What are they supposed to do about those convenient shorty.38 Specials? Is everyone going to have to switch to bulky semiautomatics with "tamper-proof" firing mechanisms and huge batteries?
phonemes are abstract groupings of phones (the most basic units of human-made sound) that are differentiated from each other by the environment they occur in. Allophone (grouping of phones in a phoneme) distribution and even the basic phone set differ from language to language and even dialect to dialect rather significantly, and so this system would actually be pretty inefficient as a replacement for regular text searches (where, for the most part, spelling is pretty standardized across dialects). It is faster and more accurate because it bypasses text recognition, but existing text would have to be converted to phone representation with several dialects/pronounciations stored, or existing audio is going to have to undergo text/word recognition and the different pronounciations generated, for it to be used in a general purpose search engine.
And this doesn't even begin to deal with "Engrish" speakers =]
Yes, but you've also got to consider the playback device - most (ie cheap) speakers produce exactly the effects (high/low frequency cutoff, distortion of the rest of the frequency range) that the article describes as being dangerous.
"They have the world's most impressive catalog of
on
EA As The Next Disney
·
· Score: 1
intellectual property"
Ha! If by "intellectual property" you mean badly recycled folk tales, a bunch of expired copyrights on three or four over-exploited cartoon characters, and several films whose storylines were "borrowed" (think Lion King, Monsters, Inc.), then yes, they have plenty of "intellectual property."
They must be suffering terribly, having to put warning labels on their products! And god forbid their newfangled moneydrug should cause spontaneous combustion in 1 in 10 of the millions of people whose doctors were "gently encouraged (with non-monetary rewards)" to prescribe that medication - my god, they could be forced to actually test their products for a reasonable amount of safety!
of education is to "show up all those European and Asian kids!"? Nooo, it couldn't possibly have anything to do with things like "creativity" or "social worth" - after all, if you can't give a multiple choice test on it, it obviously doesn't exist!
I just finished playing
Gothic (good for me, as Gothic II is only several months from an English release), and it hits on all but one of your points. The stat system is minimal but very well though out, and stat changes have a meaningful and immediate impact. I haven't looked forward to levelling up this much since Fallout 1. Your "class" is an arbitrary distinction decided by your actions in the game.
Although the storyline isn't completely plastic (none of them are or could be, alas), IMO Pirahna Bytes made a really smart design choice: at a point in the game, you can choose between three branches to continue the story. Although the locations from that point on are all the same (Gothic is a big persistent world, plus a couple of separate dungeon "levels"), the way you experience them depends on the branch you take, and also in a large extent depending on what you invest your skillpoints in. This is probably the best tradeoff between spending valuable time on making branch-specific content and providing a non-linear/replayable game.
Because the main world is a single map, the monsters and natural flora/items are kept track of. At one point in the game, I was running through the forest and realised that I actually ran out of things to kill for the experience/food/valuable items. I felt kind of bad for hunting out all of the wolves.
The best thing about the game is that all this was done with a real-time combat system - not point and click mind you, but a real beat-em-up combat system that felt like it. I guess I should stop frothing at the mouth and say that there are still good RPGs being developed, and the future looks good.
Yeah, I bet they'll really remember all that spaghetti confusion-driven time-traveling bonanza on half-hour long scroll and click random-encounter combat. And the next 10 sequels. The cutscenes are starting to become less and less worth it.
What they're doing at EA is taking half-assed marketing concepts ("hey, everybody is making WWII games!!! Let's make two dozen such titles!!"), and making them (barely) enjoyable to play.
You are right in that the process of making games is more a series of changes than a plan. But it is the same thing whenever you are solving any hard problem - I find that any project that goes according to a predefined plan is really trivialy easy when you get down to what they are trying to do.
And see that Hollywood isn't doing too good. There have been a lot movie-related companies (especially SFX) going out of business in the past two years. I think in 5 years the same thing will happen to the video games industry (ie - another early 1980's style Atari crash by overproduction is coming).
It is truly sad when the only OO paradigm most people have ever known is message-passing. This leads to, among other stupid things, an irrational fear of multiple inheritance.
"A reasonably recent video card. The oldest cards anyone has tested on are TNT2 and Voodoo 3.
For OpenGL support, your video card needs to be able to handle 512x256 or 512x512 textures. (The Voodoo 3 can not do this.)"
Can someone from the dev team please tell me why they decided to base the graphics on OpenGL? I really don't get it, what is it about SDL's 2d API that people don't like? I've seen a few other projects that use OpenGL just to draw sprites, and it really puzzles me.
So you still end up fixing broken code, whether it is OO or not. Even if you look at it as system instead of class/package wide level behavior, my argument is still valid.
circular? I'm not dumping on refactoring, as improving your code is never a bad thing. But some of these statements, especially since Fowler seems like an OO advocate, contradict each other.
"Refactoring is making changes to a body of code in order to improve its internal structure, without changing its external behavior."
"But if you will be changing the system--either to fix bugs or add features--keeping the system well factored or making it better factored will give you a payback as you make those changes."
So if your classes don't change externally, there should be little merit to this argument. You can extend them just as well as before as you can after, performance considerations aside.
For that reason I think there is a problem with this definition of refactoring, at least in the scope of OO and functional (and any others where you can wrap glue around code) systems. "Refactoring" is necessary in poorly written (ie - code that needs "refactoring", hehe) OO and functional code because it will be buggy, broken and slow (even MS gets around to rewriting their code). It can't be avoided in procedural code because it will sooner or later become impossible to maintain. This isn't as optional a process as he implies, and is not a newfangled invention.
Ehh, comparing the Lisp break-loop to Visual C++'s incremental-illusion tricks is not a good idea.
In Lisp, you not only modify the system dynamically, you fix the bugs dynamically. Whenever an unhandled exception pops up, by default the stack isn't unwound (this is the big thing about Lisp exceptions. There is also a flag to make the exception unwind the stack, if you need it). Lisp interrupts execution and puts you into the break loop - right in the middle of where the error occured. You can see and change what is currently on the stack, what values of local variables are, etc. When you are done, you can just tell Lisp to continue, and execution resumes with whatever modifications you made to it.
This isn't just a neat trick - this is the way to do debugging.
You can put Lisp into a break loop manually, interrupting the current processes, and save a memory image. When you load that image, the computation will resume right where you left off.
And this isn't something new or amazing - "quite a long time ago" (what, 5 years?) is not a lot compared to the 20-30 years (about as early as system memory considerations made these things possible) that Smalltalk and Lisp systems have had these features.
publicly popular open source projects in areas where commercial software can't compete effectively (probably file sharing, copy protection circumvention, and anonymizing and anti-censorship software like Freenet and Peekabooty). Most that will try will fail horribly because of the mentioned "dumbing-down effect." As usual, the best free software will be rather niche because it requires one to think.
Please tell, what is this mythical "high end processing environment" that I keep hearing about? Where exactly would a BSD-derived commercial Unix be better than a comparable BSD-derived free-software Unix? What can a Starfire server do that a cluster can't, and why is it better than a z-Series running a bunch of Linux images or some other mainframe?
The above comment is only too true. I've studied in NY regents and Alberta public schools, and the technology situation truly is sad.
The tech spending is entirely controlled by the highed level Board of Ed. goons, whose pockets are no doubt well buttered by the computer companies. I don't know what the situation is now, but 5 years ago NY public schools could only buy/accept Macs (I think this was largely for support reasons, and in that case it did make some sense). At least they were thrifty about it - my middle school still used Apple IIs for the word-processing class.
In Calgary, Alberta it's downright horrible. The schools don't take anything less than Pentium 166s, and put fresh copies of Windows 95 on them. They have huge contracts with Compaq (each school buys a few dozen new PCs a year which it doesn't need) and that Bess censorware company for providing a filtered proxy. Support for anything took literally months, the proxies were incredibly slow, and almost always in a half-broken state. They also ran their central record-keeping systems on NT - these always crashed every couple of weeks (at least the staff got extra coffee breaks.)
The biggest reason behind this is the inept staff and management public schools have - the only kind they can afford. It's really too bad.
planning to develop free software with this compiler? I'd be interested in the motivations of the people doing it. Given that there are so many better cross-platform, free software alternatives (Python, Smalltalk, Scheme, CL, etc.) why would anyone want to use.Net?
Funny story about Macsyma and Wolfram. In the end, Lisp was vindicated - not even Wolfram can escape Greenspun's tenth rule =]. I also hear that there is still some code written by him distributed with Maxima.
Another scientific computation package that looks promising is Lush. It's a custom Lisp dialect with a compiler in the spirit of KCL/ECL in that it doesn't need an FFI to interface with C (I'm not sure if the compiler is native-code or a C translator, the sourceforge page is down). It comes with a lot of numerical and multimedia libraries, and from the looks of it is a pretty damn cool package. I haven't had time to check it out yet.
Although I can't get it to compile, Codemist seems to have released the source to their Standard Lisp compiler and (some, all?) of their symbolic algebra system Reduce.
While we're talking about switching languages, why not Common Lisp? It compiles to native code and has all the features mentioned (fast numerical code, vendor support for multithreading (this will likely be standardized now that J13 has decided to meet again), portable graphics (CLIM), very platform-neutral, no more rat nest makefiles - hell, no more making at all). The only downside is that Allegro CL is the only compiler continuing support for SGIs (although it also supports hp-ux, aix and various flavor of DEC unix, with no extra porting effort unless you're doing tricky FFI). If the contract is large enough, it might be possible to convince Xanalys to port Lispworks to the SGI again (I'm fairly certain it ran on that platform sometime in the past).
"By the grace of Heaven and in rare moments of inspiration which transcend the will, computer science may unconsciously blossom from the labour of the hand..."
"The key reason these languages [Java, C#, Smalltalk, etc.] are postmodern is that they cannot be considered against technical criteria."
Teehee, just look at p. 15! These guys must be laughing harder than Don Woods and James Lyons after Intercal (ohh, they even mentioned it - "Intercal must be considered as a post-modern language (mostly for non-technical reasons)."
Slashdot Mirror
What are they supposed to do about those convenient shorty .38 Specials? Is everyone going to have to switch to bulky semiautomatics with "tamper-proof" firing mechanisms and huge batteries?
And this doesn't even begin to deal with "Engrish" speakers =]
Yes, but you've also got to consider the playback device - most (ie cheap) speakers produce exactly the effects (high/low frequency cutoff, distortion of the rest of the frequency range) that the article describes as being dangerous.
Ha! If by "intellectual property" you mean badly recycled folk tales, a bunch of expired copyrights on three or four over-exploited cartoon characters, and several films whose storylines were "borrowed" (think Lion King, Monsters, Inc.), then yes, they have plenty of "intellectual property."
They must be suffering terribly, having to put warning labels on their products! And god forbid their newfangled moneydrug should cause spontaneous combustion in 1 in 10 of the millions of people whose doctors were "gently encouraged (with non-monetary rewards)" to prescribe that medication - my god, they could be forced to actually test their products for a reasonable amount of safety!
of education is to "show up all those European and Asian kids!"? Nooo, it couldn't possibly have anything to do with things like "creativity" or "social worth" - after all, if you can't give a multiple choice test on it, it obviously doesn't exist!
Although the storyline isn't completely plastic (none of them are or could be, alas), IMO Pirahna Bytes made a really smart design choice: at a point in the game, you can choose between three branches to continue the story. Although the locations from that point on are all the same (Gothic is a big persistent world, plus a couple of separate dungeon "levels"), the way you experience them depends on the branch you take, and also in a large extent depending on what you invest your skillpoints in. This is probably the best tradeoff between spending valuable time on making branch-specific content and providing a non-linear/replayable game.
Because the main world is a single map, the monsters and natural flora/items are kept track of. At one point in the game, I was running through the forest and realised that I actually ran out of things to kill for the experience/food/valuable items. I felt kind of bad for hunting out all of the wolves.
The best thing about the game is that all this was done with a real-time combat system - not point and click mind you, but a real beat-em-up combat system that felt like it. I guess I should stop frothing at the mouth and say that there are still good RPGs being developed, and the future looks good.
Yeah, I bet they'll really remember all that spaghetti confusion-driven time-traveling bonanza on half-hour long scroll and click random-encounter combat. And the next 10 sequels. The cutscenes are starting to become less and less worth it.
You're forgetting that it's an Xbox port. The Elder Scrolls were originally PC games.
You are right in that the process of making games is more a series of changes than a plan. But it is the same thing whenever you are solving any hard problem - I find that any project that goes according to a predefined plan is really trivialy easy when you get down to what they are trying to do.
And see that Hollywood isn't doing too good. There have been a lot movie-related companies (especially SFX) going out of business in the past two years. I think in 5 years the same thing will happen to the video games industry (ie - another early 1980's style Atari crash by overproduction is coming).
It is truly sad when the only OO paradigm most people have ever known is message-passing. This leads to, among other stupid things, an irrational fear of multiple inheritance.
Can someone from the dev team please tell me why they decided to base the graphics on OpenGL? I really don't get it, what is it about SDL's 2d API that people don't like? I've seen a few other projects that use OpenGL just to draw sprites, and it really puzzles me.
Well, it does have a two-layer robot control AI. The thing that makes it cooler than an AIBO is that you can program your own tasks on their second layer, using C++ and Python APIs. (Ha, take that Mr. Wiseman's weblog! :)
So you still end up fixing broken code, whether it is OO or not. Even if you look at it as system instead of class/package wide level behavior, my argument is still valid.
So if your classes don't change externally, there should be little merit to this argument. You can extend them just as well as before as you can after, performance considerations aside.
For that reason I think there is a problem with this definition of refactoring, at least in the scope of OO and functional (and any others where you can wrap glue around code) systems. "Refactoring" is necessary in poorly written (ie - code that needs "refactoring", hehe) OO and functional code because it will be buggy, broken and slow (even MS gets around to rewriting their code). It can't be avoided in procedural code because it will sooner or later become impossible to maintain. This isn't as optional a process as he implies, and is not a newfangled invention.
In Lisp, you not only modify the system dynamically, you fix the bugs dynamically. Whenever an unhandled exception pops up, by default the stack isn't unwound (this is the big thing about Lisp exceptions. There is also a flag to make the exception unwind the stack, if you need it). Lisp interrupts execution and puts you into the break loop - right in the middle of where the error occured. You can see and change what is currently on the stack, what values of local variables are, etc. When you are done, you can just tell Lisp to continue, and execution resumes with whatever modifications you made to it.
This isn't just a neat trick - this is the way to do debugging.
You can put Lisp into a break loop manually, interrupting the current processes, and save a memory image. When you load that image, the computation will resume right where you left off.
And this isn't something new or amazing - "quite a long time ago" (what, 5 years?) is not a lot compared to the 20-30 years (about as early as system memory considerations made these things possible) that Smalltalk and Lisp systems have had these features.
But who knows? The future is a funny place.
Please tell, what is this mythical "high end processing environment" that I keep hearing about? Where exactly would a BSD-derived commercial Unix be better than a comparable BSD-derived free-software Unix? What can a Starfire server do that a cluster can't, and why is it better than a z-Series running a bunch of Linux images or some other mainframe?
The tech spending is entirely controlled by the highed level Board of Ed. goons, whose pockets are no doubt well buttered by the computer companies. I don't know what the situation is now, but 5 years ago NY public schools could only buy/accept Macs (I think this was largely for support reasons, and in that case it did make some sense). At least they were thrifty about it - my middle school still used Apple IIs for the word-processing class.
In Calgary, Alberta it's downright horrible. The schools don't take anything less than Pentium 166s, and put fresh copies of Windows 95 on them. They have huge contracts with Compaq (each school buys a few dozen new PCs a year which it doesn't need) and that Bess censorware company for providing a filtered proxy. Support for anything took literally months, the proxies were incredibly slow, and almost always in a half-broken state. They also ran their central record-keeping systems on NT - these always crashed every couple of weeks (at least the staff got extra coffee breaks.)
The biggest reason behind this is the inept staff and management public schools have - the only kind they can afford. It's really too bad.
planning to develop free software with this compiler? I'd be interested in the motivations of the people doing it. Given that there are so many better cross-platform, free software alternatives (Python, Smalltalk, Scheme, CL, etc.) why would anyone want to use .Net?
Another scientific computation package that looks promising is Lush. It's a custom Lisp dialect with a compiler in the spirit of KCL/ECL in that it doesn't need an FFI to interface with C (I'm not sure if the compiler is native-code or a C translator, the sourceforge page is down). It comes with a lot of numerical and multimedia libraries, and from the looks of it is a pretty damn cool package. I haven't had time to check it out yet.
Although I can't get it to compile, Codemist seems to have released the source to their Standard Lisp compiler and (some, all?) of their symbolic algebra system Reduce.
While we're talking about switching languages, why not Common Lisp? It compiles to native code and has all the features mentioned (fast numerical code, vendor support for multithreading (this will likely be standardized now that J13 has decided to meet again), portable graphics (CLIM), very platform-neutral, no more rat nest makefiles - hell, no more making at all). The only downside is that Allegro CL is the only compiler continuing support for SGIs (although it also supports hp-ux, aix and various flavor of DEC unix, with no extra porting effort unless you're doing tricky FFI). If the contract is large enough, it might be possible to convince Xanalys to port Lispworks to the SGI again (I'm fairly certain it ran on that platform sometime in the past).
they're just hooked on Java. Overloading the plus operator seems to be a very popular thing nowadays...
"The key reason these languages [Java, C#, Smalltalk, etc.] are postmodern is that they cannot be considered against technical criteria."
Teehee, just look at p. 15! These guys must be laughing harder than Don Woods and James Lyons after Intercal (ohh, they even mentioned it - "Intercal must be considered as a post-modern language (mostly for non-technical reasons)."
Thanks for the laugh, you crazy Kiwis =].