>> For example, what would stop them from designating a third-party for the collection of print copyright royalties?
To my knowledge (unless a specific law has clarified), nothing stops them from using this implementation technique.
Congress has been tasked with the mission "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries" by the United States Constitution. Implementation strategy is up to them.
I was personally shocked, however, to discover that this was the solution America uses for managing the money. It screams opportunity for corruption to me also.
If the software is not free, you can't know what the device is doing.
I hate to be the devil's advocate on this argument, because I really like free software (though I can't bring myself to whole-kool-aid on the morality argument)...
The software being open-source doesn't give me the ability to know what the device is doing any more than the law being published and accessible gives me the ability to be my own lawyer. It merely allows lawyers (or independent software developers) to exist. Hundreds of thousands of lines of code go into modern working software, and a bit of trust on the part of the average end-consumer is strictly necessary regardless of the visibility nature. The average end-consumer simply doesn't have the time to learn enough computer science to eye-verify every line of code in every piece of software they run.
I trust open-source because many eyes have seen it, and my experience has been that those eyes are not in heads that are actively engaged in the business of doing evil. I trust much closed-source from big companies because the situations where actively lying to the customer is long-term profitable are more rare than many think they are. It's true that only one of these avenues has even the potential for exploitation, but if we always kept to the safe paths we'd miss out on half the fun, eh?
It's not a morality question. It's a risk-reward question.
That's a really clever design they've come up with. I can see why they'd want to patent it. No idea if anyone will ever make use of the technology---I wouldn't. But I can see the appeal of patenting something that novel.
Self-sufficiency is a pretty fantasy; as wonderful as it sounds, entirely too few people actually want to live that way.
Take the situation in the article as example. The children were being vaccinated against polio, a disease that has claimed lives throughout human history. WIthout someone working a modern job at a medicine company to manufacture the vaccine, or the needle to inject it, or operating the plane to fly the vaccine to the region or the truck to drive it to the village, etc., how would these children be treated for this exceedingly debilitating disease? What should one living a self-sufficient life do if they fall ill? Folk remedies? Shrug and ignore it? Pray their limbs don't stop functioning as a germ eats away at their nervous system? "Let those who can't make it perish" is certainly a convenient system, but we've spent most of human history escaping the bondage of nature for this very reason.
To be sure, industrialized society has a large share of problems that go along with it. And in this specific case, the destruction of the ability for the region to support human life needs to be stopped. But while there is an inversion that must be fixed in this situation, in general industrialized civilization is better than the tyrrany of cruel fate. I ask the foil question of revolutions throughout history: What good is my freedom if I'm starving to death? What good is my freedom if I'm wracked with disease? What kind of 'freedom' is it that forces me to eke out a living alone against the fickle forces of nature, when I could instead trust experts in various fields to shield me from the worst disasters that can be thrown at me, while I in turn become expert enough to shield them from some specific hardship?
Fix the problems in Africa and other developing nations. Protect the people's lives. But don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Industrialization sucks, but not as much as polio.
You are absolutely right; I was not sufficiently clear. I was referring to 'padding' from the game mechanics standpoint---in my explanation, I was taking the interactions (i.e. the things I do with mouse, keyboard, or joystick) to be the crux of the game itself---the "game" in game. From that point of view, everything else---including plot---is filler material, in the sense that you could swap the plot around entirely with essentially no changes to the game mechanics.
The Final Fantasy series is probably the best example of this. Around FF VII, the tried-and-true game mechanic they had developed---turn-based, level-relative combat---had been not only refined to a fairly pure form, but it had been done to an extent that divorced it from the plot of the story. What I mean by that statement is that the interactions in combat situations are only loosely related to the 'reality' of the Final Fantasy world. The death of Aeris is a perfect example of this---in combat, character death can be immediately handled by phoenix down, but a plot death is a different entity altogether. Square/Enix could have taken the turn-based combat and replaced it with, for example, a card-style system, tactics-style system, or even Tetris without changing any significant aspects of the game plot. So from the point of view of the combat and leveling mechanics, the plot is 'filler' because it is completely modular; it could be changed in broad, sweeping ways without any major changes to the game mechanics.
In that sense, the big problem I have with that flavor of RPGs is that the Final Fantasy-style level-based combat system---where damage is dealt at an abstraction based essentially on what weapons I'm carrying and who I've defeated with little intervention on my part---is very boring to me, and the plot of the vast majority of them isn't compelling enough to keep grinding through a hundred tedious combat interactions. Standing in stark contrast to this are the Bioware RPGs. Knights of the Old Republic has a varied enough storyline to keep me going in spite of a traditional RPG combat system. Jade Empire doesn't have a traditional RPG combat system, which makes it exceedingly compelling to me. And I'm greatly looking forward to Mass Effect for the same reasons.
There's an excellent essay in this vein at http://lostgarden.com/2006/07/ze-story-snobs.html In short, a game with a compelling story cannot be salvaged by boring play, and game designers would often do well to consider the mechanics of play first and story second.
My dislike of the combat in most RPGs is certainly a personal opinion. For me, Dragon Warrior combat was boring in Dragon Warrior, and it's only gotten worse.
I grew up using Mac OS, and I learned my way around GNU/Linux in college. At home, I run a Debian box and an Apple laptop, and I use Windows at work. I also own a PC that ran Windows at one time; we're a small company, so it's currently the desktop machine for one of my coworkers. I'm not an expert Windows user, but I've used it enough now to have an opinion of my comfort on all three systems.`
I see the developer toolchain as the biggest advantage to using Windows, if you can afford it. Because they know the survival of their operating system depends on the applications, Microsoft's development support is far above and beyond all other options I've worked with, both in Mac OS X and the Debian community.
Let's compare the dev process in Linux and Windows, for example. The obvious linchpin of the dev cycle in Windows is Visual Studio, which features a pervasive debugger and a GUI tightly integrated to the compiler. Depending on what I want to do, I can attack a problem at multiple levels---high level abstractions such as.NET, managed C++, or straight 'on the metal' code with full library support from the Windows OS. Primarily because the dev tools are written by the same people who write the OS, the IDE is tightly integrated against the documentation that's available. Windows has hundreds of thousands of API calls, but the autocomplete features make them easy-to-find. And it's almost impossible to get the debugger into a situation where it can't dish up the current program state.
In contrast, my experiences programming in Linux have been fairly nightmarish. Eclipse is a very decent package of software, if I want to program in Java, but I try to avoid that rattrap as often as I can. I have a bevy of languages at my disposal, but not even emacs gives them to me as cleanly as, say, VS serves up C# code in a.NET project. And documentation integration is almost non-existant; I'm sorry to say that man is a terribly old system, info is little better, and documentation available in HTML is a notably less-than-perfect solution. I often find that the easiest way to find docs on whatever API I'm using in Linux is to type some function names into google, which takes me entirely out of my programming flow. And in most of the programming I do, it seems as though I can crash gdb by breathing on it. Apple's software was half-done when I used it last, and my computer was too slow to use auto-complete; hopefully, they've fixed those problems, but I've gotten away from Cocoa programming recently.
Let's talk third-party libraries. I've heard many people say great things about the freedom open-source allows. I agree it allows freedom, but it less often feels like the freedom to accomplish my goals and more like the freedom to make my own burgers by slaughtering my own cattle. Microsoft's ActiveX architecture is probably one of the best ideas they've ever implemented, and neither Mac OS X nor GNU/Linux can serve up anything I know about that is comparable. The idea of standardizing the binary interface for library interaction is completely the right idea, in my opinion. OSX is also fairly good in this respect, and their bundle architecture is a vast improvement over both libs and dlls. The GNU/Linux side of the planet needs vast improvement, in my mind, to allow software integration to be as easy as the other two major OSes. Package managers are a brilliant idea that I'd like to see more universally integrated into Mac OS and Windows. But their existence in GNU/Linux points to a major failing of that system---in general, software does not just work. The idea of being able to ship just the source code is noble, but the practicality is that because the ABI is not standardized from compiler to compiler, any time I wander away from what is available via the package manager I often have to recompile vast swaths of my OS to install just one program that demands a library version slightly newer than what is installed. This is unacceptable. As the famous line goes, "The great thi
The funny thing is that this is exactly why I don't play RPGs on a regular basis.
For me, most game mechanics get stale after twenty hours of play. RPGs in particular tend to have relatively simple game mechanics that rarely get changed-up---they pad the game out with level-grinding and plot. Once I've mastered the game mechanics, I want to move faster; I've found very few RPGs that allow me to do so, since the artificial wall of gaining levels still exists.
At the end of the day, the operating system's purpose is really to give me access to my programs. On Windows, that means a lot, but I'm fairly happy with the way XP does it. The people who should care about major OS changes ought to be the developers; a new OS changes the rules of the game they play. In general, I don't want to shell out $200 for another OS, as long as the one I have is doing its job.
I've talked to a couple of my friends, and they are not very impressed by what they see in Vista in terms of new tools for the developers. Major changes, yes, but few of them practically interesting, in the sense that they either serve such a small subset of programs that they won't be used by the average developer or there already exists a perfectly reasonable way to do the job in Windows XP. Just as I don't want to buy a new interface if my current one is acceptable, they don't want to have to re-invent wheels just because all the 'fooX' functions are now 'barX' functions.
GNU/Linux is a little different; since the operating system is available cost-free, there's no disincentive to immediately adopting upgrades (except for instability, which is probably the biggest issue with new developments and is also shared by the must-be-purchased OS's). But with Windows, they need to really convince me that there's some truly profound new way of talking to my applications that I just gotta try.
I feel like we've reached a design plateau with both Windows XP and MacOSX these days. They both do what they do extremely well, and most of the other needs can be satisfied by the applications themselves without changing the OS. Until I'm given a very good reason to pay money to learn a new way of talking to my programs, I'll hold off, thanks.
This is very true. However, this point is a non-issue, and I think it would be a non-issue in the majority of cases.
The issue at stake in the case was that traffic from anonymous users (specifically, HTTP requests) was flooding UTube's site and killing it. In contrast, e-mail, ssh, and most other internet services are authenticated services, which means one can make the assumption that the user is going to a known site, not "browsing" to a site they've never seen before.
It's not ssh traffic that's killing sites with clashing DNS names, it's HTTP traffic. And the internet isn't the WWW, but the WWW is the most popular anonymous-request application on the internet. A special-case solution might be called for, given the ridiculous skew in popularity of the application.
It occurs to me that Wikipedia already has a great solution for this sort of problem: disambiguation pages. You can see a similar solution employed by the Firefox browser team and the Firefox e-mentoring company if you go to firefox.com.
I think it would be great if these disambiguation pages could be made manditory; that is to say, in the event of a concept collision between two companies, the best ruling one or the other company could hope for would be a court mandate that a disambiguation page be hosted by whichever company is larger. Not really tenable in the grand scheme of things, I'm sure, but those pages are probably the best practical solution.
Of course, the lawsuit is probably less about practicality and more about the opportunity to wrestle large chunks of cash out of Google. *sigh*
Compare http://www.google.com/ to http://www.lycos.com./ Google realized early on that to win in the searching business, all you need to do is search really well. As long as I still have to scroll my browser page to see everything on a search site's front page, that search site is too complicated. Having a simple main page lets users set it to their home page with negligible impact to their browser's startup time; that really matters more than some people think.
AltaVista got the message, but they're still playing catch-up.
"As some of you may or may not know, Link will appear right-handed in the Wii version of Twilight Princess (as opposed to the left-handed Link seen since Ocarina of Time)."
From the source material:
"Link nodded silently in approval, and left the room after taking a long glance at the altar. Then with a magical sword in his left hand and a magical shield in his right, he set off alone on his long travels." Instruction manual, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link
... that's the first mention in the written text. If you look at the sprite in the first game, it's painfully obvious that link is left-handed.
Honestly, that was always my favorite part of Halo 1, the sense that everything was operating under reduced-gravity, with a bouncy shroud around it. I called it "squishy physics." Made the Banshee a helluva lot of fun to fly.
"When Ballbot is not in operation, it stands in place on three retractable legs."
So 'nervous balance' motions won't be necessary, one could assume.
As for the thinness issue: it is precisely the personal space issue that makes a thin robot useful in a crowded public space. Our perception of personal space factors in the personal space of the other person. So a robot that is as wide as one's 'personal space bubble' causes people interacting with it to give it even more room. The thin chassis on this robot alleviates that problem by only taking up an amount of space roughly equivalent to the human torso, so that a person's "personal space guess" comes out accurately.
The overall concept is the same (in the sense that you have a system to balance and probably similar mathematics to do it), but the single point of contact with the ground makes for a different solution matrix. Segways need only balance in one dimension; this robot has to account for two, and it must solve for its balance with one manipulator. To add to the complexity, it must also navigate and motivate itself; a Segway's navigation system takes advantage of the sensors and processor installed in all of its cargo (a handy feature!) to offset the 'heavy lifting' of directional goals.
I believe this project may also pre-date the segway by a few years, if you look at the papers published on it.
While there are some libraries that blur the line, I'd have to sincerely disagree.
Take Python for example, and compare it with C++. You can do the same things in both languages. But what C++ cross-platform library or framework gives me runtime object mutation and reflection? First-class functions? Namespaces (importable at any point in the runtime)? Type safety and introspection? Universal serialization (or "object save and load," or "pickling", or whatever one's favorite buzzword is for having a default strategy to contain any data in a static long-term storage form)? A built-in debugger? An interpreter that can allow me to pause execution and modify the runtime environment while a program is executing (including modifying the source code, re-compiling it, and re-inserting it into the environment without restarting the process)?
And more importantly... if I have those features in library A, how do I get them in library B?
While one can obtain some features in a low-level language through proper choice of libraries, a high-level language demands those features exist in all code, and that they be accessible through an agreed-upon syntax. As Paul Graham notes in this Lisp-related essay, that's one of the reasons one would bother to learn a new language---because languages are different at a level deeper than the libraries available to them. Remember, C++ started as a simple extension to C---eventually, a point was reached where it became its own language, and there are in fact valid C programs that are not valid C++ programs.
On the flip side of the Python/C++ coin, by the way: how does Python give me pointers and explicit memory management?
A couple of posters have mentioned that even though they would do regular desktop applications in an interpreted language, they would still leave high-performance applications (like games) to low-level native-code languages.
For those who haven't seen it, Panda3D is a game engine with a Python interface. It is the system underpinning Disney's Toontown MMO game for kids (IE required, because the website needs ActiveX). Panda3D is a full-featured game engine for Windows and Linux (with an unstable port to OS X; the Windows release tends to lead the pack). It has support for graphics, sound, networking, UI, collisions, physics, AI, and the Cg-shader language for high-end graphics cards. On top of that, the developer gets the advantage of a built-in engine profiler (for ironing out those trouble spots), an object placement tool, and the regular reflection, auto-documentation, debugging features, and libraries of the Python language. It's also open-source.
We used Panda3D on a project and were able to go from scratch to a complete product in a matter of two months. I sincerely doubt we'd have had that kind of turnaround with almost any other language / engine combination. From the nifty things specific to Python (pickling, solid dynamic typing, interactive runtime mode, runtime mutable classes) to the simple things that you expect from any high-level language (strings as a type, as opposed to "bag of characters;" automatic memory management; exception objects), we used about every aspect of the system to keep our project on-time and on-budget. If we had chosen a system such as SDL / C++, I suspect that the memory management issues alone would have bogged us down terminally.
Personally, I think there are a couple of lessons to be learned from the Panda3D example:
Many problems are well-understood and well-implemented. If you find yourself spending much of your programming energy re-inventing the wheel, you are wasting your time and your employer's money. HINT: Memory management is a terribly well-understood problem, as is capturing keyboard and mouse input, as is reading and writing a file or network socket.
High level languages let you get to the trouble-spots of a design more quickly so that you can address them earlier in the implementation phase. During development, we found the framerate started to drop precipitously. However, the profiler showed the issue was not in the game logic, but in the render loop. A quick trip through Panda3D's 'analyze' tool told us that we were asking the graphics card to handle 500MB of texture per frame; we simply hadn't placed a limit on our texture sizes. If it had taken us twice as long to get to the point where we realized this mistake (say, if we had burned a lot of time coding memory management and file I/O, or even if we'd burned time making sure our.h files were aligned with our.c files or tweaking our Make scripts), we'd have been in twice as much trouble.
While we never had to optimize to native code, if it was necessary it could have happened. Python has tight native bindings allowing you to expose a C or C++ interface as a Python type, which means that the "workhorse" part of that type's function is happening in native code. It is worth noting that large chunks of Panda3D are in fact written in C++; however, other chunks (the chunks that are better expressed as metamorphic constructs where components can be easily added or removed, such as the "direct" GUI widget system) are kept in Python for easy subclassing and modification. Much as C allows you to slide into assembly if you must, good high-level languages make it easy to transition to a low-level implementation where needed. I'm not sure the same can be said of the ease of accessing high-level features from a low-level language.
"executives of movie theater chains such as Regal Entertainment Group and National Amusements Inc. have countered, saying that seeing a movie in the theater is a 'fuller, more entertaining experience' and that the time window between movie and DVD releases should even be extended."
From TFA:
"She [Shari Redstone] said offering a fuller, more entertaining experience to consumers not only generates more revenue, but protects the theatrical window."
This is in the context of Shari explaining how some National Amusements theaters have been using gimmicks to get butts in seats.
The article doesn't suggest that theaters provide a fuller experience; it suggests that they need to do this to maintain business, i.e. they're not very good at it now.
I remember when members of the California government put pressure on Google to add a "delete" option. I remember when people mentioned on this very forum that the button was a red herring---that archives would generally be kept in any case, and that in fact Google was one of the few e-mail providers to be completely honest about that aspect of modern e-mail. But they added the button anyway, and now someone fell for the ruse.
When will people---not just Californians, but people in general---when will people learn that you can't legislate away the behavior of an already-established system?
According to Carnegie Mellon's alumni page (http://www.epp.cmu.edu/httpdocs/people/alumni.htm l), G. William Strauss's graduate thesis was "Portable electronic devices onboard commercial aircraft: Assessing the risks." Published 2005.
Any CMU students willing to use their library access and a photocopier for the expansion of human knowledge before the IEEE article is published in March?
Always remember, Bungie has never been in the business of "making Mac games." Their business has always been "Total world Domination." If 'shackling' themselves to the biggest software company on Earth furthers the goal, then so be it.
For Bungie, "selling out" would be throwing off a Mac port on which they lose money.
The whole article was kind of a let-down for me. Immediately after reading the title, I thought I'd be treated to a bizarre story about a Christian fundamentalist group getting in ironic trouble for an anti-porn demonstration.
Slashdot Mirror
>> For example, what would stop them from designating a third-party for the collection of print copyright royalties?
To my knowledge (unless a specific law has clarified), nothing stops them from using this implementation technique.
Congress has been tasked with the mission "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries" by the United States Constitution. Implementation strategy is up to them.
I was personally shocked, however, to discover that this was the solution America uses for managing the money. It screams opportunity for corruption to me also.
If the software is not free, you can't know what the device is doing.
I hate to be the devil's advocate on this argument, because I really like free software (though I can't bring myself to whole-kool-aid on the morality argument)...
The software being open-source doesn't give me the ability to know what the device is doing any more than the law being published and accessible gives me the ability to be my own lawyer. It merely allows lawyers (or independent software developers) to exist. Hundreds of thousands of lines of code go into modern working software, and a bit of trust on the part of the average end-consumer is strictly necessary regardless of the visibility nature. The average end-consumer simply doesn't have the time to learn enough computer science to eye-verify every line of code in every piece of software they run.
I trust open-source because many eyes have seen it, and my experience has been that those eyes are not in heads that are actively engaged in the business of doing evil. I trust much closed-source from big companies because the situations where actively lying to the customer is long-term profitable are more rare than many think they are. It's true that only one of these avenues has even the potential for exploitation, but if we always kept to the safe paths we'd miss out on half the fun, eh?
It's not a morality question. It's a risk-reward question.
That's a really clever design they've come up with. I can see why they'd want to patent it. No idea if anyone will ever make use of the technology---I wouldn't. But I can see the appeal of patenting something that novel.
Self-sufficiency is a pretty fantasy; as wonderful as it sounds, entirely too few people actually want to live that way.
Take the situation in the article as example. The children were being vaccinated against polio, a disease that has claimed lives throughout human history. WIthout someone working a modern job at a medicine company to manufacture the vaccine, or the needle to inject it, or operating the plane to fly the vaccine to the region or the truck to drive it to the village, etc., how would these children be treated for this exceedingly debilitating disease? What should one living a self-sufficient life do if they fall ill? Folk remedies? Shrug and ignore it? Pray their limbs don't stop functioning as a germ eats away at their nervous system? "Let those who can't make it perish" is certainly a convenient system, but we've spent most of human history escaping the bondage of nature for this very reason.
To be sure, industrialized society has a large share of problems that go along with it. And in this specific case, the destruction of the ability for the region to support human life needs to be stopped. But while there is an inversion that must be fixed in this situation, in general industrialized civilization is better than the tyrrany of cruel fate. I ask the foil question of revolutions throughout history: What good is my freedom if I'm starving to death? What good is my freedom if I'm wracked with disease? What kind of 'freedom' is it that forces me to eke out a living alone against the fickle forces of nature, when I could instead trust experts in various fields to shield me from the worst disasters that can be thrown at me, while I in turn become expert enough to shield them from some specific hardship?
Fix the problems in Africa and other developing nations. Protect the people's lives. But don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Industrialization sucks, but not as much as polio.
You are absolutely right; I was not sufficiently clear. I was referring to 'padding' from the game mechanics standpoint---in my explanation, I was taking the interactions (i.e. the things I do with mouse, keyboard, or joystick) to be the crux of the game itself---the "game" in game. From that point of view, everything else---including plot---is filler material, in the sense that you could swap the plot around entirely with essentially no changes to the game mechanics.
The Final Fantasy series is probably the best example of this. Around FF VII, the tried-and-true game mechanic they had developed---turn-based, level-relative combat---had been not only refined to a fairly pure form, but it had been done to an extent that divorced it from the plot of the story. What I mean by that statement is that the interactions in combat situations are only loosely related to the 'reality' of the Final Fantasy world. The death of Aeris is a perfect example of this---in combat, character death can be immediately handled by phoenix down, but a plot death is a different entity altogether. Square/Enix could have taken the turn-based combat and replaced it with, for example, a card-style system, tactics-style system, or even Tetris without changing any significant aspects of the game plot. So from the point of view of the combat and leveling mechanics, the plot is 'filler' because it is completely modular; it could be changed in broad, sweeping ways without any major changes to the game mechanics.
In that sense, the big problem I have with that flavor of RPGs is that the Final Fantasy-style level-based combat system---where damage is dealt at an abstraction based essentially on what weapons I'm carrying and who I've defeated with little intervention on my part---is very boring to me, and the plot of the vast majority of them isn't compelling enough to keep grinding through a hundred tedious combat interactions. Standing in stark contrast to this are the Bioware RPGs. Knights of the Old Republic has a varied enough storyline to keep me going in spite of a traditional RPG combat system. Jade Empire doesn't have a traditional RPG combat system, which makes it exceedingly compelling to me. And I'm greatly looking forward to Mass Effect for the same reasons.
There's an excellent essay in this vein at http://lostgarden.com/2006/07/ze-story-snobs.html In short, a game with a compelling story cannot be salvaged by boring play, and game designers would often do well to consider the mechanics of play first and story second.
My dislike of the combat in most RPGs is certainly a personal opinion. For me, Dragon Warrior combat was boring in Dragon Warrior, and it's only gotten worse.
I grew up using Mac OS, and I learned my way around GNU/Linux in college. At home, I run a Debian box and an Apple laptop, and I use Windows at work. I also own a PC that ran Windows at one time; we're a small company, so it's currently the desktop machine for one of my coworkers. I'm not an expert Windows user, but I've used it enough now to have an opinion of my comfort on all three systems.`
.NET, managed C++, or straight 'on the metal' code with full library support from the Windows OS. Primarily because the dev tools are written by the same people who write the OS, the IDE is tightly integrated against the documentation that's available. Windows has hundreds of thousands of API calls, but the autocomplete features make them easy-to-find. And it's almost impossible to get the debugger into a situation where it can't dish up the current program state.
.NET project. And documentation integration is almost non-existant; I'm sorry to say that man is a terribly old system, info is little better, and documentation available in HTML is a notably less-than-perfect solution. I often find that the easiest way to find docs on whatever API I'm using in Linux is to type some function names into google, which takes me entirely out of my programming flow. And in most of the programming I do, it seems as though I can crash gdb by breathing on it. Apple's software was half-done when I used it last, and my computer was too slow to use auto-complete; hopefully, they've fixed those problems, but I've gotten away from Cocoa programming recently.
I see the developer toolchain as the biggest advantage to using Windows, if you can afford it. Because they know the survival of their operating system depends on the applications, Microsoft's development support is far above and beyond all other options I've worked with, both in Mac OS X and the Debian community.
Let's compare the dev process in Linux and Windows, for example. The obvious linchpin of the dev cycle in Windows is Visual Studio, which features a pervasive debugger and a GUI tightly integrated to the compiler. Depending on what I want to do, I can attack a problem at multiple levels---high level abstractions such as
In contrast, my experiences programming in Linux have been fairly nightmarish. Eclipse is a very decent package of software, if I want to program in Java, but I try to avoid that rattrap as often as I can. I have a bevy of languages at my disposal, but not even emacs gives them to me as cleanly as, say, VS serves up C# code in a
Let's talk third-party libraries. I've heard many people say great things about the freedom open-source allows. I agree it allows freedom, but it less often feels like the freedom to accomplish my goals and more like the freedom to make my own burgers by slaughtering my own cattle. Microsoft's ActiveX architecture is probably one of the best ideas they've ever implemented, and neither Mac OS X nor GNU/Linux can serve up anything I know about that is comparable. The idea of standardizing the binary interface for library interaction is completely the right idea, in my opinion. OSX is also fairly good in this respect, and their bundle architecture is a vast improvement over both libs and dlls. The GNU/Linux side of the planet needs vast improvement, in my mind, to allow software integration to be as easy as the other two major OSes. Package managers are a brilliant idea that I'd like to see more universally integrated into Mac OS and Windows. But their existence in GNU/Linux points to a major failing of that system---in general, software does not just work. The idea of being able to ship just the source code is noble, but the practicality is that because the ABI is not standardized from compiler to compiler, any time I wander away from what is available via the package manager I often have to recompile vast swaths of my OS to install just one program that demands a library version slightly newer than what is installed. This is unacceptable. As the famous line goes, "The great thi
The funny thing is that this is exactly why I don't play RPGs on a regular basis.
For me, most game mechanics get stale after twenty hours of play. RPGs in particular tend to have relatively simple game mechanics that rarely get changed-up---they pad the game out with level-grinding and plot. Once I've mastered the game mechanics, I want to move faster; I've found very few RPGs that allow me to do so, since the artificial wall of gaining levels still exists.
At the end of the day, the operating system's purpose is really to give me access to my programs. On Windows, that means a lot, but I'm fairly happy with the way XP does it. The people who should care about major OS changes ought to be the developers; a new OS changes the rules of the game they play. In general, I don't want to shell out $200 for another OS, as long as the one I have is doing its job.
I've talked to a couple of my friends, and they are not very impressed by what they see in Vista in terms of new tools for the developers. Major changes, yes, but few of them practically interesting, in the sense that they either serve such a small subset of programs that they won't be used by the average developer or there already exists a perfectly reasonable way to do the job in Windows XP. Just as I don't want to buy a new interface if my current one is acceptable, they don't want to have to re-invent wheels just because all the 'fooX' functions are now 'barX' functions.
GNU/Linux is a little different; since the operating system is available cost-free, there's no disincentive to immediately adopting upgrades (except for instability, which is probably the biggest issue with new developments and is also shared by the must-be-purchased OS's). But with Windows, they need to really convince me that there's some truly profound new way of talking to my applications that I just gotta try.
I feel like we've reached a design plateau with both Windows XP and MacOSX these days. They both do what they do extremely well, and most of the other needs can be satisfied by the applications themselves without changing the OS. Until I'm given a very good reason to pay money to learn a new way of talking to my programs, I'll hold off, thanks.
This is very true. However, this point is a non-issue, and I think it would be a non-issue in the majority of cases.
The issue at stake in the case was that traffic from anonymous users (specifically, HTTP requests) was flooding UTube's site and killing it. In contrast, e-mail, ssh, and most other internet services are authenticated services, which means one can make the assumption that the user is going to a known site, not "browsing" to a site they've never seen before.
It's not ssh traffic that's killing sites with clashing DNS names, it's HTTP traffic. And the internet isn't the WWW, but the WWW is the most popular anonymous-request application on the internet. A special-case solution might be called for, given the ridiculous skew in popularity of the application.
It occurs to me that Wikipedia already has a great solution for this sort of problem: disambiguation pages. You can see a similar solution employed by the Firefox browser team and the Firefox e-mentoring company if you go to firefox.com.
I think it would be great if these disambiguation pages could be made manditory; that is to say, in the event of a concept collision between two companies, the best ruling one or the other company could hope for would be a court mandate that a disambiguation page be hosted by whichever company is larger. Not really tenable in the grand scheme of things, I'm sure, but those pages are probably the best practical solution.
Of course, the lawsuit is probably less about practicality and more about the opportunity to wrestle large chunks of cash out of Google. *sigh*
Compare http://www.google.com/ to http://www.lycos.com./ Google realized early on that to win in the searching business, all you need to do is search really well. As long as I still have to scroll my browser page to see everything on a search site's front page, that search site is too complicated. Having a simple main page lets users set it to their home page with negligible impact to their browser's startup time; that really matters more than some people think.
AltaVista got the message, but they're still playing catch-up.
From the summary:
"As some of you may or may not know, Link will appear right-handed in the Wii version of Twilight Princess (as opposed to the left-handed Link seen since Ocarina of Time)."
From the source material:
"Link nodded silently in approval, and left the room after taking a long glance at the altar. Then with a magical sword in his left hand and a magical shield in his right, he set off alone on his long travels."
Instruction manual, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link
... that's the first mention in the written text. If you look at the sprite in the first game, it's painfully obvious that link is left-handed.
The more you know!
It feels floaty.
Honestly, that was always my favorite part of Halo 1, the sense that everything was operating under reduced-gravity, with a bouncy shroud around it. I called it "squishy physics." Made the Banshee a helluva lot of fun to fly.
FTA:
"When Ballbot is not in operation, it stands in place on three retractable legs."
So 'nervous balance' motions won't be necessary, one could assume.
As for the thinness issue: it is precisely the personal space issue that makes a thin robot useful in a crowded public space. Our perception of personal space factors in the personal space of the other person. So a robot that is as wide as one's 'personal space bubble' causes people interacting with it to give it even more room. The thin chassis on this robot alleviates that problem by only taking up an amount of space roughly equivalent to the human torso, so that a person's "personal space guess" comes out accurately.
Similar, but different.
The overall concept is the same (in the sense that you have a system to balance and probably similar mathematics to do it), but the single point of contact with the ground makes for a different solution matrix. Segways need only balance in one dimension; this robot has to account for two, and it must solve for its balance with one manipulator. To add to the complexity, it must also navigate and motivate itself; a Segway's navigation system takes advantage of the sensors and processor installed in all of its cargo (a handy feature!) to offset the 'heavy lifting' of directional goals.
I believe this project may also pre-date the segway by a few years, if you look at the papers published on it.
When did Bungie announce it?
I hadn't heard!
Can I pre-order now?
While there are some libraries that blur the line, I'd have to sincerely disagree.
Take Python for example, and compare it with C++. You can do the same things in both languages. But what C++ cross-platform library or framework gives me runtime object mutation and reflection? First-class functions? Namespaces (importable at any point in the runtime)? Type safety and introspection? Universal serialization (or "object save and load," or "pickling", or whatever one's favorite buzzword is for having a default strategy to contain any data in a static long-term storage form)? A built-in debugger? An interpreter that can allow me to pause execution and modify the runtime environment while a program is executing (including modifying the source code, re-compiling it, and re-inserting it into the environment without restarting the process)?
And more importantly... if I have those features in library A, how do I get them in library B?
While one can obtain some features in a low-level language through proper choice of libraries, a high-level language demands those features exist in all code, and that they be accessible through an agreed-upon syntax. As Paul Graham notes in this Lisp-related essay, that's one of the reasons one would bother to learn a new language---because languages are different at a level deeper than the libraries available to them. Remember, C++ started as a simple extension to C---eventually, a point was reached where it became its own language, and there are in fact valid C programs that are not valid C++ programs.
On the flip side of the Python/C++ coin, by the way: how does Python give me pointers and explicit memory management?
For those who haven't seen it, Panda3D is a game engine with a Python interface. It is the system underpinning Disney's Toontown MMO game for kids (IE required, because the website needs ActiveX). Panda3D is a full-featured game engine for Windows and Linux (with an unstable port to OS X; the Windows release tends to lead the pack). It has support for graphics, sound, networking, UI, collisions, physics, AI, and the Cg-shader language for high-end graphics cards. On top of that, the developer gets the advantage of a built-in engine profiler (for ironing out those trouble spots), an object placement tool, and the regular reflection, auto-documentation, debugging features, and libraries of the Python language. It's also open-source.
We used Panda3D on a project and were able to go from scratch to a complete product in a matter of two months. I sincerely doubt we'd have had that kind of turnaround with almost any other language / engine combination. From the nifty things specific to Python (pickling, solid dynamic typing, interactive runtime mode, runtime mutable classes) to the simple things that you expect from any high-level language (strings as a type, as opposed to "bag of characters;" automatic memory management; exception objects), we used about every aspect of the system to keep our project on-time and on-budget. If we had chosen a system such as SDL / C++, I suspect that the memory management issues alone would have bogged us down terminally.
Personally, I think there are a couple of lessons to be learned from the Panda3D example:
So there's one programmer's experience with hig
HA-ha!
From the Slashdot summary:
"executives of movie theater chains such as Regal Entertainment Group and National Amusements Inc. have countered, saying that seeing a movie in the theater is a 'fuller, more entertaining experience' and that the time window between movie and DVD releases should even be extended."
From TFA:
"She [Shari Redstone] said offering a fuller, more entertaining experience to consumers not only generates more revenue, but protects the theatrical window."
This is in the context of Shari explaining how some National Amusements theaters have been using gimmicks to get butts in seats.
The article doesn't suggest that theaters provide a fuller experience; it suggests that they need to do this to maintain business, i.e. they're not very good at it now.
Changes the entire meaning of the summary.
... and they got hammered in California for it.
I remember when members of the California government put pressure on Google to add a "delete" option. I remember when people mentioned on this very forum that the button was a red herring---that archives would generally be kept in any case, and that in fact Google was one of the few e-mail providers to be completely honest about that aspect of modern e-mail. But they added the button anyway, and now someone fell for the ruse.
When will people---not just Californians, but people in general---when will people learn that you can't legislate away the behavior of an already-established system?
According to Carnegie Mellon's alumni page (http://www.epp.cmu.edu/httpdocs/people/alumni.htm l), G. William Strauss's graduate thesis was "Portable electronic devices onboard commercial aircraft: Assessing the risks." Published 2005.
Any CMU students willing to use their library access and a photocopier for the expansion of human knowledge before the IEEE article is published in March?
Quoth the Thorne,
"It is enjoying a free lunch that should, by any rational account, be the lunch of the facilities providers."
I always wondered what "Gimme your lunch money" sounded like when the bully was all growed up.
Always remember, Bungie has never been in the business of "making Mac games." Their business has always been "Total world Domination." If 'shackling' themselves to the biggest software company on Earth furthers the goal, then so be it.
For Bungie, "selling out" would be throwing off a Mac port on which they lose money.
The whole article was kind of a let-down for me. Immediately after reading the title, I thought I'd be treated to a bizarre story about a Christian fundamentalist group getting in ironic trouble for an anti-porn demonstration.