I'm sorry, I had you confused with the other guy in this thread who labels himself a Christian. You have a reasonable position that I respect. I agree that Jesus had a lot of good stuff to say, but I believe he was just a regular human being, and I don't buy into all the supernatural magic mumbo-jumbo.
M.U.L.E.
is a seminal multiplayer video game written in 1983 by Dan Bunten of Ozark Softscape. It was published by Electronic Arts. It was originally written for the Atari 400/800 and then was ported to the Commodore 64 and the Nintendo Entertainment System and to the IBM PC Jr.. While it played like a game, it was actually an economic simulation taking place on a small colony planet.
In 1996 Computer Gaming World named M.U.L.E. as #3 on its Best Games of All Time list on the PC.
Essentially, the game is an exercise in supply and demand economics that is set in space on the planet Irata (which is Atari backwards) and involves competition among four players. To win the game, the players not only must compete against each other, but they need to cooperate with each other for the survival of the colony. Central to the game is the acquisition and use of "M.U.L.E."s (Multiple Use Labor Element) to develop and harvest the player's real estate which can consist of: Energy, Food, Smithore (from which M.U.L.E.s are constructed), and Crystite. Players must balance supply and demand of these four elements (Crystite is available as an option during Tournament play only) as well as other events such as fires, theft, etc.
M.U.L.E. was revolutionary in the ease with which it allowed multiplayer interaction through a single game/computer console. (Its development came years before the advent of multiplayer Internet connectivity.) Though this failed as a trend setter at the time, the game is still heralded as the first game to make effective use of the multiplayer game concept.
The game was very popular in its day among certain groups. It did not become a bestselling title, but it has more recently become a favorite of retrogaming enthusiasts. Various clones for modern computers exist, the most recent commercial clone published in 2002. The original's addictive theme song by Roy Glover has been widely covered by remix groups.
Dani Bunten (previously Dan Bunten) was working on an Internet version of the game until her death in 1998.
Many game designers cite the game as one of the most revolutionary ever and an inspiration for many of their games. Will Wright dedicated his game The Sims, the greatest selling computer game of all time, to the memory of Bunten.
A modern version of the game entitled Space HoRSE was developed in 2004 by Gilligames and is distributed by Shrapnel Games.
If most of Christianity totally misses the point, then why do you apply their label to yourself, then get all huffy when people assume you believe in the same ridiculous superstitious myths as the Christan Party Line dictates? The true believers certainly don't think you're a Christian, if you don't believe their party line.
If you're getting offended that people lump you together with Ted Haggard and the Pope, then maybe you shouldn't be calling yourself a "Christian".
The term "Christiantity" is very well defined and widely understood, just like the words "Scientologist" and "Nazi". So what if you decided on your own personal reinterpretation of the Nazi ideology, that left out all the stuff about hating jews, taking over the world, eugenics, heiling hitler, etc. So what if you call yourself a "Good Nazi" because you don't believe in its bad parts? Then you should certainly expect for people to lump you in with the "Bad Nazi" and not make a special distinction for you as a "Good Nazi". You can't label yourself with the word "Nazi" and then get all huffy when people don't give you the benefit of the doubt. You need a new term to label yourself!
Maybe Tom Cruz is a "Good Scientologist" who doesn't believe in all the stuff about the xemu and body thetans and space aliens flying over in the dc-10s and living in the volcanos, etc. But that's the Scientology Party Line (even though you have to pay lots of money before they're tell it to you). So if you label yourself as a Scientologists, then people are going to naturally assume that you're a brainwashed member of a mind control cult.
So here's another question: Do you support gay marriage? If not, then justify. If so, then why do you label yourself with the same name and associate yourself with people who overwhelmingly don't?
So do believe all the supernatural stories about divine intervention, immaculate conception, raising the dead, ascending to heaven, etc, or do you just think Jesus was a nice but regular guy, who some other people wrote some exagerated stories about?
Do you really believe in the scientific explanation of cause and effect, and that the universe is enormous and has been around a long long time?
Or do you actually believe that God just happened to interfere with reality at the infintesimally small point in the universe our planet occupies, during the infentesimally short duration of our civilisation exists?
What's so special about our planet, that God should choose to interfere with it?
Why did he send his "only son" to our planet, instead of all the others? Is there no other life in the universe, or is Jesus like Santa Clause, zipping around faster than light speed from planet to planet every christmas on his birth and the second coming?
If you'll admit that maybe the Pope was wrong when he refused to admit the Earth orbits around the Sun and instead put Galileo under house arrest, then what makes you think they finally figured it out and are telling the truth now? Was it the Catholic Church's Child Molestation Scandal that finally made the Pope decide to start telling the truth?
OK, since there seems to be some confusion about what you believe, and you seem to want to share those beliefs with everyone else in accordance with your religious faith, please answer the following about your beliefs:
Do you take the bible literally?
Are gays sinners?
Should women be subservient to men?
Do you believe in evolution?
Do you believe in "intelligent design" or "creationism"?
How old is the Earth?
Did God commit adultery with Mary? Is Jesus a bastard? Why shouldn't Mary have been stoned to death for adultery? Who did God confess his sins to? Why is God such a hipocrite?
Why isn't there a commandment about keeping your nose out of other people's business?
I simply invite you to consider that self-contradictory, logically invalid, and scientifically disproven lies of Christianity are not true as you presuppose.
Sokoban, Sokoban, Sokoban, Sokoban, Sokoban. You don't know the history of the universe, I do. Because I believe in Science, not Mythology.
If your "history" of Christianity says that the Earth was created 6000 years ago, then you are dead wrong.
If your "history" of Christianity says that God wrote a book that you should take literally, which says we should stone women who aren't faithful to their husbands, who own them like property, then you are dead wrong.
In what way is believing a bunch of lies "knowing history"?
I've read a lot of Philip K Dick books, and I know their plots, but I don't fool myself that they're history books. They're just as fictitious as your bible and the self serving "history" of Christianity that you believe.
Anyone who watched the Southpark eposodes about Scientology or Mormonism knows the lies those religious teach to their believers, but they certainly don't know any HISTORY of the actual universe that we all live in.
BlackEmperor writes: "Is the intelligence of an object being tuned (cool)" or is the object just being given a x% production/whatever boost (sucks).
"Intelligence" generally does not have a "knob" that you can simply tune up and down. How smart a character acts is an emergent behavior that depends on many other factors in the system, themselves which include many tunable knobs like "x% whatever boost", and complex dynamic behavior scripted into the code.
That said, you can still add more layers to tune the higher level behavior of the AI, which randomize the emergent behavior and diminish the effect of the "intelligence".
For example, The Sims uses a complex dynamically tuned algorithm to figure out what action each character does next, based on scoring "advertisements": It asks all the objects in the house to enable and score all their action "advertisements", as the advertisement applies to a particular Sim at the current time. For example: the fridge's "fix dinner" advertisement is enabled in the evening; the toilet's "use toilet" action gets a higher score the fuller your bladder is; the bed side you usually sleep in remembers the relationship and raises the score, which increases when your energy is low, so it's more likely you will go back and sleep in the same place every time you're tired.
That algorithm produces a list of all possible actions, which is sorted by score. But if perfect Sims always performed the first action with the highest score, it would have made the game frustrating and un-challenging. Because if you didn't interfere with the Sims lives, they would automatically always do the right thing all the time, without they player's help. They didn't need you, because they were theoretically smart enough to live the optimal most efficient life. (I think that's what BlackEmperor means by "a clinical feel".) Anything the player told the perfect Sims to do would only make their lives worse off. The game was more fun and engaging if player intervention was required to help the Sims be happier.
So instead of choosing the first action on the list, the Sims choose randomly from the "n" top scoring actions. So "n" is a positive whole number that can be increased to "dumb down" their automymous behavior, and roughly controls how "whimsical" (or "stupid") they are.
Of course that's all assuming the ideal virtual world in which all the advertisements are truthful, mathematically correct, in your best interest, internally and externally consistent, without any contradictions, and perfectly fair and balanced. Which of course they're not, because there are many false advertisements, exagerated scores, distorted curves, and arbitrary tweaks, hacks, quirks and ironies in the code (especially stuff written by twisted players like SimSlice), that make simulated life more interesting. So tuning "n" to different values has a non-linear complex effect over their "intelligence", and it's quite coarse with a small range of useful values.
So of course you have to use lots of play testing to figure out the best value for "n", not pure mathematics.
The Armchair Empire interviewed Chris Trottier, one of the designers of The Sims and The Sims Online. She touches on some important ideas, including "Tuned Emergence" and "Design by Accretion".
Chris' honest analysis of how and why "the gameplay didn't come together until the months before the ship" is right on the mark, and that's the secret to the success of games like The Sims and SimCity.
The essential element that was missing until the last minute was tuning: The approach to game design that Maxis brought to the table is called "Tuned Emergence" and "Design by Accretion". Before it was tuned, The Sims wasn't missing any structure or content, but it just wasn't balanced yet. But it's OK, because that's how it's supposed to work!
In justifying their approach to The Sims, Maxis had to explain to EA that SimCity 2000 was not fun until 6 weeks before it shipped. But EA was not comfortable with that approach, which went against every rule in their play book. It required Will Wright's tremendous stamina to convince EA not to cancel The Sims, because according to EA's formula, it would never work.
If a game isn't tuned, it's a drag, and you can't stand to play it for an hour. The Sims and SimCity were "designed by accretion": incrementally assembled together out of "a mass of separate components", like a planet forming out of a cloud of dust orbiting around star. They had to reach critical mass first, before they could even start down the road towards "Tuned Emergence", like life finally taking hold on the planet surface. Even then, they weren't fun until they were carefully tuned just before they shipped, like the renaissance of civilization suddenly developing science and technology. Before it was properly tuned, The Sims was called "the toilet game", for the obvious reason that there wasn't much else to do!
Here are some questions and answers from the interview with The Sims designer Chris Trottier:
[...]
Q: On paper, a game where you simulate daily life doesn't sound that interesting. Yet The Sims is really fun to play, so much so that it is now the biggest-selling PC game ever. Although any development team working with Will Wright has to feel confident in the product they are creating, has the unbelievable popularity of the franchise shocked even the development team?
A: Absolutely. When I was first assigned to The Sims, it was not-very-affectionately-known within the company as "the toilet game." Will Wright had tremendous stamina for the risk involved with trying something very new, but there were certainly a lot of head-scratchers both on the team and outside of it. In all honesty, the gameplay didn't start to really come together until a couple of months before ship. Being involved in that tuning process, and seeing the game take shape from what had previously been a mass of separate components, was one of the most powerful experiences of my career.
[...]
Q: What makes The Sims massively popular with female gamers, who traditionally don't make up a big number of gameplayers?
A: It's so hard to answer that question without making broad, sweeping statements that anyone of my gender would probably resent. But... I can say that there are several untraditional forms of gameplay in The Sims. For instance, there are many people who spend most of their time decorating and redecorating their homes. Since there's so much user-created content being posted on websites, they spend a lot of time collecting more looks to add to the game. There are also a lot of people who enjoy having a fantasy life where they get to call the shots... for good or for bad. I've heard a lot of stories
What's good for the goose is good for the gander! How about a passing a law that requires putting big red warning stickers on all bibles, that say the contents of the bible is only an unsubstantiated myth that contradicts proven scientific facts, was written not by God but by human beings with political agendas, contains many logical contradictions, misguided translations, misogynistic and homophobic incitements to medieval violence, and should not be taken literally or given to children.
The problem with Real, QuickTime, Windows Media and all the other video players, is that all they are just stupid video players boxed into a rectangular prison, and not customizable or adaptable in any way. You can't add to their user interface, or fix their horrible design problems. No control over how closed captioning is presented. No transparent video overlays. No extra buttons or links to related videos. No webcam support or two-way video conferencing.
From a user interface design perspective, Flash has an enormous advantage over old-school video players, because developers are able to deeply customize and integrate the video player into their own user interfaces, like Google's and YouTube's video players, the OpenLaszlo YouTube player, or the SimFaux Network TV Fox News Simulation.
The other overwhelming advantage to Flash over all the other video players, is that it's installed on way more platforms than any other existing video player. So the fact that it has almost universal coverage, plus the fact that you can customize the user interface (like YouTube, Google Video, and everyone else does), combine to make Flash the hands-down best way to distribute video over the internet.
Here's an example of what I mean by customization: A set of reusable video playback and recording components that I've developed for OpenLaszlo, which are easy to customize and integrate into your own OpenLaszlo applications:
I've been working on developing
streaming video support for OpenLaszlo:
LZX classes to support improved audio and video, including RTMP streaming via Flash Media Server (aka Flash Communication Server) and also the Red5 Open Source Flash Server, as well as streaming video via http. It supports playback of recorded FLVs, recording from camera and microphone, live two-way (or multi-party) audio/video conferencing, and FLV streaming over http.
It's easy to use the OpenLaszlo video components, because they're nicely integrated with the OpenLaszlo programming model. They expose logical attributes and events which make it easy to integrate video into OpenLaszlo applications.
Oh yeah, saying people should spend money on Science instead of Religion is the epitomy of ignorance, if you believe Creationism is true and Evolution is a lie.
Are you ignorant of the Ted Haggard sex and crystal meth and bald face lie scandal? The Mark Foley Underage Page Sex Scandal? The numerous Catholic Priest Child Molestation Sex Scandals? The lawsuits against the Catholic Church for knowingly letting it go in and protecting their priests? The lawsuits sponsored by the Discovery Institute to teach "Intelligent Design" in schools? All paid for by religious donations and taxpayer dollars. Or is this the first time you ever heard of any of that?
The morons in Kansas who elected the religious freaks to the school board, who got their asses sued off for trying to teach Intelligent Design, cost taxpayers more than a million dollars. Why couldn't they have just spent that money on good science textbooks that don't try to portray Creationism as science, instead of blowing it on a frivolous lawsuit?
So what's your position: Do you support teaching "Intelligent Design" in public schools?
Physics and Astronomy help us understand the true nature of God (and she's not a vindicitive gay hating abortion clinic bombing fat old white bearded man, FYI). So why not spend at least as much money on Physics and Astronomy to understand the universe, instead of giving money to preachers, who just lie to you, then spend it on crystal meth, blow jobs from gay hustlers, political favors, molesting little kids, and paying off lawsuits for molesting little kids.
One of the best kept secrets on the early ARPANET (which was supposed to be for official use only) was the INFO-COBOL@MIT-MC mailing list. It has absolutely nothing to do with COBOL -- it was for jokes and other funny stuff. It was called INFO-COBOL because at the time, emailing jokes was considered an abuse of the ARPANET.
Occasionally some rube would stumble across it in the "list of lists" INTEREST-GROUPS.TXT, and ask a question about COBOL, and everybody would laugh uproariously at them -- the idea that somebody would actually consider using COBOL was even funnier than most of the jokes people posted.
Then there was another stealth mailing list maintained by The TTY of Geoffrey S Goodfellow, called "DB-LOVERS", which was specifically for Dead Baby Jokes.
I just received one of the OLPC beta test laptops, and I've played around with it and started porting some X11 software to run on it.
The hardware is very nicely designed, and has a cool, unique look and feel, although it's in the very early stages and still has some rough edges and unfinished pieces.
The touch pad doesn't currently work very well, due to a combination of hardware and software problems: the cursor jumps around and stalls, and the left and right sides (for writing with a stylus) are not currently active. But a USB mouse works just fine. The keyboard is hard for me to use because it's so tiny, but it's good for kids because it's simple and spill proof, and only requires a light touch.
The screen turns around and folds over so you can use it in "book mode" without the keyboard or touch pad. The game controller buttons (and camera and microphone) on the screen are usable when it's in book mode. The round four-direction joystick pad and the triangle/square/circle/x game pad seem to send the same arrow key escape codes, and don't auto-repeat, but I think that's a matter of software that will be addressed in the future.
The camera is on the right edge of the screen, and doesn't turn inwards, so your face appears at the edge of the screen instead of being centered. It would be nice for the camera to be centered at the top edge of the screen, but currently there is no any room for that, and it would require a redesign of the case. The directional pad sticks down sometimes when you rock it to the left, but I trust that and other problems will be shaken out in future versions of the hardware.
There is an SD card reader hidden on the bottom on the screen, but no disk drives showed up when I typed "df" after I inserted an SD card, and the spring loaded ejector didn't work so I had to pull it out with my fingernails. Again, I expect this kind of software and hardware stuff to be fixed in later versions -- that's why they're doing this beta test: to shake out problems like that.
The antennas are very cute, and give it an anthropomorphic look like a puppy dog's ears, that I think kids will dig. (Somebody's got to port XEyes, XNose and XMouth to OLCP so it has a face, to complete the look!) It took me a minute or so to figure out that they also function as latches to allow the screen to be opened. I was excited to open the screen the first time I saw it, but I was careful because didn't want to hurt it -- however, kids might break something by trying to pry the screen open before they figure out you have to rotate both antennas to unlatch the screen. I'm afraid that they might get broken off easily, and they're kind of clumsy when then laptop is in "book mode", if you don't tuck them in by opening the screen a bit so they will rotate around to their closed position. They don't latch the screen closed over the keyboard in book mode. When in laptop mode, the screen does not fold back as far as would be convenient. If you want to use a USB mouse or other USB device, external microphone or headphones, you must open up one or both of the antennae, which makes it more possible that they might get broken off.
The screen is amazing. It's quite small, but extremely high resolution (200 dots per inch). The application I'm porting was designed for a large workstation screen, and it comes up with the text and graphics looking very tiny, but quite sharp. By default the display runs in 16 bit mode, at a resolution of 1200 x 900 (201x201 dots per inch resolution according to xdpyinfo). The supported depths are 16, 1, 4, 8, 15, 24 and 32.
There are buttons on the keyboard that switch the display between color and monochrome mode, and control the brightness. The monochrome mode is handled by hardware -- the X server still thinks it's in 16 bit color mode, and the colors are translated to gray scales. However some of the monochrome gray levels show up as weird colors or diagonal cross hatching, unless the brightness is turned all the way down.
Yes, it's tragic. After JavaScript stole C's syntax, all my CPP macros stopped working. And Lisp has been an extremely weak and difficult language to use, ever since JavaScript stole its closures. But at least Lisp still has its macros and parens left.
A friend of mine (who will remain anonymous) works with the flight simulators at NASA Ames, the ones on the big hydraulic arms, which are FAA certified for pilots to qualify as 747 flying time.
I asked him if they were also certified to qualify for the Mile High Club (if the simulator's rock'n, don't come a knock'n). He said of course they were, but it was a good idea to turn off all the cameras, because otherwise everything you do in them is recorded.
They've got all kinds of programs for simulating any kind of air disaster, and there's nothing more exciting than "oh my god we're about to die" sex!
I think it's pretty ridiculous that your first reason for not using Ruby is that you're racially prejudiced against Japanese. That's not only bigoted, but also extremely foolish and self-defeating. Many Japanese and other people are laughing their asses off at you, enjoying the fruits of Ruby that you won't eat simply because you're a nationalistic racist bigot. Ruby totally kicks PHP's ass, but you're stuck with the inferior language because you're a racist, and a prisoner of your own mind. I hope most Chinese are not as close-minded as you are.
Hey, YOU are the one who wrote the strongly worded disclaimer that says "We do not store, copy or use the images processed through this site by any means - your image is piped from the '$_POST' variable directly to a function that processes and outputs it to download." (emphasis mine, but the words are totally yours)
So now you have flip-flopped and are arguing that "Almost ALL stuff we use in our modern world holds on to the information for at least a while." So that means that you were a liar when you wrote the disclaimer. You can't have it both ways.
Why did you bother writing such a strongly worded yet misleading disclaimer, if you knew that the uploaded files would be stored on disk? Or did you not even know that until I pointed it out to you by showing you the error messages?
When you store a file on disk, the data stays around for much longer than it would have if it were only held in memory. You should know that. Or is that a big surprize to you too? Are all PHP programmers as ignorant as you are? I suspect so.
A friend of mine who is a Mac user since the 1980's, but no dummy (he has a PhD from MIT) was using a program I wrote for him on a small screen Windows system. The initial window size was pretty large, but it was resizable, so the bottom edge of the window went off the bottom edge of the screen. He called me up and complained that the program was unusable because he could not resize the window because its lower right corner was off the screen, and he could not drag it up far enough to expose the resize corner. I had to explain that on Windows, you can resize a window from any corner or edge. He just assumed that you could only resize a window with the lower right corner, because he'd been using Macs for so many years.
Don't count on Apple fixing this problem any time soon. They are too proud to admit they made such a stupid mistake.
But I hereby challenge any Mac advocate to make an argument why it's better to only be able to resize the window from the lower right hand corner. I love to hear them squirm and bend over backwards to carry Steve Job's water and wash his dirty laundry. I will gladly paypal $20 to anyone who can show a usability study or even a rational argument that says Apple is right about this.
Python has a form handling library that does not store uploads in the file system, and so does Java. Why can't PHP do that?
You specifically stated that "We do not store, copy or use the images processed through this site by any means - your image is piped from the '$_POST' variable directly to a function that processes and outputs it to download." You're wrong, because you are writing the file to disk, and you didn't even know it (or you lied on purpose).
My point is that many PHP programmers have no idea what their code is doing, because they don't understand the language or its libraries. And that many PHP programmers are extremely lazy and sloppy, and write such crappy code that they don't bother to check their input parameters. And you've illustrated it perfectly.
A simple reason: ruby was laid out by a japanese...
it's a fact..
You mean Chinese base their choice of programming languages on racial prejudice instead of technological merit??!
Speak for yourself! All Chinese can't be that stupid. But at least now we know the real reason you're so fixated on PHP and refuse to consider the alternatives.
So do you think Nazi Germans should hate PHP because it was "laid out" by a Jew?
Do you refuse to use Python because you hate the Dutch?
Slashdot Mirror
Alas, the Joust machine in the Metreon in San Francisco has a totally worn-out flap button... Now that's the sign of a good game!
-Don
I'm sorry, I had you confused with the other guy in this thread who labels himself a Christian. You have a reasonable position that I respect. I agree that Jesus had a lot of good stuff to say, but I believe he was just a regular human being, and I don't buy into all the supernatural magic mumbo-jumbo.
-Don
Wikipedia says it all:
M.U.L.E. is a seminal multiplayer video game written in 1983 by Dan Bunten of Ozark Softscape. It was published by Electronic Arts. It was originally written for the Atari 400/800 and then was ported to the Commodore 64 and the Nintendo Entertainment System and to the IBM PC Jr.. While it played like a game, it was actually an economic simulation taking place on a small colony planet.
In 1996 Computer Gaming World named M.U.L.E. as #3 on its Best Games of All Time list on the PC.
Essentially, the game is an exercise in supply and demand economics that is set in space on the planet Irata (which is Atari backwards) and involves competition among four players. To win the game, the players not only must compete against each other, but they need to cooperate with each other for the survival of the colony. Central to the game is the acquisition and use of "M.U.L.E."s (Multiple Use Labor Element) to develop and harvest the player's real estate which can consist of: Energy, Food, Smithore (from which M.U.L.E.s are constructed), and Crystite. Players must balance supply and demand of these four elements (Crystite is available as an option during Tournament play only) as well as other events such as fires, theft, etc.
M.U.L.E. was revolutionary in the ease with which it allowed multiplayer interaction through a single game/computer console. (Its development came years before the advent of multiplayer Internet connectivity.) Though this failed as a trend setter at the time, the game is still heralded as the first game to make effective use of the multiplayer game concept.
The game was very popular in its day among certain groups. It did not become a bestselling title, but it has more recently become a favorite of retrogaming enthusiasts. Various clones for modern computers exist, the most recent commercial clone published in 2002. The original's addictive theme song by Roy Glover has been widely covered by remix groups.
Dani Bunten (previously Dan Bunten) was working on an Internet version of the game until her death in 1998.
Many game designers cite the game as one of the most revolutionary ever and an inspiration for many of their games. Will Wright dedicated his game The Sims, the greatest selling computer game of all time, to the memory of Bunten.
A modern version of the game entitled Space HoRSE was developed in 2004 by Gilligames and is distributed by Shrapnel Games.
If most of Christianity totally misses the point, then why do you apply their label to yourself, then get all huffy when people assume you believe in the same ridiculous superstitious myths as the Christan Party Line dictates? The true believers certainly don't think you're a Christian, if you don't believe their party line.
We are all individuals! (But I'm not.)
-Don
If you're getting offended that people lump you together with Ted Haggard and the Pope, then maybe you shouldn't be calling yourself a "Christian".
The term "Christiantity" is very well defined and widely understood, just like the words "Scientologist" and "Nazi". So what if you decided on your own personal reinterpretation of the Nazi ideology, that left out all the stuff about hating jews, taking over the world, eugenics, heiling hitler, etc. So what if you call yourself a "Good Nazi" because you don't believe in its bad parts? Then you should certainly expect for people to lump you in with the "Bad Nazi" and not make a special distinction for you as a "Good Nazi". You can't label yourself with the word "Nazi" and then get all huffy when people don't give you the benefit of the doubt. You need a new term to label yourself!
Maybe Tom Cruz is a "Good Scientologist" who doesn't believe in all the stuff about the xemu and body thetans and space aliens flying over in the dc-10s and living in the volcanos, etc. But that's the Scientology Party Line (even though you have to pay lots of money before they're tell it to you). So if you label yourself as a Scientologists, then people are going to naturally assume that you're a brainwashed member of a mind control cult.
So here's another question: Do you support gay marriage? If not, then justify. If so, then why do you label yourself with the same name and associate yourself with people who overwhelmingly don't?
-Don
So do believe all the supernatural stories about divine intervention, immaculate conception, raising the dead, ascending to heaven, etc, or do you just think Jesus was a nice but regular guy, who some other people wrote some exagerated stories about?
Do you really believe in the scientific explanation of cause and effect, and that the universe is enormous and has been around a long long time?
Or do you actually believe that God just happened to interfere with reality at the infintesimally small point in the universe our planet occupies, during the infentesimally short duration of our civilisation exists?
What's so special about our planet, that God should choose to interfere with it? Why did he send his "only son" to our planet, instead of all the others? Is there no other life in the universe, or is Jesus like Santa Clause, zipping around faster than light speed from planet to planet every christmas on his birth and the second coming?
If you'll admit that maybe the Pope was wrong when he refused to admit the Earth orbits around the Sun and instead put Galileo under house arrest, then what makes you think they finally figured it out and are telling the truth now? Was it the Catholic Church's Child Molestation Scandal that finally made the Pope decide to start telling the truth?
-Don
OK, since there seems to be some confusion about what you believe, and you seem to want to share those beliefs with everyone else in accordance with your religious faith, please answer the following about your beliefs:
Do you take the bible literally?
Are gays sinners?
Should women be subservient to men?
Do you believe in evolution?
Do you believe in "intelligent design" or "creationism"?
How old is the Earth?
Did God commit adultery with Mary? Is Jesus a bastard? Why shouldn't Mary have been stoned to death for adultery? Who did God confess his sins to? Why is God such a hipocrite?
Why isn't there a commandment about keeping your nose out of other people's business?
-Don
I simply invite you to consider that self-contradictory, logically invalid, and scientifically disproven lies of Christianity are not true as you presuppose.
-Don
Sokoban, Sokoban, Sokoban, Sokoban, Sokoban. You don't know the history of the universe, I do. Because I believe in Science, not Mythology.
If your "history" of Christianity says that the Earth was created 6000 years ago, then you are dead wrong.
If your "history" of Christianity says that God wrote a book that you should take literally, which says we should stone women who aren't faithful to their husbands, who own them like property, then you are dead wrong.
In what way is believing a bunch of lies "knowing history"?
I've read a lot of Philip K Dick books, and I know their plots, but I don't fool myself that they're history books. They're just as fictitious as your bible and the self serving "history" of Christianity that you believe.
Anyone who watched the Southpark eposodes about Scientology or Mormonism knows the lies those religious teach to their believers, but they certainly don't know any HISTORY of the actual universe that we all live in.
-Don
BlackEmperor writes: "Is the intelligence of an object being tuned (cool)" or is the object just being given a x% production/whatever boost (sucks).
"Intelligence" generally does not have a "knob" that you can simply tune up and down. How smart a character acts is an emergent behavior that depends on many other factors in the system, themselves which include many tunable knobs like "x% whatever boost", and complex dynamic behavior scripted into the code.
That said, you can still add more layers to tune the higher level behavior of the AI, which randomize the emergent behavior and diminish the effect of the "intelligence".
For example, The Sims uses a complex dynamically tuned algorithm to figure out what action each character does next, based on scoring "advertisements": It asks all the objects in the house to enable and score all their action "advertisements", as the advertisement applies to a particular Sim at the current time. For example: the fridge's "fix dinner" advertisement is enabled in the evening; the toilet's "use toilet" action gets a higher score the fuller your bladder is; the bed side you usually sleep in remembers the relationship and raises the score, which increases when your energy is low, so it's more likely you will go back and sleep in the same place every time you're tired.
That algorithm produces a list of all possible actions, which is sorted by score. But if perfect Sims always performed the first action with the highest score, it would have made the game frustrating and un-challenging. Because if you didn't interfere with the Sims lives, they would automatically always do the right thing all the time, without they player's help. They didn't need you, because they were theoretically smart enough to live the optimal most efficient life. (I think that's what BlackEmperor means by "a clinical feel".) Anything the player told the perfect Sims to do would only make their lives worse off. The game was more fun and engaging if player intervention was required to help the Sims be happier.
So instead of choosing the first action on the list, the Sims choose randomly from the "n" top scoring actions. So "n" is a positive whole number that can be increased to "dumb down" their automymous behavior, and roughly controls how "whimsical" (or "stupid") they are.
Of course that's all assuming the ideal virtual world in which all the advertisements are truthful, mathematically correct, in your best interest, internally and externally consistent, without any contradictions, and perfectly fair and balanced. Which of course they're not, because there are many false advertisements, exagerated scores, distorted curves, and arbitrary tweaks, hacks, quirks and ironies in the code (especially stuff written by twisted players like SimSlice), that make simulated life more interesting. So tuning "n" to different values has a non-linear complex effect over their "intelligence", and it's quite coarse with a small range of useful values.
So of course you have to use lots of play testing to figure out the best value for "n", not pure mathematics.
-Don
Sims Designer Chris Trottier on Tuned Emergence and Design by Accretion
The Armchair Empire interviewed Chris Trottier, one of the designers of The Sims and The Sims Online. She touches on some important ideas, including "Tuned Emergence" and "Design by Accretion".
Chris' honest analysis of how and why "the gameplay didn't come together until the months before the ship" is right on the mark, and that's the secret to the success of games like The Sims and SimCity.
The essential element that was missing until the last minute was tuning: The approach to game design that Maxis brought to the table is called "Tuned Emergence" and "Design by Accretion". Before it was tuned, The Sims wasn't missing any structure or content, but it just wasn't balanced yet. But it's OK, because that's how it's supposed to work!
In justifying their approach to The Sims, Maxis had to explain to EA that SimCity 2000 was not fun until 6 weeks before it shipped. But EA was not comfortable with that approach, which went against every rule in their play book. It required Will Wright's tremendous stamina to convince EA not to cancel The Sims, because according to EA's formula, it would never work.
If a game isn't tuned, it's a drag, and you can't stand to play it for an hour. The Sims and SimCity were "designed by accretion": incrementally assembled together out of "a mass of separate components", like a planet forming out of a cloud of dust orbiting around star. They had to reach critical mass first, before they could even start down the road towards "Tuned Emergence", like life finally taking hold on the planet surface. Even then, they weren't fun until they were carefully tuned just before they shipped, like the renaissance of civilization suddenly developing science and technology. Before it was properly tuned, The Sims was called "the toilet game", for the obvious reason that there wasn't much else to do!
Here are some questions and answers from the interview with The Sims designer Chris Trottier:
[...]
Q: On paper, a game where you simulate daily life doesn't sound that interesting. Yet The Sims is really fun to play, so much so that it is now the biggest-selling PC game ever. Although any development team working with Will Wright has to feel confident in the product they are creating, has the unbelievable popularity of the franchise shocked even the development team?
A: Absolutely. When I was first assigned to The Sims, it was not-very-affectionately-known within the company as "the toilet game." Will Wright had tremendous stamina for the risk involved with trying something very new, but there were certainly a lot of head-scratchers both on the team and outside of it. In all honesty, the gameplay didn't start to really come together until a couple of months before ship. Being involved in that tuning process, and seeing the game take shape from what had previously been a mass of separate components, was one of the most powerful experiences of my career.
[...]
Q: What makes The Sims massively popular with female gamers, who traditionally don't make up a big number of gameplayers?
A: It's so hard to answer that question without making broad, sweeping statements that anyone of my gender would probably resent. But... I can say that there are several untraditional forms of gameplay in The Sims. For instance, there are many people who spend most of their time decorating and redecorating their homes. Since there's so much user-created content being posted on websites, they spend a lot of time collecting more looks to add to the game. There are also a lot of people who enjoy having a fantasy life where they get to call the shots... for good or for bad. I've heard a lot of stories
It's not that "you are what you eat". It's that "you are what you don't shit".
-Wavy Gravy
What's good for the goose is good for the gander! How about a passing a law that requires putting big red warning stickers on all bibles, that say the contents of the bible is only an unsubstantiated myth that contradicts proven scientific facts, was written not by God but by human beings with political agendas, contains many logical contradictions, misguided translations, misogynistic and homophobic incitements to medieval violence, and should not be taken literally or given to children.
-Don
The problem with Real, QuickTime, Windows Media and all the other video players, is that all they are just stupid video players boxed into a rectangular prison, and not customizable or adaptable in any way. You can't add to their user interface, or fix their horrible design problems. No control over how closed captioning is presented. No transparent video overlays. No extra buttons or links to related videos. No webcam support or two-way video conferencing.
From a user interface design perspective, Flash has an enormous advantage over old-school video players, because developers are able to deeply customize and integrate the video player into their own user interfaces, like Google's and YouTube's video players, the OpenLaszlo YouTube player, or the SimFaux Network TV Fox News Simulation.
The other overwhelming advantage to Flash over all the other video players, is that it's installed on way more platforms than any other existing video player. So the fact that it has almost universal coverage, plus the fact that you can customize the user interface (like YouTube, Google Video, and everyone else does), combine to make Flash the hands-down best way to distribute video over the internet.
Here's an example of what I mean by customization: A set of reusable video playback and recording components that I've developed for OpenLaszlo, which are easy to customize and integrate into your own OpenLaszlo applications:
OpenLaszlo YouTube Player Demo and Source Code
I've been working on developing streaming video support for OpenLaszlo: LZX classes to support improved audio and video, including RTMP streaming via Flash Media Server (aka Flash Communication Server) and also the Red5 Open Source Flash Server, as well as streaming video via http. It supports playback of recorded FLVs, recording from camera and microphone, live two-way (or multi-party) audio/video conferencing, and FLV streaming over http.
It's easy to use the OpenLaszlo video components, because they're nicely integrated with the OpenLaszlo programming model. They expose logical attributes and events which make it easy to integrate video into OpenLaszlo applications.
To test it out the code and demonstrate its functionality, I've developed a simple YouTube Player in OpenLaszlo [click here to open it in a window]. It uses the YouTube ReST Web API, and some simple html screen scraping to get the URL parameters to stream the FLV file directly.
Here is the source for the test application wrapper that puts the YouTube video player in a resizable window, and the more interesting source for the youtubeplayer component, that uses the new OpenLaszlo video classes I'm developing (whose source is in this directory).
The new video classes and the YouTube player demo are now checked into the OpenLaszlo svn repository.
Oh yeah, saying people should spend money on Science instead of Religion is the epitomy of ignorance, if you believe Creationism is true and Evolution is a lie.
Are you ignorant of the Ted Haggard sex and crystal meth and bald face lie scandal? The Mark Foley Underage Page Sex Scandal? The numerous Catholic Priest Child Molestation Sex Scandals? The lawsuits against the Catholic Church for knowingly letting it go in and protecting their priests? The lawsuits sponsored by the Discovery Institute to teach "Intelligent Design" in schools? All paid for by religious donations and taxpayer dollars. Or is this the first time you ever heard of any of that?
The morons in Kansas who elected the religious freaks to the school board, who got their asses sued off for trying to teach Intelligent Design, cost taxpayers more than a million dollars. Why couldn't they have just spent that money on good science textbooks that don't try to portray Creationism as science, instead of blowing it on a frivolous lawsuit?
So what's your position: Do you support teaching "Intelligent Design" in public schools?
-Don
Physics and Astronomy help us understand the true nature of God (and she's not a vindicitive gay hating abortion clinic bombing fat old white bearded man, FYI). So why not spend at least as much money on Physics and Astronomy to understand the universe, instead of giving money to preachers, who just lie to you, then spend it on crystal meth, blow jobs from gay hustlers, political favors, molesting little kids, and paying off lawsuits for molesting little kids.
-Don
One of the best kept secrets on the early ARPANET (which was supposed to be for official use only) was the INFO-COBOL@MIT-MC mailing list. It has absolutely nothing to do with COBOL -- it was for jokes and other funny stuff. It was called INFO-COBOL because at the time, emailing jokes was considered an abuse of the ARPANET.
Occasionally some rube would stumble across it in the "list of lists" INTEREST-GROUPS.TXT, and ask a question about COBOL, and everybody would laugh uproariously at them -- the idea that somebody would actually consider using COBOL was even funnier than most of the jokes people posted.
Then there was another stealth mailing list maintained by The TTY of Geoffrey S Goodfellow, called "DB-LOVERS", which was specifically for Dead Baby Jokes.
-Don
I just received one of the OLPC beta test laptops, and I've played around with it and started porting some X11 software to run on it.
The hardware is very nicely designed, and has a cool, unique look and feel, although it's in the very early stages and still has some rough edges and unfinished pieces.
The touch pad doesn't currently work very well, due to a combination of hardware and software problems: the cursor jumps around and stalls, and the left and right sides (for writing with a stylus) are not currently active. But a USB mouse works just fine. The keyboard is hard for me to use because it's so tiny, but it's good for kids because it's simple and spill proof, and only requires a light touch.
The screen turns around and folds over so you can use it in "book mode" without the keyboard or touch pad. The game controller buttons (and camera and microphone) on the screen are usable when it's in book mode. The round four-direction joystick pad and the triangle/square/circle/x game pad seem to send the same arrow key escape codes, and don't auto-repeat, but I think that's a matter of software that will be addressed in the future.
The camera is on the right edge of the screen, and doesn't turn inwards, so your face appears at the edge of the screen instead of being centered. It would be nice for the camera to be centered at the top edge of the screen, but currently there is no any room for that, and it would require a redesign of the case. The directional pad sticks down sometimes when you rock it to the left, but I trust that and other problems will be shaken out in future versions of the hardware.
There is an SD card reader hidden on the bottom on the screen, but no disk drives showed up when I typed "df" after I inserted an SD card, and the spring loaded ejector didn't work so I had to pull it out with my fingernails. Again, I expect this kind of software and hardware stuff to be fixed in later versions -- that's why they're doing this beta test: to shake out problems like that.
The antennas are very cute, and give it an anthropomorphic look like a puppy dog's ears, that I think kids will dig. (Somebody's got to port XEyes, XNose and XMouth to OLCP so it has a face, to complete the look!) It took me a minute or so to figure out that they also function as latches to allow the screen to be opened. I was excited to open the screen the first time I saw it, but I was careful because didn't want to hurt it -- however, kids might break something by trying to pry the screen open before they figure out you have to rotate both antennas to unlatch the screen. I'm afraid that they might get broken off easily, and they're kind of clumsy when then laptop is in "book mode", if you don't tuck them in by opening the screen a bit so they will rotate around to their closed position. They don't latch the screen closed over the keyboard in book mode. When in laptop mode, the screen does not fold back as far as would be convenient. If you want to use a USB mouse or other USB device, external microphone or headphones, you must open up one or both of the antennae, which makes it more possible that they might get broken off.
The screen is amazing. It's quite small, but extremely high resolution (200 dots per inch). The application I'm porting was designed for a large workstation screen, and it comes up with the text and graphics looking very tiny, but quite sharp. By default the display runs in 16 bit mode, at a resolution of 1200 x 900 (201x201 dots per inch resolution according to xdpyinfo). The supported depths are 16, 1, 4, 8, 15, 24 and 32.
There are buttons on the keyboard that switch the display between color and monochrome mode, and control the brightness. The monochrome mode is handled by hardware -- the X server still thinks it's in 16 bit color mode, and the colors are translated to gray scales. However some of the monochrome gray levels show up as weird colors or diagonal cross hatching, unless the brightness is turned all the way down.
Anywhere it
Yes, it's tragic. After JavaScript stole C's syntax, all my CPP macros stopped working. And Lisp has been an extremely weak and difficult language to use, ever since JavaScript stole its closures. But at least Lisp still has its macros and parens left.
-Don
A friend of mine (who will remain anonymous) works with the flight simulators at NASA Ames, the ones on the big hydraulic arms, which are FAA certified for pilots to qualify as 747 flying time.
I asked him if they were also certified to qualify for the Mile High Club (if the simulator's rock'n, don't come a knock'n). He said of course they were, but it was a good idea to turn off all the cameras, because otherwise everything you do in them is recorded.
They've got all kinds of programs for simulating any kind of air disaster, and there's nothing more exciting than "oh my god we're about to die" sex!
-Don
I think it's pretty ridiculous that your first reason for not using Ruby is that you're racially prejudiced against Japanese. That's not only bigoted, but also extremely foolish and self-defeating. Many Japanese and other people are laughing their asses off at you, enjoying the fruits of Ruby that you won't eat simply because you're a nationalistic racist bigot. Ruby totally kicks PHP's ass, but you're stuck with the inferior language because you're a racist, and a prisoner of your own mind. I hope most Chinese are not as close-minded as you are.
-Don
Hey, YOU are the one who wrote the strongly worded disclaimer that says "We do not store, copy or use the images processed through this site by any means - your image is piped from the '$_POST' variable directly to a function that processes and outputs it to download." (emphasis mine, but the words are totally yours)
So now you have flip-flopped and are arguing that "Almost ALL stuff we use in our modern world holds on to the information for at least a while." So that means that you were a liar when you wrote the disclaimer. You can't have it both ways.
Why did you bother writing such a strongly worded yet misleading disclaimer, if you knew that the uploaded files would be stored on disk? Or did you not even know that until I pointed it out to you by showing you the error messages?
When you store a file on disk, the data stays around for much longer than it would have if it were only held in memory. You should know that. Or is that a big surprize to you too? Are all PHP programmers as ignorant as you are? I suspect so.
-Don
A friend of mine who is a Mac user since the 1980's, but no dummy (he has a PhD from MIT) was using a program I wrote for him on a small screen Windows system. The initial window size was pretty large, but it was resizable, so the bottom edge of the window went off the bottom edge of the screen. He called me up and complained that the program was unusable because he could not resize the window because its lower right corner was off the screen, and he could not drag it up far enough to expose the resize corner. I had to explain that on Windows, you can resize a window from any corner or edge. He just assumed that you could only resize a window with the lower right corner, because he'd been using Macs for so many years.
Don't count on Apple fixing this problem any time soon. They are too proud to admit they made such a stupid mistake.
But I hereby challenge any Mac advocate to make an argument why it's better to only be able to resize the window from the lower right hand corner. I love to hear them squirm and bend over backwards to carry Steve Job's water and wash his dirty laundry. I will gladly paypal $20 to anyone who can show a usability study or even a rational argument that says Apple is right about this.
-Don
Python has a form handling library that does not store uploads in the file system, and so does Java. Why can't PHP do that?
You specifically stated that "We do not store, copy or use the images processed through this site by any means - your image is piped from the '$_POST' variable directly to a function that processes and outputs it to download." You're wrong, because you are writing the file to disk, and you didn't even know it (or you lied on purpose).
My point is that many PHP programmers have no idea what their code is doing, because they don't understand the language or its libraries. And that many PHP programmers are extremely lazy and sloppy, and write such crappy code that they don't bother to check their input parameters. And you've illustrated it perfectly.
-Don
You mean Chinese base their choice of programming languages on racial prejudice instead of technological merit??!
Speak for yourself! All Chinese can't be that stupid. But at least now we know the real reason you're so fixated on PHP and refuse to consider the alternatives.
So do you think Nazi Germans should hate PHP because it was "laid out" by a Jew? Do you refuse to use Python because you hate the Dutch?
-Don