Kunstler is always a good authority on this kind of thing (he believes that American cities are wretched wastelands devoted to the worship of the automobile). Here is an article in which he compares how Europeans walk a lot more than Americans because they have the kind of cities that make walking possible (and enjoyable). Big and Blue in the USA
Here is his website: http://www.kunstler.com/index.html His "Clusterfuck Nation" ongoing commentary is worthy of a bookmark, even from a right-winger like me.
Really it depends on what sort of game you plan to be developing. If you are going to try out life as a small independant designer, you might want to try out some Flash stuff. I'm serious. Some people crank out a bunch of shareware Flash games. They're fun and easy to distro.
If you are looking at bigger projects, or trying to learn the coding side to things, you can pick apart one of the game engines in the above site. If you want to learn the real technique behind graphics, then you need to learn DirectX or OpenGL. That is where the real stuff gets done at the moment.
Having BSD code in your GPL project is asking for trouble. Do not do it. I cannot emphasize this strongly enough: Do not mix the two code bases. Promising a rewrite is not good enough. You are quite vulnerable legally, especially if you accidentally leave a chunk behind. Maybe even if you do not. And what is worse, you may have poisoned that code for everyone who takes advantage of the GPL and incorporates it into their code base. You could conceivably put a lot of people at risk this way.
And as far as I can see, your problems with Perforce will go away once you get rid of this non-GPL'able code.
Clarke's Fountains of Paradise is a wonderful book. It presents the basic physical problems of a space elevator and some ways to solve them (and it has a great plot too).
Right now, as Clarke envisioned, carbon nanotubes are the only engineering material that could be used to make this elevator. The basic technological question is whether we will ever be able to make cheap and long nanotubes. Despite the enthusiasm for a space elevator in the NYT article, we really have no idea how to do that. And any cost estimates like "$6 billion" are very immature without that kind of detail.
Local warming of the climate is to blame, they said -- adding that they did not have the evidence needed to link the melting ice to the steady, planet-wide climate change known as global warming.
My God, an actual declaration of their limited knowledge. I never expected to see those words in a CNN article on polar ice melting. How did this happen? Someone needs to stop these people before they piss away more millions in grant money.
I would like to see what benefits accrue to this company in mods and improvements over the next year. This is interesting stuff. I hope they release their in-house documentation too.
Lawrence Lessig will cream Rosen (has she argued a case before the SCOTUS?). Afterwards, the RIAA will push Congress to pass a new copyright law on public debates, with a recommended life sentence to anyone supplying a transcript without the permission of all parties. Rosen will claim victory, and when Lessig tries to use the transcript to correct her, the government will disappear him to Guantanamo Bay.
Title of the next article: Game Players Piracy Policy Criticized
I don't think that retailers are very interested in being taken advantage of. If we stop pirating games, I am sure they will be quite willing to liberalize their return policy.
I was going to repeat "switch to Telnet joke" that I made last time, but I just can't get up will this time. These bugs are killing us. I seriously think that we need to take some time to consider how Open Source projects do security. The "more eyes" mantra doesn't cut it. We need security models, standards, testing, and god knows what else. We need to look at which projects have been successful, and which have been miserable security failures. I know the open source community can do a lot better.
The cluelessness amoung MEPs is interesting. I am a firm believer that organizational incompetence is the one unifying factor amoung all political systems. Yet these MEPs are the ones will make the decision on this matter affecting everyone. It makes you wonder how many people in government actually know what is going on even a small percentage of the time.
Oh damn. This is going to sink the price of my 10 pounds of weapons enriched uranium that are up for auction at the moment. Terrorist#597 has already pulled his bid.
Actually, I would be much happier if law enforcement took a harder stance on ebay auctions. There need to be provisions in ebay license terms that keep everyone's indentities out in the open. Online auctions present an incredible opportunity for fraud. It is important that law enforcement has the power to go after the scammers.
Despite the publicity SCO's claims are receiving, they are actually unimportant. There is no legal leg for them to stand on. This back and forth debate is uninteresting. Yes, SCO's claims were outrageous, but that is obvious even without someone pointing it out in detail.
So in response, I am writing a closed letter to both SCO and the open source community. And no one can read it since it's closed. So there!
PHP is a great tool, especially if you just plan to throw something together in no time flat. Start up MySQL with PHP and Apache and you have a rather full-featured system at an affordable price: $0. On the other hand, I have no idea on reliability figures for that mixture. Still, PHP is great to work with. Easiest interface in the world.
(P.S. Lots of programmers in the Enterprise. Data and me were always slapping together code for that clunky thing. Cloaked Romulans? Yeah right--just software bugs in the sensory system. "Uh, Captain, they've gone cloaked again." "Damn! Those ships have that capability!?!" Works every time.)
Me? I bring my Navajo Code Talker with me wherever I go. I do have certain problems with system interoperability, but that is understandable, I'm told.
The problems with benchmarking graphics cards have traditionally been:
How do you benchmark image quality?
How do you compare different performance advantages in different areas?
How do you stop the card manufacturers from cheating on the tests?
The only way to test the first is with the human eye. You need to look at two images and make a subjective decision on which is better. And the programs that generally have the right amount of graphical frills are popular games.
The performance question is harder. But again, popular games level the playing field. When you benchmark using a game you know that programmers are actually using the features you are testing.
And finally, there is the matter of cheating. If a manufacturer is noticeably decreasing image quality for frame rate, he is usually "cheating." When image quality is maintained, it is an optimization. So again, it becomes a matter of subjective judgments of the human eye.
Subjective judgments are not so bad of course. A five star restaurant is only subjectively better than a two star restaurant. But usually that will mean a lot to the customer. So we can tolerate the errors that come from benchmarking cards from games pretty well. When manufacturers pull their tricks, you can bet that the review sites will be there to catch them.
Wonderful, another few years of communication incompatibilities until one winner emerges. The problem with computers is that we need monopolies. Universal standards would work in a perfect world, but you would need an authoritative government implementing them. Corporate monopolies are not an ideal solution, but they are slightly better. My opinions on Microsoft have changed a great deal for the better over the past few years. I used to be as gung ho against the big bad giant corporation as anyone. But there is nothing that is going to replace the behemoth.
I imagined for a second an advanced civilization crashing gas giants into their sun to keep it alive a little longer. I am wrong, of course, and this is no doubt the work of gravity, but I would like to point out that if we ever decide that we would like to keep our Sun burning for an extra million years or so, the only way to do that will be to crash Jupiter into her. On the other hand, the energy expended to do that would probably be better expended in creating environs that can support life without a sun.
Of the 5,259 fatalities caused when light trucks struck cars in 1996, 81 percent of the fatally injured were occupants of the car. In multiple-vehicle crashes, the occupants of the car are four times more likely to be killed than the occupants of the SUV. In a side-impact collision with an SUV, car occupants are 27 times more likely to die.
Your data is for light trucks which includes vehicles beyond SUVs. Moreover, if SUVs are safer, then the occupants of the less safe cars will be a higher percentage of the fatal injuries even if they cause no more deaths. The actual question you need to ask is how much safer those people in the cars would have been had the other drivers been in cars instead. Because of Dr. Evans' above point it seems unlikely that many more were killed. Your data is just no good.
Slashdot Mirror
I have been thinking of learning Python ever since I found the Boost.Python library at http://www.boost.org.
I suppose that it is time to go find a good tutorial. Anybody had luck using C++ and Python together with this?
Kunstler is always a good authority on this kind of thing (he believes that American cities are wretched wastelands devoted to the worship of the automobile). Here is an article in which he compares how Europeans walk a lot more than Americans because they have the kind of cities that make walking possible (and enjoyable). Big and Blue in the USA
Here is his website: http://www.kunstler.com/index.html His "Clusterfuck Nation" ongoing commentary is worthy of a bookmark, even from a right-winger like me.
Here is the mother lode: http://www.flipcode.net/
Really it depends on what sort of game you plan to be developing. If you are going to try out life as a small independant designer, you might want to try out some Flash stuff. I'm serious. Some people crank out a bunch of shareware Flash games. They're fun and easy to distro.
If you are looking at bigger projects, or trying to learn the coding side to things, you can pick apart one of the game engines in the above site. If you want to learn the real technique behind graphics, then you need to learn DirectX or OpenGL. That is where the real stuff gets done at the moment.
Wait--I'm wrong. The "BSD License" is a non-restrictive type license. http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php
You are only going to have problems if you try to claim it as GPL'ed--which Perforce does not allow.
Having BSD code in your GPL project is asking for trouble. Do not do it. I cannot emphasize this strongly enough: Do not mix the two code bases. Promising a rewrite is not good enough. You are quite vulnerable legally, especially if you accidentally leave a chunk behind. Maybe even if you do not. And what is worse, you may have poisoned that code for everyone who takes advantage of the GPL and incorporates it into their code base. You could conceivably put a lot of people at risk this way.
And as far as I can see, your problems with Perforce will go away once you get rid of this non-GPL'able code.
Clarke's Fountains of Paradise is a wonderful book. It presents the basic physical problems of a space elevator and some ways to solve them (and it has a great plot too).
Right now, as Clarke envisioned, carbon nanotubes are the only engineering material that could be used to make this elevator. The basic technological question is whether we will ever be able to make cheap and long nanotubes. Despite the enthusiasm for a space elevator in the NYT article, we really have no idea how to do that. And any cost estimates like "$6 billion" are very immature without that kind of detail.
I would like to see what benefits accrue to this company in mods and improvements over the next year. This is interesting stuff. I hope they release their in-house documentation too.
Lawrence Lessig will cream Rosen (has she argued a case before the SCOTUS?). Afterwards, the RIAA will push Congress to pass a new copyright law on public debates, with a recommended life sentence to anyone supplying a transcript without the permission of all parties. Rosen will claim victory, and when Lessig tries to use the transcript to correct her, the government will disappear him to Guantanamo Bay.
Title of the next article: Game Players Piracy Policy Criticized
I don't think that retailers are very interested in being taken advantage of. If we stop pirating games, I am sure they will be quite willing to liberalize their return policy.
I'm a professional electrical engineer. I know enough physics and RF effects to take correct safety precautions when I'm experimenting.
How many times have we heard these words just before the loud ZAP! and inevitable flesh burning smell?
I was going to repeat "switch to Telnet joke" that I made last time, but I just can't get up will this time. These bugs are killing us. I seriously think that we need to take some time to consider how Open Source projects do security. The "more eyes" mantra doesn't cut it. We need security models, standards, testing, and god knows what else. We need to look at which projects have been successful, and which have been miserable security failures. I know the open source community can do a lot better.
Le Temple des Lamas
You should keep your identity better hidden. A quick Google search reveals you. Please click
The fake update has made it to Windows Update itself. Here is the name: "Recommended Update for Windows Rights Management client 1.0."
Do not download, it's only there to own your system.
The cluelessness amoung MEPs is interesting. I am a firm believer that organizational incompetence is the one unifying factor amoung all political systems. Yet these MEPs are the ones will make the decision on this matter affecting everyone. It makes you wonder how many people in government actually know what is going on even a small percentage of the time.
Oh damn. This is going to sink the price of my 10 pounds of weapons enriched uranium that are up for auction at the moment. Terrorist#597 has already pulled his bid.
Actually, I would be much happier if law enforcement took a harder stance on ebay auctions. There need to be provisions in ebay license terms that keep everyone's indentities out in the open. Online auctions present an incredible opportunity for fraud. It is important that law enforcement has the power to go after the scammers.
Despite the publicity SCO's claims are receiving, they are actually unimportant. There is no legal leg for them to stand on. This back and forth debate is uninteresting. Yes, SCO's claims were outrageous, but that is obvious even without someone pointing it out in detail.
So in response, I am writing a closed letter to both SCO and the open source community. And no one can read it since it's closed. So there!
PHP is a great tool, especially if you just plan to throw something together in no time flat. Start up MySQL with PHP and Apache and you have a rather full-featured system at an affordable price: $0. On the other hand, I have no idea on reliability figures for that mixture. Still, PHP is great to work with. Easiest interface in the world.
(P.S. Lots of programmers in the Enterprise. Data and me were always slapping together code for that clunky thing. Cloaked Romulans? Yeah right--just software bugs in the sensory system. "Uh, Captain, they've gone cloaked again." "Damn! Those ships have that capability!?!" Works every time.)
Me? I bring my Navajo Code Talker with me wherever I go. I do have certain problems with system interoperability, but that is understandable, I'm told.
- How do you benchmark image quality?
- How do you compare different performance advantages in different areas?
- How do you stop the card manufacturers from cheating on the tests?
The only way to test the first is with the human eye. You need to look at two images and make a subjective decision on which is better. And the programs that generally have the right amount of graphical frills are popular games.The performance question is harder. But again, popular games level the playing field. When you benchmark using a game you know that programmers are actually using the features you are testing.
And finally, there is the matter of cheating. If a manufacturer is noticeably decreasing image quality for frame rate, he is usually "cheating." When image quality is maintained, it is an optimization. So again, it becomes a matter of subjective judgments of the human eye.
Subjective judgments are not so bad of course. A five star restaurant is only subjectively better than a two star restaurant. But usually that will mean a lot to the customer. So we can tolerate the errors that come from benchmarking cards from games pretty well. When manufacturers pull their tricks, you can bet that the review sites will be there to catch them.
Your data is true. It just does not apply for the reasons that I stated. Which makes it no good.
Wonderful, another few years of communication incompatibilities until one winner emerges. The problem with computers is that we need monopolies. Universal standards would work in a perfect world, but you would need an authoritative government implementing them. Corporate monopolies are not an ideal solution, but they are slightly better. My opinions on Microsoft have changed a great deal for the better over the past few years. I used to be as gung ho against the big bad giant corporation as anyone. But there is nothing that is going to replace the behemoth.
I imagined for a second an advanced civilization crashing gas giants into their sun to keep it alive a little longer. I am wrong, of course, and this is no doubt the work of gravity, but I would like to point out that if we ever decide that we would like to keep our Sun burning for an extra million years or so, the only way to do that will be to crash Jupiter into her. On the other hand, the energy expended to do that would probably be better expended in creating environs that can support life without a sun.