The game has been working quite well for me for the last week, well enough that I'm having a lot of fun playing it. Maybe I've been lucky and it just happens to work well on my system (it's a peril with PC games that there are so many brands and configurations of hardware and OS configurations out there). Maybe it's because I've got 512MB of RAM; it is a very memory intensive game.
What annoys me is that the whiners focus on the short-term technical problems, when the important thing is the game design itself. The technical problems get sorted out, but if the game design is poor, then it's wrecked forever. Personally I like what they've done with the design.
If people want space-shuttle class software that works flawlesly first time, they'd have to pay a great deal more than $50.
I'm not convinced that TCP was the wrong choice, mainly because I don't know enough about networking to form a solid opinion. Certainly I don't trust the opinions of the hordes of technically clueless, who couldn't code a minesweeper game if their lives depended on it (I'm not talking about you; I don't know you), who proclaim that it was the wrong choice on message boards. Without question, some sort of reliable protocol was needed.
Yes, it has many flaws, but appalling? Really? The amount of work and design that must have gone into that game blows my mind. Maybe, because I'm a programmer by trade, I'm taking the whining by the clueless too much to heart.
Anyway, my post got modded as a troll; it wasn't meant to be. I was trying to provide some counter-balance. Thanks for listening:)
Also, ActiveX can be used to implement standards: for instance, Adobe SVG Viewer on Windows is an ActiveX component. (SVG, Scalable Vector Graphics, is a W3 standard).
I can see where you are coming from. That description of New Jerusalem from the passage that Jon quoted is a prophetic vision of some actual event that will occur at the end of the world (according to the Christians anyway). To ask if Open Source is that event -- The New Jerusalem -- is just silly. Of course though, it's supposed to be a metaphor, so let's extend it a bit to show the absurdity more clearly by asking "Is RMS the Second Coming of Christ?"
I agree entirely with what you are saying, but I'd like to point out that
Python does have private members. You just append a double-underscore (__) to the front of an identifier, which results in that identifier getting mangled with the class name. It's explained properly in the Python tutorial.
Why not go read Guido's tutorial (which IMHO is very nicely written and easy to read) and find out for yourself. If you know a few other languages, you can learn Python in a couple of hours.
There's no way they'd do that. It would be a massive PR blunder. The press would take a very dim view.
Re:More on the subject
on
Stop, Light.
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· Score: 1
No, not a gaping asshole in sight; in fact it is a more technical article than that NYT fluff. Bose-Einstein condensates are interesting beasts (from the article):
In the case of a Bose-Einstein condensate, atoms chilled nearly to absolute
zero can barely move at all, and their momentum therefore approaches zero.
But because zero is a very precise measure of momentum, the uncertainty
principle makes the positions of these atoms very uncertain. In a
condensate, as a result, such atoms are forced to overlap each other and
merge into superatoms sharing the same quantum mechanical "wave function,"
or collection of properties.
The T in T-shirt isn't an abbreviation, it's not short for anything, it stands for itself. And hyphens don't normally signify abbreviations. T-shirt has kept the hyphen because it would be confusing otherwise.
The X in TeX is some greek letter, chi I think, hence the unusual pronunciation.
Newly coined nonce words are often spelled with a hyphen, but the hyphen disappears when the words become widely used. For example, people used to write ``non-zero'' and ``soft-ware'' instead of ``nonzero'' and ``software''; the same trend has occurred for hundreds of other words. Thus it's high time for everybody to stop using the archaic spelling ``e-mail''. Think of how many keystrokes you will save in your lifetime if you stop now! The form ``email'' has been well established in England for several years, so I am amazed to see Americans being overly conservative in this regard. (Of course, ``email'' has been a familiar word in France much longer than in England --- but for an entirely different reason.)
That's kinda like the version numbering for the SmallEiffel compiler. From the FAQ:
Version numbering uses negative numbers. The first distributed version was numbered -0.99, the second one -0.98, the third -0.97, and so on. Version number -0.0 should correspond to the very best Eiffel compiler on this planet:-)
Internationalization: Is 20012012 YYYYDDMM or DDMMYYYY? Regaurdless of the year, how about 0201? MMDD or DDMM? The obvious answer depends on where you are on the planet.
YYYY-MM-DD is an ISO standard (ISO 8601). I found a summary of it here:
When someone uses the wrong form of 'Their' (belonging to them), 'There' (over there) or 'They're' (they are) in a sentence, or worse.
That's not really a complete sentence.
Basically, I work on this simple premise.
The premise follows that sentence, but there's no way for the reader to know that until they've read the next sentence. It's not clear what this is referring to when reading that sentence. Perhaps better would be to join that one to the one that follows with a colon.
Besides, premise isn't really the right word to use there.
But these are minor nitpicks. You've written a grammar-troll that commits no serious errors of its own. That's quite rare. Nicely done.
Another one is Dark Star. One scene has one of the characters discussing phenomenology with an intelligent, planet-destroying bomb. A very funny movie.
I've been told that Star Trek Voyager ripped off that idea, but I haven't seen that episode yet.
XML is a standard. Standards are good. You can parse XML with off-the-shelf libraries (for just about any programming language under the sun. Lisp included no doubt). You can get off-the-shelf tools for working with XML.
Re:3D GUI's take a load off the CPU??
on
3D GUI Project
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· Score: 2
Nah, 2D cards have rendering hardware, bit blitting and so on. Even the cheapest cards have this.
One thing I've always wondered about Galaga: is it worthwhile to use a captured fighter? I always got my highest scores (not very high) using the single fighter because I would get killed too easily with the double fighter.
You can testify, brag, reminisce, and otherwise post your own gaming stories and experiences here.
My brag: I got all 120 stars in Mario 64. It was one of the most difficult things I've ever done in my life. Some of the stars were so hard won, I wept tears of frustration trying to get them. It was only sheer bloody-mindedness that got me through to the end. What a great game.
Even though he's produced a few duds, Shigeru Miyamoto is a genius. (Another game by him that I consider to be perfectly executed is 1080 Snowboarding. Much better than SSX on the PS2.)
The K in CMYK stands for blacK. If you had ideal inks, you could mix Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow to get black. Unfortunately, with real inks, it's not black enough, so you need an actual black ink.
But yes, I think you were right. Magazines are printed in CMYK and have been for a very long time. I was just pointing out that one could mistake Magenta for Red and Cyan for Blue, especially since it's a common, incorrect belief that Red, Yellow, and Blue are the primary colors.
Speaking of kitchen appliances, we have an old microwave oven at work that has several modes of operation (that is modal modes that lock out other functions), and about 20 buttons, many of which are covered with arcane symbols (concentric circles with wiggly lines and the like). It's a true marvel. Even though we are all experienced programmers and we have read (skimmed) the manual, none of us can work out how to use it. More precisely we couldn't be bothered to work it out. Unfortunately, this means that we've ended up using the thing in a somewhat suboptimal way: press "Quick Set" and type in a number in minutes to heat stuff at full power. The people who designed it probably thought it was really cool.
In contrast, I have a new microwave oven at home that has precisely two controls: one dial for the power setting, and one dial for the time. It's really quite beatiful.
(I think the old oven was designed when microwave ovens were still new, and people foolishly thought that they might be useful for actual cooking, rather than just heating stuff up or thawing stuff out.)
It seems that I've just reiterated what you've already said, that both the developers and users have stuff to learn. Good point:)
Early color scientists thought that red, yellow, and blue were the primary subtractive colors. Those colors aren't so far away from cyan, magenta, and yellow:
Have you ever looked at Design By Contract? A good thing about it is that part of the spec can live inside the code itself, and is checkable at run time. To some degree, the spec and the code get cross-checked against each other.
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What annoys me is that the whiners focus on the short-term technical problems, when the important thing is the game design itself. The technical problems get sorted out, but if the game design is poor, then it's wrecked forever. Personally I like what they've done with the design.
If people want space-shuttle class software that works flawlesly first time, they'd have to pay a great deal more than $50.
Yes, it has many flaws, but appalling? Really? The amount of work and design that must have gone into that game blows my mind. Maybe, because I'm a programmer by trade, I'm taking the whining by the clueless too much to heart.
Anyway, my post got modded as a troll; it wasn't meant to be. I was trying to provide some counter-balance. Thanks for listening :)
Also, ActiveX can be used to implement standards: for instance, Adobe SVG Viewer on Windows is an ActiveX component. (SVG, Scalable Vector Graphics, is a W3 standard).
I can see where you are coming from. That description of New Jerusalem from the passage that Jon quoted is a prophetic vision of some actual event that will occur at the end of the world (according to the Christians anyway). To ask if Open Source is that event -- The New Jerusalem -- is just silly. Of course though, it's supposed to be a metaphor, so let's extend it a bit to show the absurdity more clearly by asking "Is RMS the Second Coming of Christ?"
I agree entirely with what you are saying, but I'd like to point out that Python does have private members. You just append a double-underscore (__) to the front of an identifier, which results in that identifier getting mangled with the class name. It's explained properly in the Python tutorial.
Why not go read Guido's tutorial (which IMHO is very nicely written and easy to read) and find out for yourself. If you know a few other languages, you can learn Python in a couple of hours.
It seems reasonable that ebooks will affect sales of printed books -- if not now, then in the near future.
There's no way they'd do that. It would be a massive PR blunder. The press would take a very dim view.
The X in TeX is some greek letter, chi I think, hence the unusual pronunciation.
From his website:
YYYY-MM-DD is an ISO standard (ISO 8601). I found a summary of it here:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html
One nice thing about it is that an "alphabetical" sort will order such values chronologically (in a directory listing for example).
I can't recall ever having seen YYYY-DD-MM.
That's not really a complete sentence.
Basically, I work on this simple premise.
The premise follows that sentence, but there's no way for the reader to know that until they've read the next sentence. It's not clear what this is referring to when reading that sentence. Perhaps better would be to join that one to the one that follows with a colon.
Besides, premise isn't really the right word to use there.
But these are minor nitpicks. You've written a grammar-troll that commits no serious errors of its own. That's quite rare. Nicely done.
I've been told that Star Trek Voyager ripped off that idea, but I haven't seen that episode yet.
It seems that the short answer is that the JVM has much cross-language potential, but Sun doesn't seem to be supporting such usage of it.
What are Sun thinking? Java The Language is nice, but no single language is appropriate for all domains.
XML is a standard. Standards are good. You can parse XML with off-the-shelf libraries (for just about any programming language under the sun. Lisp included no doubt). You can get off-the-shelf tools for working with XML.
Nah, 2D cards have rendering hardware, bit blitting and so on. Even the cheapest cards have this.
One thing I've always wondered about Galaga: is it worthwhile to use a captured fighter? I always got my highest scores (not very high) using the single fighter because I would get killed too easily with the double fighter.
My brag: I got all 120 stars in Mario 64. It was one of the most difficult things I've ever done in my life. Some of the stars were so hard won, I wept tears of frustration trying to get them. It was only sheer bloody-mindedness that got me through to the end. What a great game.
Even though he's produced a few duds, Shigeru Miyamoto is a genius. (Another game by him that I consider to be perfectly executed is 1080 Snowboarding. Much better than SSX on the PS2.)
But yes, I think you were right. Magazines are printed in CMYK and have been for a very long time. I was just pointing out that one could mistake Magenta for Red and Cyan for Blue, especially since it's a common, incorrect belief that Red, Yellow, and Blue are the primary colors.
Just a question. Does that really work? What if both want to type at the same time, won't they fight?
In contrast, I have a new microwave oven at home that has precisely two controls: one dial for the power setting, and one dial for the time. It's really quite beatiful.
(I think the old oven was designed when microwave ovens were still new, and people foolishly thought that they might be useful for actual cooking, rather than just heating stuff up or thawing stuff out.)
It seems that I've just reiterated what you've already said, that both the developers and users have stuff to learn. Good point :)
red --- magenta
blue --- cyan
yellow --- yellow
Have you ever looked at Design By Contract? A good thing about it is that part of the spec can live inside the code itself, and is checkable at run time. To some degree, the spec and the code get cross-checked against each other.