Obviously, the/. community agree's that violent games do not cause kids to kill people. However, I don't think that enough emphasis has been placed on the parents. So far, I think that a lot of the parents are to blame (as well as the kids) in the shootings in the schools. These parents subject these kids to meaningless activities in order to live thru them, or they don't pay enough attention to them, or they don't teach them from right and wrong. Parents in society today are getting worse and worse. Just look at all of the recent new cartoons on Fox. They are all there to mock horrible parents and satire on how the world runs.
Nowadays, parents use drugs and medicine rather than real parenting to get their kids to do things. Parents have relied so heavily on drugs like Ritalin and Prozac (for example) rather than to teach their kids good values and whats real and what is not.
The kids who do activites like this (kill people) also need to get a grip (along with a shot in the arm, if you get my drift) about what society is really like. A kid needs real help if a plasma rifle in a game wants to make him kill someone.
I am glad to see that a decision like this was made by the courts. Its finally time that they wake up and smell the coffee.
Aside from having to pay for stuff you can get for free, the new Napster could fail due to download constraints. Obviously, it will be impossible to make every download work all the time. People log off, cancel downloads, etc..., which annoys the user at the other end. Admit it, when you are downloading a nice huge 700MB movie, you are a bit perturbed when the sender cuts you off at 650MB and your download fails. Now imagine that you just paid for that download. You'd be steaming. There would have to be some way for Napster to prevent files from failing to download along with allowing them to download fast.
I just came back from a LAN party last night that we hosted at my office for a bunch of my friends. It was smaller than most, only about 10 people, but we had a really fun time. I find that games that are made to be played online (read Unreal Tournament:)) usually work best for LAN parties. First, they have really good, solid online/LAN code so that you pretty much know that you don't have to worry about that.
Also, like someone else said, older games tend to work really well. Unreal Tournament is now getting into its older years, but its still really fun to play. Epic has even realeased a patch that makes it so you don't have to use the CD for playing anymore. That's pretty cool.
I also find that FPS's are the best for LAN parties. You can play regular fragfest type or play on teams, they are fast paced, you can play more of them, and everyone seems to like em. Unline RTS/RPG games that require hours and hours of play time, FPS's are over quick. Plus, you develop really good hand eye coordination along with fast reflexes and such.
Our lead programmer at our office used to be a car mechanic. Funny it may sound, it has really helped out. Car mechanics tend to be able to pay attention to detail very closely, which helps when cranking out a lot of code and then having to go back and debug. Plus, they like to stick with things until they are done 110% so that also helps when starting a new project. Since he is also our main IT guy, he does the networking stuff so his attention to detail helps greatly with that.
Just my $0.02.
-Vic
You can read more here
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Parrot Updates
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· Score: 2, Informative
Face it, its one of the most used compilers in the world (if not THE most used compiler in the world). VC++ that is, and MS has their own style of notation, you've probably heard of it, called Hungarian notation.
Very popular, a little hard to use, but will save you a ton of time.
Did a quick search on Google and got some really good results on how to use Hungarian notation:
Just to name a few. I use it in all of my major projects (see sig for shameless plug) and I hope that many other people will adopt it into their coding styles.
How many of you watch TechTV? I think its a badass channel, esepcially The Screen Savers. While its geared more towards Windows than Linux/Open Source, Leo does bring it up on occasion. TechTV has really taken off. I think it provides a balance of everything. They have the Screen Savers (which shows cool things for your computer and how to fix windows annoyances), then Fresh Gear which shows badass new technological stuff coming out on the market (although we'd have to be as rich as Bill Gates to afford it). Then there are the news shows that just broadcast news in the tech industry.
If this G4 gaming channel came on as strong as TechTV did, I think it would totally rock. If they had something, for example, that featured a badass gamer every week (or day) that would give hints, as he was playing whatever game, newbies and experienced players alike would flock to the channel. I know I would, and I consider myself an experienced UT'er.
To me, watching/playing in online games is more fun and more adrenaline rushing than sports. Sports can be enjoyable, and if kept in moderation, fun at times:), but gaming is a lot more fun.
If you don't have this new channel yet, I suggest you go here and try to get it in your community.
The practice of eliminating competition is our enemy.
Windows is not a BAD operating system, it's simply an inferior one put out by a company obsessed with the prospect of being the only operating system on the market. We don't need to fight Microsoft, we only need to fight that mentality.
What you describe here is called capitalism. Capitalism says that the best man wins, and in this case its Microsoft.
How could one not like RtCW? I think its the best shoot-em up game on the market today. Before RtCW was out, UT was clearly the best game out there, even better than Quake III that came out almost a year later than it. The Unreal engine was incredible. Then id makes the QuakeIII engine which uses OpenGL as the main rendering API and its really nice and all, but UT was just a better game than QuakeIII.
Finally, RtCW comes out and its a lot better than UT. It's a shame really that it took almost 2 years for a game to be UT, but RtCW finally did.
However, I will continue to play UT (as I am in a clan) but I think in the coming months, many UT clans will migrate to RtCW and then finally back to UT when UT2 comes out.
I must protest. I don't think that Perl is losing any popularity as a scripting language. Maybe for a CGI language, but that was not its original intention either. Back in 1998, a study was done and it showed 1,000,000+ people used Perl on a daily basis or had P+++$ in their Geekcode (ok, I made that last part up). Thats a lot of people. It's undoubtedly gone up by now, especially with the release of Perl 6 around the corner.
Also, what do you mean they like to write short and clever programs? Doesn't everyone? Cut down on the lines of code, up the efficiency, its every programmers dream. Many large professional programs have been written in Perl. If you've ever read the Oreily DBI Perl book, the first few pages have several Perl programmers talking about how Perl and the DBI have worked with databases for companies like AT&T.
Perl can very much be used for large projects.
And thus, I leave you with:
"A well written Perl program will run faster than a horribly written C program." (I think Christiansen said that one, but I'm not sure:))
That LoadLibrary call is sure ugly but it makes the code work on old versions of Windows 95. When you throw that function away and start from scratch, you are throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected bug fixes. Years of programming work.
Whats saying that a programmer can't go back into the function, rewrite it with new code, code maybe from a better API and then make the function run faster and be bug free.
Although probably already mentioned, I suggest everyone pick up a copy of Return to Castle Wolfenstein. I just beat it, and the game is incredible. To me, Unreal Tournament has been the best game for the past several years, but RtCW really whoops up on it. Its somewhat sad that it took 2 years for a game to finally beat UT, though UT is still an incredible game.
The QuakeIII engine has earned new respect in my book for running RtCW. The gameplay is incredible, the story is really cool, although definitely imaginary, and the graphics are beyond killer.
However, it requires a lot of system resources. The box says a 500 mhz box with a 16mb card, but if you want to see anything decent, I suggest at least an 800 with 512mb RAM and a good GeForce to get somewhere with the graphics.
Whats the big deal about something like this? So, Linux can hold files that are larger than any hard drive is, or will be for a while now. Not even the largest databases in the world are this big, with the exception of maybe the U.S. Governments. Other than that, I see no reason to make such a big deal over something that doesn't mean much. Maybe 100 years from now this will be useful.
I am reading another book in the series, OpenGL Game Programming, and its a very good book. Granted it assumes some knowledge about OpenGL, it does help a lot.
I was thumbing through this book the other day at BN and it did seem to lack substantiality.
Although not a full fledged game programmer yet, I do plan on becoming one, and programming for both OS's is a must. So thanks for the heads up on this, and I won't look foward to seeing this book on my bookshelf.
-Vic
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously, the /. community agree's that violent games do not cause kids to kill people. However, I don't think that enough emphasis has been placed on the parents. So far, I think that a lot of the parents are to blame (as well as the kids) in the shootings in the schools. These parents subject these kids to meaningless activities in order to live thru them, or they don't pay enough attention to them, or they don't teach them from right and wrong. Parents in society today are getting worse and worse. Just look at all of the recent new cartoons on Fox. They are all there to mock horrible parents and satire on how the world runs.
Nowadays, parents use drugs and medicine rather than real parenting to get their kids to do things. Parents have relied so heavily on drugs like Ritalin and Prozac (for example) rather than to teach their kids good values and whats real and what is not.
The kids who do activites like this (kill people) also need to get a grip (along with a shot in the arm, if you get my drift) about what society is really like. A kid needs real help if a plasma rifle in a game wants to make him kill someone.
I am glad to see that a decision like this was made by the courts. Its finally time that they wake up and smell the coffee.
-Vic
Aside from having to pay for stuff you can get for free, the new Napster could fail due to download constraints. Obviously, it will be impossible to make every download work all the time. People log off, cancel downloads, etc..., which annoys the user at the other end. Admit it, when you are downloading a nice huge 700MB movie, you are a bit perturbed when the sender cuts you off at 650MB and your download fails. Now imagine that you just paid for that download. You'd be steaming. There would have to be some way for Napster to prevent files from failing to download along with allowing them to download fast.
-Vic
I just came back from a LAN party last night that we hosted at my office for a bunch of my friends. It was smaller than most, only about 10 people, but we had a really fun time. I find that games that are made to be played online (read Unreal Tournament :)) usually work best for LAN parties. First, they have really good, solid online/LAN code so that you pretty much know that you don't have to worry about that.
Also, like someone else said, older games tend to work really well. Unreal Tournament is now getting into its older years, but its still really fun to play. Epic has even realeased a patch that makes it so you don't have to use the CD for playing anymore. That's pretty cool.
I also find that FPS's are the best for LAN parties. You can play regular fragfest type or play on teams, they are fast paced, you can play more of them, and everyone seems to like em. Unline RTS/RPG games that require hours and hours of play time, FPS's are over quick. Plus, you develop really good hand eye coordination along with fast reflexes and such.
-Vic
Our lead programmer at our office used to be a car mechanic. Funny it may sound, it has really helped out. Car mechanics tend to be able to pay attention to detail very closely, which helps when cranking out a lot of code and then having to go back and debug. Plus, they like to stick with things until they are done 110% so that also helps when starting a new project. Since he is also our main IT guy, he does the networking stuff so his attention to detail helps greatly with that.
Just my $0.02.
-Vic
Read more here
:)
Seems like a cool thing, I don't know much about it though.
-Vic
Face it, its one of the most used compilers in the world (if not THE most used compiler in the world). VC++ that is, and MS has their own style of notation, you've probably heard of it, called Hungarian notation.
t ion.htm
Very popular, a little hard to use, but will save you a ton of time.
Did a quick search on Google and got some really good results on how to use Hungarian notation:
http://www.umr.edu/~cpp/common/hungarian.html
http://csciwww.etsu.edu/bailes/1250/HungarianNota
Just to name a few. I use it in all of my major projects (see sig for shameless plug) and I hope that many other people will adopt it into their coding styles.
-Vic
How many of you watch TechTV? I think its a badass channel, esepcially The Screen Savers. While its geared more towards Windows than Linux/Open Source, Leo does bring it up on occasion. TechTV has really taken off. I think it provides a balance of everything. They have the Screen Savers (which shows cool things for your computer and how to fix windows annoyances), then Fresh Gear which shows badass new technological stuff coming out on the market (although we'd have to be as rich as Bill Gates to afford it). Then there are the news shows that just broadcast news in the tech industry.
:), but gaming is a lot more fun.
If this G4 gaming channel came on as strong as TechTV did, I think it would totally rock. If they had something, for example, that featured a badass gamer every week (or day) that would give hints, as he was playing whatever game, newbies and experienced players alike would flock to the channel. I know I would, and I consider myself an experienced UT'er.
To me, watching/playing in online games is more fun and more adrenaline rushing than sports. Sports can be enjoyable, and if kept in moderation, fun at times
If you don't have this new channel yet, I suggest you go here and try to get it in your community.
-Vic
The practice of eliminating competition is our enemy.
Windows is not a BAD operating system, it's simply an inferior one put out by a company obsessed with the prospect of being the only operating system on the market. We don't need to fight Microsoft, we only need to fight that mentality.
What you describe here is called capitalism. Capitalism says that the best man wins, and in this case its Microsoft.
-Vic
That would be Perl 5 that was released on the 18th of October.
-Vic
So Sony doesn't care if people play copied games, but they do care if people are playing imports. Boy is our world messed up.
-Vic
How could one not like RtCW? I think its the best shoot-em up game on the market today. Before RtCW was out, UT was clearly the best game out there, even better than Quake III that came out almost a year later than it. The Unreal engine was incredible. Then id makes the QuakeIII engine which uses OpenGL as the main rendering API and its really nice and all, but UT was just a better game than QuakeIII.
Finally, RtCW comes out and its a lot better than UT. It's a shame really that it took almost 2 years for a game to be UT, but RtCW finally did.
However, I will continue to play UT (as I am in a clan) but I think in the coming months, many UT clans will migrate to RtCW and then finally back to UT when UT2 comes out.
-Vic
It is a Pentium 100 with 64MB RAM, running Red Hat Linux 7.2.
I wonder how long it takes this site to get slashdotted. Any bets? 10 minutes max.
-Vic
I must protest. I don't think that Perl is losing any popularity as a scripting language. Maybe for a CGI language, but that was not its original intention either. Back in 1998, a study was done and it showed 1,000,000+ people used Perl on a daily basis or had P+++$ in their Geekcode (ok, I made that last part up). Thats a lot of people. It's undoubtedly gone up by now, especially with the release of Perl 6 around the corner.
:))
Also, what do you mean they like to write short and clever programs? Doesn't everyone? Cut down on the lines of code, up the efficiency, its every programmers dream. Many large professional programs have been written in Perl. If you've ever read the Oreily DBI Perl book, the first few pages have several Perl programmers talking about how Perl and the DBI have worked with databases for companies like AT&T.
Perl can very much be used for large projects.
And thus, I leave you with:
"A well written Perl program will run faster than a horribly written C program." (I think Christiansen said that one, but I'm not sure
-Vic
That LoadLibrary call is sure ugly but it makes the code work on old versions of Windows 95. When you throw that function away and start from scratch, you are throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected bug fixes. Years of programming work.
Whats saying that a programmer can't go back into the function, rewrite it with new code, code maybe from a better API and then make the function run faster and be bug free.
Although probably already mentioned, I suggest everyone pick up a copy of Return to Castle Wolfenstein. I just beat it, and the game is incredible. To me, Unreal Tournament has been the best game for the past several years, but RtCW really whoops up on it. Its somewhat sad that it took 2 years for a game to finally beat UT, though UT is still an incredible game.
The QuakeIII engine has earned new respect in my book for running RtCW. The gameplay is incredible, the story is really cool, although definitely imaginary, and the graphics are beyond killer.
However, it requires a lot of system resources. The box says a 500 mhz box with a 16mb card, but if you want to see anything decent, I suggest at least an 800 with 512mb RAM and a good GeForce to get somewhere with the graphics.
Hope this helps.
-Vic
One might want to check out this link as well.
-Vic
For all of you loyal Gord readers out there (www.actsofgord.com), you should probably read this as well:
this
-Vic
What sort of idiot delivers a package to a recycle bin?
:)
He must have been a Windows user.
Whats the big deal about something like this? So, Linux can hold files that are larger than any hard drive is, or will be for a while now. Not even the largest databases in the world are this big, with the exception of maybe the U.S. Governments. Other than that, I see no reason to make such a big deal over something that doesn't mean much. Maybe 100 years from now this will be useful.
-Vic
I am reading another book in the series, OpenGL Game Programming, and its a very good book. Granted it assumes some knowledge about OpenGL, it does help a lot. I was thumbing through this book the other day at BN and it did seem to lack substantiality. Although not a full fledged game programmer yet, I do plan on becoming one, and programming for both OS's is a must. So thanks for the heads up on this, and I won't look foward to seeing this book on my bookshelf. -Vic