be more efficient, and less polluting run at a big power plant than in thousands of small engines run by ordinary people at variable speeds.
Nothing else comes close to the flexibility of electricity. It's a fundamental force of the universe. In my view it's as foolish to argue about how we power our cars as it is to argue about how we power our kitchen blenders.
Everyone always seems to talk about the negatives of electric cars - mainly low battery life, which is slowly being overcome, and implying that their only benefit is being zero-emission.
Electric cars have far more advantages than that. They're quiet, and they need no gearbox, for goodness sake! Why is this not mentioned more often?
People like to point out that the energy still has to be generated somewhere, but the great thing about electricity is it doesn't matter how the energy is generated, which makes for an easy transition to any new clean source of power whenever it's discovered. It's implementation-neutral;-) And of course a large power plant is inherently more efficient than thousands of small ones.
In my view, any new method of generating mechanical energy should be hooked up to a dynamo and used to generate electrical energy. Either locally, within the car, or globally, at a power plant. Then you can say goodbye to your clutch.
This highlights an interesting problem which will likely only get worse in the future - the difficutly of relicencing a product made by large numbers of people not all under the banner of a corporation.
You could say the votes of 51% of developers (Or the developers of 51% of the code) could change the licence, but what's to stop someone coming in and adding large amounts of code just to take over control of the project.
Well, how much regex use is appropriate is a matter of opinion. Other than that, how does Perl _encourage_ the use of break, globals, and meaningless variable names?
(Warning: Variable name too meaningful!)
(Warning: No break detected! Logic may not be convoluted enough.)
(Warning: Local variable detected, recommend use of global instead)
Lots of languages have regex support these days. Other than that, and implicit variables (Pronouns for programming languages), what is really so bad about Perl?
Sure, it looks unintelligable to someone who doesn't know it, but then so does french.
The fact that DOS still existed in the "all new" Win95/98 was always ridiculed by Mac/Be/Linux people who claimed it showed that Windows was still nothing more than a shell on top of 20-year-old DOS code... are you, the same people, criticizing Microsoft for removing the oft-ridiculed feature?
What makes you think it's the same people? Did you take note of their names/handles?
This is a common error, created by viewing a group composed of many seperate individuals as a homogenous entity holding a single opinion.
Just because one belongs to a group such as, say, Linux users, doesn't mean that one agrees with everything other users say. In all likelihood the people complaining about the lack of DOS are different from the ones complaining about the fact that DOS was still there.
The hypocracy exists only in your mind, because you fail to view people as individuals with individual opinions.
I encountered an interesting idea for an electoral system here (Explained fully on subsequent pages)
I have a feeling this system might appeal to geek-types, as it seems to resemble a hill-climbing algorithm - an algorithm to find the global maxima of candidates. It might be said that current systems find only local maxima (Well-known candidates) if they can be considered to work at all.
I see two different models for how property could work:
1. When the consumer receives the product, the producer gets paid.
2. When the producer relinquishes the product, the producer gets paid.
In the case of physical property, the two models are the same. The consumer receives the product at the same time as the producer relinquishes it.
In the case of intellectual property, however, the models differ, because the consumer can receive the product without the producer relinquishing it.
Producers (Or publishers) of intellectual property prefer model 1, because it allows them to sell the product over and over again without relinquishing it.
Model 2 is closer to the way the real world works, though. The producer would create their work, and then once they get paid however much they feel is appropriate, they release the product retaining (say) only the right to be identified as the creator (Even this is artificial, but morally correct, I feel).
What we are seeing in this digital revolution, where the intellectual property is finally seperated from the physical medium, is just why model 1 is not viable, and why we should move to model 2 as the ultimate framework for property.
To me, the question is whether Napster should be accountable for the actions of its users.
There is no doubt in my mind that Napster exists mainly for the purpose of facilitating piracy. Just like certain types of guns exist purely for their ability to kill humans, and those tables you can flip over to hide the gambling markings on the top exist purely to facilitate illegal gambling.
The question is whether the guns, tables, and software should be illegal in and of themselves, or whether it is just the act that should be illegal.
Is Napster the equivalent of a fence - an active participant in the wrongful activity - or are they more distant?
The way to ensure the success of Mozilla, is to write standards-compliant web pages that are cooler on Mozilla than IE due to its support of those standards.
Standards compliance is the 'coolest shit' Mozilla has to offer.
I think the store-and-forward scheme that Usenet uses is just obsolete, and this is causing the gradual decline of all the other technologies built on it. If I post a short article to an obscure newsgroup with a handful of readers, how many megabytes of storage is that innocuous message taking up on thousands of news servers around the world?
My ISP gets newsfeeds from several sources, and still I get maybe 30% of articles missing. Loss of articles is simply not acceptable in a modern system, when you have to compete with message boards which have no article loss at all.
Usenet needs a rebirth to position it as a viable alternative to message boards. It needs to concentrate on high traffic groups which actually benefit from worldwide mirroring.
Meanwhile, private message boards can take over the low end of the market, while providing NNTP interfaces and all the features of a real news server. The big difficulty here, in fact, is that most web hosts would not allow their users to set up a 'server', restricting the idea to the big boys, which is the opposite of the proposed low-end niche message boards should have. Perhaps something could be jury-rigged to send text via HTTP, with a client-side translator program acting as a proxy news server. (Too techy, though)
And news readers, the final point in the triangle, need to have solid and seamless support for getting groups from many servers.
Even the best web-based message board is nowhere near a good newsreader for ease of use. Sadly, the Web is seen as the only interface needed for internet applications these days.
Well given that they have failed to work that way, it seems foolish to try to force them to now.
Is slashdot a legitimate.org? It probably was when it started, but it's now a commercial entity. Does this make a tiny bit of difference to where readers look for the site?
If something isn't working the way it was intended, you have to look at why. There's no way to force people to use the system properly short of actually having some regulatory body enforcing the use of specific domains.
So rather than forcing people to use a broken system, why not take what we've learned from the TLD situation, and design something better suited to the way the 'net is actually being used?
Seems to me TLDs are only useful for classifying stuff when you're guessing domains. The far better way of classifying information on the 'net is the way the WWW does it - via links between those pieces of information.
Slashdot Mirror
But oddly enough, it seems Google is still using DMoz for their own directory. Hopefully they won't switch that to Yahoo.
That is why adventure games work best as comedies - the inherent absurdity of the situation is a great platform for jokes.
That said, comedy is sadly lacking in computer games. Many games have some comic relief, but very few games these days could truly be classified as comedies.
We're so worked up about gaming genres - FPS, Adventure, etc, that we've forgotten about the story genres - drama, comedy, action, etc.
Whatever else you add to it, an FPS can never be anything other than an action game. This was amply demonstrated by Deus Ex, which had a fabulous story, but at the end of the day had to have the fighting because that's what the game part was. If you're crap at fighting, then you don't get to find out what happens.
You couldn't make a romantic-comedy FPS, though you might be able to make a romantic-comedy-action FPS.
Similarly, adventure games consist of a bunch of absurd puzzles, and no matter what else you add, they will always be somewhat absurd. You can't easily make a pure dramatic adventure, but you can make great comedy-dramas like Grim Fandango, or great pure comedies like the Monkey Island games.
Some people don't like storytelling and gaming to overlap, but for those who do, Adventure games have tended to be the games that deliver. This is why many Adventure gamers felt kinda let down by Myst - it had no plot, it just had backstory about stuff which happened to other people. Your actions didn't advance the plot one iota, they merely allowed you to find out more about what had happened.
That is what Myst killed - the idea that plot was an essential element of the Adventure game.
Adventures are still the best bet for telling non-action stories in games, but they're far from perfect.
I've always been an advocate of teen rights. I just think it's absurd to have arbitrary ages like 16 and 18, and say once you're this age you're now allowed to do stuff.
Rights go hand in hand with responsibilities. I'm in favour of a test-of-adulthood, which somehow tests (By what means I'm not sure) whether you're capable of handling the responsibilities of adulthood. If you are, then you get the rights - all the rights, all at once.
Currently the teenage years are a slow trickle of rights, but I think that it's psychologically important to have a single rite-of-passage. In primitive societies this might have been having your foreskin cut off, or going out on the hunt for the first time. What it is doesn't matter, but once it's done that person is an adult; no ifs, no buts.
This used to happen around about 13, but these days full rights of adulthood aren't granted until 21, which as far as I'm concerned is very late.
Well don't I look foolish ;-)
PHP is very similar to Perl - I tend to consider it Perl without the syntactic sugar.
In Perl:
foreach $thing (@list) {
print $thing
}
In PHP:
reset($list);
while (list($key, $value) = each($list)) {
print $value;
}
This is the basic pattern - every place Perl has a nice new syntax to do something, PHP falls back on functions, or things that look like functions but aren't (like list()).
PHP avoids new syntax like the plague. Sometimes this is good, sometimes annoying - I hate the PHP list/array syntax.
I also hate that PHP has no database abstraction layer (Unless you use ODBC) - you change databases, you have to change all your database functions.
Professional PHP Programming is okay, but it contains way too much PHP advocacy.
;-)
I don't need to read 10 chapters about why PHP and open source are so great - I'm already using it, just tell me how.
It also starts out very slowly - like it's geared towards non-programmers. That's fair enough, but not what I expected from a book called Professional PHP Programming; it's more like Beginners' PHP Programming.
Oh, and the pics on the cover look like mugshots without the serial numbers.
As for the PHP Pocket Reference, as the reviewer says, it's only a list of functions. A list of functions would be useful, except the descriptions are too sparse to find out what they do, and what the arguments are meant to be. Example:
string date(string format[, int timestamp])
Format a local date/time.
Absolutely no info on what the format string should contain, what the timestamp should be (Seconds since 1970?), and how it differs from strftime, and gmstrftime, and gmdate, all of which format a date/time and take the same arguments.
It's occasionally useful if you need to remember a function name, or the order of parameters, but I find myself going to the online docs more often. The php.net online docs have a great commenting system which often highlight the little quirks (aka bugs) of the function.
1. A robot may not harm a human, or by inaction allow a human to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by a human, except where doing so would contradict the first law.
3. A robot must protect itself, except where doing so would contradict either of the first two laws.
(I may have gotten these slightly wrong)
If the me of 10 years ago saw my computer today, I'd be saying "Wow, the monitor is a couple of inches larger, and MS Word now takes up half a 13Gb hard drive instead of half a 40Mb hard drive..."
I seriously doubt any kind of major paradigm shift in computing in the next 10 years. Hell, Unix was the big news of the '90s. In 10 years, maybe they'll invent a super groovy new version of... Unix.
Bigger, faster, better, but ultimately still the same.
My favourite villain death scene will be when a crazed fan disembowels Joel Schumaker with a fork for taking Tim Burton's great dark gotham city and filling it with stupid neon lights, and putting nipples on the batsuits, and casting a blonde girl as Batgirl, and casting a blonde guy as Robin, and ... (et cetera et cetera et cetera)
Even Tim Burton got it wrong, though. You don't kill the Joker. You send him to Arkham. Movies which kill all the villains soon run out of villains.
Temperature and pressure are just two sides of the same coin. Take water up to an altitude where it boils at room temperature, and run turbines off it, it's still a steam engine. Same with pressurized liquid nitrogen.
You can generate electricity with any of the others (And many more besides, including hydrodams, solar and wind power), so clearly electricity can take on the properties of any of the others. You can even mix and match to tradeoff cost and pollution in any way you want.
Even alcohol will be more efficient, and less polluting run at a big power plant than in thousands of small engines run by ordinary people at variable speeds.
Nothing else comes close to the flexibility of electricity. It's a fundamental force of the universe. In my view it's as foolish to argue about how we power our cars as it is to argue about how we power our kitchen blenders.
I agree.
;-) And of course a large power plant is inherently more efficient than thousands of small ones.
Everyone always seems to talk about the negatives of electric cars - mainly low battery life, which is slowly being overcome, and implying that their only benefit is being zero-emission.
Electric cars have far more advantages than that. They're quiet, and they need no gearbox, for goodness sake! Why is this not mentioned more often?
People like to point out that the energy still has to be generated somewhere, but the great thing about electricity is it doesn't matter how the energy is generated, which makes for an easy transition to any new clean source of power whenever it's discovered. It's implementation-neutral
In my view, any new method of generating mechanical energy should be hooked up to a dynamo and used to generate electrical energy. Either locally, within the car, or globally, at a power plant. Then you can say goodbye to your clutch.
This highlights an interesting problem which will likely only get worse in the future - the difficutly of relicencing a product made by large numbers of people not all under the banner of a corporation.
You could say the votes of 51% of developers (Or the developers of 51% of the code) could change the licence, but what's to stop someone coming in and adding large amounts of code just to take over control of the project.
Well, how much regex use is appropriate is a matter of opinion. Other than that, how does Perl _encourage_ the use of break, globals, and meaningless variable names?
(Warning: Variable name too meaningful!)
(Warning: No break detected! Logic may not be convoluted enough.)
(Warning: Local variable detected, recommend use of global instead)
Lots of languages have regex support these days. Other than that, and implicit variables (Pronouns for programming languages), what is really so bad about Perl?
Sure, it looks unintelligable to someone who doesn't know it, but then so does french.
What makes you think it's the same people? Did you take note of their names/handles?
This is a common error, created by viewing a group composed of many seperate individuals as a homogenous entity holding a single opinion.
Just because one belongs to a group such as, say, Linux users, doesn't mean that one agrees with everything other users say. In all likelihood the people complaining about the lack of DOS are different from the ones complaining about the fact that DOS was still there.
The hypocracy exists only in your mind, because you fail to view people as individuals with individual opinions.
I encountered an interesting idea for an electoral system here (Explained fully on subsequent pages)
I have a feeling this system might appeal to geek-types, as it seems to resemble a hill-climbing algorithm - an algorithm to find the global maxima of candidates. It might be said that current systems find only local maxima (Well-known candidates) if they can be considered to work at all.
I see two different models for how property could work:
1. When the consumer receives the product, the producer gets paid.
2. When the producer relinquishes the product, the producer gets paid.
In the case of physical property, the two models are the same. The consumer receives the product at the same time as the producer relinquishes it.
In the case of intellectual property, however, the models differ, because the consumer can receive the product without the producer relinquishing it.
Producers (Or publishers) of intellectual property prefer model 1, because it allows them to sell the product over and over again without relinquishing it.
Model 2 is closer to the way the real world works, though. The producer would create their work, and then once they get paid however much they feel is appropriate, they release the product retaining (say) only the right to be identified as the creator (Even this is artificial, but morally correct, I feel).
What we are seeing in this digital revolution, where the intellectual property is finally seperated from the physical medium, is just why model 1 is not viable, and why we should move to model 2 as the ultimate framework for property.
To me, the question is whether Napster should be accountable for the actions of its users.
There is no doubt in my mind that Napster exists mainly for the purpose of facilitating piracy. Just like certain types of guns exist purely for their ability to kill humans, and those tables you can flip over to hide the gambling markings on the top exist purely to facilitate illegal gambling.
The question is whether the guns, tables, and software should be illegal in and of themselves, or whether it is just the act that should be illegal.
Is Napster the equivalent of a fence - an active participant in the wrongful activity - or are they more distant?
Perhaps in the end, it's an issue of intent.
The way to ensure the success of Mozilla, is to write standards-compliant web pages that are cooler on Mozilla than IE due to its support of those standards.
Standards compliance is the 'coolest shit' Mozilla has to offer.
Just like you read all the previous comments which said exactly the same thing as you just did?
Don't worry. If King never finishes the novel, we can get a team of wannabes to do it instead.
There'll be about three different incompatible versions, and it'll be 'beta' for about 5 years, but hey, that's open source for you.
I think the store-and-forward scheme that Usenet uses is just obsolete, and this is causing the gradual decline of all the other technologies built on it. If I post a short article to an obscure newsgroup with a handful of readers, how many megabytes of storage is that innocuous message taking up on thousands of news servers around the world?
My ISP gets newsfeeds from several sources, and still I get maybe 30% of articles missing. Loss of articles is simply not acceptable in a modern system, when you have to compete with message boards which have no article loss at all.
Usenet needs a rebirth to position it as a viable alternative to message boards. It needs to concentrate on high traffic groups which actually benefit from worldwide mirroring.
Meanwhile, private message boards can take over the low end of the market, while providing NNTP interfaces and all the features of a real news server. The big difficulty here, in fact, is that most web hosts would not allow their users to set up a 'server', restricting the idea to the big boys, which is the opposite of the proposed low-end niche message boards should have. Perhaps something could be jury-rigged to send text via HTTP, with a client-side translator program acting as a proxy news server. (Too techy, though)
And news readers, the final point in the triangle, need to have solid and seamless support for getting groups from many servers.
Even the best web-based message board is nowhere near a good newsreader for ease of use. Sadly, the Web is seen as the only interface needed for internet applications these days.
Well given that they have failed to work that way, it seems foolish to try to force them to now.
.org? It probably was when it started, but it's now a commercial entity. Does this make a tiny bit of difference to where readers look for the site?
Is slashdot a legitimate
If something isn't working the way it was intended, you have to look at why. There's no way to force people to use the system properly short of actually having some regulatory body enforcing the use of specific domains.
So rather than forcing people to use a broken system, why not take what we've learned from the TLD situation, and design something better suited to the way the 'net is actually being used?
Seems to me TLDs are only useful for classifying stuff when you're guessing domains. The far better way of classifying information on the 'net is the way the WWW does it - via links between those pieces of information.