forget the nay sayers... I for one want to see what the/. community do. Do they run a DC ring around the house? Strip the wires and fudge some coins together to make a potential divider? replace the transformers with rodent power?
I have 4 USB hdds that I've not gotten around to putting in a case yet, because I dont have the cash for a mixed sata/ide jbod server, all of which need their own adaptor. I have a headset that needs an adaptor. My phone charger, and mp3 charger. That's some 7 sockets I'm using on 8 socket power strip, with the 8th going to a another 4 socket in serial to power my PC and high-fi (i know you shouldn't have power strips in parallel... but pfft, im not running a kettle off it like at Uni:D)
it is a problem. step down transformers are notoriously wasteful. There has to be a better way!?
I was intrigued! You gave me the info I wanted to google with - Mass CIA resignations lead me to this
I had no idea how bad it was. Retrospectively, the bashing the CIA got seems stupid considering the impossibility of what they have to accomplish... not just now, but after pissing off most of the world in the last 8 years.
old school id, 3d realms and apogee folk must be cringing at this kind of comment for it was the shareware "revolution" that created the major games industries we see today. if TH starts anti-piracy trolling, someone might have to remind him of his roots: episodic gaming is just the connect equivalent.
unless you're an embedded dev, nothing to see, move along.
the slowest part of the intel cpu cycle is decode - but before your cpu processes streams of op codes for decode you have to load the executable image into ram and then run the dynamic linker. the dynamic linker needs to parse every the segment to be worthwhile, otherwise you'll hit the linker each time you load a segment that's slightly interesting (weaker the symbols/IAT, the more likely) only to find out you didn't need to causing jitter.
its one of those "ill believe it when i see it" performance gains
In most common law courts, family law opinions are not public - moreover they are almost never public where minors are involved. If a decision is public, it probably rests on on a trust or contractual issue where equity is apportioned - eg: you don't know the relationship details of Paul McCartney's recent divorce, but you do know how his property was divided.
I welcome this presumption of value in anonymity. It seems people are finally getting the fact that computer networks don't forget as they should. If people started implementing error rates - forgetfulness for example - into computer systems, we would eventually use information with a little difference and not blindly believe everything we see. Information should not be 100% reliable because human collation is inherently error prone and not 100% accurate - without enforcing this we cant change the perception of information.
Perhaps when we see information as infallible as it really is we can then strive to build safeguards. Starting with a guarentee of privacy in communication privity.
People keep telling me that Perl is less readable than other languages, but i disagree. It's only less readable when you dont know the language specific semantics used - surely everyone remembers when they saw floor((float)i + 0.5) in C for the first time? It's no different to a perl programmer who uses @array = map { s/something/better/g } @data;
While I must admit that if you code in perl like a one-liner guru, you're not going to make particularly managable code but not coding in perl has significient RAD drawbacks. In Perl I worry about one thing: variable tainting. In C and C++ I have to worry about tainted variables, constant index-off-by-one errors, the possibility of null pointers and null reference handling, libraries and linking.
Some Perl programmers could do with more non perl experience to make their style managable. Perl 5 oop is a joke, and perl 6 is trollbait - but these aren't reasons why programmers shouldn't apply wider programming skills as a C/Jaava programmer uses their ADT knowledge and skill between langages.
I love the way you've summed up everything I've been saying to anyone who will listen for the last 5 years. We think alike, and nodoubt so does the rest of slashdot.
If only my prime minister wouldn't sell our nuclear program to a french company only interested in profits. It's not socialist to cover the cost of development of something so massive: it's development.
Sadly that's the problem. Noone in power seems to "get it".
We have an illusionary mechanism of security, when all we can validate is the validation - or worst still, all we can validate is the appearance of some kind of mechanism that if tested would prove our authenticity. We are insecure if the process of testing this security is too taxing as to render it unused.
Authenticating who you say you are vs who you're allowed to be is a trivial problem of matching biometric information that you supply with that on record. Unfortunately all the money is spent on the establishing the pretense of who you are, yet what is more important is the establishing of "yes, I can verify that". Admittedly this is for legacy/"backward compatibility" or unconnected infratructure reasons, but, still, when moving from one country to another, those that rely on the backward compatibility side are those that fear little (ie: legal movement between african nations, the EU, dual-nationality zones) from migration.
Consider the EU laws on travel within the EU. They dont require a passport. Passports are a lie. They require any kind of "valid" photo-ID to establish the name of that person. Even without ID, if boarder control can establish you are who you say you are, you are permitted to enter into another EU country. In this connected world, a photo seems a little pointless when we can take a finger print or eye scan.
What we need is, and I hate to say this, a database of "travellers". A database of hashes is sufficient - and privacy advocates should make sure that this is a one way hash. We should reply upon connectivity to check we are who we say were are, or at the very least, the ability to mirror this database to entry/exits in participating countries.
Why? Then all we have to do is say we are someone, take a finger print, scan, whatever, they can confirm they are that person.
The problem of "storing" our full biometric information whether plain or in bidirection encryption formats is that we can always alter it. Remove that ability for us to alter that data and the data becomes more resistant to tampering.
If you ignore the whole principle of encryption and biometric information, what we are doing is giving everyone an orange as a passport and saying to them -
Boarder Control - "Look here, this confirms you are you, because it's a god-damned orange and we know what oranges look like"
Traveller - "But Sir, I can tell you my name!"
"I still want to see an oranage. If I dont see an orange how I can trust you?".
"But I can grow oranges at home. How can you ever trust someone that shows you an orange."
"Because my computer checks your orange and tells me its your orange"
"But if I grow my orange, it IS my orange, and you computer will tell you it is my orange"
"Mmmm."
Admittedly I believe who whole point in having a passport that mirrors the information you supply is a good one. It shifts the focus on defeating not only biometric scanning but to forging electronic information and paper.
I believe most methods of biometric scanning that I have come across can be defeated with a little research. What we have here is just another element in the linked list of endless methods to stay one step ahead of the professional criminals. Expect more additions.
I'm definitely with you - the personal tangents make LR work so well! I guess after a while I began to notice gaps in the presenters' knowledge. They slowly became more and more evident, and I feel that many of the "i don't like"s are really "don't understand"s. Most shows will have the comical genius and the technical expertise, yet i find LR is group of like-minded comical hobbyists without a strong technical personality directing things.
Just imagine how balanced the show would be for the technical folk and the like-minded enthusiast if Jonathan Corbet was British and an LR presenter! (nb. I am an LWN fanboy)
The only problem is that I kind of disagree with what I'm typing, when I reread it back. LR is LR - it's hard to fault something so uniquely special. Having listened to a few perl related podcasts a few years ago to 'sample' the podcasting world (pardon the pun), I was a little dismayed by what the internet had to offer then: generally the more technical the cast and subject, the more boring and mundane they are presenting it. LR is great because it's like a Friday night chat show (after 9pm, you are permitted to swear on UK TV) a la Jonathan Ross, combined with the indefeasible personality like traits of Jeremy Clarkson. It's great comedy at the same level as it's technical representation.
Maybe I'm just a little too moany. Regardless, LR shall be sadly missed come next month!
I went to the first LRL and loved it, after following the banter for a while. sadly i was a poor student then, and didn't make the last one.
Thanks to LRL I met Mark Shuttleworth:D Thanks to LRL I watched about 20 people order a desert at an Indian confusing it with the main mean:D
I guess this gives the community a chance to reciprocate? Perhaps a new UK-based (humours of course!) Linux radio show with slightly more knowledgeable (on-topic?!) hosts? Unfortunately I find the show is too long for me to back jump into nowadays.
(I didn't mean to say they're not knowledgeable folk btw - only that each and every paintball I fired championed KDE and Slackware in return for all the bashing!:D)
No need to make it personal. But Ill bite (i'm bored - and someone is wrong on the internet (XKCD ftw)).
Just to clarify a few things for you - just because u were playing tribes and warcraft, doesn't mean youre right either. It works both ways. This particular annoyance of mine arose from a presentation I did on a highly competitive game design pitch aimed directly at competitions a la counter-strike. Hence the frustration I got listening to a pseudo-lecturer telling me the same BS you're telling me. You are still both wrong - while the word impossible might be incorrect a 5v5 is still a 5 on 5 fps game to every modern gamer out there.
I think you need to look up signalling - specifically the nyquist rate and shannon-hartly sampling theorum - and imagine how a computer game would want to interpolate positional vectors for accuracy. Your comparison to WC2 is a moot point and I can only assume tribes is an extrapolation system since the client side prediction is as you claim so good. Either that, or it's not a sub 50ms game.
It seems you've lost plot and really missed the point. Tell me, have u tried setting up 8+ man fps games on an xbox 360? IIRC, Call of Duty didn't allow more than 8 players. I'm not a know it all and don't profess to be, but it seems u seem to know less than me which somehow makes me wrong for being educated (and right). You're a troll the internet didn't want to access broadband.
I can hardly call myself educated when I can't question the wrong tuition of a mere undergraduate lecturer.
Yours truely, a bloke who first started playing network games over DOS packet drivers and BSD stack, Matt
Not with any reasonable expectation of realtime - by which i mean a low ping of 50ms or less. its a question of throughput, and where throughput is maxed out, a question of delaying updatings and queuing. The reason you were able to play tribes is because everyone had serveral hundred millisecond pings (if not serveral seconds!!), and the tribes landscape is huge to boot unlike CS et al which focuses on precise headshots.
Modern fps games are tuned to 5-10ms response times, in otherwords you need a much higher transmit rate. a CS client will use ~10kpbs upstream easily. Most ISPs have 512k or 786k upstreams, so you can see my problem here. It all get a little complicated the lower the ping.
My "Design & Technology" class was more about making sure I had 1cm borders on design documents than actually *doing* anything. I can't describe how true everything you've said is. I dare not even qualify that with an "almost" because it's all true.
What I was demonstrating is the way schools introduce maths leaves a lot to be desired.
I chose my masters program perfectly, because the math element was functional and entirely introduced at a level I understood for the most part, only in the final few classes did it really begin to leave me with concepts like inertial tensors as they were a little abstract without an implemented framework.
I am regularly frustrated that I have to put in a lot of effort into understanding a concept I wasn't introduced to at school - in other words i have to learn and have been learning, but at the price of a few frustrated nights in. I wouldn't say I "*still*" haven't fixed my deficiencies, i must have to succeeded thus far, but I would argue that there are a lot of programmers who would be a lot better had they had the chance to study further maths.
No, they need to keep their graphists near. I beg to differ - beyond the core set of graphic artists, everyone else is a job related hire. Something like 70% of a design team now works for asset generation, with a large subset of them either agency employees or employees using outsourced material. The larger the company, the bigger the "pool" of non-specific title artists they have. Programmers tend to be for a title from day one, and hired as needed to implement less intrusive aspects (ie: scripted responses)
Frankly, I read some parts of them, and it was so boring and useless. Frankly, if you think that you can code games because you read some books, you are so wrong ! Are you serious? If you're not keeping up with technological trends then I'm worried about the type of games you were involved with. I think you may have missed the portal and parallax/reflief mapping bandwagons by a mile. It's very hard to follow developments in RenderMonkey/orthatnvidatool if you're not following the publications or at least the implementations you find in the industry books.
I agree there is a subset of game programmers who can take on the roll of scripting. Lua itself and Lua-like clones are facilitating this. But the industry really wants lower level programmers. Guys who can think not in terms of object-think wait()-do()-wait(), but guys who can implement a smartptr system to create a better garbage collection system or guys who plan thread synchronisation rather than just wait and see.
That's the point tho isn't it - game designers are overshadowing the game programmers. Games companies don't care how skilled their CADers or Photoshopers are when they're likely to outsource most of that anyway, and since there's no shortage of them its not a massive problem. The problem lies with the fact CADers and Photoshopers and graduates who *think* they are not when they are, however skilled they maybe (terrific skills indeed - i submit!) wanting to get into the programming side because of the financial rewards. They've been subtly coerced into thinking that if they apply for jobs they'll get one. Many of them haven't heard of the Gems series, let alone own any!
I don't pretend to be the only person in the world who knows what they're doing, but I am as equally annoyed that what was once portrayed as a simple career path for the experienced and talented programmer is now one where you have to fight just to get an entry level job because the CADers and Photoshopers are taking up all the interviews proclaiming to be software engineers.
The problem is when choosing the general science route at A-Level, you do Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Maths, later dropping one at A2. If you don't much like either chemistry or biology, it's not a problem if you're interested in the gaming community. The problem lies with the fact that you can rarely timetable Maths with anything other than the 3 sciences. I didn't do A-Level maths, and I'm very annoyed that I didn't. My problem was 2 fold - the upper sets were full (we had 2 x 3 tiers since our year was divided into 2). I plodded along learning nothing in the middle set. I felt like I was a paper calculator! The interesting and applicable stuff was only introduced in the higher tiers - throughout my time at Uni I've been constantly annoyed that I don't understand introductory proof to things I've never been introduced to.
The second problem is the type of candidate the course wanted to attract. I did Computer Games Systems Masters at an ex-polytech. The course had a math element that largely went beyond me (however, I now have an appreciation for the fundamentals at a system level), having only a working knowledge of integration, and unable to show proof. How do you still cater for students that don't respond well at math? Give them system programming, internet programming, windows programming and hotsex programming modules! I enjoyed these because I didn't have to think about the work - I could program long before my Computer Systems undergraduate degree... finally however, I was using what I knew in fairly productive ways (and getting it right the first time).
So admittedly I am the type of candidate my course attracts - but that's not the whole story. There are other modules I had to do for my MSc that weren't related to Systems: Games Prototyping was a module where we took an idea, and prototyped a design: generally some kind of working model such as level. Here my course (as there were only 3 of us on it!) mixed with the Computer Games Design idiots.
Let me break for a paragraph there, because a break is required. Having done a systems engineering degree, systems programming for 4 years, and a genuine interest in technology, I had modules with CADers and Photoshopers who's only interests were in PLAYING games and hacking skins. They did NOT program, they did NOT care about the technology. For my group work in the prototyping module I actively ignored my lecturer since it turned out that he wasn't even a PhD candidate and had actually graduated through that University (one renowned for being poor at Science in the first place - albeit one with a fantastic employment track). I ignored the CAD stuff he was teaching me, I ignored the game design crap I could read about myself (his lectures consisted of photocopied material from a book!) and I ignore the fact that I was probably more qualified to teach when he questioned my analysis on throughput, net code, and the fact you couldn't realistically expect to host a 5v5 on a home broadband connection (he said he could do it on his XBox - so that made him right: if he reads this - f u c k o f f, and go study signalling).
I made the most out of that lecturers modelling by delving into the Hammer engine and coding some actually game aspects.
So what do I have to show for my masters in computer games systems? Not a lot. When people are getting degrees and masters in computer games design, and putting themselves out to games companies as great programmers having only studied a single module on C++ (not even covering allocation and collection let alone dependency garbage collection!), compared to the real engineers who were doing assembly on an ARM7TDMI in their sleep, they are destroying the reputation of the graduate industry as a whole.
As someone who drank myself stupid in my final year at undergrad, and came out with the worst possible grade given my ability, finding myself so much more technically able than those who got a first class in undergraduate computer games degree is a disgrace to any gaming graduate.
i don't run a linux system at home. I'm a gamer during the evenings, and an OpenGL programmer and law student during the day time. There has simply been no need for me to. Since term ended I decided to give my beloved KDE ago and try out KDE 4.0 using Kubuntu via the Wubi installer. Fantastic package... it all went swimmingly well
Until... The proprietary nvidia driver decided its automatic screen mode (res and refresh rate) was best, and ignored any attempt to add a modeline to xorg.conf. I had to (gasp) look at the back of my monitor and add the v and h frequencies myself. Sadly the nvidia driver simply ignores my monitors EDID.
I've been a long long proponent of "if it works" proprietary drivers in the kernel, such as nvidia's, providing they are robust and either equally or a more significantly more beneficial component to the system than others more important. But that was back when I accepted the fact there was an amount of tinkering to be done, or there was an amount of work to be done to glue things together. As the linux "system" becomes better at handling things automatically, the flaws in proprietary drivers are becoming less forgiveable because they are a bottleneck. When proprietary pieces of technology can't be glued together because they're at fault, I begin see the issues. In my case the nvidia driver finally became a more significant hindrance to my system, than a graphically accelerated benefit when correctly configured.
It's finally the time to say the bottleneck in Linux on the desktop is edging towards drivers, so very slowly.
Is this really such a big thing? Surely they only have to mirror the sources from their original location unless they've made modifications?
Shouldn't time an effort be spent on finding the guys who modify the sources, and make a profit, rather than those who merely fail to mirror and honour the distribution agreement because they're lazy?
This reminds me of the Debian upstream/downstream problem that rears it's head up now and again: if the sources are freely available, does every man and his dog have to distribute the unmodified version if they merely make use of it downstream?!
Slashdot Mirror
forget the nay sayers... I for one want to see what the /. community do. Do they run a DC ring around the house? Strip the wires and fudge some coins together to make a potential divider? replace the transformers with rodent power?
I have 4 USB hdds that I've not gotten around to putting in a case yet, because I dont have the cash for a mixed sata/ide jbod server, all of which need their own adaptor. I have a headset that needs an adaptor. My phone charger, and mp3 charger. That's some 7 sockets I'm using on 8 socket power strip, with the 8th going to a another 4 socket in serial to power my PC and high-fi (i know you shouldn't have power strips in parallel... but pfft, im not running a kettle off it like at Uni :D)
it is a problem. step down transformers are notoriously wasteful. There has to be a better way!?
I was intrigued! You gave me the info I wanted to google with - Mass CIA resignations lead me to this
I had no idea how bad it was. Retrospectively, the bashing the CIA got seems stupid considering the impossibility of what they have to accomplish... not just now, but after pissing off most of the world in the last 8 years.
I understand that's what happened in the justice department - is that true of other departments?
old school id, 3d realms and apogee folk must be cringing at this kind of comment for it was the shareware "revolution" that created the major games industries we see today. if TH starts anti-piracy trolling, someone might have to remind him of his roots: episodic gaming is just the connect equivalent.
unless you're an embedded dev, nothing to see, move along.
the slowest part of the intel cpu cycle is decode - but before your cpu processes streams of op codes for decode you have to load the executable image into ram and then run the dynamic linker. the dynamic linker needs to parse every the segment to be worthwhile, otherwise you'll hit the linker each time you load a segment that's slightly interesting (weaker the symbols/IAT, the more likely) only to find out you didn't need to causing jitter.
its one of those "ill believe it when i see it" performance gains
Matt
In most common law courts, family law opinions are not public - moreover they are almost never public where minors are involved. If a decision is public, it probably rests on on a trust or contractual issue where equity is apportioned - eg: you don't know the relationship details of Paul McCartney's recent divorce, but you do know how his property was divided.
I welcome this presumption of value in anonymity. It seems people are finally getting the fact that computer networks don't forget as they should. If people started implementing error rates - forgetfulness for example - into computer systems, we would eventually use information with a little difference and not blindly believe everything we see. Information should not be 100% reliable because human collation is inherently error prone and not 100% accurate - without enforcing this we cant change the perception of information.
Perhaps when we see information as infallible as it really is we can then strive to build safeguards. Starting with a guarentee of privacy in communication privity.
People keep telling me that Perl is less readable than other languages, but i disagree. It's only less readable when you dont know the language specific semantics used - surely everyone remembers when they saw floor((float)i + 0.5) in C for the first time? It's no different to a perl programmer who uses @array = map { s/something/better/g } @data;
While I must admit that if you code in perl like a one-liner guru, you're not going to make particularly managable code but not coding in perl has significient RAD drawbacks. In Perl I worry about one thing: variable tainting. In C and C++ I have to worry about tainted variables, constant index-off-by-one errors, the possibility of null pointers and null reference handling, libraries and linking.
Some Perl programmers could do with more non perl experience to make their style managable. Perl 5 oop is a joke, and perl 6 is trollbait - but these aren't reasons why programmers shouldn't apply wider programming skills as a C/Jaava programmer uses their ADT knowledge and skill between langages.
Matt
D-Trace.... or the Solaris-Debian distro most certainly will!
I love the way you've summed up everything I've been saying to anyone who will listen for the last 5 years. We think alike, and nodoubt so does the rest of slashdot.
If only my prime minister wouldn't sell our nuclear program to a french company only interested in profits. It's not socialist to cover the cost of development of something so massive: it's development.
Matt
Sadly that's the problem. Noone in power seems to "get it".
We have an illusionary mechanism of security, when all we can validate is the validation - or worst still, all we can validate is the appearance of some kind of mechanism that if tested would prove our authenticity. We are insecure if the process of testing this security is too taxing as to render it unused.
Authenticating who you say you are vs who you're allowed to be is a trivial problem of matching biometric information that you supply with that on record. Unfortunately all the money is spent on the establishing the pretense of who you are, yet what is more important is the establishing of "yes, I can verify that". Admittedly this is for legacy/"backward compatibility" or unconnected infratructure reasons, but, still, when moving from one country to another, those that rely on the backward compatibility side are those that fear little (ie: legal movement between african nations, the EU, dual-nationality zones) from migration.
Consider the EU laws on travel within the EU. They dont require a passport. Passports are a lie. They require any kind of "valid" photo-ID to establish the name of that person. Even without ID, if boarder control can establish you are who you say you are, you are permitted to enter into another EU country. In this connected world, a photo seems a little pointless when we can take a finger print or eye scan.
What we need is, and I hate to say this, a database of "travellers". A database of hashes is sufficient - and privacy advocates should make sure that this is a one way hash. We should reply upon connectivity to check we are who we say were are, or at the very least, the ability to mirror this database to entry/exits in participating countries.
Why? Then all we have to do is say we are someone, take a finger print, scan, whatever, they can confirm they are that person.
The problem of "storing" our full biometric information whether plain or in bidirection encryption formats is that we can always alter it. Remove that ability for us to alter that data and the data becomes more resistant to tampering.
If you ignore the whole principle of encryption and biometric information, what we are doing is giving everyone an orange as a passport and saying to them -
Boarder Control - "Look here, this confirms you are you, because it's a god-damned orange and we know what oranges look like"
Traveller - "But Sir, I can tell you my name!"
"I still want to see an oranage. If I dont see an orange how I can trust you?".
"But I can grow oranges at home. How can you ever trust someone that shows you an orange."
"Because my computer checks your orange and tells me its your orange"
"But if I grow my orange, it IS my orange, and you computer will tell you it is my orange"
"Mmmm."
Admittedly I believe who whole point in having a passport that mirrors the information you supply is a good one. It shifts the focus on defeating not only biometric scanning but to forging electronic information and paper.
I believe most methods of biometric scanning that I have come across can be defeated with a little research. What we have here is just another element in the linked list of endless methods to stay one step ahead of the professional criminals. Expect more additions.
I'm definitely with you - the personal tangents make LR work so well! I guess after a while I began to notice gaps in the presenters' knowledge. They slowly became more and more evident, and I feel that many of the "i don't like"s are really "don't understand"s. Most shows will have the comical genius and the technical expertise, yet i find LR is group of like-minded comical hobbyists without a strong technical personality directing things.
Just imagine how balanced the show would be for the technical folk and the like-minded enthusiast if Jonathan Corbet was British and an LR presenter! (nb. I am an LWN fanboy)
The only problem is that I kind of disagree with what I'm typing, when I reread it back. LR is LR - it's hard to fault something so uniquely special. Having listened to a few perl related podcasts a few years ago to 'sample' the podcasting world (pardon the pun), I was a little dismayed by what the internet had to offer then: generally the more technical the cast and subject, the more boring and mundane they are presenting it. LR is great because it's like a Friday night chat show (after 9pm, you are permitted to swear on UK TV) a la Jonathan Ross, combined with the indefeasible personality like traits of Jeremy Clarkson. It's great comedy at the same level as it's technical representation.
Maybe I'm just a little too moany. Regardless, LR shall be sadly missed come next month!
Matt
heh,
the Funky Pie phenomenon was disguised on the boards a few years ago
http://forums.lugradio.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=306&start=0&st=0&sk=t&sd=a
It's an "out of the box" ice-cream tart that many Indians have nowdays :D
Matt
I went to the first LRL and loved it, after following the banter for a while. sadly i was a poor student then, and didn't make the last one.
Thanks to LRL I met Mark Shuttleworth :D Thanks to LRL I watched about 20 people order a desert at an Indian confusing it with the main mean :D
I guess this gives the community a chance to reciprocate? Perhaps a new UK-based (humours of course!) Linux radio show with slightly more knowledgeable (on-topic?!) hosts? Unfortunately I find the show is too long for me to back jump into nowadays.
(I didn't mean to say they're not knowledgeable folk btw - only that each and every paintball I fired championed KDE and Slackware in return for all the bashing! :D)
Matt
No need to make it personal. But Ill bite (i'm bored - and someone is wrong on the internet (XKCD ftw)).
Just to clarify a few things for you - just because u were playing tribes and warcraft, doesn't mean youre right either. It works both ways. This particular annoyance of mine arose from a presentation I did on a highly competitive game design pitch aimed directly at competitions a la counter-strike. Hence the frustration I got listening to a pseudo-lecturer telling me the same BS you're telling me. You are still both wrong - while the word impossible might be incorrect a 5v5 is still a 5 on 5 fps game to every modern gamer out there.
I think you need to look up signalling - specifically the nyquist rate and shannon-hartly sampling theorum - and imagine how a computer game would want to interpolate positional vectors for accuracy. Your comparison to WC2 is a moot point and I can only assume tribes is an extrapolation system since the client side prediction is as you claim so good. Either that, or it's not a sub 50ms game.
It seems you've lost plot and really missed the point. Tell me, have u tried setting up 8+ man fps games on an xbox 360? IIRC, Call of Duty didn't allow more than 8 players. I'm not a know it all and don't profess to be, but it seems u seem to know less than me which somehow makes me wrong for being educated (and right). You're a troll the internet didn't want to access broadband.
I can hardly call myself educated when I can't question the wrong tuition of a mere undergraduate lecturer.
Yours truely, a bloke who first started playing network games over DOS packet drivers and BSD stack,
Matt
Not with any reasonable expectation of realtime - by which i mean a low ping of 50ms or less. its a question of throughput, and where throughput is maxed out, a question of delaying updatings and queuing. The reason you were able to play tribes is because everyone had serveral hundred millisecond pings (if not serveral seconds!!), and the tribes landscape is huge to boot unlike CS et al which focuses on precise headshots.
Modern fps games are tuned to 5-10ms response times, in otherwords you need a much higher transmit rate. a CS client will use ~10kpbs upstream easily. Most ISPs have 512k or 786k upstreams, so you can see my problem here. It all get a little complicated the lower the ping.
Matt
Matt
What I was demonstrating is the way schools introduce maths leaves a lot to be desired.
I chose my masters program perfectly, because the math element was functional and entirely introduced at a level I understood for the most part, only in the final few classes did it really begin to leave me with concepts like inertial tensors as they were a little abstract without an implemented framework.
I am regularly frustrated that I have to put in a lot of effort into understanding a concept I wasn't introduced to at school - in other words i have to learn and have been learning, but at the price of a few frustrated nights in. I wouldn't say I "*still*" haven't fixed my deficiencies, i must have to succeeded thus far, but I would argue that there are a lot of programmers who would be a lot better had they had the chance to study further maths.
Frankly, if you think that you can code games because you read some books, you are so wrong ! Are you serious? If you're not keeping up with technological trends then I'm worried about the type of games you were involved with. I think you may have missed the portal and parallax/reflief mapping bandwagons by a mile. It's very hard to follow developments in RenderMonkey/orthatnvidatool if you're not following the publications or at least the implementations you find in the industry books.
I agree there is a subset of game programmers who can take on the roll of scripting. Lua itself and Lua-like clones are facilitating this. But the industry really wants lower level programmers. Guys who can think not in terms of object-think wait()-do()-wait(), but guys who can implement a smartptr system to create a better garbage collection system or guys who plan thread synchronisation rather than just wait and see.
Matt
That's the point tho isn't it - game designers are overshadowing the game programmers. Games companies don't care how skilled their CADers or Photoshopers are when they're likely to outsource most of that anyway, and since there's no shortage of them its not a massive problem. The problem lies with the fact CADers and Photoshopers and graduates who *think* they are not when they are, however skilled they maybe (terrific skills indeed - i submit!) wanting to get into the programming side because of the financial rewards. They've been subtly coerced into thinking that if they apply for jobs they'll get one. Many of them haven't heard of the Gems series, let alone own any!
I don't pretend to be the only person in the world who knows what they're doing, but I am as equally annoyed that what was once portrayed as a simple career path for the experienced and talented programmer is now one where you have to fight just to get an entry level job because the CADers and Photoshopers are taking up all the interviews proclaiming to be software engineers.
I have a chip on my shoulder. Fair enough.
Matt
The problem is when choosing the general science route at A-Level, you do Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Maths, later dropping one at A2. If you don't much like either chemistry or biology, it's not a problem if you're interested in the gaming community. The problem lies with the fact that you can rarely timetable Maths with anything other than the 3 sciences. I didn't do A-Level maths, and I'm very annoyed that I didn't. My problem was 2 fold - the upper sets were full (we had 2 x 3 tiers since our year was divided into 2). I plodded along learning nothing in the middle set. I felt like I was a paper calculator! The interesting and applicable stuff was only introduced in the higher tiers - throughout my time at Uni I've been constantly annoyed that I don't understand introductory proof to things I've never been introduced to.
The second problem is the type of candidate the course wanted to attract. I did Computer Games Systems Masters at an ex-polytech. The course had a math element that largely went beyond me (however, I now have an appreciation for the fundamentals at a system level), having only a working knowledge of integration, and unable to show proof. How do you still cater for students that don't respond well at math? Give them system programming, internet programming, windows programming and hotsex programming modules! I enjoyed these because I didn't have to think about the work - I could program long before my Computer Systems undergraduate degree... finally however, I was using what I knew in fairly productive ways (and getting it right the first time).
So admittedly I am the type of candidate my course attracts - but that's not the whole story. There are other modules I had to do for my MSc that weren't related to Systems: Games Prototyping was a module where we took an idea, and prototyped a design: generally some kind of working model such as level. Here my course (as there were only 3 of us on it!) mixed with the Computer Games Design idiots.
Let me break for a paragraph there, because a break is required. Having done a systems engineering degree, systems programming for 4 years, and a genuine interest in technology, I had modules with CADers and Photoshopers who's only interests were in PLAYING games and hacking skins. They did NOT program, they did NOT care about the technology. For my group work in the prototyping module I actively ignored my lecturer since it turned out that he wasn't even a PhD candidate and had actually graduated through that University (one renowned for being poor at Science in the first place - albeit one with a fantastic employment track). I ignored the CAD stuff he was teaching me, I ignored the game design crap I could read about myself (his lectures consisted of photocopied material from a book!) and I ignore the fact that I was probably more qualified to teach when he questioned my analysis on throughput, net code, and the fact you couldn't realistically expect to host a 5v5 on a home broadband connection (he said he could do it on his XBox - so that made him right: if he reads this - f u c k o f f, and go study signalling).
I made the most out of that lecturers modelling by delving into the Hammer engine and coding some actually game aspects.
So what do I have to show for my masters in computer games systems? Not a lot. When people are getting degrees and masters in computer games design, and putting themselves out to games companies as great programmers having only studied a single module on C++ (not even covering allocation and collection let alone dependency garbage collection!), compared to the real engineers who were doing assembly on an ARM7TDMI in their sleep, they are destroying the reputation of the graduate industry as a whole.
As someone who drank myself stupid in my final year at undergrad, and came out with the worst possible grade given my ability, finding myself so much more technically able than those who got a first class in undergraduate computer games degree is a disgrace to any gaming graduate.
If I hired a
quite a strong accusation there. unfortunately you are wrong. my first Linux system had a 33mhz cirrus logic vga adaptor - a good ol' dell PS/2 clone.
nvidia-setttings
kubuntu has magically installed nvidia-xconfig which didn't help much
Thanks.
i don't run a linux system at home. I'm a gamer during the evenings, and an OpenGL programmer and law student during the day time. There has simply been no need for me to. Since term ended I decided to give my beloved KDE ago and try out KDE 4.0 using Kubuntu via the Wubi installer. Fantastic package... it all went swimmingly well
Until... The proprietary nvidia driver decided its automatic screen mode (res and refresh rate) was best, and ignored any attempt to add a modeline to xorg.conf. I had to (gasp) look at the back of my monitor and add the v and h frequencies myself. Sadly the nvidia driver simply ignores my monitors EDID.
I've been a long long proponent of "if it works" proprietary drivers in the kernel, such as nvidia's, providing they are robust and either equally or a more significantly more beneficial component to the system than others more important. But that was back when I accepted the fact there was an amount of tinkering to be done, or there was an amount of work to be done to glue things together. As the linux "system" becomes better at handling things automatically, the flaws in proprietary drivers are becoming less forgiveable because they are a bottleneck. When proprietary pieces of technology can't be glued together because they're at fault, I begin see the issues. In my case the nvidia driver finally became a more significant hindrance to my system, than a graphically accelerated benefit when correctly configured.
It's finally the time to say the bottleneck in Linux on the desktop is edging towards drivers, so very slowly.
Matt
Is this really such a big thing? Surely they only have to mirror the sources from their original location unless they've made modifications?
Shouldn't time an effort be spent on finding the guys who modify the sources, and make a profit, rather than those who merely fail to mirror and honour the distribution agreement because they're lazy?
This reminds me of the Debian upstream/downstream problem that rears it's head up now and again: if the sources are freely available, does every man and his dog have to distribute the unmodified version if they merely make use of it downstream?!
Matt
i have good karma for having nothing better to do than comment frequently :D