Networking: Extended-range Daisy Chain and Star topologies. Entire home and in-room coverage as well as commercial and industrial installations.
Sounds really, really nice if it works out. Personally I have both a TV and projector in the same room, running signals to both requires quite a bit of tweaking. This would make it possible to simply plug devices into the network and it would work.
Moffat also did The empty child/The doctor dances in the first season and Silence in the library/Forest of the dead in season 4. Considering he consistently made awesome episodes in the past I was very pleased that he's now main producer of the show.
Personally I consider both Blink and Girl in the fireplace to be extremely good. For me Blink wins out by a bit; but that's just me. What's fascinating is that Blink doesn't follow the normal Dr Who cast all that much, but he manages to introduce us to several new people and make us care more about them in 45 minutes than most shows manage for their standard cast in several seasons.
For starting Doctor Who I'd recommend going with the 2005 reboot. Every season after that kind of builds on top of it, and while the episodes are largely separate there are a lot of continuing plots as well. If you want some of the backstory I recommend watching the "Doctor Who Confidential" episodes as well. There is one for every episode and it's as 1 hour per episode. These give a lot of information and flash backs into the vast Dr Who library as well as interviews with the cast and former cast of the show. It really is an impressive "behind the scenes" presentation.
Honestly, and kind of sadly, I think Palm is already "dead company walking".
They haven't managed to get their SDK out yet. They haven't launched in all of Europe yet. I'm sure that they'll be able to get a small market but they'll have a really hard time growing beyond the fringe. Consider that Palm is already a pretty small company and they have to take on all the other phone manufacturers together (since they run Android, besides Nokia and Apple).
Palm's problem is that while Nokia and Apple are hugely successful, they are not. And while Nokia and Apple have been making a lot of money the last few years, they have not.
Honestly I think the best they can do is to offer a WebApp app for Android and hope it takes off that way. That way they can get people to make neat little apps and widgets easily and still get a big market (Android) while Palm gets some apps for their devices as well.
First off, the NDK on Android allows you to run C code on Android.devices. You'll still have to add some Java to wrap the C code, but that's mainly for input handling and such.
And yes, the Android market is more complex than iPhone. But OTOH you can target specific sizes as well. (Eg most new and upcoming high performance Android devices have large screens. So if your game targets performance then you might just target that form factor.)
What would make good sense if you are currently making games is to keep track of how things work on Android and perhaps structure future projects in a way to make future porting to Android easier.
While there are more iPhone OS devices out today the Android market is just beginning to take off. (Android has only been on the market for 1 year compared to almost 2.5 for iPhone.) If you have a small selection of solid games/apps now for Android that will give you a great advantage later on when the market increases.
You're welcome. (Android NDK allows for native development.)
You still need a Java wrapper to handle communication with Android (keypresses and such) but the game can be written entirely in C/C++.
I'd say as far as development friendliness you should take into account that you can develop for Android on many platforms. For iPhone you must have OSX.
Operating systems tend to ignore things which the BIOS tells them because they are not reliable. It's a lot easier and more robust to have the OS detect disks and memory than the BIOS.
So it takes the BIOS quite a lot of time to do something which isn't used anyways.
I believe the majority of the criticism of Sony is that they handled the launch poorly. With a bit more thinking and planning they could have averted a lot of the problems. (If you read the article it's apparent that it wasn't a very happy place to camp. Just the fact that they had the queue blocking the street which caused problem when traffic was passing is a bit bad. They also needed to have security guards to keep people from cutting in line and in general ensure that there was some order.
It reminds me of the video of when a school in the US was selling their old Mac hardware. As they opened the gates people were trampled in the chaos that ensured.
How could it have been done better? How about having a ticket system? You know, those that are used in pretty much any other location with long queues. Instead of having everyone stand in a long line let them stand in a shorter line and give them a ticket. They can then mill about while they are waiting for their turn. Naturally you can't just write numbers on a piece of paper as that would allow for easy forgery, but that can be circumvented.
Q: Isn't this just putting the paging file onto a flash disk? A: Not really - the file is still backed on disk. This is a cache - if the data is not found in the ReadyBoost cache, we fall back to the HDD.
I interpret this as ReadyBoost is a cache of your swap file. Do you have a site which explains in more detail what it is caching? (If it is not the page file.)
DSLRs have already surpassed 35mm equivalents. Full format dSLRs are currently competing with medium format cameras.
There are areas where film has a slight edge (HDR black and white) but that's also being challenged.
For the record I also have experience with developing film manually. Considering the time and work (and cancer from the nasty chemicals) that you avoid with a digital work flow there are just not many benefits from film anymore.
Every extention contains a small descriptor file which describes the extention. In this file there is also a field that state which versions the extention is verified for, it is actually this field which needs updating.
On the Ars forum there was a link to a "Nightly Build something" extention which makes it possible to override this check.
You can also unpack the extention and fix it yourself.
I was just going to write a clever retort to that post but then I found you had already done it better than I would have.
It kind of makes sense that if you are going to live or work in a neighbourhood the first thing to do might not be to piss everyone off.
I know that in the cities that I live and work (in Sweden) there are quite strict rules regarding what you build where. Basically you are not allowed to build buildings which are significantly taller than the neighbouring houses. There are also some restrictions on the look of your building. (So building a replica of a Greek temple in the middle of a modern city is not allowed.)
I'm going to fly out from Heathrow today (to Copenhagen). I'm kind of worried that I may not be able to get my laptop and camera on the plane. They have eased up on restrictions a bit but it's still quite silly.
They had a bit about it last night on "Mock the News": Q: What does "lipstick, vaseline and jam" in common? A: "Things a wizard could use to blow up a plane."
So I guess a more sensible thing to do would to bad people with magical training (and McGuyver) from flying. It would be about as effective as the current method.
Modern languages do make GUIs kind of hard. But OTOH they make it a lot easier to do all sorts of things which were just not possible in BASIC. Such as network/WWW access.
I skimmed the article but I really wanted to smack him. No-one ships BASIC today because BASIC fucking sucks. As has already been pointed out pretty much any modern scripting language outclasses BASIC on all accounts except perhaps that it's not the first thing you see on the command line.
I'd say that it's a lot easier to play around with computers today than when I was a kid. Sure you could do the really simple stuff back then but if you wanted to do something interesting (sound, graphics etc) then it got really hard, really fast.
32" is no longer considered "big". I know when I got my 32" SD-CRT is sure was big. But today most LCD/Plasma sets begin at 32" and go up.
I also use a prjector now and the 32" screen is puny in comparison. And on that screen (a little over 2m horizontal, not sure how many inches diag that makes it) the lack of resolution in DVDs become apparent.
Oh I believe that you are correct regarding the shadows. But I'm not a graphic designer and I never noticed something like that. And I'm willing to bet that most people here on Slashdot are the same. So while your comments are valid I don't think anyone here cares. To find someone that cares you'd need to go to, you guessed it, forums for projects like Tango.
And when coders comment on code (which I rarely see here on Slashdot) or someone comments on inaccuracies in Wikipedia or someone finds a bug in a program what do everyone here inevitably say? "Did you fix it or file a bug report?"
Personally I find people who complain and then don't do anything about it just plain arrogant. Nobody is expecting that you give a free seminar to them. But perhaps you should consider that many working on OSS projects actually have high-paying jobs. Personally I find it rewarding enough to share what I know with other people. And since I don't know everything (yet) it gives me an opportunity to learn new stuff from other people at the same time.
BTW if you had contacted them or looked at their mailing-list you would have found that they already know. The reason they are not doing it right now (and that there is no shadow policy in their guidelines) is that the OSS toolkit doesn't support a good way of making them.
I though the discussion was about Gnome 2.16. Then it turned to a rant about how much a icon set made by a third party (which is available in Gnome) sucks because they use elliptical shadows instead of more realistic ones.
Who cares about that? Well I guess the op does, so that one. Personally I had never noticed if he hadn't said so. And I imagine most users are like that.
Hence comlaining about it here isn't going to help. If he wants it fixed then complain about it on their forums.
So basically, what you are saying is that you don't really want them to do better. (In that case you'd just mail them directly.) You just want to sound clever?
Because everyone knows that after 30 years of being the industry's top dog, C++ doesn't have any libraries yet...
Of course C++ has libraries. It has a ton of them and a lot of them do the same things but slightly differently.
That makes it a daunting task for a newcomer as you have a lot of APIs to sort through. There is also a very real chance that you just can't find a library that's out there which you need.
Or they actually understand its power. Heaven forbid. But that's neither here or there: I'm talking to a person that actually advocates the use of a Microsoft standard (C#). Like they'll never abuse that power to further backstab competition. I mean, let's look at their track record here... Yeah, I've stopped expecting people to look at the long run anymore. Whatever.
No, it's not a "Microsoft standard" it's A standard. And let's look at their track record, how many of the things they have submitted to ECMA have they later tried to remove? Seriously, it's people like you that are spraying FUD all over the place in this case.
Naturally C#/Mono will not be identical to C#/.Net as the.Net platform has some stuff that are not opened up. However that doesn't mean that C#/Mono is useless.
Well yes, that is true. But most modern computers ship with dual core processors. There you have a spare processor which (at this moment) is completely unused by games. If you code AI routines towards using that instead then you'll likely get a much bigger performance boost and a lot more people will be able to use it.
Pretty much all new gaming PCs now are dual core. And it will be a long time until we see even a few with AI cards.
Furterhmore it seems like the current trend is to simply put more cores on there. So if AI coprocessors want to get in the game they'll have to be a lot better at what they do than the CPU. Currently I don't see that happening.
I used to think so too. Then I started looking at some C# projects for Mono. It's really a nice language and you get in CLR support for Boo (small scripting language) and Python, not sure about Ruby (yet).
Seriously, there is no point in using C++ for UI driven programs anymore. If you really need to have minimal CPU and memory requirements then sure, but otherwise you're just making things hard for yourself.
Possibly the most important thing about moving to C# is that the level of entry is a lot lower than for C++. OOTB you have a functional language with a bunch of libraries. GNOME is also moving towards being really i18n compatible. Unicode support is NOT FUN in most languages. You really need to have it built in from the start (like with C#/Mono).
Personally I think most people that go on and on about how you need C++ for UI programs are either too comfy to learn a new (possibly better) language. Or they just repeat what other people say.
For the record I think C++ is a kludgy language. But it has it's uses.
What? A* finds the optimal solution as long as the heuristic is valid. There are better algorithms of course, but to claim that you might as well brute force is just silly.
Or perhaps I just completely misunderstood your statement?
Slashdot Mirror
According to the PDF someone else linked to, yes.
Networking: Extended-range Daisy Chain and Star topologies. Entire home and in-room coverage as well as commercial and industrial installations.
Sounds really, really nice if it works out. Personally I have both a TV and projector in the same room, running signals to both requires quite a bit of tweaking. This would make it possible to simply plug devices into the network and it would work.
Moffat also did The empty child/The doctor dances in the first season and Silence in the library/Forest of the dead in season 4. Considering he consistently made awesome episodes in the past I was very pleased that he's now main producer of the show.
Personally I consider both Blink and Girl in the fireplace to be extremely good. For me Blink wins out by a bit; but that's just me. What's fascinating is that Blink doesn't follow the normal Dr Who cast all that much, but he manages to introduce us to several new people and make us care more about them in 45 minutes than most shows manage for their standard cast in several seasons.
For starting Doctor Who I'd recommend going with the 2005 reboot. Every season after that kind of builds on top of it, and while the episodes are largely separate there are a lot of continuing plots as well. If you want some of the backstory I recommend watching the "Doctor Who Confidential" episodes as well. There is one for every episode and it's as 1 hour per episode. These give a lot of information and flash backs into the vast Dr Who library as well as interviews with the cast and former cast of the show. It really is an impressive "behind the scenes" presentation.
Honestly, and kind of sadly, I think Palm is already "dead company walking".
They haven't managed to get their SDK out yet. They haven't launched in all of Europe yet. I'm sure that they'll be able to get a small market but they'll have a really hard time growing beyond the fringe. Consider that Palm is already a pretty small company and they have to take on all the other phone manufacturers together (since they run Android, besides Nokia and Apple).
Palm's problem is that while Nokia and Apple are hugely successful, they are not. And while Nokia and Apple have been making a lot of money the last few years, they have not.
Honestly I think the best they can do is to offer a WebApp app for Android and hope it takes off that way. That way they can get people to make neat little apps and widgets easily and still get a big market (Android) while Palm gets some apps for their devices as well.
First off, the NDK on Android allows you to run C code on Android.devices. You'll still have to add some Java to wrap the C code, but that's mainly for input handling and such.
And yes, the Android market is more complex than iPhone. But OTOH you can target specific sizes as well. (Eg most new and upcoming high performance Android devices have large screens. So if your game targets performance then you might just target that form factor.)
What would make good sense if you are currently making games is to keep track of how things work on Android and perhaps structure future projects in a way to make future porting to Android easier.
While there are more iPhone OS devices out today the Android market is just beginning to take off. (Android has only been on the market for 1 year compared to almost 2.5 for iPhone.) If you have a small selection of solid games/apps now for Android that will give you a great advantage later on when the market increases.
You're welcome. (Android NDK allows for native development.)
You still need a Java wrapper to handle communication with Android (keypresses and such) but the game can be written entirely in C/C++.
I'd say as far as development friendliness you should take into account that you can develop for Android on many platforms. For iPhone you must have OSX.
Operating systems tend to ignore things which the BIOS tells them because they are not reliable. It's a lot easier and more robust to have the OS detect disks and memory than the BIOS.
So it takes the BIOS quite a lot of time to do something which isn't used anyways.
I believe the majority of the criticism of Sony is that they handled the launch poorly. With a bit more thinking and planning they could have averted a lot of the problems. (If you read the article it's apparent that it wasn't a very happy place to camp. Just the fact that they had the queue blocking the street which caused problem when traffic was passing is a bit bad. They also needed to have security guards to keep people from cutting in line and in general ensure that there was some order.
It reminds me of the video of when a school in the US was selling their old Mac hardware. As they opened the gates people were trampled in the chaos that ensured.
How could it have been done better? How about having a ticket system? You know, those that are used in pretty much any other location with long queues. Instead of having everyone stand in a long line let them stand in a shorter line and give them a ticket. They can then mill about while they are waiting for their turn. Naturally you can't just write numbers on a piece of paper as that would allow for easy forgery, but that can be circumvented.
I interpret this as ReadyBoost is a cache of your swap file. Do you have a site which explains in more detail what it is caching? (If it is not the page file.)
DSLRs have already surpassed 35mm equivalents. Full format dSLRs are currently competing with medium format cameras.
There are areas where film has a slight edge (HDR black and white) but that's also being challenged.
For the record I also have experience with developing film manually. Considering the time and work (and cancer from the nasty chemicals) that you avoid with a digital work flow there are just not many benefits from film anymore.
Every extention contains a small descriptor file which describes the extention. In this file there is also a field that state which versions the extention is verified for, it is actually this field which needs updating.
On the Ars forum there was a link to a "Nightly Build something" extention which makes it possible to override this check.
You can also unpack the extention and fix it yourself.
I was just going to write a clever retort to that post but then I found you had already done it better than I would have.
It kind of makes sense that if you are going to live or work in a neighbourhood the first thing to do might not be to piss everyone off.
I know that in the cities that I live and work (in Sweden) there are quite strict rules regarding what you build where. Basically you are not allowed to build buildings which are significantly taller than the neighbouring houses. There are also some restrictions on the look of your building. (So building a replica of a Greek temple in the middle of a modern city is not allowed.)
I'm going to fly out from Heathrow today (to Copenhagen). I'm kind of worried that I may not be able to get my laptop and camera on the plane. They have eased up on restrictions a bit but it's still quite silly.
They had a bit about it last night on "Mock the News":
Q: What does "lipstick, vaseline and jam" in common?
A: "Things a wizard could use to blow up a plane."
So I guess a more sensible thing to do would to bad people with magical training (and McGuyver) from flying. It would be about as effective as the current method.
Even latest shaders don't have proper ways of doing tests in the code. You can probably get around that somewhat but it won't be very useful.
Basically shaders are not able to do procedural stuff like:
if (A)
then X
else
then Y
You can get around it somewhat with texture lookups (instead of doing compares) but the branching part isn't really there.
Modern languages do make GUIs kind of hard. But OTOH they make it a lot easier to do all sorts of things which were just not possible in BASIC. Such as network/WWW access.
I skimmed the article but I really wanted to smack him. No-one ships BASIC today because BASIC fucking sucks. As has already been pointed out pretty much any modern scripting language outclasses BASIC on all accounts except perhaps that it's not the first thing you see on the command line.
I'd say that it's a lot easier to play around with computers today than when I was a kid. Sure you could do the really simple stuff back then but if you wanted to do something interesting (sound, graphics etc) then it got really hard, really fast.
I hear AMD is going with 5 cores.
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33930
32" is no longer considered "big". I know when I got my 32" SD-CRT is sure was big. But today most LCD/Plasma sets begin at 32" and go up.
I also use a prjector now and the 32" screen is puny in comparison. And on that screen (a little over 2m horizontal, not sure how many inches diag that makes it) the lack of resolution in DVDs become apparent.
Oh I believe that you are correct regarding the shadows. But I'm not a graphic designer and I never noticed something like that. And I'm willing to bet that most people here on Slashdot are the same. So while your comments are valid I don't think anyone here cares. To find someone that cares you'd need to go to, you guessed it, forums for projects like Tango.
And when coders comment on code (which I rarely see here on Slashdot) or someone comments on inaccuracies in Wikipedia or someone finds a bug in a program what do everyone here inevitably say? "Did you fix it or file a bug report?"
Personally I find people who complain and then don't do anything about it just plain arrogant. Nobody is expecting that you give a free seminar to them. But perhaps you should consider that many working on OSS projects actually have high-paying jobs. Personally I find it rewarding enough to share what I know with other people. And since I don't know everything (yet) it gives me an opportunity to learn new stuff from other people at the same time.
BTW if you had contacted them or looked at their mailing-list you would have found that they already know. The reason they are not doing it right now (and that there is no shadow policy in their guidelines) is that the OSS toolkit doesn't support a good way of making them.
I though the discussion was about Gnome 2.16. Then it turned to a rant about how much a icon set made by a third party (which is available in Gnome) sucks because they use elliptical shadows instead of more realistic ones.
Who cares about that? Well I guess the op does, so that one. Personally I had never noticed if he hadn't said so. And I imagine most users are like that.
Hence comlaining about it here isn't going to help. If he wants it fixed then complain about it on their forums.
So basically, what you are saying is that you don't really want them to do better. (In that case you'd just mail them directly.) You just want to sound clever?
Did it work?
Of course C++ has libraries. It has a ton of them and a lot of them do the same things but slightly differently.
That makes it a daunting task for a newcomer as you have a lot of APIs to sort through. There is also a very real chance that you just can't find a library that's out there which you need.
No, it's not a "Microsoft standard" it's A standard. And let's look at their track record, how many of the things they have submitted to ECMA have they later tried to remove? Seriously, it's people like you that are spraying FUD all over the place in this case.
Naturally C#/Mono will not be identical to C#/.Net as the
Because everyone is a newbie in the beginning and some turn out allright?
If you get someone submitting patches which suck either tell them what's wrong (so they get better faster) or just don't use the patches.
Well yes, that is true. But most modern computers ship with dual core processors. There you have a spare processor which (at this moment) is completely unused by games. If you code AI routines towards using that instead then you'll likely get a much bigger performance boost and a lot more people will be able to use it.
Pretty much all new gaming PCs now are dual core. And it will be a long time until we see even a few with AI cards.
Furterhmore it seems like the current trend is to simply put more cores on there. So if AI coprocessors want to get in the game they'll have to be a lot better at what they do than the CPU. Currently I don't see that happening.
These comments are my professional help, I charge for this stuff in real life.
Why are you making the comments on Slashdot then?
Do you tend to complain about the poor service of a restaurant on the bulletin boards in your laundry room as well?
I used to think so too. Then I started looking at some C# projects for Mono. It's really a nice language and you get in CLR support for Boo (small scripting language) and Python, not sure about Ruby (yet).
Seriously, there is no point in using C++ for UI driven programs anymore. If you really need to have minimal CPU and memory requirements then sure, but otherwise you're just making things hard for yourself.
Possibly the most important thing about moving to C# is that the level of entry is a lot lower than for C++. OOTB you have a functional language with a bunch of libraries. GNOME is also moving towards being really i18n compatible. Unicode support is NOT FUN in most languages. You really need to have it built in from the start (like with C#/Mono).
Personally I think most people that go on and on about how you need C++ for UI programs are either too comfy to learn a new (possibly better) language. Or they just repeat what other people say.
For the record I think C++ is a kludgy language. But it has it's uses.
What? A* finds the optimal solution as long as the heuristic is valid. There are better algorithms of course, but to claim that you might as well brute force is just silly.
Or perhaps I just completely misunderstood your statement?