The article points out that Microsoft's Games for Windows Live, despite being relatively unpopular, has seen continued development
ie, no-one wants it, but MS is going to give it to you anyway. The sooner the latest court case finished and MS gets broken up the better - a standalone gaming division will quickly go under if it had to provide what the users actually wanted instead of being subsidised by the rest of MS.
The UK needs people who care about a consistent system of measurement
why? doesn't the current system work? I've never had problems buying stuff whether its a pint, a litre of milk or worrying whether I've put 3 or 4 gallons in my car when its measured out in litres - it just doesn't matter, I fill it up and if I want to see how far I've gone it'll tell me - in the universally recognised mpg. In my granny's time, she had no problem whatsoever working in pounds, shillings and pence. And she could add up in her head - something cash tellers today have great difficulty with.
The reason its working fine as is is the same reason English is still used as a language instead of Latin or Esperanto. The latter may be technically 'better' but everyone can make subtle and amusing word plays and still understand what you mean. It may be more confusing and have some unusual constructs, but that doesn't matter. I think those are what makes the world work for humans, its only the soulless who think that art is meaningless, that all measurements should be in a base ten, that we should go with swatch time. The world would be such a dull, geeky place if these people had their way.
I doubt its an Al Murray-esque entrenchment of views, more likely an understanding that it isn't broken, so fixing it would only cost lots for no real benefit, and just annoy everybody.
ah yes, Dungeon Keeper 2... where you built a torture chamber and shiny-black demon ladies would come to serve you. You'd drop captured opponents in the chamber and they'd appear tied to wheels and chairs while the dark mistress whipped them. If there were no opponents to play with, the mistresses would tie themselves to the devices. The sounds were quite fun too.
It should be noted it was all a bit tongue-in-cheek.
Re:Because its not part of the game play
on
Torture in Games
·
· Score: 1
certainly the after-effects of torture are not part of the gameplay. Once you've tortured the NPC to "extract" the information, what then? You go on your merry way, never looking back, and don't consider or even remember the NPC again.
Its not as if there's a sub section where the NPC goes back home to the wife and kids.
Now, if the NPC went back to the family/tribe/whatever and they took one look at him, decided that the player was an evil, warmongering SOB that deserved to be given a bloody nose, and thus raised an army of insurgent fighters to take him out, then that'd be more realistic and provide some come-back for the player. I doubt most players would notice though, there'd just more 'baddies' to kill.
If you have "reputation" that goes from 'good' to 'evil' during play, you can bet that a lot of players would try their hardest to get the ultimate evil rating. The only way to deal with that would be to restrict the shops and towns t such players, get them used to the idea that if no-one likes you, then they won't deal with you, but that'd be a bit bad for gameplay if the player couldn't buy any equipment.
So all in all, leave the dubious parts of the game out in the first place.
surely "push the files" to a remote site is the same as "posting the files" via a different transport mechanism. When people say that they need to remotely push the files, its not that the users can't/won't be able to handle them if they're not there already setup, its because they'll forget or just be too lazy to click the button to retrieve them. A DVD in the post is difficult to miss.
However, a DVD in the post may not arrive or may be corrupt.
Yeah, I expect HP will roll right over and do whatever Microsoft demands in the netbook marketplace, they've always done that right, and never ever been disappointed by the outcome.
(well, I don't think they'll be disappointed when the compensatory award comes from the "vista ready" court case)
PS. This article suggests they nuck the trend with offering more powerful Windows netbook versions:
But, in an interesting reversal of usual practice, purchasers of the Mini MIE get 2GB of RAM, rather than the 512MB and 1GB configurations featured on Windows XP versions of the Mini 1000.
Damn, just checked and though they offer Ubuntu netbooks (which looked very nice in Currys),the Mini 1000 is not yet available with HP Linux:(
With gigabit I can copy to my nas at 25 megabytes per second. At 100 I was getting under 12. So that's twice the speed for me, which is most likely limited by the CPU on my nas and not ethernet.
When the networks stops being the bottleneck, you usually find it shifts somewhere else - I think now your bottleneck is the HDDs write performance. My NAS copies at 25MBps but before I reformatted it from its default RAID5 on its useless raid card, I was getting 6MBps (its now JBOD with software RAID), the CPU isn't the bottleneck.
With USB, I reckon we will get it for Vista and XP as the manufacturers will write their own drivers - just like with Win98/ME where they always shipped a little driver CD with every USB device you bought.
One problem with interface-only inheritance is that you end up with lots of code duplication, or delegation to sub-objects in an attempt to work around the limitations imposed by not having MI.
I think the biggest issue here is that people who write in languages that do not have MI go out of their way to explain why it is so bad, without actually saying anything except that it "is bad". There are plenty of other issues in these other languages that no-one really cares about, they just work with them.
For some reason the lack of MI is like having a tiny penis, the proponents of those languages without it all seem desperate to prove that it isn't a problem for them at all, all the time telling all us C++ devs how bad it is for us to have something we're likely to trip over whilst walking.
I'm not saying interface inheritance is a bad thing, just that having it as the only option is bad, and that if you're going to allow implementation-inheritance lite (ie single inheritance of a class), you might as well have given everyone full MI.
Apparently Anders said he didn't put MI into Delphi because it would slow down the speed of the compiler. I heard it was because he said no-one ever uses MI (I think the former is much more likely as loads of people use MI - that's why you see so many posts asking how to emulate MI using interface-inheritance).
There's only 1 problem with MI - the diamond pattern. God knows there's enough other issues with Java/C#/etc that you have to understand, 1 more surely wouldn't hurt, especially one so well documented on the web already.
"Mr. McCartney, I am sure you strongly believe in what you are doing but I cannot either support your efforts or allow them to happen in my classroom. At this point, I am not sure what you are doing is legal. No music is free and spreading that misconception is harmful.... This is a world where Hard Rock plays on virtually every mp3 player and putting on a carnival show for easy-listening pop is not helping these children at all. I am sure if you contacted Roger Waters, he would be more than happy to supply you with copies of Dark Side of the Moon and that way, your music would actually be of service to those receiving them..."
1. hand out free linux CDs 2. wait for teacher to confiscate them, thus "depriving your child and holding back his education in a free society" 3. sue, bankrupting the local education district and sending all the other pupils to the poorhouse 4. spend your profit on improving the takeup and market awareness of Linux; and a private education for your kid;)
You may remember I wanted to turn the book into a wiki. That would have been awesome. But the book's fourth anniversary is coming up this spring and I have to admit to myself that I'm not gonna get the wiki together. So I'm posting the thing already.
So, perhaps if he put a bare wiki up, everyone could c&p a page at a time?
realise that if none of the 'thousands' have hired you then you may not be a fabulous as you think you are. That will probably be the first step in getting a job.
Experience does matter when interviewing, but its not much once you've actually got to the interview. Then you have to justify why you think you're good at what you do, experience just makes that part easier because you can point to projects you've worked on. In your case, you'll have to explain in detail why you think you're a good enough programmer to work for a company where you have to work on other people's code, old code that's "a bit" crufty, do what you're told within the procedures and standards the company uses.
Most people who come to interview, say "I'm the best, I wrote a program that had 1000 lines of code in it", then sh*t themselves when they see a real 10 million LOC enterprise app that's evolved over the last ten years. Being able to learn a new language is a very minor part of the job.
As another programmer who'd done his share of technical interviews (.NET/C# though),
that's probably your problem, with the new 'easy to use' languages, everything is done for the developer, this is why companies like these. However, it also means that someone with limited knowledge and skill can call themselves a developer and appear for interview with you. They even think they're developers because they have clicked a few buttons on the IDE and produced a program!
If you were hiring C++ devs, you wouldn't have this problem. There would be less candidates, but they'd all be of a much higher quality.
I think the answer to all this is to divide programming up, you have your "junior" developers writing the less important aspects of your app (eg the GUIs say) and the more experienced ones doing the harder but more important work (eg the back-end processing). If you split those divisions into different languages instead of having everything written in C# you'll be much happier in the long run.
And I thought Russia had excellent programmers who could do wonders with limited resources. Perhaps you had better go back to writing C code and hire the older guys who used to code using op amps and z80 chips!:)
You obviously have only learned half the story on inheritance. MI is a good thing, its just that most modern languages don't implement it because its hard for the compiler writers.
If interface inheritance was such a obvious and perfect option, why is it that Java (and other Java-a-like languages) provide implementation inheritance?
MI (and operator overloading) is good, as a java programmer, if you had it you'd be singing its praises.
My opinion has nothing to do with Joel's. Good to hear that he agrees with me though, I think he should credit me though as I thought it up first:)
My opinion is down to experience, even the sprawling codebase that no-one understands can be understood and refactored to something manageable, it may not be nice but its certainly possible, it just takes a little dedication on the part of a senior developer. Bear in mind that every project I've ever worked on, when I first approach it, is from the perspective of not knowing anything about how it works, you see why I think this.
I prefer the Big Ball of Mud link though, it shows how these projects arise and some of the patterns you can use to recover from them. Total destruction of the old and rebuild is left until the very end of the pattern.
Besides I think I said "nearly always the wrong approach". Rewrite is too often considered to be the only option when all this is needed is some professionalism, not a hacker's approach to being too lazy to try to understand the code, or a junior's desire to try the latest coolest technology. I say this because all too often the rewrite ends up as a sprawling ball of mud itself.
"Java is slow" is a stupid old myth. Does it not occur to you that JIT compilers compile to native code?
so does Visual Basic 6, are you saying that's just as good a language as Java?
The 'compile to native' is meaningless. That code is still full of metadata and assorted crud that slows it down, and the optimisations are limited (as the JIT doesn't have much time to work on them). Its also stupid (as all software is) so can never know how to generate code as efficiently as I can - this is why threading is poor on Java, it has to cater for the worst case nearly all the time to make 100% sure your code will work without making any assumptions on its part.
eg. I have a little benchmark app concerning C# singletons. It was comparing locks v static initialisation, but the interesting thing was when I ran the fast 'no lock' version on my single core laptop it took 1.5 seconds to complete. When I tried it on the powerful multi-cpu server it took 20 seconds. That's the same time as the locking version took (which in turn was faster on the laptop). Same program binaries, same.net frameworks and versions. Now tell me that 'it compiles to native code so its ok' is still valid.
There are reasons to use java (and.net), performance and low resource usage are not any of them.
Amen. Java is killing the planet, find a Java (or a.net) developer and set the ecowarriors on him.
I find the reasons managed code is gaining traction can be mostly down to the advances in computing power, if we had the same CPUs we had 5 years ago, no-one in their right mind would be coding in them. Now we have super-fast CPUs and more RAM than could be imagined, managed languages have found their level. The shame is that just masks the fact that they are so inefficient.
And I don't think the productivity gains are that large either, we just have more of the less-competent developers pretending they can code.
Slashdot Mirror
if you're doing the narrow fields of engineering or science (as opposed to everyday life), you can choose whatever units you like.
But remember folks, choosing multiple sets of units for your calculations crash rockets.
think what they said on the summary:
The article points out that Microsoft's Games for Windows Live, despite being relatively unpopular, has seen continued development
ie, no-one wants it, but MS is going to give it to you anyway. The sooner the latest court case finished and MS gets broken up the better - a standalone gaming division will quickly go under if it had to provide what the users actually wanted instead of being subsidised by the rest of MS.
The UK needs people who care about a consistent system of measurement
why? doesn't the current system work? I've never had problems buying stuff whether its a pint, a litre of milk or worrying whether I've put 3 or 4 gallons in my car when its measured out in litres - it just doesn't matter, I fill it up and if I want to see how far I've gone it'll tell me - in the universally recognised mpg. In my granny's time, she had no problem whatsoever working in pounds, shillings and pence. And she could add up in her head - something cash tellers today have great difficulty with.
The reason its working fine as is is the same reason English is still used as a language instead of Latin or Esperanto. The latter may be technically 'better' but everyone can make subtle and amusing word plays and still understand what you mean. It may be more confusing and have some unusual constructs, but that doesn't matter. I think those are what makes the world work for humans, its only the soulless who think that art is meaningless, that all measurements should be in a base ten, that we should go with swatch time. The world would be such a dull, geeky place if these people had their way.
I doubt its an Al Murray-esque entrenchment of views, more likely an understanding that it isn't broken, so fixing it would only cost lots for no real benefit, and just annoy everybody.
its been a while since I bought some, but I thought bags of salted peanuts also contained that warning (or "warning: contains nuts").
ah, the good old warning sticker on all jars of peanut butter: "warning, contains peanuts".
and the McDonald's coffee cups with "warning, this cup of hot coffee may contain hot liquid".
Ps. warning: this post contains the f*cking obvious.
ah yes, Dungeon Keeper 2... where you built a torture chamber and shiny-black demon ladies would come to serve you. You'd drop captured opponents in the chamber and they'd appear tied to wheels and chairs while the dark mistress whipped them. If there were no opponents to play with, the mistresses would tie themselves to the devices. The sounds were quite fun too.
It should be noted it was all a bit tongue-in-cheek.
certainly the after-effects of torture are not part of the gameplay. Once you've tortured the NPC to "extract" the information, what then? You go on your merry way, never looking back, and don't consider or even remember the NPC again.
Its not as if there's a sub section where the NPC goes back home to the wife and kids.
Now, if the NPC went back to the family/tribe/whatever and they took one look at him, decided that the player was an evil, warmongering SOB that deserved to be given a bloody nose, and thus raised an army of insurgent fighters to take him out, then that'd be more realistic and provide some come-back for the player. I doubt most players would notice though, there'd just more 'baddies' to kill.
If you have "reputation" that goes from 'good' to 'evil' during play, you can bet that a lot of players would try their hardest to get the ultimate evil rating. The only way to deal with that would be to restrict the shops and towns t such players, get them used to the idea that if no-one likes you, then they won't deal with you, but that'd be a bit bad for gameplay if the player couldn't buy any equipment.
So all in all, leave the dubious parts of the game out in the first place.
surely "push the files" to a remote site is the same as "posting the files" via a different transport mechanism. When people say that they need to remotely push the files, its not that the users can't/won't be able to handle them if they're not there already setup, its because they'll forget or just be too lazy to click the button to retrieve them. A DVD in the post is difficult to miss.
However, a DVD in the post may not arrive or may be corrupt.
Yeah, I expect HP will roll right over and do whatever Microsoft demands in the netbook marketplace, they've always done that right, and never ever been disappointed by the outcome.
(well, I don't think they'll be disappointed when the compensatory award comes from the "vista ready" court case)
PS. This article suggests they nuck the trend with offering more powerful Windows netbook versions:
But, in an interesting reversal of usual practice, purchasers of the Mini MIE get 2GB of RAM, rather than the 512MB and 1GB configurations featured on Windows XP versions of the Mini 1000.
Damn, just checked and though they offer Ubuntu netbooks (which looked very nice in Currys),the Mini 1000 is not yet available with HP Linux :(
or the HP netbook instead. A little "you lost sales" works wonders in the current climate.
I saw a couple of netbooks in a local shop last week, the HP one with ubuntu impressed me and my friend more than the asus ones.
With gigabit I can copy to my nas at 25 megabytes per second. At 100 I was getting under 12. So that's twice the speed for me, which is most likely limited by the CPU on my nas and not ethernet.
When the networks stops being the bottleneck, you usually find it shifts somewhere else - I think now your bottleneck is the HDDs write performance. My NAS copies at 25MBps but before I reformatted it from its default RAID5 on its useless raid card, I was getting 6MBps (its now JBOD with software RAID), the CPU isn't the bottleneck.
With USB, I reckon we will get it for Vista and XP as the manufacturers will write their own drivers - just like with Win98/ME where they always shipped a little driver CD with every USB device you bought.
Try to find mac/linux software designed to run an optometrists office
I thought they all still ran on DOS?
The diamond pattern is the only problem with MI.
One problem with interface-only inheritance is that you end up with lots of code duplication, or delegation to sub-objects in an attempt to work around the limitations imposed by not having MI.
I think the biggest issue here is that people who write in languages that do not have MI go out of their way to explain why it is so bad, without actually saying anything except that it "is bad". There are plenty of other issues in these other languages that no-one really cares about, they just work with them.
For some reason the lack of MI is like having a tiny penis, the proponents of those languages without it all seem desperate to prove that it isn't a problem for them at all, all the time telling all us C++ devs how bad it is for us to have something we're likely to trip over whilst walking.
I'm not saying interface inheritance is a bad thing, just that having it as the only option is bad, and that if you're going to allow implementation-inheritance lite (ie single inheritance of a class), you might as well have given everyone full MI.
Apparently Anders said he didn't put MI into Delphi because it would slow down the speed of the compiler. I heard it was because he said no-one ever uses MI (I think the former is much more likely as loads of people use MI - that's why you see so many posts asking how to emulate MI using interface-inheritance).
There's only 1 problem with MI - the diamond pattern. God knows there's enough other issues with Java/C#/etc that you have to understand, 1 more surely wouldn't hurt, especially one so well documented on the web already.
"Mr. McCartney, I am sure you strongly believe in what you are doing but I cannot either support your efforts or allow them to happen in my classroom. At this point, I am not sure what you are doing is legal. No music is free and spreading that misconception is harmful. ... This is a world where Hard Rock plays on virtually every mp3 player and putting on a carnival show for easy-listening pop is not helping these children at all. I am sure if you contacted Roger Waters, he would be more than happy to supply you with copies of Dark Side of the Moon and that way, your music would actually be of service to those receiving them..."
cut the cr*p dude, you're an American so:
1. hand out free linux CDs ;)
2. wait for teacher to confiscate them, thus "depriving your child and holding back his education in a free society"
3. sue, bankrupting the local education district and sending all the other pupils to the poorhouse
4. spend your profit on improving the takeup and market awareness of Linux; and a private education for your kid
From TFA:
You may remember I wanted to turn the book into a wiki. That would have been awesome. But the book's fourth anniversary is coming up this spring and I have to admit to myself that I'm not gonna get the wiki together. So I'm posting the thing already.
So, perhaps if he put a bare wiki up, everyone could c&p a page at a time?
realise that if none of the 'thousands' have hired you then you may not be a fabulous as you think you are. That will probably be the first step in getting a job.
Experience does matter when interviewing, but its not much once you've actually got to the interview. Then you have to justify why you think you're good at what you do, experience just makes that part easier because you can point to projects you've worked on. In your case, you'll have to explain in detail why you think you're a good enough programmer to work for a company where you have to work on other people's code, old code that's "a bit" crufty, do what you're told within the procedures and standards the company uses.
Most people who come to interview, say "I'm the best, I wrote a program that had 1000 lines of code in it", then sh*t themselves when they see a real 10 million LOC enterprise app that's evolved over the last ten years. Being able to learn a new language is a very minor part of the job.
"If you treat your development staff as interchangeable programming monkeys, then don't be surprised if that's what you get".
and Microsoft says C# solves all the problems of people who have Java implementations. And everyone else for that matter.
And in the meantime, everyone still writes at least a little bit of C where needed.
As another programmer who'd done his share of technical interviews (.NET/C# though),
that's probably your problem, with the new 'easy to use' languages, everything is done for the developer, this is why companies like these. However, it also means that someone with limited knowledge and skill can call themselves a developer and appear for interview with you. They even think they're developers because they have clicked a few buttons on the IDE and produced a program!
If you were hiring C++ devs, you wouldn't have this problem. There would be less candidates, but they'd all be of a much higher quality.
I think the answer to all this is to divide programming up, you have your "junior" developers writing the less important aspects of your app (eg the GUIs say) and the more experienced ones doing the harder but more important work (eg the back-end processing). If you split those divisions into different languages instead of having everything written in C# you'll be much happier in the long run.
And I thought Russia had excellent programmers who could do wonders with limited resources. Perhaps you had better go back to writing C code and hire the older guys who used to code using op amps and z80 chips! :)
You obviously have only learned half the story on inheritance. MI is a good thing, its just that most modern languages don't implement it because its hard for the compiler writers.
If interface inheritance was such a obvious and perfect option, why is it that Java (and other Java-a-like languages) provide implementation inheritance?
MI (and operator overloading) is good, as a java programmer, if you had it you'd be singing its praises.
My opinion has nothing to do with Joel's. Good to hear that he agrees with me though, I think he should credit me though as I thought it up first :)
My opinion is down to experience, even the sprawling codebase that no-one understands can be understood and refactored to something manageable, it may not be nice but its certainly possible, it just takes a little dedication on the part of a senior developer. Bear in mind that every project I've ever worked on, when I first approach it, is from the perspective of not knowing anything about how it works, you see why I think this.
I prefer the Big Ball of Mud link though, it shows how these projects arise and some of the patterns you can use to recover from them. Total destruction of the old and rebuild is left until the very end of the pattern.
Besides I think I said "nearly always the wrong approach". Rewrite is too often considered to be the only option when all this is needed is some professionalism, not a hacker's approach to being too lazy to try to understand the code, or a junior's desire to try the latest coolest technology. I say this because all too often the rewrite ends up as a sprawling ball of mud itself.
"Java is slow" is a stupid old myth. Does it not occur to you that JIT compilers compile to native code?
so does Visual Basic 6, are you saying that's just as good a language as Java?
The 'compile to native' is meaningless. That code is still full of metadata and assorted crud that slows it down, and the optimisations are limited (as the JIT doesn't have much time to work on them). Its also stupid (as all software is) so can never know how to generate code as efficiently as I can - this is why threading is poor on Java, it has to cater for the worst case nearly all the time to make 100% sure your code will work without making any assumptions on its part.
eg. I have a little benchmark app concerning C# singletons. It was comparing locks v static initialisation, but the interesting thing was when I ran the fast 'no lock' version on my single core laptop it took 1.5 seconds to complete. When I tried it on the powerful multi-cpu server it took 20 seconds. That's the same time as the locking version took (which in turn was faster on the laptop). Same program binaries, same .net frameworks and versions. Now tell me that 'it compiles to native code so its ok' is still valid.
There are reasons to use java (and .net), performance and low resource usage are not any of them.
Amen. Java is killing the planet, find a Java (or a .net) developer and set the ecowarriors on him.
I find the reasons managed code is gaining traction can be mostly down to the advances in computing power, if we had the same CPUs we had 5 years ago, no-one in their right mind would be coding in them. Now we have super-fast CPUs and more RAM than could be imagined, managed languages have found their level. The shame is that just masks the fact that they are so inefficient.
And I don't think the productivity gains are that large either, we just have more of the less-competent developers pretending they can code.