Its both a strawman and a false choice. He assumes that the only alternative to an authoritarian school system is anarchy. Clearly there are other choices.
I bet people said this about books in the middle ages. I think there is a difference between not being able to remember things, and not memorizing it in the first place. Sure people used to memorize the entire bible, but now they don't because they don't have to. That doesn't mean that they can't if they tried.
1.) So that when the frame rate drops it does not drop below 80FPS
2.) So that when we have stereo 3D games and the frame rate is divided between two stereoscopic views it still runs 100 FPS
3.) To simulate motion blur on a screen effectively multiple frames need to be blended together, the more frames the better.
P.S., the article's notion that our eyes somehow work like cameras and we would see objects blinking about without motion blur is silly. The eye does not take pictures which the brain then blurs together. The motion blur is an artifact of the fact that our eyes are continuously sensing light, not snapping photos.
Replying to no one in particular, so I'll reply to myself ^_^
I guess my view of using Open Inventor as a prototyping tool comes from being a game programmer. As such I feel compelled to implement everything from the ground up so I can eek every last ounce of performance out it.
Inventor could be called a tool for 'Getting It Done'(tm) which must be why it is used in scientific and visualization applications, where the application itself may be complicated enough without having to worry about how to draw everything. Sophisticated simulations are more likely to have their performance limited by sheer complexity than by graphics, so Inventor makes a lot of sense.
This is very true. I guess I was bundling these problems up into 'content'. Nothing was compelling enough and it did take too long to download a reasonable scene over a 28.8 connection.
I wonder what would happen if they tried again? Now that we have 3D accelerators and broadband, VRML could possibly be an alternative to tools like Flash. I know that Flash and VRML are very different things, but I've had just about all the 2D vector graphics I can stand ^_^
If you want an idea of what Open Inventor is, just look at VRML. VRML is based on Open Inventor. Okay, so many people will not take that to be a shining example how good Open Inventor is, but I think the failure of VRML has more to do with the implementation and the content, not the technology itself.
Open Inventors main draw (no pun intended) is its scene graph. Basically, a scene graph is a description of everything in a 3D world. You can use it to render a scene, but its not limited to that. You could visit every node in a scene graph and instead of rendering, you could build a new data structure based on the previous one which does anything you want with the geometry. Which for me means building a display list that will draw the scene using advanced texturing and shading techniques which are not available in Open Inventor. This means that I get to concentrate on the shading, and do not have to worry about how to store my geometry. Open Inventor has a file format as well, so I don't even have to worry about creating a new one.
I mainly see Open Inventor as a prototyping tool, because its possible to get something on the screen with very little code. I also see it as an API to use to create editors and other tools. But, does anyone know any "real" applications that use Open Inventor?
This is a 'meta-comment', a post on the discussion itself, please refrain from moderating it negatively (e.g., as off-topic or flaimbait).
This seems to be yet another over-reaction by the Slashdot community. I would rather that slashdot posted a handful of more accurate stories than post a dozen flawed stories each day.
I wish that the story posters would realize that half of the stupidity and misinformation in comments seems to directly result from something that is flawed in the original posting of a story. Keep in mind that a good many people would rather spout something inane rather than actually read a link.
For that reason, if you post a story, please try to keep it accurate. If you cannot be neutral and feel you must make a statement for freedom or some other cause then try to say something intelligent. Otherwise it is just so much trolling and flaimbaiting right on the homepage!
(Last time I posted something like this, I got modded down as flamebait. But I am going to put my karma on the line yet again because I am not a coward.)
i was not saying it would not be as interesting, just that your comments about Win98 "getting out of the way" seemed to be flawed, considering that gl tends to run better on NT/2000. Win98 may indeed 'get out of the way', but it does not seem to be as well archetected in other areas. My best guess is that it has to do with the way the video memory is handled in NT vs 98 (that is just a guess tho).
OT, but, under your definition, wouldn't Seinfeld be considered a "screwball comedy?" The plot almost always involves everything coming together at the end for a big punchline.
Hmmm, the rental angle makes a lot of sense. I can imagine someone with a chipped Playstation doing this a lot with a CD-RW. This would make sense even if CD-RW was much more expensive (which, through the mericle of Slashdot I now know are pretty cheap) I can imagine games being released only as DVD, because it will probably be a while before DVD-R is as cheap as CD-R (it took CD-R forever to become a ubiquitous and cheap as it is).
I doubt there will be much swapping, simply because, if you read the article, you would know that the virtual memory system is one of the features removed. 64MB of memory is still TWICE as much as the Playstation 2 and 32 times as much as the Playstation.
Amiga claims to have created the Video Game market?
From the interview: The Amiga created what we know today as the video-gaming market.
This is completely bogus! Atari showed that there was a huge market which they then proceeded to crash and burn. Nintendo created the modern video game market from those ashes.
The PC, Apple, and other systems (like the Amiga) have always had a steady market, but it is also a relatively small market compared to video games at large.
This guys comment makes me wonder if he is just ignorant, or smoking his own special brand of crack.
In the console game business you fix all your bugs before you ship. I wish PC Game makers could do that (but its next to impossible due to the nature of the PC, almost no two are alike).
PS and Nintendo games written resently DO crash. A friend of mine who worked on X-Treme G for N64 says that he can sit down with a retail copy of that game and make it crash easily (it helps that he was a programmer on the project ^_^). I have several playstation games that have bugs in them as well as old SNES games. Game console software is not bulletproof.
I have run Win2k for 6 months without a crash. If anything XBox Win2k will be much more stable because it has been vastly simplified. There is only one hardware configuration.
Why, praytail, would it take longer for games to boot? The HDD is only used as a cache to store frequently accessed data and saved games. Games will still be mostly kept on the DVD (its only an 8 GB HD). Also, considering that I can load a saved game onto another X-Box, it can't store anything permanently on the HDD or I could not play my game anywhere else.
I have probably been successfully trolled, but many people do actually believe what you said, what a shame.
I play Internet Quake on my computer all the time through a firewall/proxy. The problem is not connecting out, but people connecting in. The only thing you would have problems doing is HOSTING a game. But, I doubt very many X-Box games will be peer-to-peer. Most likely they will all support central servers.
Anyway, If you want to host a game, you need to setup your firewall properly, not your X-Box.
I figured the reason was that CD-Rs are a cheap easy way to make pirated games. I have a fairly old DVD-ROM which reads CD-Rs, so obviously they are purposefully disabiling it, either in software or on the hardware level. It supports CD-RW and DVD-R because these mediums are still relatively expensive (i.e. I will not just burn off a 12 dollar CD-RW for a friend, but I would a 50 cent CD-R without a second thought).
"Why on earth are you using a switch statement in an object-oriented language, anyway?"
Because its easier to read, IMHO, than a series of if/else statements. I admit that C's switch statment is not ideal at all, but many languages have switch statements which serve to express the notion of two dozen mutually exclusive alternatives without any pitfalls. I do not see what anyone would have against the selection statement except that it can be done with if/elses.
Select statements (aka switch) are not used exclusively to determine behavior based on type (clearly, as you say, one should use polymorphism). Your statements imply that there is absolutely no place for a selection statement. But certiainly you do not want to bring the full force of OO onto something as simple as deciding what to do based what day of the week it is. A selection statement certainly gets that idea accross better than 7 'if' statements one after another.
How are enums inconsistent? 'enums' are simply named values grouped together as the same type. Implementationally you may still be using ints, but the compiler does consider them to be different types. Basically, a lot of things are the same underneath, but the compiler is the sole arbiter of what's what. Of course its completely dumb to cast 'days of the week' to 'iMac colors' but you have to explicitly and very obviously (cast) it. Most likely, C# will complain about this unless you are writing an 'unsafe' block of code because it is a type-safe language.
Sorry, I didn't bother to count the exact number of lines, but it wasn't a very realistic example. If you had 20 values for your enum you would have had more than 20 lines and the enum would have still been 1 or 2 lines.
You are very right that LOC do not determine how good a piece of code is. But, that was not my point. The point was that your example is much more difficult to grasp immediately, meaning I must pause and consider what you are doing. If I was maintaining your code I would have lamented that you even decided to emulate enums in a language that does not support them.
I would much rather have a real feature than a verbose emulation of a feature. enums to me are a good feature that help make code more readable, and if they are typesafe then so much the better. This is definitely a matter of taste, but in some cases I believe that selection statements are much more elegant and terse than 'if's, and definitely more lightweight than an object.
Everything in C# is in namespaces, you use the
'using' directive to say which namespaces are implicit. So, the namespace should not be cluttered as long as you do not name classes the same thing. Declarations are not nessecary IMHO. Why do you need them if you have namespaces and late binding?
What exactly are forware-type declarations? I am not refering to the compiler implying a type from the way you use it (like an implicit function declaration in C) but to the compiler not complaining about not knowing the type until it has searched all the namespaces listed in the 'using' directives as well as all the files in your project and the current namespace.
Slashdot Mirror
Its both a strawman and a false choice. He assumes that the only alternative to an authoritarian school system is anarchy. Clearly there are other choices.
I bet people said this about books in the middle ages. I think there is a difference between not being able to remember things, and not memorizing it in the first place. Sure people used to memorize the entire bible, but now they don't because they don't have to. That doesn't mean that they can't if they tried.
1.) So that when the frame rate drops it does not drop below 80FPS
2.) So that when we have stereo 3D games and the frame rate is divided between two stereoscopic views it still runs 100 FPS
3.) To simulate motion blur on a screen effectively multiple frames need to be blended together, the more frames the better.
P.S., the article's notion that our eyes somehow work like cameras and we would see objects blinking about without motion blur is silly. The eye does not take pictures which the brain then blurs together. The motion blur is an artifact of the fact that our eyes are continuously sensing light, not snapping photos.
Presumably this problem existed before and its not going to become any more of a problem just because its done online now.
"The world is your oyster"
not, lobster ^_^. I am having trouble figuring out what "the world is your lobster" would actually mean if it was correct.
I guess my view of using Open Inventor as a prototyping tool comes from being a game programmer. As such I feel compelled to implement everything from the ground up so I can eek every last ounce of performance out it.
Inventor could be called a tool for 'Getting It Done'(tm) which must be why it is used in scientific and visualization applications, where the application itself may be complicated enough without having to worry about how to draw everything. Sophisticated simulations are more likely to have their performance limited by sheer complexity than by graphics, so Inventor makes a lot of sense.
Maybe VRML is not dead, as much as it is not the raging success I thought it would be when it first appeared.
I wonder what would happen if they tried again? Now that we have 3D accelerators and broadband, VRML could possibly be an alternative to tools like Flash. I know that Flash and VRML are very different things, but I've had just about all the 2D vector graphics I can stand ^_^
Open Inventors main draw (no pun intended) is its scene graph. Basically, a scene graph is a description of everything in a 3D world. You can use it to render a scene, but its not limited to that. You could visit every node in a scene graph and instead of rendering, you could build a new data structure based on the previous one which does anything you want with the geometry. Which for me means building a display list that will draw the scene using advanced texturing and shading techniques which are not available in Open Inventor. This means that I get to concentrate on the shading, and do not have to worry about how to store my geometry. Open Inventor has a file format as well, so I don't even have to worry about creating a new one.
I mainly see Open Inventor as a prototyping tool, because its possible to get something on the screen with very little code. I also see it as an API to use to create editors and other tools. But, does anyone know any "real" applications that use Open Inventor?
This seems to be yet another over-reaction by the Slashdot community. I would rather that slashdot posted a handful of more accurate stories than post a dozen flawed stories each day.
I wish that the story posters would realize that half of the stupidity and misinformation in comments seems to directly result from something that is flawed in the original posting of a story. Keep in mind that a good many people would rather spout something inane rather than actually read a link. For that reason, if you post a story, please try to keep it accurate. If you cannot be neutral and feel you must make a statement for freedom or some other cause then try to say something intelligent. Otherwise it is just so much trolling and flaimbaiting right on the homepage! (Last time I posted something like this, I got modded down as flamebait. But I am going to put my karma on the line yet again because I am not a coward.)
i was not saying it would not be as interesting, just that your comments about Win98 "getting out of the way" seemed to be flawed, considering that gl tends to run better on NT/2000. Win98 may indeed 'get out of the way', but it does not seem to be as well archetected in other areas. My best guess is that it has to do with the way the video memory is handled in NT vs 98 (that is just a guess tho).
OT, but, under your definition, wouldn't Seinfeld be considered a "screwball comedy?" The plot almost always involves everything coming together at the end for a big punchline.
That comment may be insightful, but it is wrong. Windows 2000, in general, performs better at OpenGL benchmarks than Windows 98.
Quake is certainly NOT TCP, I've been through the source code.
Hmmm, the rental angle makes a lot of sense. I can imagine someone with a chipped Playstation doing this a lot with a CD-RW. This would make sense even if CD-RW was much more expensive (which, through the mericle of Slashdot I now know are pretty cheap) I can imagine games being released only as DVD, because it will probably be a while before DVD-R is as cheap as CD-R (it took CD-R forever to become a ubiquitous and cheap as it is).
Admittedly, last time I checked the price of CD-RW it was much more expensive than CD-R. It appears the price has dropped significantly.
Quake uses UDP, yet I have no problems. What exactly do you mean?
I doubt there will be much swapping, simply because, if you read the article, you would know that the virtual memory system is one of the features removed. 64MB of memory is still TWICE as much as the Playstation 2 and 32 times as much as the Playstation.
From the interview: The Amiga created what we know today as the video-gaming market.
This is completely bogus! Atari showed that there was a huge market which they then proceeded to crash and burn. Nintendo created the modern video game market from those ashes.
The PC, Apple, and other systems (like the Amiga) have always had a steady market, but it is also a relatively small market compared to video games at large.
This guys comment makes me wonder if he is just ignorant, or smoking his own special brand of crack.
In the console game business you fix all your bugs before you ship. I wish PC Game makers could do that (but its next to impossible due to the nature of the PC, almost no two are alike).
I have run Win2k for 6 months without a crash. If anything XBox Win2k will be much more stable because it has been vastly simplified. There is only one hardware configuration.
Why, praytail, would it take longer for games to boot? The HDD is only used as a cache to store frequently accessed data and saved games. Games will still be mostly kept on the DVD (its only an 8 GB HD). Also, considering that I can load a saved game onto another X-Box, it can't store anything permanently on the HDD or I could not play my game anywhere else.
I have probably been successfully trolled, but many people do actually believe what you said, what a shame.
Anyway, If you want to host a game, you need to setup your firewall properly, not your X-Box.
I figured the reason was that CD-Rs are a cheap easy way to make pirated games. I have a fairly old DVD-ROM which reads CD-Rs, so obviously they are purposefully disabiling it, either in software or on the hardware level. It supports CD-RW and DVD-R because these mediums are still relatively expensive (i.e. I will not just burn off a 12 dollar CD-RW for a friend, but I would a 50 cent CD-R without a second thought).
Because its easier to read, IMHO, than a series of if/else statements. I admit that C's switch statment is not ideal at all, but many languages have switch statements which serve to express the notion of two dozen mutually exclusive alternatives without any pitfalls. I do not see what anyone would have against the selection statement except that it can be done with if/elses.
Select statements (aka switch) are not used exclusively to determine behavior based on type (clearly, as you say, one should use polymorphism). Your statements imply that there is absolutely no place for a selection statement. But certiainly you do not want to bring the full force of OO onto something as simple as deciding what to do based what day of the week it is. A selection statement certainly gets that idea accross better than 7 'if' statements one after another.
How are enums inconsistent? 'enums' are simply named values grouped together as the same type. Implementationally you may still be using ints, but the compiler does consider them to be different types. Basically, a lot of things are the same underneath, but the compiler is the sole arbiter of what's what. Of course its completely dumb to cast 'days of the week' to 'iMac colors' but you have to explicitly and very obviously (cast) it. Most likely, C# will complain about this unless you are writing an 'unsafe' block of code because it is a type-safe language.
Sorry, I didn't bother to count the exact number of lines, but it wasn't a very realistic example. If you had 20 values for your enum you would have had more than 20 lines and the enum would have still been 1 or 2 lines.
You are very right that LOC do not determine how good a piece of code is. But, that was not my point. The point was that your example is much more difficult to grasp immediately, meaning I must pause and consider what you are doing. If I was maintaining your code I would have lamented that you even decided to emulate enums in a language that does not support them.
I would much rather have a real feature than a verbose emulation of a feature. enums to me are a good feature that help make code more readable, and if they are typesafe then so much the better. This is definitely a matter of taste, but in some cases I believe that selection statements are much more elegant and terse than 'if's, and definitely more lightweight than an object.
What exactly are forware-type declarations? I am not refering to the compiler implying a type from the way you use it (like an implicit function declaration in C) but to the compiler not complaining about not knowing the type until it has searched all the namespaces listed in the 'using' directives as well as all the files in your project and the current namespace.