It has monetary value. It is theft weather or not its 1's or 0's or an actually copy of the software. Copyright Infringment would be selling the game as your own.
You've beautifully highlighted just what a contradiction intellectual property really is. 1s and 0s can be perfectly copied at almost zero cost with no loss in quality and - most importantly - without depriving the owner of their original. So it therefore cannot be theft - since nothing was stolen. The monetary value that software authors impose is as a result of copyright - a tradeoff between the State and an author giving him a monopoly on his creation for a limited time. The real problem is that scarcity in the digital world doesn't exist, but that the baggage of copyright treats it as if it does. Result: making copies of material - a very natural human instinct - runs slap into those who benefit from the old system. Authors charging money for copies of the same bits over and over again seems to me to be the unnatural thing here. BTW, copyright violation applies to any violation of the copyright - not just appropriating someone else's work as your own.
Hudson Is this going to be a standup job sir, or just another bug-hunt?
Gorman: All we know is there's still no contact with the colony's Web server. In the meantime I want you all to look at this book on Web security. It's just been reviewed by zenomorph.
Over and over, I see posts that seem content to write off RIAA and MPAA representatives as idiots who simply don't understand the technology. This is a grevious mistake.
They may not be idiots but the music and movie industry certainly do not understand technology as a whole. Perhaps the biggest point they've missed is the one that underlies all others: making bits uncopiable is like trying to make water not wet. SDMI and DeCSS are the poster children of this attitude.
These people are very, very smart. And they know how to work the system. They are playing the game their way, and if we're not careful, they will win.
Oh I agree that they're very smart and know how to work the system, but their skill is in the political and legal arenas.
We have to fight this war on their territory. Yes. By giving money to the EFF and let them do their job. We should get on with writing, documenting, testing and debugging freely available software while encouraging hardware vendors that support it and boycotting those that don't.
Anytime someone gets another program running under xbox linux you get a new article on/.. What is so surprising?
Probably because it's one of the fundamental drivers of OSS development - the "hey wouldn't it be cool if..." attitude. Linus originally thought it would be cool to have a Unix like OS on 386s. Scratching an itch may have its limitations when it comes to things that OSS is bad at - like user-friendliness - but it's still the driving force behind this kind of porting effort.
Don't confine doublethink like that - it applies just about everywhere:
believing that the masses must prevail while wanting government to be ruled by an intellectual elite
abhoring violence but supporting a just war
pro-death penalty but anti-abortion
the MPAA are evil but Lord of the Rings is cool
the RIAA are evil but that new Goggly Googols album kicks ass!
trusting the media until they report on your area of expertise
We all do it. I have held and still hold some of these views simultaneously. I think it's related to thinking in general: in the past, people knew when something was correct or proven and were willing to change their behaviours as a result of a pure line of thought. This trait has all but disappeared in the last 50 years.
"Doom Music" is superb - I bought a copy for myself and a friend a few years ago. Easily worth the $15 or so it cost - plus I got a nice personal letter from the Man himself when he shipped my order. If you want a nice selection of Bobby Prince tracks, including some from that album you can go here.
The bill will set up a section 21 company to control the.za domain. The government won't be doing it, or handing it to the incompetent IT division. They will be dictating policy to a company board.
You have to ask yourself though: what for? Namespace is already a section 21 company (note to non-SA readers: this is your basic non-profit org) with a clear policy of accountability, trusteeship and inclusivity. Anyone with a.za domain can become a member for the measly fee of $2 a year. From section 2.1 of it's policy document:
2.4. The Company, through the board, acts as the 'trustee' of the ZA domain namespace. No 'right' in or 'ownership' of a subdomain of ZA vests in any person or organisation.
This is entirely in line with ICANN's RFC 1591 (now called something else - can't remember right now).
The quotes about prosperity and Internet access are a media fuckup because they are completely out of context. They refer to the bill in general, which provides for better access to the underprivlidged, and recognition of the legal status of Internet communications. The comments do not apply to section X.
They are 100% in context. The Department of Communications has repeatedly stated that section X - control of.za by a Government-appointed and overseen body - is a key part of getting Internet access to all in South Africa. As for whether the bill in general provides for better access to the underprivileged, it's pretty clear that DNS doesn't, I'll let Mike Lawrie's FAQ answer that one: Q. The government has implied that control by the government of the ZA domain name system will facilitate bringing the Internet to everyone in South Africa.
A. That is highly unlikely.
There is nothing about the DNS that provides Internet connectivity. What is needed to achieve the Minister's noble objectives are a computer, appropriate software, a telephone or leased data circuit, a subscription to an ISP service, and some assistance in getting started. Only then might (might) the issue of a domain name become relevant in the matter of universal rollout of Internet services.
The "local internet community" you refer to are Namespace ZA, who are: 1. backed by industry interests, who don't want to see their monopoly as registrars threatened or be made to do more work by having to replace their shitty dispute resolution policities with something which is actually fair and legally sound;
Namespace are a proposed section 21 company that has its board elected by its members in a democratic manner in line with the Companies Act, that is open to any citizen and any resident of the country. Details have been open to public (and government) scrutiny for over a year on www.namespace.org.za. Government has repeatedly been invited to participate (for a number of years now) in the administration of the domain name system and has not even bothered to attend meetings.
2. represent a community of mainly technically oriented individuals, who are known to have an anti-government stance when it comes to regulation,
Yeah they do and with good reason. Again, Mike Lawrie says it better than I:
Ask yourself whether the government has a good track record on such things as dealing with AIDS, where the very lives of the population it serves have been used as a political football, and what track record will they have on the domain name system.
and don't really give a shit about apply ZA policy and law to domain ownership.
Erm, ICANN has extraordinarily strict rules about policy and domain ownership. Should these rules have been broken at any time since Mike Lawrie organised us the.za domain (for twas he who first started it), we would have heard by now. And you're wrong anyway. Namespace and Mike Lawrie are only too keen to construct an open and public method for domain and legal resolution. Read their charter if this is any way unclear.
You didn't need to mention you were a journalist: your complete lack of factual information or the ability to tell media hype from actual evidence make it obvious that you are one.
Heh - you'll have to do better than that. I could just as well ask what some little role-playing twerp from Durban who can't spell or get laid (as described in nauseating detail on your own Web site) is doing commenting on the domain name resolution. You don't even own your own domain:)
Moderators, what are you smoking?
on
OGRE GPL'ed 3D Engine
·
· Score: 4, Informative
It's a nice piece of work, but it solves a problem that nobody needed solved.
I'm glad you don't have a problem with calculating and drawing all visible polygons in a 50 000 poly-based world as quickly as possible. Some of us do.
Ogre is a "high-level scene graph engine". This is a level above a standard 3D rendering API, like OpenGL, but a level below a general-purpose game engine. Unfortunately, while high level scene graph engines seem plausible, they're not very useful.
I'm not sure what you mean by plausible - since Scene Graphs are not just theoretical: they work extremely well for their purpose. They are very useful, probably the fastest general purpose method for drawing large scenes available today.
There are quite a few of these things. SGI Inventor was the first major one. Apple had one in Quicktime 3D. Direct-X has one, but Direct-X is mostly used as a low-level drawing API. One was announced for OpenGL (it was called Farenheit) when SGI and Microsoft lost interest, it didn't really bother anybody.
Meanwhile in the year 2002, there are quite a few scene graphs available for many platforms. One of the best is Open Scene Graph, an LGPLed library which is used for games, demos and high-end visualisation systems. Not to mention Ogre itself which looks very sweet indeed.
You need a low-level graphics API to abstract different types of hardware. That's the real job of OpenGL and Direct-X.
Direct-3D I think you mean.
You might want a full game engine if you're building a game, and you can get those from a number of vendors.
You might also want to consider what 95% of game writers do and that is to select the best tools for the job and assemble them yourself. Graphics and rendering tends to be 10% of the typical code base for a commercial game - the bulk is AI, gameplay logic, resource management, menus, and supporting tools.
But mid-level APIs just aren't all that useful. You have to do things their way, but they don't do enough of the job to justify the trouble.
I suppose if you're looking for a game engine which does everything for you while wiping your nose and holding your hand, then a mid-level API won't be very useful. For a game writer looking to solve the one big problem of overdraw, a mid level API like Ogre or OSG is an excellent solution. Plug it in and it does the clipping, culling and drawing work for you. I know from personal experience that OSG is superb at this job - adapting equally well to visualisation, flight simulation and terrain rendering. Ogre's screenshots tell a similar story. Want a Quake 3 level? Load it and Ogre adds it to the graph and takes care of the rest.
No one here in South Africa minds who controls.za as long as a) it works and b) it's managed according to the RFC and the informal rules that the late John Postel put in place circa. 1985. The local Internet community are totally opposed to the ridiculous provisions of Section X of the Government's Electronic Communications and Transactions Bill.(Some of the other sections are equally idiotic but let's stay focused here). Specifically they want to replace the non-profit organisation Namespace (whom Mike Lawrie consults to) with a huge unwieldy bureaucracy that will cost the taxpayers millions and is overseen by the Communications Minister. In other words, a simple administrative function that has been performed superbly by a single highly-competent individual over the last decade will now be replaced by an eighteen person board of directors whose salary bill alone is millions per year. Not only that but the Government's spin on the whole debacle is that they are imposing some form of democracy on the current evil monopoly that Mike Lawrie has subjected us all to. This is complete bullshit. Mike Lawrie and Namespace have repeatedly tried to get the Government involved in ccTLD administration with no success for many years now. The Department of Communications, led by two politicians whose only qualities seem to be an equal balance of power hungriness, greed and incompetence (Ivy and Andile - yes, this means you two) say that Government control over.za will lead to some kind of new era of Internet prosperity where all people in our country will suddenly get Internet access. A few facts are in order.
The South African Government cannot even manage it's own name servers - let alone the whole country's. Five out of six of them are currently mis-configured or not working. If they do take over and.za suddenly goes dark for a few days because of some technical or beauracratic cock-up, our economy will suffer enormously.
Internet access for all is dependent on our telecommunications infrastructure and policy - which The Department of Communications has - to put it politely - completely fscked up over the last eighteen months.
The Department has not taken on board 1% of the industry advice it has pretended to listen to since it was taken over by the two current fools. Together they have crippled our local telecoms regulator so much that the incumbent phone monopoly can charge what it likes without fear of being slapped down.
And yes, as a South African journalist who's been following this saga for quite some time, I don't mind saying that I'm really pissed off.
Why are movies missing? Many movies are waiting to be reviewed. Others I have omitted deliberately. These include:
* fantasy, magic, and religion, such as The Omega Code and End of Days
* parodies, such as Galaxy Quest and Multiplicity
* movies about the past and present, such as Brazil
I also may not be aware of movies that should be covered. I would appreciate suggestions.
Looks like the Wired team kept the parodies out and the past and present ones in. It does say they based it on his methodology.
But what makes a truly great sci-fi flick isn't just popcorn appeal; it's how well a world is conceived, developed, and realized. Wired's team of serious science fiction fans - led by Josh Calder, who rates films in depth at Futuristmovies.com - determined our rankings by three calibrating factors: a film's power to enthrall and excite (Adrenaline), how well it presents a scenario for the future (Vision), and whether the science behind the fiction holds up (Precision).
The reason why I think they have it nailed can be seen in the superb replay value of most of those films - and the endless debates that they still provoke. It's not that there aren't others which are more exciting, more vision or more precision, but that the combination of the three in the ones chosen is something special.
Writing obvious code is a good idea if that coding style doesn't interfere with the problem. If your code needs to do its job in a very limited timeframe (or under other constraints), then it's possible that the "understandable" code isn't fast enough.
This is a very good point, although bear in mind that the advice is from the source distribution of the Linux kernel which does tend to have to do its job in a limited timeframe:)
I find when writing assembly that it's always a good idea to include a snippet of (debugged and tested) C in the comment header to a function if the code is anyway unclear. It can be read and comprehended almost instantly compared with say, a page of asm code.
comes this advice: Comments are good, but there is also a danger of over-commenting. NEVER try to explain HOW your code works in a comment: it's much better to write the code so that the _working_ is obvious, and it's a waste of time to explain badly written code.
Generally, you want your comments to tell WHAT your code does, not HOW. Also, try to avoid putting comments inside a function body: if the function is so complex that you need to separately comment parts of it, you should probably go back to chapter 4 for a while. You can make small comments to note or warn about something particularly clever (or ugly), but try to avoid excess. Instead, put the comments at the head of the function, telling people what it does, and possibly WHY it does it.
Oh yeah. I prefer crazyhouse where you don't have two pairs of players - it's you vs the opponent with the option to use his captured pieces at any time (with some minor placement restrictions). It's well suited to online play. FWIW, crazyhouse is not well understood at all, particularly the cascade effect whereby through an ongoing capture of pieces or pawns that can then subject the enemy king to check, you can redeem a hopeless position. Knights are especially deadly in crazyhouse, because in addition to their hopping abilities, they cannot be blocked. Strong players will often sacrifice their bishops - and even rooks - for a phalanx of knights if given half the chance.
Some handy links are Eboard, the best all-round client around and Sjeng which is a modified Gnuchess that plays a rather mean game of crazyhouse.
Watching Apocalypse Now is almost as unsettling. I'd seen the film I don't know how many times when I suddenly realised that Gunner's Mate 3rd class was a 16-year old Fishburne.
Granted. The point I was making was that flying by the seat of your pants can be dangerously blunted by electronics between you and the controls. An experienced pilot can tell immediately what the aircraft is doing just by placing his hands and feet on the controls - whether it's about to stall, unusual vibrations, mushing for any reason, or even whether the controls are actually working properly in the first place. Fly by wire doesn't give you this feedback naturally and must be (ironically) programmed in using a force-feedback technique.
the light is stuck in the middle of a confusing, crowded console.
This says it all. Have we learned nothing from the aviation industry? Studies showed that too much computerisation and increasingly complex HUDS were shown be be if anything, counter-productive for pilots - both in civil and military aviation. When a pilot is flying, he (or she - hello linux-loving Jane who flies Airbuses:) need as little distraction as possible.
This also applies to fly by wire. When you fly a manually controlled aircraft like a Tiger Moth, a hang glider or a Cessna, you can feel at all times what the aircraft is doing. As soon as that gets replaced with a computerised system, you're removing the pilot's senses from the equation - a Bad Thing.
I expect car manufacturers to go through the same learning process - and wind up diverting processing power and features into simpler displays. Why they haven't researched it properly is beyond me - after all it's a human controlling a complex machine which takes time to learn etc. - not much different from flying.
I agree with most of your points but the ARM is an interesting counter-example. It was designed by four or five guys at Acorn Computers in the UK. They had just been told to sod off by Intel when they wanted to license the 8086 as a base design. It took about five man years of work - five guys working for just under a year - everything worked first time when plugged in (including all the IO and the peripherals), and they got around the manufacturing problem by licensing the design to OEMs who wanted to embed it. It was (and is) a joy to program for, has very low power consumption and is easily extensible.
In a supreme irony, Intel ended up licensing the ARM from Acorn RISC machines in the early 90s. Right now ARMs are everywhere - PDAs, cellphones, routers and switches. Now of course a 200Mhz ARM running in an iPAQ is a little less complex than a modern P4 with SSE 2 and all its other bells and whistles, but it's close. I think its encouraging that designing a successful microprocessor has been shown to be not solely the domain of giant corporations with billions of dollars in fabs and armies of PHD-wielding staff.
Slashdot Mirror
It has monetary value. It is theft weather or not its 1's or 0's or an actually copy of the software. Copyright Infringment would be selling the game as your own.
You've beautifully highlighted just what a contradiction intellectual property really is. 1s and 0s can be perfectly copied at almost zero cost with no loss in quality and - most importantly - without depriving the owner of their original. So it therefore cannot be theft - since nothing was stolen. The monetary value that software authors impose is as a result of copyright - a tradeoff between the State and an author giving him a monopoly on his creation for a limited time.
The real problem is that scarcity in the digital world doesn't exist, but that the baggage of copyright treats it as if it does. Result: making copies of material - a very natural human instinct - runs slap into those who benefit from the old system. Authors charging money for copies of the same bits over and over again seems to me to be the unnatural thing here.
BTW, copyright violation applies to any violation of the copyright - not just appropriating someone else's work as your own.
Hudson Is this going to be a standup job sir, or just another bug-hunt?
Gorman: All we know is there's still no contact with the colony's Web server. In the meantime I want you all to look at this book on Web security. It's just been reviewed by zenomorph.
Apone: Excuse me sir - who?
Gorman: zenomorph.
Hicks (aside to Hudson) It's a bug hunt.
Over and over, I see posts that seem content to write off RIAA and MPAA representatives as idiots who simply don't understand the technology. This is a grevious mistake.
They may not be idiots but the music and movie industry certainly do not understand technology as a whole. Perhaps the biggest point they've missed is the one that underlies all others: making bits uncopiable is like trying to make water not wet. SDMI and DeCSS are the poster children of this attitude.
These people are very, very smart. And they know how to work the system. They are playing the game their way, and if we're not careful, they will win.
Oh I agree that they're very smart and know how to work the system, but their skill is in the political and legal arenas.
We have to fight this war on their territory.
Yes. By giving money to the EFF and let them do their job. We should get on with writing, documenting, testing and debugging freely available software while encouraging hardware vendors that support it and boycotting those that don't.
Anytime someone gets another program running under /..
xbox linux you get a new article on
What is so surprising?
Probably because it's one of the fundamental drivers of OSS development - the "hey wouldn't it be cool if..." attitude. Linus originally thought it would be cool to have a Unix like OS on 386s. Scratching an itch may have its limitations when it comes to things that OSS is bad at - like user-friendliness - but it's still the driving force behind this kind of porting effort.
- believing that the masses must prevail while wanting government to be ruled by an intellectual elite
- abhoring violence but supporting a just war
- pro-death penalty but anti-abortion
- the MPAA are evil but Lord of the Rings is cool
- the RIAA are evil but that new Goggly Googols album kicks ass!
- trusting the media until they report on your area of expertise
We all do it. I have held and still hold some of these views simultaneously. I think it's related to thinking in general: in the past, people knew when something was correct or proven and were willing to change their behaviours as a result of a pure line of thought. This trait has all but disappeared in the last 50 years."Doom Music" is superb - I bought a copy for myself and a friend a few years ago. Easily worth the $15 or so it cost - plus I got a nice personal letter from the Man himself when he shipped my order.
If you want a nice selection of Bobby Prince tracks, including some from that album you can go here.
It would be hard to dock to the rotating station.
Bah - I could do this all the time in Elite. Screwed up a few times to begin with and destroyed my ship and crew but...OK I see your point.
There's a quote I once read that sums it up:
"Unix may be a steep learning curve, but at least you only have to climb it once."
I think I finally understand what it's getting at now.
The bill will set up a section 21 company to control the .za domain. The government won't be doing it, or handing it to the incompetent IT division. They will be dictating policy to a company board.
.za domain can become a member for the measly fee of $2 a year. From section 2.1 of it's policy document:
.za by a Government-appointed and overseen body - is a key part of getting Internet access to all in South Africa. As for whether the bill in general provides for better access to the underprivileged, it's pretty clear that DNS doesn't, I'll let Mike Lawrie's FAQ answer that one:
.za domain (for twas he who first started it), we would have heard by now.
:)
You have to ask yourself though: what for? Namespace is already a section 21 company (note to non-SA readers: this is your basic non-profit org) with a clear policy of accountability, trusteeship and inclusivity. Anyone with a
2.4. The Company, through the board, acts as the 'trustee' of the ZA domain namespace. No 'right' in or 'ownership' of a subdomain of ZA vests in any person or organisation.
This is entirely in line with ICANN's RFC 1591 (now called something else - can't remember right now).
The quotes about prosperity and Internet access are a media fuckup because they are completely out of context. They refer to the bill in general, which provides for better access to the underprivlidged, and recognition of the legal status of Internet communications. The comments do not apply to section X.
They are 100% in context. The Department of Communications has repeatedly stated that section X - control of
Q. The government has implied that control by the government of the ZA
domain name system will facilitate bringing the Internet to everyone in
South Africa.
A. That is highly unlikely.
There is nothing about the DNS that provides Internet connectivity.
What is needed to achieve the Minister's noble objectives are a
computer, appropriate software, a telephone or leased data circuit, a
subscription to an ISP service, and some assistance in getting started.
Only then might (might) the issue of a domain name become relevant in
the matter of universal rollout of Internet services.
The "local internet community" you refer to are Namespace ZA, who are: 1. backed by industry interests, who don't want to see their monopoly as registrars threatened or be made to do more work by having to replace their shitty dispute resolution policities with something which is actually fair and legally sound;
Namespace are a proposed section 21 company that has its board elected by its members in a democratic manner in line with the Companies Act, that is open to any citizen and any resident of the country. Details have been open to public (and government) scrutiny for over a year on www.namespace.org.za. Government has repeatedly been invited to participate (for a number of years now) in the administration of the domain name system and has not even bothered to attend meetings.
2. represent a community of mainly technically oriented individuals, who are known to have an anti-government stance when it comes to regulation,
Yeah they do and with good reason. Again, Mike Lawrie says it better than I:
Ask yourself whether the government has a good track record on such things as dealing with AIDS, where the very lives of the population it serves have been used as a political football, and what track record will they have on the domain name system.
and don't really give a shit about apply ZA policy and law to domain ownership.
Erm, ICANN has extraordinarily strict rules about policy and domain ownership. Should these rules have been broken at any time since Mike Lawrie organised us the
And you're wrong anyway. Namespace and Mike Lawrie are only too keen to construct an open and public method for domain and legal resolution. Read their charter if this is any way unclear.
You didn't need to mention you were a journalist: your complete lack of factual information or the ability to tell media hype from actual evidence make it obvious that you are one.
Heh - you'll have to do better than that. I could just as well ask what some little role-playing twerp from Durban who can't spell or get laid (as described in nauseating detail on your own Web site) is doing commenting on the domain name resolution. You don't even own your own domain
It's a nice piece of work, but it solves a problem that nobody needed solved.
I'm glad you don't have a problem with calculating and drawing all visible polygons in a 50 000 poly-based world as quickly as possible. Some of us do.
Ogre is a "high-level scene graph engine". This is a level above a standard 3D rendering API, like OpenGL, but a level below a general-purpose game engine. Unfortunately, while high level scene graph engines seem plausible, they're not very useful.
I'm not sure what you mean by plausible - since Scene Graphs are not just theoretical: they work extremely well for their purpose. They are very useful, probably the fastest general purpose method for drawing large scenes available today.
There are quite a few of these things. SGI Inventor was the first major one. Apple had one in Quicktime 3D. Direct-X has one, but Direct-X is mostly used as a low-level drawing API. One was announced for OpenGL (it was called Farenheit) when SGI and Microsoft lost interest, it didn't really bother anybody.
Meanwhile in the year 2002, there are quite a few scene graphs available for many platforms. One of the best is Open Scene Graph, an LGPLed library which is used for games, demos and high-end visualisation systems. Not to mention Ogre itself which looks very sweet indeed.
You need a low-level graphics API to abstract different types of hardware. That's the real job of OpenGL and Direct-X.
Direct-3D I think you mean.
You might want a full game engine if you're building a game, and you can get those from a number of vendors.
You might also want to consider what 95% of game writers do and that is to select the best tools for the job and assemble them yourself. Graphics and rendering tends to be 10% of the typical code base for a commercial game - the bulk is AI, gameplay logic, resource management, menus, and supporting tools.
But mid-level APIs just aren't all that useful. You have to do things their way, but they don't do enough of the job to justify the trouble.
I suppose if you're looking for a game engine which does everything for you while wiping your nose and holding your hand, then a mid-level API won't be very useful. For a game writer looking to solve the one big problem of overdraw, a mid level API like Ogre or OSG is an excellent solution. Plug it in and it does the clipping, culling and drawing work for you. I know from personal experience that OSG is superb at this job - adapting equally well to visualisation, flight simulation and terrain rendering. Ogre's screenshots tell a similar story. Want a Quake 3 level? Load it and Ogre adds it to the graph and takes care of the rest.
Specifically they want to replace the non-profit organisation Namespace (whom Mike Lawrie consults to) with a huge unwieldy bureaucracy that will cost the taxpayers millions and is overseen by the Communications Minister. In other words, a simple administrative function that has been performed superbly by a single highly-competent individual over the last decade will now be replaced by an eighteen person board of directors whose salary bill alone is millions per year. Not only that but the Government's spin on the whole debacle is that they are imposing some form of democracy on the current evil monopoly that Mike Lawrie has subjected us all to.
This is complete bullshit. Mike Lawrie and Namespace have repeatedly tried to get the Government involved in ccTLD administration with no success for many years now. The Department of Communications, led by two politicians whose only qualities seem to be an equal balance of power hungriness, greed and incompetence (Ivy and Andile - yes, this means you two) say that Government control over
A few facts are in order.
And yes, as a South African journalist who's been following this saga for quite some time, I don't mind saying that I'm really pissed off.
Your .sig and your comment are beautifully in sync :)
The GPS is only updated once per second, where as the game is updated at 30 frames per second.
Wait - you mean real life has lag too? Argh! And I was getting used to this real-time feedback whenever I shut down Quakeworld...
From Josh Calder's site:
Why are movies missing? Many movies are waiting to be reviewed. Others I have omitted deliberately. These include:
* fantasy, magic, and religion, such as The Omega Code and End of Days
* parodies, such as Galaxy Quest and Multiplicity
* movies about the past and present, such as Brazil
I also may not be aware of movies that should be covered. I would appreciate suggestions.
Looks like the Wired team kept the parodies out and the past and present ones in. It does say they based it on his methodology.
Zardoz comes in at #12 in the seperate rankings by Futurism but didn't have enough of the other two to lift it into the top 20.
From the article:
But what makes a truly great sci-fi flick isn't just popcorn appeal; it's how well a world is conceived, developed, and realized. Wired's team of serious science fiction fans - led by Josh Calder, who rates films in depth at Futuristmovies.com - determined our rankings by three calibrating factors: a film's power to enthrall and excite (Adrenaline), how well it presents a scenario for the future (Vision), and whether the science behind the fiction holds up (Precision).
The reason why I think they have it nailed can be seen in the superb replay value of most of those films - and the endless debates that they still provoke. It's not that there aren't others which are more exciting, more vision or more precision, but that the combination of the three in the ones chosen is something special.
Writing obvious code is a good idea if that coding style doesn't interfere with the problem. If your code needs to do its job in a very limited timeframe (or under other constraints), then it's possible that the "understandable" code isn't fast enough.
:)
This is a very good point, although bear in mind that the advice is from the source distribution of the Linux kernel which does tend to have to do its job in a limited timeframe
I find when writing assembly that it's always a good idea to include a snippet of (debugged and tested) C in the comment header to a function if the code is anyway unclear. It can be read and comprehended almost instantly compared with say, a page of asm code.
comes this advice:
Comments are good, but there is also a danger of over-commenting. NEVER try to explain HOW your code works in a comment: it's much better to
write the code so that the _working_ is obvious, and it's a waste of time to explain badly written code.
Generally, you want your comments to tell WHAT your code does, not HOW. Also, try to avoid putting comments inside a function body: if the
function is so complex that you need to separately comment parts of it, you should probably go back to chapter 4 for a while. You can make small comments to note or warn about something particularly clever (or ugly), but try to avoid excess. Instead, put the comments at the head
of the function, telling people what it does, and possibly WHY it does it.
Oh yeah. I prefer crazyhouse where you don't have two pairs of players - it's you vs the opponent with the option to use his captured pieces at any time (with some minor placement restrictions). It's well suited to online play. FWIW, crazyhouse is not well understood at all, particularly the cascade effect whereby through an ongoing capture of pieces or pawns that can then subject the enemy king to check, you can redeem a hopeless position. Knights are especially deadly in crazyhouse, because in addition to their hopping abilities, they cannot be blocked. Strong players will often sacrifice their bishops - and even rooks - for a phalanx of knights if given half the chance.
Some handy links are Eboard, the best all-round client around and Sjeng which is a modified Gnuchess that plays a rather mean game of crazyhouse.
Watching Apocalypse Now is almost as unsettling. I'd seen the film I don't know how many times when I suddenly realised that Gunner's Mate 3rd class was a 16-year old Fishburne.
Granted. The point I was making was that flying by the seat of your pants can be dangerously blunted by electronics between you and the controls. An experienced pilot can tell immediately what the aircraft is doing just by placing his hands and feet on the controls - whether it's about to stall, unusual vibrations, mushing for any reason, or even whether the controls are actually working properly in the first place. Fly by wire doesn't give you this feedback naturally and must be (ironically) programmed in using a force-feedback technique.
the light is stuck in the middle of a confusing, crowded console.
:) need as little distraction as possible.
This says it all. Have we learned nothing from the aviation industry? Studies showed that too much computerisation and increasingly complex HUDS were shown be be if anything, counter-productive for pilots - both in civil and military aviation. When a pilot is flying, he (or she - hello linux-loving Jane who flies Airbuses
This also applies to fly by wire. When you fly a manually controlled aircraft like a Tiger Moth, a hang glider or a Cessna, you can feel at all times what the aircraft is doing. As soon as that gets replaced with a computerised system, you're removing the pilot's senses from the equation - a Bad Thing.
I expect car manufacturers to go through the same learning process - and wind up diverting processing power and features into simpler displays. Why they haven't researched it properly is beyond me - after all it's a human controlling a complex machine which takes time to learn etc. - not much different from flying.
I agree with most of your points but the ARM is an interesting counter-example. It was designed by four or five guys at Acorn Computers in the UK. They had just been told to sod off by Intel when they wanted to license the 8086 as a base design. It took about five man years of work - five guys working for just under a year - everything worked first time when plugged in (including all the IO and the peripherals), and they got around the manufacturing problem by licensing the design to OEMs who wanted to embed it. It was (and is) a joy to program for, has very low power consumption and is easily extensible.
In a supreme irony, Intel ended up licensing the ARM from Acorn RISC machines in the early 90s. Right now ARMs are everywhere - PDAs, cellphones, routers and switches. Now of course a 200Mhz ARM running in an iPAQ is a little less complex than a modern P4 with SSE 2 and all its other bells and whistles, but it's close. I think its encouraging that designing a successful microprocessor has been shown to be not solely the domain of giant corporations with billions of dollars in fabs and armies of PHD-wielding staff.
The latter.
"...founded by John Carmack, who is also a founder of Id Software, and the brain behind games such as Doom or Quake."
/. :)
You learn something new every day on