At the end of Metal Gear Solid 3, you have to kill one of the main characters (trying to keep this spoiler-free), and, instead of a cut scene, the game forces the player (i.e. you) to pull the trigger manually. Likewise, at the end of Shadow of the Colossus, you have control but you cannot prevent the inevitable from happening. The inevitability and lack of control is what makes it tragic (see every tragedy written for the last 3000 years). Games provide an interesting medium for this, since the gamer has a great deal of control throughout the game. When real control is taken away and the gamer is forced to do something they don't want to do (and they can't go back), it enhances the emotional response. Just look at how many rumors and hacks sprung up to resurrect Aeris in FFVII.
Metal Gear Solid 3 is a great example of this, since you can play the entire game without killing anyone, and it still forces you to carry out the execution at the end. Compare to a similar scene in Metal Gear Solid 1 when Snake battles Sniper Wolf and he does a similar execution in a cut scene. The scene in MGS3 is much more poignant because the player is forced to be a part of the action.
To sum up, yeah, games (good ones) can make you cry.
I second Dark Alliance 1 and 2 for PS2 (or whatever console you may have)...my wife and I played both of these through in coop and she had a lot of fun.
I believe the code jam is only for students, although I might be wrong. I competed in it last year (when I was still a student) and made it to the final online round, before the free trip to Cali. Got a free Google T-shirt for my trouble.:-)
Honestly, there isn't really that much equity in buying a car, either. If buying vs. leasing is about the same per month, then buying makes more sense. But if the difference in total payment over the term of the lease/loan is more than the car will be worth at the end of the term (assuming you bought it), on paper, you're losing money on buying the car. Cars rarely (if ever) appreciate in value like real estate or other kinds of investments.
That said, if you payoff a car in 5 years that lasts for 10-15 years, you've just saved a crapload on potential lease payments over that time span, which is the main benefit of buying a car, but should not be misconstrued as some kind of monetary return on your investment. The return on your investment is that you get to use the car, not that you sold it for more than you paid for it!
Good to see someone bring up Beyond Good and Evil. That was a great game, and is probably a steal right now in most stores' bargain bins. Good plot, fairly challenging game play, good voice acting. It's a shame we'll probably never get to see the planned sequel since sales were low.
Someone should mod parent down as flamebait. I watch full-screen movies and play full-screen games on my 20" cinema display all the time. Parent post doesn't know what he's talking about.
Not to nitpick, but I think that was actually in The Diamond Age. Cryptonomicon took place in the present (more or less), so I don't think this was in there.
Well, a very important thing to do if you study something highly theoretical, like computer science, is to supplement your studies with actual real world work. Try to get a job on your campus coding simple apps for smaller departments, just so you can say on your resume, "Hey, I've actually done this for real before, on Windows, and people used what I wrote." Beyond that, it will also make you a better computer scientist, if that's your end goal.
Believe me, it made a huge difference to me in my recent job search. No one really gives a crap about the compiler you wrote for Scheme, in Scheme, but they're probably quite interested that you wrote some security auditing software for a uni. dept. when they are interested in having some similar software written for their use.
It's a bit higher than that. Last figure I saw that seemed reasonably accurate was around 450 million users world wide, out of 6 billion people, that would be about 7.5%. But then again, people who live on <$1 a day aren't exactly out buying Coke and McDonald's either.
Remember, this is a survey of marketing people. People with no money don't really exist in their world view.
Yeah, but a person must be induced by a law-enforcment officer or someone acting on their behalf. If some random person talks you into committing a crime, that's not entrapment.
Re:Flaws in both Languages
on
Java 1.5 vs C#
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Who modded the parent up? The post is woefully inaccurate.
1. What exactly does it mean if a language is "open source?" Surely, the specification is available for free. If you wanted to, you could write a lexer/parser/compiler without paying anything to Microsoft/Sun. Do you mean that the tools provided by the companies aren't open-source?
2. C# doesn't "require" a virtual machine any more than Java "requires" a virtual machine. One could write a native compiler for both. Additionally, in fact, Microsoft's.NET implementation does just-in-time compilation of the.NET assembly generated by the C# compiler (the bytecodes, basically), so it doesn't actually run inside of a virtual machine, nor is it interpreted. Since Sun's javac is supposed to generate portable bytecodes to run on different architectures, they decided to use a VM to avoid having to write a thousand different JIT compilers.
Neither of these are inherent weaknesses in the specifications of the languages, they're implemetation details. Since this story is supposed to be about new language features in Java, I don't see how bitching about Microsoft/Sun's implementations is really relavent.
I wonder if this might backfire. Microsoft already has a rep amongst techies for its slowness to respond to its numerous security holes. Now maybe it'll get a rep with the PHBs as the company that charges its users to fix its own mistakes.
I tend to agree with you. It seems intuitive that each interpreted virtual machine instruction would map to several instructions on the native processor (at the very least, since the virtual machine has to decode instructions in software, whereas the native processor can decode the instructions in hardware). Due to this increase in the number of instructions, the code would usually run slower. However, I do agree with the grandparent post that there is no theoretical proof which requires interpreted languages to use more instructions (hence more time) than natively compiled languages. It just seems logical and tends to hold most of the time.
There are lots of good reasons to use interpreted languages; they're easier to debug, they often have very powerful runtime environments, they're great for educational and research purposes. At the risk of short-circuiting the inevitable flamewar, certain languages are good for certain applications and there is no global measure of language "goodness."
I'm not sure if they've changed the technology since it was first announced, but one of the selling points in the original announcement was something along the lines of copying a show to your laptop and watching it on an airplane. Doesn't sound like streaming technology to me. To my understanding, you get a copy of the show on your computer that you can only watch with their special TivoToGo player (or possibly a codec that can plug into other players).
One difference at least is that Wal-mart in fact has much lower prices than its competition, whereas Starbucks tends to have equivalent or higher prices than its competition. With Starbucks, you pay a premium for the whole "experience," i.e. the store, the staff, the little Java jackets, the menu, etc. I can't think of anyone in their right mind who would go to a Wal-mart for the experience. Whenever I go there, I go for the cheap prices and try not to make eye contact with the other patrons.:-)
Starbucks created the market for franchise coffee shops in America, and dominates that market. However, there is a significant amount of room for other firms to compete (with respect to price, menu, service, etc.) Wal-mart took on an existing market and is capable of competing so well with respect to price that people shop there instead. Hence, small businesses go under. It's simple economics.
In my mind, that's the main difference between the two.
The whole point of the poorly-named "Party Shuffle" is to queue up a quasi-random list of songs. They're random, but you can move them around and skip around in the queue. It's a pretty useful feature, IMHO.
It's also an awesome parody of the likely inconsequential origin of strongly held religious beliefs. Like when Brian is running away from his "disciples" and he loses his sandal, and the crowd immediately begins arguing over whether it means they need to take off their sandal to be like him, or whether it means to ignore the things of the body and concentrate on the face and head, etc. Then they immediately split into two sects, one which follows the "Holy Gourd of Jerusalem" and the other which follows the sandal.
Only problem is that iSync only syncs the calendar and address book entries. I rely on Palm Desktop on my Mac to sync memos, pictures (I have the zire 71 with the crappy digital camera), doodles, etc. Unless Apple plans to provide a full palm desktop replacement, I think Palm's leaving apple users twisting in the wind here.
Just my two cents, but unless it works almost exactly like an ordinary telephone, people won't be interested in using it. That is to say it has to "just work." No booting up computers, configuring peripherals, setting a proxy server, opening a port in your firewall, getting someone's IP address, etc. A techie might be comfortable with doing that, and I could see this catching on in a corporate environment, but for Joe Homeuser, seems like a lot of hassle, at this point. That said, if it's not significantly more complicated than a cellphone, it could catch on within 10-20 years, if it's cheaper or a lot more useful.
People always seem to think that if the feds take your computers they'll trash them and wipe them and then give them back to you. Though I don't have any personal experience, if you think about forensic techniques and chain-of-evidence type stuff, most likely they'll copy your drives and not even touch your original equipment (this is the standard technique anyways). Really the question is if you ever get your machines back. They might wipe them out, but that would probably seriously screw up their case if there was any evidence on them.
Slashdot Mirror
At the end of Metal Gear Solid 3, you have to kill one of the main characters (trying to keep this spoiler-free), and, instead of a cut scene, the game forces the player (i.e. you) to pull the trigger manually. Likewise, at the end of Shadow of the Colossus, you have control but you cannot prevent the inevitable from happening. The inevitability and lack of control is what makes it tragic (see every tragedy written for the last 3000 years). Games provide an interesting medium for this, since the gamer has a great deal of control throughout the game. When real control is taken away and the gamer is forced to do something they don't want to do (and they can't go back), it enhances the emotional response. Just look at how many rumors and hacks sprung up to resurrect Aeris in FFVII.
Metal Gear Solid 3 is a great example of this, since you can play the entire game without killing anyone, and it still forces you to carry out the execution at the end. Compare to a similar scene in Metal Gear Solid 1 when Snake battles Sniper Wolf and he does a similar execution in a cut scene. The scene in MGS3 is much more poignant because the player is forced to be a part of the action.
To sum up, yeah, games (good ones) can make you cry.
I second Dark Alliance 1 and 2 for PS2 (or whatever console you may have)...my wife and I played both of these through in coop and she had a lot of fun.
I believe the code jam is only for students, although I might be wrong. I competed in it last year (when I was still a student) and made it to the final online round, before the free trip to Cali. Got a free Google T-shirt for my trouble. :-)
Wow, I figured there would be a ninja gaiden reference in here somewhere, but I didn't think it would be first post. Then again...this is /.
That said, if you payoff a car in 5 years that lasts for 10-15 years, you've just saved a crapload on potential lease payments over that time span, which is the main benefit of buying a car, but should not be misconstrued as some kind of monetary return on your investment. The return on your investment is that you get to use the car, not that you sold it for more than you paid for it!
Good to see someone bring up Beyond Good and Evil. That was a great game, and is probably a steal right now in most stores' bargain bins. Good plot, fairly challenging game play, good voice acting. It's a shame we'll probably never get to see the planned sequel since sales were low.
Someone should mod parent down as flamebait. I watch full-screen movies and play full-screen games on my 20" cinema display all the time. Parent post doesn't know what he's talking about.
No, I think that's the actual game you're describing. And it wasn't lame techno so much as lame Paul McCartney.
Not to nitpick, but I think that was actually in The Diamond Age. Cryptonomicon took place in the present (more or less), so I don't think this was in there.
So what you really mean when you say "I've seen it happen" is that you've seen it happen on TV?
Believe me, it made a huge difference to me in my recent job search. No one really gives a crap about the compiler you wrote for Scheme, in Scheme, but they're probably quite interested that you wrote some security auditing software for a uni. dept. when they are interested in having some similar software written for their use.
Remember, this is a survey of marketing people. People with no money don't really exist in their world view.
Yeah, but a person must be induced by a law-enforcment officer or someone acting on their behalf. If some random person talks you into committing a crime, that's not entrapment.
1. What exactly does it mean if a language is "open source?" Surely, the specification is available for free. If you wanted to, you could write a lexer/parser/compiler without paying anything to Microsoft/Sun. Do you mean that the tools provided by the companies aren't open-source?
2. C# doesn't "require" a virtual machine any more than Java "requires" a virtual machine. One could write a native compiler for both. Additionally, in fact, Microsoft's .NET implementation does just-in-time compilation of the .NET assembly generated by the C# compiler (the bytecodes, basically), so it doesn't actually run inside of a virtual machine, nor is it interpreted. Since Sun's javac is supposed to generate portable bytecodes to run on different architectures, they decided to use a VM to avoid having to write a thousand different JIT compilers.
Neither of these are inherent weaknesses in the specifications of the languages, they're implemetation details. Since this story is supposed to be about new language features in Java, I don't see how bitching about Microsoft/Sun's implementations is really relavent.
I wonder if this might backfire. Microsoft already has a rep amongst techies for its slowness to respond to its numerous security holes. Now maybe it'll get a rep with the PHBs as the company that charges its users to fix its own mistakes.
There are lots of good reasons to use interpreted languages; they're easier to debug, they often have very powerful runtime environments, they're great for educational and research purposes. At the risk of short-circuiting the inevitable flamewar, certain languages are good for certain applications and there is no global measure of language "goodness."
I'm not sure if they've changed the technology since it was first announced, but one of the selling points in the original announcement was something along the lines of copying a show to your laptop and watching it on an airplane. Doesn't sound like streaming technology to me. To my understanding, you get a copy of the show on your computer that you can only watch with their special TivoToGo player (or possibly a codec that can plug into other players).
Starbucks created the market for franchise coffee shops in America, and dominates that market. However, there is a significant amount of room for other firms to compete (with respect to price, menu, service, etc.) Wal-mart took on an existing market and is capable of competing so well with respect to price that people shop there instead. Hence, small businesses go under. It's simple economics.
In my mind, that's the main difference between the two.
The whole point of the poorly-named "Party Shuffle" is to queue up a quasi-random list of songs. They're random, but you can move them around and skip around in the queue. It's a pretty useful feature, IMHO.
Good God man, what did you do to her with your Metro-sized wang?
Oh, it's just brilliant. :-)
Yeah. That sure is hilarious.
Only problem is that iSync only syncs the calendar and address book entries. I rely on Palm Desktop on my Mac to sync memos, pictures (I have the zire 71 with the crappy digital camera), doodles, etc. Unless Apple plans to provide a full palm desktop replacement, I think Palm's leaving apple users twisting in the wind here.
Just my two cents, but unless it works almost exactly like an ordinary telephone, people won't be interested in using it. That is to say it has to "just work." No booting up computers, configuring peripherals, setting a proxy server, opening a port in your firewall, getting someone's IP address, etc. A techie might be comfortable with doing that, and I could see this catching on in a corporate environment, but for Joe Homeuser, seems like a lot of hassle, at this point. That said, if it's not significantly more complicated than a cellphone, it could catch on within 10-20 years, if it's cheaper or a lot more useful.
People always seem to think that if the feds take your computers they'll trash them and wipe them and then give them back to you. Though I don't have any personal experience, if you think about forensic techniques and chain-of-evidence type stuff, most likely they'll copy your drives and not even touch your original equipment (this is the standard technique anyways). Really the question is if you ever get your machines back. They might wipe them out, but that would probably seriously screw up their case if there was any evidence on them.