Re:You do realize the other hobbies are the same?
on
How Do Games Grow Up?
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· Score: 1
But let's move on, let's see more poster children for "look at what a cool RL hobby I have" idiocies that get waved around all the time:
- mountaineering, camping, and other excuses to go out in the wild. Exactly what skills do people learn there, and when will they apply them IRL? Because it seems to me that the only times when you'll apply any of them, is... next time you go do that hobby. That's it. E.g., exactly when will you have to find north by the moss on the trees... in a city? If you want the actual useful version of that, get a GPS navigation system. No, let's make no bullshit pretenses, it's just a way to kill time.
Seriously, what going out into potentially dangerous places without backup gives you is experience of dealing with risk; assessing it, coping with it, surviving the consequences when it goes wrong, taking responsibility. These are important life skills which too many young people just simply don't have. I think kids have a basic human right to take fatal risks; more than that, I don't think you can grow up as a fully adult human being without exposure to fatal risk. This super-safe, molly-coddled, over-protective society we now live in is not good for children and other living things.
I voted today in New York State. The poll workers recorded each voter's name and the number the voting machine assigned to his vote. I asked them why and they replied that the board of elections told them to.
What is going on? The board of elections can now see who everybody voted for. I thought we had the right to a secret ballot.
In recent UK elections, election officials have written the voter's electoral roll number on the (numbered) counterfoil of the voting slip. That strikes me as dangerous for exactly the same reason - the vote is no longer secret - but I as told when I challenged the officers at the last election that it was done to allow auditing in case of suspected vote rigging.
My question is this: Why are the lines so long? I voted in the Canadian federal election a few weeks ago, I stood in line for no more than 10 minutes and I'm in a very large riding in downtown Montreal..
I'm 53; I've voted in (I think) eight UK general elections, about twelve local elections and all three Scottish Parliament elections. I've never queued up - stood in line - to vote in my life. I've worked as a party worker in at least five of those elections, and I've never seen anyone else stand in line for more than a couple of minutes, either.
Over here we tend to have enough polling booths for the voters.
In these days of the intertubes, why do government departments even need such a massive amount of data on a physical medium? Why not transfer data from one location to the next by a dedicated enrcypted net connection?
Seriously, the main reason for using memory sticks is to get around security. I regularly carry data into and out of a particular client's offices on a memory stick, because their firewall rules are too strict to allow it to be passed in or out by any other means. The data I am carrying is non-sensitive data that I am authorised to carry - but no-one verifies this, and (because I develop business critical systems for them) I do have access to their highly confidential business critical data.
There are two issues here:
It's no good having good (and necessary) network security if people can do end-runs around it with physical media;
If network lockdown is too tight, people will make end runs around it because they have to to get their job done.
Security that forces people to evade it is poor security, because the evasion route is necessarily unpoliced.
Without commenting on the particular case, most newspaper editors are scientific illiterates who will grace with "expert" anybody who knows anything at all about the subject.
This particular case being the Daily Wail, there's no need to qualify 'illiterate' with 'scientific'. OK, I admit that in this case he's confounded my prejudices by publishing a story which is actually journalism... but it was probably by accident.
I just checked and it wasn't the Pledge that I know of, it was the national anthem. The pledge could be also an issue, I'm not aware of the specifics and didn't bother checking the differences until you mentioned the law. The law is important because there actually is one, and it specifically states that "all present except those in uniform should stand at attention facing the flag with the right hand over the heart;"
OK, I'm an ignorant foreigner. I know that the US has strong laws separating church and state. But in a country which is still nominally at least partly Christian, and has substantial Jewish and Muslim minorities, how can you have laws which directly contradict the fourth and fifth commandments? Are Christian, Jewish and Muslim Americans excused from idolatrous worship of the flag, or do they have to choose between their religion and their country?
Yes, I can remember standing outside a television shop in Harbour Square in Kirkcudbright, Scotland, watching Neil Armstrong climb down the ladder. It was a different world then. Then, the United States was the richest nation in the world, and was engaged in a geopolitical struggle with Russia, primarily, and China, secondarily. Going to the moon was at least partly a triumphalist assertion of US economic and technical dominance - you could, and no-one else could. And, because going to the moon was effectively an act of war performed by warriors, safety was not an especially big concern.
The world has changed. The US and Russia are both essentially bankrupt, with debts mainly to China which there is no possible chance of repaying; we're looking at a real possibility of a US sovereign default in the next ten years, and Russia could default on its debts this year.
Whoever the next US president is, whatever his priorities are - heck, even if it's Buzz Lightyear - the only language spoken on the moon in 2020 will be Mandarin.
No I don't define "turning away patients because they are too costly" as a good Government/socialized health system.
And since the government is the only providers, where else do you turn??? At least here in the U.S. if one provider sucks, you have a million others to choose from. Private healthcare is PRO-choice.
Name any country anywhere in the world where the Government are the only providers of health care. It isn't true anywhere in Europe, it isn't true in China, it isn't even true in North Korea - so where is this communist paradise where all health care is government-provided?
In order to fly an aeroplane has to have a relatively low wing loading - that is it's weight must be low with respect to its wing area. In order to submerge a submarine must be dense - that is its weight must be low with respect to its volume.
These factors are by no means diametrically opposed. A thin sheet has high area but low volume. I predict that the winning entries will be:
Low weight;
With single sheet wings like Bleriot's monoplane, rather than hollow wings like most modern aircraft;
With an open spaceframe fuselage;
With a very small crew cabin (or none at all with the crew wearing scuba apparatus).
I'd also hazard a guess that it would be designed to be slightly buoyant, and would invert to dive, using the lift of its wings to pull it down. If propulsion failed it would automatically surface. The difficult design problems seem to me to minimise drag from the flying components when in the much denser underwater part of its range.
Although I fully agree about VNC/RDP not being 'noticable' when running in observer mode, having the background disappear tends to be a bit of a give-away... (**)
Then again, if you don't know about VNC/RDP, it's unlikely to raise more than an eyebrow...
If it's a stolen laptop the thief isn't familiar with, he won't know there should be a background.
I agree that having physical access to the disk allows anyone to read it, and that sensitive data should be encrypted. But that doesn't mean it isn't worth making things complicated. Set good passwords. Use BIOS/OpenFirmware/other pre-boot environment passwords to prevent non-standard booting. Lock/screw the case closed.
This really doesn't help you in the case that the thief has stolen your machine and has it physically in his own workshop with his own set of screwdrivers.
If you're paranoid about your security (and in some jobs you should be), then for portable machines you want to encrypt the whole disk - and, ideally, have something that scrubs the disk after N successive failed login attempts, where N is some small number. Yes, of course it's backed up. You're competent aren't you?
Bingo. On top of what the parent said, it should also be small (less than 12.1" screen) and lightweight with a battery life of at least 3 hours.
Bingo. On top of what the parent said, it should be small (less than 7.2" screen) and lightweight with a battery life of at least three hours...
Seriously, the best laptop I've ever had was a Toshiba Libretto 100CT. It had a screen resolution of (if I remember correctly) 1024x600, a perfectly usable (though small) keyboard, and mine ran Debian. It did everything I wanted of it, well - it even ran a full Oracle 8 database - and it fit easily into a coat pocket.
If I was designing a netbook now I'd start with the Libretto form factor, use solid state memory for backing store (definitely no hard disk) and finish it with about 2mm of rubber all round, for splash proofing and increased shock protection. It would run Ubuntu (possibly the netbook special build) and weigh not more than the Libretto - which is to say 910 grammes.
If Toshiba could build that machine in 1996, it shouldn't be difficult to do the same now, with solid state storage and better battey life. A Netbook - or a Libretto - is not meant to be your main computer. It's meant to be something you have with you virtually all the time. It needs to be robust because it's going to take knocks. It needs to be small, otherwise it's awkward to carry. It needs to be light for the same reason. If it doesn't have the graphics or the horsepower to run Crysis, well, frankly, I can live without.
Off-topic, I know, but I'd never seen this before, and I found it quite funny.
Trademarks are not verbs.
CORRECT: The image was enhanced using Adobe® Photoshop® software.
INCORRECT: The image was photoshopped.
Trademarks are not verbs, therefore verbs are not trademarks, therefore 'photoshopped' is not a trademark, and can therefore be used freely. Or am I applying logic where none applies? (Yes, I know, trademark law probably covers stuff like this.)
I tried to Google for an authoritative answer, but didn't come up with anything.
Could someone enlighten me as to what this is? I've seen it a few times on slashdot, and I understand the meaning from context, but where does it come from?
If we must talk about this sort of thing, how about at least using the word "fanatic". It's a drop-in replacement for "fanboi", and it also has the advantage of being a real word.
Please! Use English, don't devalue it.
Fanatic is a word with a specific meaning. Someone who blows up a truck bomb outside a crowded hotel for ideological reasons is a fanatic. Someone who prefers Brand X mobile phones to Brand Y mobile phones is not a fanatic - unless he is prepared to kill anyone who doesn't share his beliefs.
Someone who simply prefers Brand X to Brand Y may be a discriminating consumer, or a fashion victim, or a fanboi, but he is most certainly not a fanatic
This looks like the quickest way to get open source phones banned off every network that you can imagine. So it looks like a big fat juicy own goal, to me.
No that is really really really bad, you now have free Linux and pay Linux. The free Linux will bw see as crippleware and 10 years down half of a Linux system will be closed source paid apps with shinny DRM. This is a dangerous precedent.
Frankly, this is foolish rubbish. I agree absolutely that DRM is a bad thing, and that one should not buy data that comes DRM protected... but hey, guess what, you don't have to. You, the consumer, have the power to kill DRM by boycotting DRM-enabled products. And free Linux will continue to work perfectly well, with free data formats.
Move along, nothing to see here. It's a non-story.
At least there is technology getting into the hands of children who can use it to further their education. Before we whine about it running on proprietary software let's also keep in mind that it gives them access greater than what they had, interoperability they may never have had, and there are plenty of open source projects that they can use if they want to.
This is all true, but it's like saying 'a crumb is better than no bread'. These laptops can run Linux effectively, but they cannot run Windows effectively - they aren't powerful enough. So there's a very fine limit on what they can do with Windows. They certainly can't run office and they almost certainly can't run Internet Explorer 8.
But besides that, Sugar is not just Linux. Sugar is the most thoughtful redesign of the user interface since the Apple Lisa. It would not surprise me in the least to find that Microsoft are much more afraid of Sugar than of Linux
So yes, an OLPC running Windows - if it does run, and can run any applications at all - is better than no access to computing. But compared to the feast that was on offer, it is crumbs.
My team is currently leading The Witcher mod competition, and I read through this article thinking 'oh, yes', 'oh, yes', 'oh, yes'. Compared with the very well established Neverwinter Aurora toolkit, D'Jinni, The Witcher toolkit, is very fragile, and very under-documented. And, of course, we're pioneers, so while there are a few people who have already tried some things, we're having to learn a lot through trial and error.
My conclusion? This is the last mod I'll do with closed source tools. D'Jinni produces very polished results - the scenery of The Witcher is breathtaking - but when things don't work we could at least debug and find out why not. So we're looking carefully at The Blender and the Java Monkey Engine.
I also, long ago, used to believe that language features could improve software reliability. Nowadays the idea just makes me cackle
Why? Certain languages have features that eliminate large classes of errors. Whilst its possible that programmers will find other ways to screw up, I'd have though that reducing the set of errors that are actually possible would go some way to improving reliability.
Out of curiousity, what languages are you familiar with? Have you worked much in languages with very tough compile-time checks, like Haskell?
Y'know, I agree with the grandparent. On my first coding job there was a guy (Chris Burton) who'd worked on the Manchester Mark One. He was retirement age when I met him. We had a new model of inkjet printer, which had a new processor none of us had ever seen before. It printed characters, we needed it to print bitmaps.
Chris took the datasheet for the printer and the datasheet for the processor home on the train with him, and came back next morning with new code for the printer PROM written out - in opcodes, not assembler mnemonics - in longhand on a pad of paper. That code was blown into the PROM and worked first time, and continued to work without any errors reported for the three years I was on that project.
Programmers like that just don't seem to exist any more. Automatic memory allocation, bounds checking, type checking, etc. are great technology, and I wouldn't choose to live without them. But they mean we are all sloppy and careless, because we can get away with it, and when humans can, they do.
Although the laptop is probably a great piece of engineering for something that has a sub-$100 price tag, the decision to go with a MIPS processor is probably going to relegate the device to niche markets - census taking, for example, or maybe something along the lines of inventory control.
The average person doesn't know - and doesn't care - what processor their computer has. The average person keeps a processor in the kitchen for slicing carrots. The average person thinks a pipeline is something that takes oil across Alaska, that architecture is those ugly new buildings up town, and that a bus has a large diesel engine. The average person is going to ask, 'does this do what I want?'; and the average person is going to find 'yes it does'.
The proportion of computer users who use niche specialist programs which are only available on some specific processor architecture is very small. The proportion of people who run games which need more graphics performance than this device has got is fairly small. For 90% of Joe Public out there, a device like this does everything they need.
Fear, uncertainty and doubt may be worth something, but it isn't worth the difference between a $400 laptop and a $100 laptop.
However, looking at the development of art history... I imagine gaming will do something similar as we become bored of perfectly realistic games, even if they are masterpieces of both art and game design.
Anybody else with a more extensive art background have any other comments on this?
Interesting thought, but not one that persuades me. Many games have already made a virtue of deliberately non-photo-realistic visuals. Molyneux' games, for example, have cartoonish visuals not because he doesn't have the graphic sophistication to go for near photo-real but because he chooses not to.
I think the visual aesthetic has a lot to do with the entire experience the director is trying to impart. I really love The Witcher (my review here) for its immersiveness, and part of that immersiveness is the beautiful visuals which are clearly aiming towards (although not, at least on my hardware, quite achieving it). You really can, in The Witcher, just stop and watch the moon rise and be blown away by the beauty of the scene.
Photorealism also suits stories which build on the 'film noir' genre, as it's clear that Heavy Rain does - but black-and-white might work better (it's noticeable that the palette in those Heavy Rain screenshots is pretty subdued).
However, in the game I'm trying to work on I want to end up with a 'charcoal and wash' visual - very little colour and not a lot of detail. I don't - yet - know how to do this - near photo real would be a lot easier and may be what I eventually end up with. But the reason for that choice is partly to make the game look distinctive, but it's also to comment on the culture of the people I'm trying to tell a story about.
Looks like it has a lot of potential but it needs more time in the oven. I'm back to Firefox 3 for now.
If it doesn't get used (and thus tested) it won't stabilise fast. If you think Firefox is good enough, then of course that isn't particularly your concern. I think it's worth having another good open source browser in the mix for the good of the breed.
Re:Non-Tech Percent of Web Traffic from Chrome
on
Google Chrome, Day 2
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· Score: 1
I'm using Chrome right now, and so far, no issues. Actually, I really like it. When plugins are developed for Chrome, I can see myself using this as my primary browser. I did notice that gmail runs faster in Chrome. Also, the comic is quite entertaining for a geek...
JavaScript is blazingly fast. My work timesheet application, which is very 'Web 2' and bloatedly JavaScript heavy, runs extremely well with Chrome, but is virtually unusable with IE7 or Opera 9.5 due to poor JavaScript peroformance. Firefox is usable-ish, but Chrome is way better.
I currently have Chrome as my default browser on both my Windows machines but will stick with Opera on my Linux machines at least until there's a native Chrome port. So far, I'm very impressed - it's memory footprint seems consistently lower than Opera, and much lower than IE or Firefox; and Chrome's JavaScript performance is very much better than any of them. I'm seeing 79% on Acid3 as against 84% for Opera 9.52, 71% for Firefox 3.0.1 and 12% for Internet Exploder 7.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, what going out into potentially dangerous places without backup gives you is experience of dealing with risk; assessing it, coping with it, surviving the consequences when it goes wrong, taking responsibility. These are important life skills which too many young people just simply don't have. I think kids have a basic human right to take fatal risks; more than that, I don't think you can grow up as a fully adult human being without exposure to fatal risk. This super-safe, molly-coddled, over-protective society we now live in is not good for children and other living things.
I voted today in New York State. The poll workers recorded each voter's name and the number the voting machine assigned to his vote. I asked them why and they replied that the board of elections told them to.
What is going on? The board of elections can now see who everybody voted for. I thought we had the right to a secret ballot.
In recent UK elections, election officials have written the voter's electoral roll number on the (numbered) counterfoil of the voting slip. That strikes me as dangerous for exactly the same reason - the vote is no longer secret - but I as told when I challenged the officers at the last election that it was done to allow auditing in case of suspected vote rigging.
Personally, I don't like it.
My question is this: Why are the lines so long? I voted in the Canadian federal election a few weeks ago, I stood in line for no more than 10 minutes and I'm in a very large riding in downtown Montreal..
I'm 53; I've voted in (I think) eight UK general elections, about twelve local elections and all three Scottish Parliament elections. I've never queued up - stood in line - to vote in my life. I've worked as a party worker in at least five of those elections, and I've never seen anyone else stand in line for more than a couple of minutes, either.
Over here we tend to have enough polling booths for the voters.
In these days of the intertubes, why do government departments even need such a massive amount of data on a physical medium? Why not transfer data from one location to the next by a dedicated enrcypted net connection?
Seriously, the main reason for using memory sticks is to get around security. I regularly carry data into and out of a particular client's offices on a memory stick, because their firewall rules are too strict to allow it to be passed in or out by any other means. The data I am carrying is non-sensitive data that I am authorised to carry - but no-one verifies this, and (because I develop business critical systems for them) I do have access to their highly confidential business critical data.
There are two issues here:
Security that forces people to evade it is poor security, because the evasion route is necessarily unpoliced.
Without commenting on the particular case, most newspaper editors are scientific illiterates who will grace with "expert" anybody who knows anything at all about the subject.
This particular case being the Daily Wail, there's no need to qualify 'illiterate' with 'scientific'. OK, I admit that in this case he's confounded my prejudices by publishing a story which is actually journalism... but it was probably by accident.
OK, I'm an ignorant foreigner. I know that the US has strong laws separating church and state. But in a country which is still nominally at least partly Christian, and has substantial Jewish and Muslim minorities, how can you have laws which directly contradict the fourth and fifth commandments? Are Christian, Jewish and Muslim Americans excused from idolatrous worship of the flag, or do they have to choose between their religion and their country?
Yes, I can remember standing outside a television shop in Harbour Square in Kirkcudbright, Scotland, watching Neil Armstrong climb down the ladder. It was a different world then. Then, the United States was the richest nation in the world, and was engaged in a geopolitical struggle with Russia, primarily, and China, secondarily. Going to the moon was at least partly a triumphalist assertion of US economic and technical dominance - you could, and no-one else could. And, because going to the moon was effectively an act of war performed by warriors, safety was not an especially big concern.
The world has changed. The US and Russia are both essentially bankrupt, with debts mainly to China which there is no possible chance of repaying; we're looking at a real possibility of a US sovereign default in the next ten years, and Russia could default on its debts this year.
Whoever the next US president is, whatever his priorities are - heck, even if it's Buzz Lightyear - the only language spoken on the moon in 2020 will be Mandarin.
No I don't define "turning away patients because they are too costly" as a good Government/socialized health system.
And since the government is the only providers, where else do you turn??? At least here in the U.S. if one provider sucks, you have a million others to choose from. Private healthcare is PRO-choice.
Name any country anywhere in the world where the Government are the only providers of health care. It isn't true anywhere in Europe, it isn't true in China, it isn't even true in North Korea - so where is this communist paradise where all health care is government-provided?
In order to fly an aeroplane has to have a relatively low wing loading - that is it's weight must be low with respect to its wing area. In order to submerge a submarine must be dense - that is its weight must be low with respect to its volume.
These factors are by no means diametrically opposed. A thin sheet has high area but low volume. I predict that the winning entries will be:
I'd also hazard a guess that it would be designed to be slightly buoyant, and would invert to dive, using the lift of its wings to pull it down. If propulsion failed it would automatically surface. The difficult design problems seem to me to minimise drag from the flying components when in the much denser underwater part of its range.
If it's a stolen laptop the thief isn't familiar with, he won't know there should be a background.
This really doesn't help you in the case that the thief has stolen your machine and has it physically in his own workshop with his own set of screwdrivers.
If you're paranoid about your security (and in some jobs you should be), then for portable machines you want to encrypt the whole disk - and, ideally, have something that scrubs the disk after N successive failed login attempts, where N is some small number. Yes, of course it's backed up. You're competent aren't you?
And the answer we're using is MediaWiki. Before we used MediaWiki we used GoogleDocs, but MediaWiki suits us better.
Bingo. On top of what the parent said, it should also be small (less than 12.1" screen) and lightweight with a battery life of at least 3 hours.
Bingo. On top of what the parent said, it should be small (less than 7.2" screen) and lightweight with a battery life of at least three hours...
Seriously, the best laptop I've ever had was a Toshiba Libretto 100CT. It had a screen resolution of (if I remember correctly) 1024x600, a perfectly usable (though small) keyboard, and mine ran Debian. It did everything I wanted of it, well - it even ran a full Oracle 8 database - and it fit easily into a coat pocket.
If I was designing a netbook now I'd start with the Libretto form factor, use solid state memory for backing store (definitely no hard disk) and finish it with about 2mm of rubber all round, for splash proofing and increased shock protection. It would run Ubuntu (possibly the netbook special build) and weigh not more than the Libretto - which is to say 910 grammes.
If Toshiba could build that machine in 1996, it shouldn't be difficult to do the same now, with solid state storage and better battey life. A Netbook - or a Libretto - is not meant to be your main computer. It's meant to be something you have with you virtually all the time. It needs to be robust because it's going to take knocks. It needs to be small, otherwise it's awkward to carry. It needs to be light for the same reason. If it doesn't have the graphics or the horsepower to run Crysis, well, frankly, I can live without.
Off-topic, I know, but I'd never seen this before, and I found it quite funny.
Trademarks are not verbs, therefore verbs are not trademarks, therefore 'photoshopped' is not a trademark, and can therefore be used freely. Or am I applying logic where none applies? (Yes, I know, trademark law probably covers stuff like this.)
I tried to Google for an authoritative answer, but didn't come up with anything.
Could someone enlighten me as to what this is? I've seen it a few times on slashdot, and I understand the meaning from context, but where does it come from?
man sed.
If we must talk about this sort of thing, how about at least using the word "fanatic". It's a drop-in replacement for "fanboi", and it also has the advantage of being a real word.
Please! Use English, don't devalue it.
Fanatic is a word with a specific meaning. Someone who blows up a truck bomb outside a crowded hotel for ideological reasons is a fanatic. Someone who prefers Brand X mobile phones to Brand Y mobile phones is not a fanatic - unless he is prepared to kill anyone who doesn't share his beliefs.
Someone who simply prefers Brand X to Brand Y may be a discriminating consumer, or a fashion victim, or a fanboi, but he is most certainly not a fanatic
This looks like the quickest way to get open source phones banned off every network that you can imagine. So it looks like a big fat juicy own goal, to me.
No that is really really really bad, you now have free Linux and pay Linux. The free Linux will bw see as crippleware and 10 years down half of a Linux system will be closed source paid apps with shinny DRM. This is a dangerous precedent.
Frankly, this is foolish rubbish. I agree absolutely that DRM is a bad thing, and that one should not buy data that comes DRM protected... but hey, guess what, you don't have to. You, the consumer, have the power to kill DRM by boycotting DRM-enabled products. And free Linux will continue to work perfectly well, with free data formats.
Move along, nothing to see here. It's a non-story.
At least there is technology getting into the hands of children who can use it to further their education. Before we whine about it running on proprietary software let's also keep in mind that it gives them access greater than what they had, interoperability they may never have had, and there are plenty of open source projects that they can use if they want to.
This is all true, but it's like saying 'a crumb is better than no bread'. These laptops can run Linux effectively, but they cannot run Windows effectively - they aren't powerful enough. So there's a very fine limit on what they can do with Windows. They certainly can't run office and they almost certainly can't run Internet Explorer 8.
But besides that, Sugar is not just Linux. Sugar is the most thoughtful redesign of the user interface since the Apple Lisa. It would not surprise me in the least to find that Microsoft are much more afraid of Sugar than of Linux
So yes, an OLPC running Windows - if it does run, and can run any applications at all - is better than no access to computing. But compared to the feast that was on offer, it is crumbs.
My team is currently leading The Witcher mod competition, and I read through this article thinking 'oh, yes', 'oh, yes', 'oh, yes'. Compared with the very well established Neverwinter Aurora toolkit, D'Jinni, The Witcher toolkit, is very fragile, and very under-documented. And, of course, we're pioneers, so while there are a few people who have already tried some things, we're having to learn a lot through trial and error.
My conclusion? This is the last mod I'll do with closed source tools. D'Jinni produces very polished results - the scenery of The Witcher is breathtaking - but when things don't work we could at least debug and find out why not. So we're looking carefully at The Blender and the Java Monkey Engine.
I also, long ago, used to believe that language features could improve software reliability. Nowadays the idea just makes me cackle
Why? Certain languages have features that eliminate large classes of errors. Whilst its possible that programmers will find other ways to screw up, I'd have though that reducing the set of errors that are actually possible would go some way to improving reliability.
Out of curiousity, what languages are you familiar with? Have you worked much in languages with very tough compile-time checks, like Haskell?
Y'know, I agree with the grandparent. On my first coding job there was a guy (Chris Burton) who'd worked on the Manchester Mark One. He was retirement age when I met him. We had a new model of inkjet printer, which had a new processor none of us had ever seen before. It printed characters, we needed it to print bitmaps.
Chris took the datasheet for the printer and the datasheet for the processor home on the train with him, and came back next morning with new code for the printer PROM written out - in opcodes, not assembler mnemonics - in longhand on a pad of paper. That code was blown into the PROM and worked first time, and continued to work without any errors reported for the three years I was on that project.
Programmers like that just don't seem to exist any more. Automatic memory allocation, bounds checking, type checking, etc. are great technology, and I wouldn't choose to live without them. But they mean we are all sloppy and careless, because we can get away with it, and when humans can, they do.
Although the laptop is probably a great piece of engineering for something that has a sub-$100 price tag, the decision to go with a MIPS processor is probably going to relegate the device to niche markets - census taking, for example, or maybe something along the lines of inventory control.
The average person doesn't know - and doesn't care - what processor their computer has. The average person keeps a processor in the kitchen for slicing carrots. The average person thinks a pipeline is something that takes oil across Alaska, that architecture is those ugly new buildings up town, and that a bus has a large diesel engine. The average person is going to ask, 'does this do what I want?'; and the average person is going to find 'yes it does'.
The proportion of computer users who use niche specialist programs which are only available on some specific processor architecture is very small. The proportion of people who run games which need more graphics performance than this device has got is fairly small. For 90% of Joe Public out there, a device like this does everything they need.
Fear, uncertainty and doubt may be worth something, but it isn't worth the difference between a $400 laptop and a $100 laptop.
Agreed.
However, looking at the development of art history... I imagine gaming will do something similar as we become bored of perfectly realistic games, even if they are masterpieces of both art and game design.
Anybody else with a more extensive art background have any other comments on this?
Interesting thought, but not one that persuades me. Many games have already made a virtue of deliberately non-photo-realistic visuals. Molyneux' games, for example, have cartoonish visuals not because he doesn't have the graphic sophistication to go for near photo-real but because he chooses not to.
I think the visual aesthetic has a lot to do with the entire experience the director is trying to impart. I really love The Witcher (my review here) for its immersiveness, and part of that immersiveness is the beautiful visuals which are clearly aiming towards (although not, at least on my hardware, quite achieving it). You really can, in The Witcher, just stop and watch the moon rise and be blown away by the beauty of the scene.
Photorealism also suits stories which build on the 'film noir' genre, as it's clear that Heavy Rain does - but black-and-white might work better (it's noticeable that the palette in those Heavy Rain screenshots is pretty subdued).
However, in the game I'm trying to work on I want to end up with a 'charcoal and wash' visual - very little colour and not a lot of detail. I don't - yet - know how to do this - near photo real would be a lot easier and may be what I eventually end up with. But the reason for that choice is partly to make the game look distinctive, but it's also to comment on the culture of the people I'm trying to tell a story about.
Looks like it has a lot of potential but it needs more time in the oven. I'm back to Firefox 3 for now.
If it doesn't get used (and thus tested) it won't stabilise fast. If you think Firefox is good enough, then of course that isn't particularly your concern. I think it's worth having another good open source browser in the mix for the good of the breed.
I'm using Chrome right now, and so far, no issues. Actually, I really like it. When plugins are developed for Chrome, I can see myself using this as my primary browser. I did notice that gmail runs faster in Chrome. Also, the comic is quite entertaining for a geek...
JavaScript is blazingly fast. My work timesheet application, which is very 'Web 2' and bloatedly JavaScript heavy, runs extremely well with Chrome, but is virtually unusable with IE7 or Opera 9.5 due to poor JavaScript peroformance. Firefox is usable-ish, but Chrome is way better.
I currently have Chrome as my default browser on both my Windows machines but will stick with Opera on my Linux machines at least until there's a native Chrome port. So far, I'm very impressed - it's memory footprint seems consistently lower than Opera, and much lower than IE or Firefox; and Chrome's JavaScript performance is very much better than any of them. I'm seeing 79% on Acid3 as against 84% for Opera 9.52, 71% for Firefox 3.0.1 and 12% for Internet Exploder 7.