In my very first university math class, a student asked if a computer science student will use this math in real life.
The professor said something like "probably not"... but then went on to explain that one of the greatest things about math is that is teaches you how to solve problems. Problem solving is a great job skill to have.
I've been a TekSavvy customer for a few months now (they only recently came to our area). I appreciate them for introducing a little bit of competition in Canada. I also appreciate that they fight for your digital rights. The reason I switched to TekSavvy was because I watched their CEO participate in discussions on TV Ontario's "The Agenda" and CBC about digital rights and competition. When I switched from Rogers(our cable monopoly internet provider), Rogers offered me a rate that was 1/2 of what I was paying and double the bandwidth. It was even lower than TekSavvy's rates but I switched anyways. You would never get such a deal if TekSavvy didn't exist. The switch was difficult because Rogers cut the cable line rather than transfer it to TekSavvy... but I'm finally off of the mega giant known as Roger's. I'm glad TekSavvy is publicizing these legal threats, it reminds me why I switched.
Ok.. so I haven't read the damned article to see what Billie's opinion is but I have read yours and don't really agree.
I went to a university for computer science. My curriculum was basically 1/3 computer science, 1/3 math and 1/3 other stuff. So was two thirds of those courses a waste? Well I don't use calculus at my job, in fact I forget most of the details of all those math courses. However, one of the reasons a company wants to hire you is not so much that you know whatever the current exciting programming language is.... but because you can solve problems. One of the best ways to obtain problem solving skills can be though math courses. Who wants an employee who has to ask for help as soon as they see something new that they were not trained exactly for?
Although the idea of rushing together a game in 48 hours seems amusing, I don't know if there is much value of open sourcing the code. I know if I was rushing to get a game done in 48 hours my code would be a mess.
In three months our uDevGames entry was over 30,000 lines of code(we had two people). Another game I glanced at was around 11,000 and involved a lot of math and physics. Some of the games have code for Mac OS X, Mac OS 9, and Windows. I think open sourcing some of these games will be of some value to the mac developer community. If you actually try some of the games, you'd see that a number of them couldn't have been put together in 48 hours.
I've never used DirectX. You mention DirectPlay as if it didn't really have any good alternatives. OpenPlay is an alternative high level networking API. I think it is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. You should be able to write games that has networking between them and OpenPlay will deal with the Big Endian/Little Endian stuff. It is open-source. I've used it on my www.idevgames.com game contest entry and I didn't find any problems.
I got a degree in Computer Science from Waterloo University. I am beginning to think I wasted 5 years of my life. U of W is one of Canada's best for CS... they came in 3rd in the last ACM contest behind MIT and Shanghi. The degree was a lot of work. Many of my friends failed out. There was only 13% girls in my classes and most guys did not have or a girlfriend or have time for one during those five years. I had co-op work experience and had no problem finding a job at Cisco when I graduated. A year and a half later they shut down our division. Now it has almost been a year now and I still can't find work. I have skills such as Java and C++ and excellent references... but no one is hiring. I remember a long time ago someone from Microsoft made some comment about Open Source hurting the industry. At the time I thought it was an absurd comment. But lately I've been thinking it may be true. a few years ago if I wanted a library API for some network protocol my company would have had to purchase something. However, now there is almost always a free alternative that is of great quality... so there is less and less companies paying people to program things because there are free ones out there. I dunno.. just a thought. But still... if I had gotten something like a music degree.... I'd probably be equally unemployed right now.... but I'd probably be married too and maybe a little happier.
I would not pay much attention to that rumour though. They talk about FedEx reporting going from Alaska back to Taiwan. All that is, is the time zones. FedEx reports local time when things are scanned in. The thing did not actually go back to taiwan.
I've played Starcraft a bit, but I lost interest. I am just not a fast enough clicker to do well. Myth has tactics. In Starcraft the general idea is to develop as many units and as powerful as possible... you out number your opponent(or out tech him) and beat him. In Myth every player has the same amount of units. But a good player(not really me) can beat a new player without taking much losses. When you play on Myth you will recognize other players after playing a few games with them. Sometimes, especially if you play with certain groups of people, you may spent a half hour chatting before the game.. when a typical game is only 12 minutes or so.
Myth also has a lot of plugins and new scenarios that people have made. A recent one "The 7th God" was 18 new co-op levels(the original game have only 25). People modify the physics and do strange and interesting things... the game has not got old for me.
As much as a fan boi of bungie that I am, I admit they aren't perfect. Companies like Blizzard have ported some older games to Mac OS X. I look forward to playing Halo on the mac, but I also think that after Halo no titles will be coming to the PC/Mac. I get the impression Bungie has learned that developing for 1 console is a lot easier than figuring out the bugs that occur on thousands of different PC configurations.
My brother and I had registered a number of Ambrosia's games back in the day when they were not limited. Back in the dark days of Mac there were almost no professional game developers for Mac. Yet, Ambrosia was making quality entertaining games that made my PC friends jealous. In university, my room was always active with someone playing Aperion(centepede) or the fish game.
Lately though I have not played too much in the way of Ambrosia games. I'm sure they are fun and what not... but the professional developers are slowly coming back to the Mac. I am probably a bad example though, as I have only played the Myth series by Bungie since it came out in 97 and have had little interest in anything else.
So my brother has made some shareware games for the Mac too. I helped out with things like AI and networking code. These things were non trivial and took a lot of hours even though they are only card games. They still were a lot of C++ code. The first game was quite popular, we made it in 97, and made it completely free. At the time we were worried about having to maintain and fix bugs with it... especially since it was not the cleanest code. Yet, my brother did make some money off of it as some Japanese fellow payed him a little bit of money then sold the translated game commercially in Japan.
Recently we made a much better card game with much better graphics and sounds, with very clean code now that we are both much more experienced. We had one of those shareware reminder dialogs show up when you start the app. But there was no code to put in to make it go away. Instead there was 3 choices,
1) I'll think about registering later
2) I'll never register, make this dialog go away
3) I have registered, make this dialog go away
The registration fee was 10$ which was not unreasonable I thought, as it was a game with which took many many hours to make. However, since it was not limited in any way and since you could make the dialog never appear again, I figured total registrations would be 0. I was surprised that about 15 people have registered, just to be nice. Of course that did not even cover the cost of the IDE. But we made the game for fun, and hope other people had fun with it too. Making a game like that improves your development skills which will help you in a job. To be honest, I think it would be difficult for a shareware game designer to make a living off of it.
I'm not sure if Ambrosia is really a shareware developer anymore. The recent releases were more like demos for the full game than a shareware game(which is fine). I hope Ambrosia stays successful as they kept the Mac fun through the dark years.
It blows my mind when I see that some school districts have the money to enable each 6/7/8 grader a computer.
The high school I came from currently is falling apart... literally. The secretaries are forced to where hard hats because the is a huge hole in the roof above them. The school is so old that there is a plaque dedicated to students who died in WW1. The roof needs to be replaced... or better yet a new school built... but they can't afford to do either.
The computers were so laughably old and there was only one computer room.... not a computer for each kid. Even in that room kids had to share a computer.
I'm just jealous is all... iBooks look pretty sweet.
I wish that Apple did keep this up to date. It is a great tool for kids to play around with.
I made some crazy stuff with hypercard back in the day. I made a fairly massive role playing game with multiple characters with hypercard... which sadly crashes now that hypercard is so out of date.
People start out by making animations with some sounds, they then learn to make some of it interactive, and so on.
All the little games I made with Hypercard I could have never done with a real language like C or Java... even the learning languages like Turing or Pascal would still have been too much work for my short attention span.
To give an idea of how much people liked the marathon story, there is a site dedicated to the story that has been updated very often since 94 by Hamish Sinclair. http://marathon.bungie.org/story
I don't know much about Halo's story but it is apparantly good. In addition I hope that there are links of the Marathon universe to the Halo universe.
The marathon 2 engine is open-sourced and the folks working on it have made some nice improvements. http://source.bungie.org
I recently played the Marathon 1 scenario(M1A1) on the open source engine.... I had forgotten how creepy that game was.
As a university graduate in Computer Science(University of Waterloo), I disagree.
Our degree was 1/3 cs 1/3 math and 1/3 electives.
I remember the first algebra class we had. I was taught by the associate-dean who struck me as a very intelligent man, unlike many of my other profs. This algebra class was very strange it was number theory, including useless tasks like finding the Greatest Common Denominator but some interesting ones like RCS encryption.
One day a student asked a question, "When am I ever going to use this stuff on the job?"
He responded with something like "You won't."
So why do we have to use this stuff?
He explained, you are in university not to just gain knowledge but to learn how to think and solve problems. One of the greatest tools to learn how to solve problems is with math.
I can't really word it as well as he did, but you get the idea.
Waterloo used to first teach useless "learning" languages like Pascal and Modula 3. It was only until later years would C/C++ or Java be used. The idea was that if they started with C/C++ the students would develop bad habits. They taught you how to learn. New languages pop up all the time and a university grad should be able to learn that language pretty quickly.
As an example, I was hired as a Java programmer. However, my resume only had C/C++ experience.
Unfortunatly there was a lot of pressure for Waterloo to change the Comp Sci degree with the reasoning as above. The degree now has a lot less math. Java is taught to first year students, who have no idea what a thread is but probably use them. Is the new way better? In my opinion, No.
Man there were a couple times that I flew from Canada to the States and back with some tools, like a screw driver in my carry on. I always carry them around to fix up my bike and I forgot I had them when I was travelling by plane.
The security people teased me a little about it, but I was allowed to take them with me. The bicycle pump looked like a pipe bomb under the x-ray apparently.
But to think that this tragedy started with these bastards stabbing stuardesses and pilots. It would be so easy to hide stabbing weapons in something. You can never fully detect that. Even a plastic stabbing weapon could be used.
One thing is certain now though. If hi-jackers take over a plane now.... a lot more people on board will try to be a hero(which we are told not to do). I'm am glad those passengers on the PA flight stopped them before they got to their destination.
Slashdot Mirror
In my very first university math class, a student asked if a computer science student will use this math in real life.
The professor said something like "probably not"... but then went on to explain that one of the greatest things about math is that is teaches you how to solve problems. Problem solving is a great job skill to have.
I've been a TekSavvy customer for a few months now (they only recently came to our area). I appreciate them for introducing a little bit of competition in Canada. I also appreciate that they fight for your digital rights. The reason I switched to TekSavvy was because I watched their CEO participate in discussions on TV Ontario's "The Agenda" and CBC about digital rights and competition. When I switched from Rogers(our cable monopoly internet provider), Rogers offered me a rate that was 1/2 of what I was paying and double the bandwidth. It was even lower than TekSavvy's rates but I switched anyways. You would never get such a deal if TekSavvy didn't exist. The switch was difficult because Rogers cut the cable line rather than transfer it to TekSavvy... but I'm finally off of the mega giant known as Roger's. I'm glad TekSavvy is publicizing these legal threats, it reminds me why I switched.
Ok.. so I haven't read the damned article to see what Billie's opinion is but I have read yours and don't really agree.
I went to a university for computer science. My curriculum was basically 1/3 computer science, 1/3 math and 1/3 other stuff. So was two thirds of those courses a waste?
Well I don't use calculus at my job, in fact I forget most of the details of all those math courses. However, one of the reasons a company wants to hire you is not so much that you know whatever the current exciting programming language is.... but because you can solve problems. One of the best ways to obtain problem solving skills can be though math courses. Who wants an employee who has to ask for help as soon as they see something new that they were not trained exactly for?
Although the idea of rushing together a game in 48 hours seems amusing, I don't know if there is much value of open sourcing the code. I know if I was rushing to get a game done in 48 hours my code would be a mess.
In three months our uDevGames entry was over 30,000 lines of code(we had two people). Another game I glanced at was around 11,000 and involved a lot of math and physics. Some of the games have code for Mac OS X, Mac OS 9, and Windows. I think open sourcing some of these games will be of some value to the mac developer community. If you actually try some of the games, you'd see that a number of them couldn't have been put together in 48 hours.
I've never used DirectX. You mention DirectPlay as if it didn't really have any good alternatives. OpenPlay is an alternative high level networking API. I think it is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. You should be able to write games that has networking between them and OpenPlay will deal with the Big Endian/Little Endian stuff. It is open-source. I've used it on my www.idevgames.com game contest entry and I didn't find any problems.
a y/
http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/openpl
I got a degree in Computer Science from Waterloo University. I am beginning to think I wasted 5 years of my life. U of W is one of Canada's best for CS... they came in 3rd in the last ACM contest behind MIT and Shanghi.
The degree was a lot of work. Many of my friends failed out. There was only 13% girls in my classes and most guys did not have or a girlfriend or have time for one during those five years. I had co-op work experience and had no problem finding a job at Cisco when I graduated. A year and a half later they shut down our division. Now it has almost been a year now and I still can't find work. I have skills such as Java and C++ and excellent references... but no one is hiring.
I remember a long time ago someone from Microsoft made some comment about Open Source hurting the industry. At the time I thought it was an absurd comment. But lately I've been thinking it may be true. a few years ago if I wanted a library API for some network protocol my company would have had to purchase something. However, now there is almost always a free alternative that is of great quality... so there is less and less companies paying people to program things because there are free ones out there. I dunno.. just a thought.
But still... if I had gotten something like a music degree.... I'd probably be equally unemployed right now.... but I'd probably be married too and maybe a little happier.
I ordered one on Jan 8th and am still waiting.
I would not pay much attention to that rumour though. They talk about FedEx reporting going from Alaska back to Taiwan. All that is, is the time zones. FedEx reports local time when things are scanned in. The thing did not actually go back to taiwan.
Bungie makes fun games.
I've played Starcraft a bit, but I lost interest. I am just not a fast enough clicker to do well. Myth has tactics. In Starcraft the general idea is to develop as many units and as powerful as possible... you out number your opponent(or out tech him) and beat him. In Myth every player has the same amount of units. But a good player(not really me) can beat a new player without taking much losses. When you play on Myth you will recognize other players after playing a few games with them. Sometimes, especially if you play with certain groups of people, you may spent a half hour chatting before the game.. when a typical game is only 12 minutes or so.
Myth also has a lot of plugins and new scenarios that people have made. A recent one "The 7th God" was 18 new co-op levels(the original game have only 25). People modify the physics and do strange and interesting things... the game has not got old for me.
As much as a fan boi of bungie that I am, I admit they aren't perfect. Companies like Blizzard have ported some older games to Mac OS X. I look forward to playing Halo on the mac, but I also think that after Halo no titles will be coming to the PC/Mac. I get the impression Bungie has learned that developing for 1 console is a lot easier than figuring out the bugs that occur on thousands of different PC configurations.
My brother and I had registered a number of Ambrosia's games back in the day when they were not limited. Back in the dark days of Mac there were almost no professional game developers for Mac. Yet, Ambrosia was making quality entertaining games that made my PC friends jealous. In university, my room was always active with someone playing Aperion(centepede) or the fish game.
Lately though I have not played too much in the way of Ambrosia games. I'm sure they are fun and what not... but the professional developers are slowly coming back to the Mac. I am probably a bad example though, as I have only played the Myth series by Bungie since it came out in 97 and have had little interest in anything else.
So my brother has made some shareware games for the Mac too. I helped out with things like AI and networking code. These things were non trivial and took a lot of hours even though they are only card games. They still were a lot of C++ code. The first game was quite popular, we made it in 97, and made it completely free. At the time we were worried about having to maintain and fix bugs with it... especially since it was not the cleanest code. Yet, my brother did make some money off of it as some Japanese fellow payed him a little bit of money then sold the translated game commercially in Japan.
Recently we made a much better card game with much better graphics and sounds, with very clean code now that we are both much more experienced. We had one of those shareware reminder dialogs show up when you start the app. But there was no code to put in to make it go away. Instead there was 3 choices,
1) I'll think about registering later
2) I'll never register, make this dialog go away
3) I have registered, make this dialog go away
The registration fee was 10$ which was not unreasonable I thought, as it was a game with which took many many hours to make. However, since it was not limited in any way and since you could make the dialog never appear again, I figured total registrations would be 0. I was surprised that about 15 people have registered, just to be nice. Of course that did not even cover the cost of the IDE. But we made the game for fun, and hope other people had fun with it too. Making a game like that improves your development skills which will help you in a job. To be honest, I think it would be difficult for a shareware game designer to make a living off of it.
I'm not sure if Ambrosia is really a shareware developer anymore. The recent releases were more like demos for the full game than a shareware game(which is fine). I hope Ambrosia stays successful as they kept the Mac fun through the dark years.
It blows my mind when I see that some school districts have the money to enable each 6/7/8 grader a computer.
The high school I came from currently is falling apart... literally. The secretaries are forced to where hard hats because the is a huge hole in the roof above them. The school is so old that there is a plaque dedicated to students who died in WW1. The roof needs to be replaced... or better yet a new school built... but they can't afford to do either.
The computers were so laughably old and there was only one computer room.... not a computer for each kid. Even in that room kids had to share a computer.
I'm just jealous is all... iBooks look pretty sweet.
Hypercard got me into computer science.
I wish that Apple did keep this up to date. It is a great tool for kids to play around with.
I made some crazy stuff with hypercard back in the day. I made a fairly massive role playing game with multiple characters with hypercard... which sadly crashes now that hypercard is so out of date.
People start out by making animations with some sounds, they then learn to make some of it interactive, and so on.
All the little games I made with Hypercard I could have never done with a real language like C or Java... even the learning languages like Turing or Pascal would still have been too much work for my short attention span.
I don't know much about Halo's story but it is apparantly good. In addition I hope that there are links of the Marathon universe to the Halo universe.
The marathon 2 engine is open-sourced and the folks working on it have made some nice improvements. http://source.bungie.org
I recently played the Marathon 1 scenario(M1A1) on the open source engine.... I had forgotten how creepy that game was.
Our degree was 1/3 cs 1/3 math and 1/3 electives.
I remember the first algebra class we had. I was taught by the associate-dean who struck me as a very intelligent man, unlike many of my other profs. This algebra class was very strange it was number theory, including useless tasks like finding the Greatest Common Denominator but some interesting ones like RCS encryption.
One day a student asked a question, "When am I ever going to use this stuff on the job?"
He responded with something like "You won't."
So why do we have to use this stuff?
He explained, you are in university not to just gain knowledge but to learn how to think and solve problems. One of the greatest tools to learn how to solve problems is with math.
I can't really word it as well as he did, but you get the idea.
Waterloo used to first teach useless "learning" languages like Pascal and Modula 3. It was only until later years would C/C++ or Java be used. The idea was that if they started with C/C++ the students would develop bad habits. They taught you how to learn. New languages pop up all the time and a university grad should be able to learn that language pretty quickly.
As an example, I was hired as a Java programmer. However, my resume only had C/C++ experience.
Unfortunatly there was a lot of pressure for Waterloo to change the Comp Sci degree with the reasoning as above. The degree now has a lot less math. Java is taught to first year students, who have no idea what a thread is but probably use them. Is the new way better? In my opinion, No.
The security people teased me a little about it, but I was allowed to take them with me. The bicycle pump looked like a pipe bomb under the x-ray apparently.
But to think that this tragedy started with these bastards stabbing stuardesses and pilots. It would be so easy to hide stabbing weapons in something. You can never fully detect that. Even a plastic stabbing weapon could be used.
One thing is certain now though. If hi-jackers take over a plane now.... a lot more people on board will try to be a hero(which we are told not to do). I'm am glad those passengers on the PA flight stopped them before they got to their destination.