I play many games, including ones that want you to navigate large cities, and my skill navigating a city in meat-space has definitely not improved--I'm terrible at it. Can I get my money back?
I sat a few of my friends down to watch some scenes from Avatar in 2D, and one of their jaws dropped at how much worse the CG looks. 3D corrupts the live actors just enough to make the CG look of similar quality -- when it's in 2D, that effect goes away. I didn't do this to rag on Avatar's CG, but to show them how 3D destroys image quality even on something that is filmed specially for it.
I'm not looking forward to the day when the first 3D-only movie comes out.
I was under the impression that good cameras could capture much better than 8-bit? Of course, most people see really bad banding because they've got a cheap 6-bit LCD -- so unless you're going to print or process the image, it won't really matter anyway.
I think the more unfortunate side of this is that there are probably a lot of people who don't take the jury process seriously, and this was just one dumb person who showed it on Facebook.
If only there was a way to get more of these people to inadvertently get themselves removed.
While it's true that being schemaless is a big plus for NoSQL, it's also true that the majority of NoSQL databases put a lot of focus on scalability and high-availability. They give up ACID and put a lot of restrictions on how you use them in the process. They also tend to have very poor performance for small-scale things -- I don't know if that's an inherent consequence of using Erlang (seems to be popular for these things), or if it's something else.
I'd love to see a MySQL-class schemaless database -- you know, one not meant for super-scaling to Google- or Digg-sized throughput. One that is good for 95% of projects, runs good on a single server, and implements all the nice sugar on top of things that people have come to expect like ACID transactions, indexes, complex server-side queries with arbitrary IO-heavy joins, etc.
Like any self-respecting coder, I enjoy jumping on new tech to try it out and have tried CouchDB, Riak, and Azure Table. Ultimately I just find it hard to make anything serious with, because even if you've got the time and dedication to learn how to use one correctly (which can be quite tough), you'll find out the next one you try is completely different! Limitations, data formats, query syntax, etc. -- they're all too different. If you write for one and choose to move to another, you've got a lot of rewriting and debugging ahead of you. There's a lot of non-standard SQL databases out there, but at least most have a significant standard subset that works well on all of them without any gotchas.
And one small correction to TFA: SQL Azure supports full ACID transactions with no unusual restrictions. He is thinking of Azure Table, which is their low-level NoSQL store. Both live in the cloud and provide high-availability, but Azure Table is much more scalable.
TrueType is a font standard, which has largely been succeeded by OpenType. TrueType was developed by Apple and licensed by Microsoft, while OpenType was co-developed by Adobe and Microsoft.
On Windows, Microsoft has two text APIs: Uniscribe & GDI, which combine to provide text rendering and a whole lot more, and DirectWrite, which is new to Windows 7 and has much better quality, improved OpenType support, and GPU acceleration. These technologies are so baked into Windows that I'm not surprised at all that they wouldn't want to port them to OS X.
iirc the Atom uses about 5x the power as an OMAP3, and the Atom still needs other hardware that is already integrated with the OMAP. The Atom is simply not a good competitor for smart phones, and isn't even on the map for dumb phones.
Talk I've heard from friends in Microsoft indicate that they're quite paranoid about security, putting strict checks on all levels of development. To mention one small portion of it, C and C++ contain some functions that, if misused, can be easy attack vectors. VC++ has a number of non-standard replacement functions for these that they use that include runtime safety checks. They're warned off the "insecure" functions, and anyone that uses them needs a full rationale written up on why. Needless to say, most coders will have an adjustment!
Advocates look at Steam, and see the Digital Distribution, community features, automatic updates, and synchronized saves.
Don't forget, detractors also look at the automatic updates bit. Valve has seriously broken their games plenty of times -- in the old days, people would've reverted the patch and got on with things. Now they're forced to wait days or weeks for a fix.
NYTimes gives a decent rundown of what goes in to ebook pricing, showing that they make about as much profit on a $10 ebook as they do on a $26 hardcover.
They don't give pricing on paperbacks, but going off the numbers they give I'd guess a $10 ebook will give them around double the profit that a $7 mass-market paperback does.
The full article goes on to say the reason for obscenely high ebook prices is quite simple: publishers are set up for dead tree books right now. They could face problems scaling down their current model too quickly, so they're biding time and slowing down ebook adoption by increasing prices.
Given how effectively this approach removes the issue of "playing as the Taliban" I'm a bit amazed EA's developers didn't use it.
Maybe they realize the added controversy will attract more actual gamers to it. Pandering to overly-PC morons is useless -- you can tell these people probably don't play any war games, and never would have bought it in the first place. They clearly have issues separating fantasy from reality, and I've never met a gamer with that problem.
Clearly Uplink is insensitive to server admins who have lost data due to hacking. They didn't get to start over when their server was owned and they had no backups, and their families have to live with that every day. It's not a game... Introversion is very cavalier about it: "Well, it's just a game." But it isn't a game to the people who are suffering from the loss job.
The gist is that Sun very carefully licensed Java under the GPL with an agreement that anyone who implements Java 100%, without supersetting, would get access to the patents. Apparently Sun's embedded implementations have some special functionality not included in the GPLed version. This is where the "very carefully" bit comes in -- it means others can't implement their own embedded versions (adding that special functionality would be supersetting), and would have to license Sun's version. Their embedded implementation generates the bulk of the cash for them, and they wanted to protect that.
Google wanted to use Java but didn't want everyone to need to license the embedded version. So they implemented their own. To get around the supersetting issue, they changed their implementation (Dalvik) to not infringe on Sun's patents -- even going so far as to change the bytecode format and implementing a Java->Dalvik bytecode translator.
Now Sun sees everyone hopping on the Android train for all sorts of devices, and no licensing fees coming in from any of them. And they're suing.
It sounds plausible to me but Miguel is the author of Mono, so take this with a grain of salt. He's usually the one having an argument against someone saying how everyone should use Java because Microsoft will pull the same type of stunt against Mono some day, so this must be a humorous day for him.
The source released is covered under GPLv3, but has some additional terms attached to it. I would guess this makes it GPL-incompatible?
ADDITIONAL TERMS APPLICABLE TO THE WOLFENSTEIN: ENEMY TERRITORY GPL SOURCE CODE.
The following additional terms ("Additional Terms") supplement and modify the GNU General Public License, Version 3 ("GPL") applicable to the Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory GPL Source Code ("Wolf ET Source Code"). In addition to the terms and conditions of the GPL, the Wolf ET Source Code is subject to the further restrictions below.
1. Replacement of Section 15. Section 15 of the GPL shall be deleted in its entirety and replaced with the following:
"15. Disclaimer of Warranty.
THE PROGRAM IS PROVIDED WITHOUT ANY WARRANTIES, WHETHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, TITLE AND MERCHANTABILITY. THE PROGRAM IS BEING DELIVERED OR MADE AVAILABLE "AS IS", "WITH ALL FAULTS" AND WITHOUT WARRANTY OR REPRESENTATION. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION."
2. Replacement of Section 16. Section 16 of the GPL shall be deleted in its entirety and replaced with the following:
"16. LIMITATION OF LIABILITY.
UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHALL ANY COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR ITS AFFILIATES, OR ANY OTHER PARTY WHO MODIFIES AND/OR CONVEYS THE PROGRAM AS PERMITTED ABOVE, BE LIABLE TO YOU, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, FOR ANY DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE PROGRAM OR OTHER DEALINGS WITH THE PROGRAM(INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO LOSS OF DATA OR DATA BEING RENDERED INACCURATE OR LOSSES SUSTAINED BY YOU OR THIRD PARTIES OR A FAILURE OF THE PROGRAM TO OPERATE WITH ANY OTHER PROGRAMS), WHETHER OR NOT ANY COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR SUCH OTHER PARTY RECEIVES NOTICE OF ANY SUCH DAMAGES AND WHETHER OR NOT SUCH DAMAGES COULD HAVE BEEN FORESEEN."
3. LEGAL NOTICES; NO TRADEMARK LICENSE; ORIGIN. You must reproduce faithfully all trademark, copyright and other proprietary and legal notices on any copies of the Program or any other required author attributions. This license does not grant you rights to use any copyright holder or any other party's name, logo, or trademarks. Neither the name of the copyright holder or its affiliates, or any other party who modifies and/or conveys the Program may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission. The origin of the Program must not be misrepresented; you must not claim that you wrote the original Program. Altered source versions must be plainly marked as such, and must not be misrepresented as being the original Program.
4. INDEMNIFICATION. IF YOU CONVEY A COVERED WORK AND AGREE WITH ANY RECIPIENT OF THAT COVERED WORK THAT YOU WILL ASSUME ANY LIABILITY FOR THAT COVERED WORK, YOU HEREBY AGREE TO INDEMNIFY, DEFEND AND HOLD HARMLESS THE OTHER LICENSORS AND AUTHORS OF THAT COVERED WORK FOR ANY DAMAEGS, DEMANDS, CLAIMS, LOSSES, CAUSES OF ACTION, LAWSUITS, JUDGMENTS EXPENSES (INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION REASONABLE ATTORNEYS' FEES AND EXPENSES) OR ANY OTHER LIABLITY ARISING FROM, RELATED TO OR IN CONNECTION WITH YOUR ASSUMPTIONS OF LIABILITY.
As did I. Quake, Duke3D, Shadow Warrior, and Death Rally all came out in 1996 and I still play them regularly after all this time. I wonder what is it about those early years that keeps their games so appealing over time. Maybe they focused more on gameplay than graphics.
A guy who has all the time in the world to look at problems, the connections required to discuss them with people who know what they're talking about, and can say things without worrying about financial loss. You don't have to assume it's true --- but don't discard what he says just because he's rich and doesn't personally specialize in the field he's talking about.
As a self-taught programmer, the only disadvantage I have noted is that while I just know "a way that will work great", schooled people will be able to put some name to how they want to do things. The X Model, or Y Pattern. Being able to think outside the box is a skill that any good programmer should learn, but not knowing where the box is to begin with puts me at a communication disadvantage when working with a team.
Then again, that's just my experience. People can learn those definitions online just fine -- I tend to learn them on-demand when people mention them. For other fields, being self-taught might not work so great. Some would require materials and equipment too expensive to be self-taught, while others might be too hard to understand without easy access to the insight of a teacher.
And then there are a lot of people who go into school not knowing what they want to do with their lives, and just coast through their first year to find out. The uni experience, exposing them to so many ideas, might end up being better for these people.
...On Linux processes are almost never "notified" by asynchronously arriving signals, they are either processing a request, or sleeping while performing a syscall, so they are awakened by a scheduler when whatever they are waiting for (usually data arrived or buffer is available) happened.
This sounds a lot like what I said:
In Linux you get notified when you can perform an I/O, perform a bunch of non-blocking I/O, and then wait for another notification.
ie. for a single connection they will do as much work as they can, then they need to wait for a notification to find out when they can resume. Was I too tired when I wrote that and not clear enough, or are you simply using this as an excuse to embrace your inner zealot and mock other developers?
Re:Should be using Scatter/Gather +IOCP on windows
on
Java IO Faster Than NIO
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Actually, they are better for different things. In Linux you get notified when you can perform an I/O, perform a bunch of non-blocking I/O, and then wait for another notification. In Windows you perform an I/O, and it will either complete immediately or notify you when it does. This means async I/O on Linux can use less memory, while on Windows it can give higher throughput.
Of course, these are merely API advantages -- if the implementation is poor, that won't matter. I'm not aware of any serious tests on this. And even then, Windows lacks an equivalent to Linux's splice(), and its equivalent of sendfile() is crippled on desktop versions to discourage using a desktop as a file server.
Slashdot Mirror
I play many games, including ones that want you to navigate large cities, and my skill navigating a city in meat-space has definitely not improved--I'm terrible at it. Can I get my money back?
How will highway patrol know which cars are breaking the law? In southern California, most of us drive 85mph already if there's no traffic.
Jaws 3-D, of course.
I sat a few of my friends down to watch some scenes from Avatar in 2D, and one of their jaws dropped at how much worse the CG looks. 3D corrupts the live actors just enough to make the CG look of similar quality -- when it's in 2D, that effect goes away. I didn't do this to rag on Avatar's CG, but to show them how 3D destroys image quality even on something that is filmed specially for it.
I'm not looking forward to the day when the first 3D-only movie comes out.
I was under the impression that good cameras could capture much better than 8-bit? Of course, most people see really bad banding because they've got a cheap 6-bit LCD -- so unless you're going to print or process the image, it won't really matter anyway.
I think the more unfortunate side of this is that there are probably a lot of people who don't take the jury process seriously, and this was just one dumb person who showed it on Facebook.
If only there was a way to get more of these people to inadvertently get themselves removed.
While it's true that being schemaless is a big plus for NoSQL, it's also true that the majority of NoSQL databases put a lot of focus on scalability and high-availability. They give up ACID and put a lot of restrictions on how you use them in the process. They also tend to have very poor performance for small-scale things -- I don't know if that's an inherent consequence of using Erlang (seems to be popular for these things), or if it's something else.
I'd love to see a MySQL-class schemaless database -- you know, one not meant for super-scaling to Google- or Digg-sized throughput. One that is good for 95% of projects, runs good on a single server, and implements all the nice sugar on top of things that people have come to expect like ACID transactions, indexes, complex server-side queries with arbitrary IO-heavy joins, etc.
Like any self-respecting coder, I enjoy jumping on new tech to try it out and have tried CouchDB, Riak, and Azure Table. Ultimately I just find it hard to make anything serious with, because even if you've got the time and dedication to learn how to use one correctly (which can be quite tough), you'll find out the next one you try is completely different! Limitations, data formats, query syntax, etc. -- they're all too different. If you write for one and choose to move to another, you've got a lot of rewriting and debugging ahead of you. There's a lot of non-standard SQL databases out there, but at least most have a significant standard subset that works well on all of them without any gotchas.
And one small correction to TFA: SQL Azure supports full ACID transactions with no unusual restrictions. He is thinking of Azure Table, which is their low-level NoSQL store. Both live in the cloud and provide high-availability, but Azure Table is much more scalable.
That's great. Someone comes forward with evidence of war crimes, and all anyone wants to talk about is his sexual habits.
I thought that was kind of the point. Isn't it obvious that this is a smear campaign to discredit him and distract from the evidence?
TrueType is a font standard, which has largely been succeeded by OpenType. TrueType was developed by Apple and licensed by Microsoft, while OpenType was co-developed by Adobe and Microsoft.
On Windows, Microsoft has two text APIs: Uniscribe & GDI, which combine to provide text rendering and a whole lot more, and DirectWrite, which is new to Windows 7 and has much better quality, improved OpenType support, and GPU acceleration. These technologies are so baked into Windows that I'm not surprised at all that they wouldn't want to port them to OS X.
iirc the Atom uses about 5x the power as an OMAP3, and the Atom still needs other hardware that is already integrated with the OMAP. The Atom is simply not a good competitor for smart phones, and isn't even on the map for dumb phones.
Talk I've heard from friends in Microsoft indicate that they're quite paranoid about security, putting strict checks on all levels of development. To mention one small portion of it, C and C++ contain some functions that, if misused, can be easy attack vectors. VC++ has a number of non-standard replacement functions for these that they use that include runtime safety checks. They're warned off the "insecure" functions, and anyone that uses them needs a full rationale written up on why. Needless to say, most coders will have an adjustment!
Advocates look at Steam, and see the Digital Distribution, community features, automatic updates, and synchronized saves.
Don't forget, detractors also look at the automatic updates bit. Valve has seriously broken their games plenty of times -- in the old days, people would've reverted the patch and got on with things. Now they're forced to wait days or weeks for a fix.
NYTimes gives a decent rundown of what goes in to ebook pricing, showing that they make about as much profit on a $10 ebook as they do on a $26 hardcover.
They don't give pricing on paperbacks, but going off the numbers they give I'd guess a $10 ebook will give them around double the profit that a $7 mass-market paperback does.
The full article goes on to say the reason for obscenely high ebook prices is quite simple: publishers are set up for dead tree books right now. They could face problems scaling down their current model too quickly, so they're biding time and slowing down ebook adoption by increasing prices.
Maybe they realize the added controversy will attract more actual gamers to it. Pandering to overly-PC morons is useless -- you can tell these people probably don't play any war games, and never would have bought it in the first place. They clearly have issues separating fantasy from reality, and I've never met a gamer with that problem.
Clearly Uplink is insensitive to server admins who have lost data due to hacking. They didn't get to start over when their server was owned and they had no backups, and their families have to live with that every day. It's not a game... Introversion is very cavalier about it: "Well, it's just a game." But it isn't a game to the people who are suffering from the loss job.
Technology runs on a faster time scale, as shown by an educational program that aired on TV this week:
Miguel de Icaza gives a pretty good guess about what's happened.
The gist is that Sun very carefully licensed Java under the GPL with an agreement that anyone who implements Java 100%, without supersetting, would get access to the patents. Apparently Sun's embedded implementations have some special functionality not included in the GPLed version. This is where the "very carefully" bit comes in -- it means others can't implement their own embedded versions (adding that special functionality would be supersetting), and would have to license Sun's version. Their embedded implementation generates the bulk of the cash for them, and they wanted to protect that.
Google wanted to use Java but didn't want everyone to need to license the embedded version. So they implemented their own. To get around the supersetting issue, they changed their implementation (Dalvik) to not infringe on Sun's patents -- even going so far as to change the bytecode format and implementing a Java->Dalvik bytecode translator.
Now Sun sees everyone hopping on the Android train for all sorts of devices, and no licensing fees coming in from any of them. And they're suing.
It sounds plausible to me but Miguel is the author of Mono, so take this with a grain of salt. He's usually the one having an argument against someone saying how everyone should use Java because Microsoft will pull the same type of stunt against Mono some day, so this must be a humorous day for him.
The source released is covered under GPLv3, but has some additional terms attached to it. I would guess this makes it GPL-incompatible?
As did I. Quake, Duke3D, Shadow Warrior, and Death Rally all came out in 1996 and I still play them regularly after all this time. I wonder what is it about those early years that keeps their games so appealing over time. Maybe they focused more on gameplay than graphics.
A guy who has all the time in the world to look at problems, the connections required to discuss them with people who know what they're talking about, and can say things without worrying about financial loss. You don't have to assume it's true --- but don't discard what he says just because he's rich and doesn't personally specialize in the field he's talking about.
As a self-taught programmer, the only disadvantage I have noted is that while I just know "a way that will work great", schooled people will be able to put some name to how they want to do things. The X Model, or Y Pattern. Being able to think outside the box is a skill that any good programmer should learn, but not knowing where the box is to begin with puts me at a communication disadvantage when working with a team.
Then again, that's just my experience. People can learn those definitions online just fine -- I tend to learn them on-demand when people mention them. For other fields, being self-taught might not work so great. Some would require materials and equipment too expensive to be self-taught, while others might be too hard to understand without easy access to the insight of a teacher.
And then there are a lot of people who go into school not knowing what they want to do with their lives, and just coast through their first year to find out. The uni experience, exposing them to so many ideas, might end up being better for these people.
1920x1080 @ 27" is merely 81.5 DPI -- high res, sure, but still quite pixelated. I bet the GP meant to say high-DPI screens.
I think that task has been delegated to various P2P emulation groups who do indeed collect every game ever made that they can get their hands on.
This sounds a lot like what I said:
ie. for a single connection they will do as much work as they can, then they need to wait for a notification to find out when they can resume. Was I too tired when I wrote that and not clear enough, or are you simply using this as an excuse to embrace your inner zealot and mock other developers?
Actually, they are better for different things. In Linux you get notified when you can perform an I/O, perform a bunch of non-blocking I/O, and then wait for another notification. In Windows you perform an I/O, and it will either complete immediately or notify you when it does. This means async I/O on Linux can use less memory, while on Windows it can give higher throughput.
Of course, these are merely API advantages -- if the implementation is poor, that won't matter. I'm not aware of any serious tests on this. And even then, Windows lacks an equivalent to Linux's splice(), and its equivalent of sendfile() is crippled on desktop versions to discourage using a desktop as a file server.