But Gates is visciously locking them in to expensive software!
I mean, it's not like OpenOffice.org or TheGimp run on Windows -- oh.
I mean, it's not like you can run a simulated GNU environment -- oh yeah, cygwin.
Actually, I suppose as long as so many great GNU tools are available for Windows, and you get the Windows PC for free, and you could totally install Linux on it if you really wanted to, there's no problem whatsoever, and all the "Free as in Love" F/OSS pundits can go back to prosteletyzing the death of Apple.
Well, a library is a place to access information, not just borrow books. The internet has as much, if not more, information on subject X than the average book, and thought its veracity is sometimes in question, it's usually more current.
I mean, if I have a choice between checking out the Chilton manual on my car or posting a question on thesamba.com, I'll do the latter. Computers are a useful tool to keep informed, they belong in a library.
And if more people use the library for the computers, then there's more cause to fund the library. Some of that money will go to books. So there's your cause for delight.
I think it's pretty stupid to call the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation a marketing campaign, for a couple reasons.
1) Microsoft already spends a lot of money on marketing. Everybody knows what Windows is. It's not like having it in the library is going to change people's minds when it's already everywhere else.
2) To be honest, allowing them to USE Windows on a public terminal (probably locked down tight, or riddled with bugs) is probably a bad idea if you want them to love the OS.
3) When my public library, and my local YMCA, ordered their computers, they ordered them with Windows. They didn't get money from this foundation -- so why did they waste money on Windows? Because they wanted people to acutally use the machines.
Not that some people wouldn't use Linux or other UN*X machines, or macs. But I worked in a computer lab for four years. We had some awesome ultrasparcs, some great PowerPCs, some VT termingals and some Windows machines. Any one of these machines could be used for email, and any of them except for the VT could be used to browse the web. The Macs had some AWESOME productivity software -- ClarisWorks, WordPerfect AND MS Word 98.
And yet, a lot of people would come in, and if the Windows lab was full, they'd leave. Or they'd sit down and wait -- we had chairs for them! Some would even come in and complain that we should get more PCs when we had a whole Mac lab available.
Like it or not, people are comfortable with Windows, and some won't use anything else. If you want a computer people will use, you put Windows on it. And libraries, being publically funded, are all about making people happy.
It would be nice to have something less passive and more interesting: a place where people go to get together and think/discuss/etc.
It's called "Slashdot."
Seriously, though, if you want a public place where people think and discuss things, you want to visit a college departmental lounge. The pick-up discussions at my state college's Literature department lounge were really interesting and I discovered some great writers from there. I also discovered that I hate Milan Kundera.
Not to mention that most libraries are pretty locked down in terms of machine security. It's bypassable, but why bother? Most of these machines run Windows, which is only so hackable.
Re:Iron rations and other strange items
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We have been playing a lot of pick-up games lately, and have learned to abstract the gear process to a roll of the "likelihood" that a character has something if they didn't explicitly pick their gear.
Likelihood of having a torch, some rope, or a waterskin: 80%
Likelihood of having a holy symbol: 80% (cleric), 60% (druid or paladin), 20% (anybody else)
etc. This can be done by party as well, which makes it easier. Assume that, as a party, SOMEBODY was bright enough to bring a lantern.
The only thing we're really serious about is weapons, armor, and magic items. I like the way the Redblade roller handles these...you get a set amount of cash per level, which you may then spend on ALL gear including magic stuff. Want a +2 Vorpal Sword? That'll be 98315 GP. If that means you have the sword but no armor, good luck!
My experience with females in gaming is that they tend to do better if the campaign is heavily conceptual, and worse if it's heavily into fighting.
Not that they can't hold their own. But if every night becomes an epic battle with no real story to glue it together, females tend to find other campaigns. Melding the two was always a treat as a DM...especially since the one girl I played with would only join a game in which she was secretly a dragon and didn't know it.
This is some serious FUD. No D&D book is more than $35, and you don't need to buy ANY books to play D&D. So long as ONE of your friends has the PH ($30, $23 on amazon), you can have some awesome games pitting the DM's characters against your characters.
This is how I used to play in middle school, before we had begged/borrowed or stole a 1st edition ad&d DM's guide. We'd roll up three or four chacters, and have duels between them at lunch. In fact, many of my players don't have any books of their own, or even dice of their own. A hobby that costs nothing more than a pencil, some paper, and some friends is far cheaper than video gaming.
Of course, this is a game of imagination, and the more inspiration you have, the better. I bought a book for the Star Wars RPG that was almost entirely made up of story ideas, details and character name charts. At first I was like, "WTF, I just spent $35 on 20 pages of NAMES?" Then I noticed how much my players loved when I'd have each of them roll percentiles, and I'd create an NPC based off their rolls on the Personality, Traits and Motivation charts. A Sullustan bartender is on thing...but a Stingy, Sullustan bartender with a facial tick and an ambition to be a folk singer is something the players can get into.
Re:Some classic Christian D&D FUD
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I recently played a game of 3d edition in which I played Ernest Goldman, a siege engineer. He was Jewish.
The character refused to believe in the pantheon of D&D gods -- well, he believed they existed, but merely felt they were powerful men who had discovered mortality. He believed that since they were each born, they could not have created the world, and thus were not truly gods. Coincidentally, this is pretty much the definition of a god in first edition immortal level campaigns. The character chose to believe in a higher power, one not bound by the roll of dice, in fact he considered it blasphemous to receive healing spells.
Needless to say, he died. Killed "accidentally" by a racist cleric, no less. It's funny how philosophical and conceptual games have gotten since I left college.
Re:Borrowed very, very heavily
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Of course, in third edition, that Balrog would be a CR 20 monster. Despite running from it, everybody would get the experience because they were there when combat was initiated. And though Gandalf, who I assume is 20th level, would by rights only get 6000 XP for defeating said monster, party XP is based on average level. Gandalf, teamed with a bunch of level 1 hobbits, probably got far more than 60,000 XP for the kill, split evenly among the 9 members of the fellowship...and Frodo discovered, much to his surprise, that he was now level 4.
XP in 3.5 is absolutely inscruitable. I *guess* it's more fair...but I don't know if it's worth explaining to my players how killing 4 kobolds is worth 300 xp, killing 6 is 600...but killing 12 is only 900, unless one had a character level or they were ambushed, in which case it's 1,350, etc.
Re:I think we all owe a debt to D&D....
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The Star Wars D20 RPG is a breath of fresh air. It's very story driven, but also has some fun combat. Space battles are damn exciting as are the dynamics of the force. And the concept of hit points vs wound points make the game feel like a star wars movie. In case you didn't know...any shot that takes off HP is a glancing blow, like Leia getting hit with the blaster shot in Jedi. Critical hits, and any hit after your HP are depeleted, take off your Wound Points, which are equal to your CON. When your HP are gone, you're tired. When your WP are gone, you're dying. HP are recovered at a rate of your level/hour. WP are recovered at one per day, more if you're in a bacta tank.
Finally, all classes add different points to your AC. So as you get more skilled, you're less likely to get shot. This is essential when the majority of characters can't wear armor, and even the lightest pistol does 3d6.
Oh, and you don't get XP per kill. You get XP based on the length of the campaign. So if you avoid a battle, you get the same XP as if you'd executed it. So there's no incentive to be an OG killer like in D&D.
Re:Logic, Logic -- Who's Got the Logic?
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The act of observing disturbs the observed.
Holy shit, I haven't heard the uncertainty principal put like that since I memorized the Straight Dope Schrodinger's Cat rhyme in high school.
Thanks for bringing back lovely memories of mesmorizing my physics teacher when I stood up and recited it, start to finish, in the middle of class.
Re:Ask the girl out on a date!
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This is a very D&D concept. If you play some of the other D20 games, such as the Star Wars RPG, all experience rewards are based on the LENGTH of the campaign. Spend three hours negociating the release of the prisoners and you'll get the same XP as if you'd just killed them...and a bigger reputation bonus, fewer dark side points, more force points, etc.
By the way, the D20 rules explicitly state that you get the XP for besting an opponent even if they get knocked out, are turned, run away or surrender. The rules for subdual damage are set up for exactly this reason...you still get the goblin's loot if you knock him out, and it doesn't make much sense for your neutral good character to running around slitting the throats of sentients. I remind my players of that all the time -- by having them confronted by powerful bounty hunters, constables, and vengeful relations when they kill indescriminately. No reason a DM can't enforce a little moral lesson here and there -- if violent actions don't have consequences, how is your campaign any different from some dungeon crawling MMORPG?
I would rather parse 10 pages of xml on startup than wait for the JVM to fire up
Interesting point. Obviously, if you're starting up a lot of programs all the time like most UNIX coders, you don't want to open up a new JVM instance for each. I don't deal with piping or porting, so I didn't think about it...most of the programs I write are opened at 8:30 am and not closed until 5 pm. What you consider a program is more like a function to me...hence why you don't necessarily need OO.
In fact, I think that's the key to most of the pro-C, anti-OO sentiment. You're thinking of programs as things that start, perform a set process, and then end. I think of programs as things that start, and then do whatever the user tells them to do. To you, three separate user functions are performed by three programs called by a flow control program. To me, they're three separate functions of an object, or three functions in three separate objects, or one virtual function of an interface shared by all three -- depending on the context and the similarity of the functions and the data they operate on. Neither philosophy is more correct than the other, but OOP makes it a lot easier to make massive, consistant, ubiquitous GUI applications.
The other point is, why are we waiting for the JVM to start up before we can do anything? Shouldn't it already be loaded and shouldn't it be trivial to load our program with a new classloader or as a new thread on the current JVM? After all, that's how Tomcat and other servlet engines work. Why is there no applet engine? I mean, once the JVM or CLI becomes the operating system...like it did with PocketLinux...
I had a DM a few weeks ago who had us in an ice conical room that had a hole at the bottom which led 500 feet into a pit with a dragon in it. Stepping onto the ice instanly required a reflex save at DC 20 to fall down the pit -- and I was the only rogue in the party.
Obviously, the 500 feet was bullshit. He had no idea how high that really was (it's three times the height of niagara falls, half the height of the Chrysler Building), but in rare form, he refused to ammend the depth or change any of the die rolls. After the third party member fell down the hole and died, I finally stopped accepting the DM's wisdom on the issue and doing what any good player would do: I lied about my rolls.
As a result, the rest of the party survived. Unfortunately, the smugness with which I countered the bullshit offended the wise DM, and the dragon killed my character.
This never would have happened if we had played Boggle like I'd wanted.
Re:Ask the girl out on a date!
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I do think it is hilarious that so many D&D players consider CHR and WIS the most useless attributes, instead bumping up their STR and DEX.
If I had a electrum piece for every player who thought it was hilarious to play a violent anti-social nitwit, I'd be able to afford that Cloak of Eagle's Splendor for my Monk/Sorceror. Are RPGs just a way of working off the player's desire to be the alpha dog?
Re:The flagship...
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Well, Redblade beats that for sure. Automatically generate characters with complete customizable races, classes, feats, etc etc, allowing a DM to give his players a file and have them go to town, making their own magic weapons and equipment if they like. And then make nice HTML character sheets.
Incidentally, I did something similar to what you and your cousin did, aways back in 1991. I wrote a spreadsheet and forms to access it in dbase4. Essentially, I learned how to write SQL to play D&D, at the ripe age of 13. Two years later I accidentally learned LISP to program a "room" in a MUSH.
Oh, and I'd learned BASIC accidentally too...because that was the language you used to manipulate sprites in the Logo II Animals add on pack (IIRC).
Incidentally, I seriously doubt that drawing 2D icons is really a speed bottleneck in the GUI.
In the case of.NET, you'd be wrong. All graphics are stored in the assembly.resource files in their native format, and then resized to fit the image bounds like a webpage. Though end to end it's on par with reading in a bitmap from disk, the task is actually quite intense. If you use JPEGs -- which I do to save space and decrease disk access -- it has to decompress the JPEG, resize it and store that bitmap in memory. Offsetting these decompression, resizing and storage tasks to hardware that already does these three things would speed things up tremendously, as well as decrease the space needed for GUI objects in the heap.
Incidentally, Quartz Extreme is a brilliant idea, and it's one of the things making Apple computers competetive despite having lower clock rates. I am laptop shopping, and the 15" PBook has a snappier interface than the 3 GHz P4 HP notebooks I looked at. The oft maligned "eye candy" of OSX 10 hardly taxes the processor at all. Shame that the price difference was around $1000 (though considering how much more solid the PBook was, that it had a bigger hard drive and was much thinner and lighter, it *MIGHT* be worth it).
I beg to differ. 3D icons are a great idea. They can be scaled without pixellation and will look the same regardless of size. Furthermore, development of 3d acceleration has vastly outpaced non-overlayed 2d acceleration...meaning that displaying, scaling and manipulating simple 3d widgets might take less processor time and resources, as it can be pushed off onto the GPU. Repaints and updates could be performed with little or no need to interrupt other logic, meaning a snappier interface that won't have to block while waiting for single threaded operations to complete. You'd also get "free" anti aliasing, free animations, free shading, free state change on click, etc...
4d icons are also a nice idea, because they can display more information than a stationary icon. Think of the bouncing dock icons in Mac OSX or some of the many OSX icons that change their state periodically to inform you of other information. iCal changes its icon to whatever today's date is. AIM changes its icon depending on whether you have a message waiting or not. Windows minimized to the dock display the contents of their window. Even The Gimp makes use of this, changing its icon to a small version of the window's contents (does this under Windows too).
You're right...an icon IS a picture that represents an application or idea. But syntagmology is hardly "simple," as Ferdinand de Saussure would tell you, there's a LOT more information inherant to a sign than just its name. As long as that Save icon does more than just accept a click, there'll be call to make the icon do more than just sit there. It should react according to what you told it to do.
It's a shame that the bird is not an Albatross, seeing as how the OO.o developers seem to have a copy of Word 97 hanging around the neck of their interface...
Au contraire. Wine is an interpretter at heart (though it is NOT an emulator, which it's proud to tell you). It redirects commands from one API to another. That redirection layer is an unfortunate hack -- a hack that, eventually, Mono will not have to perform. It does perform it at the moment because of the number of P/Invoke calls and COM Wrappers we need in.NET to do certain things (like play sounds) that aren't in the framework yet. But the idea from Microsoft is to get the entire body of Windows functions into the Framework. At this point, any machine that supports the whole Framework can run.NET code without need for Windows DLLs.
So in other words, Mono isn't the new Wine. It's more like the new Java.
They don't want to learn new langauges or switch to a new OS
I don't know about this. I think it's more that, at the moment, there's no POINT in learning new languages or new OS. There's certainly not a lot more money in being a Linux programmer vs being a Windows programmer, and there's substantially more risk in alligning yourself with the "upstart." My company writes software for a market that is almost 100% Windows based, and none of them can or will move to Linux until all of their custom apps will run on it. Since there's no monetary incentive for us to write a Linux app, our apps do not currently run on it. It would take one of two things to break this cycle: a large investment from one of our clients to adapt our whole codebase to Linux, or an environment that makes support on Linux almost accidental while maintaining easy access to Windows functionality. Mono is the answer.
Execution time != usability. I have moved to.NET from Java, and while I miss Java a lot of the time for the efficiency and elegance of its packaging system and enterprise functionality (mostly sockets, RMI, servlets and jdbc), I do not miss the GUI. Opening a window in.NET is nearly instantaneous. Opening a window in a swing app is significantly slower, as is rerendering it when you move, resize or hide a window. That's annoying for end users, and it's why our company went with.NET.
That, and with.NET there's less possibility of a user having a dozen different virtual machines duking it out. A lot of Java developers seem to ignore the machine's state and install whatever version of Java they tested with on the machine, and set it up as the default. WebStart's a good example of this...and several of my apps weren't compatible with the latest VM!
I beg to differ. Win 2k was the best version of Windows ever written. It's basically XP without the the pretty GUI and the obfuscated menus. I mean, you open up Search, and there's no damn dog waiting for you. That, my friend, is sublime.
XP seems to be Microsoft's attempt to counter common problems by throwing words at them. Maybe it was successful in a home environment...but I've been using Windows for fucking ever. When I want to add a VPN, I just want to add it...I don't want to be confronted with a dozen paragraph-long menus asking the details in a roundabout way. I mean, if I want to buy Pringles, I ask for Pringles. I don't say, "Do you have those fried potato snacks that are extruded into a saddle shape and sold in a sealed cylindrical carboard container?"
There are a handful of features that were exclusive to XP that are nice to have...Remote Desktop is one of them, personal firewall the other (though I'd still rather have a hardware firewall). They're not worth upgrading for...unless, like you mentioned, you're still running one of the older Windows with a 9x kernel. In which case, you should really try to find Win2k. It won't insult you...and it's a hair faster, I reckon.
Well, C coding *IS* dead, or should be. Whether OSS is the future or not is debatable, but non-object oriented, non-exception handling, non-bounds checking languages with hand-rolled memory management are on the way out. They're inefficient to program in and nowadays have little to offer in terms of performance. And thanks to the unsafe block, there are ways to bypass even the smallest performance hit by removing all these safeties.
As for XUL...i can't see why anybody who touted the life of C could also praise XUL. XML is a nice idea for encapsulating data in a hierarchical, human readable format, but it's a bad bad BAD idea for user interfaces and anything else where you want INSTANT access to data. Parsing -- or should I say compiling -- all those words into language a machine can understand wastes time. Sure, it makes sense for a handful of widgets (like a web page), but what if you have an application that loads 300-500 per form like most of the apps I deal in? Not only do you have the rendering overhead, you also have the XML parsing overhead for each of them. I'll stick with JVM and the Windows Forms frameworks.
As for "catching up" with Microsoft...de Icaza's point is that while Linux is treading water with its own kind of uniformity and platform cross compatibility, trying to make inroads into Windows apps, de Icaza's aiming to replicate the.NET initiative in a cross platform manner. There's a subtle difference, but it's an important one: de Icaza's methodology takes the newest strategy from the for-better-or-worse market leader and makes it ubiquitous, instead of trying to make a name for himself with a brand new strayegy. From a risk assessment point of view, there's a much better chance that.NET will succeed than any of the dozens of competing intiatives in the OSS community. And there's less work involved. We the power users may not want to get both feet in bed with Microsoft, but for a lot of companies out there it has proven to be a very valuable strategy. Miguel's trying to give them a means of keeping one foot on the floor, to tap the ubiquity of windows while maintaining (or in many cases, gaining) cross platform compatibility.
Which I'm sure was the whole thrust behind standardizing.NET. MS couldn't say that openly, of course.
Actually, most of the time when *I* open a new window, it's because I want to branch my browsing in two different directions without losing my history path. Like responding to a slashdot post without losing my place on the main page.
One of my pet peeves with Firefox (and there aren't many) is that opening a new window, tab, etc, means starting with a clean history. Maybe nice for some, but I'd like a trail of what I did up to opening that window.
In the middle of my password, IE decides to focus the cursor at the start of the login field, and I type half my password in clear view
Many times, this is the fault of JavaScript. Often an OnLoad directive commands the browser to set focus to the username field. OnLoad will not fire -- or should not fire -- until a page has been completely loaded and rendered, else it may reference elements or functions that haven't been downloaded yet. IE is doing what it should do according to this assertion: interrupt the user to do what the page told it to do (if it didn't do this, there'd be no way to run validation scripts, which are an annoying but sometimes necessary evil). Your browser is essentially choosing to ignore the assertion, by either not running the OnLoad event, or by running it too early.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. If a browser can ignore certain assertions to provide a better user experience and still get its job done, more power to it. I do all my navigation with the mouse and get pretty tired of well meaning but confused websites telling me I can't right click because I would steal their images. I wish I could just not do business with these kinds of sites, but unfortunately most classic VW resalers have this kind of restriction...
Slashdot Mirror
But Gates is visciously locking them in to expensive software!
I mean, it's not like OpenOffice.org or TheGimp run on Windows -- oh.
I mean, it's not like you can run a simulated GNU environment -- oh yeah, cygwin.
Actually, I suppose as long as so many great GNU tools are available for Windows, and you get the Windows PC for free, and you could totally install Linux on it if you really wanted to, there's no problem whatsoever, and all the "Free as in Love" F/OSS pundits can go back to prosteletyzing the death of Apple.
Well, a library is a place to access information, not just borrow books. The internet has as much, if not more, information on subject X than the average book, and thought its veracity is sometimes in question, it's usually more current.
I mean, if I have a choice between checking out the Chilton manual on my car or posting a question on thesamba.com, I'll do the latter. Computers are a useful tool to keep informed, they belong in a library.
And if more people use the library for the computers, then there's more cause to fund the library. Some of that money will go to books. So there's your cause for delight.
I think it's pretty stupid to call the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation a marketing campaign, for a couple reasons.
1) Microsoft already spends a lot of money on marketing. Everybody knows what Windows is. It's not like having it in the library is going to change people's minds when it's already everywhere else.
2) To be honest, allowing them to USE Windows on a public terminal (probably locked down tight, or riddled with bugs) is probably a bad idea if you want them to love the OS.
3) When my public library, and my local YMCA, ordered their computers, they ordered them with Windows. They didn't get money from this foundation -- so why did they waste money on Windows? Because they wanted people to acutally use the machines.
Not that some people wouldn't use Linux or other UN*X machines, or macs. But I worked in a computer lab for four years. We had some awesome ultrasparcs, some great PowerPCs, some VT termingals and some Windows machines. Any one of these machines could be used for email, and any of them except for the VT could be used to browse the web. The Macs had some AWESOME productivity software -- ClarisWorks, WordPerfect AND MS Word 98.
And yet, a lot of people would come in, and if the Windows lab was full, they'd leave. Or they'd sit down and wait -- we had chairs for them! Some would even come in and complain that we should get more PCs when we had a whole Mac lab available.
Like it or not, people are comfortable with Windows, and some won't use anything else. If you want a computer people will use, you put Windows on it. And libraries, being publically funded, are all about making people happy.
It would be nice to have something less passive and more interesting: a place where people go to get together and think/discuss/etc.
It's called "Slashdot."
Seriously, though, if you want a public place where people think and discuss things, you want to visit a college departmental lounge. The pick-up discussions at my state college's Literature department lounge were really interesting and I discovered some great writers from there. I also discovered that I hate Milan Kundera.
Not to mention that most libraries are pretty locked down in terms of machine security. It's bypassable, but why bother? Most of these machines run Windows, which is only so hackable.
We have been playing a lot of pick-up games lately, and have learned to abstract the gear process to a roll of the "likelihood" that a character has something if they didn't explicitly pick their gear.
Likelihood of having a torch, some rope, or a waterskin: 80%
Likelihood of having a holy symbol: 80% (cleric), 60% (druid or paladin), 20% (anybody else)
etc. This can be done by party as well, which makes it easier. Assume that, as a party, SOMEBODY was bright enough to bring a lantern.
The only thing we're really serious about is weapons, armor, and magic items. I like the way the Redblade roller handles these...you get a set amount of cash per level, which you may then spend on ALL gear including magic stuff. Want a +2 Vorpal Sword? That'll be 98315 GP. If that means you have the sword but no armor, good luck!
My experience with females in gaming is that they tend to do better if the campaign is heavily conceptual, and worse if it's heavily into fighting.
Not that they can't hold their own. But if every night becomes an epic battle with no real story to glue it together, females tend to find other campaigns. Melding the two was always a treat as a DM...especially since the one girl I played with would only join a game in which she was secretly a dragon and didn't know it.
This is some serious FUD. No D&D book is more than $35, and you don't need to buy ANY books to play D&D. So long as ONE of your friends has the PH ($30, $23 on amazon), you can have some awesome games pitting the DM's characters against your characters.
This is how I used to play in middle school, before we had begged/borrowed or stole a 1st edition ad&d DM's guide. We'd roll up three or four chacters, and have duels between them at lunch. In fact, many of my players don't have any books of their own, or even dice of their own. A hobby that costs nothing more than a pencil, some paper, and some friends is far cheaper than video gaming.
Of course, this is a game of imagination, and the more inspiration you have, the better. I bought a book for the Star Wars RPG that was almost entirely made up of story ideas, details and character name charts. At first I was like, "WTF, I just spent $35 on 20 pages of NAMES?" Then I noticed how much my players loved when I'd have each of them roll percentiles, and I'd create an NPC based off their rolls on the Personality, Traits and Motivation charts. A Sullustan bartender is on thing...but a Stingy, Sullustan bartender with a facial tick and an ambition to be a folk singer is something the players can get into.
I recently played a game of 3d edition in which I played Ernest Goldman, a siege engineer. He was Jewish.
The character refused to believe in the pantheon of D&D gods -- well, he believed they existed, but merely felt they were powerful men who had discovered mortality. He believed that since they were each born, they could not have created the world, and thus were not truly gods. Coincidentally, this is pretty much the definition of a god in first edition immortal level campaigns. The character chose to believe in a higher power, one not bound by the roll of dice, in fact he considered it blasphemous to receive healing spells.
Needless to say, he died. Killed "accidentally" by a racist cleric, no less. It's funny how philosophical and conceptual games have gotten since I left college.
Of course, in third edition, that Balrog would be a CR 20 monster. Despite running from it, everybody would get the experience because they were there when combat was initiated. And though Gandalf, who I assume is 20th level, would by rights only get 6000 XP for defeating said monster, party XP is based on average level. Gandalf, teamed with a bunch of level 1 hobbits, probably got far more than 60,000 XP for the kill, split evenly among the 9 members of the fellowship...and Frodo discovered, much to his surprise, that he was now level 4.
XP in 3.5 is absolutely inscruitable. I *guess* it's more fair...but I don't know if it's worth explaining to my players how killing 4 kobolds is worth 300 xp, killing 6 is 600...but killing 12 is only 900, unless one had a character level or they were ambushed, in which case it's 1,350, etc.
The Star Wars D20 RPG is a breath of fresh air. It's very story driven, but also has some fun combat. Space battles are damn exciting as are the dynamics of the force. And the concept of hit points vs wound points make the game feel like a star wars movie. In case you didn't know...any shot that takes off HP is a glancing blow, like Leia getting hit with the blaster shot in Jedi. Critical hits, and any hit after your HP are depeleted, take off your Wound Points, which are equal to your CON. When your HP are gone, you're tired. When your WP are gone, you're dying. HP are recovered at a rate of your level/hour. WP are recovered at one per day, more if you're in a bacta tank.
Finally, all classes add different points to your AC. So as you get more skilled, you're less likely to get shot. This is essential when the majority of characters can't wear armor, and even the lightest pistol does 3d6.
Oh, and you don't get XP per kill. You get XP based on the length of the campaign. So if you avoid a battle, you get the same XP as if you'd executed it. So there's no incentive to be an OG killer like in D&D.
The act of observing disturbs the observed.
Holy shit, I haven't heard the uncertainty principal put like that since I memorized the Straight Dope Schrodinger's Cat rhyme in high school.
Thanks for bringing back lovely memories of mesmorizing my physics teacher when I stood up and recited it, start to finish, in the middle of class.
This is a very D&D concept. If you play some of the other D20 games, such as the Star Wars RPG, all experience rewards are based on the LENGTH of the campaign. Spend three hours negociating the release of the prisoners and you'll get the same XP as if you'd just killed them...and a bigger reputation bonus, fewer dark side points, more force points, etc.
By the way, the D20 rules explicitly state that you get the XP for besting an opponent even if they get knocked out, are turned, run away or surrender. The rules for subdual damage are set up for exactly this reason...you still get the goblin's loot if you knock him out, and it doesn't make much sense for your neutral good character to running around slitting the throats of sentients. I remind my players of that all the time -- by having them confronted by powerful bounty hunters, constables, and vengeful relations when they kill indescriminately. No reason a DM can't enforce a little moral lesson here and there -- if violent actions don't have consequences, how is your campaign any different from some dungeon crawling MMORPG?
I would rather parse 10 pages of xml on startup than wait for the JVM to fire up
Interesting point. Obviously, if you're starting up a lot of programs all the time like most UNIX coders, you don't want to open up a new JVM instance for each. I don't deal with piping or porting, so I didn't think about it...most of the programs I write are opened at 8:30 am and not closed until 5 pm. What you consider a program is more like a function to me...hence why you don't necessarily need OO.
In fact, I think that's the key to most of the pro-C, anti-OO sentiment. You're thinking of programs as things that start, perform a set process, and then end. I think of programs as things that start, and then do whatever the user tells them to do. To you, three separate user functions are performed by three programs called by a flow control program. To me, they're three separate functions of an object, or three functions in three separate objects, or one virtual function of an interface shared by all three -- depending on the context and the similarity of the functions and the data they operate on. Neither philosophy is more correct than the other, but OOP makes it a lot easier to make massive, consistant, ubiquitous GUI applications.
The other point is, why are we waiting for the JVM to start up before we can do anything? Shouldn't it already be loaded and shouldn't it be trivial to load our program with a new classloader or as a new thread on the current JVM? After all, that's how Tomcat and other servlet engines work. Why is there no applet engine? I mean, once the JVM or CLI becomes the operating system...like it did with PocketLinux...
I had a DM a few weeks ago who had us in an ice conical room that had a hole at the bottom which led 500 feet into a pit with a dragon in it. Stepping onto the ice instanly required a reflex save at DC 20 to fall down the pit -- and I was the only rogue in the party.
Obviously, the 500 feet was bullshit. He had no idea how high that really was (it's three times the height of niagara falls, half the height of the Chrysler Building), but in rare form, he refused to ammend the depth or change any of the die rolls. After the third party member fell down the hole and died, I finally stopped accepting the DM's wisdom on the issue and doing what any good player would do: I lied about my rolls.
As a result, the rest of the party survived. Unfortunately, the smugness with which I countered the bullshit offended the wise DM, and the dragon killed my character.
This never would have happened if we had played Boggle like I'd wanted.
I do think it is hilarious that so many D&D players consider CHR and WIS the most useless attributes, instead bumping up their STR and DEX.
If I had a electrum piece for every player who thought it was hilarious to play a violent anti-social nitwit, I'd be able to afford that Cloak of Eagle's Splendor for my Monk/Sorceror. Are RPGs just a way of working off the player's desire to be the alpha dog?
Well, Redblade beats that for sure. Automatically generate characters with complete customizable races, classes, feats, etc etc, allowing a DM to give his players a file and have them go to town, making their own magic weapons and equipment if they like. And then make nice HTML character sheets.
Incidentally, I did something similar to what you and your cousin did, aways back in 1991. I wrote a spreadsheet and forms to access it in dbase4. Essentially, I learned how to write SQL to play D&D, at the ripe age of 13. Two years later I accidentally learned LISP to program a "room" in a MUSH.
Oh, and I'd learned BASIC accidentally too...because that was the language you used to manipulate sprites in the Logo II Animals add on pack (IIRC).
Incidentally, I seriously doubt that drawing 2D icons is really a speed bottleneck in the GUI.
.NET, you'd be wrong. All graphics are stored in the assembly .resource files in their native format, and then resized to fit the image bounds like a webpage. Though end to end it's on par with reading in a bitmap from disk, the task is actually quite intense. If you use JPEGs -- which I do to save space and decrease disk access -- it has to decompress the JPEG, resize it and store that bitmap in memory. Offsetting these decompression, resizing and storage tasks to hardware that already does these three things would speed things up tremendously, as well as decrease the space needed for GUI objects in the heap.
In the case of
Incidentally, Quartz Extreme is a brilliant idea, and it's one of the things making Apple computers competetive despite having lower clock rates. I am laptop shopping, and the 15" PBook has a snappier interface than the 3 GHz P4 HP notebooks I looked at. The oft maligned "eye candy" of OSX 10 hardly taxes the processor at all. Shame that the price difference was around $1000 (though considering how much more solid the PBook was, that it had a bigger hard drive and was much thinner and lighter, it *MIGHT* be worth it).
I beg to differ. 3D icons are a great idea. They can be scaled without pixellation and will look the same regardless of size. Furthermore, development of 3d acceleration has vastly outpaced non-overlayed 2d acceleration...meaning that displaying, scaling and manipulating simple 3d widgets might take less processor time and resources, as it can be pushed off onto the GPU. Repaints and updates could be performed with little or no need to interrupt other logic, meaning a snappier interface that won't have to block while waiting for single threaded operations to complete. You'd also get "free" anti aliasing, free animations, free shading, free state change on click, etc...
4d icons are also a nice idea, because they can display more information than a stationary icon. Think of the bouncing dock icons in Mac OSX or some of the many OSX icons that change their state periodically to inform you of other information. iCal changes its icon to whatever today's date is. AIM changes its icon depending on whether you have a message waiting or not. Windows minimized to the dock display the contents of their window. Even The Gimp makes use of this, changing its icon to a small version of the window's contents (does this under Windows too).
You're right...an icon IS a picture that represents an application or idea. But syntagmology is hardly "simple," as Ferdinand de Saussure would tell you, there's a LOT more information inherant to a sign than just its name. As long as that Save icon does more than just accept a click, there'll be call to make the icon do more than just sit there. It should react according to what you told it to do.
It's a shame that the bird is not an Albatross, seeing as how the OO.o developers seem to have a copy of Word 97 hanging around the neck of their interface...
Mono is the new Wine
.NET to do certain things (like play sounds) that aren't in the framework yet. But the idea from Microsoft is to get the entire body of Windows functions into the Framework. At this point, any machine that supports the whole Framework can run .NET code without need for Windows DLLs.
Au contraire. Wine is an interpretter at heart (though it is NOT an emulator, which it's proud to tell you). It redirects commands from one API to another. That redirection layer is an unfortunate hack -- a hack that, eventually, Mono will not have to perform. It does perform it at the moment because of the number of P/Invoke calls and COM Wrappers we need in
So in other words, Mono isn't the new Wine. It's more like the new Java.
They don't want to learn new langauges or switch to a new OS
I don't know about this. I think it's more that, at the moment, there's no POINT in learning new languages or new OS. There's certainly not a lot more money in being a Linux programmer vs being a Windows programmer, and there's substantially more risk in alligning yourself with the "upstart." My company writes software for a market that is almost 100% Windows based, and none of them can or will move to Linux until all of their custom apps will run on it. Since there's no monetary incentive for us to write a Linux app, our apps do not currently run on it. It would take one of two things to break this cycle: a large investment from one of our clients to adapt our whole codebase to Linux, or an environment that makes support on Linux almost accidental while maintaining easy access to Windows functionality. Mono is the answer.
Execution time != usability. I have moved to .NET from Java, and while I miss Java a lot of the time for the efficiency and elegance of its packaging system and enterprise functionality (mostly sockets, RMI, servlets and jdbc), I do not miss the GUI. Opening a window in .NET is nearly instantaneous. Opening a window in a swing app is significantly slower, as is rerendering it when you move, resize or hide a window. That's annoying for end users, and it's why our company went with .NET.
.NET there's less possibility of a user having a dozen different virtual machines duking it out. A lot of Java developers seem to ignore the machine's state and install whatever version of Java they tested with on the machine, and set it up as the default. WebStart's a good example of this...and several of my apps weren't compatible with the latest VM!
That, and with
I beg to differ. Win 2k was the best version of Windows ever written. It's basically XP without the the pretty GUI and the obfuscated menus. I mean, you open up Search, and there's no damn dog waiting for you. That, my friend, is sublime.
XP seems to be Microsoft's attempt to counter common problems by throwing words at them. Maybe it was successful in a home environment...but I've been using Windows for fucking ever. When I want to add a VPN, I just want to add it...I don't want to be confronted with a dozen paragraph-long menus asking the details in a roundabout way. I mean, if I want to buy Pringles, I ask for Pringles. I don't say, "Do you have those fried potato snacks that are extruded into a saddle shape and sold in a sealed cylindrical carboard container?"
There are a handful of features that were exclusive to XP that are nice to have...Remote Desktop is one of them, personal firewall the other (though I'd still rather have a hardware firewall). They're not worth upgrading for...unless, like you mentioned, you're still running one of the older Windows with a 9x kernel. In which case, you should really try to find Win2k. It won't insult you...and it's a hair faster, I reckon.
Well, C coding *IS* dead, or should be. Whether OSS is the future or not is debatable, but non-object oriented, non-exception handling, non-bounds checking languages with hand-rolled memory management are on the way out. They're inefficient to program in and nowadays have little to offer in terms of performance. And thanks to the unsafe block, there are ways to bypass even the smallest performance hit by removing all these safeties.
.NET initiative in a cross platform manner. There's a subtle difference, but it's an important one: de Icaza's methodology takes the newest strategy from the for-better-or-worse market leader and makes it ubiquitous, instead of trying to make a name for himself with a brand new strayegy. From a risk assessment point of view, there's a much better chance that .NET will succeed than any of the dozens of competing intiatives in the OSS community. And there's less work involved. We the power users may not want to get both feet in bed with Microsoft, but for a lot of companies out there it has proven to be a very valuable strategy. Miguel's trying to give them a means of keeping one foot on the floor, to tap the ubiquity of windows while maintaining (or in many cases, gaining) cross platform compatibility.
.NET. MS couldn't say that openly, of course.
As for XUL...i can't see why anybody who touted the life of C could also praise XUL. XML is a nice idea for encapsulating data in a hierarchical, human readable format, but it's a bad bad BAD idea for user interfaces and anything else where you want INSTANT access to data. Parsing -- or should I say compiling -- all those words into language a machine can understand wastes time. Sure, it makes sense for a handful of widgets (like a web page), but what if you have an application that loads 300-500 per form like most of the apps I deal in? Not only do you have the rendering overhead, you also have the XML parsing overhead for each of them. I'll stick with JVM and the Windows Forms frameworks.
As for "catching up" with Microsoft...de Icaza's point is that while Linux is treading water with its own kind of uniformity and platform cross compatibility, trying to make inroads into Windows apps, de Icaza's aiming to replicate the
Which I'm sure was the whole thrust behind standardizing
Actually, most of the time when *I* open a new window, it's because I want to branch my browsing in two different directions without losing my history path. Like responding to a slashdot post without losing my place on the main page.
One of my pet peeves with Firefox (and there aren't many) is that opening a new window, tab, etc, means starting with a clean history. Maybe nice for some, but I'd like a trail of what I did up to opening that window.
In the middle of my password, IE decides to focus the cursor at the start of the login field, and I type half my password in clear view
Many times, this is the fault of JavaScript. Often an OnLoad directive commands the browser to set focus to the username field. OnLoad will not fire -- or should not fire -- until a page has been completely loaded and rendered, else it may reference elements or functions that haven't been downloaded yet. IE is doing what it should do according to this assertion: interrupt the user to do what the page told it to do (if it didn't do this, there'd be no way to run validation scripts, which are an annoying but sometimes necessary evil). Your browser is essentially choosing to ignore the assertion, by either not running the OnLoad event, or by running it too early.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. If a browser can ignore certain assertions to provide a better user experience and still get its job done, more power to it. I do all my navigation with the mouse and get pretty tired of well meaning but confused websites telling me I can't right click because I would steal their images. I wish I could just not do business with these kinds of sites, but unfortunately most classic VW resalers have this kind of restriction...