I think you're talking FUD. We already have laser guided bombs/missiles, we've used them in the past 2 'conflicts' we've engaged in. Plus, this thing is invisible, so it's not like we're taking a visible beam of light to it. Adding a signal to the laser beam should be trivial...fast switching on and off to represent data.
Odd that you mention books...most of my favorite novels cost less than $20 to own, yet I don't think I bought a book for a college class that was under $20. I know demand dictates the cost of the supply, but I still think it's assanine that college books cost as much as they do. Since they do have a 'captive' audience, though, they can charge what they like, similar to the RIAA. The college texts are obviously a more necessary buy, but it's a similar situation.
Homework is for *you* to understand how well you've absorbed the material...tests are for the prof to determine how well you've learned and to grade your understanding.
My thinking was that in classes I didn't need to study for (never cracked a CS book, never had trouble with a program), why should I have to do an hour, three nights a week of boring, time wasting work just because it was 30% of my final grade? OTOH, in my electronics classes I was more than happy to do 3 hours of problem sets three times a week, because it took that friggin long for me to understand it. A happy medium was a couple of math classes I took where the professor didn't collect homework, but would instead go over questions you had the next class. That was perfect...if I had trouble with the subject I could do the homework and ask questions, otherwise I would concentrate on my other coursework.
I'm assuming we're talking about cheating on take home assignments, right? Why bother grading them? I always like the approach taken by most of my electronics professors...homework really meant nothing, grade wise. Some of them would collect it, mark it, and hand it back with a grade, but it only counted for something like 10% of your final grade. Any test was worth more than every homework assignment, and it was much, much harder to cheat on a test.
I've never quite understood homework grading...in HS, sure, make them do work, but in college it should be a matter of learning the subject, *practicing* at home, then being tested on how well you've absorbed and interprete the knowledge. Granted, due to class period time constraints you should probably have a test every 3-5 weeks so that you can properly test their knowledge.
Probably no more than Time naming Hitler man of the year back in the 40's...it's a list of influential people, not good, righteous, people responsible for advancing our society.
Nintendo just convinced me to purchase a Gamecube. Between being able to play the old favorites (NES Zeldas), Gameboy favorites (the WHOLE library) and giving it away with a new, dirt cheap ($100) platform, they have officially won my business.
I believe his point is that Verizon could really care less if they gave out your name, social and blood type to the RIAA, so long as it didn't cost them money. They, much like most other companies in the US, are watching out for the almighty buck.
That doesn't mean that they *won't* stand up for our rights, since with our rights infringed it's less likely we'd be their customer and therefore they'd lose money, but let's not forget what their prime motivator is.
Can someone check the link to the screenshot page? I'm sorry, but there seem to be a lot of overhead shots in there, and everyone knows the trademark of BT games is the FP view.
Actual combat will be in the style of Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance, action-based and visceral. Clearly, the new game's connection to the old Bard's Tale games is more spiritual than gameplay-related.
5) They get to leave class to go perform a "concert" where they actually get a decent percentage of the profits, have lots of naked babes waiting back in the classroom for them and get to do all sorts of illicit drugs.
> My Windows XP CD has drivers for most of the > common motherboards, graphics cards, and sound > cards
I'll give you that with each version of windows, they include more and more drivers, but obviously the CD won't have the most recent ATI/nVidia drivers. NP, just download them and install them, then reboot. Wait, how do I write to this freakin' Read Only Memory?
That problem aside, one of the reasons that OS's come with installers is because they're smaller, they run once, and they make it easy to do a long task one time (detection, installation) than each time you boot. If we ran from CD, we'd be doing these setup steps EVERY TIME we booted. Pain in the ass, nobody would stand for it.
What's the point of all this anyway, to get a game that only has to be written once with ridiculous bloat for detection algorithms? Isn't hard drive space dirt cheap these days? Can't we just distribute the data, which is what makes most games, and then download the executable code per OS? Libraries like SDL and OpenGL were made to be platform independant, let's use them as such.
1) Booting from a CD means you would have to either read off a disk (hard drive, floppy), reburn/burn a CD, or store on the network. Reading/writing to the hard drive is all fine and good, unless you run Windows 2000 (or any NT derivative) which has the NTFS file system and is a pain in the ass to read/write without permission.
2) Hardware has already been mentioned, so I won't beat the dead horse, but suffice to say that hardware configurations would be an issue...having to check and load the correct drivers every friggin time would get old.
3) Writing OS checking software is fine, but what's the point? Programs are typically loads of data with OS specific executables...provide a version to the public then have them download the executable from your website that matches their OS.
nonono...Java is not directly responsible. Given the resources allocated, Java was not a good choice. However, PHP would have been fine within those constraints. Java would make a fine platform with more resources, but with limited amounts it's horrendous. That was my original point.
You've worked on systems with preset requirements and budget, right? We didn't choose problems, we acquired them. I mentioned everything you're saying from the get go, but the client wanted it her way. I adhered pretty closely to a 'good' Java OOP model, but when you include a certain number of objects, you will eventually blow your heap, if set low enough. Again, a product of our hosting provider and client's budget. We did eventually convince the client to let us increase the heap size, and as soon as we did the site came right back up.
Shared with what? Also, why did you expect this and then do nothing about it?;-)
As anyone who is a developer on a project knows, very rarely do you actually get to choose 1) platform, or 2) coding standard. This was kinda thrust on me.
and we had serious heap issues.
the provider we chose (mind you...we were working for a small client, building a small website) allocated us XXX amount of heap for our processes. We ran over that a number of times with our system because of the nature of JSP (issues with includes and resource allocation).
We didn't thrash the GC ever, but other people might have. When you share a JVM, everyone's process on that box run under the same JVM. That means if one person thrashes it, everyone's processes go down. It sucks, try to avoid it if possible in your projects (we were held to a given budget, and therefore couldn't spend the money on private JVM support...yada yada).
Java is absolutely horrid for web applications when compared to php/perl. I recently had to compose a website in jsp and thought I'd rather shoot myself...the JVM went down constantly (it was shared, what did we expect?), the code was bloated and we had serious heap issues.
Now, I use Java on my prime contract (large contract for the SEC) and it's a blessing...interoperable over both our platforms (Solaris/NT), works great with the CORBA base we have, we can patch stuff in easily and bounce our processes to reload individual components, etc.
Java was never meant to be used as a scripting language...it got adapted as such because of the Java zealots. It was designed to be a high level, cross platform, portable language. Any other application of it is as silly as putting Linux on your toaster...sure you could do it, but it's not the most efficient solution.
let me rephrase my initial post in reply to your response..."if your kid is playing around with guns, as a parent it's your responsibility to make sure they're responsible."
I wholeheartedly agree with you that people should take gun safety courses, be certified, yada yada. However, not only would it have not stopped these kids from being morons, but it's a parents' perrogative whether or not they want their kids around guns at all. My mother's logic was "You shouldn't use guns, why should you take a gun safety course?" I grew up with only one parent, and she didn't understand that boys will inexplicably be drawn to guns. I swear it's biological. Even if you don't like handling handguns/rifles (I don't), they still pique the interest of most teenage guys through video games. All it takes is one person making available a gun for a kid to try it out.
Gun control? Bah, not necessary, we have enough gun control. We need parental responsibility, and realizing that just becaues you don't want to handle a gun doesn't mean your kids don't/won't.
I'm surprised I haven't seen someone extolling the virtues and replayability of Illuminati. My buddy introduced me to this game back in the early 90's and I've been hooked. Great fun for 3 or more players, highly addictive, great party fun and I've found the girls we hang out with get a kick out of it too (it doesn't take a lot of logic or cutthroat intuition, and there's a bit of diplomacy as well).
It's apparently that time of year again (quarterly, right?) when someone decides Nintendo has had it. And it amazes me that it's always for one (or more) of the same reasons...small number of games, lack of originality, lack of FPS games, it isn't the , etc.
Nintendo has a niche. It occupies and fulfils that niche extremely well. Other consoles aren't going to take its niche. Its niche (two, really) is 1) Game Boy, 2) fun, non serious games. There haven't been competitors for it since Sega's handheld that died out (but was arguably better than the Game Boy...little larger, backlit, etc). The backwards compatibility of the GB ensures that people will keep buying it since there are quality games of all genres represented that you can get for CHEAP (read: under $10 on eBay).
Gamecube would have to be my choice, if only because the XBox and PS2 seem to be copying the PC mentality of games, only without the control interface (I like the mouse). Playing the PS2 is fun, but it's fun in the same way Quake was fun. Nintendo opens a completely separate world, one that you can only get (well done, at least) on consoles.
Mostly, that's side scrolling arcade games, what Nintendo did FAMOUSLY back in the 80's/90's. With exception to Commander Keen, I haven't played a lot of side scrolling PC games that I really dug. Mega Man, Castlevania, Mario, Life Force, all these are side scrolling games that were/are Nintendo 's bread and butter. They aren't complicated, don't involve every button and you can play for just a few minutes. There are still lots of people that like them, so Nintendo isn't going away anytime soon.
No, but I *can* choose to charter a plane and not go through the hassle, it'll just cost me more. Luckily, ISPs are a dime a dozen, in most urban/suburban areas, and therefore their quality of service had best be competitive, not restrictive, if they want my business.
I'll definitely agree with you that video game gore and real life gore are not close in degree, however, you don't see real life gore until *after* you've pulled the trigger. Seeing gore in video games day in, day out, has the possibility to warp your mind to thinking "Hey, this isn't that bad, I can handle this!". I knew people in college that could play video games like Bond, Doom, Quake, etc, all day, but got sick the first time they went out hunting. Why? Real life violence and the taking of a life (humans being far more traumatic than animals) is daunting, and you don't always realize it beforehand. I can see kids getting used to shooting people on their monitors/tv's and thinking it's no big deal, so why should real life killing be any different?
This post isn't supposed to be about me siding with the press that tries to draw steadfast correlations between video games and violence, but I *do* worry about desensitizing people to violence and gore. If anything, I sometimes wish they would make the gore MORE realistic so maybe it WOULD gross kids out.
Seriously, Taco, can we start modding stories? I would gladly give all 5 of my moderator points for the chance to z0t stories like this. It's amazing that someone managed to post a "-1: Offtopic", "-1: Troll" and "-1: Flamebait" story all in one.
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I think you're talking FUD. We already have laser guided bombs/missiles, we've used them in the past 2 'conflicts' we've engaged in. Plus, this thing is invisible, so it's not like we're taking a visible beam of light to it. Adding a signal to the laser beam should be trivial...fast switching on and off to represent data.
--trb
Odd that you mention books...most of my favorite novels cost less than $20 to own, yet I don't think I bought a book for a college class that was under $20. I know demand dictates the cost of the supply, but I still think it's assanine that college books cost as much as they do. Since they do have a 'captive' audience, though, they can charge what they like, similar to the RIAA. The college texts are obviously a more necessary buy, but it's a similar situation.
Homework is for *you* to understand how well you've absorbed the material...tests are for the prof to determine how well you've learned and to grade your understanding.
My thinking was that in classes I didn't need to study for (never cracked a CS book, never had trouble with a program), why should I have to do an hour, three nights a week of boring, time wasting work just because it was 30% of my final grade? OTOH, in my electronics classes I was more than happy to do 3 hours of problem sets three times a week, because it took that friggin long for me to understand it. A happy medium was a couple of math classes I took where the professor didn't collect homework, but would instead go over questions you had the next class. That was perfect...if I had trouble with the subject I could do the homework and ask questions, otherwise I would concentrate on my other coursework.
--trb
I'm assuming we're talking about cheating on take home assignments, right? Why bother grading them? I always like the approach taken by most of my electronics professors...homework really meant nothing, grade wise. Some of them would collect it, mark it, and hand it back with a grade, but it only counted for something like 10% of your final grade. Any test was worth more than every homework assignment, and it was much, much harder to cheat on a test.
I've never quite understood homework grading...in HS, sure, make them do work, but in college it should be a matter of learning the subject, *practicing* at home, then being tested on how well you've absorbed and interprete the knowledge. Granted, due to class period time constraints you should probably have a test every 3-5 weeks so that you can properly test their knowledge.
--trb
Probably no more than Time naming Hitler man of the year back in the 40's...it's a list of influential people, not good, righteous, people responsible for advancing our society.
--trb
Nintendo just convinced me to purchase a Gamecube. Between being able to play the old favorites (NES Zeldas), Gameboy favorites (the WHOLE library) and giving it away with a new, dirt cheap ($100) platform, they have officially won my business.
--trb
I believe his point is that Verizon could really care less if they gave out your name, social and blood type to the RIAA, so long as it didn't cost them money. They, much like most other companies in the US, are watching out for the almighty buck.
That doesn't mean that they *won't* stand up for our rights, since with our rights infringed it's less likely we'd be their customer and therefore they'd lose money, but let's not forget what their prime motivator is.
--trb
Can someone check the link to the screenshot page? I'm sorry, but there seem to be a lot of overhead shots in there, and everyone knows the trademark of BT games is the FP view.
Actual combat will be in the style of Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance, action-based and visceral. Clearly, the new game's connection to the old Bard's Tale games is more spiritual than gameplay-related.
Oh. <sniffle>, that sucks.
--trb
...and both voice and tactile command recognition
Apparently, you haven' been married very long...
--trb
The return of Yoko Ono...
Naked.
And petrified.
With hot grits
5) They get to leave class to go perform a "concert" where they actually get a decent percentage of the profits, have lots of naked babes waiting back in the classroom for them and get to do all sorts of illicit drugs.
> My Windows XP CD has drivers for most of the
> common motherboards, graphics cards, and sound
> cards
I'll give you that with each version of windows, they include more and more drivers, but obviously the CD won't have the most recent ATI/nVidia drivers. NP, just download them and install them, then reboot. Wait, how do I write to this freakin' Read Only Memory?
That problem aside, one of the reasons that OS's come with installers is because they're smaller, they run once, and they make it easy to do a long task one time (detection, installation) than each time you boot. If we ran from CD, we'd be doing these setup steps EVERY TIME we booted. Pain in the ass, nobody would stand for it.
What's the point of all this anyway, to get a game that only has to be written once with ridiculous bloat for detection algorithms? Isn't hard drive space dirt cheap these days? Can't we just distribute the data, which is what makes most games, and then download the executable code per OS? Libraries like SDL and OpenGL were made to be platform independant, let's use them as such.
--trb
I have several...
1) Booting from a CD means you would have to either read off a disk (hard drive, floppy), reburn/burn a CD, or store on the network. Reading/writing to the hard drive is all fine and good, unless you run Windows 2000 (or any NT derivative) which has the NTFS file system and is a pain in the ass to read/write without permission.
2) Hardware has already been mentioned, so I won't beat the dead horse, but suffice to say that hardware configurations would be an issue...having to check and load the correct drivers every friggin time would get old.
3) Writing OS checking software is fine, but what's the point? Programs are typically loads of data with OS specific executables...provide a version to the public then have them download the executable from your website that matches their OS.
--trb
nonono...Java is not directly responsible. Given the resources allocated, Java was not a good choice. However, PHP would have been fine within those constraints. Java would make a fine platform with more resources, but with limited amounts it's horrendous. That was my original point.
--trb
You've worked on systems with preset requirements and budget, right? We didn't choose problems, we acquired them. I mentioned everything you're saying from the get go, but the client wanted it her way. I adhered pretty closely to a 'good' Java OOP model, but when you include a certain number of objects, you will eventually blow your heap, if set low enough. Again, a product of our hosting provider and client's budget. We did eventually convince the client to let us increase the heap size, and as soon as we did the site came right back up.
--trb
Shared with what? Also, why did you expect this and then do nothing about it? ;-)
As anyone who is a developer on a project knows, very rarely do you actually get to choose 1) platform, or 2) coding standard. This was kinda thrust on me.
and we had serious heap issues.
the provider we chose (mind you...we were working for a small client, building a small website) allocated us XXX amount of heap for our processes. We ran over that a number of times with our system because of the nature of JSP (issues with includes and resource allocation).
We didn't thrash the GC ever, but other people might have. When you share a JVM, everyone's process on that box run under the same JVM. That means if one person thrashes it, everyone's processes go down. It sucks, try to avoid it if possible in your projects (we were held to a given budget, and therefore couldn't spend the money on private JVM support...yada yada).
--trb
Java is absolutely horrid for web applications when compared to php/perl. I recently had to compose a website in jsp and thought I'd rather shoot myself...the JVM went down constantly (it was shared, what did we expect?), the code was bloated and we had serious heap issues.
Now, I use Java on my prime contract (large contract for the SEC) and it's a blessing...interoperable over both our platforms (Solaris/NT), works great with the CORBA base we have, we can patch stuff in easily and bounce our processes to reload individual components, etc.
Java was never meant to be used as a scripting language...it got adapted as such because of the Java zealots. It was designed to be a high level, cross platform, portable language. Any other application of it is as silly as putting Linux on your toaster...sure you could do it, but it's not the most efficient solution.
--trb
let me rephrase my initial post in reply to your response..."if your kid is playing around with guns, as a parent it's your responsibility to make sure they're responsible."
I wholeheartedly agree with you that people should take gun safety courses, be certified, yada yada. However, not only would it have not stopped these kids from being morons, but it's a parents' perrogative whether or not they want their kids around guns at all. My mother's logic was "You shouldn't use guns, why should you take a gun safety course?" I grew up with only one parent, and she didn't understand that boys will inexplicably be drawn to guns. I swear it's biological. Even if you don't like handling handguns/rifles (I don't), they still pique the interest of most teenage guys through video games. All it takes is one person making available a gun for a kid to try it out.
Gun control? Bah, not necessary, we have enough gun control. We need parental responsibility, and realizing that just becaues you don't want to handle a gun doesn't mean your kids don't/won't.
--trb
...is where'd they get the gun? If your kid is playing around with a gun, I think as a parent it's your fault.
--trb
I'm surprised I haven't seen someone extolling the virtues and replayability of Illuminati. My buddy introduced me to this game back in the early 90's and I've been hooked. Great fun for 3 or more players, highly addictive, great party fun and I've found the girls we hang out with get a kick out of it too (it doesn't take a lot of logic or cutthroat intuition, and there's a bit of diplomacy as well).
--trb
It's apparently that time of year again (quarterly, right?) when someone decides Nintendo has had it. And it amazes me that it's always for one (or more) of the same reasons...small number of games, lack of originality, lack of FPS games, it isn't the , etc.
Nintendo has a niche. It occupies and fulfils that niche extremely well. Other consoles aren't going to take its niche. Its niche (two, really) is 1) Game Boy, 2) fun, non serious games. There haven't been competitors for it since Sega's handheld that died out (but was arguably better than the Game Boy...little larger, backlit, etc). The backwards compatibility of the GB ensures that people will keep buying it since there are quality games of all genres represented that you can get for CHEAP (read: under $10 on eBay).
Gamecube would have to be my choice, if only because the XBox and PS2 seem to be copying the PC mentality of games, only without the control interface (I like the mouse). Playing the PS2 is fun, but it's fun in the same way Quake was fun. Nintendo opens a completely separate world, one that you can only get (well done, at least) on consoles.
Mostly, that's side scrolling arcade games, what Nintendo did FAMOUSLY back in the 80's/90's. With exception to Commander Keen, I haven't played a lot of side scrolling PC games that I really dug. Mega Man, Castlevania, Mario, Life Force, all these are side scrolling games that were/are Nintendo 's bread and butter. They aren't complicated, don't involve every button and you can play for just a few minutes. There are still lots of people that like them, so Nintendo isn't going away anytime soon.
--trb
methinks some moderators misinterpreted your sarcasm for "+1: Insightful"...
No, but I *can* choose to charter a plane and not go through the hassle, it'll just cost me more. Luckily, ISPs are a dime a dozen, in most urban/suburban areas, and therefore their quality of service had best be competitive, not restrictive, if they want my business.
--trb
I'll definitely agree with you that video game gore and real life gore are not close in degree, however, you don't see real life gore until *after* you've pulled the trigger. Seeing gore in video games day in, day out, has the possibility to warp your mind to thinking "Hey, this isn't that bad, I can handle this!". I knew people in college that could play video games like Bond, Doom, Quake, etc, all day, but got sick the first time they went out hunting. Why? Real life violence and the taking of a life (humans being far more traumatic than animals) is daunting, and you don't always realize it beforehand. I can see kids getting used to shooting people on their monitors/tv's and thinking it's no big deal, so why should real life killing be any different?
This post isn't supposed to be about me siding with the press that tries to draw steadfast correlations between video games and violence, but I *do* worry about desensitizing people to violence and gore. If anything, I sometimes wish they would make the gore MORE realistic so maybe it WOULD gross kids out.
--trb
Seriously, Taco, can we start modding stories? I would gladly give all 5 of my moderator points for the chance to z0t stories like this. It's amazing that someone managed to post a "-1: Offtopic", "-1: Troll" and "-1: Flamebait" story all in one.
--trb