I can see why they wouldn't want to spend a lot of time on it
Frankly I'm already amazed they bothered to target Linux/x86, which is already an incredibly tiny games market. Linux/PPC is a fraction of the size of that again! There may well not be more than a few dozen people in the world who (a) use Linux/PPC, (b) don't have a single x86 box they can play games on, and (c) are interested in paying for closed-source games.
but this really looks like nothing more than a cross-compile needed.
Cross-compilation is not always trivial. And then you need to conduct all the testing, etc. And at the end of all that, you might get a handful of sales at most.
The simple truth is that no commercial software company is ever going to target desktop Linux on anything but the most common platforms. If you want to use an unusual processor, you're going to have to stick with free software.
No, Java runs platform-independent code in a virtual machine, with no guarantee that any architecture-specific code will be compiled at any point. It provides portability but there's a significant performance cost. Sometimes JIT compilation can be used to claw back a fair bit of performance, but that's not available for all platforms, and mostly useful for long-running server processes.
Microsoft's.NET platform is closer to what GP describes -- that does involve compiling the bytecode to native code before executing it. But obviously.NET is less portable than Java.
I'm surprised more games aren't written that way anymore, considering how powerful computers are nowadays.
Loads of games are written to run in VMs: the most popular host VM is of course Flash.
Major titles still need to be written in languages that compile down to native code, though, because they really do need all the processor power they can get in order to provide the level of AI, physics, etc. that today's gamers expect.
Why was this modded "funny"? It's true. Half-Life 2 is about as non-violent as you can make a game that's all about killing things. You can shoot someone in the face with a rocket launcher, and all they'll do is fly a few feet backwards and fall over, with no dismemberment whatsoever. And you can only directly kill your enemies; empty an entire machine gun magazine into a civilian, and it won't even hurt them!
The one disappointing thing here is that the court blames physicians for the public misconception. In reality, the blame lies more with the mass media, who turned the original claims into a massive health scare.
The vast majority of physicians correctly investigated the claims and determined that the evidence did not stand up to scrutiny. But the media took that and turned it into their beloved "lone rebel" story, with a parents' champion fighting to get the truth out while the sinister establishment tried to suppress it. Result? Massive decrease in vaccine uptake, threatening public health and risking a deadly epidemic. All because "your children are at risk" sells more papers than "oops, we goofed up, turns out vaccines are safe after all".
current text to voice converters are ghastly, this will not always be the case. In the future you will be able to have Marylin Monroe or John F. Kennedy read your book outloud and it will sound exactly right.
On what do you base this assumption? In order to read a book with the correct intonation, it would be necessary for the computer to understand the book.
We're talking strong AI here. It's not coming any time soon, and when it arrives, it may just decide it's got better things to do than read you books.:)
These days, e.g. Python is installed everywhere you need to go.
No it isn't. Not even remotely close.
And in most cases the response to a request to install an entire programming language would be flat rejection, turning to raucous laughter when they realise you only want it because you don't like any of the several scripting environments that are already available.
the last time I had a WinZip password protected file I needed to open, I opened the file in notepad and deleted the header, and it opened right up. It's not encryption at all.
I think your memory is deceiving you. Certainly the password protection in many older office file formats worked that way, but ZIP files have always genuinely encrypted data. It's just that they traditionally used a pathetically weak algorithm that was trivial to break.
One especially comes to mind in Star Wars : Dark Forces. The sewer level there was the worst ever.
I used to hate it, but these days I don't think it's that bad. It has an interesting layout and some neat architecture. The dianoga are annoying, though.
Well, I've played games that are rated as the most difficult ones and I can tell you, if you have to time sit a game, you will master it.
See that "if" there? That's the problem. Most of us don't have time to master games.
The point is, if a game is not difficult, you don't need to play it. You don't have a challenge.
Kindly use the first person when stating your personal opinions. You may see no point in playing a game that isn't difficult, but some of us enjoy playing them for the story, or for the exploration.
One of my all-time favourite games is System Shock, which has a great difficulty selection system: you can tune several elements of difficulty independently. So if you like a challenge, you can make the enemies and puzzles tougher and slap a 7-hour time limit on the entire game, while if you suck at combat and just want to enjoy the atmosphere and story, you can even make the enemies harmless.
It's like watching an interactive movie. Boring!
That's your personal opinion again. Some of us are quite fond of movies, and having an element of interactivity does not make a story less interesting.
Enjoy your DDR, but kindly refrain from telling those of us who like different kinds of games that we're wrong.
1. Algorithmic improvements will always trump optimizing execution speed.
Not true. This claim can be trivially proven to be false with a simple thought experiment: consider a language artificially constructed such that every single statement takes at least ten years to execute. Implement an O(1) algorithm in that language, and an equivalent O(N^2) algorithm in C. For any realistic data set, the C program will be vastly faster, even though it is using a much worse algorithm.
2. Unless there is a hard requirement, development time is more important than raw performance.
Only when you are paying the developer. As a consumer, I do not give a damn about development time -- unless the prices are massively different, I will always choose the program that feels more responsive, not the one that took less effort to write.
3. Hardware is cheaper than developers.
Oh, right. Okay, I'll skimp on development costs and then tell my customers to stop whining and buy faster hardware, shall I? Because that worked so well with Vista, and totally didn't land Microsoft facing a massive class action lawsuit or anything!
4. A rich and flexible library is more useful and stable than custom coding for performance.
Where's the Mass Effect demo? Where's the Fallout 3 demo? Where, indeed, is the Gears of War demo?
Some publishers still get it. Crysis had a decent demo. Ditto Bioshock. But too often nowadays we're expected to shell out in faith, and stores won't take returns if we don't like the game.
In the case of Vista, every retail copy sold is physically identical -- every DVD contains every version. The "difference" between versions is merely encoded in the license key.
To the best of my knowledge, this is not the case for cars, where more expensive models actually include more equipment and more expensive parts.
How exactly would forcing Microsoft to bundle some decent software cripple Windows?
And there's a big difference between "crippling Windows to boost Linux", and what most people here actually want -- which is a level playing field where Windows, Linux, and any other OS you care to mention can compete on their own merits, rather than Windows winning by default because nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft.
I think I'm probably in the same boat as Linus here: I really don't like Gnome, but KDE is so bad you don't have a choice.
This isn't like politics, where voting for a third party is a wasted vote. You are allowed to choose a desktop environment that isn't one of the big two.
Personally I can't stand Gnome or KDE, but I do get on well with Xfce, so I use that. (It has some nice features that neither of the big two provides, like minimise-to-desktop.)
Now imagine if MS would ship pdf viewer with their system, adobe would shred them to pieces with anti-monopoly laws.
Depends how they did it. A very basic tool that could display and print PDFs, but didn't have any of (e.g.) the form-filling capability of Adobe Reader, wouldn't necessarily be a problem.
They managed to integrate basic ZIP file support without a lawsuit from Winzip, after all.
"Pro-American"? What is that even supposed to mean? Are you suggesting that all Democrats are anti-American and enter politics with the sworn goal of destroying the USA?
It's not a question of being for or against America or Americans. Both sides want America to be a strong and prosperous nation. The difference is in how they think that will be achieved. Do you focus on the very real needs of individual Americans, with the possible consequence of lengthening the economic troubles -- or do you try to strengthen American companies (possibly at the cost of American jobs in the short term) in order to get the economy back on track, at which point the employment market will improve for everyone?
It's an interesting question, and "No more immigration! American jobs for American workers!" is not a useful answer. Drop the jingoistic propaganda bullshit and focus on serious economics, please.
"I pledge to be a servant to our President, and all mankind."
Very laudable. The world needs more people to think about their responsibilities as well as just their rights.
Exactly what rights do slaves have?
What's that got to do with anything? I don't see anything about pledging to be a slave.
For what it's worth, though, slaves have exactly the same fundamental human rights as you and I have. It's just that those rights are being violated. This is why democratic governments around the world are constantly working to fight slavery in all its modern forms. I don't really think it's appropriate for you to use the very real suffering of people around the world to attack a president who has not done anything remotely comparable to his citizens.
Except that Windows is a sucessfull platform because it's the only one that actually allows lots of random applications to be executed without much help from technicians.
If that's the reason for Windows' success, then how do you explain the fact that so many of the biggest Windows users (i.e. major companies) explicitly go out of their way to prevent that kind of behaviour? Most places these days have a horribly bureaucratic process required to get access to the most trivial of utilities. Many companies even use programs designed to sniff out unauthorised software, to ensure that nothing they don't know about ever gets run on their computers.
And of course it's worth noting that since Vista, Microsoft have been doing everything they can to move towards the Linux/Unix style, where even home users need to use an administrator password to install software. So apparently even Microsoft disagrees with you about what makes Windows successful...
Huh? PDF files don't lock up browsers. Adobe Reader does, but you can't blame the file format for the deficiencies of a single implementation.
If you don't like how long the Adobe browser plugin takes to load, then disable the plugin and use the external Adobe Reader, or get a better reader (Foxit is quite popular on Windows).
The GPL is a true quid pro quo. It says "I will give you my code if you give me yours."
"Give back your changes to my code", on the other hand, is an unequal bargain. You can't realistically claim that a handful of bug fixes are of equal value to an entire library.
You don't have to like the GPL, but please stop spreading FUD. There is nothing "immoral" about a license that merely requires repayment in kind.
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Frankly I'm already amazed they bothered to target Linux/x86, which is already an incredibly tiny games market. Linux/PPC is a fraction of the size of that again! There may well not be more than a few dozen people in the world who (a) use Linux/PPC, (b) don't have a single x86 box they can play games on, and (c) are interested in paying for closed-source games.
Cross-compilation is not always trivial. And then you need to conduct all the testing, etc. And at the end of all that, you might get a handful of sales at most.
The simple truth is that no commercial software company is ever going to target desktop Linux on anything but the most common platforms. If you want to use an unusual processor, you're going to have to stick with free software.
No, Java runs platform-independent code in a virtual machine, with no guarantee that any architecture-specific code will be compiled at any point. It provides portability but there's a significant performance cost. Sometimes JIT compilation can be used to claw back a fair bit of performance, but that's not available for all platforms, and mostly useful for long-running server processes.
Microsoft's .NET platform is closer to what GP describes -- that does involve compiling the bytecode to native code before executing it. But obviously .NET is less portable than Java.
Loads of games are written to run in VMs: the most popular host VM is of course Flash.
Major titles still need to be written in languages that compile down to native code, though, because they really do need all the processor power they can get in order to provide the level of AI, physics, etc. that today's gamers expect.
Why was this modded "funny"? It's true. Half-Life 2 is about as non-violent as you can make a game that's all about killing things. You can shoot someone in the face with a rocket launcher, and all they'll do is fly a few feet backwards and fall over, with no dismemberment whatsoever. And you can only directly kill your enemies; empty an entire machine gun magazine into a civilian, and it won't even hurt them!
The one disappointing thing here is that the court blames physicians for the public misconception. In reality, the blame lies more with the mass media, who turned the original claims into a massive health scare.
The vast majority of physicians correctly investigated the claims and determined that the evidence did not stand up to scrutiny. But the media took that and turned it into their beloved "lone rebel" story, with a parents' champion fighting to get the truth out while the sinister establishment tried to suppress it. Result? Massive decrease in vaccine uptake, threatening public health and risking a deadly epidemic. All because "your children are at risk" sells more papers than "oops, we goofed up, turns out vaccines are safe after all".
On what do you base this assumption? In order to read a book with the correct intonation, it would be necessary for the computer to understand the book.
We're talking strong AI here. It's not coming any time soon, and when it arrives, it may just decide it's got better things to do than read you books. :)
And why, exactly, is that a problem? They'll still have to buy the book in order to listen to it.
No it isn't. Not even remotely close.
And in most cases the response to a request to install an entire programming language would be flat rejection, turning to raucous laughter when they realise you only want it because you don't like any of the several scripting environments that are already available.
I think your memory is deceiving you. Certainly the password protection in many older office file formats worked that way, but ZIP files have always genuinely encrypted data. It's just that they traditionally used a pathetically weak algorithm that was trivial to break.
I used to hate it, but these days I don't think it's that bad. It has an interesting layout and some neat architecture. The dianoga are annoying, though.
See that "if" there? That's the problem. Most of us don't have time to master games.
Kindly use the first person when stating your personal opinions. You may see no point in playing a game that isn't difficult, but some of us enjoy playing them for the story, or for the exploration.
One of my all-time favourite games is System Shock, which has a great difficulty selection system: you can tune several elements of difficulty independently. So if you like a challenge, you can make the enemies and puzzles tougher and slap a 7-hour time limit on the entire game, while if you suck at combat and just want to enjoy the atmosphere and story, you can even make the enemies harmless.
That's your personal opinion again. Some of us are quite fond of movies, and having an element of interactivity does not make a story less interesting.
Enjoy your DDR, but kindly refrain from telling those of us who like different kinds of games that we're wrong.
Not true. This claim can be trivially proven to be false with a simple thought experiment: consider a language artificially constructed such that every single statement takes at least ten years to execute. Implement an O(1) algorithm in that language, and an equivalent O(N^2) algorithm in C. For any realistic data set, the C program will be vastly faster, even though it is using a much worse algorithm.
Only when you are paying the developer. As a consumer, I do not give a damn about development time -- unless the prices are massively different, I will always choose the program that feels more responsive, not the one that took less effort to write.
Oh, right. Okay, I'll skimp on development costs and then tell my customers to stop whining and buy faster hardware, shall I? Because that worked so well with Vista, and totally didn't land Microsoft facing a massive class action lawsuit or anything!
Well done, you have found a true axiom.
Except that, increasingly, they don't.
Where's the Mass Effect demo? Where's the Fallout 3 demo? Where, indeed, is the Gears of War demo?
Some publishers still get it. Crysis had a decent demo. Ditto Bioshock. But too often nowadays we're expected to shell out in faith, and stores won't take returns if we don't like the game.
Sorry, you fail at analogies.
In the case of Vista, every retail copy sold is physically identical -- every DVD contains every version. The "difference" between versions is merely encoded in the license key.
To the best of my knowledge, this is not the case for cars, where more expensive models actually include more equipment and more expensive parts.
How exactly would forcing Microsoft to bundle some decent software cripple Windows?
And there's a big difference between "crippling Windows to boost Linux", and what most people here actually want -- which is a level playing field where Windows, Linux, and any other OS you care to mention can compete on their own merits, rather than Windows winning by default because nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft.
Yes.
This isn't like politics, where voting for a third party is a wasted vote. You are allowed to choose a desktop environment that isn't one of the big two.
Personally I can't stand Gnome or KDE, but I do get on well with Xfce, so I use that. (It has some nice features that neither of the big two provides, like minimise-to-desktop.)
Depends how they did it. A very basic tool that could display and print PDFs, but didn't have any of (e.g.) the form-filling capability of Adobe Reader, wouldn't necessarily be a problem.
They managed to integrate basic ZIP file support without a lawsuit from Winzip, after all.
"Pro-American"? What is that even supposed to mean? Are you suggesting that all Democrats are anti-American and enter politics with the sworn goal of destroying the USA?
It's not a question of being for or against America or Americans. Both sides want America to be a strong and prosperous nation. The difference is in how they think that will be achieved. Do you focus on the very real needs of individual Americans, with the possible consequence of lengthening the economic troubles -- or do you try to strengthen American companies (possibly at the cost of American jobs in the short term) in order to get the economy back on track, at which point the employment market will improve for everyone?
It's an interesting question, and "No more immigration! American jobs for American workers!" is not a useful answer. Drop the jingoistic propaganda bullshit and focus on serious economics, please.
Very laudable. The world needs more people to think about their responsibilities as well as just their rights.
What's that got to do with anything? I don't see anything about pledging to be a slave.
For what it's worth, though, slaves have exactly the same fundamental human rights as you and I have. It's just that those rights are being violated. This is why democratic governments around the world are constantly working to fight slavery in all its modern forms. I don't really think it's appropriate for you to use the very real suffering of people around the world to attack a president who has not done anything remotely comparable to his citizens.
Where you can't get decent ad-free TV and radio for any price. Oh, what a blessing that must be!
That sounds exciting. Does that involve you fighting Ubuntu, or is it Ubuntu versus Windows to decide which gets to load?
If that's the reason for Windows' success, then how do you explain the fact that so many of the biggest Windows users (i.e. major companies) explicitly go out of their way to prevent that kind of behaviour? Most places these days have a horribly bureaucratic process required to get access to the most trivial of utilities. Many companies even use programs designed to sniff out unauthorised software, to ensure that nothing they don't know about ever gets run on their computers.
And of course it's worth noting that since Vista, Microsoft have been doing everything they can to move towards the Linux/Unix style, where even home users need to use an administrator password to install software. So apparently even Microsoft disagrees with you about what makes Windows successful...
Huh? PDF files don't lock up browsers. Adobe Reader does, but you can't blame the file format for the deficiencies of a single implementation.
If you don't like how long the Adobe browser plugin takes to load, then disable the plugin and use the external Adobe Reader, or get a better reader (Foxit is quite popular on Windows).
Microsoft Windows is the only modern desktop OS that doesn't come with PDF display capabilities out of the box.
The GPL is a true quid pro quo. It says "I will give you my code if you give me yours."
"Give back your changes to my code", on the other hand, is an unequal bargain. You can't realistically claim that a handful of bug fixes are of equal value to an entire library.
You don't have to like the GPL, but please stop spreading FUD. There is nothing "immoral" about a license that merely requires repayment in kind.