Project Aims For 5x Increase In Python Performance
Everyone should learn the Truths of Software Engineering from some source. For some people, it's The Daily WTF. For me, it was the Ultima series developer quotes. This time, the appropriate quote comes from Ultima VIII:
"It's hypothetical, or I'm going to poke you in the eye." - Rob to Tony when Tony describes possible 20 percent increase in game speed.
But Pi approximation day - 22/7 is quite a holiday I hear.
Except that not every country using day-month format uses slashes to separate the dates. Some use dashes (DD-MM-YYYY). How can you get a reasonable approximation of pi by subtracting two (or even three) integers? (4-1 would be good enough approximation for the Bible, though =). Some use dots (DD.MM.YYYY), which causes more problems than most people think, because some places also use decimal commas (e.g. 3,14159...) instead of decimal points.
That's nothing! When I grow old, I want my dentures to be made out of microSD cards! I want to be remembered as The Wise Old Man With a Terabyte Smile.
How Much Longer Will Physical Game Distribution Survive?
Until someone invents a way to send cash electronically. (And I mean really send cash. None of the bullshit schemes right now where tons of various middlemen take their cut.)
We've solved the problem of distribution. Now we need to solve the problem of payment. And, highly preferrably, the problem of greed (as in "we don't want bullshit DRM schemes, either").
How come nobody notices that this is a ranking of CONSOLE games?
Okay, I'm blind.
But yet - how, pray tell, console games are somehow incredibly different from computer games? This is an important question if you look at influences. Did, say, computer and console RPGs develop in vacuum, completely independent of each other? Was it really Grand Theft Auto that annoyed the hell out of moral panic fans, or were they already annoyed by Doom? There's two ways to play; there's one big game development and appreciation culture (although with different sub-factions, because there's so many ways to make and play games).
I remember fondly the first time I loaded Google's search page. No ads, no weather report, no links to personal ads. Just a search box, as Al Gore himself intended it.
I swore off garbage portal sites right then and I've never looked back.
You think Yahoo! was scary?
Good heavens, that wasn't even the worst search engine back then. They had a human-vetted directory. It was actually usable for the intended purpose. Though dmoz tended to render the web directory pretty obsolete. (And later on the f**ing SEO spammers rendered directories unthinkable. Who wants to build one that won't get exploited to hell and back, would actually be updateable by real people with minimum hassle? Oh, wait - Wikipedia External Links. =)
Anyway....
Remember AltaVista?
Good grief.
I tried to find a screenshot that exemplified why I switched to Google, but it seems I can't remember the file name (or I've dumped the file to some CD-R and forgotten about it). Basically, AltaVista didn't update the index too well (I have vague recollections of a Slashdot story from that time that the index had not been updated in a year!), and there were, ahem, the usability issues.
In the screen, we had a giant ad-filled page. In a very difficult-to-see spot on that page, there was a tiny, TINY little message that said that the search by those terms didn't match any documents.
I was frustrated because you couldn't find a damn thing with that thing. But you could actually find stuff with Google!
(AltaVista later launched RageSearch and then cleaned up their home page. Too little, too late.)
I can't even tell from the website and searching doesn't turn up much of anything. What did it do? What is a social bookmarking service?
Basically, social bookmarking = people posting their bookmarks online. This allows for things like using tags (well, it was neat before it got implemented built in in Firefox =), sending them to friends or user groups, and searching them by different criteria. And, of course, keeping your bookmarks online in one place so you don't need to worry about synchronising them between several computers. And you can do "blog-like" stuff with them, like publish them as an RSS feed as they get added.
Is burning books illegal too? After all, that could be considered a political statement on the original work, one that is so deeply founded in the content of the work that it could be pretty much considered a derivative work of its own: Certainly, one could not make such statement if one would not have read the original text (or at least deeply pondered its cultural significance - as we all know, certain people criticise things they just heard about).
What is the Author's Guild going to do to stop that particular flagrant and deeply offensive misuse of author's rights?
You say it, in 2000 I set up a Gentoo system on one of those early Pentium III Notebooks. Yes, sure, it took me a couple of hours. But guess what, I still use it every day, exclusively. Just copied it from box to box over the years. So I'd say that time was quite a good investment;)
Hah, my Debian install from 1997, originally on my Pentium 166, has served me well ever since. Dualboot went from Win95 to Win98SE to no frigging dualboot at all; Packages have been hauled in on CD-ROMs, ISDN, and later on broadband; two motherboard changes and I have no idea how many hard drives have been juggled; survived the switchover from libc5 to libc6, kernels have gone from 2.2 to 2.4 to 2.6 (or did they still have 2.0 back then? Pretty sure they didn't)... and now I'm kind of peeved that you can't switch from x86 to amd64 without a complete reinstall, so I'm kind of not hurrying much. Oh well!
Actually it's so easy that it drives me nuts Apple hasn't taken the next step - something XP actually does - and have you first set up an admin account, then set up a "normal" account for day to day activities.
That'd be a step backwards. In Unix-based OSes, there's unprivileged users and root (superuser); root can do pretty much anything, ordinary users can't. The whole point of sudo (the password dialog thingy) is that the superuser access is given only when needed, and you can have perfectly ordinary user accounts that are allowed to do some administrative tasks. You can configure sudo to only allow certain programs to be run as root; this is far better than having the lazy users flip between normal accounts and administrator accounts and stay logged in as administrators because "that's where you don't need to fill in those annoying password prompts, duh".
The biggest clinch is that if you run a program as root, it will just work; run it through sudo with root privileges, it won't give you a password prompt, it will just run the program. The model is "if the user is logged in as root, we assume they know what they're doing, even when they want to do something that could damage the system; if an ordinary user runs something that could be damaging the system, we disallow it and only let it through through the sudo prompt."
As one of the Wiki's longest-serving and most prolific _authors_ (not editor, AUTHOR) I think I get my 2 cents.
The problem is that it's the administrative nazi bastards that have decided, amongst themselves, what "the problem with the wikipedia is". Apparently, it's us authors who go around adding content? What ARE we thinking?
The problem aren't the authors. If you bothered to look at these additions, you'd notice one very clear thing in all these things: They incovenience the authors as little as possible. And by authors, I mean authors who actually care about fixing the content.
Is your vandal-infested proxy blocked? Big deal, register an account, it's better to get credited under your user name anyway. Is the article semi-protected? Big deal, you probably have registered an account and have been using it for more than a few days. Additions not getting surveyed? Big deal, you've probably been prolific enough to get sighting rights anyway.
Apologies for not using the term "editor" in the following; I believe it is merely a technical term for a person who edits the site, in whatever capacity. One can be an editor and not an "author" in any specific capacity, but an "author" must also be an editor. (Care to explain why you put such an emphasis on this particular choice of terms?)
In the spirit of improving communication between you, the Prolific Editors, and we, the Administrative Nazi Bastards, I'd like to hear some of your helpful insights on how to improve the site. I'm a bit sarcastic here, but don't let that affect your judgement; these are serious questions.
How would you deal with the constant threat against biographies of living persons? I personally think the horror scenarios are overblown, and people get way overly emotional over the articles. (They're just web pages, for crying out loud! They don't kill anybody!) Short of disallowing biographies of living persons entirely, I'm a little bit clueless on how to allow ordinary well-intentioned editors to edit the article and at the same time not allow the vandals to add Bad Stuff to the articles, without imposing something like semi-protection or flaggedrevs. What are your ideas?
While we're at it, how do you propose we improve the edit counts while at the same time focusing on the quality of the articles and upholding our requirements for reliable sourcing of details in the articles? How do we get ordinary editors to uphold the principles of reliability we've had from the beginning?
And why do we focus on edit counts at all?
And, by the way, the recent straw polls about the flagged revisions testing and what to do with the protection biographies of living persons were specifically not limited to administrators, and quite a few non-admins had their say. Did you comment on these surveys?
I'm also slightly amused by the notion that administrators can't have their opinions heard because they don't write articles, as generally the only threshold of commenting on matters in Wikipedia has been the status as an established editor (and you can't usually be an administrator without blending in the landscape). Since you obviously have an opinion on this, what do you propose as our new model of hierarchy? I used to do a lot of work on little fixes before I became an administrator, after which all of my time was spent on admin things instead - why how do you think giving prolific editors these additional menial duties helps things in any way? How do you prevent the Dilbert's Principle model, where incompetent people get promoted and those competent people who get promoted will soon become incompetent? ('cause that's what happened with me, sort of.)
And since no one knows what the heck the game will be like - if you don't like the over-inflated expectations of what this game will be, you can always fork the ideas and add your own! Like this: "Yeah, I'm sure it won't hurt 3DRealms to spend a few more years to add sharks with lasers to DNF... it would be so awesome!" After that, the users will decide whether this sharks-with-lasers fan vision of the game's future will live on, or die out.
Perhaps some of these forked visions could even form a significant vein in the pre-release history of the game! (Though I wonder if once the game is released, people still talk about the Great Sharks-With-Lasers Debate of Early 2009.)
This comes just a few days after Britannica announced that readers will be allowed to suggest edits and have them reviewed within 20 minutes. Will we see the day when Britannica can be edited almost instantly while editing Wikipedia requires fighting bureaucracy, patience and the right contacts?
Wow, talk about putting a spin on the story! The sky is falling and stuff!
The wait times of several weeks don't sound realistic to me for most articles, because heavily edited articles are also heavily watched and scrutinised - I can't imagine there being much bigger delays on getting up-to-date information on current events than there is now.
Also, I don't believe anyone really wants more bureaucracy than there already is. In my personal opinion, article sighting powers should be handed out like autoconfirmation is handed out today: Automatically after a set period of time after article creation.
But let's talk about history.
Last time when we did a major move to "limit the editing", we introduced semi-protection. A lot of people felt limiting newly registered users from editing article was a blow against the principle of open editing. But also, these people didn't stop to consider what the alternative to the semi-protection was.
The alternative to semi-protection was full protection. Either everyone is allowed to edit, or no one is. Which one do you prefer: Wait a few days to get yourself a confirmation to edit all semi-protected articles ever, or always bother the much-hated administrative nazi bastards and hope they add the precious bit of information to the protected article? I'm pretty sure most people feel the former is more within the spirit of open editing.
Flagged revisions aren't taking away open editing either. Instead, they are a tool to let people scrutinise the new additions better. No one's taking away the ability to view the bleeding-edge versions, if you want them. The idea is just to make sure that someone has at least checked the recent edits.
So what's the alternative horror scenario?
The alternative horror scenario is that no one looks through the stuff. Semi-protection is entirely mechanical in nature: we can't technically define a "suspected vandal" as "unregistered or a recently registered account", vandalism is a social issue, and social issues are solved by social interaction, not by computers. The only way to introduce social problem-solving is to let people vet the edits. That's how real editing process works in real life.
For instance, I used to play MUDs, like tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people. MUDs have been around since the mid-80s, all modern MMOs (which have "multiple third-party yadda yadda") are based off MUDs to some extent,
Yeah, a fact widely acknowledged by researchers and game historians of all kinds at this point.
and yet there's maybe... 2-3 books and a dozen articles on the entire thing.
Call me sceptical, but I'm pretty sure you aren't looking hard enough.
So I can't write a Wikipedia article on my MUD, which had hundreds or thousands of users and lasted > 10 years
Bah, you're just jealous that your MUD hasn't been covered in real publications you read, like the MUD I used to play at, which has been the subject of several mainstream media articles over the years. =)
because we never got an article in the Wall Street Journal? Fuck that.
If you're targeting WSJ, that indeed may be setting the bar too high, but how about impressing a local game magazine instead, as they generally tend to pay attention to more marginal topics than the big media? Surely there are sufficiently geeky game magazines out there who would love to cover the peculiarities your quaint game?
For those who don't want to read the article, just head to http://www.youtube.com/tv on the appropriate console browser.
This is a slight disappointment. It's nice to have a new TV-friendly interface, but it's a little bit stretch to say "Youtube is coming to consoles". You still need the web browser, and the Internet Channel on Wii isn't free. I was expecting a separate free app that was optimised for Wii (or PS3); that would have been more efficient and probably more portable, as paradoxical as it may seem...
But ROG-O-MATIC plays Rogue automatically... even if you do want to play it yourself. There's no ability to place your hands on the keyboard and take control for an hour, then remove your hands and let the bot take over again. Self-playing games isn't the point - it's an assisting game, such that you can play until you get stuck, let the game take over until you're past the particularly difficult platform jump, then take control again for the boss fight.
And what, pray tell, is the fundamental difference between an assistive AI that is being used for the entire play session, and one that is used for a part of the play session? How do you implement an AI that can save the game and continue it later? Since Rogue is a game whose environment is mostly determined by random factors, no matter how you make it, the AI has to make observations about the state of the game. There's no big practical difference between an AI that observes the whole game and one that decides to get a situational overview at the beginning of the play.
Darcs isn't the most efficient beast when dealing with repositories that have lots of binary files. Darcs 2 hashed-pristine repositories are also pretty damn slow right now to compound the problem. If a simple darcs whatsnew -ls takes 20 seconds on a directory tree with ~400 files and commits go crunchy-crunchy-crunch-done, it's starting to get a little bit aggravating.
After migration to git... git status takes never more than 2-3 seconds. And the tree with repo is much smaller too. Yay.
Oh, and memory use is usually not a problem - there's always swap for that. Speaking of which, ever tried to build Darcs from source on a machine with 32 megs of memory? It was just not pretty. =)
Mauldin et al., ROG-O-MATIC: A Belligerent Expert System, Fifth Biennial Conference of the Canadian Society for Computational Studies of Intelligence, London Ontario, May 16, 1984.
Rogue had a storyline in it - okay, not exactly a really complex one, but a storyline nonetheless... and this thing plays it automatically, in case people don't want to play it themselves! Yup, people have been making self-playing games since forever.
Is it something in his genes that compels a Geek to give a worthwhile project a name that carries a lot of excess baggage?
Possibly! And not just worthwhile projects, relatively low-key projects too! A true story: When I was a kid, I apparently found a sturdy cardboard tube of some sort (probably the sad remains of a fax paper roll). I thought "wow, this will be a perfect thing to blow out candles with." (Naturally, this probably occurred in middle of the summer.) With all due consideration and skill, I wrote "Excalibur" on the side of the tube.
I have no bloody idea why I did that... so it's obviously in the genes!
(Waves the mad computer scientist's cape, cackles manically and exits the stage)
When it's released, Perl 6 is going to be sweet and innovative and a real contender when compared to Ruby.
Meanwhile, Perl 5 isn't going anywhere just yet, and it still has its place in the toolbox. I personally use it for problems that are too complex to be implemented as shell scripts but not complex enough to warrant a nice object-oriented approach (that'd be Ruby's turf) or need GUIs and somewhat effortless non-*nix deployment (for that, there's always Java). Perl 5 is still very nice if you want some powerful text processing done. for example.
Slashdot Mirror
Project Aims For 5x Increase In Python Performance
Everyone should learn the Truths of Software Engineering from some source. For some people, it's The Daily WTF. For me, it was the Ultima series developer quotes. This time, the appropriate quote comes from Ultima VIII:
"It's hypothetical, or I'm going to poke you in the eye." - Rob to Tony when Tony describes possible 20 percent increase in game speed.
But Pi approximation day - 22/7 is quite a holiday I hear.
Except that not every country using day-month format uses slashes to separate the dates. Some use dashes (DD-MM-YYYY). How can you get a reasonable approximation of pi by subtracting two (or even three) integers? (4-1 would be good enough approximation for the Bible, though =). Some use dots (DD.MM.YYYY), which causes more problems than most people think, because some places also use decimal commas (e.g. 3,14159...) instead of decimal points.
The good thing about standards...
That's nothing! When I grow old, I want my dentures to be made out of microSD cards! I want to be remembered as The Wise Old Man With a Terabyte Smile.
Until someone invents a way to send cash electronically. (And I mean really send cash. None of the bullshit schemes right now where tons of various middlemen take their cut.)
We've solved the problem of distribution. Now we need to solve the problem of payment. And, highly preferrably, the problem of greed (as in "we don't want bullshit DRM schemes, either").
Don't worry about click tracks, real musicians with real talent probably don't have any need for them.
...or use click tracks to their advantage and not as a crutch.
(Just for comparison: I'm just a random writer, and I'm not afraid to admit that I use a spell checker. =)
How come nobody notices that this is a ranking of CONSOLE games?
Okay, I'm blind.
But yet - how, pray tell, console games are somehow incredibly different from computer games? This is an important question if you look at influences. Did, say, computer and console RPGs develop in vacuum, completely independent of each other? Was it really Grand Theft Auto that annoyed the hell out of moral panic fans, or were they already annoyed by Doom? There's two ways to play; there's one big game development and appreciation culture (although with different sub-factions, because there's so many ways to make and play games).
BioShock without System Shock series? (And since BioShock is such a recent game, exactly what has it had the chance to influence yet?)
Advance Wars, which is just a glorified Empire?
Grand Theft Auto series picked because it's the "most controversial series"? Ever heard of this little game series called Doom?
No mention whatsoever of the Ultima and Wizardry series, which laid the foundation for pretty much all of the CRPGs ever?
*sigh*
Scarier still: Yahoo still exists.
I remember fondly the first time I loaded Google's search page. No ads, no weather report, no links to personal ads. Just a search box, as Al Gore himself intended it.
I swore off garbage portal sites right then and I've never looked back.
You think Yahoo! was scary?
Good heavens, that wasn't even the worst search engine back then. They had a human-vetted directory. It was actually usable for the intended purpose. Though dmoz tended to render the web directory pretty obsolete. (And later on the f**ing SEO spammers rendered directories unthinkable. Who wants to build one that won't get exploited to hell and back, would actually be updateable by real people with minimum hassle? Oh, wait - Wikipedia External Links. =)
Anyway....
Remember AltaVista?
Good grief.
I tried to find a screenshot that exemplified why I switched to Google, but it seems I can't remember the file name (or I've dumped the file to some CD-R and forgotten about it). Basically, AltaVista didn't update the index too well (I have vague recollections of a Slashdot story from that time that the index had not been updated in a year!), and there were, ahem, the usability issues.
In the screen, we had a giant ad-filled page. In a very difficult-to-see spot on that page, there was a tiny, TINY little message that said that the search by those terms didn't match any documents.
I was frustrated because you couldn't find a damn thing with that thing. But you could actually find stuff with Google!
(AltaVista later launched RageSearch and then cleaned up their home page. Too little, too late.)
I can't even tell from the website and searching doesn't turn up much of anything. What did it do? What is a social bookmarking service?
Basically, social bookmarking = people posting their bookmarks online. This allows for things like using tags (well, it was neat before it got implemented built in in Firefox =), sending them to friends or user groups, and searching them by different criteria. And, of course, keeping your bookmarks online in one place so you don't need to worry about synchronising them between several computers. And you can do "blog-like" stuff with them, like publish them as an RSS feed as they get added.
(from the don't-give-them-any-ideas dept.)
Is burning books illegal too? After all, that could be considered a political statement on the original work, one that is so deeply founded in the content of the work that it could be pretty much considered a derivative work of its own: Certainly, one could not make such statement if one would not have read the original text (or at least deeply pondered its cultural significance - as we all know, certain people criticise things they just heard about).
What is the Author's Guild going to do to stop that particular flagrant and deeply offensive misuse of author's rights?
</sarcasm>
You say it, in 2000 I set up a Gentoo system on one of those early Pentium III Notebooks. Yes, sure, it took me a couple of hours. But guess what, I still use it every day, exclusively. Just copied it from box to box over the years. So I'd say that time was quite a good investment ;)
Hah, my Debian install from 1997, originally on my Pentium 166, has served me well ever since. Dualboot went from Win95 to Win98SE to no frigging dualboot at all; Packages have been hauled in on CD-ROMs, ISDN, and later on broadband; two motherboard changes and I have no idea how many hard drives have been juggled; survived the switchover from libc5 to libc6, kernels have gone from 2.2 to 2.4 to 2.6 (or did they still have 2.0 back then? Pretty sure they didn't)... and now I'm kind of peeved that you can't switch from x86 to amd64 without a complete reinstall, so I'm kind of not hurrying much. Oh well!
Actually it's so easy that it drives me nuts Apple hasn't taken the next step - something XP actually does - and have you first set up an admin account, then set up a "normal" account for day to day activities.
That'd be a step backwards. In Unix-based OSes, there's unprivileged users and root (superuser); root can do pretty much anything, ordinary users can't. The whole point of sudo (the password dialog thingy) is that the superuser access is given only when needed, and you can have perfectly ordinary user accounts that are allowed to do some administrative tasks. You can configure sudo to only allow certain programs to be run as root; this is far better than having the lazy users flip between normal accounts and administrator accounts and stay logged in as administrators because "that's where you don't need to fill in those annoying password prompts, duh".
The biggest clinch is that if you run a program as root, it will just work; run it through sudo with root privileges, it won't give you a password prompt, it will just run the program. The model is "if the user is logged in as root, we assume they know what they're doing, even when they want to do something that could damage the system; if an ordinary user runs something that could be damaging the system, we disallow it and only let it through through the sudo prompt."
As one of the Wiki's longest-serving and most prolific _authors_ (not editor, AUTHOR) I think I get my 2 cents.
The problem is that it's the administrative nazi bastards that have decided, amongst themselves, what "the problem with the wikipedia is". Apparently, it's us authors who go around adding content? What ARE we thinking?
The problem aren't the authors. If you bothered to look at these additions, you'd notice one very clear thing in all these things: They incovenience the authors as little as possible. And by authors, I mean authors who actually care about fixing the content.
Is your vandal-infested proxy blocked? Big deal, register an account, it's better to get credited under your user name anyway. Is the article semi-protected? Big deal, you probably have registered an account and have been using it for more than a few days. Additions not getting surveyed? Big deal, you've probably been prolific enough to get sighting rights anyway.
Apologies for not using the term "editor" in the following; I believe it is merely a technical term for a person who edits the site, in whatever capacity. One can be an editor and not an "author" in any specific capacity, but an "author" must also be an editor. (Care to explain why you put such an emphasis on this particular choice of terms?)
In the spirit of improving communication between you, the Prolific Editors, and we, the Administrative Nazi Bastards, I'd like to hear some of your helpful insights on how to improve the site. I'm a bit sarcastic here, but don't let that affect your judgement; these are serious questions.
How would you deal with the constant threat against biographies of living persons? I personally think the horror scenarios are overblown, and people get way overly emotional over the articles. (They're just web pages, for crying out loud! They don't kill anybody!) Short of disallowing biographies of living persons entirely, I'm a little bit clueless on how to allow ordinary well-intentioned editors to edit the article and at the same time not allow the vandals to add Bad Stuff to the articles, without imposing something like semi-protection or flaggedrevs. What are your ideas?
While we're at it, how do you propose we improve the edit counts while at the same time focusing on the quality of the articles and upholding our requirements for reliable sourcing of details in the articles? How do we get ordinary editors to uphold the principles of reliability we've had from the beginning?
And why do we focus on edit counts at all?
And, by the way, the recent straw polls about the flagged revisions testing and what to do with the protection biographies of living persons were specifically not limited to administrators, and quite a few non-admins had their say. Did you comment on these surveys?
I'm also slightly amused by the notion that administrators can't have their opinions heard because they don't write articles, as generally the only threshold of commenting on matters in Wikipedia has been the status as an established editor (and you can't usually be an administrator without blending in the landscape). Since you obviously have an opinion on this, what do you propose as our new model of hierarchy? I used to do a lot of work on little fixes before I became an administrator, after which all of my time was spent on admin things instead - why how do you think giving prolific editors these additional menial duties helps things in any way? How do you prevent the Dilbert's Principle model, where incompetent people get promoted and those competent people who get promoted will soon become incompetent? ('cause that's what happened with me, sort of.)
not only is there an option to turn off blood, but you can turn off the web server too!
Somebody apparently threw in the psdoom code too...
because the release date is open-ended?
And since no one knows what the heck the game will be like - if you don't like the over-inflated expectations of what this game will be, you can always fork the ideas and add your own! Like this: "Yeah, I'm sure it won't hurt 3DRealms to spend a few more years to add sharks with lasers to DNF... it would be so awesome!" After that, the users will decide whether this sharks-with-lasers fan vision of the game's future will live on, or die out.
Perhaps some of these forked visions could even form a significant vein in the pre-release history of the game! (Though I wonder if once the game is released, people still talk about the Great Sharks-With-Lasers Debate of Early 2009.)
This comes just a few days after Britannica announced that readers will be allowed to suggest edits and have them reviewed within 20 minutes. Will we see the day when Britannica can be edited almost instantly while editing Wikipedia requires fighting bureaucracy, patience and the right contacts?
Wow, talk about putting a spin on the story! The sky is falling and stuff!
The wait times of several weeks don't sound realistic to me for most articles, because heavily edited articles are also heavily watched and scrutinised - I can't imagine there being much bigger delays on getting up-to-date information on current events than there is now.
Also, I don't believe anyone really wants more bureaucracy than there already is. In my personal opinion, article sighting powers should be handed out like autoconfirmation is handed out today: Automatically after a set period of time after article creation.
But let's talk about history.
Last time when we did a major move to "limit the editing", we introduced semi-protection. A lot of people felt limiting newly registered users from editing article was a blow against the principle of open editing. But also, these people didn't stop to consider what the alternative to the semi-protection was.
The alternative to semi-protection was full protection. Either everyone is allowed to edit, or no one is. Which one do you prefer: Wait a few days to get yourself a confirmation to edit all semi-protected articles ever, or always bother the much-hated administrative nazi bastards and hope they add the precious bit of information to the protected article? I'm pretty sure most people feel the former is more within the spirit of open editing.
Flagged revisions aren't taking away open editing either. Instead, they are a tool to let people scrutinise the new additions better. No one's taking away the ability to view the bleeding-edge versions, if you want them. The idea is just to make sure that someone has at least checked the recent edits.
So what's the alternative horror scenario?
The alternative horror scenario is that no one looks through the stuff. Semi-protection is entirely mechanical in nature: we can't technically define a "suspected vandal" as "unregistered or a recently registered account", vandalism is a social issue, and social issues are solved by social interaction, not by computers. The only way to introduce social problem-solving is to let people vet the edits. That's how real editing process works in real life.
For instance, I used to play MUDs, like tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people. MUDs have been around since the mid-80s, all modern MMOs (which have "multiple third-party yadda yadda") are based off MUDs to some extent,
Yeah, a fact widely acknowledged by researchers and game historians of all kinds at this point.
and yet there's maybe... 2-3 books and a dozen articles on the entire thing.
Call me sceptical, but I'm pretty sure you aren't looking hard enough.
So I can't write a Wikipedia article on my MUD, which had hundreds or thousands of users and lasted > 10 years
Bah, you're just jealous that your MUD hasn't been covered in real publications you read, like the MUD I used to play at, which has been the subject of several mainstream media articles over the years. =)
because we never got an article in the Wall Street Journal? Fuck that.
If you're targeting WSJ, that indeed may be setting the bar too high, but how about impressing a local game magazine instead, as they generally tend to pay attention to more marginal topics than the big media? Surely there are sufficiently geeky game magazines out there who would love to cover the peculiarities your quaint game?
For those who don't want to read the article, just head to http://www.youtube.com/tv on the appropriate console browser.
This is a slight disappointment. It's nice to have a new TV-friendly interface, but it's a little bit stretch to say "Youtube is coming to consoles". You still need the web browser, and the Internet Channel on Wii isn't free. I was expecting a separate free app that was optimised for Wii (or PS3); that would have been more efficient and probably more portable, as paradoxical as it may seem...
Not in an office, but Animal Crossing is damn close.
Bah! Animal Crossing is obviously very dangerous and turns people into degenerate fishing bums, up to their ears in debt to the organised crime. =)
But ROG-O-MATIC plays Rogue automatically... even if you do want to play it yourself. There's no ability to place your hands on the keyboard and take control for an hour, then remove your hands and let the bot take over again. Self-playing games isn't the point - it's an assisting game, such that you can play until you get stuck, let the game take over until you're past the particularly difficult platform jump, then take control again for the boss fight.
And what, pray tell, is the fundamental difference between an assistive AI that is being used for the entire play session, and one that is used for a part of the play session? How do you implement an AI that can save the game and continue it later? Since Rogue is a game whose environment is mostly determined by random factors, no matter how you make it, the AI has to make observations about the state of the game. There's no big practical difference between an AI that observes the whole game and one that decides to get a situational overview at the beginning of the play.
Darcs isn't the most efficient beast when dealing with repositories that have lots of binary files. Darcs 2 hashed-pristine repositories are also pretty damn slow right now to compound the problem. If a simple darcs whatsnew -ls takes 20 seconds on a directory tree with ~400 files and commits go crunchy-crunchy-crunch-done, it's starting to get a little bit aggravating.
After migration to git... git status takes never more than 2-3 seconds. And the tree with repo is much smaller too. Yay.
Oh, and memory use is usually not a problem - there's always swap for that. Speaking of which, ever tried to build Darcs from source on a machine with 32 megs of memory? It was just not pretty. =)
Mauldin et al., ROG-O-MATIC: A Belligerent Expert System, Fifth Biennial Conference of the Canadian Society for Computational Studies of Intelligence, London Ontario, May 16, 1984.
Rogue had a storyline in it - okay, not exactly a really complex one, but a storyline nonetheless... and this thing plays it automatically, in case people don't want to play it themselves! Yup, people have been making self-playing games since forever.
Is it something in his genes that compels a Geek to give a worthwhile project a name that carries a lot of excess baggage?
Possibly! And not just worthwhile projects, relatively low-key projects too! A true story: When I was a kid, I apparently found a sturdy cardboard tube of some sort (probably the sad remains of a fax paper roll). I thought "wow, this will be a perfect thing to blow out candles with." (Naturally, this probably occurred in middle of the summer.) With all due consideration and skill, I wrote "Excalibur" on the side of the tube.
I have no bloody idea why I did that... so it's obviously in the genes!
(Waves the mad computer scientist's cape, cackles manically and exits the stage)
Didn't they make a pirate movie call "The curse of the Black Perl"? Presumably it's about particularly obfuscated legacy code.
No, it's more darker and sinister than that...
When it's released, Perl 6 is going to be sweet and innovative and a real contender when compared to Ruby.
Meanwhile, Perl 5 isn't going anywhere just yet, and it still has its place in the toolbox. I personally use it for problems that are too complex to be implemented as shell scripts but not complex enough to warrant a nice object-oriented approach (that'd be Ruby's turf) or need GUIs and somewhat effortless non-*nix deployment (for that, there's always Java). Perl 5 is still very nice if you want some powerful text processing done. for example.