You're right, it is less public. But you wrecked my analogy while you were at it, unless of course, you actually attend soap conventions.
In whatever it is you do, imagine if you had to conduct your business with some big brawny guy hanging out of a g-string.
Personally, I find the idea kind of exciting, but that's because I like big brawny guys hanging out of g-strings. But it wouldn't be fair to those who might not.
Would you feel the same way if a soapsuds company hired some Chippendale dancers to bump and grind in the aisles of your local grocery store to promote their product?
My guess: You'ld find it less than comfortable. The girls are just pointing out the same thing.
This is very true. It's actually quite ironic that the original poster used this as an example, since I thought of this as the perfect game to introduce my boyfriend to a FPS.
If you set the game to "easy" then enemy attacks do almost no damage to your character. Even so, my boyfriend died several times as he stumbed around in 3d space.
It's funny how much we take for granted after playing so many games. Areas that I could scan in a fraction of a second and identify all the exits, he would have to carefully study for minutes to find the way forward. Every once and a while he would give up, but in general there is enough infomation there that even a beginner can get by.
He's gotten to the part where they start throwing a lot of manhacks at him, and I think he's getting frustrated. I think, wow 8 manhacks at a time... this is crazy ****ed up fun! He thinks, 8 manhacks at a time... it's time to rent a video.
Is there anyone out there waiting for Black and White 2?
Also, has Peter Molyneux made a good game since Syndicate? I mean he's clearly hard working, he's willing to take risks on high concept games, and his graphics and tech are of good quality, but in the end, the gameplay is always as week as American beer.
I just looked at the code, and he's memoizing the function results in a associative list:
(* Set up an associative list for memoization *) let lookup key table = List.assoc key !table;; let insert key value table = table:= (key, value):: !table;;
Insertion is cheap, but the lookup is a linear table scan! Doh! What was he thinking?
I suspect that a Hashtable or a Map datastructure might be much better suited to the task.
In any case, it would have been very easy for him to post this code to the OCaml newsgroup and ask, "Am I writing good functional code?"
He would of gotten a lot of advice on how he could have sped up his program while still maintaining a functional style.
Lastly, in response to his question, "I could write an OCaml implementation that is isomorphic to the C++ code (using loops and side effects), but what would be the point?" The point is that you can easily mix and match styles in OCaml. You can write 90% of your code in a functional style and fall back to imperative style if there is an inner loop that would benefit from that.
For this problem though, I suspect that a well written functional version would be pretty close in speed to his C++ version, cleaner, and easier to maintain.
I don't use perl for anything that will take more than 1/2 hour, or require more than a page of code.
Except that these short programs slowly start to expand into massive behemoths as I constantly add one more feature. Soon it's unmanageable.
So I've been trying to code my scripts in OCaml to begin with. I've been playing around with "CASH" a bit. Not sure I'm in love with it, but I no longer fear the code getting out from under me.
The hours are long for the paycheck you're getting. (on the project I was on, we went into "crunch time" 60 hour weeks for 6 months straight).
But the worst part was that generally, the work I did was about as boring as the Windows apps I had been writing before. I remember spending 1/2 a day adjusting the AI of a pidgeon to get the poop to come out at the correct intervals.
I discovered to my chagrin that I enjoyed playing games and writing code, but not working as a professional game coder.
I am still like playing around with writing simple games in my spare time, but it's much more pleasurable when you make all the design decisions, no deadlines, etc.
You're arguing that programming languages are hard to parse, because, if you don't use any of the tools developed over the last 35 years to parse programming languages, it's hard?
In a similar vein, you might find that building a set of shelves is hard if you don't use hammers, screwdrivers, and drills, but instead try to embed nails into the wood simply by slamming your head into them repeatedly.
Oh, I totally walked out. I ran into one of the guys two years later at the Computer Games Developers Conference. I found someone willing to pay me to work on games, and two years later he still hadn't found anyone to program his.
I was working a job doing Windows apps in C++ by day, but what I really wanted to do was develop games. I had done some small scale stuff on my own, and I wanted a chance to do it professionally.
So I heard through the grapevine that a small computer consulting company I knew was looking to develop a game, and they were looking for a programmer. I decided I would try moonlighting on the game while keeping my day job. I showed up after hours, and was met by the top three people that ran the place.
I was ushered into a small dark office. They sat in a rough semicircle around me. After a brief introduction, they started firing difficult logic problems at me. For about an hour and a half. No paper, no time to myself, I was expected to work out the answer out loud. It was intimidating as hell.
But I'm good at that type of stuff, and although I needed a little prodding on one of the problems I eventually came up with the right answers. They seemed satisfied. I explained what sort of compensation I would require, they agreed, and we decided I would come in after hours the next day to get started.
So the next day rolls around, and I show up. I get setup on a machine, but clearly the president of the company wants to talk to me about something.
So he comes out and says it. "Well, I've talked to my associates, and we've decided we don't want to pay you. We're a little cash poor right now. So what we want you to do is create a prototype, and we'll market it, and cut you in for a percentage of the profit."
I was floored. They wanted to make all the decisions, while I did all the up front work, for the possibility of some of the profit later on. They wanted me to be their bitch.
If they had told me this up front, I would have walked out the door right then, but instead I had to sit through the most stressful interview of my life, fighting for their approval. Blech.
I can remember playing too much Warcraft II at work after hours. I was on my way home on the freeway, and suddenly my brain was thinking, "Ok, this car seems to be doing the right thing.. what other cars do I control.."
I snapped out of it immediately, but it was kind of scary in retrospect.
Re:TFA's author doesn't know what he's talking abo
on
Where's My 10 Ghz PC?
·
· Score: 1
Yes. This is exactly what I was thinking as I read that part of the article.
My first thought was that the author had confused the optimization settings of his compiler with the in chip reordering that the processor was doing.
It doesn't suprise me that he's a swimmer. I've noticed that many of the best gamers I've met have been athletes. Geeks too, but athletes all the same. One was a championship fencer, another ranked 6th nationally in the pole vault.
I think it's a combination of reflexes and a competative streak that will not allow them to lose.
They're just a different type of person than you are. They're not as motivated by money or status. They're motivated by an opportunity to really understand some small part of the world. To have the chance to learn everything everyone else has ever writting about this small thing, and then advance the knowledge of it in a small (or large) way.
Makes no sense to you, or to most people for that matter. Probably good that there are people out there like this.
There are definitely plusses and minuses. On the plus side,
1) You can really get in there and modify the look of lists and paragraphs.
2) We do mostly content management solutions where the clients are going to be editing the pages, so it's helpful to setup all the styles outside, and have them apply to what the editors create.
This definitely includes navigation, which, if you do with styles, can change dynamically. If you do it with graphical rollovers, you either have to resort to auto generated graphics, or stick with the nav you have.
3) Your pages become cleaner and thus easier to edit.
4) We also use templates for all our boilerplate code, but sometimes we have multiple back ends (some basic pages in php, combined with an ecommerce package). A single style sheet can provide a uniform look across the systems.
On the bad side:
1) You have to learn something new
2) We still have to just through some stupid hoops to make it work across IE 5.0 and other non-compliant browsers. It's constantly getting better though as older browsers die off, and the new ones get with the plan.
3) CSS need to be able to handle multi column layouts. I know there are entire websites dedicated to this stuff. There just don't seem to be any good answers. (At least given the 3 or 4 days I wasted trying to get this to work).
Overall, I'm really anal about abstracting everything I can... seperating content from presentation. So for me it's worth it, flawed as it is.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right, it is less public. But you wrecked my analogy while you were at it, unless of course, you actually attend soap conventions.
In whatever it is you do, imagine if you had to conduct your business with some big brawny guy hanging out of a g-string.
Personally, I find the idea kind of exciting, but that's because I like big brawny guys hanging out of g-strings. But it wouldn't be fair to those who might not.
Would you feel the same way if a soapsuds company hired some Chippendale dancers to bump and grind in the aisles of your local grocery store to promote their product?
My guess: You'ld find it less than comfortable. The girls are just pointing out the same thing.
This is very true. It's actually quite ironic that the original poster used this as an example, since I thought of this as the perfect game to introduce my boyfriend to a FPS.
If you set the game to "easy" then enemy attacks do almost no damage to your character. Even so, my boyfriend died several times as he stumbed around in 3d space.
It's funny how much we take for granted after playing so many games. Areas that I could scan in a fraction of a second and identify all the exits, he would have to carefully study for minutes to find the way forward. Every once and a while he would give up, but in general there is enough infomation there that even a beginner can get by.
He's gotten to the part where they start throwing a lot of manhacks at him, and I think he's getting frustrated. I think, wow 8 manhacks at a time... this is crazy ****ed up fun! He thinks, 8 manhacks at a time... it's time to rent a video.
This is pretty much exactly what I was going to to say.
The key Star Trek mania is the show's optimism. Mr. Card chastises it for being bad science fiction, which is true, but entirely beside the point.
Good science fiction is an exploration of ideas. Star trek is more a vision of utopia. A glass-half full template for the future.
Yeah. I would have held out for, "Power iCon"
I can't speak for anyone else, but I did agree to be profiled. It was very clearly optional.
Is there anyone out there waiting for Black and White 2?
Also, has Peter Molyneux made a good game since Syndicate? I mean he's clearly hard working, he's willing to take risks on high concept games, and his graphics and tech are of good quality, but in the end, the gameplay is always as week as American beer.
Yea, you're not kidding.
:= (key, value) :: !table;;
I just looked at the code, and he's memoizing the function results in a associative list:
(* Set up an associative list for memoization *)
let lookup key table = List.assoc key !table;;
let insert key value table = table
Insertion is cheap, but the lookup is a linear table scan! Doh! What was he thinking?
I suspect that a Hashtable or a Map datastructure might be much better suited to the task.
In any case, it would have been very easy for him to post this code to the OCaml newsgroup and ask, "Am I writing good functional code?"
He would of gotten a lot of advice on how he could have sped up his program while still maintaining a functional style.
Lastly, in response to his question, "I could write an OCaml implementation that is isomorphic to the C++ code (using loops and side effects), but what would be the point?" The point is that you can easily mix and match styles in OCaml.
You can write 90% of your code in a functional style and fall back to imperative style if there is an inner loop that would benefit from that.
For this problem though, I suspect that a well written functional version would be pretty close in speed to his C++ version, cleaner, and easier to maintain.
This is exactly right.
I don't use perl for anything that will take more than 1/2 hour, or require more than a page of code.
Except that these short programs slowly start to expand into massive behemoths as I constantly add one more feature. Soon it's unmanageable.
So I've been trying to code my scripts in OCaml to begin with. I've been playing around with "CASH" a bit. Not sure I'm in love with it, but I no longer fear the code getting out from under me.
Ultima Underworld was my favorite game of all time when it came out.
System Shock became my favorite game of all time when it came out.
Deus Ex became my favorite game of all time when it game out.
Give Deus Ex a try. It's Warren all the way.
Actually, the story seems to have generated a lot of questions and some open distrust.
Don't worry. There is a healthy skepticism of all corporations here, not just MS.
Actually that's what I eventually found out.
The hours are long for the paycheck you're getting. (on the project I was on, we went into "crunch time" 60 hour weeks for 6 months straight).
But the worst part was that generally, the work I did was about as boring as the Windows apps I had been writing before. I remember spending 1/2 a day adjusting the AI of a pidgeon to get the poop to come out at the correct intervals.
I discovered to my chagrin that I enjoyed playing games and writing code, but not working as a professional game coder.
I am still like playing around with writing simple games in my spare time, but it's much more pleasurable when you make all the design decisions, no deadlines, etc.
I had the explosives sensor trigger on my luggage on the way back from a trip to Washington state.
I had gone river rafting in a heavily agricultural area, and all my stuff was probably coated in fertilizer runoff.
It was a tense 20 minutes of question and answer before they let me on my way.
So let me get this straight:
You're arguing that programming languages are hard to parse, because, if you don't use any of the tools developed over the last 35 years to parse programming languages, it's hard?
In a similar vein, you might find that building a set of shelves is hard if you don't use hammers, screwdrivers, and drills, but instead try to embed nails into the wood simply by slamming your head into them repeatedly.
Oh, I totally walked out. I ran into one of the guys two years later at the Computer Games Developers Conference. I found someone willing to pay me to work on games, and two years later he still hadn't found anyone to program his.
I was working a job doing Windows apps in C++ by day, but what I really wanted to do was develop games. I had done some small scale stuff on my own, and I wanted a chance to do it professionally.
So I heard through the grapevine that a small computer consulting company I knew was looking to develop a game, and they were looking for a programmer. I decided I would try moonlighting on the game while keeping my day job. I showed up after hours, and was met by the top three people that ran the place.
I was ushered into a small dark office. They sat in a rough semicircle around me. After a brief introduction, they started firing difficult logic problems at me. For about an hour and a half. No paper, no time to myself, I was expected to work out the answer out loud. It was intimidating as hell.
But I'm good at that type of stuff, and although I needed a little prodding on one of the problems I eventually came up with the right answers. They seemed satisfied. I explained what sort of compensation I would require, they agreed, and we decided I would come in after hours the next day to get started.
So the next day rolls around, and I show up. I get setup on a machine, but clearly the president of the company wants to talk to me about something.
So he comes out and says it. "Well, I've talked to my associates, and we've decided we don't want to pay you. We're a little cash poor right now. So what we want you to do is create a prototype, and we'll market it, and cut you in for a percentage of the profit."
I was floored. They wanted to make all the decisions, while I did all the up front work, for the possibility of some of the profit later on. They wanted me to be their bitch.
If they had told me this up front, I would have walked out the door right then, but instead I had to sit through the most stressful interview of my life, fighting for their approval. Blech.
I can remember playing too much Warcraft II at work after hours. I was on my way home on the freeway, and suddenly my brain was thinking, "Ok, this car seems to be doing the right thing.. what other cars do I control.."
I snapped out of it immediately, but it was kind of scary in retrospect.
Yes. This is exactly what I was thinking as I read that part of the article.
My first thought was that the author had confused the optimization settings of his compiler with the in chip reordering that the processor was doing.
It doesn't suprise me that he's a swimmer. I've noticed that many of the best gamers I've met have been athletes. Geeks too, but athletes all the same. One was a championship fencer, another ranked 6th nationally in the pole vault.
I think it's a combination of reflexes and a competative streak that will not allow them to lose.
They're just a different type of person than you are. They're not as motivated by money or status. They're motivated by an opportunity to really understand some small part of the world. To have the chance to learn everything everyone else has ever writting about this small thing, and then advance the knowledge of it in a small (or large) way.
Makes no sense to you, or to most people for that matter. Probably good that there are people out there like this.
Yea, you're right.
Let's ignore the scientists, and trust the politicians.
Yea, but homophobia's got them both beat.
Everything is gay, and everyone is a faggot.
Do you consider yourself above average intelligence?
Probably - most people do. Most of them are wrong, too.
Well, not most. Roughly half are wrong.
There are definitely plusses and minuses. On the plus side,
1) You can really get in there and modify the look of lists and paragraphs.
2) We do mostly content management solutions where the clients are going to be editing the pages, so it's helpful to setup all the styles outside, and have them apply to what the editors create.
This definitely includes navigation, which, if you do with styles, can change dynamically. If you do it with graphical rollovers, you either have to resort to auto generated graphics, or stick with the nav you have.
3) Your pages become cleaner and thus easier to edit.
4) We also use templates for all our boilerplate code, but sometimes we have multiple back ends (some basic pages in php, combined with an ecommerce package). A single style sheet can provide a uniform look across the systems.
On the bad side:
1) You have to learn something new
2) We still have to just through some stupid hoops to make it work across IE 5.0 and other non-compliant browsers. It's constantly getting better though as older browsers die off, and the new ones get with the plan.
3) CSS need to be able to handle multi column layouts. I know there are entire websites dedicated to this stuff. There just don't seem to be any good answers. (At least given the 3 or 4 days I wasted trying to get this to work).
Overall, I'm really anal about abstracting everything I can... seperating content from presentation. So for me it's worth it, flawed as it is.
- faster page loads
- style decisions centralized in one file
- complete nightmare getting it to work across all browsers
- multi-column layouts rediculouly tedious to get working
Oh, f*** it. I would just stick with tables if I were you....