Microsoft still supports 16 bit dos programs and development. Apple runs software from the *last* generation i.e. ppc. Before that you have classic, before that you have 680x0 classic... but we don't even get that far. On the latest intel macs even ppc apps written for os9 or less don't work. Don't even think about 68k apps. Os9 is from 1999... dos came out in 1981.
Also, as an avid osx user, I can tell you that the classic environment sucked a lot. It took a long time to boot, it didn't support 3d applications, and whatever hooks it had into the OS seemed to cause fairly random problems with osx, like disks being in use so they couldn't be ejected, that would persist even after classic shut down.
Comparatively, I can still play alone in the dark and dune on windows XP, and presumably will still be able to on vista. Microsoft has many flaws, but they are the kings of backwards compatability.
Plenty of people at microsoft go to work in shorts and t shirt. When I worked there I got made fun of for wearing a buttoned up shirt (short sleaves) a few times, seems that I looked like someone from accounting. The lax dress code is pretty pervasive in the computer field whether you are working on proprietary or open source...
Generally the places that expect you to dress up are places which are not technology shops at heart, which is to say it isn't a core part of the business.
Why do computer science guys dress so sloppy? Well, 1. We work long hours alone in our offices. 2. We *have* offices for the most part. If you're stuck in a cubicle, and your neighbor Dafnie can see you, you might feel more pressure to take off your "I spend all my reward on whores and ale" T shirt. 3. We *think* for a living. 4. Few women at most companies. No matter what the other factors are like if you have more than a few good looking coworkers, you can be sure that people will start coming into the office better dressed and groomed.
Square has made a few very good games in the past, few enough that they can be listed in their entirety right here: 1. Secret of Mana 2. Chrono Trigger 3. Final Fantasy 7
You should note that only *one* of those is a final fantasy game, and they have made 12 of them. The plots, dialogue, and characters generally suck. Essentially all most final fantasy games are is mindless mob grinding, and item collection. Sadly for square, this space has been taken over by MMORPGs, and arguably blizzard has taken the lead in this market.
What Square has shown in the past, is that they have the talent and raw resources to create really great games, but no real motivation to do so. Coming up with a good plot and dialogue that people over the age of 12 can enjoy is difficult and requires that they give someone smart a lot of creative freedom, which is always dangerous. It's easier for them to just throw lots of money at artists and developers to create a beautiful expansive world, to cover up how utterly mediocre their game is at its core.
My hope is that Blizzard now feels under a certain amount of pressure to buck their old demographic of obsessive compulsive gamers, and to appeal to an average joe like me who isn't really interested in random encounters, or ultimate weapons, but who just wants to play a genuinely enjoyable game with a cool story and interesting characters. I haven't checked out the latest final fantasy, but I'm hoping that all the whining I hear from the old guard suggest some improvements.
researchers discover that paid television advertisements often present overly optimistic views of products. Very few instances of advertisements by companies urging customers not to use their products were found. Extensive discussions of a products flaws were also lacking.
Later, our conservative commentator argues that this is further evidence of the moral breakdown of our society, and the coming apocalypse, which he says should happen, "any day now."
You are almost guaranteed to *become* wealthy in our society if you are genuinely smart and hardworking, and of course, if they care about such things. When I say something like this, people often get a little pissy and say something like, "how come *I'm* not wealthy then." Heh... well... funny story behind that.
Now if it were only easier for smart people to get laid... Since smart people can get money fairly easily, and a lot of people would trade just about anything for enough money... perhaps some mechanism for trading money for sex could be developed? Then *everyone* would be happy. This is all just speculation.
Bog business and big government fund a lot of the innovation in our society... I would direct your attention to the glowing block sitting in front of your face, and the internet it is connected to.
That's not to say that individuals aren't the *most* important factors in innovation. You need smart people. It is just my experience that smart people either get government funding, or start their own business.
It may be easier for the average guy to write his own song, blog, or whatever, but that doesn't mean that he is contributing to societal advance. Just because it is easier to distribute ideas doesn't mean that it is easier to come up with *good* ideas. If anything I'm worried about all the smart, dedicated, creative people in the world being drowned out by all the morons and hacks, who vastly outnumber them, but in the past were kept quiet to some degree...
What you have to remember is that good ideas are not distributed evenly. Some people are vastly smarter than others. Vastly more creative than others. Vastly *better* than others by any way you mean to quantify better. You may have access to the modern equivalent of the printing press, but that doesn't mean you can publish the modern equivalent of the Principia Mathematica (either one).
Blogs are an excellent example of this. Blogs are horrible. They allow people who are too lazy or too ignorant even to build their own website the ability to spread their tawdry and mindless blatherings to the rest of the world. People talk about blogs supplanting traditional news media in some ways, but this is true only because traditionally news media has become so watered down and useless that just about any form of media that doesn't talk to you like a child could supplant it. Blogs are *not* an improvement over a good newspaper... it is just that good newspapers are hard to find these days (the seattle times in pretty good though).
"How about some built-in speech recognition? That's right, Vista will include a built-in speech recognition engine, and new and improved speech synthesis. Assuming it works as well as it should, you'll be able to dictate emails or give voice commands for web navigations without buying additional speech recognition software."
macs have had built in speech recognition and synthesis system since the 90's (introduced in version 7 point something?). OS 9 had a feature use your voice as a password... of course it sucked horribly. Open apple's version of GNU chess and a little microphone thingie is still available to execute your commands. I'm not sure if osx still has the option to let you control your computer entirely by a bunch of voice activated scripts... but if so it's hidden pretty well.
It's pretty disappointing how bad it used to be though (disclaimer, I had a really bad microphone... one left over from an LC2). It was pretty entertaining as a kid to mess around with the voice systhesis and recognition systems, but then you'd realize that no matter how you said something, the computer wasn't going to pick up on it and execute your little script. Very frustrating.
several times. zip, tar, gzip, bzip, 7zip, dmgs. seriously... just write a web browser plugin that reads tarballs and you are done. this is not a valid reason to make up a custom file format.
really... I don't see why people are so adverse to using a directory structure to package things... there's no reason to come up with some weird ass custom format for flattening everything.
now... on a different topic. I think PDF's are pretty great... for distributing documents to print, and ebooks, and what not... but why do people put pages of text on the web in pdf? I suspect they are just lazy. most of my profs in the cs department seem to be mac users, so I think they've gotten into the habit of "saving to print" every document they put together and want to post on the website. really... pretty much everything will spit out html for you. use that.
I was pretty directly criticizing the "god in the gaps" position. I don't recall saying that science disproves the existence of god.
>You are making the dangerous - and invalid - claim that science and religion are in conflict. have you ever even heard of the enlightenment? to say that science and religion do not come into conflict is to pretty much ignore everything that's happened in the past 300 years. science is all about conflict, with religious groups, with other scientists, whatever. you can't be a scientist and a coward.
I guess I don't consider making totally legitimate criticism of someone else's point of view as "evangelism." Reason is not a religion. If you have some real criticism of an argument I make, bring it forward, but don't just dismiss me as an evangelist. that's pretty insulting.
>Do not alienate the reasonable PRO-SCIENCE religious majority. I once had a roommate once who believed in a young earth... as in the earth is 6000 years old and people and dinosaurs lived at the same time... he was a chemistry major, and if you asked him I'm sure he'd say he was "pro science"; however, his religious views have been disproven and are not wide accepted among educated people. if I made him "anti science" by telling him that, it is no loss.
my point is that by telling the truth you will always risk alienating people who are wrong. hopefully they wont be big babies about it and just get pissed off at you. hopefully they will either point out a flaw in your reasoning, or seriously consider what you said might be the truth. if they don't? fuck them. have some courage and say what you think.
hmm... what I'd like to see on the web is an introduction to quantum physics for non physicists. something that outlines the primary results of quantum physics with some graphical explanation for laymen.
most people with an interest in physics, whether they be physics majors who have taken modern physics classes or not, have some intuitive ideas about what relativistic physics means. however, when it comes to quantum physics, people just think "black magic happens here"...
what's worse is that people increasing will say "quantum physics" and do a bunch of handwaving to promote psuedoscience. people don't do this with relativistic physics because most people at least understands the *domain* of relativity and know that it isn't likely to lead to inventions that say, clean your clothes better, or something along those lines. quantum physics on the other hand is sometimes quoted when selling just such products (I've seen little plastic balls that are supposed to go in washing machine along these lines) because most people just don't know what the results of quantum physics are, just that they are supposed to be powerful and profound, so charlatans play on that uncertainty.
and... anyway I think we all agree that the *public* understanding of scientific issues, on a least a basic level, is really important to the health of our society. I'm sure we can all name a couple of other issues where poor understanding of science in the public sphere and in government has led to poor decisions and general idiocy. popularization of science and science understanding seems like a goal we should be devoting more resources to.
microsoft isn't the best at anything? oh common, they didn't pull that monopoly out of their ass, they earned it. microsoft is king of the "good enough" solution that characterizes the american software market. software that has flaws, but does what the vast majority of people need it to do with a few kludges. additionally, they'ye always done a reasonable job of assuming technical incompetence on the part of the user (although apple has them slightly beat in this area).
microsoft software is ugly, but functional. the fact that *binaries* created for DOS in the *80's* still work on windows, but that I can't install software designed for a different *distribution* linux is a good example of how an ivory tower approach can fail so miserably.
oh, and if anyone makes some comment about DOSBox or virtualizing different distributions of linux as a solution to this problem, I will come to your house and punch you in the groin until you die.
yes. let's pretend that quantum mechanics allows god to exist... because few people understand enough about it to say how full of shit that is. let's put god in all the gaps in our understanding of things then, when we understand more things, move him out of those gaps into other gaps. lets never define what god is in any meaningful way because then there's always the possibility that someone could prove us wrong. let's hide from reality and make ever more complex models of how an all powerful, all knowing, benevolent being rules over a chaotic and sometimes evil world. let's avoid the truth at all costs.
when you drill through all the double talk... they are banning the mention that gays exist in their game? they say that they are just avoiding mention of political/religious/sexual issues, but this is an obvious lie. people get *married* in game. there are christian guilds.
and what, don't gays exist in their fantasy world? homosexuality isn't a political party that can just not happen to exist, it's a phenomena that's pervasive throughout mammalian life for whatever reason. even dogs do it. elves don't? humans in some other world don't? that's stupid.
besides, in most mythologies all or most dwarves are guys. in tolkeins world even the women looked almost identical to men. what do you think that would lead to huh? huh?
in warcraft all the night elves were women. the men were all asleep or some such shit. common, you know they were totally getting some hot lesbian elf action on.
>I don't believe in Evolution. That doesn't make me an idiot.
sure it does. if you said that you thought that the earth was flat, or the center of the universe I'd call you an idiot. I don't see why I shouldn't call you an idiot just because you're an idiot in the company of a lot of other idiots. Your position is intellectually bankrupt. Only idiots take intellectually bankrupt positions. Thus you are an idiot. QED.
Now that I have refuted your position that you are not an idiot, I will try to explain why people who are not idiots take the Theory of Darwinian Evolution pretty seriously.
The "theory" of evolution has as much evidence behind it as any other accepted scientific theory, such as the "theory" that the earth goes around the sun. When you find a series of fossils that slowly morph from one species into another over the course of a thousand years I don't know what else someone who isn't an idiot is supposed to think other than that evolution happened. If you find that nearly every life form on earth shares nearly identical genes, I don't know what you are supposed to think, if you aren't an idiot, other than that those life forms with common genes have a common ancestor. If you can see objects billions of *light years* away, I don't know what position you can take, if you aren't an idiot, other than that the universe is billions of years old.
Thus, we know evolution happens, and that the universe is really fricken old to a high degree of certainty. KNOW. We KNOW the THEORY of EVOLUTION is TRUE. bitch.
This sumarizes most of the problems I've seen in C++. Many people seem to be under the impression that because C++ is widely used, that it is a good language, or at least well adapted to the tasks it is used for. In reality, of the many many languages I've used, it is one of the most poorly put together and your writeup sumarizes why that is.
I'd like to add why I believe that C++ *is* so widely used. 1. easy access to C libraries. all the critical libraries are written in C, so there's no need to do language bindings (although wrapping some constructs in a class is still smart). 2. momentum. C++ seems/seemed like the natural next step to the many many C programmers out there. Businesses want to be able to hire from a large pool of talent. Also, C is pretty nice as far as portable assembly languages go, and so programmers who developed an afinity for C tend to assume that C++ will be just as nice to work with. 3. templates. templates are a really horribly implemented in C++, really just a glorified macro, but they are still extremely powerful and not long ago they were a feature that other mainstream languages lacked. Now virtually every language has a better implemented Generics. C#'s are pretty nice. See Ocaml or SML for a language with REALLY nice generics. 4. the belief that C++ is fast. As far as *compiled* languages go... not really. C++ may stack up well against Python and Java, but neither of these languages were designed to be compiled directly to machine code (although hacks do exist...). However, C is generally considered to be faster than C++, and Ocaml (a much higher level language which implements garbage collection) is about the same, maybe a little faster. One reason for this is that C++ tends to suffer from code bloat, which causes cache misses, which majorly slows down modern hardware. The code bloat happens because C++ tends to over-inline, any member functions in a header are automatically inlined, and because instatiations of templates are often duplicated.
One feature that would be nice to bring along from C++ to newer and better languages is easy bindings to C. If this happened, probably the largest real reason to use C++ would disappear. Here's how I'd do it if I were adding this feature to language X. 1. Define what primitive types in X are equivalent to what primitive types in C. Define a special syntax for accessing non-garbage collected C structures and pointers (similar to what C# does with com objects). 2. Make the compiler understand how to read function prototypes and type definitions out of C header files. Treat a C header file like a module in language X (assuming X is statically typed and has something like modules in C/Python/Sml/Ocaml or namespaces in C++/Java/C#). Now C functions can be called as naturally from language X as from C.
"showcase women who are intelligent, strong, and powerful."
like laura croft! the girls from dead or alive/tekken/every single video games ever.
The problem with the portayal of female role models in video games and elsewhere isn't that women aren't portrayed as powerful, but that 1. every single powerful character is also attractive. many of them also derive much of their power from sex. 2. they are only so intelligent as is fashionable. they are *never* intelligent in a funny and interesting way. they are never so extremely intelligent that they are driven to introversion.
the problem is that the things that make a woman strong in the popular opinion, are still the things that are likely to net her a man.
in my way of seeing things probably the best female role model ever was Lucca from Chrono Trigger. She was brilliant, funny, and knew how to take charge, although not that great looking. They even had a seen where the beautiful princess said she'd trade everything she had for Lucca's intelligence.
of course, as a guy, I still want the hot ditzy women, but frankly women shouldn't care if they're strong enough.
I've seen a bunch of comments complaining about how microsoft is just scared that they'd legitamize windows. Uhm... yeah. whatever.
I think microsoft's thoughts went something like this:
1. We'd spend millions of dollars porting office to linux, and some more money marketing it. 2. Our available market would be the ****DESKTOP LINUX MARKET*****. that's like 6 people. 3. Since linux *sucks* on the desktop, those 6 people can only be die hard microsoft hating linux fans. 1 will buy it to write a review for slashdot bashing how poorly the port was done, and claiming that microsoft is trying to make desktop linux look bad. The rest will pirate it, use it on a regular basis, and feel superior because they've never given money to microsoft. 4. that's about $400 revenue, and a huge net loss
The lesson here, is that in the real world, sometimes people do things for reasons other than a sense self rightious indignation.
The company I work for might be a good choice. We do custom software development. I know we have some great linux hackers working for us who have experience with opengl.
www.pnwsoft.com
Joel Voss is one person in particular who would be good for this project. You might ask our CEO about him.
that's actually a pretty sucky deal. They charge you per developer and per platform just to use their library... there are plenty of free alternatives including nave apis, gtk, and wx.
Furthermore it's pretty irrelevant for a commercial game that's already written against win32 and either cocoa or carbon. He was asking who he should hire to port the game for him. He doesn't even care what API they use.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft still supports 16 bit dos programs and development. Apple runs software from the *last* generation i.e. ppc. Before that you have classic, before that you have 680x0 classic... but we don't even get that far. On the latest intel macs even ppc apps written for os9 or less don't work. Don't even think about 68k apps. Os9 is from 1999... dos came out in 1981.
Also, as an avid osx user, I can tell you that the classic environment sucked a lot. It took a long time to boot, it didn't support 3d applications, and whatever hooks it had into the OS seemed to cause fairly random problems with osx, like disks being in use so they couldn't be ejected, that would persist even after classic shut down.
Comparatively, I can still play alone in the dark and dune on windows XP, and presumably will still be able to on vista. Microsoft has many flaws, but they are the kings of backwards compatability.
Plenty of people at microsoft go to work in shorts and t shirt. When I worked there I got made fun of for wearing a buttoned up shirt (short sleaves) a few times, seems that I looked like someone from accounting. The lax dress code is pretty pervasive in the computer field whether you are working on proprietary or open source...
Generally the places that expect you to dress up are places which are not technology shops at heart, which is to say it isn't a core part of the business.
Why do computer science guys dress so sloppy? Well,
1. We work long hours alone in our offices.
2. We *have* offices for the most part. If you're stuck in a cubicle, and your neighbor Dafnie can see you, you might feel more pressure to take off your "I spend all my reward on whores and ale" T shirt.
3. We *think* for a living.
4. Few women at most companies. No matter what the other factors are like if you have more than a few good looking coworkers, you can be sure that people will start coming into the office better dressed and groomed.
Square has made a few very good games in the past, few enough that they can be listed in their entirety right here:
1. Secret of Mana
2. Chrono Trigger
3. Final Fantasy 7
You should note that only *one* of those is a final fantasy game, and they have made 12 of them. The plots, dialogue, and characters generally suck. Essentially all most final fantasy games are is mindless mob grinding, and item collection. Sadly for square, this space has been taken over by MMORPGs, and arguably blizzard has taken the lead in this market.
What Square has shown in the past, is that they have the talent and raw resources to create really great games, but no real motivation to do so. Coming up with a good plot and dialogue that people over the age of 12 can enjoy is difficult and requires that they give someone smart a lot of creative freedom, which is always dangerous. It's easier for them to just throw lots of money at artists and developers to create a beautiful expansive world, to cover up how utterly mediocre their game is at its core.
My hope is that Blizzard now feels under a certain amount of pressure to buck their old demographic of obsessive compulsive gamers, and to appeal to an average joe like me who isn't really interested in random encounters, or ultimate weapons, but who just wants to play a genuinely enjoyable game with a cool story and interesting characters. I haven't checked out the latest final fantasy, but I'm hoping that all the whining I hear from the old guard suggest some improvements.
researchers discover that paid television advertisements often present overly optimistic views of products. Very few instances of advertisements by companies urging customers not to use their products were found. Extensive discussions of a products flaws were also lacking.
Later, our conservative commentator argues that this is further evidence of the moral breakdown of our society, and the coming apocalypse, which he says should happen, "any day now."
Is a gasoline powered laptop. Now there's something I can play quake on!
You are almost guaranteed to *become* wealthy in our society if you are genuinely smart and hardworking, and of course, if they care about such things. When I say something like this, people often get a little pissy and say something like, "how come *I'm* not wealthy then." Heh... well... funny story behind that.
Now if it were only easier for smart people to get laid... Since smart people can get money fairly easily, and a lot of people would trade just about anything for enough money... perhaps some mechanism for trading money for sex could be developed? Then *everyone* would be happy. This is all just speculation.
Bog business and big government fund a lot of the innovation in our society... I would direct your attention to the glowing block sitting in front of your face, and the internet it is connected to.
That's not to say that individuals aren't the *most* important factors in innovation. You need smart people. It is just my experience that smart people either get government funding, or start their own business.
It may be easier for the average guy to write his own song, blog, or whatever, but that doesn't mean that he is contributing to societal advance. Just because it is easier to distribute ideas doesn't mean that it is easier to come up with *good* ideas. If anything I'm worried about all the smart, dedicated, creative people in the world being drowned out by all the morons and hacks, who vastly outnumber them, but in the past were kept quiet to some degree...
What you have to remember is that good ideas are not distributed evenly. Some people are vastly smarter than others. Vastly more creative than others. Vastly *better* than others by any way you mean to quantify better. You may have access to the modern equivalent of the printing press, but that doesn't mean you can publish the modern equivalent of the Principia Mathematica (either one).
Blogs are an excellent example of this. Blogs are horrible. They allow people who are too lazy or too ignorant even to build their own website the ability to spread their tawdry and mindless blatherings to the rest of the world. People talk about blogs supplanting traditional news media in some ways, but this is true only because traditionally news media has become so watered down and useless that just about any form of media that doesn't talk to you like a child could supplant it. Blogs are *not* an improvement over a good newspaper... it is just that good newspapers are hard to find these days (the seattle times in pretty good though).
more like OV$
snap!
"How about some built-in speech recognition? That's right, Vista will include a built-in speech recognition engine, and new and improved speech synthesis. Assuming it works as well as it should, you'll be able to dictate emails or give voice commands for web navigations without buying additional speech recognition software."
macs have had built in speech recognition and synthesis system since the 90's (introduced in version 7 point something?). OS 9 had a feature use your voice as a password... of course it sucked horribly. Open apple's version of GNU chess and a little microphone thingie is still available to execute your commands. I'm not sure if osx still has the option to let you control your computer entirely by a bunch of voice activated scripts... but if so it's hidden pretty well.
It's pretty disappointing how bad it used to be though (disclaimer, I had a really bad microphone... one left over from an LC2). It was pretty entertaining as a kid to mess around with the voice systhesis and recognition systems, but then you'd realize that no matter how you said something, the computer wasn't going to pick up on it and execute your little script. Very frustrating.
several times. zip, tar, gzip, bzip, 7zip, dmgs. seriously... just write a web browser plugin that reads tarballs and you are done. this is not a valid reason to make up a custom file format.
really... I don't see why people are so adverse to using a directory structure to package things... there's no reason to come up with some weird ass custom format for flattening everything.
now... on a different topic. I think PDF's are pretty great... for distributing documents to print, and ebooks, and what not... but why do people put pages of text on the web in pdf? I suspect they are just lazy. most of my profs in the cs department seem to be mac users, so I think they've gotten into the habit of "saving to print" every document they put together and want to post on the website. really... pretty much everything will spit out html for you. use that.
The Gervais experiment will give analysts an answer to the question - will people pay for radio shows on the net?
?
I was pretty directly criticizing the "god in the gaps" position. I don't recall saying that science disproves the existence of god.
>You are making the dangerous - and invalid - claim that science and religion are in conflict.
have you ever even heard of the enlightenment? to say that science and religion do not come into conflict is to pretty much ignore everything that's happened in the past 300 years. science is all about conflict, with religious groups, with other scientists, whatever. you can't be a scientist and a coward.
I guess I don't consider making totally legitimate criticism of someone else's point of view as "evangelism." Reason is not a religion. If you have some real criticism of an argument I make, bring it forward, but don't just dismiss me as an evangelist. that's pretty insulting.
>Do not alienate the reasonable PRO-SCIENCE religious majority.
I once had a roommate once who believed in a young earth... as in the earth is 6000 years old and people and dinosaurs lived at the same time... he was a chemistry major, and if you asked him I'm sure he'd say he was "pro science"; however, his religious views have been disproven and are not wide accepted among educated people. if I made him "anti science" by telling him that, it is no loss.
my point is that by telling the truth you will always risk alienating people who are wrong. hopefully they wont be big babies about it and just get pissed off at you. hopefully they will either point out a flaw in your reasoning, or seriously consider what you said might be the truth. if they don't? fuck them. have some courage and say what you think.
hmm... what I'd like to see on the web is an introduction to quantum physics for non physicists. something that outlines the primary results of quantum physics with some graphical explanation for laymen.
most people with an interest in physics, whether they be physics majors who have taken modern physics classes or not, have some intuitive ideas about what relativistic physics means. however, when it comes to quantum physics, people just think "black magic happens here"...
what's worse is that people increasing will say "quantum physics" and do a bunch of handwaving to promote psuedoscience. people don't do this with relativistic physics because most people at least understands the *domain* of relativity and know that it isn't likely to lead to inventions that say, clean your clothes better, or something along those lines. quantum physics on the other hand is sometimes quoted when selling just such products (I've seen little plastic balls that are supposed to go in washing machine along these lines) because most people just don't know what the results of quantum physics are, just that they are supposed to be powerful and profound, so charlatans play on that uncertainty.
and... anyway I think we all agree that the *public* understanding of scientific issues, on a least a basic level, is really important to the health of our society. I'm sure we can all name a couple of other issues where poor understanding of science in the public sphere and in government has led to poor decisions and general idiocy. popularization of science and science understanding seems like a goal we should be devoting more resources to.
microsoft isn't the best at anything? oh common, they didn't pull that monopoly out of their ass, they earned it. microsoft is king of the "good enough" solution that characterizes the american software market. software that has flaws, but does what the vast majority of people need it to do with a few kludges. additionally, they'ye always done a reasonable job of assuming technical incompetence on the part of the user (although apple has them slightly beat in this area).
microsoft software is ugly, but functional. the fact that *binaries* created for DOS in the *80's* still work on windows, but that I can't install software designed for a different *distribution* linux is a good example of how an ivory tower approach can fail so miserably.
oh, and if anyone makes some comment about DOSBox or virtualizing different distributions of linux as a solution to this problem, I will come to your house and punch you in the groin until you die.
yes. let's pretend that quantum mechanics allows god to exist... because few people understand enough about it to say how full of shit that is. let's put god in all the gaps in our understanding of things then, when we understand more things, move him out of those gaps into other gaps. lets never define what god is in any meaningful way because then there's always the possibility that someone could prove us wrong. let's hide from reality and make ever more complex models of how an all powerful, all knowing, benevolent being rules over a chaotic and sometimes evil world. let's avoid the truth at all costs.
because...
when you drill through all the double talk... they are banning the mention that gays exist in their game? they say that they are just avoiding mention of political/religious/sexual issues, but this is an obvious lie. people get *married* in game. there are christian guilds.
and what, don't gays exist in their fantasy world? homosexuality isn't a political party that can just not happen to exist, it's a phenomena that's pervasive throughout mammalian life for whatever reason. even dogs do it. elves don't? humans in some other world don't? that's stupid.
besides, in most mythologies all or most dwarves are guys. in tolkeins world even the women looked almost identical to men. what do you think that would lead to huh? huh?
in warcraft all the night elves were women. the men were all asleep or some such shit. common, you know they were totally getting some hot lesbian elf action on.
that's all I have to say on that topic.
>I don't believe in Evolution. That doesn't make me an idiot.
sure it does. if you said that you thought that the earth was flat, or the center of the universe I'd call you an idiot. I don't see why I shouldn't call you an idiot just because you're an idiot in the company of a lot of other idiots. Your position is intellectually bankrupt. Only idiots take intellectually bankrupt positions. Thus you are an idiot. QED.
Now that I have refuted your position that you are not an idiot, I will try to explain why people who are not idiots take the Theory of Darwinian Evolution pretty seriously.
The "theory" of evolution has as much evidence behind it as any other accepted scientific theory, such as the "theory" that the earth goes around the sun.
When you find a series of fossils that slowly morph from one species into another over the course of a thousand years I don't know what else someone who isn't an idiot is supposed to think other than that evolution happened.
If you find that nearly every life form on earth shares nearly identical genes, I don't know what you are supposed to think, if you aren't an idiot, other than that those life forms with common genes have a common ancestor.
If you can see objects billions of *light years* away, I don't know what position you can take, if you aren't an idiot, other than that the universe is billions of years old.
Thus, we know evolution happens, and that the universe is really fricken old to a high degree of certainty. KNOW. We KNOW the THEORY of EVOLUTION is TRUE. bitch.
This sumarizes most of the problems I've seen in C++. Many people seem to be under the impression that because C++ is widely used, that it is a good language, or at least well adapted to the tasks it is used for. In reality, of the many many languages I've used, it is one of the most poorly put together and your writeup sumarizes why that is.
I'd like to add why I believe that C++ *is* so widely used.
1. easy access to C libraries. all the critical libraries are written in C, so there's no need to do language bindings (although wrapping some constructs in a class is still smart).
2. momentum. C++ seems/seemed like the natural next step to the many many C programmers out there. Businesses want to be able to hire from a large pool of talent. Also, C is pretty nice as far as portable assembly languages go, and so programmers who developed an afinity for C tend to assume that C++ will be just as nice to work with.
3. templates. templates are a really horribly implemented in C++, really just a glorified macro, but they are still extremely powerful and not long ago they were a feature that other mainstream languages lacked. Now virtually every language has a better implemented Generics. C#'s are pretty nice. See Ocaml or SML for a language with REALLY nice generics.
4. the belief that C++ is fast. As far as *compiled* languages go... not really. C++ may stack up well against Python and Java, but neither of these languages were designed to be compiled directly to machine code (although hacks do exist...). However, C is generally considered to be faster than C++, and Ocaml (a much higher level language which implements garbage collection) is about the same, maybe a little faster. One reason for this is that C++ tends to suffer from code bloat, which causes cache misses, which majorly slows down modern hardware. The code bloat happens because C++ tends to over-inline, any member functions in a header are automatically inlined, and because instatiations of templates are often duplicated.
One feature that would be nice to bring along from C++ to newer and better languages is easy bindings to C. If this happened, probably the largest real reason to use C++ would disappear. Here's how I'd do it if I were adding this feature to language X.
1. Define what primitive types in X are equivalent to what primitive types in C. Define a special syntax for accessing non-garbage collected C structures and pointers (similar to what C# does with com objects).
2. Make the compiler understand how to read function prototypes and type definitions out of C header files. Treat a C header file like a module in language X (assuming X is statically typed and has something like modules in C/Python/Sml/Ocaml or namespaces in C++/Java/C#). Now C functions can be called as naturally from language X as from C.
another side sign of the decline of the american public education system.
"showcase women who are intelligent, strong, and powerful."
like laura croft! the girls from dead or alive/tekken/every single video games ever.
The problem with the portayal of female role models in video games and elsewhere isn't that women aren't portrayed as powerful, but that
1. every single powerful character is also attractive. many of them also derive much of their power from sex.
2. they are only so intelligent as is fashionable. they are *never* intelligent in a funny and interesting way. they are never so extremely intelligent that they are driven to introversion.
the problem is that the things that make a woman strong in the popular opinion, are still the things that are likely to net her a man.
in my way of seeing things probably the best female role model ever was Lucca from Chrono Trigger. She was brilliant, funny, and knew how to take charge, although not that great looking. They even had a seen where the beautiful princess said she'd trade everything she had for Lucca's intelligence.
of course, as a guy, I still want the hot ditzy women, but frankly women shouldn't care if they're strong enough.
anyway, listen to me. I'm smarter than you.
I've seen a bunch of comments complaining about how microsoft is just scared that they'd legitamize windows. Uhm... yeah. whatever.
I think microsoft's thoughts went something like this:
1. We'd spend millions of dollars porting office to linux, and some more money marketing it.
2. Our available market would be the ****DESKTOP LINUX MARKET*****. that's like 6 people.
3. Since linux *sucks* on the desktop, those 6 people can only be die hard microsoft hating linux fans. 1 will buy it to write a review for slashdot bashing how poorly the port was done, and claiming that microsoft is trying to make desktop linux look bad. The rest will pirate it, use it on a regular basis, and feel superior because they've never given money to microsoft.
4. that's about $400 revenue, and a huge net loss
The lesson here, is that in the real world, sometimes people do things for reasons other than a sense self rightious indignation.
I am awesome
The company I work for might be a good choice. We do custom software development. I know we have some great linux hackers working for us who have experience with opengl.
www.pnwsoft.com
Joel Voss is one person in particular who would be good for this project. You might ask our CEO about him.
-Brendan Miller
Pacific Northwest Software
not so weird...
if you're just some random guy asking for their source.
that's actually a pretty sucky deal. They charge you per developer and per platform just to use their library... there are plenty of free alternatives including nave apis, gtk, and wx.
Furthermore it's pretty irrelevant for a commercial game that's already written against win32 and either cocoa or carbon. He was asking who he should hire to port the game for him. He doesn't even care what API they use.
fanboys...