I don't care about the polygon level or whatever the latest techie circle jerk effects your man-shooter game engine can pump out. If you need to raise the price level because of graphics whoring, you're on the wrong track. A much more modest investment in innovative game ideas, better gameplay systems, AI, and their ilk will reap bigger rewards for you. If you continue to invest solely in graphics and in-game cutscenes (because your art directors have film-envy), you do so to your folly. The indie game scene is getting bigger and for good reason -- it's a rare place where new ideas can be played, not just a linear, scripted high-poly cinematic trash. Oh sure, your man-shooters and brain-dead action-RPGs will continue to pull in big numbers, but it's unsustainable as a long-term strategy.
I'm relatively fluent in three languages now, and can more or less read another two. I read books in all of them, and I find it really enriches my mind. I just started learning a fourth (Japanese), and am really looking forward to reading Japanese books in their original form (even though learning enough of the kanji characters will be a pain).
How do you retain all of them conversationally? Did you grow up multilingual? My non-English skills are continually crumbling from disuse.
Thanks for the clarification. It's been a while since the announcement and I had some details confused. As I can't update to 1.3 since they locked out Snow Leopard support for everything but the framework, I had confused the two issues. Regardless of the inaccuracies of my example, I still stand behind my basic argument.
What I don't like is when open source project teams suddenly decide to make the project closed-source and for-profit. System notification tool Growl on OS X is one example. Sure, a project's community can fork the project, but entropy tends to have her way. I don't think you should get into open source and then suddenly feel bitter about the time you put into it and want to make money off of it. That's like volunteering your time at a homeless shelter and then going back later and asking to be paid for the time you spent there. It's just a dick move. If you want to do something for-profit, make that upfront to the community.
In one (or more) of producer Ronald D. Moore's BSG podcasts he mentioned that several people on the BSG writing staff had served in the military, including himself who had served a stint in the Navy aboard the frigate USS W. S. Sims. It's possible one of them even served on the Big E.
What personal data did you actually share with them, other than perhaps credit card information (which for many reasons, they wouldn't be sharing)? I'm not defending Sony, I'm just curious. If they want to share with 3rd parties that it took me about three years to finish Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, fine. If I was giving them a rich user profile, it'd be a different story.
Anything's possible, but I can't see a US carrier group *purposefully* letting subs from a nation we consider a military threat to come within torpedo range of the carrier. From the analysis I read at the time, most military wonks think the US Navy severely underestimated the stealth capabilities of the newest Song class submarine.
Given how much data the Chinese government is purported to have stolen from military subcontractors and hacking intrusions over the years, it seems plausible to me that the Chinese have the knowledge to develop a stealthy sub. But defeating the US Navy's advanced detection systems? If true, it's akin to a hidden pocket defeating the TSA cancer machines. The worrying difference being, the Navy actually provides security, not just security theatre.
Maybe, but when Chinese subs can surface within a US carrier group without the US knowing about it, the number of planes the Chinese carrier has becomes less of an issue.
Depends on the pain med for me. With headaches, acetaminophen works pretty well. But the heavy-duty stuff, not so much. Last year I had an impacted tooth removed (nothing but trouble, these teeth) and the oral surgeon gave me Percosets. Those didn't help much at all, and I was in a fair amount of mind-splitting pain.
You don't have any locals for fillings? Wow, I'd at least take a couple shots of whiskey. But yea, after that second local I told my dentist to just do it, but she insisted. I'm sure they're concerned about us, but also concerned about frivolous lawsuits: "She tortured me in that chair!"
[thanks slashdot for erasing my message when I just wanted to turn off karma bonus]
I had fire engine red hair when I was little, but it's more brownish-red now. The last cavity I had, the dentist had to give me three shots of local in my gums to numb the area. Not real pleasant. When I was around 10 I had a cyst in my jaw that had to be surgically removed, which they put me under for in the hospital. I had no problem going under, but woke up in a hallway next to several passed-out people on gurneys. As you can imagine, I was a bit disconcerted by this. A nurse finally walked by and looked over in surprise, "You're not supposed to be awake yet!" No, I guess not. Now at least I have an explanation...
Maybe, but he was preaching to his audience. Most slashdotters at that time were almost as anti-Apple as they were anti-Microsoft. Even if he privately saw benefits in the iPod, he wouldn't have said that publicly. Or maybe he believed what he said. Either way, he would've gotten his head chopped off (to continue your metaphor) if he'd come out in defense of it.
Re:advantages of multiple inheritance
on
PHP 5.4 Released
·
· Score: 2
Taking away options in the language can make the outcome better. For instance, you *have* to strongly type in Java, and you *have* to put everything in classes. Surely its safe to say that Java tends to be more modular by default.
This is sort of like saying democracy in the United States is better because the Constitutional Convention decided an Electoral College would help keep the masses in check. Speaking as a proponent of strong typing, I reject languages that force behavior on programmers. A good language *encourages* good behavior through elegance, pragmatism, and tangible benefit. A bad language creates unnecessary rules because the creators of the language think they know better than the users.
whooooshy.... the clip I linked is from her role in Dancer in the Dark where she daydreams in a factory. Very dark and depressing; as an old curmudgeon you might like it.;)
GUI interfaces have always opened the door to mainstream computer use.
* It wasn't until Windows 3.1 that your average person really took to computers because people just don't like to type and remember arcane commands. [Of course the Macintosh pre-dated this, but it was too pricey for mainstream] * It wasn't until America Online and their GUI that people started using networked services. CompServe and its ilk had been around, but were mostly used by business and tech people. * It wasn't until Netscape Navigator 1.0 that people really took to the internet. It provided a GUI for navigating networks and content. This abstraction was important for your average non-techie to understand. [okay, technically the masses came to the web through AOL, but once they got rid of the training wheels...]
So this thing didn't take off for the same reason early PCs didn't gain wide acceptance in homes -- they were too...'computery' for adults who had never used a computer before, and it was targeted directly at them. If they had taken the tack that the late-80s America Online did -- using a local GUI and only sending data over the wire -- maybe it would've taken off. But they hadn't seen a Macintosh yet (or been to Xerox PARC either, I guess).
As you might guess from my handle, one of the things I do in life is make and record music. I've done double-blind tests before between 24/96 and 16/44.1 music. I can pick out the 24/96 tracks every time. Some people can run faster than others, and some people can hear better I guess.
The problem when converting an analog signal into digital bits is the resolution. An analog-to-digital converter has to take an analog audio wave and slice that up into data chunks, and with a low sampling rate and a low bits-per-sample, your waveform ends up looking more like the curve on an 8-bit videogame. No matter what the software does, it will be throwing away information. It has no choice but to do that. For 16/44.1, it is focusing on the meat of the sound, but throwing away the subtleties of the frequency range...the transients and overtones in the high and low end. Those influence the sound and the way we hear them -- the way our brain expects to hear sound and when you take those away everything sounds flat, even if most people can't properly express the difference. The difference is subtle, but important to reproducing all of the audio information that went into the microphones. When you move up to 24/96, the A/D converter has 8 more bits-per-sample to work with, and over double the sampling rate. To me, the most important aspect is the bits-per-sample, and provides the most noticeable improvement. It can use those 8 extra bits per sample to record the subtle interplays between the instruments, voices, and the room they're in. The sampling rate is more like cranking up the FPS in a videogame. Music is certainly listenable at 44.1kHz, but crank that up to 88.2 or 96 and your brain gets delivered a more continuous stream of audio information. Beyond 96, I don't think anyone can really hear that rate of sampling. I've never heard an audio engineer claim they can, but I'm sure some audiophiles claim so.
Recording and mastering are very important to the sound, but they will never improve the fidelity of the sound beyond the limitations of the format. There's tricks to make our brains think it's louder or "bigger", but those are just tricks. Those transients in the original signal can't be brought back because they were already cut out!
I don't want CD quality, which is 16-bit/44.1kHz. I want 24-bit/96kHz lossless. (That's 24 bits per sample, and over double the sampling rate of CDs) That is the only thing that matches up to vinyl or the original masters. No one records in 16-bit anymore. This is the main problem with digital distribution. We format-shifted to digital files and didn't shift to better quality. The other problem is that the audio decoder of iDevices don't even support 96kHz files. 24-bit yes, which is probably more important than the sampling rate, but it makes the format unattractive to major digital music stores. Sadly, even most bands on sites like Bandcamp -- which allows lossless downloads -- aren't distributing their stuff in 24/96.
Now we have Apple requesting 24/96 masters from the labels, and they're taking those and compressing down to 256 AAC. It makes no sense unless you take the long view and imagine that Apple is trying to have a lot of their catalog in 24/96 before they move to a new format (and when a new iDevice supports it). I believe they'll do that, but it probably still won't be lossless and they'll claim it's just as good.
They're going to do dangerous shit with their phones anyway, so may as well encourage them to not to message with their hands while driving and hence be slightly less dangerous.
Apple spokesperson: "We’re working to make this [protecting user privacy] even better for our customers, and as we have done with location services, any app wishing to access contact data will require explicit user approval in a future software release."
The recommendation is that you contact Unity sales directly, as they have their PS3 license prices under NDA (yea...). Rumor is that the Unity license is $40k for PSN and $80k for a retail disc. I do not know whether the associated SCEA license fee is included in this. In either case, it's a big investment for an indie to get on Sony/Xbox, but that's true no matter what tool you develop with.
There's a lot of heavy-hitters on the iOS store now -- Grand Theft Auto III, Soul Calibur, the Final Fantasy games. I'd say those are worth more than a dollar. They look pretty great and play so-so. The play so-so part is the problem -- not the game's fault, but lack of physical buttons. And until the touch devices find some way around this (and having physical buttons or a dedicated non-screen touch area like the Vita seems the only ways around it), game genres that require complicated button sequences and movements will seem cheap compared to their console/handheld brethren.
Possibly Unity -- with an extra license they have PS3/PSN support available, so Vita support can't be far behind. And it also enables cross-publishing for iOS and Android, as well as PC/Mac. I know a lot of indie game devs are using Unity because of its good toolset (especially the integrated asset pipeline) and this freedom to choose platform targets. Of course, going "down to the metal" will sometimes give your game engine better results, but it's hard to knock the versatility of the engine. One downside is that you're limited to coding in C#, Javascript (ugh), or Boo (some Python-esque affair I've never used).
Slashdot Mirror
Dear game industry,
I don't care about the polygon level or whatever the latest techie circle jerk effects your man-shooter game engine can pump out. If you need to raise the price level because of graphics whoring, you're on the wrong track. A much more modest investment in innovative game ideas, better gameplay systems, AI, and their ilk will reap bigger rewards for you. If you continue to invest solely in graphics and in-game cutscenes (because your art directors have film-envy), you do so to your folly. The indie game scene is getting bigger and for good reason -- it's a rare place where new ideas can be played, not just a linear, scripted high-poly cinematic trash. Oh sure, your man-shooters and brain-dead action-RPGs will continue to pull in big numbers, but it's unsustainable as a long-term strategy.
How do you retain all of them conversationally? Did you grow up multilingual? My non-English skills are continually crumbling from disuse.
I stand behind my statement, not the particular example I used to illustrate the statement.
Thanks for the clarification. It's been a while since the announcement and I had some details confused. As I can't update to 1.3 since they locked out Snow Leopard support for everything but the framework, I had confused the two issues. Regardless of the inaccuracies of my example, I still stand behind my basic argument.
What I don't like is when open source project teams suddenly decide to make the project closed-source and for-profit. System notification tool Growl on OS X is one example. Sure, a project's community can fork the project, but entropy tends to have her way. I don't think you should get into open source and then suddenly feel bitter about the time you put into it and want to make money off of it. That's like volunteering your time at a homeless shelter and then going back later and asking to be paid for the time you spent there. It's just a dick move. If you want to do something for-profit, make that upfront to the community.
In one (or more) of producer Ronald D. Moore's BSG podcasts he mentioned that several people on the BSG writing staff had served in the military, including himself who had served a stint in the Navy aboard the frigate USS W. S. Sims. It's possible one of them even served on the Big E.
What personal data did you actually share with them, other than perhaps credit card information (which for many reasons, they wouldn't be sharing)? I'm not defending Sony, I'm just curious. If they want to share with 3rd parties that it took me about three years to finish Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, fine. If I was giving them a rich user profile, it'd be a different story.
Anything's possible, but I can't see a US carrier group *purposefully* letting subs from a nation we consider a military threat to come within torpedo range of the carrier. From the analysis I read at the time, most military wonks think the US Navy severely underestimated the stealth capabilities of the newest Song class submarine.
Given how much data the Chinese government is purported to have stolen from military subcontractors and hacking intrusions over the years, it seems plausible to me that the Chinese have the knowledge to develop a stealthy sub. But defeating the US Navy's advanced detection systems? If true, it's akin to a hidden pocket defeating the TSA cancer machines. The worrying difference being, the Navy actually provides security, not just security theatre.
Maybe, but when Chinese subs can surface within a US carrier group without the US knowing about it, the number of planes the Chinese carrier has becomes less of an issue.
Depends on the pain med for me. With headaches, acetaminophen works pretty well. But the heavy-duty stuff, not so much. Last year I had an impacted tooth removed (nothing but trouble, these teeth) and the oral surgeon gave me Percosets. Those didn't help much at all, and I was in a fair amount of mind-splitting pain.
You don't have any locals for fillings? Wow, I'd at least take a couple shots of whiskey. But yea, after that second local I told my dentist to just do it, but she insisted. I'm sure they're concerned about us, but also concerned about frivolous lawsuits: "She tortured me in that chair!"
[thanks slashdot for erasing my message when I just wanted to turn off karma bonus]
I had fire engine red hair when I was little, but it's more brownish-red now. The last cavity I had, the dentist had to give me three shots of local in my gums to numb the area. Not real pleasant. When I was around 10 I had a cyst in my jaw that had to be surgically removed, which they put me under for in the hospital. I had no problem going under, but woke up in a hallway next to several passed-out people on gurneys. As you can imagine, I was a bit disconcerted by this. A nurse finally walked by and looked over in surprise, "You're not supposed to be awake yet!" No, I guess not. Now at least I have an explanation...
Maybe, but he was preaching to his audience. Most slashdotters at that time were almost as anti-Apple as they were anti-Microsoft. Even if he privately saw benefits in the iPod, he wouldn't have said that publicly. Or maybe he believed what he said. Either way, he would've gotten his head chopped off (to continue your metaphor) if he'd come out in defense of it.
This is sort of like saying democracy in the United States is better because the Constitutional Convention decided an Electoral College would help keep the masses in check. Speaking as a proponent of strong typing, I reject languages that force behavior on programmers. A good language *encourages* good behavior through elegance, pragmatism, and tangible benefit. A bad language creates unnecessary rules because the creators of the language think they know better than the users.
whooooshy.... the clip I linked is from her role in Dancer in the Dark where she daydreams in a factory. Very dark and depressing; as an old curmudgeon you might like it. ;)
You're Bjork, right?
GUI interfaces have always opened the door to mainstream computer use.
* It wasn't until Windows 3.1 that your average person really took to computers because people just don't like to type and remember arcane commands. [Of course the Macintosh pre-dated this, but it was too pricey for mainstream]
* It wasn't until America Online and their GUI that people started using networked services. CompServe and its ilk had been around, but were mostly used by business and tech people.
* It wasn't until Netscape Navigator 1.0 that people really took to the internet. It provided a GUI for navigating networks and content. This abstraction was important for your average non-techie to understand. [okay, technically the masses came to the web through AOL, but once they got rid of the training wheels...]
So this thing didn't take off for the same reason early PCs didn't gain wide acceptance in homes -- they were too...'computery' for adults who had never used a computer before, and it was targeted directly at them. If they had taken the tack that the late-80s America Online did -- using a local GUI and only sending data over the wire -- maybe it would've taken off. But they hadn't seen a Macintosh yet (or been to Xerox PARC either, I guess).
I stopped reading after "You may tinker with music". If you can't be civil and respectful when you have a discussion, don't bother replying.
As you might guess from my handle, one of the things I do in life is make and record music. I've done double-blind tests before between 24/96 and 16/44.1 music. I can pick out the 24/96 tracks every time. Some people can run faster than others, and some people can hear better I guess.
The problem when converting an analog signal into digital bits is the resolution. An analog-to-digital converter has to take an analog audio wave and slice that up into data chunks, and with a low sampling rate and a low bits-per-sample, your waveform ends up looking more like the curve on an 8-bit videogame. No matter what the software does, it will be throwing away information. It has no choice but to do that. For 16/44.1, it is focusing on the meat of the sound, but throwing away the subtleties of the frequency range...the transients and overtones in the high and low end. Those influence the sound and the way we hear them -- the way our brain expects to hear sound and when you take those away everything sounds flat, even if most people can't properly express the difference. The difference is subtle, but important to reproducing all of the audio information that went into the microphones. When you move up to 24/96, the A/D converter has 8 more bits-per-sample to work with, and over double the sampling rate. To me, the most important aspect is the bits-per-sample, and provides the most noticeable improvement. It can use those 8 extra bits per sample to record the subtle interplays between the instruments, voices, and the room they're in. The sampling rate is more like cranking up the FPS in a videogame. Music is certainly listenable at 44.1kHz, but crank that up to 88.2 or 96 and your brain gets delivered a more continuous stream of audio information. Beyond 96, I don't think anyone can really hear that rate of sampling. I've never heard an audio engineer claim they can, but I'm sure some audiophiles claim so.
Recording and mastering are very important to the sound, but they will never improve the fidelity of the sound beyond the limitations of the format. There's tricks to make our brains think it's louder or "bigger", but those are just tricks. Those transients in the original signal can't be brought back because they were already cut out!
I don't want CD quality, which is 16-bit/44.1kHz. I want 24-bit /96kHz lossless. (That's 24 bits per sample, and over double the sampling rate of CDs) That is the only thing that matches up to vinyl or the original masters. No one records in 16-bit anymore. This is the main problem with digital distribution. We format-shifted to digital files and didn't shift to better quality. The other problem is that the audio decoder of iDevices don't even support 96kHz files. 24-bit yes, which is probably more important than the sampling rate, but it makes the format unattractive to major digital music stores. Sadly, even most bands on sites like Bandcamp -- which allows lossless downloads -- aren't distributing their stuff in 24/96.
Now we have Apple requesting 24/96 masters from the labels, and they're taking those and compressing down to 256 AAC. It makes no sense unless you take the long view and imagine that Apple is trying to have a lot of their catalog in 24/96 before they move to a new format (and when a new iDevice supports it). I believe they'll do that, but it probably still won't be lossless and they'll claim it's just as good.
They're going to do dangerous shit with their phones anyway, so may as well encourage them to not to message with their hands while driving and hence be slightly less dangerous.
Apple spokesperson: "We’re working to make this [protecting user privacy] even better for our customers, and as we have done with location services, any app wishing to access contact data will require explicit user approval in a future software release."
http://allthingsd.com/20120215/apple-app-access-to-contact-data-will-require-explicit-user-permission/
This was in answer to a Congressional inquiry (hopefully that inquiry will knock on Google's door as well).
I imagine Apple has your UI concerns in mind are probably redesigning the interface to support multiple choice permission popups.
That's changing in iOS 5.1 – users will have to explicitly allow address book access, just like they are prompted to do with GPS access today.
The recommendation is that you contact Unity sales directly, as they have their PS3 license prices under NDA (yea...). Rumor is that the Unity license is $40k for PSN and $80k for a retail disc. I do not know whether the associated SCEA license fee is included in this. In either case, it's a big investment for an indie to get on Sony/Xbox, but that's true no matter what tool you develop with.
There's a lot of heavy-hitters on the iOS store now -- Grand Theft Auto III, Soul Calibur, the Final Fantasy games. I'd say those are worth more than a dollar. They look pretty great and play so-so. The play so-so part is the problem -- not the game's fault, but lack of physical buttons. And until the touch devices find some way around this (and having physical buttons or a dedicated non-screen touch area like the Vita seems the only ways around it), game genres that require complicated button sequences and movements will seem cheap compared to their console/handheld brethren.
Possibly Unity -- with an extra license they have PS3/PSN support available, so Vita support can't be far behind. And it also enables cross-publishing for iOS and Android, as well as PC/Mac. I know a lot of indie game devs are using Unity because of its good toolset (especially the integrated asset pipeline) and this freedom to choose platform targets. Of course, going "down to the metal" will sometimes give your game engine better results, but it's hard to knock the versatility of the engine. One downside is that you're limited to coding in C#, Javascript (ugh), or Boo (some Python-esque affair I've never used).