Re:Any chance we can draw circles and boxes now
on
GIMP 2.6 Released
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Why create entirely different "line", "rectangle", "polygon", and "ellipse" tools when "stroke selection" and "stroke path" do all of those -- and more?
For one reason because they don't. Stroking a selection gives a rather uglycircles compared to a real circle tools, since to much information gets lost along the way. And of course also usability, lack of proper circle tools has been an issue for a decade and yet it is still not fixed and still continues to be an issue and the issue won't go away by pretending its not there. Name a good reason why Gimp shouldn't have a set of geometry tools. I frankly can't think of one. If somebody worries that the toolbox is getting crammed, just add a way to remove tools from it.
All that aside, there is also a larger issue with the lack of those tools, namely that tools can't be plug-ins, so any new tool has to be done directly in Gimp and can't be supplied as an add-on. If they could be this issue would have already been fixed long ago.
My question to those that play and feel that way, is if it's so tedious and so mindless why play in the first place?
From those 20 levels I played on a two week trial account I would say it gets played because its addicting and the game being mindless just helps the addiction part because its easy to dive into and do stuff without using your brain to much. I see WoW pretty much the same as soap operas on TV, its pointless and repeating and such, but its easy to sit down in front of it and let the time pass, you can't do the same thing with a flightsim or even Second Life, because for those you actually have to think about stuff, in WoW on the other side you can just go from quest to quest to quest. There simply is always a quest waiting for completion in WoW and you never really reach a point where you have to ask yourself "What do I do know?", so people keep playing. Its constant progress without an end.
The whole reason why people don't shut down their Linux boxes is because booting takes so long. If booting would be fast people would have a good reason to shut down their box much more often. And that aside, "geeky goodness" also isn't such a bad argument, after all its kind of ridiculous that computer speed has increased a thousand times since the C64 or early DOS boxes, but at the same time boot times have gone from pretty much instantaneous to horrible long. I mean is there a good reason why we shouldn't expect todays hardware to be instantly on on a button press?
The problem is that when you make something round you quickly end up with triangles smaller then a pixel and when you do that you have so many vertexes to move around that your graphics card can no longer handle it, so it just wasn't practical in the past. However things are moving forward and new graphic cards already have support for Geometry shader, so you might see round things being round in the next generation of graphic engines. Just as usual, it takes some time from having a feature available in hardware till it becomes common practices in actual games.
The big problem is that boycotting doesn't really work, not only is there the problem that the publisher will conclude that piracy was the fault, not DRM, but there is also the problem that the publshier is often the one dictating the DRM not the developer, in fact the developers are often against it, but they can't really do much about it. And when boycotting the publisher means to also boycott the developers that I actually care about, then boycotting is often a not an option.
Maybe people should just realize they're using delicate instruments and should treat them as such.
With people like you its no surprise that software today is as bad as it is. Get real, computers are common items used by millions of people not exotic rare items. They have hundreds of gigabytes of storage that would make it rather easy to have near unlimited undo for most common day tasks and enough CPU power to ease a lot of other tasks. That of course doesn't mean that the user shouldn't know what they do, they should, point however is that todays software is so terrible that it does everything it can to teach the user bad habits and keep him an idiot. If you treat your users like idiots they will act like some and seriously, you really have to switch your brain to not be driven insane by the shitload of boxes that a Vista will throw at you on everyday tasks.
Its not the programmers' fault. Its the user's.
Blaming it on the user is of course the easiest and most unproductive way to tackle the problem, since it will make sure that nothing ever changes. Get a clue, software these days is for most part rather terrible and there is nothing that the user can do to fix that easily.
And would be able to do much more and diverse probings and experiments.
Yeah, except that you could send around 2500 rowers to mars for the price of a human mars misson. Have some doubt that a small human team can perform better then those.
You can easily set sudo to not require a password:/etc/sudoers # Members of the admin group may gain root privileges %admin ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL
Problem solved. Also lets not forget that Linux doesn't have a bazillion EULA dialogs and what not, UAC adds annoying clickery on top something which is already terrible annoying.
Looks nice on a simple example, the problem is that it can quickly get quite complicated, for example take this:
func1 x y = x * y func2 fn x = fn x > func2 func1 2 5 10
It is completly non obvious what the code will actually do, since it could be func2(func1(2,5)) func2(func, 2, 5), func2(func1(2), 5), func2(func1)(2,5) or whatever, with mandatory parenthesis you would never have such a problem. This might not be much an issue when one is very experienced with the language, but then that is kind of the point, languages like Python are popular because you can understand them even without having a very deep knowledge of the language internals, Haskel on the other side can easily confuse even an experienced (non-Haskel) programmer.
In C, the programmer can realize that sin(45) is a constant and inline the value by hand.
Thats just a trivial example. The whole point is simply that lack of side-effects makes the optimization far easier and gives the compiler far more freedom in what it can do to make the code fast. Of course you can do that all by hand in C or Assembler or whatever, but the whole point of programming languages is that you can describe your problems at a higher level and let the compiler do the grunt work.
Very simple example try to call a function, like say "sin(45)", in a language with side effects like C the code has to be evaluated at runtime, in a language without side-effects it is trivial to prove that the return value is always the same and thus the compiler can simply insert the result into the code by evaluating it once at compile time and never at runtime. Since you don't have side effects the compiler has a much easier job at optimizing things than a compiler in a language with side-effects, because it can't guarantee that changing the order of two procedure calls will lead the same result. This by the way has nothing to do with the language being lazy, such optimization would work just as well in a non-lazy functional languages.
One of the main issue with C is simply that it just one step away from assembler, you tell the computer not only what you want, but also how you want it to be done, so a C optimizer can only optimize things in such a way that is guaranteed to not change the result and figuring that out is pretty hard or even impossible due to all the side effects.
we don't usually have wires with infinite bandwidth, disks capable of storing infinite frames of video, or users that can press infinite keys.
You completly missed the point. An infinite data structure in a lazy language isn't something that you write down to disk or something you store in memory, its a concept with which you structure your code. For example instead of having a while-loop to poll an event from an event queue like you would do in C, you could have an infinite list of all the events that you system would ever create, but it isn't a list/array in the C sense, its much more like a generator in Python in that the elements are only generated once requested, except that you can handle it like any other list in Haskel. Having a recursive function that walks over an infinite list in a lazy language really isn't much different then having an endless loop in C.
Depends on how you determine "easy to read". The main difference between Haskel and say C is that Haskel is very dense while C is not so much, so one line of Haskel holds a lot more information then C, which of course makes look like its Haskel harder to read, since understanding a line of code requires effort, while its trivial in C. However that line of Haskel might contain the same information as a whole function in C and reading that whole function in C might turn out harder then comprehending that single line of Haskel.
All that said, I don't consider the syntax of Haskel very good, lack of parenthesis around function arguments certainly doesn't help readability and the error messages can be rather obscure as well.
Depends, if the only story in a game is text, ala Metroid Prime, then it sucks pretty badly, since you have no connection between the game an the story. On the other side if the text is there to provide additional backstory, like say Resident Evil 1, it works quite nicely to enrich the gaming world, since it gives you insight into events that already happened. The important part is simply that those text pieces have to fit the setting and have to be an addition to the main story, not a replacement.
People who care can already easily find out if a topic has some facts behind it or not, a simple look at Wikipedia will easily solve that and when that isn't enough a little more web search will also give you some more opinion on a topic. And well, people who don't care now, won't care later. If a rating would be low they would argue that it is due to some conspiration, not due to the topic at hand actually being untrue.
Such ratings would of course also be highly subjective, I mean do we label all religious pages as "untrue", as "non scientific" or whatever? I guess many people would disagree with such a rating.
The web really has more serious problems then this.
Its an EULA, thats all there is to know. In the Free Software world there is no need for an EULA because if you obtained the software legally, you already have the right to use it, EULAs are only there to restrict your rights, if they don't do that, they are meaningless, if they to it then its no longer Free Software. Which is why there should never be an EULA in Free Software.
I for one like that I can install Linux on a new box and have it work and not like in Windows where I have to click through dozens of EULAs before the system gets into a usable state.
would it matter whether or not the EULA is shown during installation, no one is going to read it anyway.
Well, thats the point. Why should there be a useless EULA to waste my time when instead the browser could "just work"? EULA are one of the major annoyances under Windows, there is no reason why we should have them on a OS based on Free Software.
Seriously, game prices aren't an issue, especially not today and especially not on the PC. PC games are already $10-$20 cheaper then their console counterparts and the prices fall fast, wait a few month and you can have most games or $20 or even less and that is not even considering that game prices have been totally immune to inflation over the past decade.
PC games will always be around - they will always be popular, always be cutting edge, always be present. nVidia and ATI didn't build their giant companies because PC gaming is dead.
PC games will always be around, since it is after all the only open platform and developers have to start somewhere. However I wouldn't count on the cutting edge. Crytrek wasn't all that pleased with the sales of Crysis, while non-cutting edge games like World of Warcraft or Sins of the Solar Empire sell great, Starcraft and CounterStrike also continue to be popular far beyond the point where they could be called "cutting edge". And a lot of other games come out on consoles first and PC then somewhat later, ofter badly ported, so nothing cutting-edge from that area either.
The 'cutting edge' simply doesn't seem to be an area where there is much money to be made and without money, developers will move elsewhere.
I find it hard to imagine how much more "freedom when it comes to "sex"" you could want,
The trouble starts when you send stuff per mail and import it from another country, since sending indexed stuff per mail isn't allowed the the Zoll can confiscate it. Sounds to me like quite a serious violation of "secrecy of correspondence", but well the law sees that different. There are workarounds like "post-ident" and such, but I have some doubt that you can get that arranged with a random retailer outside the EU.
I have absolutely nothing against age ratings, I am all for them, what I have a serious problem with are the restrictions that are imposed beyond "age 18", "age 18" should simply be the end of regulation, no need to impose further restrictions. And of course in the days of the internet some restrictions feel utterly ridiculous, since well, not much age verification on the internet, so the kids will see the stuff anyway.
Parallax mapping is simply a texture shading technique that gives a texture the impression of depth, just as bump mapping and normal mapping do, only more advanced. It has nothing to do with giving the final image any kind of depths and is a completly unrelated topic.
Germany does have age ratings, and it does have something they call "indexing", which sounds like "banning", but really isn't.
For consoles "indexing" is pretty close to banning, since neither Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo allow an indexed game to be published in Germany, which means you can't buy a German version of Gears of War in Germany and neither can you download demos or add-ons from XBoxLive or PSN. You might still be able to find a shop that imports the game for you from another country and you might be able to create an XboxLive or PSN account with fake data that puts you in the USA, but that are just workaround to what is effectivly a ban. For PC games its different because there is no central authority that stops you from publishing the titles.
Germans don't mind nude models on magazines,
Germany doesn't have a problem with boobies, but hardcore porn is indexed by default, so freedom when it comes to "sex" isn't exactly there either.
Very few games are actually "banned"
True, but it actually does hit major titles, see Dead Rising.
The real issue with the whole "indexing" and "banning" however is that its really just censorship in disguise. We already have rating agencies that can give a titlel a 18+ rating, its hard to find a reason why one would need restrictions beyond a 18+ rating.
From what I have seen of Dead Space a large chunk of the gameplay is build around being able to shoot limps and other body parts of of enemy creatures. There really isn't a way to do that kind of gameplay with less violence. Now I am all for more clever game concepts, but they don't seem to sell all that great, so developers and publishers go into the other direction making the stuff even more violent.
there is no central authority that has final say on what may or may not be sold.
There actually is a central authority and that is Microsoft. I can't speak for Japan, but in Germany titles that don't get a USK rating are still allowed to be sold to people above 18 years, however Microsoft doesn't publish titles that don't have a USK rating. So what should be just sales restrictions ends up being a complete ban due to Microsoft not publishing those titles. Maybe the situation is similar in Japan.
Slashdot Mirror
Why create entirely different "line", "rectangle", "polygon", and "ellipse" tools when "stroke selection" and "stroke path" do all of those -- and more?
For one reason because they don't. Stroking a selection gives a rather ugly circles compared to a real circle tools, since to much information gets lost along the way. And of course also usability, lack of proper circle tools has been an issue for a decade and yet it is still not fixed and still continues to be an issue and the issue won't go away by pretending its not there. Name a good reason why Gimp shouldn't have a set of geometry tools. I frankly can't think of one. If somebody worries that the toolbox is getting crammed, just add a way to remove tools from it.
All that aside, there is also a larger issue with the lack of those tools, namely that tools can't be plug-ins, so any new tool has to be done directly in Gimp and can't be supplied as an add-on. If they could be this issue would have already been fixed long ago.
My question to those that play and feel that way, is if it's so tedious and so mindless why play in the first place?
From those 20 levels I played on a two week trial account I would say it gets played because its addicting and the game being mindless just helps the addiction part because its easy to dive into and do stuff without using your brain to much. I see WoW pretty much the same as soap operas on TV, its pointless and repeating and such, but its easy to sit down in front of it and let the time pass, you can't do the same thing with a flightsim or even Second Life, because for those you actually have to think about stuff, in WoW on the other side you can just go from quest to quest to quest. There simply is always a quest waiting for completion in WoW and you never really reach a point where you have to ask yourself "What do I do know?", so people keep playing. Its constant progress without an end.
The whole reason why people don't shut down their Linux boxes is because booting takes so long. If booting would be fast people would have a good reason to shut down their box much more often. And that aside, "geeky goodness" also isn't such a bad argument, after all its kind of ridiculous that computer speed has increased a thousand times since the C64 or early DOS boxes, but at the same time boot times have gone from pretty much instantaneous to horrible long. I mean is there a good reason why we shouldn't expect todays hardware to be instantly on on a button press?
The problem is that when you make something round you quickly end up with triangles smaller then a pixel and when you do that you have so many vertexes to move around that your graphics card can no longer handle it, so it just wasn't practical in the past. However things are moving forward and new graphic cards already have support for Geometry shader, so you might see round things being round in the next generation of graphic engines. Just as usual, it takes some time from having a feature available in hardware till it becomes common practices in actual games.
The big problem is that boycotting doesn't really work, not only is there the problem that the publisher will conclude that piracy was the fault, not DRM, but there is also the problem that the publshier is often the one dictating the DRM not the developer, in fact the developers are often against it, but they can't really do much about it. And when boycotting the publisher means to also boycott the developers that I actually care about, then boycotting is often a not an option.
Maybe people should just realize they're using delicate instruments and should treat them as such.
With people like you its no surprise that software today is as bad as it is. Get real, computers are common items used by millions of people not exotic rare items. They have hundreds of gigabytes of storage that would make it rather easy to have near unlimited undo for most common day tasks and enough CPU power to ease a lot of other tasks. That of course doesn't mean that the user shouldn't know what they do, they should, point however is that todays software is so terrible that it does everything it can to teach the user bad habits and keep him an idiot. If you treat your users like idiots they will act like some and seriously, you really have to switch your brain to not be driven insane by the shitload of boxes that a Vista will throw at you on everyday tasks.
Its not the programmers' fault. Its the user's.
Blaming it on the user is of course the easiest and most unproductive way to tackle the problem, since it will make sure that nothing ever changes. Get a clue, software these days is for most part rather terrible and there is nothing that the user can do to fix that easily.
And would be able to do much more and diverse probings and experiments.
Yeah, except that you could send around 2500 rowers to mars for the price of a human mars misson. Have some doubt that a small human team can perform better then those.
You can easily set sudo to not require a password: /etc/sudoers
# Members of the admin group may gain root privileges
%admin ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL
Problem solved. Also lets not forget that Linux doesn't have a bazillion EULA dialogs and what not, UAC adds annoying clickery on top something which is already terrible annoying.
Looks nice on a simple example, the problem is that it can quickly get quite complicated, for example take this:
func1 x y = x * y
func2 fn x = fn x
> func2 func1 2 5
10
It is completly non obvious what the code will actually do, since it could be func2(func1(2,5)) func2(func, 2, 5), func2(func1(2), 5), func2(func1)(2,5) or whatever, with mandatory parenthesis you would never have such a problem. This might not be much an issue when one is very experienced with the language, but then that is kind of the point, languages like Python are popular because you can understand them even without having a very deep knowledge of the language internals, Haskel on the other side can easily confuse even an experienced (non-Haskel) programmer.
In C, the programmer can realize that sin(45) is a constant and inline the value by hand.
Thats just a trivial example. The whole point is simply that lack of side-effects makes the optimization far easier and gives the compiler far more freedom in what it can do to make the code fast. Of course you can do that all by hand in C or Assembler or whatever, but the whole point of programming languages is that you can describe your problems at a higher level and let the compiler do the grunt work.
You don't need to understand stacks for that, you simply have to know that objects aren't valid beyond their scope.
Very simple example try to call a function, like say "sin(45)", in a language with side effects like C the code has to be evaluated at runtime, in a language without side-effects it is trivial to prove that the return value is always the same and thus the compiler can simply insert the result into the code by evaluating it once at compile time and never at runtime. Since you don't have side effects the compiler has a much easier job at optimizing things than a compiler in a language with side-effects, because it can't guarantee that changing the order of two procedure calls will lead the same result. This by the way has nothing to do with the language being lazy, such optimization would work just as well in a non-lazy functional languages.
One of the main issue with C is simply that it just one step away from assembler, you tell the computer not only what you want, but also how you want it to be done, so a C optimizer can only optimize things in such a way that is guaranteed to not change the result and figuring that out is pretty hard or even impossible due to all the side effects.
we don't usually have wires with infinite bandwidth, disks capable of storing infinite frames of video, or users that can press infinite keys.
You completly missed the point. An infinite data structure in a lazy language isn't something that you write down to disk or something you store in memory, its a concept with which you structure your code. For example instead of having a while-loop to poll an event from an event queue like you would do in C, you could have an infinite list of all the events that you system would ever create, but it isn't a list/array in the C sense, its much more like a generator in Python in that the elements are only generated once requested, except that you can handle it like any other list in Haskel. Having a recursive function that walks over an infinite list in a lazy language really isn't much different then having an endless loop in C.
Depends on how you determine "easy to read". The main difference between Haskel and say C is that Haskel is very dense while C is not so much, so one line of Haskel holds a lot more information then C, which of course makes look like its Haskel harder to read, since understanding a line of code requires effort, while its trivial in C. However that line of Haskel might contain the same information as a whole function in C and reading that whole function in C might turn out harder then comprehending that single line of Haskel.
All that said, I don't consider the syntax of Haskel very good, lack of parenthesis around function arguments certainly doesn't help readability and the error messages can be rather obscure as well.
Depends, if the only story in a game is text, ala Metroid Prime, then it sucks pretty badly, since you have no connection between the game an the story. On the other side if the text is there to provide additional backstory, like say Resident Evil 1, it works quite nicely to enrich the gaming world, since it gives you insight into events that already happened. The important part is simply that those text pieces have to fit the setting and have to be an addition to the main story, not a replacement.
People who care can already easily find out if a topic has some facts behind it or not, a simple look at Wikipedia will easily solve that and when that isn't enough a little more web search will also give you some more opinion on a topic. And well, people who don't care now, won't care later. If a rating would be low they would argue that it is due to some conspiration, not due to the topic at hand actually being untrue.
Such ratings would of course also be highly subjective, I mean do we label all religious pages as "untrue", as "non scientific" or whatever? I guess many people would disagree with such a rating.
The web really has more serious problems then this.
Its the Firefox EULA,
Its an EULA, thats all there is to know. In the Free Software world there is no need for an EULA because if you obtained the software legally, you already have the right to use it, EULAs are only there to restrict your rights, if they don't do that, they are meaningless, if they to it then its no longer Free Software. Which is why there should never be an EULA in Free Software.
I for one like that I can install Linux on a new box and have it work and not like in Windows where I have to click through dozens of EULAs before the system gets into a usable state.
would it matter whether or not the EULA is shown during installation, no one is going to read it anyway.
Well, thats the point. Why should there be a useless EULA to waste my time when instead the browser could "just work"? EULA are one of the major annoyances under Windows, there is no reason why we should have them on a OS based on Free Software.
Seriously, game prices aren't an issue, especially not today and especially not on the PC. PC games are already $10-$20 cheaper then their console counterparts and the prices fall fast, wait a few month and you can have most games or $20 or even less and that is not even considering that game prices have been totally immune to inflation over the past decade.
PC games will always be around - they will always be popular, always be cutting edge, always be present. nVidia and ATI didn't build their giant companies because PC gaming is dead.
PC games will always be around, since it is after all the only open platform and developers have to start somewhere. However I wouldn't count on the cutting edge. Crytrek wasn't all that pleased with the sales of Crysis, while non-cutting edge games like World of Warcraft or Sins of the Solar Empire sell great, Starcraft and CounterStrike also continue to be popular far beyond the point where they could be called "cutting edge". And a lot of other games come out on consoles first and PC then somewhat later, ofter badly ported, so nothing cutting-edge from that area either.
The 'cutting edge' simply doesn't seem to be an area where there is much money to be made and without money, developers will move elsewhere.
I find it hard to imagine how much more "freedom when it comes to "sex"" you could want,
The trouble starts when you send stuff per mail and import it from another country, since sending indexed stuff per mail isn't allowed the the Zoll can confiscate it. Sounds to me like quite a serious violation of "secrecy of correspondence", but well the law sees that different. There are workarounds like "post-ident" and such, but I have some doubt that you can get that arranged with a random retailer outside the EU.
I have absolutely nothing against age ratings, I am all for them, what I have a serious problem with are the restrictions that are imposed beyond "age 18", "age 18" should simply be the end of regulation, no need to impose further restrictions. And of course in the days of the internet some restrictions feel utterly ridiculous, since well, not much age verification on the internet, so the kids will see the stuff anyway.
Parallax mapping is simply a texture shading technique that gives a texture the impression of depth, just as bump mapping and normal mapping do, only more advanced. It has nothing to do with giving the final image any kind of depths and is a completly unrelated topic.
Germany does have age ratings, and it does have something they call "indexing", which sounds like "banning", but really isn't.
For consoles "indexing" is pretty close to banning, since neither Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo allow an indexed game to be published in Germany, which means you can't buy a German version of Gears of War in Germany and neither can you download demos or add-ons from XBoxLive or PSN. You might still be able to find a shop that imports the game for you from another country and you might be able to create an XboxLive or PSN account with fake data that puts you in the USA, but that are just workaround to what is effectivly a ban. For PC games its different because there is no central authority that stops you from publishing the titles.
Germans don't mind nude models on magazines,
Germany doesn't have a problem with boobies, but hardcore porn is indexed by default, so freedom when it comes to "sex" isn't exactly there either.
Very few games are actually "banned"
True, but it actually does hit major titles, see Dead Rising.
The real issue with the whole "indexing" and "banning" however is that its really just censorship in disguise. We already have rating agencies that can give a titlel a 18+ rating, its hard to find a reason why one would need restrictions beyond a 18+ rating.
From what I have seen of Dead Space a large chunk of the gameplay is build around being able to shoot limps and other body parts of of enemy creatures. There really isn't a way to do that kind of gameplay with less violence. Now I am all for more clever game concepts, but they don't seem to sell all that great, so developers and publishers go into the other direction making the stuff even more violent.
there is no central authority that has final say on what may or may not be sold.
There actually is a central authority and that is Microsoft. I can't speak for Japan, but in Germany titles that don't get a USK rating are still allowed to be sold to people above 18 years, however Microsoft doesn't publish titles that don't have a USK rating. So what should be just sales restrictions ends up being a complete ban due to Microsoft not publishing those titles. Maybe the situation is similar in Japan.