I don't think you ever played FF7's PC version. Even the software renderer was graphically superior on a middle-ranging PC at the time of its release to the PSX version. Having a fast enough computer/3D accelerator to run it in high resolutions and there was no comparison.
Er, yeah, I also work on space ground system software and "math" per se is in my experience so far not even close to the priority of what the developer needs in his skill-set.
Re:Smalltalk and LISP for the History Major
on
Metaprogramming Ruby
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· Score: 1
Very much incorrect. Most computer programs spend most of their time "sleeping" while they are not actively updating the display, receiving input from somewhere, or actively processing something. This is the standard non-realtime paradigm used for almost two decades in commodity computers. Did you ever notice that your CPU is not running "at 100%" all the time?
and you can use OpenAL if you want to have the same sound effects engine on windows
Especially Windows Vista and 7 since DirectSound acceleration doesn't exist anymore LOL
Yeah, sound processing is really quite intensive for a modern computer with some cores lying mostly unused by most video games even without sound turned on.
"50% Efficiency Boost" "promises increased efficiency of up to 50%. "
Please,/., learn the difference between "50% efficiency" and "a 50% increase in efficiency". I come here to get away from the slapdash treatment of science in the mainstream press.
What the fuck are you talking about? The "X times more than is not the same as X times as many" fallacy does not apply here.
Because not everyone has multiple cores so PC games have to go for some version of the lowest common denominator
Which is honestly quite strange, because most games I know require you have the latest uber-$500 graphics card to run properly. I would argue that there is something else involved (eye candy important, multi-core not) in the design process.
You need your hyperbole license revoked until you can use some semblance of realism. BioShock 2 literally came out less than a week ago and it runs at a full 60fps at 1920x1080, all graphics settings at their highest, on a Radeon 4870 -- a $200 graphics card when I got it a YEAR ago.
to be fair, all primitive types like int, float, etc are stored on the stack and not the heap, only objects are
Mostly wrong. That is true only if they are stack variables rather than class or instance variables, and only if they are not arrays (which are also primitives). Everything else is a reference to a heap object.
Wrong. There is no justification for the final comma in your sentence: "Even if using smilies in term papers merely indicated we were at the forefront of innovation in English, the inability of switch to a formal, scholarly register in the appropriate context would make us seem ignorant in the eyes of the world, and would hamstring our international credibility."
Stop being elitist if you cannot be bothered to be correct, please.
It's untenable to provide an environment conducive to true rehabilitation while prisons are artificially kept full as a result of a corrupt war upon humanity billing itself as the "War on Drugs." The first problem needs to be fixed before you can ever expect prisons to evolve.
Clean code tells you how, good comments tell you why.
Fixing the "how" becomes significantly easier when you know "why" the code was there in the first place.
You seem to be implying here that good comments cannot explain how something non-obvious works. Often in software there are tricky sections of code that benefit from both comments explaining why a given algorithm is implemented but also how the control flow works. Comments are also extremely useful to mark spots that need attention later but are sufficient for now, and also to document any type of "contract" that a particular body of code adheres to.
It actually makes much more sense to complain and try to fix things where society is proactively hurting people than when society is just ignoring people or where some natural problem is.
I mean, an organization trying to figure out why someone is homeless is hard. Getting them off street is hard, as is making sure someone just doesn't show up to take their place.
Likewise, curing a disease is hard. We can spend millions on research that doesn't go anywhere.
Compares to those, not locking people up for drug us and not spending money to do so is incredibly efficient. We don't actually have to solve some biological or social problem. We just have to stop doing something.
It's like, if your house is falling apart, due to termites, random vandals, water damage...and a guy you're paying to run around punching holes in the wall with a sledgehammer.
Which problem are you going to address first to fix your house? I dunno about you, but I'd get the sledgehammer guy to stop, even if the other problems are 'worse' in some objective sense of how damaged your house is.
Wish I ever had mod points when I saw posts like this.
I remember when I was younger, my mom was given a ticket in Arizona for going 56 in a 55, which seemed ridiculous, but maybe Arizona is one of those states without the officer's discretion.
An officer can always use his discretion. I suspect that in this case the ticketing officer either had a quota that he needed to meet or was being an a$$^$#@.
I suspect that in this case she was actually going faster than 56mph but the officer was being a tiny bit lenient and letting her pay the lowest possible fine.
Nice wild-assed guess, there, which kinda matches your username. It's good that you know of the existence of context switching but there is no basis for your claim that you experienced "loss of cache efficiency" versus another effect entirely, especially one imposed by the OS architecture.
Screenshots or it didn't happen. You almost certainly failed to set its priority to "low" or "idle" which would have been easy to tell by looking at the process list.
Really? Because hearing that, I'd question your generator's air filter and such.
Re:I can tell you about the game
on
Review: Eufloria
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· Score: 1
Plenty worth the $20 for me because this is the first RTS game I've ever really enjoyed:) I would love to play a multiplayer version if ever one was developed; the concept of a "zerg rush" is foreign to this game off the bat due to the requirement of colonization of intermediate asteroids before being able to reach enemies that are not neighbors. The balance between defense and offense feels good; even a planet full of grown defensive trees will fall almost instantly to a large enough swarm of enemy seedlings, so you must have a defensive force of seedlings available in order to have a defense at all once the levels progress and colony sizes grow.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think you ever played FF7's PC version. Even the software renderer was graphically superior on a middle-ranging PC at the time of its release to the PSX version. Having a fast enough computer/3D accelerator to run it in high resolutions and there was no comparison.
Er, yeah, I also work on space ground system software and "math" per se is in my experience so far not even close to the priority of what the developer needs in his skill-set.
-1 Troll
Writing a wall of text doesn't
Very much incorrect. Most computer programs spend most of their time "sleeping" while they are not actively updating the display, receiving input from somewhere, or actively processing something. This is the standard non-realtime paradigm used for almost two decades in commodity computers. Did you ever notice that your CPU is not running "at 100%" all the time?
and you can use OpenAL if you want to have the same sound effects engine on windows
Especially Windows Vista and 7 since DirectSound acceleration doesn't exist anymore LOL
Yeah, sound processing is really quite intensive for a modern computer with some cores lying mostly unused by most video games even without sound turned on.
"50% Efficiency Boost"
"promises increased efficiency of up to 50%. "
Please, /., learn the difference between "50% efficiency" and "a 50% increase in efficiency". I come here to get away from the slapdash treatment of science in the mainstream press.
What the fuck are you talking about? The "X times more than is not the same as X times as many" fallacy does not apply here.
His point is that there's nothing "derived from" about some things considered "drugs"... they came to us through purely natural process.
The real lesson here is the one you need to learn about emergency brakes.
Because not everyone has multiple cores so PC games have to go for some version of the lowest common denominator
Which is honestly quite strange, because most games I know require you have the latest uber-$500 graphics card to run properly. I would argue that there is something else involved (eye candy important, multi-core not) in the design process.
You need your hyperbole license revoked until you can use some semblance of realism. BioShock 2 literally came out less than a week ago and it runs at a full 60fps at 1920x1080, all graphics settings at their highest, on a Radeon 4870 -- a $200 graphics card when I got it a YEAR ago.
to be fair, all primitive types like int, float, etc are stored on the stack and not the heap, only objects are
Mostly wrong. That is true only if they are stack variables rather than class or instance variables, and only if they are not arrays (which are also primitives). Everything else is a reference to a heap object.
Wrong. There is no justification for the final comma in your sentence:
"Even if using smilies in term papers merely indicated we were at the forefront of innovation in English, the inability of switch to a formal, scholarly register in the appropriate context would make us seem ignorant in the eyes of the world, and would hamstring our international credibility."
Stop being elitist if you cannot be bothered to be correct, please.
Cygwin works fine on "64 bit windows *anything*".
Clearly the one woman on /. had moderation points today!
It's untenable to provide an environment conducive to true rehabilitation while prisons are artificially kept full as a result of a corrupt war upon humanity billing itself as the "War on Drugs." The first problem needs to be fixed before you can ever expect prisons to evolve.
Clean code tells you how, good comments tell you why.
Fixing the "how" becomes significantly easier when you know "why" the code was there in the first place.
You seem to be implying here that good comments cannot explain how something non-obvious works. Often in software there are tricky sections of code that benefit from both comments explaining why a given algorithm is implemented but also how the control flow works. Comments are also extremely useful to mark spots that need attention later but are sufficient for now, and also to document any type of "contract" that a particular body of code adheres to.
You really had to stretch here. One of the most universal forms of entertainment, dancing, is "very unpleasant?"
It's so finely-tuned that it has 0.00 load average, i.e. nothing running.
Amazing, a totally idle system with uptime!
It actually makes much more sense to complain and try to fix things where society is proactively hurting people than when society is just ignoring people or where some natural problem is.
I mean, an organization trying to figure out why someone is homeless is hard. Getting them off street is hard, as is making sure someone just doesn't show up to take their place.
Likewise, curing a disease is hard. We can spend millions on research that doesn't go anywhere.
Compares to those, not locking people up for drug us and not spending money to do so is incredibly efficient. We don't actually have to solve some biological or social problem. We just have to stop doing something.
It's like, if your house is falling apart, due to termites, random vandals, water damage...and a guy you're paying to run around punching holes in the wall with a sledgehammer.
Which problem are you going to address first to fix your house? I dunno about you, but I'd get the sledgehammer guy to stop, even if the other problems are 'worse' in some objective sense of how damaged your house is.
Wish I ever had mod points when I saw posts like this.
I remember when I was younger, my mom was given a ticket in Arizona for going 56 in a 55, which seemed ridiculous, but maybe Arizona is one of those states without the officer's discretion.
An officer can always use his discretion. I suspect that in this case the ticketing officer either had a quota that he needed to meet or was being an a$$^$#@.
I suspect that in this case she was actually going faster than 56mph but the officer was being a tiny bit lenient and letting her pay the lowest possible fine.
Nice wild-assed guess, there, which kinda matches your username. It's good that you know of the existence of context switching but there is no basis for your claim that you experienced "loss of cache efficiency" versus another effect entirely, especially one imposed by the OS architecture.
Screenshots or it didn't happen. You almost certainly failed to set its priority to "low" or "idle" which would have been easy to tell by looking at the process list.
You think the majority of these computers are either laptops or are desktops recent enough to do serious power saving? In a school system?
Really? Because hearing that, I'd question your generator's air filter and such.
Plenty worth the $20 for me because this is the first RTS game I've ever really enjoyed :) I would love to play a multiplayer version if ever one was developed; the concept of a "zerg rush" is foreign to this game off the bat due to the requirement of colonization of intermediate asteroids before being able to reach enemies that are not neighbors. The balance between defense and offense feels good; even a planet full of grown defensive trees will fall almost instantly to a large enough swarm of enemy seedlings, so you must have a defensive force of seedlings available in order to have a defense at all once the levels progress and colony sizes grow.