Heh, I do that. Worst part was turning it in with my assignment not remembering that I had left the comment in there.. Code worked fine, it just had a big
// Note to self, this code written while really fucked up.. go back and check it later
Dude, every LAN Party I've been to has had copious amounts of beer, weed, shrooms, etc. We turn counterstrike into a drinking game. Your team wins, you take a shot. This tends to even out the skill, plus get you drunk really quick. True, this doesn't solve the women thing, but I personally don't care, just think of LAN parties as a tech-age version of poker night. Most of us have girlfriends anyway, and they don't care how shitfaced we get because there's no "competition" there. I do realize this isn't true for about 99% of slashdot's readers (the closest they've come to sex is circle-jerking with their LAN party buddies) but it's not true for everyone.
In Austin. They had it at Mojo's Daily Grind, a local coffee house. It sucked, frankly. There were about 20 people there and it was pretty lame. I left like right after I got there. Frankly I'm surprised this is getting slashdot coverage. If the next one is better, maybe.. but if it's anything like the last one you'd be wasting your time going.
This is either a huge troll or someone who just got burned on ebay. Or did you meet some "hot 15 year old" off AOL and are using your "one phone call" to send this post to/..
The math is rather trivial. Take a linear algebra class and you've got the right amount of math skills. Think of creating a world of polygons, then taking their orthogonal projection relative to the screen. Heck, this is all 3d is, well, of course there is some perspective stuff in there (sizing yadda yadda, add shadows for depth, etc) but essentially it's just matrix calculations. Nothing too earth-shattering here.
Modern 3d is a lot easier, because with 3d chips, all the tedious calculations were removed. The 3d card will handle all the scaling, lighting and masking for you, so you don't have to write any slow code to do it; it's all hardware and really fast because the operations are essentially the same for every game (and where they're not, we now have things like programmable shaders, vector units, etc.)
Anyway, I guess the point of this is even if you did what you say, it would give no real insight into modern game programming. It's like learning assembly so you can make a mysql database. Just keep in mind that doom (and doom 2 for that matter) were written before the advent of 3d accelerators. Hell, Doom was the first time 3d was used to create a convincing, immersive environment; before that 3d gaming just seemed like kind of a novelty.
The news industry is kind of held in a different standard because this is normal. Reuters is a wire service, and it's common practice for newspapers to reprint articles verbatim from a wire service (after paying for them, naturally.) Google News is also somewhat edited; any crackpot can write a story and send it to a news outlet (newspaper, etc) but it's up to their editors whether or not to print it; thus giving the newspaper some sort of responsibility to what they print.
Ehh, IDSL is a waste of time. It's not really any faster than ISDN (160k as opposed to 128k) but it costs a lot of money to implement. When I worked for an ISP we considered IDSL but the reality is it's not really any better than plain ISDN.
Well, see, the thing is, there's basically a ton of fiber running down the middle of the country and nothing on the ends to fill it up. It's like trying to fill a sewer with a garden hose, there's just not enough on the ends to possibly use that much capacity in between.
"Last mile" solutions are where this stuff gets REALLY expensive. You have to find a way to get an exclusive connection to a large amount of people -- and do it cheaply. So far, cable and DSL is all we have, and while, yes, cable caps are artificial, it's only so they can offer a premium service for more money. They're not trying to screw you; 99% of their customers have no need for more bandwidth than the cap anyway; and those who do really need more can pay more and get it. It's just business. Regardless, it's better than it was 5 years ago, when that kind of bandwidth meant buying a few T1s at a cost of several thousand dollars a month.
Now I'm going to go off on a little political rant here, so if you don't want to hear it, politely scroll down and get on with your day. Yes, voter apathy is a problem. Unfortunately, this country's election system is so fundamentally flawed that it doesn't matter. Basically, if you're a politician with any reasonable chance of getting elected, your election platform falls in one of two categories. Third party candidates have absolutely no chance of getting elected because, well, the republicans and democrats draw up the congressional districts and they're obviously going to draw them such that any third party support that springs up is diluted by their votes. This is illegal along racial boundries, but definately not along party lines.
Not that any of that matters. In reality, politicians are no longer elected by the people. They are elected by the corporations who stand the most to gain from lax corporate control. They buy off politicians so they will support certain laws or ignore certain small injustices in order to be able to keep their jobs next election that comes up. The sad thing is there's not much we can do about this. Sure, we can write our congressmen or whatever, but whoever writes a bill that would actually fix something like this is committing political suicide. Not to mention it would be watered down to the point where it does nothing (McCain finance reform bill anyone?) by the time it is even put up for a vote. When the people who make the rules aren't fair, there's little hope for the system.
Yes, you CAN make a difference. Start a corporation, make lots and lots of money, buy some politicians, and correct past injustices. Other than that, voting is largely a formality.
Ditto here. I keep two e-mail accounts. One for stuff I think I'm gonna get spam off of (online shopping, subscriptions, whatever) and then another for personal e-mail. The personal e-mail account is only given out to friends and family. Though I've found Apple's spam filter in Mail to be very effective at blocking spam (and not blocking real mail) once it's trained. Finally, a spam filter that the spammers can't avoid (because it's a learning filter:)
For some people, smaller is worth more than more powerful. You are obviously not one of them, so you're not part of their intended market. These things could be used in car stereos easily, for example. Try cramming your $500 commodity-part athlon system in a car dash. Besides, this is actually a very feature-rich offering. Hell, it has firewire, which is more than 90% of PCs out there.
Hrm.. Well, as one of my Computer Science teachers once told me (in a discrete math class).. Mathemeticians do things because it interests them. The fact that it often has no practical application is why they are often cold, bitter and broke.:)
He was calculating the size of a text file containing pi, and for that, he was correct. Actually, by its nature, pi should not compress very well, if at all. The numbers in pi have no pattern (I forget the proof, but there is one) so most compression algorithms wouldn't be able to do much with it.
127,000 people? Last count, Tokyo was one of the biggest cities in the world. Somewhere around 10-15 million people for Tokyo alone. So I'd say your numbers are off.:)
Yeah, but she was initially awarded $3 million or something ridiculous. 3rd degree burns, while painful for a few days, normally don't even require a trip to the doctor. Even so, I highly doubt her medical bills were anywhere $3 mil. The concept of "punitive damages" is retarded. Besides, to McDonalds, $3 million is nothing compared to the amount of money they deal with, so it's not really a punishment anyway.
Actually, from what I've heard, DigiPen is laughed at from within the industry. Regardless, a good conceptual knowledge of the concepts is more important than "knowing how to code." Hell, at the university I attend, we aren't taught programming languages, really. Some of the intro classes are taught in Java, but after that, you're expected to learn languages and APIs on your own, and you can use any language you wish to code programs. This is the way the real world works too. Your employer probably isn't going to have a class on OpenGL, at the most you may be able to borrow a book on OpenGL but you have to learn it on your own.
Opteron will probably be the victor here, but not solely because of IA-32 backwards compatability. The vast majority of the desktop market runs Windows, and you'd be stupid to think that Intel wouldn't give Microsoft a very good emulator to include in their OS. x86-64 will win out because Itanium 2 is extremely power-hungry and very expensive. It really wasn't designed to be a desktop chip. Intel designed the Itanium to compete with Sun and IBM, not AMD. That's what will win out, with backwards compatability being a secondary consideration.
The state of the industry is such now that only those with the money to promote their games will make any money off them. And that's not even enough. Part of the problem is the price of games; most gamers can't afford to drop $50 on every game that comes out. But it's kind of a cyclical problem, that $50 pays for the development of the game and the development of the other games the company produced that didn't make it big. But now video game development costs are approaching hollywood figures and the margin for error is much less, so fewer of those less successful games get made. Which is a shame, a lot of them are very good but their appeal is too narrow to ever draw a broad audience.
It's eventually going to get so expensive that only a few companies can afford to do it, which is what is happening right now in the industry. With colossal companies like Nintendo, Electronic Arts, and now Square Enix, there's little room for the smaller developer. I see the video game industry (at least in the console world, but it's happening on the PC side of things too) becoming much like the movie industry. The big companies make most of the games with an occaisional breakout hit by a smaller company (think indie films.)
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like things are going to get better. Consumer attitudes are also to blame for this, but it's somewhat understandable that if someone is going to drop $50 on a game, they want to KNOW it's good before they buy it. The problem is the standards are set so high that only companies with a mammoth budget can hire good artists and designers while having enough money left over for an army of coders to get the damn thing out on schedule.
This situation really isn't too big a problem so long as the large companies continue to put out quality product, because if they should stop, the market is not yet prohibitive to smaller developers (hell, 3 years ago, Square looked invincible) They'll continue to milk their flagship series because, well, it sells. That's why we have so many Zeldas, Metroids, Final Fantasys, Dragon Quests, Madden NFL games and the like. Big developers will always be able to count on these to make a profit, but if the margins on each game are decreasing, there will be less room for experimentation. There's really not much that can be done here; consolidation is a reality in pretty much every industry. Let's just hope it doesn't decrease the quality of the games.
Re:Religious paranoid idiots will ban anything
on
Don't Stymie Nanotech
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Wow, where to begin...
Your analogy with the crosswalk is rather inapplicable to the situation, as at a crosswalk crowded with second graders, I know the outcome, and I know that society will be no better for me turning little Timmy into a speed bump. With nanotech and other stuff, this is all uncharted territory. There is a relative degree of uncertainty as to what will happen. As opposed to driving through a crosswalk, where all I've got is a dead seven year old.
As for assuming he is amoral just because he feels strongly against the religious right is just plain foolish. You are confusing morality and ethics with religion. They are two totally separate things. I consider myself a moral person, but I don't want other people to try and force THEIR morals upon me, which the religious right has a tendancy to do.
The questions you ask are the kind that will probably never have an answer. We have been trying to decide exactly what constitutes "life" (not biological life, but conscious life) for thousands of years, if not longer. I do agree, the risk of acting without forethought is there, but also there is the risk of not acting.
There is no universal answer to questions of morality, as morals vary from person to person, society to society. Myself, I don't find pornography morally offensive, but I know a great many people do. In America, we do not find the sight of a woman's legs morally offensive, but in Saudi Arabia, they do.
The basis for applying these morals gets especially sticky in the areas of 'altering life' (nanotech, gene therapy, even abortion, though that's a whole other matter) because we don't even know what makes "life" exist. Yes, we've sequenced the genome, but without the so-called "spark of life," all you have is a lifeless, gene-sequenced body. What actually creates life? Many would say God. Others would not. But should we not at least try to find the answer, or should we just throw up our arms and say "It is the work of God!"
Yeah right! What video store chain is gonna go for this? They make all their money off late fees. If you don't have to return the movie, there go the late fees they used to be able to charge you. Blockbuster is owned by Viacom (uber-media conglomerate) which just happens to be a company that can squash this kind of thing should they so desire.
Bill (as in Bill Gates) actually has very little to do with Microsoft these days. He gave up control of the company to Ballmer years ago. Sure, he's still chairman of the board, but I really doubt the board has much say in technical matters. Linus on the other hand, has an active role in OS development and even codes stuff. I doubt Gates has touched a compiler in ten years. Contrary to popular belief, Gates didn't make his money because he was a super-smart computer geek. He made his money because he was a super-smart businessman. He then hired super-smart computer geeks to do all the work for him, and made them all very rich as well.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure my TA found it rather humorous...
Dude, every LAN Party I've been to has had copious amounts of beer, weed, shrooms, etc. We turn counterstrike into a drinking game. Your team wins, you take a shot. This tends to even out the skill, plus get you drunk really quick. True, this doesn't solve the women thing, but I personally don't care, just think of LAN parties as a tech-age version of poker night. Most of us have girlfriends anyway, and they don't care how shitfaced we get because there's no "competition" there. I do realize this isn't true for about 99% of slashdot's readers (the closest they've come to sex is circle-jerking with their LAN party buddies) but it's not true for everyone.
In Austin. They had it at Mojo's Daily Grind, a local coffee house. It sucked, frankly. There were about 20 people there and it was pretty lame. I left like right after I got there. Frankly I'm surprised this is getting slashdot coverage. If the next one is better, maybe.. but if it's anything like the last one you'd be wasting your time going.
This is either a huge troll or someone who just got burned on ebay. Or did you meet some "hot 15 year old" off AOL and are using your "one phone call" to send this post to /..
where the men are men, the women are men, and the boys are FBI agents.
The math is rather trivial. Take a linear algebra class and you've got the right amount of math skills. Think of creating a world of polygons, then taking their orthogonal projection relative to the screen. Heck, this is all 3d is, well, of course there is some perspective stuff in there (sizing yadda yadda, add shadows for depth, etc) but essentially it's just matrix calculations. Nothing too earth-shattering here.
Modern 3d is a lot easier, because with 3d chips, all the tedious calculations were removed. The 3d card will handle all the scaling, lighting and masking for you, so you don't have to write any slow code to do it; it's all hardware and really fast because the operations are essentially the same for every game (and where they're not, we now have things like programmable shaders, vector units, etc.)
Anyway, I guess the point of this is even if you did what you say, it would give no real insight into modern game programming. It's like learning assembly so you can make a mysql database. Just keep in mind that doom (and doom 2 for that matter) were written before the advent of 3d accelerators. Hell, Doom was the first time 3d was used to create a convincing, immersive environment; before that 3d gaming just seemed like kind of a novelty.
If you don't care about karma, don't bitch about getting modded down. There will be other chances to voice your opinion.
The news industry is kind of held in a different standard because this is normal. Reuters is a wire service, and it's common practice for newspapers to reprint articles verbatim from a wire service (after paying for them, naturally.) Google News is also somewhat edited; any crackpot can write a story and send it to a news outlet (newspaper, etc) but it's up to their editors whether or not to print it; thus giving the newspaper some sort of responsibility to what they print.
Ehh, IDSL is a waste of time. It's not really any faster than ISDN (160k as opposed to 128k) but it costs a lot of money to implement. When I worked for an ISP we considered IDSL but the reality is it's not really any better than plain ISDN.
Well, see, the thing is, there's basically a ton of fiber running down the middle of the country and nothing on the ends to fill it up. It's like trying to fill a sewer with a garden hose, there's just not enough on the ends to possibly use that much capacity in between.
"Last mile" solutions are where this stuff gets REALLY expensive. You have to find a way to get an exclusive connection to a large amount of people -- and do it cheaply. So far, cable and DSL is all we have, and while, yes, cable caps are artificial, it's only so they can offer a premium service for more money. They're not trying to screw you; 99% of their customers have no need for more bandwidth than the cap anyway; and those who do really need more can pay more and get it. It's just business. Regardless, it's better than it was 5 years ago, when that kind of bandwidth meant buying a few T1s at a cost of several thousand dollars a month.
Now I'm going to go off on a little political rant here, so if you don't want to hear it, politely scroll down and get on with your day. Yes, voter apathy is a problem. Unfortunately, this country's election system is so fundamentally flawed that it doesn't matter. Basically, if you're a politician with any reasonable chance of getting elected, your election platform falls in one of two categories. Third party candidates have absolutely no chance of getting elected because, well, the republicans and democrats draw up the congressional districts and they're obviously going to draw them such that any third party support that springs up is diluted by their votes. This is illegal along racial boundries, but definately not along party lines.
Not that any of that matters. In reality, politicians are no longer elected by the people. They are elected by the corporations who stand the most to gain from lax corporate control. They buy off politicians so they will support certain laws or ignore certain small injustices in order to be able to keep their jobs next election that comes up. The sad thing is there's not much we can do about this. Sure, we can write our congressmen or whatever, but whoever writes a bill that would actually fix something like this is committing political suicide. Not to mention it would be watered down to the point where it does nothing (McCain finance reform bill anyone?) by the time it is even put up for a vote. When the people who make the rules aren't fair, there's little hope for the system.
Yes, you CAN make a difference. Start a corporation, make lots and lots of money, buy some politicians, and correct past injustices. Other than that, voting is largely a formality.
Ditto here. I keep two e-mail accounts. One for stuff I think I'm gonna get spam off of (online shopping, subscriptions, whatever) and then another for personal e-mail. The personal e-mail account is only given out to friends and family. Though I've found Apple's spam filter in Mail to be very effective at blocking spam (and not blocking real mail) once it's trained. Finally, a spam filter that the spammers can't avoid (because it's a learning filter :)
For some people, smaller is worth more than more powerful. You are obviously not one of them, so you're not part of their intended market. These things could be used in car stereos easily, for example. Try cramming your $500 commodity-part athlon system in a car dash. Besides, this is actually a very feature-rich offering. Hell, it has firewire, which is more than 90% of PCs out there.
Hrm.. Well, as one of my Computer Science teachers once told me (in a discrete math class).. Mathemeticians do things because it interests them. The fact that it often has no practical application is why they are often cold, bitter and broke. :)
He was calculating the size of a text file containing pi, and for that, he was correct. Actually, by its nature, pi should not compress very well, if at all. The numbers in pi have no pattern (I forget the proof, but there is one) so most compression algorithms wouldn't be able to do much with it.
127,000 people? Last count, Tokyo was one of the biggest cities in the world. Somewhere around 10-15 million people for Tokyo alone. So I'd say your numbers are off. :)
Yeah, but she was initially awarded $3 million or something ridiculous. 3rd degree burns, while painful for a few days, normally don't even require a trip to the doctor. Even so, I highly doubt her medical bills were anywhere $3 mil. The concept of "punitive damages" is retarded. Besides, to McDonalds, $3 million is nothing compared to the amount of money they deal with, so it's not really a punishment anyway.
Wow, you just got the entire point of this lawsuit. :) Nevermind that internet advertising doesn't really work anyway...
Actually, from what I've heard, DigiPen is laughed at from within the industry. Regardless, a good conceptual knowledge of the concepts is more important than "knowing how to code." Hell, at the university I attend, we aren't taught programming languages, really. Some of the intro classes are taught in Java, but after that, you're expected to learn languages and APIs on your own, and you can use any language you wish to code programs. This is the way the real world works too. Your employer probably isn't going to have a class on OpenGL, at the most you may be able to borrow a book on OpenGL but you have to learn it on your own.
Opteron will probably be the victor here, but not solely because of IA-32 backwards compatability. The vast majority of the desktop market runs Windows, and you'd be stupid to think that Intel wouldn't give Microsoft a very good emulator to include in their OS. x86-64 will win out because Itanium 2 is extremely power-hungry and very expensive. It really wasn't designed to be a desktop chip. Intel designed the Itanium to compete with Sun and IBM, not AMD. That's what will win out, with backwards compatability being a secondary consideration.
The state of the industry is such now that only those with the money to promote their games will make any money off them. And that's not even enough. Part of the problem is the price of games; most gamers can't afford to drop $50 on every game that comes out. But it's kind of a cyclical problem, that $50 pays for the development of the game and the development of the other games the company produced that didn't make it big. But now video game development costs are approaching hollywood figures and the margin for error is much less, so fewer of those less successful games get made. Which is a shame, a lot of them are very good but their appeal is too narrow to ever draw a broad audience.
It's eventually going to get so expensive that only a few companies can afford to do it, which is what is happening right now in the industry. With colossal companies like Nintendo, Electronic Arts, and now Square Enix, there's little room for the smaller developer. I see the video game industry (at least in the console world, but it's happening on the PC side of things too) becoming much like the movie industry. The big companies make most of the games with an occaisional breakout hit by a smaller company (think indie films.)
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like things are going to get better. Consumer attitudes are also to blame for this, but it's somewhat understandable that if someone is going to drop $50 on a game, they want to KNOW it's good before they buy it. The problem is the standards are set so high that only companies with a mammoth budget can hire good artists and designers while having enough money left over for an army of coders to get the damn thing out on schedule.
This situation really isn't too big a problem so long as the large companies continue to put out quality product, because if they should stop, the market is not yet prohibitive to smaller developers (hell, 3 years ago, Square looked invincible) They'll continue to milk their flagship series because, well, it sells. That's why we have so many Zeldas, Metroids, Final Fantasys, Dragon Quests, Madden NFL games and the like. Big developers will always be able to count on these to make a profit, but if the margins on each game are decreasing, there will be less room for experimentation. There's really not much that can be done here; consolidation is a reality in pretty much every industry. Let's just hope it doesn't decrease the quality of the games.
Wow, where to begin...
Your analogy with the crosswalk is rather inapplicable to the situation, as at a crosswalk crowded with second graders, I know the outcome, and I know that society will be no better for me turning little Timmy into a speed bump. With nanotech and other stuff, this is all uncharted territory. There is a relative degree of uncertainty as to what will happen. As opposed to driving through a crosswalk, where all I've got is a dead seven year old.
As for assuming he is amoral just because he feels strongly against the religious right is just plain foolish. You are confusing morality and ethics with religion. They are two totally separate things. I consider myself a moral person, but I don't want other people to try and force THEIR morals upon me, which the religious right has a tendancy to do.
The questions you ask are the kind that will probably never have an answer. We have been trying to decide exactly what constitutes "life" (not biological life, but conscious life) for thousands of years, if not longer. I do agree, the risk of acting without forethought is there, but also there is the risk of not acting.
There is no universal answer to questions of morality, as morals vary from person to person, society to society. Myself, I don't find pornography morally offensive, but I know a great many people do. In America, we do not find the sight of a woman's legs morally offensive, but in Saudi Arabia, they do.
The basis for applying these morals gets especially sticky in the areas of 'altering life' (nanotech, gene therapy, even abortion, though that's a whole other matter) because we don't even know what makes "life" exist. Yes, we've sequenced the genome, but without the so-called "spark of life," all you have is a lifeless, gene-sequenced body. What actually creates life? Many would say God. Others would not. But should we not at least try to find the answer, or should we just throw up our arms and say "It is the work of God!"
That is simply ignorant.
Yeah right! What video store chain is gonna go for this? They make all their money off late fees. If you don't have to return the movie, there go the late fees they used to be able to charge you. Blockbuster is owned by Viacom (uber-media conglomerate) which just happens to be a company that can squash this kind of thing should they so desire.
Yeah, we all know how well that worked for the Xbox...
Yeah but BO2k has a legit use. Not that many people really use it for that...
Bill (as in Bill Gates) actually has very little to do with Microsoft these days. He gave up control of the company to Ballmer years ago. Sure, he's still chairman of the board, but I really doubt the board has much say in technical matters. Linus on the other hand, has an active role in OS development and even codes stuff. I doubt Gates has touched a compiler in ten years. Contrary to popular belief, Gates didn't make his money because he was a super-smart computer geek. He made his money because he was a super-smart businessman. He then hired super-smart computer geeks to do all the work for him, and made them all very rich as well.