it's a worse version of something that the PS3 has done since launch
I wouldn't say it is that bad, I actually like having advertisment, trailers and stuff shown to me while doing something else in the virtual world. The Playstation Store surely is faster, but if you don't know what you are looking for it doesn't really help all that much, Home on the other side shows you stuff you haven't been actively looking for (which is how I learned that there was an ew Watchmen trailer). Home however has two huge problem. The first one is that movie trailers in the cinema require load times, you have to sit there and watch a status bar instead of being allowed to freely walk around while the thing is loading, which is stupid and breaks the whole 'loading in the background' that Home does in most other cases. The second problems however is the bigger one, there simply isn't anything to do in Home, so you really have no need to get back to it after having seen all the location once. Now I don't expect Home to turn into GTA, but if they haven't any decent gameplay going for it, they should at least have a good amount of locations to wander around in, so that you can do some exploring while being bombarded with advertisment. Or heck, they should just implemented some full blown adventure games in Home, that way you would have plenty of walking to do without it feeling all pointless. The biggest problem with Home for me is simply the lack of content, after all those years I would have guessed they did create more then those handful of rooms, currently it feels more like being locked up in a virtual shopping mall then like a virtual world.
Don't they take notes or stuff? Human memory isn't exactly the most accurate way to store data and if they can't even remember which the guilty party is they better should keep pen and paper handy.
If you want to fake video you are doing much better by using 2D composition instead of 3D rendering, the later one is still quite a bit away from being practical, the first one however can produce quite convincing results without all that much effort.
Have you ever actually tried it? The whole menu structure breaks down and has to be redone, the games balance gets out of wack and has to be redone, game mechanics no longer work due to different capabilities of the devices and the whole QA now has to be done twice. Its nothing you do in an hour or even a day and one of the main reason why games available for both PC and console quite often suck on one or the other.
A useful thing to have in case you're incapable of holding on to a controller.
As demonstrated by dozens of accidents it is not useful in those situations, because it will fail there quite frequently. Its so hard to get? The strap has a single easy to understand function, it failed at that very function. Even Nintendo admits that, which is why they replaced it with a stronger one.
Considering that game development cost have skyrocketed in the last years while the actual game price have stays pretty much the same for two decades I find it hard to argue that games are to expensive.
The presented features do look nifty, especially the graph, but one big problem I see is that the timespans it can process will likely end up rather short. Webpage design changes over time and when that happens lensing will get troublesome, since content might no longer be where it used to be. Also the tool only seems to work on portal pages, while most real content is hidden in some sub page, which naturally doesn't have much of a history.
Advertisement for alcohol and tobacco is already heavily limited in many countries, you could just do the same for other drugs. Just because something is legally available doesn't mean it has be available without restrictions.
Nothing overlaps, nothing looks out of place. Try learning how to properly use CSS before you make such blanket statements.
My statement refers to other peoples webpages, almost all of them break when you browse with non-standard font size, not just some few isolated ones, but almost all of them. I never had those problems back in the day when everybody was doing table based layout stuff.
The basic layout of a webpage really doesn't change all that often and moving stuff in a table is just a bit of copy&paste, but more importantly divs really don't help, quite the opposite is true. The CSS code that gets the divs into the correct positions is quite often extremely hardwired and inflexible, since one div depends on others with hardcoded positions, float instructions, clear instructions and all kinds of other hackery, so moving div around requires fixes in lots of other unrelated divs. Divs are only really nice on the HTML side of things, since there its just a box that doesn't depend on anything, in the CSS on the other side its as ugly as it can possibly get.
My experience is exactly the opposite. Tables are trivial to understand, logical and robust. Div layout on the other side is completly counter-intuitive, fragile and just plain ugly on the code side. Now from a pure philosophical point of view I absolutely agree, layout and content should be separated and tables don't allow that, while div do. But I really wish there would be a way to define table-style layout logic on the CSS side, since trying to get those div boxes in the right location in a way that is robust is just plain annoying and tons of webpages fail at that (try to browse with fontsize set to 200%, most pages will result in overlapping text and other crap). Tables, duo to their logical structure and recursiveness are far easier.
And of course in days where all the content is in a database anyway, where nobody writes plain HTML any more, its questionable how much benefit there really is from separating layout and content the way its done with HTML/CSS, especially when it just doesn't work in practice (again, try to browse with 200% font size).
Speaking about language speed, how does it come that Lisp always comes out rather high in those rankings, while newer languages like Ruby and Python and up deep down at the bottom? In terms of expressiveness they all are very similar, yet nobody seems to have bothered to write a proper native code compiler for the newer languages, even so the popular interest in them is much larger then that for Lisp. Is there any fundamental reason for this?
More to the point, why would your choice of programming paradigm have a significant impact on parallelization of algorithms?
A functional languages allows you what you want to do, an imperative languages allows you to express how you want to do it. The former gives the compiler much more power to optimize, while the later leaves very little room for optimization compiler and leaves the grunt work to the programmer. The reason for this is that a functional language doesn't have side effects, without side effects code evaluation can be spread across multiple CPU and evaluated out of order, the result is guaranteed to be always the same. In an imperative language the order of evaluation is specified in the code itself and it can't be evaluated out of order, since there is no way to guarantee that the result would be the same.
Misplaced blame, methinks. Blame the website designer, not the browser.
The trouble is that this isn't an isolated problem, it affects pretty much all webpages that have a non-trivial layout, some fall apart later then others and some have worse errors then other, but pretty much all of fall apart when you increase the font enough, the Firefox homepage, Slashdot, just to name a few. In fact I don't even know if you can achieve some of those effects (round corners, gradients as background in boxes, etc.) in a way that doesn't break when the font size changes a lot.
I don't quite see why algorithm should break. I would say the opposite is true, functional languages allow you to write an algorithm down much more clearly and compactly, leading to fewer bugs and better code.
The problem I have with functional programming is more that most programming isn't about clear well specified algorithms, but about routing UI events around, connecting framework components and simple batch processing, i.e. areas where functional programming doesn't provide an obvious advantage.
And of course functional programming doesn't make your algorithms magically parallel, it can help sometimes, but there is still plenty of manual work involved.
I wish it where. What I find annoying these days is how bad pretty much all browsers are at producing readable webpages. Do a simple change from the defaults settings, like increase the font size, and lots of webpages will become unusable, text will overflow boxes, overlap with other text and all kinds of mess, its ridiculous and yet I have never seen it mentioned in any browser review.
Another thing that I find highly annoying is Firefox image scaling algorithm or better lack there of. What good is a zoom function when it will make all images look like crap? Bilinear filtering isn't all that complicated, yet Firefox doesn't have it and goes the ugliest possible route in making an image larger. I just don't get how such a basic feature is still not in there after over a decade.
I am talking about attention span, not length, i.e. how long it takes till the player gets his 'return of investment' and well, a 15 years ago you had flightsims on a PC and jump'n runs on the console, quite a different learning curve. Today that of course is less meaningful, but you can still tell from a mile away that something like Stalker or Sins of the Solar Empire is a PC game, not a console one. This by the way does not refer to the gamers itself, but the publishers expectation of gamers and its probally more true for Western console developers then it was for Japanese. Lots of JRPGs never got released in the Europe because they where considered unfit for the market and that includes high profile stuff like ChronoTrigger and FF3.
But as said, it gets more and more meaningless these days, as PC games get more console-like and console games more PC like and half of them are developed cross platform anyway.
As far as I know most of the bigger third-party games on Wii have tanked, the games that sell are the Nintendo ones. Those publishers that make money are making it because they produce the cheap minigame collections, not those that do the Zack&Wikis.
When you take them one by one the Wii wins by a long shot, but PS3 and Xbox360 together still have more then the Wii. 'Hardcore gaming' isn't half as dead as some people claim. Seems more like an even split between hardcore and casual stuff these days.
Nintendo has proven graphics don't have to matter.
Nintendo has mainly shown that graphics don't matter for *them*, if you look at third party developers you get a whole different picture, graphics matter a lot of them, which is why none of them has their big games on the Wii, the big money goes into PS3 and Xbox360 titles.
The difference is that DRM on a console works together with the hardware/firmware to accomplish its goal. DRM on the PC on the other side works against the hardware and OS and thus breaks lots of stuff and leads to tons of incompatibilities and problems. From a freedom-loving point of view that might not be much of a difference, but from a gamers point of view its a hell of a difference. The issue with PC DRM isn't that its DRM, but simply that it breaks stuff, if it wouldn't constantly do that, sometimes even intentional, it would be much less hated.
Slashdot Mirror
it's a worse version of something that the PS3 has done since launch
I wouldn't say it is that bad, I actually like having advertisment, trailers and stuff shown to me while doing something else in the virtual world. The Playstation Store surely is faster, but if you don't know what you are looking for it doesn't really help all that much, Home on the other side shows you stuff you haven't been actively looking for (which is how I learned that there was an ew Watchmen trailer). Home however has two huge problem. The first one is that movie trailers in the cinema require load times, you have to sit there and watch a status bar instead of being allowed to freely walk around while the thing is loading, which is stupid and breaks the whole 'loading in the background' that Home does in most other cases. The second problems however is the bigger one, there simply isn't anything to do in Home, so you really have no need to get back to it after having seen all the location once. Now I don't expect Home to turn into GTA, but if they haven't any decent gameplay going for it, they should at least have a good amount of locations to wander around in, so that you can do some exploring while being bombarded with advertisment. Or heck, they should just implemented some full blown adventure games in Home, that way you would have plenty of walking to do without it feeling all pointless. The biggest problem with Home for me is simply the lack of content, after all those years I would have guessed they did create more then those handful of rooms, currently it feels more like being locked up in a virtual shopping mall then like a virtual world.
Don't they take notes or stuff? Human memory isn't exactly the most accurate way to store data and if they can't even remember which the guilty party is they better should keep pen and paper handy.
If you want to fake video you are doing much better by using 2D composition instead of 3D rendering, the later one is still quite a bit away from being practical, the first one however can produce quite convincing results without all that much effort.
Have you ever actually tried it? The whole menu structure breaks down and has to be redone, the games balance gets out of wack and has to be redone, game mechanics no longer work due to different capabilities of the devices and the whole QA now has to be done twice. Its nothing you do in an hour or even a day and one of the main reason why games available for both PC and console quite often suck on one or the other.
A useful thing to have in case you're incapable of holding on to a controller.
As demonstrated by dozens of accidents it is not useful in those situations, because it will fail there quite frequently. Its so hard to get? The strap has a single easy to understand function, it failed at that very function. Even Nintendo admits that, which is why they replaced it with a stronger one.
Considering that game development cost have skyrocketed in the last years while the actual game price have stays pretty much the same for two decades I find it hard to argue that games are to expensive.
The presented features do look nifty, especially the graph, but one big problem I see is that the timespans it can process will likely end up rather short. Webpage design changes over time and when that happens lensing will get troublesome, since content might no longer be where it used to be. Also the tool only seems to work on portal pages, while most real content is hidden in some sub page, which naturally doesn't have much of a history.
you see behind the cashier "ICE BRAND METH $40".
Advertisement for alcohol and tobacco is already heavily limited in many countries, you could just do the same for other drugs. Just because something is legally available doesn't mean it has be available without restrictions.
Nothing overlaps, nothing looks out of place. Try learning how to properly use CSS before you make such blanket statements.
My statement refers to other peoples webpages, almost all of them break when you browse with non-standard font size, not just some few isolated ones, but almost all of them. I never had those problems back in the day when everybody was doing table based layout stuff.
The basic layout of a webpage really doesn't change all that often and moving stuff in a table is just a bit of copy&paste, but more importantly divs really don't help, quite the opposite is true. The CSS code that gets the divs into the correct positions is quite often extremely hardwired and inflexible, since one div depends on others with hardcoded positions, float instructions, clear instructions and all kinds of other hackery, so moving div around requires fixes in lots of other unrelated divs. Divs are only really nice on the HTML side of things, since there its just a box that doesn't depend on anything, in the CSS on the other side its as ugly as it can possibly get.
My experience is exactly the opposite. Tables are trivial to understand, logical and robust. Div layout on the other side is completly counter-intuitive, fragile and just plain ugly on the code side. Now from a pure philosophical point of view I absolutely agree, layout and content should be separated and tables don't allow that, while div do. But I really wish there would be a way to define table-style layout logic on the CSS side, since trying to get those div boxes in the right location in a way that is robust is just plain annoying and tons of webpages fail at that (try to browse with fontsize set to 200%, most pages will result in overlapping text and other crap). Tables, duo to their logical structure and recursiveness are far easier.
And of course in days where all the content is in a database anyway, where nobody writes plain HTML any more, its questionable how much benefit there really is from separating layout and content the way its done with HTML/CSS, especially when it just doesn't work in practice (again, try to browse with 200% font size).
Have a look here for some benchmarks: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/
Speaking about language speed, how does it come that Lisp always comes out rather high in those rankings, while newer languages like Ruby and Python and up deep down at the bottom? In terms of expressiveness they all are very similar, yet nobody seems to have bothered to write a proper native code compiler for the newer languages, even so the popular interest in them is much larger then that for Lisp. Is there any fundamental reason for this?
CC isn't the GPL, there is no requirement to include the source for a CC piece of work.
Is there any way to get direct access to these images without going through the Wikimedia webpage, i.e. a torrent containing them all or so?
Firefox 3 does bilinear filtering on image scaling
Not on Linux, which of course makes the zooming rather useless, since it would causes all webpages to look rather ugly.
More to the point, why would your choice of programming paradigm have a significant impact on parallelization of algorithms?
A functional languages allows you what you want to do, an imperative languages allows you to express how you want to do it. The former gives the compiler much more power to optimize, while the later leaves very little room for optimization compiler and leaves the grunt work to the programmer. The reason for this is that a functional language doesn't have side effects, without side effects code evaluation can be spread across multiple CPU and evaluated out of order, the result is guaranteed to be always the same. In an imperative language the order of evaluation is specified in the code itself and it can't be evaluated out of order, since there is no way to guarantee that the result would be the same.
Misplaced blame, methinks. Blame the website designer, not the browser.
The trouble is that this isn't an isolated problem, it affects pretty much all webpages that have a non-trivial layout, some fall apart later then others and some have worse errors then other, but pretty much all of fall apart when you increase the font enough, the Firefox homepage, Slashdot, just to name a few. In fact I don't even know if you can achieve some of those effects (round corners, gradients as background in boxes, etc.) in a way that doesn't break when the font size changes a lot.
I don't quite see why algorithm should break. I would say the opposite is true, functional languages allow you to write an algorithm down much more clearly and compactly, leading to fewer bugs and better code.
The problem I have with functional programming is more that most programming isn't about clear well specified algorithms, but about routing UI events around, connecting framework components and simple batch processing, i.e. areas where functional programming doesn't provide an obvious advantage.
And of course functional programming doesn't make your algorithms magically parallel, it can help sometimes, but there is still plenty of manual work involved.
I wish it where. What I find annoying these days is how bad pretty much all browsers are at producing readable webpages. Do a simple change from the defaults settings, like increase the font size, and lots of webpages will become unusable, text will overflow boxes, overlap with other text and all kinds of mess, its ridiculous and yet I have never seen it mentioned in any browser review.
Another thing that I find highly annoying is Firefox image scaling algorithm or better lack there of. What good is a zoom function when it will make all images look like crap? Bilinear filtering isn't all that complicated, yet Firefox doesn't have it and goes the ugliest possible route in making an image larger. I just don't get how such a basic feature is still not in there after over a decade.
I am talking about attention span, not length, i.e. how long it takes till the player gets his 'return of investment' and well, a 15 years ago you had flightsims on a PC and jump'n runs on the console, quite a different learning curve. Today that of course is less meaningful, but you can still tell from a mile away that something like Stalker or Sins of the Solar Empire is a PC game, not a console one. This by the way does not refer to the gamers itself, but the publishers expectation of gamers and its probally more true for Western console developers then it was for Japanese. Lots of JRPGs never got released in the Europe because they where considered unfit for the market and that includes high profile stuff like ChronoTrigger and FF3.
But as said, it gets more and more meaningless these days, as PC games get more console-like and console games more PC like and half of them are developed cross platform anyway.
As far as I know most of the bigger third-party games on Wii have tanked, the games that sell are the Nintendo ones. Those publishers that make money are making it because they produce the cheap minigame collections, not those that do the Zack&Wikis.
Where is Castlevania?
It came out a few days ago and judging from the reviews it sucks pretty badly.
39mil Wii, 24mil Xbox360, 18mil PS3
When you take them one by one the Wii wins by a long shot, but PS3 and Xbox360 together still have more then the Wii. 'Hardcore gaming' isn't half as dead as some people claim. Seems more like an even split between hardcore and casual stuff these days.
Nintendo has proven graphics don't have to matter.
Nintendo has mainly shown that graphics don't matter for *them*, if you look at third party developers you get a whole different picture, graphics matter a lot of them, which is why none of them has their big games on the Wii, the big money goes into PS3 and Xbox360 titles.
The difference is that DRM on a console works together with the hardware/firmware to accomplish its goal. DRM on the PC on the other side works against the hardware and OS and thus breaks lots of stuff and leads to tons of incompatibilities and problems. From a freedom-loving point of view that might not be much of a difference, but from a gamers point of view its a hell of a difference. The issue with PC DRM isn't that its DRM, but simply that it breaks stuff, if it wouldn't constantly do that, sometimes even intentional, it would be much less hated.