If you have a clear and good case, you can easily sue in this system. While in the current US system, you very likely can't sue even if you are 100% right, because you couldn't afford the cost.
Well, that would still be true in Loser Pays, because it should be obvious that being 100% right doesn't mean you're going to win your case. And because it's Loser Pays, you have to pay the other guy's expenses too.
I'll assume what you say about actual systems with Loser Pays is true, and ask: What else is different about these systems such that Loser Pays works?
AFAIK, nobody in these countries are arguing for going to the US system. That tells you something.
There's a lot more wrong with our legal system than just people being overly litigious.
That's a really, really bad idea, because it makes suing corporations or rich individuals too daunting to even consider. But they can still sue you, because they can afford to lose. All "loser pays" does is raise the financial bar for gaining access to the courts even higher.
I agree that people who make their living through lawsuits should be stopped, but making the plaintiff pay if they lose isn't the way to do it.
Even better, instead of competing against the mulititude of good Windows games the Linux port of Disciples 2 will basically be competing against NetHack.
Heh. I dunno, Nethack is some pretty tough competition. Though I do normally need something else to play after my latest promising Priestess dies because I accidentally touched a cockatrice. I need a week or so to recover emotionally, and some nice HOMM-like gameplay would be just the ticket.:)
Finally, a game like Disciples 2 (which is an excellent game, btw) will likely do better among the Linux crowd than among the point-and-drool crowd. Not to be arrogant, but I think the people who are willing and able to do all the stuff one has to do to maintain a Linux box correctly are probably a little more cerebral than most.
Well, not that I wouldn't like to join your elitist circle-jerk... But I'm pretty sure that most of your -truly- discriminating gamers aren't using Linux because of the very supply problem you mention. I may not be a drooling Deer Hunter player, but I'm also necessarily less discriminating than some of my friends who simply won't use Linux because it lacks the games they want.
That said, I still think your other reasons mean that Disciples will do quite well on Linux.
wouldn't it be in LGP's best interest to work on porting games that are more comercially successful?
Short answer: No.
Long answer: A game that is commercially successful is going to cost more to get a license for. Loki apparently payed several hundred thousand dollars for the rights to some of their games. Unsurprisingly, the immature Linux gaming market wasn't large enough for them to recoup their costs. That, along with mismanagement, is what buried Loki. LGP, not wanting to go bankrupt, is taking the much more conservative business model (remember that, from before the.com boom?) of buying rights to less successful games. They're going to be much cheaper, and thus require much fewer sales to recoup the costs of. With the dearth of Linux games, users are going to buy the game if it interests them whether or not it's a big-name title. For example, I never would have heard of Disciples if I was still using Windows. But because I use Linux and I crave HOMM-like gameplay, I'll be buying the only new game in that genre, namely Disciples 2. What's the point? To make money. Not a ton of money, but to make money. If LGP can profit off of Disciples, then they can afford to do another game. Maybe a bigger-name game. Each game they can profit off of grows not only themselves but the Linux game market. With a slow, conservative approach they have a much better chance of being successfull than if they bought a $300,000 game, lost $1 mill, then went bankrupt.
The reason you think work has to begin on porting massively popular games seems to be because of a common, but incorrect line of thinking: That Linux has to become a major desktop success right now. It doesn't. Modest, sustainable growth in Linux gaming is the correct method, and the one that will work. Maybe the size of the market will reach a critical mass and be able to grow much more rapidly, but trying to force that day to come sooner by over-reaching is a recipe for failure. LGP learned this lesson from Loki, and I think they learned the right one.
You're right, and the evolution-aping does have many merits.
What's so good about evolution is, as you allude to, the robust testing mechanism. The hardest part about genetic algorithms and other forms of self-learning is defining the criterion to judge any given solution by. Evolution has that covered -- if the organism can survive and reproduce in the face of limited resources, other organisms that may think of the organism as food, adverse weather, and everything else the world can throw at a poor carbon-based mess of chemicals.
That's part of why studying the existing solution can be beneficial. Could the genetic-algorithm-based dragonfly fly in the rain? A stiff breeze? The answer could easily be no, and the only way to get it to learn that is to expose it to those elements. This naturally slows down the learning process (you can't only progressively expose it to new tests, because it could easily 'forget' how to fly when it's not raining otherwise). Okay, that may be a bad example, as I don't think offhand that dragonflies can fly in the rain... But I think you see the point.
I love genetic algorithms (mostly because it saves -me- from having to solve the problem myself;) but studying the results of other algorithms with a proven history can't be a bad thing.:)
No, don't just use what will get the job done. That's engineering at its most primitive, but you can do better. What about the next job, that may be similar? Will it get that job done easily? Is it maintainable? What about when it stops getting the job done in a couple years, after you're gone? Can it be fixed? What if the "job" changes? Deciding whether or not these are issues, and whether or not a solution addresses these issues, is something engineers should think about.
All that is still just things related to the specific computational task you expect the solution to perform. There are tradeoffs beyond that space that, despite being an engineer, are valid to consider.
Other questions, like is the ability for the solution to get the job done dependent on one company? What are the costs of dealing with that company? Will I be locked in to using that one company's products? If that company stops supporting my solution, what are my options?
I'm not saying you're wrong that people should consider more than one solution, and use what is appropriate. I'm just arguing that "getting the job done" is not the only thing that should be considered, and that as a result what appears to be blind allegience may not be.
For example, Venezuela's government is considering more than just "getting the job done" when they decide to use Open Source. The mandate to use it across government is based on those non-technical aspects of their situation that can only be satisfied by open products. It's not blind allegience, it's pragmatism -- the same engineering tradeoffs made in our jobs every day -- based on more than just technical aspects.
Or for myself, I simply value Free in my software where I will take a Free solution over non- even if the Free doesn't -technically- perform as well.
Again, I'm not disagreeing with your main point, that each situation may be different and the decision should be made not on what tech you like, but on what is best. I'm just saying "best" can be based on more complex things which seemingly drive out other solutions as if they are not considered.
Sure, but the point is that you should be able to have your fingers move 20 miles, if you have correct hand posture. With correct hand posture, the difference in movements between the keyboard layouts doesn't make as much difference in your RSI. It's lots of repetitive movements -while your tendons are scrapping across your bone- that is the big problem.
But I didn't mean to imply that using Dvorak wasn't a good thing in and of itself.:)
Switching to dvorak is an improvement over qwerty, but it's a very minor improvement compared to using correct typing posture. You'll get RSI typing in dvorak just the same as qwerty if you have your wrists bent while typing, though it might take longer. I type dvorak and have for a good four years, but I still see a pair of these gloves in my future.
The vast majority of law enforcement professionals are good, decent, upstanding citizens who care deeply about our laws, our society, and the people who live in it. In most cases, they actually do deserve the benefit of the doubt.
You know what? You're absolutely right. Most cops I've met have been good people who take the responisibility that comes with their power very seriously.
You know what else? It doesn't fucking matter.
It takes precisely one run-in with a bad cop on a power trip to seriously ruin your day. From pulling someone over for Driving While Black to performing unwarranted strip searches, I've seen enough abuse of police power to understand that "vast majority" isn't nearly good enough. It's not even close as in hand grenades.
I respect police officers -- the good ones -- but you simply can't hand out such power without the strictest of oversight. If that makes the good cops' jobs more difficult -- too fucking bad.
In all seriousness if the manufacturers can guarentee that its safe I'm all for portable power that lasts 200 years.
Screw that. I want the manufacturer, a government agency, and a dozen or so independent non-profit organizations to guarantee it is safe. I mean, we saw well letting the company tell us what is safe worked with tobacco.;)
But do that, and yeah, I'd use one.:)
Re:Well, that's all good 'n' all
on
Film Gimp
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· Score: 2
No, you're right.
The GPL only covers your right to distribute the software. You can modify the software to your heart's content and never show anyone a line of your code, so long as you aren't giving them your modified program. This was deliberately done, since the FSF feels that being able to have private versions (ie not being forced to distribute) is a fundamental right.
And that's why Apple's license isn't a Free Software license.
You have no way of knowing what other people are programming, but buddy, if you miss some types of errors in some types of programs, Bad Things Happen.
No shit. But if you're programming that type of thing, you know it, and that's completely separate from the issue of whether XP actually increases programmer productivity.
No, he'd get laid off. That's economics. Airlines don't want spare bodies getting paid salaries
That was exactly my point. Pilots aren't programmers, so the doubling-up of pilots in airplanes is irrelevent to the discussion.
Lines of code may be a horrible way to measure productivity, but it's very hard to get accountants to believe in "function points".
I've always liked the productivity measurment "accomplishing goals". But I'm old-fashioned like that.:)
what I've seen work in practice is the use of XP (adapted slightly) as a training ground
Yes, that makes sense. Actually, some people who work near me did that when one was leaving the job and another was picking it up.
Which seems to be what the book says -- there are specific cases where XP is good, but it isn't something to use across any (or even many) situations.
Did you ever wonder why every commercial aircraft of a certain size has a captain AND a co pilot?
Because the co pilot might realize an error or a danger the pilot did not realize.
And missing an error in the plane is a tad bit more important than in a program. And it's not like if the copilot could go fly -another- plane instead of co-piloting that the airline would get any benefit. They don't get more money for being able to fly more planes.
How many compiler errors do you usaly correct after a compiler run? How long does it take to get 10 lines changed/eddited/added and compiled successfull?
Far, far less than 50% of my time. For each hour I spend coding, only a few minutes will be spent fixing compiler errors.
Anything less than 50% means that XP is a loss, not a gain.
A pair creating 100 lines of code distributed via 3 classes in one day and getting it into production another day or having to single programmers coding 200 lines of code where 50 lines from each one are similar to the other ones code resembling the same concepts expressed by different people?
Forget that lines of code are a horrible method of measuring productivity, and the slanting assumption that 1/2 of each programmers work would be redundant. Actually, don't forget that. If you can't divide work in such a way that your programmers aren't doing more than half non-redundant work, you have problems XP won't solve.
But anyway -- the question is which is more efficient. While I believe that with XP the two-person programming unit is more efficient than a single-person unit, that isn't enough. If the increase in efficiency isn't more than 100%, then you would be better off having the programmers work separately.
Please stop bashing something you have not at least used/applied for a couple of years, and don't call yourself an expert if you have not used it at least for 10 years.
I have a new programming method. I call it Jabbing a Stick into Your Eye. Don't knock it until you've tried it for a few years.
Thank God the rest of us can recognize a bad idea without doing it for years first.
My only problem with these extensions is that they're only available on that graphics board model. Until they are approved and standardized by the ARB, there isn't any garauntee that my code will run on a different machine.
Sure there is. You just make sure to detect whether or not that OpenGL implementation supports the extension, and only use it if it does.
The reason why this isn't as bad as, say, using Glide instead of OGL is that the vast majority of your code is the standard OpenGL, and only the code to support a specific feature is vendor-specific. And any graphics engine coded for PCs is designed to allow graphical features to be turned on and off. This is just a feature that instead of being a user-selected option is gated by the existence of the exension. It's not that big a deal.
Besides, you'd want to do the same thing anyway -- if your card doesn't have hardware support for shaders (for example), you probably don't want to be using shaders in your program. So the code would be gated anyway.
You can't add more stuff to the API if you find that it's lacking. The reason is that you can't add your new functionality to the hardware, which is the whole point in using OpenGL in the first place.
Ah, but what if you can add new functionality to the hardware, because you are the manufacturer? With DirectX, nothing changes -- if the API doesn't support what you want, it won't until MS says so. With OpenGL, you can expose new hardware functionality through an extension. Programmers can use your hardware's new features immediately, unlike with DirectX.
So, you still have to wait for the next version of OpenGL to come out, and graphics-cards manufacturers to build cards with it in mind.
This is the exact opposite of what actually happens. In reality, manufacturers build cards with new features and expose them through extensions. Then, in the next revision, the new functionality may be folded into the standard API. The hardware leads the API, rather than trails, without sacrificing the ability to use the hardware immediately.
This is one spot were DirectX has a big advantage over OpenGL. DirectX is designed by only one party, rather than a big committee of different companies who want different features. As such, DirectX has a much faster development cycle, and gets improvements quite often.
OpenGL gets an improvement whenever a vendor has an idea for what new trick they'd like their hardware to pull. Yes, it takes them some time to agree on what the next official version of the API should look like, but that doesn't slow the development and acceptance of new features a bit. Vendors can innovate as much as they want, without waiting for a central body to approve and support their innovation -- that is a big advantage.
As opposed to DirectX... I just can't see how being dependent on a single outside vendor to support your hardware's features is an advantage.
Four years is a long time in the world of 3D graphics.
Yes, and in those four years we've seen the development of hardware T&L, texture compression, pixel and vertex shaders... And OpenGL has not wanted for one of them.
They are cooperating. That's how OGL 2.0 came about. It's an open consortium of componies that decide what the standard should be. They may disagree, but overall it's cooperation.
And the extensions let them expose feature of their hardware that the spec currently doesn't support. That's good for you (who get the features sooner) and good for the company (who can sell their cards based on those features sooner). And the best of those features get folded into the spec next revision. I'm not sure how you can call this a "problem".
It's a lot better than ATI not being able to sell the nicest features of their card because the owner of the software they depend on hasn't put out a release that supports those features yet -- and of course you not being able to -use- those features.
But it sounds like you're basically talking about the same thing as Mr. Reiser. You'd be able to search based on both relations and keywords (eg project X).
The thing I liked about his idea was that this concept -was- the filesystem, in that you could specify these things in the same way one specifies a file now, but also use traditional paths as further methods of organizing data.
Eg (and he has much better syntax for this) you could do/home/me/documents/(Author=Yohansen)/[Chewbacca] to reference all files in/home/me/documents that had as their author Yohansen containing the meta key Chewbacca. The reason I like this is because 1) it's seamless. You don't need to re-write every application to understand it. and 2) it doesn't throw away the file/directory metaphor entirely, because it can in fact be useful.
The computer he seem to describe would be able to pull up the information based on what you wanted based on a request, not on some method of searching for a file.
You mean he's invented grep?! Hooray!
I read something by Reiser of ReiserFS on a relational database/keyword search method of organizing files. I liked it more and I think it was more realistic about the actual necessity of keeping the traditional file system intact, if only visible to applications and the OS.
Which you're of course always going to have -- an OS is just the thing that manages access to hardware and provides an abstraction for that hardware.
And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered
Don't be sloppy. That isn't a fact. The facts -- the data, as you say -- are that we have found fossils that resemble to varying degrees apes and humans, with older ones more closely resembling apes than more recent ones. It's pretty obvious that what those fossils mean is that we evolved from apes, but that isn't a "fact".
Of course then a Creationist then uses that to put their literal interpretation of Genesis on equal footing as evolution... But that's no reason to call something a fact that isn't.
Ten dollars isn't a lot of money, but then again Doom is an old game, and all you get for the $10 is an upgrade with better rendering. I'd think they'd do better just charging $10 up front. Also, is this a port of the GPL code base, or did they actually pay iD for a non-GPL code license?
including steven hawkings? in his book he pointed out that no one can guess what happened before the big bang, and he put it down to God, god created the universe before the big bang. since god is infalable he set the big bang up *exactlly* how he wanted it and we are here reading slashdot, by his design.
personally i'm not a christian, but i liked his reasoning.
Well I am, and Creationists piss me off. Why? Because Stephen Hawking's explanation isn't good enough for them. Because they think that they know exactly how God created the universe, and that it had to be some 7-periods-of-24-hours affair. They don't think it's possible that God could have used the Big Bang, evolution, and the forces of nature to perform His will. In effect, they are placing limits on the God that they'll spend as long as you care to listen telling you is omnipotent!
As a result they want to teach kids a literal interpretation of a book absolutely laden with symbolic language, parable, and metaphor -- with the reason explicitly stated that the truth is more complex -- that these fools decided must be the only way it could have been.
And the part that pisses me off -- because they're such morons, smart non-religious types end up thinking all religous types must be morons as well, and I have to deal with it. Thanks, guys.
Slashdot Mirror
If you have a clear and good case, you can easily sue in this system. While in the current US system, you very likely can't sue even if you are 100% right, because you couldn't afford the cost.
Well, that would still be true in Loser Pays, because it should be obvious that being 100% right doesn't mean you're going to win your case. And because it's Loser Pays, you have to pay the other guy's expenses too.
I'll assume what you say about actual systems with Loser Pays is true, and ask: What else is different about these systems such that Loser Pays works?
AFAIK, nobody in these countries are arguing for going to the US system. That tells you something.
There's a lot more wrong with our legal system than just people being overly litigious.
That's a really, really bad idea, because it makes suing corporations or rich individuals too daunting to even consider. But they can still sue you, because they can afford to lose. All "loser pays" does is raise the financial bar for gaining access to the courts even higher.
I agree that people who make their living through lawsuits should be stopped, but making the plaintiff pay if they lose isn't the way to do it.
Even better, instead of competing against the mulititude of good Windows games the Linux port of Disciples 2 will basically be competing against NetHack.
:)
Heh. I dunno, Nethack is some pretty tough competition. Though I do normally need something else to play after my latest promising Priestess dies because I accidentally touched a cockatrice. I need a week or so to recover emotionally, and some nice HOMM-like gameplay would be just the ticket.
Finally, a game like Disciples 2 (which is an excellent game, btw) will likely do better among the Linux crowd than among the point-and-drool crowd. Not to be arrogant, but I think the people who are willing and able to do all the stuff one has to do to maintain a Linux box correctly are probably a little more cerebral than most.
Well, not that I wouldn't like to join your elitist circle-jerk... But I'm pretty sure that most of your -truly- discriminating gamers aren't using Linux because of the very supply problem you mention. I may not be a drooling Deer Hunter player, but I'm also necessarily less discriminating than some of my friends who simply won't use Linux because it lacks the games they want.
That said, I still think your other reasons mean that Disciples will do quite well on Linux.
wouldn't it be in LGP's best interest to work on porting games that are more comercially successful?
.com boom?) of buying rights to less successful games. They're going to be much cheaper, and thus require much fewer sales to recoup the costs of. With the dearth of Linux games, users are going to buy the game if it interests them whether or not it's a big-name title. For example, I never would have heard of Disciples if I was still using Windows. But because I use Linux and I crave HOMM-like gameplay, I'll be buying the only new game in that genre, namely Disciples 2. What's the point? To make money. Not a ton of money, but to make money. If LGP can profit off of Disciples, then they can afford to do another game. Maybe a bigger-name game. Each game they can profit off of grows not only themselves but the Linux game market. With a slow, conservative approach they have a much better chance of being successfull than if they bought a $300,000 game, lost $1 mill, then went bankrupt.
Short answer: No.
Long answer: A game that is commercially successful is going to cost more to get a license for. Loki apparently payed several hundred thousand dollars for the rights to some of their games. Unsurprisingly, the immature Linux gaming market wasn't large enough for them to recoup their costs. That, along with mismanagement, is what buried Loki. LGP, not wanting to go bankrupt, is taking the much more conservative business model (remember that, from before the
The reason you think work has to begin on porting massively popular games seems to be because of a common, but incorrect line of thinking: That Linux has to become a major desktop success right now. It doesn't. Modest, sustainable growth in Linux gaming is the correct method, and the one that will work. Maybe the size of the market will reach a critical mass and be able to grow much more rapidly, but trying to force that day to come sooner by over-reaching is a recipe for failure. LGP learned this lesson from Loki, and I think they learned the right one.
You're right, and the evolution-aping does have many merits.
;) but studying the results of other algorithms with a proven history can't be a bad thing. :)
What's so good about evolution is, as you allude to, the robust testing mechanism. The hardest part about genetic algorithms and other forms of self-learning is defining the criterion to judge any given solution by. Evolution has that covered -- if the organism can survive and reproduce in the face of limited resources, other organisms that may think of the organism as food, adverse weather, and everything else the world can throw at a poor carbon-based mess of chemicals.
That's part of why studying the existing solution can be beneficial. Could the genetic-algorithm-based dragonfly fly in the rain? A stiff breeze? The answer could easily be no, and the only way to get it to learn that is to expose it to those elements. This naturally slows down the learning process (you can't only progressively expose it to new tests, because it could easily 'forget' how to fly when it's not raining otherwise). Okay, that may be a bad example, as I don't think offhand that dragonflies can fly in the rain... But I think you see the point.
I love genetic algorithms (mostly because it saves -me- from having to solve the problem myself
Yes, use what will get the job done.
No, don't just use what will get the job done. That's engineering at its most primitive, but you can do better. What about the next job, that may be similar? Will it get that job done easily? Is it maintainable? What about when it stops getting the job done in a couple years, after you're gone? Can it be fixed? What if the "job" changes? Deciding whether or not these are issues, and whether or not a solution addresses these issues, is something engineers should think about.
All that is still just things related to the specific computational task you expect the solution to perform. There are tradeoffs beyond that space that, despite being an engineer, are valid to consider.
Other questions, like is the ability for the solution to get the job done dependent on one company? What are the costs of dealing with that company? Will I be locked in to using that one company's products? If that company stops supporting my solution, what are my options?
I'm not saying you're wrong that people should consider more than one solution, and use what is appropriate. I'm just arguing that "getting the job done" is not the only thing that should be considered, and that as a result what appears to be blind allegience may not be.
For example, Venezuela's government is considering more than just "getting the job done" when they decide to use Open Source. The mandate to use it across government is based on those non-technical aspects of their situation that can only be satisfied by open products. It's not blind allegience, it's pragmatism -- the same engineering tradeoffs made in our jobs every day -- based on more than just technical aspects.
Or for myself, I simply value Free in my software where I will take a Free solution over non- even if the Free doesn't -technically- perform as well.
Again, I'm not disagreeing with your main point, that each situation may be different and the decision should be made not on what tech you like, but on what is best. I'm just saying "best" can be based on more complex things which seemingly drive out other solutions as if they are not considered.
Sure, but the point is that you should be able to have your fingers move 20 miles, if you have correct hand posture. With correct hand posture, the difference in movements between the keyboard layouts doesn't make as much difference in your RSI. It's lots of repetitive movements -while your tendons are scrapping across your bone- that is the big problem.
:)
But I didn't mean to imply that using Dvorak wasn't a good thing in and of itself.
Best post recognizing that one has been inappropriately mod'ed up... ever!
Switching to dvorak is an improvement over qwerty, but it's a very minor improvement compared to using correct typing posture. You'll get RSI typing in dvorak just the same as qwerty if you have your wrists bent while typing, though it might take longer. I type dvorak and have for a good four years, but I still see a pair of these gloves in my future.
The vast majority of law enforcement professionals are good, decent, upstanding citizens who care deeply about our laws, our society, and the people who live in it. In most cases, they actually do deserve the benefit of the doubt.
You know what? You're absolutely right. Most cops I've met have been good people who take the responisibility that comes with their power very seriously.
You know what else? It doesn't fucking matter.
It takes precisely one run-in with a bad cop on a power trip to seriously ruin your day. From pulling someone over for Driving While Black to performing unwarranted strip searches, I've seen enough abuse of police power to understand that "vast majority" isn't nearly good enough. It's not even close as in hand grenades.
I respect police officers -- the good ones -- but you simply can't hand out such power without the strictest of oversight. If that makes the good cops' jobs more difficult -- too fucking bad.
In all seriousness if the manufacturers can guarentee that its safe I'm all for portable power that lasts 200 years.
;)
:)
Screw that. I want the manufacturer, a government agency, and a dozen or so independent non-profit organizations to guarantee it is safe. I mean, we saw well letting the company tell us what is safe worked with tobacco.
But do that, and yeah, I'd use one.
No, you're right.
The GPL only covers your right to distribute the software. You can modify the software to your heart's content and never show anyone a line of your code, so long as you aren't giving them your modified program. This was deliberately done, since the FSF feels that being able to have private versions (ie not being forced to distribute) is a fundamental right.
And that's why Apple's license isn't a Free Software license.
You have no way of knowing what other people are programming, but buddy, if you miss some types of errors in some types of programs, Bad Things Happen.
:)
No shit. But if you're programming that type of thing, you know it, and that's completely separate from the issue of whether XP actually increases programmer productivity.
No, he'd get laid off. That's economics. Airlines don't want spare bodies getting paid salaries
That was exactly my point. Pilots aren't programmers, so the doubling-up of pilots in airplanes is irrelevent to the discussion.
Lines of code may be a horrible way to measure productivity, but it's very hard to get accountants to believe in "function points".
I've always liked the productivity measurment "accomplishing goals". But I'm old-fashioned like that.
what I've seen work in practice is the use of XP (adapted slightly) as a training ground
Yes, that makes sense. Actually, some people who work near me did that when one was leaving the job and another was picking it up.
Which seems to be what the book says -- there are specific cases where XP is good, but it isn't something to use across any (or even many) situations.
Did you ever wonder why every commercial aircraft of a certain size has a captain AND a co pilot?
Because the co pilot might realize an error or a danger the pilot did not realize.
And missing an error in the plane is a tad bit more important than in a program. And it's not like if the copilot could go fly -another- plane instead of co-piloting that the airline would get any benefit. They don't get more money for being able to fly more planes.
How many compiler errors do you usaly correct after a compiler run? How long does it take to get 10 lines changed/eddited/added and compiled successfull?
Far, far less than 50% of my time. For each hour I spend coding, only a few minutes will be spent fixing compiler errors.
Anything less than 50% means that XP is a loss, not a gain.
A pair creating 100 lines of code distributed via 3 classes in one day and getting it into production another day or having to single programmers coding 200 lines of code where 50 lines from each one are similar to the other ones code resembling the same concepts expressed by different people?
Forget that lines of code are a horrible method of measuring productivity, and the slanting assumption that 1/2 of each programmers work would be redundant. Actually, don't forget that. If you can't divide work in such a way that your programmers aren't doing more than half non-redundant work, you have problems XP won't solve.
But anyway -- the question is which is more efficient. While I believe that with XP the two-person programming unit is more efficient than a single-person unit, that isn't enough. If the increase in efficiency isn't more than 100%, then you would be better off having the programmers work separately.
Please stop bashing something you have not at least used/applied for a couple of years, and don't call yourself an expert if you have not used it at least for 10 years.
I have a new programming method. I call it Jabbing a Stick into Your Eye. Don't knock it until you've tried it for a few years.
Thank God the rest of us can recognize a bad idea without doing it for years first.
My only problem with these extensions is that they're only available on that graphics board model. Until they are approved and standardized by the ARB, there isn't any garauntee that my code will run on a different machine.
Sure there is. You just make sure to detect whether or not that OpenGL implementation supports the extension, and only use it if it does.
The reason why this isn't as bad as, say, using Glide instead of OGL is that the vast majority of your code is the standard OpenGL, and only the code to support a specific feature is vendor-specific. And any graphics engine coded for PCs is designed to allow graphical features to be turned on and off. This is just a feature that instead of being a user-selected option is gated by the existence of the exension. It's not that big a deal.
Besides, you'd want to do the same thing anyway -- if your card doesn't have hardware support for shaders (for example), you probably don't want to be using shaders in your program. So the code would be gated anyway.
I'm not sure why that got posted anonymously... I was logged in and didn't check the box... Oh well.
You can't add more stuff to the API if you find that it's lacking. The reason is that you can't add your new functionality to the hardware, which is the whole point in using OpenGL in the first place.
Ah, but what if you can add new functionality to the hardware, because you are the manufacturer? With DirectX, nothing changes -- if the API doesn't support what you want, it won't until MS says so. With OpenGL, you can expose new hardware functionality through an extension. Programmers can use your hardware's new features immediately, unlike with DirectX.
So, you still have to wait for the next version of OpenGL to come out, and graphics-cards manufacturers to build cards with it in mind.
This is the exact opposite of what actually happens. In reality, manufacturers build cards with new features and expose them through extensions. Then, in the next revision, the new functionality may be folded into the standard API. The hardware leads the API, rather than trails, without sacrificing the ability to use the hardware immediately.
This is one spot were DirectX has a big advantage over OpenGL. DirectX is designed by only one party, rather than a big committee of different companies who want different features. As such, DirectX has a much faster development cycle, and gets improvements quite often.
OpenGL gets an improvement whenever a vendor has an idea for what new trick they'd like their hardware to pull. Yes, it takes them some time to agree on what the next official version of the API should look like, but that doesn't slow the development and acceptance of new features a bit. Vendors can innovate as much as they want, without waiting for a central body to approve and support their innovation -- that is a big advantage.
As opposed to DirectX... I just can't see how being dependent on a single outside vendor to support your hardware's features is an advantage.
Four years is a long time in the world of 3D graphics.
Yes, and in those four years we've seen the development of hardware T&L, texture compression, pixel and vertex shaders... And OpenGL has not wanted for one of them.
They are cooperating. That's how OGL 2.0 came about. It's an open consortium of componies that decide what the standard should be. They may disagree, but overall it's cooperation.
And the extensions let them expose feature of their hardware that the spec currently doesn't support. That's good for you (who get the features sooner) and good for the company (who can sell their cards based on those features sooner). And the best of those features get folded into the spec next revision. I'm not sure how you can call this a "problem".
It's a lot better than ATI not being able to sell the nicest features of their card because the owner of the software they depend on hasn't put out a release that supports those features yet -- and of course you not being able to -use- those features.
Yeah, I was joking about grep.
/home/me/documents/(Author=Yohansen)/[Chewbacca] to reference all files in /home/me/documents that had as their author Yohansen containing the meta key Chewbacca. The reason I like this is because 1) it's seamless. You don't need to re-write every application to understand it. and 2) it doesn't throw away the file/directory metaphor entirely, because it can in fact be useful.
But it sounds like you're basically talking about the same thing as Mr. Reiser. You'd be able to search based on both relations and keywords (eg project X).
The thing I liked about his idea was that this concept -was- the filesystem, in that you could specify these things in the same way one specifies a file now, but also use traditional paths as further methods of organizing data.
Eg (and he has much better syntax for this) you could do
The computer he seem to describe would be able to pull up the information based on what you wanted based on a request, not on some method of searching for a file.
You mean he's invented grep?! Hooray!
I read something by Reiser of ReiserFS on a relational database/keyword search method of organizing files. I liked it more and I think it was more realistic about the actual necessity of keeping the traditional file system intact, if only visible to applications and the OS.
Which you're of course always going to have -- an OS is just the thing that manages access to hardware and provides an abstraction for that hardware.
Yeah, because I'm sure iD software is really kicking themselves for not being able to cash in on this lucrative deal. *rolls eyes*
And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered
Don't be sloppy. That isn't a fact. The facts -- the data, as you say -- are that we have found fossils that resemble to varying degrees apes and humans, with older ones more closely resembling apes than more recent ones. It's pretty obvious that what those fossils mean is that we evolved from apes, but that isn't a "fact".
Of course then a Creationist then uses that to put their literal interpretation of Genesis on equal footing as evolution... But that's no reason to call something a fact that isn't.
Ten dollars isn't a lot of money, but then again Doom is an old game, and all you get for the $10 is an upgrade with better rendering. I'd think they'd do better just charging $10 up front. Also, is this a port of the GPL code base, or did they actually pay iD for a non-GPL code license?
including steven hawkings? in his book he pointed out that no one can guess what happened before the big bang, and he put it down to God, god created the universe before the big bang. since god is infalable he set the big bang up *exactlly* how he wanted it and we are here reading slashdot, by his design.
personally i'm not a christian, but i liked his reasoning.
Well I am, and Creationists piss me off. Why? Because Stephen Hawking's explanation isn't good enough for them. Because they think that they know exactly how God created the universe, and that it had to be some 7-periods-of-24-hours affair. They don't think it's possible that God could have used the Big Bang, evolution, and the forces of nature to perform His will. In effect, they are placing limits on the God that they'll spend as long as you care to listen telling you is omnipotent!
As a result they want to teach kids a literal interpretation of a book absolutely laden with symbolic language, parable, and metaphor -- with the reason explicitly stated that the truth is more complex -- that these fools decided must be the only way it could have been.
And the part that pisses me off -- because they're such morons, smart non-religious types end up thinking all religous types must be morons as well, and I have to deal with it. Thanks, guys.