Well Valve took the QuakeWorld engine, but they heavily modified it, and even incorporated some of the Q2 features. I wouldn't say that the Q2 engine was significantly better or worse than Half Life's GoldSrc engine.
I quite like this idea, but it's certainly been used in (non-MMORPG) games before. A quest may require you prove how good you are by killing a certain monster before you can take it. In fact this is pretty much the entire basis of games like Legend of Zelda (albeit with a good degree of plot to restrict your growth and a few bonus hearts thrown in).
So your abilities and XP come down to which items you've collected, and how much you've practised. You could make a completely different character by equipping yourself with a different set of items. However, I'm not entirely sure how you prevent it from becoming just another 3rd person shooter (sorry action game) with different weapons if PvP happens.
William Hartnell (the 1st Doctor) dies at the end of The Tenth Planet due to fatigue and old age, and regenerates into Patrick Troughton's 2nd Doctor (in what is in my opinion still the best regeneration sequence of any Doctor).
Patrick Troughton's Doctor is forced to call upon the Time Lords for assistance in The Wargames, and they punish him for meddling by forcing him to regenerate, returning Jamie and Zoe to their own timelines (and leaving Jamie in Culloden, with everyone around him dead), and removing the time circuits from the TARDIS, thus grounding him on Earth for a while.
Next episode you see Jon Pertwee's 3rd Doctor fall unconscious out of the TARDIS. And the show is in colour!
Yes, you got me there: it was in the article, just not in the first few comments I read, so I thought a reply was in order. An "app store" would be my favourite solution (I don't see the harm in replicating useful ideas - despite the attempt of people to use software patents to prevent this sort of thing).
If Windows 7 doesn't ship with a browser, how are people with a fresh install actually going to obtain any web browser?
Did no one think of this problem? With no browser to download another browser, you either need one on CD, or master the art of using wget and a text editor (assuming they are even installed).
I'm guessing they'll have to bundle some sort of micro-browser, for people to obtain their own, but this isn't going to make computer illiterate types happy.
I don't use Java, but my supervisor uses it when he needs nice and interactive applications (although given his physics origins, he usually uses Fortran for really high performance). I wrote a simulation in C++ that models the spread of disease among a set of populations, and allows things like migration and culling. These simulations can take a very long time to run, although the memory requirements are quite low.
I don't really have the time to recode my simulation, but I'm tempted to try, just to see how Java compares with C++.
Note that my coding style is very C, rather than C++, and I used C++ because I found it better at handling variable length, multidimensional arrays, and for its overloading of functions. I don't really know how I'd start jamming objects into the simulation for Java's sake, so it would probably remain pretty much the same style (my supervisor says in his experience Java is much faster when you leave out the objects). Cue pitchforks and torches from OOP fans.
22/7 is the 2nd approximation to pi in continued fractions. It's actually an extremely good approximation, and the relative error is only 4.03x10^-4 or about 0.04%. compare this to 3.14, where the relative error is 5.07x10^-4 or about 0.05%.
Decimal expansion is not always the best way to describe an irrational number (or even a rational number). Your next best bet is probably the 4th approximation, 355/113, which has a relative error of 8.4914x10^-8, and is almost as close as 3.1415927 in decimal.
Going back to your original complaint: yes, you may have a calculator with a pi button, but not always. 22/7 is often good enough, is handy for quick calculations and is easy to remember. I'm sorry the people around you don't know enough maths to get the significance.
The argument about weak governments is that no one can ever get any new laws passed. Sometimes this is good, sometimes bad, but it may lead to very little change happening. Look at how much the US has changed since the Democrats won. Now consider a party that really differs in policies from the main party, and imagine how much that could change the country.
Yes, the UK does not have PR, but it still elects politicians based on individual constituencies, so overall the number of seats held by a party better reflects the proportions of voters than the US system with its electoral colleges. It sits in the middle of the spectrum between PR system used in Scotland and the US system.
There are many people unhappy with how Scotland has limited control over its own governmental powers, but we are making the best with the powers we are given. Hopefully our system will inspire other countries to consider changing too.
In Scotland we have proportional representation. This system gives us a government that better represents the views of the people, as the proportion of each party more closely reflects the number of people who voted for them. Even better, we actually have six parties with seats, and many more who stand a chance of gaining a seat.
Proportional representation is not perfect, and it has been accused of resulting in weak governments as the main party is usually small compared to the opposition parties; however, I think it's considerably closer to democracy as the Ancient Greeks saw it, than the choice between two similar parties that tends to exist today. Most importantly, it allows me to vote where my conscience tells me, rather than for the lesser of two evils.
Yes, if you're still using a 486. Use any decent modern processor and it will compile pretty quickly: on my Core2 Duo, Gentoo just flies. I've never used Arch Linux, but I've heard it described as Gentoo without the compiling, so maybe you should try that instead.
I gave up on Gentoo though, because I couldn't be arsed with all the configuration any more (and got a whole set of different problems:P, but that's just life).
I just stole the Gentoo bash prompt, as it is really attractive. Put this into your.bashrc, (or your/etc/bash.bashrc and replace any references to PS1 in your/etc/skel directory if you want all users to have this, possibly more tweaking required depending on your setup).
if [[ ${EUID} == 0 ]] ; then
PS1='\[\033[01;31m\]\h\[\033[01;34m\] \W \$\[\033[00m\] ' else
PS1='\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[01;34m\] \W \$\[\033[00m\] ' fi
It gives a nice green username @ blue host, and gives you a red host if you become root.
It's unfortunate, but scientific papers sometimes do reference a particular paper with a flaw, and they in turn get referenced. The original reference eventually gets lost, but the flawed idea continues, and becomes dogma. Eventually (hopefully) someone notices and publishes their own paper, correcting the idea and everything recovers, but that's why a thorough literature search, and peer review are important (someone in the field will spot the flaw and prevent new papers from being published).
Okay,granted,./configure && make && make install really doesn't compete with apt-get (sorry, I rushed that post because I had to get a bus)!
I really wanted to say that if emerge was used regularly in combination with binary packages then it would easily surpass apt-get. The only problem with portage as far as I can tell is some slowness due to storing all the ebuild files individually rather than having everything in a database like apt. apt-get is fast, but it doesn't give the options that portage does, and I really don't see that much of an advantage over yum.
Yes. Thanks for noticing that I thought the game was crap. That was the intent of the message.
Do you not think I followed with great interest Doom 3's development, after it was announced? Do you not think I discussed it at length with gaming friends, watched trailers, watched friends play it? And then I sat down and played it myself. After two hours of most other FPS games, I knew pretty well whether or not I liked the game, and in this case I knew I didn't.
It's difficult to say how much money is being gained or lost on the XBox. Since they sell (or used to sell) each box at a loss, then yes, they did lose money on the Xbox. However, they may have reclaimed that money on game writing, but even more importantly, they produced a system that made developing games for the PC more attractive, and in doing so may have vastly improved their position.
Games written in DirectX are easily ported between Xbox and PC, but games written in OpenGL are easily ported between different operating systems, and Microsoft do not want gamers leaving Windows for Mac/Linux. By ensuring that more games are written in DirectX, Microsoft hurt the gaming market for other platforms, and improved their own. Consequently, any sacrifice they made on selling Xboxes was easily worth it for the loyalty they gained to their own platforms.
But then my comments would get ragged and unaligned when I made small changes the the preceding code. This gets even worse in files with columns of data. And tabs were, after all, designed specifically for the purpose of aligning text. No, I think I'll stick to tabs thanks.
If you happen to be using tabwidth 8, then:set tabstop 4 will make all my files align correctly on your PC. Alternatively, you can add/remove some tabs, but I assure you it is far less effort than going through and fixing the much greater number of spaces when alignment goes wrong.
The phrase is "couldn't care less". If you could care less, then you do care at least a little?;)
Anyway, I loved the original Doom and Doom II, and must have puts weeks/months of game time into playing them. I used to do co-op with friends, set myself challenges. Other FPS games since then have been judged next to those games. I played Doom 3 for about 2 hours, before I got bored and gave up, as it was just about unplayable. There were some dark bits in Doom 1 and 2, but they were rare, and well used (and very atmospheric); Doom 3 just relied on this as an overused gimmick. It was also far too slow, and the graphics were poor next to Half Life 2, which did dark and atmospheric brilliantly (not to mention a better light mechanic - resource management with your suit's battery).
While id software managed another success with Quake 1, and to a lesser degree Quake 2, I don't think they've been leaders of the FPS market for a long time now, and I really doubt Doom 4 is going to change that. id software do write reasonably good gaming engines that other people can use to make good games with, and they do support Linux (which Valve currently don't).
I let her use my backup laptop for a week to see how she liked OO instead of Office on her laptop and she was amazed that for $120 I was able to find her an Intel 2.66Ghz desktop that would run Gnu-Linux nicely.
This is exactly the sort of thing that I wish happened more often in computing.
No, this does not refer to code duplication, but rather copying someone's code from a forum (where you might post your code for error inspection) becomes tricky due to whitespace mangling. Alternatively copying a bit of code into another file for testing only a small section of the program can become error prone.
Code reuse on the other hand is something to be encouraged wherever it is practical and useful.
I find the single biggest problem with doing that is the old 24 line issue. I want to see as much of my code as possible, but by splitting lines to accommodate braces I end up being able to see fewer lines of context code.
Also I was shown to do the { on its own line thing when first taught to program; this was in Java, and I really hate Java.
I've been trying to play Thief and Thief 2 on Windows XP. Thief worked albeit with frequent crashing, Thief 2 has never got past the intro screen. These are known problems, that many people have tried to find workarounds for, sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. The reason for this situation is that the games were designed for Win9x; the installation was specifically designed to fail if installed on an NT kernel (because WinNT4 at the time had a poor implementation of DirectX), although they can be forced to install via the command line.
Incidentally, I got both games working fine under Linux via Wine, with only two tweaks needed (using only one CPU core, and forcing VSync). A few crashes in the intro sequence, but it seems to just skip past that now.
Oh god yes. I've used Linux for years, and I still find X to be a real pain. Sometimes it just doesn't work, and it can take hours of trawling forums and fiddling before it finally pops up (and note you either been continually rebooting, using another computer, or using a command line browser). Someone, somewhere, knows how to fix your problem. Things are improving slowly.
Where I work (a biomathematics and statistics research and consultancy group in Scotland) almost everyone uses Linux, or dual boots between Linux and Windows. Fortunately we have competent sysadmins who can fix problems when they arise, and we don't need everyone to debug their own xorg.conf errors. I think this sort of environment is a great place to start for people who would want to use Linux at home.
> The problem is, that's subjective to the users. I've yet to find any WM that looks decent the first time. That, sadly, only works if the WM you are looking at has most of what you want/need.
Agreed. I've tried to make it clear that this is just my opinion ("it seems to me", "I think"...). I see screenshots of Fluxbox, Xfce4 or FVWM, and I've thought they look fantastic. Actually trying to make things look like that myself on the other hand is quite tricky, and I usually fall back to things that look simpler and plainer (less eye-candy means less eye-strain).
> Last time I tried gnome, it took forever to get to auto-hiding panels, increasing font sizes, and getting colors set so my eyes didn't hurt.
These things should be reasonably easy now. Right click on any panel and the option is there in the preferences. Font sizes are in System > Preferences > Appearance (which you can reach in several ways, including via setting the desktop wallpaper, since they've all merged). Getting the right colours is difficult, as it's very subjective. The clearlooks theme which is default on many distributions is quite good, but it's not everyone's taste.
> The control application, kcontrol or something like that, has a tree structure rather than a static list. Maybe I just find different things intuitive, but I found it much easier to find whatever I wanted to change, in that as opposed to gnome.
Another subjective option. I think I remember the way the control panels worked on Mac OS pre X, and it works like that. I find the tree distracting, and it's very easy to get to the different preferences, providing they're well organised (not always the case, but things usually improve between releases). Occasionally I can't find what I'm looking for (and people always remember failures better), and I don't like using GConf (I want to get as far away from a Windows registry as possible).
As for GNOME's pre-Mac OS x panel: they don't work like old Mac OS, as they don't give you the applications own menus at the top, but that was always a debated subject anyway. Mac OS did some wonderful things, and some really stupid things, but it worked for the time. You can give GNOME a dock like OS X, but every time I've tried I gave up after a few hours, as it just seemed a distraction that wasted lots of desktop space. Just put the usual icons you want to use on the panel, and use a window list, not as pretty, but just as functional.
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Well Valve took the QuakeWorld engine, but they heavily modified it, and even incorporated some of the Q2 features. I wouldn't say that the Q2 engine was significantly better or worse than Half Life's GoldSrc engine.
I quite like this idea, but it's certainly been used in (non-MMORPG) games before. A quest may require you prove how good you are by killing a certain monster before you can take it. In fact this is pretty much the entire basis of games like Legend of Zelda (albeit with a good degree of plot to restrict your growth and a few bonus hearts thrown in).
So your abilities and XP come down to which items you've collected, and how much you've practised. You could make a completely different character by equipping yourself with a different set of items. However, I'm not entirely sure how you prevent it from becoming just another 3rd person shooter (sorry action game) with different weapons if PvP happens.
Nope, quite definitely the second regeneration.
William Hartnell (the 1st Doctor) dies at the end of The Tenth Planet due to fatigue and old age, and regenerates into Patrick Troughton's 2nd Doctor (in what is in my opinion still the best regeneration sequence of any Doctor).
Patrick Troughton's Doctor is forced to call upon the Time Lords for assistance in The Wargames, and they punish him for meddling by forcing him to regenerate, returning Jamie and Zoe to their own timelines (and leaving Jamie in Culloden, with everyone around him dead), and removing the time circuits from the TARDIS, thus grounding him on Earth for a while.
Next episode you see Jon Pertwee's 3rd Doctor fall unconscious out of the TARDIS. And the show is in colour!
Yes, you got me there: it was in the article, just not in the first few comments I read, so I thought a reply was in order. An "app store" would be my favourite solution (I don't see the harm in replicating useful ideas - despite the attempt of people to use software patents to prevent this sort of thing).
If Windows 7 doesn't ship with a browser, how are people with a fresh install actually going to obtain any web browser?
Did no one think of this problem? With no browser to download another browser, you either need one on CD, or master the art of using wget and a text editor (assuming they are even installed).
I'm guessing they'll have to bundle some sort of micro-browser, for people to obtain their own, but this isn't going to make computer illiterate types happy.
I don't use Java, but my supervisor uses it when he needs nice and interactive applications (although given his physics origins, he usually uses Fortran for really high performance). I wrote a simulation in C++ that models the spread of disease among a set of populations, and allows things like migration and culling. These simulations can take a very long time to run, although the memory requirements are quite low.
I don't really have the time to recode my simulation, but I'm tempted to try, just to see how Java compares with C++.
Note that my coding style is very C, rather than C++, and I used C++ because I found it better at handling variable length, multidimensional arrays, and for its overloading of functions. I don't really know how I'd start jamming objects into the simulation for Java's sake, so it would probably remain pretty much the same style (my supervisor says in his experience Java is much faster when you leave out the objects). Cue pitchforks and torches from OOP fans.
22/7 is the 2nd approximation to pi in continued fractions. It's actually an extremely good approximation, and the relative error is only 4.03x10^-4 or about 0.04%. compare this to 3.14, where the relative error is 5.07x10^-4 or about 0.05%.
Decimal expansion is not always the best way to describe an irrational number (or even a rational number). Your next best bet is probably the 4th approximation, 355/113, which has a relative error of 8.4914x10^-8, and is almost as close as 3.1415927 in decimal.
Going back to your original complaint: yes, you may have a calculator with a pi button, but not always. 22/7 is often good enough, is handy for quick calculations and is easy to remember. I'm sorry the people around you don't know enough maths to get the significance.
The argument about weak governments is that no one can ever get any new laws passed. Sometimes this is good, sometimes bad, but it may lead to very little change happening. Look at how much the US has changed since the Democrats won. Now consider a party that really differs in policies from the main party, and imagine how much that could change the country.
Yes, the UK does not have PR, but it still elects politicians based on individual constituencies, so overall the number of seats held by a party better reflects the proportions of voters than the US system with its electoral colleges. It sits in the middle of the spectrum between PR system used in Scotland and the US system.
There are many people unhappy with how Scotland has limited control over its own governmental powers, but we are making the best with the powers we are given. Hopefully our system will inspire other countries to consider changing too.
In Scotland we have proportional representation. This system gives us a government that better represents the views of the people, as the proportion of each party more closely reflects the number of people who voted for them. Even better, we actually have six parties with seats, and many more who stand a chance of gaining a seat.
Proportional representation is not perfect, and it has been accused of resulting in weak governments as the main party is usually small compared to the opposition parties; however, I think it's considerably closer to democracy as the Ancient Greeks saw it, than the choice between two similar parties that tends to exist today. Most importantly, it allows me to vote where my conscience tells me, rather than for the lesser of two evils.
Linux has no chance on the desktop until the basic UI gets professionally done.
Linux has been on my desktop for around 6 years now. And that a significant number of my friends. And my parents.
I think you're mistaken.
Yes, if you're still using a 486. Use any decent modern processor and it will compile pretty quickly: on my Core2 Duo, Gentoo just flies. I've never used Arch Linux, but I've heard it described as Gentoo without the compiling, so maybe you should try that instead.
I gave up on Gentoo though, because I couldn't be arsed with all the configuration any more (and got a whole set of different problems :P, but that's just life).
I just stole the Gentoo bash prompt, as it is really attractive. Put this into your .bashrc, (or your /etc/bash.bashrc and replace any references to PS1 in your /etc/skel directory if you want all users to have this, possibly more tweaking required depending on your setup).
It gives a nice green username @ blue host, and gives you a red host if you become root.
It's unfortunate, but scientific papers sometimes do reference a particular paper with a flaw, and they in turn get referenced. The original reference eventually gets lost, but the flawed idea continues, and becomes dogma. Eventually (hopefully) someone notices and publishes their own paper, correcting the idea and everything recovers, but that's why a thorough literature search, and peer review are important (someone in the field will spot the flaw and prevent new papers from being published).
Okay,granted, ./configure && make && make install really doesn't compete with apt-get (sorry, I rushed that post because I had to get a bus)!
I really wanted to say that if emerge was used regularly in combination with binary packages then it would easily surpass apt-get. The only problem with portage as far as I can tell is some slowness due to storing all the ebuild files individually rather than having everything in a database like apt. apt-get is fast, but it doesn't give the options that portage does, and I really don't see that much of an advantage over yum.
I've used apt-get, emerge, yum, and ./config && make make && install. I don't see how apt is any better than the others.
Yes. Thanks for noticing that I thought the game was crap. That was the intent of the message.
Do you not think I followed with great interest Doom 3's development, after it was announced? Do you not think I discussed it at length with gaming friends, watched trailers, watched friends play it? And then I sat down and played it myself. After two hours of most other FPS games, I knew pretty well whether or not I liked the game, and in this case I knew I didn't.
It's difficult to say how much money is being gained or lost on the XBox. Since they sell (or used to sell) each box at a loss, then yes, they did lose money on the Xbox. However, they may have reclaimed that money on game writing, but even more importantly, they produced a system that made developing games for the PC more attractive, and in doing so may have vastly improved their position.
Games written in DirectX are easily ported between Xbox and PC, but games written in OpenGL are easily ported between different operating systems, and Microsoft do not want gamers leaving Windows for Mac/Linux. By ensuring that more games are written in DirectX, Microsoft hurt the gaming market for other platforms, and improved their own. Consequently, any sacrifice they made on selling Xboxes was easily worth it for the loyalty they gained to their own platforms.
But then my comments would get ragged and unaligned when I made small changes the the preceding code. This gets even worse in files with columns of data. And tabs were, after all, designed specifically for the purpose of aligning text. No, I think I'll stick to tabs thanks.
If you happen to be using tabwidth 8, then :set tabstop 4 will make all my files align correctly on your PC. Alternatively, you can add/remove some tabs, but I assure you it is far less effort than going through and fixing the much greater number of spaces when alignment goes wrong.
The phrase is "couldn't care less". If you could care less, then you do care at least a little? ;)
Anyway, I loved the original Doom and Doom II, and must have puts weeks/months of game time into playing them. I used to do co-op with friends, set myself challenges. Other FPS games since then have been judged next to those games. I played Doom 3 for about 2 hours, before I got bored and gave up, as it was just about unplayable. There were some dark bits in Doom 1 and 2, but they were rare, and well used (and very atmospheric); Doom 3 just relied on this as an overused gimmick. It was also far too slow, and the graphics were poor next to Half Life 2, which did dark and atmospheric brilliantly (not to mention a better light mechanic - resource management with your suit's battery).
While id software managed another success with Quake 1, and to a lesser degree Quake 2, I don't think they've been leaders of the FPS market for a long time now, and I really doubt Doom 4 is going to change that. id software do write reasonably good gaming engines that other people can use to make good games with, and they do support Linux (which Valve currently don't).
I let her use my backup laptop for a week to see how she liked OO instead of Office on her laptop and she was amazed that for $120 I was able to find her an Intel 2.66Ghz desktop that would run Gnu-Linux nicely.
This is exactly the sort of thing that I wish happened more often in computing.
No, this does not refer to code duplication, but rather copying someone's code from a forum (where you might post your code for error inspection) becomes tricky due to whitespace mangling. Alternatively copying a bit of code into another file for testing only a small section of the program can become error prone.
Code reuse on the other hand is something to be encouraged wherever it is practical and useful.
I find the single biggest problem with doing that is the old 24 line issue. I want to see as much of my code as possible, but by splitting lines to accommodate braces I end up being able to see fewer lines of context code.
Also I was shown to do the { on its own line thing when first taught to program; this was in Java, and I really hate Java.
I've been trying to play Thief and Thief 2 on Windows XP. Thief worked albeit with frequent crashing, Thief 2 has never got past the intro screen. These are known problems, that many people have tried to find workarounds for, sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. The reason for this situation is that the games were designed for Win9x; the installation was specifically designed to fail if installed on an NT kernel (because WinNT4 at the time had a poor implementation of DirectX), although they can be forced to install via the command line.
Incidentally, I got both games working fine under Linux via Wine, with only two tweaks needed (using only one CPU core, and forcing VSync). A few crashes in the intro sequence, but it seems to just skip past that now.
Oh god yes. I've used Linux for years, and I still find X to be a real pain. Sometimes it just doesn't work, and it can take hours of trawling forums and fiddling before it finally pops up (and note you either been continually rebooting, using another computer, or using a command line browser). Someone, somewhere, knows how to fix your problem. Things are improving slowly.
Where I work (a biomathematics and statistics research and consultancy group in Scotland) almost everyone uses Linux, or dual boots between Linux and Windows. Fortunately we have competent sysadmins who can fix problems when they arise, and we don't need everyone to debug their own xorg.conf errors. I think this sort of environment is a great place to start for people who would want to use Linux at home.
> The problem is, that's subjective to the users. I've yet to find any WM that looks decent the first time. That, sadly, only works if the WM you are looking at has most of what you want/need.
Agreed. I've tried to make it clear that this is just my opinion ("it seems to me", "I think"...). I see screenshots of Fluxbox, Xfce4 or FVWM, and I've thought they look fantastic. Actually trying to make things look like that myself on the other hand is quite tricky, and I usually fall back to things that look simpler and plainer (less eye-candy means less eye-strain).
> Last time I tried gnome, it took forever to get to auto-hiding panels, increasing font sizes, and getting colors set so my eyes didn't hurt.
These things should be reasonably easy now. Right click on any panel and the option is there in the preferences. Font sizes are in System > Preferences > Appearance (which you can reach in several ways, including via setting the desktop wallpaper, since they've all merged). Getting the right colours is difficult, as it's very subjective. The clearlooks theme which is default on many distributions is quite good, but it's not everyone's taste.
> The control application, kcontrol or something like that, has a tree structure rather than a static list. Maybe I just find different things intuitive, but I found it much easier to find whatever I wanted to change, in that as opposed to gnome.
Another subjective option. I think I remember the way the control panels worked on Mac OS pre X, and it works like that. I find the tree distracting, and it's very easy to get to the different preferences, providing they're well organised (not always the case, but things usually improve between releases). Occasionally I can't find what I'm looking for (and people always remember failures better), and I don't like using GConf (I want to get as far away from a Windows registry as possible).
As for GNOME's pre-Mac OS x panel: they don't work like old Mac OS, as they don't give you the applications own menus at the top, but that was always a debated subject anyway. Mac OS did some wonderful things, and some really stupid things, but it worked for the time. You can give GNOME a dock like OS X, but every time I've tried I gave up after a few hours, as it just seemed a distraction that wasted lots of desktop space. Just put the usual icons you want to use on the panel, and use a window list, not as pretty, but just as functional.