Hmmm, don't helicopters work by generating down drafts?
No, they don't. They work the same way as airplanes, producing lift by moving air over an appropriately shaped airfoil, reducing the pressure above the wing, causing the vehicle to rise. The only difference is that in the helicopter's case, the lift is generated by moving the wing around in circles really fast. In the airplane's case, the wing is moved laterally through the air really fast. The result is the same.
I'd "like" a trillion times increase, the hell with this 1000-fold stuff. That's chump change!
Maybe what they really meant to say was they're investigating parallel processing, not distributed computing. If they wait long enough that they can get a 10 times increase in graphics processing power and design the system such that it can run 100 of those processors in parallel, well then there's a 1000 times increase (of sorts, it's not really that easy, nor would that likely turn out to be a reasonable proposition for consoles that are meant to cost <$300!). But otherwise I think this is just marketing being out of touch with reality.
There was an article about someone wanting to write a multiplayer game engine in C# not long ago. I posted something very similar then. I have yet to talk to anyone who has actually made games professionally and has seriously considered using Java. But a lot of people, many of whom are experienced programmers outside the gaming industry, who haven't seem to think it's a good idea, it comes up all the time.
Skimming the paper in question, the author even says that Java development is not recommended for consoles, and in fact using it is not even possible in most cases. Furthermore, he wisely realizes that it may never be possible for the X-box. His final conclusion is that because of the lack of console availability and due to performance considerations, Java is only feasible for low profile games or high profile but low performance games, and of course only for PC-only games.
As you say, somebody would have to take the plunge first. But I can't imagine who it would be. The problem is it's going to be very hard to convince an experienced developer like you or me to try it for a long time to come, and inexperienced developers have a big enough learning curve to get over without also trying to blaze a trail in a new language.
Unlike you, I do doubt that we'll a system that uses Java as it's primary environment any time soon. It won't happen on the current generation of consoles, and I highly doubt it will happen on the next. Beyond that, it no longer fits my definition of the near future. It's too many product cycles down the road to make any reasonable predictions about what people will be using. I do think we'll probably see Java being supported in the next generation (PS3, GameHypercube, Y-box, whatever), but not widely used.
Re:Why did it take so many posts?
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Abusing the GPL?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
As for precedent, can anyone find a discussion of GPL'ed yacc/bison grammars? This would fit exactly the case above - the original source that must be distributed is the.y file, not the result of compiling the.y to a.c file. Unfortunately, I don't think that anyone has ever been tempted to rip off a GPL'ed grammar.
Yacc has a BSD license, not GPL, and so this was never an issue at all for yacc. You can do whatever you want with BSD licensed code.
Bison makes a specific exception to the GPL for the code that it includes in your parser. You can compile your.y file with bison and still use it in a closed source product. This didn't used to be the case, but it is now. Before that happened, everyone who needed to do that just used yacc (or should have!)
Re:CSI - Crummy Science for Idiots
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The Rise of CSI
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The conflict between Grissom and the guy who represents the mayor's office (I didn't think he was the sherrif, actually, but you could be right.) has nothing to do with authority figures being assholes. You've read that into it based on your own bias. The reason that whole running subplot exits is to highlight Grissom's tendency towards finding the truth at the expense of all else, including people's feelings. It's a recurring theme in the show, and that's not the only device they've used to show it. Grissom is one of my favorite TV characters ever, and that's part of the reason why. Like you and me, he is not perfect, and he knows it. Frequently the tasks that involve dealing with people get delegated to Willows.
Also, I agree that they made a bunch of scientific mistakes in that one particular episode. I even posted something about it on another website at the time, the only time I've done that. But it's the only episode that's been that bad, it's usually much better. It isn't perfect, but that was the worst of the bunch. If it's the only episode you've seen, it's not fair to judge the whole series by it.
I agree with another poster that I don't want them going after larger issues. There's plenty of preachy trite crap on TV dealing with "larger issues" all the time, it's great to have one show that can tell interesting personal stories with believable, well thought-out, and imperfect, characters for once. Quincy was a two dimensional cardboard cutout medical examiner, who needs more of that? It's everywhere!
It just might make the hassle of a homebrewed weblog a little more attractive. Of course, Slashdot service is what makes Slashdot more attractive than a plain weblog anyhow.
...which is enough to make me raise my voice in song. Let'em try to take that away.
All music is owned by the RIAA. You may not sing without prior written consent, nor distribute a recording of your singing in any form. Please desist singing this instant in order to avoid a costly lawsuit.
Re:Good for some, nightmare for others
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Peek-a-Boo(ty)
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· Score: 1
My goodness, is that what uids are for? You mean to tell me I'm only one order of magnitude away from a marriage proposal from CmdrTaco? What if Kathleen dumps him, I might be next! SWOON!
I remember the slashdot story about the machine that eats. Slug-catcher was a proposed future use, but it's not practical yet. I think the story said they only got a few seconds of power from several hours of digesting.
Not to mention autonomous slug-catching is a pretty advanced robotic task. I think you'd have a hard enough time building a bot to do that even without trying to make it self-powering. If you were to do such a thing, solar power or a recharging base station where the thing goes to sleep would be much more practical.
Now if I'm wrong, then someone please post a link to a company that makes robotic slug-catchers. I'd love to see it. Lego Mindstorm versions are acceptable too!
Nope, not kidding, and I've seen that episode. It is one of the better ones. But still not great. Here's some related Simpsons jokes for you. (and I do mean you, no one else is going to read a reply on a story more than a whole day old on slashdot!)
Bart is on a school tour of the police station, and spots a wall full of megaphones. After pondering for a few moments, he has an idea. Cut to shot of 30 megaphones placed end-to-end, with Bart at the speaking end. A fly buzzes by, and the room starts shaking. Bart starts to say "Testing..." but only gets as far as "Tes..." before a shockwave spreads all over Springfield. The ringing doesn't stop until after Wiggum takes Bart home (and in the middle of one of Marge's lines).
Homer is on board the space shuttle, and accidentally breaks open the ant farm. Back on earth, Kent Brockman sees an ant float close to the camera, and assumes that it's a race of giant ants coming from space to enslave us all. "Let me be the first to say, 'Welcome!' to our new ant masters!"
Got to agree with you. There are many things from every single season of the Simpsons that will make me laugh out loud every time I see them (or just think of them... I wish Pinchy were here to enjoy this!) I do think it's past its prime, but I also think it's still way better than every other show's "prime". It's all relative, and The Simpsons is still my favorite show.
On the other hand, I can't remember a single thing from Futurama that made me laugh out loud. I don't mean I've never laughed at it, just that I don't remember anything that funny now. I stopped watching regularly (but not entirely) a while back, which is why I'm not terribly disappointed it's going away. I mean, I'm disappointed in the sense that I'd cancel everything else on Fox's schedule before The Simpsons and Futurama (not that I can name much of anything else on their schedule - that's the point) but still not really upset.
Garbage collection is nice in theory. But if you're talking about a real-time game, it can be a major pain in the butt if it isn't done well. I don't know how good Java and C# run-times are at it, but imagine if you had GC that took 5 seconds every 10 minutes. Every 10 minutes, your game is going to pause or at least run very slowly for 5 seconds. You really want something approaching real-time programming for games, and GC makes that hard. At the very least, I'd want it to be something you have control over, which I believe is not the case in Java! You can correct me if I'm wrong, I'm probably just confused:)
Now, if it's a turn based strategy, or if you're sure the GC implementation isn't going to get in your way, then yeah, it's pretty nice.
Yes, some of us love being plumbers (tweaking malloc calls or fine tuning a large loop in ASM), but for projects like this I think it is more appropriate to use a higher level language.
Ok, that's fair enough, but I think something that isn't always clear outside the gaming industry is that most of the people who work in it (especially those who are successful at it) are the ones who like being plumbers. If you think about it, it makes sense: a large portion of the history of game development centers around coding increasinly complex games for the same platform that ran last year's games. The playstation 1 was a "current" platform until a year ago, and it only has 2MB of RAM! TWO MEGATBYTES. The PS2 still only has 32MB, way behind PCs, where you need more than that just to load Windows. There's a lot of baggage to get rid of before most game programmers will start considering things like C#. (I've mostly done PC programming, just using the PS as a graphic example, because it does still apply to some extent)
When I say C# is shocking, it's partly because I'm trying to imagine myself going into work and suggesting it to a bunch of programmers who are used to programming "impossible" things on minimum spec systems. Even moving to C++ has been mighty slow for a lot of studios. No one would even take me seriously if I tried to push C# on them. "Let's code it in Java!" is already guaranteed to get a laugh from any game developer I know of. C# has the same sort of negative connotations.
I generally try to stay out of these language discussions, because I've come to realize that being in game development has skewed my perceptions a bit over the last few years. "Let's code it in Java!" isn't automatically funny in other industries, I know that. And I suppose it's the same with C#, but being newer, it's even higher up the joke-language-for-games scale.
If you've never written a client-server game at all, you might check out Netrek for some basic ideas. It isn't massive, but it is client-server, and it's where I learned most of the important things I know about network programming in general (and I do, in fact, get paid to write network code for games now.) Quake or Quake 2 source are probably also good things to look at, though I haven't seen their code personally.
None of those solve the major problems you're really asking about though: how to decide who gets to know about what. Worldforge is the only open source project I can think of to point you to in that area. Perhaps some MUDs might be useful as well, but they tend to be based on rooms, not areas, which doesn't translate well at all to most other games.
Probably the biggest problem is avoiding N^2 operations as much as possible. At some level, there's no way around it: N players in an area generate events that have to be propagated back out to N (or at least N-1) players. This obiously makes scaling to arbitrarily large populations difficult. On the other hand, if you can guarantee a set maximum number of players in an area/server/whatever, you can target that maximum and not worry about it a whole lot.
A slashdot post isn't really the right medium to answer this question. There aren't any quick and easy answers, you need to figure out what makes sense for your game on your own. I've spent a large portion of the last year thinking about these problems myself, and I wish you the best of luck on it. I'm having a blast myself, but it's also the most challenging work I've ever done.
I am interested in hearing your reasons for using C#. That's actually somewhat shocking, but maybe it's just ignorance on my part. I can't imagine why you'd want to bet the farm on such an immature system, regardless of the strengths you've perceived in it. What does it do for you that C++ doesn't, and is it really worth it?
So, are you pointing this out to make the argument that they shouldn't sell advertising space? I can see the merit in that, but it really has nothing to do with Microsoft. Microsoft is just another advertiser in this case, it could have been anyone's display there. It could have been Redhat. Or the company you work for. And still could be.
So why isn't the story titled just, "Promotions turn up in USPS Offices?" I suspect that that's not really news, first of all, since the USPS is run as a business and can largely do what they want to make up their costs. But when a particular company a large portion of slashdot readers dislike buys that ad space, well, NOW there's something to get pissed off about! By placing Microsoft in the subject, instead of just mentioning who the promotions belong to in passing (if even that) it's implying that Microsoft has done something evil again. There's an interesting debate here about whether it's appropriate for a quasi-governmental business that receives no tax dollars to sell advertising, but it's been derailed by turning this into yet another Microsoft story.
Any annoyance you may observe in the above is directed more at the story than the post I'm responding to, sorry ChrisCampbell47.
Sure, but I could definitely see playing, say, chess, and other things with simple interfaces that don't take a large time commitment (the opposite of MMORPGs). Especially if I could easily find a human opponent of equal skill any time, anywhere. You don't need graphics, fast connections, or community for games like that to be a succcess. You just need a few million people with cell-phones who occasionally have a few minutes to kill.
People say they play MMORPGs for friends or other players, because so far they haven't been much fun in and of themselves for more than a short while. But a lot of people think chess is fun, and much more fun against a person than a computer.
Harmful or not, it bugs me the way they use the term "Release Candidate". I don't know about the rest of you, but on every project I've ever worked on, once you start calling things Release Candidates, you stop adding features and just fix bugs until you get the actual release version nailed. Generally speaking, your first RC should be something you think has a shot at becoming the actual release, otherwise why are you calling it a candidate? This is obviously not the case with Vorbis, as they keep adding new stuff with every candidate.
Now, having said that, there's two things I'll point out. First, I can't find anywhere where they actually spell out "Release Candidate" so maybe RC actually stands for something else. Second, this post (mine, not the one I'm responding to) boils down pointless nitpicking over semantics. They can call it whatever makes 'em happy. But following the same conventions as the rest of the world makes it easier to figure out what they really mean. In the meantime, I will just mentally replace "RC" with "Beta" when reading about Ogg Vorbis.
I'm a little annoyed by the increased posting history, not for any real concern over privacy (that would be dumb, it's a public forum) but rather because I've always counted on anything stupid I post essentially disappearing after a few weeks. Now all the stupid things I've said will be easily found for all time (or at least a lot longer). Including this post.
Thus making me look even stupider. Wait, is that how you spell stupider?
And besides, with a little bit of futzing, you can easily disable specific drivers from being on the list.
That's probably true, since the article tells us what file the list is stored in, but that list is going to be automatically updated periodically, so even assuming that it is easy to manually remove drivers from the list (which isn't clear, you never know what kind of tricks they might play to avoid letting you run your system with a modified file!), you're going to have to do it every time it gets updated. And maybe they'll move it around or otherwise obfuscate it in future system updates.
I do think that this is a REALLY NEAT IDEA. Heck, some Linux distro should steal it. But it's not so neat not if they are forcing everyone to use it.
Ah well, it's not like this is the first reason not to use XP.
What's to claim about digital cable?
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The Joys of HDTV
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· Score: 1
What do you mean digital cable is not as good as the companies claim? What can they claim other than "You get 250+ channels!"? Have they promised it will clean your windows, mow your lawn, vaccuum your apartment, or walk your dog, and I just missed it? It isn't like they've ever promised better picture quality or better quality programming because of it, just more channels.
Of course, it's only worth it to me because I also have TiVo, so I haven't watched an ad for anything, including digital cable, in a long time. Maybe they are promising all those things. In which case you're right. Otherwise I have no idea what you're talking about.
It's a neat idea... but wake me up when I can get 100 Terabits/sec into my house.
Actually, strike that. It doesn't really require 100 Terabits/sec of network capacity, it just needs a hardware device that can take random data (which both parties receive) at that rate and pluck a key out at a specified time. Quite possibly from a satellite, but any kind of broadcast will do. That's probably feasible in some form, but still not easy.
I was about to agree with you, but I think I figured out what's really going on with this that the article doesn't explain. It suggests using a public key encryption technology to exchange the message containing the start point, which seems to make it insecure (since the article had previously stated no public key system to date is provably secure).
But it's also relying on a random bitstream with VAST bandwidth (10 million million "numbers" per second is 100 Terabits/sec if a "number" is a byte, right?), the idea being that whatever stream you use has to be signifigantly beyond anyone's ability to record it. Since no one can record it, the public key exchange only has to be secure for as long as it takes to get to the start point, which should be somewhere between right away and far enough down the line that no one can save that much data. If you can increase the bandwidth of the bitstream, you can shorten that time, otherwise you just wait longer.
But if the bandwidth is too low, then your public key exchange may be cracked before the start of the bitstream is hit, so it really does need to be huge.
So, the requirements are actually that you have a communications channel that can't be cracked in the amount of time it takes to transmit the bits for the key, and that you're transmitting enough bits in that time that no one can save them.
It's a neat idea... but wake me up when I can get 100 Terabits/sec into my house.
Larry Niven's first published story was actually called "The Coldest Place," and it was about the point on Mercury facing directly away from the sun. At the time, they thought Mercury was tidally locked, but they discovered that it actually rotates slowly after the story was accepted but before it appeared.
It was published anyway (I believe Niven actually asked them not to), but the thing to take away is that even though Mercury is close to the sun, it also has no atmosphere and so any parts facing away from the sun will get extremely cold. Anything in space experiences this sort of effect. If something's completely in shadow, there's nothing else that's going to put radiation into it. If the parts of those craters with ice are never hit by sunlight, it's possible there could be ice.
I'm sorry I don't really remember more of the story itself, I just remember that story about the story.
but Visual Programming is the most efficient and intuitive method of rapid application development
No, it's the most efficient and intuitive method of rapid user interface development. There is quite a big difference. User interface isn't everything. No matter how easily you can lay out your interface, you still have to write code to make it do something useful. That's where the language comes in, see. An IDE does not have to restrict you to only one language, and some don't.
The IDE is not the language, but I will grant you that for some people who mainly write interfaces, the choice of IDE may outweigh the choice of language.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm, don't helicopters work by generating down drafts?
No, they don't. They work the same way as airplanes, producing lift by moving air over an appropriately shaped airfoil, reducing the pressure above the wing, causing the vehicle to rise. The only difference is that in the helicopter's case, the lift is generated by moving the wing around in circles really fast. In the airplane's case, the wing is moved laterally through the air really fast. The result is the same.
I'd "like" a trillion times increase, the hell with this 1000-fold stuff. That's chump change!
Maybe what they really meant to say was they're investigating parallel processing, not distributed computing. If they wait long enough that they can get a 10 times increase in graphics processing power and design the system such that it can run 100 of those processors in parallel, well then there's a 1000 times increase (of sorts, it's not really that easy, nor would that likely turn out to be a reasonable proposition for consoles that are meant to cost <$300!). But otherwise I think this is just marketing being out of touch with reality.
There was an article about someone wanting to write a multiplayer game engine in C# not long ago. I posted something very similar then. I have yet to talk to anyone who has actually made games professionally and has seriously considered using Java. But a lot of people, many of whom are experienced programmers outside the gaming industry, who haven't seem to think it's a good idea, it comes up all the time.
Skimming the paper in question, the author even says that Java development is not recommended for consoles, and in fact using it is not even possible in most cases. Furthermore, he wisely realizes that it may never be possible for the X-box. His final conclusion is that because of the lack of console availability and due to performance considerations, Java is only feasible for low profile games or high profile but low performance games, and of course only for PC-only games.
As you say, somebody would have to take the plunge first. But I can't imagine who it would be. The problem is it's going to be very hard to convince an experienced developer like you or me to try it for a long time to come, and inexperienced developers have a big enough learning curve to get over without also trying to blaze a trail in a new language.
Unlike you, I do doubt that we'll a system that uses Java as it's primary environment any time soon. It won't happen on the current generation of consoles, and I highly doubt it will happen on the next. Beyond that, it no longer fits my definition of the near future. It's too many product cycles down the road to make any reasonable predictions about what people will be using. I do think we'll probably see Java being supported in the next generation (PS3, GameHypercube, Y-box, whatever), but not widely used.
As for precedent, can anyone find a discussion of GPL'ed yacc/bison grammars? This would fit exactly the case above - the original source that must be distributed is the .y file, not the result of compiling the .y to a .c file. Unfortunately, I don't think that anyone has ever been tempted to rip off a GPL'ed grammar.
.y file with bison and still use it in a closed source product. This didn't used to be the case, but it is now. Before that happened, everyone who needed to do that just used yacc (or should have!)
Yacc has a BSD license, not GPL, and so this was never an issue at all for yacc. You can do whatever you want with BSD licensed code.
Bison makes a specific exception to the GPL for the code that it includes in your parser. You can compile your
The conflict between Grissom and the guy who represents the mayor's office (I didn't think he was the sherrif, actually, but you could be right.) has nothing to do with authority figures being assholes. You've read that into it based on your own bias. The reason that whole running subplot exits is to highlight Grissom's tendency towards finding the truth at the expense of all else, including people's feelings. It's a recurring theme in the show, and that's not the only device they've used to show it. Grissom is one of my favorite TV characters ever, and that's part of the reason why. Like you and me, he is not perfect, and he knows it. Frequently the tasks that involve dealing with people get delegated to Willows.
Also, I agree that they made a bunch of scientific mistakes in that one particular episode. I even posted something about it on another website at the time, the only time I've done that. But it's the only episode that's been that bad, it's usually much better. It isn't perfect, but that was the worst of the bunch. If it's the only episode you've seen, it's not fair to judge the whole series by it.
I agree with another poster that I don't want them going after larger issues. There's plenty of preachy trite crap on TV dealing with "larger issues" all the time, it's great to have one show that can tell interesting personal stories with believable, well thought-out, and imperfect, characters for once. Quincy was a two dimensional cardboard cutout medical examiner, who needs more of that? It's everywhere!
It just might make the hassle of a homebrewed weblog a little more attractive. Of course, Slashdot service is what makes Slashdot more attractive than a plain weblog anyhow.
...which is enough to make me raise my voice in song. Let'em try to take that away.
All music is owned by the RIAA. You may not sing without prior written consent, nor distribute a recording of your singing in any form. Please desist singing this instant in order to avoid a costly lawsuit.
My goodness, is that what uids are for? You mean to tell me I'm only one order of magnitude away from a marriage proposal from CmdrTaco? What if Kathleen dumps him, I might be next! SWOON!
I remember the slashdot story about the machine that eats. Slug-catcher was a proposed future use, but it's not practical yet. I think the story said they only got a few seconds of power from several hours of digesting.
Not to mention autonomous slug-catching is a pretty advanced robotic task. I think you'd have a hard enough time building a bot to do that even without trying to make it self-powering. If you were to do such a thing, solar power or a recharging base station where the thing goes to sleep would be much more practical.
Now if I'm wrong, then someone please post a link to a company that makes robotic slug-catchers. I'd love to see it. Lego Mindstorm versions are acceptable too!
Nope, not kidding, and I've seen that episode. It is one of the better ones. But still not great. Here's some related Simpsons jokes for you. (and I do mean you, no one else is going to read a reply on a story more than a whole day old on slashdot!)
Bart is on a school tour of the police station, and spots a wall full of megaphones. After pondering for a few moments, he has an idea. Cut to shot of 30 megaphones placed end-to-end, with Bart at the speaking end. A fly buzzes by, and the room starts shaking. Bart starts to say "Testing..." but only gets as far as "Tes..." before a shockwave spreads all over Springfield. The ringing doesn't stop until after Wiggum takes Bart home (and in the middle of one of Marge's lines).
Homer is on board the space shuttle, and accidentally breaks open the ant farm. Back on earth, Kent Brockman sees an ant float close to the camera, and assumes that it's a race of giant ants coming from space to enslave us all. "Let me be the first to say, 'Welcome!' to our new ant masters!"
Got to agree with you. There are many things from every single season of the Simpsons that will make me laugh out loud every time I see them (or just think of them... I wish Pinchy were here to enjoy this!) I do think it's past its prime, but I also think it's still way better than every other show's "prime". It's all relative, and The Simpsons is still my favorite show.
On the other hand, I can't remember a single thing from Futurama that made me laugh out loud. I don't mean I've never laughed at it, just that I don't remember anything that funny now. I stopped watching regularly (but not entirely) a while back, which is why I'm not terribly disappointed it's going away. I mean, I'm disappointed in the sense that I'd cancel everything else on Fox's schedule before The Simpsons and Futurama (not that I can name much of anything else on their schedule - that's the point) but still not really upset.
Garbage collection is nice in theory. But if you're talking about a real-time game, it can be a major pain in the butt if it isn't done well. I don't know how good Java and C# run-times are at it, but imagine if you had GC that took 5 seconds every 10 minutes. Every 10 minutes, your game is going to pause or at least run very slowly for 5 seconds. You really want something approaching real-time programming for games, and GC makes that hard. At the very least, I'd want it to be something you have control over, which I believe is not the case in Java! You can correct me if I'm wrong, I'm probably just confused :)
Now, if it's a turn based strategy, or if you're sure the GC implementation isn't going to get in your way, then yeah, it's pretty nice.
Thanks for the responses, good luck again!
Yes, some of us love being plumbers (tweaking malloc calls or fine tuning a large loop in ASM), but for projects like this I think it is more appropriate to use a higher level language.
Ok, that's fair enough, but I think something that isn't always clear outside the gaming industry is that most of the people who work in it (especially those who are successful at it) are the ones who like being plumbers. If you think about it, it makes sense: a large portion of the history of game development centers around coding increasinly complex games for the same platform that ran last year's games. The playstation 1 was a "current" platform until a year ago, and it only has 2MB of RAM! TWO MEGATBYTES. The PS2 still only has 32MB, way behind PCs, where you need more than that just to load Windows. There's a lot of baggage to get rid of before most game programmers will start considering things like C#. (I've mostly done PC programming, just using the PS as a graphic example, because it does still apply to some extent)
When I say C# is shocking, it's partly because I'm trying to imagine myself going into work and suggesting it to a bunch of programmers who are used to programming "impossible" things on minimum spec systems. Even moving to C++ has been mighty slow for a lot of studios. No one would even take me seriously if I tried to push C# on them. "Let's code it in Java!" is already guaranteed to get a laugh from any game developer I know of. C# has the same sort of negative connotations.
I generally try to stay out of these language discussions, because I've come to realize that being in game development has skewed my perceptions a bit over the last few years. "Let's code it in Java!" isn't automatically funny in other industries, I know that. And I suppose it's the same with C#, but being newer, it's even higher up the joke-language-for-games scale.
If you've never written a client-server game at all, you might check out Netrek for some basic ideas. It isn't massive, but it is client-server, and it's where I learned most of the important things I know about network programming in general (and I do, in fact, get paid to write network code for games now.) Quake or Quake 2 source are probably also good things to look at, though I haven't seen their code personally.
None of those solve the major problems you're really asking about though: how to decide who gets to know about what. Worldforge is the only open source project I can think of to point you to in that area. Perhaps some MUDs might be useful as well, but they tend to be based on rooms, not areas, which doesn't translate well at all to most other games.
Probably the biggest problem is avoiding N^2 operations as much as possible. At some level, there's no way around it: N players in an area generate events that have to be propagated back out to N (or at least N-1) players. This obiously makes scaling to arbitrarily large populations difficult. On the other hand, if you can guarantee a set maximum number of players in an area/server/whatever, you can target that maximum and not worry about it a whole lot.
A slashdot post isn't really the right medium to answer this question. There aren't any quick and easy answers, you need to figure out what makes sense for your game on your own. I've spent a large portion of the last year thinking about these problems myself, and I wish you the best of luck on it. I'm having a blast myself, but it's also the most challenging work I've ever done.
I am interested in hearing your reasons for using C#. That's actually somewhat shocking, but maybe it's just ignorance on my part. I can't imagine why you'd want to bet the farm on such an immature system, regardless of the strengths you've perceived in it. What does it do for you that C++ doesn't, and is it really worth it?
So, are you pointing this out to make the argument that they shouldn't sell advertising space? I can see the merit in that, but it really has nothing to do with Microsoft. Microsoft is just another advertiser in this case, it could have been anyone's display there. It could have been Redhat. Or the company you work for. And still could be.
So why isn't the story titled just, "Promotions turn up in USPS Offices?" I suspect that that's not really news, first of all, since the USPS is run as a business and can largely do what they want to make up their costs. But when a particular company a large portion of slashdot readers dislike buys that ad space, well, NOW there's something to get pissed off about! By placing Microsoft in the subject, instead of just mentioning who the promotions belong to in passing (if even that) it's implying that Microsoft has done something evil again. There's an interesting debate here about whether it's appropriate for a quasi-governmental business that receives no tax dollars to sell advertising, but it's been derailed by turning this into yet another Microsoft story.
Any annoyance you may observe in the above is directed more at the story than the post I'm responding to, sorry ChrisCampbell47.
Sure, but I could definitely see playing, say, chess, and other things with simple interfaces that don't take a large time commitment (the opposite of MMORPGs). Especially if I could easily find a human opponent of equal skill any time, anywhere. You don't need graphics, fast connections, or community for games like that to be a succcess. You just need a few million people with cell-phones who occasionally have a few minutes to kill.
People say they play MMORPGs for friends or other players, because so far they haven't been much fun in and of themselves for more than a short while. But a lot of people think chess is fun, and much more fun against a person than a computer.
In other words, small games for small devices!
Harmful or not, it bugs me the way they use the term "Release Candidate". I don't know about the rest of you, but on every project I've ever worked on, once you start calling things Release Candidates, you stop adding features and just fix bugs until you get the actual release version nailed. Generally speaking, your first RC should be something you think has a shot at becoming the actual release, otherwise why are you calling it a candidate? This is obviously not the case with Vorbis, as they keep adding new stuff with every candidate.
Now, having said that, there's two things I'll point out. First, I can't find anywhere where they actually spell out "Release Candidate" so maybe RC actually stands for something else. Second, this post (mine, not the one I'm responding to) boils down pointless nitpicking over semantics. They can call it whatever makes 'em happy. But following the same conventions as the rest of the world makes it easier to figure out what they really mean. In the meantime, I will just mentally replace "RC" with "Beta" when reading about Ogg Vorbis.
I'm a little annoyed by the increased posting history, not for any real concern over privacy (that would be dumb, it's a public forum) but rather because I've always counted on anything stupid I post essentially disappearing after a few weeks. Now all the stupid things I've said will be easily found for all time (or at least a lot longer). Including this post.
Thus making me look even stupider. Wait, is that how you spell stupider?
And besides, with a little bit of futzing, you can easily disable specific drivers from being on the list.
That's probably true, since the article tells us what file the list is stored in, but that list is going to be automatically updated periodically, so even assuming that it is easy to manually remove drivers from the list (which isn't clear, you never know what kind of tricks they might play to avoid letting you run your system with a modified file!), you're going to have to do it every time it gets updated. And maybe they'll move it around or otherwise obfuscate it in future system updates.
I do think that this is a REALLY NEAT IDEA. Heck, some Linux distro should steal it. But it's not so neat not if they are forcing everyone to use it.
Ah well, it's not like this is the first reason not to use XP.
What do you mean digital cable is not as good as the companies claim? What can they claim other than "You get 250+ channels!"? Have they promised it will clean your windows, mow your lawn, vaccuum your apartment, or walk your dog, and I just missed it? It isn't like they've ever promised better picture quality or better quality programming because of it, just more channels.
Of course, it's only worth it to me because I also have TiVo, so I haven't watched an ad for anything, including digital cable, in a long time. Maybe they are promising all those things. In which case you're right. Otherwise I have no idea what you're talking about.
"If there's a bright center to this universe, you're on the planet that it's farthest from." That's originally from Foundation. Not Star Wars.
I'm not really an Asimov fan either, but that's a line everyone knows, even if they don't know it's Asimov.
Actually, strike that. It doesn't really require 100 Terabits/sec of network capacity, it just needs a hardware device that can take random data (which both parties receive) at that rate and pluck a key out at a specified time. Quite possibly from a satellite, but any kind of broadcast will do. That's probably feasible in some form, but still not easy.
I was about to agree with you, but I think I figured out what's really going on with this that the article doesn't explain. It suggests using a public key encryption technology to exchange the message containing the start point, which seems to make it insecure (since the article had previously stated no public key system to date is provably secure).
But it's also relying on a random bitstream with VAST bandwidth (10 million million "numbers" per second is 100 Terabits/sec if a "number" is a byte, right?), the idea being that whatever stream you use has to be signifigantly beyond anyone's ability to record it. Since no one can record it, the public key exchange only has to be secure for as long as it takes to get to the start point, which should be somewhere between right away and far enough down the line that no one can save that much data. If you can increase the bandwidth of the bitstream, you can shorten that time, otherwise you just wait longer.
But if the bandwidth is too low, then your public key exchange may be cracked before the start of the bitstream is hit, so it really does need to be huge.
So, the requirements are actually that you have a communications channel that can't be cracked in the amount of time it takes to transmit the bits for the key, and that you're transmitting enough bits in that time that no one can save them.
It's a neat idea... but wake me up when I can get 100 Terabits/sec into my house.
Larry Niven's first published story was actually called "The Coldest Place," and it was about the point on Mercury facing directly away from the sun. At the time, they thought Mercury was tidally locked, but they discovered that it actually rotates slowly after the story was accepted but before it appeared.
It was published anyway (I believe Niven actually asked them not to), but the thing to take away is that even though Mercury is close to the sun, it also has no atmosphere and so any parts facing away from the sun will get extremely cold. Anything in space experiences this sort of effect. If something's completely in shadow, there's nothing else that's going to put radiation into it. If the parts of those craters with ice are never hit by sunlight, it's possible there could be ice.
I'm sorry I don't really remember more of the story itself, I just remember that story about the story.
No, it's the most efficient and intuitive method of rapid user interface development. There is quite a big difference. User interface isn't everything. No matter how easily you can lay out your interface, you still have to write code to make it do something useful. That's where the language comes in, see. An IDE does not have to restrict you to only one language, and some don't.
The IDE is not the language, but I will grant you that for some people who mainly write interfaces, the choice of IDE may outweigh the choice of language.